StigmergicWeb

{begin sarcasm}Oh how I do love the lockdown on my ability to customize my account with our new Windows computer system at my school. I’m so happy that the IT folks are preventing me and my students from doing useful things that might interfere with their ability to manage the system. We wouldn’t want students’ learning to interfere with their system, would we?{end sarcasm}

I am feeling loathing towards our school division system administrators right now, and very bad words are prominent in my inner monologue. The reason - Google Notebook. Google Notebook itself is not the cause of my loathing, merely a symptom. I think that Google Notebook is a terrific research tool. I would love to be able to introduce it as a resource for the students and other staff here at the school. My favourite feature of GN is the extension that allows highlighted section of text on a web page to be clipped and added to a notebook along with the address of the web page it came from. The notebooks can be shared or published so that teachers are able to follow along the process of a student’s research. This is a great tool from Google, and one that too few people (especially students and teachers) know about.

But I can’t install the extension on IE on our system. I don’t have the rights to add an extension to my browser. I’m not surprised about this, considering the control issues of the current IT regime. So, being a resourceful and geeky kind of guy, I thought I thwart the IT guys by running the portable version of Firefox, which runs off a USB drive. I could then install the notebook extension.

Alas, this does not work. I have other apps on my USB drive - Skype, PuTTY and Opera (which I am currently running) and others which all run just tickety-boo. Firefox seems to be singled out and prevented from funning running (Oops - apparently I was too upset to type correctly). I can’t install the GN extension on IE, and I can’t run Firefox. These are the only two browsers that support the plugin. I can still use GN, but without the extension it is only flying on one wing.

As an isolated event, this is an inconvenience to me. But it’s not just an isolated event. It also prevents teachers and students from using a wonerfully useful research tool to its fullest. It is symptomatic of an unfortunate fact in many school divisions that education is secondary to the demands of the IT department. If that’s not a case of the tail wagging the dog, I don’t know what is. When that happens, something is seriously wrong with the system.

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!

Open Thinking - a new site/community for anyone who is interested in open content, open source software, open publishing practices or open content formats - is now open. Here’s our current definition of open thinking:

Open thinking is the tendency of an individual, group or institution to give preference to the adoption of open technologies or formats in regards to software, publishing, content and practice. Open thinkers critique, question and seek to reject technologies or formats that compromise the power of adopters, especially in the freedom to use, reuse, edit and share creative works and tools. Open thinkers value group-based problem solving and give preference to tools that enable social collaboration and sharing. Open thinkers actively strive to replace adopted technologies and formats with open alternatives. Open thinkers advocate for the adoption of open technologies and practice.

If you are interested, why don’t you head on over and join in the discussion.

I’ve just read this post from Andy Carvin about Seymour Papert - Andy Carvin’s Waste of Bandwidth: Prayers for Seymour Papert. Seymour Papert was hit by a motorcycle and “gravely injured” while in Hanoi for a conference. According to a report at boston.com, the accident on Tuesday left Papert, 78, in a coma. An e-mail from Hanoi says On tuesday afternoon, Seymour Papert got run over. He hit his head, and has had to undergo emergency neurosurgery.

I don’t think that educational technology would exist in its present form without his influence. We need to keep his ideas about the importance of play in learning ever present in our minds as corporations try to claim control over learning (by patenting e-learning, perhaps?).

David Wiley quotes from and links to a paper entitled “Open Access: Why should we have it?” As someone who promotes open access, open source software, open data formats and other forms of open thinking, it is rewarding to see that there is tangible evidence of the value of these practices. The cases studied in the paper focus on open access journals/articles in the physical sciences but I think that it is safe to generalize the results to all areas of academic research.

By the way, the open thinking concept is one that a lot of people have been exploring. Alec Couros, Heather Ross and I have been discussing ways to advocate open thinking and initiate some open discussions on the topic. Watch here for further details.