September 2007
54 posts
Reality EduTV and Open Second Life
This weekend I saw the future. Not that it’s the long term future by any stretch since things seem to be moving at warp speed anyway. But there were a couple of technologies on display at the “New Media Literacies in Learning Landscapes Conference” in Charlottetown, PEI that had me feeling like that giddy little geek that sometimes pops up when everything around me is feeling new again. The first...
Scottish Learning Fesitval
Scottish Learning Festival is doing what all conferences ought to be doing - namely posting videos of keynotes, interviews, using a conference blog to post new resources, etc. Not related to SLF, but quite interesting - Scott Leslie provides a link to a service called 51 Weeks with “the idea being to build a conference support system that facilitates the ongoing conversation for the 51 weeks...
Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism
I’ve been thinking lately about the real impact of social technology. The hype still far exceeds explicit impact in many aspects of society. Podcasting has largely failed to enter the promised land (Yahoo recently announced they are closing their podcast directory)…blogs are making differences in marketing, business, and some classrooms, but are still a fringe phenomenon (stats on...
Five Reasons Why The Mobile Web Sucks
Scott Karp vents: Five Reasons Why The Mobile Web Sucks. Comments from readers suggest the problem is not as dire as Scott states (a few lay suggest the languishing mobile web is a US problem). The reality is, however, that in spite of the problems of mobile web access, people are still using it. It’s a developing concept that will continue to improve - a new genre of devices (ipod touch,...
Blended Learning
Blended and hybrid learning have become popular conference themes and subjects of journal articles. As with any new or developing terms, confusion abounds. What is being blended? Time? Pedagogy? Media? Peter Tittenberger has compiled a useful wiki resource on blended learning…including a section on differentiating what does/doesn’t qualify as blended learning.
(via elearnspace)
What does it cost for text books these days...
Beyond the Spin Zone - a new blog from University of Manitoba’s PR Director - asks what does it cost for textbooks these days?: “The grand total (insert best Bob Barker voice here) for a typical first year student’s text books was $626.56…Carrying the books offers a good workout, at the very least.
By my calculations, the grand total works out to about $42 per kg.”
...
“School as Node”
I’ve had George Siemens’ “Pots, Kettles, and other small appliances of like appearance” post open in my tabs for what, three weeks now, and it’s been percolating in my brain as I keep mousing across it from time to time, rereading, rethinking. (As a side note, that’s an interesting little shift in my practice that the advent of tabbed browsing and sessions management in Firefox has brought, isn’t...
“Clearning the Tabs” Episode #473
Only 29 tabs open today. Here’s a few of the things I’m hanging on to: Twitter Tales: This might be old news since I’m having trouble even finding my aggregator these days much less read anything in it, but somehow I stumbled across Nancy White’s “Twitter Collaboration Stories” Wiki. Really cool. Twitter as “Virtual Water Cooler”. Twitter for “Serendipitous Improvement”. And, my favorite, Twitter...
RSS and Alexander Hayes
A few years ago, when LMS fever was still assailing the health of education, a few of us edubloggers started about RSS as a means of preventing the end of course “lock out” syndrome…and allowing new students to learn from the experiences of former students. RSS has, since that time, largely slipped from the discussion. We use it to aggregate content in iGoogle or Pageflakes. We...
Thinking Disruptively About Conference...
One of the things I asked Jeff early on in planning for Learning 2.0 in Shanghai last week was whether or not I could do something a bit different in my sessions. I just did not want to “prepare” a 45-minute presentation to “deliver” to the people in the room for a variety of reasons. I’m sure the genesis of this feeling was because of the “unconference” format we used at Edbloggercon last summer...
Michael Geist
We had Michael Geist deliver a presentation during our Copyright/Copyleft symposium to a very full online session. Recordings are available here: elluminate, podcast, and Camtasia.
(via elearnspace)
Extending the conference
Conferences are changing. Instead of an event of a few days, we now see conferences fostering dialogue months in advance (and, in some cases, following the event…but post-conference dialogue is generally harder than pre-conference). ONLINE EDUCA is a good example of extending conferences. They provide articles, videos, podcasts, and other resources in advance. I’m not sure about how...
