Brainstorm in Progress: twitter

Showing posts with label twitter. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Connectivism - The First 2000 Years

I would like to highly recommend a book I am currently reading to educators interested in Connectivism. It is called Writing on the Wall: Social Media - The First 2000 Thousand Years by Tom Standage, the digital editor at the Economist. The point of the book is that social media is not a new phenomena but it is something that we have been engaging in for millennia and that it is part of being human. The book is interesting, well-researched and brings pieces of history that have been floating freely in your head together in some unusual and useful ways. He ties how we used to communicate with everything from cuneiform tablets, pottery shards and graffiti together with Twitter, email and Facebook. Some of those themes are discussed were discussed here in postings about the Silk Road as a network, The Republic of Letters, and other postings. I have also written here about Connectivism being "nothing new" and, for me, that is a great compliment to a theory - it means that we can use the theory not only to account for where we are now and where we are going, but also use it to analyze where we have been.

How this vision informs instructional design is that we recognize the social dimension of learning and how learning experiences happen in networks. Instructional design and teaching is the facilitation of these networks. The one-way delivery of information is a one sided "conversation" that has some use. I can gather information through reading a book or hearing a lecture, but I learn when I discuss it, through writing, talking, meeting others (in whatever medium) and make connections.

Thursday, January 02, 2014

Social Networks and The Good Way to Do History

Biblioteque Nationale

There is a fascinating article by Harvard librarian Robert Darnton in this month's New York Review of Books called "The Good Way to Do History." It is a review of Arlette Farge's book The Allure of the Archives. This book was originally written in 1989 before the rise of the internet and ebooks, and yet, as Darnton points out, Farge's work addresses issues that are quite relevant. Farge's work talks about how information travelled in earlier centuries. I think that what we will find is that the patterns of communication are strikingly familiar. Darnton addresses what he says are some of the myths about our time with Farge's work:

1. We live in the information age.
Darnton says that this is misleading and that every age was an age of information. I agree with this - the networks people created through letter writing and books were slow but just as significant and useful as the networks we have now. He points out that Farge once used the phrase "the logic of the crowd" to talk about how inflammatory information spreads revolt - much like Twitter in our age but through word of mouth. "The logic of the crowd" is like Howard Rheingold's concept "Smart Mobs." As Darnton puts it:

"Farge shows how information traveled through the media of eighteenth-century Paris. Primarily oral but intermixed with printed material such as chapbooks and popular engravings, the flow of talk and images (also, I would add, songs) shaped a collective consciousness that often erupted in violence."

I have a note here on the Republic of Letters that describes some of these early modern networks.

2. All information is available online.
Darnton says that this is false. He says that there are an estimated 129,864,880 books and Google has only digitized 20,000,000 of them. He discusses the miles of archives that exist: 252 miles of them in the Biblioteque Nationale alone. Although I get his point, the significance of Google is that I do not have to be a member of an elite academy to get access to the information. The internet can represent the democratization of information (and yes, there are problems to overcome with that idea). Farge documents in her book the arduous process she had to go through to get access to the archives.

3. The future is digital.
Darnton calls this myth true but trite and misleading. The death of the book is routinely predicted since the invention of just about every other media (movies, television, comic books, etc.). Darnton points out that "more books are produced each year than the year before - an increase of 6% in the United States in 2012." He goes on to say that new media actually expand and enrich the experience of the old.

I think it is important that I read outside of my discipline. We need to stop thinking so much about specific disciplines and make the connections between them to solve problems. Sometimes it feels like we spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel by addressing issues that may have been solved, in part, by other scholars elsewhere. I really appreciate publications like the New York Review of Books because it gives me a chance to read about what is happening in other fields and make connections that I would not readily be able to make.

I actually bought the Kindle version of this book. I like to read physical books as much as anyone else but this is a short one and I could not resist the price or the irony.

Saturday, October 27, 2012

MOOCs and Connectivist Instructional Design

George Siemens (Photo credit: heloukee)

I am very interested in the instructional design of MOOCs. While I was working at Tacoma Community College, I co-taught a course called "Health Information Management 101." The purpose of the course was to introduce health information management students to all of the technology that they would encounter in the course of getting a certificate or degree in health information management, as well as collaborative technologies that would help them successfully work online (this is where modern HIM is going). The idea was that we would use all of the tools to teach the class that were also part of the curriculum. We taught the course using a "multimodal delivery" method: it was a hybrid online but students could choose at anytime to take the course online or show up for the lab. The whole point of the curriculum was to help students get the idea that they did not have to learn how to use any software program, but that they could gain transportable skills that would enable them to use any technology to meet the needs of any situation. When students are taking HIM classes, they can't be taught the technology of the work place because that technology in HIM changes too quickly. One year, hospitals and insurance companies are using one program, the next they are upgraded to a new system or have moved on to something else. They are as bad as schools and their learning management systems. What we had to teach was the core skills that allowed anyone to adapt to any technology they might find themselves in. We got the students up to speed on texting, messaging, sharing and collaborating using wikis, blogs, Google docs, and even toyed with Second Life. The idea was that if we could create a community online of HIM students, then they could help one another manage the pace of technological change in their field. We wound up succeeding far beyond our expectations. Within a couple of semesters, the network we facilitated, had first semester students, second semester, and students who were working in the profession all talking to one another in twitter. We even had students who were in other fields also talking to our HIM students. Our "classroom" was streamed live from a lab where we assisted students with the different projects. We wanted a space where local students could drop in physically if they wanted to or participate remotely. What we noticed was that students started helping one another as much as we were helping students. One of the reasons for this was that each assignment was basically a detailed guide on how to use a particular tool, and each assignment asked the students to share their work with one another. They wouldn't just sign up for Twitter; they would add the entire class to their account. They wouldn't just sign up for a social bookmarking site; they would share their bookmarks with the class. Creating the community was built into the lessons. This class was not MOOC but it gave us the experience of letting the community, even the community outside of the classroom, drive the learning.

