StigmergicWeb

I’m reading a paper right now entitled Comparing Weblogs to Threaded Discussion in Online Educational Contexts by Donna Cameron and Terry Anderson, published in the November edition of the International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning (thanks to Stephen for the pointer to this). When I write that I’m reading it right now, I mean that pretty much literally as I flip between the windows for this entry and the paper. I’d usually wait until I’m done reading the paper then write about it, but this is too compelling to resist putting thoughts on paper - er, web in real time.

Donna and Terry discuss the use of blogs as tools to create and sustain a community of inquiry. The community of inquiry model was developed by Terry Anderson, Randy Garrison and Walter Archer. It describes three elements of educational transaction - cognitive presence, social presence and teaching presence - and their use in designing online education. Their original research is available online at the Communities of Inquiry (CoI) website, and is well worth the read. At the time of the original research, they were looking mainly at threaded discussion, but these elements also work extremely well if one looks at blogs as the communication tool. This line of thought actually occurred to me two years ago when I was at a presentation by Walter Archer entitled Fostering Critical Thinking in an Online Environment at the Instructional Design conference in Saskatoon, in which he discussed the community of inquiry model. Dirk Morrison had also used the CoI model earlier in the day. One of my first thoughts when looking at the CoI model was that blogs could be used to create cognitive, social and teaching presence, not in any sort of centralized location, but in a much more diffuse and distributed fashion. Here are my notes from the presentation - Fostering Critical Thinking in an Online Environment. (I also blogged some notes about Alec Couros’ presentation on education blogging, and Alec has his educational blogging presentation slides online) My first podcast also describes the conference - StigmergicWeb podcast #1. (link is to blog entry)

OK - back to the paper. Donna and Terry (I keep wanting to retreat back into academic speak by saying “The authors …” or “Cameron and Anderson …”, but that wouldn’t be very blog-ish of me, would it? Informality is an inherent part of the medium. But I digress …) then show how blogs have positive and negative aspects with regard to all three types of presence. One particular thought I like is about teaching presence:

This means that the design of LMS based courses tend to exclude use of emerging Internet tools such as collaborative bookmarking, FOAF, podcasting, synchronous web conferencing and other social software and external database systems. Thus, the design and organization component of teaching presence is generally more restricted when LMS based conferencing systems are used as opposed to blogging tools.

Hmmm - maybe the choice of an open-source LMS versus a proprietary one is not as important as the consideration of why we need an LMS, and what other tools we might need to bring into the design of online learning. But again, I digress …

I enjoyed the paper and did a lot of nodding as I was reading it, more from my own ideas being affirmed rather than from any new perspectives. I think that these ideas have been around for a while; I’ve written and presented (at AMTEC - audio also posted - and a LORNET research symposium) about the utility of blogs as tools in online learning, along with many others far more intelligent and well-spoken than I am. If you are reading this, then you might have the same sense of familiarity. I think that having what we know fit within an established framework of online education should help in trying to get our ideas out to the larger educational structures we work in. Why not print a couple of copies of the paper, leave them strategically placed in your staff/faculty room and then see what happens? Of course, if you want to blog about the experience, that would be even better!

I’ve found out that my students have found my blog. I guess its time to stop talking about them. ;^)

Just kidding, James (and anyone else who wanders this way). Feel free to check in every once in a while. I spend a lot of time talking about students, so you can even correct me when I make mistakes in my assumptions about you.

Just saw this via Brian Lamb:

Stewart Mader has published a book Using Wiki in Education, which has some interesting sounding (I haven’t actually read the book yet, so this is one of those Read The Fine Article reviews) case studies of wikis being integrated into a variety of settings. Stewart’s publishing model is an interesting mix of traditional publishing and open content. Intially, two chapters (of ten) are free then every month a new chapter is made free. For $19, you get access to the entire book, the ability to download chapters as PDFs and access to edit the tenth chapter. If you just want the content online, it’ll be free in 8 months. If you want the whole book now, you want access to the PDFs or you want to be able to participate in the content of the book, you fork up the $19 (which is not a bad price for a good book). I’ll probably pay the $19 just to support a great publishing model.

Watch for my book Turning Random Streams of Consciousness into Content soon.

Oops. I just got an email from Alec letting me know that his comment on my previous post was not getting through. I checked and it seems that Spam Karma 2 had gone bad on me, and was giving errors on any submitted comments. I deactivated SK2 and reactivated Akismet, which still shows all the comments in the queue (all 2000 or so of them). I still have to go through the backlog to see if there are any other trapped comments, so if you tried to comment on something and it didn’t work, check again soon to see if it is back up.

