Public Apology

Last February a small tempest erupted in our little corner of the edtech world. Ostensibly what sparked it was a post and an accompanying image by Leigh Blackall (which I won’t link to here, not to hide anything, just that the purpose of this post isn’t to stir anything more up or inflict further harm) which led to a string of responses, including mine, which only seemed to add to whatever hurt those initial posts might have created.

Too often we I haven’t admitted when we’ve made mistakes and apologize, and this is not a practice I want to continue in. After many months reflection I am able to acknowledge that I was not practicing deep listening or mindful speech, but simply reacting defensively, and did so in a way that compound the problem. I am sorry for this.

I don’t expect that this will heal the rifts that were created over those few days; trust is something that is difficult to build, easy to break. The greater shame too is that, as a few wise folks like Chris Lott and Nancy White tried to flush out, underneath the poorly framed/badly received post & images were issues, about public personas and their importance for catalyzing communities, amongst other things, that are indeed worthy of discussion. I am sorry for the role I had in derailing that potential outgrowth too. – SWL

Bookmarklets I have Known and Loved

You can thing the inimitable Rick Schweir for this post.

A brief exchange on twitter made me realize that there may be value to some for me to come back to an old topic near and dear to my heart, Bookmarklets. I have written about the utility of Bookmarklets to augmenting your web experiencea number of times over the last 9 years of this blog, but haven’t for a while, and thought maybe there are maybe some new ones I use that might be of interest. But first…

A Little Background (skip this if you already know, love and use bookmarklets)

So bookmarklets. Huh? Well, basically they are little pieces of javascript, stored as a bookmarked URL, that can be easily launched and either themselves do something to the web page you are looking at or often send that page (its contents or its URL) to some other application for processing. This will get clearer as we look at some specific examples; the really important thing to understand is that for them to be useful, you should really have your browsers “Bookmark Toolbar” visible. This is a little bar that runs across the top of your browser window; it takes up maybe 20 pixels of screen real estate, but it allows you to add a ton of functionality to your browser in exchange.

Most modern browsers have some equivalent of a “Bookmarks Toolbar” (Firefox’s name for it.) Chrome calls it the “Bookmarks Bar,” as does Safari. Internet Explorer? LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU LA LA LA.

To view it, typically look under the “View” menu, e.g.

After enabling it, you will see an additional toolbar under the main address bar of your browser.

Once this is visible, installing new bookmarklets is as simple as dragging them onto this bar. NOTE: As Bookmarklets do contain small pieces of code, they can be used for malicious ends. As with ANY link, it is important to have some trust before clicking on it; if you don’t read javascript yourself (and really, if you are reading this section still, that seems quite possible) then only install ones from sources you trust/people you trust. Still, don’t be afraid; I mean, where has that ever got you?

Bookmarklets I have Known and Loved

Now you are ready to install some Bookmarklets to make your life on the web easier, quicker, more powerful. Here are some of the ones I use regularly.

Press Thishttp://codex.wordpress.org/Press_This

This first one will hopefully already be familiar to all wordpress users, and if it’s not – hopefully this just saved you a bunch of time. Press This is a wordpress bookmarklet available under the Tools Menu of the Administration screen. Once you drag it to your bookmarklets bar, you can launch a blog post editor for that blog that will populate the post with the URL and whatever copied text from the page you are looking at. If, like me, you often start a post by refering to something you’ve found, this becomes an invaluable part of your workflow.

Readabilityhttp://www.readability.com/

Readability is the bookmarklet that set off this initial post – Rick was mentioning a bookmarklet that helps format pages for print. I took a look and though I should mention Readability to him; Readability takes advantage (as do many bookmarklets) of a fact people often forget about the web – it is the most amazing copying machine ever invented! Often I find people getting caught up on the idea that content is “on a server” when, for much of the ‘traditional’ web, its instead the fact that when you are viewing a web page you are actually looking at a copy that lives on your machine. As such, a copy that can be altered to work better for you.

In the case of Readability, the web page is altered to make it, well, more readable, removing all the cruft and formatting it as clean, legible text. Not only does this mean I can read much longer pieces than I normally would on my screen (and thus save printing them out) it also provides a beautiful form in which to print them out, if I chose to.

SplashURLhttp://splashurl.net/

If you present a lot, you’ll like this one, which I have Tony Hirst to thank for (or Tony Hurst, as the site still mistakenly attributes 😉 Have you ever been giving a presentation and someone puts up there hands and asks “What’s the URL?” for a page you’re looking at, one that inevitably turns out to be 253 characters long? SplashURL allows you to shorten that URL with one click, and then displays that short URL in EXTRA LARGE BOLD TEXT, perfect for a presentation. This has saved my bacon many times.

