Customized Education

ASU grad Stephen Dubner, coauthor of Freakonomics with Steven Levitt, is now doing a regular Freakonomics podcast for the New York Times (see the Freakonomics blog here). The latest freakonomics radio broadcast is a fascinating look at how we can customize education through an algorithm similar to how Pandora picks our music. This episode centers on “the thrill of customization” — that is, how technology can enable each of us to get access to what we want, whether it’s music, or education. The focus of the podcast is a very creative New York City Department of Education pilot program called School of One. The School of One is an experiment that is currently only being used in an after school setting, but it brings us to the edge of a very exciting time in education. It moves technology to the center of decision making about what works best for a given student, and then partners technology with excellent teaching to optimize the best teaching and learning modalities for each kid. Can this algorithm really work for millions of school age students? Does Pandora work for you?

You can go here to listen to this great podcast.

You can learn more about School of One here.

Individual Project - A Virtual Book Club for Kids and Teens

This individual project for web 2.0 is something I would love to pursue in more depth over the summer. I admit that I have not given it the time or attention to detail that it deserves. My basic idea is this: create a virtual spot for kids and teens to share ideas about books with friends and peers. This site would include a variety of tools already in place on the web, but not coordinated, not necessarily easy to find, and certainly not as user friendly and intuitive as kids need them. Some of the key activities I hoped to integrate were crowdsourcing in the form of sharing knowledge about books, audio and video development in the form of book trailers with sites like animoto and prezi. I would like the site to be a social networking hub in the form of things like messaging, chatting, creating groups, sharing favorites, reviewing, and ranking. I also wanted to incorporate blogging and microblogging, creating mash-ups, the use of tagging and sharing bookmarks, and geotagging, and use existing web-based applications that kids will enjoy, and most importantly foster collaboration.
Now, if I knew how to make all that work, I would not be in this class. I have learned a lot, but have a lot more to learn. So, I created a simple mock up of a site, made my own logos, and linked to sites that do some of the things I would like this site to accomplish. I introduce to you Literati.org. Stay tuned for more updates.

Geotagging with nature....the evolution of GIS

Geotagging of images and media involves assigning geographical identification metadata to the image. Geotagging is a form of geospatial metadata consisting of latitude and longitude coordinates, and sometimes more complex data like altitude, etc. This very specific metadata can help users find images taken near a given location by entering latitude and longitude coordinates into a geotagging-enabled image search engine. The great power of geotagging is enabling information services which can be used to find location-based news, websites, blog or rss feeds, tweets, or countless other resources. Geotagging gives users the location of the content of an image, or other media, and conversely on some sites and web applications can show media relevant to a given location.
Geotagging evolved from the world of geographic information systems, a complex geospatial database tool developed in the early 1960’s. The Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis at the Harvard Graduate School of Design was the real genesis of GIS, it is where the scientific world geospatial sciences, and the artistic world of design merged around the idea of geographic data representation. Some of the preeminent architects and planners of the world including Ian McHarg set forth the basic concepts that were to develop later in geographic information systems.
The great breakthrough of GIS data was the representation of real objects such as roads, land use, elevation with digital data. The ability to tie geospatial coordinates to real world objects allowed for the extensive development of geospatial metadata. Later, with the opening of the global positioning system (GPS), the access to geospatial data grew exponentially. This satellite-based navigation system is made up of a network of 24 satellites placed into orbit by the U.S. Department of Defense. GPS was originally intended for military applications, but in the 1980s, the government made the system available for civilian use. GPS works in any weather conditions, anywhere in the world, 24 hours a day, and it is extremely accurate through the use of satellite triangulation. Originally the system required a complex unit, often accompanied with a large antenna system for accurate use. Today, gps receivers exist in every cell phone, and almost any mobile electronic device.
Of course, one of the great advantages of all of this metadata is the ability to link the quickly growing world library of online digital images. The work that Blaise Aguera y Arcas is doing with seadragon at Microsoft is astounding. The visual clarity is phenomenal, and the grace of the movement in the interface is also remarkable. When Google purchased Keyhole in 2004 they made amazing strides in the field of geodata analysis. The emergence of Google Earth, and the associated tools, including streetview, have changed the way we deal with spatial information. Now, with the alliance of microsoft and yahoo, Bing mapping and flickr are offering amazing capabilities, and most importantly ease of use to the end user.
When I was an undergrad, my favorite professor liked to call geography “the science of the obvious”. It is in effect, everything that surrounds us. Combine that simple idea with the capability to manage immense amounts of data and metadata about everything that surrounds us, and the ability to capture spatial coordinates from satellites, and digital images of amazing clarity and quality, and you arrive at the brave world of geotagging, marching right in to the future of the obvious.

