The Ed Techie

iCasting as new digital literacy

 

<Now Broadcasting Live, Jose: http://flickr.com/photos/raveneye/2473034500/>

I was part of the broadcast strategy review at the OU, where we looked at what broadcast meant to us in the internet age. The OU has partly defined itself by its relationship to broadcast, and so it seemed like a good time to reexamine that. You won't be surprised to hear that my basic line was 'forget traditional broadcast and put it all online' (that was a step too far for most, but we made some progress).

Anyway, there is a Director of Multi-Platform Broadcasting post being advertised. We struggled over the title - the broadcast part is appropriate if one views it as working with the BBC, but less so if the role is to help educators become self-broadcasters. So, I think it's a bit of a compromise because what the title reflects is that this is a shifting landscape.

This relationship to broadcast is something I've been pondering recently. On Friday I happened to spend nearly all day in broad/narrowcasting activities. I didn't intentionally bunch all this activity into one day, and it's not typical, but it is telling. Here's what I did:

• Record a talking head piece for the launch of the OU's YouTube channel
• Record and synch the audio and upload a slidecast of a talk I gave last week
• Upload an educational video I had created to YouTube and add annotations
• Write two blogs posts
• Finish of a Camtasia video for a project

This was, of course, all done by myself, on my laptop, with no support and using (mainly) free software. This is far removed from any notion of 'broadcasting' we have, it's focused on individual activity - iCasting.

I was never much of a fan of the term 'digital literacies' - to me it seemed like an excuse to say people needed training and development in using new tools, rather than just encouraging them to use them, e.g. we needed to create courses on becoming digitally literate before we would let our students use them, and then we could tick a box saying this was covered, like basic numeracy. I still think encouraging people to play is the best approach, but my recent dabbling with making videos has made me appreciate that this may be approaching a digital literacy.

This is about more than technical or design skills, more significant is the mental shift to thinking of iCasting as the route for distributing ideas. We have so long been subject to the tyranny of paper, that to conceive of an output in any other form takes a real effort. In fact, we often mistake the production of a paper artefact for the actual output of a project. So my message to the incoming Director is this - help us become iCasters.

Future of content vid with annotations

Accusations of flogging dead horses may well be justified, but just in case you thought my Future of Content was some randomly assembled clips, the annotated version is now up on YouTube (again you have to click through to see the annotations).

So, I've now done the article, made a video of it, then added textual annotation to explain the video. Erm, full circle anyone? Still, you do now have a choice of medium.

The sweet spot in education

| View | Upload your own

Above is a slidecast of a talk I gave to a JISC Emerge conference recently entitled 'Finding the sweet spot between web 2 and education'. My basic argument is that new tools encourage this overlap between areas we used to keep distinct, for instance home and work,personal and professional, individual and institution. A lot of people see this as a 'bad thing', but I think it has enormous potential also. Why do I spend time blogging or in twitter? Because it is both fun and work, because it's social and professional. I wouldn't bother to spend as long in a discussion forum of educational technologists who only talked about ed tech. Yet, most of my twitter network are people associated with ed tech, and I spend a bit of time in there every day. Why? Because it helps me professionally (it's how I keep up to date, I can put out queries, I create a network of peers, etc), but also because it's social - we chat about football, films, etc  and share jokes, have chats, etc.

And that's just one example of the sweet spot - creating my edupunk video was, for me, another. I created it over a weekend, and it was kind of work, but mainly fun. It was partly for me, but also a gift to the community (whether they wanted it or not). This was much more motivating than doing something purely for its own sake, e.g. writing a report for a committee. I argue that making learning a gift economy is something we should foster.

The ideas are a bit ill-formed at the moment, but I think there's something in this, so want to explore it further.

The eduWomble manifesto

For those who have difficulties with the connotations of edupunk, straight of Wales we bring you - eduWomble! One of my twitter friends Griffithss4 tweeted yesterday that regarding their learning environment

"Current approach can be summarised (and will be referred to) as the #'Womble Strategy"

For those outside the UK, the Wombles was a children's television programme set on Wimbledon Common about creatures who lived underground and made their homes and stuff by recycling the rubbish humans left around. The green message was very ahead of its time, but it's the theme tune that offers itself up to us educational technologists as metaphor.

