February 2008
84 posts
Our Individual Role →
Do you know what that’s a picture of? It depicts the 426,000 cell phones that are retired in the US every day. Here is the detail:
And here is the project:
Statistics can feel abstract…
50 Ways to Tell a Story →
I’ve linked to Alan Levine’s site 50 web 2.0 ways to tell a story before. I just listened to a presentation that he delivered on ustream (it takes a minute or so until the audio starts). The…
The Ultimate Conference Attendee →
I’ve been watching the flow of content coming out of Illinois, and it’s obvious we have officially jumped the shark in terms of distributing ideas once held only in ballroom walls to the rest…
Canadian eLearning Technology Holds its Own →
This past month I’ve been conducting a learning management system (LMS) evaluation for a client, in collaboration with Bryan Chapman. We used the Brandon-Hall LMS knowledge base to gather data…
Rhizomatic Knowledge Communities –> Edtechtalk,... →
The idea of a rhizomatic knowledge community draws on a strong current tradition of random ideas and solid scholarship. There is a sense in which we all understand the way that these types of…
Between Friends →
An interesting look at various networks, particularly revealing of the strong presence of a small minority in acquiring the majority of links - Between Friends: “The idea of a social graph—a…
The Strength of Walled Gardens →
The concept expressed in this post is reflective of a McLuhan-like notion of new tools being first adopted to do the work of the old. Only after personal experience and time do we realize that some…
Worker Networks →
I’ve been reading The Future of Management, recommended by Jay, and would say that it’s one of the better management books I’ve read in several years. The book’s major premise is that industrial…
Free will? →
Rough day. Apparently new research suggests we don’t have free will and the resulting deterministic messages have the potential to lead to general moral decay. I’d do something about it. But it…
Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business →
Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business: “Over the past decade, however, a different sort of free has emerged. The new model is based not on cross-subsidies — the shifting of costs from one…
Future of Reputation →
I haven’t had time to read this book in its entirety, but from the sections I’ve skimmed, it’s worth taking a look at: The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet. The…
Remixing Cities →
Another excellent paper from CEO’s for Cities is Remixing Cities (PDF), which has lessons pertinent to many large organizations as well as smaller towns. The report has a strong focus on…
The Downside of a Good Idea →
The Downside of a Good Idea - a short critique of the challenges of too much openness and sharing (to the point where innovation is negatively impacted as good ideas are overlooked while everyone…
Robots... →
Robots, long common in industrial settings, are now approaching a degree of sophistication to perform jobs within the service sector. Is this where e-learning becomes r-learning?
The Distributed University →
Jeff Jarvis riffed yesterday on “Google U,” the idea that there are all sorts of new ways to think about a college education aside from the 4-year, right outta high school model that most kids go through. Jeff and I both have kids and are staring the college decision game (and the subsequent payouts) in the face, so his post caught my attention. Reminded me on some level of my “Dear Kids, You...
Upcoming presentations →
I’ve updated my conference presentation page with links to some previous conference recordings, as well as my presentation schedule for 2008. If I’m in your area, and you’d like to meet/chat/or have me present at a conference, let me know - always great to put faces to names I’ve only encountered online. I should mention as well, two conference where I’m involved on...
elearnspace in Chinese →
Ken Carroll sent me this link to a Chinese translation of elearnspace. Not sure who is doing the translation…but, it’s important to note that the ability for extending ideas starts with openness - i.e. Creative Commons license. This type of translation (re-creation) is discouraged under traditional copyright. Result? A person might own the content, but in a context of limited influence...
Stop Bullying - Wear Pink →
Tomorrow (27 Feb) is wear pink day, and according to Christy Clark:
Bullying is a major problem in our schools, workplaces, homes, and over the Internet … on February 27th I encourage all of you to wear something pink to symbolize that we as a society will not tolerate bullying anywhere. I wish I could take credit for this idea but it comes from two incredible Nova Scotia high school students …...
Knowledge Artisans →
I noticed this piece on The App Gap which mentioned “knowledge artisans”, and it reminded me of a business plan I did about three years ago:
Next-gen knowledge artisans are amplified versions of their pre-industrial counterparts. Equipped with and augmented by technology, they rely on their human capital and skill to solve complex problems and develop new ideas, products and services. Highly...
“I Never Knew I Could Have a Network” →
That quote from a teacher at one of the schools Sheryl and I are working with pretty much sums up the scale of the shift that a lot of educators (and others) are facing these days. And since I heard it last week in one of our sessions, it’s stuck with me as a testament to how isolated and how local teaching as a profession still is. At various times, some of us have called these network...
Business Consulting for Beginners →
Mark is from the UK and asked for my advice about getting into business consulting. He’s 24 years old, is completing a Master’s in International Relations and has some work experience teaching in Asia.
