Dave’s Educational Blog

Presenting with live slides – OER, literacies, libraries and the future preso

Had a great presentation yesterday and though i’d take the opportunity to lay out what i did and how the process of building live slides works. It’s pretty simple really.

The theory
Well… it may be a surprise to my mom… but i don’t know everything. Not even close. There’s a sense in which being invited to present at a conference, that you are the expert coming in to notify the locals of what they should know. You could also be presenting your own work, or, say, trying to explain a particular point… and live slides might not be best for that. Lets assume you have a broad topic like I was given for this presentation “the future of libraries”.

I’m not a librarian.

So what i decide to do is offer a platform for that discussion and a lens through which it might be useful to examine the discussion. Below are the slides that i put together with a series of questions that are about the work that i do – openness, literacies, digital stuff, learning, rhizomes – all focused towards the topic of libraries. The questions start at a controversial but audience focused (audience was supposed to be mostly librarians) so the first question i asked was “what is a library”.

I took these slides and put them into an eluminate room kindly borrowed from George Siemens and then invited some friends to come along. So, now we have 15 people in a room (i had fifty five on the first go around) and 11 questions on 13 slides. (first slide is a doodle slide to get people accustomed to doodling and the last a participant slide) We go through the questions and the “live slide guide” (me in this case) starts the discussion going. What is a library…? the audience posts their ideas into the slides… I do approx 5 min on each slide and try and present the slides as they are being built, using my own perspectives on the topic brought in through the questions and blending them with the ideas coming live from the collaborators in the elluminate conference. After 50 minutes the slides look like they do below.

At the same time, I was also doing a screencapture of the whole eluminate conference so i could post it later. The fine folks at archive.org seem willing to host this kind of stuff for us… here’s the direct link to the big video… embed below.

For me
I love working this way. I learn from the audience, my prep time is lower, and I think people are far more engaged. Both times i’ve done this people seem to have had a good time. I think we learned interesting things. The title of this presentation changed after we did it… it focused far more on literacies than i was expecting and made some very interesting links between teachers and librarians (actually, several people thought there was really no difference)

More theory
I think this presents a far more realistic vision for knowledge. When asked a question like “what is a library” a single person has to come down to a single definition that can’t possibly encompass the full cultural impact of a word. If you look at the first question slide of the presentation you’ll see a very broad ranging definition created by a collaborative of people… the definition is rhizomatic, created in time, and the record presented here is a snapshot of it… an archive of a live moment of knowledge.

I’m really excited about this.

Presentation prep/notes for -> Open Educational Resources – A potential foundation for the future.

Thursday November 5th, 4pm Eastern NA. GLOBAL TIMES

In May i had the wonderful opportunity to try a live slide build as part of the WIAOC (webheads in action online convergence). They were a great crowd, and the build was awesome. It was the first success that I’ve had with that kind of live interactive slide building, and, well, I’m going to try it again this afternoon. Here’s how it works… I put together a dozen or so slides that are mostly blank with a single question on each slide… we import that slideshow into eluminate (or some other program that will allow for whiteboarding over slides). Each member of the audience is responsible for answering the questions, and I, your confused moderator, will present from the slides as they are being built by the audience.

I don’t know the folks who invited me to speak at this conference (although i think i recognize a name or two). I don’t know if anyone is going to show up… which is a bit nerve wracking for a live presentation created by the audience. So… if your interested in libraries, OER, the future, learning or apple pie, please come along, share your ideas and have some fun.

Please come play. SUPER IMPORTANT PRESENTATION LINK

This is the presentation description as it appears on the your school library website and below are my empty slides.
As more people turn towards opening their work to the world we are confronted with a remarkable challenge. We could change our approach to stewarding content, to encouraging learning and to teaching. We could look at this ever changing landscape of work that others have made and find new and interesting ways of working with these resources. We could decentralize the school and the teacher and connect learners directly with some of the content they are interested in. We could empower teachers to the point where they feel comfortable reusing and remixing these resources to promoted collaboration and life long learning in their students. We might also take these new resources and fit them in with existing objectives, use them to leverage our current curriculum and teaching plans. We could promote the centralization and standardization of these resources into national/provincial/state curricula. These are the decisions that stand before us… how to deal with the change from knowledge being scarce, to it being abundant.

