Dave’s Educational Blog

I’ve been spending much of the last eight months working on two, interconnected projects. The one, the Virtual Research Enviornment, is an attempt to create an open source cocktail of software, grounded by an institutional repository, that can integrate the research interests or a given researcher with their educational and collaborative needs. The other (still pending final funding approval) is an attempt to use that very research environment to support a K-12 project where kids will be doing historical, archival work and taking the fruits of that work to a virtual world.

Big bites. both.

As you might imagine one of the big issues that we’re confronting is training. And not, as too many training systems do, stop at simply ‘demonstrating the tools’ but actually showing how to use them effectively in a context. This problem is further complexified by the fact that we are following an iterative development model. We aren’t going to know 6 months ahead of time, what’s going to be needed. A well designed, well thought out piece, might get designed and then not needed. Which either means that your goals change to fit your objects or you just have to start over.

The solution? The disposable learning object.

Create a training system so simple, so semantically automated, that in the time it takes to explain a concept you have created the learning object for it. The system to cataloguing those learning objects, then, also has to be simple enough that storing it takes little to no time at all.

So, if you have just learned how to do something, lets say create a del.ico.us account, you then do it one more time (to reinforce the memory) and screencast the process… talking your way through it. You then upload it (hopefully point and click) to your educational site giving some basic information. (URLs description some free tagging) and then the server gets to work. It should strip the available metadata from the file, convert it to a usable format and semantically tie it in with like objects. (we’re also contemplating a workflow that then has an ‘expert’ (whatever that might mean) who will leaf through those for potential adoption into a more permanent life in the more traditional archive.

All that babbling and only five minutes of work. It becomes part of the student’s job to contribute to the curriculum. The pedagogical advantages to this are obvious. Besides the advantage of just doing a training piece more than once, you end up with curriculum created by students for students.

This works the same for podcasts… detailed wikilike copy and paste directions… any number of things. The key is to have an infrastructure that allows you to do it fantastically quickly and be willing to throw it away when the technology changes…

build your own youtube, build it into an OS content management system, blah blah blah… all possible. Just a question of being able to build quickly and not be too attached to the stuff you make.

Now, there still needs to be solid overall curriclum. It also means that you can create very nice, fleshed out pieces using those disposable learning objects as models.

Well… this is an interesting conversation.

It seems that there is some debate over whether there should be a ‘university degree’ in social computing. Quite a good debate over there with many of the standard position being taken on both sides. In short, I kinda agree with parts of what most people are saying… but think that the institution/no-institution dualith seems a little tired. It really has nothing to do with whether or not these things are taught in institutions but whether they realize that we now REALLY have to be teaching and learning a moving target. Our hierarchical power structures need to be constantly moving (teacher/student for instance). We need to move more towards distributed knowledge bases and a new critical analysis that takes the new framework of knowledge as its starting point… Here’s a little breakdown of how I saw it.
Will Richardson says

I mean how in the world would this particular degree “certify” anyone as a social computing specialist any better than, um, spending a year or so just actually becoming a part of social learning network, learning from the various teachers and conversations within it, and building a rich, online portfolio that illustrates your ability to be an online community manager, social network analyst, community organizer or any of the other job descriptions they list as possible outcomes? For, um, zero dollars?

Harold Jarche says

How in the world would any degree “certify” anyone as any kind of specialist? It’s called “book learnin’” amongst more practically minded people.

Our society & economy place a higher value on degrees than on experience (for now). The university is taking advantage of a market opportunity as well as its market position in providing certified education. Would you expect anything else?

And Liz Lawley says in reply (if not directly… but she does sorta represent the other side

…There’s also a big difference between being able to do something, and being able to analyze and assess it critically. The reason people listen to and cite danah boyd and Lee Rainie (of Pew) is because they bring an analytical research approach to subjects that most of us have only an anecdotal understanding of. That’s what a graduate degree seeks to accomplish–to provide people with a broad-based understanding of a topic, to push them to see different points of view on a subject, to assess analytically and critically….