My own suggestion would be that when you lack experience in consulting, your should first try working for a larger organisation. With a Master’s degree you might qualify for entry-level work with...
Connective or Collective: Round 2 →
After receiving a fair bit of feedback on my initial post on collective and connective intelligence, I posted some thoughts on my connectivism blog: Collective or Connective Intelligence?
Productivity in an information age →
While this comes from the school of “well, duh, of course”, it does serve to make explicit the value of dealing with people who are well-connected to ideas, concepts, and people within a certain field (we used to hire for expertise, today, it makes more sense to hire based on how connected they are to the field). Understanding productivity in the Information Age:...
ED-MEDIA and changing conferences... →
Last year, while attending ED-MEDIA in Vancouver, I lamented about lack of opportunity for participation. This year, we’re trying to add more interactivity to the conference through the use of blogs, wikis, and podcasts. We’ve set up a conference blog and will continue to add interviews and resources as the Vienna event nears. I posted an interview (links to audio file) I conducted...
Creating our future →
Last night I attended our town’s Business Retention & Expansion briefing, which reported on findings from a study conducted last year. One of the findings was that the local business priority is to attract industry to the town. Key issues for local businesses were cost of leasing space; municipal taxes; availability of zoned land and land costs. The local economic development agency stated...
Who’s Your Town? →
Richard Florida may be coming out with Who’s Your City? but some of us prefer towns. I know that Florida is positive on the potential for small towns, as this comment in the Telegraph Journal shows;
But Florida told reporters at a reception after his speech that it’s not just big cities that are creative. He said people in big cities are looking to get away to “cosmopolitan country towns” like...
21st Century Literacies from the NCTE →
Paul Allison tweeted out this update from the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) exec committee last week in terms of how we need to think more expansively about literacy in the context of these shifts. As a former English teacher and NCTE member, I find these couple of lines to be of particular interest:
Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate...
The Attention Crisis in Learning →
Tony Karrer has an excellent post on the implications of the long tail on organisational learning and compares training organisations to publishers. The challenge is not having enough stuff to distribute, it’s getting attention at the receiving end. He finishes by asking these questions:
How do we get into the attention economy business?
How do we dramatically lower production and delivery...
What's obsolete? →
A bit of a rash of comments on “what skills are obsolete”. A wiki has been setup to share obsolete skills. Scoble (the Paris Hilton of bloggers) has his own list. And, on a slightly more practical note, ACRLog has put detailed obsolete skills for librarians. Wonder what types of skills educators no longer need…
Blogging About Politics; Lessig for Congress →
When I first started blogging in 2001, I wrote a lot of short little snips that dealt with politics and my general frustration with the world. That was before my voice here evolved into an ongoing conversation about how traditional ideas of teaching and schooling change in the face of the Read/Write Web and all that comes with it. I’ve been hesitant to do very much blogging about my political...
Opensim in education (with alpha software)-... →
just some quick notes… so i don’t forget them. More will get posted at openhabitat.
Well… for those of you following, the second run at it went MUCH better than the first one. We rejigged our plan, forwarded our initial goals to the front end, used a little more scaffolding, and the whole process skimmed along quite nicely.
So, when your working with alpha software, it helps if you’ve got two...
Bilingual education for all? →
It seems that bilingual education may finally become the norm in Canada’s only officially bilingual province, according to CanadaEast:
“We have immersion for people who like bilingualism, and for those who don’t like bilingualism there is Core French, and don’t worry, your child won’t really be learning French in Core French,” said Lamrock [NB Minister of Education] with an ironic tone.
“Maybe...
Four Years →
That means 1,184 posts; 2,392 comments and counting …
Photo by cactus22minus1
Collective Intelligence? Nah. Connective... →
The NMC/EDUCAUSE 2008 Horizon Report (.pdf) is a great resource. Educators and administrators will do well to consider its contents in their planning. I have a small concern. Something about the notion of collective intelligence doesn’t sit well with me. I can’t quite put my finger on it. I can (and have) used the term myself to explain the combined efforts of “the many” in...
Better than free →
Better than free: “When copies are super abundant, they become worthless. When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable. When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied….In short, the money in this networked economy does not follow the path of the copies. Rather it follows the path of attention, and attention has its...
Machines and humanity →
Machines ‘to match man by 2029’: “Humanity is on the brink of advances that will see tiny robots implanted in people’s brains to make them more intelligent, said Ray Kurzweil.
The engineer believes machines and humans will eventually merge through devices implanted in the body to boost intelligence and health.”
