This week, Google is slated to announce OpenSocial - a series of APIs that will allow developers to essentially "network social networks". This is obviously targeted at Facebook's growing prominence, as Google finds itself in the unique position of not being the default hype leader, but is instead playing catchup (just walking through U of Manitoba's campus, if a student laptop is open, chances are the individual is on FB...which I suspect is the norm in most campuses in Canada/US).
TechCrunch reviews OpenSocial: "Google wants to create an easy way for developers to create an application that works on all social networks. And if they pull it off, they’ll be in the center, controlling the network."
Dave Winer, periodically cantankerous, but generally prescient, doesn't think the effort will not succeed.
This somewhat satirical article - The Outsourced Brain - proclaims: "I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants — silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves."
As Dave Snowden has indicated, it's tough to determine the level of irony intended by the author. I assume it is at least somewhat ironic/tongue-in-cheek. But, I think it begins to tackle a reality we all deal with; namely, that many "lower level" cognitive tasks are now happily performed on our behalf by technology. This assumes somewhat of a clear demarcation between where I end and the tools I use start. The concept of "what is mind" is important here. Do the tools I use to extend my cognitive functioning constitute a portion of my mind? Andy Clark states as much: "For we shall be Cyborgs not in the merely superficial sense of combining flesh and wires, but in the more profound sense of being human-technology symbionts: thinking and reasoning systems whose minds and selves are spread across biological brain and non-biological circuitry."
It may seem somewhat overstated by Clark. but consider your daily habits and what has already been offloaded to some type technology. Likely travel, meal preparations, access to information, communication with colleagues, writing (well, writing in any form could be regarded as a technology that extends our minds), and so on. Last November, I posted an article (.doc) suggesting that much of our life (or learning) is about externalizing ourselves - i.e. making what is in our minds available to others. Those attempts to externalize - through language, symbols, emotions - are precisely what enables us to extend ourselves. Or to join ourselves to others - to connect with and be a part of a network of humanity. I'm still a bit unsure about my cyborg future, but I can comfortably say that my mind is increasingly distributed and networked through the many tools I use on a daily basis. The depth and breadth of our learning networks today are not possible without the activities of externalization and extension of ourselves through technology.
I was reviewing Lost in Translation: (Mis)Understanding Youth Engagement (.pdf) - a discussion on why youth are "increasingly disenchanted with formal political institutions and practices". My thoughts turn to how the changed youth relationship to government play out in the educational space. For the most part, we can opt out of voting without any real immediate impact. Obviously, after a period of many years, not having the voice of youth reflected in government will certainly have an impact. A large percentage of the population is not being heard and dissatisfaction of those affected will eventually spill into some form of action. Education is a bit different. When we decide not to pursue higher education, we are impacted almost immediately - loss of opportunities, restricted opportunities for work, etc. Over time, I think the impact of lack of participation in politics or education is likely the same (assuming that many of our current societal structures continue to exist - i.e. accreditation isn't provided and accepted by institutions other than colleges and universities). This quote in the report says much about how government and education should related to the younger generation: "Youth are not disconnected from politics; it is political institutions, practice and culture that are disconnected from youth" (report via Stephen Downes)
The conference page for Corporate Learning: Trends and Innovations now has most of the information on speakers, topics, and so on. If you're interested in attending (it's free and online), please register here.
V.S. Ramachandran - known for his work with mirror neurons - delivered a talk to TED in March. The video is now available online: A journey to the center of your mind. Fascinating extrapolation of how our mind works through an analysis of what happens in certain instances where it doesn't work as we assume it should (phantom limb pain, Capgras delusion).
So, I'm happily watching CSI:New York last night. Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be an hour long advertisement for Second Life. The idea of blending media is quite interesting - the show continues in Second Life where viewers can access the CSI island and participate in virtual crime solving, exploring New York, etc. There is a blurring of entertainment and advertising that I'm personally not comfortable with (though it's certainly not new). Laying aside that small detail, the shift from passive viewing to active involvement in media is certainly welcomed. Ewan McIntosh provides a more involved summary with links to Henry Jenkin's interview with the creators of the show. For all the hype of Second Life, it is still a fringe element (contrast a few million people in 2L with many billion in the real world. If it were a religion, it wouldn't register on many scales). This type of crossover media event will certainly drive adoption and awareness of virtual worlds.
