How do you connect to people online? from D'Arcy Norman on Vimeo.

(Link to video, for the RSS folks)

I had to cut back on the scope quite a bit to keep it to a 15 minute length. This could have easily turned into an epic documentary… Lots of very difficult decisions.

Thank you SO much to everyone for the contributions.

Jaymie Koroluk asked the twitterverse about the proper spelling of “eLearning”.

I responded back, a bit snarkily:

@jaymiek learning. There is no e.

It’s too much to describe in 140 characters. But I can’t stand the “e” in eLearning. (I can’t stand the “m” in mLearning, either.)

It’s just learning. The “e” is counter-productive. It forces people to focus on the technology. To see it as separate. As an isolated thing that must somehow be fit into the regular flow of teaching and learning.

Bullshit.

It’s all just learning. Technology can provide some pretty amazing affordances – the ability to handle larger scale open discussions, the ability to have every participant in a class to be content producers/consumers/collaborators, etc… Technology is important.

But it is not separate. Viewing it as a separate thing – eLearning/mLearning/whateverLearning – leaves it disjointed and fractured. A class has to shift gears to somehow begin dealing with the “technology section” of a lesson, before returning to the “real” learning. Focusing on “eLearning” pushes the incredible stuff that technology can do into some form of electronic/abstract ghetto.

My team at the Teaching & Learning Centre is often called in to various teaching programmes to provide a “technology session” – we do it grudgingly, knowing that the hour (or two) we’re given out of a week-long programme is likely the only real non-superficial integration of technology and discussion of pedagogy and implications. The “technology session” underscores the “e” in eLearning. The “e” as a separate thing that can be bolted on. A separate thing that is less important than the “real” learning that happens without the “e”.

I understand that “eLearning” is used as a shorthand, much like “Web 2.0″ is a shorthand for a constellation of properties and attributes rather than anything concrete. But, we need to stop treating technology as a separate thing, as something in addition to conventional teaching and learning.

Effective learning requires seamless application of appropriate technologies – or the lack thereof – and when this is done, the distinctions and segregation disappear. It’s just learning.

I just heard about TEDxYYC – an independently organized TED-like event to be held right here in Calgary. This should be awesome. I can’t wait.

I have no idea how many people will be able to make it. From poking around on the internets, it sounds like it might be held in the Karo warehouse, with room for ~100 folks. Possibly on Jan. 22, 2010.

If there’s anything I can do to help get TEDxYYC off the ground, count me in.

The Alaska Coffee Roasting Company (ACRC) produces, without a doubt, the best freshly roasted coffee in Fairbanks and– in my experience– the state. But the owner is, to put it as kindly as I can, a smug, self-satisfied jerk of a mini-tyrant who suffers from a short man complex. From what I have seen and overheard, his attitude is a combination of barely tolerating customers combined with deep regret at having to put up with them at all rather than just have their money magically transfer from their wallets to his. Thus the nickname for his establishment: bad man, good coffee.

So I had to laugh this morning when I came for my morning cup (I won’t even go into how much money I put in his coffers each month given that I stop almost daily with my son before school) and saw that the owner had gone to some expense to put locking covers over all the outlets so none of those malicious computer users could plug-in while using the wireless internet connection he ever-so-reluctantly provides. It reminded me of the time many years ago, before the days when laptops were common, when little big man told me I couldn’t plug my laptop in because it would use too much energy.

The power prohibition put into place by the Napoleonic roasting man makes no practical difference to me– I spend most of my time writing on paper and my netbook has a 5-8 hour battery life– but it’s just the kind of petty action that typifies his operation. I’m guessing it stems from the same reasoning behind his refusal to fix the wobbly, ratty tables that date back to about the time my son was born.

The funny thing is, these kinds of anti-customer moves only hurt the business. I’ve been coming to the Alaska Coffee Roasters since the first week they were open and I see customers come and go. Few of the lingerers plug-in (there were hardly any outlets to begin with) and the cost of those who do is minimal. Those who are here using the wireless are buying his product. And in this instance wireless is a low fixed cost anyway: judging by the performance he clearly has the whole place on a crappy consumer plan suitable to a household not a business, and I know the router he uses is one of the lowest-grade consumer routers you can find (if you can find it anywhere outside of closeout sales).

It’s strange to me that the owner of the Alaska Coffee Roasting Company understands quality product so well while his understanding of customer experience is on par with a 3rd grader. Here are some fundamentals:

• Provide robust wireless or don’t provide it at all. Providing free, flaky service is worse than no service at all. Hear me, Barnes & Noble?
• If the cost of providing the wireless service is too great (in this case the annual cost is probably less
  than the owner’s unfortunately form-fitting body suit he uses when
  racing his appropriately tiny race cars), institute a fee… there are plenty of easy ways to do so, including systems that tie access to a purchase.
• Energy use costs almost nothing in this case… a back-of-the-envelope calculation reveals that at the local cost ($0.1642/kWh) and assuming every available outlet were being used to charge a computer for 16 hours each day (a great over-estimate on every dimension), the cost would be well under $4 per day.
• Computer users aren’t the enemy. The real “drain” on this store’s capacity to generate turnover comes from large groups of casual talkers. Computer users rarely gather in large, sedentary groups. As I write this there’s a table with 9 high school students who have two small drinks between them. I bring headphones just to tune out the various groups of old-philosophers who congregate here to share their solution to all the ills of the world over their single small cups of plain coffee. People aren’t turning away from this store in droves because tables are filled (though on any given day you will see plenty of people walking in the door and turning around and leaving due to the length of the line).