Couchsurfing - "doveryai, no proveryai"

My experience with couchsurfing goes back to my days as an ultimate frisbee player, well before the couchsurfing site existed. The ultimate community is a very informal group, sharing an interest in a sport played for fun and friendship rather than money and fame. Tournaments happen all around the country and teams travel great distances to play, often couchsurfing in the homes of host team players. I have slept on couches in Charleston, Savannah, Charlotte, Blacksburg, Washington, Philadelphia, Chicago, and more. I have had more than 10 players from other towns sleeping all over my house, including on my screened porch. Some of my best friends are people I have met through ultimate tournaments and couchsurfing. In the old days, the game depended a close knit community and trust.
Couch surfing has occurred informally, in more than just ultimate, for thousands of years, but the modern internet version started in 2003. The site started when the founder had a plane ticket to Reykjavik, Iceland and could not afford a hotel. So, he stayed on a friend of a friend's couch and found it was fun. Today there are 1.8 million couchsurfers in almost 71,000 cities worldwide. According to the site, there have been 4,649,018 positive experiences, which is about 99.8% of all member experiences.
Over 80% of these are under 35 years old, about half of couchsurfers living in Europe. Most of weekmonth, the service is free, but donations are encouraged to support the work of the site.
Some call couchsurfing a movement toward a kinder and more connected planet. It seems most couchsurfers are looking for new connections, and to add new social experiences. Most reviews talk about extraordinary kindnesses of strangers on their couches, but some the occasional poor guest. Mostly you read about amazing people participating in the lives of the homes they are staying in, how they immediately involved themselves into their families- helping with dinner and washing the dishes afterwards.
As all this relates to our class, research about social networks consistently shows that people with larger social networks are healthier, happier, and live longer. Of course, those who attend church regularly also fair well in these areas, and this is likely due to the social connections and fellowship that follows worship services. Nonetheless, this is a very real social network, and a way to build real long term relationships with strangers.
One of the most important aspects of couchsurfing is the trusting of a stranger. Obviously this trust must always be based on information. There is an old Russian proverb "doveryai, no proveryai" that translates as "trust, but verify." The couchsurfing site is based on reputation and verification. New couchsurfers must earn verification, and be “vouched” for by other couchsurfers.
Overall, couchsurfing is a great social experiment, a test of community building and trust. Now that I have kids, I am a little more prone to seek verification, but I hope to formally participate in couchsurfing again soon.

Web 2.0 gap analysis

My original objectives needed more specificity about building my knowledge base and understanding of web 2.0 concepts.  At this point in my academic career, I need to recognize that much of the learning comes from pursuing what I have been exposed to and see in a class like web 2.0 and Social Media.  I certainly have learned a tremendous amount about communicating through social media, but how do I implement that in my classroom?  How can I best inspire reading and writing using these tools? Is it through the use of wiki's and blogs? Can I begin to incorporate handheld technology, what would that look like with my students? What about podcasting, or digital storytellling? It is up to me to actualize these goals based on what I have seen here.
DI mentioned a previous comment about "academic rigor".  The class was challenging, and certainly had a lot of useful material and activities.  The assigned readings, the TED lectures, the youtube videos, all had their own intellectually stimulating quality.  Were they directly aligned and linked with established pedagogical research? Would that have made them more useful?  Probably not for me, I enjoyed the more conversational approach which encouraged peer learning and a lot of sharing. We were asked to join and participate in a number of social media sites that dealt directly with implementation of web 2.0 tools and concepts in education. At a workshop recently I was asked to align certain web 2.0 tools with pedagogical theory, this was interesting and eye opening. It felt a bit forced, and in this class I was able to explore and learn, later I can think about how theses tools work in terms of educational theory.
I would have liked to address implementation more directly in class, but cannot define how that would have happened. Just as I know my teaching style must adjust in this quickly evolving web based environment, my learning style and expectations must be adjusted as well.

The last mile...making it real

Tonight I had the pleasure of attending the Asheville "Town Meeting" about our effort to win the Google fiber initiative. My goal was two-fold. First, selfishly I hoped to actually meet many of the people involved in the initiative face to face for the first time, as I have been part of the google group, facebook group, followed the twitter feed, and more. Second, I am so excited about the process, regardless of whether we get it, this is an amazing participatory drive in our community, and yes I would love to get 1 gigabit fiber in Asheville. About 300 hundred people gathered at the civic center banquet room to discuss how Asheville positions ourselves to get Google here. So, our mayor, a great lady named Terry Bellamy, kicks off the meeting and says "Google needs us", they need our creativity, and our initiative, to show this fiber roll out could work. Well, she thinks big, what can I say. I have to agree that our little hamlet is full of creative types, and not short on initiative, mainly due to the people attracted here by the natural beauty, arts scene, and maybe our 13 micro breweries. There is a local t-shirt that reads "If you are too weird for Asheville, you are too weird", gotta think Google would like that one.
We hear from a panel of local experts, including Hunter Goosman of ERC Broadband. Hunter discusses the "last mile principle". The "last mile" or "last kilometre" is the final leg of delivering connectivity from a communications provider to a customer. The last mile is the most cost prohibitive, sometimes costing more than hundreds of miles of fiber run point to point, due to labor and logistics.
Anyway, my first goal was a great success. I met Jose Ibarra of Applied Solutions Group, or H0zae, as he goes on twitter. H0zae is the key driving force behind the Google Avl initiative. I also meet Gary of gsocialmedia.com, possibly the most prolific tweeter on the planet, certainly in the AVL. I talked to many old friends, and got to finally meet some of the social media gurus of my community. I will be meeting with Jose soon to discuss an education strategy for Google AVL.
I thought the last mile was appropriate for this "tie the worlds" part of web 2.0. Getting together online with these guys is so easy, but actually meeting, and beginning to work together on an exciting project is less so, but once done, it really starts to bring it all home.
I will be blogging more about Google AVL soon......

