StigmergicWeb

A grade 11 biology class that I teach has been involved in an interesting project that I’ve meant to pass along to you. The course objectives include a study of classification of organisms and a study of some basic ecological principles. I wanted to combine these two into a long term project for the course on the study of species at risk, a topic that I think is only going to be of increasing concern as the effects of climate change begin to manifest in increasingly dramatic ways.

But I didn’t want to do the standard go-to-the-library-and-research-then-hand-in-a-report sort of project. I want to concentrate more on the process of the research than the product. To be honest, I still don’t know what I want to do as a final product. My students find this vaguely disorienting since they seem to be very focused on whatever that final product is. To be completely honest, I also hate marking essays, so if I will avoid it if I can.

In consultation with Donna DesRoches, teacher-librarian extraordinaire, we came upon the idea of having the students create a pathfinder - a sort of expert guide for a topic - to document their research process. We’re using a couple of tools for doing this:

• Wikka Wiki - a very robust, easy to use, easy to install wiki engine. One of the most important features of it is that it can easily integrate an RSS feed so that as the feed is updated, updates are automagically made on the wiki. It also provides RSS feeds for pages so that changes can be monitored and wiki-spammers can be thwarted. Wiki-spam actually hasn’t been a problem (we’ll see how it holds up once the URL to the project is posted). A pathfinder template page was created so that students can paste it into the pages for their species at risk.
• Scuttle - a free (beer and speech) social bookmarking tool. Similar to del.icio.us in many ways such as tagging, but we have the luxury of being able to resrict access to the school community so that there is no tag-poisoning by spammers. Scuttle can, like del.icio.us, create an RSS feed for a tag, so that it can be integrated into the student’s pathfinder on the wiki. You can download Scuttle and install it on your own server, and there is a small but growing Scuttle documentation wiki.

The students have each picked a species at risk from a list I posted on the Pathfinder wiki. They registered on the wiki to be able to edit it (take that, wiki spammers!), copied the student Pathfinder template to their species page, and started the research process. I had them focus on reference resources, especially print resources, for the first two days. After about a week back in the class, we went back to the library and I showed them how to bookmark, tag and comment web resources using Scuttle. The next session, I showed them how to integrate the RSS feed into their wiki page.

I’m still not exactly sure what I’ll have them do as a final product for the project. Right now I’m leaning towards having the work in pairs to prepare and present to an elementary classroom on one of the species they have researched, but I’m open to suggestions.

Links:

• Species at Risk Pathfinder research wiki assignment page
• Pathfinder template (thanks to Donna for putting this together)
• Species at Risk pathfinder list - links to students work. Some notable ones are:
  • Nilgiri Tahr
  • Peregrine Falcon

I’ve told my students I would publicize their research. If you have any comments, you could leave them here, or on the wiki pages.

Its a peaceful day in the middle of my Easter break. My family has left me alone to take care of the 1001 projects that I need to get done, along with some house work. Is there a better time to update Wordpress to version 2.0.2 and play around with some new plugins? I think not - all that other stuff can wait for a couple of hours. So - this will either work brilliantly, or fail tragically. Stay tuned for details.

UPDATE - if you can read this, everything so far is good, and the update to WordPress 2.0.2 worked. Now to start playing around with some new plugins!

I’m working with a teacher in the school who wants to give students a chance to do some authentic, self-directed writing (music to any edu-blogmeister’s ears, I’m sure). I’ve set up a site using Drupal. On the first day of student writing, we’ve already had some issues about appropriate levels of self-disclosure in the students’ writing.

What we would ideally like to do is to have the students be able to describe each blog entry as public, restricted or private. Public posts would be available for all the world to see (and I’ll have the link to the class blog up as soon as the teacher is a bit more comfortable with the process), restricted posts can only be seen by users who are logged in, and private entries can only be seen by the student and the teacher (who has the role of editor for the site). I have the taxonomy set up to describe all posts as such. I was working with the taxonomy access control module, but I have set it up so that private entries can’t even be seen by students.

So - am I on the right track? What do I need to do to get this happening?

BTW, I was originally thinking of just e-mailing some Drupal geeks I know and getting their answers, but I thought that some others might be having the same kinds of questions.

