On My Semantic Radar

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There is some interesting news about the focusing of standards for the semantic web by the W3C today. The semantic web is the idea that by combining different kinds of metadata, it will be easier to find, share and combine information on the internet. According to Wikipedia: "At its core, the semantic web comprises a set of design principles, collaborative working groups, and a variety of enabling technologies. Some elements of the semantic web are expressed as prospective future possibilities that are yet to be implemented or realized. Other elements of the semantic web are expressed in formal specifications."

One interesting way to learn more about the semantic web is to take a look under the hood at webpages that use semantic data.

Uldis Bojars and Sergio Fernandez at the SIOC project have written a plug-in for Firefox that allows you to do just that:

"Semantic Radar is a semantic metadata detector for Mozilla Firefox.

• Install Semantic Radar

Available at Mozilla Add-ons site. It is a browser extension which inspects web pages for links to Semantic Web metadata and informs about presence of it by showing an icon in browser's status bar. Currently it supports RDF autodiscovery (SIOC, FOAF, DOAP and any type) and RDFa metadata detection.

New: Semantic Radar can now ping the Semantic Web Ping Service when metadata are detected. This allows for a community based discovery of the Semantic Web data."

Right now the semantic web is a hodge-podge of many different kinds of data and systems. That is changing some with SKOS - (Simple Knowlege Organization System) which was announced by W3C as the standard.

Visions of the Semantic Web Future

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Every so often, as technology changes, people like to make predictions about what the future holds for us.

I love these visions of the future from semantic web folks:

Web 2.0 – Web 3.0 – Web 4.0? one8nine UnConference Blog: "I’m booked on a flight from Toledo to Seattle. It’s cancelled. My phone knows that I’m on the flight, knows that it’s cancelled and knows what flights I should consider instead. It uses semantic data but it also has permission to interrupt me and tell me about it. Much more important, it knows what my colleagues are doing in response to this event and tells me. ‘Follow me’ gets a lot easier."

There are so many things wrong with this scenario! What if the phone is wrong? What if you are not on a flight and it only thinks you are on a flight and then buys you a one-way plane ticket to Damascus by mistake? Now your boss wants to know why you are charging plane tickets to Syria and Homeland Security has put you on a watch list because you are buying one way tickets to Syria and you forgot to update your passport. Why? Because the same glitch that bought the ticket forgot to send you an email reminder that your passport had expired. The semantic web is smart enough to correct those errors, but after a long talk with your HAL9000 smart phone, they said to hell with it. Why should we take care of someone not smart enough to secure his bluetooth connections and needs an email reminder to breathe? I don't want to be interrupted by my phone. What would it say if I wanted to change service?

Here is another great scenario for the future:

"As a project manager, my computer knows my flow chart and dependencies for what we’re working on. And so does the computer of every person on the project, inside my team and out. As soon as something goes wrong (or right) the entire chart updates."

And what happens when our phones realize we are in trouble financially? They get concerned. We could be jeopardizing the mission. What would happen to them if we go for a cheaper plan? They suck data from our RFID chips and credit cards, make a run on the company, and buy us out.

It is really difficult to predict what the future holds for us in technology because we can't really predict the necessary conditions for change. If someone could have predicted what the economy was doing five years ago, then someone might, for instance, have had some idea about how innovation would happen in education.

20 Online Fact Checkers and Reference Books

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Libraries are not the only places to find reference materials. There are many different online encyclopedias, dictionaries, guides, and fact books that can be used for free on the Internet. Here are 20 online fact checkers and reference books that are freely available to everyone:

Gray's Anatomy of the Human Body - This online reference book provides an in-depth look at the human body. Gray's Anatomy features more than 1,000 engravings and illustrations.

Encyclopedia Smithsonian - The Encyclopedia Smithsonian offers 1.9 million records--from art to zoology. This online encyclopedia also links to more than 180,000 videos, images, and sound files.

The World Factbook - The CIA provides this online fact book with resources on government, history, economy, people, communications, transportation, and military. The World Factbook is also a great reference for maps, flags, and fun facts.

The Farmer's Almanac - This almanac has been providing information to people since 1792. The Farmer's Almanac offers useful information on weather, gardening, astronomy, and food.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary - This online version of the famous dictionary offers definitions, pronunciations, and information on word origins. Merriam-Webster also features a variety of other references, including a thesaurus, encyclopedia, and medical dictionary.

World Book Encyclopedia - World Book Encyclopedia has been providing reference material for children and adults since the early 1900s. This encyclopedia features accurate facts on history, people, events, and more.

