Author: dave

it’s been a great couple of weeks hanging with Oscar and bon. So far being a dad is pretty cool. But time to get back to work, at least back to blogging.

Second life is not a game. That is the first thing that I came to realize after about fifteen minutes into the virtual reality environment. In order for something to be ‘a game’ there need to be clear defined rules, and, most would argue, a way to win. True, you could measure ‘winning’ by how much money you have, a common path in our own ‘meatspace’ world… and not one I particularly subscribe to. You could play a game IN second life… much like you could in ‘first life’. But, in and of itself, it is not a game.

And it is this potential for creating ANYTHING that both supports all the potential and all the difficulties with using it as a educational platform. At worldbridges we’ve been testing bunches of different ways to use second life.

• we’ve webcasted.
• we’ve met.
• we’ve built stuff.
• we’ve bought and sold.
• i bought a blackjack machine.
• i’ve won a lost money playing it.
• i built some furniture.
• jeff bought and configured an amphitheatre.
• we’re designing a conference environment.
• jeff built a soju tent.
• i’ve met new people

The 3.0ness assuming that makes any sense, comes from the feeling of ‘actually being there’. During our various live, participatory events, we’ve often gotten a great deal of feedback that people felt disassociated from other members, who were confused about ‘where to go’. In second life – you can follow. If someone turns to go into a group, you can follow them… chatting works by proximity, communities of conversation can form naturally, according to the needs of the people involved.

The interactivity of blogs and podcasts still comes from the old ‘expert central’ model. yes, you can respond to a blog and a podcast using your own blog or podcast, but it is still an exchange of expert opinions… and i’ve had some very nice conversations that way. But very little gets BUILT that way. How many projects have actually gotten DONE through blogging and podcasting? Even with live webcasting, there still tends to be a central voice, or voices that control the conversation. A conversation in second life, however, allows for an open conference without the without that central expert opinion.

Now, you might say, sounds life a real life conference, except with less beer. Well, that may be, but in a real conference, the money, the control of the agenda, no matter how open, still has a great deal of effect on the outcome. If Star Macrosystems supports a conference, is it really possible to openly criticise their work? A second life conference takes one call out, and it can begin. It’s completely supported by Linden labs.

The catch? They want your credit card or paypal account. but you can play without paying cash. And the sign up process is long and tedious. Ostensibly, the process assures that you don’t wreck the economy by signing up a million times and gathering the cash. and it does do this. But it does mean that anytime you find something appealing to purchase, you are that much closer to buying it.

Educationally, especially with adults and by distance, this environment is without equal. The opportunies for interactivity and to deal with the alienation that comes from virtual classrooms is amazing. With the K-12 system i forsee many, many more problems. A system of control would need to be very tight in order to stop students from simply skydiving away the whole class. It would be possible, but difficult.

We will be doing a conference there soon, and are in there working on stuff all the time. You are all invited. My name in SL is coarsesalt Warrigall. say hello.

Early Sunday morning and I find myself checking out fark… Interestingly, I find myself turning there for news more than anywhere else on the internet. While things can be a little… shall we say graphic, there sometimes, I find the multiplicity of viewpoint interesting, and the fact that thousands of people are searching out links and trying to be interesting/funny/sarcastic/mean/noticed/intelligent/etc on a given topic does make for some fascinating reading. What i don’t like, i don’t read. it’s simple.

This morning there was a link to this article in Minneapolis-St Paul Star Tribune. Quickly, the way things work there is that an article gets posted and then the members comment on the post. The ‘submitter’ who, well, submits the article, gets it submitted in part based on the appeal of their headline. The headline, in this case… not so good. The comment thread for this post makes very interesting reading. It pretty much runs the range of different opinions (including those that don’t particularly care)

some of the many i liked

• Muddie’s comment that those who knew the answers would read the quiz and those that didn’t would ignore the quiz.
• Neospartan’s why does beer come in sixpacks tautology
• tr0ut10’s comments about question framing

I whine, as i’ve whined many times… How many of you still have the image of the Bhor atom in your head? Is it helping you? Memory doesn’t upgrade, it doesn’t change with the times.