The main theme is represented in the lyrics by "Making good use of the things that we find/Things that the everyday folks leave behind." For the modern educational technologist this means using non-educational applications in educational settings. It also applies to content - as I argued in the YouTube annotations post, what commentary allows you to do is to take any resource and make it an educational one, and what digital content allows you to do is find and locate any resource. So an average photo becomes part of a digital storytelling class, a clip from a 50s TV series part of a commentary on changing architectural styles, a Sex Pistols track a theme tune for RSS, and so on. We're making good use of the things people leave behind.

A second theme is that of the loosely coupled nature of the educational technologist. Obviously this applies to our use of applications, but also our network. We all belong to different types of network (e.g. I sort of belong to networks such as 'The OU', 'The OU plus associated people', 'UK edubloggers', 'The Canadian/US eduglu affiliation', etc). These are bottom up, but still highly effective networks. Here the lyrics do the Clay Shirky by stating " Wombles are organized, work as a team."

Another theme is that of change management by stealth. Here the lyrics remind us that " People don't notice us, they never see/Under their noses a Womble may be." And furthermore that " We're so incredibly, utterly devious/Making the most of everything". This sounds like Injenuity in Viral Professional Development mode.

And just to reiterate the reuse, mashup agenda the lyrics end with " Pick up the pieces and make them into something new/Is what we do!". Surely written with Tony in mind?

Recently David Wiley asked if we should have something akin to a carbon footprint for education, which calculated how much you reused material. The status one should aspire to is eduWomble.

Here are the lyrics in full:

Underground, Overground, Wombling Free,
The Wombles of Wimbledon Common are we.
Making good use of the things that we find,
Things that the everyday folks leave behind.

Uncle Bulgaria,
He can remember the days when he wasn't behind The Times,
With his map of the World.
Pick up the papers and take them to Tobermory!

Wombles are organized, work as a team.
Wombles are tidy and Wombles are clean.
Underground, Overground, wombling free,
The Wombles of Wimbledon Common are we!

People don't notice us, they never see,
Under their noses a Womble may be.
We womble by night and we womble by day,
Looking for litter to trundle away.

We're so incredibly, utterly devious
Making the most of everything.
Even bottles and tins.
Pick up the pieces and make them into something new,
Is what we do!

I heart Wordle

Given my fondness for tag clouds, it's inevitable I would love Wordle - it generates word clouds from text you input. Nothing new there, but here's the catch - it's lovely. You can manipulate the text colour, orientation, layout, etc.

I'm not sure tag clouds always add value, but I think we could use them a lot more - for instance at the OU we do a lot of student surveys, often with a free form comment section for students to fill out. As a course team chair I would get back lots of data, plus all of the comments. Wading through these was difficult and time-consuming. A simple tag cloud of student comments would instantly highlight what the main issues were.

Apart from that, I think I am going to refuse to read any report that doesn't start with a nice tag cloud summary.

Here is one from a 30 page SocialLearn report I fed through Wordle. Doesn't tell you much, but is pretty:

LAMS 08 Animoto

Just playing with Animoto - here is a movie from the LAMS conference

The question around learning design

Intellectual powerhouses (and me) - Stephen Downes, James Dalziel, me, Grainne Conole

I’m at the LAMS European Conference in Cadiz, where we’re presenting some of the work from the OU Learning Design project. Grainne gave a keynote on Thursday morning, along with Stephen Downes. Simon and Andrew presented their work in the afternoon, and I got co-opted (read press-ganged) onto the panel at the close.

Stephen was talking about he made an Audacity recording of his presentation, and that constituted a learning object in his view, although it wouldn’t meet many of the strict definitions of one. Grainne was talking about our Cloudworks project (loosely based on the Flickr for learning design concept) and the importance of adding in the social factor to encourage educators to share. Listening to Stephen and Grainne talk one thing struck me – education often seems very bad at solving some of these problems. For instance, learning object repositories haven’t been a resounding success despite being such a plainly good idea. And yet Slideshare is very successful and could be thought of as a repository. So why did they succeed where many smart, dedicated people in education failed? Here are my suggestions:

1. Educators tend to see all possible problems and thus create an overly complex solution – e.g. masses of metadata fields to cover every possible element of reuse.
2. Educators don’t actually like sharing much when it comes to teaching, but Slideshare is like sharing research.
3. Many of the projects have definite deadlines, and project milestones, etc. These can get in the way of the flexible, lightweight development you need.
4. The learning object repositories were too content-centric and didn’t utilise the social motivation – people put stuff up on Slideshare partly for altruistic reasons, but also because they get ego boosts from people favouriting, or commenting on their presentations.

