StigmergicWeb

From EdTech Posse site - The Posse is riding to TLt 2006:

On May 1, all four members of the EdTech Posse will be presenting at the Teaching and Learning with the Power of Technology 2006 conference in Saskatoon. Our presentation about podcasting (no big surprise), is entitled Podcasting in Real Time. During the presentation, we will record, edit, upload and post a short podcast (at least, we hope that’s what we’ll be doing); we’ll also have a discussion around some of the instructional issues regarding the use of podcasts. In addition to the short, demonstration podcast we also hope to record and podcast the entire presentation.

There’s also a short audio note at the site saying much the same thing. Why the audio note? I have an iBook borrowed from the school that I’m taking to the conference (due to my laptop’s non-functioning screen), and it has the newest version of GarageBand on it. I’ve heard that this version of GarageBand has some integrated podcasting creation functionality, and I wanted the chance to play with it. My take on it was that it was pretty easy, but of course it doesn’t have the fine control like using a tool like Audacity.

I’ll put some links here to any audio or other stuff that we use in the presentation.

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.

News from the BCEd Online Annual Conference

Stephen’s Web: A Conversation With Stephen Downes

And yes, the hiatus is nearly over; stay tuned to this channel for more.

What more need I say - follow the link, already! I haven’t even listened to it yet, but I know that its going to be some seriously good stuff. Also check out the audio from the UnKeynote from Stephen. D’Arcy also has reflections/braindump, and Brian provides the requisite levity.

More thoughts shortly - first I gotta listen to the audio.

(by the way, I’m trying Performancing in Firefox for blogging this, just to give the full release a test)

We were never really gone, actually, just all extremely busy. I think the conversation is worth the wait!

EdTech Posse Podcast #13 - Why is this worth doing in schools?

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).

I have to admit that my reservations about Apple co-opting podcast production and distribution are beginning to falter. I still have a bad feeling about GarageBand because it seems to produce podcasts only in Apple’s proprietary formats (or am I mistaken about this? Please let me know). These probably could be converted to standard formats like mp3, but when the tools make it super easy to produce great content in proprietary formats, why would anyone bother? (Except for ed-tech nerds like you and me, of course).

So why the faltering of my opposition. Because Will Richardson linked to these terrific student produced digital stories this morning. I don’t think these sorts of things would have been produced if the only way to get it done was to use 5 or 6 arcane tools that needed to be MacGyvered together in order to work. Most people just don’t have the time or inclination to bother, nor do they care about the advantage of standardized file formats. And when I look at the results that can be produced by students using really easy to use tools, the educator part of my brain duct-tapes the ed-tech, open-source loving, ubergeek part of my brain that is trying to scream out in process. Enough of reading me - go look at some really cool stuff!

Long Elementary Student Podcasts

Rick Schwier has claimed that I have converted (or is that corrupted) him into a podcaster. P’shaw - Rick is a natural storyteller and speaker and, therefore, a natural for podcasting. He has started a new podcast

Now you hear me …

He is using the latest version of GarageBand to put together the podcasts and hosting it in a .Mac account, so the podcasts are in m4a format which, I believe requires iTunes to play, and the subscribe button on his page is for iTunes. Is the Apple-centric product the price for the ease of podcast production in GarageBand?

If you aren’t using iTunes, you might want to consider it just to get Rick’s podcast. Each one is short - 1 to 3 minutes - and does a great job of provoking thought and reflection. Its not quite EDCMM 802 (a class Rick teaches at the U of Saskatchewan in the Educational Communication and Technology program), but its good stuff!

That makes 3 of the posse - Rick, Dean and me (albeit irregularly on my own) - who are independently podcasting. I think its time Alec got into the act (but maybe after the dissertation is finished) and we can start our own EdTech Posse Podcast Network!

Will Wright, the creator of The Sims, SimCity and many other wonderful Sim- games has an article in which he asserts that games are unleashing the imagination. I would argue that games always have unleashed the imagination, but he is arguing from the point of view of electronic games. Fair enough, but we shouldn’t forget that there were games that fired up people’s imaginations before the computer game era (any other D and D players out there - IMHO, real games are played with paper and dice). Here’s the article link: Dream Machines

Here’s the pithy quotation - there’s an implication in his article about the upcoming clash between the learning styles of the gaming generation and the teaching styles of traditional schools:

In an era of structured education and standardized testing, this generational difference might not yet be evident. But the gamers’ mindset - the fact that they are learning in a totally new way - means they’ll treat the world as a place for creation, not consumption. This is the true impact videogames will have on our culture.

I would say that blogging, podcasting, and the whole read-write web thingy also trains participants to be creators of media. Gaming is perhaps a particularly well-defined facet of this, and something that has a wide participant base. It also offers some great possibilities for learning as well (I’d love to get SimEarth running for my Biology 20 class, but I don’t think it would run on our school’s Linux terminals). A major shift will be required in our ideas about assessment in order to make this fit in with school-based learning.

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.

On Monday morning, Donna and I are putting on a presentation entitled How to Drink Water from a Fire Hose, a read/write web presentation-demonstration-recreation hoedown (in the tradition of the presentation mashups created by the three amigos), for the teachers and other invited guests at the school. I think the title is a pretty good analogy for how some teachers feel about some of the newer social technologies built on the world wide web. We decided that it wasn’t enough for us to do a standard talk while we click through some slides kind of presentation - we need to eat our own dogfood, as the saying goes. The main body of the presentation notes are on a wiki. I’ve put up a blog post on my school blog for viewing and commenting during the presentation. I’ll be taking some photos and adding them to Flickr during the presentation if the opportunity presents itself. If I can find a moment to record some audio, I might even put up a 3 minute podcast for the presentation. After the main presentation, which will be about 80 minutes, we’re going to give the teachers time to play with some of the tools - blogging, wikis, social bookmarking and RSS aggregation.

You are cordially invited to come play with us. Leave comments on the here, on the wiki or on my school blog. You can add to any of the presentation notes (you must be a registered user on the wiki in order to edit). Send me an e-mail to robwall AT gmail DOT com. If you want to blog some ideas, leave a link to your post on the wiki for the teachers to follow.