I was turned on to this video via a Tweet from Alec Couros. It may or may not explain the rise of Twitter, but it certainly illustrates that if you bring it hard, the energy can become infectious, and just might create something beautiful…
I intend to bring it hard to TTIX.* Consider yourselves warned, people of Orem, Utah.
BTW, the song is by Santogold, “Unstoppable”… and it is.
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* – yes, I am Poobah-ing…
Just a quick note to say how honoured and excited I am to be the kick-off speaker for the Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange in Orem, Utah this week.
First off, it’s a pleasure to contribute to an open conference. Kudos to the organizers for pulling this off, having been immersed in my own bouts of conference logistics the past few months, I am all too cognizant of what an achievement it is to offer a full-scale event, for no charge, to all comers…
Having been invited by Jared Stein (Flexknowlogy is an essential read) when we finally met at last year’s OpenEd Conference, I was inclined to accept. The pot was sweetened, albeit with terrifyingly raised stakes, knowing that Scott Leslie and Chris Lott would be the other guest speakers. And there’s also Marion Jensen, Jon Mott (whose ‘loosely-coupled gradebook’ may prove to be a literal killer app – I leave it to you to decide what it might kill, and oh, do read Jon’s thoughts on Google Wave), and other friends I haven’t met yet.
Suspicions that this post is largely motivated by an unwholesome desire to claim the Grand Poohbah crown presently worn by Marc Hugentobler are not unfounded.
cc licensed flickr photo shared by vaXzine
I promised myself that when I broke this weeks-long absence from my blog it would be with a post that was neither a) about myself, nor b) about the Open Education Conference. So, I’m starting off with two strikes against me.
But today I had the pleasure of co-presenting an installment of EDUCAUSE Live! with Chris Lott entitled Where is the open education movement going? And with all that talk about sharing we did, it seems kind of weird not to pass this on…
When this opportunity came my way, it occurred to me that one of my biggest motivations for being involved with this conference was the chance to spend time talking with co-organizers like Chris, David Wiley and Scott Leslie (well, that and manufacturing the chance to meet Ken Freedman). So it seemed natural to structure the session as a series of fairly loose conversations about what motivates each of these passionate open educators to do what they are doing. I had a blast last week doing interviews with each of them, and the biggest challenge I ended up having was either containing or editing the discussions into pre-recorded segments of about ten minutes each. (Special thanks to the producers of EDUCAUSE Live! for being willing to adapt their structure for this experimental approach.)
The archive is here. I have to add, as the session progressed I was grateful to have pre-recorded most of my presentation, as the sheer density of the ongoing text-chat (transcript in a .doc file), some of it from my favorite bloggers, was almost dizzying. And special kudos are due to Chris Lott jumping in as live co-presenter on one hour’s notice and doing an excellent job.
I wasn’t sure how this would go, but this session has me feeling even more energized about the conference. Along those lines I should note that the call for proposals has just closed, and I am very confident we are going to put forward a smashing program with some amazing speakers. Registration is now open, and I would advise you not to wait too long to get in on it…
PS: Attribution of the image above made easy thanks to Alan Levine’s Flickr CC Attribution Helper Greasemonkey Script.
I’ve had a few people tell me that while they hope to attend the Open Education Conference (August 12-14 in the shockingly delightful city of Vancouver), they are not sure that their own work or interests qualify as sufficiently ‘open’ to submit a proposal themselves. I’ve been a little surprised to hear this, as I had not realized that the open education movement was perceived to be such an exclusive and rigidly guarded domain.
So if you are wondering if you have the right stuff to make a contribution to OpenEd 2009, but need some additional guidance, try asking yourself the following questions:
If you answered “uh, yeah” or even “working on it” to most of those questions, then you are at least as open as I am… And I hope that if you have ideas or work that might be of interest you will give some thought to submitting a proposal before May 1.
Disclaimer: I recognise that there are more zealous types out there who may think my acid test is too broadly defined. Speaking for myself (to the best of my knowledge the other conference co-organizers agree) I want this event to grow and to energize the open education movement in some way. And to do that we need new voices and new ideas. We might disagree on whether the non-commercial clause is a good thing or not, or we may exhibit varying degrees of purity in terms of open source software adoption. But diversity can be seen as a sign of strength, and I hope to see a lot of it at OpenEd 2009.