LibraryLookup from Wikipedia Articlehttp://www.slideshare.net/val_forrestal/metr-obookmarklet-preso

This is one that you may have to do a little leg work on your own and will become the source of a longer blog post (eventually, soon as I finish coding up all the variants I want to release), but it’s still one I find handy and is a start to a goal I have of showing folks how Wikipedia can be a gateway drug to further knowledge and learning. The bookmarklet does a search of my local library’s catalogue using the subject of the wikipedia page I am looking at as the search term.

PwnYoutubehttp://deturl.com/

Now you know that I would never telling you to do anything that broke copyright law, right? Me? But say you find a video on youtube (or indeed many other media sites) that you want to use in a presentation or class, but are worried that you may lose connectivity and want to have a backup plan. Well this bookmarklet and related site will allow you to grab a local copy of the video (and also points to sites that will just strip the audio track to a soundfile, if that’s what you are after) so that you can use the local copy instead of the network one. If anyone tries to give you grief, just tell them you’re exercising your constitutional fair use rights and the can try to pry that video out of your cold, dead hands. Or something.

Whois Lookuphttp://bencollier.net/2010/05/whois-lookup-browser-bookmarklet/

Ok, this might seem arcane and overly techie, but I think it’s actual a basic net literacy skill (of which more to come soon too, another half-written blog post.) This bookmarklet will do a whois search on the domain of whatever page you are looking at. Why is this useful? Well, whois is not the only step you’d want to take in trying to determine the reputability of a web source you were questioning, but it is one of the first and easiest. I often discover SEO ploys hiding behind seemingly ok sites by looking at who has registered domains. Follow the money, folks.

Web XRay Googleshttp://hackasaurus.org/goggles/

This last one is more for fun, and heck, I like the name. If you do any serious web development then presumably you already use something like Firebug or the Web Developer add-on, which makes this one kind of superfluous. But for those maybe just testing the waters, or wanting to learn a little bit about how a web page works, this plugin from Mozilla provides a way to see the “bones” under the skin of the page you are looking at, letting you move the mouse around while it highlights the structural elements that make up the page. It was built to teach web development to kids to, but it’s fun for all ages.

Well, that’s it for now. I have about a dozen other bookmarklets installed, but many of them are idiosynctratic, things I’ve hacked together to make my own life easier. But I’m always interested to hear of other useful ones – what bookmarklet do you find indispensible to your workflow? – SWL

Visualizing Twitter Conversations – Twitwheel

http://www.twitwheel.com/

I came back to work this week after a glorious 5 week holiday (the longest, and BEST, holiday I’ve ever taken) and have mostly dug out now from the backlog of emails, RSS feeds etc that piled up during that time.

One gem I discovered in the pile, via OLDaily, was a link to a new platform called Talkwheel. What I saw when I went to that website, a discussion platform similar to many microblogging systems that created a visualization of the conversations (and their depths/intensities) excited me. Not only have I had a long interest in visualization, it spoke to work I did very early on in my career of using the medicine wheel and talking stick as a method of facilitating online conversations.

However, when I tweeted about it I did so with a caveat:

While I loved the visualization, the idea of having to switch to a new platform did not appeal to me at all.

But, owing both to the power of open conversations and the canniness of the folks at Talkwheel, I quickly got a reply that I was underestimating the power of their platform:

Sure enough, after some back and forth, the pointed me to an example which is exactly the kind of thing that excites me, Twitwheel. This is an instance of the Talkwheel visualizer that has been customized to work with Twitter, and uses either a username or a search term as the seed for exploring conversations. As an example, here is a conversation that happened yesterday where I introduced David Gratton the sni.ps project to Pat Lockely, who has been working on the Open Attribute plugin.

Perhaps there are other tools that already do this, but I haven’t come across them. Most of the twitter visualization stuff I’ve seen focuses on friend relationships or simply _that_ a tag was used, not that it was used in a conversation _between_ people. And what is exciting is that the TalkWheel folks, clearly Web 2.0-savvy, understand its value to existing conversations and platforms (but also have built their own, which in many cases in formal ed might be just what the doctor ordered given all the privacy concerns, etc.)