UPDATE -  After a bit of experimentation (and much cursing) I’ve found that the node privacy byrole module seems to do the trick very nicely by allowing authors/editors to pick who can view (and also edit) the posts, and the interface and logic of the module is extremely elegant. Right now this module is only available for Drupal 4.6, but it looks like it will be upgraded/ported for Drupal 4.7. Thanks to D’Arcy and Harold for suggestions (and I will take a more serious look at Elgg in consideration of my next project).

Dave Winer explains What is an unconference? Here’s the pithy quote:

My guess is that if you swapped the people on stage with an equal number chosen at random from the audience, the new panelists would effectively be smarter, because they didn’t have the time to get nervous, to prepare PowerPoint slides, to make lists of things they must remember to say, or have overly grandiose ideas about how much recognition they are getting.

How absolutely true. With some exceptions, I’ve always found the conversations amongst the audience and with the presenter after a conference presentation are far more engaging than the presentation itself. An unconference is a nice technique for changing a presentation back into a meaningful dialogue. I also think that the change from a traditional presentation to an unconference is similar to the change from an instructivist approach to a connectivist approach in learning. Our classrooms should also be unconferences.

We’ve all become fairly accustomed to this read-write web thingy where we are all consumers and producers of information. I use the pronoun we assuming that if you are reading this, you are probably also involved in creating some sort of online content (blogging, wiki-ing, podcasting, contributing to discussion groups) or you soon will be. But I’ve noticed lately that another element is being emphasized, that of blending different RSS or Atom feeds together to create a sort of meta-feed. I don’t think that its new because I’m sure that I remember reading Brian and Alan writing about Rip-Mix-Feed, a pithy little meme summarizing how information can be repurposed using some fairly simple small technologies. In a sense, we all do this every day. I talk to students and colleagues, I pick up ideas from them (as they might also do from me), our ideas all get remixed somewhere in the connections my frontal cortex, and I pass the remixed ideas on to others as I speak with them or, most notably, as I write. I have found that blog writing is a medium especially well suited to this forwarding of my mental feeds.

I’ve noticed this sort of RSS-blending technology seems to be catching on lately amongst us edu-geeks. Stephen, of course, has been doing this for a long time with EduRSS, and as usual its just taken a few years for the rest of us to catch up. SuprGlu is a web service that also does this mix blending, with very polished looking results. As cool as SuprGlu is, I was slightly dissatisfied because I wanted to put something like this together on a page on my domain. Shortly thereafter, Stephen released MyGlu, which is a subset of EduRSS that replicates the functionality of SuprGlu, but with all the yummy freshness of open source code included. Additionally:

MyGlu not only aggregates feeds, it also filters them according to your specifications. So, for example, you could aggregate your posts, photos and bookmarks with the term ‘Amsterdam’ in them.

Impressive! Shortly thereafter, D’Arcy began musing:

I’ve been giving some thought to the “school aggregator” that grew out of the discussions around Northern Voice. What kinds of things will it have to be able to do? Types of interfaces? Explicit and implicit data and metadata? How to manage caching of items, and manage displaying the potentially hundreds of thousands of bits of content that will be pulled into the system over the course of a year? And how to present cohorts/classes/years within this? How to allow students to add multiple data sources, and tag it for use in whatever class context(s)? How to let students and teachers mine the aggregated data to get what they need/want? Lots of stuff to chew on here.

His post on EduGlu is worth reading not only for D’Arcy’s musings, but for the brilliant conversation that is evolving in the comments. Its like my bloglines account talking amongst itself!

So where does that lead us? It turns out that the crew on the good ship elgg have built this capability right into elgg, as D’Arcy just blogged (Elgguglu?!? Yikes, I hope that name doesn’t catch on!). Scott Leslie was simultaneously, synchronistically also pondering if elgg is the mythical EduGlu, his post prompted by reading Dave Tosh’s notes on feedbooks and populating an elgg blog with external content. (By the way, if this works, this blog post will show up not only on my personal blog, but also on my elgg blog).

The emerging theme in all of this is that we seem to learn (and in this context I’m not sure if we means edtech geeks or people in general) through the strange combinations and permutations of ideas that we have picked up from others, which we then pass along to the people around us. I think this is what George Siemens means when he describes connectivism:

Connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories. Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual. Learning (defined as actionable knowledge) can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization or a database), is focused on connecting specialized information sets, and the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing.

