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.

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.

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’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.

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).