Updating cyber times
Barry Wellman is king of the interplay between networks, society, and culture. He has been writing about networks (from a sociological perspective) for decades. If only he had a blog…
Anyway, one of the resources he offers on his site is an interesting differentiation of cultural habits, attitudes, and expressions: Updating Cyber Times - looking at “how much our technology and social...
Abandoning Paper
Not really ground-breaking, but part of a trend: Leading sociology journal abandons print edition (note the funding model proposed at the end of the article - that might be something new). Journals (academics) are getting the message that openness translates into broad scale impact. I attended a presentation by Terry Anderson a few months ago, and he mentioned the significantly greater impact of...
Headlines From the Frontlines
NBC has now joined the other major media outlets in taking a stab at kinda, sorta giving away it’s content but ultimately making you pay if you want to keep it model that the New York Times just failed at. Download your favorite show the night it airs, keep it for a week on the one device you download it to, and then, “poof” it goes away. Read the whole article.
But here is the graph that jumps...
Back in the U.S.S.A!
Well, we missed the typhoon, the one that never materialized past the torrential downpours we had on Tuesday, and here I sit, back in my comfy little, boring, stateside house at 5 am, unable to sleep. Time to get on with reality. But before we get back to our regularly scheduled blogging, I just wanted to post my favorite picture from my China trip. Jeff pointed out that what really made this...
Jeff Lebow - Technology and Learning Leader of the...
I’m adding my voice to the throngs(see list) of folks nominating Jeff Lebow as a Technology and Learning Leader of the Year. I’ve never nominated anyone for an award before… but, over the close to ten years I’ve known Jeff, I’d be hard pressed to imagine anyone who is more worthy, and less willing to admit it.
I arrived in Pusan, South Korea in the late fall of 1998, and ran into the first real...
Copyright/Copyleft: Issues for Education Symposium
In case you missed it and are interested, we (Learning Technologies Centre) are hosting an online symposium on September 24 (that’ll be next week): Copyright/Copyleft: Issues for Education (we will be focusing on Canadian copyright concerns, but the topic will certainly be relevant to others…it is becoming more of a global and less of a local issue). It’s free, but registration...
Back to Curatorial Teaching
Leigh Blackall asked me to provide a short presentation to a group of educators in New Zealand on curatorial teaching. The audio, elluminate recording, and slidshare files are available here. I like the approach he uses - 10 - 15 minutes of presentation…the rest of the hour in dialogue. A much more sane way of connecting with others than is found in most presentations.
(via...
Webgame 2.0
Bryan Alexander links to a cynical, but interesting article: “In a way, the web has always been a game. Anyone with an internet connection could participate by simply viewing a web page, raising the hit counter (score) of that site’s creator. Advanced players could grab an HTML editor and some free web space and create a home page (avatar) that represented them in the online universe....
Relationships and content
While relationship-based tools are hugely popular (insert your social network tool of choice here), it’s pretty tough to be in the content business these days. New York Times has decided to close their Select service…Wall Street Journal is rumored to close their paid service…and Business 2.0 closes (the article also lists huge subscriber drops for magazines like Forbes and Money...
Wired: How To wiki
Wired has created a fairly simple resource: How To Wikis covering subjects such as making youtube videos, using flickr, explaining DRM, etc. I’m starting to question the usefulness of resources like this. Five minutes with a good search engine will provide the same information, but with better context specific information for the searcher. Part of the same reason I’m questioning...
Learning - a different approach
A project worth following: Massively Multiplayer Online Learning: “Instead of holding one-to-many classes via Webex, the company is building a new product from the ground up. Founder Farbood Nivi calls it MMOL, for Massive Multiplayer Online Learning (a play on the term MMOG). He says studies show that people learn best from each other, not in a teacher-students situation.”
The rather...
Presently
This will be all over the web: Google has released its PowerPoint online tool call Presently. I uploaded a short presentation I delivered last night…not quite a smooth as Slideshare (yet), but the ability to jointly edit and include others during the presentation (with Google Talk) will be appreciated by many educators. Common Craft has put together a short video on Google Docs in Plain...
