Microsoft's new Surface initiative has been gaining significant attention...the way it's currently presented, Surface is a 30-inch tablet where individuals can callaborate, share, move digital artifacts without the aid of a mouse or keyboard. The videos look rather interesting. But after years of tablet hype...with limited penetration, I'm not convinced most people are ready to give up the current tools to interact with digital content. Still, as Scott Wilson notes, now might not be the best time to purchase that interactive whiteboard.
Our Future of Education Conference starts later this week and runs all of next week (you can still register for the event...feel free to share with colleagues). The presentation schedule is also online now. The conference presentations will be recorded as we did with our connectivism online conference.
Guide to Micro-blogging: "Micro-blogging allows you to write brief text updates about your life on the go, and send them to friends and interested observers via text messaging, instant messaging, email or the web."
Microblogging is not quite the right term (though it has stuck). Tools like Twitter, Jaiku and others are more about persistent presence - keeping that small group of people who care about us informed about the sandwich we just ate.
Microsoft has announced a new 3D mapping service...and Google announces a "street level 360" view.
Dave Snowden states: Is a network a community?: "All communities are networks, but not all networks are communities". The network theme seems to be gaining a fair bit of attention as an expression of interaction different from what occurs in communities. The real question being addressed is one of determining the properties that we'll ascribe to networks...and the ones we'll subscribe to communities. Stephen Downes tackled this last year...and Terry Anderson and Scott Wilson are currently grappling with these distinctions. In the process of splicing these attributes, it is hoped that we'll better be able to understand and nurture networks for learning and knowledge sharing. I think our current language of networks carries with it the aroma of our discussions of communities. We're still trying to make networks conform to the notions we have of communities. And it's impossible. Communities are an instantiation of one type of networks...but our questions should be deeper - namely "what are the attributes of networks of leaning (dare I add "understanding"?) that influence their formation?" (regardless of whether we are discussing communities or collectives).
Anyway, all of this is to simply say that I've decided to write a book on how networks function as learning devices. Much of the current dialogue on networks assumes similarity with what we understand from physics and sociology. I'd like to explore whether concepts of power laws, weak ties, ecologies, and other attributes translate to learning spaces as directly as is often assumed.
After our upcoming conference, I will make a wiki available...with Knowing Knowledge, I made the book available in a wiki after writing...with this book (still unsure of a title...), I would like to co-write it with contributors to the wiki.
As educators, we are often drawn to tools and spaces that have a high level of activity. If everyone has a mobile phone, we explore ways to teach with the phone. Or a large percentage of our student population has a Facebook account, we start looking for ways to use Facebook for teaching. I'm not sure our learners always agree with our urge to use their tools of communication for our goals of teaching and learning. It's a challenging line to walk - to what degree do we try and educate in the spaces in which our learners exist...or to what degree do we want our learners to come to our space (school, LMS)? Libraries and Facebook: "More librarians, however, felt that Facebook should serve as a space exclusively for students and that librarians, professors, administrators, police, and other uninvited folks should keep out."
Conferences are changing. Instead of an event lasting a few days, more and more organizers are extending the conference experience through blogs, wikis, podcasts, interviews, etc both in advance of an following a conference. Conferences are becoming more of a relationship with a trusted source, and less of a casual encounter.
A few examples:
ODCE offered both blogs and wikis for members to connect prior to the event (and following).
For ONLINE EDUCA in Berlin in December 2006, podcasts, wikis, interviews, and video were used in advance of, and following, the conference.
Elliott Masie uses interviews, wikis, SecondLife, podcasts, and video to increase conference attendee's ability to connect with leaders and each other.
ADETA - is using a combination of newsletters, blogs from participants, and wikis to promote their October 2007 conference.
MoodleMoot 2007 blended face-to-face with the online conference - offering participants unable to travel a conference experience. With our upcoming online conference - Future of Education, we offer a similar experience for participants...but the blended feel of f2f and online adds an additional experience.
All of this is simply to say that conferences are changing...and organizers are starting to understand that conference attendance is a relational experience. Instead of simply planning to host an event, it's important to create opportunities for networks to form in advance and following the conference. If anything, a well done conference has the potential to offer a year-round relationship.