An expanding universe?

A Private Universe is a video documentary of Harvard grads, alumni, and faculty being largely unable to detail what causes the seasons of the year or the phases of the moon. Their views were sometimes based on the correct fundamental idea, but were an incorrect understanding of the facts. Why had they never solidified their understanding of these basic principles of astronomy and geography? Had they carried these incorrect concepts since grade school, or somewhere along the line unlearned what they previously understood. I was left asking of the Harvard grads, did they used to know, had they never learned, or had they learned these principles incorrectly.
In his speech at TEDxNYED on Saturday, George Siemens, author of Knowing Knowledge which is a study of how the context and characteristics of knowledge have changed, argued that what we see in A Private Universe is an issue of "conceptual failure". Siemens argues that "the inability on the part of individuals to share and shape their understanding of a subject through discourse with others causes erroneous or errant concepts that could be eliminated through social interaction."

Siemens contends "the scientific method offers a response to faulty connections, offering a long history of creating a transparent structure whereby connections are validated and evaluated." Traditionally, educators have lead students to meaningful and useful information via the curriculum (scientific method), and helped them build understanding through socialization (the classroom).

Web 2.0 and New Media change the equation. Rather than the educator creating a linear series of lessons within a tightly structured curriculum, learners build knowledge and understanding as part of what Siemens calls "peer participative pedagogical practice". Students make sense of content via social and technological connections. The educator still has an instructive role, but now the responsibility moves directly to the learner in terms of how they interact with the information and their peers.

Siemens argues that social media rebuild a sort of lost "small group" socialization that existed prior to modern production and transportation networks. Prior to mass movement via mechanized transportation networks, and mass production of goods and food, core knowledge was validated in a small group within a family, a village, a farming community, a church, where people discussed these matters, and provided peer instruction. In a mechanized world these validation tools break down, and things like the cause of the seasons lose relevance and importance.

In a new world of social media, sites like Delcious, Facebook, Ning, and products like blogs, podcasts, and now Twitter represent an increased exchange of information and a possible reconstruction of social systems. The new media tools allow socialization that sort of recreates traditional small groups and communities. These technologies offer a link to our social, networked, small-group past. Siemens thinks these tools represent a recreation of "a past centered on the social sharing of information and making sense of the world together."

The promise of this idea in the abstract is limitless. Our ability to network, recreate shared sense of community, not based on geography, but on ideas and values, is exciting and potentially powerful. The visualization tools are well beyond the power of television because they are not unidirectional, the viewer can now react, and interact in a way traditional video lacked. The capability to share text, audio, and images, holds incredible potential. Thus the sharing of ideas and knowledge and information could grow in an almost limitless manner.

Yes, but were these small networks of our agrarian past always accurate in the information they shared and validated? Didn't isolation lead to bigotry and racism? Didn't some of us hold on to outdated, unscientific ideas for hundreds of years based on religious tradition and fear? I am shocked when I hear my 10 and 11 year old students tell me that President Obama is going to take away their guns. How do they know, their parents read it on the internet. In how many blogs could I go to read that global warming is a myth? Can misinformation be spread just as fast or faster using new media? Can wrong ideas become ingrained by a sense of shared community in a new media environment. Instead of a private universe, could it just turn in to a shrinking universe?

In a modern new media world, does it really matter if you know what causes the seasons? As long as you know they are coming and can adjust, isn't that all that matters. Does it matter if you accept an idea that is incorrect without questioning the validity of the idea?

This is a fundamental challenge to those of us who want to see new media tools reach their great educational potential. To overcome the pitfalls of small ideas, and fulfill the potential of new media tools with a great cacophony of big shared ideas. To make a social media landscape that inspires a great pursuit of knowledge and information, that leads the way to true reconnection of community around the shared goal of the common good.

Map image from Wikicommons:
Planisphaerium Coeleste, by G. C. Eimmart (first published in 1705, copy probably by Matthäus Seutter, c. 1730); 56.5 x 49 cm
Date Augsburg, c. 1730
Source http://www.jpmaps.co.uk/map/id.32893
Author
Georg Christoph Eimmart (1638(1638)–1705(1705)

Map is part of the public domain

TEDxNYED

TEDxNYED was an all-day conference examining the role of new media and technology in shaping the future of education, the conference took place in New York City on Saturday, March 6, 2010. Presenters, including Lawrence Lessig, Michael Wesch, David Wiley, Jeff Jarvis, Gina Bianchini, Amy Bruckman and many more were invited to share their insights and inspire conversations about the future of education. I stumbled upon this conference due to a tweet I saw, and I watched and listened to a number of these presenters. As an educator, I was so impressed by the overall message of the presenters. New media and technology have created a fundmental change in the way education will happen at every level, and as educators we need to understand our students and the relationship they have with new media and technology.

