abject learning

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Gardner – NMC Jam, originally uploaded by umwdtlt.

…but knowing that Gardner Campbell was leading a course entitled Rock/Soul/Progressive: transatlantic crossings in popular music 1955-present, I couldn’t help but reflect on how much this experience would have meant to me had it been possible. As readers of this blog have probably figured out, I share Gardner’s conviction “that careful attention to popular music can open more doors of perception than one usually finds in a course of study.”

One fantastic benefit of this moment in educational history is that I can enjoy an unprecedented amount of access to the process and outcomes of the course, not just the syllabus, but the thoughtful and amusing final projects as well. I’ve also spent a fair bit of time poking around and lurking in the student blogs (aggregated here)… which demonstrate fairly convincingly what a dynamic and effective personal learning platform UMW Blogs has so quickly become.

And now Gardner has posted detailed accounts of his thinking going in, working through, and coming out of the course (parts one and two). Essential reading for anyone who wonders what a gifted academic and teacher experiences when plunging headlong into unknown learning territory. And for some reason, I especially liked the more modest technological reflections of the Coda, which stands as a compelling example of what an open-minded embrace of available tools might make possible:

Laptops: I asked students to bring their laptops with them to class. Almost everyone had one. The few who didn’t had them on order but hadn’t yet received them. Over time, three or four of the sixteen got out of the habit of bringing theirs to class, but the rest constituted a pretty good yield in my view, and enabled some interesting learning opportunities.

One was what I’d expected (and hoped for): instant research journeys, and use of the class wiki for notes and other materials. It was a great day when we used the Internet to discover the explanation for “black Irish” that made sense of Jimmy Rabbitt’s insistence that Dubliners were “black and proud.” When the student at the end of the table found the resource and read it aloud, the entire class was charged with the discovery. That kind of serendipitous inquiry-fest is exactly what ubiquitous computing and connectivity should enable in classrooms–but it takes being alert to the possibilities.

Dr. Campbell is speaking at UBC on March 5 (visitors to the university are welcome to attend, but please do register). You think I’m excited?

RIP Eduspaces, some good commentary from Tony Hirst, Brian Kelly and Graham Attwell (and as usual from Stephen Downes), and I can’t add too much. It’s always dangerous to take a single instance and extrapolate too broadly, every story has a back-story. But since I see the tension between centrally-supported vs. distributed, student-owned applications (and all the fuzzy approaches in between) as perhaps the central question that educational technology managers are wrestling with (at least in higher ed), it’s hard to avoid that kind of specious reasoning.

I don’t have any answers, but some uninformed opinions:

* Comprehensive, centralized, highly managed learning environments are expensive, emphasize insular and locked-down tendencies, and cannot begin to match the dynamism of the wider web. They can be disastrous from a basic usability perspective, and may be even worse from a pedagogical perspective.

* Open source applications are an improvement in a number of respects, but they imply a commitment to ongoing iterative implementation, development, and support that most educational institutions find very challenging, at least as they are presently constituted, staffed, and funded. There aren’t really any turn-key solutions, and success usually depends on a lot of people working together across and between institutions. There have been success stories, but success is hardly guaranteed. Constant change is a given, uncertainty is the only certainty, and those characteristics can make open source a tough sell, especially inside a big institution where you need buy-in from a lot of people who feel they have a lot to lose.

* Third-party applications promise rapid uptake and are inexpensive to get rolling. They are usually the flashiest, grooviest things going. They tend towards an emphasis on individual ownership and responsibility for learning environments that is promising and perhaps empowering. But I’ve learned that nobody wants to make the same third-party choices, and Web 2.0 hype aside these tools don’t always play so nicely with one another. Fostering an approach to technology that allows for fragmenting environments does not forestall a “customer service” mentality from many instructors and students, who are justifiably freaked out by the range of options and the dizzying implications of their choices. There are plenty of legitimate concerns about privacy of data, and the imperative for companies offering “free” services to monetize will inevitably lead to some creepy decisions. The environments and conditions can change at a moment’s notice. And these services can just go away. In a comment to Kelly’s post, Alan Cann adds: “When I was a young man, I thought new year resolutions were naff, but I’ve made (and mostly kept) one for the past few years now. You just helped me decide what next year’s resolution is going to be: work out my strategy for surviving the bubble burst which is surely coming in 2008 and will result in multiple sites/services disappearing.”