If OERs have the potential of being the dictionary of our era. If it will be the common language, the new knowledge base upon which we work, what effect will this have on the traditional stewards of that
knowledge. Wither the librarians? What literacies will be necessary and what are the potential effects of the decisions that we make about how we deal with the new knowledge. This presentation will be a
facilitated conversation around the continuum between openness and standardization, between collaborative learning and content focused study in the context of this amazing new OER landscape. What’s that going to look like? Here is an example of a previous online presentation of this kind http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/1555002 that I did on community learning. Come and join the fun but be ready to participate and the audience will be the most important part of this
presentation.

And this is what the last one looked like when we were finished

How do I connect online?

D’Arcy Norman has sent out a request for people to answer the question “How do you connect online.” I took a shot at it, here’s the presentation i threw together. Join in http://connect.darcynorman.net/

Link to less blurry video

PEI site tech conference – overcoming obstacles

I had a really nice time with the site techs on wednesday. I got a chance to speak to them in the morning and then participated in a few short presentations and did a few small group discussions in the afternoon. I found an energetic group of people, very open to ideas, receptive to mine (for whatever reason) and pretty passionate about learning.

Here’s a link to the synopsis i recorded today of the presentation. http://www.archive.org/details/OvercomingObstacles-PracticalProjectManagementInWebBasedEducation

Blogging
There were several blogging projects running. Most on edublogs.org. That was a big surprise to me, as i hadn’t heard of very much of it happening on the island. I also heard of one other teacher who was using blogger. I had several people ask about what I would do for a ‘blogging project’ and my answer was the same. Don’t do a blogging project, if you have a writing project that blogging makes sense for… then go ahead and use a blog. Don’t focus your project on a technology.

Wikis vs. Blogging
Lots of wiki work going on as well. The department has a pro-level pbworks (once pbwiki) account and are using it for art projects to create an eportfolio. I’m not a big fan of using the word portfolio for this, as a portfolio does suggest portability and I”m not sure how these kids will ‘port’ the folios around… but still… nice wiki work. Here’s a link https://peistudentartloft.pbworks.com/. Had four conversations explaining to people that i think that blogging is far preferable to wikis… Blogging makes it easier for people to feel ownership over their work, and it doesn’t get crazy messy like a wiki. Wikis are good when the project implicitly involves stucture (like a cookbook)

Koha Implementation
I saw an impressive presentation about their new library system. They’ve done a nice job integrating Koha into their existing infrastructure and getting rid of their 1980’s era library system. Best conversation i had around this is that parents could, very soon, browse through their schools library at home with their kids looking for books. How cool is that. http://koha.org/

Other fun stuff
They are supporting a number of different tech projects (modules) but with a real focus on how they translate practically. They have some pretty serious podcasting gear that they are sending out to schools and setting them up using audacity (might even be overly complex for some, might be nice to offer two levels, a blue mic and the mini-soundboard they have) They have video planned for use with movie maker. They are using Alice for 3D and some lego robotics (planned for after the Alice) for some fun robotics stuff.

Overall?
From the stuff i took in and saw, i was pretty impressed with the direction being taken. Technology… yes, but with a focus on what we are going to do with it. I left them with a suggestion of trying to create a community of practice user Yammer (or skype or something) to allow them to support each other. I saw two people sign up while i was there… i hope they do. It was a good group, and a good day.

Overcoming obstacles – a practical guide

This is the title of a presentation I’m going to be giving to the elearning support team from PEI k-12 on Wednesday. It’s my first time being asked to speak here, and I’m pretty excited about the opportunity to meet these people and get a sense of the challenges they face. My kids are 3 and 5 years away from the school system, so my interest is not merely academic. And No. this blog post isn’t the practical guide, but i think it wouldn’t hurt if we all created one. (or, better, found the one that someone is already building and added to it. I just wanted to think outloud about a few concepts and maybe ask you folks for some of your stories about obstacles you’ve met and how you overcame them.

Overcoming obstacles – being ready
I think the most important strategy for overcoming obstacles is to accept that they are coming… with a certain amount of equanimity. You will not run a web-based project without running into difficulties. It may be that people have forgotten their password, it may be, as once happened to me, that any time the students started circling each other in OpenSim the server would asplode. wipe hands. reboot. They will come, and I think a risk assessement, however informal, is critical to any web based learning project no matter how small. A default password for handing out just in case, a plan for doing your planning for the webbased project while the site isn’t working… it never hurts to have these things in the back of your mind.