Newbie event at ISTE Island

So I teleported over to ISTE island for the newcomers social. Feeling pretty confident after my evening session a few weeks ago with DI and many of my classmates. The social was set up around a campfire, quite a few people chatting. ISTE member Maggie Larimore was the hostess of the event, or seemed to be leading the chat session. My daughter wandered in with her homework (my wife was at book club), so she was immediately very interested. I tried to show her around and proceeded to walk through the campfire, sit down backwards, and generally bumble around for a while. Maggie was very helpful. I was able to get a marshmallow on a stick, and even accomplished getting a cup of tea. After a while I wandered around ISTE island, a very helpful place. A lot of nice beginner signs and notecards. I saw the snowmen! My daughter wanted a backpack, so we got one, and a giant pencil. I was really impressed with the ISTE resource center, very nice. I am looking forward to going back and exploring some more. I want to learn more about the podcast center. My daughter (8 years old) was hooked. She wants to go back and shop for some better clothes for my avatar. We ran in to another avatar in the resource center who was my twin (clone?), which convinced my daughter I need a new look. I have to admit, I really like the experience and the landscape, I am not very interested in spending time on appearance, etc. so getting her involved may be the push I need. I have the sense that this is not a "kids" environment, but I am intrigued with the educational potential and want to see how she does.

Left is right, or something like that.....

Intellectual property rights are a daily issue for the public school teacher. Of the reading we did this week, the licensing scheme that intrigued me the most was copyleft.
Copyleft is a licensing scenario where the author or creator gives up some but not all rights under established copyright law. Rather than giving the work completely over to the public domain, where no ownership of copyright can be established, copyleft basically establishes some control over the actions of the secondary user of the product. Using copyleft, the work may be used as long as any products created are also licensed under the same copyleft scenario. The basic idea is no person or corporation can take your work and then modify it, and turn to traditional copyright to limit further use. It is really just a reciprocal licenses. Copyleft or reciprocal licenses are a way to make sure your work remains freely available in perpetuity, no matter who later uses it.
As an educator, this matters to me in a very real way. I understand people want to protect their intellectual property, but some of the things that education publishers copyright tie the hands of teachers. I hope I can create something that is so useful in the classroom that others want to use it, and I hope they will, and they will modify, improve, and then let others do the same. If I want to make money from it, that should come off my own time, teaching others how to use it, or writing about the product.
The story of how copyleft came to be exhibits the complexity of our current legal system of licensing intellectual property. Stories like this give me pause about the long term stability of open source licensing.
Below is a photo from the wikimedia commons which was released to the public domain.


See the information here. I would guess she just wanted to share a beautiful picture with the world.

wikimedia, publicly funded for the good of the world

As a public school teacher I have had a bumpy relationship with wikimedia. Personally, I love the concept, and the goal to develop and maintain open content, and to provide full contents of wiki based projects to the public free of charge. Hand in glove with public education, right? Well, it seems some in the educational world disagree, and wikipedia did suffer some credibility damage over the years, while others argue that new editing techniques using peer review insure non biased and accurate entries. I know I love to use it as a starting point for student research, a jumping off point of sorts.



My most important interaction with wikimedia came in early 2008 when my family participated in the OLPC give one get one program. OLPC is a non-profit organization set up to create an affordable educational computing device for use in the developing world. Its mission is "to create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning."
The OLPC project was completely supported by the wikimedia foundation. In August of 2006, the Wikimedia Foundation announced that static copies of selected Wikipedia articles would be included on the laptops. Jimmy Wales, chair of the Wikimedia Foundation, said that "OLPC's mission goes hand in hand with our goal of distributing encyclopedic knowledge, free of charge, to every person in the world. Not everybody in the world has access to a broadband connection." So, when we got our little green xo-1 almost every help function, software download, upgrade, application background, etc. was to be found on a wiki page of some sort. The static wikipedia files were on the machine and super cool for the kids, easy and thorough. The access to community forums, software debugs, and upgrades was easy to follow in the wiki format.
As we used the xo-1 (mainly my the 6 year old daughter) we used one important wikimedia portal, wikibooks, specifically wikijunior. The xo-1 has been criticized on many levels, but it is a good e-book reader, and the use of ebooks and wikipedia articles was a boon for my daughter. Much like the OLPC, the wikijunior site is somewhat incomplete, but does have some great resources. Admittedly, the format was and is challenging for my daughter, but overall it has been a useful site.
Another wikimedia portal that is intriguing is wikisource. Wikisource has over 140,000 texts, an open free content library for the world. It has many nice older documents from prior to 1923, now copyright free, and a wide variety of more contemporary materials.
I think the wikipedia article about wikimedia is thorough and honest. It gives a nice overview of the structure, the history, and goals of the wikimedia foundation. In addition, it outlines some of the problems and pitfalls of the endeavor. I for one hope the wikimedia foundation prospers in to the future.

media sharing, let's have some fun.....

