I did it. I managed to ride my bike 3000km (so far) in 2007. Last year, I rode about 1500km. I estimated I might ride 2000-2500km this year. But this morning, after dropping Evan off at school, I pulled the bike out and rode along the Bow River Pathway. I’ve now ridden over 3000km this year, and hope to do even more in 2008.

The year’s riding started while on Maui, when I rode about 60 miles down Haleakala - starting at over 10,000′ and descending to near sea level. As I rode through the year, it’s like a switch got thrown - I wasn’t making myself ride my bike to work, it was just how I got around. I didn’t have to give it much thought. And, because I was riding on my commute, I was making far more time for exercise than I could have otherwise (with a family at home that needs attention as well) - but because I have to spend time getting to and from work, it was really simple to just convert that into some great exercise. I wound up losing almost 20 pounds of flab without really trying, and without paying any attention to what I was eating.

The season’s almost over for the year (never thought I’d be thinking the season wasn’t officially over at the end of November!) and I know I’m going to miss it during the deep winter months. I’ll try to ride earlier in the season - maybe starting in March 2008? All I need is a pair of waterproof riding pants, and I’m good to ride through the spring rainy season…

Update: Added photos from my Flickr set from Northern Voice.

I’ve been meaning to make the time to put together some reflections on Northern Voice 2007 before the memories start to do that thing that memories do. Life intervened, and so here I am, almost a week afterward, trying to remember with as much clarity as I can muster, the defining moments of NV2007 (for me).

First, the openness and generosity of the Lamb/McPhee family continually blows me away. I had the pleasure of imposing on them while I was staying in Vancouver, and I truly felt (feel) like I’m a member of the family. As H. put it “You’re a Lamb boy, but you’re slow because you like the Stampeders.”

I spent much of Wednesday in a meeting hosted by the Donat Group, where participants in the Social Learning shared hosting project affiliated with BCCampus were planning the next steps. It was interesting, but I have to wonder if a shared hosting model is really necessary. The recurring theme from the leaders at Northern Voice is that decentralized, individually controlled personal publishing trumps institutional endeavors every time. I wonder what would happen if the energy was put into finding a way to make that happen, rather than hand-holding institutions. Maybe that’s a necessary first step to bring them into the era of social software, but it’s not the target destination. I hope I don’t get punted from the project for saying this, either…

Thursday was spent hanging out at Brian’s place, planning sessions for MooseCamp. Brian and I tossed some ideas around for our “Mashups for Non Programmers” session (lead by Scott, with Chris Lott, Brian and myself). Brian and I had an idea that would have been cool to show - how to display a social network visually, on the fly? I spent too much time chasing that idea down the rabbit hole, then brought myself back and settled for making a mashup circa 1997 - a Northern Voice Zeitgeist using iframes and meta refresh to show a control panel view of the conference at a glance. The zeitgeist displays the most recent posts tagged with “nv07″ via Technorati, a slideshow of NV07 images via Flickr, and a live java applet displaying the realtime IRC channel (the IRC channel has since been removed, because it’s rather quiet after the conference).

Friday - MooseCamp. After finding our way to UBC and locating the Forestry building, we meet up with our co-conspirators for the Mashups session. We’re up first thing, so we head to the room to set up. I go first, and spend some time showing Yahoo! Pipes. It pretty much embodies the “non-programmers” angle on how to do things. No code. No files to manage. Just point, click, fill in some blanks. It was working great, until I got to the third pipe to demo, when Pipes took an abrupt faceplant into the pavement. It must have hurt, because he didn’t get up again. Next! Scott recovered for me, and showed some great mashups he’s working on using non-Pipes applications. It went pretty well, until some of those apps started to fall over. [maybe this was a precurser of Moose Fever?] Brian then gave his vision for AggRSSive, which was compelling and entertaining (as he always is). Chris was last up to bat, but hit the ball the farthest with his in-the-trenches use of mashups (using Ning, etc…). Man, did I ever take the easy way out by focussing on Pipes. Doh. From the feedback I heard after the session, many of the attendees actually appreciated the fact that applications fell over on us, and that we were able to recover and keep moving. That’s one thing you just have to do when dealing with online apps (especially those hosted by third parties). This was a really fun session. I’m humbled by the energy and effort put forth by my compatriots.

Also at MooseCamp, I got to co-present a session with Jim Groom called “More than just a blog” - we were showing things you can do with “blog” applications that aren’t just cat diaries. This was a really fun session, especially the discussion at the end, when we devolved into WordPress vs. Drupal cutdowns. Good times.

