abject learning

I just completed my day-long workshop Learning objects, wikis, and other curious things at Maricopa College in Arizona, which some of you will recognise as the home territory of Alan Levine.

Coming to Mr. Levine’s turf to hold forth on reusable learning resources and emergent technologies felt like heading down to the Grand Ole Opry to lecture the locals on the finer points of country music. It was additionally weird because most of the work I’m proudest of has been developed in collaboration with Alan, while for this event he had made it clear that this was my show, not another Three Amigos Production (he had plenty to do coordinating logistics on the ground). (I should state that while this gig might reek to some of cronyism, in fact the invitation was engineered by someone who had never met me before.)

I won’t go into too much detail about the the shindig itself, other than to note that once again I was fortunate to work with a stellar group of participants. When you are in a room with thirty talented, smart, eager and fun people, facilitating is a delight, and often quite easy.

Now that the so-called work is done, I’m looking forward to taking advantage of this beautiful region for some time with the family. We’re presently being entertained in high style by Alan and his wonderful companions (human and canine), including a trip yesterday on the Verde Canyon Railroad and an excursion to the revived ghost mining town of Jerome, both of which were an absolute blast, and especially perfect for those traveling with a toddler boy besotted by trains, horse-rides and such.

The next week will hopefully consist of more time here in the crisp, cool, sunny perfection of the Arizona mountains, a quick run over the Mexican border for a dose of family-friendly chaos, finishing up with a stop at one of my all-time favorite haunts, the Hotel Congress in Tucson.

I won’t have email access until April 10th or so. That’s correct, more than a week completely unplugged — five years ago that would have been no big deal at all, now it seems almost unthinkable. Hopefully my professional presence is not so indispensable as I sometimes like to think.

See you on the other side.

Oh my, it’s been a while since I blogged, hasn’t it? There’s a substantial backlog of post-worthy items that have accumulated over the past week or so… but that is not why I’m finally hauling off on the keyboard right now.

No, what’s foremost in my so-called mind is a full-day workshop on “learning objects” I will be delivering in Arizona at the end of this week (and repeating here in Vancouver immediately upon my return, with a couple more gigs shortly thereafter). I’ve given dozens of these talks over the past few years, and it wouldn’t be hard for me to yet again rehash my current routine of song, dance, card-tricks and copious linkage. But even if much of the material is new to the participants, it feels a bit stale to me, and I have learned from experience that I need to be excited about my content to deliver it effectively.

I am also haunted by the sense that yet again the ground is shifting with digital media and learning. I haven’t come across any one development that makes it all cohere, just a series of newsbytes and blog postings that I feel I need to account for… a sampling:

* Robin Good links the emergence of the improved Google News Search, the Creative Commons search (now enhanced by a partnership with Yahoo), and the buggy-yet-damn-exciting Ourmedia project. One might add A9’s Open Search into the mix, which Stephen describes as “deliciously open – and exceptionally useful.” When you see how services like these are allowing users to store and share media, and define and redeploy searches and news services… well, I’m not exactly sure what the end result is. But whatever is happening, the common notion of the “(first generation) learning object repository” seems to be left in the dust.

* Then there’s that whole folksonomy thing… which I’ve raved about before… I’ve been so bogged down in administrivia the past month or so that I have done a poor job of tracking developments in this space. But even if it’s largely old news, Flickr still strikes me as the best-designed content storage and sharing application that I’ve seen.

* Lots of stuff about the emergence of podcasting (which makes production of sound files accessible to the individual user)… but I’ve also been running across notions of RSS enclosures to support the distribution of other digital media types (perhaps in conjunction with all those portal sites that sit tragically under-exploited at most universities).

* Like Gardner, I’m damn impressed with the simple elegance and expository power of Jon Udell’s documentary screencasts, and suspect they may provide a very flexible model for future learning resources. I think what I like about these screencasts is how they tap into the natural dynamism of Web interaction. But my initial investigations suggest the tools are still a bit too expensive, and the process too complex for common adoption.

