abject learning

One of the benefits of being based in Vancouver is that over the course of a typical year at least three or four major events will take place that don’t involve travel. (Although typically, it’s harder to truly engage a local happening, harder to get clear of the office, etc…) This week I am attending Ed-Media, a huge conference with a very international flavour, and a certain kind of academic air. Kind of strange in a lot of respects, most sessions I have seen are very straight presentations of papers with little discussion, maybe a bit of Q&A if time permits.

So I give serious props to Sebastian Fiedler for his vision for a symposium. He urged six presenters to keep the formal presentations as short as possible, keeping lots of time open for follow-up discussion.

The session was entitled “Getting beyond centralized technologies in higher education” and I was personally very pleased with how it all went. Sort of a hybrid between a traditional seminar and a hootenanny — a good combination of focus and spontaneity, it struck a balance that I would like to approach again for future events.

I recorded some quick ‘n dirty audio, though the levels were very uneven (and generally inaudible) because the presenters were moving about the room a fair bit. I did some post-production tweaking, but be warned, the quality of the files below varies quite a bit. Apologies.

* Sebastian Fiedler – contrasted the immense difficulties of coordinating higher education activities that are centred around learning management systems (which still do not generate RSS feeds, for example) with the relative ease enjoyed by users of social software tools, allowing them interact while making their own platform choices. [Sebastian’s audio (MP3)]

* Robert Fitzgerald – reviewed a number of elements relating to LMSs, their function within the insitution, and how they intend to support a “pedagogy of the answer” as opposed to a more critical “pedagogy of the question.” Pointed to Produsage, a concept that is new to me. Discussed potential for distributed personal tools to provide welcome and constructive disturbance within higher education. [Rob’s audio (MP3)]

* Scott Wilson, in an historically-grounded analysis, noted how large centralized systems tend to ‘create their own momentum’ institutionally, in which the IT needs of the systems get out ahead of the organization’s real needs. A model that stresses “user-owned technology” actually promises “an escape route from escalating costs, liabilities, etc… that come from supply-driven model.” This was a rare seminar presentation that actually made me want to read the associated paper, one which essentially provides an institutional process for extricating itself from the grips of big central systems. [Scott’s audio (MP3)]

* I didn’t do as good a job as the others at keeping my section short (shame-faced apologies all-round). As it was, I blasted through my bit on mashups so quickly I nearly hyperventilated. I stood next to the audio recorder (because I needed to manipulate my wiki on the laptop) so my audio is clearer than most (honestly, I’m not fiendishly enhancing myself to level the playing field with my more lucid co-presenters!). [Brian’s audio (MP3)]

* Kai Pata – a learning environment is not just a set of tools, but roles, activities and activity patterns. And do all the participants and stakeholders see the systems the same way? If people can choose their tools, we can’t assume a common toolset. But based on activity patterns, we can think in terms of recommending certain affordances. [Kai’s audio (MP3)]

* It seems insane that this was my first meeting with George Siemens, he’s been an integral cog in my blogosphere for nearly five years, and he’s a western Canadian to boot. He delivered an amusing and engaging riff on strategies for an age of overwhelming information abundance. He reviewed a number of tools and strategies for doing so, stressing the need to learn how to interact with patterns of information, and to let go of our instinctive need to directly engage every piece of information. [George’s audio (MP3)]

The second half of the symposium was more or less freeform discussion, and it really was awesome. Lots of mindbending points from the facilitators and participants (who were very engaged). Alas, the audio here is even more uneven… if I get time [cue hysterical laughter] I may try to do what Draggin did with the Hootenanny audio and try to extract the audible bits and mash them together.

Kai took live notes into a PowerPoint slide, which I uploaded to Flickr and posted above.

I didn’t take proper notes, bit did some Twittering, excerpted below:

* Scott W: ‘from origins of the web, educators have developed bad habit of needing a separate set of educational tools, our own internal web.’

* George S: ‘the best way to keep our kids from drowning is to teach them to swim, not trying to keep them away from water.’

* Scott W: ‘learning an LMS is harder than learning the web, and the skills acquired are non-transferable. All students learn is to use an LMS.’

* Scott W: ‘Rather than providing an enclosed whole platform, educational institutions might fulfill historic role to promote rendezvous points.’

* From an unknown attendee: the wonderful phrase “digital taxidermists” — describing the unfortunate tendency of educators to suck the life out of online applications and communities.