And here’s the simplest rule of all:

• Don’t be a dick. Why squander the (remaining) good will customers have with petty moves that accomplish nothing except stroking one’s already inflated ego? Customers aren’t the enemy (your loud complaints and ill-chosen characterizations of the many customers constantly demanding an affinity program notwithstanding).

Bad man, good coffee, indeed.

On UCalgaryBlogs, I’d modified the adminbar to include a link to the current site’s dashboard if a person was logged in, making it easy to get to the members-only side of WordPress without having to go through My Blogs and finding the right blog, then mousing over the pop-out “Dashboard” link. Most people never found that, and it’s not very intuitive.

So, I hacked in a hard-coded link to Dashboard in bp-core-adminbar.php. This worked, but meant I had to remember to re-hack the file after running a BuddyPress update. I forgot to do that right after I ran the last upgrade, and got emails from users asking WTF?

I decided to figure out the best way to add in the Dashboard link without hacking the actual plugin files. Turns out, it’s drop-dead simple. Yay, WordPress.

In your /wp-content/plugins/ directory, create a file called bp-custom.php (if it’s not there already), and drop this code into it:

<?php // custom functions for tweaking BuddyPress function custom_adminbar_dashboard_button() { // adds a "Dashboard" link to the BuddyPress admin bar if a user is logged in. if (is_user_logged_in()) { echo '<li><a href="/wp-admin/">Dashboard</a></li>'; } } add_action('bp_adminbar_menus', 'custom_adminbar_dashboard_button', 1); ?>

When in place, your BuddyPress adminbar will look something like this:

Yes, I know I should do something to properly detect user levels and privileges, rather than just providing the Dashboard link all willie-nillie to anyone that’s logged in, but the link itself just provides access to whatever Dashboard features the user is allowed to see, so there’s no security risk. Better to just say that a user can see the Dashboard for any site they’re logged into, and let WordPress deal with restricting access properly.

I should also deal with the possibility of WPMU being configured as a subdirectory vs. subdomain (the /wp-admin/ link will bork if you’re using subdirectories – better to use the real code to sniff out the base url of the current site…)

It’s immaterial whether Ong is “right” or “wrong” because his theory is important as a lens. If it reveal something useful, then the specific composition of the lens is, pragmatically, irrelevant. And the theory of a secondary orality is, as I tried to bring out in my presentation, both fantastically relevant to many different areas of the current information ecology/arena (not least in that it might present an opportunity to cut the Gordian knot of digital/media literacy/fluency confusion/conflation – how’s that for slashing a sentence?) and distinctly under-studied.

So, here’s the video (the setup Jared Stein came up with worked well… the only change I would make would be to use a detached cam instead of the built-in web cam… and figure out a way to mic the audience for questions):

If you haven’t watched Lessig’s fantastic, passionate keynote yet, watch it.

(link to the video, in case it gets stripped from the RSS)

It’s worth it, if for no other reason than to get your own Certificate of Entitlement, signed by Lawrence Lessig:

Scott Leslie posted a link to Charter for Compassion, and I can’t think of a better thing to support. Compassion is so painfully lacking in the world today. It needs to be universal. We are all connected.

This is something I struggle with as well. I need to try harder. A LOT harder. Compassion is essential. Compassion is active. I can’t imagine leaving my son a world that lacks real compassion.

However, this is not about religion. Religion has nothing to do with compassion. I am an athiest, and see compassion as essential – without being muddied by religious interpretation. Compassion is not righteousness, nor is it divine.

(link to video, in case it borks in RSS)

I’m taking a graduate level course on Technology & Society, and for my Big Term Assignment, I’ve decided to try something a little non-traditional. Taking a page out of Alan Levine’s great playbook, I’d like to ask people to respond to a simple question:

How do YOU connect online?

More info is available over on the project website – but the short version is that I need people to respond to the question, however they interpret it, in whatever format they’re comfortable responding. I will assemble the responses into a narrative which will be published on November 30, 2009.

Please spread the URL – I need as many different responses and perspectives as possible.

I was asked to share how I got that Bike Blur photo yesterday. It’s really simple, once you know a couple of tricks.

If you can read this, then the move to a new server at CanadianWebHosting.com is complete. They had to disable SSH on the existing servers because of an apparent hack attempt, so I asked to be moved to a server that had SSH available. They moved stuff over the weekend, and DNS took a bit to propagate. But relatively painless…

(sorry for the banal feed noise – I needed a post published on the new server so I could test DNS propagation – and if I post a bunch of these, I might catch up to The Reverend, now that he’s gone all Bob Villa…)

I just posed this question on Twitter, but thought I’d try posting it here as well, in case there are different people reading each stream…

How is the nature of connection between people online different from “traditional” offline connections? How, really, do they differ?

I’m hoping to tease out some real, perceived, and possibly false differences between internet connections and traditional connections between people, for a project as part of the Technology & Society course I’m taking. I’m not meaning TCP/IP connections, or ethernet, but how people are able to connect, interact, communicate, engage, etc… online as opposed to offline.

Any thoughts?

This Thursday, October 22 at 3:15p (Denver (MDT) time, check for your time zone) I and my compadre Jared Stein will be in Denver at WCET presenting on the Gutenberg Parenthesis, secondary orality, and information literacy & fluency. If you are attending WCET, you can just show up at the room: Colorado GH.