Some interesting decisions being made at Facebook in an effort to transition into a platform of services, rather than simply a social networking site. It's tough to bet against openness and user control - a realization Facebook seems to have acquired.
Facebook's new face: "Facebook may turn out to be a lot more important than any of us thought. It has just launched a major change in its strategy that will transform its role in the Internet ecosystem and could create a raft of new opportunities for companies of all sizes."
Facebook - the anti-MySpace: "Facebook is giving an unprecedented amount of access to developers. The API would allow, for example, a third party to recreate Facebook Photos, the most used photo application on the web. Users could then remove the default Facebook Photos and install the third party version instead."
Distrust/Disdain of Google: "I think Google has to be very transparent, very warm, and very open when it comes to privacy and the data it’s collecting on all of us and to many of us it’s coming across as closed, cold, and opaque."
Dave Cormier explores some aspects of: Building Ecologies - Making room for communities and networks.: "It’s a very strange thing to have to find a bunch of language to describe what is already happening… but it is the way of things. Until the language is there… it’s very difficult to describe to people what you are talking about."
I've stated previously that networks occur within something, that is, our capacity to form networks is influenced by a space or an ecology. Some ecologies are better suited for the formation of learning and knowledge networks than others. For example, certain corporate environments are structured to reward holding instead of sharing knowledge...a climate not conducive to the creation of new knowledge. Or, consider what we see occurring today with intellectual property - the climate of ownership of ideas at best only vaguely credible - creates an ecology in which the creation and dissemination of new knowledge is inhibited. Organizations - corporate, academic, or other - should be aware of the attributes of a successful ecology, namely one which allows the greatest probability for network formation. Dave Snowden stated in a presentation (can't remember where) that ecologies can't be engineered. While I don't know the exact scope and context of his statement, my first reaction is one of disagreement. Ecologies can at minimum be fostered (much like networks can be). Consider the economy as an ecology...or IP law...or innovation labs. In each instance, we can certainly influence how they develop and, to varying degrees, how they function. Anyway, the task is to explore what constitutes a desired ecology - a discussion which Dave has initiated...and we can hopefully pick up on over the next few days while we are both in Moncton presenting at the Learning Communities conference.
Action Research and Teacher Professional Development: "Action research/teacher research and teacher inquiry is part of a new vision of teacher education and personal/professional development. It suggests that what educators need are opportunities to explore and question their own and others’ interpretations, practices, and ideologies..."
Every educator is a researcher. After spending a few years in a classroom, she/he will have developed an array of practices and habits often reflecting current formal research (I teach a variety of educational theory/practice courses to college instructors and regularly hear comments like "oh, I do that already, I just didn't know there was a phrase for it"). Action research becomes particularly attractive when a distributed group of educators connect via social software and begin to dialogue about their experiences. As Chris notes in his post, educators do not often clearly document their research. Blogs and wikis are effective documentation tools...adding significant value (in terms of communication, dialogue, and sharing) to the general concepts of action research. As those experiences are shared - particularly strong within the K-12 sector - a rich pool of information becomes available for formal research activities as well.
We are working on a Certificate in Online and Blended Learning ...but taking a non-traditional approach to both design and delivery. A fifteen minute presentation introducing the concept is avalable here. We've posted an online survey on what potential learners might find to be of value in a certificate program of this nature...if you're interested, we'd love to hear from you (survey is here).
Jane Hart has re-launched her site as the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies. Jane has long produced one of the most complete compilations of trends and tools in the emerging technologies landscape. I've directed numerous colleagues at U of Manitoba to her learning tools resource. Well-worth bookmarking. She also runs the Pick of the Day blog on new elearning tools.
For a Saturday morning, 6:00 am is a bit early for me. Today, I presented to WiAOC on Connections and Conversations: What happens to content? (.ppt file is here)...so to avoid the disjointed presentation I delivered a few weeks ago, I opted to consume sufficient quantities of Tim Horton's coffee prior to presenting. Still, a Saturday, or a long weekend, is not the most desirable time to present. The participants in the discussion area were great - lots of comments...always nice to see the voice of the presenter balanced with the interactions of participants. Overall, I think it went well...
All presentations from the conference are now available - an excellent series of presentations...much joy for the old iPod.