Brewer's Readers Guide - The Brewer's Readers Guide offers reference material for poems and well known tales. This is a great reference for finding information about plot lines and quotes.

Encyclopedia Britannica - This online encyclopedia offers information on every topic imaginable through articles, videos, images, and biographies.

Roget's Thesaurus - Roget's Thesaurus is a well known resource for increasing the flow of words in writing. The online version of this reference features an easy-to-use search engine.

Wolfram Mathworld - This comprehensive online math encyclopedia provides information on everything from algebra to topology. Wolfram Mathworld is updated daily and carefully maintained to provide the latest mathematic techniques.

RefDesk - The RefDesk is an Internet fact checker with search engines, news headlines, dictionaries, literature, and other useful resources.

Virtual Reference Shelf - The Virtual Reference Shelf features links to information on everything from abbreviations to statistics. This site is a great place to find the best links to all sorts of factual information.

FactFinder - This U.S. Census Bureau tool offers factual information on housing, population, economic, and geographical data.

Encyclopedia of Life - This online encyclopedia offers scientific information on every species on earth. The Encyclopedia of Life includes both text and images.

Infoplease - Infoplease provides answers to factual questions on a wide variety of subjects. This informative site also features encyclopedias, summer guides, almanacs, dictionaries, and timelines.

John Hopkins Medical Desk Reference - This medical site provides links to comprehensive information about medical conditions and illnesses.

Artcyclopedia - The Artcyclopedia offers facts about artists, news, history, and movements in art. The site also links to more than 100,000 sources of factual art information.

American Museum of Natural History - The American Museum of Natural History is a great place to find factual information about anthropology, astronomy, biology, natural science, and paleontology.

Library of Congress - The largest library in the world, the Library of Congress offers several resources for checking historical facts.

Med Bio World - Med Bio World is an online medical fact checker with journal articles, databases, dictionaries, and directories. This is an excellent site for finding up-to-date medical facts and information.

This is a guest post from education writer Karen Schweitzer. Karen is the About.com guide to Business School. She also writes about accredited online colleges for Online Colleges.net.

Revisting the Digital Divide

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I was looking back at some bookmarks and materials that I had on an old computer and it was fascinating to me how the questions around technology have changed. When educators were talking a lot about the "digital divide" back in the early 2000s, the questions were around how were we going to get these expensive machines and infrastructure to the poor. They needed lots of power, cables, expertise and money. Computers were huge and expensive and they still can be today. But we now define a whole other class of machines as computers, including phones, netbooks and PDAs. The most important of these right now are the phones. According to a report by the International Telecommunications Union back in March of this year, at the end of 2008 there were there were an estimated 4.1 billion phone subscriptions world-wide, compared with about 1 billion in 2002. And the definition of a phone has certainly changed since 2002. Phones now play media and connect to the internet and allow for a whole new kind of connection to learning materials. We no longer need to distribute media through CDs or laser discs. Data storage and new kinds of programming (java, ajax, web2.0 tools, etc.) combine to make distributing media easier than ever. Technology is still not absolutely universal, but the wide variety of tools that are now available for communication, the availability of netbooks for under $200, the low-cost of connectivity via WIFI and phone networks means that the real digital divide is one of the imagination. We need to bridge the gap between how we think of learning networks and teaching and the wide variety of tools and technology that are now available.

12 Time-Saving Tips for Teaching Online

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Online learning saves time for students. Students in online courses have 24/7 access to their course materials, other students, and their instructor. For working students, this is an incredible benefit. But we often hear that online learning takes a lot of an instructor’s time. I have found that it can be, but when a course is set up in advance to take advantage of a learning management system’s features, a lot of time can be saved. Many of these techniques make for a more engaging experience for the students and less stress for the instructor.

Here are some of my favorite time-saving tips. Please add to them!

1. Create a comprehensive syllabus.

• Utilize a "Week Zero," a module that explains to new students how to be an online student and use the learning management system (LMS).
  
• Direct students to tech support and the help desk as much as possible.
• Create a course “scavenger hunt.”

2. Use a syllabus quiz.
3. Make your course easy to navigate.

• Keep as much content as you can no more than two clicks away.
• Use a consistent format week-to-week or module-to-module.

4. Schedule your time.

• Do not work on your online course because you can; work on it because you have scheduled the time.
• Let the students know your schedule.
• Access your course consistently (e.g. three times a week) and respond to email promptly (with-in 48 hours).