Around the same time, we ran into George Siemen's essay, "Connectivism: a learning theory for the digital age"as well as the work by Stephen Downes on the same topic. We were then so far beyond the ADDIE model of instructional design. There was no model of typical instructional design that could account for what was happening here. Stephen Downes wrote in the Huffington Post "At its heart, connectivism is the thesis that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections, and therefore that learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks. Knowledge, therefore, is not acquired, as though it were a thing. It is not transmitted, as though it were some type of communication." We were really excited by many of the ideas around connectivism because it is the only learning theory that does not have the justification of the old model of education at its heart (i.e. hierarchical, top down, sage on the stage, medieval lecture halls, exclusivity, etc.). Connectivism accounted for how our students were working, interacting, and collaborating. We could piece together bits of social constructivism and other theories to account for some of it, but none of the other models we looked at were as complete. This isn't to say that we agreed with everything about connectivism. Instructional designers are a very practical bunch. We tend to evaluate a theory based on its usefulness, not its pedigree. And a theory is just that - a theory. Theories do not spring forth whole like Athena from Zeus's forehead - they are postulated, tested, experimented with, and revised. Connectivism isn't wrong just because it does not validate every theory that went before it. The questions that instructional designers ask are like Wittgenstien's answer to the afterlife: "The real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists, but even if it does, what problem this really solves?" A theory, for instructional design, should be a tool that answers questions that are actually being asked. It should lead to real solutions to instructional problems.

I participated in George Siemen's and Stephen Downe's MOOC, "Connectivism and Connective Knowledge 2008" (CCK08). And unlike other education classes I had taken at the graduate level, this one was taught using the method it was teaching. Each week, there were blogging assignments, discussions in Twitter, Facebook, the discussion forum in Moodle, and even in Second Life. There were weekly guest lecturers as well as presentations by the course facilitators. The real heart of the course was the groups of students who would meet virtually, using the collaborative tools of their own choosing, who would discuss the presentations and readings. These groups were self-organized, leaderless, and informal. Yet, there always seemed to be someone in the group who would carry the discussion back into the course to have questions answered by the facilitators. And the facilitators would sometimes participate in the discussions. This experience was highly interactive. There was interaction with the facilitators, the content and between the students. Interestingly enough, the research shows that interaction is one of the primary measures of success and retention in online classes: the higher the degree and opportunity for interaction, the more successful a course will be. This course completely changed how I think of course design. Giving students the opportunity to apply what they are learning to their learning experience, workplace, and previous knowledge is a powerful experience. This should be at the center of our learning design and course outcomes.

Another experience that I think ties the two course models together was my experience in Jim Groom's DS 106 - a digital storytelling MOOC from Mary Washington University. In this course, there are detailed instructions on how to do each assignment, and more importantly, how to create your own assignments. There is also a degree of networking and collaboration that I don't think has ever been attempted before. Students don't just participate in the network - they literally become the network. Each student is asked to create their own domain on the web. Each one becomes acutely aware of their status as a node in the web. This is the way it should be. Students of digital storytelling should know their media as well as any painter who creates their own materials. Again, the network created in DS106 goes far beyond the idea of a classroom. The twitter hashtag #DS106 basically has a life of its own with past and present students, artists, media professionals, and followers from around the world all participating, collaborating and sharing art, video, and projects.

So given these experiences, what should connectivist instructional design look like? Based on the principles of connectivism, learning should:

Provide for a diversity of opinions
Allow students to create connections between specialized nodes and learning sources
Foster their capacity to learn (teach metacognitive learning skills)
Increase their ability see connections between fields, concepts, and ideas
Teach students to build networks that will allow students to keep current in their field
Allow students to choose what to learn and how

Aditionally, in a presentation that George Siemens gave on instructional design for the MOOC "Connectivism and Connective Knowlege 2008" he said that learning should be designed for adaptability, for "patterning, wayfinding, and sensemaking" and focus on "content, context, and connections." He says that it is difficult to take all of this and try to build some mechanistic formula for creating learning experiences. I agree with that - but this is also a teaching philosophy. The best way to help students get this is to model it in our teaching. This is exactly what MOOCs can do that traditional classes can't. In this blog, I will be collecting assignments and activities that model these principles, that have the connectivist principles built into them.

If you have some that you would like to share, as a student or as a teacher, feel free to add to the comments below.

