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I’ve been following Spore since I saw the first demo at TED. I remember playing SimCity back in the day (on my Amiga 1000!), and SimEarth, and the other variants, and have really been looking forward to Spore.

It’s really a universe simulator, where players interact at various scales separated by orders of magnitude. The full game starts at the single cell stage, evolving up through multicellular life, eventually up to group and society, and finally planetary and galactic scales. What a great way to show interconnections between the various disciplines? Biochemistry through cellular biology through zoology through ecology through sociology through planetary biology and astrophysics. In a format that can be jumped into by anyone, including kids. Especially kids. What would happen if kids are able to develop a sense of these interactions and interdependencies at various scales?

I downloaded (and purchased) the full Spore Creature Creator – it’s the demo app to showcase some of the technology that will be in the final game. It lets you create creatures using a set of biological widgets, and the behaviour and charactistics of the creature are developed based on the properties of the components selected.

I put together a quick creature to see what the full demo would do, and it’s really pretty cool just how detailed the creature is. Based on the limbs and body size, the thing as a believable gate and stance. Based on the head, jaw, and body shape, it has a realistic voice – able to call and roar.

I’m REALLY looking forward to the full game.

I’ve been working on organizing a project I’ve called “Learning Communities” here at UCalgary. It’s still a bit amorphous, but that’s actually part of the plan. What I’m going to do is offer resources and support to any communities on campus so that they can effectively get together and share what they’re doing. I’ll facilitate meetings, find guest speakers, search for resources, organize presentations, or whatever else is needed for these communities to share the interesting things they’re doing (or want to be doing) on campus.

The project has been directly inspired by two existing projects that have been extremely successful. First, is Cole Camplese’s really amazing Community Hubs project at Penn State. The PSU ETS team has rolled out support for 13 communities that have been identified (so far) across the various PSU campuses. The communities share resources in both face-to-face sessions, and through the website created by ETS just for that community. Support and services are provided as needed. And, the activities culminate as sessions in the annual TLT Symposium conference at PSU. I haven’t been lucky enough to attend one of the Symposia, but from all accounts they sound like incredibly powerful events that solidify the physical and tangible sense of community, resulting in a highly effective professional development programme for PSU faculty and staff.

The other primary inspiration has been Jennifer Jones‘ work with Viral Professional Development at Bellingham Technical College. This is an equally inspiring project, where resources are provided and shared, and the professional development activities are really run by the faculty members themselves through a series of “play and learn” sessions. Instructors play with new tools, discuss pedagogy and techniques, and explore together in a safe environment before trying what they’ve learned in their own classes. By putting the faculty members themselves in the driver’s seats, Jen has been able to model and reinforce some amazingly powerful strategies – with a very strong pull from the grassroots levels of the institution.

So, how have these two radically different projects inspired what I’m trying to set up here at UCalgary? I really want to borrow heavily from the PSU model, where resources and support are offered to a wide variety of communities. I love that these communities are primarily face-to-face, and that the discussions are extended through websites provided by ETS. And the annual TLT Symposium is definitely something I’m going to try to get going here as well – taking the learning communities and providing them a showcase to gather and share not only with each other but with others who may be interested.

And, I want to take the grassroots and viral nature of Jen’s VPD work, and try to scale that across a fairly sizable campus. The most direct way I’m going to try this is by not predefining the communities. I’m going to handpick one or two just to get things going, but will work hard to make it easy for faculty members (and staff, and grad students, and possibly others) to identify, create, organize and join their own learning communities on any topic. And I’ll work hard to find resources to support all of these communities. Ideally, these communities will be about more than just technology – I’d love to see learning communities form around topics such as “large enrollment classes” and “storytelling” – with several technology-related topics also forming. I’m hoping to keep things extremely flexible, open, and organic, so there may be overlap between various communities (technologically and/or pedagogically).

Is it going to be successful? It’s way too early to tell. It could fly like a lead balloon. But, I think it’s important to try to put as much of an effort into providing effective professional development for our faculty as is possible, so it’s worth a shot.

I had a meeting with a prof last week about a very interesting project she wants to set up (to run the course as a series of blog posts resulting in a science magazine published by the students – I’ll write more on that later). During the discussion of the project, we got to talking about blogging in general and she mentioned that she had recently started a blog of her own.

Gwendolyn Blue started blogging less than a month ago at Home Grown Alberta, and already has some great posts up about sustainability and local food sourcing. 100 mile diet? In Calgary? Apparently, it IS possible (just a little more difficult due to the insane sprawl of this city…)

I’m looking forward to seeing what Gwen comes up with, and really excited to have discovered her blog!