* Then there’s that wonderful bit of Downsia: “The greatest non-technical issue is the mindset. We have to view information as a flow rather than as a thing. Online learning is a flow. It’s like electricity or water. It’s there, it’s available and it flows. It’s not stuff you collect. I don’t see myself sitting in my home collecting jars of water. I use the water as it comes. If you think the internet as an environment that is moving and shaping all around you, then you will have a better attitude to be able to handle the flood of information that is coming at you” — This is in one sense a more poetic articulation of Rip-Mix-Feed, but in my reading it goes deeper — challenging the whole static-resource fallacy that is embedded in the common-sense learning object vision. As David Wiley, another LO pioneer, recently ranted: “Why would we turn the greatest enabler of social interaction into a simple data download service?”

These are just a few of the issues that I feel I need to account for. I suppose I could just take a portion of the day and lecture on these trends — my complete lack of real knowledge on the subjects has never stopped me before — but to the participants these developments may well seem completely irrelevant. I need to figure out a way to raise these issues within a framework of their own concerns.

I also need to recognise that the culture of reuse in education is hardly something that can be taken for granted. Right now I am working in an advisory capacity with a project that is developing a series of “reusable learning objects” on some themes that could be adopted very widely across multiple disciplines. When we were writing the funding application for this project, I contributed some background text which promised we would “maximize reusability” and edit-ability (sorry for that homely term), making materials available in CSS-structured HTML with a dead-easy roadmap that would allow future users to easily rework the resources for their own purposes. At that stage of the project, all parties agreed that this was A Good Thing. Now that content development is underway, a new hesitancy about allowing others to change the hard-earned text has emerged, and at the last meeting it seemed as if the new working plan was to lock all content into secured PDFs, and to deliver them via a series of links within a CMS. It’s about as non-reusable (not to mention non-usable) a framework as can be imagined.

I don’t relate this story to bash anyone — I can understand the concerns, even if I disagree with them. If a poll were taken of academics on this scenario I don’t doubt that the lock-down model would win hands-down. But I think this episode demonstrates how far educational culture is away from developments on the wider web. I’m trying very hard to think of ways I can engage a conversation on this subject.

So far, all I’ve been able to come up with are a series of questions I might pose to various groups of participants, and then using their responses as a jump-off point for discussion. Some possible questions:

* As a teacher, have you reused (or would you reuse) digital media in your instruction? Why and/or why not?
* As a content creator, have you made (or would you make) your work available for reuse by others? Are there conditions you might require for reuse?
* How much of the material you use in your practice is explicitly produced as “educational content”, and how much from other sources (give examples)?
* In your experience, how gracefully do digital learning materials age? Do you still use materials that were created years ago?
* Has digital media changed the way you create or distribute your own personal artifacts (photos, writing, music)? How?
* Have you developed strategies to deal with information overload?
* Have your students changed the way you approach online media?
* Is there a digital learning resource you wish existed but doesn’t? Is there a way you wish the resources you have seen could change?

Those questions are inelegantly phrased — in part because I am literally feverish as I type them — and I worry they may be loaded to suggest a “right answer”.

If anyone reading this has a) suggestions for developments in media and learning I should be looking at or b) ideas how I might get a meaningful conversation going on these topics I’d love to hear them. I do have some history of begging for help on developing a learning objects event that does not suck, and it worked out great back then. Believe me, any feedback would be appreciated.

I’ve been too quiet about the many hot-shot 18 wheeler WikiRigs I’ve been seeing on the highway. I’m not talking horsepower, though Jotspot and Wikka (or is that Wakka) look like hard driving diesel engines that can turn on a dime. Nah, what I’m jabbering on about are slick operators tricking out their machines and handling them with style. There’s some serious gear-jamming going on out there.

My good buddy D’Arcy Norman has been burning up with white line WikiFever while bird-dogging social software at the University of Calgary. When he heads out on the highway to spread the word, he does it from behind the wheel of his trusty WikiRig — with a heavy load of useful links for educators in tow.

Speaking of WikiRigs for presentations, have you seen the snazzy custom pipes and paint that Alan Levine (who goes by the handle of CogDogBlog on the CB) has put on his machine? He was delivering a load of Ocotillo-style goodness to the smart folk at MIT, and used it to show off his flashy new presentation wiki site. Check out that slick little menu he inserted for navigation between pages — that boy knows what he’s doing under the hood.

