StigmergicWeb

I’ve just posted at my work blog about a project to create a new school announcements system that will be powered by WordPress. I wanted to put some notes up here about how it works, and hopefully get some feedback. I also have some ideas about how this could grow - again, feedback would be great. (This does not mean that I’ve recanted my earlier posts/podcasts about how schools could make great use of Drupal - I just like to have lots of tools available.)

Here’s what we do for our announcements now:

• Announcements are given to a secretary who types them up, photocopies them for all staff and a few extra student copies.
• The announcements are read to all classes in period 1 of the school day.
• The word processor file is e-mailed from the secretary to the library technician.
• The library technician copies the announcements and pastes them into a post in Blogger. Other announcements also get posted in the Blogger account.
• The Blogger account publishes the school announcement blog to our own server.
• Using some feed2JS mojo (thanks, Alan), the atom feed from our blogger-powered announcements blog end up on the front page of our school web site

Here’s the great irony in this whole, elaborate fandando - every teacher in every classroom of our school has a computer terminal on his or her desk. It is entirely possible, from a technical standpoint, for each staff member to enter their own events/announcements onto some sort of content management system (including, I will admit, a Blogger powered blog). The teacher librarian at the school has struggled valiantly trying to get teachers to add their own announcements, with only some recent success. It is also possible,right now, for every staff member to go online to read the announcements to their class. Instead, however, we waste vast quantities of paper for ROTA (read-once-throw-away) announcements.

But, the system has failed us this past week. For reasons that I cannot, and do not, care to understand, Blogger can no longer publish the announcements site to our web server. Here’s what I’m using to replace/revamp this system:

• A WordPress powered blog for the announcements and events. The blog will reside entirely on our own server, so outside services failing can’t cripple our site.
• Use feed2js to place the blog content on the school main page.
• Start showing staff and students how to use an aggregator like bloglines to stay in touch with what’s going on at the school!

To do this, I’ve set up a WordPress install with some basic themes and plugins, including:

• K2 theme for wordpress - it just rocks!
• Adhesive plugin - to keep events at the top of the events list so they don’t fall off the main page
• EventsCalendar3 plugin - might be used to create a page of upcoming events for a week/month

If this catches on, and I think it just might, then other staff and students may also want to set up their own blog. Its easy enough to set up a default wordpress install directory with all the desired plugins and themes. The 5 minute install is great, but it would be even nicer to have a script to create a new blog based on a default wordpress directory. I’m not going to explore WPMU - I’ve had problems getting it set up on the school server.

Once we get a bunch of classes and groups with active blogs, we can start to put some of their content on the school front page. This could be done with feed2js, but there are a few plugins (BDP RSS Aggregator and FeedWordPress are two that I’m aware of) that might be able to redirect the RSS content into a single wordpress blog.

Anyone up for some discussion about this?

Further thought: I had a great big well duh! moment last night as I was heading off to bed. I could probably use MyGlu to mix a bunch of feeds together on the front page! Sad to say, though, that my perl hacking skills have atrophied from lack of use, and I’m a little more proficient in PHP. Maybe I’ll try to find a way to integrate MyGlu into a PHP page.

UPDATE - I’ll post some more details later, but I just wanted to let anyone who is interested know that the school page for North Battleford Comprehensive High School now has a listing of events and announcements that is put there by Alan’s uber-cool feed2js thingy which processes the RSS feed generated by the school events and announcements blog. Its not much, but its a start and a proof of concept to show others. There are some discussions that need to happen before the front page can be revised, but I think this is a nice model for how to shift the school website, including the way information gets added and updated, at a gradual pace.

I’d also like to thank all the commenters for some terrific suggestions and ideas. These are very much in my mind as I’m planning the next step.

I have played around some with SuprGlu, a web service that allows you to take some RSS feeds and munge them all together in one blog-like page (I have an example that pulls together the web sites for various members of the EdTech Posse).

Never content with the web services where the code is locked behind closed doors, Stephen is starting to put together some similar services, which he refers to as MyGlu, complete with code so the you or I or your great-aunt Mathilda can run it on our own servers, and even tweak the code to our requirements. I suggest you take a look at the code, then spend the rest of the day playing with it.

I was going to title this Dean kicks educators in the RSS, but reconsidered.

