I may be crazy, but I’m not the only one …

Abject Learning: Waves
I don’t pretend to be a McLuhanesque visionary, I’m just one of millions of nodes bobbing out in the digital wonderland, riding waves of information, with socially filtered antennae-bots probing out in innumerable directions and sending back data that I have no expertise to analyse. Lately I’m receiving increasingly strong and troubling transmissions…

Brian doesn’t need *my* juice to add to his message, but damn this is one beautiful bit o’ bloggery.

Posted in Observations | No Comments »

Dave Winer is right. Again. Still. Some more.

Why most conferences suck Scripting News
[I]f you want to have a truly useful conference that everyone gets something out of, structure it so that everyone has something to do at all times. Hopefully things that involve other people or the venue, if not, what’s the point of going somewhere to do this stuff?

We try to fill the time with sessions so people will have something to look at, but that’s not the same as having something to do.

Posted in AECT2007, Observations | No Comments »

After the convention a couple weeks ago in Anaheim, I keep thinking about this issue of adoption. Having endured the presentation I’d nominate for “Most Annoying” on the subject of Digital Natives, I keep thinking it’s more about Digital Ignorants. The major point of the Native/Immigrant debate is that the Natives “learn differently” from the Immigrants but the assertion is based on — as nearly as I can tell — a foundation of behavioral clues and use of technological affordance.

Extending the argument, those who grew up with VCRs understand movies differently because their clocks don’t blink. While it may be true that those with the remote in their hands tend to stop, back, repeat, and slow mo more often than those without, I’d have to submit that the reason they do that is because (a) they can and (b) it occurs to them. Having a blinking clock is merely an artifact of prioritization. If it bothers you enough, you fix it. The underlying appreciation of the medium is based less on affordance than exposure to and knowledge of the vernacular.

The reality, of course, is probably more complex, but I would maintain that this notion is not that much different than looking at the difference between “pedagogy” and “andragogy.” I’ve long maintained that the distinction is arbitrary, artificial, and more an indictment of the shameful ways we treat kids in school than it is any kind of actual distinction in the way people learn. Compare the list of the characteristics of “adult learners” to what are alleged to be the characteristics of “digital natives” and the parallels become obvious.

The problem is, of course, that when we actually face the world of the Digital Ignorant — whatever age they are — we tend to see what we expect to see. The kid using the cell phone to text his gf with “<3 u - xx" isn't being any more technologically savvy than the study hall note passer of 40 years ago. He just has more tools at his disposal. The odds are good that he's still struggling with his history class and bored out of his skull learning English grammar. The adult that prints out email is, more often than not, translating to a "more convenient" (read: more familiar) medium. Is that really so different than having your inbox forwarding to your cell phone?

What *is* different is that the rich stew of available resources is being used by kids to learn a whole lot of stuff that just appalls parents and sends paroxysms of dread thru entire school districts. It's as if the kids all have access to the "secret notebook" and they're using it to learn things that adults can't learn or don't know. This activity is -- and please correct me if I'm wrong -- characterized by these cognitive and behavioural tags:

1. Involved in the planning and evaluation of their instruction
2. Experience (including mistakes) provides the basis for learning activities
3. Most interested in learning subjects that have immediate relevance to their personal life
4. Problem-centered rather than content-oriented

Those who looked up the andragogy link above will recognize these characteristics of adult learners as provided by Knowles but have to admit that they bear a striking resembance to the characteristics attributed to Digital Natives. The only thing different is a statement of the kinds of technology that the Natives are using.

But this fails to address the issue of why the “kids” are using it and the “adults” aren’t. Well, perhaps that perception isn’t really very accurate either as evidenced by a recent Harris Poll that finds that 80% of adults are going online and many of them are using the same technology as the “Natives.”

Could the reality be nothing more complex than an application of classic adoption? The early adopters — in this case kids who have more time on their hands than adults and fewer options available for socialization — are using the tools and toys provided by their parents in ways that many find as offensive and dangerous as drinking cadged beers behind the 7-11 and smoking cigarettes behind the barn was a decade or three ago.