From a formal learning perspective, one of the pieces that is missing here is the ability to visualize the full set of pre-defined participants; like much of Web 2.0, this currently seems to be based on visualizing “presence,” not “absence.” By this I mean – I can see what conversations are happening, but what I can’t see is what conversations *aren’t* happening, or at least I can’t see this unless someone contributes at least 1 thing, and thus starts to show up on wheels. When part of your task, whether in a classroom or in a community, is to help foster connections, being able to see these absences is HUGELY useful. This is not a big shortcoming and something I could see being fairly easy to address; in the context of twitter it could be done by using a “list” as the seed for a wheel rather than an individual, that way the gaos between all members of a list become apparent very quickly.

Still, exciting to see tools like this emerge. Will look forward to playing with it more and seeing if there are ways to have it visualize Buddypress networks, Moodle and phpBB-style discussion forums. – SWL

What I learned at Northern Voice – the 2011 edition

…is cancelled. Not going to happen. I thought I was going to break blog-silence for it (and apparently I am, but only to say I can’t and won’t write it.) Make of that what you will. I expect that was my last Northern Voice. 7 years was a pretty good run. But feels like it’s time to move on.

One thing I do want to make clear though, is that none of this has anything to do with the conference itself or the organizers; anyone running a conference would do well to take lessons from these folks. The attention to detail, the atmosphere they have helped create, the community they have helped foster – all of it deserves nothing but applause and thanks. If you have never attended and you are in the Pacific Northwest, do yourself a favour, if they run it again next year, make the trip. It is a different kind of conference. – SWL

CAS’ifying WordPress 3.1

http://solr.bccampus.ca/wiki/index.php/CASify_WPMU_3.1

Still on hiatus from social media (and really enjoying the general silence and calmness that’s brought me) but did want to share this in case it helps anyone else out. As part of hosting the new BC Ed Tech User’s Group site, now powered by WordPress/Buddypress, we hooked the user accounts up to the BCcampus Central Authentication Server.  Not only will this allow single sign-on for the ETUG users to other BCcampus resources, but more importantly, as we role out Shibboleth with our partner schools (the first one with SFU to go live in a few weeks) it will mean that users can access the community with their existing institutional accounts.

We were greatly assisted by the existence of the wpCAS plugin and the phpCAS library, as well as the work by Steve Hannah at SFU to do account provisioning in an early version of WordPress.

But as is usually the case, it was not simple “plug and play” and we needed to re-write some of this to work in our environment and against the new WordPress 3.1. The wiki page documents this work, the lion’s share of which was done by my colleague Victor Chen, and is free to reuse, modify, etc. – SWL

Some Resources on How To Meditate

I just got a DM in twitter from someone asking me for pointers to some resources on how to meditate, and thought I’d post my reply here in case these were of any help to others.

First off, to be clear, I am offering these not as any great expert but simply as things I have used in the past that I’ve found helpful. As they say Your Mileage May Very. Second, there are many, many different forms of meditation, traditions and rituals. I do not intended to go into those details. I sit with a Buddhist Sangha (community of practitioners) that practices in the “Plum Village Tradition” developed by Thich Nhat Hanh, but also have sat in the Vispassana and Zen traditions. It’s all good. I tend to not be overly dogmatic about these things, trying to find what works for me ,but I expect there are many more experienced practitioners who would chastise me for this as being lazy.

In any case, for some very brief reading you could try

One of the ways I got started was by listening to guided meditations. Two of the collections I like are

I guess the biggest pieces of advice I would have are

  • Don’t give up. I use the phrase “Firm but Gentle” to describe the attitude I need to have towards my practice and myself – I need to be firm in my resolution to keep practicing, but gentle both in my practice and with myself when my mind wanders or when I find a few days have passed without sitting.
  • Let go of expectations – don’t expect a flash of lightning or a dramatic transformation to overtake you. That is not what it’s about, in my experience. But if you are consistent in sitting, starting with maybe 15 minutes a day and expanding as you go, you will start to notice subtle changes and benefits from cultivating mindfulness. But don’t even attach to those! Just sit.
  • Find a sangha or others to practice with. This can take some time, and don’t worry if at first you don’t find one that jibes with you. Eventually you will, and it feels wonderful once you do, to simply sit with others.

That’s it. I’m happy to talk to anyone who has questions but I’m really no expert, just someone also trying to find his way along the path. – SWL

Cool Hand Luke in 5 Animated Gifs

I don’t do MOOCs. I am not a big joiner to begin with. But heck if the proposed assignments for Jim’s upcoming Digital Storytelling 106 didn’t sound like fun. So much fun that I had to do one myself, actually combine 2 of the assignments into one, using my favourite movie of all time, Cool Hand Luke. Predictable, probably, but I can watch this film over and over again. So, without further ado, here’s “Cool Hand Luke in 5 Animated Gifs”:

All I can say is – you know you have an amazing course when non-participants are submitting assignments, for fun! And one thing we definitely don’t have here is a failure to communicate 😉 – SWL

On the Twelfth Day of Christmas – My 12 Favourite Gifts from OLDaily

‘Tis the season, eh? I’m feeling so grateful, that in addition to this year’s Nessie’s, I thought I would give thanks for the bounty that is OLDaily and Stephen Downes.