Saturday, September 15, 2012

Seoul Man: Viral Videos and the Shrinking World

I have been thinking recently about Psy and the K-pop phenomena of his video "Gangnam Style" that broke out of the internet and onto mainstream television and media. This video was destined to become the Numa Numa of the year (Gary Brolsma's lip-synching of the Romanian pop song Dragostea din Tei by O-Zone) except for one thing: the world is smaller now. Or rather, the internet and other media are quickly collapsing into a single macro-market. The video "Gangnam Style" was released in July and in two months, after being kicked around Facebook and Twitter, the YouTube video has gotten nearly 181,000,000 views. I believe it took Numa Numa a year or so to hit 2,000,000 views. Which is remarkable in itself seeing that Brolsma was just a kid with a web cam. (Mike Wesch has an excellent presentation on viral videos and YouTube that discusses Brolsma's video and many others called "An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube" that is really worth watching.) Psy from Korea is part of the pop industry there, but there has been little breaking out of the K-pop world and into the mainstream until now. By mainstream, I mean Psy's appearance on the Ellen Degenere's show and his appearance at a Dodger's game. That would not have been possible without Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. You can't set out to create this kind of content on purpose. Most people who are watching the video are not familiar with the Korean TV personalities and comedians in the video, they do not understand the context. They don't really need to. The dancing is funny, and the music has a catchy beat. To many Western viewers, the randomness and cultural alienation is part of its appeal.

Of course, there is a darker side to the shrinking world too. Another viral video with a definite air of cultural alienation is circulating and being used to basically dismantle the Arab Spring and as a pretext by extremists to attack all things Western. The same connections that can create a pop sensation can create chaos.

We have to recognize this change in how unpredictable information can be. Psy and his producers could not have predicted anything like the reception he has gotten. We no longer live in a world of "media outlets" and consumers. The consumers of the past are creating responses to media using the same tools that were once only available only to "The Media." We are the media. And when something goes viral, we have no idea how it will be perceived. I am not saying that we have to be careful what we put out there, but learning how these new connections are changing the world has never been more important. A theory of how meaning or dissonance is created through connections, like George Siemen's Connectivism, would be very useful about now.

Sunday, June 03, 2012

France: Minitel and the Internet

Minitel, France, 1982. Wikipedia

I was just in Paris this month. How did I get to Paris? Fortunately for me, my car got stolen in October, and I decided to go to Paris instead of replacing it. We were a two car family but there are now only two of us. Two cars makes sense when we are both adjunct teachers teaching at three different colleges, but now that I am an administrator, it makes no sense to have two cars. I miss my non-descript Mazda Protege. So what did I do in Europe? I went on a long over-due vacation: I spent 8 days in Amsterdam researching Dutch art for a novel I am writing and spent 9 days in Paris just because I love Paris.

Paris, of course, was amazing. I was there 13 years ago and I never imagined it would take so long to get back. I love art, music, French literature, history, urban walks, and food, and Paris has all of that in spades. It is the most gorgeous, romantic city on earth and only San Francisco comes close. I have heard SF referred to as "Paris West" but interestingly enough, no one calls Paris "San Francisco East."

I inadvertently got unplugged in Europe. I had all of these great apps on my phone that were going to help me translate, navigate, mediate, and explicate my experiences in Europe, but Verizon charges Louis the XVIth era prices for international data and over-seas connections. The phone stayed home. I have a camera with the latest card format allowing me to take thousands of pictures and movies on my camera but my Ubuntu Linux netbook would not read the card. Neither would any internet cafe in Europe using Windows XP, which is most of them. On top of that, the budget hotels we were staying in were not exactly up to snuff with wireless. Wifi worked in the lobby and the first four floors, but after that, we were out of luck. Which is fine, we tend to stay in the kind of hotels that brag about "potable water." So I spent most of my vacation disconnected - I did not feel smarter; on the contrary, I would have loved to be able to talk to my people while traveling.

One of the headlines in Paris while I was there was "The second life of Minitel." Minitel was the bulletin board of the nation in the pre-internet age. It was their AOL. It has been around for 30 years and they are finally pulling the plug. They were going to stop the service last year but they gave in to pressure to wait for the 30th anniversary. But what exactly was Minitel? Minitel was a terminal-based service that used existing phone lines to let users access bulletin boards, make travel reservations, order from retail outlets, access databases, and telephone directories. The terminals were given away for free to 9 million people and the service is used by 25 million people because there is also a computer interface to the service. This was a lot like the bulletin board services in the United States.

According to Wikipedia, "Minitel was often considered as an impediment for a fast deployment of the Internet in France, since it already provided safe and easy online access for many useful services without requiring a personal computer. Indeed, it still has advantages over the Internet: it does not require subscribing to a service (except the phone service), buying and maintaining a personal computer..."

However the Minitel system got French people used to making purchases online and using online services for connecting to one another and communicating online. So it made the Internet possible in France. The people of France were familiar with all of the issues that we were only to meet up with later: the government did not intervene in pornographic bulletin boards, they said it was the parents responsibility.

In 1986, French students used the Minitel system to coordinate a national strike, demonstrating an early use of digital communication devices for "participatory technopolitical ends." This was a prelude to the Velvet Revolution in Eastern Europe, Twitter, and the Arab Spring.

Saturday, May 19, 2012

Facebook and My 1000 Closest Friends

This is an article I wrote for the Times Standard "Tech Beat' column for May 11, 2012:

I have read a few claims recently about the detrimental effects of the Internet. The most recent one came from the New York Times in the article “The Flight from Conversation” by Sherry Turkle, a professor from MIT, who says that the Internet is making our relationships with one another superficial. Her idea is that we are mistaking our “likes” on Facebook as real conversation and our “friends” online as real friends. I think this argument comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of online communication.

