Technologies for Learning, Thinking and Collaborating
http://community.uaf.edu/~cde/wiki/SSW
I am sitting in a session at the WCET 2006 conference in Portland listening to a really fabulous presentation by Chris Lott and Terry Anderson, amongst others. Chris is presenting with the above wiki, and offered up this tagcloud of affordences for education by social software as a new rubric to organize examples of social software use. Have a good example, add it in, we’re live right now (1:42 PM Friday November 3). – SWL
Like Alan, I have fairly low expectations of the shwag you get at most conferences, but props (and a link, so my tarrif paid in full) to webnames.ca for one of the best giveaways yet – a nalgene bottle (yeah, I know, if I was really cool I would have a photo embedded here of the nalgene bottle, but you do know what one looks like, right?). There are water fountains everywhere, and after the night last night, what a godsend! – SWL
What can I say, even if I get nothing from the enitre conference, which seems extremely unlikely, having dinner last night with D’Arcy and Alan at Brian and Keira’s place (and making a new friend) has made the trip more than worthwhile.
The festivites continued on into this morning (literally) as Alan, Brian, D’Arcy and I hosted a bit of an open discussion on ‘blogs and education’ (check Brian’s blog for the resulting wiki and likely a recording too). In honor of the edubloggers hootenany I performed a little live set of blogging ejaculatives – you can hear El Guapo’s revenge on the 3 amigos at a file I hosted on my ELGG site (which I was going to discuss but the discussion had so much steam there ended up being no time or need to!). Enjoy (or cringe as the case may be). – SWL
So my last rant reflected my unhappiness at being inundated with crappy powerpointings, but that’s not the only dissatisfaction I’ve had with presentations I’ve sat through in conferences over the last few weeks.
In addition to the dull quality of the ‘lecture’ experience, I’ve been really disappointed with the vision of learning that’s been in the background of some of the presentations, e.g. too many talks on eportfolios that see them solely as a way to create a resume, or just another way to squish students into an artificial assessment framework, too many talks on more and better ways to generate reams of metadata and remove the humans from that sticky operation of sharing and reusing learning resources.
But the good thing about all of these is that I’ve had a series of small epiphanies that have made me a true believer in social software. What’s that brother’s and sisters, can you say it, I BULEAVE! Say it again, I BULEAVE!
Which may sound strange to some, but none who know me well. Yes, I’ve been a blogger for almost 3 years now. Yes, I use flickr, I use furl, yada yada yada. But I was always looking for holes and just a little bit sceptical. No longer. We need software that is obvious in the value it offers its end users so we aren’t forcing them to do things they don’t want to already do. We need software that recognizes users not just as the ‘operators’ of software, but as having identities that are important, identities that are the basis for rich connections and enabling possibilities. We need software that notices and records these conections and interactions in order to add even more value to those users and to other people trying to do similar things. Hallelujah!
And for all my past (and present and current) sins against this, mea cupla. Like Thomas Pynchon once wrote, I’m a slow learner. – SWL
Today’s my last day at the LORNet conference in Vancouver, as I have to miss the Friday sessions to attend the fall session of the BC Ed Tech Users Group workshops.
I’ve enjoyed meeting the people at the conference and seeing their work at the poster sessions, but I have really not been enjoying the actual plenary sessions at all. Too much “death-by-powerpoint-no-demos-talk-and-no-show” which anyone who attends academic conferences, especially research-focused academic conferences, has experienced to no end.
It’s pretty easy to complain about this. I won’t go on much more. Alan pretty much has the market cornered on indignation at what a waste most of these sessions are, and I agree. But like Alan, I long to figure out a better model, one which could still preserve all of the good things we like about conferences, and re-invent or do away the bad.
So, here’s my modest proposal. Do away with the formal scheduling of presenting papers altogether. I’m not saying do away with presenting your ideas, but do away with the formal schedule that says “at 2 o’clock everyone should assemble in Room 1400 to hear what’s-his-name drone on about whatever” (sorry, I know I’m sounding dismissive, but there are many hours of my life that I will never get back due to such presentations).
Instead, book spaces with large rooms/halls, and make everyone who wants to present their work do it as a poster session over the course of 1 or 2 days. Offer seating in front of the poster areas if you like, and then let the wisdom of crowds decide which presentations to attend. Make it like the agora in days of yore, with the sages holding forth and the ‘learners’ wandering around till they found the conversation they wanted. See a big group forming and want to find out what the buzz is about – go and find out. Want to stay with that group discussion for the remainder of the conference – great, stay there. No one is coming to your presentation, fine, go to someone else’s, presuade others you have somthing to say, bring them back to your conversation or join the existing one and make it something bigger. Create ways in which people can also connect to these self-forming ‘groups’ via social software – different sessions could have different tags, different chat channels, whatever. Or else pre-create the groups via social software and then have meetups in real space around them. Take the whole conference concept a step futher and adopt a practice like “Open Spaces” whose explicit goal is “to create time and space for people to engage deeply and creatively around issues of concern to them.” Novel idea, eh?