I was starting to wonder why I wasn’t getting any comments. I was starting to consider blogicide (shutting down the blog) if I didn’t get some feedback ;^). Thanks to D’Arcy, Rob (twice), Dean, Chris and of course Alec for leaving some comments. Keep talking to me, folks - I live for your feedback.

Another test post using an offline blogging tool. This time I’m trying MarsEdit. It looks nice too!

Sorry for the RSS feed noise, but I’m testing ecto, an offline blogging tool for the Mac (Windows version also available).

If you listen right now, you can hear that the edublogosphere is buzzing in outrage at the U.S. congress’ proposed Deleting Online Predator’s Act (DOPA). I found out about it from Will Richardson (Congress Targets Social Network Sites), but Stephen, Danah and Raj have mentioned it as well. (and on Kairos News, and Bryan Alexander).

My mind is reeling at just how ignorant this is. If legislators were really concerned about protecting children from predators, they would ban minors from going into shopping malls and school yards, since I’d bet many more children face threats from predators in those venues than online. We’d best ban the kiddies from skating rinks too - who knows who might be taking their picture without permission?

Sayeth Will:

It’s not safety. It’s politics. It’s a hot button issue. It’s fear mongering. It’s power, or the potential loss of it. It’s got to stop.

Too right, Will. It seems to me that this is much more about denying people the right to communicate more than safety. I’ve talked with students who use MySpace, and they know how to choose who to talk to - generally they only allow people they know (and like) in RealSpace to be on their buddy list. And the girls are quite able to discern who the creepy guys are, just like they can in the rest of their life. The kids, to quote the ever-quotable Mr. Townshend, are alright. We’d be much better off spending our time teaching children and young adults how to deal with the creepy guys in the world instead of isolating them for 18 years then expecting them to cope in a world they’ve never been allowed to experience. Will, I think, agrees:

I’ve got two days left in the public school system, so I can still feel insulted. Insulted that I’m not trusted to make good decisions about the technology. Insulted that I’m not trusted to teach my students what they need to know to be safe. Insulted that my school space is being trotted out as a place where kids are running amok online all for the sake of political gain. Talk about dangerous…

I’m glad to hear that Will is full of righteous indignation. I hope that , whatever he ends up doing after the next two days, he’ll remember that the students and teachers in the school need his help (and your help, too) to protect their right to communicate.

Thomas Hawk, writer of the uber-great FlickrNation blog, puts it all in a nutshell - You’ve Got to Fight, For Your Right… to Take Photos of Your Own Kid at a Public Ice Skating Rink?

The sheer irony of a public skating rink disallowing photography in a public place while the push is on by governments of every level to cram cameras into every public place makes my bones ache. We are being asked to give up our rights to interact in public places based on a perceived threat that is undoubtedly far less than it is represented in the media. What’s next - we’ll need government approval to look and listen as we walk on a sidewalk?

OK - enough ranting. I’ll return back to my regular edu-geeking. Or maybe I’ll keep ranting. Yesterday, Stephen (announcing his official return from hiatus) said:

…we do not need great leaders. There will be no revolution, no rennaissance, until we change ourselves, until we ourselves become the embodiment of the caring and compassionate society we want to create. How hard that is! I return from my time away more aware than ever of how fallible, how ordinary, how human I am. Oh my yes, I have my apologies to give and my amends to make. Still, no matter how hard it is, we need to believe in ourselves, to believe we can make a difference, to believe we matter, to believe we can live freely. This, above all, must be our legacy.

Maybe what we need is a little more ranting, a little more critical dialogue, and a little less willingness to pass off the stuff we don’t like as someone else’s problem.

Early preview of Skypecasts - Skype Blogs

Skype announces (with the new version of Skype - but sadly version 2.5 is currently Windows only) Skypecasts, 100 person conference calls that have a moderator who controls who is talking.

So - if we combine this with Thumbstacks (sweet little online presentation creation/hosting), we basically have all we need for a conference except for a banquet and an awards ceremony. Sweet!!

Kathy Sierra, in her great blog Creating Passionate Users, writes about The myth of “keeping up”.

You’re not keeping up. I’m not keeping up. And neither is anyone else. At least not in everything.

Wow - those are encouraging words to hear. I’m just getting some last minute work done before I leave to Saskatoon for the TLt 2006 conference, so I haven’t had time to read the whole thing. Would someone mind reading it and leaving a summary for me here? ;^D