abject learning

UBC eLearning Open House, Wednesday, March 1st

Posted on February 22, 2006 by Brian

I wanted throw a shout-out to the organizers of this year’s eLearning Open House, which is an informal gathering of the university’s wired educators that is being held for the third year.

If you want to get a sense of the innovation with learning technology that is happening all over campus, this is a great event to check out. No PowerPoint — just music, cheese and wine and lots of free-flowing demos and discussion. This year’s Open House is being held in the West Atrium of the Life Sciences Centre entering on Agronomy Road.

You can register here — some lucky attendee will walk out with a 60GB iPod.

I will be traveling to complete a scary mission, so I am doubly sorry I will not be able to attend this year. Previous years have been fun, and laden with suspense and intrigue. I am working on the Unit’s poster presentation, however, which is shaping up very well.

Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments

Edublogger Hootenanny – The Draggin Remix

Posted on February 21, 2006 by Brian

We recorded the Hootenanny at Moose Camp, and now Jason has mixed the thirty minutes down to a ten minute Moosecamp Mashup (4.2 MB).

Jason has done an excellent job of pulling out the points, cleaning up the noisy bits, and layering it all into a very fast and dense package. That’s Scott’s “El Guapo’s Revenge” in the background, which he was mixing live at the beginning of the session. My only regret is that more of the points made by attendees aren’t in the final mix — but that’s largely because the microphones were in the centre of the room with the facilitators, and therefore our source audio came out clearer. So most of the talking here is done by Scott, D’Arcy, Alan, and myself. There’s some great stuff toward the end by Mark Mayo from the Genome Sciences Centre, who have set up a very sophisticated weblog network to support research, with refined aggregation and redistribution (he cautions that this stuff is “fairly non-trivial”). If you were there and hear yourself in the track, feel free to identify yourself.

I am really pleased with Jason’s mix — but I was there, and have a high tolerance for sonic chaos. I’d be interested in knowing if others are able to follow this, and if they find it a worthwhile listen.

Lesson learned — I want to do more of this type of thing in the future, but I have great deal to learn about the art of recording a room full of people talking. One obvious thing to remember in the future is to account for projector noise — gotta keep it well away from the microphones.

On a related note be sure to check out Alan’s post on social software in action, tracking the spontaneous evolution of media capturing Nancy White’s NV presentation resulting in this multimedia mix on the archive.org server:

Doesn’t this set of unplanned, network-enabled collaborations add so much more valuable context to the experience? Let’s follow the geographic trail- starting from a session presented and recorded in Vancouver BC, audio loaded to a blog in Arizona, images uploaded from Seattle, a movie produced from Hong Kong, and a distilled session summary from Portugal!

None of this was done via any snazzy, über-cool-logo IPO seeking Web 2.0 software. It would not happen inside a singular, expensive, closed wall enterprise-ware application. None of it was designed, planned, or directed. It just happened, almost in its own?, as do many meaningful social interactions. ‘Social Software’ has less to do with software than the internet protocols that allow it, and everything to do with the “social” end of it.

Posted in Workshop | 7 Comments

Every day is Christmas, every night is New Year’s Eve

Posted on February 20, 2006 by Brian

Looking ahead to a week jam-packed with performance and peril, and the technology is not cooperating.

On the home front, the aging plumbing in our bathroom seized up last week, rendering our tub/shower non-functional. Not easy to find a plumber in Vancouver these days — we eventually found a “fun” plumber, who is doing what he can to fit us into his schedule. Since we have to rip the walls apart to even minimally fix things, we’ve decided to move ahead and replace the whole tub and tiling setup. Not that it fits anywhere near our present financial reality, but “financial reality” and “home debtorship in Vancouver” are mutually exclusive terms anyway. Our fun plumber expects me to the prep work and line up the replacement units (which had me scoping out slightly damaged tubs at 7:30 this morning looking for a deal), and then do the work with him in stages in the evenings.

On the work front, my decidedly non-aging laptop has also seized up, rendering it non-functional. I am at an utter loss on the cause — there had been no danger signs, and I have treated this machine with reverence and more than due care.

My wrists are already aching from the lousy ergonomics of my temporary work setup. So a trip the physiotherapist is likely in my future as well.

Nothing to do but play droning dissonant music on the headphones, flail away at my laughably long list of to-do items, and try to ride this sucker out.

Posted in Abject Learning | 5 Comments

It ain’t nepotism if it’s awesome

Posted on February 18, 2006 by Brian

Not an ed tech story, but I wanted to throw a shout-out to a story by my brother-in-law Kennedy Jawoko in the Toronto Star: Haunting images typecast Africa:

Last summer at the height of the “Make Poverty History” campaign, British television station Channel 4 broadcast a documentary titled The Empire Pays Back, in which it estimated Britain’s debt to Africans, both on the continent and in the diaspora, to be in the trillions of pounds sterling.