Following that was the PhotoCamp session. It didn’t have the same groovy vibe that it had last year, where it was basically just a flowing 2-hour conversation. This year was a series of mini-presentations with questions thrown in. Still a great session, but not the mind blowing experience of last year.

Friday night - to the Lamb/McPhee homestead for a Ceviche eating festival. A whole bunch of edu-folk (and many non-edu-folk) hung out, ate, drank and were merry. I got to hang out with Jim Groom and Chris Lott for the first time (aside from our sessions that day). It’s really surprising just how genuine their blogs are, because it definitely felt like I already knew both of them. We ended up talking into the wee hours, coming back to the EduGlu concept several times over the evening (thanks to prodding from Jim). WHAT! IS! EDUGLUUUUUUU! - I just realized: I’m likely blending Thursday and Friday evenings. Jim, Scott and Chris came over after the Pre-Conference Gala and we had some great conversations (and beer). Similar pattern repeated on Friday evening. Blurr…

Saturday - Northern Voice (proper). Keynote by Anil Dash from SixApart. The dude works a Lessigian presentation pretty well. There were lots of cliches in the presentation, but some great lines, like “a date stamp is a social contract… that there will be more content to come”

Our “Social Software for Learning Environments” session went really well. Brian moderated, attempting to hold us to our scheduled presentation times. I rushed through showing a few sites we’ve set up here at UCalgary - various Drupal sites for online and blended learning communities. I was basically showing institutional approaches. Jon got up and showed the individual approaches he’s been using successfully in his classes, including an example where a student was critiquing a book and the author responded with a very well thought out and deep comment. That’s something that likely wouldn’t happen in an institutional solution (but I could be wrong). Sylvia showed the SCoPE online community, and talked about some of the back-end things they’re working on. Chris followed up with a demo of his work at UAF.

The Photography session of the more formal conference day ironically turned into the freeform discussion hangout that last year’s MooseCamp/PhotoCamp session was. Kris masterfully led a discussion that wandered around topics such as workflow, composition, camera gear, lighting, using flash and diffusers, etc… One of the best sessions of the conference. Except for when Scoble had to keep piping up because we weren’t talking about him enough. Jeez, Scoble. Isn’t it enough to sit in the front row, shoving your monopod in front of the projector, but you have to throw your 2 cents in on every. single. question?

I was trying to take a fair number of photographs during the conference, especially during the sessions I was involved with. I came out with about 70 photos worth keeping, and of those there are a few I’m actually pretty proud of. It’s also funny how my memory seems to work best when jogged by a photograph. I’ll forget about something almost completely, then after seeing a photo of a session, I’ll remember every detail.

Then there’s the dreaded Moose Fever. I wasn’t spared. I’m just shaking the last of it now (hopefully). We must find Patient Zero, and apply the Atomic Wedgie of Doom.

After last year’s conference, the conversations kept ringing around in my head for weeks afterward, helping me to shape my thinking and pound out some ideas for things to do this year. I’m feeling the same effect this year, but I’m hoping I can actually implement some of the ideas this time. It’s always surreal to see my blogroll come to life and operate in realtime. It’s so much more effective to be having these discussions over ceviche and beer…

Update: I forgot to mention a couple of important things. First, it was definitely obvious that Alan wasn’t there. Several people asked me where he was, and his energy was missed. Also, the Northern Voice session on wikis by Stewart Mader and John Willinsky was a good one. Stewart talked about how his book was authored in a wiki (ala Dan Gilmore), and John talked about how his education students are using wikis to collaborate on lesson plans, and how he’s created a very impressive workflow as part of his curriculum (roles are assigned, and some students contribute content while others contrubute community moderation and “making sense and linking” the content). Very cool stuff, that.

Last month, while on vacation at a lakeside cabin in BC, I received an email asking permission to use one of my photos on Flickr for a magazine cover. “uh, sure? it’s creative commons, so have at ‘er. Can I have a copy?”

I got my copy today. Is that ever cool. It’s for a petroleum industry magazine “The Negotiator” (sounds like a movie starring Clive Owen or the like), and lo and behold, right on the front cover, is my photograph:

It’s not the first time one of my photos has been used in something like that - I’ve got one in the GifTRAP game, and one in a book about colours and shapes, but it’s still pretty cool to see one of my photos on a magazine cover!

We just launched the new website for the Teaching & Learning Centre at The University of Calgary. It’s been a long time in the making, with heavy use of themes, custom CCK content types, events, signups, views, and a bunch of other Drupal modules and tricks. King worked his usual magic in putting together the CSS for our theme, which uses the same HTML templates as the official www.ucalgary.ca site.