Typhoon in Shanghai
So here’s the view from Jeff’s apartment at about 3 pm Shanghai time. Typhoon Wipha is scheduled to make a direct hit on Shanghai at about 6 am tomorrow. Eight inches of rain. 60-plus miles an hour winds. Over 200,000 people evacuated already. And we’re on the 31st floor. Guess we’re not gonna make it home tomorrow… Technorati Tags: typhoon, shanghai, china
Listen to this podcast
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Surreal Shanghai
Not to overstate this, since stark contrasts can be seen in just about any major city you visit, but the surrealness of this place lies in the scale of those contrasts. And it’s a scale that is just hard to put words to.
Shanghai is city split by a river. On one side is the old part of town where, in pockets at least, the architecture is a mix of European and what you would traditionally think of...
Edtech Conference at UPEI - September 29th
Well here comes the self serving public service announcement. We have an uber-cool conference coming up on the 29th of September at the University of Prince Edward Island and we want YOU to come. ALL ARE WELCOME –> kick off at 9:30am New Media Literacies in Learning Landscapes Our speakers Will Richardson - via Shanghai, Australia and… umm… New Jersey
Elana Langer - OLPC, MIT Media Labs, SUNY...
Students' evolving use of technology
EDUCAUSE Centre for Applied Research has released a new report (.pdf) on undergraduate students and technology. The outcome isn’t particularly surprising: students use technology. Reading a few of the chapters (it’s a 124 page report), I’m pleased to see traditional institutions are taking note of what’s happening, and we’re building a base of data on which to make...
Learning at Learning 2.0 in Shanghai
So what am I learning at Learning 2.0? This is a bit of a very tired brain dump, but, I’m learning that… …the teachers everywhere struggle with many of the same challenges and pressures that teachers in the States struggle with, by and large. The one big thing they don’t struggle with is NCLB. …that teaching at an international school can be an amazing and rewarding experience. I’ve been struck...
Image resizing
David Gurteen linked to a YouTube video on Content Aware Image Resizing. It’s far more exciting than it sounds. Very cool.
(via elearnspace)
Greetings From China
So it may seem strange to start my first blog post ever from China with a picture of my daughter, but the reason I’m feeling so giddy at the moment (aside from about seven hours of sleep after a 27-hour travel day) is because I am just loving my Skype, Skitch, connected from wherever I am in the world life. It’s about 9 am here in Shanghai and I just got off an hour Skype video call with my kids...
Future of media and those crazy kids
Educators, trainers, parents, managers, (continue list as long as is appropriate) would benefit from reading these two short reports detailing the digital lifestyle and technology use of the younger generation.:
Are you ready for the future of media? (.pdf)
and Creating and Connecting (also .pdf)
(via elearnspace)
Visual Search
oSkope is an interesting search application, relying on eBay, Flickr, Amazon, and YouTube sources. Results are displayed visually, with specifications set by the searcher (i.e. display as list, pile, graph, etc.). You can capture key resources (images, books) by dragging and dropping into your folder. Not necessarily anything earth shattering, but I continue to be surprised at how rapidly the web...
What if we ran the media
This report - The Latest News Headlines—Your Vote Counts (.pdf) - is worth reading, even though it’s quite frustrating in sections. For example, it’s opening analysis of news content on various user-contributed sites (Reddit, Digg) found their focus to be on iPhones and Nintendo, while mainstream media was focused on Iraq and immigration. The veiled insinuation is that while Rome...
Top edublogs
Edutopia has listed their view of “top edublogs”. Stephen Downes (and others) criticizes its lack of international representation…and he (Stephen) offers his much more global and complete EduRSS list. Perhaps even more consequential than a too small sampling of blogs provided by Edutopia, is the mindsets revealed by list selection. For example, if you understand the criticality...
Shanghai Bound
So picking up on yesterday’s theme (which amazed me in the scope and depth of commentary, btw) here’s a picture I don’t have to take while I’m in Shanghai for the Learning 2.0 Conference this week. There ought to be quite a conversation going on…Gary Stager, Alan November, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and others…I’m sure our host Jeff Utecht will be chronicling it well. I’m just so looking forward to...
Writing, Sharing And Protecting Your Life’s Story
Eportfolio activities generally fit into two broad categories: content (the more traditional view) and conversations/connections (a more recent view championed by tools like ELGG). There is obviously some overlap between the two. For example, to assemble artifacts of learning requires a narrative (curatorial?) voice…simply placing artifacts in a repository hardly makes a portfolio....