Turkle says that for the past 15 years she has studied connective technologies and talked to “hundreds of people of all ages and circumstances about their plugged in lives.” She relies primarily on anecdotes, and one of my favorite quotes from economist Roger Brinner says that “the plural of anecdote is not data.” A collection of subjective experiences does not make them objective. Anecdotal evidence is of limited usefulness; it can provide case studies and be the starting point for research, but it is generally considered as weak evidence.

Turkle says that the little devices we carry around with us are so powerful “they change not only what we do but who we are.” I basically agree with this. I don't particularly think this is negative. People write less. Last year the post office closed 3,700 locations. Some of this was due to expanded retail marketing, but much of it is because email and texting make most letter writing superfluous. Does this mean that somehow our correspondence is less meaningful?

I have hundreds of anecdotes of my own. Let's take my community college cafeteria in 1984. There were no cell phones. There was no email. The college library had a non-networked computer lab with TRS 80s. Our only hope was to actually talk to somebody face to face. I would go into the cafeteria, buy a cup of coffee, sit down at the table, and ask the nearest girl “What classes are you taking?” or “What's your major?” with what I hoped would pass for something not quite entirely unlike sincerity. One might suspect that, even though I was trying to start up a conversation, I may not have been really all that interested in what classes they were taking or what their major might have been. Needless to say, my intent was to have a conversation. More often than not, the “conversation” stopped there. But once in a great while it led to more coffee elsewhere.

Today, I have 879 friends on Facebook, but let's take a closer look. I do not expect birthday cards from 875 of them. I originally started using Facebook because many educators and instructional designers I met at education conferences (both face-to-face and online) were using it to share materials, links, and contact information. This accounts for at least 300 of my “friends.” About 200 of my “friends” are literary journals, editors, and literary agents. They never call or come over for dinner, yet I follow them on Facebook because I write and want to keep up with what is going on in the literary world.

A little over a hundred friends on Facebook are family. Some I see often, and many of them I have never met. Some of these distant cousins live in Ireland. We will be using Facebook to plan a birthday/family reunion this December when my father turns 80 and my little brother turns 50. There is nothing superficial about that.

You might have friends at your local service organization, temple, or church. But what happens when you go to that weekly meeting? Do you have a deep conversation? Maybe not, but you probably know that if you need help, you have a community to fall back on when things are tough. Or you might be willing to lend a hand to someone who is in need. It might be something simple like a lift to the hospital on a Monday morning or a chore that an older person might find difficult to do. When you meet those people, you might just smile and nod. The “like” in Facebook is that smile and nod.

Social networks can be superficial, and yet over and over again, we see that when there is trouble, those friends in social networks can have a major impact. I am thinking here of the Arab Spring and the communications networks that sprang up out of Twitter to change the face of the Arab world forever. Maybe the technology has allowed us to see the superficial surface of human communication frozen in time in the social network, but that is not how we should be judging technology because most people seem to be using to enhance their connections with one another rather than trivialize them.

Geoff Cain is a member of the Redwood Technology Consortium and director of distance education at College of the Redwoods. Contact him at geoff-cain@redwoods.edu<

Saturday, April 07, 2012

Mobile Learning: Education is Everywhere

This is an article I wrote for the "Tech Beat" column for the Times-Standard:

Darrell is a part-time student who does not own a car. Every Tuesday and Thursday, he takes the hour-long bus ride to school. Like many students at his community college, he works nearly 30 hours a week while taking three classes. Between work, commuting, and attending classes, he is hard-pressed to find time for studying.

Fortunately for him, though, while taking the bus one morning, he found himself sitting next to one of his fellow classmates, Julie. He told her about his frustrations with his schedule and the homework and how he didn't feel like he had time to see a tutor. She told him about the many educational sites that can be accessed on the phone. Sites like the Mobile ESL page from Athabasca University (http://eslau.ca) that has online grammar lessons and short self-tests that will help you check your work. She also pointed out that parts of the college's own learning management system were accessible by phone. She even had one instructor who was using an electronic textbook that was accessible by smart phones.

Darrel quickly took to the world of mobile learning. His phone was no longer just for texting and music.

What exactly is mobile learning? Mobile learning (often called “mlearning”) is any learning or instruction that takes place at a specific location but relies on a mobile device to access the information or event.

Mlearning often depends on “smart phones.” Smart phones, such as the iPhone or Android, are basically minicomputers that can connect to the Internet via wifi or through the phone network. Any phone that can connect to the Internet can participate in mlearning. Mlearning is also taking place on tablet computers such as the iPad and the highly portable netbooks. Not all phones are smart phones, but they are becoming more and more widespread and common. Soon, there will be no other phone but a smart phone.

What are some ways that instructors can use phones for learning? They can host content that is easily accessible to phones on the Internet. Many software packages make mobile-friendly websites out of the box, and many phones have simplified web browsers that help make accessing the information easier.

Many resources and institutions, such as the New York Public Library, have mobile-friendly sites. And speaking of libraries, a number of libraries, such as Oregon State and Yale, are taking advantage of mobile phones with a “Text-a-Librarian” service.

Mobile phones often have applications on them that will allow them to read electronic books. Tens of thousands of books are available for free on the Internet through sites such as gutenberg.org. Amazon's Kindle software is available for phones, but there are many free non-corporate readers out there as well.

