Confession: I like books. I like museums. They possess a spirit of inquiry, of possibility. They are also obsolete in their traditional form. In fact, any industry that is content-based is experiencing tremendous change - a shift in value from the content itself, to conversation about, and interpretation of, the content. When I make these declarations at conferences, my relationship with librarians becomes mildly strained. Which is unfortunate. Of all academic fields, libraries have reacted more significantly to the change of information and knowledge.
Libraries today hardly resemble what they were only a decade ago. Sure, there are stacks of books...but I usually see more learners at the banks of computers than anywhere else. I don't think libraries quite have the right model yet...but "learning commons", learner support, experimentation with new learning technologies (I've encountered numerous institutions recently where the Second Life initiatives are driven by libraries), digital repositories, and focus on digital literacy skills are a great start. Short article: Libraries at the Cutting Edge.
In terms of museums, we are seeing a similar change in making content open and accessible. Large museums provide excellent educational material online. Recent initiatives are adding greater levels of "socialization" to artifacts, allowing learners to connect to others with shared interests. Have a look at these resources: Museum Open Learning Initiative...and Museum 2.0
Knowledge artifacts are context. Whether it's a book, a piece of pottery, a painting, or an ejournal, our first questions, relate to meaning. Obviously, there are aesthetic aspects - beauty, awe, a connection to our history. At its core, libraries and museums become curators of understanding, not curators of artifacts. Not sure why they don't talk more to each other...they are both climbing the same mountain.
Clarence Fisher has been experimenting with, and writing about, studio models of learning. Instead of the teacher dominating the discussion, get learners to work together and create an environment of energy and innovation. This learning model is valuable in that it provides a balance between the expert and the learners. Learners are active in their activities, while the instructor "hovers" around, highlighting interesting projects, getting learners together to focus on exceptional work, fostering discussion, creativity, and exploration. Studio classrooms and flow: "But moving towards a studio, I have seen almost all classroom management issues disappear."
...and now, on to the wisdom of penguins: Why penguins have no commanding officer… "But if they have no leader then how do they know where to go?
This is a good question because it reveals the essential difference between human teams and nature’s teams. The answer is that no single penguin knows where to go, but they know where to go as a group.
This is known as collective or team intelligence and is a key feature of other biological teams, such as ant colonies. Perhaps surprisingly, humankind is the only species that operates ‘leader intelligence’ – the trust that a small group of leaders knows best for the whole group."
I've been harping on how the computer model of cognition isn't accurate for a few years. Here's an interesting article: 10 important differences between brains and computers - it's an important article for starting the conversation on differences. Conceptions of the brain as a blend of networks and ecologies (self-organization) provide a better understanding of how we learn than so schema and modularity. Be sure to check out the comments at the end of the article for contrary viewpoints.
Dave Snowden responds using Hutchins-like language: "In practice I am using a distributed artifact, the blogosphere as a part of intelligence."
A few additional articles to consider:
So, How Do REAL Neuronal Networks Compute?
Neural Network "Learning Rules"
...as well, this interesting discussion on Walt Whitman's body/mind fusion - well before it's time - based on point #10 of the above list: "we don't have a body, we are a body"
Terence Armentano asks:
...what are universities across the world doing about this information revolution? How are we demonstrating to our future students that we are not only a part of this human network but that we are leaders in the movement? Most universities were built and designed to function effectively in a single geographic location to a specific group of people in a print based environment. Now that we can communicate with people around the world instantly and access books, journals, presentations, videos, and more online, we should think of the world as our classroom. Future students understand this information age and expect universities to be on the front lines. As the world moves toward a global economy and information can be accessed from anywhere in the world, universities need to think more critically about how they want to proceed in developing leaders of this brave new digital age.
I spoke with Phillip Long of MIT during the recent EDUCAUSE ELI focus session. He had presented on iLabs (remote online lab access for real, not simulated, experiments using equipment that might not be available in certain institutions or countries). I asked him why MIT was offering these resources to other institutions (without charge). His response - it doesn't cost MIT anything to allow others to use their equipment when it's idle. But, in return, MIT hopes others will partner with them by writing and sharing learning activities, data sets, course outlines, etc. While this openness is certainly not common across all institutions, it does reveal a mindset shift: knowledge is not held or owned by an academic institution - it's owned by a discipline. While we have created structures to "lock down" knowledge, it has always been owned by a discipline (scientific discoveries at one institution influenced activities in another). Great to see these gestures of collaboration from leading universities.