And so we have the three sides of the debate. The one (Will) who seems to claim that social networking is different than other, more traditional academic disciplines, and is one that needs to be learned by experience. Harold’s position, which seems to be all things are better learned by experience. And Liz’s position, which seems to be that all things benefit from the academic, analytical remove that can usually only be found in a graduate degree. (I have probably butchered those for simplicity… but this is my blog damnit 🙂 ) Let’s take these one at a time

Social Networking is different

My feelings of agreement here have to do with the way that Will talks about knowledge production and dissemination. In a traditional university environment, the professors are seen as the final arbiters of whether something qualifies as acceptable ‘knowledge’. His framework for knowledge is a community created one. A distributed vision. I like that.

Where I part ways with Will is on the idea of the privilege of the first wave. Will is a top tier blogger in this community, and people pay him to speak and participate in their social networks. Most social networks would be ecstatic to have him join their communities for free. He has almost total access. This is not the experience of those of second wavers who are moving into the community for the first time. I’m often reminded of how many times Linux admins have told me to ‘just read the manual’ when i have a simple question about how to do something. For year i didn’t understand the manual! An MSI is a great short cut for that.

What do we need the whole university institution for anyway?

My provincial neighbour to the south has often expounded on how he thinks that in ‘experience’ lies the way to wisdom. In a sense, I agree with him. I have been in many situations over the years where the educated have fallen flat on their face concerning anything practical. I have also seen many degree courses that amount to little more than navel gazing.
Where I part ways with Harold is on the idea that their is no intrinsic value to the navel gazing. And, what’s more, I think that people who have had graduate school education forget all the skills that they learned during that process… and perhaps don’t realize what they picked up during their university experience that was of real value. Yes… much of it needs experience to temper it… but the university experience often contributes the raw materials.

Critical Analysis and assessments in academia

I’ve never spoken to Liz… but according to her website she is “an assistant professor of Information Technology at RIT in Rochester, NY. She has master’s and doctoral degrees in Library & Information Science.” Where I find myself wholly onside with Liz is in her belief that all things do well by mixing the experience factor with ‘broad based understanding’ that comes with the time and space that can be used at an academic institution. There is a solid spectrum of our society that does not seem interested in developing the analytical skills that would allow them to hypermediate their social and political lives. I do not, however, include Will in that category of anti-intellectuals.

While I shuddered slightly at the phrase “an analytical research approach” which seems to imply that analytical research is the only thing that happens at a university (please… no. no more analytical research of society. It really hasn’t served us all that well. new research method please!) this is not the core of my objection. My problem here is in the hidden premise in this phrase; “what a graduate degree seeks to provide”. This implies an objectivity of framework and viewpoint that is sorely lacking and, indeed impossible, in the mainstream educational system. Knowledge is broken down into ‘courses and degrees’ that are often decided upon at the administrative level without any real ‘analytical research’. What is this “graduate degree” that is providing something. There is something in the expression that seems to imply an authority to academia that I don’t think it deserves.
I also notice, at the risk of being picky, that in her third paragraph she uses the phrase “only an anecdotal understanding” to separate ‘real understanding’ reached at the university from experiential knowledge but then goes on to support her own argument in her last paragraph she uses a different expression my experience has been to make a general claim about the viability of distance education as a replacement for RL interaction.

Conclusions

This need not be a simple in/out debate about universities. This is about what we consider valuable in our culture. Will’s point regarding how distributed knowledge is different is well taken, Harold’s about experience more than valid and Liz’s about the need for critical remove right on the mark. But they don’t really disagree. I think that there are mores and strong emotional and historical attachments at play… we need all of these things in the new world that is building. We can either be part of that new construction by identifying what we want to keep from the old and incorporate it in the new… or… not. If we allow ourselves to get lost in the dualith, in the two solitudes as it were, we’re missing a fantastic opportunity.

At the risk of giving my readers whiplash from the topic changes… I saw on twitter (who says twitter doesn’t work) that bud is looking for a flash embed into moodle solution. This is something I swore I would post just to try and save the pain and misery to the next person who came along trying to do this. A friend of mine asked for a solution for embedding video into his first year class. He wanted to see what would happen if he replaced his lectures with video and stuck to oral exams and tutorials. The response has been VERY positive. As always… the same warning… there’s probably (almost definetely) a better and easier way to do this. This is the way i sorted out.

(I would also like to formally apologize for using youtube as a common noun.)

Why exactly would i want to do this in the first place?