Instructors can ask students to gather data with their phones. Often, smart phones include cameras. That, combined with the Internet connection, allows students to post photographs online. Students can also post data to websites, blogs, or wikis. This can allow students to gather information in the field.

Mobile phones can also read barcodes and special versions of barcodes called QR codes that will allow users to interact with objects. QR codes are used in science and art museums on the description cards for exhibits or works of art. When they are scanned, they might give more information via text, audio, or video, or it might take the visitor to a webpage.

Mobile phones are natural portals to sites like Facebook and Twitter. Some instructors will use services like Twitter to send announcements, as a “back channel” discussion site for lectures, and as a way to continue the community of the classroom beyond the walls of the college.

Sample of a QR code.

Mobile phones are also used as “student response systems.” Any mobile phone can be used this way. Using websites like Poll Everywhere (www.polleverywhere.com), instructors can set up polls that the students can respond to in class. Give three choices for an answer, for instance, the students can text a number to respond to their choice. Instructors can get instant feedback no matter how large their class is.

Smart phones like the iPhone or the Android have an “app store” associated with them. There are numerous free applications that can be used on a phone that allow students to learn anything from languages to the Periodic Table.

There are many ways that both students and teachers can take advantage of phones for teaching and learning. It is important for educators to understand that students often will be catching what they can of their learning experience when they can catch it. Everyone benefits when we use tools that, by default, make the learning materials as accessible to as many as possible when they need it.

Geoff Cain is a member of the Redwood Technology Consortium and director of distance education at College of the Redwoods. Contact him at geoff-cain@redwoods.edu.

NOTE: Drake Teller posted a comment at the Times Standard: "Also check out Celly, a free service with group texting and instant polling. However, with Celly you can send and receive polls from the web or from any sms capable phone. Thus, it does not necessarily require a smart phone to have class discussions, send alerts, or gather student response (like a software clicker w/o the software). For more info: http://cel.ly/schools

Friday, March 23, 2012

Wired Love: From Telegraph to Twitter

An illustration of Phelps' Electro-motor Printing Telegraph, the last and most advanced telegraphy mechanism designed by George May Phelps. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)This is an article I wrote for the "Tech Beat" column for the Times-Standard:

As one who works in online learning, I often get forwarded emails from colleagues alerting me to the dangers that might arise from using Facebook, Twitter, or other social networks. For instance, a few years back, after sending out a notice for a workshop on social networks and education, I received several emails warning me with a link to David Gardener's article called “The Marriage Killer: One in five American divorces now involve Facebook” from the Daily Mail. This lurid article begins with, “It used to be the tell-tale lipstick on the collar. Then there were the give-away texts that spelled the death knell for many marriages. But now, one in five divorces involve the social networking site Facebook....” The implication being that I may want to be careful in promoting the use of social networks like Facebook in education because there are perils that lurk beneath the surface of the Internet that may lead to unintended and tragic consequences.

This is not surprising. I have given workshops on how to use virtual worlds in education, often using educational sites designed in the virtual world “Second Life.” Invariably, after sending out the announcement for the workshop, I will get a cautionary email such as the one informing me of the 40-year-old British couple who had famously married in Second Life in a huge wedding, but then divorced later after one of them had an alleged “affair” in the online world. The wife said that she caught her husband's avatar having sex with another animated woman: the couple are now divorced (in the real world).

What are these stories really telling us? Is there anything really inherently dangerous in online communication? This is not a question of 'should we' or 'should we not' have relationships online. The fact is that the online world is just another medium of communication, and that is what humans do: communicate in a wide variety of ways. We are every bit as complicated in our courtship rituals and communications as the rarest of birds-of-paradise in New Guinea.

The only difference between the modern online courtship rituals and those of the past is the new medium of the Internet. There are a lot of things we are doing online that we never could have imagined doing just 10 years ago. Who would have thought that making purchases online would become so commonplace? Or online banking? Or wedding invitations?

But yet, there was something about the more recent warnings I received that seemed very familiar. And the reason is that every time we, as a culture, develop a new technology, there are always those who see it as the first step down a slippery slope that will ultimately mean the end of the world as we know it.

For example, people had been batting around the idea of the telegraph in various forms since the 1740s. Eventually, Samuel Morse developed a system that could transmit signals over long distances and by the 1860s there was a trans-Atlantic cable, a well-established telegraph network in the Northeastern United States and a network in California and other parts of the West linked by a trans-continental cable. In less than a generation, this new technology transformed how people handled money, got the news, ran elections and even fell in love!

Doesn't this sound familiar? Sense trouble?

The stage was set for wire fraud, romances and the usual chicanery that happens when people figure out new ways to communicate with one another. There was even a novel written in 1880 by telegraph operator Ella Cheever Thayer who published the world's first “cyber-romance.” “Wired Love: a romance of dots and dashes,” was a novel about two telegraphers who fall in love over the telegraph wires without ever meeting face-to-face. It was the mother to the film “Shop Around the Corner” (about a relationship via letters), and the grandmother to the modern email version of the love story “You've Got Mail.” “Wired Love” was a bestseller for 10 years, and according to Tom Standage in his book “The Victorian Internet,” relationships like this were not at all that uncommon.

