abject learning

I don’t have the jam to weblog the sessions I am attending, but luckily I’ve encountered Kenton Good’s weblog… which was new to me. I stumbled on his page via the wonders of reverse linking (once again demonstrating the power of constructive narcissism).

He’s doing a pretty good job so far, but when I introduced myself (I scanned the nametags of the laptop geeks sitting in the back… and yes I’m one of them), he confessed he’s running out of gas.

Anyhow, his page looks good, he’s got Time Fades Away, one of my favorite Neil Young albums on the turntable (it would have to be, I think it’s a vinyl-only release), and judging from his sidebar links he’s got his anti-war on as well. A happy accident all round… one more linkmonger added to my RSS-roll.

I recently linked to an inane set of criticisms on weblogging from the BBC. I like this piece from the Guardian better…

Long after the term “weblog” is forgotten, the impact of what the word means will live on.

Being able to publish words, pictures and – ultimately – multimedia to the web without specialised geek skills will remain a important advance, and have a broad impact on the nature of online media.

That’s a decent short summary of why these tools are of interest… I also concur with the implication that weblogs are themselves limited, and likely to be forerunners to a form that has yet to emerge.

More importantly, however, the cultural implications of information-sharing may not be a comfortable fit with the essential structure of most organizations….

While blogging’s earliest advocates operate on the “information wants to be free” principle, many businesses would shudder at the very thought.

“Information is power” is a more likely mantra in many organisations. Whenever you hear those three words, you’re hearing the signal of the kind of closed information culture where there’s also a heads-down, bunker mentality utterly unsuited to the openness required for a convincing weblog, be it an external PR effort, or knowledge-sharing internal one.

There are plenty of areas of business where people are judged on their knowledge, and the competitive edge – and thus the safety of everyone’s jobs – is the thickness of a single good idea. Share it all on a weblog, with competitors or (worse) an office rival? You must be kidding.

And, alas, changing that kind of culture is going to take far more than merely installing a smart piece of software on a server, and encouraging everyone to blog on.

It would be nice to think of educational institutions as rarifed sanctuaries fostering the free exchange of ideas… but ultimately they are organizations too, and certainly not exceptions to such survival-motivated tendencies.

:: Via Library Stuff

Well, as usual, Scott has beat me to the punch on a new resource. Normally, there’s no great shame in that, but in this case it’s a bit embarrassing.

First off, my colleague (OK, she’s my boss), UBC’s Director of the Office of Learning Technology Michelle Lamberson has been weblogging for a while now, and she’s really starting to kick some ass. (Unlike me, who’s now really starting to kiss some ass.) I set her up with Michelle’s Online Learning Freakout Party Zone via our Movable Type instance on the CAREO server… expecting she would get a little chuckle out of the name and quickly change it. I guess the handle has begun to grow on her…

It’s groovy to know that I have a boss who not only “gets” weblogs, but who has quickly become a nifty blogger herownself… her output humbles me. Our office is discussing various collaborative and integrated personal weblogs as a means to facilliate our communication, which obviously has me squirming with delighted anticipation. I hope we can make it work.

She links to a PDF (1.1 MB) preview of a book entitled Learning Objects: Contexts and Connections. It’s the culmination of a great working event, “Building and Assessing Shareable Content” held last winter by the OLN Institute at Ohio State. The paper Michelle and I wrote (truth in attribution, she is generous to give me equal billing… she did most of the heavy lifting) “Course Management Systems: Trapped Content Silos or Sharing Platforms?” (p.57), was a learning experience for me… It really brought home that, for better or worse, our existing educational technology communities have evolved in concert with the features and requirements of CMS’s, and it’s vital to keep that in mind when planning new projects. It was also gratifying to learn how the new generation of systems are far more supportive of sharable content strategies than I had previously understood.

Many thanks to Catie Gynn and everybody else at OSU for a tremendous event, and the dogged follow-through with the book. The published result looks excellent, and I’m honoured to have taken a modest part in its creation. The contents:

* “The Challenges of Collaborative Knowledge”, James A. Anderson

Apparently trying to channel some of that Howard Dean politico-blog mojo, now our Canadian Prime-Minister-in-Waiting (for about ten years now) has a blog, too.

PM-to-be Paul Martin offers befuddled newbies a definition of the blog:

No, it