abject learning

Dead iPhone, originally uploaded by mikeykrieger.

So, a few weeks ago I acquired a certain much-discussed handheld telecommunications device made by a certain corporation based in Cupertino. It wasn’t a step I took lightly for a few reasons… for one, I had relentlessly mocked the hype around Steve Jobs’ announcements of said device to my Apple-loving friends and co-workers, and knew that I would be in for some frightful payback. (I was right.) Having grown up with a certain kind of knee-jerk anti-corporatism, especially when it comes to online technology (I came of age electronically in the glorious and heady days of 1992), I still can’t quite bring myself to use this device’s brand name in conversation or in writing. Sorry if that causes you any confusion.

Maybe I should have held out for Android, or OpenMoko, but after Novak (a longtime Apple hater), gave me a personalised tour of how this thing worked, I simply couldn’t help myself.

And yes, at the risk of joining the hype brigade, it is a damned (I damn thee, snazzy phone!) impressive machine… Before I had one, I would never have believed I would want to read anything on a screen smaller than my EEE (a device I love without complications)… but now I do get it. In fact, I prefer reading on the smaller screen, I can position my body anywhere and anyhow, as I would with a paperback.

So, I’ve now entered a complicated but undeniably passionate relationship, tinged with self-loathing, with a wildly popular piece of technology… what now? I’ve accepted on an intellectual level that mobile technology was the future since Bryan Alexander blew my mind (as he tends to do) with his Going Nomadic talk at an EDUCAUSE event five years ago… now I feel it in my bones. But again, what now? What do I do with this?

Is it just a matter of wider access, faster speeds, smaller screens, and shorter messages? I gather that geocoding will be more important, and that ‘place’ may reassert itself as a force in online environments… but in how many disciplines can geocoding be important? (Though seeing how some applications have ingeniously incorporated my GPS information into something cool on my handheld, I’ve learned these uses are not always obvious.) And I gotta admit, I’ve been ignoring a lot of the ground-level work in this field… and now I’m playing catch-up. I know about Jen’s project, who else should I be paying attention to?

And maybe I need to admit that I have a problem. And admitting a problem is an important first step towards self-acceptance. So bear with me here, this isn’t easy…

My name is Brian… and… I’m… an iPhone user.

I feel somehow cleaner already.

My first attempt to make sense of online learning on a mobile device is below the jump… in which I compare the experience of checking in on my online discussions via courses hosted on an enterprise LMS and on RSS-fied courses hosted on weblogs:

The desired task: check in on my courses on my iPhone to see if there are any new discussions, and then read them.

First up, a course I teach on WebCT Vista.

Between the various logins, and menus, It took me about than five minutes of intent hunting and pecking to get to this discussion screen.

I suppose with bookmarking and more familiarity I could get that time down to about two minutes to get to this screen. (Though the system crashed frequently and usually forced me to go through the complete login process again to get back to the discussion screen.) But the problems don’t end there. I don’t intend to pick on the platform here, but navigating these menus, while not impossible, is not easy. Keep in mind that screenshot is larger than the actual size.

• For one thing, all those links are too close to one another for my big clumsy fingers – that’s a problem I have with other link-heavy sites such as the New York Times website as well — though at least I can pull RSS off of most news sites.

• Even when I can cleanly click the links, many of them simply don’t respond. I can’t figure out why some links work and others do not.

• Frequently, clicking a link to a specific discussion page sends me to a new Safari window to read it. Which would be great, except that when I go back to the window with the discussion menu the entire Safari screen reloads, taking me back to my initial course menu, so I have to navigate back to the discussion board nearly from the beginning of the process (at least it usually remembers my login).

I meant to take more screenshots, but worry about student privacy, and to be honest I’m sick of the crashes and multiple logins. Call me lazy.

I’m sure my own lack of skill with the iPhone is an issue, but I have to say that this system is a half-notch above completely unusable. If courses on this platform will ever be delivered to mobile learners, some sort of redevelopment or ‘mobile layer’ will need to be implemented. My quick search query turned up this short thread on a Blackboard discussion space, and it seems to confirm my assessment.

