Superuser

Jimmy Wales dropped in on a Wikiversity discussion about his deletion and account blocking activities on Wikiversity recently. There were concerns about him over stretching his authority by deleting pages without following Wikiversity protocols of discussion before deletion. Typical to discussion in these large wikis, there are a lot of threads to follow, revealing some very profound examples of civil discourse (hats off to SB_Johnny), right along side some not so profound. Deletion is a very contentious issue on all the big wikis.

In that discussion Jimmy has called on Wikiversity to set up stronger policies for deterring what he sees as "trolls, breaching experiments (experiments designed to test the strength of Wiki policies), and attacks on Wikipedians". That discussion appeared to get a little heated and Jimmy dropped what appeared to be a threat:

I am currently discussing the closure of Wikiversity with the board. That is an unlikely outcome, but I mention it because I really want to press the point that the scope of Wikiversity has to be restricted to genuine OER. I think that my actions here are strongly supportive of the genuine community who want to do that, making it clear to them that they have very strong support for making it happen. Some may feel that Wikiversity should be a place for silly and juvenile experimentation. If people want to discuss such things, there is an entire Internet open to them - they should not hijack Wikiversity for these purposes.--Jimbo Wales 14:49, 13 March 2010 (UTC)

I've come into the conversation a little late, but I am shaken by Jimmy's threat. One it polarises a complex issue into two simplistic extremes, belittling the other and inflating his own; two it suggests that Jimmy and others have a clear and set idea about what Wikiversity should be; and three the now obvious possibility of Wikiversity being closed by people outside the Wikiversity volunteer base!

I have no incite into the details or even much of the background of such a thing being considered by the Board, but I sure hope it is being recorded somewhere even if it was just an idle threat from a guy getting a little frustrated and over exercising his power and influence in a debate.

Disempowering Wikiversity volunteers

If it was a simple throw away remark by Jimmy, the punch in the threat (closing Wikiversity unless they fall into line) causes my commitment to Wikiversity, indeed the Foundation to waver. More importantly however, it undermines the community building in Wikiversity if others react to the threat like I do.

Just last week I was involved in several conversations with staff at the University of Canberra about how we might engage with Wikiversity and sister projects more directly in our work. I was giving advice, assurances and pointing to examples of good and bad work. All those discussions ended very favorably towards investing resources into education and research projects using the big wikis. But a remark like this from Jimmy suggesting far from strong support for Wikiversity obviously puts a dampener on that for now.

For what its worth, I have asked Jimmy to ask the Board to give a strong reassurance of their commitment to Wikiversity before my colleagues and I continue with our investment considerations. As impotent as that will sound, It is horrible to think the Board's minds might already be made up on a closure, or on what Wikiversity WILL become... because what happens now is a slow and protracted weakening of those who remain in the way of such a move.

A conflict of interest?

I think it also has to be noted that there is a potential conflict of interest on the Wikimedia Foundation Staff and Advisory Board that might be having some influence on the WMF Board discussions that Jimmy refers to.

• Wayne Mackintosh - founder of Wikieducator, is on the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Advisors, and using Wikieducator centrally for the running of the Open Education Resource Foundation recently established at Otago Polytechnic. It is in his interests to promote Wikieducator, but while advising the Foundation board on a question of closing Wikiversity, would would he say?
  
• Erik Möller, Deputy Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, also sits on the Wikieducator Community Council, is long term transitional host of the Wikieducator servers, and managed the implementation of extensions to Wikieducator such as Liquid Threads.
• I am also officially on the Wikieducator Community Council, but am no longer engaged after a dispute and other reasons gave me cause to retract. I am a custodian on Wikiversity, but compared to others there, am a very low key player.
• Here's some history to early concerns of a possible soft campaign to eclipse Wikiversity with Wikieducator
• There is another link to a high profile Wikimedian publicly speaking favourably about Wikieducator and poorly about Wikiversity.. TBA
  

What is deletion in Wikiversity anyway?

All of this recent storm in a tea cup stems from a concern Jimmy (and no doubt others) have that Wikiversity is too permissive. This is an accusation I find a little rich after discovering very explicit images on Wikimedia Commons that remained for years before eventually being removed. In that instance it was another Foundation wiki compromising Wikiversity through its permissiveness, but I didn't see Jimmy in there deleting pages or calling for strong policy or else.

I'm actually a no-deletion, less policy kind-a-guy myself. Take this page on Russian Roulette (a drinking game). It was recently nominated for deletion because it was perceived to be outside the scope of Wikiversity. On the one hand you can see why.. its educational value at first was pretty low brow, but James Neill made a minor edit to bring it within acceptable boundaries, and voted not to delete it. A link to Alternatives to partying was added and so begun a teachable moment in that page. It now has the beginnings of sections on the risks and considerations of binge drinking; a quest for links to research into drinking culture, games and alcohol abuse; and another section for counseling and self help resources for people with destructive drinking habits. I mean, the potential educational value of this page is endless, imagine if it was deleted Jimmy Wales style?

But pages like Russian Roulette are politically harmless compared to a perception that Wikiversity harbours misfits out to slur Wikipedia and the top brass. The relative permissiveness on Wikiversity is seen to be the problem, not the policies and culture of the other wikis that are creating so much bad will. And there's a problem for Wikiversity developing policy in tune with the other WMF wikis. Its not a wiki encyclopedia, or even a book or any other reference material. Its a wiki (uni)versity, meaning its scope and academic freedom is potentially limitless. I think that could well be a great thing, but does the $6million Board think so, and can they take the blows they attract if this sort of of freedom is to continue?

There's something fascinatingly dark about wikis

I'm sure there is research out there, perhaps on Wikiversity soon, that looks at this darker side of wikis. All through these wikis is a dark reflection of the great political and group struggles of humanity. A simple and maybe even a little unfair a comparison would be to Animal Farm. All these individual efforts amounting to something so big that the implications become individually massive, and we start believing in a sort of revolution. But we install, permit or need a power structure that replaces that which was over thrown. At the same time all our identities become entwined in this something so big that's made of us, it stands for something well beyond our actual self. Its a recipe for another conflict and another revolution. Something I'll have to read more about before I will understand it.

Just thought I’d point to a few things that I’ve found and enjoyed of late.

Went onto last.fm the other night to find out that what I thought was a free service is actually a limited trial. Saw a new station on there for the band Angels And Airwaves and had a quick listen before realising that this band was former Blink 182 front man Tom De Longe’s current main musical project. I can sort of relate to the way that DeLonge started off making his mark in, well, the making of some pretty immature music content and concept wise (I still enjoyed it) and now as he’s heading into his mid thirties is more interested in “creating positive music that he hoped would inspire kids to make a difference.” Sounds like a late maturer – and I can definitely relate to that.

Anyway, following the lead of Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails, the new Angels And Airwaves album “LOVE” is now available as a free download. If the music is to your taste, then it’s nice to see another quality band trying to shake up the traditional music distribution model.

This album is free for you. If you like it and want to put some money towards it, we would be grateful for your support. In fact, as our way of saying thanks, we’ll give you an exclusive song remixed by Mark Hoppus of blink-182!
If you don’t want – or aren’t able – to contribute, then please accept the album free of any charge.
You don’t even have to give us your email address.

In class, we are looking to sharpen up our apostrophe usage and I’m loathe to critique the students’ own errors in a public way to learn the differences between omission and possession. Thankfully, there are a few very useful web based resources that any teacher can use with their students – starting with the Grocer’s Apostrophe Flickr Pool. Back this up with some savvy blogs (apostrophism, Apostrophe Catastrophes and my personal favourite Apostrophe Abuse) jam packed with real life boo-boos and laced with snappy, sarcastic one liners and apostrophes can be a lot of fun to tangle with.

So, in the absence of any insightful blog posts, I humbly share these offerings. And I hope that I haven’t allowed any errant apostrophes into the place.

This is documentation for a learning management system I built at Assiniboine Community College between the years 1995-1999. It does not refer to a currently existing system, as development on OLe was ended when no development money was forthcoming and I left the College to work at the University of Alberta. There is more documentation of the same system in my 1997 presentation, later published as a paper, Web-Based Courses: The Assiniboine Model (Wayback version here).

MS-Word Version

What is OLe?

OLe (Online Learning Environment – pronounced oh-lay) is an internet based system for distance education course delivery.

It has two major components: first, a content component, consisting of online texts, graphics, and multimedia, and second, a communications component, consisting of an array of tools for discussion and collaboration.

OLe also supports online registration, online tests and exercises, quick quizzes, and a variety of other tools and utilities.

Behind the scenes, OLe also provides course instructors with a variety of options: online test marking, dynamic pages, class scheduling, personal profiles pages, and more

And because of its modular design, course development on OLe is efficient. A set of course building routines generates course structures in seconds. New courses may be constructed out of components of existing courses, or developed from scratch.

Because it is designed primarily as a distance education delivery system, OLe benefits from established methodology in that field. It is much more than a conferencing system, and much more than a set of web pages. Content and communications are integrated, allowing students to be paced through learning materials and discussion.

OLe is scalable. Any number of new courses may be added to the system. If enrollments are too large, a new course section with a new instructor may be created in seconds.

And OLe is portable. Written in PERL, the standard language for programs on the internet, OLe may be run from any internet server. And because OLe is modular, it is distributed. This means that a course being offered on one machine may access course components located on another machine. This means that any number of institutions may share OLe resources.

OLe Components

OLe is essentially structured as follows:



Courses on OLe use the same registration system and users in the OLe system each have their own Custom Home Page, from which they access all of their courses. Each course has its own home page, from which course content and discussion tools are accessed.

Behind the scenes, OLe has the following structure:



Instructors access the system through their own login page and enter their own home page. From there, they may access student data and update student records. They may also update many course components or build a new course.

Online Registration System

The Registration Information Gathering System allows OLe to gather new student information, create new student files, and send registration information via email to a designated Registrar. The system is launched automatically when a user attempts to access OLe components.

New users are taken from the Login Page to a new user information page, from which, if they choose, they may be sent to a registration page. Online forms collect basic information, which is used to generate the student’s database.

From the Custom Home Page, users may elect to register in a program or a course (if they are not previously registered in a program, program registration is selected automatically if they choose to register in a course). More information is collected to fill out student data, and email is sent to the designated Registrar.

Users who enter the registration system are either sent back to where they tried to enter OLe, or to the Custom User Page if they entered directly via the Login Page.

The Custom Home Page

The Custom Home Page is the user’s primary starting point. From this page, all other OLe services may be accessed.



What’s New provides links to new pages, marked assignments

Your Message Centre is a personal one-to-one messager

Discussion Lists on a variety of topics

Your Online Courses links to home pages for each course

Options include course and program registration

Instructors have a link directly to their Instructor Page

Links and email contacts

Course Home Page

The Course Home Page is the starting point for any given course. Students may access any of the course tools, contact the instructor, enter the course content where they left off, or view the course table of contents.