Cisco has been running these "welcome to the human network" commercials. Captures some of the tremendous changes being forced on individuals today (in how we relate to content, each other, the world). All in under two minutes. This quote stuck with me: "People subscribe to people not magazines". When I subscribe to someone's blog, I'm really subscribing to them. The content they write about today will be obsolete soon...but as long as they keep writing and reflecting, I learn from them. I stay current through them. Now, how do we do that with our learning content?
Learning with Networks: "Networks allow cost effective ways for us to move learning out beyond the campus or virtual classroom. Networks are not communities of practice in which all members are struggling to develop common solutions to common problems. Rather, networks are diverse, free form and free-flowing resources. Participation within these networks by learners in formal education not only develops lifelong learning skills, but provides cost effective and scalable tools for not only extracting information, but for contributing and building knowledge."
It's great to see the network learning theme spread. When I reflect on how rapidly knowledge is growing, society is changing, disciplines are blending and blurring, and our activities are "complexifying", I can't think of any model other than networks that is capable of adjusting and reacting at the required pace and manner. But the real problem is not identifying the solution to our current challenges. The real problem rests in implementation. When we move to networks, we need to change pretty much everything else. It's like a software program that has been written in one language, and we are now trying to write it in another. We can't simply add on and tweak. In education, we basically have to start over...rethinking curriculum, teaching, learning, the role of technology, and so on. I don't think we are under enough pressure yet to make changes of that scale.
I'm in Raleigh for the next few days for an EDUCAUSE immersive learning environments conference (and then off to Ottawa to present at the Canadain Museum Association. For some reason, librarians and museum personnel have a better grasp of the scope of change being generated by technology and the internet. Perhaps they feel it in their disciplines before the changes spread into the other aspects of society. Anyway, came across this useful article - Alternate Reality Games whitepaper - a great introduction to the field of games and learning (but, fortunately, not only focused on SecondLife as most game-based literature in the mainstream seems to be).
I've posted an article on Scholarship in an age of participation. Still trying to chip away at that rather large block of "academic closedness".
While the article is focused specifically on journals, the broader view represented is one of a changed relationship to how we create, consume, and validate information.
I've posted a presentation on professional development approaches for educators. It's the concluding element in a course I'm currently teaching on "course implementation". I think most educators do professional development well...but not often recognized by the institution. I imagine (with absolutely no evidence) that someone who is active in reading blogs, contributing to wikis, engaged in online communities, follows trends through Google Alerts, del.icio.us, Digg, etc. receives the equivalent of any certificate program...with the side skills of critical thinking and pattern recognition thrown in.
The Learning Technology Centre at University of Manitoba is announcing a new initiative to increase the dialogue on, and awareness of, innovative approaches to the use of technology to improve the effectiveness of learning. We are currently seeking individuals and organizations interested in partnering with us. The basic structure:
- Monthly online (live) presentations showcasing innovative technology projects
- The formation of a network of practitioners to dialogue about the implications of different types of technologies - we will host this in Moodle
The goal of this project is to form a central node for the dialogue and debate of different approaches to technology use in the learning process. While our specific focus is on higher education, it is hoped that sub-communities will form on the moodle site focusing on K-12, corporate, or other environments.
If you're interested in being involved (in partnering with us, presenting your innovative topic, or simply to be a member of the network/discussion), or would like to be added to a mailing list of future activities,send me an email: george_siemens@umanitoba.ca.
Our first session will be held on April 12, 2007 at 11:00 am CST. Peter Tittenberger and I will be presenting the Virtual Learning Commons project at University of Manitoba, and the implications to online sense of community in academic environments.
Learning content is typically owned and hosted by an author, organization, or institution. When the institution doesn't own the content (i.e. the lecturer's notes, learning object), it mediates the resources owned by others (textbook). In reading this article on where the music industry went wrong (hint: they misjudged how customers wanted to interact with their music), I was reminded of how short-sighted we are in our relation to learning content. We expect learners to come to us for content (at best, I would argue they should come to us for interaction around content). Our content should come to them in their own space. YouTube understood this early. Instead of expecting viewers to come to the YouTube site, a blogger could embed the player directly into their own site. How difficult would it be for an organization to create a YouTube like "player" that allowed individuals to pull learning content into what ever space they spend the most time (MySpace, Facebook, etc). Obviously, not all learners want their social spaces polluted with learning resources...so we can still provide the centralized site (like YouTube does) where learners can explore content in a more traditional, categorized manner (we current call that WebCT or Blackboard...but these sites are closed, permitting a one-way flow - "learner in" but not "content out").