The next time you’re tempted to drop a tab of “Digital Native” or label yourself “Digital Immigrant” ask this question:

Do I eat microwave popcorn differently than my kids?

Posted in Distance Education, Observations | 4 Comments »

I’ve been tagged by Clif Mims to participate in the Eight Things You Didn’t Know About Me meme that’s been wending its way thru the blogosphere..

THE RULES

1. Post these rules before you give your facts.
2. List 8 random facts about yourself.
3. At the end of your post, choose/tag 8 people and list their names, linking to them.
4. Leave a comment on their blog, letting them know they’ve been tagged.

EIGHT RANDOM FACTS ABOUT ME

1. I know how to mend net – and I use my feet.
2. I used to spend my summers working in a factory – until I became old enough to get legal work
3. I hate weeding — gardens, collections, file structures …
4. I love reading books and spend most of my spare time with a paperback
5. I don’t believe in protecting children at any cost. Prison is the ultimate protection and I don’t advocate locking up kids — or their minds. Ever
6. I’m a coffee snob. I don’t like Starbucks coffee because they have only one roast — too dark — and their blends are pathetic. But I drink it anyway.
7. I have too many blogs. Some don’t have my name on them. No, I won’t tell you what they are.
8. I write science fiction novels and publish them as audiobooks at http://podiobooks.com

THE MEME TRACE STOPS HERE

These memes are sometimes interesting, often cute, but I don’t know 8 people who blog that Clif hasn’t tagged already.

Posted in Observations | 1 Comment »

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been playing over in Ning with the Classroom 2.0 and School 2.0 people. The usual suspects are there and some of the puzzlements I’m dealing with is “what the heck is this space?” and “why do we need a centralized location?”

David Warlick wrote this reflective bit about the space today:

2 Cents Worth » Starting to Get It?
I’m coming to suspect, however, that there are many kinds of networks, and that they are, in a sense, part of one network, tied together (attracted to each other) through the conductivity of conversations and the gravitational pull of logic.

He goes on to talk about attention and how when we started blogging, there was a lot of attention available but that as more and more voices flooded into the space, the natural limits set by hours in the day begain to overwhelm attention. I think a lot of people (at least those who’ve been doing this for more than a few months) have had the experience of trimming back their feed lists because it’s just too much. So the idea of attention has merit, but this other notion of a variety of interconnected networks precipitated another discussion.

In an ancillary conversation I was having with Mrs B on the subject of professional organizations, we began to analyze what it is a professional organzation offers to its members in a networked world. Why would anybody pay dues to be a member of a club? What could a club offer that would make it worthwhile?

She pointed out that humans are tribal animals, so we want to belong to something — that old Maslow affiliation drive. Which made me go back and think about the idea of “professional organzation” as a way of permitting its members to address the top half of Maslow’s hierarchy. I don’t know quite how this all works yet, but I wanted to get it down while I could remember it.

One of the things the “tribe” needs is identity and that comes from a shared vision, shared values, and shared goals — a sense of “us.” The tribe also needs a center. The center becomes the instantiation of identity through that shared vision, value, and goal. Someplace where, if you go there and meet another member of the tribe, you know you have something in common — just by virtue of their being there — even if you’ve never met them before.

The next question, logicially, is the nature of this ‘community center’ and I thought it could be decentralized. A technorati feed with the tribe’s name as tag could provide the center, but that would require a level of skill, and expertise that I don’t think a lot of people have yet. It’s going to be hard to identify with a feed and most people don’t see the river of content flowing from a feed as a center.

And that brings us back to Ning and other centralized spaces like TappedIn or MySpace or The ORG. They provide a place to go to find the tribe. To see what the members are doing. They provide a baseline that’s easier to deal with than the dispersed and distributed model. The problem with the ones I know about are that there’s no good way to merge distributed and centralized content together.

