Top 10 Edtech stories of 2009

10 – YAWN
Our “haven’t you heard abouts” got rusty this year. We woke up with a cat stretch after new years hangovers, looking forward to the next great thing that would force us to remember just one new password. Just one more “is this the new twitter”? And what did we get? Nothing. No super tool shared. No chance to smile knowingly over other people who found out about it 2 weeks later. It seems we are expected to be able to do something useful with our technology now… no sir. I don’t like it.

9 – GOOGLEWAVE
And please… don’t give me the ‘what about googlewave. It has teh awesome.’ It doesn’t qualify for this list because it doesn’t do anything. “it’s the new email” “people just don’t understand how cool it is yet”. It’s a platform… I get it. There’s one thing it can’t do for me… and that’s make my day any longer. It can’t carve out an extra hour to live collaborate on the next great american novel with fifty of my bestest chums and 20 people who walked in barely invited. Do that for me. Then i’ll be impressed.

8 – SPEAKING OF GOOGLE – THEY HATE YOU
Google hates your job. If it’s not near perfect translations, it’s automatic captioning, and I’ve heard rumour that ‘they’ the actual ‘omnipotent they’ have just stopped hosting their own email and have said that “google docs is just a nice bonus”. If you are in the business of doing anything, ever, forget it. Google is just about to do it better. Barak Obama, they say, is already switching over his blog to googlesites… the UN can’t be far behind.

7 – GOING MOBILE – ANNUAL SHOT AT OLPC
It wouldn’t be a top ten list if i didn’t make some reference to the OLPC project. Here is the tablet of the future… 2012. It’s only going to cost $100 and will save the world… oh wait, sorry. Flashback. All this year, we’ve been droided, and iphoned and i can’t stop saying it itableted to death. The future of learning is MOBILE… or so I’m told. Um… my brain is mobile. I’ve been moving around with it for years. Someday, someday we’re going to get post-digital and stop thinking about the technology as the locus for learning. Just not today. I’m the future!
http://mashable.com/2009/12/23/olpc-tablet/

6 – INTERNET GROWS UP – PEOPLE DIED THIS YEAR
The internet is growing up, it helped win an election… and reality is seeping in. This year we started to notice that things like people dying is going to create a few issues for our favourite social networking sites. If the population of facebook is 8 cagillion, and the fastest growing segment is middle aged… well… what are we going to do about people’s identity when they aren’t able to sustain it themselves? One more thing to worry about. Come on google… solve our problem. http://davecormier.com/edblog/2009/09/18/identity-memory-death-and-the-internet/

5 – UNFRIEND
Don’t leave enough comments on my blog? Don’t RT me enough? Don’t return my tweets? No more friend for you. The venerated oxford university press has chosen ‘unfriend’ as it’s word of the year. It’s hard to imagine a more depressing commentary on our times. Maybe we’re just looking at this wrong… maybe we should be seeing unfriend like unconference. Kind of a post-friendship worldview. Yeah… that’s it.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_friend_mom_dad_and_the.php
http://blog.oup.com/2009/11/unfriend/

4 – THE LIVE CONFERENCE
“There are really just too many live events.” This is my favourite complaint of 2009. The poor educationalist forced to not be able to claim to have shown up to every single presentation. But but what if i missed the CDAFGDSAG conference? Or the social media in learning in future in what about the children seminar. Oh the huge manatee. http://www.flickr.com/photos/ulrichp/1362599/
Imagine, the pain of too much choice.

3 – OK. MAYBE ONE NEW TOOL
http://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton/ Here’s my shot in the dark for this year. A an open source webconferencing system… 15 min install. Asterix. Red5. Flex/flash. I’ve been hoping for it for years, and these dudes might just have the moxie to do it. I really, really, like the look of this project. They claim they are working on recording… which is kinda necessary, and are looking for feedback. Follow along, get involved. Open source matters.

2 – OPEN ME
Alan Levine, who both killed and unkilled blogs last year, curmudgeon of awards , requester of snark, barker, and storyteller extraordinaire gives us a reason to believe in the ‘open’. And, as a result, wins the award. One biscuit to you. “What do you mean by open?” has become the theme of the open movement, sign of maturity or impending senility. Or, as my son would say, maybe both. Cast all thoughts of definition from your mind, openness is a state of mind… a state of YOUR mind. Be open. ’nuff said.