5. Automate your course as much as possible.

• Take advantage of the time-release feature of announcements.
• Record and reuse lectures.
• Let the LMS handle as much of the grading as you can.

6. Distributing and exchanging documents.

• Use the assignment feature of your LMS instead of e-mail.
• Have the students attach documents to a forum posting.

7. Centralize question and answers.

• Use a discussion forum for “Frequently Asked Questions.”
• Create a FAQ page.
• Ask students to ask questions in the forum rather than e-mail.

8. Use online groups with a deliverable

• Let the students do the work.
• Do not respond to every posting, respond to the group deliverable.

9. Use a "common responses" file to quickly paste in answers to common questions.
10. Allow students to facilitate online discussions.
11. Use a detailed grading rubric to help answer questions in advance.
12. Encourage student-student interaction and study groups.

• Give them the space to solve problems.

What about you? How do you streamline your online teaching process? Leave a comment below if you have any time saving tips.

What is Innovation?

As I have been working here at my new job, I have been thinking a lot about innovation. In previous postings, I have talked about how money, or the lack of it, influences change and innovation.

I am at a new college, College of the Redwoods, as Director of Instructional Design. It is an exciting time at an interesting college (think of the old Chinese curse): a ten thousand square mile college district needs to expand its online college with little to no money and with what I would consider a minimal infrastructure. This is just the sort of climate that breeds innovation. I also have a chance here to work with innovative people like Maggie McVay Lynch, the Dean of Distance Learning. If her name rings a bell it might be from her article on preparing students for online learning; it is often cited. We used these ideas in our health information management class. She is also responsible for bringing Sakai (called "MyCr" here as customized by rSmart), Gmail, and Google Apps for Education to the campus. Many campuses would consider these radical and outrageous moves - especially IT depts. - but they feel like the most natural solutions here.

So a definition of innovation that is useful here is one by David Yost who used to work for Apple's Advanced Technologies Group: "Another way of putting this is that an innovation lowers the costs and/or increases the benefits of a task. A wildly successful innovation increases the benefits-to-costs ratio to such an extent that it enables you to do something it seemed you couldn’t do at all before or didn’t even know you wanted to do." That is certainly what is happening here. We are moving from a linear, hierarchically organized "learning management system" to a "collaborative learning environment" that is much more inline with constructivist (and connectivist) models of online learning. One of the things that makes College of the Redwoods such an exciting place to be right now is that few here have any real idea how a combination of tools like Sakai and Google Apps for Education can dramatically increase the interactivity of their courses and build community among the students and faculty.

Yost also makes a note of James Burke's ideas on innovation: "...the web of innovation has been and always will be highly interconnected, how each innovation brings forth a paradigm shift which enables other innovations that were unthinkable in the previous paradigm."

I often wonder if ideas from people like George Siemens are not acceptable to some because Siemens is answering questions that some people are not asking yet. And when you find yourself in an institution that is short on money that their ability to see beyond their traditional positions also changes. So a few things have to be in place for innovation: the right people, ideas, and a catalyst (like a budget collapse!). Anyone of those may not be enough.

Language: News of its Death Greatly Exaggerated..

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I am not an apologist for Twitter. These technologies come and go and what remains is the ingenious methods that humans devise to connect with one another. There is nothing superficial about the insatiable drive for people to connect. I find it really ironic that someone can publish an article about how Twitter is destroying the English language when half a world away the streets of Tehran are burning and there is no main stream media there to get the message out. The news of the riots, student deaths and voter fraud is getting out through Twitter, the current unsuppressable voice of the people, the cyber samizdat. What is language for but to inform and express ourselves? How can something that so powerfully enables that expression be "the death of language"? Aren't we forgetting that language is not an end unto itself? What was the last 20 page paper that changed the world? It is a very simple tool. Short, sometimes cryptic utterances that are merely 124 characters long, yet it is undermining the foundations of power in ways that the mainstream media once did. Articles like that declare Twitter to be the death of language, meaningless, or superficial are only looking how it works not what it does or the effect. What is does is create networks that enable communication, and we will see that this kind of technology will have as profound effect on the world as the telegraph or the radio.

Twitter and Social Networks for Teaching

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Sharon Gross wrote a great post on teaching with social networks called "Embracing the Twitter Classroom." The article is a good short argument for the connectivist classroom and the work we did here at Tacoma Community College in HIM 101. In that class, we used blogs, wikis, and twitter to create a community of learning.