In a sense, I think learning misses the element that Ze Frank describes as "conversational energy". It's not the content, it's the connection (expressed in conversation, dialogue, relationships). Teaching is an invitation to engage learners in a dialogue. Learning is what happens once we are engaged.
It only makes sense that the growing space of user generated content should begin to clash more directly with the structured content creation models of formal studios. The greatest barrier to creating video and audio, until the last few years, was the costs associated with creating and distributing content. Today, with a few decent software programs, anyone with aspirations (talent is nice, but optional) can write, produce, and distribute a video, movie, or song. Amateur journalism has followed a similar path - formal newspapers augmented, not replaced, by blogs and user filtered news sites. The success of YouTube for distributing video has created a destabilizing environment for formal media networks. So, they've opted to create their own version of YouTube - primarily to distribute their own content (it doesn't appear at this stage to allow user-created content). The clash between formal/informal, structured/unstructured, control/foster is playing itself out in music, journalism, software (see Can Office 2007 Prevail In A Web 2.0 World?), video, and, to varying degrees in education. I imagine we'll eventually see a bit of a settling between both open source and proprietary, experts and amateurs. In the short term, however, the key word is disruption.
Widgets are increasingly popular on both web sites...and desktops. A very practical, introductory overview: Using widgets to build community (done using SplashCast). Widgets are small pieces of code, serving a single function - displaying weather, notifying blog visitors your online for chat, news feeds, calendar...Yahoo has a library of thousands of widgets (Google/Microsoft call them gadgets). Most widgets are quite easy to install - Google for example, allolws users to click and select a widget, and it's added to their personalized home page.
Digital Learning Apartheid: "Historically, the early concerns and discussions of the digital divide assumed that the most important issue was to provide access for all learners via infrastructural improvements to our country's public schools...What was neither anticipated nor addressed then, nor is being focused upon now, is the disparate at-home access to the Internet of our have-not learners from the country's poorest families. When they leave school at the end of the day, they suffer from a disproportionate degree of at-home Internet isolation and the lack of access to their schools’ online digital learning resources."
Well, isn't this nice: Blog makes law firm uninsurable: "Basically, the concern is that anything posted on the blog could be construed as legal advice, and thus open up the firm to a lawsuit should a reader act on this "advice"."
Forbid that we should have commonsense. One commenter suggested that the issue is not that the insurance company doesn't understand blogs, but rather that the courts don't understand blogs. That may be. But I don't see why blogging is any different from a memo, a website, or any other type of communication.
Video Lectures, while not as effecient/smooth as TED Talks, is a great resource for lectures. I think education should be much more like this - listen to the lecture in advance of the class (especially those lectures that aren't interactive - i.e. Q & A)...and then spend class time in dialogue, application, and synthesis. I found the lecture on fuzzy logic rather interesting. (via TerenceOnline)
Speaking of Tutors...Tutor Mentor (I think I've linked to them before): "The map below shows where poverty is concentrated in Chicago and where poorly performing schools are located. These are places where non school tutoring and/or mentoring programs are connecting kids with extra adult help. "
Obviously, a great use of tutoring and technology to provide a valuable service to a community. Embedded in many of these emerging tools is not only the capacity for connecting with others...but also the capacity for making our corner of the world a bit better. Consider, for example, the stated intent of Tutor Mentor: "to build a community of adults and organizations that are dedicated to reaching youth living in poverty and to building a sophisticated, long-term support system that leads them to careers." Excellent.
Good idea: Tutor Linker - find tutors by location, subject area, price range, etc. This would be a useful site if universities encouraged capable students to register as tutors - but right now, after searching Winnipeg and Toronto, not a single tutor was listed in either city. Searching major US cities resulted in numerous hits. At this point, the site needs more tutors, but it's a nice proof of concept. Let students organize themselves...