1 – THE ZEPHORIA INCIDENT
Harbinger of the end of civilization or righteous crowd demanding its due from someone who should know better… interpretations on this one span the gamut from moral to epistemic. A web 2.0 speaker trashed on a live twitter stream during her presentation. Should she? should they? Nevermind. In it is distilled the most important conversation of this year and probably the next five. What rights does the entertainer have before the crowd? Do we want to restrict knowledge in a presentation to that that can be ’shared’ by a presenter (or teacher)? Should presenters (or teachers) be accorded any more respect than a comedian (who would have gotten the same treatment or worse in the same spot?) What are our classrooms going to look like with live twitter streams flipping through them? My friends, we have the tower of babel a million times over… We have 20 students in a classroom, 200 in a conference or 20,000 in a field all building their tower of knowledge… growing, maybe, passed the teacher, the presenter or the expert. Will you knock the tower down? The people are going to be heard… speakers corner has come to the back of the room… are we ready? I doubt it. http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/11/24/spectacle_at_we.html

Top 10 Edtech News etc thingers of 2008

10. Blogging is dead
http://cogdogblog.com/2008/11/10/blogging-dead-after-all/
Proclaimed and recinded. Here it is ladies and gentlemen the end of the first era of blogging. Far fewer are the blogs that tell us “just how exciting it all is”… According to Alan Levine, who quoted Nick Carr who quoted Technorati “they’ve been tracking 133 million blogs since 2002, only 7.4 million have posted in the last 120 days “ its current death was facilitated by Nancy white at Northern Voice and then case closed on December 16th as injenuity proclaimed

Jen 2:07 pm on December 16, 2008 | 0 | # |
Very pleased to no longer be a blogger.

Is it really dead…? meh. But it’s different. Our blogs are now less megaphone and more like 21st century school lockers.

9. Wikipedia is old
http://oc-co.org/?p=124 Is Wikipedia saturated? Yep! Last year.
Wikipedia came into its own this year, no more drastic increases, no more crazy growth. Gone are the debates from years gone by about whether or not it’s the same as brittanica (how that ever was thought to be a good thing is beyond me) but now its where and what for. Proven by the focused if silly schools-wikipedia project… claiming to be school safe… yes, lets take the participation away so that everyone can participate. Never mind. It’s not cool anymore… it just is. And, if you need anymore proof… Overheard from a prof on CBC radio “when i was an undergrad all we heard was “don’t use wikipedia””
http://schools-wikipedia.org/

8. There are alot of people who still – just. don’t. get it.
http://www.thestar.com/News/GTA/article/309855
“First-year student Chris Avenir is fighting charges of academic misconduct for helping run an online chemistry study group via Facebook last term, where 146 classmates swapped tips on homework questions that counted for 10 per cent of their mark.” And now, he faces 147 Academic charges. If my math holds out, he’s also being charged for working with himself on Facebook. A group of students comes together to work on the thing they are trying to learn… ban them! Burn them! Dear Professor, your system is broken.

7. PLN vs. PLE http://www.flickr.com/photos/catspyjamasnz/3118564555/
Oh the humanity. Whatever can be the difference? Whether it’s by twitter via @courosa or by image via doug belshaw people do love to debate the meaning of acronyms that they are currently making up the meaning of. There is someting strange about the kinds of negotiations that are being made with new phrases we’ve all just made up… Never mind. PLEPLNs are important, they’re helping people talk about what we’ve all been doing since we started scratching sticks together a few million years ago http://edtechpost.wikispaces.com/PLE+Diagrams

6. Open Viewers MUVEs for the plebes
http://www.adamfrisby.com/blog/2008/12/the-state-of-open-viewers-december-08/
Blah blah blah. Oh yes, multiuser virtual environments… have to have that on the list. Every early adopter has to have one, but like any technology, it can be measured by when people start forgetting their passwords. They’re old. But now, for your participatory pleasure, we have the first real breakthrough in 5 years. Browser viewers. Bringing the virtual world to the peeps. No more downloads, no fuss, no mess, “ooooone world for eeeeevvvvry boooooy.” (and girl)

5. MOOCS – Massive Online Open Courses
http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/wiki/Connectivism
Yeah, well, so I’m biased. But when 2400 people sign up for what is essentially an epistemic research club (sounds fun doesn’t it, the web equivalent of “pawn day at the chess club”) something is happening. Couple of really big offshoots of this one. Fame will bring fortune. Professors and instructors who can bring in 5000 students are going to be worth their weight in gold… or, say, silicon. That and we’ve got a new model to make our universities work. Let everyone in. I like it.