For every failed relationship in cyberspace, there is an example of success. The most famous modern example is the couple in the “twitterverse,” Greg Rewis and Stephanie Sullivan (now Mr. and Mrs. Rewis). Greg Rewis proposed to his girlfriend on Twitter and sent an instant message on his phone asking her to check her Twitter account just for good measure. Later, their children sat in the church and tweeted the ceremony to those attending virtually.

Despite the “dangers,” the real lesson is that people communicate and connect with one another. This is what we do. We are very good at it. We will use all forms of communication for education, banking or socializing. Despite the warnings and cautionary tales, people will not resist using any means possible to connect with one another.

Geoff Cain is a member of the Redwood Technology Consortium and director of distance education at College of the Redwoods. Contact him at geoff-cain@redwoods.edu.

Twitter and the Greater Community

Tweeting bird, derived from the initial 't' of Twitter Deutsch: Twitschervogel, entwickelt aus dem Anfangs-'t' von Twitter (Photo credit: Wikipedia)Over the last week, I went to a bookstore where an internationally known author was reading from her latest book. As people were sitting down, we all started talking with one another. We were gathering together to share an experience, to connect with one another over our shared love for this author and books in general. I looked over the crowd and there were a handful of people with their heads down tapping quickly into their phones. I followed suit. The woman behind me said to her friend, "I wish I could Tweet." Now I thought this was very funny on many levels - she was not saying she didn't have the ability or the means although both of those could be true. She may not even own a mobile phone. What she was expressing was that she was really excited to be where she was and she wanted to be able to share that with a broader community - with as many people as possible. The popularity of Twitter, microblogging, and texting isn't in the inanity of knowing who is eating pizza where, but in our connection to that greater community. This is not to say that knowing when someone is eating pizza is really inane. I have found by reading tweets from people I know and work with, I begin to get an unconscious sense of their life's patterns. I will sometimes catch myself knowing I had better call an associate at 3:30 because they always head out to the gym at 4:00. The company celebrated their sixth birthday on March 21st. Like most 6 year olds, it is still finding its legs and learning how to read. Twitter has certainly become part of the digital public square when to "Tweet" can also mean "I wish I could tell the whole world I am here."

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Monday, January 30, 2012

Apple Innovates Away Textbook Access and Affordabilty

I wanted to write a few notes here about many of the questions and comments I have read on Twitter and elsewhere about the iPad and textbook authoring. Two things that Apple does well is marketing and innovation. Sometimes though, the two don't speak well together. Apple is "reinventing" the textbook only for those who haven't been watching the textbook get reinvented over the last ten years. The open textbook and OER movements have been reinventing textbooks and revolutionizing education for while now. What Apple has figured out is how to monetize and brand that "revolution" into a free app on an expensive non-ADA compliant platform.

Image via Wikipedia

I have a Mac at home and an iPod, why aren't I delirious over the "new" technology? Because for what I do, for the problems I need to solve, Apple is no solution. What Apple has done is to figure out a way for instructors to quickly author textbooks on their proprietary platform. For instance, faculty can now take an open textbook, load it on to an iPad and upload it to the app store where it is now inaccessible to those with smaller budgets, older computers or even an e-book reader. How is this an improvement? All I see is an expensive tool designed to lock out poorer students and colleges.

Where would we get the money to provide iPads for students? Do we make it a requirement that students have to have an iPad to take someone's class? The colleges that are most excited about this are those with money. I think you will find the community colleges less enthusiastic.

Why is Apple doing this? According to Publisher's Weekly: "Sales of mass market paperback plunged in September, falling 54.3% at reporting houses. Trade paperback did much better with sales flat at reporting houses, while hardcover sales fell 18.1%." PW goes on to say that "For the first nine months of 2011, e-book sales were up 137.9% at reporting publishers, to $727.7 million." The e-book market is ripe for "innovation." Apple is not interested in opening access to education; they are not interested in innovating in education for the sake of education. Their eye is on the bottom line as it has always been.

Patrick Martin really summed this up nicely: “at the bare minimum, the technology that replaces textbooks must work across multiple platforms and be capable of running on the cheapest hardware. Anything short of that will just be another thing that only more prosperous parents can purchase in hopes of giving their children a leg up. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not a revolution.”

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

SOPA Resistance Day

On Jan 24th, Congress will vote to pass internet censorship in the Senate, even though the vast majority of Americans are opposed. We need to kill the bill - PIPA in the Senate and SOPA in the House - to protect our rights to free speech, privacy, and prosperity. See this timeline of SOPA and PIPA events and the activist backlash.

What can you do?

Image by ~C4Chaos via Flickr

If you have a Twitter account, tweet about the #SOPASTRIKE and ask your followers to get ready. You can follow SopaStrike on twitter for news as the strike gets closer. Go to Blackout SOPA to add ‘STOP SOPA’ to your Twitter image.
Post the SOPA Strike page to your Facebook account by clicking here.
Get ready for January 18th! Email and tweet at your friends, tell them to tell everyone about the strike. When the day comes, call Congress, tweet like crazy (#SOPASTRIKE), and help the strike appear everywhere!

Sunday, December 11, 2011

Redwood Technology Consortium's Annual Holiday Tweet-Up

The Redwood Technology Consortium welcomes the public to join them at the 3rd annual Holiday Tweet-up, Wednesday, Dec. 14, at Greenway Partners in Arcata from 6:00-10:00 P.M.