I'm almost done with the Twitter thing (a tool to let the world know "what you're doing right now")...it fits in with the statement that in the instead of being famous for 15 minutes, today we are famous to 15 people.. It's easy to dismiss twitter as a waste of time...or fad. But I think the issue is deeper. It's about (as I've stated earlier) persistent presence - being hyper-connected to those few individuals who care about our activities on minute levels - close friends, family, children, etc. I have also heard of Twitter as a project management tool - for staying informed of project progress. On it's simplest level, Twitter, and other tools that will be spawned as a result, are about relationships and presence. Sure it's a time waster (on one level). But so are quick conversations in the hallway. But that is what makes us human to the small group of people we are closely connected with. Twitter may be a fad. The concepts that Titter reflects, however, are here for the long term.
Bryan Alexander captures much of the recent conversation around Twitter
Kathy Sierra asks: Is Twitter too Good?
WSJ weighs in as well
...and TechCrunch compares Twitter and Dodgeball
Interesting comparison of the state of the web today...and the PC industry pre-Windows: "The Web today still resembles MS-DOS more than MS-Windows. Every website is an island, an island that knows nothing about any other website."
I agree with this - Tribal Mind: "In a hierarchy the entity is the prime unit, the linkages secondary; in a network the linkages are prime, the entities secondary and fluid."
My current concern or thought focus is on the implications of our shift in primary focus on how our organizations are designed. We see the increase in, as well as the context and characteristics of, knowledge. We can only make small adjustments for so long. Eventually, we have to stop and make some hard choices. How should our organizations function in an era where the connection (or flow), not the content (or knowledge object), is primary? How should we design our universities, corporations, and organizations? We can only talk about changed climates of knowledge for so long before we have to roll up our sleeves and start to deal with the implications.
I've been saying this for a few years now with regard to education: "Don’t get me wrong – content, especially high quality content, will always have value. But, on a relative basis, the opportunities for value creation are shifting. As content proliferates, the ability to help audiences connect with content that matters the most to them will become the real sweet spot of the media industry."
Here's a cool tool - part wiki, part MS Word: Coventi. While writing a recent research proposal, I used a wiki for collaboration instead of Word (the track changes feature is nice, but unmanageable after a while). The problem with the wiki, however, is that it blurs individual identities and comments. If I want to approve changes (or hold discussions around suggested changes - in context, instead of the "discuss" wiki tab), rather than have them directly inserted into a document, wikis don't work that well. Coventi combines the collaborative nature of wikis...with the ability to comment and discuss a document (like Word).
I've been playing with SpashCast recently. A simple web-based application that enables the creation of multi-media presentations (i.e. audio with powerpoint, images, youtube). Great tool for educators to consider...limited time required to produce some fairly decent presentations.
How we interact with, and determine the authority, or content has changed. Sites like digg.com give the community the control to determine what is important (articles grow in prominence based on how many people "digg" it, suggesting that popularity is at least partly related to importance - except when some celebrity shaves their head). Ebay has reputation systems in place that allow buyers to share their experience with a seller. Amazon allows readers to rate and comment on books - and others to rate comments. I recently came across to new sites seeking to use the power of community in teaching and in :
tteach - "free interactive knowledge sharing website. Here anyone can teach, learn & share their knowledge, educational resources & original classes worldwide"...everyone is a teacher...everyone is a learner.
Vouchon - where individuals can "vouch on" different subjects based on their own experience (simply, a recommendation).
I'm not so much interested in these specific tools - there will be many more. I'm interested in how we are injecting personal experiences into tasks previously assigned to experts. From product recommendation, to teaching, to authority - these have shifted (at least in part) to the community. The Consumer Reports have given way to the community reports. The teacher/learner line is blurring. It's a different world...but we are still experiencing it primarily through our existing institutions. Teaching, scholarship, and research are to date largely immune from these substantial changes. That's about to change. Not as a dramatic shift to "everything is validated by masses", but to a model that allows for a greater role for all individuals. The expert will still be prominent. But her voice will no longer be the only one heard.
Michigan takes a compulsory online learning experience to education, requiring "all students to take an online course or have an online learning experience in order to graduate from high school."
Reading the article felt like a corporate news release. We need more Neil Postman in our education discussions. Our focus is on "how do we make education better". That's an important conversation. But we also need to understand the "why of education". And it's more than developing better corporate employees - it's about developing better people, better societies...work and careers is a part of that, but by no means the only part.