Overcoming obstacles – needs and wants assessment and flexibility
Oh my. This is a bad one. On a pretty much daily basis someone says to me ” i have this plan, and I want to get students to X”. My response is usually some variation of simplicity. ‘Use wordpress’ for instance. The invariable next response i get is “that doesn’t do ‘exactly’ what i want it to do. And that is the place where you need (if you have the time) to dig in. You need to make two lists, the list of things that absolutely need to be in the project or it isn’t of interest or use to do and a list of things you would prefer for a variety of reasons. That second list is one that you have to be willing to cross things off of. Complexity is the killer of projects. The more things you cross off that second list the better the chance of actually starting the project and people actually finishing. Just send people the chart, with a line between the two questions… seriously, people love to have charts to fill in when they are interested in a project. The chart serves a secondary purpose. People unwilling to fill in a needs chart are not really interested in doing a project.

Overcoming obstacles – know thyself
You (or your client) really need to know what they are trying to accomplish. I saw clarence fisher’s idea hive video a couple of days ago when i asked him for something that represented the work that he does in his classroom. It’s the theory, the idea behind what they are trying to do. It is very difficult to feel good about success when you don’t know what you were trying to do in the first place. Getting the software to work is not success. Having kids writing get better is.

Overcoming obstacles – Finding other people
It is much, much easier to start working IN someone else’s project than it is to start another one. Far better to join youthvoices for a writing community than to try and develop, deploy and find a new community. I understand as well as anyone the temptation to be the person who starts something, to want to have the thing exactly as you like. But, and I feel pretty confident about this, no single person is going to come up with the best way to do any project. Your first draft ideas are probably not going to be anywhere near perfect. Work with the work of others, help make their work better and, if, after that, you still feel like starting your own go ahead. Your work will be much better for the time you took.

Overcoming obstacles – learning communities
You can’t collaborate alone (JM). Find learning communities. Connect with other people like you. You can all come to edtechtalk, we’d love to have you. There are tons of other great ways to communicate. Find one (or several) you like. If you are at all careful IT WILL SAVE YOU TIME. seriously.

Overcoming obstacles – be a smarty pants, be resilient, be whatever you need to be, just don’t give up.
I asked my good buddy John Schinker to do a little video talking about his experience working with Teachers without borders this summer. Some of the challenges they faces were ridiculous. How do you train people to use technology in a school without power? How do you form community with someone who needs to take A BOAT to get to the nearest internet cafe? Well… you can. you just need to want to. And you need to not give up. Here’s the youtube video. If you’re coming to the presentation… Don’t watch it! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrGb__Hw1Ic (jk. you can watch it again on wednesday)

Overcoming obstacles – please add your strategies and stories. pls pls. comments. your blog. tweets… they’ll aggregate here.

Dave’s wildly unscientific survey of technology use in Higher Education

This survey
In the late spring early summer I sent out the questions below to my twitter followers in the hopes of getting a starting point for the discussion of where universities are with technological adoption, particularly where it is supporting learning.

A word on the respondents.
The responders to this survey included their names on the understanding that their names and institutions would not be published as part of the results. I include institution because, for many of them, the responses would clearly indicate who had completed the form.

The form was sent out to the followers of my twitter account. There are any number of biases inherent in that, not the least being that the majority of them, broadly speaking, don’t mind seeing my twitter updates. I am professionally familiar with almost every respondent. We got one student respondent and the majority of the others are either edtech or educational professionals at Universities in North/South America and Europe.

All that to say this this is not a terribly scientific survey, but it does reflect the usage of educational technologies at 25 institutions of higher ed in different parts of the world. I would not use it as a guide to action, but rather one more piece of the overall context.

This piece is strewn with ‘davenote’s. These are personal reflections on the data rather than quantifiable results pulled from the data. I would regard these with suspicion if i had not written them.

Do you use E-Portfolios at your university? If so, please tell us what you use and what the uptake has been like. Does it work well? Does it help or hinder ‘learning’?
Over half of the respondents replied in the negative to this question. Of those that suggested that some use was being made pebblepad and d2l were most often cited as the Eportfolios of choice. There was some consistent commentary about lone individuals or faculties (usually Education) that were moving in this direction, but no mandatory eportfolios were mentioned.