The Tweet-up started three years ago with the intention of providing a face-to-face meeting place for community members whose main interaction was through social networking websites, like Twitter and Facebook. The event has become a fun place to gather with laptop computers, smart phones and even without technology devices to visit, play trivia games and win prizes.

Image via WikipediaRTC will also provide a bar with the vodka-based Humboldt Hashtag (a clever nod to the Twitter habit of following the pound sign with a common word or phrase, which makes a topic easy to search), local wines and microbrews and non-alcoholic drinks.

Throughout the year, the RTC focuses primarily on advocacy for broadband duplication and education. This year, the Humboldt Internet Marketing Group was created, under the RTC umbrella, and community members meet at lunchtime on the second Tuesday of each month to discuss topics that focus on marketing businesses of all sizes in the internet age

This year, the RTC has seen the retirement of board members Steve Stratton and Robert Beckerdite, and welcomed new members Geoff Cain, Terry Olgin and Monica Topping. Veteran members Seth Johannesen and board president Mary Cruse, and board treasurer Sean Connors remain.

Greenway Partners is located at 1385 Eighth Street in Arcata, across the street from the Arcata Kinetic Lab.

The RTC Holiday Tweet-up is a no-cost, all-ages event.

Contact: Monica Topping (707) 498-3534
Redwood Technology Consortium

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Open Ed Conference - Keynote speakers Josh Jarrett & Jim Groom

Josh Jarrett at discussing "Access is Not Enough."
Challenges from here to 2020

Warning: raw notes ahead!

Three challenges for the OER community

Four Challenges for the Next decade

Completion
Quality
Funding
Demographics

Higher ed tuition has gone up over 400%. There is over a trillion dollars in student loan debt. The "new normal" is students who work and go to school. "Education drives social mobility in the U.S."

Gate's Foundation rewards institutions for success, not just access, accelerate early momentum through restructured dev ed and smoother transitions between HS nad college; unlocks the power of technology for education.

First three accolades,
1. Developing frameworks, rules, and regimes to support OER.
2. Establishing a community of sharing
3. Creating access to rapidly expanding stores of OER

The three OER bugaboos: quality/impact, usage/dist., sustainability

Three Challenges:

1. Evidence: translate OER cost savings into student impact on

course completion
retention
enrollment intensity
credential completion rates

2. Content development: design for reuse

How much of this content is reuseable?
Content has to be modular for reuse.

3. Integration, instrumentation, and distribution

How do we create common distribution?
We need a comparable OER distribution channel like a publisher.

What would it mean to solve these issues?

"You can't fail placement but placement can fail you!"

Analytics tools improved success in a course by 50%.

Jim Groom - Climbed out of a tent. "We are here today to occupy Open Ed."
Are we talking about open ed resources as a store? or as an on going experience. Ten years ago there was more of a community, outside of sustainability.

Why aren't the open repositories open and accessible?

Michael Branson Smith - his course DS 106. DS106 Radio.

Gardner Campbell wrote a book called "Love Analytics" that informs his presentaion. "The bags of gold" talk.

He doesn't care about the institutions or grants - this should be a grass roots movement.

He ran his DS 106 course as a open course. He ran three sections for credit and then opened it up and had 400 sign up online. DS 106 is not an open education resource, it is an open education experience. He started with 8 assignments but then let the students create assignments. There are 200 assignments now that a student can take.

The course has a student created tutorials, examples, and assignments.

http://bit.ly/radio4life

Twitter was an important component of the course - students hash tag their messages with #ds106

"A community that transcends any technology."

The Summer of Oblivion: a pedagogy of uncertainty
He taught the course as if he had not talked to someone for 20 years. He called himself "Dr. Oblivion."

Why would we waste out time lecturing when there are new media?

"Looking for Whitman" Michael Branson Smith has a class of 80 students are working on DS 106.

"Education is an experience, not a resource."

Saturday, August 27, 2011

Open Learning and the Next Generation LMS

Onderwijsdagen 2007 - Keynote - Stephen Downes

Image by moqub via FlickrWe have been talking at work about what the next generation of LMSs (learning management systems) should look like. In the education blog world, LMSs are considered pretty old fashioned because they tend to be proprietary silos, built on old code (by committee), and do not empower students to facilitate their own learning. Once the class is over, the LMS shuts the door behind the student. We agree with all of that. We find it particularly hard to get really meaningful information in and out of most LMSs. We are all in favor of "personal learning networks" - the way LMSs generally attempt to integrate Web 2.0 or social networks is pretty laughable. It is usually misunderstood and bolted on as an after-thought. But LMSs can be important to institutions because they provide a consistent interface for students who may not have any experience with technology. I got the idea to email Stephen Downes about this because I have been reading his blog and newsletter since I have been involved in teaching and education. I asked him what he thought the next generation of LMSs would look like and he was gracious enough to send us this response:

"I guess my short answer to the query is that I think the future LMS will look like what gRSShopper will look like when it's done. Because I've been developing gRSShopper for the distributed and open model of learning for some time now, in other words, exactly where I think institutions should be going. Of course I'm not a great programmer so gRSShopper is far from complete. But it gives a bit of a model of what the future LMS should look like.

In particular, gRSShopper supports a distributed environment, This allows the institution to aggregate student content from wherever it's posted. gRSShopper also supports syndication. So content can be distributed by email or RSS into pretty much any environment. The idea is that the LMS isn't a destination that people have to visit, but rather a clearing house that manages content aggregation, indexing and redistribution.

