Category: The Rest

“A House Half Built” – Happy Canada Day

http://www.walrusmagazine.com/
article.pl?sid=06/05/16/0247214

If you’ve never read it before, I highly recommend The Walrus as one of the best Canadian “general interest” print mags out there (they post back issues online). In the June issue they published a piece by former Saskatchewan premier Roy Romanow titled “A House Half Built” on the shaky future of Canadian federalism that I thought to point to, in part because of our national holiday tomorrow, and in part because I was reminded of it again by this recent discussion on Ulises Mejias blog Ideant about “Socialist Software”.

The part of Romanov’s piece that stuck in my mind was actually not by him, but a quote by former Saskatchewan deputy Attorney General, John Whyte:

“A nation is built when the communities that comprise it make commitments to it, when they forego choices and opportunities on behalf of a nation…when the communities that comprise it make compromises, when they offer each other guarantees, when they make transfers, and perhaps most pointedly, when they receive from others the benefits of national solidarity. The threads of a thousand acts of accommodation are the fabric of a nation….”

Now if I was really smart I would somehow connect this back to the great discussion that unfolded on Ideant, but I’m not, and I have to go enjoy my July long weekend (plus our washer just exploded and we’ve water all over the basement, oy vey!). But I am left with a nagging feeling that the social interactions fostered by ‘social software’ are all too solipsistic, or at best are an “echo chamber,” and that the way in which we interface with them, sitting in front of screens typing away, allows us a safety that one does not get when there is real territory, real resources, real people involved, staring you in the face. But then I’m also someone who always thought Samuel Johnson’s refutation of Berkely was pretty good too. – SWL

Futurelab paper on Social software and learning

http://www.futurelab.org.uk/research/
opening_education/social_software_01.htm

I wanted to like this paper but was frustrated with the first 12 pages or so, mostly because it is just review of the ‘social software’ field and forrays into how knowledge and learning are changing à la Downes and Siemens. Nothing particularly wrong with it, just nothing that new.

But it was worth sticking with for the practical suggestions in section 4, “How Do We Move Towards ‘C-Learning’?” especially the section on what educators can do…

“You can plan your curriculum as though education does not stop at the classroom walls.”

Doesn’t get much more succinct than that! Or this line – “In particular, schools should not expect students to leave the 21st century in the cloakroom.”

This is an important paper. It is both academically respectable, readable (though a little longish for time constrained Deputy Ministers and the like) and ‘gets it’ without being fanatical or evangelical. Send it on to those who can help affect this change. – SWL

PROWE (Personal Repositories Online Wiki Environment) Project

http://www.prowe.ac.uk/index.htm

JISC-funded project that sets out to examine “in what ways could wiki and wiki-type environments be useful and useable as personal and informal repositories to support professional development within part-time tutor communities of practice?” While I think a lot of us already participating in the edublogosphere might think the answers self-evident, I am definitely looking forward to the results when they come out latter this year, especially if they come up with any useful insight into fostering adoption that isn’t to simply “wait for older faculty to retire” or “give faculty more PD time and training.” – SWL

Worth Reading – The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism and its Discussions

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier06/
lanier06_index.html

Apologies if you’ve seen this too many times now, but it is really worth the read. Actually, the important bit is not just the initial article by Jaron Lanier (“DIGITAL MAOISM:
The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism“, though you do have to read it for the rest to make sense) but more the ensuing discussion by the likes of Yochai Benkler, Clay Shirky, Esther Dyson, Jimmy Wales, George Dyson, and Howard Rheingold.

I especially liked Benkler’s, Shirky’s and Dyson’s responses. Lanier’s piece seems shaky, and, as a number of commentators point out, over-generalizes and actually mis-characterizes Wikipedia’s processes. And yet his piece still resonates with many of the commentators because it picks up on both over-hyped terms (the “hive mind”) and some real phenomenom of both the web and user generated content and challenges us to think about them. What emerges is some really interesting commentary on the individual in the networked world, collective action, collectivism, voting versus persuasion and bottom up versus top-down systems that is incredibly pertinent to those of us trying to envision and build new technologies for learning, thinking and collaborating. – SWL

Dynamically Wikipedia-fying Text: Drawdoc and Wikiproxy Greasemonkey script

http://nagle.u1i.net/drawdoc/autolinker.php and http://wikiproxy.whitelabel.org/greasemonkey.html

Both of these accomplish pretty similar things – take an existing web page, and turn proper nouns/key terms into links to wikipedia automatically.

Drawdoc is currently a web-based app (but not hard to see how it could be a service instead) that employs Yahoo’s term extraction service to identify the salient terms in a document, and then offers possible image matches from Yahoo images, and annotates those terms with links to either Wikipedia, Google or Yahoo to the selected terms.

The Wikiproxy Greasemonkey script works slightly differently, as a Greasemonkey script that appears to just look for ‘Proper Nouns’ on a page and then annotate them as the page is rendered with links to wikipedia. So works on the client side, but the effect is similar, a text automatically annotated with key words to wikipedia.