Overall (other than the ‘No.’) respondents, the general thrust of the respondents seemed to be that they understood this to be a good idea but that there was some confusion or resistance about how this was actually going to be done.

davenote: eportfolios are a vast hidden overhead. They really only make sense if they are portable and accessible to the user. Transferring vast quantities of student held data out of the university every spring seems complicated. Better, maybe, to instruct students to use external services.

Are you doing much with so-called ‘mobile education’? Can you point us to some of the work you are doing?
Most universities that responded said they either had none or there had been ‘discussions’ but no real movement. A smaller group suggested that they had done podcasts, one iphone applications and several others had explored ways to format existing work so that material was easily readable by mobile devices.

davenote: Our new mobile infrastructure at UPEI appears to be ahead of the majority of the respondents. By far the easiest ‘mobile’ work seems to be to just make sure your websites conform to mobile standards.

Are you using anything for lecture capture? (we’re using epresence) Is this something that you would consider an advantage for instructors or learners?
Quicktime broadcaster/podcast producer. camtasia. elluminate.adobe connect. Aprevo. Sonic Foundries, MediaSite system. Lectopia. echo360. ustream. jing.

A real broad spectrum of different tools appear to be in use with most universities saying that they are using something. There are only 2 occasions where broad spectrum adoption is present, but most seem to think that this is a necessary part of the 21st century university. There was also a broad interpretation of this question, some interpreted it to mean capturing powerpoints, some video and some the audio that was being produced. There is certain an indication of broad adoption.

davenote: There are a huge number of options and they are all fit for different purposes, and most require significant support. Things like ustream, adobe connect and elluminate benefit from being supported off site and being easy to record but suffer in the accessibility portability department.

Do you have an LOR (Learning Object Repository) or OER (Open Educational Resources (thingy)) Are these collections something that ’should’ be part of a institution of higher education?
Over half of the respondents here said they did not have an LOR to speak of. There were many of those that suggested that bands of educators worked together to share materials. Of those that responded in the affirmative the majority suggested that the ones that were in use were getting little use. A handful suggested that the use of the LOR was mandatory and that it was being used for sharing. My guess here would be that either it gets built into the system (some form of mandatory) or people will move off into whatever works for them and their colleagues.

davenote: The peers we have in our learning and teaching are more often in other universities… these are the people that we really need to share with.

What is your elearning support structure(do you have a dedicated elearning support group?) Are there specific needs that are/aren’t being satisfied? Is this considered a ‘professional curriculum position)?
One respondent in particular simply laughed at the idea that they were being supported at all. The vast majority, however, have a centralized support system (perhaps 7-8 did not) and they are usually in the ‘educational support’ division or the elearning support group or something else that suggests a group dedicate to computer assisted learning. In each of the 5 cases where the support was being done by computer services the comment was coupled with “and they don’t know anything about learning”.

davenote: the comments here seem to suggest a much higher level of satisfaction with a centralized elearning infrastructure. I am biased in this, as I have suggested the same thing, but these respondents at least, seem to agree with me.

Are you using a VLE (LMS, LCMS, CMS) for education? Which one are you using, and what percentage of faculty do you estimate actively use it? How do you feel about them?
Broadly speaking this is the question that need not have asked. Everyone said yes, many suggested that use was mandatory and that there was a universal presence for every course. It was a mixture of moodle, D2L, blackboard/webct.

davenote: yup.

Do you have a formal elearning strategy? Is it publicly available? Do you think such a thing is necessary?
Many universities seem to have an elearning strategy, for some it is included in the overall strategic plan, for others, it is a discrete document. With the exception of the respondent that suggested that it was more important that they have someone in charge of thinking about this rather than the document itself, all respondents agreed that it was necessary (if they answered that part of the question. About half of those that were spoken of were publicly available.

davenote: Strategic plans, if enforced are very good things. Even if they aren’t enforced, they at least reflect thinking at a given time.

