Stephen links to an interesting article - Net Heads - which explores how the small world phenomenon of social networks (i.e. we cluster in small networks, with a few connections to other networks providing the ability for information to jump from small world to small world). The discussion of synchronization caught my attention - I discussed this concept in a different context in Knowing Knowledge...random entities don't connect, instead connections occur through an "exchange of synchronization" where we first seek to understand the nature of a network or knowledge source, and then, after similarity/compatibility has been determined, we connect. Loosely translated - my attention is heightened when I encounter discussion on subjects I'm interested in, while subjects not in my direct line of interest pass under the radar of my awareness.
On Sunday, I'm heading to Ohio for the Ohio Digital Commons for Education 2007 Conference (say that 10 times, fast). The confernce organizers have set up a conference blog...and given permission for certain individuals (myself included) to post comments and reactions to the conference. Much like our classroom walls are opening, conferences today enable greater dialogue in advance, during, and following the event. The audience, like learners in classrooms, have a voice through blogs, wikis, and podcasts. And that's how it should be. Something as simple as providing a conference tag (in this case, ODCE07) allows learners to find each other in varied blogs, flickr accounts, and search engines. As we see the shift in attention from the experts (who play a role, just not the central role they have perhaps become accustomed to) to the learners, audience, readers, listeners, and viewers...we get a sense of just how profound our world has changed over the last several decades.
I can't teach properly: "The role of a traditional teacher is basically one of learning administrator. Standardization, not creativity, is the key. So long as books look neat and are filled with ‘information’ and students do reasonably well on tests, everything is OK...The reason that teachers don’t rebel against the whole system is because they don’t have time. Teachers, instead of being learning facilitators, are standardization enforcers, something that is anaethema to me."
Heh. I think Doug gets to the heart of the problem - and an idea that I've heard expressed by many educators. Innovation requires experimentation. When our schedules are too full for experimentation (a vital activity for helping teachers/educators understand the affordances of social software), we end up in a role of validating the existing structures of learning...rather than pushing boundaries of education for the benefit of learners.
Welcome to MyWorld explores some of the challenges universities face in adjusting to the changed profile and interests of learners today. Toward the end of the article, the Virtual Learning Commons at U of Manitoba is presented (and, as I've mentioned before, VLC is available on SourceForge as open software)
I received two emails today from what I had previously considered to be at least partly important "nodes" in my learning network suggesting that I should promptly go and vote for them in some type of childish "Top 20 Influentials" in the training field. Wow. Insecurities, anyone? Trying to stay relevant? Mark captures this as well: "I'll tell you what is silly though are the emails that I am getting from people who have been nominated and asking me to go vote for them. Please people..what is this? What's next buttons? Posters? A series of debates focusing on such topics as "I'm more important that you are" and "No, I am"?" I've personally lost significant respect for those involved in soliciting votes...
Well, this is rather cool and should serve the ego-satisfying urges of bloggers and others: socialmeter - "social meter scans the major social websites to analyze a webpage's social popularity. Currently we scan Bloglines, Del.icio.us, Digg, Google, Rojo, Shadows, Technorati and Yahoo My Web." In line with the presentation I posted yesterday - we are doing things with content not foreseen by the original creators (or even aggregators) of content. We personalize, organize, or restructure data to meet our needs.
Connectivism: What's happpening with content - an abbreviated version of my presentation last week at McGraw-Hill Reyerson conference at Mount Royal in Calgary. My basic assertion: people have much more control over content than ever before (consider Yahoo Pipes, Dapper, blogs, wikis, podcasts, etc.). The ability to create, co-create, and re-create has washed over many industries (newspapers, music, radio, magazines), essentially re-writing their field in a short period of time. Content-centric views of those fields needed to be altered once end-users had greater control. Education is presented with a similar challenge. Our content-centric views of learning are destined for a clash with the learner's expectation for greater control of our content in their spaces.
Barbara Ganley has posted a "jaw-dropping beautiful" (to quote Bryan Alexander) reflection on learning in environments of abundance, and being called toward reflection by the events of life.
David Weinberger has a new book coming out shortly titled Everything is Miscellaneous. To support the book, he has started a new blog. Worth following.
Future of open business Two quotes stick out in this article for me: "Trying to fit the emerging future into the structure of the past...Embracing The Future For What It Is Becoming". This is a challenge most educators continue to see as unsettled. To what degree are we to change our institutions for trends? To what degree should we shape society by ideals often not reflected in trends. Technology is not neutral - it expresses a world view, a pedagogy, a philosophy. What is the balance between "changing it" and "it changing us"?