What’s New in this course

Your Progress shows you where you are and takes you there, or view contents

Instructor information and messaging

Discussion lists for this course

Links back to your Custom User Page

There may appear to be fewer links and resources on this Course Home Page than on similar pages in other systems. This is because much of the interactivity in an OLe course is embedded within the course content.

The Course Home Page is streamlined, providing only the most important links to other components. This focuses the student on the course content, rather than the communications tools or other distractions. It also makes the page easier for students to use.

Course Contents Page

The Course Contents Page serves a variety of functions. It gives the student an overview of the course in a single page. It also allows the student to view any part of the page. It reports on a student’s progress. And it provides links into any online exams or exercises.



Each of the Unit Titles (pictured, at left) expands into a display of the component unit modules. Clicking on a module opens a display listing each page in the module. By clicking on the page name, the student may go directly to that page.

Student progress is depicted by the status report (pictured, at right) for both units and their component modules. Clicking on the status report takes a student to a listing of exams or exercises in that module or unit. This is a direct access to required work, which allows the student to challenge a course (where appropriate), and also to marked versions of submitted work, where grades and comments may be viewed.

Static and Dynamic Content

One of the most innovative features of OLe is its use of two types of content: static content, and dynamic content.

Static Content is content which does not change over time. It is analogous to a course text, a handout, or any other resource material a teacher may have available in a classroom.

Dynamic Content is content which changes from time to time, reflecting either events of the day, instructor style or interests, or the interests and aptitudes of the class. Or, another way of describing dynamic content is this: it is the set of learning instructions a teacher would provide on a day-to-day basis, instructions which are emulated in distance with a Study Guide or Course Manual.

Each module of a course is composed of a combination of static and dynamic content. From the Course Home or Contents page, a student is taken into a set of dynamic pages. Following the instructions page by page, the student is eventually linked into static content as appropriate.

Static pages always return a student to the place they entered. This means that the same static pages may be used more than once within a course, or for more than one course, with no danger of the student getting lost. Indeed, students may enter static pages located on another machine or on CD-ROM.

Dynamic Pages

As mentioned above, an instructor may change the content of dynamic pages from time to time. This means that an instructor may react to a particular class (or even a particular individual) by amending instructions or providing access to resources as needed. Originally set up and configured by the Course Generation Tool, the system generates the following pages:

Welcome – a ‘splash page’ welcoming the student to the module

Introduction – a brief description of the module contents and relevance to the course content as a whole

Objectives – a statement of the module’s learning objectives

Evaluation – a description of how the student will be evaluated for work completed in this module

Resources – a list of resources (texts, videos, etc.) required to complete the module

D1 … Dn – generic dynamic pages

Congratulations – closure and a link to the module assignment or test

The table of contents page pictured below illustrates a typical set of dynamic pages in a given module:

Static Pages

Static pages contain the content of a given course module. Static pages are similar to the resources one might expect to find on a CD-ROM based course. For any given topic, static pages provide information (such as the presentation of concept or idea), examples, and exercises.

Static pages may link into a variety of tools. For example, a static page may recommend participation in a discussion list, or it may suggest that a student write a journal entry, or an online exercise form may be provided.

Static data in OLe is stored in its own directory, separate from other course pages, and is organized hierarchically. This allows an instructor to create a link to a very general description of the concept, or a particular aspect of that concept.

An instructor may determine how much, or how little, of a given set of static data pages a student should view at a given time. This allows the instructor to pace delivery, and avoid overwhelming a student with too much information at a time. For review, however, a student may be given access to an entire set of static pages.

For example, the link from Dynamic page c to static page c allows the student access only to the shaded area in the static data set pictured below:

Content Pages

The primary design criteria for content pages are simplicity and clarity. Pages are for the most part designed to fit the computer screen. A few simple navigation buttons are available, directing the student through the material.

This approach differs from most online courses. In other courses, the entire range of communication and navigation tools is available on each page. We feel this distracts the student from the content and takes up valuable screen space.

Pages employ wide margins and reasonably large text for easy viewing (this is especially important for delivery over non-standard media, such as Web-TV).

Standard images – such as the background tile and navigation buttons – are the same on every page. The system administrator may change these globally with minor modifications. Indeed, as the course is delivered, these will change to reflect the season.

Communication Tools

As mentioned above, an array of communication tools is employed on OLe to facilitate discussion and interaction between instructor and students. These tools are for the most part embedded in course content, although links to some of them are provided on the Custom User Page and the Course Home Page.

For the most part, however, communication tools are accessed on an as-needed basis from static or dynamic pages. This means that a student does not need to interrupt his or her learning to seek the appropriate tool; it is provided when necessary.

The illustration below depicts a typical sequence of dynamic pages linking into communications tools:



In order to keep the student from getting lost, most tools pop up in their own window when they are invoked, and disappear when the student is finished. This means that the student never leaves the current page.

The next few pages describe some of the communication tools used by OLe.

Comm Badge

Comm Badge is a personal messaging system. It is designed for quick one-on-one communications. It was developed because, in cases where many students share one internet account, email does not provide enough privacy.

On opening Comm Badge, users may view a list of messages, compose a new message, search through a list of users to send a message, reply to a message, delete messages, or quit.

Comm Badge links may be located anywhere in static or dynamic pages. Comm Badge links may be pre-addressed, so the student need not look up the instructor’s address. Thus, the only work a student does is to type the message and click ‘Send’.

The primary design criteria for Comm Badge was simplicity. It is intended to establish communications even for very novice users.

Future options for Comm Badge will include the ability to save messages (both those send and those received) and to email messages to a regular email address.

Clist

Clist stands for Convergent Discussion List. It is an online discussion forum in which users may post messages for others to read, and read messages others have posted.

Clist provides separate forums, each dedicated to a distinct topic. A link to Clist may specify a particular topic, or a user may select from a list of topics. Each user has his or her own list of topics, so users do not view discussions outside their course (or even discussions among people more advanced in the same course).

Clist is a very flexible program, intended to be used in a wide variety of situations by both instructors and students. A full search capacity is included for both content and authors. Messages may be sorted in several ways. Topics may be merged, and messages may be merged. Messages may be quoted in other messages.

A Clist topic is added to a user’s list of topics simply by linking that user to the topic. So, for example, an instructor may send a Comm Badge Message or What’s New Message (see below) with an embedded Clist link. Alternatively, when a student is ready for a new topic, the link may be embedded in a dynamic or static page.

An instructor or student may create a new Clist topic at any time either by creating a link to a topic which does not exist or by selecting the ‘Create New Topic’ option on the CList screen.

Notebook

Notebook is a tool which is intended for quick off-the-cuff comments by students. This makes it ideal for use as a journal or notebook. A notebook consists of a set of pages (a new page is created for each Notebook entry) through which a student or instructor may peruse.

The student version of Notebook provides a form on the left hand page, into which text is entered. On pages which have previously been created, the text is displayed. Instructor comments are displayed on the right hand side. This allows the instructor to react page by page to the student’s work.

The instructor view, pictured above, provides a form for comments on the right hand side and the student’s text on the left hand side.

Students are not restricted to one notebook. They may have any number of notebooks, each devoted to a different topic.

Links to Notebook are embedded in static or dynamic pages. A link may specify a notebook topic. A new Notebook is created if a student enters a topic for the first time.

Online Forms

Online forms are the most common of internet interactivity, and OLe supports them as well. Forms may be embedded into any static or dynamic page. Forms input is sent to a program which creates an page with forms input and creates a link which allows both instructor and student to add and view comments later.

Pictured below is a typical online form:



Additionally, many static pages contain self-test quizzes. Input from a self-test quiz is not stored on a web page. Rather, it is evaluated on the spot and answers are displayed to the student. Self-test quizzes are typically multiple-choice or true-false quizzes.

Instructor Options

Instructors have a home page which in many ways resembles a Custom User Page. From this page, an instructor may edit his or her personal profile, as pictured above, or enter a given course, as pictured below:



In a given course, the instructor may access the class list, or define course dynamic pages.

The Student List

In any given course, an instructor accesses student data by means of a student list, pictured above. The student list page also allows the instructor to view any or all of the students’ major types of information: location, program, and the like.

The instructor may view student information, and from that page, select a student’s course records. On this page is provided links to the students exercises and exams, as well as the student’s course plan (or schedule) and grade sheet.

Dynamic Page Editing

Going the other direction off the instructor’s Course Page, an instructor may edit dynamic pages. A list of all dynamic pages in a given course is presented, sorted by unit and module. Selecting a page by title, the instructor then works on an editing screen to edit the page. See the illustration, below.



In development are a number of tools and aids for instructors. Specifically, this page will contain a number of buttons which allow them to select, and embed into the page, any of the tools described above, links to external URLs, and links to static pages.

The dynamic page generation program creates dynamic pages as they are edited and stores them as web pages, automatically adding headings, backgrounds, and links to other dynamic pages.

Typically, an instructor would not revise every dynamic page every day. They would be revisited from time to time on an as-needed basis. However, instructors who are leading a group of students through a paced course offering can edit pages just before students arrive at them.

The Build Menu

One of the advantages of OLe is that new courses may be built very quickly and changes may be made in existing courses, or the entire system, easily and efficiently. The key to all this is the Build Menu, pictured below:



From this menu, an administrator may define major system pages (such as the login information page), change display formats (such as banners, text fonts and colours, or background tiles) on the fly, or create or edit new course components, including courses, sections (which are like individual classes), units, modules, instructors, and other data.

OLe Design Team

Conrad Albertson – HTML Programmer, software design assistant

Stephen Downes – Webmaster, software design, instructional design

Susan Hawkins – Content Specialist, English

Tranna Homenick – Content Specialist, English

Jerr Kerr – Project Coordinator

Dave Perkins – Content Specialist, Computer Systems

Bonnie Proven – Project Coordinator

Pih Ha Voon – Content Specialist, Mathematics

Original links accessible via the Wayback Machine.

In October of 1995 I ran for Mayor of Brandon (Manitoba, Canada). The fact that I had lived in the city for only ten months made the gesture a little audacious; the fact that the incumbent mayor was running unopposed made it necessary.
Yes, folks, my campaign headquarters was the local pub, the Double Decker. This is my candidacy announcement press conference. I am visible at the very top of
the photo.

Right from the get-go I knew I was in for a tough run. The incumbant was very conservative, the city's newspaper was very conservative, and quite naturally each tried to portray me as a wide-eyed radical. Pictured right, the Brandon Sun's obviously unbiased photograph...

From the Brandon Sun. The announcement in the bar left an image too obvious to overlook. But, dammit, my head does not look like a Christmas tree.

