abject learning

On the flight down I was hunting through my hard drive for useful sound clips, and ended up listening again to a conversation via Skype I had with Gardner Campbell some months ago while preparing for the New Media Consortium’s virtual conference on personal broadcasting. Due to time limitations, I was only able to use a few minutes of the interview in the final presentation, but Gardner’s contribution deserves better than languishing in my personal archive.

Over the course of twenty minutes (9.8 MB MP3) I ask him about the intimacy of radio, the uncanny elements of sound, his concept of the “explaining voice” and how his career as a broadcaster informs his work as an educator and scholar. In addition to ample heaps of unique insight and the usual effortless and illuminating erudition, what comes through for me most powerfully here is Gardner’s generous spirit, how much care he puts into addressing my half-baked queries.

I am so grateful that my job provides opportunities to have conversations like this one. I’m thrilled that Gardner will be here at the NMC regional conference — he’s speaking on “metaphoric immersion in Croquet and Second Life.” And hard as it is to believe, it will be the first time I’ve seen him give a full presentation in person.

Tags: nmc2006reg, radio, sound, podcasting

Today I am literally swamped. Not misusing ‘literally’ here, I mean my place is besieged by floodwaters, much of the yard underwater, the city engineers responsive but apparently unable to do much until the rain lets up here in Van Rock City — whaddya know, it’s flooding all over the lower mainland… So far, we haven’t suffered much damage besides some stuff we had in the garage, but it’s been buckets of driving round-the-clock fun. A certain elemental tension in the air, a pervasive sogginess in my socks…

In other news that’s all wet, the company that once set the standard for warm and fuzzy relations with its community is acting like yet another bully behemoth. Boris Mann reports that Flickr is patenting interestingness. Next up they can patent good will. He’s disgusted, and so is Stephen Downes. Seems like a dangerous game to play for a company that has benefited so handsomely from its fabulous blogger-karma… perhaps they’ve achieved the requisite dominant status to stop caring. I suppose Web 2.0 really has arrived as a major corporate player…

At least tomorrow I expect to dry out as I fly to warm and sunny climes, though in all honesty I’m far more excited by the program of this year’s NMC Regional Conference in San Antonio. So many of my favorite people will be there, and every time slot will be a difficult decision. Myself, I’m taking another crack at my extended riff on mash-ups, last inflicted on unsuspecting participants at the Utah State Open Education Conference, but with a few new wrinkles. Let’s just say that if things progress as planned this iteration promises to be a lot louder and even less coherent.

Tags: nmc2006reg, biblicaldeluge, soggy

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Fire I, originally uploaded by sharply_done.

Last Saturday my family took part in the Public Dreams Society’s wonderful Parade of Lost Souls event — think Day of the Dead on the Canadian west coast.

I have no time to write a proper review, but there’s no chance I could top this write-up anyway:

Multiple bands: a band of ghosts, dressed all over in white, clothes and faces both; a band of angels, white halos hovering above; a band of devils, glowing red horns sprouting from heads; drums, brass, woodwinds, bells; musical guides, playing increasingly cheerful melodies and rhythms, beckoning the crowd onto the street, forming a flowing river, a flowing river of people travelling, travelling from the field where death is remembered to the park where life, being alive, is celebrated.

… the journey becomes a celebration in the delight of life, with dancing in the streets. Giant puppets bob above the heads of crowd. Skeletal birds on stilts caw as they stalk through the throng. And everywhere, costumes, costumes, as people take the opportunity to dress up, to show off their creativity and effort, to become another character, to leave their mundane selves behind, even if only temporarily. Numerous witches, skeletons, vampires, zombies, pumpkinheads, and demons, but too, medieval and renaissance garb, 1920s flappers superheroes, fairies, robots, pirates, giant dice, Lego minifigs, wolves, cats, a microwave-head, a banana slug, even just rainbow wigs, feather boas, domino and glitter masks, facepaint, glowsticks and LEDs. Even several blocks beyond the central hub of fire and music and dancing, there is a steady back and forth flow of people, enjoying the freedom to walk down the middle of a road, to see and be seen.

And thanks to Tim Bray for demonstrating what strikes me as an essential new literacy skill: the artful construction of an effective Flickr search URL.

All in all, a genuinely magical night, and a welcome reminder why I love my city and my neighborhood. Kudos to the organizers, volunteers and the ten thousand-plus participants for making it happen.

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Second Real, originally uploaded by stevegarfield.