Now, let’s compare that experience with an open, weblog-based course. When I go to the URL, this is the first screen I see, the most recent post at the top:

And with one finger-poke get to this detail:

Then there is Google Reader, which is the easiest way to navigate web content via the mobile (that I know of, anyway). Here’s a shot of weblog-based courses I am monitoring:

To get from picking up my iPhone to seeing this screen is maybe ten seconds of loading time, and two link-clicks.

And here’s a detail shot of one course’s discussions…

And to be clear, while there are many free WordPress plugins and themes intended to enhance the mobile experience, as yet we have implemented none of them. We made no effort to develop a mobile platform. All we have is open access, clean HTML, and RSS.

Gotta love RSS! And I do…

I mentioned a couple posts back that we are running some courseblogs this semester on WordPress, with a range of approaches and configurations. One of these courses has all of the students working within one multi-authored courseblog, posting assignments and engaging in follow-up discussions via the comments… This particular course is part of a fully online degree program, one in which the vast majority of interactions happen via WebCT Vista.

I’ve been at turns surprised, disheartened, and fascinated by the feedback we have been getting. A common complaint is a sense of feeling lost and overwhelmed by the structure of successive posts and comments… not knowing where discussions begin and end.

I think I understand where these students are coming from, they have been conditioned to expect a certain format of threaded online discussion and they have gotten good at using that format… and now they are being asked to change. Speaking for myself, I have the posts and comments RSS loaded into my Google Reader account and find following the threads to be dead easy. But that reflects my own conditioning. In all honesty, when I do my occasional round of teaching inside Vista, I find the discussion forum to be clunky and confusing, and I find myself longing to see what my buddies in the blogosphere are talking about in the relative comfort, speed, portability and ease of my Google Reader page.

And there’s no question that having thirty or more students posting and discussing inside a single blog generates a lot of activity to track. We have considered using a system like bbPress or one of the forum plugins, but in a sense we would prefer to augment the existing comment functionality rather than adding another layer of stuff for people to track.

My colleague Novak Rogic has posted his proposed approach, which is to create an enhanced “Recent Comments” page. Here’s his wireframe:

Novak suggests that we can use AJAX so that the ‘+’ sign on the left can expand to display the comments, and maybe we can integrate this menu with some of the threaded comments plugins that have already been developed.

I think this is quite promising… Is there another plugin that already does this? Any other thoughts? It might be better to offer feedback on Novak’s post, as unlike me he has the advantage of actually knowing what he is doing.

As of a half hour ago, we’ve also got a working test version, if anyone is interested in testing or collaborating.

I hadn’t really looked in on the blogs today, but I did take a peek at Twitter, and I got the impression from some of my trusted network of experts that @psychemedia had gone and done something that had gotten them rather excited…

So, I head over and start following the steps in Tony Hirst’s blog, learning that someone can go from this list of statistics in Wikipedia:

…into this:

As Tony sums on it up: “we have scraped some data from a wikipedia page into a Google spreadsheet using the =importHTML formula, published a handful of rows from the table as CSV, consumed the CSV in a Yahoo pipe and created a geocoded KML feed from it, and then displayed it in a Yahoo map.” (It seems a lot less intimidating to the data illiterate when you read Tony’s full post.)

Or, to add my own feeble learning here on the sidelines:

* The tools for scraping, manipulating and re-presenting data keep getting easier to use (hell, even I more or less understand the steps Tony lays out here), and you really can do a great deal with free, web-based tools without writing code.

* More and more, I’m starting to think that in addition to being a model for massive scale knowledge building, and an indispensable reference source, that one of Wikipedia’s key contributions to the web will prove to be providing raw material for a range of data mashups such as this one.

* This is what data literacy looks like. To extend the analogy, I’m a first grader right now — I can make out the letters, and sound out the simple words… but the ability to confidently read and write in this form still seems like a form of magic.

