• The Things He Carried - The Atlantic (November 2008)
  
  "Counter­terrorism in the airport is a show designed to make people feel better..."
• Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Why Universities Shouldn't Create
  
  "People often ask why not use materials under Creative Commons license and the problem is that the kinds of materials currently circulating under Creative Commons tends to be indie media, which is great, but in teaching media studies, I also have to deal with material by mainstream media and universities feel themselves vulnerable to the exagerated assertions of copy right by many corporate rights holders."

I hadn’t really looked in on the blogs today, but I did take a peek at Twitter, and I got the impression from some of my trusted network of experts that @psychemedia had gone and done something that had gotten them rather excited…

So, I head over and start following the steps in Tony Hirst’s blog, learning that someone can go from this list of statistics in Wikipedia:

…into this:

As Tony sums on it up: “we have scraped some data from a wikipedia page into a Google spreadsheet using the =importHTML formula, published a handful of rows from the table as CSV, consumed the CSV in a Yahoo pipe and created a geocoded KML feed from it, and then displayed it in a Yahoo map.” (It seems a lot less intimidating to the data illiterate when you read Tony’s full post.)

Or, to add my own feeble learning here on the sidelines:

• The tools for scraping, manipulating and re-presenting data keep getting easier to use (hell, even I more or less understand the steps Tony lays out here), and you really can do a great deal with free, web-based tools without writing code.

• More and more, I’m starting to think that in addition to being a model for massive scale knowledge building, and an indispensable reference source, that one of Wikipedia’s key contributions to the web will prove to be providing raw material for a range of data mashups such as this one.

• This is what data literacy looks like. To extend the analogy, I’m a first grader right now — I can make out the letters, and sound out the simple words… but the ability to confidently read and write in this form still seems like a form of magic.

Finally, I wasn’t the first to shout it from the rooftops, but let me be the latest: ALL HAIL TONY HIRST!

As it has for generations, Open Access Day at my house will involve insane travel stresses, endless hours of cooking and dishwashing, dangerously excessive alcohol consumption, the therapeutic airing of familial tensions, grievances and debates on the Creative Commons NC clause in shrieking tones, and falling asleep in front of the television watching an uncompetitive big league sporting match...

Thankfully, more mature people are organizing more wholesome fare at public locations, with a series of local events and multicast video extravaganzas.

Kudos to the UBC Library for hosting a series of free talks right upstairs from my office, in the Dodson Room in the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre. Here are some of the amazing local initiatives we will be featuring:

11am - 12:20pm
Introduction to Open Access & cIRcle: UBC's Information Repository
Joy Kirchner and Hilde Colenbrander (UBC Library)

1 pm - 1:40 pm
Using Wikipedia in the Classroom: an OA medium for research and student work
Dr. Jon Beasly-Murray (Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies, UBC)

2 pm - 2:40 pm
The Public Knowledge Project: providing open source software for OA publishing
Brian Owen (SFU Library)

3 pm - 3:40 pm
Open Medicine: a peer-reviewed, independent, open-access general medical journal
*Dr. Anita Palepu (Internal Medicine, UBC)

4 pm - 5 pm
OA Day Worldwide Webcast: Taxpayer Access to Publicly Funded Research
Keynote address: Sir Richard Roberts, Ph.D., F.R.S

Come one, come all, no registration is required. I'll be dropping in later this afternoon, once I clean up all the broken glass and furniture from our own Open Access Day party, and finish sleeping off this turkey hangover...

• Searching for Robert Johnson
  
  "That's not B. B. King, Schein said to himself. Because it's Robert Johnson."

PorcuJim, originally uploaded by Serenae.

So, we have very quietly been running some WordPress blogs for the past month or so. I say "quietly" because we are treating this is as something of testing phase. Not so much testing the software (which has mostly run well, with a few hiccups on the custom hacked stuff), as testing how it works for a set of exemplar cases and monitoring the associated support needs. Hopefully I will be able to share the stuff that's been happening in the not-too-distant future, as some of it is quite exciting.

