moving day

I moved this blog, posts and all, to here: http://techteachlearn.wordpress.com/

I still like Blogger and still maintain my Second Life blog here, but am starting a team venture and wanted a fresh start in a new and different space.

just for fun

Maybe you've already seen this Twitter-phobic video, but does it express what you've been thinking?



That's a pretty brief video; compare to this long article on whether Twitter is good or bad for us. It contains the video and a few other cartoons, but you will have to show if you can really focus your attention to read the whole thing.

crowdsourcing, smart mobs, ideagoras: more collaboration or something else?

First a few terms.

crowdsourcing: from Wikipedia, "a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call." Other terms for this act: "community-based design" and "distributed participatory design." Some also call it spec work because members of the community can bid on doing the job or hope to be chosen for the job, instead of going through normal hiring methods. crowdSPRING is an online company that facilitates crowdsourcing for its members.

smart mobs: From Wikipedia, "A smart mob is a form of self-structuring social organization through technology-mediated, intelligent emergent behavior. The concept was introduced by Howard Rheingold in his book Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution." Such mobs can physically gather just to create a scene, or they might have some social/political motivation, as in Meetups (remember how popular those were a few elections ago?). Are these virtual entities examples of the smart mob/crowdsourcing phenomenon: eBay (business built and powered by users), Second Life (a virtual world built by users), and Wikipedia, itself (an encyclopedia built and maintained by users)?

ideagoras: Depending on the context, a place/space/network/marketplace for ideas. Drawing on the popular concept of crowdsourcing, the focus is on innovation. Take the Innovate-Ideagora, related to the journal Innovate, it describes itself as "an open agora, where problems seek solutions, new visions are explored, and the status quo is challenged." Or there's this take on ideagoras in business that sounds a lot like any crowdsourcing article, but the concept in business often leans toward consulting services. I suppose the old think-tank is an instance of an ideagora.

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What's in it for education?

Here's an interesting section of the blog Education Innovation on Crowdsourcing. It's more than one post, so scroll down through all. The first post looks forward to a crowdsourced type of wikipedia of video content that is that is educational and research driven. More likely to happen in the near future are the crowdsourced textbooks envisioned in the second post, and I expect that they would also take advantage of the participatory wiki format. Can you imagine a wikipedia-like site with tones of content on one subject? Let's say you need course material (no longer called a textbook) for a course in Nursing and there's a comprehensive and searchable wiki on the topic that allows you to pick and choose where to send students for readings and resources, like videos and images with Creative Commons licenses, links to professional organizations and journal articles. And you might even ask your students to work on editing a page or topic in the wiki as a way to both contribute to the profession and learn more through research.

You could have students experiment with crowdsourcing an idea on Twitter or some other microblogging service and reporting the results. Or introduce a group project using the concept of crowdsourcing to give students a fresh approach to the old group project that so many students dread. Have them create a wiki for the project or use Twitter to discuss it or let them decide what tool to use.

Lastly, as a professional concept, how do you feel about crowdsourcing a solution to a problem in teaching? Have you built a professional learning network (PLN) on Twitter that could respond to your questions? Does your institution or department have a wiki or blog that can serve as an ideagora? Maybe if college committees were called Smart Mobs and allowed to behave like them, they would be more productive and would be more interested in meeting.

I knew there was one good example of using Twitter as a crowdsourcing tool for a library project: http://b2e.nitle.org/index.php/2008/12/05/crowdsourcing_ideas_about_libraries_in_2

The Seven Deadly Sins Of Technology In Higher

Are you guilty of any of these positions?

The Seven Deadly Sins Of Technology In Higher

View more presentations from Sarah Robbins.