If you’d like to participate remotely, we will be broadcasting the session via U-Stream (http://www.ustream.tv/channel/ruminate) and monitoring the live U-Stream chat as well as the Twitter hashtag: #wcet09

I’d love to make this session as interactive as possible because it really is about high-level rumination on something that represents emergent thinking (for me, at least)… so the more I can hear from you the better.

The basic idea behind the session is to explore the potential for the thinking of Walter Ong on secondary orality (the Gutenberg Parenthesis) as a lens for conceptualizing and teaching new media literacy and information fluency. Along the way I’ll dip into a couple of sidestreams, such the “problem” of so many different ideas of digital literacy and the changing role(s) of memory in the context of new media.

I’m not talking about the larger issue of lack of Kindle content outside the most mainstream—I can count with just the fingers of both hands the number of times a Kindle edition of a book I am looking for has been available—but a much simpler problem: the horrible production quality of so many Kindle edition books. It’s one thing when a free, public domain book is the victim of poor conversion, but when I pay very near the paper price for a book and Amazon (or whoever create the Kindle edition) can’t be bothered to even take care of things like formatting paragraphs properly… that’s not cool. And with no way to preview a Kindle book, you essentially roll the dice each time you buy one.

For example, here’s what my recently purchased Kindle edition of Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy looks like:

Notice anything missing? Having sufficient leading between paragraphs—or even indented first lines—might seem like a small thing, but not when you have thousands of screen to read. And this is just one example of many. The books I download have problems more often than not.

Two more examples that clearly stem from faulty conversion and absolutely no effort put into correction:

• Cloudworks – The Open Scholar — Many people thinking along the same lines as I lately… good stuff from Terry Anderson, Martin Weller, etc

• Informal Education – Exploring reflection and learning — “Here we look more closely at the process of working with others (or ourselves) to deepen learning. In particular, we explore: emancipating and enlarging experience, the nature of reflection, and learning from experience”

• Pursuing the elusive metaphor of community in virtual learning environments — “Social networking software sites are often mistakenly called learning communities, betraying a significant lack of agreement or concern for what actually constitutes a community. However, social networking sites are being used by teachers to engage students in dynamic ways, and by learners as vehicles for constructing their own, very personal learning environments and communities. This paper draws on lessons we have learned about building personal learning environments and virtual communities from our research and experience in formal and non-formal learning environments. It addresses the key questions of how can we construct, maintain and usher out communities, who joins communities, and what characteristics of communities seem to be shared across learning environments. The paper also questions whether the label “community” is actually a failed metaphor for something that seems to be much too dynamic and elusive to capture with a single construct. “

• Smokescreen privacy game — Smokescreen privacy game uses fun missions to show kids how data on social services can be used against them

• The Ed Techie: Is the revolution justified? — Martin Weller has posted his draft paper for comments, which will be integrated into the print version. A great idea for engaging the network and sharing informally while working toward a formal artifact. It’s lengthy, but at a quick glance wortwhile. Check it out. Leave comments. Plenty to chew on here!

• Newsmap — Treemap of hottest current news stories. Pretty and useful “at a glance.”

• Office Web Apps rolling out — Will the new Microsoft Office Web Apps challenge Google Docs? I think so… the relative simplicity and limited feature set of Google Docs is a boon… until you *need* some of those complex features. Should be interesting. Competition is good!

• Academic Evolution: The Open Scholar — Precisely what I was talking about at the AAAS conference yesterday! Working in the open, open teaching, open learning. Not just for students (except in the sense that we are all students.

• enjoysthin.gs — “enjoysthin.gs is a place to save and share things you enjoy.” Share images, videos, web pages, quotes, etc. in a graphical manner. Could be interesting for curating/collecting.

• Visual Search Galleries – Bing — Bing introduces visual search… not image search, but visual search that can be refined by various classifications (for cameras you can drill down into type, brand, megapixels, optical/digital zoom, what the camera is good for)

• Readtwit — I’ve been using Yahoo Pipes for something similar… this is *much* better.

  “Readtwit filters your twitter feed to links only, resolves link destinations and publishes the content as an RSS feed. You can then use any feed reading software / service to read twitter posted content along with the rest of your feeds. Duplicate links in the same time-frame are grouped together. No more retweets overwhelming your link browsing activity.”

• flickr Galleries: Unleash your inner curator — New flickr freature! “For whatever you find interesting, fascinating, or mind-blowing on Flickr, galleries are a way to curate up to 18 public photos or videos of your fellow members into one place around a theme, an idea or just because.”

• 25 Cutting-Edge Wolfram Alpha Tips for Serious Students

• MacDailyNews — [I call shenanigans on Jobs' lame excuse] “Jobs explaining why iPod touch didn’t get a camera: “Originally, we weren’t exactly sure how to market the Touch. Was it an iPhone without the phone? Was it a pocket computer? What happened was, what customers told us was, they started to see it as a game machine.”

• ‘Facebook makes you sharper but Twitter makes you thicker’

• You Didn’t Plagiarize, Your Unconscious Did | Print Article | Newsweek.com — “But could some alleged plagiarists—like Maureen Dowd, Chris Anderson, Elizabeth Hasselbeck, and even Viswanathan, who all either deny the charge, or blame their copying on unconscious mistakes—be guilty of psychological sloppiness rather than fraud? Could the real offense be disregard for the mind’s subliminal kleptomania? And if it is real, is unconscious copying (or “cryptomnesia” to those who study the phenomenon) preventable?”