Of course, i got 8/10 so maybe i’m just bitter 🙂

A chilly holiday Friday morning here on the red dirt island. Coffee poured, and catching up on all the little things that have been left dangling due to the speed at which things have been going the last couple of weeks. Today the blog is going to wander away from education and into my real life.

First, my partner, seen here with her mother, has got her blog up and running. The crib chronicles are a slightly different flavour of mom blog, as you’ll sense from the first few lines of text. The most recent post at the time of writing is a powerful piece of writing (if I say it who shouldn’t) and speaks very much to the way the last year of my life has gone, and said in a way I’m not sure I’d be able to. Clear, direct, honest (if a little off the chart on the vocabulary… bon’s a smarty pants) It is, like I warned earlier, a very personal part of our lives, but to all those fine people out there who I talk to all the time, I figured this was the best way to share it.

Bonnie is also going to be starting a webcast on the site, maybe sometime next week… She’s one of my fellow interns at the Wedcast Academy. If any of you out there are interested in joining in, just drop a line over at her blog and let her know that you’d like to join in.

She’s been my partner now (no, we’re not married) for five years… and is my best friend. As well as my favourite debating partner.

The other girl in my house is not so nearly well presented. She’s the tyrant of the place. Her name is Clementine. As you can see from this photo, she’s very energetic… This is actually the five seconds that she was stopped on this given day. You can occasionally hear her during the shows…

I’ve spent alot of time thinking and talking about what it means to be an expert recently. I’m going to fire down a few of those ideas here, and see where they lead… Feel free to jump in.

Facts and Truths are IMHO not the solid rocks of security they were even 50 years ago. As what my old phil prof called ‘knowledge producers’ increase, get less cohesive, and as their interests diverge, other narratives of truth continue to make their way into the mainstream. The major text-events of our time don’t last very long, and they are written in increasingly changeable media. I was struck today, for instance, about the defense the american ruling government is making against an accused ‘flip-flop‘, an expression now so reified, that most people don’t need an explanation of its meaning, its political rammifications or the reaction against it as a concept. It really only came into general usage in its current form a little over two years ago.

How, I ask you, does one get to be an expert… or, maybe more importantly REMAIN an expert, in such quickly changing times? In times where ‘authority’ is so hard to quantify?

Authority granted by accomplishment 

The context for this particular issue started during our conversations with Larry Sanger about digital universe. Larry was saying that the difference between du and wikipedia was that du would be validated by ‘experts’. During that conversation, i tried to figure out what Larry meant by expert, but he seemed to take the definition as self-descriptive, “an expert is someone who is recognized as an expert.”

At about the same time, I had a conversation with some  faculty at a university about the future possibilities of an e-learning project. About half way through, someone turned to me and said, “but what are your qualifications… oh, you don’t have a Phd, we’ll we should consult an expert.” As you might imagine, (certainly those of you who’ve heard me on  the podcasts) i did not react very well to this distinction… Does a Phd make me an expert? Should we trust that as validation?

So… 

So, in both cases, we are looking for authority. People are looking for a way to decide if the person who is writing an article are responsibly reporting the ‘facts’ they’ve discovered – are giving good advice for belief. And that, I think, is what it comes down to. Can I believe this person? And in both of these cases, the people involved are throwing they ‘belief’ over to those who have their doctorate in a given field, or who have published extensively in peer reviewed journals… (which leads us to…)
Authority by community 

Here in blogland, we do that by searching through the ‘nodes’ of people’s interaction. (see G. Siemens) We can look through who links to them, and who they link to and get a sense of what kind of a thinker they are. It doesn’t stop us from looking elsewhere for information, but it does give us the vaguest inkling of where people are coming from. This is authority granted by community.

We are, in a sense, the worlds largest peer reviewed journal. And its a journal that includes various rating systems. There have been oodles of links and comments about Stephen Downes’ elearning 2.0 and George Siemens’ connectivism. They have been, by popular acclaim of their peers, designated experts.
But experts at what? I would not, for instance, approach Stephen for driving lessons. I have, also, had significant (and very entertaining) philosophical disagreements with George. Does it make George right? He would probably not say so, nor has he ever suggested that his status as an expert makes him more ‘right’ than anyone else. In their debate on edtechtalk, the two had significant disagreements. Who is to judge which of them is ‘correct’?