...and another Pew Internet report on tagging...a bit ironic that the very aspect of tagging that makes it most useful (i.e. we define a resource as we perceive it) is listed as a qualifier for the challenges experienced by the report (i.e. more people may tag, but they use different names for the process). Sucks when new approaches are squeezed into existing models of information dissemination. While the report is a bit sparse, the short interview with David Weinberger is useful in presenting tagging as a means of information classification in contrast with traditional systems (like Dewey).
Pew Internet has released a report on wireless internet access. Wireless use impacts traditional "wired" internet access, reversing many of the figures (for example, wired access: 54% female, 46% male...wireless 56% male, 44% female. Wired access is more common, compared with wireless access, among certain ages (i.e. over 65), by income, and by race). 40% of Americans surveyed had a phone with internet access (seems low to me).
Widgets - the future of content?: "All content needs to be loosed in the smallest particles possible (widgetized). Then it will reform itself into valid and relevant units, driven by the consumers of that content."
A good reference for bringing individuals up to speed on the messy language of our field: Glossary of Social Media
Google announced the release of their Apps toolset (for a fee - starting at $50 per year). Wired News presents reasons to switch from Microsoft Office...and reasons to stay.
Tim Berners-Lee: "There is a very important difference in attitude between a foundation technology and — well — let's call it a ceiling technology. A foundation technology is designed to enable innovation, to be the base which will support other even more powerful things to come. A ceiling technology is not. It is designed to provide a value, and for its provider to cash in and cash out."
Over the last year, I've noticed a big shift in attention and focus on the ideology of open source software (and, if trends hold as they have in other apsects of education) and the parallels in education content. Many educators are proclaiming the value of openness...but are increasingly using closed tools. What's getting all the attention these days? Content tools with great functionality and ease of use...but which are closed in format. Openness and free are being confused (or, perhaps for many educators, is not something that is important).
We've seen this before - in the mid-80's, Microsoft offered an operating systems with ease of use (relative to other operating systems). Ease of use trumped openness. Now, we have educators adopting excellent tools - provided by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Zoho, and others - often at the expense of opensource wikis, blogs, and other tools (though Wordpress has high adoption, but as blogging becomes more mainstream, more and more educators are opting for Blogger or other hosted services...and this discussion is largely outside of the "foundational" tools like web servers, databases, and other open source tools pivotal to the functioning of the web). Is this trend good or bad? I'll reserve opinion on that - there are certain upsides (namely reliable, hosted, trusted service provided by Google), but initial starting points have long-term consequences. We have a bit of history we can rely on to evaluate implications...much innovation was unleashed, but at a cost of certain elements of society. Free, effective, easy to use tools are the biggest challenge to open source - an indication of open source's failure to mainstream their tools, and human nature's habit of sacrificing comfort for freedom.
Today, during my presentation at McGraw-Hill Ryerson conference at Mount Royal College (Calgary), I was asked about whether we needed a new conception of what it means to be educated. Short answer: Yes. We need to focus more on the process of becoming educated (education itself needs to be seen as continual, not ending with a degree - but that's a very obvious statement)...not the end product of education. In a sense, we need to make friends with uncertainty. The goal of education is not to eliminate uncertainty, but to hold it in balance. Dave Pollard has some thoughts on moving from simplistic thinking to embracing complexity.
Zach Lynch (NeuroInsights) releases an interesting (and disturbing) presentation he delivered on ethical and societal implications of neursocience. We are at the doorstep (so say researchers) of understanding and manipulating our brains on cognitive, perceptual, and emotional levels. What does emotion become (or what purpose do they serve) when we are able to change them with a pharmaceutical? In an interesting discussion at the end of the presentation, the types of questions being asked reveals just how close we are to re-writing our understanding of being human: Q: "When will we be done sleeping? When can we just work 24 hours a day?" A: "Well, that depends on what you want". (No credibility was given to whether it is even possible to stop sleeping - the point I would like to focus on is that we will be selecting our emotional and intellectual skills based on desires - instead of "what do you want to do today?", the question becomes, "how do you want to feel today?", or "how smart do you want to be today?").
A relationship is essentially a connection (with a bit more history and permanence than a casual connection (for example in the online world, when I read an article by an author it's a casual connection...when I subscribe to an author's blog feed it raises the potential of a relationship...and regular postings on the part of the author, combined with my reactions/reflections in my blog, helps to solidify the relationship)). Doc Searls tackles the question of relationships from the perspective of markets: Building an Relationship Economy: "What happens when you view markets through the prism of relationship?"