“Education is learning what you didn’t even know.” — Daniel Boorstin

I’m arriving very late to the Second Life party for a number of reasons. For one, my bent toward ‘fast, cheap, and out of control’ technologies has left me underwhelmed by top-heavy immersive 3-D environments. And given my demonstrable inability to manage my life and professional interests as they stand, I had my concerns about whether I could handle the increase in mental bandwidth. But given the rapid increase in activity, my uninformed contrarian stance becomes increasing untenable.

My co-instructors and I committed to staging a short foray into SL for the Text Technologies course, so for the past couple of weeks I’ve been poking around the environment and beginning to read up. My so-called thoughts are barely half-baked at this point, but my impressions of the technology itself are surprisingly positive… though my ability to find environments that genuinely engage me needs to improve.

One thing that has been clear to me in this process is the tremendous support available due to efforts of people in my dispersed professional network. I cannot say enough about the great work that Alan and his peers at the NMC have done to establish an environment and supporting documentation. Simply a lifesaver. I’ve enjoyed reading Bryan’s periodic observations, and he’s turned me on to what Warren Ellis is doing. I loved this snarky take on the limitations of gratuitous 3-D by Jon Udell.

And today Katherine Miller here at UBC alerted me to a local initiative that might have big effects:

Four of the Lower Mainland’s major post-secondary educational institutions will simultaneously open a virtual campus in the online cyberworld Second Life and a new real-world $40-million digital media school on Great Northern Way.

The Masters of Digital Media Program is a collaboration between the University of B.C., Simon Fraser University, Emily Carr Institute and BCIT, and is due to welcome its first cohort of 35 students in September 2007. An open house for prospective students is scheduled for Nov. 25 at the Vancouver campus and the virtual campus now being built in the three-dimensional metaverse, peopled by more than one million registered users worldwide.

… While the curriculum, developed in collaboration with local new media companies like Blast Radius and Electronic Arts, is still at the outline stage, Clayman can envision holding classes and interactive labs at the virtual campus.

The aim of the program is to groom the world’s best digital animators and effects creators and that makes Second Life an obvious place to recruit students from all over the world, said program director Gerri Sinclair.

“All kinds of amazing creativity and talent in this very field of digital media is very much in evidence there,” she said.

In addition to taking classes, students will help design and create the virtual campus in Second Life, Sinclair added. Having students create their own learning environment “is the future of educational research,” she said.

Tuition for this program is going to cost twenty grand per year, but given the educational activity in this space, we will be seeing far more accessible projects soon — at least to those who can afford the bandwidth.

From cranky skeptic to provisional convert in under a week. I guess that’s called learning.

One of the best things about working at a big university is the abundance of cool stuff happening across campus, though it’s always a challenge to keep up with it all.  I’ve been meaning to throw up a blog post on GUSSE (Global Urban Sustainability Solutions Exchange) for a few weeks now.  It’s one of the latest generation of repository-type sites that are employing tools and practices associated with social software to enhance the experience, promote engagement, and make it easier for contributors to participate.  So blogging and tagging are key to workflow and organization, and approaches such as Creative Commons licensing are integral to the content ownership model.  I like this formulation for soliciting content:

Participants are rewarded helping to refine and improve the tools that are essential to their professional success. GUSSE applies the network
effect, where millions of small, individual contributions of knowledge
assemble into a trustworthy authority.

It reminds me of a slogan my colleague Novak Rogic and I came up with this morning to describe our office’s disaggregated intranet (which draws on blogs, del.icio.us, wikis, Basecamp, Flickr, and a whole lotta RSS): “Act selfishly, enrich organizationally.”

This is short notice but tomorrow, Thursday October 26 at 10 AM,
David Vogt  and Lee Iverson (two of UBC’s most prominent thinkers and doers in this area) are presenting an overview on one underlying approach in a talk entitled GUSSE: Teaching and Learning with Social Bookmarking. 

Alas, I’m scheduled to deliver a workshop elsewhere on campus while this on.  Double drat.

Allow me to add my own shout-out for the eminent wikiologist Stewart Mader today, as it marks the publication of his book/wiki hybrid Using Wiki in Education, a welcome contribution to the canon.

What’s most notable about the book is its emphasis on actual uses of wikis in diverse educational settings, in the voices of the practitioners themselves — most of them new to me with the exception of the fabulous Cool Cat Teacher. Stewart was kind enough to offer me a sneak preview, and based on what I read there is much that is useful to those of us working to make open text editing work to support teaching and learning.

And I’ll be intrigued to see how the publishing model that Stewart has set up flies. It’s sort of a hybrid between traditional and open license approaches.