My candidacy prompted another candidate to run, a university student who went by the name of Gorf. Though I was happy to see an additional face, he detracted a bit from my own campaign and we split the protest vote. There he is, pictured left. I am in the centre and incumbant Rick Borotsik is at the right.

Here I am at the same forum addressing an audience of about 500 or so people. Brandon's one electorial forum is sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce (I know there's only one because I lived in the city through three elections) and held at the Royal Oak Inn. Borotsik, lower middle, looking bored (ah the skills of the career politician), is clearly the focus of this newspaper shot.

The Brandon Sun's cartoonist depicts the forum. Gorf has a bag over his head because of his reluctance to be photographed. For my efforts - proposing a virtual city hall and plugging Brandon into the technology industry - I am caricatured on television. Oh well.

Ooo yeah, it's the love connection...

All good things come to an end, and the end came with a thud election day with the result that I got 1600 votes, about eleven percent of the poll. It's funny - I had never really expected to win the election, and went into the pub election night knowing I would be sent down to defeat, but when the actual moment arrived, there was no escaping that sad feeling in the pit of my stomach. I've run in elections before, won some and lost some, and losing is always the same, no matter how faint the hope. It's tough.

But look... I did get 1600 votes, which in a city of 40,000 people is pretty good for a newcomer, and my primary objective, of ensuring that there was an actual campaign, was achieved. And Brandon didn't forget; next two mayoral elections were properly contested, allowing me to sit on the sidelines and cheer the winners and losers.

(Originally posted in 2001)

Reading James Hansen's book, Storms of my Grandchildren, has convinced me that AGW (anthropogenic global warming) is a real problem. I won't attempt to summarise the book except to say that it is an outstanding  example of clear science communication to the public.

I haven't looked closely at the issue of species extinction yet but Hansen and other research convinces me that the threat of rising sea levels is real and that the IPCC estimates are conservative. Sea level rise is difficult for humans to adapt to since so many people and important cities are located around the coastline. I hadn't thought about this much before. I had thought that Climate might or might not be changing but the IPCC maximum projection of 59cm in the next century was a maximum and was sufficiently far off in the future to be not a major problem.

Hansen points out that sea level stability has been with us for approximately 7,000 years and that this provided enormous advantages for the emergence of civilisation, such as increased fish breeding around the coasts providing a high protein diet for a settled population. He also uses paleoclimate data to point out that in the previous interglacial, the Eemian, 140,000 years ago, at one stage the climate was only 1 degree Celcius warmer and the sea level was 4-6 metres higher. See Fig. 3 (source)


My thinking was guided by the idea that everything changes continually anyway and in general new technological discoveries can be used to overcome new problems as they arise. I still think this is correct as a generalisation but I can't think of anyway in which new technologies would overcome a significant sea level rise for millions of people. Of course, it's possible / probable that sea level will rise anyway, sooner or later,  and we will have to adapt. But it seems that we have reached the point where we do have some control over the climate and should collectively exercise that control.

Back to the present, the evidence from the GRACE satellites (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) and other data indicates that the ice sheets in Antarctica (especially West Antarctica) and Greenland are losing mass at an accelerating rate. The GRACE figures are in gigatonne per year and the mass loss is accelerating over the period measured (2002-09) on both sheets:

In Greenland, the mass loss increased from 137 Gt/yr in 2002–2003 to 286 Gt/yr in 2007–2009, i.e., an acceleration of −30 ± 11 Gt/yr2 in 2002–2009. In Antarctica the mass loss increased from 104 Gt/yr in 2002–2006 to 246 Gt/yr in 2006–2009, i.e., an acceleration of −26 ± 14 Gt/yr2 in 2002–2009.
- source

A central issue is the inertia of the oceans and the ice sheets. Ice begins to melt slowly but the rate accelerates over time. Ice in the wild has different dynamics. Ice flows, ice can get dirty, moulins can form to accelerate the destruction etc. With oceans the warming process is much slower overall but the quicker part is early rather than late. These combined inertias create the threat that if you go past a tipping point, which we can’t predict, then you can’t recover from it. We may be letting systems which are controllable to an extent slip out of control. With so many people living in coastal regions then anything faster than the IPCC predictions would be a real concern for future generations.

I still think that economic and industrial development is very important for everyone, especially for the developing world. Since we have the nuclear energy option I don't see any reason for pessimism about the long term energy future for humans.  However, the present problem is that nuclear is more expensive and subject to excessive regulation owing to the widespread fear of anything nuclear. These issues have been and are being discussed in detail at Barry Brook's  blog, Brave New Climate.

At the moment I'm particular interested in the threat of rising sea levels. I found another excellent blog, Getting skeptical about global warming skepticism which has a series of posts about this question. This amazing page lists 94 skeptical arguments and links to responses to all of them based on reviews of peer reviewed papers by John Cook, a Queensland physicist. Here are some of the links to Cook's blog which directly or indirectly look at the issue of rising sea levels:

Sea levels aren't rising
Ice isn't melting
How much will sea levels rise in the 21st Century?
Is Greenland gaining or losing ice?
It's the ocean
Arctic ice melt is a natural cycle
Does ocean cooling prove global warming has ended?

Reading these references makes me think that the IPCC maximum estimate is a conservative one and the sea level may well rise faster than that. This video provides an illustration of how the ice sheet dynamics might work, explains the reasons for IPCC conservatism and looks at some of the paleoclimate data. The section right at the end is overly alarmist but overall it's worth watching:

Letter to the Editor, Times & Transcript
(We'll see if it ever gets published)

Moncton is a hub city and draws people from around the region for shopping, events and medical services. Thus its policing costs are higher on a per capita basis. This is part of what it costs to be a hub, and if you cut back that cost, you threaten Moncton's role as a regional service centre.

This is just one of the facts completely overlooked in the Times & Transcript's misguided campaign against the existing RCMP service in the community. Another fact overlooked is value for money.

Yes, you can hire fewer officers, and pay them less money. This is what other cities in the region like Saint John and Halifax do. But you pay for such shortsightedness. According to Statistics Canada, Halifax has about 50 percent more crime than Moncton, and Saint John has 60 percent more. The differences are even greater when we look at violent crime, with Saint John almost twice the rate of Moncton.

The news coverage also misrepresents how many police serve in the Moncton region. Though we are told Moncton has too many officers, Statistics Canada reports that, at 115 officers per 100,000 population, the Moncton region has the lowest coverage of any metro area in Canada between 100,000 and 500,000 in population. That's significantly less than the 177 officers that were employed by the city and town police forces at much greater cost before the RCMP took over.

And where are we going to get savings? As noted in the article, "In 2008, Moncton residents paid $269 per capita for Codiac, while Frederictonians paid $210 and Saint Johners paid $272." If we consider that we're not getting a police subsidy, and if you consider that RCMP officers are higher paid, the Codiac RCMP service looks like an incredible bargain.

You know, people are quick to forget what Moncton was like before the RCMP. Ask around, and you'll hear stories about organized crime. Recall, according to the city's own web site, that the "1970s were marked by the unprecedented level of crime in Moncton. Two policemen were murdered, people were kidnapped, and there were even gang-style assassinations." Is this what we want to return to? As late as the 1990s, organized crime had a foothold in the city and the City police force was in such bad shape the province had to intervene.

The only people who would benefit from the elimination of the RCMP in Moncton are the criminals. This newspaper is playing a very dangerous game with the lives and livlihoods of Moncton citizens when it advocates for an end to quality policing in the city. Citizens should take a very hard look at the statistics and the recommendations from the Perivale Taylor report. They argue that the current RCMP is the best and most efficient option available.

While I’m really interested in all sorts of technology possibilities, as a person responsible for a huge library facility and resource centre I passionately believe that the first and most important ‘augmented reality’ option for children and youth are found in books, magazine, graphic novels and more.

Good books. Good literature. Good augmented reality!!  Through books you can experience so many possibilities, so many  passions and emotions, so much history, exciting mystery, and more.

This week has been a big one for us on the ‘augmented reality’ front!

As our visiting speaker Paul MacDonald from The Children’s Bookshop said to our Year 7 students: “A good book should leave you slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it”.

Paul challenged the boys for an hour with many exciting ideas, and reasons to get into ‘what’s hot’!  He even got into quiz mode to capture every single boy – the prize?  A Cherub beanie!  You’ve never seen such a sea of hands desperate to answer a question about books and authors!  Heaps of boys charged over to the library after getting out of the dining room at lunch time – and queued to grab or reserve the books that Paul had been enticing them with.

Patrick Ness

We also had a fabulous visit from Patrick Ness, who spoke to Year 9.  Talk about mischievous but exciting! He also sat down for a literary lunch discussion with our Extension English students. Patrick was just fantastic at pitching the literacy message to active adolescents.

Oh, and don’t forget the magic of buying your own signed copy of an author’s book!

For me – the first and best form of augmented reality – guaranteed to impact on every aspect of a students learning future – is reading and more reading.  More important than any other technology tool in the whole world!

Filed under: Reading & Literacy, Students 2.0 Tagged: books, Patrick Ness, Paul MacDonald, reading

It’s that time of the year again – when everyone gathers inworld for the annual Virtual Worlds Best Practice in Education Conference! You’d be mad to miss it! ;) You can access the full conference schedule @ https://sites.google.com/a/vwbpe.org/schedule/main-schedule-page

Look for sessions from Bron Bloxsome, Spiral Theas, Chimera Cosmos, Emerly Alter, slammed Aabye, Pandora Kurrajong and jokay Wollongong. GO Team! ;)

Also, go support AgileBill Firehawk who has been coordinating the Poster display (SLurl).

jokaydia Openhouse @ ReactionGrid!

And finally – you are all invited to come help us celebrate our early forays into Opensimulator by joining us for an Open House at jokaydia@ReactionGrid which is happening from 9pm SLT on Friday 12th March – which is 4pm on Saturday 13th Sydney time! (Check your local time here!)

To join us, simply signup for an avatar via the ReactionGrid website -reactiongrid.com/Default/Register.aspx

Once you’re inworld.. look for the robot (see her above)… who holds a sign with landmark to our sim. Alternatively you can use the map tool to search for jokaydia or IM jokay Wollongong for a teleport!

Seeya inworlds!

praise: VLC

This came to mind because last weekend my sister in law was talking about her search for a primary school for my oldest nephew. She expressed frustration at the school web sites for supplying mostly high-level vision statements rather than sharing how they set out to achieve those visions.

In researching some schools for her, one promise they all made was to partner with parents so that the education of each child was a parternship between the school, parent and child.

I know this is pretty typical, so I asked my sister over in New Hampshire, USA, if she could scan and send a copy of my niece’s (a senior in highschool) report card. I went to school in the States and as I wanted to track the evolution of the report card along one system, thought that made the most sense. Sis’ did one better and gave me the log in for her daughter’s school’s web site area for parents and guardians.