A professor at my university has started using flash video in his classroom moodle to replace his first year lectures… His students have the option of coming to pretty much as many small tutorials as they like, but for the lectures they get his video, which they can watch as many times as they like and which he can track. Surprisingly, many of the students are watching the video 4 and 5 times… it gives them a chance to review the content and match it against other things they have (textbooks… documents… wikipedia…) This is a very nice solution for the delivery of content, particularly when matched with online discussion forum and chat and live face to face tutorials. Thus far… a very nice solution. Looking forward to the teacher assessments. (his have been fantastically high before this little adventure)
There are alot of advantages to choosing flash as the solution for your video needs.

• It is almost universally accessible across all browsers on all systems (assuming people have the plugin in their browser).
• It is lightish in terms of space and loads very nicely.
• You can have very direct control over the look, feel and size of your video display and can quite easily adjust the way it gets taken in.
• An flv (flash video) file can very easily be sent all over the place.
• It’s what all the cool people do (see youtube and googlevideo)
• There are ways to do serverside conversion INTO flash so that your users can post whatever they like to your server and you can convert it to your preferred format (flash)
• meh. i like flash.

What you need for just embedding my flash into moodle

• Jeroen Wijering Flash FLV Player – a simply fantastic piece of coding.
• A moodle (and as you can see on Jeroen’s page, it will work for all kinds of stuff drupal wordpress and you only need one installation of this software to work EVERYWHERE) For installation instructions see the fine work done at moodle.org.
• A way to make an flv file.

One way to do it

1. The first thing to do is download the FLV player.
2. upload it to your server somewhere that is web readable… (that is, that can be accessed by http://yourdomain.com/directory_of_flv_player)
3. Copy the code from the flvplayer.html file and paste it into a topic or something in your moodle installation and change the following variables so that they point to your directory_of_flv_player. You’ll see that there are a few ‘files’ in there… the ufo.js, and the others listed below.

http://yourdomain.com/directory_of_flv_player/ufo.js

http://yourdomain.com/directory_of_flv_player/flvplayer.swf

http://yourdomain.com/directory_of_flv_player/playlist.xml

4. Edit your ‘playlist.xml’ so that the link points to your flv files. This is the only thing that you need to change in order to update the content in your media player that you’ve created with camtasia, camstudio or something…

NEXT STEP Go all the way to building a youtubeUsing this drupal/youtube

And/or this phpvideo

I, like everyone else in the blogosphere (and a fair number outside it) have been reading up on the Kathy Sierra ‘death threat’ affair. I wandered over to bud’s site to check out how his digital storytelling was going and found his post about standing up against hate crimes in the blogosphere. I’m a little twisted up about the whole thing. I don’t like fear… nor those who inflict it on others. I also really don’t like censorship… nor those who inflict it on others. This is a tricky issue. Some thoughts… and if you don’t read all the way through… I verily encourage you to at least click these two links KATHY SIERRA –> RAGEBOY RESPONSE
I went over to passionate users and saw a photoshop that I can imagine was very distressing and some very over the line anonymous writing that was posted on a website about her. This escalated to a discussion of how they ‘the only thing Kathy has to offer me is that noose in her neck size.’

Not good. Actually… very not good. I was reminded of this “(even to the point of one comment, which Marc Hedlund deleted in my absence, implying that I’m a child molester!)” from o’reilly web2.0 conference controversy and the dozen or so fairly nasty comments i’ve deleted off of this blog (while still in moderation). I have a few posts that get alot of ‘younger traffic’ and they seem to like to make nasty threats and comments. I also work at the university in Canada (or one of them) that posted the Mohamed cartoons last year… oh my the death threats they got that week.

Death threats are bad. Anonymous (or worse, non-anonymous) people threatening harm is bad. It is not, sadly, very new to those people who live public lives. As the famous among bloggers share themselves here on the internet they are becoming fodder for “the star” equivalents that we have on the internet. I might put it a little differently, but Chris is not to terribly off the mark given that half the human race consists of women, it should not come as a newsflash that some of them — in about equal proportion to men — are stupid, venal, dishonest, or just generally annoying.”note – (I just realized that I misread this quote… I’m now not quite sure what Chris was getting at… what I meant was that there are lots of folks out there and alot of them suck) No. This is not new. Any wander around sites that get spammed with lots of anonymous users will bring you up against nasty stuff. I can only imagine what kind of photoshops get ‘banned’ from the fark photoshop contests considering some of the things that have shown up there over the years. The internet is not a particularly nice place in that regard…