Laying aside the buzzwords, The state of enterprise 2.0 is a good article exploring how distributed social media is impacting organizations. A few points of emphasis: the use of many social tools (for example, blogs and wikis) will occur regardless of organizational response...many employees require education on tools (for the less than technically proficient, wiki editing and social bookmarking may not be intuitive)...changes run deeper than simply procedural - systemic changes are required (and will occur) over time.
Earlier this year, I (and about half a dozen others) presented at the Digital Cultural Content Forum in Montreal. Presentations from the session are now available online. Museums, libraries, and archives are reacting to the development of the participative web. Museums, for example, are beginning to use blogs to provide a narrative of a soldier's letters to his "sweet heart" back home (see Miss Griffis), the use of tagging for visitors to label virtual artifacts, and so on. The forum revealed some fascinating work being done in traditional content-based organizations as they attempt to increase audience engagement.
Online learning continues to grow. In a recent COHERE symposium in Toronto, Joel Hartman presented statistics of blended and online learning growth at University of Central Florida. Surprisingly (at least to me), blended learning courses (where part of the learning occurs online and part in a classroom) have plateaued, while online courses continue to grow in popularity. From recent experiences I've had with students (and partly supported by ECARs recent report) indicates that many students want more personal (face-to-face) contact and less emphasis on technology. Sloan-C has released a report - Online Nation (.pdf) which supports Joel's point of the growth of online learning. Online education, according to the report, continues to "grow at rates far in excess of the total higher education student population". In fact, almost 20% of higher education students were taking at least one online course in fall 2006.
Terry Anderson revisits the concept of adding social interaction to self-directed courses: Having your Cake and eating it Too - Part Two. In fully self-directed courses, procrastination and isolation are prominent concerns. Terry highlights, for example, a 30 percent lower completion rate in self-paced courses as compared with classroom instruction. The inclusion of social presence and interaction can hopefully increase completion rates. This is a good example of using technology for "what it's good for". In additional to giving learners the opportunity to connect with each other (possibly within the same course, but not necessarily), a discussion or interaction trail is created for subsequent learners to review the experiences of previous learners.
Libraries Shun Deals to Place Books on Web: "Several major research libraries have rebuffed offers from Google and Microsoft to scan their books into computer databases, saying they are put off by restrictions these companies want to place on the new digital collections."
Future to Newspapers: Jump in the river: "Here’s the problem with most news: it isn’t. It’s olds. It happened hours ago, or last night, or yesterday, or last month, or before whenever the deadline was in the news organization’s current “news cycle”. It’s not now."
I'm at the ADETA conference in Edmonton, where I'll be delivering a keynote tomorow on Living, Learning, Communicating in an Immediate World (10 am, MST (GMT-7). Other keynote presenters are listed here. If you're randomly bored, the presentations will all be streamed live (leave everything blank and use 1001 as the Conference ID). The organizers have put much effort into extending the conference - each attendee has a blog automatically set up, virtual lockers for notes, rating presentations, etc.
I've posted the slides on slideshare.
Ross Dawson states that "the evolution of human society is as much about old things disappearing as new things appearing. This means it is particularly useful to consider everything in our lives that is likely to become extinct." He then lists what has disappeared in the past...and what will likely disappear in the future (including Microsoft, Google, blogging, copyright, coins). While these types of lists are generally of limited predictive value, they do serve to pause our attention and force reflection.
Marketing has changed. It's becoming more distributed. If the updates I receive daily are any indication, there are entire PR firms dedicated to harnessing the network properties of blogs. Sometimes the emails are of very little interest. Other times, they're actually quite useful. Over the last few weeks, I've received notifications of the Economist's Debate Series, tackling the question: "Effectiveness of Technology - Does new technology add to the quality of education?". Looks like an interesting debate (Sir John Daniel says no - tech doesn't add quality (due to poor implementation, not technology itself), while Robert Kozma argues the opposite). The debate runs for the duration of the week. You'll need to create an account (free) to participate.