I’ve been in Juneau for a few days taking part in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Arctic Science Conference. I was privileged to have the opportunity to run a distance education segment in partnership with my colleague Carol Gering (see session abstracts, resources, slides, etc.)… which morphed for natural reasons into a session on science education in general. What follows are thoughts based on my presentation and having heard from a variety of scientists, educators and authors.

Fighting a Common Foe
A recurring theme in presentations from educators, researchers and authors was the problem of scientific illiteracy, innumeracy and apparent understanding. At issue is how to best teach students who may only (and often reluctantly) take a single science course in their higher education career but who will go on to be voters, politicians and policy-makers making decisions that are practically random without a sense of basic scientific principles. It’s too easy to play the scientific literacy “gotcha” game ala Jay Leno or E. D. Hirsch, extrapolating from a random person’s inability to come up with the chemical formula for water a global educational decline, but it’s hard to dispute that there’s a significant problem.

Seems to me that some answers lie in: promoting inquiry- and problem-based learning, connecting local and place-based knowledge to science activities, having students act as citizen-scientists, giving students tools that they can come back to after the specific course or activity in which they use them, and making use of curriculum development methods that specifically address the problem of apparent understanding. There are probably many more strategies I’m forgetting or am unaware of.

Natural Limits of Replication
There’s good reason for science educators to be excited about developments in virtual worlds such as Second Life and OpenSim. But at the point where the rubber meets the road for most educators in their daily practice, significant independent development in these environments is problematic due to constraints on time and resources.

Major initiatives in virtual worlds are often extremely expensive, beyond the resources of most instructors and even most programs. Even more problematic, too much of the development in these environments seems intent on replicating real-world environments in ways that are unnecessary and unproductive. I’m firmly behind efforts to bring science (and other) educational activities into virtual worlds, but the question that constantly has to be asked is: why? What affordances of the immersive environment are being taken advantage of? Can the time and effort spent to develop in such a top-heavy, closed environment be better spent developing in a more open way? I don’t see any benefit in creating, for example, a simulated science lab in Second Life that doesn’t take advantage of the benefits of virtual worlds (scale, spatial orientation, etc)… such a virtual lab bench could be created at less expense using simple web programs, applets and Flash components. And then be re-usable and shareable.

Of course this doesn’t apply when the virtual world is used in a way that goes beyond replication… but examples of such developments seem few and far between.

Open Teaching
At the other end of the developmental spectrum from expensive, top-down developments in virtual worlds is the crying need for educators to teach openly. Open Education advocates are seeing the need to take the next step from content provision to sharing of process, context and developing collaborative teaching activities. I’m convinced this is the way forward—if we teach openly, content is not only generated naturally, but it is naturally contextualized and the educational process(es) in which it was embedded made accessible.

It’s astounding to me (though it shouldn’t be) to attend conferences like this and see yet again how many things—artifacts, documentation, records, instructor and student work—is inaccessible. Amazement and surprise at what colleagues—often within the same institution, sometimes within the same program or school—are doing is the norm. Sometimes this is due to being required to use (or in the habit of using) an LMS. More often the idea of defaulting to being open and making closed activity the exception—and there are legitimate exceptions!—hasn’t even been considered or is seen as “more work.”

Using Open Education Resources
Surprisingly, a significant number of educators and scientists I spoke with were not only unaware of the Open Education movement, but even Open Education Resources as a simple content resource for enhancing teaching were only vaguely familiar. The process of finding and using OERs is not just a boost for teachers with limited time but provides an invaluable entree into thinking about Open Education.

Giving Students the Tools
In many institutions, including my own, distance educators are a particularly overworked group, laboring despite systemic issues understanding what distance learning is and how much effort and time it takes to provide a good student experience. So it’s understandable that many educators default to the “read, read, test” model of distance education and rely heavily on proprietary tools that come with textbook web sites or CDs.

“Web 2.0” (or whatever you want to call it) has the potential to transform methods of science teaching. This comes in (at least) two forms: applications that facilitate collaboration, community and publication—the same processes we see across disciplines—and the variety of applications that could be of specific use for science classes, such as visualization, concept-mapping, and calculating apps.

Further, these are tools that students can take with them from class to class and then beyond into their careers… building the famed PLE.

Awareness of these resources would be heightened by open teaching practices!

Considering Teachers and Learners—Being an Open Scientist 
Research scientists too need to adapt their practices and activities, keeping educators in mind. Students—whether they are taking a single required science class or in are in the process of becoming a scientist—are often not just unclear about what science and its fundamental principles are, but also about what a scientist does.

Scientists should consider how their work and practices can be shared with teachers and learners as part of their ongoing activities, including such things as the formation of hypothesis and research questions, the administrative business of writing grant proposals, data collection and refinement, false starts and dead-ends. One thing that’s been made abundantly clear as social software and other technologies have opened up formerly hidden, obscured and/or opaque processes is a kind of rule of unintended educational consequences: the set of artifacts and activities any individual or small group thinks is worthwhile to share is almost always much smaller than the set that ultimately turns out to be useful.

The idea of the “open scholar” proposed at the Academic Evolution blog (h/t Martin Weller) is precisely what I have in mind, and it is articulated well there:

“It’s like this: there is great value to others to see the methods used in pursuing knowledge, the various attempts in pursuing solutions (failures as much as successes), the data generated (especially beyond the subset of data used for drawing conclusions in the study at hand), and the various resources used to mount the investigation (whether that is lab equipment, social resources, bibliography, theory, or protocols). Again, there is great value in others being allowed to see this whole context of inquiry, not just the final outcome for the specific study at hand.”