I couldn’t wait to see what would be there. Insightful notes from teachers would surely have to be there – how could my sister be a partner in her child’s education without communication from/with teachers? Perhaps examples of work good or bad so that she could see what her daughter has turned in? Perhaps a graph showing her improvement over time (or lack thereof) in critical skills?

What I found was the same information that used to be on my white cardboard report card in the manilla envelope in the 70s and 80s: letters and numbers. True there was also data on her attendance (really handy for checking up on kids who fib like a friend of hers apparently), but nothing else. No comments at all. I at least would get some database-ready stuff like “Could work harder” or “Pleasure to have in class”

So, letters and numbers. Links to the teacher’s email accounts. A history of her past grades that didn’t seem to go back too far. Course names that didn’t link to descriptions or learning outcomes. One course was “Advanced Health”. I asked my sister what that entailed – home surgery? Resurrection perhaps? She told me to ask my niece – she had NO idea.

So, if parents/guardians/involved adults are going to be partners in a child’s education – shouldn’t they get more information than letters and numbers?

PHOTO CREDIT: “Mark’s First Report Card” by laszlodemo, published to Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/11618809@N03/ CC (by) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

Posted via email from kerryj’s neotenous posterous

Graham Attwell has found a copy of a 1971 New York Review of Books article written by Ivan Illich, entitled ‘A Special supplement: Education without School: How it Can Be Done‘. Graham recognises the direct relevance to educational work in the Internet, and does a good job summarising the article.

I tried to leave a comment on Graham's Wordpress, but as happens on so many Wordpress blogs - due to their struggle to manage spam, my comment was lost. I should have paused, copied, and posted on my own blog anyway.

All I was trying to comment was to point Graham into what I have on Illich to date. Instead, I've gone through my memory and created this delicious tag stream below:



I hope someday, a furious and passionate discussion will take place around the writing of Illich again. I've been waiting a while, still looking for it. At the very least I hope his writing may become part of EdTech and Open Education's common dialogue and shared experience. We'll see...

Forward written for El Proyecto Facebook y la post-universidad. Sistemas operativos sociales y entornos abiertos de aprendizaje (The Facebook Project and Post-University. Social OS and Open Learning Environments), Editors: Alejandro Piscitelli, Iván Aidaime, Inés binder.


In February, 2004, Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg launched a web site called ‘thefacebook’ as a service to help Harvard students network with each other.[1] The name was taken from sheets of paper profiling students and staff that were distributed to new students. [2] Harvard has an elite reputation, a close-knit community, and the networking one does is almost as important as the learning. Within 24 hours, a thousand people had signed up, and after a month half the Harvard student body had a profile. The service soon spread to other elite schools, Stanford and Yale, and was eventually offered to schools across the United States. The name was shortened to ‘Facebook’ in 2005 and a phenomenon was born.

Facebook was not the first social networking site – arguably that honour belongs to Friendster or Tribes – nor even the first social networking service designed by Zuckerberg. Indeed, if we focus on the community aspect of social networking sites, we can see predecessors in The Well, launched by Stuart Brand in 1985 [3] and in the Globe, a community launched in 1994 by Cornell students Stephan Paternot and Todd Krizelman. [4] By the time Facebook came along, the idea of connecting people through the use of profiles, status updates, and forums was well established.

It may seem hard to comprehend in a world where it has 350 million users [5] and where people compile ‘friend lists’ of thousands of people, but Facebook became successful because it tapped into genuine need, by focusing on authentic community. The social networking site was defined, in its early years, by its exclusivity. People without a university email address were not permitted to join. Membership was restricted to students, staff and alumni. Facebook, in other words, cleaved tightly to an existing community, drawing upon strong connections in the physical world to create strong – and exclusive – connections in the virtual world.

This strength continues to play an important role in Facebook’s success in the years since it opened to the public at large. Facebook allows family members to create their own private groups, for example, and functions as a “virtual living room” for far-flung extended families. [6] Activists and social organizers, too, have seen the value of transferring existing communities to online venues; in this, Facebook’s groups and networking features have made it an ideal venue to support social mobilization. Ethan Zuckerman, for example, talks of Facebook activism in Egypt; where one in nine has internet access, the country’s 800,000 Facebook members have spawned numerous activist groups. [7]

The structure of Facebook is therefore a reflection of society itself. How are we to understand this? What insights about ourselves can we glean from the organization of Facebook contacts? Some structures, such as the university, the family, the activist group, are obvious. But we are able to look at ourselves through a new lens, taking advantage of new ways to visualize Facebook data. [8] Will we see, as danah boyd does in her examination of MySpace, not just social organization, but social divisions, and in particular, class distinctions? “It breaks my heart to watch a class divide play out in the technology,” she writes. “I shouldn't be surprised - when orkut grew popular in India, the caste system was formalized within the system by the users. But there's something so strange about watching a generation slice themselves in two based on class divisions or lifestyles or whatever you want to call these socio-structural divisions.” [9]

If there is a sense, though, in which Facebook can become popular by mirroring existing communities in society, there is a sense in which it can draw upon that popularity by exerting its own structure into communities. As Schimkus and Gruffat remind us, [10] Lawrence Lessig writes in Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace that architecture in cyberspace is law, it is control. As he writes, “Architecture regulates behavior; its constraints are simultaneous; but its constraints get enforced not through the will of the state, or through the will of a community. Its constraints get enforced through the physical power of a context, or environment.” [11]

Consider the effect one small change creates in the entire social networking community and how it is perceived. Facebook requires that members have an email address from an elite institution to join. Years later, we see social divisions reflected in the choice of social networking service. Danah boyd observes, “The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other "good" kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we'd call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities. MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, ‘burnouts,’ ‘alternative kids,’ ‘art fags,’ punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn't play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm.” [12]

If our architectures are intrinsically politically, as Schimkus and Gruffat say, then what will be the political organization revealed in the global graph? What will our social network architectures reveal about our society, in general, and what changes will we impose on our society, in general? Lessig writes that freedom, privacy, and free flow of content were built into the original design of the internet, but that this is changing. “Technologies are being layered onto the original architecture of the web that change this original design. Architectures that make it easier to identify who someone is; architectures that make it easier to know from where they come from; architectures that make it simpler to control the content that they use.” [13]

* * *

We are, of course, cognizant of control in other, more physical, forms of architecture. Dan Lockton, for example, illustrated the ‘architecture of control in design’ in his blog and dissertation. [14] Subtle changes, such as sloping seats, creating barriers or clearing paths, can guide and manage user behaviour through design. And control may be even more gentle, through the shaping of language. George Orwell illustrates this through his design of ‘Newspeak’. He explains, “Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.... Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.” [15]

But the excesses of control in language suggest that more nuanced approaches are desirable in architecture and in software. Language can be used to guide, suggest or cajole. It allows for the possibility of dialogue, exchange, conversation. The cold edge of technology doesn’t sit well with the warmer forms of interaction found in more human enterprise. Language allows, and arguably encourages, engagement and even empowerment. Technology looks like language, but behaves more like architecture, a duality that may lead us to expect more from its intervention than is warranted, as suggested by Cobo. [16] If we are to understand what technology can do, he argues, we need to understand what it can do, and crucially, what we can’t do with it.

Technological literacy has much in common with its logical and linguistic counterpart, critical literacy. It is a set of tools, skills and aptitudes that allow one to manipulate the design, and not just be manipulated by it. If is more than just a defense, it is additionally a way to project one’s own intentions into the world. It is a matter of learning not simply as being shaped by the world around one oneself, but of shaping oneself through the process of shaping the world. Creating words, creating design, creating software, creating communities: these are all ways we create our own learning, and shape our own thought, our own knowledge, in the most liberating manner possible. As Seymour Papert would say, “people construct new knowledge with particular effectiveness when they are engaged in constructing personally-meaningful products.” [17]

Of the ‘products’ a person could create, perhaps the most challenging is his or her own learning. This is an idea I explored with Diego Leal through the delivery of EduCamps in Colombia, where participants in Bogota and Medellin created their own learning through participation in creative Web 2.0 activities. [18] And the idea was extended and put online with the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge course I ran with George Siemens in 2008 and 2009. [19] This leads Leal to propose “an unstructured collective learning experience that seeks to make visible the possibilities of some social software tools in learning processes and interaction.” [20] The intent is to help people not simply to learn about the tools, but to develop a capacity to work with the tools, to build a creative capacity, and hence not just technical knowledge but rather technological literacy.

The development of a technological literacy, though, is uneven. In the divide between a world where we control technology and a world where we are controlled by technology lies what Henry Jenkins calls the “participation gap.” [21] It is the divide between those who can create and have created using digital technologies and those who have not. This is not simply a digital divide, not simply a division between those who can access technology and those who cannot, but rather, a divide between those who have been empowered by technology and those who have not. And it is a gap we see not only at the base level of simple web constructs such as web pages or Twitter profiles, but even more so at the higher reaches of social engagement, in professional discourse and communities of practice. To begin to learn is to begin to participate at the periphery of a community of practice [22]; to become learned is to reduce the participation gap between oneself and fully engaged members of that community.

It is no wonder, then, that Dolors Reig writes that one of the most important tasks of educators is to extend and enlarge participation in new media and in these online communities. [23] Students need to access the basic skills required to use technology, and to take advantage of online services to extend their participation into the wider community. New technologies allow them to reach into these networks independently of any institutional constraints. And they create the possibility of new forms of participation – of blogs and Twitter posts, for example – beyond the more traditional modes of conference presentations and academic papers. And it will be the responsibility, not only of educators, but of professionals in those communities, to embrace this new reach. “Things as important as the power of minorities, the long tail, the diversity and opportunity for innovation, growth and not as a threat, depend on it.”

But if meaningful change is to be enabled, if the premise of participation is to be realized, then it will be necessary to extend practice beyond the traditional reach of institutions and community networks. To the extent that we rely on existing institutions, we depend on an earlier-style “broadcast” form of communication, on in which the learner is the passive recipient rather than the active contributor. The participation gap widens. This, writes Alejandro Piscitelli, is what we have seen in much learning technology to date: “because it relies on broadcast models of Web 1.0, strengthening the culture of unilateral top-down world of books and quality content - fixed and unchanging, produced exclusively by adults and experts - ends up getting exactly what it says it wants to avoid.” [24]

Instead, learning online needs to rely on an ethos that has aggregated under the name “edupunk” in recent years. Coined by Jim Groom, [25] edupunk “is student-centered, resourceful, teacher- or community-created rather than corporate-sourced, and underwritten by a progressive political stance.” It is not simply an end to reliance on institutional structures, it is a kicking down of those structures, treating them not so much as scaffolds that lead to greater empowerment and participation, but rather as the embodiment of the forces that limit these, that keep the learner subservient. The role of edupunk is to create one’s own learning, using whatever materials may be at hand, to advance one’s own agenda, and not a logic and language of participation delivered intact from the existing community. Patricipation is essentially transformative, not only of oneself, though it is that, but also of any community or network in which one participates.

