David Vogt
Responding to a few offline questions I’ve received about our upcoming A3 assignment I offer the following few focusing tips: – remember that the topic of A3 should be an ‘original’ venture, either an entirely new venture or an entirely new direction for an existing venture; – your role is to act as the visionary […]
Continue reading A Few A3 Tips Posted in: Announcements Most of my recent innovation work has been in the area of mobile cultural media and professional networking, so I’ve had my head in the clouds for a while. I’m particularly enthusiastic about cloud learning, not so much for many of the reasons already put forward, but mostly for the inevitably changed and enhanced relationship […]
Continue reading Children of the Cloud Posted in: Week 08: Files in the Cloud With poetic timing, I was reminded today of one of the reasons we are learning in a blog. One of our great support staff noticed on Google analytics that ZDNet has become a top referring site to our ETEC 522 blog. The reason is that Allie’s analysis of ZDNet’s predictions caught the original author’s attention […]
Continue reading Reverberations in the Blogosphere Posted in: Week 07: Blogs
Hooray Allie!! This is exciting to have our discussions bounced across the cyberworld! As for the risks – I believe that this is part of the hesitation that many educators and school systems have when it comes to opening up blogs to the wider audience. In our board, we have a closed system for blogging to prevent access from outside and in some ways I think that really restricts the benefits of true blogging. Our job is to teach students how to post and respond appropriately and safely.
Way to go Allie!
That really is an acknowledgment and kudos; it really was a well written piece on both their parts. It appears that this site is educating more than just the students at UBC. I applaud anything that makes us stand up and take a second look….however, it is also a reminder that professionalism and decorum are necessary here.
Good timing David,
Allie really did a good piece there and of course the fall outs of public blogging, in this instance, to me it will mean an immersion in real life understanding of the pros and cons of topic at hand. It should all make for good learning.
Ifeoma
Good work Allie! It is a great post. It is great to know that blogging can be such a great advertising feature- when done well.
It also a great reminder that this blog is a very public forum…:)
Verena:)
Excellent work Allie! It looks like you have a good discussion going on your post!
I think this can be some of the benefits of blogging. You can draw other people into the conversation. Of course when you are dealing with students, this can also raise some security issues. This issue has already been touched on by many people in this week’s discussion and may need to be a consideration with blogging platforms of the future.
Juliana.
Thanks all, and sorry for my really belated response – I had a really hectic week! It was really exciting to find that my post piqued the interest of the ZDnet blogger I had critiqued, and I was really grateful for his response and subsequent post. The experience certainly gave me confidence that even though I am very new to this field (this is my 2nd MET course), I nevertheless have genuinely good contributions to make. It has also led me to reconsider whether I should be more forthcoming with my online identity.
I’m taking a break from marking A1 (it’s going well; should be done by the weekend) to blog about blogging. I’ve tried traditional blogging in some serious way at least a half-dozen times, with it never sticking for more than a year. The activity always seemed far too time-consuming and undirected. I also always […]
Continue reading A Humble Metablog Posted in: Week 07: Blogs
this is amazing work David! Thank you for directing us to Gleanr – I too do my blogging just for me, for my internet presence – not sure if anyone reads my stuff, and I’m not sure I care…but my posts are helping me consolidate my learning at the time, and my musings for future reference..but for myself.
I am also going to spend quite a bit of time reading and rereading the Future of Learning in Canada – this is going to help us with our visioning exercises at my office!
Great personal assistant! Great innovation! Thanks for sharing. I spend a lot of time updating social networking sites so I will definately be exploring Gleanr.
Keisha
Thank for introducing us to Gleanr. I plan to explore it and its effectiveness in the classroom.
Just a general note (as a couple of you have asked): please submit your A1 assignment directly to me via email, whether it is in the form of a link, a file, or whatever other. I’m looking forward to reviewing them! David
Continue reading A1 Submission Posted in: Announcements
David,
I have been looking for a link to submit my assignment but not able to do so. Could you please provide me with an email address or any other way to submit.