Finally, I wasn’t the first to shout it from the rooftops, but let me be the latest: ALL HAIL TONY HIRST!

As it has for generations, Open Access Day at my house will involve insane travel stresses, endless hours of cooking and dishwashing, dangerously excessive alcohol consumption, the therapeutic airing of familial tensions, grievances and debates on the Creative Commons NC clause in shrieking tones, and falling asleep in front of the television watching an uncompetitive big league sporting match…

Thankfully, more mature people are organizing more wholesome fare at public locations, with a series of local events and multicast video extravaganzas.

Kudos to the UBC Library for hosting a series of free talks right upstairs from my office, in the Dodson Room in the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre. Here are some of the amazing local initiatives we will be featuring:

11am – 12:20pm
Introduction to Open Access & cIRcle: UBC’s Information Repository
Joy Kirchner and Hilde Colenbrander (UBC Library)

1 pm – 1:40 pm
Using Wikipedia in the Classroom: an OA medium for research and student work
Dr. Jon Beasly-Murray (Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies, UBC)

2 pm – 2:40 pm
The Public Knowledge Project: providing open source software for OA publishing
Brian Owen (SFU Library)

3 pm – 3:40 pm
Open Medicine: a peer-reviewed, independent, open-access general medical journal
*Dr. Anita Palepu (Internal Medicine, UBC)

4 pm – 5 pm
OA Day Worldwide Webcast: Taxpayer Access to Publicly Funded Research
Keynote address: Sir Richard Roberts, Ph.D., F.R.S

Come one, come all, no registration is required. I’ll be dropping in later this afternoon, once I clean up all the broken glass and furniture from our own Open Access Day party, and finish sleeping off this turkey hangover…

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PorcuJim, originally uploaded by Serenae.

So, we have very quietly been running some WordPress blogs for the past month or so. I say “quietly” because we are treating this is as something of testing phase. Not so much testing the software (which has mostly run well, with a few hiccups on the custom hacked stuff), as testing how it works for a set of exemplar cases and monitoring the associated support needs. Hopefully I will be able to share the stuff that’s been happening in the not-too-distant future, as some of it is quite exciting.

There has been one technical issue that has bedeviled us. Even though we are running the system on a top-end hosting platform, and the usage levels are relatively light, some users report periodic stalling and hang-ups when posting or even commenting. The problem is particularly acute with the admin and management interfaces. The strange part is that reported slowdowns are not reflected in any anomalies with the server or activity logs. It seems worse for users off-campus, and perhaps worse for users on wireless networks.

I thought I had identified a major cause while traveling a couple weeks back. The management interface in Firefox was stalled, so I tried it in Safari where it worked like a charm. Firefox was still non-responsive, so I tried it again there with Greasemonkey turned off, which proved to be my problem. When Greasemonkey was on, the interface hung up, when off it was fine.

I thought this was THE breakthrough, but most of our users reporting problems claim they are not Greasemonkey (or even Firefox) users, or of other similar extensions such as Firebug.

It seems clear that there is some issue related to javascript, and network latencies. (Do I sound impressively techie with that last sentence? I hope so, as I am mindlessly parroting what smart people are telling me.) I am hopeful that someone else out there has dealt with similar problems… Are there things we can advise or ask people who complain about sluggish performance? Are there any plugins that might be causing the problem? (We have actually been fairly minimalist in our use of plugins precisely due to potential issues like this.) Is there anything we can do to address this problem in our management of the system?

I do hope to get this cleared up, as overall the early returns suggest that the platform is a winner.

An excerpt from Neil Postman’s 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death:

…information derives its importance from the possibilities of action. Of course, in any communication environment, input (what one is informed about) always exceeds output (the possibilities of action based on information). But the situation created by telegraphy, and then exacerbated by later technologies, made the relationship between information and action both abstract and remote. For the first time in human history, people were faced with the problem of information glut, which means that simultaneously they were faced with the problem of diminished social and political potency.