So if my focus seems to wander when I am responding to a question on technology strategy, it’s because contingencies like these won’t stop buzzing in my head.

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DRM- it makes things inaccessable., originally uploaded by vrogy.

I’ve recently namechecked both the Lefsetz Letter and Ian Rogers, so when Lefsetz blogs about Rogers I just gotta chase that rabbit down the hole. Here are a few choice passages, devoid of context, commentary, or any value-add whatsoever [really, it’s hard to live with myself]:

The old model is market the hell out of diminishing quality. Whereas in the Net era, you focus on quality, marketing is secondary.

Ian told a great story. He went to a teen leadership conference. There were in excess of two hundred kids there. He asked them how many had seen “Lazy Sunday“. Every single kid raised his hand. Every single one. How many had seen the original broadcast, on SNL? Almost none. How many had seen “Superman”, the blockbuster being hyped at the same time? Fewer than ten. Why had everybody seen “Lazy Sunday”? Because it was FUNNY!

And that tells you almost all you need to know about today’s media world. Kids are only interested in quality, and they’re going to consume it when they want to, not on your schedule.

…Ian’s for open standards.

The labels are for scarcity.

The days of scarcity are done. DRM is done. If you’re not thinking how to enable your fans, get them to spread the word on great music, you’re probably sitting in an ivory tower pissed that people aren’t paying twenty bucks a CD. You’re on your way to extinction. You need to go out, you need to spend money in order to survive. The labels have cut back so far, everybody in the business has cut back so far, that they’ve surrendered the future to newbies. If you were here, you would have learned this. But, don’t worry, just watch. As the new world emerges and you’re sidelined.

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14122007592, originally uploaded by roland.

It might be my favorite meeting of the year.

Not that the task is easy. Once again we were near-overwhelmed by the quality of proposal submissions we received for conference sessions. The thought of reading, vetting, ranking, grouping and scheduling them could be a mammoth and unpleasant task, but after four years the Northern Voice planning committee seems to have arrived at a pretty good formula: block off the whole day, ingest a dangerous amount of caffeine, fight for your favorites (but do it nicely), keep the wisecracks coming, and go for a tasty meal when we’re done — our growling stomachs are effectively a whip cracking over our heads by mid-afternoon.

This year was notable as Darren and Julie were participating from Malta. The plasma screen at UBC’s Telestudios enabled us to make some pretty slick use of Google Docs as a collaboration tool (Boris was especially adept), and Skype allowed Darren to listen and chip in with his sarcastic good sense via a text window.

The schedule will be posted very soon. I can say that it is a very promising set of sessions, and that the educational community will be represented in full perverse force.

As ever, I am grateful for every opportunity to work with this committee — the chance to spend focused time with such gifted, personable and most amusing people is not something I take for granted. I wish every working day was this productive and this much fun.

[Previous obligatory planning day posts here.]

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04-4-06 Radio Waves to the moon…., originally uploaded by Picture_taking_fool.

I can’t believe I’ve yet to blog about Radio Lab, a radio show from WNYC that has immeasurably enriched my commuting and late-night dogwalking experience over the past month or so.

Ostensibly, Radio Lab is a “science show” but it covers such a wide range of phenomena (from behaviour, to physiology, to time and space) and addresses these topics with such wit and technical mastery that the categorization seems inadequate somehow. Every show I’ve listened to so far has been outstanding, though I would recommend newcomers check out Emergence, Space, and Detective Stories.

Radio Lab makes excellent use of the web, not only podcasting shows but offering up segments for download (with embed code for reuse by others), and each show has a companion website loaded with supporting media and links. Yes, this is what sonic pedagogy can be…

What sets the show apart for me is the astonishing production, its pacing, its deep understanding of how sound and the theatre of the mind work with one another. So after you’ve listened to a few episodes if you’re anything like me you’ll enjoy Making Radio Lab, in which host/producer Jad Abumrad and his co-host Robert Krulwich discuss their philosophy of radio and also some of the nitty-gritty details of production. I got a real kick out of this section that I’ve excerpted, you can listen in the flash player below. The clip they are talking about is from the show Musical Language, which is in tight competition with Where Am I? as my favorite episode — though there are still a few I’ve yet to listen to.