Putting Nanotechnology on the map - good example of combining mashups and visualizations...a quick glance at the map provides an overview of the concentration of research and activity, and deeper exploration provides the individual companies/specific focus.
I've been at the CADE 2007 conference for the last several days. I've had the opportunity to be involved in numerous panels, presentations, and (most importantly) lunch/dinner/beverage conversations with Stephen Downes, Dave Cormier, Terry Anderson, and others. As is generally the case, the real learning happens in the hallways, not in the sessions. During the afternoon panel, Terry presented his current research slant on defining groups, networks, and collectives. I agree with the concepts he is attempting to describe. It brings to the forefront the power of naming things. When we name things (web 2.0, long tail, etc) we apply organization to a concept, and in the process, set boundaries. When we assign names too soon (when the concept is still emerging), I think our act of naming influences future directions (which can be negative). I personally don't object to the term collective...I'm curious as to whether the concept of networks isn't sufficient...and that collectives are an example of networks formed by groups rather than individuals (i.e. it's still a type of network). Perhaps group and collective are fine, but network is the meta-component that encompasses both...and what is now termed network in Terry's research should be called "individual".
Stephen has posted comments on the conference (Applications and Theory of Social Software and Elearning in Canada: Evidence, Gaps, and Promising Directions)...as has Dave: Day 1 and Day 2
Continuing in the multi-week theme: 16 awesome data visualization tools (thanks to Donna Farren for the link). The big concept behind this that I keep harping on, is that we need more tools of this nature to assist us in making sense of complexity. When we are in environments of abundance, we have a changed relationship with information. Instead of interacting with individual elements, we interact with patterns.
This video parody - ofone - of Apple's eventually to be released iPhone is reportedly produced by Microsoft. First, it's amusing, second, with Microsoft's history, it takes a bit of time to understand that it is a parody. But the interesting aspect is what it says about how advertising (or spreading the message or mocking your competition) is happening. Entertainment is blended with advertising seamlessly. In a recent this week in tech podcast, Leo Laporte presents advertising as integrated with content, so viewers/listeners are not aware of the product placement. This isn't really anything new - we see it in movies and TV programs. I'd prefer an ad to be an ad...and content to be content. I start to distrust sources when I'm unsure of whether they are serving as a mouth piece for a company, or whether they are presenting a personal opinion. Increased consumer choice over how people interact with media content (in skipping commercials with Tivo, watching videos on Youtube) requires corporations to rethink how they package their message. If consumers can skip commercials, the more indirect/hidden the presentation of the message. On the other hand, perhaps this is what education should become - inject a quick learning activity on quadratic equations during Survivor or Spiderman or Sponge Bob...yes, I can see a brave new future for education.
A group of students from University of Manitoba are heading out to Bangladesh to observe the workings of a non-governmental agency...and are using blogs to document their experience (faculty are as well): Blogs, sweat and volunteers. Great use of a simple technology...and leaves a knowledge trail for future classes.
On Saturday, I conducted a workshop for CADE 2007 on personal learning environmnets. The notes used for the session are posted in a wiki - feel free to change, add, or whatever. We had a fairly international group in attendance, so the discussion during the session was great. I spent time playing around with definitions - there are many - and settled very loosely on one I offered in a previous elearnspace pots: Essentially, they are a collection of tools, brought together under the conceptual notion of openness, interoperability, and learner control. This creates additional challenges - is SecondLife part of a PLE? What about Facebook? What about devices - such as mobile phones and PDAs? While I think it's still a bit too early to define PLEs too precisely (it's all changing too quickly), some type of working definition is likely required to make serious inroads in discussions with academics or corporate training managers.
I'm quite pleased to announce that details for our upcoming Future of Education Online Conference. We have a wide range of speakers confirmed (and many more to still confirm), including: David Weinberger, Dave Snowden, Stephen Heppell, Rene Barsalo, Sugata Mitra, Jay Cross, Brian Lamb, Chris Sessums, Vicki Davis, Mark Oehlert, Cheri Toledo, Dave Cormier, Teemu Leinonen, and MaryFriend Shepard.