I also took note of this reply from rageboy (chris locke) and note that Kathy Sierra doesn’t make any effort to clear the ‘owners’ of the blogs in question of wrongdoing even though in both cases they removed the entire site containing the offensive comments. I do notice that Chris’ response to the comments were that they ‘were in bad taste…’ which seems understated. How many of us (assuming we were well known enough to be noticed) would like to take total responsibility for what is on our wikis I wonder? Are we now to think that the owners of a website are responsible for the opinions expressed on the website?
Here’s the problem. We have no way of enforcing identity on the internet. We can enforce (to a decent degree) identification on our own sites, but for those that do not take those steps, it is not possible. If you take the position that rageboy et al. take that they will not censor other people’s words… what then shall we do? We could say, I suppose, that Chris is wrong… that there is cause for him to censor people’s words on his website if it is hatespeech. Of course, this brings the internet to the point that our other media are in where they are governed by a board of folks who tell US what is RIGHT and GOOD… which i also don’t like.
Shall we ‘ have the police hunt down the perpetrators and bring the full weight of the law upon them.’ as Andy Price says in the comments to kathy’s post. I do not find it surprising that, as Kathy says in her post, “Was the photo itself meant to be a threat? The police believe so, yes…” There has been a desperate attempt by every law enforcement agency in the world to get the enforcement powers to mitigate what is happening on the internet.

So here it comes down. Do we wish to give up a little bit of liberty to gain safety? The ONLY way to ensure that anonymous people do not post nasty things on the internet is to log every keystroke of every computer in the world to the person who is keying it in. We have the technology, microsoft is, to some degree trying to put it into vista. It’s really not much liberty… only that every keystroke we log from here on in will be tracked.

And, as a corollary to this… how much do public figures have to accept to remain public figures. Our actors, politicians and now our bloggers are subject to personal assault. Is this the inevitable result of the public private world of blogging? What kind of comments would Voltaire, Hypatia, Mary Wallstonecraft or Rosa Parks received on their blogs?

Hate sites and hate speech are bad… censorship is bad. Safety and liberty do not often go hand in hand. These are the critical times, however, when the cynically minded people in our culture seize on fear to push their policies…

One more thought –> all the net-savvy younger people I showed the Sierra post (not a scientific survey) to shrugged their shoulders and said “those dudes are a##holes.” (meaning the people posting the hate material) There is a cultural shift here and a disconnect. As someone said in the long list of comments on passionate users ‘victimization is art’ and it is becoming that.

A great recap of the stuff people have been saying blogosphere recap

Been a good solid month since i had the brain space to blog. I’ve got a bunch of things coming up where some of the ideas that are pinging around my brain are going to need to come out… so i thought I’d better get some of them out in time to reconsider them 🙂

One of the topics that has been repeatedly coming up in discussions lately is the idea of layers of membership in a collaborative community. With the mind numbing escalation of online communities available for people to participate in, and the second wavers starting to turn their minds to those communities, its becoming more and more important to allow for multi modal membership models…

To give this a little context, let me tell you about the project that we are running at my university. We are creating virtual research environments specially designed for the needs of given research groups. We’re using a cocktail of open source products, front-ended by Drupal, and connected to the library research infrastructure to allow our increasingly distributed research groups a comfy place to do their research in a protected/open environment, to collaborate and not collaborate… kind of a perpetual conference space where they can get their work done.

Now the early adopters are loving it. No more dreamweaver, no more webex or elluminate, and fewer flights and phone calls. They are finding their research associates, keeping track of their meetings and realizing that the library is really kick ass. We’re looking at designing custom databases for specific projects and linking all of this, through a persistent digital library to our e-learning infrastructure. All that and we can get it started in five minutes and over a couple of weeks teach people enough of the basics for them to be able to control their content online.

Working pretty well… so far as it goes. The problems lies in the very ease with which is can all be created. Any whoozit with a hundred bucks can install an elgg or a drupal or a moodle or a wiki and spam the bloggosphere saying that “this is the new community… supporting (insert obscure bit of cartilage on the long tail here)” We are increasingly collaborative, increasingly involved in collaboration… We are members of our banking sites, our research sites our community sites our schools our communities of practice…
So as we move forward with our VRE project I’ve been thinking about how to deal with this assault of membership so that we can allow as many forms of membership as possible. I want to have a series of different membership types identified so that when I’m discussing requirements with a client I can lay them all out and say, for instance, “do you care if a casual member of your community can follow along with this community?”

