Patrick Murray-John has been working tirelessly over the last month to realize an extremely exciting possibility for marrying the Semantic Web with WPMu, although this experiment is by no means limited to this application. What he has been doing is scraping the available data from the uber RSS feed of public blogs from the UMW Blogs Tags Site, and pulling it into a suite of semantic web tools provided by MIT’s Simile project (namely Exhibit and Timeline).

“Why?” you ask. Well Hondo, because these tools provide the means to visualize and connect the activity on UMW Blogs in new ways, check out the Timeline of UMW Blogs posts over the last two weeks here. Or look at how a tool like Exhibit provides interesting ways for creating a more comprehensive directory of users, tags, and posts (something WPMu just can’t do extensively). The alphabetized Bloggers Exhibit that has a weighted tag cloud for each letter of the alphabet which lists usernames, or take a peek at the Blogs Exhibit that does the same thing with Blog titles.

Moreover, we now have a way to collect all the images uploaded to UMW Blogs in one place, and a gallery of top ten lists for those blogs with the most images, audio files, or videos. What this means is we now have a series of alternative means for capturing and mnpulating dta for UMW Blogs that will allow us to search, discover, and make connections more easily than we could previously. We are at the beginnings of this experiment in some ways, yet in others we simply just have to style and re-theme the data accordingly and we are ready to unleash it on the UMW Blogs community to see how they use it and what value it brings to further build upon this already robust publishing platform. Is this what the trendy discussions about Web 3.0 is all about (besides the pervasive idea of cloud computing which is in many ways upon us)?  Finding ways to marry the power, ease, and usability of Web 2.0 tools with the promise of discoverability, visualization, and deep connections that the Semantic Web has promised? I guess we’re about to find out here at UMW.

This Summer I had the good fortune of working with professor Angela Gosetti-MurrayJohn and the students of her “The Classical Tradition” course. I would like to say I came up with some original and elaborate EdTech scheme to change the world through mediated mean, but I didn’t. However, Angela did by pushing her class to explore a variety of digital tools for relating their work. And I just happily obliged by pretending to be a dog, and barking about 50 ways you could present a digital story with free Web 2.0 tools.

During the session where I talked to the class about these tools, I channeled Alan Levine’s presentation on the 50 Ways resource that he gave at Northern Voice 2008—which was a gem. I found myself laughing hysterically when he went to the Blabberize homepage and showed the Llama speaking with a thick, comical Indian accent. I stuck with me, so I tried it out on this group and lo and behold everyone was laughing hysterically and I felt good. Nonetheless, I still wrote Blabberize off as a pretty useless tool, and went on to my own personal favorites once I had their attention like YouTube, FlickrSlidr, etc.

So when I saw a group from the class that was working on the theme “War in the Aeneid“ and had incorporated Blabberize effectively into their web-based, multimodal narrative of The Aeneid and war, I was intrigued.  Here it is below, featuring none other than Vergil himself:

Now, that is an entertaining and intelligent use of this seemingly silly technology to set the stage for a dynamic, media-rich site dedicated to The Aeneid. What’s more, this group utilized a number of embeddable resources from YouTube and Comiqs to highlight and contextualize their presentation while at the same time enriching their own readings. Alan’s 50 Ways is the resource that keeps on giving and, as an added bonus, just about every tool that has embed code available works with UMW Blogs, making it the Web 2.0 Digital Storytelling publishing platform par excellence

Extend your PBD (personal beverage democracy) and order bottles of Cola featuring your favorite Presidential candidate. Now, thanks to the wisdom of the crowds, you - lonely blogger, can also be a candidate for POTUS, if only virtually via soda bottles.

The web truly does change everything in revolutionary ways.

Give me liberty or give me root beer
- Lawrence Lessig

Here he goes again.

Wes Fryer's latest blog post, This is why we have so few laptop initiatives in Oklahoma, is a rallying cry for the technocenctric who think schools and universities should use any and all information technology available or our children will be left behind.

Wes is a nice guy, but I must confess that I am occasionally confused by his prolific blogging. He seems to justify any application, regardless of its quality or educational practice it supports, while simultaneously working tirelessly to scare the pants off parents and educators afraid of all the "bad stuff" out on the Web.

Fryer's blog states that Oklahoma Christian University and Abilene Christian University "are among the first colleges in the United States to implement initiatives which involve ALL students in entering classes purchasing and using either Apple iPhones or iPod Touches." Then he goes on to say...

I almost passed out on the spot, but I was torn by a simultaneous urge to weep.

Question: What is Wes so upset about?

Answer: He met a professor at Oklahoma Christian University who "broke my heart"

It seems that the professor Wes spoke with was less than enthusiastic about the prospect of iPhone use in his classes. This in turn resulted in Fryer condemning the academic's disinterest in 21st Century skills (assuming they exist) and accusing the professor of all sorts of crimes against modernity.

Putting aside the generalizations drawn from a conversation with one academic, Wes' attempt to persuade the professor to embrace technology is as ridiculous as the institution's iPhone/iPod requirement.