About 8 years ago, I was presenting to a group of faculty and Deans at RRC about how we should approach content management. Back "in those days" folders on a hard drive still ruled organization approaches to managing content. Google was still emerging...tags and folksonomies didn't yet exist explicitly. I was asked how we should best organize our resources when content was developing so quickly. I stated that we should "throw everything into our containers and apply intelligence at the point of search". I still think that's the main way to manage information. For example, I have a variety of blogs, use different tagging services, contribute to different website, etc. It's impossible to manage those resources at the point of creation. What's the solution? Well, I came across an interesting tool recently called Lijit - here's my profile. You simply add your various spaces of content creation and sharing (flickr, del.icoi.us, stumpleupon, blogs, furl, digg and so on), and then search across your entire network with one search query. While the service isn't anything revolutionary, it is the model that we will need to rely on in our climate of "abundance of abundance".
Engagement and social activism varies from generation to generation...at least in the medium of expression. Network-Centric Advocacy takes Thomas Friedman to task for criticizing the lack of civic engagement by the younger generation. NCA rightly suggests that the tools of the generation shape the nature of engagement. One statement in particular resonated with my experiences in seeking reform at an educational level: "Leaders that are not online are not a part of culture."
Wow, October has been a cruel month for the music industry. First Radiohead and nine inch nails dumped decided to go it alone without a publishing label, and now we have a whole group of artists proclaiming similar freedoms. In the case of Madonna, for example, her departure from a record company is unique in that a concert promotion agency is paying her for albums and merchandising. Ah, the diminishing value of content...and the emerging revenue model.
Mediashift provides a short article on virtual worlds - their development, hype, distribution as subsets of main sites (BBC, CBS, Disney), blogs/articles, and a glossary. A good resource for newcomers to the virtual world conversation.
On the heels of the Radiohead's announcement to allow listeners to download their album and pay what they (listeners) would like, nine inch nails adopts a similar model in declaring: "I have been under recording contracts for 18 years and have watched the business radically mutate from one thing to something inherently very different and it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate."
In the end, it's about relationships. Content is, after all, only a conduit to a conversation.
Curt Bonk explores an interesting theme - teachers as concierges: "We need to push students into the many learning possibilities that are ripe for them now. Concierges sometimes show you things you did not know were available or possible. Teachers as concierges can do the same things."
The theme is somewhat similar to what I presented as curatorial teaching. Both approaches emphasize the importance of educator expertise as a means of directing learners to important resources and ideas without compromising their "wayfinding" skills in complex environments.
From the information age to the connected age: "The Information Age is the age of the knowledge worker. The Connected Age is the age of the web worker. Knowledge workers create and manage information, massaging it into intangible knowledge goods. Web workers create and manage relationships across knowledge goods, hardware, and people."
I think this is an important distinction - i.e. the importance of networking and connecting as key activities of learners today. Much like Richard Feynman proclaimed the most important point for budding scientists to understand is that "everything is made of atoms", we need to focus on all learning and knowledge starts with connections. The question naturally arises as to how knowledge is formed through connections...or how understanding is achieved. A simple connection does not necessarily equal deep understanding. But, it is a start. Without the connection (between concepts, ideas, people, information sources (I'm not focusing on the neural level here)), nothing can emerge. It seems rather obvious to state, but I find most discussions of learning and knowledge have a tendency to wash over the primacy of the connection and the network.
K-12 Online Conference has officially kicked off. Looks like an exciting few weeks. Conference schedule is available here. Congrats to the organizers for putting together what will surely be a successful event!
Great comments by Sebastian Fiedler:
"What if...we start from the assumption that people in most industrial and post-industrial societies...
- increasingly live in abundance of affordable and accessible networked human and informational resources of all kinds...
- have to live with growing levels of dis-continuity, uncertainty and individual risk taking in their attempts to live a meaningful life...
- have to integrate and cope with periods of self-, un-, part-time- and traditional (full) employment...
- have to make their own choices and take responsibility for interpreting what is going on around them...
then, does most of mainstream "educational technology" that we see in higher education today make any sense?"