* Terry Anderson made an interesting point that when given a choice (in ELGG) most students prefer to have their course interactions private. (Fair enough, but does that mean all course content needs to be hidden away? – BL)

* George S: ‘instead of centralizing the tool set, we should strive to centralize the protocols for data flow (RSS) and push open standards…’

Ahh, if only Bryan Alexander hadn’t been laid out by a Texas flu bug… I think he would have made a great fit here.

And as is so common, as much as I learned during the session itself, I got so much more out of the pre and post-symposium interactions with the rest of the group. I had never met any of these people before, so it was a real privilege on so many levels. They are all evidently very smart, but even more impressively easygoing, unpretentious and great fun to hang out with. My head is still spinning. I hope I see more of this group in the future.

Three fairly intense events in the last week, on top of the usual work stuff (busier than usual)… but people have been asking how things went, so I’ll toss up yet another self-absorbed progress report. I am looking forward to spewing some verbiage about what other people are up to soon…

My fears aside, the IT4BC talk went OK — I certainly can’t complain about my reception. But I was thrown off-course early, when I asked the room of approximately 250 educational IT professionals if they had heard of learning objects… and I got two hands up. SInce I had more or less structured my narrative as a contrast between my experiences pushing LOs and what I’ve learned since, my whole approach was imperiled. I should have cut the LO stuff short and moved on, but instead I panicked and went into greater detail to try and explain what happened, using increasingly hyperbolic and simplified language. I think things got better toward the end.

My learning from this session: while it’s nice to target a talk to your audience, it is pointless to anticipate what they know.

Earlier this week I was in Edmonton for the Canadian E-Learning Conference. I gave a pre-conference workshop on the usual stuff. This one was more fun than I expected. I had a great room, a full house ready to learn and try new things. What was especially gratifying was that people were especially keen to learn more about RSS and how syndication might support distributed approaches to learning and publishing. I’m used to having a tough sell getting people interested in that side of the equation, so their contribution to the session was gratifying.

I enjoyed a lunch with Michael Hotrum (first meeting) and then I was off to Bourbon Street at the West Edmonton Mall to meet D’Arcy, and man it was just like being back in the French Quarter. I haven’t had such an authentic immersive experience since eating at Taco Bell. I signed up for this gig because it offered the chance to hang out and work with D’Arcy, and as ever it was an absolute blast. D’Arcy has written a post on our process, he did most of all of the heavy lifting in making the video clips flow together smoothly. My assessment was that we got a mixed but acceptable audience reaction, some of the videos (like Spare Me My Life) bombed big time, others (like Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk) really seemed to connect with people.

Next week I am part of a symposium at Ed-Media here in Vancouver with some true heavy hitters, most of whom I’ll be meeting for the first time. Updates pending…

So last week’s workshops on Creative Commons and Digital Images both went reasonably well – thankfully Joy, Hilde and Jeff were all stunningly effective co-facilitators.

The CC workshop was enlivened by the attendance of Ciaran Llachlan Leavitt, who was interjecting with so many challenging and compelling points I interrupted my presentation to ask, “who are you?” Turns out she is a writer who among many other things has battled with Disney (and come out smiling), shared a panel with Jonathan Letham (author of this piece which you’d better read if you haven’t already), and worked out her fiction online via a CC license.

Ciaran (perhaps I should refer to her as Llachlan) made a lot of pertinent points, but perhaps the most important was the evident need for users of CC to select the license relevant to the jurisdiction they live in. For that reason, and because I feel obliged to finally remove my NC clause (for reasons I only begin to understand, but whatever), the license on this blog has changed.

Yes, you tens of millions of content mongers who are looking to reuse my musings on freeform radio, the Saskatchewan Roughriders, and occasionally on educational technology — take note.

And I see D’Arcy is already there, of course. I am unsurprised yet comforted.

A few months back I got an intriguing invitation. An organizer for the IT4BC conference, a gathering of IT staff from the province’s educational instituions, wrote to tell me that I had been nominated as a keynote speaker. An anonymous person suggested I would be an ideal choice to represent those who make life hellish for on-campus IT professionals. Really, I have pissed off so many IT people at UBC and beyond it could have been anyone.