Different Cultures Make Very Different Use of ICT (.doc): "Much can be learned from teacher training institutions in well-to-do Western countries that efficiently and effectively utilize ICT in teaching and learning, management and administration. But it is not always possible to implement the same practices in classrooms where the culture, infrastructure and other factors are completely different. This paper suggests that it is important to consider how learning environments differ in terms of culture and to examine how the needs of teachers and students may differ from country to country."
Leigh offers valuable ideas on wikis: "the aggregation of individual efforts and then the collaboration...one-way aggregation is only half useful. Being able to quickly and easily compile an information piece on a wiki page from a variety of already existing information and media is great, being able to then quickly edit and add your own information around that media is even better, but to be able to dynamically export that page in true Web2 fashion would be the bomb!"
In response, Alan Levine presents approaches to aggregation and content remixing through extensions in MediaWiki: "I think 90% of the users of MediaWiki stray as far as changing the logo in the top left and 95% of us use the stock Monobook style I feel like I’ve only scraped down maybe 5 or 10% of what is there. It’s cool to see even more unfolding out there, especially as wikis grow more in variety and interesting uses out there."
..and as Leigh asks, when does this stop being a wiki? Aside from being a language game, I'm much more intrigued with the conceptual elements of wikis and blogs. A year ago or so, I posted on the functionality issue: "the real value of blogs and wikis is not the tool itself. It's what the tool enables". Blogs aren't blogs like they were when the first started - the functionality has increased enormously (remember the first generation of Blogger?). Now we use tags, categories, images, trackbacks, etc. to extend the use of blogs. But the means of expressing ourselves as individuals or groups remains the same with blogs. Scott Leslie offered a link to John Maxwell's presentation - love the statement that wikis are "simplest thing that could possibly work". I imagine the tools we use today for communication and collaboration will bear small resemblance to the tools we'll use in a few years time (I saw one illustration of a wiki in Austria last year that used wikis as a knowledge management system, recording an individual's interactions with information and keeping track of key ideas - so after posting thoughts, the wiki would come to know a person and an organization - recognizing patterns and suggesting "oh, last year, you had a similar idea here"...or "Susan in HR is working on this concept as well").
The issue being explored by Leigh and Alan has two aspects: a) the use of functional content: how do we aggregate, mix, and extend content , and b) our identity as content creators and individuals...for use in different spaces. If I contribute on a wiki, but want my contribution to come from my blog, how can we do that without cutting and pasting. Reminds me a bit of designing a relational database - we want the content in one place, but repurposed for many uses. Perhaps the concept required is of a web database that allows us to open our content for numerous systems to use...but the core still stays in our system. The problem arises, however, when our content is remixed and improved - do we allow others to update our content in our system?
This is an important concept for educators - to what degree do we want our learners to retain the tools they already use? Should my content come to the learner's tool? I would think so...but it raises all types of concerns about copyright, ownership, control and so on. I imagine we will have a system designed that manages the the multi-laticed nature of content creation in different spaces well before we will have attended to our systemic concerns.
Content aggregation and identity does not require that we have a central model that we always bend to - we can have different identities in different spaces...and we may not wish to enable others to aggregate our content. A system should allow the option or the choice. But, to use my current favorite metaphor of educational change, we are at a point with technology, content, and learner identity that we need significant changes to our system. But it's like doing a bathroom renovation. We may only start by wanting a new mirror. Then we seen the drywall needs replacing. Then the sink. The bathtub. The flooring. The light fixtures. And once we're done with all that, we get dissatisfied with our kitchen or living room. Eventually, we commit to large scale renovations...or we start looking for a new home more in line with our needs and interests.
...oh, and then I tried out Send2Wiki - draw a button to your toolbar, and when browsing a website, you click the send2wiki button, and it will send the page to a wiki (you are then required to specify copyright permission, etc.). Once in a wiki, you can mess around with it. Quite cool.
Canadian Council on Learning continues to produce useful reports - ranging from post secondary trends to corporate training. In a recent article, they tackle the looming skill shortages to serve corporate needs of Canada (a trend reflective of most western countries): "A decade ago the biggest economic challenge facing Canada was creating enough jobs for our workers. Within the next decade, our biggest challenge will be ensuring that we have enough workers and that they have the skills and knowledge they need."