This is the light in which we should understand our participation in social network services such as Facebook, argues Piscitelli. It is not to use Facebook “as an educational tool”. Rather, it is to model, in the best edupunk style, the subversion of Facebook as a tool with which to learn. “it shows in practical state what we often glimpsed, rarely wanted to accept, let alone recognize: we do not know what we want to teach. And this for infinite reasons, being one of the most important the fact that ‘how to learn’ is constantly changing and cannot be taught once and forever.”

* * *

This, then, is the frame against which the essays in this volume are set. It is an exploration not only of Facebook, but of new technologies in general, not as devices that we may use to ‘deliver’ an education to our students, but rather, as a logic and a language that may be learned, to create a new literacy, that we may leverage in order to help ourselves learn. Each of the papers in the first two sections of this book explores this theme, approaching it from one direction or another, understanding Facebook as an architecture expressed in computer code, a community with its own ethos and set of values, or a language that can be learned and understood critically. The logic of participation as primary to learning is evident at all stages of the discourse, expressed as construction or creativity or communication, as well as the perils of the participation gap, the disempowerment we create when we treat ourselves and our students as passive observers.

How do these considerations become manifest in practice? The remaining essays in this volume explore this theme.

Consider video, for example. Film and television have been a part of education for decades and have had an impact that has been widely derided as unimpressive. Nadaner, echoing a conclusion reached by many others, writes, “While imaginative uses of television may augment visual thinking, constant exposure to fast-paced programming may inhibit the basic cognitive processes of attention, reflection and analysis.” [26] The faculties developed by the creation of video, though, is another matter. Maria Balestrini explores the creation of short videos in the Facebook project using mobile phones as a way for students to learn both an audio-visual language as well as the technology of recording devices. [27]

Using the technology simply to rewrite the rules of engagement of the traditional classroom also creates an interesting dynamic. Heloisa Primavera describes a scenario in which the number of course textbooks is reduced and where students are encouraged to explore new and much more diverse sources of information. This requires, they discovered, a new way of studying, one where students were encouraged to create abundance, to share liberally, to create – and then live in – a flow of content and information, and to think creatively and opportunistically.

Finally, we are faced with the possibility of the “post-university”. This is a possibility that has occurred to many as they explore digital alternatives. Can we imagine a world where universities are “irrelevant”, as David Wiley, a professor in the United States, suggests? [29] The Facebook Project, suggests Ivan Adaime, is a look at what this post-university would look like. [30] It is a way of looking at learning beyond the traditional transmission model, a model where instructors (and books) broadcast and students passively receive. The Facebook Project surprises, he writes, because of the level of engagement and commitment displayed by the participants. But the project, he writes, is not a model for others to follow, but a journey, which others may wish to undertake.


[1] Sid Yadav, ‘Facebook: The Complete Biography’, Mashable, August 26, 2006. http://mashable.com/2006/08/25/facebook-profile/

[2] Sarah Phillips, ‘A brief history of Facebook’, The Guardian, July 25, 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/jul/25/media.newmedia

[3] George Por, ‘The Well: Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link’, Netweaver, August 1, 1985, http://cgi.gjhost.com/~cgi/mt/netweaverarchive/000013.html

[4] Jonathon Lawrence, ‘A student created company is the talk of the web’, Cornell University Chronicle Online, April 11, 1996. http://www.news.cornell.edu/chronicle/96/4.11.96/webgenesis.html

[5] Clara Ciuffoli and Guadalupe López, Participatory audiences: Facebook as a paradigm of 2.0 literacy, this volume.

[6] John D. Sutter, ‘All in the Facebook family: older generations join social networks’, CNN, April 13, 2009. http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/04/13/social.network.older/index.html

[7] Ethan Zuckerman, ‘Revolution, Facebook Style’, New York Times, January 22, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/magazine/25bloggers-t.html

[8] Ignacio Uman and Carolina Venesio , ‘The challenge of selecting, indexing and mapping information. Graphical tools to visualize Facebook’, this volume.

[9] danah boyd, ‘Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace’, Apophenia Blog Essay. June 24, 2007. http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html

[10] Roberto Schimkus and Carolina Gruffat, ‘Architecture is the policy of the network. Facebook and its rivals’, this volume.

[11] Lawrence Lessig, ‘Architecting for control’, Internet Political Economy Forum, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, May 11, 2000. http://www.lessig.org/content/articles/works/camkey.pdf

[12] danah boyd. Ibid.

[13] Lawrence Lessig, Ibid.

[14] Dan Lockton, ‘Architectures of Control in Consumer Product Design’, MPhil Technology Policy dissertation, Judge Institute of Management, University of Cambridge, 2005. http://econpapers.repec.org/paper/wpawuwpot/0512009.htm

[15] George Orwell. Nineteen Eighty-Four I, 5, 1949.

[16] Cristóbal Cobo, ‘What if new technologies were not the answer?’, this volume.

[17] Mitchel Resnick, Distributed Constructionism, Proceedings of the International Conference on the Learning Sciences, Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education, Northwestern University, 1996. http://llk.media.mit.edu/papers/Distrib-Construc.html

[18] Diego Ernesto Leal Fonseca, Educamp Colombia, edu.co.blog weblog, Nobember 18, 2008. http://www.diegoleal.org/social/blog/blogs/dotedu-dotco/index.php/2008/11/16/educamp-colombia-1

[19] Stephen Downes and George Siemens, Connectivism and Connective Knowledge, web-based course, 2008. http://connect.downes.ca

[20] Diego Ernesto Leal Fonseca, Learning in a connected world: When to do (and to learn) is to click, this volume.

[21] Henry Jenkins, ‘Combating the Participation Gap: Why New Media Literacy Matters’, Distinguished Lecture, UC Berkeley School of Information, February 6, 2008. http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/newsandevents/events/dls20080206

[22] Alison Fuller, Heather Hodkinson, Phil Hodkinson and Lorna Unwin, ‘Learning as Peripheral Participation in Communities of Practice: A Reassessment of Key Concepts in Workplace Learning’, British Educational Research Journal, 31:1, February, 2005, 49-68. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1502156

[23] Dolores Reig, A world of endless media. Changes in learning, Facebook and the apotheosis of expressive applications, this volume.

[24] Alejandro Piscitelli, ‘Edupunk, ignorant teachers invisible education and The Facebook’, this volume.

[25] Stephen Downes, ‘Introducing Edupunk’, OLDaily, May 29, 2008. http://www.downes.ca/post/44760

[26] Dan Nadaner, Toward an analysis of the educational value of film and television, Interchange, Volume 14, Number 1 / March, 1983. http://www.springerlink.com/content/j0011r78j78621r6/

[27] Mara Balestrini, ‘From chalks to mobiles: cell phone short films to think transmedia images and narratives’, this volume.

[28] Heloisa Primavera, Coaching, peer to peer production and neolearning, this volume.

[29] Elaine Jarvik, Universities will be 'irrelevant' by 2020, Y. professor says, Deseret News, April 20, 2009. http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705298649/Universities-will-be-irrelevant-by-2020-Y-professor-says.html

[30] Iván Adaime, ‘The Facebook Project and the Post-university’, this volume

Kill the ego



Recently I was a cry baby over Jon Mott not citing my writings on the LMS. Jon was quick to address my complaint and put a sentence and footnote in for one of my more well known 2005 rants.

A discussion has followed.

Jim Groom questions the need to give specific attribution in his post, Credit where credit is due?

I’m also not too sure the issue of credit isn’t in many ways at the root of some of the more problematic issues tied up with traditional ways we have thought about teaching, learning, and scholarship more generally.

Jim links to Joss Winn's post, Towards a Manifesto for Sharing to support the idea that a formal system of referencing works against the natural and social aspects of the mediums we are communicating in, and possibly reinforces the dogma we are railing against.

Stephen Downes picks the issue up equating the academic process as an inherent power play taking away from the communities that foster the original ideas, using the ideas but severing the original connection through notions of acceptable reference material.

...But I wouldn't feel too bad, Leigh - there's no reference to any of my work in their either. That's what academia does, though. It whitewashes the original work and presents it as a genuine made-in-the-USA "discovery" with corporate-friendly references, patents to follow, no doubt.

Mike Caulfield helps Stephen with his point

I think there is a problem with the system. If you want to get something published, you have to choose to source stuff to peer reviewed journals, not blogs. This results in a sort of idea laundering that serves to hide the fact these ideas are coming from those crazy bloggers that everyone derides. And because these articles don't redirect people into the conversation that produced the ideas in the first place, it keeps the people dependent on EDUCAUSE reports dependent on EDUCAUSE reports. Which is, of course, the entire point of the current conventions.

But earlier in the same post, Mike supports Jim's original sentiments:

I don’t want our blog world to become a copy of the frozen sterile and gridlocked academic discourse we are fleeing. I want it to continue to be a conversation, and not to start reaching a 1:1 content to footnote ratio. I don’t want us to start bulking up our posts with ridiculously detached prose in an effort to be “citable”. (Heck, this post is way too long by my standards).

But at the same time, you can’t imagine how painful it will be for me to now sit in meetings with people from IT and have them quite literally try to educate me about this new thing called “Loosely Coupled Assessment”. And believe me, this will happen. It has before.

Jon has been posting short sometimes sharp comments too.. this one back on Jim's blog raises an interesting side angle:

I wonder if this concern for credit had anything to do with the abject failure of my Wikipedia challenge a couple of years back.

In which he outs Jim's call for humility with a very poor track record of Wikipedia edits. What's equally interesting is Jon's investigation into other A-lister contributions (or lack there of) to Wikipedia.

On this front I'm happy to say I have a pretty good contribution record across a number of Wikimedia Foundation projects including Wikipedia, Books and Versity, and go as far as saying such a record is an important feature on one's credibility rating :)

There is a lot to think about in all this discussion, but really the original concern I had was that my work didn't rate a mention anymore, especially if the criticisms of the LMS are finally going to mean something :(

I've since been reassured, but how reassured?

While it is about integrity, the connections and historic record, its equally if not more about that moral and human need for recognition, for occasionally doing something remarkable, and for just knowing that people know you're there and what you did. We all need it, we should do more to give it, otherwise we all disappear in a cacophony of untraceable sound bites, academic make believe, and institutionalisation/corporatisation.