There has been one technical issue that has bedeviled us. Even though we are running the system on a top-end hosting platform, and the usage levels are relatively light, some users report periodic stalling and hang-ups when posting or even commenting. The problem is particularly acute with the admin and management interfaces. The strange part is that reported slowdowns are not reflected in any anomalies with the server or activity logs. It seems worse for users off-campus, and perhaps worse for users on wireless networks.

I thought I had identified a major cause while traveling a couple weeks back. The management interface in Firefox was stalled, so I tried it in Safari where it worked like a charm. Firefox was still non-responsive, so I tried it again there with Greasemonkey turned off, which proved to be my problem. When Greasemonkey was on, the interface hung up, when off it was fine.

I thought this was THE breakthrough, but most of our users reporting problems claim they are not Greasemonkey (or even Firefox) users, or of other similar extensions such as Firebug.

It seems clear that there is some issue related to javascript, and network latencies. (Do I sound impressively techie with that last sentence? I hope so, as I am mindlessly parroting what smart people are telling me.) I am hopeful that someone else out there has dealt with similar problems... Are there things we can advise or ask people who complain about sluggish performance? Are there any plugins that might be causing the problem? (We have actually been fairly minimalist in our use of plugins precisely due to potential issues like this.) Is there anything we can do to address this problem in our management of the system?

I do hope to get this cleared up, as overall the early returns suggest that the platform is a winner.

An excerpt from Neil Postman's 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death:

...information derives its importance from the possibilities of action. Of course, in any communication environment, input (what one is informed about) always exceeds output (the possibilities of action based on information). But the situation created by telegraphy, and then exacerbated by later technologies, made the relationship between information and action both abstract and remote. For the first time in human history, people were faced with the problem of information glut, which means that simultaneously they were faced with the problem of diminished social and political potency.

You may get a sense of what this means by asking yourself a series of questions: What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha'is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them. You may, of course, cast a ballot for someone who claims to have some plans, as well as the power to act. But this you can do only once every two to four years by giving one hour of your time, hardly a satisfying means of expressing the broad range of opinions you hold.

As with most of Postman's withering critiques of communication technology, I find this assertion to be a bit harsh, but not unfounded. We might use the web to find ways to reduce our own carbon footprint, for example, and there are some early (though hardly decisive) indications that a more engaged form of citizenry might yet emerge online. But while I do have amazing access to instantaneous information at my fingertips, at almost any time and almost any place... it's hard for me to argue that this in itself makes me any more effective or influential in terms of making the world a better place.

The peculiar myopia that can affect those of us immersed in the exciting world emerging technologies was brought home to me reading this account by Alfred Hermida of Robert Scoble's keynote at the Online News Association conference.

The talk turns out to be a tour of Web 2.0 communication tools and how they are changing the nature of how we interact with information.

Scoble moves on to talk about Twitter, demonstrating the power of micro-blogging. He cites how he found out about the China earthquake through TwitterVision before it was reported.

To which I can only reply, what possible good can come of Robert Scoble knowing about an earthquake before it is reported? (Which in today's environment must have been a span of what... five minutes?) Did he mobilize a Web 2.0 rescue team? Were global waves of emergency response funds raised via Twitter before the mainstream media itself got around to reporting the story?

I'm not suggesting that networked media can't have a constructive role to play in these situations. Wikipedia comes to mind as a resource that has demonstrated an astonishing capability to rapidly synthesize information (that has proven useful) in response to events like these. But again, how often does sheer speed improve my capacity to act? Especially within the context of a Twitter hivemind that is always chasing the newest, buzziest story? (I don't see too many follow-ups on the current state of Chinese earthquake victims in my Twitter feed lately.)

Another object demonstration of the limits and peculiar hubris of the Web 2.0 crowd came through my newsreader late last week, when the tech news site Mashable noted that "Robert Scoble asked the tech blogosphere's 'thought leaders' to weigh in on this issue of the economy (and included Mashable amongst those he invoked)" and not surprisingly "all but declared defeat in his search for expert opinion."