Here’s a first shot at a list… It is by no means meant as definitive… but meant to start a conversation.

Core membership

These are the folks who are going to be at the website almost everyday. There membership in this community represents a key part of their life/practice and they are going to be very familiar with the interface, even if you’re using hieroglyphs for navigation. Most communities will have 2-20 of these… depending on size. This graph gives a real nice sense of how this looks.

needs 

• they need to know how this community will help them
• they need recognition/acknowledgement (of whatever kind) or their core-ness
• they need to be included in decision making

 members

This is the critical middle ground in any community. These are the folks who are very familiar with the community but don’t necessarily come to it everyday and might leave for months and come back. They don’t perform any ‘critical’ functions individually in any given community, but as a whole, they are essential. They keep core members from wondering off track. They supply alot of workload as a whole. They are also key to the spreading of that community. My own membership in the moodle community would be a good example of this. I participate in discussions occasionally, and have posted some 50 or 60 times on the website, but will be absent for months at a time.

needs

• a sense of belonging
• the ability to leave and rejoin the community
• direction in terms of what they can do in and for a community
• will make an effort for rewards

Casual membership

We have alot of these people over at edtechtalk. They are folks who actually take the time to register on the website but don’t usually participate in the discussions or post of the website. They are, I would guess, the vast majority of people in an online community. They listen, read the results of work done in a community, and are often the ‘audience’ for that community. A good way of thinking about this might be someone who reads a blog but never responds to the ideas there either in comments or by blogging about the content elsewhere. It is critical in a collaborative community to know whether or not you are interested in servicing this community.

needs

• clear navigation
• clearly presented content
• tagging
• reap rewards with little effort

client membership

These are people who are seeking a particular service from a community. These might be information seekers from a tech forum or people downloading software from an open source software community.

needs

• easy access to the product
• troubleshooting advice
• clear descriptions of the contract (social or otherwise)

Active visitors

These are people who might have a vested interest in a given piece of content, but may not wish to join a community (for any number of reasons). These people could be reporters, researchers with related interests etc… They could also be the funders of a given project who are stopping by to see how things are going. This is always critical. Many communities that are actually successful can fall on hard times because those people who might be interested in supporting it don’t ‘see’ the success of the community when they come and visit.

needs

• They need to be able to experience the community quickly
• this is where about pages and tours are useful
• clear delineated sense of the purpose of the community

 passive visitors

These people are not members of the community per say. They are people who may visit the community once.

needs

• a way to get something out of a piece of the experience
• experience a piece without needing the whole

There’s a quick list. There’s no saying that a community NEEDS to support all but the ‘core membership’ people… just that you should know what kind of membership you are looking to support before you start. Some platforms do a better job when people come all the time, others for casual membership.

Was reminded again today how interesting it can be to be part of a blogging community. I received this pingback from the ‘Discourse about Discourse‘ blog regarding my last post about writing in our current post-paper age. In that post i laid the groundwork for an argument about what it must mean to do academic writing now that the limitation of paper has been removed from our work. I’ve been debating about the follow up I planned to write on that issue but have been drawn slightly sideways by the post listed above.

The dominant TEXT of our time will be digital. The ways in which we replicate the biases of a paper based world are no different than the criticisms I’ve heard leveled at Second Life architects who insist on putting roofs and stairs in their buildings in a 3D space that not only does not need them but is very inconvenienced by it. There is a hearkening in it for a time past, of a time that is passing. As the technology changes so does what we need from the world knowledge change.

Available technology is intrinsically tied to our understanding of what knowledge is at a given time in a given society. Or, to be more specific in this case, the state of technology is tied to what it means to be knowledgeable. For the purposes of this conversation think less about technology in the sense that it is used to mean electronics but the more general sense in which we talk about tools created by members of our society to accomplish a given task. A pencil is a fine example of technology in our given conversation.

