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One of the use-cases for UCalgaryBlogs.ca is for a class to integrate external resources such as OpenLearn courses, or potentially anything that has an RSS feed, to be ingested into the class blogsite. Currently, there are 2 scenarios possible for doing this, each with their own specific benefits, but neither quite matching what I think would make for a more powerful way to contextualize these external resources within the activities of a course.

With the VERY sweet OpenLearn Republisher plugin, you can set up a set of Sources (courses on OpenLearn, etc…) to be pulled into an installation of WordPress Multiuser. The OpenLearn plugin creates a new blog for each Source, and sucks down all items in the provided RSS feed into that blog, and creates blog Posts for each item.

The benefit of this is a set of centralized blog sites for each course, which could be shared across multiple courses. But that’s also the big downside of this model - what if you want to contextualize the content differently for each course that’s using it? If you didn’t want to do that, why not just use the online OpenLearn hosted version of the course?

With FeedWordPress (or wp-o-matic) you can pull RSS feeds into a single course blogsite, and all items will be published as blog Posts within that site. Categories can be set up and inherited to help organize the imported content.

But, if the activity of the course takes place as blog Posts, it becomes mixed in with any content imported from the external resources. Conversation and content become merged.

Ideally, a course blogsite would use the Pages feature to manage “content” - the stuff the conversations refer to - and use the blog Posts for the activity and conversation of the course. As such, I think it would be more effective to have the content from external resources be ingested into a blogsite as Pages, created within the hierarchy of pages (select a parent page, and a full table of contents structure is generated as needed).

I’m not sure if that’s possible now with the available tools, but I think we’re getting REALLY close to a powerful open content contextualization platform - ingesting prepared resources for use within the spatial and temporal contexts of a course.

Ideally, the power and features of OpenLearn Republisher, with the ability to designate the “host” blog for the ingested content (or have it create new blogsites as needed), and to create Pages rather than Posts. It’s VERY close, and it’s got the potential to change how people interact with (open) content.

I’ve been reading Postman and Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity (more info), and I’m finding myself extremely drawn into it. It’s the kind of book that I may have read as an undergrad, but just wasn’t ready for. It’s the kind of book where you need to be ready to really engage with it before it makes sense. And it’s the kind of book that has me rethinking pretty much everything, and seeing new patterns everywhere. The book was written before I was born, and published only a few months before I was. But it feels so intrinsically relevant and important today - maybe moreso now than in 1969.

One of the chapters is describing inquiry, and what an honest adoption of inquiry would mean for curriculum, education, and society at large. What does it mean when curriculum isn’t predefined, and must be pulled from individuals and groups through the act of questioning, and the process of making sense? What does that look like?

Although much of it rings as important, even critical, to adopt in education, I think a full-scale adoption of inquiry would require more than just a tweak of the education system - it would require essentially nuking every concept of curriculum, and assessment, which would in turn require nuking large parts of entire educational institutions (and non-educational ones as well) and rebuilding from scratch. Sounds nice, but it’s just not practical.

Then, I turned the page and hit something I hadn’t seen before. A blank page, filled with handwritten sentences. At first I thought there was something wrong with the book. Postman and Weingartner had been talking about eliciting questions from the reader. And their implementation was to actually leave room inside the book for contributions from the reader. Not a blank page at the back of the book with “Notes:” stenciled on the top. Not a generic page for random scribbling. A blank page, with the specific purpose of eliciting responses from the reader: What questions would you ask if there was no curriculum? What is worth knowing?

It’s a simple technique, but shows a few things in action.

1. The simple act of honestly asking for contributions radically changes the nature of the experience. One is no longer simply “reading” the book - they are helping to write it.
2. Inquiry doesn’t need to be a Big Scary Thing - it can be as small and simple as asking a question, and allowing all responses. Note that the authors didn’t say “what topics are important?” or “what are the fundamental subjects that should be taught?” - they asked “what is worth knowing?” and that is a pretty simple yet powerful question, leading to further simple yet powerful questions in response.
3. Starting from a set of open-ended questions, one can start to define some paths for further inquiry pretty quickly. Inquiry isn’t chaos - it’s finding out what matters to the individual participants, and then searching for strategies to finding solutions and answers. It’s not the absence of content, or the absence of direction. It’s placing the focus of the activities of teaching and learning on the individual, and finding what their needs are, in various contexts.

And others have used similar strategies to draw people into conversations and presentations. I was able to help facilitate an inquiry-based session a few years ago with Brian and Alan, and it was one of the most powerful experiences I can remember. Stephen Downes has been doing this for years - I had the pleasure to see his new EduRSS (now gRSShopper) backchannel running at TLt this summer during his presentation.

Sure, some of the responses are silly when there are no restraints placed on contributions. But some responses are deep, thoughtful, relevant, engaging, engaged, and enriching. And the participants care about what is going on.