Like many in this class, I already had a youtube and picasa account, but very rarely used them. That is going to changing, as I have taken a closer look at these useful tools. I remember back in the day, before the 21st century, when sharing pictures was not so easy. I remember setting up a web page when my son was born, oh how I wish flickr and picasa had been around back then. Well, times they have changed. The photo sharing sites are wonderful and so easy to use. We have already discussed the great value of youtube. Now for the fun part, all the great web 2.0 apps that have cropped up to utilize the creative content in new and fun ways.
I love Stories in Flight and the app FlickrPoet. With this app you type or paste in a poem or story, and FlickrPoet will find matching photos on Flickr based on a search of tags, titles and descriptions of the photos. Great Fun, please check it out.



Then I found Bubblr, a tool to create comic strips using flickr pictures. The great part is that you can search for pictures using tags. Here is an example, I put in web 2.0 in the search, and of course I added the bubble:




and another, I searched Aardvark:


There is also big huge labs, the home of flickr toys

With video I found the National Geographic wildlife filmmaker, a wildlife mashup machine. So much fun. Here is one my daughter made in two minutes.

And last but not least for audio sharing I decided to introduce blabberize. If you are familiar with the old program crazy talk, this is the web 2.0 version. Well, this one is the MOST fun. My kids at school love this site, it provides hours of great entertainment. Here is one for you:




Hope you enjoy these.

Tagging and organizing, fun with social bookmarking

“The addition of a few simple labels hardly seems so momentous, but the surprise here, as so often with the Web, is the surprise of simplicity. Tags are important mainly for what they leave out. By forgoing formal classification, tags enable a huge amount of user-produced organizational value, at vanishingly small cost.”

“This is what we're starting to see with del.icio.us, with Flickr, with systems that are allowing for and aggregating tags. The signal benefit of these systems is that they don't recreate the structured, hierarchical categorization so often forced onto us by our physical systems. Instead, we're dealing with a significant break -- by letting users tag URLs and then aggregating those tags, we're going to be able to build alternate organizational systems, systems that, like the Web itself, do a better job of letting individuals create value for one another, often without realizing it.”

These are quotes from Clay Shirkey, given in a series of speeches titled “"Folksonomies & Tags: The rise of user-developed classification." and published on his blog here.

I have been reading more of Clay Shirkey this week after hearing him interviewed this week on Learncentral. Shirkey, a professor in NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program, is famous for his most recent book "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations". His insights on social media and research about how our networks shape culture and vice-versa, is directly related to our look at social bookmarking.
Shirkey has fascinated me with this idea of organization of information without formal structure. Without this ability, imagine how complex our catergorization of the web would become. Delicious of course, allows the user to easily tag, organize and reorganize pages. Tags allow me to label sites, and later find them easily. In addition, tags group sites in to categories, and enable the entire Delicious community to create user aggregated categories. The social aspect of the process, in some ways the crowdsourcing of the categorization of the web, is a great side effect of a service I can really use easily. This whole process allows for following other users, and the ability to monitor trends, which is probably more important to other types of users. It also allows for updates to twitter, FaceBook, or other social media sites if I feel compelled to share, very useful for breaking news and information.

Digg and Stumble Upon work using a different principal, essentially a binary choice of like or dislike of a site. Again, this is a user driven process, and as users submit sites, other users can review, or just digg a site. As a user, you can choose categories, and digg and SU will organize sites and stories for you. The process is based on your inputs, and what other users push collectively. As a user, I find this less helpful, as it does not provide long term organization.

Overall, Delicious has been a great revelation for me, tagging sites makes things so much simpler over time. I look forward to participating in the organic organization of information through tagging.