My answer is that no one can. It is a clumsy, difficult and dangerous thing to decide who is correct on any given issue. At the moment of choice, someone is marginalized, a path of discovery is closed off, a possibility for exploration is nipped in the bud.

Many people get irritated with me at this point. They say stuff like “some things have to be true.” We have to be able to “make a decision.” And i’m certainly not espousing the lack of decisions. What I’m saying is the decision between several courses of action is rarely a decision that is ‘right’, but more a decision of what is ‘best’. Regardless of what we ‘believe’.
What is an expert?

An expert, then, would be someone who can present the possibilities that exist, and explain how different choices can lead to different kinds of results. As the quantity of information increases, and the diversity of opinions multiply, I don’t see how any one single person can be an expert in the old sense of the world. It would take a community of people, working in concert, in an openly accessible environment, to allow the many truths to present themselves to public view to allow the looker to judge for themselves which of the paths on a given subject will work for their context.

But isn’t that what a reporter does? 

In a sense, what i’ve described, is what a reporter does when they go out and get different ideas on a subject. Jeff and I were approached by a gentlemen for an interview for this podcast about wikipedia. He tracked various opinions from various experts regarding the use of wikipedia as a ‘trusted source’. But does that make the reporter an expert, or from a different perspective, does it make the podcast the expert?

I don’t think there’s AN answer to any of these questions. I do believe that a discussion on them is warranted. And the more we continue that discussion, the easier it’ll be to talk about solutions to the challanges that keep arising in our practice.

meme please.

ps. and someone give me a phd please. 🙂

I’m kicking back on the couch with Bonnie and the cat, trying to get some of the ideas that have been flooding through my head over the last couple of days into print. I don’t know if its the springtime, or a return to a slightly more normal life that does it, but i seem to be settling into posting a little more often and potentially getting a few different ideas posted.

I came across a fantastic article in the guardian today. It’s the kind of article that makes you stop, read the title again, read through it, cheer, shudder and then wonder what its all about. For those of you too… um… busy to read the link, a quick recap. (although the article is well worth the read) Group of students in England form two companies. One in England and one in Ireland. Through this company they are able to import ‘weapons of torture’ into the country. They also get some ‘price quotes’ on things like a grenade launcher. They bring a ‘sting stick’ to some guy named Malcolm Wicks, who’s the head of some department called – import controls.

So, first reaction, George Lear, the head of ‘citizenship’ at Lord William’s school is my new hero. Now that! That was a PLAN! We’ll get the students (assuming it was his idea, which i’m in no way sure of) to set up a company that will try to import dangerous items in order to both prove its possible, as well as convince the student’s that anything is possible. That they can be involved in the politics of their country… that they can even have an effect on policy. Fantastic.

The second reaction… well. Holy crap. People can really do this. And kids can do it. Annaarrcchist ccookbook eat your heart out. That’s all we could ascribe to as kids (not that i’ve ever had one, google, i know you’re watching) But now the list is endless, and a group of students form the UK can import whatever they want. OMFG.

My third reaction was the one that really hit home. I’ve seen great projects before (although maybe never one quite this grand) and i already actually knew that this kind of stuff was happening on the internet. No. My third reaction was, what is the ‘minister of control’ going to do about it? He gets cornered by a bunch of kids who give him a stun gun, and, according to the article, there’s going to be a full extravaganza on BBC on Monday

What is the reaction that we get everytime that a new part of the internet gets bad publicity? Shut it down! What about the children! The sky is falling! and a rise in the price of oil. Never quite figured out how the last part happens, but it always seems to.

I am now getting officially worried about the policing of the internet. I remember a series of posts at the turn of the new year (links absent, too lazy) that talked about the big cable/phone companies regulating traffic and charging for movement on the internet. I can but imagine that some control of traffic will naturally come along with that. At the risk of receiving a tin-foil hat in my inbox tomorrow deals are usually made when two people have something they want to trade. The government is going to want to control this access. The companies are definetely going to want to make as much money as they can from the internet.

Sounds like a deal to me.

So what can we do? Same as ever. Educate. Chase away bad air with bright metal. Fight the power.