Our last online conference (Connectivism conference in February) attracted over 1200 registrants, with excellent discussion in moodle with conference participants. We effectively managed to, in my humble opinion, to shift the conversation from the pulpit to the conference floor. For this conference we have added a variety of 20 minutes presentations in addition to daily keynotes. This will hopefully extend the conversation...and (due to different presentation times) enable people in other timezones to participate for the live sessions.
We are still adding presenters...please let me know if you have any suggestions on improving the conference- we would like to add diversity to the current male/western viewpoint. You can sign up for the conference here. If you attended the online connectivism conference, your name may still be in the email list...so no need to register again. The conference itself is sponsored by LTC, Extended Education, and Elluminate, in consultation with CHERD.
Take your PowerPoint and... " Unconferences turn the plodding, predictable business gathering inside out. They're a hybrid of a teach-in and a jam session, with a little show-and-tell mixed in, and they are attracting hundreds in cities like Austin, Tex., Bangalore, San Francisco, Sydney, and Tokyo. Unlike traditional, $1,000-a-head and up conferences, they're totally unstructured—the agenda isn't determined until the opening day of the event. Everyone who shows up is a potential speaker, and those who don't speak contribute by posting photos, blog entries, podcasts, and video clips of the proceedings. Neckties and heels are noticeably absent. And attendance is almost always inexpensive or free."
While unconferences are interesting, online conferences hold at least as much (if not more) promise in impacting how conferences are held.
If you're interested in an overview of what's happening with read/write web technology, the 2007 Web 2.0 Awards is worth a skim (via Joyce Valenza).
Where many people gather, politicians are not far behind. Tony Blair has a YouTube channel...John Edwards has a SecondLife presence (which was vandalized)...Barack Obama has a Facebook profile...blogs bloom during elections (for candidates and voters). Like many people, If a news item doesn't hit my online network, I don't encounter it - I rarely get informationfrom traditional newspapers, radio, or Television. Our lesson as educators is to ensure that we are speaking our message where our audience is...and in a manner they understand.
NetSci07 has released network visualization competition submissions. Amazing. I haven't viewed all the video, but from what I've seen, two in particular stand out: flight patterns (almost hypnotic) and moving with meaning (visualizing interactions).
I've encountered several mentions of this today: Encyclopedia of Life: "Ultimately, the Encyclopedia will serve as an online reference source and database for every one of the 1.8 million species that are named and known on this planet, as well as all those later discovered and described. Encyclopedia of Life will be used as both a teaching and a learning tool, helping scientists, educators, students, and the community at large gain a better understanding of this planet and all who inhabit it."
Webheads in Action are hosting an online conference: Connect: Conversations in Networking, Education, Communities, and Technology. Runs from May 18 - 20, registration is free. Keynote speaker list: Stephen Downes, Etienne Wenger, Leigh Blackall, Barabra Ganley, Teemu Leinonen, George Siemens (that'll be me), and Robin Good. Registration links can be found here.
Some brief musings over at my Learning Technologies Centre blog on the relationship between user generated content and Cultural Content: "Basically, we have a shorter relationship with academic content than we’ve had with content in the past. Content today is essentially a stream - we don’t commit it to memory so much as we interact with it to see what it holds for temporary understanding…and then we move on to the next innovation or emerging research. The state of understanding is not directly associated with an object, but rather with a stream of continually developing research and new discoveries."
The Web 2.0 Bubble: "Few of the social networks have yet proved adept at truly linking people of like-minded interests, and many of the networks being started now, especially by entrepreneurs and corporations looking to grab their slice of 2.0 glory, tend to miss the reason the best sites work: They facilitate behavior that people already engage in." (via Innovation Forum)
Bruce Sterling's presentation on "the internet of things" is available here. Basic premise: in the future, due to the joys of RFID, we will be able to link physical objects to the internet, so that we can use an online search to find our keys, shoes, or whatever other physical things we've misplaced. Also introduces us to spimes - objects tracked through space and time. I need to get more active in making up new words as well...spime just reminds me of a Monty Python skit. More info on object hyperlinking here. Eventually, all of life will be reduced to a search box...:).
The "nurture vs. nature" debate is a given in most discussions on why people become who they become. Due to the challenges of the discussion, we most often settle somewhere between the due - part of who we are stems from our genes, part from our environment. It's a fairly safe agreeement to reach. I came across an interesting article today that adds a third dimension - context - to the discussion: "The ability to behave differently in different social settings and with different social partners is a built-in survival mechanism. What works in one setting won't necessarily work in another."
