Moving to Wordpress

I just wanted to say that I've moved my blog to my wordpress account. Even though it's called Webucation, it won't be strictly ITEC 830 and Web 2.0 stuff (although that will be part of it).

You'll want to change the URL in your reader.

Thanks!
Alex

Search Engines

I just heard about three new search engines that present your search results differently.

WolframAlpha is pretty cool. It comes up with some interesting information. Type in "meaning of life" and see what happens.

The Wonder Wheel is from Google is a type of visual search. I don't have a direct link to it, but here is a link to my "instructional technology" search. It lends itself well to exploration.

Lastly, Spezify is the one that is especially well suited for exploration. I did a search for "instructional technology" on that one, too (you might have to reload it if there are a bunch black boxes). The text field where you type in your search terms is just to the right of their logo on the header. I like how you can explore the visual results, but also there are search terms on the black bar just under the header/text field that you can click on and go to different results.

Cool protein folding game

Protein folding is such a complex, amazing, and beautiful phenomena. I have often wondered why someone didn't come up with a program where you can visually play with the globs and get a sense of how the pieces attract and fold. Well, someone has! Last year!

Foldit is a game using distributed computing a la SETI@home, and crowdsourcing. Too cool!

Introducing or teaching social media to newbs

I think the big takeaway message from the last class (which really just reiterated previous class discussions) is that when you're teaching people how to use social media, you need to make sure that your learners understand that they have to take responsibility for their actions. They need to be taught how to use proper 'netiquette, understand 'nethics, and how to protect (or kinda protect) themselves.

spreading the word

Well, I'm sure that you all know that today, 5/7/09, is odd day. But just in case, I thought I'd pass it on!

Final project revisited

Well, I realized that my interest in Second Life might have clobbered me. What I thought I wanted to do is way too vast given the time and resources at hand. I mean, people do Ph.D. dissertations on this stuff!

So, I backed up a little and gave it a little more thought. I'm working on a project for my 801 class on eating out healthily and I can't really build any of the main instruction out for it until I get more skills under my belt, but I can certainly work on the Web 2.0 aspects of it. That would be really rewarding and I can get that project at least a couple of inches off the ground. Whew! Aside from the Facebook page, and cheat sheets (that hopefully will be read on an eReader as well as printable) I've been told that WordPress allows users to build web apps for the iPhone. While that's not really an iPhone app, a web app is still OK in my book! So we'll see what happens...

last 830 class for instruction

Last week's class was a lot of fun. It's always fun, but we got to get into our little groups and brainstorm about Web 2.0 and education. Everyone designed their maps differently, and each one brought something different to the experience. While I am biased and thought my group's was really great, I admit that none of us are confident artists -- so it didn't look cool.

I was really impressed with the Web 2.0 learning cycle map -- the one that's like the nitrogen or carbon cycle in biology books. The names they came up with and the ideas that they attached to the land, sea, and clouds was really fun and FUNNY. Lastly, I think Ty's description that the information has to be filtered before being pumped to the individuals is like municipal water filtration was very thought provoking.

Rodney Dunican's Presentation on Project Management

I am amazed that people aren't taught project management as a matter of course while they're in school. Pretty much everything is a project of one sort or another and being able to manage it (either your own time and resources or a group's) is key to getting things done effectively.

I think that everything he went over was really helpful even if I've managed projects before. His presentation was so concise and broke things down in such a way that some very obvious things were clearly articulated (rather than just being fuzzy ideas floating around in the back of my brain soup).

Most especially, I liked his take away advice (parting notes & summary) which I've sort of listed here:

• Do celebrated work (do stuff you like & are proud of)
• Almost all jobs are project based
• Billing is critical (bill by milestones not just projects)
• When it comes to instructional design, the focus of your boss/whoever hired you is not learner-centric (the business' bottom-line and stats is what's important)
• Theory and practice don't line up. So the ADDIE model isn't going to match the real world well. It's a good guide, but not the rule.
  