4. Whisper of Green
http://mygreenelectronics.org/
Just the tiniest whisper of a concern for the fact that Jennifer Maddrell’s 47 computers are burning down the rainforests and for the greenness of all this technology was heard this year. I think it’s the harbinger of change to come. We’ve got greener chips in the laptops, autoshutoff extension cords and cows running computers (can’t imagine that’s good for the cows) Barring the coldfusion breakthrough we’ve been promised for thirty years I’m seeing power conservation as a key move in 2009

3. Bring on the research
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28035543/ Technology may be altering how brains work
http://www.rand.org/news/press/2008/11/03/ RAND Study Is First to Link Viewing of Sexual Content on Television to Subsequent Teen Pregnancy
http://www.newsweek.com/id/163924 A leading neuroscientist says processing digital information can rewire your circuits. But is it evolution?
Blah blah blah. More research telling us that thinking and doing stuff changes the way our brains are structured. Enough already. Ok. I believe you. My instrument of learning can learn. I agree. The thing that is manifestly obvious to anyone who actually has a brain, that our brains change with stimuli, is now confirmed. Now… if we can only figure out how they get that tasty caramel in there…

2. Unleashing The Tribe: small passionate communities Ewan McIntosh
http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/2008/06/unleashing-the.html
People are really starting to like their communities. Much less hopping around this year, started the year in twitter, ended the year in twitter. We communitophiles are growing up and settling down in the communities that allow us to thrive and survive. Overheard in my kitchen regarding mommy blogging “people can only have so many real friends, smaller communities make sense”. We’ll see more people identifying themselves by where they learn, and less eager to ‘invite the world’ to their communities. We might be on the road to a little more isolation as the long tail solidifies.

1. Death of ‘T’ruth and the killer app
All this year and for the year to come… very little but silence about “the absolute only best way to do whatever it is you probably don’t need to do anyway… is…”. People are finding different solutions to the same problem… If twitter brownouts have taught us anything its the value of being there, enjoying the good with the bad and taking life as it comes. We’ve finally come to terms with the fact that ‘better for me’ does not mean ‘better for you’ and that we are not, as some would have us believe ‘working out our differences’ but, rather, ‘accepting our differences’. Let the truthiness reign. Kumbaya.

Top 10 educational stories of 2007 – connectivism!

yes… i know it’s still the beginning of December Mr. Downes.

10. Connectivism
Many of us have taken a huge leap this year from the dungeons of our physical existence up to the light and wonder of connectivism. Each of us has had the wonderful experience of having hundreds of people send us a message in a hundred ways to in some way interact with what they’re doing. Each of us has also had the awful experience of having hundreds of people send us a message in a hundred ways to in some way interact with what they’re doing. Connecting is the only way we can succeed in the world of edtech. This years theme for the top10 list is connecting and the forces of bad that are trying to stop us from sharing. And no… I don’t know who started connectivism.

9. Year of me realizing that I’m not a lawyer
from Bud
A variety of legal issues popped up this year that including the ‘resolution’ to the blackboard owning the internet problem. Sharing is about the only way I’m going to get my mind around copyleft, copyright and copycenter. It’s gotten so bad we don’t even know when we’ve won anymore. I’m not a lawyer… I need lawyers to share with me.

8. USTREAM
Another of our sharing tools this year was USTREAM. I’ve been in people’s classrooms, in their meetings, and streamed myself out to a variety of places around the world.4 months ago I’d never heard of it, now I’m slowly learning how to watch three videos at the same time on the same screen. How much of the daily life of people I”ve never met do I really need to watch? Don’t know yet, can’t think, too busy watching.

7. Ted Stevens Alert! Banning social networks!
Mr. Ted!
Early in January, Stevens introduced Senate bill 49, which among other things, would require that any school or library that gets federal Internet subsidies would have to block access to interactive Web sites, including social networking sites, and possibly blogs as well. It appears that the definition of those sites is so vague that it could include sites such as Wikipedia.

I love this guy. Not content with clogging my tubes with his rampant ignorance, this year he’s trying to stop read/write sites for an encore. His new babydopa bill 49 is tearing it’s way into the american educational system again… and, to preempt the US centrism critique from last year (you know who you are), as the US educational system goes, sadly many of us follow.

6. Cape Town Declaration.
Cape Town
The declaration is intended to make it easier for us to work together. It’s a series of guidelines that are intended to sow happy, connected working togetherness. It’s part of the ongoing work on many people in education to make This declaration set off a ripple of dissent and agreement across the blogosphere. Share my way! Share my way now!

