Author: sleslie

Why I am going to #occupyvictoria on October 15th

Last night I attended my first meeting of the People’s Assembly of Victoria, the name chosen for Victoria’s version of #occupytogether. It was a long, slow, occasionally tense (or at least tenuous) meeting – in other words, exactly what it needs to be.

With only a week to go until the initial action (which I do hope is followed by an actual camp), the desire to move “past process” and onto some specific issues and decisions was palpable (and indeed, important.) And hopefully some of that happened by the end of the meeting – I actually don’t know what ended up happening in the last half hour, as I broke off with others to discuss technology support and expand that team beyond the heroic efforts of the initial two volunteers.

People's Assembly of Victoria consensus making process
This is What Democracy Looks Like

Yet I have nothing but praise for the folks trying to facilitate the meeting and help this assembly be born (nor indeed nothing but praise for ALL who attended the meeting.) This isn’t to say there aren’t ways to improve the process, there always are, but NOT forsaking process (and the overlooked and under-represented people and perspectives it is meant to protect) in favour of “efficiencies” is EXACTLY part of “the point” of this movement, from where I am sitting.

Someone on twitter yesterday (I think quoting Naomi Klein on Democracy Now) summed up one of amazing aspects of this emergent phenomenon – it has the courage to ask questions for which we don’t have answers. Many will see that as weak, as being simply idealism. To which I say, firstly, when did idealism become a crime? But much more than that – not only is it not weak, it represents the very best, the most courageous, of us as loving humans, to hold space for a multitude of voices clamouring to be heard and not collapse our discomfort with uncertainty through violent imposition of will, but instead, through patience and listening, allow real learning and change to occur, something that can only happen over time.

If the facilitators have not already experienced Open Space Technology (which seems unlikely given the level of awareness many of the folks seem to bring) I do hope some aspects of it can be brought into play on October 15th and following. As its originator, Harrision Owen, describes in his book “Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide,” the conditions for which Open Space process works best sound a whole lot like the conditions we are all facing right now:

  1. a real issue of concern, that it is something worth talking about.
  2. a high level of complexity, such that no single person or small group fully understands or can solve the issue
  3. a high level of diversity, in terms of the skills and people required for a successful resolution
  4. real or potential conflict, which implies that people genuinely care about the issue
  5. a high level urgency, meaning the time for decisions and action was “yesterday”

I know this will sound like old hat to many folks, especially activist types. Consensus process has LONG been common in activist circles. But instead of jadedly dismissing what we are seeing as simply “Johhny Come Lately’s,” people have to recognize that for many of the “99%,” consensus process (and learning how to speak and listen in a way that doesn’t replicate the dominant paradigm) is extremely new; we should be rejoicing that what was once a discipline practiced by only a few is coming to the fore, and expect that it may take a while for people to learn this new way of relating. But isn’t that in part what we are gathering for?

So – I’m not going to list out here the many issues I have with the current massively-interconnected financial/government/military/educational/entertainment complex that has come to dominate our world (and for which resistance has always existed.) My analysis of that hasn’t changed for a long time – though if anything I finally found the courage not to abandon the truths I’ve come to understand in exchange for security and a mortgage. Those are certainly part of why I am going to #occupyvictoria. But even more so, I’m going precisely to participate in a General Assembly, one that hopefully includes many who don’t self-identify as activists, to participate in the birth of this new conversation, this new way of relating. And I’m bringing my kids, so that one day, when they are old and I am gone, they can tell their grandkids they were there when it was born.

If you are in Victoria, I hope you will come and join us – the Assembly is on October 15th at Centennial Square but hopefully that is just the start. If you are elsewhere, I hope you seek out an action near you, or find other means to show your support. In the  words of the Democracia Real Ya, a collective created in Madrid:

An Ethical Revolution is necessary. We have put money above human beings and we must put it at our service. We are people, not the products of the market. For all of the above, I am outraged. I believe I can change it. I believe I can help. I know that united we can do it. Come out with us. It’s your right.

SEO as Enclosure – Another Real World Example

Wikipedia Device, aimed at the elderly

I know in the past people have given Stephen and others lots of grief about their stance on the Non-Commercial clause. And I admit that, while I understood the theoretical possibilities Stephen was concerned about, that commercial entities often seek to obscure or enclose free resources so that even if the original is still literally “open” it becomes effectively lost, I initially wrote that off as edge-case fear mongering.

But over the last few years I have come to see this not as an edge case at all but is actually a real practice that we see emerging over and over, whether it be in various threats to “net neutrality” or SEO practices that effectively bury the free versions of content. This post is just a brief note about yet another example that came up in conversation with a potential partner in government who wants to share openly some training resources aimed at helping immigrants to Canada have their foreign credentials accepted and become members of professional organizations in Canada.

I raised the question of “flavours” of Creative Commons license simply because the current configuration of SOL*R supports the 2.0 Attribution Share-Alike license and wanted them to realize they had a choice. This gave them some pause, and then mentioned that actually, one of the challenges faced when communicating with new immigrant populations in general is that there are certain groups (e.g. immigration lawyers and others who “facilitate” the process) who have a strong motive to short circuit official channels so that they can communicate “on behalf” of new immigrant clients (read – “charge them lots of money for things the government actually provides for free.”) Fair play to Google, the top unsponsored hits for “Immigrate to Canada” are indeed government websites, but the first one is a sponsored commercial link, and on that same first page of results are a number of commercial “immigration consulting” services pretty much masquerading as government sites.

All of which is simply to add yet another to what seems to me to be the long and ever-expanding list of examples of ways in which commercial entities, usually through legal if not totally ethical means, obscure what should be free and public resources. This is not make believe or edge case. This is in fact the modus operandi of capital. – SWL

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 This – http://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.

Readability – http://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.

SplashURL – http://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 Article – http://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.

PwnYoutube – http://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 Lookup – http://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 Googles – http://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

On the “value” of Open

For this year’s ETUG workshop in Nelson the skookum (look it up) organizing committee did a call for videos discussing the Value of Openness. The submissions, from happy mutants all over the network, were fantastic.

The complete finished version (about 30 minutes long) is well worth the watch (I can’t find the embed code, but watch it here – http://etug.ca/2011/06/02/2011-etug-spring-workshop-open-keynote/)

Here’s my little contribution, didactic and heartless as usual ;-( Anyways, for what it is worth

 

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

Hiatus

I post infrequently enough that I probably don’t even need to tell anyone edtechpost is going on hiatus, but there it is. Not sure if it will be back. Not looking for sympathy or comments. Mostly just feel done with all of this.

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