There is nothing really new about using these tools for teaching and learning. Since the dawn of constructivism, educators have been talking about getting students to share their experiences as it relates to what they are learning and to communicate what they are learning in their own words. Constructivism is a recognition of the social dimension of learning. These technology tools are just other media that enable and facilitate that. Where the real change comes when these tools and networks become so ubiquitous that they begin to shape how we think and communicate (and no news there either since McLuhan).

Just as educators had a responsibility to teach the critical thinking skills needed for the traditional media, we have a responsibility to show students how to apply and use the new. Sharon Gross puts it well when she says "But the point of teaching students to use social media isn't just to embrace a novel trend: it's to help students become literate in our networking-based society."

Connection Between Interactivity and Retention in Online Courses

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Here is some preliminary research/reading into online course retention, completion, success and interactivity. It is a claim I make in our handbook of online course development, I want to make sure our research is up to date. If you have anything to add to this, PLEASE comment with a link. You will be remembered in a later annotated bibliography!

This kind of research is essential for understanding the importance of group projects, social media, and utilizing a wide-variety of networking modes in online courses. It is not enough to have information on the web or in a network. Students and teachers need to engage with this information, interact in a network in particular ways. This becomes a course design strategy. Some of these articles are older because I believe that they hold some keys to how we should be looking at social networks and media - both of which hold a potential for interaction undreamed of in the early 90s.

Aldrich, Clark (2009) A Taxonomy of Interactivity. Clack Aldrich On Serious Games and Simulations. http://clarkaldrich.blogspot.com/2008/08/taxonomy-of-interactivity.html

Anderson, Terry (2003) Getting the Mix Right Again: an updated and theoretical rationale for interaction. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, Vol 4, No 2. http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/149/230

Henry, Jim and Meadows, Jeff (2008) An Absolutely Riveting Online Course: Nine principles for excellence in web-based teaching. Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology / La revue canadienne de l’apprentissage et de la technologie, V34(1) Winter / Hiver, 2008. http://www.cjlt.ca/index.php/cjlt/article/view/179/177

Herbert, Michael (2006) Staying the Course: A Study in Online Student Satisfaction and Retention. Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, Volume IX, Number IV, Winter 2006. University of West Georgia, Distance Education Center. http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/winter94/herbert94.htm.

"Incorporating Interaction in Your Distance Learning Course." (2005) Academic Technology Center. Worcester Polytechnic Institute. http://web.archive.org/web/20060909200751/http://www.wpi.edu/Academics/ATC/Collaboratory/Teaching/interaction.html

O'Brien, B. (2002). Online Student Retention: Can It Be Done?. In P. Barker & S. Rebelsky (Eds.), Proceedings of World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications 2002 (pp. 1479-1483). Chesapeake, VA: AACE. http://www.editlib.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Reader.PrintAbstract&paper_id=9973

Roblyer, M. D. and Ekhaml, Leticia (2000) How Interactive Are Your Distance Courses? A rubric for assessing interaction in distance learning. Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, Volume III, Number II, Spring, 2000. State University of West Georgia, Distance Education Center. http://www.westga.edu/~distance/roblyer32.html

Sims, Rod (2000) An Interactive Conundrum: Constructs of interactivity and learning theory. Australian Journal of Educational Technology. 2000, 16(1), 45-57. http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet16/sims.html

Shedroff, Nathan (1994) Information Interaction Design: A Unified Field Theory of Design. http://www.nathan.com/thoughts/unified/

Thorpe, Mary (2008) "Effective Online Interaction: Mapping course design to bridge from research to practice." Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 24(1), 57-72. http://ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet24/thorpe.html

Thurmond, Veronica and Wambach, Karen (2004) Towards an Understanding of Interactions at a Distance. http://web.archive.org/web/20080130193445/http://www.eaa-knowledge.com/ojni/ni/8_2/interactions.htm.

What I am reading now:
Journal of Interactive Online Learning http://www.ncolr.org/jiol/
This is a publication of the Virtual Center for Online Learning Research. There are articles here from 2002 to the present.

The Future of Learning

I love the opening of this video where he says that we can finally get technology to do what we want, now the real question is what do we want to do."

I like that this video used archival footage and vj clips - both of which are freely available and can be found online at places like www.archive.org. A video of this quality is not beyond the reach of anyone at Tacoma Community College. This week (5/15/09), I will be presenting a workshop on the Flip video camera. A little camera that puts film making and editing into the hands of teachers and students at a very low cost. It comes with editing software built into the camera (it installs it on the computer). It also will create a direct link to your YouTube account and upload the finished film. I will post a link to the presentation the and its resources here.

