Show link: EdTech Posse Podcast 3.2 (link to mp3 file)

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So why close up now? First reason, and I have only myself to blame, is the domain name. Stigmergy is a very cool idea and a key concept for understanding emergent systems. It is also, however, not the easiest domain name to tell people out loud without having to spell it for them.

The second reason is restlessness. Way back in 2003 (that feels like such a long time ago) Alan Levine noted that many edu-blogs seem to be abandoned after about a year. If that is the case, I’ve put in more than my time here. This incarnation of my blogging started in June of 2004 after trying other formats for a couple of years, and I just have a feeling that it is time to move on. When I’ve moved before, I have changed the focus, and I think it’s time for me to do just that.

I think that the desire to change the focus of my writing is probably the biggest reason. Go check out the new blog – Open Monologue – to see a summary of what I want to write about. I am not, as I mentioned before, going to give up writing about education, learning and technology. Those are still subjects I try to think deeply about, but other things will be there as well. Besides, I think the edu-blogging thing is starting to get a little tedious. No offense meant to anyone who is in the edu-blogging camp but I have to agree with some of the points made by Tim Holt in a recent post on his blog.

You know, you have to stop preaching to the choir. I am sorry, but frankly, the people that are listening to you leaders are the ones using the technology already. Have you seen the attendees at the conventions that no one can afford? It is a nerdfest. It should be filled with teachers that have no frikkin’ idea what a blog is or what podcasts are. But that isn’t the case. Seems to me that the message has been, for MANY YEARS, that we need to use technology. Okaaaay…So, you have saturated the ed-techie teachers with that message and most of them have done their darndest to get ed tech in their classrooms. But have you ever stopped to think that maybe after all of these years, the message needs to be changed to appeal to the non-techie educator?

In general I have to agree with that. I think that the conversations are becoming rather circular. (By the way, I disagree vehmently with pretty much every other point on dissent that he raises.) Certainly there are new technologies since this blog started, but I think we are still having the same discussions as we did then. And, generally speaking, we are preaching to the choir. There certainly are many more voices in the choir than their used to be, are we articulating a vision that is coherent in a way that is comprehensible to the teachers I work with who still don’t know how to use their e-mail? Can we show them something that will make them change their teaching practice? We seem to present technology based solutions – blogging, digital story telling, wikis, etc. – as the one true way to reform education. I certainly don’t believe that is true, at least not at this stage in my life. I know teachers who are brilliant speakers and lecturers that can enthrall and educate a class of students just by standing in front of a group of students and talking. My organic chemistry prof in my first year of university did just that (although he did use some very commonly used technology in his classes – an overhead projector and a chalkboard). I learned a lot from him. It was his way of teaching and it worked for him and for his students.

I should stop. I don’t want this to turn into a criticism of what we (speaking with my edu-blogger hat on) are trying to do or of the importance of some of the models of learning that we develop. we have some valuable contributions to make to pedagogy. I just want us to think critically about what we collectively want to achieve. Are our goals for the common good, or is it hubris for us to think that we hold the one true solution?

OK – if I haven’t totally alienated everybody with that, y’all can follow me over to the new blog which is pithily entitled Open Monologue. You’re invited to drop by anytime you’d like. No cat diaries – I promise.

To start the day off just right, I got the chance to sleep in. Since I have two small children, sleeping in means sometime around 8:30 in the morning. The girl came into the room to let me know it was time to get on and the coffee was on. She knows that I’m a much happier man if the coffee is already made when I shamble out of bed.

After breakfast, the rest of the family left the house to give me two hours of peace and quiet. I had a quick nap then went off to the school to pick up the marking which is currently looming. Back at home I did a bit of paper shuffling to make me think I was getting something done, then noodled around on the computer. Since I couldn’t do the Leopard upgrade like everyone else seems to be doing, I contented myself to installing Sapiens, an uber-cool app launcher for the Mac (and a big shout-out to D’Arcy for twittering about that). I also found out via Dean Shareski on Twitter that Chris Sessums and I have the same birthday. I hope you had a good one, Chris.

The family returned, we had lunch, the boy went for a nap and I went into the office to get some marking done. Well, that was my intention as I went into the office. Proximity to the computer was too much for me to resist, so I ended up writing up my previous blog post about convocation. It needed done anyway, so I feel that it was a worthwhile use of my time.

After the boy awoke, we went to play in the back yard. Since it was my birthday, I was given the choice of supper. My daughter pointed out that I really like pizza. Unable to come up with a better alternative, the pizza was ordered then consumed upon delivery. Birthday greetings were sung and I found out that we are getting a digital video recorder installed as a gift to me.