This is what I've been building out on gRSShopper - but because web 2.0 has migrated away from standards and toward proprietary APIs I need to do a lot more to extend it. But any LMS should be working with remote content minimally with RSS/Atom, DC, LOM, iCal, FOAF, and various other standards, as well as the Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and related APIs. gRSShopper is a tool for managing things like MOOCs, and should support open online course content.

In addition, student access is ideally managed witgh a personal learning environment (PLE). This is a bit like a gRSShopper for idividuals, but with better management for personal accounts on remote systems. It would also have a more robust player - it would be a PLE that plays cartridges, not LMSs (though PLEs should report to LMSs any results). PLEs contain permanent records for student - all bookmarks, references and readings, created work, etc., is stored (or indexed, if stored in the cloud) locally, so the student can always retrieve it.

That's a short answer. A long answer would be consideraly more in-depth, but along these lines."

We would love to gather more ideas from others. If you have some thoughts on what you think the next generation LMS should look like or not look like, send us an email or leave a comment below.

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Flash Robs and the Darker Side of Human Nature

Image via WikipediaAfter weeks of Twitter fuled violence, rioting and crime, the British government is considering shutting off social networks. With similar problems, the mayor of Philadelphia is appealing to youths shape up combined with increased "stop and frisk" policies. Just as networks like Twitter and Facebook can be used to create art and topple governments, it turns out that they are good at quickly, nearly spontaneously organizing gangs of criminals. The same technology that is used to form learning networks is the same technology that youths are using to organize robberies. I have links to the relevant stories at the bottom of this page. I originally wanted to join in on the rhetorical fun and talk about the "darker side of social networks" but this is really, once again, a case of the media missing the point. It is not the technology: the same press that publishes the works of Ghandi also can publish "Mein Kampf." The same phone technology that can announce a Nobel prize can direct a terrorist attack. Guess what? The problem is not the technology and stopping the technology will only spur further innovation and technological change that the authorities will understand even less. Attempting to close down communication is a lot easier than addressing poverty, unemployment, and the escalating crime rates. The technology is already here to monitor twitter and track who is tweeting and what they are tweeting. I am not condoning this, but it shows you how far behind the curve the British and Philadelphia are that their own police are not using Tweeps Around type software as a crime radar. Twitter is basically an open channel. Why aren't there flash mobs to prevent crime? Why do the police still look like they are barely above the phone-box-on-the-corner level of technology? But before they attempt to boot-block communications, I hope they do something about the roots of these crimes and address the needs of these desperate communities.

Friday, June 03, 2011

Google Music: Bask in the market socialist sunshine!

Image via WikipediaAs you are probably aware, I am a big fan of Google. I have been using and writing about their products from very early on. In fact, this blog was acquired by Google way back when. They are a real conundrum for me at times; they represent the best of what I think companies should be and yet they are still corporate; they are not a foundation or an open source organization, but they have open source projects, products, and contribute to the open source community. Tonight I am loading Google Music on my computer. Interestingly enough, Google's Music Manager relies on about 26 open source projects to do what it does. I recommend reading the licensing documentation because that will really tell you what you can expect from this new tool/service. What Google Music is meant to do is to upload all of your music from all of your devices and host them in one spot which you can then access from any device (phone, computer, etc.). And yes, this means iTunes. I am not sure how Apple is going to take this. This means the iTunes at my work PC, my iTunes on my home computer can now be combined in one service. It all goes from the locked down silos at Apple into the socialist free market sunshine of the cloud. How does this effect the digital rights? If I bought something from Apple to be played in an Apple platform did I also buy the right to reproduce that where ever I want? I am really curious to know how this is going to play out legally.

For now, Google's Music Manager is churning through my 21 days of music and has uploaded most of Beethoven and rejected nearly 350 songs. I am not sure what that is about yet, but I will post updates to my installation and cloudification of my music on Twitter - I am at geoffcain in the Twittersphere. If you have already installed Google Music and are using it, post your insights to the comments below or email me - I am interested to know how it worked for you too.

Sunday, March 13, 2011

The Japanese Earthquake: New Roles for Social Media

Image via WikipediaI think we should all be getting now how important social media has become in politics (Iran, Egypt, Tunisia, Wisconsin, etc.) and in natural disasters such as Haiti and now with Japan. The earthquake and tsunami are terrible disasters and my focus on social media is in no way meant to trivialize them, on the contrary, social media will be an important component in the international response. Social media and networks after the tsunami were the only way millions of people in Japan were getting information about the scope of the disaster. So many people photographed, filmed and tweeted the tsunami that not only do researchers now have a historically unprecedented amount of data available, but lives were saved. Trapped people were able to tweet or text their location and get help. Families were able to communicate for hours after the event to let one another know where they were and what was happening.

Image via WikipediaSocial media is also part of the solution afterwards. With services like HelpAttack!, people are able to easily pledge money to the Red Cross and spread the word to others on how to help. It is very easy: you just log-in with your Twitter account, pledge an amount for every update (up to a limit you set), and after 30 days, you pay your donation.
The Red Cross also has a mobile giving program: you can text "REDCROSS" to 90999 to donate $10.
Groupon has an online offer inviting customers to donate $5, $10, or $25 to support International Medical Corps' emergency efforts in Japan. They have raised $16,000 in donations so far.

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