In economics, a monopsony (from Ancient Greek μόνος (monos) "single" + ὀψωνία (opsōnia) "purchase") is a market form in which only one buyer faces many sellers. It is an example of imperfect competition, similar to a monopoly, in which only one seller faces many buyers. As the only purchaser of a good or service, the "monopsonist" may dictate terms to its suppliers in the same manner that a monopolist controls the market for its buyers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony

The Internet as Playground and Factory - Ulises Ali Mejias from Voices from The Internet as Play on Vimeo.

Harold Jarche, Jane Hart and Stephen Downes have been discussing learning generalised into concepts of dependent learning, independent learning, interdependent learning.

I like things in threes, and wanted to try these out in a practical sense of how people work their learning.

One of the more important principles I have set myself is independence. When I show a teacher how to do something, my goal for them (whether or not they share the goal at the time) is for them to achieve relative independence from me and the organisation they are affiliated with. Some of the more contentious examples of this thinking involve my discouragement of the use of an LMS or organisational email. The argument goes something like this:

Why would people, in an increasingly casualised teaching and research work force, invest time in learning a system that makes them dependent on and limited by their employer - especially if the functionality of that system is surpassed by external tools that also serve to give that person independence and the organisation gains as well?

Similarly, why should a student invest time in a system that makes them dependent on the organisation they are not likely to keep a relationship with for longer than 3 or 4 years, often much less - especially if the functionality of that system is surpassed by external tools that serve to give that person independence and the organisation gains as well?

It is easy to explain with email. You join or enroll with an organisation and for reasons that are not clear, they issue you with an email address with its own password and its own peculiar ways of operating. Inexperienced in the trappings of dependence, you build up a reputation, a network, even your professional reputation in that email system, only to be faced with a big problem when it comes time to leave that organisation. All the functionality of that email system can be surpassed using your own email address that frees you from the risk of dependence.

This scenario plays out across almost all the dwindling systems provided by the organisation. With the quality of external, utility even "cloud" based systems already surpassing what can be provided by the organisation, the question of should I use external systems can be answered by what both stand to loose and gain. What do you lose or gain by asserting independence? What does your organisation lose or gain by your assertion of independence?

• Do you use their restrictive Internet, or bring your own in via a wireless USB key?
• Do you build up a profile page on the organisation's website, or simply link it to your Linkedin profile or stream your own site into it via RSS and embed codes?
• Do you build your teaching and/or learning inside their learning management system, or do you build it outside on more popular channels under your own name, and link it in to the LMS if you have to?
• Do you publish research only on the restricted journal or do you negotiate release so you can link another copy on your own web?
• Do you use the lecture recording system, or put it out on your own uStream or Livestream channel with the connected functionality and cross posting features?

The list goes on.

Even those who have come to see the benefits of using external platforms fall into the same institutionalised trappings however. Recently I attended a seminar by James Neill for an initiative at UC called Hothouse. James arrived ready with his own uStream channel, but the host had also arrived with a uStream channel for the Hothouse. Confronted with the choice, James accepted to stream over the Hothouse channel, thereby surrendering his independence and accepting dependence on the Hothouse project. As it would turn out, the Hothouse forgot to click record on their stream, and so Jame's lost doubly, and the Hothouse gained very little.

An alternative would have been for James to stream on his own channel, and to link to and mention the Hothouse in his talk. The Hothouse could add James' recording to their own playlist, offsetting a variety of liabilities, and benefiting from the immediate exposure to James' network. James would also benefit from exposure to the Hothouse network while accepting responsibility for his own presentation. Hothouse gets networded, Jame's keeps independence. Its a win win situation. See also Out from under the umbrellas, and What would it be like to be the rain.

An institution, even an initiative within the Institution, has more to gain by networking. Take for example the Otago Polytechnic's Youtube channel. I set that channel up not to upload videos, but to collect and create playlists of any videos found on Youtube about Otago Polytechnic. The desire for an Institutional identity is still served, but without weakening a network and asking individuals to forgo their own identity for the sake of a collective. See also groups vs networks.

Where I personally draw the line in this independence, is in setting up my own domain. My personal challenge and long term experiment is to see how far I get free ranging, and how well I can manage an online identity that is distributed across free online services. I still follow the rules of thumb in terms of backup, but by cross posting rather than saving on my unreliable hard drives or servers. I agree however, that ultimate independence is in setting up your own domain and managing your own media. It doesn't have to be at the exclusion of popular channels, but that is more hassle and cost than I'm prepared to take right now. See also Tools for Conviviality.

Not my very first site, but made just after my first site, from July 20, 1995.


This was my first experiment in user-hostile design. Hidden in the various images were links to different parts of the site - the Klingon ship went to my Star Trek page, the star when to my logical fallacies page, my name to the 'about me' page...



Guide to the Logical Fallacies... which still has the same theme today!


My Star Trek pages...







Finally, my favorite page on the whole site...


You can see the whole thing on the Wayback Machine, but it will take a long time to load.

[ image : educause ]

What a classic diagrammatic overture incomplete with any semblance of connection between the artifact repository and that of cloud based publishing. Where are the swarming body-worn mobile repositories of a meshed network and interconnected global network that makes up the mobile learning ecosphere ?

Yes….another late entry as I meander through Leigh Blackall’s struggle via the Reverend with credits where credits are due and Johnathon Mott’s EDUCause paper on envisioning something beyond the architectures of learning commodification.

It strikes me as I prepare this Phd application that I’m probably  positioned to be agreeing with the matter of factness of an academic register for the refreshing array of ways to say the same thing complete with it’s reinforcement of semantics for correct referencing register whilst disagreeing with the need for a populist approach to redeem credits where credits are due from a personal politic perspective.

Questions I’m asking myself include;

• How many isms should I be bookmarking in a bid to understand the human condition of needing credit ?;
• Is the  history tab enough ?
• Does the LMS actually have any future in a (open) learning network ?
• Can the simple act of sharing knowledge be such a bad thing ?

Probably best I keep writing this open prose on why I’m examining the implications of geo-data enabled body worn technologies on educational organisational futures policy.

Pending the Moodle 2.0 release, who will tell Blackboard that it is dead, dead, dead….even if it has a cleaner interface ( apparently).

On Friday, James Neill presented Going Naked - Openism and Freedom in Academia to a small group at the University of Canberra. The talk and responses were broadcast via uStream, but the host for the session appears to have forgotten to click record. Luckily James took notes on the Wikiversity page.

Interest in open education and research practices seems to be growing at the University, particularly it seems within the Faculty of Health (the largest number of people at the session).

Jame's talk set down a case for staff at UC adopting open educational practices.

Discussion:

• Questioning the assertion that there is an altogether trend towards openness
• Concerns of commercial exploitation of openness
• What is the relavence of a University in the face of openness?
• Why does the university not engage staff in the review of policy?
• How much does the use of restricted content cost UC each year?

Actions:

• The Teaching and Learning Centre to find out the annual fees paid to CAL, and if possible - a break down of that fee.
• The Teaching and Learning Centre to find out why only external agencies review UC policy, what agency reviewed UC's IP policy, and what their review was.
• Leigh and James to run Workshops on how to source free content and reuse it in a free way
• Leigh and James to propose the Faculty of Health lead the university and adopt a default open education and research position.

A new report from the Pearson Foundation examines how digital media is affecting early literacy around the globe.

How is digital media changing the way young children learn? Could the way young children learn be evolving to meet a new, dynamic digital media format?

Authors Jay Blanchard, a professor at Arizona State University, and Terry Moore ask these and other questions in their new report: “The Digital World of Young Children: Emergent Literacy” (PDF), out this week from the Pearson Foundation.

The white paper was released at the annual Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) International Symposium.

Blanchard and Moore conclude “developmental milestones are changing as today’s children approach learning and literacy in new ways, not thought possible in the past. “

The paper is worth a read, especially for understanding our current context around the  emergent literacy needs of primary-aged students.

(via Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning)

Filed under: Australia, Communication Tools, Reading & Literacy, Research, Social Media, Technology and Software

This strikes me as potentially pretty huge news for open educational developers in the United States.

The [US] Department of Education has a role in stimulating the development and use of OER in ways that address pressing education issues. The federal government has proposed to invest $50 million per year for the next 10 years in creating an Online Skills Lab to develop exemplary next-generation instructional tools and resources for community colleges and workforce development programs. These materials will be available for use or adaptation with the least restrictive Creative Commons license. This work is expected to give further impetus to calls for open standards, system utilities, and competency-based assessments. (For more information on the Online Skills Lab, see the Learning section of this plan.)

50 Million per year! That's a potentially massive step up in pace for the USA, and a huge incentive to publishers and producers to get with it. David Wiley and co will now have their work cut out for them watching the progress and calling out the BS, wheel reinventions, double handling and corruption. A very important job it will be too, because this puts the USA way out in front for setting the International OER agenda.

Source: Creative Commons Blog

Second Life Viewer 2, now in beta, is the next generation of Second Life viewers that makes it easy to explore and socialize in Second Life with a familiar, browser-like experience, enhanced search, and fully integrated web-based media capabilities. Test Drive Second Life Viewer 2, Now in Beta by downloading here.

Filed under: 3D Worlds, Virtual Worlds Tagged: Second Life

A recent study by Leeds University has found evidence of a link between excessive internet use and depression. The information was collated from a questionnaire-based study of 1,319 young people and adults, used data compiled from respondents to links placed on UK-based social networking sites.

The respondents answered questions about how much time they spent on the internet and what they used it for; they also completed the Beck Depression Inventory – a series of questions designed to measure the severity of depression. The report, by the university’s Institute of Psychological Sciences, said 18 of the people who completed the questionnaire – 1.4% of the total – were internet addicts.

“Our research indicates that excessive internet use is associated with depression, but what we don’t know is which comes first – are depressed people drawn to the internet or does the internet cause depression?” the article’s lead author, Dr Catriona Morrison, said, “What is clear is that, for a small subset of people, excessive use of the internet could be a warning signal for depressive tendencies.”

This is the first in depth study of its kind in the west and now leaves us to consider what the wider societal implications are. Today in the Guardian there are reports of a couple in Korea who allowed their three-month-old daughter to starve to death while they devoted hours to playing a computer game that involved raising a virtual character of a young girl.

No related posts.

Well shit hey! Educause published a paper calling the LMS out!