• You may make more $$ contracting but don't forget the other costs, such as liabilitiy and professional insurance, as well as health care, home costs, dependents, marketing yourself, etc.
• Stay in contact with your classmates, even if they don't stay in this field or your field, since a lot of work comes from word of mouth
  

Weekly reflection: Google Docs

Well, I have to say that I really love Google Docs for a number of reasons. First among them is that I can take notes in class with whatever computer is available and I can access those notes from any other computer. I also like the new Forms function (can we say, "yay!"?). Let's not forget about how we can collaborate, too. I like it that it's a lot like a wiki in that you can collaborate with your team.

But it ends there. Because the bottom line is that it is limited in your functionality. When you're done collaborating, someone needs to download it and pretty-fy it. Take, for example, my last project with Hai and Tracy. While Google Docs was great for us to come up with the content of our presentation, we couldn't use Google Docs to make a GREAT presenation. No. And the nature of asynchronous online collaboration -- iterative, scrolling through each person's schedule to accumulate our collaborative efforts -- we couldn't get to the point where Tracy could fold our stuff into her awesome PPT template and neat animations, music, and slide transitions. Google Docs just couldn't handle that and all that stuff would get lost if she tried to upload the results of her hard work.

What Tracy did, instead, was de-uglify the original Google Docs template, but there's only so much de-uglifying you can do. Yes. I just made up that word. Welcome "de-uglify" to the English language.

Anyway, we uploaded the presentation to SlideShare, but it also removes all animations, music, and slide transitions. Oh well.

Anyway, here's a link to the .mov file, and the following is the embedded SlideShare file:

Where's ITEC

View more presentations from inannamouse.

Allosphere

I just read about the Allosphere project at UCSB. Pretty cool! Imagine taking a field trip here!

You should check out Prezi. It's a zooming presentation editor.

They have three pricing plans, one of which is FREE. Here's a sample slide show:

World Digital Library

I just heard about the World Digital Library from the latest Nova podcast. It seems like it would be a great resources for both instructors and students of history, culture, etc.

More detailed info is on their About page.

final project for ITEC 830

Well, I guess the think that was on my mind all week (actually for the past two weeks) is about the final project. There are a lot of interesting things in this world, but not a lot of time to focus on them ALL. One thing that I had on my mind before even joining the ITEC program was the uses of Second Life for education. No one is surprised by this, I'm sure. I wondered why SFSU didn't have a presence in Second Life.

Well, I did some poking around and I learned some interesting things. The SF State Visioning project, which has a small toe-print in Second Life. It looks like the DAI department has had some virtual world building classes in the past. But that's about it. I was told that one reason we don't have a Second Life presence is because our president and provost have not been big technology-type folks. A push for a Second Life presence would have to be a grass-roots movement. I was also told that the new provost is much more technologically oriented and we can expect to see some big strides in the technology area.

So, for my final project I'd like to research what other schools have done or had to go through in order to introduce Second Life to their campuses. What are the characteristics of the stakeholders? What were the hurdles to overcome? What were the pitfalls? Would they have done anything differently? What are the benefits to having a Second Life presence? What kinds of metrics would one use to measure the benefits/drawbacks. I could go on, but I think you get the picture.

Design Critique

The website I chose to critique is Common Craft -- Explanations in Plain English. The website itself is really easy to navigate, with the standard (and simple) navigation at the header. The colors are simple and easy on the eye -- they don’t distract from the main content. At the bottom, flowing below the fold there are other types of links categorized by most viewed, popular right now, and recent blog posts. The navigation at the top is more important, and those below added bonuses but not absolutely necessary to get around.

The main content is right in the middle. (1) there’s a short video discussing the difference between types of licensing and versions (free or fee); (2) there are links to watch or purchase.

That’s just the site. The videos themselves are short, to the point, and easy to follow. They are not cluttered and use interesting visuals. If you like it, you can get the code to embed the video in your blog or site.


My specific responses to the in-class questions are as follows:

On Information Design
Who are the users?
- The users are people who want to know what new technologies are, quickly & easily, in plain English.