Are you using any tools (twitter, wikis etc.) that might be considered web 2.0?
I hesitated to include this question in the first place, as it was likely that the respondents to my twitter account would be using collaborative tools. They were. Twitter, delicious, WPMU, Twitter, Plurk, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Vimeo, Ning, Chatzy, Diigo … and the like. The two themes that seem to come out is the purposeful viral spreading of these tools and the institutional support of blogging.

PLEASE ADD YOUR ANSWERS BELOW

Identity, memory, death and the internet

Lofty title perhaps, but a topic that I’ve been thinking about a lot over the last year + since our excellent colleague, Lee Baber died of lung cancer. A shining light that woman… and one that I’m reminded of every week. Not just in the legacy of good work and good friends that she left behind, but also on the internet. Her name is everywhere. I’ve got her in my skype account, still, she’s in my gmail memory thingy, she’s in a half dozen of my friends lists on different sites. If you a google search for me, or edtechtalk or, well, or alot of things, you’ll see her name. The page linked to above is a fine example of that… a fine person through the eyes of her colleagues. A memorial, like many others created over millenia, it’s just that this one has a different medium than most of its predecessors.

Identity is, for me, things being identical over time. When i think of my own identity i look for those things that are the same in two different incarnations or timestamps and calls those things identical. To say that there is no identity is to say that things aren’t the same, and to look at someone’s identity is to look for those things that are the same over the period you are looking at. The internet makes this both more complicated and less so. There is a sense where it crystalizes your performance of yourself and makes it possible to measure if two performances are identical, and while all things might be performance, it is difficult to think that the premeditated performance mediated through the internet somehow encompasses a ‘person.’

That being said, we are creating this identity in little bits all the time. We leave little trails of ourselves in different places only for them to crystalize when we stop feeding the beast. In Lee’s case… that was her very rapid, sudden death. No time to wrap things up or ’set things straight’ we are left with a snapshot of her work the day she stopped doing it. There is the possibility for remixing, for reshuffling, for her projects to grow (and this is happening in some cases) but the image we have of her is crystalized in a way that is unique to our particular period in history.

When we talk about students putting ’stuff on the internet that will stay with them for the rest of their lives’ we sometimes forget, i think, that in our local communities the stuff we do stays with us for the rest of our lives. Our communities allow for growth, they all for things to no longer be identical, for new patterns of behaviour to emerge, for new things to be identical. We adapt for the fact that people ‘grow out of things’ that there is a time and place for each kind of thing. We will, as a culture, adapt to this new memory that we have, this digital memory, and we will no longer worry about such things (any more than we do about the silly things we’ve done in our childhoods are anything more than an injoke in our hometowns (depending )

Dave Cormier and Stephen Cormier

Just not in a digital way. Not with the 1600 http://flickr.com/opoe + photos bon and I already have posted of our kids. The video http://youtube.com/davecormier . The incredible blog posts over at http://cribchronicles.com. Our grandkids will, barring a worldwide meltdown, KNOW their parents and grandparents in a way that we never did. Identity… particularly in this sense of being able to see how two things are the same over time… and how they are different, is a far more present concept.

I don’t and never have until the last couple of days, thought about his digital identity. About the fact that, for whatever i do online, I have never mentioned that name “stephen cormier” in a blog post or a tweet. His name, to my searching, didn’t exist anywhere. It got me to thinking about Lee and about the good and the bad of our identities online. About the concern that some people have about what kinds of things that people post and how i often warn people that they should be cultivating their online identities. There is a longer, more human thing at work here that I’m reaching for. There is a sense in which we are storing the memories of ourselves, of our friends, of the ways that we are all connected to each other. Of our love.

So. 20 years later. This is my flag in the ground for my long lost brother. cheers.

Open Course preparation 2 – introduction au technologie émergentes

We have a tag – ite09

Well… things are firming up, we have a start date and confirmed courses. I’m going to be teaching a twelve week course as the leader of the french cohort of professors and administrators from universities in different parts of West Africa.(will include countries when i get them) It is going to be an open course (yay!) with all curriculum created and published on wikiversity. http://fr.wikiversity.org/wiki/Introduction_au_technologie_%C3%A9mergentes I’m still a little fuzzy about the zones of interaction for the course (as per openness) stay tuned for this. I’ve got alot to learn between now and then, but i must say i’m pretty excited about the adventure of it all.