But like I said, a ‘modest proposal’ – what would we list on our resumes as a result of such metings? How would we get publication credits? Right, right, I forgot, the reason for conferences is publishing opportunities, not learning and professional development. And you want me to pay me registration fee why exactly? – SWL
There was no way I could pass up attending the Northern Voices blogging conference given that it was only a ferry ride away, and for the most part I came away glad to have made the effort. Here are some reflections, in no particular order.
The High Points
– Dinner with Brian, D’Arcy and other friends the night before. In truth, the whole trip was worth it for me for a few hours of good food and conversation with some old and new friends.
– Stephen’s presentation, nominally titled ‘Community Blogging‘ (in essence the notion that communities are defined by semantic affinity, not network proximity, and that we need to develop systems which help us derive meaning that emerges out of collective/aggregated contexts) was for me the highlight of the conference from the perspective of presentations given. It deserves a post of its own and for me was the most concise synthesis of what Stephen’s been driving at for the last few years I’ve seen.
– UPDATED: I forgot to mention the other highpoint of the conference, a 2 minute description on the use of RSS feeds and wikis for sharing and collaborating on the research at the Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre. The fellow making the point sat patiently with his hand up throughout almost all of the question and answers in the ‘Blogging in Academia’ session, and then in the space of about 2 minutes simply blew most of our minds away with the description of the collaborative knowledge sharing ecosystem they had assembled using syndication technologies and wikis. Worth far more than the price of admission itsself.
– Realizing one’s blogosphere ‘bozo filters’ are incredibly accurate when you finally hear the bozos f2f. The downside – not having f2f bozo filters.
The Low Points
– Its probably an unfair criticism, but the format of the presentations/conference (sages on the stage, plebes in the audience gazing longingly) basically replicates a lot of hierarchical structure that seems antithetical to what’s interesting about the blogosphere. Undoubtedly there exist power laws, ‘a-list bloggers’ and the like, but for the vast majority of us, what’s interesting is not a quest to be listened to by everyone else, but to participate in ‘elocutions’ with as few as 2 people (even 1 in ‘blogs as soliloquy’ mode) and can grow as large as the net. So, suggestions for improvement: more coffee breaks/networking time (there are never enough), and less formal presentations. Instead, look to ‘workshops’ or other participatory models as a way to engage everyone and create useful outputs, not just speeches. (To be fair, Tim Bray’s did make some fun efforts at including the audience and seemed quite well received). And sheesh, with that much technology in the room, formally engage with it, not just accidentally through flickr tags and the like.
– Nametags: I guess I must be getting old, but my eyesight can’t handle 8 point type from more than a few feet now. Any really, a blogging conference without the name (not just the URL) of people’s blogs in bold print on their name tags?
Still, much fun was had by this attendee, and the organizers are to be thoroughly lauded for their efforts. Bravo. For any shortcomings, it was still one of the more fun gatherings I’ve been to of late. – SWL
http://www.imd.macewan.ca/imd/content.php?contentid=26
From Clayton R. Wright at Grant MacEwan College comes this handy list of Ed Tech related conferences for 2004. I found it helpful because as someone also located in Western Canada, Clayton has noted some conferences (like the May 20-22 Distance Education Technologies Symposium sponsored by Athabasca University in Banff, Alberta) that might not always make some of the other US-focused or international lists. – SWL
This isn’t really an ‘ed tech’ related post, more a public service to anyone who has had to suffer through one of my personal pet bugaboos – phone calls and meetings to schedule future meetings. Yes, you read that right – the amount of time I spend trying to schedule meetings is simply ridiculous. So if you are charged with setting up a meeting for busy folks (and who isn’t these days) and these people don’t all work for the same organization (and thus already have access to a common calendaring system) I have a simple URL for you – meetingwizard.com!
I’m sure there are other such systems out there; this isn’t necessarily an endorsement of this particular one, it’s simply one that I’ve used with success and that is free! So look around if you don’t like this one and find another – but please pay attention to the idea.
To book a meeting simply 1)enter in up to 12 proposed meeting times 2)enter in the email addresses of the invitees 3)send the invites out. The site then allows each of the invitees to check off which of the times could work for them and the ones they absolutely can’t make. It tallies the results and lets you see which dates are likely to work best. You can indicate specific participants as ‘critical’ whose absence would derail a meeting, and the software can ‘autoconfirm’ when an appropriate date is found or lets you manually notify people of the details.
Sounds simple? It is. And free. So why do I keep getting these calls to try and schedule more calls? – SWL
http://blogoehlert.typepad.com/eclippings/
2003/11/techlearn_trip_.html
Mark Oehlert lets us know that Michael Parmentier’s notes from the recent TechLearn 2003 are now online. Having tried to produce conference notes myself, I am awed at the thoroughness and real usefulness of these notes. One can actually get a sense of what each of the speakers was focused on, and even an overall sense of the conference. A great model to emulate in the future. – SWL
http://blogoehlert.typepad.com/eclippings/
2003/11/research_slides.html
Last month I posted a note that Mark Oehlert was asking folks interested in elearning on where they see the field going. I know at least one person took the opportunity to respond 😉
Mark presented his findings at the TechLearn 2003 conference. He shares the slides, the executive summary and a draft of the final full report. – SWL
Continue reading “Report on the ‘Future of elearning’ survey”