Stephen pretty much does not need an introduction in our field; OLDaily is, by my reckoning, still pretty much the “paper of record” in the edu-blogosphere and I have a hard time thinking of any other individual who has had such an impact on the direction and thinking of educational technology as him over the past decade. I know I am sounding like a bit of a fanboy, and heck, I am, but don’t think it’s all been smooth sailing. I regular challenge Stephen in his comment area and elsewhere, and some of my struggles to understand what he is saying have lasted almost as long as I’ve known him. And this is one of the things I am most grateful for, because that is how I learn, by challenging, by contesting, by not getting it and pushing until I do. And so far, through it all, I have felt respected, heard and considered. I don’t think Stephen is *right* about *everything,* but I’m not looking for him to be “right about everything,” to give me THE answers. Those I need to figure out for myself. But I consider it an honour and pleasure to count him as one of the people I constantly learn from and with.

Which got me reflecting today on which of his posts, articles and presentations have had the biggest impact on my learning over the past almost decade I’ve been reading him (a tall order, considering that on his article page alone he lists 1134 items!) Below, in no particular order, is my selection of “OLDaily’s Greatest Hits”:

elearning 2.0

I would guess this is possibly one of Stephen’s best known and most cited articles. It is an early effort and for a pretty general audience/magazine, and so does not, for me, represent his best writing on the subject, but it pulled together as well as anyone had the trends we were all starting to see (which, also somewhat following Stephen, I took to calling “network learning” instead of this 2.0 moniker.)

“Role of educator in network learning”

A more recent talk, and one which put more flesh to the earlier shorthand instruction to “model” for learners that had been the response for a few years on how instructors should behave in this new world of ubiquitous content, participatory culture, peer to peer support and networks.

Things you really need to learn

As I wrote in a comment recently when Stephen re-posted this 2006 article, the thing I’ve always admired most about this piece is that, alongside the more conventional “academic” skills Stephen also lists “empathy” and “self care” as important things to learn. What I especially like is that these don’t feel like nice liberal values added on; in my understanding, these are actually key pieces of what it means to know.

Groups vs. Networks

I am still not convinced we have this completely right; there is definitely an important distinction, but I have a feeling that by focusing on these as “entities” (groups and networks) we are missing other ways of looking at this that don’t result in polarizing binaries; that perhaps looking at it from the perspective of participation and belonging-ness might ultimately evolve a more nuanced understanding. But I am not sure. All I know is that this distinction has resonated with many and served as a useful opening to explain the difference that could be had in networks from learning in pre-constrained cohorts and classrooms. See also “Communities and Networks” for additional exploration of this.

RSS for Educators

I had forgotten this one but luckily Alan Levine reminded me in response to my twitter shoutout about this absolutely critical essay from Stephen. I think it would be safe to position Stephen as the first, or certainly one of the first, to start promoting RSS as a simple and effective means of syndicating content, especially learning content. The Three Amigos deserve a lot of credit for raising awareness about RSS in 2003, but this article preceeded that talk by almost a year, and I think they all recall it as a seminal piece that inspired that work (work I will forever kick myself for not getting, or getting on board with, at the time I was invited – El Guapo forever shall I be.) Indeed, in the annals of ed tech guides, this deserves a spot up there with @cogdog’s own Writing HTML, high praise in my books.

Models of Sustainable OER

I’m interested to hear where Stephen stands on this paper now. It was written in 2006 and for its time was absolutely the most comprehensive write up I know of looking at the sustainability of OER (conceived in the sense formal institutional publishing efforts.) And I don’t know that much of the thinking, from that perspective, has changed much. This year’s Open Ed 2010 took as its theme “Impact and Sustainability” as I believe did 2008 (and maybe even 2007?) No, what’s changed is realizing (and I don’t think this is new, for many including Stephen) that this sustainability issue rears its head when you try to institutionalize sharing or share stuff after the fact; that if instead you simply start from a posture of openness, and don’t coerce people to share who aren’t actually interested in sharing, that it just happens. Like OLDaily. Like the MOOCs. Which is why I’m interested in Stephen’s take now; because I don’t think this paper is “wrong,” I just think he, and others, have moved on from forcing the round peg into this square hole.