Publishing Informally
At one time or another, scientists must grapple with—and sometimes spend valuable time they’d rather use doing something else—writing for (and otherwise communicating with) non-scientists, including administration, funding agencies, and the public. Teachers and learners are another group that scientists need to keep in mind in the same way. The effects of addressing that group may not be as immediate and obvious as research dollars, but in their own way they are just as critical.

Instead of working out of sight until the moment a full-fledged research publication in a peer-reviewed journal emerges, take advantage of easy methods for informal publication along the way: blog about ongoing activities and the experience of being a scientist, make some data available in a useful form, spend 30 minutes every few weeks writing a bite-sized piece on some aspect of research as if explaining it to a high school class or a new college student or the child of a friend.

Innovating Within (and Expanding on) Traditional Publication
In addition to creating many more points at which “publication” is possible, the ubiquity of lightweight tools for sharing and collaboration create affordances that can enhance or expand the traditional publication process.

For example, a colleague of mine has spoken to representatives of the National Science Foundation about substituting creation of educational materials—open courseware, learning modules, OERs– based on project results and data for the much dreaded final/project reports that grants require (and which often get done poorly, if at all). They were very enthusiastic about the possibility.

Serendipitously, the aforementioned Martin Weller is modeling another method: he’s using his blog to publish the draft of a paper (accepted for publication in the Journal of Interactive Media in Education) to solicit comments and review which will be integrated into the final published piece.

And while they may not be innovative opportunities, it is certainly useful to consider expanding on traditional avenues of publication by selecting an Open Access Journal for publication (or re-publication) and submitting published articles to the Cornell University Library arXiv.

Recognizing the Value of Reputation and Social/Intellectual Currency
Research and teaching don’t happen in a vacuum even if both activities are sometimes pursued as if they are. I’m not writing here about becoming a selfless egalitarian, sacrificing one’s own times and activities for the good of all. While I do believe educators and scientists have a moral obligation—and most educational institutes a mandate—to share openly in their content and processes, the activities I’m talking about can be considered as pure functions of self-interest.

Many studies have shown that publication in Open Access Journals (and using other open publication techniques) results in far more citations than other methods. Without becoming a pop-science writer—which I have nothing against at all, but isn’t necessary to be rewarded– informal publication and sharing enhance a scientist’s reputation, engaging the virtuous circle in which intellectual currency becomes social currency and vice-versa, leading to enhanced consciousness, recognition, potential for expanded publication, funding, the works.

I’m not advocating radical transformation, which is impractical for most. Much of what I’m writing about can occur just fine within and alongside traditional operations. There are clear concerns to be considered: keeping necessarily proprietary information secure, not sharing information that could be too easily misconstrued, etc. Incremental change is probably the only way to go for most scientists and educator. More important is adopting a change in posture, in mindset, in consciousness—making open scholarship and education a regular option (if not a default) and considering teaching and learning as a natural, everyday part of the context of research—which allows for the cumulative effect of many small, subtle and relatively painless changes to effect overall transformation.

• The hidden curriculum of 21st century learning — Important stuff here that overlaps with many of my concerns: attention, participatory agility, character– the stuff of information fluency, etc. Much to chew on

• A few notes about openness (and a request) — “Without any special authority to do so, may I please give you a homework assignment? Would you please blog about why you choose to be open? What is the fundamental, underlying goal or goals you hope to accomplish by being open? What keeps you motivated? Why do you spend your precious little free time on my blog, reading this post and this question? If each of us put some thought and some public reflective writing into this question, the field would likely be greatly served. The more honest and open you are in your response, the more useful the exercise will be for you and for us.”

• PmWiki| Recipe Check — What recipes are being used in the main pmwiki.org wiki?

• The Social History of the MP3 — “This is our attempt to survey the damage, assess the gains, and try to put the mp3’s first full decade in perspective. Keep in mind that while the mp3 is a radically new technology, it’s not a different musical medium: The mp3 is still “recorded music”– that’s not going to change until Apple unveils the iBrain– but it’s recorded music that moves around very differently than ever before. As a result, mp3s have opened up vast new musical horizons over the past 10 years– how we discover it, the value we give to it, and how we see ourselves connected to other people through it– that both depart from and build upon the innovations that came before it. Everything’s still messy at the moment, but it’s not going to be this way forever– a few decades from now, we’ll most likely find ourselves nostalgic for the mp3 decade.”

• Thomas Paine v. the Right’s torture defenders — It really is that simple.

• YouTube – Don’t Copy That 2 – COMING ON SEPT 9!! — This has to a be a joke. Right? Right!?

• BackTweets — Search for links on Twitter. Expands and searches (most) shortened links as well. Incredibly useful… no idea how I’d not heard of it before…

• Tweeting Too Hard — Where self-important tweets get the recognition they deserve.

• The tragedy of the Internet (Garrison Keillor) — “Millions of people have discovered the joys of seeing yourself in print. Unfortunately, no one’s making a dime…”

• Paul Stacey – Open Ed Resources Diagram — Interesting visualization of open ed resources and relationship to policy, legal, business, technology and academic socio-cultural. via @sleslie

• Neuromodulation and Neural Plasticity — Neuromodulatory synaptic transmission differs from classical chemical synaptic transmission in both mechanism and function. The function of a classical synapse is to convey information rapidly from the presynaptic neuron to its target cell, producing a short-term effect. The neuromodulatory synapse may do the same initially, but its primary function is to transmit information that will have long-lasting effects on the postsynaptic neuron’s metabolic activity, and on its response to subsequent input. These effects are fundamental to the development and adaptation of the nervous system, and are believed to be the basis of such higher functions as learning and memory.