Fallen Angel

Angel sold out to Blackboard.
Or Blackboard acquired Angel. Either way it is a real shame. Angel had a lot going for it as a company. It was practically revolutionary in the way it handled customer service. While Bb had service tickets that were years old, angel would send a team of people out to each campus to meet with people. All of the reasons Blackboard claims to have acquired Angel were all of the reasons we left Blackboard - innovation and customer service. I really hope Bb doesn't figure out too soon how to lock down, monetize and password protect all of the great features of Angel. The next year will probably be the greatest argument for open source software since Micro$loth. I seriously think this aquisition should be looked into especially in light of all the litigation around Desire2Learn and Blackboard's attempts to sue them out of existence. Angel's market share was expanding and if they just waited they would certainly have become a dominant force in another year. We really need to take education out of the hands of the corporations. I am not anti-Blackboard - I am anti-big money, bad service, and stifling of innovation. I was pretty angry when I first heard this news because of all of the time, training, energy, and money the State of WA has put into this. We still really don't know what it all means. I will be brushing up on my Moodle skills. One of the more measured responses to this Paradise Lost was from Marc Lentini who said via email:

"We got word about the Blackborg buyout less than an hour before starting our very first Angel Transition Orientation.

Our plan is to continue transitioning to Angel. It's still a better product, it's still going to be maintained as its own entity, it's going to be here for three years (which is all we figure you get out of any system these days), and it'll still allow cross-campus collaboration.

Then I'm going to ram my head into a concrete wall."

Concept Maps: from pencil to virtual world

Here is a presentation I am giving in Wanatchee, WA on concept maps and problem solving using visual methods. I appreciate any feedback and suggestions:

Concept Maps: From Pencil to Virtual World

View more presentations from Geoff Cain.

Respublica Digitarum

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Some random notes I made while I was catching up on my reading last week with my non-swine related illness:

There is an article in the latest New York Review of Books on Anthony Grafton and his latest book "Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West" reviewed by G. W. Bowersock. Towards the end of the article there are some amusing notes on Grafton's suspicion of Google and online texts. What I miss about the communities of scholarship in the online world vs. the face-to-face is that if one challenged someone's thinking real-time they came back the next week with research, essays, or evidence and called you on to the carpet. Today they just drop you from Twitter! We read the work of a professional scholar like Grafton's born in full armor like Athena from the forehead of Zeus. This is lovely of course, but I would also like to read Grafton's letters and notes as well. I would have also liked to have participated in the broader understanding of that work as it evolved. I can't do that yet with him, but I can with writers like George Seimens or Stephen Downes because their work is being created in the new "Respublica Litterarum" of the internet. I will call this the "Respublica Digitarum" or the "Respublica Digitara." The internet and the blogosphere is the new coffee house of the 18th century, the "penny university."

Bowersock waxes nostalgiac about the old libraries and books. I don't see it that way. He sees a beutiful old library; I see knowledge siloed away in an inaccessible ivory tower of privilege. I too love old books and value the feel of original sources. But that world is only for the select few and knowledge dribbles out of that silo very slowly. I am glad classical literature is moving online in places like the Perseus Digital Library. Not only do I not have access to these documents elsewhere but neither does the collective intelligence of the internet, or that highly gifted young person with original ideas and fresh enthusiasm (but little money or connections for education at Harvard).

George Seimens asks in Teaching as Transparent Learning about the connection between community, learning and teaching and how interrelated the activities might be. It is in direct contrast to the spirit of Grafton's work. The "Republic of Letters" is the same cacophonous bazaar of ideas that is the "Digital Republic" but much slower. Ideas like this that connect the various traditions are an important context to our intellectual history because they provide a vital context that shows that these ideas are part of a long tradition of research, study, and communication. It is unfair of scholars like Bowsock or Grafton to compare the on-going seminar of the blogs to a closed and finished traditional journal article. Blog entries are always seen as questions, open statements, works in progress, not ends in themselves. Blogs are important because they are somewhat more durable than email or discussion board postings. Electronic books (where some of this wisdom is collected) are going to

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be even more important. A good example of that is Seimen's book "Knowing Knowledge."

In another posting from George Seimens on New Criteria for a New Media the idea of blogging as part of a scholar's academic publishing is brought up. I think if someone gets academic credit for a 225 word note on the use of the passive paraphrastic in the poems of Callimachus in an issue of Modern Philology then scholars and teachers who are constantly engaging and challenging others in their field in new ways via social media should also get some recognition. "As the reports from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Modern Language Association, and the University of Maine recommend, promotion and tenure guidelines must be revised to encourage the creative and innovative use of technology if universities are to remain competitive in the 21st century." I read all of this together in the same afternoon and it is amazing how it all works together. On one hand you have a traditional scholar who isn't quite sure about all this "new" technology and on the other you have the new scholars trying to make sense of where there work fits into that stream.

