Scottish Learning Festival is doing what all conferences ought to be doing - namely posting videos of keynotes, interviews, using a conference blog to post new resources, etc. Not related to SLF, but quite interesting - Scott Leslie provides a link to a service called 51 Weeks with "the idea being to build a conference support system that facilitates the ongoing conversation for the 51 weeks the conference isn't running" (Scott's words).
I've been thinking lately about the real impact of social technology. The hype still far exceeds explicit impact in many aspects of society. Podcasting has largely failed to enter the promised land (Yahoo recently announced they are closing their podcast directory)...blogs are making differences in marketing, business, and some classrooms, but are still a fringe phenomenon (stats on number of blogs vary dramatically - from a low of about 35 million to a high of 70 million). Compare 70 million bloggers with 2 billion mobile phone users.
What's popular? Tools that aren't broadcast-based: flickr (image sharing), social networks (facebook, myspace, bebo), personal information management (del.icio.us), and collaborative tools like wikis. The initial rush of "wow, I can post my comments on the web to the world" has given way to "wow, I don't feel like it". It appears that people are getting more selfish (not in a bad way) in their use of technology. A tool has to go beyond "hey, cool" and contribute something useful. Collecting hundreds of friends in facebook gives way to creating a small network of people you actually want to talk to (if you're on facebook or myspace, think about what percentage of the total number of people in your friend list you actually connect with once a week...or month. I sit at about 2%). New tools and media have a huge initial hype where we are infatuated with what they do/permit (Twitter, for example). After the novelty wears off, the real work of making the tool useful starts. It was never really about the technology, but rather what the technology enabled (two-way flow of information, personal control, and so on). The distinctive nature of tools such as blogs are already blurring into the background of many sites. Online news sites offer readers the ability to comment and interact with authors. For example, Inside Higher Education is not a blog in the traditional sense...but possesses much of the functionality of blogs. The name is fading...the functionality is retained. The impact is occurring...but it's more indirect than many state.
With those thoughts in the background, I found this article to be an interesting exploration of social network history and changes in what many of our basic notions of being connected to each other means - Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism: "But we are only beginning to come to grips with the consequences of our use of these sites: for friendship, and for our notions of privacy, authenticity, community, and identity. As with any new technological advance, we must consider what type of behavior online social networking encourages."
Scott Karp vents: Five Reasons Why The Mobile Web Sucks. Comments from readers suggest the problem is not as dire as Scott states (a few lay suggest the languishing mobile web is a US problem). The reality is, however, that in spite of the problems of mobile web access, people are still using it. It's a developing concept that will continue to improve - a new genre of devices (ipod touch, iphone) helps. It's important to recognize that criticism of current status does little to alter long-term progress. Remember the web in year 1? No images. No search engines. Limited interactivity. Access was very slow. But, sitting in a computer lab, reading a document on a server thousands of miles away, was proof of concept. It worked. Glitches had to be attended to, but the experience was sufficiently memorable to ensure long term viability.
Blended and hybrid learning have become popular conference themes and subjects of journal articles. As with any new or developing terms, confusion abounds. What is being blended? Time? Pedagogy? Media? Peter Tittenberger has compiled a useful wiki resource on blended learning...including a section on differentiating what does/doesn't qualify as blended learning.
Beyond the Spin Zone - a new blog from University of Manitoba's PR Director - asks what does it cost for textbooks these days?: "The grand total (insert best Bob Barker voice here) for a typical first year student’s text books was $626.56...Carrying the books offers a good workout, at the very least.
By my calculations, the grand total works out to about $42 per kg."
A few years ago, when LMS fever was still assailing the health of education, a few of us edubloggers started about RSS as a means of preventing the end of course "lock out" syndrome...and allowing new students to learn from the experiences of former students. RSS has, since that time, largely slipped from the discussion. We use it to aggregate content in iGoogle or Pageflakes. We use it to keep track of news and information. But we haven't used it to transform the classroom experience and sustained access to content. Enter Alexander Hayes slideshare post on RSS as Glu. I personally see RSS less like glue and more like a flow, but that's a secondary point. It's an excellent overview of how we ought to be providing access to educational content. My only request: Alex, add narration and post as a video.
We had Michael Geist deliver a presentation during our Copyright/Copyleft symposium to a very full online session. Recordings are available here: elluminate, podcast, and Camtasia.