Your outboard brain knows all: "In fact, the line between where my memory leaves off and Google picks up is getting blurrier by the second. Often when I'm talking on the phone, I hit Wikipedia and search engines to explore the subject at hand, harnessing the results to buttress my arguments.
My point is that the cyborg future is here. Almost without noticing it, we've outsourced important peripheral brain functions to the silicon around us."
I'm pleased to announce an upcoming conference on Corporate Learning: Trends and Innovations. The conference will be held fully online (with live presentations and asynchronous discussions). We have an exceptional group of speakers...conference details are available here (more information will be added soon). It's a free conference, but registration is required. Thanks to Duke Corporate Education and TechEmpower for sponsoring and assisting in organizing the event. The conference will be held November 15 - 20, 2007..mark your calendars! It's an exciting opportunity to discuss current trends and innovations in corporate training environments around the world...
Just came across a fairly new blog by Gráinne Conole titled e4innovation. Gráinne is Professor of e-learning in the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University. It's great to see research-focused academics entering the blog space. We need a edublog ecology which runs the full breadth from practical application to theory and research. Many of the original edubloggers were/are practice-based. For example, an instructor or teacher at the classroom level starts playing around with the different ways of expressing herself and engaging with students. The small blog network takes notice and communities form. Over the last few years, the community has gained the attention of researchers and established academics - people like Terry Anderson - who are able to translate the trends at classroom levels into research activities at the academy level (and in the process, improve use, application, and respectability of blogs in the eyes of traditional academics). Over the last few months, I've seen numerous chapter requests for books, article submissions for journals, conference requests, etc. that focus specifically on using the participative web for teaching and learning. Great stuff! (and welcome Gráinne!)
Learning management systems are evolving. They are becoming less like traditional LMS' and more like what many have been describing as personal learning environments. This week I had the pleasure (?) of attending two separate LMS presentations - one from Desire2Learn and one from Blackboard. A significant divergence between the two: D2L is making LMS far simpler to use: easy to create content, easy to manage profiles/options, online dialogue, manage learning resources, etc...and Blackboard is seeking to innovate the LMS through tools like Scholar, community portal, eportfolios, etc. I taught with D2L several years ago. Many elements of the tool looked similar to what I saw this week, but were generally cleaner, more effective (for teachers in particular), and more developed.
At the Beyond Boundaries conference, I attended a presentation (marketing session) by Blackboard. I was impressed. Blackboard lost enormous favor within academic circles with their patent claims. I suspect more than a few executives (and most salespeople) regret the decision. While being publicly assailed for the last few years, Blackboard has been quietly innovating their platform through a strong focus on community and participatory web tools. If they dropped their patent claims and embraced, rather than antagonized, the educational community, I imagine they would get significantly more favorable reaction from the community they are (or are seeking to) serve.
I can see the appeal of LMS' to administrators and teachers. They integrate what is currently a very messy and confusing space of technology and tools. While early adopters like the chaos of different tools and constant experimentation, most educators do not. But my concern remains that we sacrifice future flexibility for current convenience. The greater flexibility of distributed tools remains a strong draw that exceeds organization and ease of use provided by centralized tools (at least for me...).
Stephen Downes has posted slides and audio from his recent presentation in San Jose on E-Learning 2.0 in Development (audio improves after 2 minutes of introductory background talk). He begins by delivering a well-rounded critique of why education modeling language (EML) and other learning design approaches are ineffective (primarily due to complexity of concepts and different perspectives - i.e. the example he has used over the last few years of Paris (i.e. the person, the substance (plaster of paris), the city). To counter the shortcomings of traditional design, Stephen proposes use of connectivist and connectionist orientations as the basis for seeing learning in today's world. Slightly off topic, connectionism has a long history - Thorndike is one of the first researchers I'm aware. Thorndike's work found its roots in behaviourism...and fell from prominence. Connectionism was then revived by neuroscience and artificial intelligence as a means of explaining thought/thinking/knowing at a neural level. Connectionism focuses on micro-level networks. Connectivism, while incorporating micro-level activities, also incorporates macro (connecting people, databases, social networks) and conceptual (connecting ideas or artifacts expressing ideas) levels.