Elearning records two sentences in the report - a bit short sighted. While they address many of the concerns, suggest several solutions (partnerships, setting clear goals, selecting right methods, etc.), the means of re-tooling a workforce is largely ignored. Like it or not, technology-enabled training will have an enormous presence in future corporate training. The use of learning management systems, video conferencing, professionally produced learning resources, online conferences, performance support systems, virtual mentorship, online meetings, and so on, will be a primary approach to gab filling needs of employers/employees (as well as re-skilling the workforce for new careers).
Cisco has purchased WebEx for the very reasonable sum of 3. 2 billion (?!?). Techcrunch gets to the real problem: "WebEx is exactly the kind of a company that is being disrupted by new web startups, who are creating cheaper and better alternatives to older web applications."
Twitter and Jaiku are part of a new generation of persistent presence tools. These tools basically allow you to be hyper-connected to the few people who might actually care (there appears to be a small audience for information about my dietary, sleep or media habits). Luis Suarez explores corporate uses of twitter - "I, finally, decided to give it a try and my initial opinion has now changed completely. So, like I mentioned previously, here is a weblog entry that I have put together where I have listed 10 reasons why I strongly believe that Twitter is actually a very empowering social software tool that would help knowledge workers improve their already existing social networks."
Some thoughts on what I need from a search engine today: "What I need today is a search tool that captures and searches my activities in interacting with knowledge as a process."
Like any business at the door step of significant change, academic journals are seeking to find their way...a struggle impacted by requests for openness by government funders - Open Access Launches Journal Wars: "When it's the taxpayers that are underwriting projects in the federal government, they deserve to access the very things they're paying for".
We've (Learning Technologies Centre, University of Manitoba) put together a wiki of New Technologies for Teaching and Learning. If you're interested in blogs, wikis, aggregators, audio, video, flickr, web conferencing, and social book marking, these wiki pages are a good starting point. They've been put together with the intent of providing a quick overview of the technology...and basic uses in teaching/training/learning environments. The resources extend and support the Personal Learning Environments symposium we hosted earlier this year. For instructors interested in starting to teach with technology, the process is quite simple - start with a few different tools (blogs or wikis for example) - experiment with them, add new tools as learners express interest, and stay connected to a network of researchers and practitioners who are experimenting as well (I would suggest, subscribing to Downes' OLDaily...and of course, the weekly elearnspace newsletter :) (summary of blog postings)).
Wikipedia, and other amateur/user-created sources of knowledge, are often rated as inaccurate (or with greater potential for errors than work generated by experts). Is Most Published Research Really False? revisits a 2005 article suggesting many formalized research findings are actually false. The current article suggests that replication of research increases its prospects for being true (obviously) and that our society may be at a stage where "less than perfect" results are acceptable. Laying aside the indirect challenge to the scientific method...and the biases inherent in adopting and approach and constructing a research project...it's important to acknowledge that our relationship to knowledge has changed within the last 10 - 15 years. We have less of a sense of permanence. We have a "good enough" (using Weinberger's analogy) view of knowledge - if it meets our needs now, it is sufficient. Most of us don't use Wikipedia in formal writing (journal articles, books, and thesis) - we use sources subject to greater scrutiny and more rigorous processes. But to answer a quick question or fill a small knowledge need/gap, wikipedia works fine. And, as noted above, even formal, published research lacks the certainty we crave. The biggest lesson we have to learn in our knowledge climate today may well stem from the breakdown of certainty, and the increased reliance on trusted networks and contexts to inform our actions and understanding.
While blogs and wikis can't be compared due to different functionality (blogs are largely about individuals and broadcasting, wikis are largely about working as a group and co-creating)...I'm getting the feeling that, in the long term, wikis will receive greater (widespread) adoption. Derrick de Kerckhove states that blogging is about publishing our network. Wikis, in my eyes, are about using our network to achieve particular aims.
A few recent wiki articles:
Tapping Wikis for Web Community-Building
David versus Goliath (wikis and Blackboard): "But can Web 2.0 tools truly replace something as big as a CMS? In my analysis, the answer is a resounding yes. Whereas Blackboard was designed for instructors, wikis were made for everyone."