• ACMHE: Contemplative Mind in Higher Education — “Promoting the emergence of a broad culture of contemplation in the academy.” This is exactly (part of) what I’ve been harping endlessly about…

• Edge: HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK? By Lera Boroditsky — I have described how languages shape the way we think about space, time, colors, and objects. Other studies have found effects of language on how people construe events, reason about causality, keep track of number, understand material substance, perceive and experience emotion, reason about other people’s minds, choose to take risks, and even in the way they choose professions and spouses.8 Taken together, these results show that linguistic processes are pervasive in most fundamental domains of thought, unconsciously shaping us from the nuts and bolts of cognition and perception to our loftiest abstract notions and major life decisions. Language is central to our experience of being human, and the languages we speak profoundly shape the way we think, the way we see the world, the way we live our lives.

• SAMSUNG DualView TL225 – Compact – Digital Camera — A pretty sweet looking point and shoot– particularly if you like pointing at and taking photos of yourself…

• Van Gogh Meets Social Networks and Marketing — Tom the Dancing Bug comic

• Official Google Reader Blog: A flurry of features for feed readers — Great new Google Reader features for sharing, managing unread items and more

• Cogito ergo sum, baby | Salon — “Toddlers have amazing philosophical minds that work like computers and can teach us a world about ourselves” – fascinating (looking) new book by Alison Gopnik “The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life”

Was Open Education 2009 a diverse, inclusive conference? I have no idea. I don’t know what any specific use of those terms means. I think Open Ed 2009 accurately reflected a larger part of the Open Education community than many other conferences on the topic, including its own previous incarnations. But it didn’t approach any idea of absolute diversity for a lot of reasons including the most basic:

• conference programs tend to take shape within reach of the intellectual scaffolding of the organizers
• conference attendance entails material resources that are out of reach of those who don’t share a relatively privileged background

I’ve been to conferences that are composed much more (and some much less) of a particular “in-crowd.” The interesting thing about Open Ed, for me, was that it was a kind of super-set that included a good part of “my” network and a whole lot of the members in the degrees-of-separation that radiate from it… along with the expected body of those I’d never met or been in any known contact or communication with before. But there are social network effects that come into play here. Having that significant contingent of people in my first- and second-degree network was exciting (and terrifying) and affirming (and, again, terrifying). That super-group of relatively close connections tend to communicate with each other more freely, quickly and voluminously, which I can easily see would exacerbate feelings of being “on the outside” on the part of others.

Gender equity (whatever that means—I’m speaking here of simple mathematics) was honestly better than I expected, but not great: approximately 35% of registered attendees were women. Of course the important aspect of gender and inclusion has little to do with the math! Jen’s insightful comments are important. I agree with most of what she says… my disagreements likely pointing to areas where discussion is even more critical, such as when it comes to perceptions of family obligations, social agility (or, in my case, lack thereof), and entrance and exit into conversations.

The bottom line (for me) is that my conversational references—my very intellectual frameworks—are built around philosopher and writers and educators who are predominantly male because—regardless of the complicated reasons—most of the great thinkers in each area, particularly in a historical context, are/were men. In other areas this is less true—when it comes to actors, musicians, contemporary artists and writers, my personal pantheon is more proportionately female—but the ugly reality of the world is that you don’t have to go back very far to reach a point where trying to identify a significant number of examples of women at the top of these fields requires more than a bit of wishful thinking paired with unwarranted historical rehabilitation that can actually work counter to one’s well-meaning intention.

I can’t see how to work against that legacy any harder than I already do, though I remain open to new approaches. Everyone who pays attention says they are—or try to be—gender-neutral, that they aren’t thinking about gender when they X, Y and Z, and I maintain the same. When I wasn’t choosing to see a friend, I chose sessions to attend without even looking at the names. I recall discussing and/or invoking, in some cases at great length, Flannery O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Catherine Ngugi, Julia Kristeva, Virginia Woolf… but the fact remains that I can’t really talk about education, language and literature without bringing in Plato, Vygotsky, Wittgenstein, Kafka, Joyce and Eliot.

It’s difficult to disentangle the thinking about these issues w/r/t a specific event like Open Ed–or even a specific community such as that which has sprung up around it—from the world in general. The thing is, I’m not so sure it even helps to try. Considering these issues in a holistic sense of the world and we living within it leads me right to despair and hopelessness. When it comes to something like organizing a conference or participating in a community I can consider specific problems and solutions. When it comes to the state of civilization? Not so much.

What does this mean? I don’t know. But I know how it feels. How it feels is: my best efforts aren’t good enough. I can’t change the world and apparently this event where I did my best didn’t manage to address the issue either. I can exhibit trust and love as intensely as I know how but it doesn’t make the tiniest dent.

I feel what Jen says in her comment. Not based around gender, but in its own way just as vital, painful and frustrating. I suffer terribly from impostor syndrome (of course I like to say it that way because it sounds like I have some rational apprehension, but in fact deep inside I know it’s not such a syndrome at all but a reflection that I am, essentially, an impostor). I know how it feels to to have all eyes on me when I walk into a room or up to a table where a conversation is happening. I know the whispered conversations are about me. I know what it’s like to imagine what was said before I got there, what isn’t being said because I am present, and what will be said about me when I’ve left. I know how it feels to always feel that I’m not worthy of being in a group, in front of a room, or in a conversation. It’s a constant, sometimes unbearable struggle (that I lose often) to not retreat to my room and fabricate some good reason for avoiding the whole thing. Sometimes I barely manage not to catch the next plane home.