What we can do is realize that the arguments we all make about access to computers, About freedom being about responsibility, that one needs to come with the other, and this being one of the greatest things that blogging will teach our students. About how collaboration dispels fears. How trying to shut down the system has only ever sent somewhere else, somewhere less controllable. These arguments are important. And even if some of you get tired of saying it over and over again. That audience is still out there that needs to hear it.
I think the fine work you are all doing is important. Please. Keep it up.

Fingers full of paint flipping over a keyboard propped on my lap, on an evening following a day that actually smelled like spring. Spring that brings all the little jobs that need to get done, Spring that brings the leaves out of the trees we planted last year (hopefully). It’s our first spring in our first house. A very, very special time. And a time for my computer muscled body to remember that those muscles are actually made for doing something other than typing…

Had a great chat with Bud Hunt tonight, just before i put brush and roller to my stairs.  He was asking me, quite rightly i think, what it was exactly we were trying to do at the barnraising. He pointed out that Tadge O’brien, over at Monroe, has a fantastic resource in his edtech wiki. During the shows many other fine pieces of work have been mentioned, most of which are detailed in the barnraising modules. Why then, if we knew these things existed, were we trying to do it all over again? (I must interject here, and say that Bud put all of this in a far better way, and i hope he forgives the crude way I’m abusing his fine conversation to work towards my point)

Let me start with some premises for background.

1. The Read/Write education is in its infancy.
2. Those who were there at the birth, are, by necessity, defining the conversation.
3. They are also defining the terms of the conversation.
4. They are empowered by this position of… er… power.
5. This empowerment, to some degree, separates them from the ‘second wave’.
6. The second wave of people are the ones who ‘learn’ the language. (different from the ones who created it)
7. When one is ‘learning’ something, one vaguely expects those things that one is learning to ‘work’. As opposed to someone who is ‘creating’ something, who is a little more prepared to ‘test’ something.
8. These waves overlap, and some people have their feet in both pools, in different circumstances.
9. People who quibble over details the first time I expound a theory are not very nice, and should be more patient.
10. That overlap, EVENTUALLY, solidifies, and the item, like the telephone, becomes a standard of everyones practice.

And now premises for creation of learning ‘items’.

1. Audience, in everything, is critical.

I remember the first time I started to program in CSS. I was in the second wave, we were already at CSS2, and there were already very serious experts at it.(those guys still blow my mind, anyone who says webdesign isn’t art…) I was going around, pulling down pieces of stuff from different sites, looking at the code, pasting some of it into my own little test site to see how it would work. I was coming into what was a mature environment (for the internet) and as I would appear very uncool asking simple questions like, “waddaya mean cascading…?” or “How do i make my page center?” i just lurked around until i could find bits to start with.

When I take a look at the three or four sites that taught me the admitedly elementary webdesign that i do know, a couple stand out. The listematic, a fantastic show by example site supported by the grand master of css, w3schools, and glish, the layout site. With these three websites, I learned enough to design and sell a website or two over the years. Take a look at them. They all share one very important quality. They show you EXACTLY what you would need to do, in a basic way, to be successful.

As a ‘second wave’ learner to css, that’s exactly what i needed. A way I could succeed automatically, without fear, without the chance of failure (beyond my little bouts of inattention. Second wavers want to be able to see where they’re going to get without asking alot of questions that they know the first wavers have heard a zillion times. They want to show up, copy and paste, and then make it happen in their own lives.

This is what i would like to see happen for new media education. I would like to see a copy and paste solution for a classroom wiki project. A copy and paste solution for blogging with your students. These things, these copy and paste solutions are the markers of a mature medium. Once things can be easily copied, they are really part of the mainstream. And for my part I want the read/write web to be part of the mainstream. I want students to be producers of knowledge. I want them to be able to control the media that is trying to control them.

All that to say. The second wave is the audience many of us are seeking. We need to produce for them, not for us… until we all blend into the same, and those separations wont matter anymore, and blogging will really be the same as calling someone on the telephone.

The debate about whether digital universe is better than wikipedia is better than britannica is better than my mom?

Irrelevant. There are no gatekeepers protecting knowledge. Or at least, the gatekeepers are very difficult to find and/or they can’t do their jobs very well anymore. What we have now are salespeople, they are selling particular brands of knowledge and we need to teach our students to be good consumers.

