StigmergicWeb

This is the last blog post I’ll write here. If you want to skip my droning on about why, you can just head over to the new blog, Open Monologue, at robwall.ca. If you want to stay subscribed to this blog, I’ll be auto-posting the ed-tech links that I bookmark at del.icio.us so and I’ll probably announce when EdTech Posse podcasts are online here as well, so if you want to keep track or our podcasts stay tuned here.

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.

It occurred to me earlier that starting today, there are four significant countdowns in my life:

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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If you are reading StigmergicWeb via an aggregator, you should update the RSS feed to http://feeds.feedburner.com/Stigmergicweb - I’m routing the RSS feed through feedburner. Why? Mostly just morbid curiousity with regards to how many people are actually reading this. And to make use of the way cool WordPress Reports plugin!

And if you aren’t reading this via an aggregator, this is a good time to start! If you don’t have an aggregator program or site, I recommend Google Reader.

Stephen commented on Quentin D’Souza’s post regarding building a wiki community (originally from Danny Horn of Muppet Wiki).

Wikipedia, he says, is not just a larger wiki with a larger contributor base than a small wiki with a group of 50 contributors (such as Muppet Wiki). Wikipedia can control content by having a large base of contributors/editors (about 43 000 according to Danny). Having such a large pool of eyeballs to keep watch on the content can spot and erase vandalism quite quickly. How can a smaller wiki prevent vandalism and spamming?

A small wiki is different from a big wiki, not just in amount of content or number of contributors. The relationship between the contributors is also different. The contributors of Wikipedia probably don’t know much about each other - 43 000 is way way bigger than Dunbar’s number. In a smaller wiki, contributors have the chance to know of all the other contributors. Muppet Wiki has a policy (community value?) that contributing members must have a user name. Enforcing a user name might seem contrary to the wiki way, but it serves its purpose within a small wiki:

The User Name policy helps to weed out vandals and creeps — and it also helps to build communication and trust. Having a stable identity makes communication possible. Contributors with user names build a record of contributions, and a reputation. If the community as a whole knows that a particular contributor is trustworthy, then that can influence how conflicts get resolved. You need a stable identity to earn people’s trust. Allowing people to sign in with a random string of numbers breaks down the community’s sense of trust and common goals. You can’t build a strong team of trustworthy colleagues that also includes shadowy, faceless strangers.

One word that keeps appearing in that description is trust. Rick Schwier has done some research on online communities, and one of his findings is that the most important element by far in an online community is trust. Trust is the glue that holds any community together. It is especially important in online communities because it is the key form of social capital. Trust is what Muppet Wiki has that Wikipedia does not, at least not in the same degree.

In something the scale of Wikipedia where there are thousands of contributors, the degree of trust between contributors is going to be limited. It may be an effective model for managing a large corpus of content, but it cannot be truly described as a community. Muppet Wiki is much smaller. There is trust between the contributors. Membership is limited so that those whose behaviour is contrary to the policy of the wiki will not be allowed to join the group. Muppet Wiki is a true community. In a smaller wiki, the quality of the content is maintained not by the overwhelming numbers of contributors. It is maintained by the trust that contributors - the members of the community - have for the community goal (information about Muppets - I can definitely respect that as being a worthy goal) and for each other.

I’m letting myself take a distraction break from marking and entering numbers into the grading program (Good old numbers … what would school be like without them?). In OLDaily Stephen has posted about his presentation “What you really need to learn“. Great stuff. I’m looking forward to the audio.

Here’s a tasty little morsel from the presentation that started some neurons to flicker:

Rather than memorizing form (the old way) multimedia teaches to look for signs in the environment (the new way)

Literacy, if I may paraphrase, is not about memorization of facts. I think we all take that as a given. Literacy is also not about finding facts, a notion that I find interesting although it is at odds with what I usually conceive of as information literacy. Literacy, of any type, is about pattern recognition, about seeing how art is like physics is like literature is like dance is like architecture is like …

Literacy is not about knowing where the dots are. Literacy is not about finding dots about which you may not know. Literacy is about connecting the dots and seeing the big picture that emerges.

Well - enough intellectual stimulation. Time to get back to judging students on how well they know where the ecology dots are.