Not knowing how I can make a difference for me this way, I’m a long, long way from knowing how to help make a difference for anyone else.

Even before I saw Alec’s example, I was never able to read George Siemens’ phrase “A World Without Courses” without hearing it in one of those great Movie Trailer Voices, like Hal Douglas or the late, great Dan LaFontaine…

In a world without courses. One man. Stands alone. Connected. Disruptive. And with a pedagogical score to settle…

‘Your Education Matters‘ TV Program

Together with Faculty of Education, Media Design is producing a television program called “Your Education Matters“. It is the only TV program in BC dedicated to addressing education issues beyond the headlines. Hosted by Dr. Paul Shaker, Dean of Education at SFU, the program provides insight and opinions from practitioners and scholars on education issues that matter for parents, students, educators and policy makers alike. Your Education Matters will air a new episode with a new topic monthly and rebroadcasts three times a week on Shaw TV Cable 4: Mondays 6:30 pm – 7:00 pm, Sundays 9:00 am – 9:30 am and 7:00 pm – 7:30 pm

“We have created this program to provide insights and opinions from practitioners and scholars on education issues that matter for parents, students, educators and policy makers alike,” said Dr. Paul Shaker who will host the new program. “Our guests are people who know the key issues and who can help our viewers be prepared to actively participate in making the education experience a successful one for learners today and in the future.”

What I was even more pleased to see, is that along with the televised broadcasts, that they made the videos available online using the social video sharing site VIMEO. Of course, I had to immediately sign up for an account and add SFU education as my first contact. Vimeo seems fun! =) Among the very simple but useful features it boasts (besides your typical social networking stuff) is the ability…

to “Like” a video thereby recommending it to your other contacts,

to ‘Embed‘ a video onto your own blog or website much like you can do with YouTube (excpet i cant right now due to some unfortunate bugs in my Wordpress installation. )

or to add an ‘RSS feed‘ of a members vids, which will allow people to subscribe to SFU Education videos using Google Reader or Bloglines or whatever and keep up on the latest SFU education videos from the comfort of their aggregator.

Now, the LIDC has a bit of history with video, particularly webcasts and maintains an extensive archive of videos produced within the department. As well, it has been involved in the SFU TV project in collaboration with Media and PR, but each of these has lacked the extent of features and user experience that comes with a full fledged ‘Web 2.0‘ application such as VIMEO. I for instance like to post videos on my own blog (when i ca) and although this is possible with videos from the archive, there is no GUI support for it, and it in fact requires some funny scripting to make it work. Clearly, this new initiative shows how the third Party sites can be used to increase the reach of media produced at the university, as well as open up access to ‘amateur’ media producers who want to enrich their website content. The revolution continues!

Scholar

Blackboard Scholar is built right into the Blackboard Learning System, for easy integration of relevant, reliable resources and dynamic streams from Scholar, directly into the course.

Peerworks

Peerworks is an open source project that is building content classification tools to help online browsing, collaboration, and social discovery.

Both of these look to be useful applications for educators and both of them incorporate tagging into the user experience. It was also fun to share with educators from around the world, and meet some new people from my own back yard. One of the participants in fact resides a stones throw from my own office, the blog Data Designs from from Therese Weel’s was a welcome addition to my RSS reader. Always good to know there are fellow bloggers right here at SFU. (and yes, one post per month still allows me to call myself a blogger)

http://www.sfu.ca/punkconference/

North America’s first international scholarly conference on punk will be held at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, on April 24-26, 2008. The conference will be held at Simon Fraser University’s Harbour Centre, located in downtown Vancouver, close to historic Gastown and the original site of Vancouver’s first punk club, the Smiling Buddha. The conference will help promote the establishment of a punk archive at SFU’s Bennett Library

Its amazing that I didn’t come across this sooner, but I was pleased to see the conference organizers (Paul Budra and Stephen Ogden) are using a blog as the main point of contact for web communication.

http://blogs.lib.sfu.ca/index.php/punk

The SFU library has been running a number of blogs for awhile using b2evolution.net , which seem to be working well. This one will definitely be worth keeping an eye on over the coming months as preparation heats up. I may even consider a contribution on the topic of my masters thesis or something, particularly if I can get a few of my old cohorts together for another kick at the speakers. fuckinhellya!

I led a brown bag discussion on the topic of tagging today with some of my illustrious colleagues from the university, which is how I even came to discover this site. Hopefully we will see more sites around here that will be able to leverage this powerful Web 2.0 feature. If you know of any, let me know or leave a note on the wiki.

Be sure to check it out and come back for more as I expect this site to have some very interesting updates in the months ahead.

The SFU Local Food Project in collaboration with students from the Semester in Dialogue program would like to hear what you think about the possibility of a farmers market at SFU! We know your time is valuable so if you are able to participate we would like to enter you in a draw for a free cookbook. Please follow this link to participate in the survey http://websurvey.sfu.ca/survey/4817388 and then follow the directions for the draw entry.