Information chunk (gestalt principle, amount information)
- The videos are about 3-5 minutes each.

Relevance (graphics, content, reading level, text)
- Graphics are simple; content is accessible; the reading level is in plain English.

Labeling (visual with text)
- The labels are simple and clear, as are the graphics

Consistency (visual, text)
- Colors for the THML page are clean & simple; they don’t detract from the content.

Detail (too much on one page or one screen)
- There isn’t too much detail on the page, which makes it very digestible.

On Interactivity
Orientation (Can you find the path, and know your way around?)
- It’s very easy to figure out where to go.

Navigation (Branching)
- Navigation is simple & easy.

Functionality (Does it work?)
- The functionality works great.

Information access (Multiple entry and exit? Logical path?)
- Multiple entries; very logical path.

On Screen Design
Attractive (first impression)
- It’s very easy on the eye. The page design doesn’t detract from the content.

Color
- The colors do not detract from the content.

Lay out
- I like that the main navigation is on top and the content is simply placed in the middle. The extra links are at the bottom, going beyond the fold (but they are secondary in importance).

Readability
- Very readable.

Other comments
- I really like this site. I think they’ve done a good job.

Norman Door

When my husband and I first moved into our house, it was very confusing to figure out which light switch worked for which light. We figured it out and we would tell our houseguests that all they had to do is do the exact opposite of what made sense: If you think one light switch went to one light, pick the opposite switch. That worked. I had to think every time I wanted to turn on or off a light.

That was seven years ago.

The one thing we couldn't ever figure out or work around was our thermostat. It had pre-defined times set with pre-defined temperatures, and over the years (with the various black outs and power outages that we've had) the pre-defined times were nowhere near real-time. And almost all the settings were set at 72. Our home was a sauna, but we couldn't figure out how to re-set the thermostat timings. Luckily, the manual override was easy to use.


Right. The SET button in the middle would be the obvious choice, but we were wrong, and we couldn't figure it out. That's seven years of bad heating problems.

A few months ago, our carpenter decided that our light switches sucked so he re-did them. It was easy to rehabituate to the change and it's a relief that FINALLY the switch I automatically reach for has the desired effect.

It was at this point that we had a conversation about the thermostat and he offered to fix it, clueing me in on where the instructions were. Right. You have to remove the cover to find the instructions. Why didn't I think of that?? I guess I'm a newbie when it comes to these central heating units.


I finally found out where the instructions were! And they were complicated.


I finally got it done. They weren't easy to follow (the buttons didn't behave as they should), but I could figure it out from here. I just can't believe how long it took to actually find the instructions!

Apps for America

Talk about civic involvement! Check out the Apps for America contest page.

Daniel Pink's "A Whole New Mind"

In reading Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind, his discussion about the left-brain dominance of right-brain thinking reminds me of one of my problems with the critical thinking classes I've taken. While I strongly believe that critical thinking should be required and taught much earlier than college (maybe as a yearly spiral from 5th grade onward), especially now that he advocates STORY as a organizational tactic (to gain customers, p. 105-107, but more on this next), I do have a problem with the whole argumentation and debate thing.

I feel that sometimes it robs us of truth and meaning because winning can easily become more important than understanding, compassion, and empathy.

On another note, my sister has a collection of TIME Magazines dating back from the 1930s (about 2-3 per decade). I love print advertisements, so I like to leaf through her magazines looking at the ads. What's astonishing is that the earlier ads looked like articles and were text heavy. They told a story and were geared toward emotionally hooking consumers. Fast forward to the Dot Com Boom, and ads were just an image and a URL. Now, though, when I leaf through magazines, I'm finding a return to STORY again. I see many ads that look like articles, are text heavy, and are designed to emotionally engage consumers. Again.

Web 2.0 conference

Well, I had a lot of fun in the exhibit hall with Jeff and David. We ran into Brian and Lance there and they pointed us to a really cool product, OER Commons (which Tai mentions in his blog). I really liked that one a lot because after one of the reading assignments from my 801 class, I've been thinking a lot about pre-existing materials. They have an enormous database of freely available materials for education. Also, the lady was really nice and obviously cared deeply about her project.