5. The evils of bad timing. VISTA/Amazon – Woohoo!
Sharing can also be about timing. This year two pretty big companies have decided to share their products with us. One, maybe a little too soon, the other maybe a little late. Vista has ripped a swath of pain and misery across the new computer buying world and Amazon is now trying to charge us $400 bucks for the privilege of buying their digitized books. While, sitting at number 4 on our list

4. CHEAPO comps in 3rd world.
computer wars
So, uhh… amazon, you want me to pay how much so I can buy your books? OLPC’s windmill tilting has forced everyone else in the computer industry to drive down their own entry level offerings toward the $200 mark… a nice corporate bidding game shielded under the guise of third world revitalization. The upside, we may just get another billion people connected. That’s good. That’s very good.

3. Choice.
I can choose. And I have to choose. I can’t be everywhere. Every educator is having to decide where they will stake ground. To twitter or not to twitter.

2. TWITTER
Holy connectivity batman. Twitter has brought new meaning to ‘connected’. I now know when people are getting out of bed, what they put in their coffee, and how good the cleaning staff is at their schools. I just read that someone missed their favourite television show. They never bothered to mention what it was. Just said they missed it. What, tell me, am I possibly supposed to get from that!?! That being said… holy wow… It’s saved my buns a bunch of time. Yay Microblogging.

1.Tom Wood.
Internet warrior. My new personal hero. Has set the best example for the rest of us this year. He’s gone out and used his skills for the cause of good, the cause of keeping us connected… and the… uh… cause of porn. He’s the kid from Australia who cracked the $80 million dollar government sponsored porn filter in 30minutes. I’d like to finish off with wisdom from Mr. Wood.

“For his part, the teenage hacker, Wood, says filters like the one he busted, don’t address larger issues. A former victim of cyber bullying, Wood says educating kids on how to protect themselves online, is where he’d like to see money spent.”

YAY TOM WOOD

Edublog awards – Top 10 news events of the edublog year 2006

2006 – THE YEAR OF DISCOVERY

(my top 10 goes up to 11)

11. Patents trademarks and servicemarks OHMY!

On the 26^th of July we all discovered that our industry had grown up when Blackboard filed suit against desire2learn for patent infringement. It seemed, suddenly, that Blackboard had invented the ‘common sign on to multiple courses where a person signing on was able to be in two courses at the same time’ or some such thing. We also heard that Web2.0 TM! and Podcast TM! are now part of the protected lexicon. By the end of 2001 it became very clear that everyone wasn’t going to be making infinite money infinitely on the interwebs… It takes about 5-7 years for patents to clear —> expect an onslaught.

10. Television

After years of being the bad boy on the block this year TV discovered that it could finally win the hearts and minds of parents all over by being the ’safe place’ for kids to not exercise. A night has not gone by in 2006 without a crime drama relating the chilling tale of an axe murderer climbing out of someone’s monitor to slay Eunice the family Beagle.

9. A Series of Tubes

Senator Stevens discovered that he’s desperately in need to new assistants in his office. He revealed in a speech (that was supposed to lead to legislation) that my movie downloads were ‘clogging his tubes’ and that there was someone in that worked for him who seemed to think that the internet was a dumptruck. This is the only conclusion I can draw from the fact that, on June 28^th, he said the following “

Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got… an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday. Why? [...] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

8. Burnout

This year any number of people in the edubloggosphere discovered that reading 1302 blogs everyday in your bloglines account is not going to cut your grass, read the latest Harry Potter novel or take your husband out to dinner. The sale of replacement delete keys soared as people hacked and slashed their RSS readers down to a reasonable 200 blogs.

7. Learning communities

This year we also discovered that we could learn together. The year was full of online conferences and new communities and new wikis that popped up to ’support people’s learning in a collaborative way’ In the words of Jennifer Maddrell… It is hard to collaborate alone.

6. MMO – Second life

This year professional educator research and funding type people seem to have discovered that children like to play games. Especially fun ones. Massive multiplayer online games have been all the rage… second life and world of warcraft are the latest victory for 10 year olds on the battlefield of education. I’m not sure they notice… but now those ten hours a night are educational.

5. Content management systems – pligg elgg drupal

This is the year that I and many other folks discovered,. for the last time, that we have no business coding webpages for our students or for anyone else for that matter. Now we’ve got pligg and elgg and drupal and moodle and any number of a kagillion other products that somehow warrants Bluehost to offer us 50Gigs of space for a hundred dollars a year.

