What are we doing with all these technologies? There are three distinct sets of technology that I asked you to take on last week — the blog-aggregator, TappedIn, and Instant Messenger. They each serve a unique purpose to the course and — I hope — to your ongoing learning.
The most melon-twisting was the blog-aggregator set — or more precisely, the blog-rss-aggregator set. The blog is where you write. It’s your space for communicating to the world and for writing to find out what you think. I’m a firm believer in the idea that you need to talk about what you think you know in order to organize it for later use. So, you each have a space for that now. The advantage to the blog is that it automatically creates a “computer readable” version of what you write. That’s the “RSS feed” part. RSS stands for a variety of things but is generally referred to as “really simple syndication” and it’s a stripped down version of your content. What makes it so valuable is that each bit of content is identified by type of content. Look at a feed sometime and you’ll see there’s information in there identified as title, content, dates, and so on. It’s a bit nasty to look at if you’re not used to reading code like that, but your aggregator is built to parse through all the information and organize it for you. By putting a collection of feeds into your aggregators, you can have your computer sort out who, what, and when on new content. That greatly enhances your ability to wade through the massive information flows that the internet represents. So, the blog is for writing, and the aggregator — or ‘gator — is for reading.
Next, TappedIn is more than just a chatroom. While one of the most obvious features of TappedIn is the chat, the value to you is that it creates a free form repository so that you can begin to collect and store your own information and artifacts. By creating your office in TI, you get a place where you can upload files, create your own discussion boards, and generally start the process of organizing the artifacts that support your own learning in ways that are semi private. We’ll be using it for our weekly chats, but the main goal of TI is to provide you with an enduring repository for your on-going learning.
Last, Instant Messenger (IM) is to allow you to connect. The beauty of IM — and perhaps its curse — is that you can be aware of the people around you when you’re online. This is important as you all wrestle with the technology and the concepts. Think about what happens when you go to school. You see people in the halls. You see people in the classroom. You see people in the parking lots. Some of them you might know. Most, you don’t. But the point is that you know that education is a social process and you are aware of the people who are engaged in it all around you. IM provides that linkage to keep you aware. Moreover, these should be the people you know — the ones you see in the hallway on the way to class — and with whom you can talk, comment, commiserate, and discuss the learning that’s taking place. And it happens in real time. You know that somebody else is there with you in the “right now.”
These tools are bonded by two important characteristics — they’re learner centric and they’re outside of Blackboard.
These are tools that you control. You can use them in this class and in others. I know at least one of you is in the Gaming course that Chis Miller is teaching and could add in bloggers who are writing about Gaming in the classroom. Some of you are involved in Special Ed and could be subscribing to feeds on that subject as well, to help keep yourselves informed about what’s happening right now in that field. Your aggregator becomes your window on the web — a personal filter on the flow that selects out those things in which you are interested. The aggregator is the main web-based tool for the self-directed learner.
Your blog is yours to do with as you wish. You can use it to reflect on what you’re learning and thereby organize your thinking. Your writings, because they are in the open, are available for others to see, use, and comment on. The feedback you garner will help focus and refine your thinking. And the writings become a kind of benchmark for your evolving thinking. My Cognitive Dissonance blog, for example, has been going since October 2004 and as I scan back through the postings — which have become more sparse as I write in other spaces — serves me as a kind of repository of my mental path. Cory Doctorow called blogging his “outboard brain”.
Your TI office is yours and the TappedIn community is a rich collection of other educators with whom you can engage. With 19,000 members, it’s not as large as some other online communities, but it is specifically geared to educators. Your membership in this community guarantees you access to at least some of the people who are most closely interested in the same kinds of things you are professionally.
The IM tools are yours to control. You get to say who’s “in” and who’s “out.” It’s up to you whether you talk or not. Some of my most insightful thinking happens when I’m having a brainstorm IM with my friends Donal or Heather. Through that channel I stay connected — not just to the people but to the knowledge and insight that those people represent. For the first 30 years of the internet, it’s main goal was to connect people with data. In the last five years or so, the main purpose is to connect people with people and the tools I’ve described here are some of the keys.
That leaves the “outside of Blackboard” issue.
Most of you have taken other online courses using the Blackboard platform. You know one truth about work in Blackboard. It’s not yours. Over an above all the issues of institutional control of the space, who controls what’s said, who can edit and control (censor) the content, it’s all temporary. When the course is over, the doors close and anything you put into the course is lost to you forever. The only artifacts you keep are those you had the foresight to collect before the course ended and there’s not any good way to collect, say, your discussion board postings from Blackboard. More over, the organization of the space is not learner-centric but course-centric, as if learning can/should be arbitrarily chunked up in catalog-shaped bits. The institution shapes the knowledge in an arbitrary form which is most efficient from their perspective of the application of instruction, but which may not be the best form from your perspective of learning. And in the Blackboard shell, you — as student — have no say in how that is all shaped. Even as a teacher, I can only control so much.
Which is why I’ve asked you to “take it outside” where the tools are under your direct control and — since you are the learner — learner centric.
August 30th, 2006 at 10:00 pm
This is so nicely presented. I had never thought of the fact that all my thoughts and projects that I put in to Blackboard actually disappear after the class is over. It is just one of those things that I had never thought about. I have taken several classes in the past through Blackboard and I have entered some quality work and discussions that took time to prepare and present and they are all gone now. That is kind of depressing. I like the idea of expanding outside Blackboard with something I can continue. I can look back next year and see a record of my thoughts and discussions that I have presented. It always amazes me how an instructor always seems to have a purpose for the things or projects that are asked to be completed. I will be honest–one of the first things I said when I read our list for this class was, “Why can’t we do this on Blackboard? Isn’t that what it’s used for?” Now I see the reason–there was a purpose/a learning experience. I appreciate that.