Friday Fun w/ Augmented Reality

Tried out the cool feature at http://ge.ecomagination.com/smartgrid/#/augmented_reality, which you can do if you have a webcam on your computer. Here's an example of how it will work from YouTube:



I did it and it was fantastic. You can see my video on Screencast:
GrinnPidgeon

clicker report

Remember all the practicing with online polling options and thinking about clickers? Well, here is the report I worked up on the current state of classroom response systems:

Class Response Systems

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Reports Academic Work audience response sy classroom response s

love the cloud, fear the cloud

I had two interesting experiences with clouds yesterday--as in those spaces on the Internet where you can access software as a service (SaaS) and store files, for example.

I sync my Outlook calendar (Entourage, really, on my Mac) with my Mac iCalendar and then with my Google calendar, so that I can always see what I should be doing when I don't have access to the school network. In addition, it allows me to embed my Google calendar on my personal web page, so others can see where I am. All my information and the syncing process works through my account on Mobile Me, an Apple service that provides email, calendar, and storage.

Well, something went wrong yesterday, meaning I did something wrong. Wasn't paying attention. Said yes when I should have said no. In an instant, all my calendars were empty, and I realized how much I depend on them to guide my work and schedule. I had some frightful moments, until I realized I had published my iCal as a web page for sharing and that it still existed, but I didn't know for how long. So I subscribed to it and then went about fixing everything in a backwards fashion. So, yesterday, was clearly an example of the love/hate relationship with one cloud in my sky.

Later, there was a flurry of discontent on every social network about Facebook's new terms of service which spelled out what seemed to be a right to everyone's posted material, such as photos and videos, forever. Here's how Mark Zuckerberg explained the situation, and let's see if he objects to my using the photo he uses on Facebook:

Our philosophy is that people own their information and control who they share it with. When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they've asked us to share it with. Without this license, we couldn't help people share that information.

One of the questions about our new terms of use is whether Facebook can use this information forever. When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person's sent messages box and the other in their friend's inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear. Read the rest . . . .

As I noted on Twitter yesterday before this was posted, to quote myself, "I sorta figure when I post any content that I am tacitly agreeing to share it with anyone who can right-click--what's the FB difference?" So, it didn't come as a surprise to me that Facebook made clear that it was one of anyone. Some people were talking about how to delete your entire Facebook account, but in social networking, aren't we making the first step of trusting the network itself? Sure, there are ways to work safely, to be selective in the information you share, but if you fear the software/application/site/etc. you are paralyzed. I'm not worried about my content on Facebook, but I can tell you that I do not share everything. I am not playing the 8, 16, 20 or whatever number things-you-don't-know-about-me game that's going around. Let's leave some things unknown and still socialize for our own reasons.

P.S I could have posted any number of page images from Facebook to illustrate my post, but decided on the Tri-C libraries fan page, in case you didn't know about it and wanted to be a fan.

Update 2/18/09: Facebook reconsiders its TOS, reverting to the old TOS in the meantime:

why Twitter?

It's been a year since I first posted about Twitter. I was harsh, unkind, suggesting that we were twits, me included. Yet, I gave it a long chance to become part of my daily technology-reading routine, alongside reading RSS blog feeds, online news, email, calendar agenda.

During that time, I thought a lot about whether it could usefully be an educational tool, and I think that it has developed into one, not limited to a prescribed use, but open to your imagination.

Twitter is a tool for microblogging. Micro, because you are limited to 140 characters. Go over and get a warning, meet the 140 exactly and you've created a twoosh. Blogging, because you are publishing, and if I must remind you again, a blog is not a discussion board. You publish for your own reasons and replies are gravy. On Twitter, you may get a reply, a re-tweet when someone wants to let more people know what you said, a direct message that is not public, or you may get nothing at all. On occasion, your tweet will create a ruckus and it will spread like a virus, but virality is not something you can control.

I use it personally and professionally by carefully picking people to follow whom I know personally and/or professionally or would like to know. I follow around a hundred and that's plenty for me, because I like to keep up with what they are saying, and that's not as hard as it sounds because there are a host of applications and plugins that make it easy to stay connected. I often have both Tweetdeck and Twhirl open, or might go to the Twitter web page, using the Firefox plugin Power Twitter, because it shows pix and videos inline. Another Firefox plugin, Twitterfox, pops up with new Tweets from the browser status bar. You can have Twitter update your Facebook status through a Facebook app, and you can install a Twitter gadget alongside your Gmail.