On Closed and Open Sytems

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I have a couple emails from the James Burke web asking me why all of a sudden there has been this increase in traffic to his YouTube page. I am not sure why they are asking me. But I did recently subscribe and put him on my favorites list. The answer was that recently a couple of educators mentioned on Twitter that his videos were on YouTube and it is a real testament to the power of Twitter that enough people went and subscribed or downloaded the videos enough for someone to notice. James Burke is the journalist/historian that did the BBC show "Connections" and "The Day the Universe Changed." I was pleasantly surprised to see how his shows from the late 70s and early 80s held up. The shows were popular and I found them very interesting, informative, and fun. The fact that he could hold the interest of a late teen with a mixture of history and science is a real credit to his work. The principles behind his work still holds up today. His latest project is something he calls the "K-Web" or "Knowledge Web." The K-Web, so far, is a collection of over 200,000 thousand entries in a database of people and technology. All of them are interconnected in time, events and other people and objects. It is like a large encyclopedia of connected information. He is talking to the people who created "TheBrain" mindmapping and presentation software which I think is a terrific piece of programming and a great presentation tool. I have embeded a film below of his description of the project. There are some comments at his YouTube page from a few people who are wondering if this project is still active and I have a few ideas about why it might not be or at least why it might be going slowly. You have a great teacher and communicator (James Burke), a lot of information, and some great tools. The problem is going to come in with the creation of yet another closed information system. My impression of the project (and I hope I am wrong) is that they are creating a dynamic, interconnected encyclopedia. And that is the problem - we don't need another encyclopedia. We don't need another database of information (we have Wikipedia). We don't need another closed commercial project that will separate users and knowledge creators from sharing information. What is really special about the idea of the K-Web is that it implies a set of semantic rules that can show us how information, technology and people are interconnected. And that is exciting. I would be interested in an XML/RDF schema that authors could apply to information (metadata) that databases could then gather and assemble according to programed rules. This is essentially the idea of the semantic web. There is an information entropy in closed systems such as MERLOT (of which I am, nevertheless, a participant and believer) because it needs an easier way for people to connect information with people besides memberships and subscriptions. Projects like the K-Web can be a lens through which we really see and make sense of all of the information. I just hope it doesn't get locked up in commercial software. He says here that he sees it as open to education but I mean open as far as people being able to contribute and edit. I like his criticism of concept mapping as too hierarchical to really represent information.

Note: Occasionally I read criticisms of Burke saying that at times the connections he discusses between ideas, technology, information, and people are superficial. But his philosophy is that we are all interconnected and so we are participating, even in small ways, in all of this knowledge building, creating, and inventing. In the past, some of the smallest interconnections have led to the biggest changes. This is especially true in this age of collaboration and communication.

3 Reasons Why Twitter Works in Education

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A number of us here at Tacoma Community College are using Twitter. Recently one of our faculty who is new to it said "I doing this but I don't know why yet" which is a fair thing to say. On the surface, it looks (and can be) fairly superficial. As a matter of fact, the Common Craft video on Twitter is pretty ridiculous. If I saw that video first, I would not have created an account. I thought I really didn't care what you were having for lunch; it turns out I am wrong about that, but the video is an overly simplistic view of Twitter that does not do the power of the simple or the network creation capabilities justice. It is quite possible that when the video was made no one really knew how this tool would really be used.

1. It's Simple
Twitter is one of those tools that nearly does nothing. It is extremely simple. I do not need to hold a two hour seminar to teach students or educators how to use it. It is a microblog. You can follow people and people can follow you. You can tell people what you are doing in 140 characters or less. Brevity is the soul of wit. Twitter forces you to be concise. I can easily create accounts and I can place a twitter feed on my blog or website very quickly. It is low bandwidth.

2. Communication
Twitter is a great way to link people back to your blog, business, or other website. It is also a way to be alerted when something is happening in your network of interest to you. And you also get a lot of mundane details about people's lives and vice-versa, but here is why that can be important too. Let's say I am trying to form a team and I need to talk to someone, I may know that John eats lunch at his desk every Thurs. because he tweets that now and again. I may not remember why I know that information, but it is Thursday and somehow, I know he will be at his desk. This mundane information gives me an idea of when students are studying, when people are going to work and puts me in the ebb and flow of their day no matter what time zone they may be in.