An Introduction to Connective Knowledge

I would warrant this is the article that Stephen should be best known for, and ultimately may become so, but that likely fewest people have read. Because it is not an easy read. Not because it is not well written. But because it really pushes you to think beyond simplistic notions of knowledge and knowing. And while Stephen seems to have made peace with George Siemen’s Conectivism, I have always looked to this piece for the much deeper version of that slogan. It is also, in my recollection, the first place where Stephen started talking about the key network properties of “diversity, autonomy, openness, and connectivity,” a set of heuristics anyone would do well to memorize for looking at how effective one’s network interventions are likely to be.

No, Really, This is What We Want

I know there’s a few people who love this talk for what it didn’t do – it was a keynote for an IMS Standards meeting, and instead of pandering to the mechanistic vision of learning that has always lain beneath that agenda, Stephen got up there and blew it out of the water. I only got to see it on video (if I recollect correctly) as I came down with chicken pox the day before I was to attend that meeting in Vancouver. But it is still legendary in some circles. See also “One Standard for All: Why we don’t want it and why we don’t need it” for another brilliant challenge to the metadata orthodoxy.

Community Blogging (NV ’05)

For me, this talk was significant because it was my first (and one of the only) occasions to hear Stephen speak live. I want to say this was the first Northern Voice (I think, I’m getting old.) The one piece that really stuck with me in this entire talk was Stephen’s distinction of “groups of proximity” to “groups of affinity” (which I take as an early phrasing of the “groups vs. networks” distinction.) I can remember already viscerally wrestling with this as the talk was still going on, wanting to burst out of my seat to engage with him on it. Not that it was wrong, just that it was a distinction that got me thinking (and feeling) overtime.

Open Content, Enclosure and Conversion

I don’t know for sure if this was the start, but certainly this piece was an early foray into the ongoing discussion between another friend and mentor of mine, David Wiley, and Stephen on the merits of Non-commercial licensing of Open resources. This piece also represents for me the clearest example of where, over time, I have come about face and now agree with something that at first I didn’t get at all. From a purely theoretical point of view, which is how I first approached this issue, the fears of the potential of commercialization seem not well founded, as the free and open version should always be there. But I have come to see that in the actual world, the ability of commercial entities to enclose and obscure access to free and open versions of content they have exploited is not only very real but a natural extension of their existing business practices. The tricky part, of course, is the argument about not-for-profits and other educational organizations needing to resell improved content to cover costs, something I expect many in the free and open world don’t want to prohibit. I do not know the answer for sure; I do know that on a personal level I deal with this on an ad hoc basis, which in some ways runs completely against the entire purpose of the CC licensing scheme…

How to attend a conference

Simply put, good advice from a veteran conference attendee and another great example of the network teacher as model

Speaking in LOLCats

This is another real hidden gem; it is easy to mis-understand the depth of the argument here, couched as it is with the introductory piece about “lolcats.” I hope Stephen will consider re-riffing on this again, and indeed will keep experimenting with “form” as he explore this and other messages, because I have the sense that from the perspective of radically contextualizing technology and knowing, this talk and approach offers one of the best avenues.

What not to Build


We need more posts like this, especially from people inside institutions stnading up to the next big project that comes along which sure sounds like a good idea at the time, but doesn’t understand that the network doesn’t stop at your doorway. That sounds harsh, I’m sure, and I know there are many good reasons why we end up building yet another system. Indeed, as my understanding of the role of “users” in regards to educational technology changes, I am less and less offended by the notion of local systems; it is more understanding the kinds we need to build (or help/encourage faculty and students to build) instead of continuing to impose monolithic, centralized approaches that neither encourage autonomy nor engage well with the net as a whole.

So, Stephen, for all you do, this posts for you. Have a great Christmas and a fantastic 2011. Cheers, Scott

The Nessie Awards – 2010 Edition

The Nessie AwardOnce again, it’s that time of the year. I time for pleading, needling, pandering, giving and receiving. No, not Christmas, you silly rabbit – Awards Season!

I know you’ve all been waiting on the edge of your seats for this year’s Nessie Awards (this year with a new Award Statue – the old one seemed to scare the children) so, here we go:

Favourite New Subscription(s)

A brand new category this year. And… it’s a tie! Between two posterous blogs. And two Brits who I got to meet for the first time last summer.

David Kernohan works as managing the UK OER initiative for JISC, but his blog at http://dkernohan.posterous.com/ is intended to, as he says, “deal(ing) with the gaps between my ‘day job’ at JISC and my general personal interest in openness and education policy.” And that it does, with incisive clarity. Since I started following in July, David has been absolutely on fire with a string of posts about the de-funding of education in the UK as well as the ins and outs of OER.