Museum 2.0 mentions a new service - ExhibitFiles - capturing the "knowledge in transition" that arises from creating and hosting a museum exhibit. Many of our educational projects (designing a course, implementing new technology) have a similar experience...namely that we focus on the end product, and ignore the wealth of knowledge created by those who were involved in the project. How can we better capture the experiences of participants involved in these projects? An article in a journal is fine for summarizing a project, but it misses much of the "softer learning" that occurs due to interactions of individuals involved, problems encountered and so on. ExhibitFiles is one potential approach for capturing those experiences so others can benefit.
This isn't anything new, but nicely captures the shift impacting business, education, and society - The Power of Power Laws: "We’re shifting from a Gaussian world to a Paretian world, with profound implications for business."
Will Richardson recently commented on some personal frustrations with the limited uptake and impact of the social software tools: "And so I’m still trying to figure out where the best spend of my time and energy is in terms of helping to bring real change into the conversation" (be sure to follow the extensive discussion in the comments section).
This brings to mind Stephen Downes' post on the reactions of digg.com members when the site took down an article to avoid a lawsuit. The community responding by expressing their intentions. For me, this experience exemplifies the nature of our debate today. In a democracy, not everyone exercises the right to vote. The tools which enable everyone to express their views/thoughts similarily aren't going to be used by everyone. Perhaps only a small percentage integrate them into their teaching practices. It is freedom that defines a society - the ability for openness is the premise that drives all aspects of a system. Those who do not care to vote, podcast, blog, or whatever, still benefit from the availability of those options to everyone. The fact that education systems are grappling with openness is an important step...fortunately (and sadly, as we see with declining voter participation), not eveyone needs to participate to benefit.
The Australian Flexible Learning Framework has a habit of putting out useful reports, synthesizing dialogue on emerging technologies. A recent publication - Networks, Connections and Community: Learning with Social Software - runs a fairly broad path covering innovation adoption curves, Gladwell's connectors, mavens, etc, research (based on an appreciative inquiry model), and practical uses. I found the practical illustrations of technology tools to be the most valuable part of the report...overall, a valuable resource for educators still trying to "make the point" of why these social, distributed tools are important ( thanks to Steven Parker for the resource).
I've been in Montreal for the last few days at the Digital Cultural Content Forum - an international group exploring the future of libraries, archives, and museums. It's been a fascinating conversation (I'll post more shortly). With that as a backdrop, I've been more attuned to the activities of museums. I came across this interesting resource exploring Radical Trust: The State of the Museum Blogosphere: "As 2006 began, there were less than thirty known museum blogs; since then, that number has more than doubled. Today there are well over 100 blogs exploring museum issues, from a range of institutions and individuals across the globe. All of these blogs have embraced the concept of ‘radical trust,’ taking the big step to trust (radically) the community on-line."
Periodically, I get somewhat weary of my own ideas. Happened with blogs/wikis once they hit "mainstream". After years of dialoguing on the nature of learning networks, I'm now starting to encounter the ideas we explored in the edublog space in more popular resources: The guru is dead, long live the network - "In such an environment, do we really need gurus or intellectual thought leaders anymore? In the ‘business model’ of the open source operating system Linux, there is no guru. It’s distributed intelligence."
I'm not quite comfortable with the pendulum swing from "it's all about the guru" to "it's all about the network". The whole point of networks (for me at least) is that ideas/concepts live and die on their own merit (i.e. who links and contributes to them) not on the person originating the idea (as in a hierarchy). While networks may not have a guru, they are subject to power laws. In the end, certain nodes in a network become central, acquiring an unusually large number of links. Networks have gurus as any other structure does...the difference is that the network guru is subject to feedback and holds her/his position based on continued valuable contributions. Network gurus are being made and remade regularly - their position is held based on merit, not on a system that doesn't reflect the feedback of the constituents it serves.
Next-generation toys: "Technology from NeuroSky and other startups could make video games more mentally stimulating and realistic. It could even enable players to control video game characters or avatars in virtual worlds with nothing but their thoughts."