Wes reaches into his bag of free Web 2.0 tricks and asks the professor if is aware of PollAnywhere. That's right. In Wes' world of plug kids into anything that plugs-in (as long as you remember that they may be abducted), PollAnywhere is just the ticket to "enthralled" [Wes' term] students.

On my planet, PollAnywhere sustains medieval educational practices. Thanks to Wes and PollAnywhere, a teacher can give a multiple choice quiz in class and get responses instantly via cell phone or other mobile device. WHO CARES?

Justifying classroom technology use with such weak examples as PollAnywhere does not represent progress as much as it does desperation on the part of the evangelist. I am only worried about the professor if he is in fact persuaded by this argument.

Lots of institutions of higher education require students to have a personal mobile computer. Pepperdine University, where I work, required student laptops during the Clinton administration and I began working in K-12 1:1 schools before the first Gulf War. This however is not why Abilene Christian and Oklahoma Christian is being singled out by Wes Fryer. Wes is touting their requirement that each student have an iPhone or iPod Touch.

It is ridiculous to suggest that an iPhone or iPodTouch is an adequate learning tool.

These devices are great for looking up answers to easily answered questions or even blogging. However, they offer VERY little of the potential of computers as intellectual laboratories and vehicles for self-expression.

Why does an institution of higher education make such requirements? Because these devices 1) APPEAR cheap and 2) APPEAR modern and groovy.

So, the institution doesn't have the courage to ask kids to buy a multimedia laptop. Instead they suggest an iPhone and then shift the ongoing expenses to the student anyway in the form on monthly fees.

It might also be true that Abilene Christian and Oklahoma Christian have higher priorities than "21st Century Skills" or epistemological pluralism. To quote Hebrew National commercials, perhaps they "answer to a higher authority."

---

No matter what you think of the arguments above, I hope we can find common ground in stating unequivocally that neither the requirement that every college student own an iPod or the fact that professors don't embrace them has NOTHING whatsoever to do with Wes Fryer's blog title, "This is why we have so few laptop initiatives in Oklahoma."

---

Note: Here are a few recent examples of blog interactions to support the analysis above:

• Wes Fryer on Animoto vs Gary Stager on Animoto
• Gary Stager, Sylvia Martinez and others vs. Wes Fryer regarding interactive white boards
• Wes Fryer vs. Gary Stager on the "power" of Voicethread in education

Snapped at Staples in Manchester, NH

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 have been listening in to several conversations of late that have been pondering our collective fate in light of new social media affordances. It's not just politics or education or celebrity news that's driving this train. It seems the potential to organize, act, and solve problems has never been greater given new social media applications. And given the relative trajectory of social media adoption across the globe, things appear to be potentially getting brighter.

Since we have the ability to organize in a ridiculously easy fashion (Paquet, 2002), the next step involves developing new forms of group leadership. Managing people, activity, and information is no small feat; thus, while new social tools are re-vising the way we do our work, new organizational models are required that, for the most part, have yet to be invented. I look forward to reading the research that examines how to best manage and leverage new media applications for social action in profit and non-profit arenas. However, with the pace of new application development and deployment being what it is, it seems difficult in many cases to stay on top of rigorously assessing these new media applications, hence functional research is often years off.

A different solution might be turning social media research over to the users themselves. This is precisely how the notion of action research evolved. Imagine having school children studying the effects/affects, and impacts of social media in mathematics, biology, economics, in literature, as well as the communities within which they participate. Imagine K-12 school children using social media to study social media and the world they live in. Of course, teaching children how to set up, validate, and evaluate experiments with rigor and aplomb requires teachers to be capable of doing such, as well. So the reality there points back to the caliber and quality of educational professionals and what we are doing as a country to ensure that we are providing our youth the best education possible (and not simply what they can afford). As such, it is my belief that school curricula need to be re-written to allow learners and educators to become researchers of, as well as producers of knowledge and information, and not just consumers thereof.

So, if this is something you believe in, you might ask yourself: What am I going to do to alter this reality?

What are your expectations? How are you going to make these changes happen? Who do you need to better educate? What's is your timeline? What resources will you need?

Somewhere in the distance, I can hear John Henry's hammer ring.... Just don't swing yourself too hard and I look forward to reading your results.

How does the Read/Write Web (pdf) embody notions of existentialism as portrayed in this clip from Waking Life*** (2 mins.)?

Discuss...

 

 

 

*** From George Santayana's maxim that "[s]anity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled."

 

Reference:

Santayana, George (1989). Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press), 156.

See you all when I see you all.

Photo Credit: Alec Courosa - EduPunk Version 1 on Flickr

(and not this Hiatus for all you edupunks out there)

Technorati Tags: And that’s the way it was … and that’s the way it is … and it’s always changing … and it is always the same.

Cacophony’s good friend Jim Groom (right) has recently coined a term that has the edublogosphere all atwitter: edupunk. It probably runs counter to the meaning behind the word to note, impressed, that The Chronicle of Higher Education’s blog, “Wired Campus,” picked up Jim’s phrase. Punks probably don’t care much what the Chronicle’s got to say.