Envisioning the Post-LMS Era: The Open Learning Network. By Jonathan Mott

I was sad to see my name not in the references, perhaps 2005 was too long ago! Perhaps blog posts don't rate, perhaps its just me.. anyway, here's an impotent addition to the bibliography that's missing :)

December 2004. The Post LMS Age
May 2005. Everything you need to teach and learn online
May 2005. Graffiti is OK - BlogTalk DownUnder 2005
June 2005. More against the LMS
July 2005. Networked Learning
August 2005. EdNA Groups or the Open Network
September 2005. Lawsuit forces Web 2 learning strategies
September 2005. ePortfolios - I don't get it?
Nov 2005. Die LMS Die, you too PLE
Dec 2005. LMS Comic
Jan 2006. Learning should be free, its an education that can cost
February 2006. Host your own or hold a third party? Change needed as per usual
March 2006. Education, reactionaries, determinism and singularity
April 2006. Digital Network Literacy
April 2006. A snapshot of networked learning
May 2006. What's in a name? Why some succeed and others fail
July 2006. Technological Change and Systemic Change
September 2006. Groups and/or networks... the future of learning in a networked world
October 2006. Out from under the umbrellas
October 2006. What would it be like to be the rain
November 2006. Flogging the dead horse that died in the trough
2007 and 08 are a blur.. lost to the Wordpress blog, self censored due to work place conflicts
January 2009. LMS, VLEs.. oh PLEs what next? ePortfolios?
February 2009. Migrating from Blackboard to Moodle (via the web)

In less than 48 hours and in partnership between UCNISS and CIT, we've submitted an application to the Australian Flexible Learning Framework ACT, for their eLearning Innovations Fund.

Google Search, Youtube and Wikipedia are within the top 10 most visited websites in Australia, and are well configured for mobile as well as desktop access. The open nature of the data held at these sites makes for ease of reusability and customisation. We know with some certainty that students refer to these sites for learning over most other sources, but there are issues and concerns relating to the reliability of the information. This project will collect and review information on those channels relating to the Diploma of Sport Development and Certificates 3 and 4 of Fitness, developing collections, adding supplementary material, and designing learning activities for the reliable use and engagement with such material.

In a face to face setting, students will analyse their unit outlines and assessments to identify key words and concepts for use in Google searches. They will be shown how to refine search results by linking through networked media, socially recommended media, and "see also" links. By creating their own accounts on Youtube and Wikipedia, they will be shown how to organise and customise information to their needs, followed by discussions on the importance and methods of reviewing and critiquing the information. To fully comprehend the user generated nature of Youtube and Wikipedia, students will be asked to adopt a Wikipedia article and make contributions following the Wikipedia standards and guidelines, as well as upload instructional videos to Youtube that demonstrate their understanding on a particular topic or competency. Finally, they will be shown the work of their teachers, who have developed collections and playlists along with a series of learning activities that use content on Youtube and Wikipedia, and invited to join an ongoing community of practice committed to reviewing, editing and adding reliable new content related to the subject areas on a longer term basis.

Fingers crossed...

A colleague here at UC is engaging with my ideas, commenting and sending links to research. I very much appreciate the engagement, the over all silence and disengagement from work colleagues is always a disappointment.

Recently I was sent a link to another one of those annoying formats only researchers like to use, the PDF, writing up a study done by Adam Friedman and Tina Heafer called "You Think for Me, So I Don't Have To." The Effect of a Technology-Enhanced, Inquiry Learning Environment on Student Learning in 11th-Grade United States History.

I think the study was bogus, but more interestingly - points to the inherent problems and bias in teaching practice and the research of its impact on learning.

The abstract:

In a study investigating the effects of student engagement in inquiry learning through the development of Web sites, nearly every student reported having enjoyed the project, and the majority scored an A or B for their project grade. However, neither enjoyment nor high achievement on this performance task necessarily translated into high scores on the unit test. Therefore, this paper explores why success in a technology rich inquiry environment did not translate to measurable changes in student learning. Results demonstrated that students were not accustomed to this type of pedagogy and that the assessment did not match the task.

I was looking all over the paper for some more detail on what they thought inquiry learning was in a school context, what they though "the Internet" was, what they meant by students creating "websites", and what they mean when they refer to "use of technology" in social studies. I like to think I know what all that means in a school context, and that has no similarity to what it means in real life, and real inquiry learning.

Students created "websites", what sort of websites exactly? Websites all out on their own where no one would see, or editing Wikipedia articles or creating Wikibooks - where everyone will see and evidently engage, leading to authentic engagement with the Internet, networked learning and continuous inquiry learning. In the absence of a qualifying statement in the paper, I'm able to assume that the teachers in the school, like most I've met, think uncritically on the feasibility of any of this truly taking place in a school context. Saying they used the Internet in this study, to consume information so as to create obscure websites amounts to saying they used all the world to create a cardboard poster with scissors and glue for a 5 minute show and tell in their safe little classroom.

And get this P204:

Despite the availability of primary and secondary sources for students on a Web site
developed by the researchers, many students spent a significant amount of time searching
for images using search engines and electronic encyclopedias, particularly Google images
(http://www.images.google.com) and Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.com). These
sites were often the first place students sought information about and images of World
War II. Researchers as well as the teacher had to remind students that there had been a
Web site designed to provide them with resources to complete their Web site
development class.

If only their teachers and the researchers they cited, used Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons a little hey! The places the students (indeed everyone!) go to could be the same place the teachers want them to go! Perhaps the students instinctively knew the content the teachers had gathered was bogus in copyright, and too difficult to reuse, fraught with unreliable URLs, and very poor rez images based on the extent of the teacher's Google Image Search abilities.. :) LOL

I guess my reading of it comes down to this. It seems the researchers and the teachers didn't consider the bias that their generalisations brought to the question. They didn't elaborate on the things being used in the measure, such as "The Internet", "Create websites", "Use technology", coupled with an uncritical view of common educational practice such as assigning work that amounts to inauthentic guess-what-the-teacher-wants tasks. Inquiry learning by way of the Internet? Somehow I doubt its possible in schools.

But this criticism goes deep into the cultural make up of institutionalised education doesn't it? We don't teach and learn in the real world, we create replicas and simulations, within impossible time frames, to formulate a schizophrenic appreciation of the world that fits our bureaucratic processes.

How would I do it differently? Using the popular Internet to teach and learn would be a start I guess. And try this old post for size: Teaching has nothing to do with technology

I hope this usual ranting critique doesn't turn my newly engaged colleague away. Maybe I've got this study all wrong!?

The past few weeks i've been guiding 9 locals in my neighborhood on a Webdesign with Wordpress course, but they're pretty savvy and inquisitive and I can't get through the course without alluding to RSS, my own Twitter obsession, open source software, embedding media, and getting them somehow intertwined with my own social network(s). This is great but it can get pretty confusing for some, and a bit off the topic of just creating a simple site using Wordpress ... so, i've been thinking about developing a new course for next semesters offerings along the line of "Social Media for ..." something. I haven't figured the right label yet, but it would a fast paced workshop on how to develop your social media network, how to manage and cultivate such a network, and why you might want to do such a thing (personal, marketing, professional networking, etc.)

So it was timely to see gnuchris (a member of a network I sometime inhabit) tweet a reminder of his Planet Talo river of news feed ... where I saw this post by Steven Parker about developing a master course around some networked principles originally articulated by George Siemens:

1. Amplifying
2. Curating
3. Wayfinding and socially-driven sensemaking
4. Aggregating
5. Filtering
6. Modelling
7. Persistent presence

My experience in the community education centre's Wordpress course really resonated with this idea by George, that

"For educators, control is being replaced with influence. Instead of controlling a classroom, a teacher now influences or shapes a network"

As I work on ideas for this course over the next few weeks I think i'll organize them around these principles rather than any really specific technologies or tools.

(Image Credits: Patch, by VirtualErn. CC-By)

(aka ‘Axe a TV station instead’)

This whole impending closure of BBC 6 Music has got me thinking. Obviously, I’m very very unhappy about the prospect of it closing - 6 Music offers something that nobody else does. 6 Music’s DJs are a diverse, intelligent bunch, playing a wide range of great music - and I’m constantly scurrying off to t’internet to find out more about the band that’s currently playing.

And, of course, there are the peerless, magnificent, multi-talented, yet self-effacing but always hyper-endearing, song-warring geniuses, the eye-wateringly, stomach-crampingly funny, Adam and Joe.

I can’t understand that, under the rationale to focus on “higher quality” programming, Mark Thompson is proposing to axe 6 Music. Mark, you’ve got high quality right there - on 6 Music - and it seems pretty good value for money too.

So, I’ve done my small bit, joined facebook groups, signed petitions, posted on twitter, etc. And today, I’ve taken part in the consultation process, which I appreciate that the BBC trust have put together to garner the public’s views. This is what got me thinking.

I think that a radio station is a more distinctive entity than a TV station, and if I had to make a cut anywhere on the BBC, it would be to one of their TV stations. (BBC3 I’d say, but, in the sake of neutrality, I’ll keep an open mind.) What I’m saying is that I will channel hop on TV, but I won’t do that to the same extent on radio. I’ll leave the radio on the same channel, and tune my attention in or out depending on what’s playing, or what they’re saying. We consume radio in a different way to television. And more importantly to my point, I believe that we go to particular radio stations at particular times because they fit our current mood, as well as our values (in much the same way as we go to a particular newspaper). I will turn on Radio 4 or 6 Music because that’s the mood I’m in at the time - but I would never say, “Ooh, I’m in a BBC2 (TV) mood now…”.

For what it’s worth, and for the potential interest of anyone out there, these are my thoughts - and I said more or less the same thing in the consultation…

I think, if anything, that TV programming could be cut and consolidated among fewer channels (even though it would pain me to see BBC4 cut, for example). A radio station is more important to have as an *entity* than is a TV station, in my opinion and experience. In other words, I don’t mind tuning into a TV station to watch a specific programme, but I like to be able to turn on a radio station and know that it will be giving me ‘the kind of programming that I know it does, and that I’m currently in the mood for’. Radio 4 and Radio 6 (and occasionally Radio 3) are my go-to stations, covering most of my moods!

#savebbc6music!

#whattheboggins?!

Will Richardson posts on the teacher as a master learner, inspired by some observations from George Siemen’s post ‘Teaching in Social and Technological Networks’.
This snippet gives an idea of what Will means by the teacher as a ‘Master Learner’:

“George goes on to suggest a totally different way of thinking about “teaching” one where instead of controlling a classroom, a teacher now influences or shapes a network.” And he discusses seven different roles that teachers will play, all of which are worth the read…we don’t teach subjects, we teach kids. And I’ll add to that: we teach kids to learn. We can’t teach kids to learn unless we are learners ourselves, and our understanding of learning has to encompass the rich, passion-based interactions that take place in these social learning spaces online. Sure, I expect my daughter’s science teacher to have some content expertise around science, no doubt. But more, I expect him to be able to show her how to learn more about science on her own, without him, to give her the mindset and the skills to create new science, not just know old science.“

The following are codified behaviours George advocates a teacher can adopt in the context of networked learning environments:

1. Amplifying
2. Curating
3. Wayfinding and socially-driven sensemaking
4. Aggregating
5. Filtering
6. Modelling
7. Persistent presence

Read George’s teaching paper and Will’s ‘Master Learner’ post for an explanation of what they mean.