Joss Winn is the owner of the other winning site, http://stuck.josswinn.org/, which is markedly different than David’s. Joss uses this posterous site to gather clippings, sometimes with notes and commentary, about his latest (and I must say – prolific) readings. His focus is often around resiliency, peak oil and Marxist theory, and I greatly credit reading his feed and some wonderful exchanges with Joss over the last 6 months for en-courage-ing me in my own pursuit of these topics, interests I’ve always had but always sublimated so as to be a polite Canadian.

The “Blog which Posts Least Often and Yet whose Every Post I Anxiously Await” Award

This next award is a recurring category with some fairly distinguished past. recipients. This year’s recipient is not as well known but is even closer to my heart. This year’s award goes to my friend and colleague Paul Stacey for his site, Ed Tech Frontier. Paul is not a prolific blogger, but each post is incredibly well written and thought through. Paul really does deserve more credit as a thought leader in the field of Open Educational Resources and is one of the Canadian’s in my opinion making the biggest practical difference in the field, not waiting for changes that may never come but helping to transform government funding from within.

The “Blog whose Posts remain ‘Keep Unread’ in my Reader longest (and not because they are boring!)”

Another regular award (and one that really is meant as a compliment), this year’s go to Graham Attwell for http://www.pontydysgu.org/. As I tweeted recently, Graham is on my short list of edubloggers who I have yet to meet in real life but hope to soon. Graham is especially impressive to me for how consistently he has articulated a vision of personal learning and the importance of a critical stance both towards institutions and technology. Like other past recipients, Graham’s feed stays unread for long periods as I am often daunted to open it, there often just being too much good stuff in there.

The “Makes me Laugh My Ass off Most Often” Award

In past years this award has gone to master satirists for their intentional work. This year, though, I can’t help but award this to an organ that, I’m pretty sure unintentionally, makes me laugh my ass off almost every time I read it. The award this year goes to The Chronicle of Higher Education Blogs (and it’s unfair to pick on their blogs, because the whole damn thing is so often funny, but this is a “Blog” awards thing.) Making fun of The Chronicle is, well like Suck.com used to say, like “shooting fish in a barrel” but damn if they (and the people who continue to look to it for validation) don’t deserve it.

The “Most Unsung EdTech Blogger” Award

This award is always a tough one to give, but also one of my favourite to award, because they are so many great overlooked edubloggers out there, but at the very least I can do my small part to bring attention to a few I think deserve it. This year’s goes to friend and BC colleague Grant Potter who blogs at Network Effects. Awarding this for being an “unsung edtech blogger” doesn’t go far enough, though, to express the richness that Grant brings to the blogosphere and our province. Not only has he done some amazingly innovative work at UNBC on Open Sim and WPMU, his blogging about his projects with his kids is truly inspirational and demonstrates a lifelong learner, pure and simple. And the man plays a mean, well, pick your instrument! Yet a more humble soul I don’t think I know. I know I feel grateful every chance I get to work with Grant as well as every time we get to hang out, which is not nearly often enough.

The “Makes my Jaw Drop and Scratch my Head Most Often” Award

This year’s winner is a very recent addition to my RSS reader and not someone I had ever run across before, though as soon as I did I ran his site past some trusted colleagues and found that sure enough they were already engaged in conversation. Giorgio Bertini blogs at Learning Change and could easily have one any number of the awards above; his rich, thoughtful posts often stay unread in my reader for fear my head will not be able to handle them. I love his approach as he is not looking at learning simply from a technological or institutional perspective, but instead running his site as an action research project to enable, as he writes, “collective intelligence of communities of self-organized educational and change researchers to develop their potential as change agents.” Right on, I say! Check him out.

Most Valuable Twit Award

Last year saw the introduction of some new Twitter-focused awards, which I’ll continue on with this year. The MVT (Most Valuable Twit) is a tough one, because I feel blessed to connect with so many smart, creative and skillful folks from around the globe on twitter. But in terms of sheer quality references, it is hard to beat @courosa. Alec has an immense twitter network himself, and he acts as a fantastic hub, redistributing great references while making connections, between people, countries, sectors. His impact on educational twitter users makes me think of him as the “OLDaily of Twitter” except with more acting credits to his name.

Tweet that made me LMAO

Twitter makes me laugh, a lot sometimes. It is hard to pinpoint one tweet that made me laugh more than others (partly because I don’t capture all the ones that I find funny.) but going back through my twitter favourites, I found a tweet from someone whose tweets pretty consistently make me chuckle. So this year’s Nessie for “Tweet that made me LMAO” goes to Darren Barefoot, not only a damn funny guy, but skilled communicator and intrepid organizer of many past Northern Voice events.