4. DOPA

The government discovered that legislation to ‘protect children’ (COPA) written in 1998 just might not be current enough to deal with the fastest developing technology of our time. The solution DOPA. Planners of this legislation started off solid, recognizing that D (DOPA) comes after C (COPA) clearly making DOPA more current. The thinktank funding must have run out after their first breakthrough as their next idea was to bar students access “from commercial social networking websites and chatrooms” Mmm… stop capitalism and a 13 year old from talking in one fell swoop of the pen. Ha.

3. Google.

This year we discovered that google is trying to take over my desktop. Trying to crush my desktop in fact. On last years list we predicted that the web based app was going to rule 2006, we didn’t expect them to all come from one company. Expect breakfast.google.com and ‘google university’ in 2007.

2. Emancipation

This year teachers everywhere discovered that they don’t need to look to their school for their edtech needs. The year was full of teachers taking the power back… of finding ways to move around the complications of funding and bureaucracy to use the free tools and free help to make our education a better place

1. ME!

This year… yesterday in fact, Time magazine discovered that ‘I’m’ the internet. They’ve awarded this year’s ‘person of the year’ award to ME! or you! To a random person or, as the English Language lacks a clear delineation between second person singular and second person plural – to all of us. Seems the hundreds of millions of us who’ve been making websites since Al Gore made the internet are now validated.

(don’t see something obvious… might have been on last year’s list)

Edublog awards – Top 10 news events of the edublog year 2005

December 18th, 2005 10
Obviously, the blackboard takeover of Web CT
Well… who’s to say what happens over this. It may be that the whole market gets cornered by this new giant, as they stop wasting money trying to crush each other and now go to work on the world. Blackboard’s close relationship to microsoft notwithstanding the new monolith that is the mega-LMS industry is something we’ll be watching in 2006.

9
Moodle at Athabasca and open university.
This year saw two massive online universities switch to an open source VLE. I is proof that the open source model can be attractive even to big companies, those of us that are fans of moodle and the open source industry are hoping that all goes well…

8.
Something about web 2.0 which bust out this year
2005 was, if anything, the year of the read/write web. Few websites now don’t at least give you the chance to play with their themes, if not create most of the content. This year user side apps were king, and the wisdom of the masses put to the test.

7.
Open Office 2.0 released
This application might be the biggest reason that microsoft loses its stranglehold on the desktop market. It allows for full compatability to everything that anyone uses. If the browser based app doesn’t kill all, then this will carve out a lot of market for mac and linux.

6.
rising censorship/targeting/moral panic surrounding
myspace, facebook, teen-blogging
One of the big debates this year is ‘what do we do about our students being on the internet’. While this is not new, nor is it the kind of conversation particularly restricted to the net, it just seemed everywhere we turned someone was talking about a new server blocking edublogs, or skype. Or someone talking about how a student who did something wrong ‘also had a blog’. This conversation has now become part of the common discourse.

5.
Podcasting!
Wow. Podcasting’s cool huh…

4.
The one hundred dollar laptop
While many of us are tired of hearing about this already “i want one damnit, stop talking to me about it” we are tired of it because some people were interested in talking about nothing else. How many times have each of you had someone come up to you and say “hey, there’s a hundred dollar laptop”. Well… hey, there’s hundred dollar laptop. ps. It doesn’t really exist.

3
Wikipedia and news reporting.
While the ‘Indian Ocean Tsunami’ actually happened on boxing day of 2004, it was harbinger of the rise of wikipedia and ‘on-the-spot’ reporting. As the cable news reporters were becoming more imbeded and centralized it stepped up and filled the need for immediate personalized news. Other events this year, like the London bombing, have only served to reinforce this. Millions of people now turn to wikipedia to both produce and consume information about what’s happening right now.

2
Firefox
On October 19, 2005, Firefox had its 100 millionth download, just 344 days after the release of version 1.0. Many of us forget that a year ago we were still telling people… hey, you gotta try this firefox thing. Another of the new solid competitors for Microsoft, firefox has now become a household name for people outside that long standing community of netscape/mozilla lovers.

1
the browser based app.
The second, and perhaps more serious, competitor to the microsoft hegemony is the browser based application. With programs like ‘writely.com’ and ‘odeo’ the desktop based app. May soon become a thing of the specialist and the uncool. This year they hit the mainstreem, and they work. We may soon be looking back on 2005 and saying… ‘man, i was still using applications… what a pain in the ass.’