In both cases what seems lacking is a connection to wikipedia that actually confirms there is something to link to before creating the link. Not surprising. That’s not how they are intended to work, they are lightweight mashups. But the IDEA here is important – start thinking about collections you have on your campus that are pedagogically significant to your students – how tough would it be to code a greasemonkey script that then rendered key terms in your online course as a link to that collection.. of anatomical images? of learning objects? …you get the idea. Why do this? Well, in the case of an approach like drawdoc, it could become an automated annotator for your CMS-based courses, saving time and effort. With a greasemonkey-type approach, it could potentially become a tool that augmented the students experience of materials you didn’t create and don’t control with links to content in collections you trust.

Mashups are here. They’re even commonplace, almost. But just wait until they start invading the academy. You can already get a list of the available ‘web 2.0 APIs’ (that is almost inevitably incomplete) – do you know what’s available inside your own institution? …you’re either on the bus, or it’s running over you… exciting times indeed. – SWL

BC Educational Technology Users Group Spring Workshops

One of my other destinations last week was the BC Educational Technology Users Group annual Spring Workshop, this year held at North Island College’s lovely Comox Valley campus.

If the workshop schedule was actually reflective of current practices in BC, then you’d be led to believe we have almost ubiquitous adopting of elearning 2.0 in the province – 2 different wiki workshops, a podcasting session and blamb’s always entertaining and educational social software tsunami (with guest D’Arcy Norman, who we keep letting into the province, but I told him he better just move out here or else we’ll start asking to see his papers!) BCcampus’ Executive Director, David Porter, has a good writeup on one of the wiki sessions as well as the invigorating opening session by journalist Mark Schneider over at his new blog.

And as D’Arcy has mentioned, I also made my small contribution, a Web 0.1-ish session on our new service, SOL*R. More to come on that soon, but so far I have avoided being pelted with rotten fruit, always a relief when rolling out new services. – SWL

All I want for Christmas…

http://electroplankton.nintendods.com/flash.html

Brian and I have been trading links on wigged out music makers and visualizers recently. It started when he pointed to opening in his furl feed, which I replied back to with the whitney music box.

These are cool, but I dig even more things like Nintendo’s ElectroPlankton, really the only reason I would consider buying one of these Nintendo Dual Screen handhelds, though with a 7 year old son I am sure that will change 😉 And from a slightly different angle, I admit to coveting toys like Alesis Air FX Sound and Effects Controller or the Korg KPE-1 KAOSS Pad Entrancer. One of the reasons I love things like these – you can put them in the hands of non-musicians and see their eyes light up as they start to mangle and manipulate sounds to make new ones, something they never thought they could do. In my life, turning myself and other people onto the joy and power of making music is as powerful as any other teaching/learning I have done. Hallelujah! – SWL

Eyespot and One True Media – OnLine Video Editing Tools

http://eyespot.com/ and http://www.onetruemedia.com/otm_site/public_home

Via Mark Oehlert’s post I came across these two new tools with the promise of “online video editing tools” and I just had to check them out. With more and more services popping up allowing people to share and find media, this is another logical step, online remix tools, and one that I am interested in as well because I don’t have any video tools of my own (or ANY skills with video for that matter, making myself a perfect test candidate) (read more…)
Continue reading “Eyespot and One True Media – OnLine Video Editing Tools”

‘Blog Uses in Education’ Drag and Drop Exercise

http://www.ldu.leeds.ac.uk/dragndrop/bloguse/

Back in 2003 I created what’s become one of the more popular things on the EdTechPost site, the ‘matrix of blog uses in education.’ For whatever reason it’s gotten lots of links and traffic over the last 3 years, but what has been especially gratifying is when people have picked it up and actually done something new with it (like, you know, re-used/re-mixed it!)

The first example I found a year or so ago was the Dutch site Frankwatching, which took the original sketchy document and translated it into Dutch, along the way making it much more fetching to the eye.

But I was really blown away by a recent example emailed to me by its creator, Tony Lowe. Tony, through a company called Webducate, has developed a number of flash-based tools for creating learning content. Using one of those tools, Dragster, he created an interactive version of the ‘matrix of blog uses in education’ with a cool innovation – in addition to a pre-existing list of “uses,” which the user can drag and drop into their chosen quadrant of the matrix, it allows you to create new ones on the fly to then be placed there.

In an email Tony writes that in future versions people will be able to save completed exercises and look at a gallery of others’ work, but even as it is now I can see this being a useful tool to use with faculty or others in workshops to brainstorm different uses they can make of blogs and blogging and help them see it as an activity and process, not an end product (which was a main goal of the ‘matrix’). – SWL

University of Washington’s Catalyst team releases Solstice Perl Framework

http://solstice.eplt.washington.edu/Say_Hello_to_Solstice

Oren Sreeby wrote me today to let me know about the recent open sourcing of Solstice, a Web application development framework for Perl which the University of Washington has developed to power their suite of Catalyst tools. Solstice itself is just the framework used in the development, but the team is also apparently at work to open source the actual web tools themselves. This is exciting news as people who have seen the Catalyst tools will know that they represented an early and quite innovative approach to providing teaching and learning tools (including a much lauded eportfolio tool) that wasn’t simply replicating the same CMS over and over again. Ed Tech Perl developers, are you listening? – SWL