The new site should make it much easier for us to keep content up to date. We’re also planning some potentially cool community features for down the road a bit, once the dust starts to settle after The Big Website Launch.

Also, it’s currently running on our aging PowerMac Quicksilver dual 1GHz G4 server, so is a bit slower than it should be. We’ll be moving it to a shiny new-ish XServe ASAP.

TLC Website in Drupal

I had the pleasure of attending a presentation/workshop by Craig E. Nelson this morning. The Teaching & Learning Centre hosted the event, which brought faculty members from the various sides of campus together to discuss critical thinking and implications on pedagogy.

It was a really interesting session, with Craig telling stories and modelling effective use of the strategies and activities he was talking about (and getting us to talk about). My takeaway points from the session:

1. there are no broken students, only broken pedagogies
2. successful students are the ones who can adapt to repair broken pedagogies for themselves (spontanously forming study groups, connections, etc…)
3. “shut up and allow for processing time” - give students a chance to move stuff from short-term to long-term memory. simple 2 minute pauses and asking questions may be enough to start this.
4. “bulemic learning” - binge/purge of stuff, leading to mental starvation
5. an educator’s job is to educate students, not sort/filter them. The goal is not to enforce the bell curve, it is to maximize grade inflation through effective teaching and learning.

I was there (primarily) to take photographs. I’ve been wanting to record the activities of the TLC for awhile now, and finally just started doing something about it. This was the first “real” event I’ve photographed, so I’m sure I was doing many things awkwardly. But, the end result is something I’m at least not disappointed in. I learned some things:

• for an indoor event, get a long, fast lens. the kit lens won’t cut it. I used the zoom lens from our old D30 on my XT body, with ISO cranked up to 1600. Even at that, the aperture was too small to get decent shots. Fast, long lens is required. Something like this one would do nicely.
• get a big CF card. Or two. Or three. I was using my 1GB card, so left it in JPEG/fine mode. It would have been better to be shooting in RAW so I could adjust white balance properly later. I was afraid of filling up the card too soon, so reverted to JPEG.
• plan shots ahead of time. I was able to get some of the “best” shots by picturing in my head where Craig would have to be standing/looking, and where I’d have to be, in order to take advantage of (or reduce the effect of) background items in the room. It didn’t always work out, but thinking ahead would help reduce background distractions like the overhead projector…
• try not to distract. I found I was being extremely self conscious of the shutter noise, afraid I was distracting the other participants, or affecting the audio being recorded for the session. I refused to use the flash, because I didn’t want the paparazzi effect. Work to find the happy medium between getting the shot and not being noticed.
• I overplanned. I brought in my monopod (which broke on the way in this morning. crap.) I brought 2 batteries. I brought the extra lens from the office’s D30, as well as my XT’s kit lens. I brought lens cleaning cloth and brush. I brought battery charger. I brought vertical grip. I ended up not using the monopod, nor the vertical grip. But they were there just in case.

I wound up taking almost a hundred photos. Many were unusable due to the slow lens producing blurry or excessively grainy images. The survivors are available in a Flickr album.

I hinted at this in a previous post, but it wasn't "official" yet so I didn't provide any details. It's now official. The University of Calgary just finished the official CMS selection process, including input from ~140 web folks on campus and 6 presentations on 6 different CMS options. I was asked to present on Drupal, drawing on what we've done on some projects, and how it might fit into a larger community and workflow on campus.

The technical committee recommended Drupal last week (followed by Joomla - the only 2 solutions recommended were open source!), and the CMS group (including our IT department) approved that recommendation this week. The Teaching & Learning Centre abstained from voting to avoid any appearance of pushing one solution over the others.

So, over the next few weeks, our IT department will be getting up to speed on hosting Drupal. I'll be working with them to transfer information about our experiences in the Teaching & Learning Centre, and they'll merge that with their enterprise plan.

The short term goal is to provide an easy and effective way for faculties and departments to manage their websites without needing geeks in-house. If they can view a web page and use MS Word, they have the skills to maintain a website with Drupal.

Since this is now an officially supported CMS on campus, our IT department will be setting up servers, providing tech support, and keeping the gears meshed. The TLC will likely be providing project-specific support, and perhaps more general pedagogical guidance (what to do with it, what not to do with it, how to use it to enhance blended learning, etc…)

The longer term goal is to take advantage of some of the more social/community-oriented features, and open it up to individuals on campus. No timeline on that part of the plan at the moment, though, but that has me more excited than migrating the quasi-static websites into a CMS.

