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I just wastedspent the evening training the Faces feature of Aperture 3. Wow. It can't put a name to a face automatically, but as you teach it, it's spooky how well it does finding photos of people. I've been sitting here giggling at all of the photos I'd forgotten of people I care about. Great stuff.

What amazes me is how few pixels it seems to need to be able to recognize a face. It's finding faces in group shots (of course), in crowds at hockey and football games (even if the shot is a wide angle photo with hundreds of people in it). It even finds faces in photographs pinned to the wall in the background of photos. Fun with recursion. It could also be a bit scary as a latent crowd identification system - but The Man has this stuff already...

The image of Cole above was found in this photograph of my laptop. Cole is only visible in a small iChat window. On an angle. Amazing.

it's consistently the most interesting, varied, relevant, and mind-opening conference. go. register. now. even better - there's still time to submit a proposal for a session.

I'm going. May in Vancouver? What could be better than that?

The Boy™ wanted to explore Second Life this evening, so we fired up the new SL2 beta client, and went to (virtual) Hawaii, before spending some quality time at the NASA education island. I'm a little scared at how easily he picks it up...

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a discussion board post for my "conceptualizing edtech" course, archived for posterity. It was written for an audience (fellow students in the course) that may not have much background in living online, so I settled for using terminology they may have seen before. It's also supposed to be a brief post, so I didn't go into anywhere near the depth I could/should have...

Three pressing challenges for learners in creating and using technology in an educational context.

1. control and ownership

If we learn what we do, then we can extend this philosophy to educational technology. Students are now able to "do" their own technical infrastructure, meaning they can be in control of _what_ they use, _how_ they use it, _why_, _where_, and _for whom_. This shift toward being able to manage a personal cyberinfrastructure sets up students to be able to function far more effectively on their own, without needing the constraints necessary for institutionally provided and supported infrastructure.

Campbell (2009) writes (( Campbell, G. 2009. Personal cyberinfrastructure. EDUCAUSE Review. 44(5). 58-59. Retrieved from http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Review/EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVolume44/APersonalCyberinfrastructure/178431 )) :

Templates and training wheels may be necessary for a while, but by the time students get to college, those aids all too regularly turn into hindrances. For students who have relied on these aids, the freedom to explore and create is the last thing on their minds, so deeply has it been discouraged. Many students simply want to know what their professors want and how to give that to them. But if what the professor truly wants is for students to discover and craft their own desires and dreams, a personal cyberinfrastructure provides the opportunity.

Jim Groom, from the University of Mary Washington, is teaching a course at the moment on digital storytelling. Much of the course involves working with students to set up _their own_ publishing spaces, and in working together to build their personal infrastructure. They manage their own web publishing platforms. They write and publish. They integrate and contextualize. These are skills that they will use after they graduate.

Students (and teachers) being able to manage their own technical infrastructure and publishing platforms means they will be able to control what they publish, how they publish it, and to retain it as a living archive of their professional scholarship. These things are difficult, if not impossible, strictly using institution-provided infrastructure such as Blackboard. This personal infrastructure becomes, as much as I cringe at the term and the acronym, a Personal Learning Environment. (see some example PLE diagrams, as collected by Scott Leslie)

2. overwhelming options

If we are using non-instutitionally-provided tools, the list of available options becomes potentially unmanageable. Which tool(s) should I use? For what purpose(s)? How do I use them? What do I do with them? What are the risks? The benefits? It is easy to become overwhelmed, which is why institutionally-provided solutions are so appealing.

But, by becoming an active member of the larger community, and engaging with people who are working on similar things (students in a class, faculty members in the same department, etc...) it is possible to take advantage of what the other people in your personal learning network are doing - to use similar tools and therefore to be able to support each other. To find resources of interest and share them with each other. The PLN is best described as part of the Connectivist theory (Siemens, 2005) (( Siemens, G. 2005. Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age, International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, Vol. 2 No. 1, Jan 2005. Retrieved from http://www.itdl.org/Journal/Jan_05/article01.htm )) .

3. literacy

And, finally, if we are managing our own infrastructure and engaged with a network of people working together, it is crucial that we understand the implications of what we are doing. Literacy is essential, due to the implications of privacy, copyright, and the nature of online discourse. Digital literacy is not a new concept. See, for example, Jones-Kavalier & Flannigan's (2006) (( Jones-Kavalier, B.R. & Flannigan, S.L. 2006. Connecting the Digital Dots: Literacy of the 21st Century. EDUCAUSE Quarterly. 29(2). Retrieved from http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/EDUCAUSEQuarterlyMagazineVolum/ConnectingtheDigitalDotsLitera/157395 )) description of the nature and importance of digital literacy. It is critical that we understand the nature of the media we are using, that we are aware of how they shape what we do, and that we are able to take advantage of the affordances they offer - as well as manage and mitigate the limitations.