The product that I really dug was gooseGrade. It's "crowd-copyediting." Great for students to improve their English if they copyedit each other's assignments, but also great for anyone who'd love to have input on their writing skills. I wonder... Does this work for whatever language? I imagine that it could as far as the users actually inputting corrections and/or responding to them, but that the badge and their "grading" dialog box would need to be translated.

There was a bunch of other neat stuff there, but I don't want to ruin anyone else's chances of reporting on it.

Games and learning

I really enjoyed the talk we got to go to last Thursday, The Civic Potential of Video Games, by Dr. Joseph Kahne. When it comes to the cliché'd admonition to not throw the baby out with the bathwater, I thought he eloquently expressed the case for the baby.

I feel like I've heard so much negativity and fear whenever a new technology captures the time and attention of people, that I can't justify jumping on that boat. Yeah, sure, video games can be violent, but not all of them. To focus on their negative aspects is to negate any benefits or usefulness inherent in the technology.

The tools at our disposal continue to grow in number and quality, but seem slow to be picked up in education. Why? Well, some people will say that they need to see a track record of usefulness in order to engage the stakeholder buy-in. But if the track record is only in violent games, then those stakeholders won't see the track record of usefulness. This violent track record is, I believe, given to us by sensationalist media eyes (google the negative effects of video games for more references). Cooperation and puzzle-solving aren't newsworthy. Killing your fellow-students is an internationally newsworthy story. We see what we are given to see and ignore the benefits.

Yes. There are bad aspects to pretty much everything. We might as well protest about humans and ban ourselves if we want to take things to their logical conclusion. Just look around you. But humans span the vast spectrum of human nature, which encompasses both good and evil. Likewise, videogames (along with many technologies which humans use) span the spectrum of human nature.

What we need to focus on is not how bad they are, but on how useful they could be. We don't have to call it education, but as Shakespear said, "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."

To what use can we use them in a way that fosters cooperation, critical thinking, civic involvement, and a great number of other things that could be educational?

E. Wagner podcast

Listening to all the sound clips from my fellow students regarding Dr. Wagner's presentation was very interesting. Trying to put a bunch of them together to make an audiofile made it even more interesting. Ty and I tried to focus on the bright side of the future, and we therefore took some of what people said out of context and repurposed it.

Here is the link to the podcast. I hope you like my favorite photo of Mars.

Second Life, the Gartner Hype Cycle, and the Innovation Adoption Curve

In my last post, this is one of the things I said about Dr. Ellen Wagner’s presentation:

If you look at the Gartner Hype Cycle and the Innovation Adoption Curve, you’ll see that they intersect in the Trough of Dissolutionment area. After that, adoption rises to become mainstream and Hype Cycle moves into the Slope of Enlightment toward the Plateau of Productivity.

Although Dr. Wagner’s slides don’t include Second Life and Sloodle, I think that we are at that intersection where the Gartner Hype Cycle and the Innovation Adoption Curve intersect when it comes to these two things.

She says in her slides that “[t]he path from innovation to adoption is a lengthy journey of implementations and evaluation to determine the benefit/return.”

I think we’re there when it comes to the widespread adoption of virtual worlds and MMORPGs for education. You can’t elicit stakeholder share in newfangled technologies until they’ve somehow been proven, and institutions such as MIT, Stanford, and the Exploratorium, trailblazed this.

So now’s the time, since it’s on it’s way to the Plateau of Productivity, that the technology can be utilized in a more widespread fashion.

Podcast Script Assignment

Our assignment was to write a short podcast script for an interview with Dr. Wagner. The script should pose questions and supposed answers based on her presentation and slides. I'm not clear on this because when I left class I thought it was something we were supposed to bring to class but then Ethan's email said to put it on our blogs. So... While I am feeling a certain lameness, here it is... One minute or less, right?