There’s been a fair bit of buzz on Twitter this week about The Coh, some about his ongoing “give me a new nestegg” tour (which I personally can’t afford to top up), some about the music…
The National Film Board has posted some classic Cohen recently, the magnificent Ladies and Gentlemen… Mr. Leonard Cohen. If you watch the opening five minutes, I suspect you will be held by his unbelievable charisma through the whole forty-five minute film:
He performs, he ponders, he parties… One thing I like about this film is that while I have always thought of Cohen as a figure who transcends nationalism, the way he interacts with 60’s Montreal makes it clear he is very much a Canadian artist.
It’s going to be one hot summer here in Vancouver, as I am thrilled to be one of the co-organizers of the 6th Annual Open Education Conference, hosted by UBC at its downtown Robson Square campus, August 12-14. OpenEd has been one of my absolute favorite events for a number of years, and I can’t wait to do it up west coast Canadian-style. The planning so far with my good friends David Wiley, Scott Leslie, and Chris Lott has been an absolute blast, and judging from how things are going I’m confident that the event will be dynamic and stimulating, yet friendly, fun and accessible.
More to come, much more… But in the meantime I draw your attention to our scheduled keynote speakers. Fred Mulder is the Rector of Open Universiteit Nederland and has been leading Holland’s National Initiative on Lifelong Learning since 2005. Catherine Ngugi is the Project Director for the truly inspiring OER Africa juggernaut. And finally, we have Ken Freedman, Station Manager and Program Director of the mighty WFMU, not to mention founder of the just-launched Free Music Archive. Long-time readers of this blog will understand what a big deal that last keynote is for me personally… and indeed I’ll need a few follow-up posts to express just how excited I am that I will finally be meeting one of my true heroes. (Not to mention writing more about the very impressive and hopefully game-changing FMA.)
For now there is plenty of hard work here on the ground to ensure that the OpenEd party reaches its full glorious manic potential. And there is at least one way you can help. The call for proposals has been posted with a May 1 deadline, and I fervently hope we will have some very tough decisions to make for the program. Obviously, a gathering is as only as strong as its participants. And speaking for myself, I’m hopeful this event will build on the identity of previous OpenEd conferences to push the notion of how we think about open education. I’m hoping to see a strong presence from the worlds of social media and the open web, not to mention the participation of community educators and activists. So please consider submitting a proposal (we tried to make that painless as possible), blogging or Tweeting it, and/or passing the call on to anyone you know who might be interested. And if you have questions about just how fabulous Vancouver is to visit in the summertime, or how to make the most of your trip, please consider me your host.
Let’s make it one for the ages people. I want that open education goodness to kick Van Rock City so hard that the 2010 Olympics will just seem like a hangover…
Photo by Julio Albarrán
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Yeah, I’m losing my edge.
I’m losing my edge.
The kids are coming up from behind.
It’s been more than a week since I came home from the Symposium on Expanded Education hosted by the ZEMOS98 collective in Seville, Spain. My failure to blog about it does not reflect anything so much as how overwhelming I found the experience. Simply put, it was one of the great weeks of my life. And nothing like any other event I’ve ever attended. Imagine a week-long festival of film, music, activism, and learning held in some of Seville’s most beautiful locations, including a home base with the Centro de Arte de Sevilla. Imagine all the activities open to the general public, most of them free of charge. And the focus of the event was as close to a pure expression of my professional passions as I could have imagined:
Even wilder, the event had a tremendous youthful vibe, largely because the average age of the ZEMOS98 collective seems to be around 25 years old. I knew this would be a different kind of event when I was picked up at the hotel my first day by a young woman on a skateboard. And though the feel of the week was very casual and informal, it was not an unconference… to the contrary it was incredibly well thought-out and meticulously planned, logistically flawless. Watching these gifted, passionate and relentlessly professional young folks do their thing, I couldn’t get that LCD Soundsystem song out of my head (which presumes I ever had edge, but let’s not think about that right now):
But I’m losing my edge
to better-looking people
with better ideas
and more talent.And they’re actually really, really nice.
After I finished my talk, I had a couple free days in Seville, and going into the event I intended to be a tourist at that point. But as it turned out, I found there was nothing I wanted more than to spend time with these remarkable people. I can’t thank everyone who was part of that feeling enough, they created a learning environment that was inspiring, stimulating, great fun, yet also oddly relaxing. I love this video (via Pedro Carrillo), as it captures the flow of a typical day of the festival as it felt to me:
I want to blog much more, if only to hold onto this feeling a little longer. I intend to interview Juan Freire and Rubén Díaz to capture and to better understand the thinking that went into the remarkable programming. I also want to follow up on a number of the projects I saw, for instance to talk more with Olivier Schulbaum about the inspired and inspiring Bank of Common Knowledge. I wrote in an earlier post about wanting to know more about Brazil’s fascinating relationship with free culture and copyright, so it was an incredible opportunity to speak with Ronaldo Lemos at length about his home country, about music (he’s a huge music geek) and I want to share some of that as well.