Image by GustavoG via Flickr

3. Connections
Twitter doesn't just allow you to create networks but as you add people to your following/follwers list, you begin to see messages to and from people you may not have thought of following or meeting before. Instructors can leverage this in some very powerful ways. If a new student opens a teachers followers list and follows everyone on that list, those new students are then following a list of professionals, students from the previous classes, and those who have graduated and are working in the field. I have an example from a Health Information Management's social networking map. This is an easy way to increase the interactivity of a course.

There are a number of good introductions to twitter for educators, tools to harness the power of it's simplicity, or to find other educators on twitter, but the motherlode of all links to all things twitter is at Jane Hart's microbloging page.

Wisdom Cries Out in the Streets...

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A in the "60 Seconds Science" column in Scientific American there is an interesting note about Jest and Meeks' attempt to map "wisdom." They have looked at 10 scientific papers that have attempted to define wisdom and believe that they have found its seat in certain areas in the brain.

"Jeste and Meeks concede that some might call their conclusions reductionistic because they based their 'map' not on the idea that wisdom is a single trait, but a collection of attributes. But Jeste said that similarities between how wisdom was portrayed thousands of years ago in the Bhagavad Gita (a Hindu scripture) and in the West today — as well as the tale of Phineas Gage, a railway worker whose allegedly wise attributes such as amiability and good judgment were said to vanish after a spike penetrated his left frontal lobe — 'makes you think it's not a cultural phenomenon but biologically consistent.'"

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First off, I have to say that my amiability might suddenly vanish if I had a railroad spike through my head. What makes me a little less cranky but cranky none-the-less is the illusive definitions of "wisdom," "knowledge," "memory," "ideas," and "information." I do like that they refer it to a collection of attributes. When we talk about learning and our relationship to knowledge and information, I think we are looking at a similar problem. When we use taking notes to learn, I think it is important to remember that that action includes the movement of the hand and the feel of the pencil. In other words, thinking and cognition may not reside in a single organ. Until we understand how all of the parts work together, I am not really sure if we have a working definition of knowledge epistemologically.

One of the weaknesses of the cognitive approach to pedagogy is that there is a false correlation between how the brain functions and how we learn. This cognitive approach is found in many theories of learning whenever the researcher wishes to put the stamp of legitimacy on a project with Real Science. Thinking, memory and learning are a little messier than the fMRI's would lead us to believe. Neuroscience is going to tell us how we sense the world around us and how currently measurable systems function in the brain but that is as far away from knowing how we learn as the Hubble is from answering cosmological questions about the origin of time. We are learning valuable things but we do not know enough about all the interrelated complex systems that go into creating a single thought to make any conclusions about how we learn.

I hope we read more about an accounting of Eastern systems of epistemology and ontology as they relate to learning. The current thinking about education is decidedly Cartesian. Ironically, Leibniz read a Latin translation of the I Ching which if it did not influence his exploration and invention of binary numbers, it certainly led him to strongly consider the the archetypal significance of a numbering system (as seen in his writings) which led to the modern computer.

A Vision of Students Today Redux

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Mike Wesch recently posted a revisit to his original video “A Vision of Students Today.”

I found the original video exhilarating. I knew people who interpreted the video as a negative thing. I did not understand that. I thought people would see that video and say “it is time to change how we teach.” I really thought that it was about time. Instead, they would say “those poor kids” and talk about how we should be banning computers in the classroom. I celebrated the video because I knew that those changes in our culture were already happening. Students today do not read paper; they do not read journals, and they don’t subscribe to newspapers. The current culture of teaching prepares students for a world that is already gone. No one is going to ask them in the work place to solve a problem by writing a ten-page research paper.

The original video was one of the inspirations for our class (Health Information Management 101). This class utilizes social networks, new media, and is portfolio assessed. I felt that it was important to create a class that taught students how to build knowledge networks of peers, advanced students, and professionals. We also have classes where students are creating videos and podcasts in place of traditional papers. Since the students are utilizing the internet and networks for their main source of information, it is extremely important that we facilitate critical thinking about new media and social networks. Isn't that why we were doing this in the first place? When did papers and tests become more important than critical thinking?

