Well… it’s been quite a ride. For those of you who are interested in the good/complex of the my life on the personal side, do check out http://cribcronicles.com.
Professionally, things have been moving on apace. I have great hopes that I’ll be able to deal with each of these issues over the next several weeks but for now I’m just going to try and break the silence.
Living Archives
The project has gone really well overall. We’ve had far more successes than we’ve had challenges we couldn’t overcome. The best comment i heard was from one of the principals who said “there are kids in that class that have never really been engaged who are excited about learning”. We should have our version of the website to hand out to folks in the next week or so for you guys to download and try out in your own schools if you are interested. No promises, but it is pretty good.
Openhabitat
I’m working with some fine folks (though not as closely as I’d like, time being what it is) on MUVE’s in education. If you drop by http://openhabitat.org you’ll get a sense of the great work that’s being done there. For my part, I’m working on the interactive website that were using as well as doing some work with opensim… an automated server install and some precanned training material. Fun stuff
Ukanskills
I’m working with another group of folks over there (UK) on this project. I’ve been working on two systems (that’s i’m hoping to fold into each other) to store and deliver different versions of curriculum and learning objects in a cool web2 kind of platform. More on this soon.
Innovate Online
I’ve been working on an article on rhizomatics for the last eight months. The very good people at Innovate have been patient enough with me (for whatever reason) and, all things being equal, the article should be appearing in next months special edition on the future of education
Edactive Technologies
I’ve managed to get the company through which i do the majority of my consulting work incorporated and am almost to the point where my professional online life is organized. It’s been a bit of a silly journey, but as the contracts have started to get more significant, I’ve had to take the company itself more seriously. I’m not sure if i’m going to be ready to ‘go it alone’ anytime soon, but i am at least in a solid position to take on contracts. I’m part of an excellent network of very good people.
Educationbridges
The non-profit is, i hope, finally on the horizon. We’ve been looking to get company set up and running to take care of Edtechtalk and potentially allow us to broker some educational projects… Looks like we might finally have the pieces we need.
UPEI
My day job (web technology specialist) at the university has been lots of fun. We’ve been trying to move the university to more dynamic, interactive drupal based platform. We’re about 90% done the initial grunt work and are looking forward to starting to use some of the more interesting and interactive sides of the platform in the next little while
Presentations
Pretty thin this year. With Bon on bedrest, i’m not really in a position to head out until late ’08 at the earliest. I am speaking three times at a conference in june at the university which i plan to ustream… but just bits and pieces this year i think. Probably not a bad thing.
oh. and i’ve started a new blog. http://plywoodviolin.com
Hi!
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I have been reading through some of your rhizomatic knowledge information and immediately saw connections to an Idea I am just starting to flesh out. I have been thinking about better ways to enable the creation, organization and retrieval of learning materials after being disappointed at the whole “learning object repository” model and previous attempts to reach the same goal. After spending the last 4 months immersed in SL, my thinking started to drift toward 3D enhanced methods for doing this. The biggest problem I experienced as a teacher trying to locate information was finding things that would be a close match to particular curriculum outcomes without having to go through each resource the “search” turned up to assess its relevance. Another annoyance going back to the “Web page containing Weblinks” to “database driven sites” right up to “learning Object Repositories” was the problem of “loopiness” (there’s probably a more sophisticated name for it, but it was the best I could come up with.) In each case no matter how well designed the metadata collection and resource description process was, people found ways to reduce many of the resource entries down to links to “great websites…” which themselves contained mostly links to other “great websites” and so on. Sometimes by chance you ran into something useful, but most of the time was spent chasing threads which quite often ended up leading back to a previously visited site creating a loop. The big issue that had not been tackled very effectively I thought, was the lack of a direct connection from resources to specific curricular outcomes. Trying to link a resource back to all the related outcomes after the fact relying on machine processing is difficult, but using a rhizome approach may make it possible. I am working on a small trial using my free OpenSim region on the Tribalnet p2p grid, but I can imagine something similar on any VW or a google earth/sketchup implementation. I have a fairly large map of north america and am going to start with Alberta and Saskatchewan, subject mathematics. In the appropriate geographical location on the map I am going to construct clusters of prims tagged/imprinted with curricular outcomes direct from official documents. The shape, color, height above surface, proximal arrangement etc. can be used as visual cues. Once several different regions have been completed it would be possible for Avatar/users to fly between different regions and identify very similar outcomes which could be physically joined by a thread. The outcome prims themselves can act as drops for notecards containing text,urls to sites containing “actual related content” or teleportation information to Sims containing related immersive activities. This info is made accessible to all the other outcomes linked to it. I could see a synergy between the VW interface and a drupal based back end managing the actual content offering a secondary flatter interface to the same body of resources. Sorry, got a little carried away with the length. Must start my own blog…