StigmergicWeb

I’ve been reading a few blog posts from the Building Learning Communities conference, mostly from Dean, but Will’s post Why is it so Hard for Educators to Focus on Their Own Learning? hit on a topic that I’ve been trying to gain some perspective on for a while. We have a lot of terrific free read-write webbish tools around us - the entire google suite of apps (possibly evil but I still love ‘em), mind mapping tools, blogging tools, wiki tools and so on. I’ve struggled, and sometimes it feels like a real uphill battle, trying to show teachers how useful these can be as tools for their students. Will has a slightly different perspective, and maybe its the way that I should be looking at this:

Weblogg-ed » Why is it so Hard for Educators to Focus on Their Own Learning? And even as I sit in this session with Tim Tyson at Building Learning Communities, one principal says “I want to learn more about these tools so I can help my teachers use them in the classroom.” I want to jump up and say “No! You are missing a step! You want to learn more about these tools for yourself so you can help your teachers learn from them too.” So what’s that all about? Is it just habit? Is it just such a focus on curriculum delivery that “learning” is all about how to do that job better? Is changing the way we do our own business just too darn hard? Or is this such a huge shift, this idea that we can actually learn through the use of technology that most people just don’t think they have to go there, that they can just keep using it as a way to communicate without the surrounding connective tissue where the real learning takes place?

As a teacher, I think I do tend to think about my students’ learning to the exclusion of thinking about my own learning. I have at times been more concerned with pumping out the curriculum - leading the students through their learning journey more than becoming an equal participant in a group learning journey. I think the communication and connection is the key - connecting with other learners who are playing around (isn’t that how all real learning takes place when you think about it?) with some of these tools. But if I’m using these tools to communicate and collaborate, would it be possible for me to avoid the learning that takes place concurrently? I’m not sure about that one. I think that if we are communicating and connecting with others who have some common interests, we can’t help but learn as we share pieces of information. Regardless, thinking of these tools as something for teachers to learn with, not (just) teach with or teach about, is a valuable perspective and one that I’ll keep in mind next school year when I’m working with other teachers.

Life is now in post project mode, meaning I get to re-acquaint myself with some long forgotten activities such as doing housework/yardwork, sleeping for more than 5 hours a night and the ever popular wasting my time online. My first distraction from WISBD (”what I should be doing” which in this case is marking some Biology 20 assignments) is Twitter. If you are interested in how I am wasting time, here’s my twitter page

So far, I am at Alan Levine’s second stage of the twitter life cycle. I still don’t get it. But after two entries, I’m not in a position to make a thoughtful reflection. So far, it seems like a kind of web-based social Skinner box - keep tapping at those keys and checking on your friends, and you will be occasionally rewarded. I expect it is a random schedule of reinforcement, like slot machines, so infrequent small reinforcement produces a behaviour that extinguishes very slowly. It is, in other words, designed to be addictive. Well, it’s too late - I’m already in. I’m just worried that twitter is a gateway social networking tool that eventually leads to harder stuff like MySpace. I promise to restrict myself to being an occasional twitterer - just a few tweets on weekends to relax with friends!

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!

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.

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.

It has been such a busy week that I haven’t had time until now to finally post the audio from the workshop that Donna and I led on Feb. 13. I think it is fair to say that Donna had some reservations about how the workshop went; I tend to think that it went well, and I particularly enjoyed the collaborative process that went into making the presentation. The presentation is in a wiki, and we built the presentation in a fairly organic sort of way, adding and adjusting to the different parts over time. Here are the links:

• How to drink water from a fire hose (audio - part 1 of 2)
• How to drink water from a fire hose (presentation wiki)

As I said, I thought the workshop went well. To be honest, some staff were resistant to any kind of presentation on technology. There are various reasons for this, but I think one reason my colleagues were resistant is that they believe (rightly or wrongly) new ways of doing things means more work. I would agree with this, but instead of focusing on the extra effort that may be required of them, they should perhaps focus on differences they could make by putting in that extra effort. This is what we ask of our students every day so how can we honestly expect less of ourselves?

I should mention that I work with some of the most amazing, caring and talented teachers I have ever known. As a technology lead teacher, I get the chance to be in many other teachers’ classrooms, and I am in awe of the skill and compassion exhibited by my colleagues. Would I tell any of them that I believe their teaching methods to be insufficient? Absolutely not! But I would ask any teacher to give a fair consideration to methods that might enhance their communication with and understanding of their students, which is what I hope our presentation did.

I tend to be a “glass half-full” kind of guy, though, which is why despite some resistance, I spent my time in the presentation focusing on the staff who were receptive to some new ways of doing things. If I had to pick one technology that seemed to catch people’s fancy, it was social bookmarking. We have installed scuttle on a school server, and I’m delighted to note that a few staff are now making use of it. I hope to see some students using it in the near future.