Google Docs as an Assessment Tool

Yesterday I had Monica Monk in my office. She is an ESL teacher here at Tacoma Community College. She was looking for some way for her students to record what kind of errors they make in their writing and how often. She also wants them to record what they are doing right. Monica is pretty fearless when it comes to technology, so I suggested that we try the forms in Google Docs. We logged into Google Docs and created a form that asks for the student's name, assignment, and then asks the frequency of certain kinds of errors that she wishes to track (e.g., how many errors, adjective clauses, adverb clauses, etc.). When you create a form in Google Docs, it automatically builds a spreadsheet based on the form. Monica will be able to sort this data by student or assignment and track the success (or weakness) of an assignment over time. I think there are a lot of untapped possibilities here and I am thinking that we can't be the only ones who have thought of using this tool in this way. I would love to find others who are doing this. Google Docs is secure - no one will be able to see the data except for Monica or those she chooses to share it with. The spreadsheet creates charts and graphs and is exportable into Excel. Getting an IT dept. anywhere to build a tool like this for the school would take years and cost a lot of money, and forget about trying to get institutional data on individual assignments or even an individual class.

As the economy weakens, more projects like this will surface as people seek solutions to assessment problems. Projects that use free or open source tools in creative ways, If you are doing something similar, know of someone who is, would like to do this, leave us a comment here.

Why We Need OER Textbooks

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I can't recommend enough George Seimens and Peter Tittenberger's "Handbook of Emerging Technologies." I had been working on (and co-teaching) a "Student Success 2.0" class that has a wiki associated with the syllabus that links to tools. Seimens and Tittenberger will save me a lot of time in the future with keeping this up to date, especially their tools page. As an instructional designer, I need resources like these to help faculty solve problems and keep their courses interactive. I have one faculty member who just calls now and again and says "what really cool tools are out that that I don't know about?" (She is any instructional designer's dream teacher!) I will be directing a lot of people to this book. But here is the real point, it would be ridiculous to try to make this a print textbook. The tools change too rapidly for a print edition with the minimum two-year turn around time to make any sense. Also, for maximum usefulness, there has to be live links to the internet and these have to be kept up. I was thinking about this after reading a review in the New York Times about Leher's book on how we make decisions. It is essentially a popular look at the neuroscience behind decision making. His book discusses research that involve fMRI and I thought "wouldn't it be cool if this book could link to the research that is on the web?" And many books do, some have webpages associated with the book that serves as an online bibliography. But lets take all this further - the bulk of the relevant research in nearly every discipline is at least being managed on the web. When all of the information was in print, it makes sense to design textbooks that way - but since so much of it is accessible on the web now, why not create textbooks that utilize the media? There are cognitive science textbooks on the web and I think there are enough resources out there and combined with RSS feeds, one can imagine a textbook that essentially updates itself. And this could work for the humanities too. I was in an online workshop that was moderated by Steve Hargadon called "Remixing Shakespeare" that presented ways to get students involved in Shakespeare using new media tools. This workshop was presented by PBS Teachers and Classroom 2.0 and featured people from the Folger Library and of particular interest to me Amy Ulen, an English teacher at Tumwater High School in Tumwater, WA. who is the founder of Shakespeare High. There were enough resources in this one workshop for someone to turn around and create a living, dynamic "textbook" of interactive texts, tools for recording, videos of plays, and an online community dedicated to the subject matter. It didn't cost anyone a dime. Why wouldn't you want that?
I want to make sure that when we are discussing OER textbooks that we are not just talking about doing this because of the financial crisis. This is an opportunity to not only solve a problem, but to redefine textbooks in such a way that they include up to the minute research, instant corrections and updates, and community.

Brain Lives at "Edge of Chaos"

Studies like Brain lives at "edge of chaos" are particularly interesting to me because of the tendency of those engaged in education research to interpret the brain's ability to organize information as somehow a description of how the brain works or how we learn. This study applies a phenomenon they call "self-organized criticality" to brain science — where systems spontaneously organize them­selves to operate at the borderline between order and chaos. This phenomena is present in many different physical systems, including "avalanches, for­est fires, earth quakes, and heart rhythms." We can learn using concept maps, for instance, not because that is how the brain works, but because one of the functions of the brain is to organize information. Networks exist in the brain but rather than a flowchart model typical of cognitivist pedagogy, this study is interested in the synchronization of activity between dif­ferent regions of the functional networks in the brain. Pictures of the brain merely as a network are far too mechanistic to explain what is happening. I don't think there is anything mystical about how the brain works, but it is an incredibly complex system that cannot be described by a flowchart. Scientists will one day look back on those models just as we now (or at least should be) look at those models of atoms with orbiting electrons. It is easier to imagine them as orbiting electrons and it would be difficult to represent an electron probability cloud in k-12 science textbooks, but the model tells us more about our limitations than the world.