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Jaymie Koroluk asked the twitterverse about the proper spelling of “eLearning”.

I responded back, a bit snarkily:

@jaymiek learning. There is no e.

It’s too much to describe in 140 characters. But I can’t stand the “e” in eLearning. (I can’t stand the “m” in mLearning, either.)

It’s just learning. The “e” is counter-productive. It forces people to focus on the technology. To see it as separate. As an isolated thing that must somehow be fit into the regular flow of teaching and learning.

Bullshit.

It’s all just learning. Technology can provide some pretty amazing affordances – the ability to handle larger scale open discussions, the ability to have every participant in a class to be content producers/consumers/collaborators, etc… Technology is important.

But it is not separate. Viewing it as a separate thing – eLearning/mLearning/whateverLearning – leaves it disjointed and fractured. A class has to shift gears to somehow begin dealing with the “technology section” of a lesson, before returning to the “real” learning. Focusing on “eLearning” pushes the incredible stuff that technology can do into some form of electronic/abstract ghetto.

My team at the Teaching & Learning Centre is often called in to various teaching programmes to provide a “technology session” – we do it grudgingly, knowing that the hour (or two) we’re given out of a week-long programme is likely the only real non-superficial integration of technology and discussion of pedagogy and implications. The “technology session” underscores the “e” in eLearning. The “e” as a separate thing that can be bolted on. A separate thing that is less important than the “real” learning that happens without the “e”.

I understand that “eLearning” is used as a shorthand, much like “Web 2.0″ is a shorthand for a constellation of properties and attributes rather than anything concrete. But, we need to stop treating technology as a separate thing, as something in addition to conventional teaching and learning.

Effective learning requires seamless application of appropriate technologies – or the lack thereof – and when this is done, the distinctions and segregation disappear. It’s just learning.

I just heard about TEDxYYC – an independently organized TED-like event to be held right here in Calgary. This should be awesome. I can’t wait.

I have no idea how many people will be able to make it. From poking around on the internets, it sounds like it might be held in the Karo warehouse, with room for ~100 folks. Possibly on Jan. 22, 2010.

If there’s anything I can do to help get TEDxYYC off the ground, count me in.

On UCalgaryBlogs, I’d modified the adminbar to include a link to the current site’s dashboard if a person was logged in, making it easy to get to the members-only side of WordPress without having to go through My Blogs and finding the right blog, then mousing over the pop-out “Dashboard” link. Most people never found that, and it’s not very intuitive.

So, I hacked in a hard-coded link to Dashboard in bp-core-adminbar.php. This worked, but meant I had to remember to re-hack the file after running a BuddyPress update. I forgot to do that right after I ran the last upgrade, and got emails from users asking WTF?

I decided to figure out the best way to add in the Dashboard link without hacking the actual plugin files. Turns out, it’s drop-dead simple. Yay, WordPress.

In your /wp-content/plugins/ directory, create a file called bp-custom.php (if it’s not there already), and drop this code into it:

<?php
  // custom functions for tweaking BuddyPress
  function custom_adminbar_dashboard_button() {
 	// adds a "Dashboard" link to the BuddyPress admin bar if a user is logged in.
 	if (is_user_logged_in()) {
 		echo '<li><a href="/wp-admin/">Dashboard</a></li>';
 	}
   }
  add_action('bp_adminbar_menus', 'custom_adminbar_dashboard_button', 1);
 ?>

When in place, your BuddyPress adminbar will look something like this:

Yes, I know I should do something to properly detect user levels and privileges, rather than just providing the Dashboard link all willie-nillie to anyone that’s logged in, but the link itself just provides access to whatever Dashboard features the user is allowed to see, so there’s no security risk. Better to just say that a user can see the Dashboard for any site they’re logged into, and let WordPress deal with restricting access properly.

I should also deal with the possibility of WPMU being configured as a subdirectory vs. subdomain (the /wp-admin/ link will bork if you’re using subdirectories – better to use the real code to sniff out the base url of the current site…)

If you haven’t watched Lessig’s fantastic, passionate keynote yet, watch it.

(link to the video, in case it gets stripped from the RSS)

It’s worth it, if for no other reason than to get your own Certificate of Entitlement, signed by Lawrence Lessig:

Scott Leslie posted a link to Charter for Compassion, and I can’t think of a better thing to support. Compassion is so painfully lacking in the world today. It needs to be universal. We are all connected.