Eventually, I began to think that the community center needs to be centralized as a symbolic commitment to the tribe. We can each have our own spaces but the tribe needs a kind of metaphorical long house. It’s an answer to Stephen Downes’ perennial question of “why does there need to be another place?”

I’m working in analogy here. In metaphor. Bear with me if it breaks down.

If I go to the market and meet somebody, we share some things in common, and for a short period we even share a common goal – getting whatever we came to the market for. But the meeting is co-incidental. It’s not being driven by any kind of common vision or shared outlook except in the most superficial way. We’re not tribe.

So if I tag a post as “online community” and it merges with something that somebody else posts, it’s co-incidental. We might have opposite views and opinions, and while that has some value, it’s not the view of the tribe. While it’s true that the person is part of my network, that person is not one of “us” and is not part of my affiliation set.

And that brings me back to David’s notion of the gravitational attraction of ideas and linked and related but not congruous networks. People are finding Classroom 2.0. People are joining, reading, writing, participating. There is a rudimentary sense of identify forming — an idea of tribe. We’re still in the storming-norming stages but it’s already beginning to shape up. The conversations that happen in there tend to stay in there. They don’t appear to be pinging out (altho it’s entirely possible that I’m missing it). A few people are cross posting content from outside in and from inside out, but the link out of the community seems to consist primarily of links to the individual members’ blogs and web sites. So this sorta looks like David’s idea of connected networks holds up with one network inside the Ning garden and links in and out.

All of this leads me to the conclusion that the value of places like Ning is in forming centers around which networks and affiliations can form. Not as a replacement for the distributed world of feeds and aggregators, but as kinds of hubs. Cross pollination centers. Tribes.

Posted in Observations, Online Community | 1 Comment »

At the turn of the last century, the most economical way to travel from New York to Los Angeles was by rail. Not many people did it because it took a long time and was relatively expensive. There were good reasons to make the trip, but not everybody was able to capitalize on those reasons. By the middle of the century, passenger rail was already slated for “has been” status in the US with the growth of the airline industry resulting from innovations in long distance air travel during World War II. Transcontinental air travel killed passenger rail — and ushered in a new era in business opportunity — by removing several days from the round trip. By 1975 almost three-quarters of passenger travel in the US was by air and less than 10% was by rail. Today it’s possible — altho uncomfortable — to fly from New York to LA for a business meeting and return the same day. It’s a long day, but it’s possible. More to the point, new business opportunities arose because air travel became more available and ubiquitous. Disney is a prime example. Without air travel, DisneyLand would never have been able to “go national” and attract visitors from around the country — and eventually the world. In a certain sense, the world’s business required the development of air travel once the technology became available. The pace of the world required it. At the turn of the last century, taking a week to get from New York to LA was acceptable because there was no other choice. Today, very few people can afford the luxury of taking that much time. And we’ve learned that the airplane can take us places where rail lines cannot be laid.

The parallel between the Academy and passenger rail is inescapable. The question of “Where are we going?” is less clear. When you need to get to LA, you know where you’re bound for. But what’s the destination for education? Is there one? From an economic perspective, we need credentials to apply for a job. The reality is that you don’t really need skill in the job to get it, just good credentials. Lacking credentials, you don’t even get the opportunity to fail. So, in a certain sense, the role of education is certification.

That’s a problem.

The line worker who loses his/her job at the factory can’t afford to spend four years getting a degree. Even two years of trade school is problematic. Unemployment compensation lasts a matter of weeks, not months, and financial obligations snowball quickly. A professional caught in a mid-career job shift has similar, albeit less immediate, problems. Having one degree makes it easier (altho not necessarily less expensive) to acquire another. Again, making the change from retail management to, say, computer programming can take years to achieve transition. In the meantime, those people have some serious problems. Forget going into math or science related fields unless you start young — say, 14 — and work forward. It’s as unlikely as becoming a gymnast at thirty.

But Education isn’t really about just getting credentials, is it? I mean the credential gives us the opportunity to apply for a job, but the skills to actually DO the job are also needed and we need a better way to get those skills than the current model of Education.