The post in which Scoble acknowledges the sheer stupidity of his exercise is itself a must-read:

In the past 18 hours I've read literally thousands of posts and have done almost nothing but hang out on FriendFeed. I've seen a LOT of idiocy. And these are supposedly from the smarter, more educated people around. People who I've had a beer or two with and who I count as friends and fellow Americans.

...The downside of this new media world is that you'll hear a lot of opinions. Which one is right? I'm not always right. In fact, I'm often wrong. But I've counted on YOU, the audience, to help me correct that when I'm off in the deep end. Now, though, I've seen so much idiocy that I'm not even sure of my audience anymore. That's how deep our loss of confidence in each other has come.

As an aside, I've seen Scoble post these sorts of penitent reflections on the hype-soaked discourse of his practice before, and it never seems to change how he does his work.

Why is Scoble surprised that techbloggers aren't the best people to ask about a complex global financial crisis? Did he think to canvass the photobloggers? Why not the dentist bloggers? (There must be a dental blogger scene by now, right?) Scoble might be a guy to read when it comes to understanding modern communication technology (then again, maybe not), but to me the real power of self-publishing is that I now have the opportunity to learn the thoughts of Nouriel Roubini directly - without having to go through Tom Brokaw (or Robert Scoble) to do so.

Being an "expert" on new media does not in itself make anyone qualified to comment on what's going down. Do we automatically assume the operator of a printing press knows all the ins and outs of literary theory? That doesn't mean we as citizens don't have a right (or an obligation) to learn what we can, and the power to express ourselves in a wonderful thing -- but surely demonstrable expertise should count for something?

Banksy, originally uploaded by Pete Ashton.

This blog is rapidly approaching a state of hibernation. I have not even pointed toward the contribution that Jim Groom (with major assists from Tom Woodward and Serena Epstein, and a minor one from me) made to the Open Education Conference in Logan, Utah a little over a week ago.

The concepts that we were trying to communicate will be a familiar ones to readers of this blog: the maturation of user-owned open source publishing tools; the increasing capacity for these tools to support fast, easy and (if need be) dynamic and embedded reuse of content; the absolute need for syndication in our toolsets; and finally an attempt to frame the thinking of these tools against a backdrop of simple economics.

We also wanted to share the materials not just as a set of visuals accompanying a talk, but as a resource that itself modeled what we were trying to communicate. Given the apocalyptic tenor of the times, the aesthetic sensibilities involved, and the riotous late-night planning phone calls, perhaps it was inevitable that Radical Reuse would result.

I'm not sure how the RR site comes across to readers - my observation is that most people don't get it at first glance - but it is something I am very proud to be associated with (though again, I have to stress that Jim ended up doing the vast majority of the work, and deserves an equivalent share of the credit). There are links to a vast array of WordPress plugins, MediaWiki extensions, and real-world examples that might provide a good starting point for establishing a learning environment that is inexpensive to run, friendly to users, supports open source code and open educational resource sharing, and incidentally presents an argument for economic and cultural imperatives along the way (albeit in some unconventional and downright silly ways)...

Yes, it was an absolute hoot to do from start to finish. I can't express what I kick I got out of the videos that Jim, Tom and Serena have put together: the Mad Max meets liberal arts revolutionary intro; the fishing with feeds episode (which has cracked up every person I've shown it to, even those with no idea what RSS is); the reprise of Non-Programmistan (another Groom/Woodward masterwork); and the most recent hybrid of the Matrix and First Blood. These guys might be my favorite comedy team going these days.

There is some raw video of me talking this stuff during a poster session at the conference (the sound gets better about a minute or so in.) Mike Caulfield does an excellent job of framing the moment in the broader discussion that was happening at the conference... capturing why, even with all these fantastic tools at hand it still can be so useful to get together in person.

One aside, to be followed up in a future post... in the video clip linked above I'm talking about the happy accidental discovery of just how well blog-based learning environments and approaches translate to mobile devices, in this case with no additional development or cost whatsoever. (Can your LMS say the same thing?)

