Dave’s Educational Blog

story link
So it continues.

• Waden [the mother] said she made clear on a consent form at the start of the school year that her 15-year-old daughter was not to be allowed Internet access. But the girl used the school computers to access the Web site MySpace.com, where she met 18-year-old Michael Macbeth.
  

two ways to read it. You can say “damn you my space! What about the children.” or you can take to heart the lesson that kids that are protected from a thing, and not taught how to deal with a thing, a at greater risk. see blog post over at will richardson

I usually don’t plug the show here in the blog, but as it directly relates to the things i was talking about here, I’m gonna break the rule and post a direct link to a show. Tom Raftery was kind enough to show up and give the Irish version of the o’reilly story. His website makes for VERY interesting reading on this whole issue.
a link i’ve picked up in the course of my research for the show.

links added later.

This is the CMP letter to It@Cork

Great post about the issue 

notice the date on this post.

Night all.

I’ve been flying around the internet for the last 24 hours, trying to get my mind around something that is disturbing me far more than it should be. Why should i care if Tim O’reilly’s company filed a trademark infringement cease and desist order to some conference with the name web 2.0 in the title?

Now i have my answer I fear oreillyism. I take issue with the coiner of the word, Dallas (whoever that is), as to the specific definition however. To me, oreillyism is the tendency of very good, socially construted ideas to be ‘owned’ by someone once they become successful and their usage/meaning enters the mainstream.

Let us take a case in point. Webct was created at the University of British Columbia as a collaborative project amongst many different people in and out of UBC. Last year, while trying to incorporate moodle into a school, I was told by the head of IT “listen, we were onboard with webct when it first started, we were asked to be part of the development, and now we pay 27000 dollars a year for the ‘campus edition’. and now you want me to get involved in another ‘free’ open source project. How long before moodle starts to charge us 30,000 dollars for its software?”

Am i saying that Murray shouldn’t have made a company, and they shouldn’t have sold it…? no way. Business is what it is. Schools need money as much if not more than other people. The problem is that oreillyism creates the form of alienation above. When people enter into a socially constructed environment, (like social software advocacy for instance) there is a certain expectation, right or wrong, that all the free work they are putting in will not be directly profited upon by others.

naive? maybe.

But that’s neither here nor there. The truth is that it happens. How many projects that were supposed to be ‘for the community’ have we all worked on, helped edit, playtest or whatever, that are now being marketed.

Again. Marketing is fair play. Situations change. Children need to be fed.

But every instance of oreillyism creates more alienation, makes it harder for everyone to trust that the project that they are working on is not simply going to be sold by the organizers.

So, how do we avoid oreillyism?

1. Please, everyone, clearly identify your trademarks so we can all know what we can and can’t use.
2. If you are going to be, someday, selling your product to google, let us know. Sell shares to your helpers.
3. If you have plans to do new marketing, post it on your website
4. Just let us know what you’re doing. Odds are if we’re working with/for you, we like you, we’ll be happy to see you succeed.

We can all make money together. We can all work together. This is about finding a new way to do business. AN OPEN WAY.

comment added following this post on eschoolnews

I in no way meant to imply that moodle WILL charge anyone anything ever. My intention in using the example was to illustrate how trust is affected by ‘oreillyism.’

Wow…

A rabid man took over my blog and posted a very silly comment… which, for posterities sake, I will leave attached to the end of the post. I must say, a couple of hours later, that i’m still a little concerned about the o’reilly thing. It always seems that someone will send out something trademarkish, demanding and limiting when there’s money involved. I’ve never really understood the reification of ideas.

So much has already been written about this… i really do need to take a day and think it over. for those of you who were forced to read the previous post… my apologies. dave.

Web 2.0 (from tim o’reilley) is a concept that, at its web 2.0 (ftor) heart, is a concept that lives and breathes on its (ftor) openness.

You’ve got to be fcuknig kidding me.

That is officially the first time i’ve ever sworn in this blog. But this is rediculous. A trademark is something that should protect WORK done. I can’t even write.

And now he wants to trademark it.

fine. poop on him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

some of the many i liked

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Authority granted by accomplishment 

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

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

So… 

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

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

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

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

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

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

But isn’t that what a reporter does? 

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

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

meme please.

ps. and someone give me a phd please. 🙂

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sounds like a deal to me.

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

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

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

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

Let me start with some premises for background.

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

And now premises for creation of learning ‘items’.

1. Audience, in everything, is critical.

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

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

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

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

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