In an era, for instance, before the technology of writing is widespread, where writing implements, surfaces are scarce, the memory becomes of paramount importance. Rhetoric, the ability to call upon inner reserves of knowledge and skill at a given time are also of supreme importance. As we see the transition to the written era, those skills start to be of less importance and writing and the deliberate thought necessitated by the written word begins to predominate.

If you are writing on vellum or parchment… you are going to spend a great deal of time considering what is going to be on that paper. It is a permanent record of the work that you do. There is a classic (and possibly apocryphal) story that one of my professors used to quote of a Phd thesis being submitted to Oxford and almost failing because the page number 472 was missing. A problem only solved by binding the work into two separate books. Under these circumstances knowledge production must by necessity be the result of LONG deliberation. How else to explain the explosion of energetic thought (mostly in pamphlets) that followed the adoption of the printing press.

We have another of these transitions on our hands. There is great security to be found in the permanence of printed text, and a security that we will not altogether lose… but one that we must put aside in our discussions about writing in this digital age. What does it mean, in our current era, to speak ‘the truth’ about the Middle East. Who is to say that the American Government, Wikipedia, the Times or Al Jazeera have a more balanced position. That the historian, the political activist, the ‘common person’, the journalist or the politician are ‘less biased’.

We need, as Ben has done in his post, to ask ourselves what writing the digital is going to mean to us. And that is the terrible trick to all of this. There is not going to be one answer to this question. What it is going to mean to me is not necessarily what it is going to mean to you. We are moving away from an era with a single dominant paradigm where people from one part of the world can ignore the truths of another part, or one class ignore the beliefs of another. We are, for better and for worse, all in this together. And the worst thing we can do is force everyone to agree. This is where, I think Stephen Downes‘ theories of networks over groups really comes into force. We must work, at least in part, as part of larger networks. We need not all be working toward a single goal.

Just as the Second Life architects (me included in my small way) are tearing down their buildings and putting up new ones without roofs… without stairs, we too must do the same with our writing. They have, for the most part, retained some kind of floor and have retained the purpose of having a building – a place to meet, a place to show a place to feel safe – we too will retain our own purpose — communication.

The owl way
More fun times out here on the east coast. Still waiting to hear back on a couple of different grants that could make the next year even more interesting than it is already promising to be. I’ve also been working pretty hard on getting the VRE (virtual research environment) together here at the university. More on this soon.

The owl way – a preliminary babbly post

I’ve been in a bunch of discussions recently about literacy. Not the newish version that I use here in the blog, the literacies that include all the things that are the backbone of the lowest common denominator of the skills necessary to perform in our society. Nope. Literacy. Writing. We’ve been talking about what a university writing program should look like. We’ve also been talking about what ‘should’ be happening in high school writing programs.

And it is this ‘implicit should’ that i’m finding interesting. There seems to be a general agreement, in maybe 90% of the people that I talk to, that writing is important and that writing is defined by what you might find on this website. The Purdue owl (online writing lab) is one of the cornerstone of online writing. The BIG YELLOW EYE has popped up on piles of forgotten handouts, sadly missing its sharp yellow jauntiness.

That view, not surprisingly, is upheld by almost every single person who has complete command over the secrets of the ‘owl way’. Now, one could say that this is a conspiracy to maintain the status quo… or one could say that the ‘owl way’ was somehow, through a process of trial and error – a science of the humanities as it were – the ‘best available’ way to pass information between different people, through both time and space. The truth, as in so many of these cases, is probably a little of both.
Lets take a closer look at the owl way, just for a second, as I’ve taught it to writing students here in Canada, in Slovakia and in South Korea. We will all accept, I suppose, that English is an ad hoc language. At least to a certainly degree, the rules and regulations of both the spelling and usage have been developed in response to common usage not the other way around. (like Korean say)

• We use thesis statements, and paragraphs.
• We use, some of us, topic sentences.
• Things are spelled according to the OED or Websters.
• Formal writing conventions are observed (no abbv etc…)
• It is a linear argumentation style, usually presenting one point of view, or at least surveying several points of view on a given subject.
• There is research.
• There is ‘new research’ (usually separated into qualitative and quantitative research)
• You can refer to other people’s published research. This presumes a trust in the publishers to hold to the rules of the ‘owl way’. Publishers who don’t do this lose this ‘trust’.
• These publishers employ ‘experts’ to survey new research and decide whether it’s ‘valid’.
• The goal of the owl way is to contribute to the ongoing discussion on a topic
• Our students, in most cases, are not doing this. They are practicing so that they can both understand the discussion and then, someday, participate in it.