Learning in a new language
The most obvious stretch here is that I’ll be teaching in French. I’m a good acadian boy from the north shore of new brunswick… I went to french school, have french relatives, but have never done academic work in French. More importantly, i didn’t (three weeks ago) have a french learning community to speak of. I’ve been working on that and have had a really positive response from the french educational community. I’ve probably posted it before, but i’m quite please to be participating in http://apprendre2point0.ning.com which is also helping get me into shape for the course.

Openness
We are going to be able to share this course with anyone who wants to join in. I’m am wary of forcing my new (and unknown) students to share openly however. It is one thing to believe in openness for yourself, it is quite something different to impose it on someone without giving them a chance to make an informed decision. So, I’m thinking now, that we’ll end up with one sponsored group location and a private location that allows for students to get accustomed to the idea and make their own choices. No decisions here yet, would need to talk to Mr. Siemens about what he wants to do, but we’ve agreed on this in the past.

I used the term ‘zones of interaction’ earlier and the term ’sponsored’ here more recently. I’m thinking that with a course that might have 15 or 50 (or who knows) people in it, it’s important to make the lanes of communication obvious. If people wish to take the course in their own direction, copy the curriculum and cut it into fridge magnets for a local teachers party… that’s fine. They don’t need my direction anyway. For those who are looking for a little more guidance, i hope to provide some (unsupervised) locales for that to happen. People are going to like to be open in different ways.

Creating the syllabus
I settled on wikiversity for two reasons. Leigh Blackall suggested it and I’d like the course to not be ‘mine’. While the folks at the University of Manitoba have in no way infringed upon my creativity or openness in the past, i thought the suggestion of ownership by a university might be too strong. This is a rare opportunity to have an international course created, with differing viewpoints included during the creation process. While the course will, initially, be based on the course that george and i designed and taught last year, it will hopefully grow beyond that and take on a scope beyond what a couple of people could manage. So i hope this will happen.

My french will get better as i remember how to write in french, but feel free to fix the grammar, the spelling and the thoughts. We will, as always, play

Add don’t take away – for all content

Can’t wait to see the changes start to happen.

Will keep you all updated. Have not yet decided if i’m going to blog in french from this blog or not. Probably will. a little later.

Is thinking for remixing the new best?

This is me thinking outloud. It’s spoken from a fairly certain tone… but that’s only because that is the only one my fingers seem to be able to type. My bad. But I’ve been mulling this around in the car driving back home today and was going to just mail it off to a few folks but chickened out and posted it. Butcher as you like… but think about it if you can.

Where I’ve been
I suppose it’s always been positive membership karma for people to lay waste to the popularisers of ideas. I remember my own lambasting of James Redfield’s rediculous remixing (uncredited of course) and popularisation of the works of Shakti Gawain in the Celestine Prophecy. It was tacky, it was short sighted it overlooked the ‘important parts’… you name it. And, in truth, it’s really badly written. And it… uh… sold 20 million copies.

And so we of the no-million copies but very high philosophical standards maintain our memberships in our communities and our adhrence to a traditional view of rigour, research, citation and ‘best’ and shake our heads knowingly. We have a new crop, I’ve heard nothing but sly remarks and frustrated mutterings (and I’m one of the worst ones) regarding Malcolm Gladwell and his butchering of everything from neuroscience to postmodernism. I was sitting amongst friends and colleagues a few weeks ago and his name came up and a practiced ‘meh’ shuddered through the group.

The old best
Our best, to speak broadly, is about either practical applied experience (good points there) or about specially researched and confirmed study (also good but ’specially’ changes drastically depending on who’s speaking). Popular success, like in many communities on or offline, is seen as a failure of the creed. As a betrayal of the covenant. So we have our best teacher practitioners out there who are allowed to be cool. And we have our senior officianadoes who have done the work and speak with authority and, as long as they don’t get too popular, make too many concessions to the man or, ‘popularize’ can be best of best.

Change of perspective?
But I’m having misgivings. When i think of all the work that we are doing around trying to remix things and make our work open and make it accessible (think broadly about accessible here) I’m wondering if we ourselves shouldn’t be seeing ourselves as horses in front of the plow on this. Our best may be pulling said plow… but the harvest is elsewhere and the farmers are those

Who can speak in ways that can be remixed.