I am sitting in a mind-numbing meeting. I was planning on Twittering to make my way through the morning. Sadly, Twitter seems to be ignoring me. What to do, what to do …

I understand why students spend their time in classing texting each other instead of listening.

Hey, there is a “Write Tweet” tab in WordPress. I’ll give that a try. Check at http://www.twitter.com/robwall to see if it works! If that fails, I’m off to Second Life for the rest of the morning.

UPDATE - twitter likes me again. Happy dance.

I’m upgrading and clearing out some of the detritus. Things may look a little goofy for a while, until I get the Markdown plugin installed.

Today was the day that I drank the Twitter kool-aid. I have moved from Stage 2 to Stage 6 (at least) in Doc Levine’s description of the epidemiology of Twitterosis.

I spent (most of) my day attending the TLt 2007 conference in Saskatoon, which is about a 90 minute drive from home. During the drive, I listened to the audio recording of Brian, D’Arcy and Alan’s Open, Connected, Social presentation. They are all on my Twitter friends list, a detail that becomes important later in my story.

I’ve blogged conferences in the past, but today I wanted to try Twittering the conference instead. I did this for Ian Juke’s keynote, but Alec managed to coerce me into co-presenting with him in his podcasting session (OK - he asked me and I said yes, but knowing my passion to talk about podcasting makes asking akin to coercion). He also asked Heather and I into co-presenting with him on Free, Open and Collaborative Processes and Tools for the Creation of Digital Content Related to Course Development.

Note - the following interactions are archived on my Twitter favourites page; you may refer to it for the full, non-paraphrased conversation.

Dean walked into the room, so Alec invited him to join us as well. I twittered the session that I was involved in presenting whenever Alec was talking. Dean was sitting beside me, twittering about watching me twitter. As I was describing Alec’s presentation, Brian added his support for our presentation. Dean twittered the address for Alec’s open thinking wiki. Brian added a link to the wiki as Alec was presenting. At about the same time, D’Arcy twittered about a greasemonkey script that turned a MediaWiki page into an S5 presentation. I passed the URL for the script along to Alec via Skype while he was presenting. (I was also adding commentary and suggestions to Alec via Skype providing a live backchannel for the presentation).

A few hours later, Alan wrote about Twitter in his blog. He cited our addition of the mediawiki-s5 script to a presentation as it was happening:

you might chalk this up to the rabid swarming of techno geeks, but for little effort, not stuffing people with email, twitter can generate action. All it takes is a nudge, some contacts …

Dean wrote in his blog about our earlier Twitter synergy, including a link to Alan’s post describing it. Just a short while ago, D’Arcy tweaked the wikipedia-s5 script and loaded it up on his server. He then announced it on Twitter, but not (yet?) on his blog. I have now installed the newly revised script, and I’m going to check with Alec about re-writing his wiki in a MediaWiki so it can be viewed/presented as an S5 presentation.

Thus my twitter mediated day comes to an end. I am still somewhat gobsmacked by the way that Brian and D’Arcy (and Alan, in retrospect) were able to become co-presenters as mediated by Twitter. A posse-amigos co-presentation, if you want to look at it that way. Cool - very, very cool!

Update/rewrite I just installed the PHP Markdown Extra plugin in the blog, and it seems to be working

My main reason for wanting a Markdown plugin is to use the offline blogging capabilities built into Textmate, especially with the introduction of the new Blogmate plugin. If the site blows up … well, I guess if it blows up, you won’t be reading this anyway.

Oh - you might be wondering what Textmate/Blogmate connection is. Textmate is the coolest text editor in the world (although I know the emacs zealots will disagree) which has built in blogging capabilities. Blogmate is an extremely sweet plugin for Textmate that gives the blogging capabilities a nice GUI. I could use straight HTML with either of them, but both have the capacity to work with Markdown, and Markdown is a much cooler way of formatting text as you type.

I noticed that O’Reilly press has come out with a new short cut publication entitled How to Build an RSS 2.0 Fee The description they give is This Short Cut will give you the hands-on knowledge you need to build an RSS 2.0 feed. Well, I suppose you could pay $8 for this information, or you can go read Stephen’s guide to RSS creation for free. The O’Reilly publication does not, to the best of my knowledge, have any mention of beer. (Read Stephen’s How to Create an RSS Feed With Notepad, a Web Server, and a Beer for details)