I’m listening to the EdTechPosse podcast 4.3, and they’re talking a bit about “edupunk”. I fired a few comments into Twitter, but wanted to flesh them out a little more.

“Edupunk” is not about a bunch of middle-aged geeks reliving their youth. Back in the day, I was much too much of a dork to be a part of punk. I was never a punk as a kid. I’m not “reliving” anything. Edupunk is more than just reminiscing some form of adolescent anarchy. It’s not just trying to recapture lost youth. Although, if there is that angle for some people, more power to them.

“Edupunk” is not about the name. One could call it Super Happy Fun DIY Smiley People and it would be the same thing. The name has been more of a source of confusion than anything – but it has been valuable in that it did cause much conversation about the topic that wouldn’t likely have happened if it had been called Super Happy Fun DIY Smiley People. The *punk portion of the label was also important because it pushed conversation in the direction of tearing down walls and breaking down hegemony. That is important, and needs to be talked about. We need to be talking about these topics that make us uncomfortable.

“Edupunk” did not die a week after the initial discussion. It just went underground. The wordsmithers and people who were hung up on dissecting the “*Punk” portion of the name sucked the soul out of it, and, at least for myself, I’ve decided to just ignore all conversation on the topic and just do it. (says the guy listening to a podcast discussing edupunk, writing yet another blog post on edupunk…)

Anyway, here closes my last post on the topic. No more talking about it. Time to get back to work.

I’m not sure what to make of this. According to the Associated Press,

The Associated Press, following criticism from bloggers over an AP assertion of copyright, plans to meet this week with a bloggers’ group to help form guidelines under which AP news stories could be quoted online.

- Seth Sutel, AP

And they provide commercial (and even educational) licenses for purchase so people can legitimately use content published by the Associated Press.

But what of fair use? I’m honestly not sure what to make of this – can the AP demand a fee for a quote using as little as 5 words? Did I break the law by citing one sentence above? Did I need to pay $17.50 to pay for quoting one sentence of an article, while providing proper attribution? According to their site, anything resembling fair use is described as “piracy” – that can’t be right. They do offer a “free web post” version – as long as I am comfortable with only using the quote for a limited time, and will let the AP post their ads on my site. That’s not “free”. Here are the options they provide for “reuse”:

I picked up a Flip Ultra video camera this weekend, and one of the things I wanted to try was strapping it to my bike helmet to record my morning commute, just to see what it looked like. So, I dorked myself up a bit by attaching the Flip to my helmet via a handy dandy bungee cord, and recorded the morning ride. It’s a bit stomach-churning in spots, because of head motion swinging the camera all over the place, but it’s pretty close to being there…

I’m still trying to whip up a flash version of the video for proper embedding, but in the meantime, here’s a QuickTime version.

 

Update: there’s now a Flash Video version of the movie posted to Vimeo.com. I still haven’t been able to get Google Video to play nicely though…

All of the cool kids are playing with the shiny new fancy tag cloudifier over at Wordle. It is shiny. I think this is the best visualization of my del.icio.us tag cloud that I’ve seen. I think I might try to whip up a poster to slap on the office wall or something. I’ve got a vector-based PDF version just itching to rasterize onto some huge chunk of papyrus…

That’s like riding from Calgary to Vancouver and back. Or Calgary to Thunder Bay. Heck, I could have ridden from Calgary to San Francisco, with over 400km to spare. hmmm….

I’ve been riding my bike as primary transportation on my commute for a couple of years now (started really doing it again in 2006, after a few years of not riding very much). I ride just over 28km per day, every weekday, so have managed to rack up the kilometers pretty quickly. I had set a target for myself to ride 3,500km in 2008, trying to beat my 3,100km ridden in 2007. Looks like I’m on track to blow that away, and might hit 4,000km if I’m able to keep going. That’d be like riding from Calgary to Quebec City. Or to New York…

I’ve ridden through blizzards, monsoons, hail, lightning, and the regular traffic filled with aggressive and psychotic drivers.

But I wouldn’t give it up. I’m so much happier riding. The smells of spring. The sounds of the birds. That would all be missed if I was trapped in a bus or car. It’s just so much better to be riding. And, I’m in the best physical shape of my adult life – I’ve lost almost 30 pounds from my all-time fatass peak. Feeling great! Here’s hoping I can do another 2,000km in 2008

I’ve been deep in thought, planning a set of resources to support a community project, and have been struggling with how to best position these resources to best reflect a dynamic, engaged, face-to-face set of communities.

My initial reaction was that the communities need to exist first face-to-face, and that any online resources are supplementary and intended simply to continue and extend their conversations. The online resources are not the community. I think this part is pretty obvious.