There are even longer term (and much grander) plans being discussed, but I won't mention details except to say that this could be a very big thing, both on campus, and for Drupal.

We've also begun investigating how Drupal may play a part in the U of C's podcasting (and larger digital media sharing) strategies. Ideally, we'd have a combination of iTunesU, Blackboard and Drupal, each playing to their respective strengths.

I've ranted about the IT department before, but I have to give them full props now. They went the extra mile to support an open source solution, when commercial packages might have caused them less grief (but also provided less flexibility and control). Sometimes the good guys do come out ahead…

Our session this morning went really well. I think we were able to walk the line between force-feeding the participants with the relentless firehose of super-cool social software stuff, and having a fun interactive session that served as a solid starting point for people wanting to play with Web 2.0™ toys.

The session was completely full, with Harry quietly jamming to the groovy vibes of Sesame Street. It was pretty cool having Harry in the session, and he was good enough to let Keira participate.

I think that Brian and I got into a pretty decent flow, and wound up demonstrating some cool apps and concepts, with participants doing as much hands-on activity as possible (tagging, blogging, playing with Flickr and Flickrlilli, etc…) SocialLearning.ca was used as a concrete example of social software, a tagging and blogging platform, and as a "client" app for a 3rd party tool (receiving photos from Flickr).

It was a blast, as always, riding on Brian's coat tails. I've got to find a way to invite him to UCalgary, assuming Keira is forgiving enough to let Brian keep travelling…

Dave, Patty and I spent 2 (and a bit) glorious days in beautiful downtown Lethbridge for the ADETA Interface 2006 conference. It was my first time to Lethbridge (aside from a blur seen from a speeding car that didn’t leave the highway, back when I was a kid). We wound up spending some time exploring, hiking, and wandering around town (and the U of L campus).

The Interface conference was different than any other conference I’ve been to. It was much homier, with all of the attendees appearing to know each other already. This was my first Interface, so although I knew many of the names, I didn’t recognize many faces.

I’m not going to blog much about the conference - it’s a distance ed. conference, so I’ll assume it’s all available online somewhere. I did write a page of notes during one of the keynotes - not about the keynote, but to capture some of my thoughts about didacticism and risk aversion, using my “inside voice” rather that just blogging it out loud. I’ll filter and self censor, and if any of it survives, will make a future blog post about it.

I did take a whole bunch of photos of Lethbridge and the U of L campus. It’s a very beautiful place - with a deep gorge cut through the middle of the city by the Old Man River. The world’s longest and highest train trestle bridge dominates any view of the river. I’ll post a pano taken from the U of L, overlooking the entire valley - including, of course, the train bridge.

There are more photos in my Interface 2006 album.

We were able to record that Intro to Podcasting presentation I gave on Wednesday, and the video has been processed and compressed. The audio is a bit wonky because the microphones were fixed and all turned on - and I wasn’t wearing a lapel mic so I get hard to hear as I wander around the front of the room. Next time, I’ll wear a lapel mic, and warn everyone that all of the microphones are on all the time to avoid the paper rustling and desk drumming that got picked up.

Thanks to King for working his video compression ninja skillz on the rough VHS source. He pumped out a small (iPod) and larger (computer playable) version.

Intro to Podcasting

(more formats available here)

I’m sitting in the airport in Vancouver (and later on the plane coming home) and wanted to capture some of the thoughts I have about how the keynote went. I’m absolutely exhausted, so I’m not sure how coherent this is going to be, but it’s important to get this down before it’s glossed over and starts to fade away.

Some context - this was my first keynote as presenter (well, co-presenter), so I was a bit intimidated by that. I’ve been part of (and have given) presentations to very large groups, but never as Keynote Presenterâ„¢. Our ideas about what the keynote should be about all revolved around topics involving individual autonomy and control of content and learning, of ownership, and of thinking critically about the nature of relationships between students and teachers, as well as with institutions. Education vs. learning. Individual vs. institutional. Some potentially radical and non-traditional keynote topics, which would be completely unsuited to a conventional powerpoint chalk-and-talk presentation.

We had been joking about going into the keynote unprepared - I think mostly to mask nervousness about taking such a big risk with a “keynote” session. The three of us have been tossing around ideas and spit-balling what we’d like to do in the session for a couple of weeks - hoping to generate a level of discomfort and disorientation in the attendees - that this session belongs to them, not us. That learning belongs to the individual, not the institution. That they are in control of what they do, as are their students.

It was easily the scariest and highest “risk” sessions I’ve ever been involved in. We all knew going in that there was a real chance of some pretty dramatic “failure” if the people in the audience didn’t engage.