ALEX:
Dr. Wagner, you said that instructional designers should design using today’s technologies, rather than design using those of tomorrow. Could you please elaborate on this?

DR. WAGNER:
Yes. You want to design with the available tools because it can be sustained. It’s affordable (from the school or company’s perspective) has enough users. It's also predictable, and therefore more easily accepted. We need to focus on sustainable innovation.

If you look at the Gartner Hype Cycle and the Innovation Adoption Curve, you’ll see that they intersect in the Trough of Dissolutionment area. After that, adoption rises to become mainstream and Hype Cycle moves into the Slope of Enlightment toward the Plateau of Productivity.

Automated responsiveness everywhere!

I really enjoyed our guest speaker's presentation in the last class session. Dr. Ellen Wagner is an engaging, dynamic, and forward-thinking woman.

Two things she brought up, haptics and ubiquitous access (and subsequently smart buildings / products), are subjects that I have thought a lot about in relation to world- and community-changing technologies. I believe that these two things combined will have a significant impact on our future lives. it will change our assumptions and the assumptions of future generations. But we don't have to feel that they are things that are coming down the pike. In fact, these concepts are not totally new or revolutionary. When I think of ubiquity of access to information, I try to remind myself of books, newspapers, and magazines -- even while out in the woods camping, I still had my book to read if I wanted to. I try to think of how televisions and telephones saturated the market to the extent that some homes even had several of these items. Or of the thermostat keeping the temperature in a building within a certain range. Even of automatically opening doors.

While the concepts may not be revolutionary, their implementation certainly is. It allows us to do magic (or what would appear to be magic if we were time travelers from the past). Hmmm...

NEWSFLASH: My favorite blog, information aesthetics, just posted about Sixth Sense. Here's a four-minute video. Imagine the implications! This is soooo cool, and it's very much what Dr. Wagner was discussing in class about Web 3.o (3D).



Oh, speaking of automatically opening doors, I have to share something that happened to me once in Las Vegas. I learned that casinos are designed to always turn the customer back to the slot machines and tables. On this particular day I was determined to see the outdoors -- to see sunlight. Somehow I couldn't find my way out of the place (but it was so easy to come in!). Finally, I found the door! In my excitement, I raced to the door and was stopped by the glass. I backed up and went toward the door. Nothing happened. Obviously it was broken. So I went to the other door and it, too, was broken. Aaaargh! I couldn't get out of the casino!

Just then, I saw some people heading into the casino. They walked up to the door and pushed it. It wasn't broken; it was manual.

Finally, I'd like to share this link with you. It's an interactive map of future forces affecting education: http://www.kwfdn.org/map/map.aspx. It's really interesting and they invite participants to add to it.

Global Community

OK. Sorry folks. I couldn't resist.

I know this sounds like a shameful plug for Amazon.com, Google (the new evil empire, to some... yes, yes, I know), and our newly elected president, but like I said: I couldn't resist.

I am reading The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama and I had to share this one excerpt from the book (p. 166). He's talking about visiting Google in 2004.

"These lights represent all the searches that are going on right now," the engineer said. "Each color is a different language. If you move the toggle this way" --he caused the screen to alter-- "you can see the traffic patterns of the entire Internent system."

The image was mesmerizing, more organic than mechanical, as if I were glimpsing the early stages of some accelerating evolutionary process, in which all the boundaries between men--nationality, race, religion, wealth--were rendered invisible and irrelevant, so that the physicist in Cambridge, the bond trader in Tokyo, the student in a remote Indian village, and the manager of a Mexico City department store were drawn into a single, constant, thrumming conversation, time and space giving way to a world spun entirely of light. Then I noticed the broad swaths of darkness as the globe spun on its axis--most of Africa, chunks of South Asia, even some portions of the United States, where the thick cords of light dissolved into a few discrete strands.