4. Solution?

The only solution I can think of is to just dive in. To live with a whole bunch of technologies. To not see them as separate, distinct, or extra, but rather as just the way things work. Write a blog. Publish a newsletter. Manage a wiki. Shoot some video. Post photos. Just spend time doing it. Manage your own personal cyberinfrastructure. Build your personal learning environment. Engage your personal learning network(s). They are there already, you just need to tap into them.

Rereading Alan's post on his blog hiatus, where he takes a month off of posting on his blog to comment elsewhere, I was struck (as always) by the patterns in activity he described. I decided to take a closer peek at the activity on my own blog - I've been thinking a lot about discourse analysis lately, so it's at least partially non-navel-gazing.

Here's the graph for the first few years of life for my blog. It started out as a private, personal outboard brain, then kind of took off with a life of its own.

Interesting. This blog's heyday was 2005-2006. A lifetime ago, in intartube years. Then twitter happened in January 2007. It would be _really_ interesting to run some latent content analysis on both posts and comments, to see if they're different BT vs. AT. Are the activity patterns different? Is the content different? Linking patterns? etc... It'd be completely nonscientific, but fascinating nonetheless...

Sinclair, J & Coulthard, R.M. (1975). Towards an analysis of discourse: the English used by teachers and pupils. London, Oxford University Press.

The book describes research into student/pupil discourse - who controls the flow, what coded messages are being communicated, etc...

Four minimum criteria for producing a descriptive system as outlined in Sinclair (1973): (( Sinclair, J. (1973). A course in spoken English: Grammar. London. Oxford University Press, 1972. Linguistics in colleges of education. Dudley Educational Journal. 1(3). ))

1. The descriptive apparatus should be finite, or else one is not saying anything at all, and may be merely creating the illusion of classification.

2. The symbols or terms in the descriptive apparatus should be precisely relatable to their exponents in the data, or else it is not clear what one is saying.

3. The whole of the data should be describable; the descriptive system should be comprehensive. (have an "other" category)

4. There must be at least one impossible combination of symbols. (I don't get this...)

5 major dimensions along which situations could vary:

1. Number and grouping of participants
2. Control
3. Copresence
4. Intended audience
5. Purpose

Sociolinguistic aspect...

Latent patterning.

A model for discourse
- orientation
- organization
- fit
- play
- assembly

The Blackboard discussion board system is really quite amazing, in that it couldn't have been designed any worse. It is easily the most awkward, clumsy, and deliberately obtuse discussion board software I've ever used.

There aren’t many things in life that are more fun than using the Blackboard discussion board system. But if we find any, they’ll be dutifully documented here.

bite me.

- mr. grumpy pants

That's pretty scary. And the article sounds pretty accurate.

While there is a public perception that cyclists are usually the cause of accidents between cars and bikes, an analysis of Toronto police collision reports shows otherwise: The most common type of crash in this study involved a motorist entering an intersection and either failing to stop properly or proceeding before it was safe to do so. The second most common crash type involved a motorist overtaking unsafely. The third involved a motorist opening a door onto an oncoming cyclist. The study concluded that cyclists are the cause of less than 10 per cent of bike-car accidents in this study.

The available evidence suggests that collisions have far more to do with aggressive driving than aggressive cycling.

Also, the U of T has an article with an interview with Dr. Chris Cavacuiti, who is looking into cycling safety.

I was really excited that a TEDx event was being planned for Calgary. I was looking forward to TEDxYYC, and was planning to attend and help out in any way that I could. The website for the event went live today, so I went to register.

I got to the registration form. Except it's not a registration form. It's an application-to-register form. okaaaaaay... That's unusual...

I proceed to fill the form in.

First Name. check.
Last Name. check.
Company/Organization. (hmm... whatever.) check.
Job Title/Role. (ummm... why is this relevant? fine.) check.
Email address. check.
Address. (maybe they mail the pass?) check.
Phone. check.
Tell us about yourself. (maybe for a bio on the website? um... okay.) check.
List some of your lifetime achievements. (wait. what? To attend? Really? No. Not appropriate. Closetab.)

The demographic info, I get. The address, sure, for correspondence. The company and job title may even be okay, but questionable for just attending the event.

But Lifetime Achievements? What the fuck? That's not cool. That's an elitism filter. That's exclusionary. Even if they "allow" people with lesser lifetime achievements, it sets the tone for the event. It's about Awesome People™ being hand picked to hang out together and watch Even More Awesome People™ talk about Awesome Stuff™.

I told my wife about this, and she wondered why I was so upset. "Hey, you'd probably get in. What's the problem?" She may be right. I don't know. But there shouldn't be a worthiness filter to register to an event about making the world a better place.

Not interested. I'll stick to the TED Talks website, where I don't need to prove my worth to gain access.

trying to figure out how to describe various options to faculty members. this diagram's been flashing in my head for awhile now. it's rough, but it's a start.