So the question this raised for me was ‘is there an equivalent change we can do for learning design that happened for learning objects?’. I’m hoping it’s Cloudworks, but it may yet be some smart start-up in San Francisco.

Photo story: In the conference bags the LAMS people gave away a lamb in a can. My bag was devoid of this item, and I tweeted to this effect (it could constitute my travel gift for my daughter). An international incident of bodyline proportions was thus avoided when one was donated to me.

When organisations commit reputation suicide

Fellow UK edu-blogger Doug Belshaw had the unusual experience of being censored last week. He had done a post back in May looking at various VLEs. In it he had compared them and made one provider, TALMOS, had come out unfavourably on some accounts.

Doug takes up the story:

The company whose VLE product I did’t rate very well threatened me (via my school) with legal proceedings. 

The upshot was that I felt it was in my best interests to remove the ‘offending’ paragraph so as to not cause difficulties within my school. I replaced it with one that, in my eyes, was more damaging to the VLE vendor: that they’d almost forced me to remove any criticism (however slight) by referring to ‘legal proceedings’ in their communication with my school

.
The point here is not whether Doug was right or not in his assessment, but that this is such a poor way to play the situation. When people talk about markets being conversations, they mean you talk to users and engage them in dialogue. A good response to Doug's post might have been something along the lines of "Sorry you didn't like it Doug, actually it does do what you want" or "We always welcome feedback, actually in the next update we're going to include that", or whatever. The aim is to engage the blogger (unless they're a nutter and are suggesting your software is made by sucking the souls out of children or something, but then no-one would listen to them anyway). It's a grown-up conversation we're having here, and threatening legal action is just not the way it's done. I'm always impressed when I blog about a piece of technology, good or bad, and get comments along the lines of the ones I've suggested, from the software company. It makes me well-disposed towards them, and likely to offer genuine feedback.

What the threat of legal action nearly always demonstrates is that those doing the threatening simply don't get it, they don't understand the nature of the online world and how you engage users, create mutually beneficial dialogue and generate good publicity. It's bad enough for any organisation to reveal this, but for a technology company it's reputation suicide. CEOs need to know when not to listen to lawyers.

Oh, and in case it's needed - these are my views not endorsed by any organisation I am associated with.

SocialLearn workshop

We had a very good user workshop on SocialLearn last week (Jo and Nigel have both blogged about it). That one was for OU folk, but Simon Buckingham-Shum has organised another one for non-OU people (apparently they do exist I've been told), on the 1st and 2nd July. Details are here if you're interested:

http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/socialearn/2008/06/20/sociallearn-workshop2/

(Apply there, not through me - I'll only lose it)

A couple of thoughts from the last one:

i) Organising successful workshops which have the right amount of interaction and information  giving is a definite skill. I don't have it, Simon does, so thankfully he's organising these.

ii) There was a very active backchannel in operation, to the point where I wondered if the presentations weren't becoming the backchannel and the twitter conversations the foreground. It didn't prevent very fruitful discussions in real social space though, and probably encouraged them (for instance I found out that Michelle was friends with Howard Rheingold through Twitter). But I'd like to foreground it more, so maybe have it displayed during the presentations. Mind you, Simon used Ning to this effect, and that was interesting to watch.

Technology as metaphor (or I'm on e-Literate)

I was really pleased to be asked to contribute an article to the edition of On The Horizon that Michael Feldstein is editing. As part of the procedure all the authors are writing a guest blog post on e-Literate. It feels kind of like getting the opening slot on the Parkinson show (US readers - substitute with Leno).

My piece is up now, called SocialLearn: Bridging the Gap Between Higher Education and Web 2 (surprise choice of topic, I know!). As well as talking about SocialLearn I wanted to make the argument that the technology we (individuals and institutions) use is a metaphor, or at least an artefact, for how we engage with the social issues. My argument then is that the conventional LMS is the wrong metaphor, not just the wrong technology, for engaging with some of the changes we are seeing that we might cluster under the web 2.0 banner. I am in the position of being able to quote myself, so I'll let M Weller sum it up:

I would suggest that the reason the centralised LMS is not the answer to the ‘web 2.0 problem’ for education is because in its software DNA it embodies the wrong metaphor. It seeks to realise the principles of hierarchy, control and centralisation – the traditional classroom made virtual. This approach won’t help educators understand the new challenges and opportunities they are now facing.