Bryan Alexander first hit the road with a weblog posting on polar music, which led to the PolarMusic wiki, which asks: “is there a genre or movement of music by people living around the North Pole, and about that environment? Is there a polar sensibility?” The collection of links is growing fast, and Big Daddy Seb has even set up a Webjay collection. Mercy sakes alive, that’s some good listening when you’re six days on the road and a thousand miles from nowhere!

A little closer to home is the Ancient Spaces project, which was developed by the Faculty of Arts at UBC and is getting some worthy shout-outs in truckstops and garages across this land. Most people get worked up by the high-powered gaming engine that pushes the graphical interface, but this old text-jammer can’t help but eye that wiki space that the students use to post and comment on their work.

More later. In the meantime, and in between time, keep your eyes on the screen, your hands on the keyboard, and the smokies off your tail.

Spin your minimalist grooves via this intuitive, feline-based interface.

Via WFMU’s Beware of the Blog, which recently pointed me to this amazing site that links bands to each other by common members. Ever wondered how many degrees of separation between Blondie and Black Sabbath? The answer is right here!

I don’t link to Gardner Campbell nearly often enough. What usually happens is that he raises issues in his posts (or over a number of posts) that demand more engagement than my usual glib pose allows. I risk revealing my ignorance in all its shallow glory. Witness his most recent post, which juxtaposes a NY Times piece entitled “Is a Cinema Studies Degree the New M.B.A.?” with a podcast by Jon Udell on podcasting, blogging and rich media on the web.

The NYT piece says nothing about blogging, podcasts, RSS, or even the Internet per se. Instead, it’s about a deeper kind of media literacy, one that not only trains students to sit back and dissects the rhetoric of, say, television commercials, but provides the deeper training in expressiveness within these media that we in the academy have long taken for granted in the realm of English composition. Dating back to the humanist revolution in education that occurred in the European Renaissance, the idea here is that merely reading isn’t enough. Deep skill in reading cannot be attained without deep skill in writing. Thus we teach not only attention to others’ words, but adaptive skills and strategies in creating those words ourselves. Now, students are going to film school not simply to land a job in the film industry, but to master the skills and strategies of sophisticated visual and aural communications. Moviemaking 101 sits right alongside English Comp.

What strikes me this morning is how closely Udell and the NYT piece agree on the fundamental importance of acquiring these skills and strategies for the new era of rich media on the World Wide Web. Udell points out that we no longer have people type for us. Instead, the word processor means that we all have to learn typing. The gain is that we are more productive. Similar new skills and new literacies — in modes of multimedia writing, not simply in reading — will be essential to success in this century.

Shades of a line by Jill Walker that I apparently never tire of quoting: “What’s more important to teach our students is network literacy: writing in a distributed, collaborative environment.” As Gardner’s post makes clear, our conception of literacy is likely to grow not only off of the static page, but beyond the domain of text as well.

I’d say more — I’m certainly thinking more — but that wall of ignorance contains my shallow pool of insight, at least for now. Oh well, nothing much at stake here, really, except the future of communication and cognition.

Roland makes a similar point to one that was made by Suzanna — that the Northern Voice weblog conference would have benefited from a more diverse roster of presenters and panelists.

I can say that this concern was discussed by organizers when we planned the event, and that the final program reflected the submissions that we received. The limitations of a relatively small one day event also come into play. The lesson learned is that simply avoiding overt discrimination is not enough to ensure diversity, it’s something that requires work, and needs to be a priority from the outset of planning. As Roland notes we’d be grateful for suggestions on how to do better.

I get it from an extremely reliable source that the technical infrastructure beneath the fair dominion of CogDogBloggia has suffered a serious blow. It may be 24 hours or more until we are able to read Alan’s wit and wisdom again. But fear not, all evidence indicates that no content has been damaged. The Dog will howl.

Until then, we’re just going to have to get on with our lives without him. Buck up. I think it falls on each of us to blog just a little bit better than normal until Alan’s back.

Those of us who have been leeching off of Alan’s heroic Feed2JS Service (ahem) won’t be sucking ad-free bandwidth off his server either, at least until things are back to normal.

Update: Looks like things are back to normal. Go Dog, Go!