The first 20 minutes of the session were sheer torture (ironically, amplified by the fact that the microphones Just Didn’t Workâ„¢). We started by coming off the stage to emphasize that the session wasn’t “ours”. We all had wireless microphones, and were trying to wander, to solicit some form of involvement. We set up a web-based chat room to serve as a back channel, and left that on the Big Screen to help direct the session (I’ll come back to that later).

At first, every single attendee looked freaked out, uncomfortable, and wondering what the hell was going on. Why wasn’t there a powerpoint on the screen? Why are these jokers just wandering around? What’s going on? This is the lamest thing I’ve ever seen! What are they DOING? What a waste of time…

After the initial uncomfortableness wore off a little, people started to get into it. Certainly not everyone. The feeling of discomfort in the room was pretty tangible. I wound up subconsciously moving back closer to the stage to provide a semblance of a traditional keynote, I suppose trying to put people a bit at ease. Or, it might have been to put myself at ease.

This was by far the riskiest thing I’ve ever done professionally. I parachuted into Vancouver, and attempted to lead/herd 500(?) strangers into some form of guided anarchy. I was so far outside of my comfort zone it wasn’t even funny, fighting the urge to just bolt from the room. What the hell were we thinking?

And then it felt like it started to gel, at least for a portion of the audience. Some extremely interesting points were raised, and answered by responses from other attendees. We shifted to more of a Phil Donohue role, running with the microphones to people who wanted to speak up. Not everyone got engaged, but enough to drive the conversation forward.

For the last quarter of the session, we started to get some momentum. Questions and responses started to pile up, and I stopped hogging the microphone as much. If we’d had an extra 15 minutes, I think most people would have reached a level of comfort with what was going on so they would have gotten more out of the session. It didn’t hurt that everyone stayed seated for the iPod door prize draws.

The web chat back channel served an invaluable purpose. People were able to anonymously put “huh?”, or “what are they TALKING about?”, or “talk about GLU!” comments (etc…) up on the big screen, helping to guide the session. I think that open back channel helped to save the session, as it helped us get a better feel for what the Audience was going through. I’ll be keeping an archive of that chat transcript available to serve as reference later.

One thing I realized is that it is extremely hard to read an audience that size. A small group is easy to read. You can make eye contact. You can hear comments, rustling, shifting. You can see attention diverting. But in a room with several hundred people, it is hard to get a feel for what is going on. Even when someone was talking, it was quite hard to spot them in the sea of attendees.

So, what are the lessons learned from this?

• Open, anonymous back channels are insanely important to helping to keep a finger on the pulse of a Large Audience. The anonymity is important because people don’t have to worry about offending by saying something’s gone off the tracks, or is boring, or just by suggesting a topic without having to be put on the spot with a microphone shoved in their face. Having a working wireless network, and an audience with capable laptops, definitely helped here. But not everyone had a laptop. This works out something like “clickers” on steroids, and could be a useful strategy for other presentations, or in the classroom in general.
• The audience was too large for this kind of activity. Even half the size would have been better. This was approximately the same activity we’d run at both the Social Software Salon and Edublogger Hootenanny, but those events had participant counts around 12-ish and 50-ish, respectively. I hold those previous events as the best sessions I’ve ever been involved with, and am extremely proud of what we were able to do. That chemistry just didn’t happen during this keynote. Perhaps the audience-is-the-presentation model doesn’t scale to 300-500 people? More thought needed on this…
• Defining a narrower topic or series of topics is important. We’d set up the wiki page, but failed to fall back on it when the audience wasn’t engaging - we were perhaps overcommitted to drawing the audience out? Back to the Salon and Hootenanny - both had (comparatively) narrow topics well defined ahead of time. We’d tried to do that with the wiki page, but didn’t successfully fall back on it when things didn’t move forward fast enough.

In the final conclusion, I felt the session was both a success and a failure. I personally rated it at 5/10. Stephen gave it a 6/10. That’s not great. I’m not used to that. But, I think that it’s actually a good thing. I’d been staying inside my comfort zone way too long. It’s crucial to stretch out and try new things. Failure isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Worst case scenario, we modeled some risk-taking behaviour for the attendees, and survived the experience. Best case scenario, some of the attendees will have walked away with the seeds of some important new ideas waiting to germinate sometime in the future. No way to track that, though.

Am I going to be a little gun-shy about doing a session like this again? Probably. I’ll have to put some thought into how to ensure the session remains useful and interesting for everyone. It’s not acceptable to just push forward, knowing that half the audience is not with you (or, you’re not with them).