The amazing thing about the James Redfields and the Malcolm Gladwell’s of the world (Dan Brown comes to mind as well) is that they can get first time readers to contemplate ideas that have taken traditional experts years to get their minds around. They get people to try and blend these ideas into their lives. The repulsed response is usually “yes, but they’re doing it the wrong way” and “putting the work in is important” and even “they’re only getting a surface reading”.

Are we not being a little silly, maybe, may I say it, traditional by taking the names of the popularizers in vain? Are they not the actual arms of change out there in the wilderness? Are they our politicians? Our capitalists? Because one way or the other, they are the ones that are capitalizing on change, if by capital we mean money. Or broad recognition. Or broad status.

We can easily say that these are not the things that we want. And this may be true. But one of the things that most of us are interested in is change… and the popularizers are, more often then not, the ones at the table of change.

So. I’m going to stop taunting our new overlords and thank them for making my job easier. (that really hurts)

The new equation
So… if a vague understanding of philosophy, science and society combined with a keen sense of language and marketing is the new best and the ‘experts’ that they are lifting from are the new cart horse, then what is this equation that we are using to measure? and why is it happening? How can we measure this kind of expertise and how do we recognize it when we see it?

Does it really matter if someone completely understands network theory before they write a book about it? Need someone actually know anything about cave paintings before they use them as a balance point for an entire argument?

Our pre-knowledge abundance views of accuracy were founded on the potential spread of non-canonical ideas. On the idea of the scarcity of paper. of the pain of the publishing cycle. of polluting the knowledge stream. Here we stand polluted. Everyone can publish.

Is it the ideas themselves that matter or is it the social change that they bring about?

Thinking for remixing
So if toning down on an idea and speaking simply about it allows for people who are not specialists to get a handle on things… why is that wrong? And we think it’s dirty business, are we just being exclusive and inaccessible? The market for an academic paper has not gotten wider (and i still quite value the academic paper for getting my thoughts clear and deep thinking… cart horse) but the market for thought is huge. How do we think for remixing other than just talking in soundbites. (something that i find myself doing more and more and not admitting to… before now)

Is there some kind of assessment of this new best that we can do to make our own work more palatable and more effective for the social change (whatever that might be) we are looking for?

Is thinking for remixing the new best?

How I approach teaching a new course – the state of my art.

People have heard alot about it… but Open Ed 09 was a transformative experience for alot of people. The four months i spent thinking about the presentation that i did there, the responses to it, and the wicked discussions i had there did much to focus my feelings about learning and how one goes about trying to ensure that that kind of thing might happen in ones ‘classroom’.

The course and the challenge.
So i had this quick conversation with George. This kind of thing is never good.

[30/07/09 6:23:10 PM] George Siemens: dave
[30/07/09 6:23:20 PM] George Siemens: you’re generally bored without a lot of free time, right?
[30/07/09 6:23:32 PM] George Siemens: wait, I mean, with a lot of free time
[30/07/09 6:23:34 PM] dave cormier: yes. that’s me

It seems that George wanted me to teach something similar (and I’m still not sure how similar) to the Introduction to Emerging technology course we taught last winter. The only catch, and this is the tricky part, is that he wants me to teach it IN FRENCH. And, while my last name is Cormier, and I spent my first five years of school in a little French acadian school in Norther New Brunswick, I have not done a terribly huge amount of professional work in French.

However, what it does present me is a wonderful opportunity to assess the way that I put a course together, the assumptions that I make and the things that i take for granted. I’m going to do my best to record that process and incorporate the new clarity that i think i have about the practical applications

OER (Open Educational Resources) is the dictionary of our time
I designed all my slides for opened on the plane ride from PEI to Vancouver. I had the images on my netbook, gimp loaded and open office ready to go. (thanks for images @cribchronicles). I knew that i didn’t like the idea of people/communities being seen/used as resources, but i wasn’t able to figure out what i thought the role of these resources were. If a person believes that discourse and collaboration are the best ways to acquire/create knowledge wither the content? On the flight one of the images that bonnie had found on flickr of an old dictionary combined with a Dale Spender quote (Print made the Dictionary) made it clear to me. OER is the dictionary of our time. It is the foundational knowledge base that will provide the common semantic that the dictionary has provided for the last 300 years. This means (among other things)

• That definitions will be about tracking use in multiple locations (meaning is use – Wittgenstein)
• Knowledge building will be an overt mashup rather than the implicit one we’ve had before
• Content will live outside of the curriculum
• Teaching will slide on the towards the ‘leader’ side of the ‘leader’/'teller’ continuum

Web 2 vs. Open education (george again.)
In a recent blog post addressing concerns about flatworld knowledge… George included this little tidbit

This is a central conflict in web 2.0 vs. open source. Web 2.0 has few of the ideals of the open source movement. For many users, this is fine – free is the desirable trait. Monetarily free is not without cost.