I found this site rather interesting - Speech Accent Archive. The archive would be of particular use to language/linguistic instructors. The resource includes speech samples from numerous languages...neat way to waste some time trying to guess accents. I did find that certain examples immediately activated memories/experience/images of people I have met who embody certain accents. (via Cognitive Daily)
More Digital Data Than Space: "We'll need better technologies to help secure, parse, find and recover usable material in this universe of data."
The challenge of data abundance is only partly tied to storage. Our real need rests on two areas: different approaches to how we handle data (i.e. our personal skills) and different technology for making sense of what the abundant data means.
I will be releasing a short paper within the week on a new project we (University of Manitoba and numerous other individuals and institutions) are initiating as a means to blend the scholarly model of traditional journals with the changed context and characteristics of knowledge today. Open access is substantially impacting all aspects of society. Journals are adopting a collaborative model - Economists Try Open-Source Peer Review "adopts a ‘Linux approach’ to publication, viewing research as a cooperative enterprise between authors, editors, referees and readers"... open-source politics are gaining momentum...Soft peer review? Social software and distributed scientific evaluation explores traditional peer review...or consider this exploration of How the Open Source Movement Has Changed Education: 10 Success Stories. Stephen links to an article on the preservation and archiving needs of e-journals. A recent text - Understanding Knowledge as Commons is a must read for librarians (and educators in general) on the changed nature of scholarship. While the move to openness is not without concern (see this AAUP statement on open access - .pdf), the trends are significantly defined that academics need to familiarize themselves with the key aspects of this conversation...
Envisioning the Whole Digital Person: "As a human society, we’re quite possibly looking at the largest surge of recorded information that has ever taken place, and at this point, we have only the most rudimentary tools for managing all this information—in part because we cannot predict what standards will be in place in 10, 50, or 100 years." (via infobits)
I've been going on (and on) over the last several years about how the tremendous increase in information (and thereby knowledge) requires that we change our assumptions and views of what it means to learn. Over the last year, tools have emerged that react to the increased abundance. We are now less concerned with managing information in individual units, and more focused on relying on networks to play a filtering role. I've suggested previously that tag clouds (like flickr's popular tags) offer the grunt-level cognition of presenting basic patterns...which then allows us to move to meaning and sense making. This notion is reflected in a post on LibraryThing's use of tags...namely that tags create a "web of meaning" which reflect the aggregate of the activities of many contributors. I would take slight exception to "web of meaning" - meaning making is something that we do in our heads (though influenced by social, network activities). The tag clouds presented here are more of a "web of patterns" - i.e. what are many people doing.
Video and audio files are available from my presentation at ODCE 2007 earlier this week, focused on how universities/schools/businesses need to shift from content-centric to connection/conversation-centric views of teaching/learning:
Should I give up on listservs: "There are many others, but I am beginning to think that the day of the list serve is over. Open wikis and the blogosphere provide greater stimulus and diversity. The discussion pages of the wikipedia form a fascinating community in their own right."
CBC posted an article on the innovative in-class work being done by Clarence Fisher and Darren Kuropatwa at the K-12 level (actually, much of the practical adoption of blogs and wikis is done at that level...podcasts are being adopted rapidly at the university level - possibly and indication of our desire as educators to lecture). It's a good article...and we need more mainstream acknowledgement of the uses of social tools for creating learning networks that extend beyond the classroom. I do, however, have a small point of clarification i(n addition to failing to identify my position as being at the University of Manitoba) - the statement attributed to me - 'Students are no longer able to learn in a linear model" - is not accurate. Students are taught in linear manner based on how we design our curriculum. The issue here is one of our model of teaching - sequenced, structured, hierarchical - and how we actually learn.
In a recent brain networks conference, Olaf Sporns stated that the brain is a essentially a complex (chaotic) system. It's not sequential in operation. My intent in the interview was to suggest that we can't exclusively TEACH in a linear manner. From what we see coming from neuroscience research, it appears that we never really did learn in a linear manner. It's our teaching model that's on trial...not how we learn. What I'm advocating for is a shift to teaching in a manner that aligns with how we learn and with the nature/flow of knowledge today. Now, if CBC would allow direct feedback on the article, I could clarify the concept. Great to see Darren and Clarence receiving well-deserved recognition for their work.