The Nessie Lifetime Achievement Award

And to go out with a bang, a new category, the “Nessie Lifetime Achievement Award.” I can think of no one better to give the inaugural award to than the inimitable Alan Levine. You may know him better as @cogdog, and whether you realize it or not, if you work in online learning there’s a good chance you’ve ended learning or using something he’s done. (Seriously – some of us have taken to wondering if he’s not superhuman or maybe one of the un-dead, he never seems to sleep!)

cogdog avatar
The CogDog

Alan really is the consummate open educator – I know some people attribute the idea of “blogging your process” to others, but it was Alan who for me first exemplified this practice. The number of times one of his posts comes back as the answer to a google query never ceases to amaze me, constantly showing the value in sharing early and often. And it doesn’t stop with blog posts – Alan’s feed2js really was groundbreaking when he released it, and it is STILL the simplest piece to insert RSS I know of. I use it all the time. If you ever get the chance to see Alan present, take it. He makes it seem so effortless (though anyone who knows him knows how hard he works) and constantly innovates on stage and in virtual worlds. And don’t listen to any of his guff decrying theory – I mean, don’t get me wrong, he means it, he is foremost a practitioner, but he also has a deeply reflective and thoughtful practice.

Congratulations to all of this year’s Nessie Winners. The cheque is in the mail. To all those who didn’t win, better luck next year. But like I always say – if you really want to make sure you win an award, run your OWN awards contest! – SWL

Not exactly “Against” Reductionism, but… (A reply to Martin)

(The below is a reply to Martin’s thoughtful post defending Reductionism, itself a product of an earlier twitter conversation. I tried to leave it on Martin’s blog but it borked. Didn’t seem to brook any contest from alternative points of view 😉 So I am posting it here, but really, really, REALLY not trying to ignite any sort of debate. I’m also not trying to shut one down. It’s just increasingly less important to me to solely convince anyone with words. That ain’t teaching or learning.)

Martin, so your thoughtful post set me off writing (5000 words and counting) and I expect I may keep working on that, but rather than post it, which I fear at this point will simply reveal my own tortured relations with power and control (because really, that is what is at issue here, I think) I’ll just try a much shorter stab at a few of the things that bug me about “reductionism.” At a gross level, these amount to two – that science isn’t honest with us or itself in its relationship to those pieces that reductionism doesn’t address, and that science is not simply “science as practiced by scientists following a pure method” but in fact has many different material relations – to investment, to education, to knowledge, to politics, to society, to general intellect – and it is in these places where science as gross reductionism is most easily seen, in the vast Scientism that currently envelops us, and far from being a simple education issue is actually a natural result of the way science (and reductionism) attempt to not simply “understand” but actually Dominate the world. (Sheesh, I did say shorter, didn’t I?)

So, to the first point – I actually am willing to agree with you about the obvious value of reductionism (and won’t even bother problematizing the “value” part of that, which I think deserves at least a book.) And agree with Dennett that many, scientists and others, do not hold this naive view of “preposterous reductionism,” that indeed since the 30’s it has been implausible to hold this view. Though he makes the mistake of conflating “materialist” with “reductionist” when he says “everybody should be a reductionist in the bland sense.”  This is very much my issue with the bracketing of reductionism as simply an “approach” that co-exists with newer understandings of emergence and complexity (and I’d remind us that while to name is to try to gain power over, it is not the same as explaining.) Because underneath many of the concessions to emergence, complexity and self-organization I hear a muttering “if only we had faster computers, better algorithms, better sampling, if only, we could reduce those problems too.” I see very little willingness to engage with the idea that the “how” we go about investigating things is as important as the “what” – that things that resist reductionism aren’t instead pointing at a different way of approaching our engagements with the world, aren’t heralding very loudly the need to factor US into our investigations. I am NOT saying that the answers derived by reductive methods are “incorrect” – but adding 1 and 1 is not the only way to get 2. In my longer piece I go into much deeper explanation of this, but part of the violence in reductionism is exactly in seeking essences at the expense of accidentals, that style (and with it read “culture,” read “individuals” and so on) and method are not important, only the result, the reproductive fidelity of reality of the result, or at least that it’s ok to bracket these other considerations for the sake of a result. And we can. We do, all the time. But then – why are we surprised with the larger results of those results? Like you say – look around you, the evidence is plenty. Taking a reductive approach to understanding “works” but also clearly, in my eyes, unsurprisingly leads to a DOMINANT culture that has a hard time co-existing with the discomfort of difference.