I also have a couple funny stories relating to my own talk, including my attempts to legally show a clip from a movie that is about the absurdity of copyright.
But this post is already too long. So in the meantime I refer you to Julio Albarrán’s wonderful photos, and Tiscar Lara’s phenomenal job of bilingual blogging. And of course the ZEMOS98 site itself is a trove of delights I have yet to fully unearth (more videos here)…
But I was there!
I have come to believe that your personal learning network (it probably doesn’t need the ‘learning’, it’s just your personal network) is increasingly the most valuable asset you will have. And that’s valuable as in ‘adds value to your life’, not economic value. It will help you with work, socialising, personal life, interests, hobbies, entertainment.
To deploy probably the most over-used analogy around, it’s like a garden – you’ve got to sow, tend and weed it to get value from it. But it’s more of a country garden, a bit organic and unplanned rather than the highly structured garden. It takes time and effort and you have to give something of yourself to it.
Think about how your PLN is constructed. It probably centres around twitter, a blog, your blog reader, delicious, Flickr, a few wikis, and maybe some other tools where you follow people (eg Slideshare). There will be different types of reciprocity in this, for example most of the people whose blogs I read also read mine. Similarly in twitter, I tend to follow people if they follow me. This is fairly standard reciprocity – do unto others as they do unto you.
But can we extend the notion of reciprocity? Continuing with the examples of blogs and twitter, I will give you my continued readership if you give me interesting and regular updates. We can then build on this notion of reciprocal, but not identical, activity for more subtle interactions, let’s call it shifted reciprocity. I can put out a lazyweb request on Twitter if I have either responded previously to such requests (standard reciprocity) OR I have given enough of myself to twitter, such that people feel well disposed towards me (shifted reciprocity)
My first day here in Seville for the ZEMOS98 Festival on the theme of Expanded Education was capped off by an unexpected treat, the chance to see one of my long-time heroes, the multimedia artist Vicki Bennett, AKA People Like Us.
In addition to the voluminous media on her site, I highly recommend you check out the archives of her show Do or DIY on WFMU. I’ve not only admired her work for ages, I’ve reused it for a lot of my own stuff… For instance, you can hear it in the background throughout my now-outdated online presentation WikiRadio.
So it was a treat to see what apparently will be the final performance of her present performance approach, mining the aesthetic you can see in her archived videos (ably blogged by Jim Groom). I worked up my nerve to say hello, and am pleased to report she was very cool, down-to-earth, and fun to talk with… I think the fact I was wearing my WFMU hoodie helped break the ice — pledging has its privileges.
Before moving on, this being a putatively education-oriented weblog, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out Vicki’s work with Ergo Phizmiz on the epic and extraordinarily rich podcast series Codpaste, which opens up the process and thinking that goes into this form of work. The site even includes a complementary .pdf teaching pack (30MB).
I’d been meaning to blog this excerpt from the Comedy episode of Codpaste for some time, in which Ergo and Vicki break down a sound clip from Spike Milligan’s Goon Show:
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As an aside, what is it about bizarre and brilliant use of soundscape for comic effect, and dudes named Spike?
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It’s exciting to see Jim Groom’s pioneering work integrating WordPress Multi-User with BuddyPress and bbPress not only being recognised, but being pushed forward in the higher ed community.
I highly recommend reading an overview written by Joss Winn at the Learning Lab at the University of Lincoln on their own efforts in this regard. As the a-listers like to say, read the whole thing, but here are a few teasers:
The final set up is really quite sweet. A member of the university goes to https://blogs.lincoln.ac.uk for the first time and logs in with their usual credentials. The first time they login, they are signed up. That’s it. No sign up page needed. It’s as if they were already a member of the social network, which, being members of the university, they are of course. From there, they see the BuddyPress home pages, can join groups, change their profiles and, when they’re ready, create or join a blog.
…I’ve finally finished setting it up for general use today. The few people that know about it and have already joined, instantly see the benefits of having the social networking layer on top of the blogs. I’m excited to see how this works out over time.
…The potential for supporting personalised and group online learning is now better than it’s ever been and the social networking element only helps bring peers together for collaboration and discussion.
Many thanks to Jim Groom and D’Arcy Norman who have been working on WordPressMU at their universities in ways which I hope we can emulate and contribute to here at the University of Lincoln.
It’s tantalizing to imagine maybe someday writing a blog post like this about our own experiences at UBC.