I'm going to try and model their ideas in Moodle 2.0, it makes sense to me, and as a teacher I’m asking myself how do l become a master learner? The answer for me is to model a learning design for myself based on my learning need.

At the moment I have a NEED TO LEARN how to grow food so I’ve therefore found an opportunity to participate in some hands on workshops organised by Sydney Carriageworks, Kitchen Garden Project, there I will learn about.

• Composting
• Planter boxes
• No dig gardens
• Seed saving
• Planting
• Harvesting

By participating in the Kitchen Garden project I am expected to share the application of my newfound skills and knowledge with a wider network (i.e. using Moodle 2.0, wikibooks, youtube, flickr networks etc.) I’ll use the opportunity to try and model the George Siemen's approach, with a learning design based on the practical Kitchen Garden tasks.

From this I will document and share my resources and networks, found, adapted, linked, embedded or created by me in Moodle 2.0. The learning design, resources and networks together will make up a narrative of coherence' or ‘master course’.

(Note: It’s good to model this approach outside the context of an education organisation in that for me the point is to demonstrate a move towards self directed learning in a LOCAL AND INDEPENDENT/ REAL LIFE CONTEXT (with RPL opportunities for VocEd sector).

This diagram from GnuChris’s twitter feed (Thanks!) sums up a good workflow for developing a master course:
Based on work from http://wikieducator.org/File:KtOER-Cycle-Find.png

“A master course is a complete Moodle course consisting of well designed learner centered activities and resources. A master course is typically developed by a team of teachers (with experience in learning design) and made available in a community repository.

A master course can be cloned from the repository and locally adapted to improve upon the learning design. There are regular reviews of local changes and where appropriate new learning design elements are incorporated into the master course as part of continuous improvement process.” Steven Parker 2010

Plannning & documenting my own learning design approach is an important part of this master learner process and I’ll utilise some fine, easy to understand templates developed by Vicki Marchant as part of her research into learner centred design. In these templates Vicki focuses on thinking and documenting 5 elements in relation to course design.

• Task Design (Learning Activity, Sequence)
• Tutoring (Feedback, Discussion)
• Teamwork (Collaboration)
• Topics & Tools (Content/Resources/Tech)
• Reflection (Review, explanation)

As part of my SWSI work training teachers in innovation and technology enhanced learning I advocate teachers document and share their learning designs as part of the course they deliver to students. Students can then explore and understand as to why? they are asked to do the learning tasks/ activities. Students may also see the value in developing their own learning design approach as part of their trade/business/ studies?

As said the platform I’m going with for my ‘growing food’ master course is Moodle 2.0 for its new network friendly features AND direction towards the community hub/ repository functionality. Also refer: http://tinyurl.com/repositoryexample .
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Community_hub

As somebody who works day to day with learning platforms, learning design and networked technology I already have the prerequisite skills and knowledge to uderstsand where George Sienmens' is coming from, when teacher new to networking technologies clone my Moodle course they will have exposure to a variety of the networks which they can explore and connect to.

• Design a master course for myself on growing food (based on Kitchen Garden tasks) and publish to Moodle + Wikibooks.
• Explain my learning design.
• Share my master course.
• Open up lines of communication for feedback from others.
• Let others clone a master copy of my course to build upon & adapt for their own learning needs.
• Participate/ give feedback...learn more about growing food.

It's a draft for me but feedback is welcome.
Related:

"Leigh Blackall developed open education at Otago Polytechnic New Zealand over a period stretching 2007/2009. The Polytechnic signed progressive IP and copyright policies, and encouraged staff to use popular internet and social media to aid teaching and learning. Leigh is completing research measuring returns on this investment, and will describe the process and initial findings."

http://webconf.det.nsw.edu.au/p13103637/ - Leigh’s presentation.

Today’s conference began again bright and early at 8 am and already I’ve been to 2 sessions and the trade show, and now I’m waiting for the 3rd session.

The first presentation on Interactive Technologies was actually about how one school system installed 1200 Promethean interactive whiteboards, one in every classroom, over the summer holidays 5 years ago, and the difference that has made to classroom pedagogy.

Each classroom also has 4 or 5 stand alone computers with Promethean software available so students can prepare materials for use on the IWB. The presenter talked about how some existing technologies quickly became obsolete, the changes that have occurred in classroom dynamics, and how the IWB has become the de facto standard for instructional delivery.
He also talked about the effect he is noticing on the text book budget where spending is dropping quite dramatically.

The second session I participated in was with Steve Hargadon, whom some of you will know from Classroom 2.0. His topic predictably was Social Networking in Education.
Steve’s premise is that Social Networking provides an excellent platform for collaboration and professional development. The audience was mainly district and school administrators who are considering “the next step” in providing web 2.0 tools for their systems.
Steve’s advice is to provide for their teachers first and then think about their students. Steve talked very persuasively about what social networking can do for teachers. He warned that you can manage the process but not the outcome. There will often be a power shift once the network is established.

I feel as if I may be back, for real. I have a new job here: http://www.creative.auckland.ac.nz its kind of full-circle for me as I started out at the University of Auckland when moving back to NZ 7 years ago, got a bit waylayed at AUT, but am back at where I really wanted to be the whole time. I'm not leaving this time ... so you're stuck with me. I'll try to play nice.

This morning I listened to really a inspiring Keynote by Larry Keeley called Finding the Future First. The conference theme is innovation, ingenuity, and insight. Larry took us through the basics of innovation and some thinking about what we need to get innovation in education, which is typically sluggish to adopt and adapt.

Among the points he made:
1. All enterprises and industries need to innovate, to be responsive to changing conditions, but most innovations faiL. The failure rate is 96%.
He quoted Charles Darwin - it is not the strongest of the species that survive… but the ones most responsive to change.
2. Effective innovation is not about new products, it is fundamentally about having more discipline. New products are the least valuable things to come up with.

He identified 10 types of innovation related to Finance, Process, Offering and Delivery. All important things use a combination of the 10. Most stitch together 6 or more types of innovation at the one time. The most successful hit 8 or more.

3. Systemic change is routine. It is easier to spot looking backwards in time than in looking forwards. Central control should always be suspect. Real systemic change affects the way we do things.

4. Standards pave the way for improved function and style. When we agree on standards, the pace of innovation increases. The problem in education is that we often have only a loose alignment to standards. In education there is often a complex web of interdependence.

Keeley wound up by talking about the catalytic role of educational professional associations like CoSN in sponsoring change and innovation.

So today I heard John Hattie today going through his list of factors that make a difference (or don’t) for students in our schools. A few sacred cows get a little trampled on in this process but here’s what popped into my head as he (eloquently) spoke this morning.

His research is based on thousands of research studies conducted over the past fifteen years, so reflects what has been happening in schools. So essentially his research can only be used to change schools as we currently know them.  I know that all research is based on past events but how do his findings ensure that we can cater for what education or at a more basic level, learning, will look like in a increasingly networked future?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/4118660543/

Here are my raw and at times possibly inaccurate notes from this morning’s presentation by Professor John Hattie. His meta-analysis of educational research in his book “Visible Learning” has provoked a lot of interest and some indignation from the education community. I will say that he is a very engaging speaker able to show off his findings while weaving a narrative and context for his audience to come to terms with his findings. He spoke for about two hours today – we were lucky enough to have six of our staff attend – and my attention waned a bit at times so the notes are patchy. I’ll post some reflection at a later date.

Tried hard to make the data tell a story, condensed thousands of studies into a continuum of “Influences on Achievement?” Curriculum is important but it is not what makes the difference for learning in the classroom. Reducing class size has a positive effect of 0.20 which equates to advancing achievement of 9 months – reminded any reporters in the room that he was not saying that it was not worth reducing class sizes. All you need to enhance achievement is to “have a pulse.” We should be looking for the 0.40 improvement factor. Australia has a pretty good education system. We talk about the people who hardly exist – the bad teachers. We need to be concerned with the OK teachers who should be doing a better job.  We should know what effect we are having on our students.

The 0.40 is the average of what happens now. We should not allow autonomy in our teaching profession – “some teachers are making the difference.”  Kids without schooling achieve progress of 0.15 anyway (Liberia, Guatemala etc) through street smarts etc.

Retention is one of the most negative things that can happen to a student’s learning, was an expert witness in a trial for NAACP showing that retention with US education is aimed predominantly at African-American or Hispanic students.

Teacher subject matter knowledge does not have a positive effect.  [Spirited discussion within the audience at this point.]  Would matter if we had deep learning rather than surface content learning and effective assessments, more time spent listening than talking.

Hattie’s data is not about What Could but What Has Happened. Class reduction makes a difference only if there is a change in teaching practice. Too many parents judge the school by the amount of homework – recommends no more than 5 minutes, make sure it’s something that the kids already know (deliberative practice) and make sure that it is assessed. A better option would be for parents to engage with their kids to talk about their learning.

Used abseiling as a example of learning that is at the 0.50 level – Outdoor/Adventure Programs at 0.52. The important ingredient is challenge – keeping all students to be challenged or they will challenge you!  Show what success looks like – as examples, the steps to success. If a seven year old is struggling with mathematics, give them the answer so that they can work on the process. Direct instruction is powerful because it gets teachers talking to other teachers about teaching. How do you create dialogues around teaching? We need to be able to change our teaching on the fly to suit the different ways that students will learn.

Labelling kids – one of the most damaging things the education system does is use labels to define what students should only be capable of.

The No 1 is self reported grades – exceed expectations, more powerful – setting a safe target is not enough. Streaming is a way of telling kids “Know your place.” Students find it easier to set performance based targets – faster, neater etc. When kids set targets, they invariably reach them. We need to share targets with the kids – the most important thing for home is to have high expectations for their kids.

What the student brings to the classroom is pretty powerful – 50%.  Largest variant we have control over is teachers – the differences between schools is less 8% variance in Australia and NZ, students have similar opportunity for achievement regardless of schools.

His mantra:

When teachers SEE learning through the eyes of the student
and
when students SEE themselves as their own teachers

We can’t change the kids in front of us – but it’s the teacher mindframe that makes the difference.

Transparency with Learning Intentions and Success Criteria is very important. Create a dialogue within your school on a common conception of progression. 80% of feedback kids get is from other kids and 80% of that is wrong. A lot of general feedback is given in the class but less than 3 seconds of that is received by the individual. Feedback about the task is infinitely more valuable than feedback about self [Well done, good girl] etc.

Assessment should be totally used for feedback in the classroom and the student, not foremost for the teacher.

Classrooms that welcome error are the best places for our students. Relationships in the classroom are important to foster so that students feel comfortable to make mistakes and learn from them.

www.visiblelearning.co.nz