I’m taking his quote out of context… but what popped into my head was that this was one of the other big things that cleared up for me at OpenEd. Openness matters a great deal to me, and, while it’s sometimes harder or even counter-intuitive to someone brought up and trained in our society, it works. I’ve always had problems with the idea of trading ‘no-money’ for ads. I still use gmail and can’t seem to break the habit… but it bothers me. But the difference between the two is the same difference that i feel between a simple network and a community. In an Open context i see there being a responsibility to the discussion you are contributing to. The people… and the knowledge matters.

Applying this to my teaching
One of the core precepts of my teaching around emerging tech has been that what i currently know, in the specific sense, about tools or approaches, is probably not what my students need to know. The experience that i have using different kinds of tools, thinking about how I have failed with things before, and the idea of integrating them into my practice without really worrying too much about them, however, i think might be more useful to them. I’ve always agreed with the people who consider ‘teaching education’ a bit odd, and like to stay in subject matter discussions, context analysis and people own context as much as possible.

The last course was designed to do a number of things. Hopefully give some people a sense of using things in context, covering some theory existent in the field and getting people ready for the rest of the certificate program. I felt during and have since that while we tried to include a couple of overarching assignments designed to give ongoing context to the sections that it didn’t really work the way i had hoped. This time (when i was still going to be teaching it in English) I was going to include six running discussions that would be the locus of discussion for all the assignments. Essentially one moodle topic called ‘discussions’ which would include 6 discussions spaces addressing themes. Yes. moodle. it’s what they use. and will work fine for this.

But now. Now i have the theory clear in my mind. The OER stuff is the stuff of weekly work and the discussion spaces are the knowledge contextualizing places (i wish i could say co-creating just to irritate @fncll but i think he may be right about that word). The OER provide the ground floor, the common language of the discussion and the discussion is where the learning happens. The trick, then, is going to be the creation of those 6 main themes, and how much is co-created with the students and how much I want to influence that. I could go with themes from the field (maybe IP, openness etc.) or go with goals from the students in terms of what they are trying to get out of this course, or speaking about it in terms of their own context and how things will apply to specific contextual issues. I don’t know yet… but at least now i have a way of thinking about it.

So it’s in french – How do i start?
The first thing i did was go out and join a community. I am now a proud member of http://apprendre2point0.ning.com (learning 2.0) and am using that community as a jumping off point to finding resources as well as a place to start the discussion in french. I have specific literacies to acquire(where is that stupid french question mark) there are a lot just broad language issues to establish but, more importantly, the subtlety of the language. In what ways does the french word réseau = network and how is it different. It’s forcing me to assess every story that i’ve ever used as a default example for something and wonder what kind of philosophy it is supporting. The community has been great, people have started helping already, I just have to get comfortable enough to start giving back… something i’ve not done yet in the 6 or 7 days i’ve been in it. Better get comfortable with that before classes start

I’m am looking for acorns. I have a little tree over at the ltc.manitoba wiki where i am gathering those acorns for use during the course. Little bits of OER that might come in useful, that discusses some of the stuff that I think might come up. If you look at the course that goerge and I taught, you’ll see many of these acorns strewn about the course. But i’ve got my mind, now, around what i’m doing with them and where they fit in my hierarchy of importance.

Maybe this is obvious to everyone else… but it’s been huge for me. I’m not sure I’m even doing anything different… but i have a much better idea of WHY i’m doing it.

• I’m favouring open source because openness matters because its responsibility based and encourages the right kind of responsibility for learning
• I’m looking for OERs because they are the foundation of establishing a common semantic for discussion much like the dictionary was for the 18th century
• I’m using discussion forums to bridge my course because it contextualizes the OERs and gives a locus for knowledge building and ends up being where the learning happens.