I will probably be blogging more show episodes in the future. In fact, I have a budding idea for an entire course that could be built around Radio Lab episodes — I think it would be especially cool for advanced EFL learners… Anyone wanna back me in developing it?

In the meantime, get thee to a Radio Lab, your brain will thank you.

Click To Play

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There are two reasons I’ve been writing more than usual about music lately. One, I’m trying to follow my own advice to fledgling bloggers, which is to write about the stuff that you are genuinely most interested in, and not worry too much about what you think you’re supposed to write about. Two, I can’t stop seeing parallels between what I see as the smarter analyses of the current state of the music industry and that of the educational domain.

For instance, this presentation by Ian Rogers from Yahoo! Music rightfully garnered a lot of attention when it was posted a few months back. The most commonly quoted passages:

History tells us: convenience wins, hubris loses. “Who is going to want a shitty quality LP when these 78s sound so good? Who wants a hissy cassette when they have an awesome quadrophonic system? Who wants digitized music on discs now that we have Dolby on our cassettes? Who wants to listen to compressed audio on their computers?” ANSWER: EVERYONE. Convenience wins, hubris loses. [check Fredric Dannen’s comments here]

I’m here to tell you today that I for one am no longer going to fall into this trap. If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! put more barriers in front of the users, I’m not interested. Do what you feel you need to do for your business, I’ll be polite, say thank you, and decline to sign. I won’t let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience. I will tell Yahoo! to give the money they were going to give me to build awesome media applications to Yahoo! Mail or Answers or some other deserving endeavor. I personally don’t have any more time to give and can’t bear to see any more money spent on pathetic attempts for control instead of building consumer value. Life’s too short. I want to delight consumers, not bum them out.

…In the end you get what you pay for. I won’t spend another dime paying engineers to build false control, making listening to music harder for music-lovers. I will put all of my energy into making it easier and making the experience better. I suggest you do the same.”

I can’t help but substitute the proper nouns for ones closer to my own experience. In a sense, I’ve been adopting a strategy like this for some time myself. When I meet with someone who says they want a blog or a wiki, but all of their questions are about privacy, and control, and roles, and structure, and monitoring, and management, I do my best to answer… and to an extent those things can be addressed. There once was a time when I was so determined to get people using social software that I was willing to engage programmers to make the tools behave in a way that they were never intended — with results that were occasionally rewarding, but more often highly labour-intensive and with disappointing outcomes. Now, if the common-sense middle-ground strategies (and thank you edublogosphere for your tireless efforts to develop and share these approaches) don’t assuage the concerns, I’m likely to smile and say something like, “you know, maybe what you need is a Course Management System, UBC supports the biggest, baddest CMS on the planet, let me hook you up with some people.”

Which may be an improvement, or it may be a cop-out… but I wonder what the online education milieu might look like if we as a profession adopted something like Rogers’ pledge. And where might we focus our efforts instead?

If, on the other hand, you’ve seen the light too, there’s a very fun road ahead for us all. Lets get beyond talking about how you get the music and into building context: reasons and ways to experience the music. The opportunity is in the chasm between the way we experience the content and the incredible user-created context of the Web.

…Lets envision the end state and drive there as quickly as possible. Lets not waste another eight years on what is obvious today. Lets build the tools of a healthy media Web and reward music-lovers for being a part of it.

What I find heartening is that everywhere I go I hear more and more educators, many of them in positions of real influence in their institutions and beyond, talking this kind of language, thinking hard about what knowledge-lovers need and how we might build a healthy media Web that supports and rewards them. What I worry about is that for whatever reasons, we find it hard to let go of the strategies that have caused us so much pain and hassle in the past, and keep digging ourselves in deeper and deeper…

The recent normalization of torture in our public discourse has offered up some wonderful perversions of the language, as our journalists, perhaps out of a sense of propriety and good manners, can’t quite bring themselves to use the “T” word. So we read of interrogations spiced up with adjectives like “rough”, “coercive”, “aggressive” and of course, who could object to “enhanced interrogations”? That probably means with wi-fi, or maybe vitamin supplements.