After the session, we schlepped our exhausted carcasses across the street to a hole-in-the-wall pub for debriefing. The discussion that Stephen, Brian and myself had there over a few brews was worth the trip and the risk all by itself. I’ve been needing that discussion for a long time, and am feeling a renewed sense of energy that I hope will last for a while. I think I will benefit a lot from learning about Stephen’s walkabout, as well as Brian’s thoughts and feedback. Thanks for that. You are both true friends, in every sense.

Update: Added podcast link to the audio recorded by Stephen.

I’ve been thinking about what some of the possible implications of this various “2.0″ stuff might be on Universities (or, I guess, on academic institutions in general). Likely nothing too earthshattering here, just some thoughts that were sparked over the weekend while thinking about the upcoming BCEdOnline fireside chat we’re planning.

Disclaimer: This blog entry is written by myself as an individual, not as a representative of the University of Calgary. I’m not advocating for anything here, just thinking out loud about what some of the implications might be if some trends continue for another 5/10/20 years.

If we assume that things like “web 2.0″ tools, and concepts like the “PLE” are going to mature and evolve, and that individuals will be able to effectively manage their own online identities and resources, that has some implications for a University.

If a person is able to manage their own information, outside of the IT-mandated technobubble, they have the ability to negate any monopolistic tendencies of an institution. That is to say, if a student (or faculty member) is able to manage their own online identity and published resources, without the need for direct intervention by an Institution, they will be able to operate outside the boundaries of any single University. Extrapolating this, a student who is able to have relationships with more than one University, and who manages their own PLE, will be able to select what kind of relationship they want to have with each University. Perhaps they take their first-year biology courses from University X, chemistry from University Y, physics from MIT, philosophy from Cambridge, etc… Perhaps a professor is able to teach students who have relationships with any number of institutions (and are located anywhere they’re technically able to access the professor and course materials). In which case, to which University do the student or professor “belong”? Does that even make sense any more?

If individuals are in control of their institutional relationships, what is the role of the institution? Previously, it was (at least partially) to provide services that were not available to individuals without institutional support. Things like email, network access, classrooms, registration systems, scheduling systems, access to researchers, and access to publications were all offered by the University to its faculty, students and staff. If individuals are able to access any of these services as effectively (or moreso) on their own, what is left for the University? Perhaps the primary role becomes as a research institution? It’s still hard for individuals to conduct hard research on their own (chemicals, infrastructure, safety and security, protocols, etc…). Maybe Universities will become hubs of research activities, with teaching and learning under the auspices of the individuals that choose to have a relationship with a University?

So, the Institution becomes a place for individuals to come together to conduct research, and perhaps to facilitate discourse. Teaching and learning activities are perhaps supported by the Institution, but managed by individuals in any number of locations. What happens to curriculum? Degrees? Tenure? How different is this from where we are now?

I’m sure Stephen (one, two, three, four, five, six, seven), David Wiley (eg.), and many others have put much more thought into this than I have.

Over the last few days, I’ve been privileged to be a part of some extremely interesting and engaging discussions about the nature of “blogging” in education. The Social Software Salon and Edublogger Hootenany sessions were incredible, unstructured, free-flowing, and unbelievably interesting. Essentially, there were no “presenters” and no “moderators” - both were completely open and lively discussions that I was lucky to be present for.

There were several recurring themes that emerged from these sessions, stated from multiple perspectives by several people with different backgrounds. Here’s my Colesâ„¢ Notesâ„¢ version of these sessions. It’s not unabridged, and if I’m missing (or misrepresenting) anything, I’m going to Trust In Blog that I’ll be corrected. I’m sure I’m forgetting large tracts of the conversations - they were recorded, and will be available as podcasts as soon as Jason and Brian have had time to edit and publish the audio. In the meantime, the wiki pages (linked above) for both sessions provide some background (thanks to Brian for setting those up).

Blogging is not a classroom/class activity

We talked about the current implementation of blogging in the context of a class. Someone mentioned that a student may have 5 different blogs - one for each class - and must post content to each blog in order to get “credit” for their work. And, at the end of the semester, the blogs are nuked from orbit. So, not only is a student’s work divided across several quasi-related locations, it is so closely tied to the Class that in ceases to exist after the Class is over.

But, what we’re hoping to approach is the mythical “lifelong learning” - if content is tied to a Class, that implies that Learning occurs only in that Class. And that learning starts from scratch in the next Class. And for the following cohort.