Everton
david dot vogt at ubc dot ca
Thank you.
Everton
Hi everyone – I wanted to thank our intrepid Learning Games team for starting us off in such a fine manner; setting the bar suitably high. It’s always tough to go first, especially with our schedule, so bravo! The only general comment I would make for succeeding groups is to remember that this assignment […]
Continue reading And the games continue… Posted in: Announcements
Hi David,
I have a few questions regarding my second assignment as well as our group assignment.
For the second assignment, where are we supposed to turn it in? Should we email you or post the assignment here? If we need to post it here, could you make a category where we can submit our assignments?
For our group assignment (I’m in the Week 7 group), would you like use to direct the discussion to the course blog or can we keep it within ours?
Deb
Happy Monday, everyone – Your insights and interactions regarding the various pitches last week were on target. Thanks. I trust the exercise was useful in getting you to assume the mindset of an analyst and investor. Being an “angel” investor myself, I can affirm that the activity becomes much more focused when it is your […]
Continue reading Welcome to W4: a Bootcamp for Entrepreneurs Posted in: Announcements, Week 04: Entrepreneur Bootcamp A couple of comments before we leap forward. Last Week: First, I enjoyed everyone’s comments and discussion last week on the various future-surveying reports and sources that are available. I hope it demonstrated both the value and limitations of these materials. Week Change-Overs: As eager as we all are to move forward, please don’t post […]
Continue reading Welcome to W3: Analyst’s Bootcamp Posted in: Week 03: Analyst Bootcamp
Well said!
Everton
Some tips about tagging, categories, experimentation, and our A1/A3 assignments.
Continue reading A few coaching comments Posted in: Blog Café
Hi David,
I don’t see the PulsePress feature when I’m reading posts. I saw it for the poll, but not for our comments. Am I missing something?
Emily
PulsePress hasn’t been applied uniformly across all posts (yet).
I was concerned that we didn’t necessarily want a situation where students are rating each others’ posts, both positively and negatively. The “like” feature in many blogs works well, but I’m not sure we also want the “dislike”. What do you think?
I know what you mean… it doesn’t really seem productive to have a dislike feature. Even a ‘like’ might start to give someone a complex, if their posts are not liked very often.
Emily
Hi everyone – By now you should have received an email from me to your external email address that tells you which Emerging Market Team you have been assigned to, along with the week your team has been given to present your Assignment #2 work. Please let me know immediately if you haven’t received this […]
Continue reading Emerging Market Teams – Assignment #2 Posted in: Announcements
Yes, I have received your mail and meeting with W9 group shortly.
Before you publish your posting, please make sure that you select a category (eg. Introductions) as well as assign some meaningful tags (keywords).
David William Price 2:21 pm on October 27, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Hi David
Thanks for posting this. I’m thinking there is way too much IT focus in the cloud discussions thus far. I’d have to take issue with the concept that our brains have been self-contained thus far. Have you had the chance to read Don Normans, “The Design of Everyday Things”? It addresses the concept of memory that is internal and external, with external memory incorporating not only memos and job aids but even good design — a well-designed thing incorporates enough knowledge to allow you to operate it automatically to accomplish a task. I think this is further developed in literature about cognitive tools which include things as simple as spreadsheets and concept-mapping.
I think I’ve mentioned before my concern with hyper-personalization – that we get trapped in our niches and stop stumbling into different points of view that challenge our existing paradigms. I would be very interested in a cloud paradigm that integrates a heuristic for enhancing my critical thinking rather than something that cocoons me and my limited experience set.
But maybe I completely misunderstood your point?