Anyway, following the connectionism/connectivism discussion, Stephen moves into defining groups and networks...and why education (and today's educational tools) need to be based on network models.
Mark Grabe - from the cleverly-titled blog Learning Aloud - directs our attention to tips for conference blogging (an illustrated guide!). I have tried live blogging events in the past (and more recently with Twitter - which I have largely abandoned lately). But in the end, I find I enjoy other distracting activities instead (such as reading RSS feeds/blogs, searching resources shared by speakers, backchannel chat (IRC or Skype), etc).
Bryan Alexander provides a link to an article in WSJ on how aspiring novelists in Japan are writing their masterpiece on a mobile phone: ""PCs might be easier to type on, but I've had a cellphone since I was in sixth grade, so it's easier for me to use," says Ms. Nakamura, who has written eight novels on her little phone."
I'm sure we'll continue to see much more of this: University of California, Berkeley has a YouTube site for streaming video lectures. Not too many lectures posted yet...but the idea is great. And it shows how the current challenge for many educators is not to create more resources or educational content, but to find what's currently available and get learners to dialogue with each other on the lectures/presentations already existing.
Alan Levine has compiled a resource of 50 tools (actually, it's 49, but that doesn't sound as complete) for telling stories (creating narratives is probably a better term): "It was not long ago that producing multimedia digital content required expensive equipment and technical expertise; we are at the point now where we can do some very compelling content creation with nothing more complex than a web browser."
The shift has been enormous, in a short period of time...the narrative-creating power of an average web user is outstanding.
Pretty much what I was trying to say with the recent post on social networking distributing into many tools, rather than as a site/location-based tool: Social networking is a feature, not a destination.
The Future of Newspapers: "When you have a web browser in your pocket, a printed newspaper is redundant."
We've been running some workshops for faculty at University of Manitoba on how to begin integrating technology into teaching. One of the areas of greatest concern (for me at least) is the challenge of traditional instructional design. Instructional design is a complex, involved, and expensive process. Most courses/workshops/training sessions are NOT subject to ID. Why? Time, expertise, and the reality of teaching/training - we just don't have (or take) the time to subject our activities to ID models. When new programs are initiated, ID is often prominent (as it ought to be). But for existing programs or courses, the ID process is missing, and instead we get a more haphazard approach to adding technology to teaching/learning. I've posted a short article based on yesterday's workshop: Context: Planning for the space of learning.
What is the role of content? Think on this for a while: Radiohead: Pay what you want "Sure, Radiohead is on a sustained run as the most interesting and innovative band in rock, but what makes In Rainbows important — easily the most important release in the recent history of the music business — are its record label and its retail price: there is none, and there is none."
In an interview earlier today, I was asked what I use for social networking services. Short answer: I try them all (facebook, myspace, bebo, orkut, linkedin, twitter, etc.) and then resume the more ad hoc mixture of blogs I've been using for many years. Quite simply, social networking sites require a high level of commitment. It's like taking care of a pet or a garden. If you want to keep it in good health, it requires time, effort, and work. So while facebook/twitter/ning/etc was cool for a while, I once again find myself using my aggregator (finally made the switch to Google Reader, after vowing not to give my entire digital soul to them...Bloglines just kept failing on me) to track the thinking of people I want to follow. I don't have the patience or time to commit to a social network service. Business Week questions whether we need completely unique social networking sites: Scaling the Social Web...and explores how many websites are now offering increased user-interaction/networking. We soon end up with a network of social networks...rather than one huge over-arching network like facebook. It also results in our identity repeated each time we join a new network or social group online. Terry Anderson states that our "capacity to engage with new applications is severely limited due to the ever consuming time pressures needed to establish a presence in every new application and domain". A central identity management service becomes critical as our profiles are used for more and more services.
Not nearly exhaustive (needless to say, it's very difficult to predict 10 years forward), but an interesting list of 10 businesses facing extinction...some businesses will be challenged by technological advances, others by social trends...ranging from coin-operated arcades to record stores and used book stores.