After that, it settled back to a regularish sort of evening. Once the household duties were done, I started marking math tests which I am still doing (writing this post notwithstanding). I suppose it is time to get back to those math tests so I can sneak in a few hours of sleep before morning.

Next time – the last-ish post.

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Then I picked up the robe and hood. It started to feel a little bit like I had just left platform 9 and three quarters on the Hogwarts Express. As the graduands began to wander backstage in preparation for our procession, we donned our robes and were instructed in the proper way to hold the hoods when we walked onto the stage for the convocation. We looked rather scholastic and medieval in our costumes, which I suppose is the desired effect. We were marshalled into place for our procession and led into the front seats of the auditorium. The band was playing, the attendees were all on their feet and we found our way to our seats. Then we stood and waited while the rest of the procession made its way in. Then we stood and waited as the platform party (president, chancellor, college deans and so on) made their way in all wearing their brightly coloured robes. Finally, after singing Oh Canada, we sat.

So we sat, people talked, more people talked, etc. The honourary degree that day was being given to Roy Romanow, who is the former Premier of Saskatchewan (greatest place in the world, in case you didn’t know). Roy is an extremely good public speaker so his speech to the graduands was a welcome alternative to the dry, sleep-inducing speech that usually seems to be part of the required ritual for convocating.

Finally, it was time for the best part. Row by row, we were called up to line up then make our way across the stage to receive the parchment. I know that getting the parchment is purely ceremonial and the important piece of paper is the transcript, but when my row went to line up everyone, at least everyone around me, had silly grins on their faces including me. Most of us receiving M.Ed. degrees were into our teaching careers and you wouldn’t think we would be the types to be subject to giddiness, but there we were smiling, waving at family and waiting to proceed across the stage. More ceremony ensued, including the bestowing of the Ph.D. degrees. I’m not sure if I would ever want to get a Ph.D. because their robes bear more than a passing resemblance to a court jester. On the other hand, they did get to take a seat on the stage after receiving their degrees, which looked kind of cool. More ceremony ensued, then we were dismissed to go find our families and friends. My wife even gave me a frame for the parchment as a grad gift. My first two degrees are sitting somewhere in the boxes in our basement instead of being properly displayed somewhere so it is a much appreciated gift.

So – now I am done getting the degree and looking forward to putting it to good use. Since I didn’t write a thesis for my degree and since I didn’t have the chance to express my gratitude at the convocation for those who helped get me here, I didn’t have any forum for acknowledging those who got me here, so here it goes. I want to thank Len Proctor and Barry Brown for being excellent mentors and for sharing their experience and wisdom with us. I want to especially thank Rick Schwier for prompting me to do some of the best thinking and writing that I have done in my life (so far) and for being a great friend. I want to thank all the other students in my classes – I learned so much from all of you. If you have read this blog while I have been thinking out loud over the past few years, I’d like to thank you for your attention; and if you left comments I need to give you a big thank you for provoking me to think more deeply and critically about my ideas. Finally, and most important, I need to my children and my wife for supporting me while I was working on this – I couldn’t have done it without you.

That felt pretty good. And now, back to marking math exams. Getting the degree is great, but real life is calling!

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Next entry – convocation day!

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1. Tomorrow (Oct. 26) Apple releases Leopard. I suppose this isn’t really that significant or specifically involve me, but I am looking forward to the updated OS. I think that having automated backups via Time Machine will be the best feature, not that automatic backups are new but it has a bee-yoo-tee-ful Apple wrapper on the whole thing which looks like it will make backing up and restoring easier to manage. Hopefully this will make backups part of all Mac users lives. Backups are important – I have learned that the hard way! I haven’t ordered my copy yet. I’m waiting to see if it crashes Alec’s dual quad core first. A small, petty, evil part of me is kind of hoping it does. ;^)
2. Two days hence (Oct. 27) I convocate from the University of Saskatchewan’s M.Ed. program in Educational Communication and Technology. I’ll probably have more to write about it after the convocation is done.
3. Three days hence (Oct. 28) is my birthday (sound the trumpets and let the pigeons fly). It won’t be a multiple of 10 (or even a mere multiple of 5) so it doesn’t feel especially significant. But it will be a prime number so I will be, once again, entering the prime of my life. As with the convocation, I might have more to blog about at the time. Then again, maybe not. After a certain age it becomes just another day, albeit a day for sleeping in. Also, my report card marks are due in on Monday, so my birthday will include a whole whack of marking.
4. Four days hence, this blog is done (mostly). I mentioned before that I needed to rebrand – change the focus or the scope of what I am writing about, so I will be moving shop. I’ll still be writing about ed-tech kinds of things, but that is only going to be part of it. I want to write about so many different things and I feel like I need a new space to do that. I’ll definitely leave a last post here regarding that. This site won’t be completely gone but I’ll have more to say about that in 4 days.