Last night I read a linguistic sterilization that may have scaled a new height of creativity, even topping the comparisons of torture to frat house pranks and waterboarding with swimming. A recent Wall Street Journal article described Jose A. Rodriguez (the guy who’s taking the credit for erasing those torture videos and sparing us all a lot of discomfort) thus:

Mr. Rodriguez, who grew up in Puerto Rico, is a product of what one former agency colleague called “the rough and tumble” Latin American division, which was responsible for thwarting Russian aggression in that part of the world. That strategy eventually evolved into the Iran-Contra scandal.

“Rough and tumble”! You know, like Bobby Clarke or Gordie Howe. I love it. If you want a sense of what “rough and tumble” in Latin America meant, take a quick read of this.

I just hope things don’t escalate to roughhousing or horseplay in Guantanamo Bay, somebody might get hurt.

levon helm in central park, originally uploaded by daniel arnold!.

One of things I find most valuable and satisfying about blogging is throwing together some half-baked thoughts on whatever is on my mind, and then watching as people come in to elaborate, to affirm or to disagree, and most importantly to make trivial musings seem relevant…

Witness my recent blatherings on the dissolution of the music industry, which attracted a number of thoughtful comments, including this one from Richard:

I had a shock today that brought the digital revolution home. We went down to A&B Sound here in Victoria, the goto place for vinyl in 1971, cassettes in the 80’s and CD’s ever since they hit that affordable price point in 199- something.

The whole second floor full of treasures is closed. They’ve shoe horned stock into part of the main floor, but it looks depressingly like HMV in terms of selection.

We were looking for Dirt farmer by Levon Helm but no luck and no special orders either. This is sad, they always had more stock and knowledge than anyone else.

It’s how the sharp end of bittorrent and amazon.com look on the street.

There are a lot of sad stories in the broken businesses and broken dreams at the bottom of the distribution chain, and it’s not just digitization but consolidation that’s to blame — I worked for a smart but struggling independent bookstore as it dwindled out of existence in the mid-nineties, and shudder with empathy at the empty shelves and the haunted, desperate looks of retailers that flavours a lot of culture shopping these days.

Richard’s specific example is provocative for me. One of my all-time favorite music books is Levon Helm’s This Wheel’s On Fire, it really is a wonderful read that covers huge swaths of American cultural and musical history. The book is perhaps best-known for its harsh portrayal of Robbie Robertson, who among other things is accused of conspiring with various music business scumbags to rip off the other Band members of songwriting credits and royalties, cutting them off from the money generated by their records. (If this is true, it makes a lot of sense that Robertson is now primarily occupied as a record company executive himself.)

Whether or not you believe Helm’s account, the old media narrative of musicians and money is depressingly familiar. What makes the story of Levon Helm a little more interesting is recent history, and how well he seems to have adapted to the new reality. His main source of income derives from regular Midnight Rambles, which are intimate gatherings mixing spontaneous music and potluck dinners hosted at his home/studio in Woodstock, NY. He’s also got a pretty decent website selling wares in various formats. From the press interviews I’ve read, Helm says this DIY approach is the first to provide him with a steady living in years.

As an aside, the fact that this record store couldn’t even bring Dirt Farmer in on a special order suggests a certain cluelessness. A quick Google search brought up links to both direct orders and Amazon — even with a 40% markup the clerk should have been able to say, “we can bring it in for 20 bucks,” which I suspect Richard would have accepted.

And yes, it looks like you can snag Dirt Farmer on BitTorrent networks (I searched but didn’t download), or get most of it track-by-track via the Skreemr method I outlined in my previous post. It sounds like a pretty good record, I have a lot of affection for Levon and I might buy it… too bad it isn’t on vinyl, I would order it via our (seemingly thriving) neighborhood record store.

Here are a couple teasers from Levon’s new record:

@import url(http://skreemr.com/styles/embed.css);

	Levon Helm – Feelin’ good
	Found at skreemr.com

@import url(http://skreemr.com/styles/embed.css);

	Levon Helm – False Hearted Lover Blues
	Found at skreemr.com

Levon sounds downright amazing for a 67 year old guy who fought through throat cancer not so long ago.

It occurs to me that based on recent posts Abject Learning is in danger of morphing into a music blog. Suits me…

There was a time in my life when the prospect of Led Zeppelin reuniting would have been a ticket to rock and roll heaven for me, and while that time has past I hope for everyone concerned that tonight’s show goes well. Morbid curiosity may prod me into checking the NME’s blog every now and then as the show goes on…

Zeppelin were a tremendous band, and they also illustrate the inherent pastiche nature of popular music. It’s well-known that they pillaged the blues as aggressively as they trashed hotel rooms, eventually paying a settlement to Willie Dixon for “Whole Lotta Love” amongst others. But they also borrowed heavily from contemporaries.