Other than the fact that President Obama is IMHO obviously a great and engaging writer, this is a telling tale about connectivity and communication. The world is connected, but there are places where this connection is slow to arrive. If we use Web 2.0 technologies to reach the world, do we have a responsibility to bring those who are not connected into the fold? Do we just shout out to the existing 'netizens, or do we strive to increase the population? Does that striving come from a desire to educate, a desire to share these great tools, or what?

Video Response to C. Bonk's lecture on 2/26/09

I read an article early last week, Facebook and Bebo risk 'infantilising' the human mind. This kind of sensationalism about new technology both frustrates me and makes me laugh. I couldn’t help but think of previous sensationalist claims. For example, Is television destroying our children's minds?

Yes. I chose the same online news publication, The Guardian, from the U.K. I couldn’t help myself.

I’ve also read articles about how we've discovered specific genes (HAR genes) that give us a propensity for rapid brain development and that each new tool we use somehow acts on our brains, furthering our development – a development that supposedly makes us better than our fellow co-critters. Whether it does or doesn’t, current research indicates that we have genes that speed up brain development, and that’s what makes us different from other creatures.

Dr. C. Bonk’s lecture last week fed right into my mindset of the day, and one of the very many websites he presented was Adora’s website.

So my assignment, a 1-minute visual, tries to capture those things.

storytelling

This is great storytelling and visualization from www.crisisofcredit.com

Part 1:


Part 2:

It's not splooge, it's web 2.0!

Well, last night’s class was a lot of fun. But when isn’t it? I mean, my fellow students totally rock. We feed off each other and in a good way (we’re not co-cannibals, we’re co-conspirators).

There were a couple of things in our reading (pdf) and our class discussions that came up that really hit home for me. One thing, in particular, was about the reading we did and the concept of “create, communicate, collaborate.” I found validation in the section Technology in Education: Looking at Fiction to Find Real Possibilities. Not just in my thoughts that the arts and the sciences feed off each other, but in that web 2.0 is about user-generated content.

Ok, now that I’ve repeated myself. I will go further. One of the hurdles that I've had to get over is that I used to think of blogs as internet splooge. I thought that blogs were a bunch of people mentally masturbating and that I needed to keep myself clean by staying clear of them.

As the world has transitioned from web 1.0 to web 2.0, my analogy grew to see that there are internet voyeurs and internet exhibitionists. Hey, man, that's fine. But bloggers were the consummate exhibitionists. By nature I am a voyeur--that is, I am a lurker.

Over time, as the blogosphere grew, I found blogs that I really liked--my opinion of them grew and the splooge analaogy diminished. Yet I could still passively consume them (i.e., be a voyeur).

Well, last week I felt like I got caught. No. “Busted” would be a more appropriate word. I got busted, and my voyeurism days are over.

During class discussion, Dr. Foreman mentioned that people often read without commenting. Jeff, on the other hand, protested that he expected more comments. During class, I cringed about this, so I commented on his post (during class). I apologized that I hadn’t said it, but my comment said that I thought it was funny and relevant. He moderates his posts and the emails he gets automatically send his phone a text, so when he got a text he was prompted to look. Of course, he related this experience to the class and we all had a good laugh. Web 2.o meets F2F. It was a good example of how all this technology can still be used during class and not be off-topic or irrelevant.

And it’s not splooge.

This is a great segue to my next topic. I'm glad that our reading talks about "user-generated content." Yes. Web 2.0 is about user-generated content. Jeff generated content; I generated content in response. But when it comes to education, you have to think about this when you think about web 2.0--how do you use it for education?

You can’t just splooge web 2.0 all over people--you have to think of it as a tool. In what instances will you be able to use this tool in order to best generate understanding about information? In what instance do you think this will transform information to knowledge? How will these tools instill not only knowledge but wisdom?

What do you think?

architecture

Here is the companion video to the Information video. It's about architecture:

I just saw this great video on the information aesthetics blog:

Taking class online

Well, I haven't really been a big fan of being an online student, but I must admit that last week's session changed my mind. I liked it that I could see the class live and interact in real time with my fellow online students, Zack and Angie. Our conversations were not only relevant, but funny, too!