Edupunk (here are musings and run downs by Mike Caulfield, Stephen Downes, and D’Arcy Norman) is a new name for ideas that have been bouncing around the progressive edublogosphere for some time, namely, that higher education humanity needs an alternative to proprietary course management systems and the philosophy of teaching and learning that they implicitly promote. At the core of edupunk are older pedagogical stances unrelated to technology: an ethic of self-reliance, the valuation of student-centered experiential learning, and the rejection of the “banking concept of education.” Edupunk seeks to update and adapt these ideas within the rapidly evolving realm of edutech.

I’m coming a little late to this particular conversation (last week I was DIYing the walls of my house with a wallpaper steamer and buckets of paint– domesticpunk), and hope I can add something to the celebration/elaboration. Seems to me that “edupunk” is a useful term, though, like all metaphors, it breaks down in the end. It has successfully congealed and branded the thinking that’s at the core of the unease many of us working in this field have with the way things are done at most schools. It’s good that it’s been picked up by the Chronicle, and it’s fantastic that more people are finding their way to Jim’s blog these days.

I fear, however, that the attention to the phrase may distract from the work that produced it. For instance, I’ve been been trying to square the circle of my dislike for punk music and culture with my love and appreciation for the work of the cats who’ve rallied to this term. I see a rejectionist ethos and cliquish sense of superiority behind much punk music and culture, and I’m not sure that’s an accurate description of the edutech movement that I feel a part of. I’ve always been more of a funk and soul man myself, and think that the affirmation native to those genres, the love and depth of feeling at their center, are much more pleasant (and just as useful) rhetorical and political stances. A brilliant administrator I once worked with, wise enough to know what she didn’t know and to defer to folks like Jim and Zach Davis on all things digital, once said, “we want to use technology to seduce students to our pedagogical goals.” That seems more Barry White than Johnny Rotten.

In that spirit, I present: edufunk.

photo(shop) credit: skywaltzer

Or, how about yet another metaphor: edujazz.I sense in the discourse around edupunk an appreciation for messiness, even a distaste for form. I’m not sure this lends itself to the best teaching. The pedagogy that I’ve been exposed to and have practiced as a teacher of history is much more like jazz… lay down a structure, and leave plenty of space for improvisation. This allows a variety of types of learning to happen in a classroom, acknowledges that both facts and the skills to interpret them are important areas to work on, and encourages our students to explore from within material that we’ve laid out with a set of goals in mind. I’m all for the “guide-by-the-side” approach to teaching… but the work that went into the Ph.D. I’m about to earn does qualify me, I think, to do a bit more than that at times.

This metaphor is translatable to how we, as instructional technologists, nurture critical approaches to online learning, particularly in how we can “seduce” talented teachers to experiment with new forms. Our Institute is incredibly lucky to have the autonomy to deploy and develop whatever software we deem pedagogically appropriate, so to a certain extent we are isolated from Blackboard. Baruch’s IT shop also recognizes that an institution of higher learning should offer a range of solutions to its community, even if those solutions compete with one another. BCTC blesses and supports our experimentation.

Yet Blackboard still runs wild at this university, and we are constantly engaging with faculty members and administrators who refuse to see the differences between the solutions we promote and what BB offers. BB’s appeal is in its antiseptic pre-fabrication, in the very fact that it doesn’t force faculty to take the extra steps to really consider how Web 2.0 and distributed learning open up new pedagogical possibilities. As a result, many faculty graft onto it existing modes of learning, fearful of allowing technology to “get in the way.” They get on Blackboard, get off, and move on.

Some faculty members do use Blackboard quite successfully, particularly for collaborative projects. Good teaching is good teaching, no matter where it happens or how it happens. Our job as instructional technologists, I think, is to explore the new possibilities and modes of learning that Blackboard happens to work against. If that software gives faculty members what they need to accomplish what they want, then so be it. But if faculty are interested in making full use of distributed learning, in continuing to learn themselves, and especially in truly empowering students, they need other solutions.

Edujazz, emphasizing structure and improvisation, can help reach out to faculty who are reticent to give up their control and jump into the pit with the edupunks. This argument evolves from my work in an academic service unit, where my job is to help a wide-range of faculty members experiment with this stuff. Such work requires, and benefits from, sensitive responses to their concerns. An anti-authoritarian, anarchic response will ultimately accomplish little. The DIY approach of edupunk is a great goal, but often times DIT– Do It Together–is necessary, and even preferable. Helping faculty members translate their pedagogical structures to a new environment goes a long way towards mollifying their concerns about the impact of technology on their students’ learning. The students, if the structure is sound, can handle the improvisation.

Now, behind the scenes, hell yeah, I’ll cavort with the punks. Jim’s named a movement, even if the contours of that movement still haven’t yet been fully defined. The politics of this stuff and the consideration of the logic of capital are deeply important, and should constantly be a part of the conversation. If a university is going to spend millions on a limited and problematic application, it should probably be able to explain why that solution is better than cheaper alternatives. I haven’t seen that done yet.

Until it is, there’s work to be done. So, edupunks, edufunks, eduheads, or whomever: keep doing your thing.

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