The web 2.0 recipe, finding the right mix

We are now over a month in to this web 2.0 and social media class, and it has been packed with content and connections, new tools, exposure to great videos and articles, and a toe in the water of many new (to me) sites. I feel a bit like a dilettante chef walking in to a gourmet kitchen. The scale and volume of the content available is overwhelming, the palette of social media platforms and tools is vast, and my limited use of all of them can feel overwhelming. As others have pointed out, I would like to move towards a mastery of some tools, particularly where they relate to my daily challenges educating young learners. Extending the cooking analogy, right now I feel like I have been exposed to so much, but finding the mix that works well together will be an experiment, an organic process, and there is no recipe written yet.
I feel DI has pushed me to try new things, and exposed me to some awesome resources. The Wesch videos, and the Epic videos produced by Karl Fisch are thought provoking and challenging on many levels. The Wesch article that Lucy referenced challenged further as an educator and a parent. The variety of materials and activities have been challenging in a positive way. Establishing a blog is something I simply would not have done on my own, and as I move forward it has been an excellent way for me to sort out my thoughts about the myriad of resources I come across daily. Shelley referenced a nice graphic called information overload that is descriptive of my situation as an educator. This blog has helped me slow down and be thoughtful about what things are critical, and I hope to extend that after this experience. A tool like Wordle was a revelation, fun, effective, and simple, my favorite combination. The logo development process was a rich reminder of my weaknesses, and a helpful push towards trying new tools and not being satisfied with the first thing I find. The wiki editing was also a push I needed, and a super fun project that got my kids interested as well (BTW, each of my kids has now started there own blog on topics of interest after the wiki project, not at my request, but rather by seeing how easy it was for me to set it up. I guess they figure if the old man can do it, can't be too hard). Social bookmarking helped me bring together a lot of divergent resources. Experimenting with Delicious, Digg, and Stumble Upon helped and get a better feel for where these tools can be most effective with my own students.
I heard someone say recently that RSS is dead, well I am a happy Google Reader user, and I think these social bookmarking tools are the evolution of RSS for a new generation, and an evolution of the organization of information, as Clay Shirkey points out here in a great set of speeches turned in to an article. The additional exercises in explaining web 2.0 as we currently see it, and to someone who presumably does not understand it, and writing a job description, have been less helpful in focusing my understanding, but still challenging. Second life is worthy of entire blog post, but suffice it to say that I certainly have been educated on the potential value of this tool. Crowdsourcing is another topic I want to explore in more detail as it relates to the students I teach daily.
Where do I hope to go on the rest of this journey? What have we not done well? Big questions. Over the past week or so I participated in two elluminate sessions offered by classroom 2.0 and learncentral. I would love to learn to moderate using elluminate, and have some structured class or group collaboration sessions using this tool. On learncentral they have a series of sessions on how to moderate, but it costs $199, I feel like some of you probably know how to do this already, or that at the very least we could teach each other, that would be valuable to me. It also feels like a platform (again limited experience here) where we could make concrete some excellent collaborative ideas. I feel like the wealth of knowledge in the participants in this class is tremendous, and I would like to have more of a chance to learn from all of you. On thursday Clay Shirkey was interviewed as a part of a learncentral series, it was interesting to say the least, but the interactive aspects of the interview were dominated by the moderators, 45 minutes of a single questioner, versus only 15 allotted to participants.
I think Lucy has already pointed out the desire to focus in on educational applications of these tools, and she has done it far more eloquently than I could, I second that concept.
I really appreciate being able to have direct interaction with DI, and using a new and evolving tool like Buzz, and getting to follow his thoughts and reactions early was enriching. I love that he shared those early thoughts with us, pointing out problems and positives. I love being able to share in buzz right to the group, and I hope our Google group will become more active. I also appreciate the honesty of evaluating a faltering tool like wave, which I still have lingering hopes for, but is not fitting in our current progress.
Reading back through this it looks like my recipe is pretty full, in 4 weeks we have touched on a lot. I hope we can create a wonderful recipe together, one that is more refined, over the next ten weeks.

Wiki, where will you take us?

I have worked with wikimedia previously, but never actually made an edit to a wikipedia page. I had a snow day on Monday, so I took advantage of the morning and sat down with my kids and looked at the Asheville page. That led to looking at the page about our neighborhood. We had some fun editing, and adding some information. We researched and added information about a former Governor of North Carolina, Locke Craig, who happens to be buried in Riverside Cemetery very near our home. Then we walked up and took some pictures to add to the site. There are quite a few famous people resting eternally at Riverside, including Thomas Wolfe, whose gravestone is pictured above. My kids are eager to do some more wiki contributions.
Actually setting up my profile page was more challenging in terms of creative content. I am not fond of writing about myself, so I bailed and just used my career and education information. I think I used 10 editing functions, but wikimedia keeps things fairly simple. You can see my profile page here.

What we missed in the buzz...Google fiber

In my mind the bigger announcement from Google this week was Google fiber. I spent many an hour reading about and reacting to buzz, but I think in the long term, as it relates to new media, the fiber roll out is the bigger deal.
From the Google press announcement " Our goal is to experiment with new ways to help make Internet access better and faster for everyone. Here are some specific things that we have in mind:

* Next generation apps: We want to see what developers and users can do with ultra high-speeds, whether it's creating new bandwidth-intensive "killer apps" and services, or other uses we can't yet imagine.
* New deployment techniques: We'll test new ways to build fiber networks, and to help inform and support deployments elsewhere, we'll share key lessons learned with the world.
* Openness and choice: We'll operate an "open access" network, giving users the choice of multiple service providers. And consistent with our past advocacy, we'll manage our network in an open, non-discriminatory and transparent way."

Well, the reaction in my community was that every tweeter and social media "guru" rushed to the forefront to say "hey, Google, we'll take some of that" I am already a member of a Google group called "Asheville's Google Fiber Initiative", and a fan of said group on Facebook. A proposal is in the works, a video being planned, analysis of what other communities are doing is taking place via the Google group. The group includes politicians (city council and county commissioners), business folk (COC reps) activists, free lancers, educators, and I suppose a lot more labels could stick. Why are we all so eager to collaborate? Because we know how, and we know that infrastructure like this will allow a future of boundless collaborative opportunities afforded by web 2.0, 3.0 and beyond apps. Second life as a truly educationally functional web app gets way more realistic at 1 Gb per second.
Ironic that now that we have a chance for infrastructure, our true geographic community comes together, so we can build better and stronger virtual communities as a result.