Professionally, I benefit from hearing about new technology, following links to neat blogs and articles and videos about technology, as well as hearing appeals for answers to complicated technology problems, or news about successes. And along the way, these professional voices become a community I belong to, not one that is all work and no play.

What can you use it for in your classes? Well, I hear that it can work as a classroom response system if all your students are equipped with computers or web-enabled mobiles. You would "collect" the responses on the Twitter web page if you wanted to display it.

Although I'm not a fan of using Twitter to create threads, hash-mark tagging (#your keyword) allows you to see all the comments with the same tag. So, you can create a tag for your group or class and then see them all on the Twitter search page. You might allow students to create what's referred to as a backchannel in the class, an ongoing Twitter discussion of participants (students)--such use of Twitter is now common at conferences and large meetings, or at national events like the recent election or last night's Grammy Awards.

I've gone way over my 140 character limit. Give it a try, a good long try, and let me know what you think.

more wiki ideas

I am finishing reading and annotating the new Horizon Report, and was just distracted by something useful from Howard Rheingold--this link to the syllabus for Digital Democracy, a course at Tufts, taught by Joshua Goldstein and Patrick Meier.

Please note the nice feature that it resides on a wiki, where it can be edited to update information, and can be a space for the course participants to work, if permitted.

2009 Horizon Report

Download the 2009 Horizon Report from New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) and let's talk about it tomorrow.

[Sorry, got sidetracked by office visitors and I'm a day late with my response to the new Horizon Report.] Here are the six topics covered this year:

• mobiles
• cloud computing
• geo-everything
• personal web
• semantic-aware applications
• smart objects

I have some comments about three of them, but feel free to add your own comments about those or any on the list.

1. Mobiles carries over last year's topic of Mobile Broadband, and I won't be surprised to see it again until we all have mobile devices that have access to broadband and data plans. I think there are still too many people wearing blinders about our students' access to both broadband and devices that can access the web. Many students are lucky to have laptops with which they can access our wireless on campus. So, I always take with a grain of salt ways of using cell phones in the classroom that require Web and email connectivity. So many recommended classroom uses are based on the iPhone, possibly the most expensive of the smart phones, without consideration of students' actual devices, that I am wary of the success of such projects. I do agree, however, that we are moving closer to a time when the mobile device is commonplace and ubiquitous.
2. Geo-Everything: Again, the ability to use geo-location/GPS to tag locations, depends on mobile devices to a great extent, if you are in the field. And the report's examples do illustrate that field work, particularly in the sciences, makes good use of geo-tagging. I'm grateful that they also include a use in literary studies of mapping out geographical locations in literary works. They use the example of The Travels of Marco Polo, and provide a link to an idea using Google Earth to explore literature. Much like recreating a virtual literary space in Second Life, this kind of visualization is engaging as it inspires students to think creatively in imagining more fully the author's depictions.
3. Personal Web. This is particularly interesting to me, as I am thoroughly invested in having access to information at my fingertips and publishing my ideas, whether it be here on this blog, in Twitter or Facebook, on my personal Website, or my ePortfolio. The customization of personal Web space through widgets, for example, is a step in creating your own Personal Learning Network (PLN), part of the ability to educate yourself. Combined with tools like Zotero and Delicious that let you aggregate resources in links or bibliographic entries, and that let you have access to the collected resources of others, today's students participate in their own development in ways we couldn't have imagined ten years ago. Read a previous post about do-it-yourself sites, like PageFlakes for an example.

What I like about the Horizon Report is that is prods us to look to the future, says it's okay to wonder about how technology might advance and how educators might use it. I think it can often have us thinking about what's available now, as well, which is good, because now is where we are.