StigmergicWeb

I’m letting myself take a distraction break from marking and entering numbers into the grading program (Good old numbers … what would school be like without them?). In OLDaily Stephen has posted about his presentation “What you really need to learn“. Great stuff. I’m looking forward to the audio.

Here’s a tasty little morsel from the presentation that started some neurons to flicker:

Rather than memorizing form (the old way) multimedia teaches to look for signs in the environment (the new way)

Literacy, if I may paraphrase, is not about memorization of facts. I think we all take that as a given. Literacy is also not about finding facts, a notion that I find interesting although it is at odds with what I usually conceive of as information literacy. Literacy, of any type, is about pattern recognition, about seeing how art is like physics is like literature is like dance is like architecture is like …

Literacy is not about knowing where the dots are. Literacy is not about finding dots about which you may not know. Literacy is about connecting the dots and seeing the big picture that emerges.

Well - enough intellectual stimulation. Time to get back to judging students on how well they know where the ecology dots are.

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!

Graham Atwell has published a screencast of his presentation Personal Learning Environments - Live at Edinburgh.

There’s just so much I like about his presentation, but two main ideas stand out in my mind:

• A personalized learning environment is not an application. It is a suite of services which could be, I suppose, web based or locally run on a PC. Most important, Graham points out that the suite of services is made up of small tools, loosely connected. This is a theme I’ve written about before. I love hearing other people talk about it - it means I’m less likely to be raving or demented, at least about this particular topic.
• Learning, especially informal learning is not something that can be commoditized, monetized or discussed in the context of free markets. Learning, and education, is a public good - the more people in a society that are learners, the better off that society will be.

I keep meaning to write more on this last topic, but my life seems to drag me away from writing and blogging as much as I’d like to. Ah well, someday I’ll get back to being a more dedicated blogger. I estimate that day will come in 2011 when my son starts Kindergarten. Until then, we’ll have to make due with what I can fit into my schedule.

I just read about this via Dean:

K12 Online 2006 Conference…

Announcing the first annual “K12 Online 2006? convention for teachers, administrators and educators around the world interested in the use of Web 2.0 tools in classrooms and professional practice. This year’s conference is scheduled to be held over two weeks, Oct. 23-27 and Oct. 30- Nov. 3 with the theme “Unleashing the Potential.”

Holy cool idea, Batman! There are so many conferences that I’ve had to miss because of scheduling or being too far away, but this, as Dean points out, could be good. I’d even say this could be great! Big salute to Will, Darren and Sheryl for organizing this.

The organization of this conference is brilliant in its simplicity:

There will be four “conference strands”– two each week. Two presentations will be published in each strand each day, Monday - Friday, so four new presentations will be available each day over the course of the two-weeks. Each presentation will be given in podcast or screencast format and released via the conference blog (URL: TBA) and archived for posterity.

I think that limiting the length of time of the conference and selecting the presenters will help to limit the cognitive load on conference attendees and prevent repetitive presentations. How many conferences have you been to where two (or more) presenters are talking about the same thing? There are some terrific affordances that become apparent when a conference gets changed from a physical, synchronous event to a virtual, asynchronous one!

If you are interested in presenting, and who wouldn’t be, you can get further information at Will’s blog post about K12online 2006. I’d love to contribute something - anyone want to co-present? How about an EdTech Posse presentation? Anyone else interesting in co-operating to put something together? I am pumped!

I have a couple of days in Saskatoon this week, and today I did something that has been on my personal to-do list for a while - I saw the film An Inconvenient Truth. (Tangential note - I saw the film at the Broadway Theatre in Saskatoon. If you love films, and you like to see them in movie houses instead of megaplexes at the mall, this is the place to go!) An Inconvenient Truth is essentially a documentary presentation of Al Gore’s slideshow presentation that he has made around the world on the topic of global warming and climate change, along with some biographical bits about Al that provide some background not only about how he came to be concerned about climate change over the past 30 years but also some personal examples of how people can manage to ignore the truth of the consequences of their actions.

There are two levels at which I watched and appreciated the documentary. I suppose the more trite and insignificant level is as a teacher/instructional designer. The movie is, amongst other things, a great commercial for Apple and especially its Keynote presentation software. These are the tools we are shown Al Gore using as he crafts his presentation. As I watched the presentation, I appreciated how well crafted it was - not too much information on any slide, great use of graphics and video - and how well Al Gore delivered it. It brings home the point that a good presentation, like any form of instruction, needs to be carefully crafted, revised and polished over time.

The other level at which I appreciated the film was for its main message about climate change. Gore clearly explains the science and the data. Once this is out on DVD, I will definitely be using it in Science/Biology classes. There may be many skeptics as to the cause of climate change or the effects of carbon dioxide emissions, but I don’t see how any rational human being could see this without realizing the urgency to do something that reduces our carbon dioxide emissions, on a personal, national and global level. Although I’ve taught Biology for many years, and climate change has been a notable topic in my classes, I didn’t realize how quickly the changes may come upon us. The canaries have been dying in this global coal mine all over the place, and too many people with power are urging to keep digging.