This is something I struggle with as well. I need to try harder. A LOT harder. Compassion is essential. Compassion is active. I can’t imagine leaving my son a world that lacks real compassion.

However, this is not about religion. Religion has nothing to do with compassion. I am an athiest, and see compassion as essential – without being muddied by religious interpretation. Compassion is not righteousness, nor is it divine.

(link to video, in case it borks in RSS)

I’m taking a graduate level course on Technology & Society, and for my Big Term Assignment, I’ve decided to try something a little non-traditional. Taking a page out of Alan Levine’s great playbook, I’d like to ask people to respond to a simple question:

How do YOU connect online?

More info is available over on the project website – but the short version is that I need people to respond to the question, however they interpret it, in whatever format they’re comfortable responding. I will assemble the responses into a narrative which will be published on November 30, 2009.

Please spread the URL – I need as many different responses and perspectives as possible.

I was asked to share how I got that Bike Blur photo yesterday. It’s really simple, once you know a couple of tricks.

If you can read this, then the move to a new server at CanadianWebHosting.com is complete. They had to disable SSH on the existing servers because of an apparent hack attempt, so I asked to be moved to a server that had SSH available. They moved stuff over the weekend, and DNS took a bit to propagate. But relatively painless…

(sorry for the banal feed noise – I needed a post published on the new server so I could test DNS propagation – and if I post a bunch of these, I might catch up to The Reverend, now that he’s gone all Bob Villa…)

I just posed this question on Twitter, but thought I’d try posting it here as well, in case there are different people reading each stream…

How is the nature of connection between people online different from “traditional” offline connections? How, really, do they differ?

I’m hoping to tease out some real, perceived, and possibly false differences between internet connections and traditional connections between people, for a project as part of the Technology & Society course I’m taking. I’m not meaning TCP/IP connections, or ethernet, but how people are able to connect, interact, communicate, engage, etc… online as opposed to offline.

Any thoughts?

I finally got my invite to Google Wave, and it’s a bit of a mixed blessing. Google’s in a bit of a hard spot, because they have to live up to some insanely strong hype that was created by non-Google folks about how Google Wave Will Change The World! Google Wave Will Kill Blackboard/Windows/BinLaden/WorldHunger. Sure, there was some hype sparked by Google themselves, but most of the unrealistic stuff was spun by people dreaming about what Wave could possibly do, in some mythical Wave-enabled future.

Sure, Wave is big. It’s probably going to be useful. But for now, it’s really just a glorified, collaborative, polysynchronous “Hello World!” generator. Yes, you can embed Gadgets/Doodads/Whatnots. Yes, you can make it convert your text into Pirate Speak. Very cool. Awesome. I can feel the future changing.

So far, from my limited experimentation with it, it is too confusing to use as a conversation space. It’s too disconnected to use as a publishing medium. So, its real functions have yet to be discovered. It’s not email. It’s not the web as we know it. It’s something different. But that doesn’t mean there is anything necessarily wrong or broken about what we have now.

If I want to communicate, I’ll talk to people. Or IM. Or email. Or write a blog post. Or post a tweet. Or any of an uncountable list of other activities, none of which are replaced by Wave. And that’s OK. It’s not going to absorb and consume all online interaction. It’s not going to change the world. It doesn’t have to.

Now, get off my lawn.

Update: I hadn’t seen this post before I wrote this, but from Slate:

Live-typing illustrates Wave’s bigger problem: In many cases, the software creates new headaches by attempting to fix aspects of online communication that don’t need fixing. What is Wave? Its designers say that it’s an effort to modernize e-mail by adding features from IM, wikis, and other tools for collaborating in the Web age. Improving e-mail is a worthy goal: There’s too much of it, a lot of the mail we get is useless (even the stuff that’s not spam), and threads involving more than two or three people can get wildly, incomprehensibly out of hand.

But Wave tries to fix these problems by replacing e-mail with an entirely alien interface that isn’t very intuitive and that introduces new problems of its own. You pretty much have to watch one of the Wave team’s instructional videos in order to learn how to do the simplest things—send a message, reply to a message, add more people to your message, etc. You’ve even got to learn a new nomenclature: In Wave, messages are called waves, which are themselves composed of smaller elements called blips. There’s also another class of message called pings, which are meant to be more urgent than waves—though once you’re done with a ping, it turns into a wave. Got that?

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