Conferences are changing. Instead of an event of a few days, we now see conferences fostering dialogue months in advance (and, in some cases, following the event...but post-conference dialogue is generally harder than pre-conference). ONLINE EDUCA is a good example of extending conferences. They provide articles, videos, podcasts, and other resources in advance. I'm not sure about how many people take time to engage with the resources...but for those that do, it is a great way to get to know the ideas of speakers and presenters (or even just current trends).
A few recent resources posted:
Wikis in Education: Public, Semi-Public, or Private - Which Is Best?
Graham Atwell provides interviews with Seb Schmoller, Stephen Downes, Vijay Kumar, Toru Iiyoshi , and others.
Internet and Radio Teaching in Greece
Barry Wellman is king of the interplay between networks, society, and culture. He has been writing about networks (from a sociological perspective) for decades. If only he had a blog...
Anyway, one of the resources he offers on his site is an interesting differentiation of cultural habits, attitudes, and expressions: Updating Cyber Times - looking at "how much our technology and social relations have changed subtly in the past 30 years". Spending a few moments on the site leaves one with a mild confusion of nostalgia and trends - of the familiar and the emerging. Quite a neat resource.
Not really ground-breaking, but part of a trend: Leading sociology journal abandons print edition (note the funding model proposed at the end of the article - that might be something new). Journals (academics) are getting the message that openness translates into broad scale impact. I attended a presentation by Terry Anderson a few months ago, and he mentioned the significantly greater impact of IRRODL over traditional journals...due to ease of access. In a networked world, to be closed is to hamper flow of information. The information has to be substantially better than what's available in the open space in order for most people to consider paying for it.
In case you missed it and are interested, we (Learning Technologies Centre) are hosting an online symposium on September 24 (that'll be next week): Copyright/Copyleft: Issues for Education (we will be focusing on Canadian copyright concerns, but the topic will certainly be relevant to others...it is becoming more of a global and less of a local issue). It's free, but registration is required so we can forward access information to the Elluminate site (Michael Geist and Marcus Bornfreund will be presenting). After the presentations, we will hold frolicking discussions in Moodle. Fun will be had by all.
Leigh Blackall asked me to provide a short presentation to a group of educators in New Zealand on curatorial teaching. The audio, elluminate recording, and slidshare files are available here. I like the approach he uses - 10 - 15 minutes of presentation...the rest of the hour in dialogue. A much more sane way of connecting with others than is found in most presentations.
Bryan Alexander links to a cynical, but interesting article: "In a way, the web has always been a game. Anyone with an internet connection could participate by simply viewing a web page, raising the hit counter (score) of that site's creator. Advanced players could grab an HTML editor and some free web space and create a home page (avatar) that represented them in the online universe. The goal, as it so often is in life, is to gather more attention (links) and prestige (Google ranking) from your fellow players.
The social/collaborative revolution known as Web 2.0 didn't change the basics of this game, but it did make it easier to get caught in the virtual attention-seeking madness."
While relationship-based tools are hugely popular (insert your social network tool of choice here), it's pretty tough to be in the content business these days. New York Times has decided to close their Select service...Wall Street Journal is rumored to close their paid service...and Business 2.0 closes (the article also lists huge subscriber drops for magazines like Forbes and Money) completely. Part of the problem is readership (people can get content freely online). The bigger issue is advertising. Businesses are shifting advertising to the online medium - that's where the eyeballs are. Need I say it again? Ah, might as well: Education has much to learn from media. Consumers, like learners will in the future, have a dramatically different relationship with content than they have had in the past. Textbook publishers, journals, and other content-centric industries need to take heed of these lessons and adjust before they become the next statistic.
Wired has created a fairly simple resource: How To Wikis covering subjects such as making youtube videos, using flickr, explaining DRM, etc. I'm starting to question the usefulness of resources like this. Five minutes with a good search engine will provide the same information, but with better context specific information for the searcher. Part of the same reason I'm questioning wikipedia as a concept - it is quite simple for anyone with marginal competence with online search/databases/Google Scholar to find what is needed. What is the value of aggregation completed on behalf of many people, rather than based on needs of one person? Not much value anymore.
A project worth following: Massively Multiplayer Online Learning: "Instead of holding one-to-many classes via Webex, the company is building a new product from the ground up. Founder Farbood Nivi calls it MMOL, for Massive Multiplayer Online Learning (a play on the term MMOG). He says studies show that people learn best from each other, not in a teacher-students situation."
The rather sweeping statement that "students learn best from each other needs to be qualified. Context determines best approaches. My tolerance for monochromatic viewpoints of learning is diminishing. Context, context, context. Sometimes an expert is needed. Other times peer assistance is fine. And in other cases, self-learning will work quite well.