You may get a sense of what this means by asking yourself a series of questions: What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them. You may, of course, cast a ballot for someone who claims to have some plans, as well as the power to act. But this you can do only once every two to four years by giving one hour of your time, hardly a satisfying means of expressing the broad range of opinions you hold.

As with most of Postman’s withering critiques of communication technology, I find this assertion to be a bit harsh, but not unfounded. We might use the web to find ways to reduce our own carbon footprint, for example, and there are some early (though hardly decisive) indications that a more engaged form of citizenry might yet emerge online. But while I do have amazing access to instantaneous information at my fingertips, at almost any time and almost any place… it’s hard for me to argue that this in itself makes me any more effective or influential in terms of making the world a better place.

The peculiar myopia that can affect those of us immersed in the exciting world emerging technologies was brought home to me reading this account by Alfred Hermida of Robert Scoble’s keynote at the Online News Association conference.

The talk turns out to be a tour of Web 2.0 communication tools and how they are changing the nature of how we interact with information.

Scoble moves on to talk about Twitter, demonstrating the power of micro-blogging. He cites how he found out about the China earthquake through TwitterVision before it was reported.

To which I can only reply, what possible good can come of Robert Scoble knowing about an earthquake before it is reported? (Which in today’s environment must have been a span of what… five minutes?) Did he mobilize a Web 2.0 rescue team? Were global waves of emergency response funds raised via Twitter before the mainstream media itself got around to reporting the story?

I’m not suggesting that networked media can’t have a constructive role to play in these situations. Wikipedia comes to mind as a resource that has demonstrated an astonishing capability to rapidly synthesize information (that has proven useful) in response to events like these. But again, how often does sheer speed improve my capacity to act? Especially within the context of a Twitter hivemind that is always chasing the newest, buzziest story? (I don’t see too many follow-ups on the current state of Chinese earthquake victims in my Twitter feed lately.)

Another object demonstration of the limits and peculiar hubris of the Web 2.0 crowd came through my newsreader late last week, when the tech news site Mashable noted that “Robert Scoble asked the tech blogosphere’s ‘thought leaders’ to weigh in on this issue of the economy (and included Mashable amongst those he invoked)” and not surprisingly “all but declared defeat in his search for expert opinion.”

The post in which Scoble acknowledges the sheer stupidity of his exercise is itself a must-read:

In the past 18 hours I’ve read literally thousands of posts and have done almost nothing but hang out on FriendFeed. I’ve seen a LOT of idiocy. And these are supposedly from the smarter, more educated people around. People who I’ve had a beer or two with and who I count as friends and fellow Americans.

…The downside of this new media world is that you’ll hear a lot of opinions. Which one is right? I’m not always right. In fact, I’m often wrong. But I’ve counted on YOU, the audience, to help me correct that when I’m off in the deep end. Now, though, I’ve seen so much idiocy that I’m not even sure of my audience anymore. That’s how deep our loss of confidence in each other has come.

As an aside, I’ve seen Scoble post these sorts of penitent reflections on the hype-soaked discourse of his practice before, and it never seems to change how he does his work.

Why is Scoble surprised that techbloggers aren’t the best people to ask about a complex global financial crisis? Did he think to canvass the photobloggers? Why not the dentist bloggers? (There must be a dental blogger scene by now, right?) Scoble might be a guy to read when it comes to understanding modern communication technology (then again, maybe not), but to me the real power of self-publishing is that I now have the opportunity to learn the thoughts of Nouriel Roubini directly – without having to go through Tom Brokaw (or Robert Scoble) to do so.

Being an “expert” on new media does not in itself make anyone qualified to comment on what’s going down. Do we automatically assume the operator of a printing press knows all the ins and outs of literary theory? That doesn’t mean we as citizens don’t have a right (or an obligation) to learn what we can, and the power to express ourselves in a wonderful thing — but surely demonstrable expertise should count for something?