Another aside... I mentioned that on first glance people didn't usually get our presentation concept. They'd ask what was up with the camouflage and the survivalist language. I'd do my best to put on a deadpan face and reply with "well, we are exploring how education technology might continue in a world that follows economic and societal collapse." Suffice it to say, this response did not go over well with anyone. I concede it might be in questionable taste to make light of some real financial (and social, and environmental, and military) pain that is coming down right now. But though the rhetoric is light-hearted, the message is serious. I was (am) a bit surprised that considerations of social conditions that affect everyone are seemingly off-limits at educational conferences. Even if we consider these issues strictly from our own selfish perspectives, it seems clear that what we are reading about in the business pages is bound to cycle down on all of us. Even "best case" scenarios would suggest that budget cuts and job losses at our institutions and in our departments are likely. How we are prepared to deal with scarcity in the near future is not a pleasant thing to consider, but it strikes me as pertinent, and urgent. But that, again, will need another post for a more detailed consideration.

Border Crossings Slide39, originally uploaded by bgblogging.

It's a real thrill to have Barbara Ganley here in Vancouver this week. I've long been blown away by her ability to go deeper when the the rest of us get caught up in going faster. And how richly she has conceptualized and articulated the potential for learning that can happen out on the open web -- perhaps most infamously with the frame of "slow blogging"... She was also a shaker in what I honestly think was the most compelling and effective conference session I have been at in recent years.

So obviously I'm eager to experience what she lays down this Wednesday:

Both Sides Now: In Person and on the Web; Slow Learning Communities for Fast Times

The tensions between traditional and emerging forms of learning should be energizing, not paralyzing higher education. Harried and fearful of Nabokov's reminder that "Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form," we overlook the rich potential of positive deviance and failure; we forget that learning should be disruptive. In this discussion/workshop we will explore how creative dissonance, experienced through the vibrant interplay between face-to-face and online spaces, the rich borderland between old and new, leads us right now, right here to extraordinary, deep learning outcomes.

As you can guess from the abstract, we can all expect to be provoked in our assumptions. Along those lines, I think about this passage from her most recent post on (the new) bgblogging (which is a true epic):

I’m conflicted about the open-education movement, about MOOCs and online affinity groups and online communities. The openness is exemplary. The learning possibilities mind-boggling. The chance to even the playing field–open access to all–downright thrilling. But I also sense, as a natural outcome of networked individualism, an increasing movement towards the ME and away from the US, both online and off, towards polarization and insularity rather than expanded horizons and inter-cultural understanding. I’m concerned about Negroponte’s “Daily Me” . Participatory learning, both online and off, can help us counter this risk, by enabling us to bump into one another and other ideas if we work at it, in keeping with Sunstein’s Republic.om contention that “Unplanned, unanticipated encounters are central to democracy itself.”

The session is set for this Wednesday, October 1, 1:00 - 4:00 pm in the lovely Dodson Room at the Learning Commons, UBC's Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, 1961 East Mall (please register if you're coming, non-UBCer's welcome).

• XML.com: HTML and XSLT
  
  This process might be useful in exporting WP blogs and converting them to IMS CC packages.

• Paulson Bailout Plan a Historic Swindle
  
  "The agenda is staggering. The United States is ill equipped to deal with it smartly, not to mention wisely."

• Opening Up Education
  
  The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge

• Link by Link - Don’t Buy That Textbook, Download It Free - NYTimes.com
  
  "both textbook publishers and drug makers benefit from the problem of "moral hazards" — that is, the doctor who prescribes medication and the professor who requires a textbook don't have to bear the cost and thus usually don't think twice about it."

• smarter and faster
  
  It doesn't look good. Via Tony Hirst.

• iCamp » MUPPLE'08
  
  Conference toward "...understanding and engineering mash-up personal learning environments (MUPPLEs)."

We're having a federal election up here in Canada as well, set for October 14. I guess I shouldn't be shocked to see that the Work Less Party hasn't quite gotten around to nominating candidates. In the run-up, UBC's School of Journalism (one of the University's most web-savvy pockets, always good for new surprises) has set up a nifty resource: NetPrimeMinister.ca

As Professor Alfred Hermida puts it:

It shows how the candidates vying to be Canada's next prime minister are being talked about in social media from blogs to Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.