So, where is the bad in all of this? the conspiracy theorists are folding up tin foil hats for all of us. What is Google up to, what are they after, there must be some evil motive here? Call me naive, and educate me please if I am wrong, but I really think this is just win-win for Google. By making it easier to do what we do online, they win. In a post modern business world is that wrong?

Welcome to Second Life

What I knew about Second Life prior to my experience this week was next to nothing. I had heard it discussed on NPR weekend edition, I had the sense that it was an immersive world with a complex set of graphics and 3D environments. In my mind I had lumped it with World of warcraft (which I hear about from my students constantly) and other immersive "games". I am not all that interested in immersive games, so I had never taken any time to pursue information about SL. I went in to this week with skepticism, I can barely keep afloat with my responsibilities in one life, how could I make time even to play at a second?
Well, this week I had an educational experience. I was introduced to Second Life's offbeat, dream like landscape. I encountered a programming environment which is multi-faceted, crammed full of features, almost overwhelming at first glance, but comfortably intuitive for the user. And, most importantly, I learned to fly.
DI's notecard and walk through on Friday evening was insightful and quite useful. The explanation of how SL creates "emotional investment" and "proximity" started to make things seem more reasonable as an approach to an educational environment. My questions: What can we do here that we cannot already do with a skype connection, video conferencing, and other simpler online tools? Well, after an initial experience the answer seems to be a lot. The "virtual" proximity is much different than virtual conference room, less structured, more comfortable, more capability for honest interaction. More authenticity, a word that seemed antithetical under my old mind set. Learning on a flying carpet at 200 meters was pretty cool. While I can see how some users approach the SL world as a game, I was quickly convinced it is not a gamers environment. As a matter of fact, I suspect gamers would be disappointed that there is no "quest" or "goal" other than interaction. Question 2, how do you overcome the skepticism of people like me that a virtual world just does not have the austere environment that an educational experience deserves. Answer, you likely cannot, but the skeptics are really not important if you can get results with a generation of users who are comfortable and most importantly, productive within the immersive world environment. I then realized that the best educational experience I ever had happened on a beach in Costa Rica, not a classroom in Asheville, Boone, or anywhere else.
There are still many hurdles to overcome. As Neil pointed out this is not a true web 2.0 environment. The program is so far out of reach for my current teaching environment that I can not even contemplate it relative to my reality. However, part of this program is understanding where these new media will take us, being prepared, and developing the tools to maximize these environments when the infrastructure is in place. Is this web 3.0? Maybe, it seems very possible.

A quick side note, if you have time to view this video about Alice, please do. Teaching students to program in an environment like Alice will better prepare them to appreciate the complexity of SL, and appreciate the value of the SL experience. Plus, they will get to make things fly!

Fun with words

Words hold the potential to impact many lives, change a course of events, or trigger a radical change. Words can give us hope, they can scare, encourage, console, entertain, and much more. Certainly in the modern age of digital collaboration, words are our most important connection.
Wordle is a web 2.0 application which allows the user to create fun and interesting word clouds. It really is easy to create a Wordle. You input a piece of text, or a list of words, click go and your text becomes a Wordle, a word cloud in which the most frequently used words are displayed in a larger font. You can then play around with the font styles, colors and layout until you have a finished Wordle.
In terms of my own teaching, I can see Wordles as great activity starters. It could be a tremendous vocabulary exercise, which allows pupils to discuss classification. In the computer lab it is an excellent way to help students craft a writing assignment, and combine it with a fun technology tool. With younger students it would be a fun way to craft a greeting card or a poster about themselves.

A major advantage of wordle is that you can use these word clouds anywhere, even in commercial publications. All wordles are under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. So don’t be amazed if you see one in your favorite blog, or maybe your favorite magazine.
There is no option to save an image file, but you can always create a screenshot. There are lots of options to play with, including fonts, colors, alignment, and some language filters. You can also save your Wordle into the public gallery. The FAQ is a good resource if you need to learn some extra tricks.

Which Browser?

There has been a significant amount of discussion in this class about the relative merits of different browsers, particularly firefox, safari, and chrome. In previous classes I had always used firefox, and really love some of the extensions and add-ons, but had grown tired of the update process and relative slow start up I was experiencing. When Chrome entered the scene I tried it out and quickly found myself using it often on my PC at school. I like the speed, and the minimal interface, and at school the add-ons and extensions were not as much of an issue. There is no question that firefox has the best and most extensive library of extensions and add-ons. But I continue to be drawn to chrome, and each time I am I hit a snag, particularly on the mac, relating to lacking an extension. I know they are coming, but they are not here yet. Anyway, here is article from Farhad Manjoo extolling the relative virtues of the browsers currently in play. I loved this statement: "I think Chrome is perfect for high-volume consumers of the Web—idiots like me who keep several browser windows open concurrently, each populated with dozens of tabs, and don't restart the browser for days and days on end. More casual Web users may find its unusual interface—and its lack of support for third-party interface add-ons like the Yahoo Toolbar—hard to get used to." I sometimes fall in to that class of idiots.
Any thoughts from classmates? Which browser are you using and why? Which one works best with the most useful web 2.0 apps?