Learning can occur outside of the classroom

If we assume that Lifelong Learning is a fact of life, we likely have lives outside of the Classroom - even outside of the School. People learn, teach, share, publish, connect, etc. in all parts of their lives. The real value comes from being able to make the connections between the activities - by valuing “non-classroom” activities as much as Classroom ones. One example was about an individual that was extremely active in their community, but that activity wasn’t valued as part of their Education.

The learner is in control

The current model places the Teacher or the School at the centre. Blogs are provided as part of The Institution, tied to a Class. But - what happens when the semester is over? When a student graduates? Moves to a new school? If they don’t own their own online presence, their incentive to making it a meaningful part of their practice of teaching and learning becomes very small. If the learner is at the centre - and they own their own stuff - they are able to use their own content in all parts of their lives, at all times. Instead of having a “class blog,” why not have a class aggregator - pulling in the relevant feeds from the learners in a cohort? Learners publish to their own space (blog, Flickr, del.icio.us, digg.com, etc…) and tag content as being relevant to a course or topic - and have a “class aggregator” do the work of bringing the content together into one place.

By placing the learner at the centre, and assuring that they are in control of their own online presence - and taking advantage of that presence in various contexts (including within and between Classes) we can reinforce (or at least model) Lifelong Learning.

The Teacher/Professor/Instructor is not the boss

By extension, the current teacher-is-boss model isn’t valid. Everyone in a Class is a learner - including the one(s) being paid to be there. Cluetrain applies as much to education as to business. By taking advantage of the connections between all learners, and using the various pieces and types of content that they all publish, the role of the Teacher can shift from being a disseminator of information to a mentor/coach/guide.

It’s about more than blogging

It’s about the read/write web, not blogging. Take advantage of the stuff that learners are publishing in whatever modality they are using. If they have a blog, use that as part of their learning program. If they post photos to Flickr, use them. If they bookmark in del.icio.us, use those. Stories flagged in Digg? Comments on Slashdot? etc…

This stuff doesn’t need IT support

This was a radical idea - but obvious in hindsight. IT provides services that are difficult or impossible for individuals to access outside of The Institution. Email is the classic example. But, the read/write web is composed of tools that enable individuals to publish their own content. IT isn’t required for this to happen. How can The Institution better enable integration of the various bits of content that is being published by the individuals who are associated with it? What if IT and The Institution shifted its focus to that of aggregation rather than publishing?

I was able to put together a version of the presentation as an “enhanced podcast” using a borrowed copy of Garage Band ‘06. It worked very well for the task, with one glaring issue - apparently GB can’t handle audio longer than 65 minutes, so the last couple of minutes of the presentation audio is truncated. No big loss, as it’s mostly just wrapup (and there is an 11-minute section of awesome Q and A around the 30 minute mark - at the “Wiki Discussion” chapter).

Here’s the Enhanced Podcast version, as well as an interactive Flash version (maybe that will work well if your mp3 player is playing the full audio at the same time), a .pdf version, and a .zip of all slide images (but that loses the build effects used in the Flash version). Also, the source Keynote file is available.

The whole shooting match is released under a Creative Commons license (attribution, non-commercial, share-alike), so have at’er if you have the Mad Skillz to produce a better version (or make the audio suck less), or want to remix it into something else.

Brian’s asking for comments to help build a presentation tonight. I’m cutting it awfully close to the wire (the presentation starts in just over an hour) but hopefully another trackback will help…

What is most significant about the emergence of blogs and/or wikis?

The biggest thing about these self-publishing tools is that they’re self-publishing, natch. You don’t need to be a geek to be able to publish to the ‘net anymore - and this stuff has the potential to “fix” the web, which was supposed to be a dynamic network of linked content published by individuals, but got co-opted into a variation of the TV broadcast model, with users sitting in front of glowing screens receiving the content that The Man wants to feed them (picture a scene from Max Headroom or something). Instead, we can effectively publish our own content, with whatever authority we can muster. Individuals are just as able as companies (large and small) - as an example, this blog currently has a Google rank of 6, which is higher ranked than some companies. That would have been impossible without easy and effective self-publishing tools.

In your mind, what is most misunderstood (or little understood) about these tools?

That they make you interesting. They don’t. It’s just a tool to help publish content. Just because you have a blog, doesn’t mean anyone cares. On the flipside, however, if you are even remotely interesting (or at least not completely boring), I can guarantee that no matter how narrow your area of interest, there are others online searching out blogs about it…

Are blogs and wikis evolving into something else?