If you haven’t seen this film, see it. If you have seen this film, see it again and take a climate change skeptic with you. You can find out where it is currently playing on the documentary’s web site. I note with some ironic amusement that it is currently showing in Calgary, home of the Canadian oil industry and Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s constituency. I wonder if he’s planning to see it?

Jay Wilson is talking about using iMovie/iChat. Some key points

• Ugly is good. Don’t worry about making it beautiful - capturing good content is more important than competing with Spielberg. A lot of educational video is not played back under optimum conditions - low bandwidth, old equipment, etc. so spending a lot of extra time on gloss is not important. (Wildcat video)
• file formats: for streaming video, Jay’s experience has been that Real Player gives the best performance.
• FireWire (a.k.a. IEEE1394 a.k.a. iLink) is the most universal way of getting video from a camera to the computer. You can use the camera to shoot and the computer to record when they are hooked up. To record straight onto the computer, an iSight camera works well (autofocus, good microphone, adjusts well to various lighting situations)

Jay demoed iMovie. As always, iMovie is pretty easy to use and almost anybody can start using it right away.

(BTW - Heather Ross is sitting right across from me, and is blogging this right now. Well - I think she’s blogging this. I just checked - she is blogging about the conference in general. Cool. I wonder if she’ll mention me).

Back to demo. Jay has loaded clips from a video camera. Showing how to add clips to the product. After the movie is created, it can be exported (”shared” in MacSpeak) to e-mail, DVD, back to the video camera, etc.

Jay says the most practical way of archiving old tapes from the video camera with stock footage is to keep them on the tapes, and store the tapes in a cool, dry place.

Final Message - in relatively little time, we can assemble some video together that looks well packaged.

Daniel Mittleholtz is presenting about Multimedia Learning Theory (Mayer), and how media should be applied to provide optimum retention of information. (Daniel has a MLT blog, as well as a podcasting blog).

Started with an overview of the presentation and a slides summarizing Multimedia Learning Theory.

• problem of engaging learners online. We use e-mails and forums to engage students but that doesn’t work to engage all students (text bias)
• Text is a graphic medium! (Ref Earl Misanchuk’s work on text and enhancing learning)
• Seven principles of multimedia design

• Multimedia - we learn better when corresponding text and pictures are combined
  
• Spatial Contiguity - corresponding words and pictures should be next to each other
  
• Temporal Contiguity - corresponding words and pictures should be presented simultaneously
  
• Coherence Principle -
  
• Modality Principle
• Redundancy Principle
  
• Individual differences - design effects are stronger for low-knowledge learners than for high knowledge learners and for high-spatial learners than for low spatial learners

Good design involves giving students choices (audio on/audio off buttons for example) so they can optimize. The design has to be flexible enough to permit all these options.

Video is really good for engaging students and getting their interest. (Great video of his grand-daughter laughing - yep, that was engaging).

So - how does this relate to podcasts:

• We learn best when the text (or audio for a podcast) corresponds with the visual, so we can include a link to a powerpoint or pdf
• iTunes U (Stanford is the popular example). iTunes has some great features - the podcast can be listened to using the software instead of having to open another program. iTunes can also let the user listener listen to the first minute without having to download the whole thing.
• Demo - how to post a podcast. (Using the Movable Type blogs available at blogs.usask.ca. This is great because this is the stuff we didn’t have a chance to do in our session yesterday).
• Dan also posted a vodcast (Photoshop TV)

Dan mentioned a Windows program that generates m4v video files called Cleaner XL.

Today the EdTech Posse gave our very first presentation together - EdTech Posse: Podcasting in Real Time. Dean has already put a short description and some photos up over on Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech. I have to agree with Dean that it was a pleasure to present with the rest of the posse. We have been connecting up via Skype and recording our conversations to impose on an unsuspecting world for almost a year and, as Dean has noted, its been the best PD experience I could hope for. Today, however, was the first time that all four of us were in the same room at the same time.



The premise for presentation was pretty simple - record a podcast for about 20 minutes, edit it, load it up to a server and put the entry on our blog all within the hour we had. The editing was made a little bit easier thanks to the beta version of Audacity 1.3, which includes a batch processing filter for cleaning up speech. I didn’t do any editing other than adding the podcast leadin and pressing the batch process button. The final audio mix was fairly decent - you can head over the the EdTech Posse site to judge for yourself. We might have a podcast of the full discussion from our presentation posted sometime soon. We did set up a Podcasting in real time wiki on wikispaces, initially to help in planning our presentation but I’ve started adding some podcasting resources. If you’d like to see or suggest any resources on podcasting, you can go ahead and add to the wiki or leave a comment here.

The rest of the conference has been going well, except that the wireless seems to keep denying me; I checked out the wireless on the U of S campus yesterday, and it worked flawlessly, but today it was showing me no love. Consequently, I have not had the chance to blog the conference live, although I hope to get some things written here before they completely escape my brain.

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.

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)