But it is not only the United Kingdom that owes a debt to Africa and Africans.

Almost every Western European nation and the United States, which participated in and benefited from slavery and the 19th-century scramble for African territories and its wealth, owe the continent something.

Canada, a former settler colony, is guilty by association with Britain because of the trickle-down effects. But these facts are not mentioned in the anti-poverty and development debates that rage on in five-star hotels in western cities. Instead, the haunting images, shown on prime time, of starvation, conflicts, fly-filled faces of children and AIDS, help to maintain a sense of hopelessness and dependence, which serve the purpose of wealthy states.

…. Nowadays, Africans, like their counterparts in other parts of the Global South, continue to contribute to developed countries’ economies by exporting raw materials and providing cheap labour. In turn, the West lowers interest rates and inflates the value of its currencies, enabling consumers to pay peanuts for goods imported from the South.

The fact that Africans helplessly look on while Africa continues to grease the wheels of Western economies says a lot about the current generation of Africans.

I’ve watched Ken make the adjustment from Uganda to Toronto with aplomb, and have benefited a great deal from his critical perspectives on issues abroad and at home. As this article demonstrates, he’s well on his way to building a nifty career for himself. I can’t say how impressed I am that he’s gotten such a strongly-worded piece published in a mainstream paper.

Posted in Abject Learning | 6 Comments

Multi-Touch Interaction Research

Posted on February 17, 2006 by Brian

Via YouTube

(Thanks Bruce.)

Posted in Emergence | 4 Comments

Alternate Reality Game Antecedents via Infocult

Posted on February 17, 2006 by Brian

I’ve made some inept attempts to relate some of what Bryan Alexander opened up in my skull during his ELI presentation on alternate reality games. For the benefit of the poor souls who’ve been on the receiving end of my incoherent harangues, I follow up with a pointer to Bryan’s post on ARG antecedents (just updated) — a short collection of literary works, participatory games and hoaxes that give a sense of the cultural flavour for this emerging genre.

I am haunted by an uncanny sense there needs to be some Poe added, but can’t think of the appropriate tale, some kind of brainlock…

Posted in Textuality | 4 Comments

Submitted for your consideration – two new weblogs

Posted on February 16, 2006 by Brian

For two years, back in the old TechBC days, I worked next to Dan McGuire with only a thin cubicle membrane between us. It was my job to find learning objects (as long as I ignored the accepted definition of LOs, I did OK), it was his job to get copyright clearance so we could use them. The first thing I noticed about Dan was his silly sense of humour. The second thing I learned was that he was an omnivorous consumer of news and developments regarding IP and elearning. Perhaps my dominant recollection from that period is him leaning over top the cube divider and telling me about the latest copyright oddity, obscenity or paradox that had caught his fancy.

Well, by the miracle of online self-publishing, you too can be on the receiving end of Dan’s peculiar yet absolutely necessary mania by reading Rights, Fights and other online occurences (note to Dan — you might want to spellcheck that title, and make the caps consistent). This blog will be a useful resource for anyone concerned with IP in education (which should be all of us), and is a rare source of Canadian perspective on the subject. Written in Dan’s unmistakable voice, it is accessible and irreverent.

When I first started getting interested in promoting social software at UBC, Jim Sibley was an early collaborator. He installed my first wiki sandbox (even before D’Arcy did), and co-delivered our first adaptation of Alan’s Blogshop. Jim is relentless, talented, without pretence and a damn fine fellow. Recently, he has focused his considerable energy towards the application of team-based learning. Be sure to check out the open-source iPeer, which supports instructor workflow when using peer evaluations — it may indeed be “the greatest software ever built.”

Thinking of my weblog reading list as a distributed network of experts who each possess special expertise in a relevant domain, Dan and Jim are exactly the kinds of people I want to be blogging. I’m subscribed, reading and clicking.

Posted in Webloggia | 2 Comments

One more valuable thing about Northern Voice

Posted on February 14, 2006 by Brian

To get a sense of how getting people together to share ideas and have fun (I have those priorities listed in the wrong order, but I’m in the office right now) can pay off with ~~enhanced~~ augmented capacity, check out D’Arcy’s latest post on the as-yet nonexistent EduGlu aggregator.

I’ve been thinking about this stuff for some time, but the conference allowed me the opportunity to get a sense of how some of my most respected peers were thinking through the issue, and as D’Arcy’s post suggests this theme came up repeatedly.