If inquiry is honest, and participants are working together to identify questions that they feel are valid - and then to answer them - that is a powerfully subversive activity that can change education from simple content dissemination into something that is so much more engaging and relevant. It changes education from being an industrial age “teaching factory” to an organic, adaptive, extensible process.

And I’m not using subversion in a negative sense. From Wikipedia:

Subversion refers to an attempt to overthrow structures of authority, including the state. It is an overturning or uprooting.

I’m working through Teaching as a Subversive Activity, by Neil Postman. I hadn’t read it before, and am seriously kicking myself for that. Some quick notes and quotes from the first couple of chapters. Keep in mind that this book was written in 1968, published in 1969, and reads as though it was crafted in 2008.

3 problems that require schools to remake themselves into training centers for subversion:

Communications Revolution or Media Change:

• “A lot of things have happened in this century, and most of them plug into walls.”
• “A change in an environment is rarely only additive or linear… What you have is a totally new environment requiring a whole new repertoire of survival strategies.”
• “When you plug something into a wall, someone is getting plugged into  you. Which means you need new patterns of defense, perception, understanding, evaluation. You need a new kind of education.”
• “As the number of messages increases, the amount of information carried decreases. We have more media to communicate fewer significant ideas.”

Change Revolution:

• “Change isn’t new - what’s new is the degree of change… Change changed.”
• “Change occurs so rapidly that each of us in the course of our lives has continuously to work out a set of values, beliefs, and patterns of behavior that are viable, or seem viable, to each of us personally. And just when we have identified a workable system, it turns out to be irrelevant because so much has changed while we were doing it.”
• “The trouble is that most teachers have the idea that they are in some other sort of business. Some believe, for example, that they are in the ‘information dissemination’ business.”
• “While (students) have to live with TV, film, the LP record, communication satellites, and the laser beam, their teachers are still talking as if the only medium on the scene is Gutenberg’s printing press.”
• “While (students) have to understand psychology and psychedelics, anthropology and anthropomorphism, birth control and biochemistry, their teachers are teaching ’subjects’ that mostly don’t exist anymore.”
• “While (students) need to find new roles for themselves as social, political, and religious organisms, their teachers are acting almost entirely as shills for corporate interests, shaping them up to be functionaries in one bureaucracy or another.”

Future Shock:

• “Future shock occurs when you are confronted by the fact that the world you were educated to believe in doesn’t exist.”
• “We just may not survive another generation of inadvertent entropy helpers.”

I’ll have lots more notes as I work through the book - not sure I’ll post everything here though, as I may just distill it down into more concise posts…

I’ll keep this rant short. I don’t know what the future of education is, or will be, but I do know that it’s not “web 2.0″ despite the hype.

Education is, always has been, and always will be, about the acts of teaching and learning. It is not, nor has it ever been, nor will it ever be, a form of technology. It is not a suite of distributed online tools, no matter how buzzword compliant they might be.

We need to move past this infatuation with technology, this desire for shiny things to change everything, and get back to basics. To storytelling. To valuing and respecting the work of all participants (students, teachers, and others). To working together to teach our children, and ourselves. To extending the activity outside of some industrialized classroom and into the community.

Sure, “web 2.0″ has a role in this - in providing tools to enable individual publishing and collaboration - but it is NOT the technology that is the future of education. It’s people. Without proper philosophies and pedagogies, all the shiny websites on the planet don’t add up to a hill of beans.

(donning asbestos underoos in preparation for ensuing deluge of fire and brimstone)

I had the chance to work on a presentation for the K12 Online 2007 conference. Alan, Brian and I started by thinking of doing an updated “Small Pieces” piece, and we wound up creating a 53 minute video presentation touching on 9 trends in successful online tools, and how they might be used effectively.

The trends are, in no real order:

1. embed
2. connect
3. socialize
4. collaborate
5. share
6. remix
7. filter
8. liberate
9. disrupt

Here’s the presentation, hosted in chunky Google Video transcoded format. There are links to higher (and lower) res versions on the K12 conference page for the presentation.

There’s a live “fireside chat” Elluminate session scheduled for Saturday, Oct. 20 at 1pm GMT (which is 7am here in Calgary - so much for my day to sleep in…)

I’m thinking of writing up a blog post describing the process we used, which worked out surprisingly well (except for my inability to properly normalize all of the audio - sorry!). Final Cut Pro was used to pull together audio, images, and video from 3 presenters, and spit out the final product. I learned a LOT about using FCP during the process, and think I could do it much quicker (and better) next time around…

I’ve been completely addicted to the Sharkrunners game hosted by The Discovery Channel. It’s a promotional/educational tool, aligned with their “Shark Week” sweeps week ratings booster. It uses real shark data to position 6 sharks off the southwest coast of California. You are given a boat (not quite a ship) and a few crew members. You have to plot your course to meet up with the sharks, and decide how to collect data. You get dollars for collecting good research data, which can be used to improve the boat, acquire better gear, or to hire new crew members.