Blogs and wikis (and mashups, and other stuff) are all just baby steps. To what? I have no idea. I have a hunch that Gibson may have been onto something (for good or bad) with his concepts of pervasive online communities. These types of things become possible once the tools evolve a little.

What are the implications of these publishing tools on ideas, public opinion and free speech?

Well, I can answer this from personal (recent) experience. It’s really easy to say something stupid. And thanks to the wonders of RSS, people find out about it in a hurry. And it’s not undoable (there is no Delete key on the internet). It’s not a bad thing, just something to keep in mind before posting your innermost ramblings and stuff like that…

What are a few of your essential blog reads or wiki communities?

Abject Learning, of course Actually, I’m currently subscribed to 115 “edublogs” (loosely defined), most of which I consider essential reading. (OPML for these feeds) Won’t name names on who gets the coveted 5-Star rating in Blogbridge (yet)…

Anything else?

Just that his whole read/write web thing is pretty cool. I seriously doubt I’d be as effective at making connections between emerging concepts/projects/people as I am with access to the “blogosphere” (gack). Just relax, Neo. There is no blog.

David Wiley just wrote an excellent post about the “death” of learning objects. He’s right on the mark, emphasizing the learning part of the buzzword, while us geeks who were attempting to implement some of the early LO-based software got so woefully distracted by the object and reuse angles. He’s also much more articlate than I am, so give his article a read, then come back here. I’ll wait. Go ahead.

OK. You’ve read his post. Good, eh? Now, I just wanted to add some thoughts from the perspective of a “learning objects” software developer (I was rather involved with the development of CAREO, which has apparently been championed as one of the early Learning Object Management Systems).

I was as guilty as anyone, if not moreso. CAREO was intended to provide a central clearinghouse of these magically reusable bits of buzzword compliant digital goodness. I was sucked into the hype, along with an entire generation of implementors. We had an entire nationally funded project (EduSource) with the goal of working out the plumbing problems to get these wondrous Learning Objects flowing. As geeks, that’s all it was - a plumbing problem. All we had to do was hook a few things together, attach an input or thirteen, throw a switch, and revel in the magical incredibleness that would Just Happen Because We Built It.

And, of course, outside of carefully scripted demos, nothing really happened. EduSource sort of dissolved. CAREO continued to operate, sortof, but without any financial or institutional support. There are still some users of the system, but it’s basically running as a snapshot. A postcard from 2002.

Was CAREO a failure, then? I’d argue an emphatic “absolutely not, bucko!” because it served (and continues to serve) a crucial role. Before CAREO, there wasn’t a solid, concrete example that we could all point to and say “there’s learning objects!” We didn’t have a testbed, a sandbox, a lab. Through CAREO, and an entire generation of “learning object management” software, we learned a heck of a lot about the concept. We were right sometimes (metadata should be as transparent as possible, people to want to share stuff…) and we were wrong sometimes (the UI as a thin veneer over the database, overemphasis on metadata specifications and interoperability…). But we learned.

Also, I get the feeling that the Learning Objects Movement was just a few years ahead of itself. Now, social software is oozing out of the woodwork. Tagging and folksonomies are pushing metadata into every corner of the networks. Mashups via “Web 2.0″ web-application-API layers are amplifying and exposing network effects to connect and layer sources of information that were previously relegated into locked silos.

Personally, I learned a very valuable lesson that can best be distilled into Ward Cunningham’s description of the original wiki software:

The simplest online database that could possibly work.
- Ward Cunningham

I used to have a version of that written in big block letters across the top of my whiteboard.

It’s something that was essentially ignored by all of us Early Learning Object Implementors. We wound up with insanely complicated data schemas (have you ever looked at the full IMS/IEEE LOM?) and attempted to find elegant ways to store the XML directly in databases (before XML-in-databases was in vogue). We came up with these funky national networks of unique and distinct flavours of webservices, so we could share our overly complex data. We invented new, innovative and cool ways of connecting these systems.

But, we completely lost sight of the simple fact that the reuse that is important. and actually much more difficult, is the pedagogical use of content and not a futile pursuit of technical interoperability. I suggest that learning objects are not dead. Far from it. New ideas like implementations of the semantic web, and structured blogging, and social software for creating and sharing resources - they all combine to breathe new and fresh breath into the concept of the learning object. But, with the ability to place the emphasis on learning rather than object.

I’ve got a nagging feeling that the whole buzz over ePortfolios is following a familiar path. Which is why I’m choosing to ignore the buzz on that topic and play with some of my own ideas.

Whew. OK. That’s off my chest. Albatross released. Monkey off of back. Thanks to David for the cognitive nudge required.