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Banksy, originally uploaded by Pete Ashton.

This blog is rapidly approaching a state of hibernation. I have not even pointed toward the contribution that Jim Groom (with major assists from Tom Woodward and Serena Epstein, and a minor one from me) made to the Open Education Conference in Logan, Utah a little over a week ago.

The concepts that we were trying to communicate will be a familiar ones to readers of this blog: the maturation of user-owned open source publishing tools; the increasing capacity for these tools to support fast, easy and (if need be) dynamic and embedded reuse of content; the absolute need for syndication in our toolsets; and finally an attempt to frame the thinking of these tools against a backdrop of simple economics.

We also wanted to share the materials not just as a set of visuals accompanying a talk, but as a resource that itself modeled what we were trying to communicate. Given the apocalyptic tenor of the times, the aesthetic sensibilities involved, and the riotous late-night planning phone calls, perhaps it was inevitable that Radical Reuse would result.

I’m not sure how the RR site comes across to readers – my observation is that most people don’t get it at first glance – but it is something I am very proud to be associated with (though again, I have to stress that Jim ended up doing the vast majority of the work, and deserves an equivalent share of the credit). There are links to a vast array of WordPress plugins, MediaWiki extensions, and real-world examples that might provide a good starting point for establishing a learning environment that is inexpensive to run, friendly to users, supports open source code and open educational resource sharing, and incidentally presents an argument for economic and cultural imperatives along the way (albeit in some unconventional and downright silly ways)…

Yes, it was an absolute hoot to do from start to finish. I can’t express what I kick I got out of the videos that Jim, Tom and Serena have put together: the Mad Max meets liberal arts revolutionary intro; the fishing with feeds episode (which has cracked up every person I’ve shown it to, even those with no idea what RSS is); the reprise of Non-Programmistan (another Groom/Woodward masterwork); and the most recent hybrid of the Matrix and First Blood. These guys might be my favorite comedy team going these days.

There is some raw video of me talking this stuff during a poster session at the conference (the sound gets better about a minute or so in.) Mike Caulfield does an excellent job of framing the moment in the broader discussion that was happening at the conference… capturing why, even with all these fantastic tools at hand it still can be so useful to get together in person.

One aside, to be followed up in a future post… in the video clip linked above I’m talking about the happy accidental discovery of just how well blog-based learning environments and approaches translate to mobile devices, in this case with no additional development or cost whatsoever. (Can your LMS say the same thing?)

Another aside… I mentioned that on first glance people didn’t usually get our presentation concept. They’d ask what was up with the camouflage and the survivalist language. I’d do my best to put on a deadpan face and reply with “well, we are exploring how education technology might continue in a world that follows economic and societal collapse.” Suffice it to say, this response did not go over well with anyone. I concede it might be in questionable taste to make light of some real financial (and social, and environmental, and military) pain that is coming down right now. But though the rhetoric is light-hearted, the message is serious. I was (am) a bit surprised that considerations of social conditions that affect everyone are seemingly off-limits at educational conferences. Even if we consider these issues strictly from our own selfish perspectives, it seems clear that what we are reading about in the business pages is bound to cycle down on all of us. Even “best case” scenarios would suggest that budget cuts and job losses at our institutions and in our departments are likely. How we are prepared to deal with scarcity in the near future is not a pleasant thing to consider, but it strikes me as pertinent, and urgent. But that, again, will need another post for a more detailed consideration.

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Border Crossings Slide39, originally uploaded by bgblogging.

It’s a real thrill to have Barbara Ganley here in Vancouver this week. I’ve long been blown away by her ability to go deeper when the the rest of us get caught up in going faster. And how richly she has conceptualized and articulated the potential for learning that can happen out on the open web — perhaps most infamously with the frame of “slow blogging“… She was also a shaker in what I honestly think was the most compelling and effective conference session I have been at in recent years.