David Vogt 2:43 pm on October 27, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
And thanks for these thoughts. Yes, Norman’s sense of design is deeply resonant with self-referential nature of the brain. What I mean by ‘contained’ is that the dynamic tools of identity re-generation are entirely local rather than distributed. And so much of who we are was already ‘hyper-personalized’ before anything digital came along; the whole point of self-reference is to simultaneously challenge and reinforce, based on new information, different aspects of the models we build about ourselves. Enhancing your critical thinking – I bet you could build an app for that!
David William Price 3:05 pm on October 27, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Sounds interesting if I could grasp it better. I like the concept of the challenging but I guess I need more hand holding to understand how this works.
At an Australian university teaching nurses, they built a web-based app that pushed nurses through a critical-thinking algorithm as they were writing literature reviews (it’s called WRAP). Basically a series of prompts to push students through a model of thinking. They want to abstract this into a heuristic. Sounds very cool.
Jim 7:15 pm on October 27, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I agree that as people become more and more digitally mobile, cloud computing will become the primary method for accomplishing tasks. The new mobile culture and explosion of devices reminds me a little of the thin client idea… Most of the data storage and computing horsepower is going to reside server side… but the devices we slip into our pockets or bags are far more powerful than those thin clients ever were. I have also thought that the agent or genie or PDA idea would have been here by now. I remember reading about personal digital agents over ten years ago and then, there was nothing… Siri is rather like that but ‘she’ doesn’t act independently, anticipating your wants or needs based on past interactions (does it? I haven’t used it, only seen it in use).
jarvise 7:09 am on October 28, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Your thoughts on the changed relationships between people with themselves and with the web make sense in terms of distributed cognition. I read an article a few years back about brain plasticity and spacial sense and reasoning. Basically, the argument being made was that increased reliance on GPS navigation units actually changed our brains at a structural level (hippocampus, maybe?). Because we don’t need to know how to get somewhere, it becomes a waste of space. If we are rewiring in response to technology, then anywhere/anytime access becomes imperative. Cloud-based delivery of services becomes essential. Its interesting to think of the environment as extending into the digital realm. The ideas that purport to reveal and clarify our thinking (and even enhance collaboration) such as mind mapping don’t seem to be growing in any big collaborative way. The places seeing enhanced collaboration of minds right now (from what I can see) are places like blogs, youtube, and consumer comments on products. Its hard to envision where we will be in a couple of years.
Emily
kstooshnov 1:54 pm on October 28, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Hi Emily,
I agree with your point about the rewiring of the human brain but wonder about the “wasted space,” do you mean such mental functions as locating places, remembering phone numbers or sustaining our attention span (to sit through a Wagnerian opera, for instance) are being lost, or just relegated to the figurative “back of our mind,” the 90% of the brain we supposedly don’t use? When gathering information for the eBook EMA, I heard a lecture on how reading has changed with the latest technology, similar to how Gutenberg’s press changed reading several centuries ago. Since then, reading and writing have taken on new shape, and it seems more important for students to learn how to navigate through a webpage and post comments than it does for how to use the Dewey-decimal system or cursive handwriting.
While it seems spooky to suggest that we should allow parts of our brain and their related skills to waste away, technology such as cloud computing, or even the PDA-in-place-of-memory, may be part of the human species’ evolution – we are the ones designing this stuff after all. One only hopes that we learned enough lessons from the 20th century, such as the damages to the planet from our dependency on oil, or to our bodies from microwave ovens and processed foods, that we don’t mess things up with our minds too much. But even if we do, someone will probably create some psychoanalyst app to fix it :-l
Kyle
khenry 7:10 am on October 29, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Hi David,
As a follow up to my comments to Doug and in response to your post, I believe that technology itself is evolving to what is a more ‘natural response’. Students and processes are driving the media used/media design in education, the needs of society are also driving the media in order to get out their message hence now the message is driving the media/technology use/design. We are finding out more about ourselves and trying to tap into or harness even greater power. Our ability to harness/ facilitate the ‘natural response’ as well as to develop/extrapolate potential are going to be central to future successful ventures.
Kerry-Ann