So on this first point I try to engage science and reductionism somewhat on its own ground, but that is unlikely to get a lot of purchase; I believe it’s turtles all the way down and while generous scientific listeners might try to engage ultimately when we fall back to “results” as the adjudicator, this isn’t really going to get far.

I think the other point is more damning (but also far more difficult to engage, runs a serious risk of being dismissed as “name calling” which I don’t intend it as.)

If I read both you and Dennett correctly, at base the argument is – science isn’t simply or only just reductionist, that is but one, if albeit a major, tactic, that it has room for these other phenomenon that we acknowledge can’t be reduced, and what’s more, we’re not “greedy reductionists” who think everything is or should be reduced, at least not right now. And by and large, within the specific discourse of the philosophy of science and the practice of science by thoughtful people, I actually can somewhat agree with this. I am not simplistically “anti-science.” But this is a rarefied view of science indeed (one I understand scientists are keen to keep upholding, as some sort of “pure” science, but eh, life’s a dirty business.)

Because “Science” is NOT, demonstrably, empirically demonstrably, a pure “thing” or “practice” – “Science” is  embedded in specific material conditions: some stuff gets funded, other stuff doesn’t, NOT based solely on “pure” reasons; “Science” and its results influence (increasingly so) not just the “what” of education but the “how,” across ALL disciplines, not just the clearly scientific ones; “Science” and “scientific reasoning” clearly (increasingly) effect how we run governments, general discourse in society and general intellect. All of which a supporter of Science as the only way might say “Good.”

But to say so is Scientism, which I take not to be a belief simply in “Science” but a belief in the reductive power of science to explain (and ultimately control) everything. But clearly, in your post, you are advocating for a broader view, a more reasoned view, of Science, right? Except…

Except you forget the very discussion on Twitter which brought this up. Remember the context in which I made the dismissal around reductionism. It was in the context of you contesting Marx as not being worthy of the name Science. It wasn’t ME who made the conflation between Science and Reductionism, it was YOU. Accidentally, uncritically, but without a doubt in my mind. Because in throwing out the term “reductionist” I wasn’t seeking to discredit Science (though in my longer piece I go WAY further to trying to put it back in its place, alongside other ways of being in the world and knowing the world, a place that for all his protest Dennett and his brethren Dawkins would surely not like to stay.) I was countering YOUR reaction as being a reductionist view of Science. Which is also why I tossed out Popper’s name, because his is the same rabbit hole, just maybe in less obvious form.

And here’s the thing – I am NOT trying to caricature your understanding – your entry above clearly demonstrates you do not actually think about these things in a simple way. But your reaction to another approach to understanding the world (in this case Marxism) using the word “Scientific” does belie a bias to a reductionist conception of Science. And this is really, really common place, indeed I would suggest that the majority of our K-12 education systems completely perpetuate this bias, and that it is endemic in the non-specialist discourse in society when the word “science” or “scientific” is invoked.

Is it fair to lay all of this on “Science” and “Reductionism.” Probably not. But in as much as the practice and discourse of Scientism perpetuates purely reductionist relations, I am happy to lay it at its feet and contest it. And in my longer piece I try to go way further to explain that, indeed, reductionism, for all of its efficacy and evident value, is in fact part of the root cause, that as a way of relating and understanding it breeds its own ineluctable logic of how to relate to the world, but more importantly, IS NOT THE ONLY WAY TO BE OR UNDERSTAND. It IS a choice. Which is why, far from a flippant comment, the appeal to human nature (we all know children ask why?) is extremely dangerous.

So I said a “shorter piece” and, believe it or not, this is. Much. This is a deep issue, I appreciate your own thoughtfulness on this, and for all of my obvious passion I hope you can see that I am not trying to invoke the supernatural nor argue that the world that we are in currently hasn’t largely resulted in the effects of reductionism. And indeed, were it not YOU who wrote this, I wouldn’t be writing this at all. Because to be consistent with where I am going with my ideas ultimately looks like a lot less talking, a lot more being. I don’t actually need to convince you, though I will contest, in self-defense, this ideology where and when it impacts me to the extent that is possible and reasonable.

Much love, Scott

P.S. I tweeted this the other day but it bears linking to here. This strikes me as a very deep talk by a scientist that is acknowledging some (not all) of what I am trying to get across – http://dai.ly/9nwgbB. It is worth listening to all the way through. And even he, for all his awareness, dips once or twice back into a fully reductionist view of science, and he’s quite actively not trying to.