Also, our guest speaker was engaging and I felt that I really learned a lot from him. What kinda bums me out, though, is that I use my Twitter account exclusively for science news updates (Mars Pheonix, Spirit, Opportunity, Cassini, Earth Observer, etc.) and I feel that by following anything other than my science updates will clutter up my Twitter account--people's random musing and updates will pepper my stream of science news.

Connectivism revisited

I have really enjoyed reading and listening to George Siemens on connectivism. I always say to people that I'm so glad I don't live in a vacuum (often in response to hearing a great idea), and I think that really sums up the concepts highlighted by connectivism.

He stressed that knowledge is a moving target now--adaptive and emergent. Different skills are required to deal with knowledge as a moving target rather than a stationary target; we need to manage knowledge as a process rather than a product. This leads to one of his main points: "We have defined our students with skill sets that enable them to be relevant in a world that existed about 20 years ago."

With knowledge being so fluid, he urged that our capacity to know more must be nurtured because it is far more important than putting our intellect in stasis by clinging to what we know today without the skills to continually build on it. To this end, he noted that content is the conduit for conversation and we must find ways to utilize this conduit in developing the capacity to know more.

Although I only heard 10, he said that there were 11 key elements comprising the nature of learning today with which the educational system is at odds. I'll list 9 of them here because the 10th was an ad for his blog:

1. Anchoring (reduce mutiple stimuli and distractions, be disciplined in thought)
2. Filtering (peer review)
3. Connecting (connect to the right sources & info to keep us current; being personable and human with technology as well as with face-to-face interactions)
4. Creating & deriving meaning (what does it mean to me and to what I'm doing?)
5. Authenticating and validating information (how do we know it's true?)
6. Critical and creative thinking skills (both in balance)
7. Pattern recognition (how to move through it all to what is needed)
8. Accepting uncertainty (are we prepared to accept a fuzzy truth instead of a simplistic falsehood?)
9. Contextualizing (some people just promoting one's own perspective instead of listening to another's perspective; where was the person coming from when they generated their bit of information?)

He didn't say it in the list, but he earlier noted that we should seek diversity in our information. Not just the extremes, which he said comprise around 20% of the population and define the boundaries of a given subject's range, but the rest of the 80% who span the entire spectrum. Seeking diversity, rather than sticking to our echo chamber, helps us be informed individuals.

These all point to something else he said and which we discussed at length in the last class session: "The reverse of knowledge happens when we have too many choices... We know how to break knowledge apart... what we need now is to know how to bind it together... so that it's meaningful for us."

I think that what he's really saying is that people need to learn how to develop an intuition for finding relevant and contextual information in general, not just their knowledge domains. As knowledge is decentralized, we must be discriminating in what we choose to consume without confining ourselves to our own specific niche or opinion.

More on the Web 2.0 discussion (& two educational wikis)

I was thinking about our class discussion last week and wanted to mention what I think of when I think of Web 2.0.

When I think of Web 2.0, I think “user-generated content.” It’s not just "interactive" in that we have to interact with things (i.e., clicking on a link). I've had problems with these kinds of interactive activities because it seemed that people were making the user click just for sake of clicking -- not to add value. But now, with Web 2.0, "interactive" actually means that interacting with a thing ultimately means we are interacting with other people. With an environment that stresses user-generated content, people are creating things, putting them out “there,” getting feedback generated by other users, and interacting with the content put out by other users.

Anyway, these are the two educational wikis I found in response to our homework assignment:

Classroom 2.0 is one of the social networks I lurk in and I read their blog. They also have a wiki. The whole Classroom 2.0 endeavor is about sharing ways to incorporate Web 2.0 technologies into the classroom.

This wiki is for The Time Travel Narrative wiki. It's an online course focusing on the timeline in narrative endeavors (movies, literature, anime, TV).

lively class

This is the more serious and reflective post...

This week's class session was pretty lively and fun. There were several things that seemed to really stand out as far as how the class views Web 2.0 in general and in relation to transferring knowledge or information.