Glutton for abuse that I am, I couldn’t resist. I submitted the following abstract for my opening talk:

Confessions of a Royal Pain in the Butt

Our keynote speaker has been working closely with UBC’s IT professionals for years, and has consistently vexed them with his unorthodox demands and unwillingness to specify use cases. Brian will attempt to defend his shockingly lax approach to planning as a grounded philosophy intended to foster user autonomy and innovation. He will also review some approaches to web strategy that are emerging outside of campus environments, such as open access to content and open APIs, and attempt to make a case why we need to learn from these efforts and apply them within our educational institutions.

I see that the organizers deleted my concluding sentence, which was: “Attendees are responsible for bringing their own projectiles.” I guess that means suitable throwables will be provided in the conference loot bag.

I intend to have some fun with this talk, but I also see this as a rare opportunity for useful dialogue, given the audience. As of now, I intend to cover some of the following themes or topics — but they have yet to cohere for me, so please excuse the mess:

* The rise of personal learning environments, and the contrast with the “course management system” approach.

* Rich online course environments that don’t use campus IT systems. The benefits of free third-party tools.

* The perils of pushing students to third-party tools, including conflicts with British Columbia’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA), which appears to make it illegal to require students to use American-based services (because that PATRIOT Act is whack).

* Why it’s pointless to plan in a traditional sense.

* The changing infrastructural environment (ie what happens when you can do massive web innovation on 6.95 a month).

* The importance of open content, open licensing, open formats (no matter what the topic is, you can bet I’ll work this stuff in for any talk I do).

* Mash-ups and open APIs on campus.

I am scheduled to give the talk Thursday morning, and the next couple days already look rather packed. So while I’m not quite panicked enough to send out one of my periodic cries for help, input certainly is welcome. And as the image above illustrates, I am hoping to employ the Blackall/Levine method of reworking CC licensed images, at least in part. So if there are themes, or better yet images, resources or examples you’d recommend, please (please! PLEASE!) feel free to pass them on.

I’ve been traveling and presenting (not to mention trying to keep up with my real work) non-stop this week, so I haven’t had much chance to participate in The Future of Education online conference that’s been going on. But I second Leigh’s huzzah’s for how George Siemens is running the show. The Moodle site is well set up, and I’ve begun catching up with the sessions I’ve missed via the podcast feed. Nifty use of a Pageflakes Portal as well.

The line-up of presenters is first rate. Today, the live sessions wrap up with David Weinberger, Mark Oehlert, and… uh-oh. I’d better get ready.

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003, originally uploaded by leighblackall.

I need to write a follow-up post on my first stint working down at COSL. For now, suffice to say that it was an absolute blast, that I learned a great deal in a very short period of time, and that I feel more fortunate than ever to be engaged with such a fabulous group of gifted, fun and passionate people. Our discussions went in a number of different directions, but as I left we were agreed on an initial project that I think will be most groovy. More on that soon.

But as much as I would like to linger and ponder on the past few days and process a bit, I am co-leading a couple half-day workshops tomorrow, and both of them require more energy and attention than usual. In the morning Jeff Miller and I will facilitate Digital Images and the Web, a primer on the basics of digital photography with special emphasis on how to work the web to republish and to find imagery. I’m not much of a photographer, so I will be leaning heavily on Jeff for a lot of stuff.

In the afternoon, I share facilitation with UBC librarians Joy Kirchner and Hilde Colenbrander for a session on intellectual property and Creative Commons. I’m glad to have a couple of great partners for this one, but I’ve never done a full-length workshop on Creative Commons before, so there’s a lot to be done before this sucker is likely to feel right. If you have suggestions for resources, activities or discussion points please feel free to share either by comment here or adding into the workshop wiki directly.

Now, back to the hypertext mines…

Bad enough that I haven’t had access to WFMU’s archives, or that my podcasts haven’t come in for nearly a week. Today I learn that things could have been, and may well end up being so, so much worse:

The reason why this outage is lasting so long is that we are on the cusp of losing the last six years of our audio archives. We don’t want to act rashly and lose it all. Our backup archive server turned out to be unuseable, meaning that the failed archive server is holding the only full copy of our archives. The archive server suffered a problem with it’s linux operating system following a scheduled upgrade of Red Hat linux. While it looks like the archive server’s data is intact, we can’t put it back online again until we’ve been able to check it out more thoroughly and nake a copy of all the archives. It looks more likely that when the archives come back, it will only be for newly created archives, while we continue to backup and massage the main archive server.