The shift in libraries
The shift in libraries: “To me, the new element that Library 2.0 brings to our libraries is a shift in power balance - between us, our users, suppliers, software vendors, non-users.
Users are able to control parts of our library that they previously could not. Librarians are now able to control spaces outside our buildings. This is different.”
(via elearnspace)
Mobile access
Meet the Mobile Web: “Believe it or not, more people have access to mobile devices than desktop computers. Many handhelds can access the Internet, including cell phones, Palm handhelds, Pocket PCs, Nintendo DS’s, and Sony PSPs.”
And you can now add the new iPod Touch to the list for mobile access. In terms of education use - the biggest complaint I’ve heard about mobile...
My Flickr Conundrum
We took a lot of photos while in Australia. A lot. I must have shot about 400 frames throughout the trip, most of them of my kids having fun. But a few of them were of fairly tourist-y spots: the train station in Melbourne, the Syndey Harbor Bridge and Opera House, nice landscapes at various surfing spots. And I found myself wondering aloud at some points just why it was I was taking these...
“For Mike–(RIP 9/3/07)”
So here’s another example of how things are changing…
Yesterday I’m driving down Main St. in the little town where I live when I see a crowd milling about the local funeral parlor. That in itself isn’t totally unusual, but as I pass by, I see an inordinate number of teenagers coming out. Not good. Having been away for the past two weeks, I’m completely out of touch with the local news, so I’m...
Blogging student research. Five good reasons
Just posted my five top reasons for blogging the research process. Check it out in my SLJ post.
(via http://joycevalenza.edublogs.org/feed/)
K12 Online: The conference is coming
The 2nd annual K12 Online virtual conference is just about a month away. Make sure you attend, or attend the conference archive. The event is completely free. Important thinkers and dreamers and practitioners will present. Connect yourself with their visions of how our schools are evolving, how learning is changing. Because the presentation list might overwhelm, yesterday the site began posting...
Headlines From the Frontlines
I need to clear out some tabs in my browser…
Back to School 2.0–A Business Week article that highlights some of the work teachers have been doing with Web 2.0 tools, many of whom participated in Sheryl Nussbaum Beach’s most excellent professional development program in Alabama. (You go, girl!) “Freeman says her district is trying to help teach children to solve problems, think creatively, and...
Diving In Part 2
Aside from taking about a zillion pictures during our trip to Australia, (and yes, I did take that photo) I did do some work too, giving presentations at the Expanding Learning Horizons Conference in Lorne on the south coast and at a smaller, local conference in Mackay on the East Coast. (Did you know like 95% of people in Australia live near a coast?) After the one in Mackay, a woman came up to...
Web Trends
10 Future Web Trends doesn’t really read like trends at all, but more like current directions. Most of the items listed already show strong progress. To this end, nothing about this list is really surprising. Instead, it’s a useful review of where we are today. I’d be more interested in seeing how biology/technology integration is developing…or the impact of...
Diving In
So of all of the stories to tell from our trip to Australia (and I hope to be telling a few more in the coming days) this is the one that sticks with me:
It takes two hours on a fast boat out of Port Douglas to reach the Great Barrier Reef, and when we get there and tie up there is nothing, and I mean nothing but a very blue Coral Sea stretching out in every direction. In spots, where the reef...
What a wonderful world...
What joy resides before us. Not only do we have web 2.0, but we also have copyright 2.0, learning 2.0, enterprise 2.0, retail 2.0, faculty 2.0, and don’t forget hype 2.0. Ah, the shallow metrics by which we neuter progress through word games. These terms work for today, but offer little long term value. At best they set things up for the next series of conferences, books, and hype cycles.
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Many Eyes
I’m a huge fan of visualization tools (simply because I see them as instrumental in our ability to manage overwhelming amounts of information…and complex, interconnected relationships). One of my favorite sites is IBM’s Many Eyes. Data sets can be uploaded (including free text) and visualized and compared in numerous ways. They recently added a word tree visualization. So I...
The Music Man
I frequently reference music and media industries as valuable in instructing education and training. The content bottom has dropped out of both (music is reported 30+% decrease in sales over last year). While this is credited to illegal downloads, it is primarily about relationships. The music industry has isolated its user base for decades. They failed to learn the lesson of Napster’s...