This will be all over the web: Google has released its PowerPoint online tool call Presently. I uploaded a short presentation I delivered last night...not quite a smooth as Slideshare (yet), but the ability to jointly edit and include others during the presentation (with Google Talk) will be appreciated by many educators. Common Craft has put together a short video on Google Docs in Plain English.
EDUCAUSE Centre for Applied Research has released a new report (.pdf) on undergraduate students and technology. The outcome isn't particularly surprising: students use technology. Reading a few of the chapters (it's a 124 page report), I'm pleased to see traditional institutions are taking note of what's happening, and we're building a base of data on which to make decisions. Chapter 2 of the report, however, basically says what edubloggers have been saying for five plus years. At least the message is getting out. See also the slashdot discussion.
David Gurteen linked to a YouTube video on Content Aware Image Resizing. It's far more exciting than it sounds. Very cool.
Educators, trainers, parents, managers, (continue list as long as is appropriate) would benefit from reading these two short reports detailing the digital lifestyle and technology use of the younger generation.:
Are you ready for the future of media? (.pdf)
and Creating and Connecting (also .pdf)
oSkope is an interesting search application, relying on eBay, Flickr, Amazon, and YouTube sources. Results are displayed visually, with specifications set by the searcher (i.e. display as list, pile, graph, etc.). You can capture key resources (images, books) by dragging and dropping into your folder. Not necessarily anything earth shattering, but I continue to be surprised at how rapidly the web is becoming visual/image-based.
This report - The Latest News Headlines—Your Vote Counts (.pdf) - is worth reading, even though it's quite frustrating in sections. For example, it's opening analysis of news content on various user-contributed sites (Reddit, Digg) found their focus to be on iPhones and Nintendo, while mainstream media was focused on Iraq and immigration. The veiled insinuation is that while Rome burns, user-content sites fiddle. That misses the point completely. The real point isn't the content itself. Rather, it's that any community can filter information that it finds to be of greatest importance. What is valuable is process, not the specific content. Many of the news sites - like digg.com - are focused on the tech community. Why not ask what the gossip magazines were discussing while mainstream media was doing "serious work". I'm guessing the journalistic emphasis of these magazines were heavily focused on Britney, Paris, and Lindsay. This is just silly.
After that initial diversion, the report goes on to make important points - namely the increased diversity of user-generated media and less obsessive attention (remember days of CNN repeating the same story every 3 1/2 minutes? Just in case we had forgotten) paid to current themes. I regret the "either/or" nature presented by the report (though toward the end they acknowledge readers being active in both online and traditional media spaces). I think we can happily blog, contribute to Digg...and still read involved research reports and have a concern for global politics. I go to digg for a different type of news, a type I cannot readily find in regular media. And when I find it, it's obsolete.
Edutopia has listed their view of "top edublogs". Stephen Downes (and others) criticizes its lack of international representation...and he (Stephen) offers his much more global and complete EduRSS list. Perhaps even more consequential than a too small sampling of blogs provided by Edutopia, is the mindsets revealed by list selection. For example, if you understand the criticality of networks in forming diverse understandings, rather than link to "a blog", link to something that is more network like in nature - like Google Alerts on "elearning", "pedagogy" or similar phrase, or Technorati tags and blog search. Or, better yet, ask readers to contribute to the list. I guess I see too much hierarchical, one-way thinking evident here. It's not about getting people in touch with a few gurus...it's about helping people form their own learning networks. Edutopia's list reflects the mindset many of us have been addressing for years. Don't tell us. Help us learn for ourselves. Don't filter for us. Help us develop the skills and tools to do so for ourselves.
Eportfolio activities generally fit into two broad categories: content (the more traditional view) and conversations/connections (a more recent view championed by tools like ELGG). There is obviously some overlap between the two. For example, to assemble artifacts of learning requires a narrative (curatorial?) voice...simply placing artifacts in a repository hardly makes a portfolio. Reflection, integration of elements, demonstration of progress, expression of personality - these form the basis of eportfolios. I came across an interesting post listing various tools for Writing, Sharing And Protecting Your Life’s Story. A fair bit of overlap with traditional eportfolios, but the applications listed go beyond simply one person's life and often include family, genealogy, and so on. Personal eportfolios may best be seen as sub-elements of the greater "portfoliozation" of society and each of our extended family/friend networks.
The shift in libraries: "To me, the new element that Library 2.0 brings to our libraries is a shift in power balance - between us, our users, suppliers, software vendors, non-users.