Just as the airlines superceded the railroads as passenger carriers, we need to find/develop the replacement for the current models of education. We’re still going the same places. We still need to learn. We need skills and knowledge. We need paths to credential so that we can actually use our skills and knowledge by passing the gatekeepers. We still need to get to the same places — credential, skill, knowledge, self-fulfillment. What we need is some kind of jet plane to replace our Educational Iron Horse and, when we find it, perhaps it will take us places we didn’t think were possible.

Posted in Education, Observations | No Comments »

Will Richardson had some interesting words about “Tough Choices or Tough Times” — the report from The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce.

“Community and Collaboration on a Scale Never Seen Before”
[I]f 2007 is going to be the watershed year that it seems to be shaping up to be, we need to do more work in traditional spaces and spend less time blogging back and forth to each other. While this is a powerfully engaging and nurturing environment, if we are going to make our voices and ideas truly heard, we need to start building a grassroots movement “out there,” one that highlights the realities of the world and successes in the classroom through channels that those decision makers (read parents, board members, etc.) are still wedded to.

Here’s the problem, Will.

The report is calling for a new system, not a patch to the old. In the same way the airlines have replaced passenger rail, this new system of education will replace what we know as school. What will it look like? How will it be implemented? I agree that “blogging among ourselves” amounts to “preaching to the choir” but how would engaging the railroads in developing the airlines have helped? If we take this commission’s report seriously and start thinking about what a new — replacement — system would look like, why would those with vested interest in maintaining the status quo be willing to engage?

The Cluetrain holds — pardon the expression — a clue as does Kat Herding and Doc’s Latest writings. If business in the Industrial Age has been about economies of scale and de-personalization, then the new economy might buyers and sellers talking to each other to create products and services specific to the need. In many ways, we’re talking about artists and artisans being the workers in this new economy. Whether your art is accounting or marketing or distribution, when we start talking about creativity and imagination, we end up with art. Think: The Secret of My Success.

Which brings us to the model for this new economy. Is it something akin to a global “open mic night” where people form ad hoc collectives to create a specific work? A kind of jazz combo? Can we build cars that way? Or airliners? Will we need to, or will we let other parts of the world deal with the cheap-labor/mass-produced commodity goods?

I don’t know. ‘M just askin’

Posted in Education, Observations | No Comments »

“The Internet changes everything.” We think we know what that means but I’ve come to believe that we’ve overlooked an important characteristic of everything.

We’re becoming more and more aware of the effect of the internet on geography. The meta-verse erases space. Online, everybody is the same distance from anybody else. The corollary of that has been slipping by us. If the meta-verse erases space, it must also erase time. For those who spend many hours each day onlne, I don’t mean that kind of time. Einstein gave us the models for non-Euclidean space-time and we’ve projected the web into space without paying attention to the effect on time.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Distance Education, Education, Observations | 1 Comment »

Python is one of those languages that I feel like I should know better. I bought a book on it a couple weeks back and thought I’d try to figure out why I can’t get anything that’s Python based to work on any of my Linux machines. I figure that it has to be something common that I’m doing on all of them. There’s some default I’m setting/not setting.

Anyway. My daughter came to me the other day and said, “Dad? Can you teach me to read computer codes?”

“What do you mean ‘computer codes’? What kind of codes?”

She shrugged, “I don’t know. Whatever there is.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Kids, Observations | 2 Comments »

It’s been just about 18 months since I’ve been carrying my MP3 player almost everywhere. I don’t think about it any more — unless I run it out of content and forget to reload. That happened recently and I was forced to turn on the radio in my car.

And just as quickly shut it off again.

Scrabbling thru my playlist I found a couple of podcasts that were worthy of a re-run and let them play rather than listen to the aggravating babble on the airwaves.

I realized at that moment that my iRiver has become the sound track in my life. Sometimes it’s music, mostly it’s not. But I’ve noticed some things that are different now than BP (Before Podcasts). Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Observations | Comments Off