I was sent this little article this morning with one of those open mouthed smilies… It seems, at least according to The Register, which has been trashing wikipedia for months and months, that Nature did bad things with its data… That its research was bogus. Brittannica wrote a response to the Nature article that condemns their research practices and suggests things like – Nature sent parts of articles – Nature sent the childrens version.

Damning information for Nature. If they did it, they deserve a kick in the head. They’ve got one of those names you don’t like to be able to refute, like “my mom told me that”.

Damning for wikipedia? No. Not at all. It proves the point we’ve been making all along. Truth is a matter of perspective. Even the best research can be cooked (assuming Nature did that, which I’m not, I haven’t the foggiest idea if they have or not) and biases enter into every discussion.

The quest for ‘Truth’ in its capital T sense, is one best left for comparitive religion classes. What we need to teach students today is how to assess the ‘truths’ they are being presented with. This makes a perfect example…

• Look at the register article
• Look at the ‘related links’ on the bottom
• Notice that they are all ‘anti-wikipedia’
• Read the Britannica article
• Read the Nature article
• Draw your own conclusions
• Wikipedia isn’t perfect
• Britannica isn’t perfect
• The Register isn’t perfect
• Nature isn’t perfect

Add them together and you get a picture not only of what the ‘truth’ might be, but also of how biases affect knowledge, of how the corporate and tradition affect the way people see certain issues, and you do some solid research along the way. This is what our students need to learn how to do.

We’ve been working on a couple of projects over the last couple of weeks. It’s been a wild ride, trying to balance the live work and encourage the asynchronous work… Live wiki building is, well, pretty busy work. There has been some confusion regarding the separation between the two projects… so i figure i’ll write a little review of both, sketch out some lessons learned and talk a little about where, from my own point of view, i’d like to see them go.(All opinions are those of the author alone and are not meant to reprensent the views of educationbridges, or worldbridges inc. 🙂 )

Wikitextbook Project at Educationbridges.

The wikitextbook project, or at least the live construction of it can be seen over at educationbridges. We had two main goals in trying to construct a wiki over there… We wanted to give some of our crew some experience working inside the wiki, and we wanted a working space to test out some of our speculative policy ideas.

We’ve done two shows around that space so far, and while there is not a terribly large amount of ‘content’ in the space, it was not entirely meant to ever house that content. The idea was to play around with some of the essential issues are wikitextbooks;

1. How will validation be organized in practice?
2. How will teachers work together in order to create content?
3. How can content be displayed in ways that avoids the ‘text to screen’ problem?
4. Who will the audience be and how will we reach them?
5. What wiki building policies will we need?
6. What would the template of a ‘good page’ look like?

There are more I suppose, but these are some of the issues that have come up over the course of the two episodes. The most compelling issue for me, and the one upon which i believe i have changed my mind concerns the audience. I went into this process believing that we were going to need to appease the administrators in given locals in order to be able to reach our initial goals of creating a wikitextbook that can be used in areas where the purchase of up-to-date textbooks is financially restrictive. On the last show… my mind was changed by the excellent arguments of the many.

I now believe that a core group of the willing will be needed for a successful wikitextbook project. We need to find three or four schools (cyber or otherwise) that have a willingness to work with us to create the first pilots of a project that will work. Only after success has been proved are we going to be able to convince more traditionally minded administrators that this can be a long term solution. Now, we need the schools and the money… and a clear delineated plan.

Edtech Barnraising – Building a New Media Curriculum.

The edtech barnraising and its accompanying wiki is was, and is, a very different beast. The intention of the barnraising is to get a bunch of different, talented edtechish educators together to create a foundation for new media education. A baseline of basic skills and knowledge available to anyone, to give them an idea of what can be done, and how to go about it.

The audience for the wiki is ‘the teacher on a Saturday night, who wants to teach something on Monday morning’ . There are five basic modules that are in the process of being built by some very smart people, and we hope that everyone will come and contribute to the process.

What have we learned about live wiki-ing in general?

We learned a bunch of stuff.