I also tend, like Doug Johnson, to have a different view of how to implement change than I did a few years ago. After spending some time working to make some changes at the division and school level, I take a much longer view on things. I don’t think that very many meaningful changes happen suddenly. I work towards change by making sure that I’m walking the walk as well as talking the talk (and we all know tht more walking is healthier anyway ;^D ). I think that I can be more effective working with individuals than in large workshops or presentations, and I tend to be somewhat skeptical about the effectiveness of workshops for changing people’s behaviour. Workshops and presentations are great for raising awareness and generating interest, but real change happens one person at a time.

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.

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

Earlier this week I wrote about building a school website one blog at a time, and some thoughts on the merits of not building a monolithic site, but as a series of small inter-related pieces. I’m happy to report that things have already started to move in that direction. You can see the main school page for North Battleford Comprehensive High School, and right in the middle of it is a set of links with the title NBCHS Happenings. (See screenshot below) (Dang - the screenshot got automagically reduced when I uploaded it. Someone must know how to get the full size image up there - D’Arcy, any ideas? Yay - D’Arcy knew what to do! See comments for details.)

The NBCHS Happenings links are actually all harvested, using feed2js, from the NBCHS Happenings blog. We had done something like this before using a Blogger powered blog to generate the feed. The improvement in this system is that the entire system resides on our own server. Its also going to be very easy to put new dynamic content via RSS feeds from our blogs on the main web page, or any other page that we’d like. Of course, this doesn’t preclude anyone from choosing to use a different tool - wordpress.com, for example - as long as it generates an RSS feed from its content.

The next step - some really good discussions with the teacher librarian (Hi Donna!) and others to start defining what information belongs on the front page of the website and what information can be enfolded elsewhere in the website. Then we figure out how that information gets entered, sorted and displayed where we want it. But at least we have step one taken care of! Not bad for one week worth of effort, which included other distractions such as teaching! ;^D

I’ve had some ideas in the past about using some sort of CMS to run a school web site, but after my recent post about building a school website out of a colony of blogs I’ve been encouraged to consider scaling that project up.

The feedback and ideas that were left by Stephen, James and Christopher were very helpful. My original stated goal was to have a variety of wordpress blogs being used by various staff, students and groups around the school. If a teacher wanted a web site, they could build one themselves or I could set them up with a blog. If a creative writing class wanted a public online writing space, I could set them up with a blog (or a set of blogs). If a team or a club or anyone in the school wanted some way to put stuff online, I could (OK - all together on the chorus please) set them up with a blog. It should be noted that I have a pretty generous view of human nature, and would assume, perhaps naively, that all these sites would not be used for malicious behaviour such as online harassment of others. Whenever I’ve worked with students in a way that involved communicating online, I’ve found that this is generally the case.

Christopher made the terrific suggestion that I could use a more fully featured CMS such as Drupal to power the site. I love Drupal - I think it is such an incredible application, and loaded with functionality. But I’m going to try things a different way, at least for now, for a couple of reasons. First, I think Drupal is too much for what I want to do, and when I show other staff and students how to post and edit material, they will be overwhelmed with information. Well - I think some of the staff would; the students would probably show me some features I didn’t know about. The main reason for going with WordPress instead of Drupal is a much more pragmatic one - its the tool I know best. It also fits with my affinity for a small-technologies-loosely-joined approach to building a learning environment.

I also want to thank Stephen for his suggestion about RSS aggregation in PHP using MagpieRSS (I had forgotten about that) and James for his offer of help with WordPress MultiUser (I still might get ahold of you for that!). The three of you got me thinking about different ways a multiple author web site might be put together. The main issue that I’m trying to work out is whether it is better to have a site in which everyone contributes to one centralized CMS, or if I can let everyone work on their own site (maybe a WP blog, but it could be anything else that squeezes out some kind of RSS or Atom feed) and glue the whole thing together. I’m favouring the latter plan because it gives any potential contributor a choice of content creation tools.

I’m also favouring the latter plan because I’ve shown the prototype of the announcements site to some colleagues, including the school principal, and they’ve encouraged me to use what I’ve done so far to revise the main school web site, and the tools at hand are always the easiest ones to work with!

My revised mental plan, then, is to put the school website together using WordPress. Legacy content can be linked from the main page, which will also be used to display school news, events, deadlines and similar information. As individuals or groups in the school want to get involved in adding content, they can be added as a contributor to the site, or given their own blogging space if they want to create content but not necessarily add it to the main school page. Such content can be linked to from the main page, or aggregated together somewhere on the “core” school site.

I’m going to try getting some more work done on the preview of the site tomorrow. So far, the core is looking good, and I’m just going to assume that there will be some way to route the feeds into the blog once that becomes a necessity. And if there isn’t an existing solution, the school division has a very talented PHP nerd on the technical staff! :^)