So obviously I’m eager to experience what she lays down this Wednesday:

Both Sides Now: In Person and on the Web; Slow Learning Communities for Fast Times

The tensions between traditional and emerging forms of learning should be energizing, not paralyzing higher education. Harried and fearful of Nabokov’s reminder that “Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form,” we overlook the rich potential of positive deviance and failure; we forget that learning should be disruptive. In this discussion/workshop we will explore how creative dissonance, experienced through the vibrant interplay between face-to-face and online spaces, the rich borderland between old and new, leads us right now, right here to extraordinary, deep learning outcomes.

As you can guess from the abstract, we can all expect to be provoked in our assumptions. Along those lines, I think about this passage from her most recent post on (the new) bgblogging (which is a true epic):

I’m conflicted about the open-education movement, about MOOCs and online affinity groups and online communities. The openness is exemplary. The learning possibilities mind-boggling. The chance to even the playing field–open access to all–downright thrilling. But I also sense, as a natural outcome of networked individualism, an increasing movement towards the ME and away from the US, both online and off, towards polarization and insularity rather than expanded horizons and inter-cultural understanding. I’m concerned about Negroponte’s “Daily Me” . Participatory learning, both online and off, can help us counter this risk, by enabling us to bump into one another and other ideas if we work at it, in keeping with Sunstein’s Republic.om contention that “Unplanned, unanticipated encounters are central to democracy itself.”

The session is set for this Wednesday, October 1, 1:00 – 4:00 pm in the lovely Dodson Room at the Learning Commons, UBC’s Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, 1961 East Mall (please register if you’re coming, non-UBCer’s welcome).

We’re having a federal election up here in Canada as well, set for October 14. I guess I shouldn’t be shocked to see that the Work Less Party hasn’t quite gotten around to nominating candidates. In the run-up, UBC’s School of Journalism (one of the University’s most web-savvy pockets, always good for new surprises) has set up a nifty resource: NetPrimeMinister.ca

As Professor Alfred Hermida puts it:

It shows how the candidates vying to be Canada’s next prime minister are being talked about in social media from blogs to Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.

The idea was partly inspired by the US site techPresident and its Politickr site that combines official blog posts, news feeds, photo streams, and video posts from 2008 presidential candidates.

The techie in me can’t help but note that the portal is built on a straight-forward application of the Netvibes platform, so presumably the vast majority of the effort that went into this project was shaping the concept and finding the feeds — not on programming. Kudos all round!

Via Darren Barefoot.

bus3, originally uploaded by Lawrence Whittemore.

When considering how changes in media might affect how education is delivered, I’ve been known to indulge in heaping helpings of hyperbolic speculation spiced with apocalyptic flavours. I can’t help myself, when I observe something like the meltdown of a cultural industry, my mind immediately begins toward similar scenarios in my own profession. Isn’t it possible that new media might spawn similar challenges to how education is funded and delivered? Are there equivalent threats to what Craigslist has meant to newspaper revenues out there?

I haven’t really gotten past that idle speculation phase, but a few recent developments have caught my attention.

* I had long wondered why the high and rising prices of textbooks hadn’t spawned an online piracy scene. Well, evidently that practice is indeed quite common.

* I’ve seen a few attempts by online communities to connect potential learners with potential instructors. The School of Everything has garnered a lot of buzz, and will be fascinating to watch.

* I thought David Wiley’s open course on Open Education was a fantastic model, and it’s clear the big happening in online learning for this semester will be George and Stephen’s course on Connectivism & Connective Knowledge. It’s hard not to be impressed with the many means of interacting with the course, or amazed with the sheer scale of the thing (the number of signed-up participants is in the thousands, hence the notion of massive open online courses (MOOCs). Looking at my schedule in the coming months, I refrained from signing up. But I intend to be observing and interacting – I have no choice, it’s where all of my friends will be! In any event, these sorts of courses, run on scalable open tools, can be successful without much regard for a lot of the conditions we are used to thinking of as essential to educational program delivery.

If we don’t do it right, somebody just might do it better.