1. Many, many people said that they needed voice chat in order to plan, as this would facilitate the interaction, as well as leave the fingers free for content creation.
2. A system for navigation for the wiki absolutely needs to be worked out before you start.
3. Allow for pauses in the development for people to catch their breath.
4. Follow everything else you know that applies to other disciplines, be organized, do a nice introductory exercise, be encouraging, give people clear defined tasks etc…

Good early morning to all of you. 5:39am here on the red dirt isle and I’m finishing my prep for a  5 hour class I’ll be teaching at ten… Crisp here, even in my house, and I’m soaking in that intense quiet of the early morning. An intense quiet disturbed only by the sharp teeth of one little orange kitten who seems to feel that fingers zinging over a laptop are the house’s version of ten blind mice.

I’m reading over an article by one of my favorite educational writers, Frank Smith, and been mulling over the events of the last few days: My somewhat unorthodox presence at the MACUL conference, the rolocking good time we had at the wiki spectacular, and the quite amazing group of people that have signed up for our barnraising on Sunday. And then I came across this line in the 5th Chapter of Smith’s book…

Learning is a social phenomenon. What everyone in every culture has taken for granted for millenia (until experimental psychologists took the study of learning out of the real world and put it in the laboratory) is that learning is a simple consequence of the company you keep. (p. 57)

I’ve learned a great deal since joining this community, and feel quite proud of my membership, excited to work with you all in the ways i get to, and humbled by your willingness to accept my contributions.

I would like to thank you all for being such fine company.

Have a great weekend, and see you on Sunday.

EdTech Barnraising – Building a New Media Curriculum

There’s the title. Others might be considered, or better found, but i like this one. I like the image of a community coming together to build something we all agree needs to be built. All contributing the skills that they have, their more specific knowhow, bringing their bests to a project that supports the entire community. yes, nice image, but what does it mean.

Introduction – what is a barnraising?

This barnraising is the prototype which, if it works, will be the first in an infrequent series of live online working conferences which are dedicated to the creation of pieces of content that are needed for the advancement of bleeding-wave new e-learning 2.0 media educationy stuff (note that i’m not super worried about what peopel call it, i call it new media). Our intention is to create a repository that reflects the views of our community, that being defined as the edublogging community, its friends, and the larger association of educators that know (or will soon) of its existence.

What is this barnraising all about?

This barnraising intends to build a new media curriculum that could be the starting point of, or an asset to, a course or program intended to help teachers blend new media into their classroom.

Who can come to this conference?

You can. By reading this blog, and making it this far into the post you have qualified to come. The things needed are an interest in education, new media and a basic knowledge of the technology. The live audio show will be offering the gravitational pull for this conference. Listening to this is a one click operation. In orbit around the show are the textchat(like MSN messenger), virtual white board and the wiki. If you can find edtechtalk, click on the audio and make it to the chatroom, your in.

What will happen if i go to this ‘barnraising’?

You will work, hopefully. There is room for everyone to take on a job, a responsibility. There is room for the experienced and the inexperienced. You can check out the agenda and follow your way through what we are planning, or contribute your own ideas of how you think it should work. The basic layout however, is this.

first – we will establish a common starting point with a statement of peda/andragogy. This will be boring, but necessary. I must insist on people bringing up their objections to this statement BEFORE the conference. If we start arguing about this during, nothing will get done.

second – choose the ‘modules’ and ‘module team leaders’. Each module team will be responsible for building part of the curriculum. A sample will be provided, but i generally expect, and indeed hope, it will be ignored. It is meant as a starting point. We will also discuss various rules and posting guidelines at this point.

third – the work begins in earnest. People will go to various whiteboard areas in order to begin work with their teams. i expect people to start various skype conferences, text chats etc… and encourage everyone to record their work for the archive. The responsibility for each module being posted to the wiki falls to the leader, but all are welcome to start their own strands as different points of view arise. Two ideas of how to solve a problem would be considered better than one in this project.

fourth – the wandering talk show. We’ll be dropping into various work groups as the conference progresses, getting a sense of what is going on, briding the modules together for crossover work, recruiting help and advice for difficult issues.

fifth – the recap. We’ll try to bring as many people together at the end to get a sense of where were at, where we need to go, and overall, to see if the project worked.

How will we know we’ve succeeded?

Always the most important question. Success will be measured by whether or not we’ve created something that can be built upon.