Thought I would at least post the link to survey, (having already filled it out myself) but am thinking about volunteering with this group as they seem to be looking for a broad assortment of skills and talent. Their site is interesting , although as an info nerd I notice the lack of an RSS feed for their news and events right away. They do provide a couple of handy resources. a nice looking 2007 Local Food Calendar, which you can print out, (new recipes every month) and a green practices guide which I plan to look over.

I know some of my other web 2.0 brothers and sisters have been big in this area for awhile now, so i’m off to troll through my links for the best of the best eco websites and organizations out there. What factors make a kickass and eco-friendly website/community?

The announcement was made back in March on the “User Experience Connection“, and I was interested to learn that Qixing is a masters graduate from UBC in Human Computer Interaction. I thought the interview went fairly well and I appreciated her explanation of what the role of the user experience professional is all about (even Ricki seemed to get it). Her website states that her passion in this area is

…deeply rooted in helping people to improve their user experiences with the technology they rely on everyday. To me, a good user experience is simple, consistent, pleasing, and reliable.

I have been trying to update my profile page on the wiki we use in the LIDC (here, but soon maybe here), with a small blurb about my approach to creating better user experiences on SFU websites, and the projects I have worked on. So far I’d say its still in an early draft form, but I look forward to articulating what I try to do here, especially in light of the recent news.

“..and they are doing their homework together of course they are, but they’re getting graded individually, and they’re getting tested more and more and more. They separate the tables, they all face forward and they get their little books they write down what they know as individuals.

This is a radically different view of knowledge. What they are being told is, to ‘know is to be equal’. I mean this is an old rant right but it’s getting worse. They are being told that ‘to know’ is have content shoved into your head and be able to write down answers, whereas they’re doing the right thing online outside of the view of teachers, who think they are doing their homework by themselves, they’re not. They’re learning socially.” timecode 22:28 - 23:05

If you keep listening from that point, he responds a bit to the issue of testing and suggests ways that social software may be able to create new ways of teaching and learning.
This software will be a new focus here, particularly in the area of organization. For digital resources to be useful for academics, some new proficiencies in managing these assets are needed such as tagging, and the capability to navigate between the many formats information can be displayed in and converted to.

Although rather paltry, my results do tend to reflect those found at eMarketer in their recently published survey for the top websites used amongst the college going demographic.

I thought it was interesting that of all the sites they deemed their ‘favorite’, only one, (wikipedia) could be considered educational, or at least seen to be usable in an educational context. So I thought I’d post the Top Web Tools for College students list from NextPath.

Maybe next year some more of these sites will be among students favs. (yea of course wikipedia is in there.)

1) Book Finder: Over a year you can end up spending thousands of dollars on books. I am one of those poor students who struggles for money, so the less I pay for books, the better. Book Finder is a neat site/tool that allows you to compare prices on more than 125 million books for sale from 4,000 sellers. So there’s no need to go to Amazon, Half.com and all the other book sites when Book Finder can search them for you.

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2) MynoteIT: If you’re a real organization freak—and by that I mean someone who irons underwear—you’ll love this app. Like the Google suite, you’ll have everything at your fingertips. But, and this is a big plus, it’s just for college students. Form online class groups, share, edit and search your class notes, plan your assignments with your calendar, and get things done with your task list.

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3) Ottobib: Don’t you just hate making those bibliography pages? Although they look really simple, they can drain a lot of time out of you when you have more than 20 sources. Ottobib is a simple bibliography tool that allows you to enter multiple ISBN numbers at a time and retrieve the bibliographies in APA, MLA, or Chicago format.

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4) Google Docs: Every semester it always seems that I have group projects. I use Google Docs heavily for collaboration work. I’ve had multiple papers with a partner, and with Google Docs I just give him/her editing ability on a particular document and we can write the paper at the same time while talking on AIM.

5) Tada List: Scatterbrained? Disorganized? If you never can remember what homework assignments you have, Tada List will do it for you. It will help you keep track of whatever it is that you need to do and easily is accessible from any computer, wherever you are.You can create as many “to do” lists as you like, such as “homework,” “projects,” or whatnot, and then track your items via RSS. Also, for a step up try Backpack. It manages your tasks, but also allows you to set up pages to store important files, photos and the like.

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6) Meebo: I am one of those tech geeks who is a computer science major, which means I have computers in a lot of my classes. I usually get bored because my teachers are slow, so I like to go online and chat with friends to keep up-to-date on all the latest things going around school, such as parties. Instead of installing chat software every time I go to class, I use Meebo. Meebo is an online instant messaging software where you can chat with others through AIM, MSN, Yahoo Messenger and Gtalk.

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7) Wikipedia: Although Wikipedia technically is not a tool, it’s worth mentioning. If you have to do a term paper, Wikipedia is a great resource to get your information. I would not rely on Wikipedia by itself, but it is a great place to get basic information as well as find links to other sites that discuss the topic of your term paper.

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Zoho Show: Everyone I know who goes through college has to do a PowerPoint presentation sometime in their life. Some people like to use Microsoft PowerPoint, but I am not one of those guys. With Zoho Show I can edit, import, create and publish PowerPoint presentations online.

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9) Google Reader: Talk about information. One of the main reasons I am in college is to learn, but there is so much knowledge out there that it is just hard to keep track. With Google Reader I can easily keep up-to-date on the latest news.

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10) Del.icio.us: This social bookmarking site allows you to have all your bookmarks in one place and to share them with other people. The advantage to this site is that I can access my bookmarks on ANY computer. I Del.icio.us all of my college courses’ Web sites and tag them with the course name and semester date (i.e. gatech and spring07).