As we spoke about the topic of connectivism, it was hard to escape the idea that truth exists externally and is constructed internally. Other learning theories might have made this external/internal relationship seem mutually exclusive, but there’s no reason for this to be the case. Web 2.0 technology is educationally useful in that the associated tools contain inherent knowledge. Also, use of the tools enable a sharing of knowledge. Instead of knowledge being unidirectional, going from one to many, it now is pan-directional, going from all to all (or many to many).

Validity seemed to be the unanimous issue, so I won’t say much about it here except that just because something is posted doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s true or that the information is valid.

We are bombarded with information and we need to sift through it to find the facts. More importantly than ever, people need to learn how to learn effectively as early as possible. The ability to think critically and to define one’s own learning goals and educational agenda are necessary.

Personally, I really liked the analogies!

great analogies

There were a couple of analogies that I really loved. I love analogies.

The fridge analogy was great. The outside of the fridge has lots of stuff on magnets and post-its--typically notes and photos and stuff. This is like commenting on people’s blogs, putting reminders in Remember the Milk, wikis, and the like. Then there’s the inside of the fridge which has all kinds of stuff in there for consumption. Some of the stuff is good and some of the stuff is either unhealthy or has gone bad. Sometimes you need to check with your peers, “Hey, does this milk smell bad to you?” Ultimately, you tend to avoid the yukky stuff.

The Borg analogy was also pretty good in that it points to the Hive Mind. What one drone learns, all drones learn. While there are some definite advantages of this and it reminds me of D. Dennett’s quote about a joined cognitive system. The downside is that indiscriminate consumers of the information could be misinformed by the unscrupulous participants out there.

Dr. Foreman's driving analogy was really descriptive in how navigating around all these wonderfully collaborative and user-generated content can be tricky. She said that it’s like people are learning how to drive while simultaniously trying to figure out how to get to their destination. Meanwhile, all the beginners on the road could, and more likely would, cause accidents.

Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age

I can really relate to this quote in the article we were assigned to read, Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age , by George Siemens:

Connections between disparate ideas and fields can create new innovations.

It's something that my husband and I jokingly argue about because he says that innovation comes from the abuse (of a thing or knowledge), whereas I believe that it comes from its misuse (or misapplication). My view stems from the synergistic relationship between the arts and the sciences. For example, a lot of science fiction books draw from existing science, but also act as a driving force for exploration.

That's why I read a lot of really disparate books and blogs, because they give me ideas. As I muse on them, different connections are made.

As far as chaos and emergence are concerned, though, I'm not sure where the author is really going. Sensitivity to initial conditions has an effect on what pattern emerges. Do we just stand back and watch things emerge? Or do we try to do something about those initial conditions, trying to somehow alter or affect the emergent pattern? I believe that the latter is virtually impossible. I mean, we can have an affect, but we'd be sorely disappointed if we were actually attached to a particular outcome.

I really love the idea and phrase, "This amplification of learning, knowledge and understanding through the extension of a personal network is the epitome of connectivism." I think that "amplification" is an excellent choice of words. I think that amplification of learning (or knowledge) is very closely tied to communities of practice as well as to interdisciplinary collaborative teams. It reminds me of an article from the book What is Intelligence, called The Role of Language in Intelligence, by Daniel Dennett. He says:

...our brains are in effect joined together into a single cognitive system that dwarfs all others. They are joined by one of the innovations that has invaded our brains and no others: language...each individual human brain, thanks to its communicative links, is the beneficiary of the cognitive labors of the others in a way that gives it unprecedented powers.

I really like Seimen's concluding statements to the article. It echoes why I am excited about being in the ITEC program and what I hope to gain from it:

How people work and function is altered when new tools are utilized. The field of education has been slow to recognize both the impact of new learning tools and the environmental changes in what it means to learn.

Hello World

Well, I just started taking ITEC 830, the Web 2.0 class, and I'm very excited about what I'm going to learn. No thoughts just yet, but more to come soon.