The crux of this, the key point to keep in mind, is that many of those rules are governed by the pros and cons of using paper, as well as the inability of people to establish a common context quickly and easily. If we can’t all agree on how to spell ‘read’ we’re going to have a difficult time understanding what is being referred to by that particular ‘sign’ of ‘read’. What was needed then was a concerted effort to standardize writing according to the technology of the day. Paper. Here’s a preliminary look at where bee vomit leaves us…

• It is very difficult for two people to write on the same piece of paper at the same time.
• It isn’t much easier to do it asynchronously
• Because of the way that printing works, it is difficult to offer two different versions of the same piece of work
• As printing is expensive and distribution complicated, the writing cycle (time from idea to dissemination) is relatively long
• Paper isn’t easy to erase
• Paper needs a nice dry play to live.
• Generally, unless you’re very rich, you need to go to the paper (like a library)

The technology, then, lead us down the inevitable path to what we are seeing in academic writing today. The paper itself, transportation, the printing press… all had a direct impact on the way that we have constructed research writing.
I am starting, in my not so subtle way, to present a case of the technology changing the way we should be participating in the research discussion. In fields like physics, people are already starting to make this transition. It is almost a truism now, on the cutting edge, that by the time you make it through the writing cycle of traditional publishing, your conclusions are probably out of date.

coming in the next post…

The paragraph

The paragraph is intrinsically a one person beast. It is linear and it is single voiced. It is meant to convey on single idea. We have many people now who are trying to write collaboratively, but it is very difficult to bring this down to the paragraph level. Paragraphs tend to work together in an essay to forward the positions of a single thesis.

Busy times… I just fell exhausted off my exercise bike and fell over towards my computer to do the other thing that I keep meaning to get to… I have four or five posts that I really want to write… and have gotten tied between them. Today I’ll try and get some of the jumble out on paper.

The review

I was listening to cbc radio a couple of days ago (if you don’t listen… you should… they just might be our greatest export) and heard a very interesting conversation regarding the removal of student imported technologies in the classroom in Milwaukee. My interpretation of her position at the time was that we need to take the technologies out of the classroom in order to stop the disruptions and in order to protect students.

As all this stuff flies by, it’s hard to get any real grasp of what the issue really is. In this case, I’ve decided to do a little research, and pass it on to you folks. It seems that the rules are pretty specific. Here’s the cell phone guidelines from the administration’s website. There are three documents there, one for the parents, one for the administrators, and one that seems to be the actual ‘rules’.
The deadline for implementation passed last Monday…

“Students are not allowed to possess or use two-way electronic

communication devices such as pagers and cell phones while

on premises controlled by MPS unless approval has been given.”

I was very much prepared to react very violently against this policy when i heard about it. But, I must say, in print it looks pretty sound. There are a series of proceedures for punishing students who disobey the rules, as well as an injunction specifically demanding equality of judgement across schools. Nothing unexpected here. There is also the chilling line near the end

” Adults who engage in battery against school personnel will receive a criminal review for possible criminal charges. Any use of a device for criminal intent is subject to prosecution.”

It is clause number three in this ruling that makes me both very impressed with the work that the school administration has done in documenting their thought process… and makes me pleased that i actually took the time to check on what they were talking about.

3. Each school will establish a procedure for granting approval for students to possess and use cell phones.

According to the MPS rule, approval must be obtained for students who must carry electronic communication devices for medical, school, educational, vocational, or other legitimate uses. Obtain the request for approval in writing. Ensure that the student and parent understand that the device is to be used for the approved purpose only. Establish a procedure for communicating this information to staff members who come into contact with the student.

There you have it. A school that is trying to come to terms with a new technology… and is being very forthright about its thinking and still leaving a little room for the technologies to be used for educational uses.

The rebuttal

I think that the above response is the best bit of banning I’ve ever seen in this kind of situation. It is thoughtful, well organized and fair. It will probably accomplish the goals of reducing phone use in the classrooms… it will give teachers the support that they need in order to force students to focus on their lessons.