Online Video Industry Index - an excellent resource of roughly everything you need to know about online video - from sites for sharing, editing, search, and more.
Toward the end of January, we hosted a Personal Learning Environments Symposium at University of Manitoba. We now have the website of the symposium updated. Presentations are listed with video and PowerPoint files. Direct links: Terry Anderson's keynote... and afternoon plenary Clarence Fisher, Darren Kuropatwa, and George Siemens (that'll be me)
Information validity is increasingly determined by the views of many individuals, not the select domain of a few. Wikipedia validates information (or settles disputes) based on a transparent process (try challenging an "expert" to reveal how they allow for feedback to their lectures and writing). The activities of many (not in creating the content, but in evaluating it - i.e. "rate this" approach from eBay, Digg, and other sites) provides a different type of validation of information. I emphasize different - expert-bases systems have value, but their value diminishes simply because no single person can keep up with today's information. A network, however, can.
How Choice, Co-Creation, and Culture Are Changing What It Means to Be Net Savvy: "The vast amount of readily available information is just one reason for transforming the way we conduct research and acquire knowledge. The nature of information itself has changed. In text and other formats, information is not just created by experts—it is created and co-created by amateurs. We can select what information to receive (via RSS, for example), and it comes to us—we don't have to seek it out. More than ever before, we can choose what, when, and where to use information. With all these choices, do we really know what we are doing, whether the information is valid, or how best to use it?"
Widgets are small, add on programs that allow users to do basic tasks from finding stock quotes, weather information, serving as a calculator, etc. Apple calls their widget collection a "dashboard" (you can add dictionary widgets, business updates, myspace search, and more). Yahoo offers a gallery of thousands of widgets.
Widgets generally serve single tasks - providing some time of information selected by the user. Pageflakes embeds the widgets in a web page (and calls them flakes...but the functionality is very similar to widgets). Blog software - like Wordpress and MovableType - offer widgets to extend the functionality of their services. Google calls their widgets "gadgets"...Firefox has add ons and extensions...Dave Lee links to blidgets (blogging widgets - yikes, we need a language purification session for technology) fromWidgebox, and on and on. All intended, of course, to help us make sense (and function within) the deluge of information washing over our computer (and increasingly, mobile) screens on a daily basis.
Of course there are concerns with widgets...and Scott Karp asks
Will Widgets Hit A Mainstream Wall Just Like RSS?
While "the world is flat" is a wonderful ideal, it's not reality. It's not reality globally...and it's not reality within Canada (or US, Europe, Middle East, Africa, or where ever). Consider this animation of global economic activity (via Creativity Exchange)
I posted a short overview of tools educators can use for starting with technology on my LTC blog. I focused on tools like Zoho, Google Docs, etc. The Great Web Office Experiment adds a few additional tools for consideration as our lives move from desk tops to the web.
Hubert's Error: "Human knowledge is messy not neat and tidy. Knowledge discovery is serendipitous, not planned. It is just not good enough to say that people can volunteer to join centrally determined systems. That is volunteering in the sense of the drill sergeant. It is a lot better to allow order to emerge bottom up from a fairly messy environment. It costs less, it is more likely to work and above all in reflects the way that people naturally work."
I was playing around with Yahoo Pipes on the weekend. Some have called it "a milestone in the history of the internet"...others aren't too impressed. I fit into the "I'm impressed" camp. Not for the technology itself, but how it relates to what I've been saying about learning and technology for the last few years: the networks we create are our structures of learning. Pipes allows individuals to filter data in a manner that is personally relevant - i.e. data from many sources meets the needs of the end user. Simply, open data repurposed and re-created for personalized needs.
Jon Udell: "The dominant way in which most people will “program” the web is by writing metadata, not code, and we’ll need an interface as friendly and powerful as Pipes to help them do that."
After a fairly involved week of dialogue and presentation, the Online Connectivism Conference is now finished. We had 1200 registrants from 50+ countries (the conference Attendr map gives a bit of a visual). If you are interested in listening to the presentations...or following the discussion, it's available on the conference website.
I presented to SCoPE several times over the last month on Knowing Knowledge. Part 1 ...and Part 2 (I think the second session was more effective...).
I've seen this resource linked on several sites and listservs. Excellent (5 minute) overview of what's happening with technology: Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us