The abundance and complexity of information requires that we rethink how we relate to information (creating, validating, disseminating, evaluating). David Gelernter says: "If you have three pet dogs, give them names. If you have 10,000 head of cattle, don't bother". To cope, we rely on technology to do our cognitive grunt work - providing visual representations of information...allowing us to move to meaning/sense-making more rapidly. A few recent articles on visualization:
Sense.us - collaborative information visualization
I'm at the ODCE conference in Columbus, Ohio...having dispensed with my speaking duties this morning, I'm able to start learning :). I posted some thoughts on the future of higher education on the conference blog: "Those who suggest that universities have no future forget the one basic principle of any organization: continual change, experimentation, and evolution."
Sometime on the weekend, two individuals who I greatly respect got tangled in an important dialogue. David Tosh posted that open source only works in an ideal world...in the comments, Scott Leslie suggests that open source revenue is a business problem, not a problem with open source. Last November, I posted on the challenges of open source, suggesting that healthy open source projects require an income stream. Recently, I stated that the philosophy of open source is being eroded by free (as in no financial cost) tools like Gmail, flickr, and others that meet the needs of many...but that are closed and proprietary.
Stephen Downes responded strongly to David's thoughts, suggesting that the focus of open source is not to make money - it's a passion, a goal, a contribution to community. I will side step the issue (here and here) that requires resolution between David and Stephen. What I see, is that Stephen is presenting the world the way he feels it should be for software development (and sharing...while David is presenting the world the way he feels it should be for developers of software (namely, the ability to earn a living). Perhaps individuals shouldn't pay for use of software...but if a large organization desires to adopt tools like ELGG, I think it is important that they contribute to ongoing development - in code or in resources. Perhaps this is why open source projects are being abandoned by educators now adopting social technology (this is a subjective statement - I don't have stats to support this...but I see educators (who don't have institutional support) adopting technology are now more likely to use proprietary hosted services (for blogs, wikis, audio) instead of open source media wiki, wordpress, and others).
Stephen gives freely of his time daily (up until about two months ago, I believe he produced the newsletter as part of his work with National Research Council...but he was producing it prior to his appointment there) to produce a newsletter read by thousands....and provides mentorship in his spare time to many others through posting comments, highlighting blogs, etc....and David gives freely of his time daily to produce a program used by thousands.
In the end, it's a matter of how strongly we are committed to an ideology. Richard Stallman, for example, has refused to support the One Laptop per Child initiative because one element of the project (the microkernel in the mesh network chip) is proprietary. Where do we moderate? When do we moderate? To what level do we continue to hold to high ideals? Or when do we (assuming that we do) admit alternative, competing views to our ideals? The answer, of course, must be provided by each individual. And, we see the battle expressed daily in politics, religions, academia, software, and organizations.
The new science of sharing: "As large-scale scientific collaborations become the norm, scientists will rely increasingly on distributed methods of collecting data, verifying discoveries, and testing hypotheses not only to speed things up but to improve the veracity of scientific knowledge itself."
Nice article on $100 laptop: "Here's an outrageous idea: What if every child in the world could have a free personal laptop? Put some e-books on it, make it Web-capable, and add a palette of media tools so children could work on creative projects. Wouldn't that be incredible?"
Several weeks ago, The Machine is us/ing us was released on YouTube and quickly became an iconic representation of the changes represented by web 2.0 (I'll save you 4 1/2 minutes: Text is different online than in physical form...it's participatory and forces changes to existing structures of text flow/dissemination, etc.). Recently, another video was released in response (I'll save you 3 minutes on this one: the form of the internet is still about text (even though we have greater control and flexibility with digital text/images)...only the scope of content has changed. We need more immersive, sensory-laden experiences (Plus there's a cat at the end - a key requirement for YouTube videos)). For some reason - and I can't quite put my finger on what it is - both videos don't seem to fully capture the scope of change (it may well be impossible to capture the reality of the change in any single perspective). It's more than content being different. More than form being different. I'm acutely aware of how my perspective is still driven by my existing conceptions and experiences - i.e. I think about web and technology changes through the lens of existing in the space. Feeling confused...need to think more on this...but the current conceptions provided by these videos seems to be off-center enough to not fully capture the reality of the change.
Maish links to Social Software in Libraries...which has an excellent resource page of links mentioned in the book - the usual range of social software - blogs, wikis, vlogs, etc.</