Most teachers I talk to are overworked… and the students they are teaching are not responding to the forms of discipline that worked even half a generation ago. The teachers are, also, undertrained, and are often overwhelmed by the vast number of ‘secondary literacies’ that they are forced to pick up just to keep up with their students.

What we have here is more evidence of the disconnect. The disconnect between our school system and the world that our students are living in. I’ve made this argument at length elsewhere… and will again in the next few weeks, but, in short

Twenty years ago my teachers felt they knew what I was going to need to know when I grew up. The things I did in class that got me thrown in the hallway

1. passing hand written notes
2. talking in the back of class
3. pretty much anything else you can imagine that might be irritating 🙂

If you look at the literacy skill set there you’ll see that the things that I was doing in the classroom were actually different interpretations of the things that were already going on there. (that is, if you accept that my teachers were trying to irritate me… something of which i was mightily convinced when i went to school.)

Now, lets take a look at the things that are the cause for disciplinary action in the here and now.

1. SMS messaging in class
2. cyber bullying
3. social networking (see myspace… you may have heard of it)

The literacies that these students possess are not really being valued… and they are moving on to the set of literacies that they will need in order to work in the next few years. When, I wonder, will we be able to change our schools so that those are the literacies that we are actually teaching?

The students are already leaving us behind.

A brief introduction to the educationbridges plan. 

It’s the first day of 2007 and it’s now time, I think, to put some long time plans into action. I won’t go too far into the background of all this today, suffice it to say that the good folks at the Nord Family Foundation got us started on this road, we’ve had some people step up and offer their help (and would love some more), and we think that the time is ripe to create a supportive structure to help underwrite some very good work that is being done in the educational community.
Educationbridges is a company that is yet to be, a non-profit in the making, that hopes to help fund some of the great work that educators are currently doing online. We want to create this company to help fund online collaborative projects that are currently being done by educators. We are going to approach various charitable foundations and request funding to do two major things

1. Offer edugrants to individual and small groups of teachers
2. Help support online collaborative projects like edtechtalk (and many others)

Edugrants 

Over the last two years we’ve been approached by many teachers who were interested in starting a project at their own schools. They are constantly faced with the same questions.

• Who do we trust?
• How can we get non-biased advice about what is important for our students to learn about using technology?
• How do we get funding?
• What’s a good platform for (fill in blank)?
• How can I make my project sustainable?
• What are other people doing?

There are many others. The idea of the edugrant is to solve many of these issues. In short, a teacher would apply to educationbridges with an idea. We would most likely help get them involved with a community of people who were currently working on the same sort of work, thereby saving them the time, money and effort of starting a new project on their own. If their work is particularly novel, or seems to need funding of its own, we would start the funding application process. If a candidate were successful, we might find an appropriate consultant nearby (or, likely, set them up with one online) who can help them through the critical project management phase of their project and then present us with a joint report on their financial needs. The intention is to bridge the gap between the teachers who don’t have the 100 hours it could take to do a funding application directly to a foundation… and those foundations who might be interested in helping many different educational institutions and might not have the ‘on the ground’ individual contacts (national and international) that we might have.Supporting online collaboration 

This is about sustainability. There are many great projects going on right now. It seems unlikely that they will be able to continue indefinitely without some kind of support. While there is the option of corporate sponsorship, we would like to offer and alternative. Online collaborative projects that serve the entire educational community sponsored by foundation money… distributed through educationbridges.
Edtechtalk, through its affiliation with worldbridges, has had the opportunity to support a great many different endeavours, some of them educational projects, some of them ed tech shows. There’s a great deal of data for research lying around, a bunch of websites in need of editing, design and management and alot of good work that we’ve had to turn down through a simple lack of time. We have been fortunate to accumulate a great many good friends and compatriots during this time, and alot of good work has been done. Funding would mean that we could continue the work that we are doing and expand our work to offer more ‘services’ to teachers.

You are all invited along for the ride. If you read through the information at the educationbridges link above, you’ll see where we are at. If you want to help, and can see a place in this project for yourself, please feel free to email me at dave _at_ educationbridges D0T org. If you haven’t the foggiest idea if you have a place in this project, or think that I’ve lost my mind… feel free to email me anyway. This project will not ‘get done’ by me. It will live or die on community involvement. I’m almost sure that there is a need for this kind of company… I will only be really sure once the community picks up on the challenge and joins the network.