Not only does D’Arcy make some worthy points, they get followed up by Gardner, Boris (who’s in Europe somewhere right now, talk about being a conscientious commenter!), Bill Kempthorne and Scott — all of whom were very much part of the NV scene last week (Gardner via Skype). I managed to get Jon (a UBC professor who has pushed this concept forward) out to NV and he described what he wanted to D’Arcy and Alan directly over an open-source beer. The conference about blogs sparks a discussion theme, and the blogs provide a medium for pushing the discussion forward so it doesn’t die when the conference ends. (And I see via D’Arcy’s comments that Jon’s remarks at the NV Education Panel will be shared during Bill’s presentation at UVic this week — who knows where it will go from there…)

Increasingly common occurences like this make me increasingly impatient with people who are (still) dismissing this stuff as trivial or tangential, or even sinister. And yes, it still happens. All the time.

FYI, the students D’Arcy refers to are Enej and Tyler (thanks kk+) — and they indeed are tantalizing me with hints of something fun to come along these lines. (They love toying with me like this. Almost as much as I love it.)

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Don’t call it a Northern Voice wrap-up. Part one – what worked

Posted on February 13, 2006 by Brian

Three days last week that were definitely of the drinking water (or beer) from the firehose variety. So insight does not run deep. Rather than attempt a comprehensive overview, I’ll jot down some of the things that in my view made Northern Voice a worthwhile experience.

* Having the chance to share social time with D’Arcy, Alan, Scott, Jason, Jon, Wendy, and a few others. Getting to mix professional and personal spheres with admired peers over good food and drink reinforces my will to live, so I’m grateful a little of this was possible in the general hubbub.

* The opportunity to engage in fairly extensive discussions on the practice of social software in education, over a series of days, with the people named above and many others. Between the Salon, the Hootenanny, and the Blogging in Education panel, I estimate we generated about six hours of fairly high-level discourse, with some very provocative moments, most of it captured on digital audio. Over the coming weeks one of my big tasks will be break these elements down, and release them in small, indexed, and hopefully contextualised chunks.

* I can’t express how much I enjoy planning this event with the other organizers. They are so talented, so energetic, and so fun. I’ve learned a lot from them over the past two years, and had a lot of laughs in the process. I enjoyed moderating the They’re threatening to sue panel simply because I got to hear more of the relaxed, informed banter that I’ve grown addicted to. I don’t know if we will do this event in this configuration next year, but if we don’t I’ll be agitating for some other excuse to see these people once a month.

* The logistics of the event were pretty much flawless, if I may say so. Things ran on time, lineup wait times were minimal, the wireless network held up well (the embarrassing network banning of Drupal.org excepted), the UBC Robson Square staff were awesome.

* I think the payoff for UBC was substantial. Many attendees from the University, good PR (had many people thank me for UBC’s support), lots of reusable media, and I met a few talented people who’ve said they will do workshops out on campus in the coming months to share their expertise.

* We delivered two days of solid conference programming, on diverse topics, in a nice setting for fifty bucks. This low price has been a source of some criticism (as it means we do minimal catering, to name one limitation). But I had a number of people thank me personally for making the event accessible to non-professionals (one reason we held part of the event on Saturday). We could have done much more than simply set aside a room for child care, but even our minimal efforts were rewarded by the presence of more than a dozen kids.

* Among the things people got for their nominal fee was a free meal. The Friday night BBQ was a high-risk affair, but I think Boris (et al) pulled it off very well. I was only able to make the briefest of appearances, but saw a lot of smiles, the food was plentiful and served efficiently, and we were on the beach when the sun went down.

* I didn’t see as many sessions as I would have liked, but overall I thought the calibre was pretty strong. I especially enjoyed Philip Jeffrey on tagging (which generated some very strong and informed discussion); Bruce Sharpe’s pragmatic and useful riff on doing better podcasts cheaply, and Nancy White’s talk concerning online competencies (very applicable to education). I wish I could have seen more than ten minutes of Kris Krug’s photocamp — his energy was tremendous, and he’s a gifted facilitator.

* One thing about doing an event like this – the amount of media generated is simply astonishing. Heaps of useful blog posts, great photos, and audio recordings. I had a moment of panic during the Bray/Sifry dialogue, wondering if anybody was recording it. I ran into the theatre control room to discover the aforementioned Mr. Sharpe already there, plugged into the soundboard. I can’t express how relieved I was. He was there all day, and has told me he will give the files the same treatment he does to his work with IT Conversations.

Another unique characteristic of these events is the amount of detailed feedback we as organizers receive via the hundreds (thousands?) of blog posts that get generated. I’m still processing those. Some of these posts conveyed some really useful constructive criticism that point to ways this conference could have been better. I’ll be following up with my own take on how we could have improved the event in a future post.

But before I sign off — huge thanks to everyone who made this such a stimulating and enjoyable few days.

Posted in Webloggia | 10 Comments

Edublogger pre-conference session wrap-up…

Posted on February 11, 2006 by Brian

… more than ably done by D’Arcy. I’m manic and exhausted, so I’m grateful he did this. When I go back and try to make sense of this all, I will be consulting D’Arcy’s post.

And an overview of the Salon from Alan.

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