I know that this is how I, as an edtech geek-blogger-podcaster, learn. When I get the chance to watch students engaged in powerful learning, I believe this is how they are learning as well. When I am blogging, I am also hooked into the same process - I read many potent ideas that others are posting on weblogs, I blend the ideas in with some of the secret herbs and spices dwelling in my pre-frontal cortex, and I write down this strange concoction of ideas in public so that you can read this and the whole process reiterates over and over and over …

Now we are pulling together tools to make it easy for us to do the same thing automagically. The thought of that is so profoundly revolutionary, I can’t begin to fathom what this might lead to. Truly, the read-write web is rapidly becoming old-fashioned, and the read-blend-write web is waiting in the wings ready to take its place.

There are many over-whelming ideas left to explore here, but its getting late. If I don’t stop now, I might end up turning this into a Jerry Maguire-esque breakdown/epiphany.

D’Arcy blogged about coComment, a new tool for tracking distributed conversations by keeping track of comments you have made on various blogs. Now we can achieve total zen-like serenity by blogging across the internet without actually having a blog. The description at the coComment site sound great, and a brief poke around shows that each persons list of comments has RSS and Atom feeds available, so someone can now establish a blog by putting up a single web page with a little bit of rss2js sweetness embedded in it, and update the content just by putting comments on other blogs, or just add a bit of the feed to the sidebar of a regular blog. This seems like a great way to encourage interaction. I know that I normally put my reactions to other peoples’ posts on my own blog, but with this I’ll be more inclined to be a bit more neighbourly. At least, I will once I have a chance to use it - sadly, coComment is in beta and requires an invitation code (which I have signed up for!). Heck, if I had this going already, I might have just commented on D’Arcy’s blog instead of posting to my own! :^D

Jeffrey Zeldman has pronounced his judgement on the Web 2.0 hype in A List Apart: Web 3.0. Much of his discontent seems to spring from an incident with a Web 2.0 boor:

“Web 1.0 was not disruptive. You understand? Web 2.0 is totally disruptive. You know what XML is? You’ve heard about well-formedness? Okay. So anyway—” And on it ran, like a dentist’s drill in the Gulag.

His comparison to the Marshall McLuhan scene in Annie Hall is amusing enough to make it worth the read. But there are boors in any profession or industry. You don’t give up on something good - and I think that despite the hype, some of the so-called Web 2.0 applications (think Flickr, del.icio.us, bloglines and many others that I don’t even know about yet) are very good because they give anybody with access to a computer the chance to be connected that no one in history ever has before. I can enjoy fruitful collaborations with people from around the world because of some of these technologies. Zeldman’s discomfort with the Web 2.0 hype, and I share this, is that the good stuff will be obscured by the noise of the hype. This seems to be heightened by a sensitization to hype that was earned by living through the Web bubble of the late ’90s:

I hated the bubble. I hated it when Vanity Fair or New York Magazine treated web agency founders like celebrities. I hated that mainstream media and the society it informs either ignored the web or mistook it for a high-stakes electronic version of the fashion industry.

True enough - there are so few media outlets that really get the whole web thing. And what we’re seeing now isn’t really Web 2.0, its more like Web 0.9 - this is just a preview candidate of what the real thing will be like. There is definitely more functionality than we’ve seen before, but the best stuff is yet to come. Those who are easily distracted by the hype may get misdirected for a while, but there will also be those who continue to work and refine and improve the web for the benefit of all. Zeldman concludes with a word of encouragement to these people:

To you who feel like failures because you spent last year honing your web skills and serving clients, or running a business, or perhaps publishing content, you are special and lovely, so hold that pretty head high, and never let them see the tears. As for me, I’m cutting out the middleman and jumping right to Web 3.0. Why wait?

Web 3.0, Jeffrey? I’m still waiting for 1.0!

As non-politically correct as it may be, I present to you the best blonde joke ever. Semiotically speaking, its hilarious! ;^)

I have played around some with SuprGlu, a web service that allows you to take some RSS feeds and munge them all together in one blog-like page (I have an example that pulls together the web sites for various members of the EdTech Posse).

Never content with the web services where the code is locked behind closed doors, Stephen is starting to put together some similar services, which he refers to as MyGlu, complete with code so the you or I or your great-aunt Mathilda can run it on our own servers, and even tweak the code to our requirements. I suggest you take a look at the code, then spend the rest of the day playing with it.

A great way to get developers to release an upgrade is for me to install it.

I just downloaded and installed this and … the site looks just the same! I don’t even see any difference on the administration side of things. But nothing seems broken, so I think I’ll keep it ;^) K2 at Binary Bonsai