It’s quite well done, with a few very minor nits. I’m just about to finish collecting full sets of data on all 6 sharks, and have gathered over $300,000 US in the process. I’ve been reinvesting every penny back into the research team, and now have an improved boat and almost all the gear I can buy.

It’s not a very challenging game, but it’s extremely compelling because it forces you to think about the geospatial data as well as trajectories, fuel consumption, state of crew fatigue, and strategies for collecting data to minimize risk. It awards you with various “accomplishments” - like collecting a full set of data for a shark, or increasing the skill level of a crew member. Some awards come with hefty cash prizes, too.

The game is also addictive because of the constant feedback you get. It runs in “real” time - it doesn’t pause when you log out. So, you set a series of waypoints for your research vessel to travel, then come back to check in on things. When a shark is in range (detected by sonar) you’ll get an email, or SMS message. I guarantee you’ll respond to those. Very cool way to keep people coming back in. There are also rewards for responding quickly. Pavlov’s dogs are slobbering all over the place.

This is an excellent game, and one that I’d definitely be using if I was teaching biology.

Sylvia mentioned this in an email discussion putting some ideas together for the Northern Voice Social Software for Learning Environments session we're wrangling, and I promptly forgot to check it out. Oops.

Anyway, she's coordinating an online seminar through SCoPE titled "Blogging to enhance learning experiences" - it's a moodle community with a fair amount of activity (and many familiar faces). It runs from February 12-25, so it's already under way.

Definitely worth checking out. I'll be mostly lurking, but will try to participate in the buildup to Northern Voice (our session is on the 24th)

To contribute to the discussion on SCoPE, you have to register in that instance of Moodle. After doing that, be sure to tweak your account's email subscription settings (to Digest mode) to prevent getting reams of email duplicating every forum post… 

I just checked the schedule, and I’m going to be part of a panel discussion titled “Social Software for Learning Environments“. The other panelists are Chris Lott, Sylvia Currie and Jon Beasley-Murray, with moderation by Brian Lamb.

It should be a blast. I’ve been following Chris and Jon’s (and of course Brian’s) blogs for a long time now (I’m sorry Sylvia - I don’t think I’ve seen your blog yet, although I’ve seen your tracks on many of the blogs I read). I’m not completely sure what I’ll talk about for my portion of the panel presentation, but I’ll likely share some experiences from weblogs.ucalgary.ca, our incredible success with the student teacher blogging/journal program, and the shared social software hosting environment I’m working on with BCIT for BCCampus.

Hopefully the session is spent mostly on discussion, rather than presentation. I’m sure we’ll all have a lot to talk about.

We’re also working on a cool session for Moose Camp (with Scott Leslie at the helm of that one) on mashups for non-geeks. That should be fun, too. (and I’ve still got a lot of homework to do before that session…)

Northern Voice (and Moose Camp, and anything else we can scrape together) should be another incredible experience this year. To top it off Cole is coming up from Penn State (maybe we’ll get to do an ETS Talk Podcast from Vancouver?), and Chris is flying in from the UK.

Good thing I’ve got a nice, long vacation planned shortly after I return from NV!

I've been following the activities of educators and ed-tech folks in Second Life. It seems like it could be a really compelling virtual environment to help enhance online learning, by providing a shared quasi-physical face to face venue for distributed groups that wouldn't otherwise have one.

The amount of effort and care being put into these virtual places is stunning. The architecture is impressive, and the potential to create your own regions is compelling. 

There are some amazing, interesting, and cool things being done in SL. For instance, the Space Museum, where you can walk around, climb on, fly over/through what appears to be every space craft ever created. Sit on top of the Space Shuttle, and see just how much taller the Apollo rocket is. And how much smaller SpaceShipOne is. Walk up to the Hubble Telescope and see an animated cutaway showing the lightpath through the instrument. View a simulated solar system, complete with orbiting planets.

Second Life - Flying around rockets: Taken while flying around the Space Museum in Second Life.

Second Life - Solar System Simulation: Taken in the Space Museum in Second Life.

What I don't understand is the faithful reproduction of the physical environment, warts and all, in the creation of other educational spaces. I don't want to pick on any organization or group, but I have seen two separate education-oriented SL places, and each has involved exact reproductions of lecture halls. Dozens of seats, aligned in rows. A stage with a podium. A large screen.

Second Life - NMC Classroom

It's an obvious first step, but in a simulated virtual environment, why would you willingly apply the same constraints as a real lecture hall? Why would you create a place where there is a concept of a "bad seat". Where your "view" of a presentation can be obstructed. Where the number of available seats is limited. It the case of the screenshot above, the audience is limited to 32 members, unless people are willing to "stand".

I'm not sure how Second Life would be applied in a real education setting, as compared with something like Croquet , which is more of a collaborative workspace environment (think Hypercard, rather than The Sims™). 

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