Cognoscor Ergo Sum

Stephen Colbert had some interesting thoughts on some web 2.0 applications in the segment called "The Word" on Tuesday night. Click here to link to the video. Now his examples were a bit on the extreme, I cannot fathom the usefulness of blippy. However, the general theme was thought provoking, how much of social media is productive for society?

Three cheers for CMU, bringing the world productivity through fun!

The google tech talk in which Luis von Ahn outlines how he and his colleagues at Carnegie-Mellon are openly enticing gamers to do the laborious work of image labeling by creating a fun environment is nothing short of fascinating. I must say that the CMU computer science department is high on my list of the coolest programs in the US. I discovered Alice
a few years ago, a CMU creation, and have used it as a primer to programming for 5th grade students. Storytelling Alice is an improvement upon the original design. These are great “teaching games” that encourage creativity, create enthusiasm, and foster a desire to learn by having fun. von Ahn is extending this tradition of creative education and productivity through gaming from CMU. I must say, the 9 billion hours of solitaire is a real disappointing, but not so shocking number.

Games like Free Rice are big hits with elementary and middle school aged students, and just plain fun. My 3rd grader will play free rice for hours, just to make a high score, capitalizing on our human drive to do better than before. I also teach 8th graders who love the game, and have more altruistic goals. Many of my students have asked recently if they can play free rice for Haiti, so fun and altruism can work together. I can think of countless instances in my school where teachers have made kids "work for free" by making it into a game or reward. You would be surprised at the competition among kids to “earn” the right to clean computers at the end of the day.
Are things different with adults? I don’t think so, especially when you look at some of the classic crowdsourcing examples from wikipedia. Adults recognize where self interest and community interest intersect, and are happy to live in the middle of that Venn diagram. Business and corporate interests will undoubtedly try to overuse this basic human desire to improve things for the common good, and might turn people off at some point. However, I think that in the growing culture of “free is good” people understand that value is built by common interest and collaboration. The economy of cooperation can work to maximize the potential of the human mind and the human spirit.

Future of eReading might not be iPad, but Blio

I'll admit it, I geeked out over the Ipad. This supersized Ipod touch seems to have unbelievable potential in the classroom of the future. As inelegant as the name might be, the device itself is sleek, clean, and appealing. I read all the reviews from writers I trust saying their skepticism melted away when they held the new device.

But time brings about equanimity, and some further research. This interesting story from ESchoolNews sobered me right up. Yes, I still want a sleek tablet that can handle my day to day classroom tasks, but until the right one comes along I will be paying close attention to all my options.

The Pros And Cons Of A YouTube Democracy

Here is an NPR story about President Obama planning to start on Monday to answer questions submitted via YouTube as part of a project called Citizen Tube. The story points out that "YouTube democracy" isn't without its problems, there are always questions about UFOs and the price of marijauna mixed in with valuable questions about health care and the economy. Clay Johnson of the Sunlight Foundation talks about effect of integrating social media into the democratic process.
This is a really macro scale of what can happen in schools. Is it valuable?

Rest in Peace Howard Zinn

"There's no such thing as a whole story; every story is incomplete. My idea was the orthodox viewpoint has already been done a thousand times."
While not directly related to web 2.0, the death of Howard Zinn encourages me to reflect on the power of the collective voice of the common man. We can utilize and develop web 2.0 tools which can help us bypass the major media outlets that spoon feed the corporate dialogue.

Think Blogging is hard: Try being the Pope....

I really enjoyed this story on NPR this evening. The story is partially tongue in cheek, but somewhat serious about the potential use of blogging in spreading the gospel, so to speak.
I thought this was a useful quote for us new bloggers: "Putting a message out over the Internet is exactly the same thing as losing total control of your message. People take it up, they republish it, they make fun of it, they contextualize it. The simple message becomes incredibly complex because of all the ideas that are pulled out and linked to it. That means that the very thing that you wanted in your message was control and what you ended up with was the opposite of control."

The World Tech Podcast

Those of you who know me from last semester might remember my many references to PRI's the World, and The World Tech Podcast. The Tech podcast is hosted by Clark Boyd, and is a compilation of tech stories from the PRI's the World podcast and radio show. The podcast gives excellent insight in to how technology is impacting world events, and is being impacted by world events. I really appreciate the scope of this podcast, how they cover such a broad range of topics. In addition, they can take the time to cover these stories in amazing detail. You can find the website here. You can listen to the January 15th show with some great stories on the technology aspects of relief efforts in Haiti, and two interesting viewpoints on the Google-China situation.