Users are able to control parts of our library that they previously could not. Librarians are now able to control spaces outside our buildings. This is different."
Meet the Mobile Web: "Believe it or not, more people have access to mobile devices than desktop computers. Many handhelds can access the Internet, including cell phones, Palm handhelds, Pocket PCs, Nintendo DS's, and Sony PSPs."
And you can now add the new iPod Touch to the list for mobile access. In terms of education use - the biggest complaint I've heard about mobile phones and PDAs for learning focus on the small screen size. The assumption being that people don't want to do much small screen reading or browsing. True, we've had some issue with screen sizes, but it's a concern that's changing with larger screens on blackberry's, iphones, etc. I see it more as a technology trade off. We'll accept small screens in order for access. We also accept some sloppiness in wikipedia for access.
See also mobile use in classrooms and examples of well-designed mobile sites.
10 Future Web Trends doesn't really read like trends at all, but more like current directions. Most of the items listed already show strong progress. To this end, nothing about this list is really surprising. Instead, it's a useful review of where we are today. I'd be more interested in seeing how biology/technology integration is developing...or the impact of nanotechnology...or e-democracy...or the social impact of open information access...or how governance changes when transparency and "fact checking" are available to everyone...or how intentional aims can be achieved in distributed methods (i.e. how to achieve intended learning, information distribution, or message propagation in networked models).
What joy resides before us. Not only do we have web 2.0, but we also have copyright 2.0, learning 2.0, enterprise 2.0, retail 2.0, faculty 2.0, and don't forget hype 2.0. Ah, the shallow metrics by which we neuter progress through word games. These terms work for today, but offer little long term value. At best they set things up for the next series of conferences, books, and hype cycles.
I'm a huge fan of visualization tools (simply because I see them as instrumental in our ability to manage overwhelming amounts of information...and complex, interconnected relationships). One of my favorite sites is IBM's Many Eyes. Data sets can be uploaded (including free text) and visualized and compared in numerous ways. They recently added a word tree visualization. So I uploaded a few articles...my original article on connectivism (see the visualization of keywords "learning theories", or type your own in the text box to see how concepts in the article relate. The article is also available as a tag cloud of words. I then grabbed Stephen Downes' article on Connective Knowledge and uploaded it as a data set - see the visualization of network in the article. You can explore different concepts by clicking on linked words (which expand the map view). Or have a look at the tag cloud. Kinda neat.
I frequently reference music and media industries as valuable in instructing education and training. The content bottom has dropped out of both (music is reported 30+% decrease in sales over last year). While this is credited to illegal downloads, it is primarily about relationships. The music industry has isolated its user base for decades. They failed to learn the lesson of Napster's popularity (did people want free music or did they want control over how they listened to music?). And then promptly sued their customers through RIAA. A business fighting its customers, however, has a tenuous future at best. As tools for music distribution became more prominent, channels more distributed (satellite and online stations, instead of traditional radio), and artists more able to connect directly with fans (yes, Myspace played a role here, but Prince's experiment in giving away music should not be ignored. With this background, I read a recent NY Times article on The Music Man with interest. It's a rather anguished look at the ailing industry. And the convulsions of last minute attempts to save its own soul. From the article: "The kids all said that a) no one listens to the radio anymore, b) they mostly steal music, but they don't consider it stealing, and c) they get most of their music from iTunes on their iPod. They told us that MySpace is over, it's just not cool anymore; Facebook is still cool, but that might not last much longer; and the biggest thing in their life is word of mouth. That's how they hear about music, bands, everything."
Dave Cormier shares his UPEI blogging presentation: Blogging - Not ‘IF’ but When and Where. Good introduction to blog use at a higher education level. I liked it so much, I happily stole a few of his links for our own blog/wiki/podcast/social technology chaos workshops.
Slashdot tackles the important question of effective use of technology in classrooms. I was surprised at the responses. Slashdot is a technical forum exploring advanced uses of technology. While education is not generally their focus, the participants are technically competent. The tools listed for frequent or preferred use for teaching math and physics are quite basic - i.e. Powerpoint...and hands on traditional experimentation. One individual states: "Asking "how can I use technology" is always the wrong question. Your goal is not to use technology, its to teach. The correct question is "How can I increase the amount my students learn?" or perhaps "How can I increase the number of students who learn?". When you look at solutions to this technology *may* be part of it, but it probably won't be."
The slashdot forum is not going to yield rich research results, but the message is clear: technology is not necessarily beneficial to teaching. Start with teaching and learning first. Then consider technology as a possible add on.