To quote Yogi Berra, the future isn’t what it...
iReport: merging citizen journalists with "the... →
CNN appears to understand some of the foundational shifts occurring with how people create, share, and consume information - in this case, news. In response to the popularity of citizen journalists, they have created an uncensored, user-created news resources called iReport. Take a few minutes and contrast the iReport site with the main CNN site. What’s different? iReport is more cluttered,...
Chinese Pod...Curt Bonk...and NY Times →
A few nodes - Ken Carroll of ChinesePod and Curt Bonk - in my information network recently received coverage in NY Times: Learning From a Native Speaker, Without Leaving Home: “The best way to learn a foreign language may be to surround yourself with native speakers. But if you can’t manage a trip abroad the Internet and a broadband computer connection may do the job, too, bringing native...
Recognising desirable patterns →
I’ve been reading as much of Dave Snowden’s work as possible, as I find the Cynefin framework makes a lot of sense to my own practice, which I’ve mentioned previously. In an earlier article, Snowden & Kurtz talk about an interesting case in The New Dynamics of Strategy: Sense-making in a Complex and Complicated World:
In another case, a group of West Point graduates were asked to manage the...
Real Work by My Smart Daughter →
So Tess made the local paper this week, in large part to Ms. March, one of her teachers who hit upon a cool project when she started wondering what the division symbol was called. Turns out, after contacting MIT and Princeton, that there was no known name it. Perfect opportunity for a contest, which Tess entered and happily won. “Discula” is what she came up with based on the various roots which...
Low-cost content management →
I was recently interviewed by Canadian Technology News and the resulting article, Six Strategies for Content Management, covers several points worth considering. Proprietary software and open source options for enterprise content management (ECM) are both discussed. I’m glad that I’m quoted on what I consider the two most important points:
Open source may do the job
Tap into free (or near-free)...
Our first run at getting the students in Opensim →
Well… well well well.
What we wanted to do was get a bunch of students to come into our computer lab, sit at a computer in pairs, wander around opensim, take their photo from their blog post and post it into a picture frame. That was the bottom line. Simple quest based goal - find the house, find the picture frame with your number on it, put your picture in the frame. If this is easily...
Playin’ PVC →
Before I did some evangelizing in Moline this morning, four very creative students from Lewiston High School about 90 miles away from here put on a 45-minute mini concert playing, wait for it, a collection of pvc and rubber tubes that, depending on length and thickness, created different tones when thumped on with a drum stick or a spatula. It was amazing, and I managed to snag a minute of Flip...
Seesmic...still playing →
Ok, so, as mentioned yesterday, Seesmic is the latest life sucking tool I’ve found online (apparently they’ve received several million dollars worth of funding). It has Twitter like options for following others and replying to them. Here’s my seesmic post for today. I found Alan Levine in seesmic as well…replied to his video…but for some reason can’t directly...
Seesmic →
As the world currently does not have enough software tools that we can use to waste time (and create deep meaningful connections (in 140 characters)), I was most pleased to encounter Seesmic today. It is described as the “twitter of video”. After I posted my first few videos, I had several “threaded” video responses in about 3 minutes. There is always a unique feeling as...
Soft peer review? →
Somehow, one link led to another, and I found myself on this site: Soft peer review? “Traditional peer review has been criticised on various grounds but possibly the major limitation it currently faces is scalability, i.e. the ability to cope with an increasingly large number of submissions, which—given the limited number of available reviewers and time constraints on the publication...
Advertising... →
Google continues to explore ways to extract revenue from advertising (and in the process make the final transition into a media company with technology as a secondary concern - at list if you view a company’s roots as being in the industry from which it derives its revenue). YouTube held an advertising coming-out party recently: “But the event was clearly centered on getting...
Facebook Workshop →
As part of a series of workshops on emerging technologies at University of Manitoba, I delivered a session on Facebook. The supporting wiki is available. Facebook has an increasing Greek tragedy feel. On the one hand, due to its popularity, I would love to use it for communicating. Or to experiment with its use as a teaching and learning tool. On the other hand, they’ve destroyed any visage...
School Closure? →
Another school closure today. That’s the second this week, and schools weren’t closed on Monday, when we had the worst driving conditions of the year. Here it’s just a regular work day, with a telephone interview to do and a discussion with a client scheduled. For me, information technologies reduce my dependence on industrial technologies.
Schools are closed today because of the flooded, and now...
What Do We Know About Our Kids’ Futures? Really. →
A lot of us (or should I say I?) frame the conversation around Read/Write Web tools in schools in the context of this very blurry future that our kids are entering into, one that despite its lack of clarity is decidedly different from today. In my own case, I tend to frame this through my parenting lens, that it doesn’t feel like the system is preparing my kids for their futures very well even...