The idea was partly inspired by the US site techPresident and its Politickr site that combines official blog posts, news feeds, photo streams, and video posts from 2008 presidential candidates.

The techie in me can't help but note that the portal is built on a straight-forward application of the Netvibes platform, so presumably the vast majority of the effort that went into this project was shaping the concept and finding the feeds -- not on programming. Kudos all round!

Via Darren Barefoot.

• How to Put Anything in Your MediaWiki Pages » CogDogBlog
  
  "you could write extensions to put any kind of content into your wiki pages, and not necessarily let anyone put any code in the editor…"

• a unified field theory of publishing in the networked era
  
  "The emergence of the web turned this vision of the book of the future as a solid, albeit multimedia object completely upside down and inside out. Multimedia is engaging, especially in a format that encourages reflection, but locating discourse inside of a dynamic network promises even more profound changes."
• if:book: MacLuhan analyzes the presidential debates of 1976
  
  "it's hard to imagine an interview like [this] on the Today show of 2008."

bus3, originally uploaded by Lawrence Whittemore.

When considering how changes in media might affect how education is delivered, I’ve been known to indulge in heaping helpings of hyperbolic speculation spiced with apocalyptic flavours. I can’t help myself, when I observe something like the meltdown of a cultural industry, my mind immediately begins toward similar scenarios in my own profession. Isn’t it possible that new media might spawn similar challenges to how education is funded and delivered? Are there equivalent threats to what Craigslist has meant to newspaper revenues out there?

I haven’t really gotten past that idle speculation phase, but a few recent developments have caught my attention.

• I had long wondered why the high and rising prices of textbooks hadn’t spawned an online piracy scene. Well, evidently that practice is indeed quite common.

• I’ve seen a few attempts by online communities to connect potential learners with potential instructors. The School of Everything has garnered a lot of buzz, and will be fascinating to watch.

• I thought David Wiley’s open course on Open Education was a fantastic model, and it’s clear the big happening in online learning for this semester will be George and Stephen’s course on Connectivism & Connective Knowledge. It’s hard not to be impressed with the many means of interacting with the course, or amazed with the sheer scale of the thing (the number of signed-up participants is in the thousands, hence the notion of massive open online courses (MOOCs). Looking at my schedule in the coming months, I refrained from signing up. But I intend to be observing and interacting - I have no choice, it’s where all of my friends will be! In any event, these sorts of courses, run on scalable open tools, can be successful without much regard for a lot of the conditions we are used to thinking of as essential to educational program delivery.

If we don’t do it right, somebody just might do it better.

There have been a couple of notable resources that have crossed my screen lately that merit a shout-out:

• The first drafts of the ongoing OER Handbook have been posted on the ultra-yummy WikiEducator site. If you are wanting to be more active in the open education space there are heaps of useful pieces on the creation, sharing and reuse of open educational resources.

• Via George Siemens, this Wikibook on Web 2.0 and Emerging Learning Technologies, assembled by by Curt Bonk and a global cast of collaborators, looks most useful.

Now, since both of these resources are openly licensed, and authored on the MediaWiki platform, I can’t resist noting that the Wiki Inc. plugin (blogged by Jim Groom here) would allow any WordPress publisher to incorporate these pages with a simple copy-paste of a URL.

And when the source is updated, your reuse of it will be updated as well.

For example, here’s the Adapt page for the OER Handbook, and the Digital Divide chapter of the Emerging Technologies Wikibook over on UMWBlogs, which as previously noted is making fine use of this approach to manage its WordPress user support documentation.

Now, are those your brains on the floor, or did I just blow your mind? In all seriousness, this sort of thing may seem simplistic given some of the flashier technology buzzing across our screens these days, but to me the combo of easy-as-possible open content authoring mixed with simple dynamic reuse (all within a context of free open source tools) is a broad approach with significance well beyond the toolset.

• The 50 greatest arts videos on YouTube - The Observer
  
  "...among its millions of clips is a treasure trove of rare and fascinating arts footage, lovingly posted by fans."