I think I’ll have a lot to say in the next few days. I hope that I’ll also have the time to write it up and share it with you.

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I’ve been feeling a malaise in my desire to blog lately. I’ve attributed this to a number of things. With the M.Ed. complete, I’ve been spending more of my time with the family. I don’t want my children to think of me as the man who spends time in the untidy computer room downstairs. I’ve also had to chance to become involved in a few nifty projects – co-designing a course with Alec, reworking a website in a two week timeframe, developing an online course at school and developing my role as an in-school intructional technology support teacher. OK, this is more than a few projects but they all kind of inter-relate.

I think that Twitter is another reason my blogging productivity is low, for two reasons. First is that twitter is distracting enough to keep me from forming any coherent thoughts. When asked to describe twitter, one of my responses is that twitter is crack for anyone with ADD.

But I’ve finally hit on a bigger reason that the blogging productivity has declined. It’s time to move on. When I moved to this blog after spending time as an omegageek and as an ant, I chose the name of the blog from the concept of stigmergy

Stigmergy is a method of indirect communication in a self-organizing emergent system where its individual parts communicate with one another by modifying their local environment.

I wanted to talk about learning as an activity of a network, and that the community of educational-technology bloggers formed a kind of stigmergic network in the way we modified ideas by that whole rip-mix-learn-feed paradigm. A lot of bloggers have joined in on that conversation. They are far more articulate than I am so lately I’ve tended to follow the conversation and leave comments on other blogs rather than initiate some of the conversation here.

I still want to follow and occasionally be a part of those conversations but it is time to move on (cue the Sarah Brightman and Andrea Boccelli music). I’m not sure if the change will be changing what is here or heading to a new location. I think that I want to move in the direction of having a more general topic blog. I’ll still be talking about education, technology and digital learning. I’m still deeply interested in those topics and my career ensure that I will continue to have things to say about them. I also want to talk about parenting, politics, photography, insomnia as a lifestyle and anything else that I think is worth writing about. My life, like anyone else’s, has many facets to it and they are all related. I want to write about all parts of my life, not just one.

But no cat diaries – you have my word on that.

Stay tuned for details.

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The official outline is rather vague, but we will be focusing on the principles of learning being “open, connected and social” (full credit to Alan, D’Arcy and Brian for coming up with that pithy little phrase) and focusing specifically on open and social tools/software for the classroom, how they can be used and how pedagogy changes the way we perceive and guide learning and knowledge. Social learning and connectivism are two key pedagogical concepts that guide the course. The will be offered completely online. We’re planning to use a synchronous tool for once a week get-togethers, about 1.5 hours/week where we can discuss course goals, content and create collaborative opportunities.

That’s the elevator pitch. What we really want to do is get some educators and edtech folks together for some great conversations and opportunities to collaborate. There are two ways we’re looking for people to participate. Obviously we are looking for students since we need some enrollment for the course to run. If we get a high demand for the course, that will help to make sure we run it again next year. If you are interested in that way of participating, details are for registration are available at the Distance Learning Division of the U of R.

The other way you can participate is involved in the discussions and collaborations. If you’ve got some ideas about using social software/web apps/web 2.0 (ugghh), we would welcome your contributions in some way. We’re looking at a number of ways to get people involved in some way – maybe wikis, maybe doing some RSS mashup of blog feed, maybe podcasting. In the end, it will probably be a mix of all these things and more.

This is a new implementation of an existing course, so we’re still not exactly sure where it will end up. If you want to get involved to see where it goes, leave a comment or send me an e-mail (robwall at gmail dot com).

There is some irony in my being involved with this course but that’s another blog post that will have to wait.

Video: Google Docs in Plain English | Common Craft – In Plain English Our second client production was for the Google Docs team. For the first time, we got a chance to work on a product that we use every day. This video was timed to accompany the release of Google’s new presentation product.

These guys produce the best videos to explain some of the basic web technologies. Their video on RSS is a must view. When I want to explain some of these things to teachers, I’ll point them to these videos. Thanks to MColeman for the link via Twitter.

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No longer shall we be held hostage by Microsoft. From now on our allegiance shall be with Google. That’s an improvement, right? :^)