Does “Taurus” by Spirit remind you of something (wait about 30 seconds)?

@import url(http://skreemr.com/styles/embed.css);

	Spirit – Taurus
	Found at skreemr.com

And I don’t know how Zep got away without scoring Jake Holmes a few bucks for this shameless rip-off:

@import url(http://skreemr.com/styles/embed.css);

	Jake Holmes – Dazed And Confused
	Found at skreemr.com

I should note that pointing out these well-known instances of reuse doesn’t diminish the power and influence of Led Zeppelin’s music in any way — though the refusal to share a little of the enormous wealth they earned does speak to a certain lack of grace.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to ramble on…

[Image above taken from one of many misguided initiatives as social networking enters its cash-in cycle…]

Nothing I intend to post here will be news to people who have been following the Facebook privacy saga. Facebook’s behaviour could be described as standard operating procedure in Web 2.0 these days, free services are paid for with leveraged user-generated content and relentless marketing — my own opinions are pedestrian and predictable.

Having said that, I am still encountering lots of people who are completely unaware of these issues, so with that in mind I’ll post some essential points on Facebook and privacy, hopefully they will be useful for a few people.

One, the quiet launch of the Facebook Beacon should make it clear what the value proposition for its absurdly high market capitalisation is all about. There’s lots to find creepy about Beacon, most notably its collection of your user data beyond the confines of Facebook itself. Participating companies extend Facebook’s surveillance of your online activities, reporting back, say, that you just bought a volume of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers at Amazon. If you are alert, you may have the option to “opt out” of a “feature” that would report that purchase to all of your Facebook friends. But even then Beacon would record that purchase and attach it to the detailed profile that Facebook keeps on you, one that when correlated with its huge user base may end up being of considerable interest to marketers.

After a fairly intense backlash, CEO Mark Zuckerberg offered a non-apology apology for how Beacon was rolled out (“we missed the right balance”). They claim you can now ‘opt out’ via the privacy settings on your Facebook profile. Directions on how to do so (mixed in with some high-grade snark) are here.

While you are in your privacy settings, I recommend you take some time to look through the tabs and think through what is exposed, and to whom. Two essentials jump out at me.

* Under “Profile” the default allows any user who belongs to any of your “networks” to see your profile. In other words, if you belong to the “Vancouver, BC” or “UBC” networks, anyone else in those networks can see your profile, not to mention those binge drinking jokes that your old high school buddy left on your wall. You may want to adjust that level of exposure.

* A friend of mine does security for a credit card company. He tells me that for various reasons the single most useful piece of information for identity thieves is your birthdate. (I remember one instance of telephone banking where I could not remember my “security codeword” for the life of me, but my birthdate was enough to convince the service representative that I was legit.) If you are intent on getting lots of well-wishes on your special day, consider dropping the year at least –though that part is not hard to figure out, especially if your high school graduation year is on your profile.

As an aside, I almost never install external applications for “Stupid Walls” or pop culture quizzes or zombie attacks… mostly because I find them highly annoying, but also because these applications gain access to your FB data, and I have no idea how far that access extends.

Personally, I always expect the worst of everyone, and believe that more often than not privacy settings provide a false sense of security. I expose myself accordingly. I still have a Facebook account, because at least once a week I get back in touch with someone I had thought I had lost all contact with. And I am endlessly fascinated with what my old classmates have done with their lives. So given all that, I anticipated Facebook’s scuzzy behaviour, and I’ll be keeping my profile active, at least until the next inevitable outrageous abuse.

Anybody else have Facebook digital identity tips or horror stories?

Update: I think Facebook is feeling the heat from this Beacon backlash. As of now, when you receive a message inside FB, you don’t merely receive a notice to go check Facebook, you actually get the text of the message itself. This will result in significantly fewer pageviews for Facebook, but a much improved user experience.

A bloggy high-five towards Northern Voice organizer Travis Smith, who organized one of the few Facebook groups I have joined, one dedicated to achieving just this very outcome…