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Education for Liberation!, originally uploaded by opencontent.

I’ve been trying to write a short post about my arrival in Logan to begin this whole COSL ride for a few days now. Until today, I was so tied up in fear, uncertainty and doubt that I found it difficult to gather the words. I’ve started posts at three or four different points of the day, only to delete them shortly after as new stuff came up. A capsule summary:

* Day begins: do I have what it takes? And what is it I’m supposed to do? Man, everybody is so nice, I don’t want to let them down.

* First meeting with David, Brandon and Justin. We talk in broad themes about what we want to do. We identify a few ideas that I can actually wrap my head around, like a review of the literature on Web 2.0, or a survey of educator attitudes toward emergent technologies along the lines of the Daedalus Project. Elation ensues — maybe I can do this after all?

* Sit in on COSL project leads meeting. I thought I had a sense of the stuff COSL was up to, but am still blown away.

* Eat a delicious sandwich (I actually typed del.icio.us), hear Vancouver indie rocker A.C. Newman on the cafe’s stereo. Take it as a good sign. Man, these people are nice.

* I settle in front of the computer, explore some ideas and try some of the tools we talked about using. Quickly become overwhelmed by potential range of topics and approaches.

* Some more directed exploration, getting a sense of how crazy much stuff is out there. Trying to ignore all the email that keeps coming in when I’m trying to think. The hill gets steeper.

* Another round of brainstorming and refining. Watch Justin Ball download the dataset for CiteULike and do some crazy crunching on the fly. Dude has some skills.

* As working day winds down, realize that my brain is saturated, and the only semi-constructive thing I can do is toss off a quickie blog post, promising to write through some of the day’s themes soon.

Did I mention how nice everybody is?

That’s the Dumbest Thing I Ever Heard, originally uploaded by cogdogblog.

Pardon me if I don’t blog about Twitter.

I’ve had more fun with it than any other web application in ages, certainly since the glory days of YouTube (back when they didn’t care about respecting copyright). But I have no desire to post my Tweets on my blog (or vice versa), and most of the Twitterhacks I see leave me cold. I would prefer not to spoil the fun with analysis.

That is not a swipe at my friends and heroes who are thinking hard about what 140 character doses of text might mean for educators. At the very least, their efforts mean my Twittime counts as “applied research” rather than “goofing off.” I am grateful.

I’ll spare you my own wishlist for how I’d like to see Twitter improve. I know that it’s hard to search for people, and that it can be disorienting to track conversations across accounts. I’ll admit I’d like to hide some of my Twits from some people. But Twitter is the garage band (not GarageBand^TM) of web applications — clunky, unprofessional, lots of missed notes, yet possessed of glorious shambling charm.

I’ve said in the past that I think of this blog as the equivalent of the “hallway chatter” I might engage in when at a conference. If that holds, then my worktime twits are like the snarky remarks I whisper during other people’s presentations, and my offtime ones more like the trash talk I spill at the pub just before last call.

I’ve felt for some time that Twitter would have a short shelf life. If it continues to grow in popularity the intimacy and backchannel quality of the dialogue will die — I already have more Twitfriends than I feel comfortable with. And I figured it wouldn’t be long before people would burn out on it (people drop out all the time), or move to a more feature-rich alternative.

But I didn’t expect harbingers of doom to appear so quickly. Already there is movement toward Jaiku, which is superior to Twitter in every respect except its user community, positively loaded with nifty features. Think of it as prog rock. The recent and relentless instability of Twitter (I do wish they’d ditch the server problem lolcats) has prompted rumbles of revolt from the Twits — there was an aborted revolution in my circle yesterday. Part of me doesn’t really see this as an important choice — we have RSS after all, and I doubt it will be long before our micro-blogging community is no more significant than our choice of blogging platform.

I’m uncomfortable with the tenor of this post, which has veered uncomfortably close to analysis for my liking. I’d really just prefer to let the mystery be and have fun with it.

I had hoped to maintain a similar professional distance from Facebook, and just enjoy making lists of my favorite bands and hooking up with old friends again. But then they went all social networking platform on us, and I think given the usage levels on campus and their rather fearsome chops that’s just too significant a development to ignore. I certainly would be freaking out if I was holding Blackboard stock today. I’d say that Andy’s Stamp Syndicate (background here) is a much safer investment at this point.