My second reaction was that I should whip up a new site in Drupal to host the online portion of the communities – discussions, notes, questions, presentations, etc… I’ve even deployed the site and begun to craft it to reflect where I hope to help steer the communities.

But then, after thinking over Cole’s post, I started thinking that the right tack would be to just have the community members publish wherever they like (with a few suggestions offered) and pull their various bits back together in one central aggregation site to help them track the activities. It provides much more flexibility, and each community would be able to draw on any tools and resources they wished to use.

BUT.

After thinking some more, I realized that most people aren’t in the same headspace as the edtech geeks like myself. They don’t get eduglu. They don’t get distributed publishing. They don’t get aggregation. Or tagging, or rss, or rip-mix-burn. And, quite possibly, they shouldn’t have to. I take a fair number of things for granted in how I interact with various resources online. Most people don’t have the context to make sense of this, and forcing them to jump into the pool without first sticking their toes in is not productive – people will be overwhelmed, overstimulated, and alienated.

They’re in a place where they need some guidance. Not authoritarian mandates, but simple guidance. They need constraints and limits, because without them all they’ll see and hear is noise. They won’t be able to participate effectively in distributed conversations, because they will have difficulty even finding the various threads.

There are a few parameters in how a community can select resources, and I think these parameters also reflect the style of the community itself. Here’s a grossly oversimplified 5-minute diagram to help illustrate:

What we’re trying to do is hit the sweet spot, where a community resource has enough flexibility, support, control, and ease of use to enable a high quality online experience to help extend the community.

I’m now convinced that my initial draft at the centralized website resource “hub” for the community is the right approach. I’ll be providing means for the individuals within the community to basically do whatever they want to, to create their own groups (both formal and ad hoc), and to publish whatever they want within the resource. But – they won’t be required to use this website. If they want to move into a WikiSpace, or start up a WordPress blog, or any of a billion other options, they are free (and welcome) to do so. But by starting things in a more centralized and safe place, there is less risk of leaving people out in the cold by forcing them to move too quickly.

This is a response to Cole Camplese’s great post “Should it all be Miscellaneous” – which was, itself, a response to the Penn State Web Conference (which, in turn, sounds like it was a fantastic gathering of PSU folks).

Go read Cole’s post before reading any further. It’s worth it. I’ll wait.

Really. I’ll wait. Go read it. Seriously.

OK. You’re back. Took long enough. Great post, eh? Here are my thoughts in response:

• Content management is not the problem – overly prescribed, rigid, and enforced application of content management is. One-solution-fits-all “solutions” that are applied as universal hammers are the problem. If people are free to choose the right tool(s) for the job(s) – and are aware of available and relevant options, they should be free to choose whatever tools fit best. Sure, some options might have different levels of support, but that will help inform an individual’s decision – don’t need support? choose whatever you want. Need lots of support and training? Choose one of the institutionally supported options.
• Does the act of management interfere with the natural flow of content through a community? Does it interfere with the connections and links between people, concepts, and bits of content? Does cramming content into a predefined taxonomy and/or site structure affect the content, or the utility of it? Does a community (and its content/context/information) become subtly altered through the process of trying to manage it. Do we kill the community/content when we stuff it in a content management box?
• Efforts to “manage everything” have typically failed. Miserably. Remember learning object repositories? They started as a small-scale effort to organize some content, then ballooned into massive, interoperable, enterprise-scale metadata storehouse and indexing systems, complete with multiple specifications, namespaces, and taxonomies. Content (and people) fell by the wayside. Fail.
• Cole’s thoughts triggered images of Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control. DIY. Edupunk. Control isn’t necessarily bad – control helps keep focus and direction. Some level of control helps maintain group cohesion and productivity. But the locus of control must be the individual or workgroup, not the institution.
• I’ll take you up on the beer. It’s been far too long.

I’m in the early stages of planning what could turn into a pretty large scale community project on campus. My gut reaction was to craft a website using our CMS of choice. I wanted to keep it as organic as possible, letting people in the community do pretty much anything they want with it. But, now I’m seriously wondering if even that would be too constraining. I’m now thinking about just having individuals and groups set up blogs wherever they like (with several suggested services provided to help guide them) and let them publish whatever they want, however they want, wherever they want.

The downside of that approach is that it’s difficult for people to get a feel for the activities of the community at a glance, or for new people to get up to speed. It’s messy and noisy, but that’s one of the reasons the approach is attractive. Maybe I try rolling out some form of Eduglu service to pull the various bits back together in context, and track links and conversations? hmm…

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