But seriously, Dean Shareski just gave a great session on RSS. I think the trick that he hit onto, besides a great intro with a thoroughly engaging presenation (which proved that Powerpoint does not have to be considered a tool to lull your audience into a hypnagogic state), was avoiding the discussion of what is RSS as much as possible, instead focusing on what you can do with RSS.

Dean was also trying to do a bit of recording of the presentation, so I hope that there will be a podcast/screencast coming out of this from him. In the meantime, here are some of my impressions.

Life before RSS - simple and fun! (Great slide) But eventually, there is so much stuff out there, it gets difficult to make sense of it all.

Dean has a picture of me and Noami (at her soccer game) on his slide show. Dean says that I strike him as quite geeky (or at least I did back in our EDCMM 802 days - I wonder if my geek factor has worn off since then?).

The first time Dean looked at RSS, it scared him. (big laughs - Dean is a great presenter). It stands for really simple syndication. “Syndication for me is when Seinfeld goes into re-runs“

Newsreader - a place/program where you can read info that is syndicated by RSS. Bloglines is a good one, and it is web based.

Finding RSS feeds to add to a newsreader. Problem that they don’t all look the same, but they are out there if we look carefully.

Checking my bloglines account is more important than checking my e-mail. It is professional development, personal development. There’s no spam - its just stuff that I want.

Cool RSS stuff:

• calendars
• packages
• auctions
• social bookmarks
• photos
• searches
• e-mail
• more stuff! (including breaking up with someone? Read the list for more details)

Educator’s guide to RSS by Will Richardson is a resource interested educators should look at.

Dean introduced us to his friends, via his bloglines account. Bloglines make it easy to add RSS feeds via a bookmarklet. Dean showed how easy it is by adding D’Arcy Norman to his bloglines list.

It is now about 15 minutes past the end of session, but everyone is still intently listening. RSS definitely is a technology that gets people’s brains going once they find out about it.

Suprglu A tool for rip, mix, feed with RSS - takes many RSS feeds and turns them into an uber-blog. I think this is too cool for words. Check out the EdTech Posse on Glu for details. (This could be the most powerful yet easy tool for creating ePortfolios!)

Great session, and really well done by Dean. There was a lot of buzz afterwards about how this could aid with the always present problem of sharing information in education.

I’m at SACE in Regina. Lots of great people are here - Alec and Dean from the posse are here, Heather is here. Lots of very thoughtful educators who should be bloggers are also here. The first time I attended one of Stephen’s presentations was when I started blogging, so maybe this will give some of them the impetus to get started. I sure hope so - there are a lot of great and thoughtful bloggers in the edtech blogosphere, but even more who aren’t yet.

The presentation is entitled “On Being Radical” (audio and slides available on Stephen’s website later; I’ll put in a link once its there). These are just my rough jot notes on the presentation - I’ll try to put in some kind of synthesis at some later time.

Two paths meet today. How did that happen - how did we come to be together here today. There is the factual account - someone sent me e-mail, etc. That is just the technical story, it doesn’t tell us how it came to be.

What is radical? Tommy Douglas, as an example, was a dangerous radical. And what once was radical has now become commonplace - how did this happen?

John Stuart Mill wrote on the subjection of women and advocated for their equality within society, a radical topic at the time. Now the idea is commonplace.

What is radical?

Consider at the WSIS conference in Tunisia - talking about global internet access in a place where blogging, taking pictures and open communication are radical ideas.

Technology changes everything. 24 hours ago Stephen was in an airplane flying over the mountains of Greenland.

I can with the click of a button, reach out and touch a life half way around the world. This is not theoretical - I know I can do this. How did this happen? And what’s next?

When new technology - the press, the gun, the computer - empowers a previously disenfranchised population , the results are radical. The new empowerment - the millenials, the Cluetrain Manifesto, learner center designed - these are all evidence of the new empowerment. (And the results, it seems self-evident, must therefore be radical)

We need to change learning from a service we provide to people to something they do themselves. That is a radical notion.

Empowering technology - the interactive web - blogs, CMS’s, wikis, podcasts, screencasts, video, IM, skype, wireless access, the mobile web. This is how it happens - where do we go next?

Radical ideas:

1. Connectivism - knowledge resides in a diversity of opinions. The knowledge to build from scratch and safely pilot an airline exists in no one brain - our intelligence is collective.
2. Open access - file-sharing, open source, open content. This is at odds with our current ideas about intellectual property.
3. The open society - transparency, accountability, partnerships.

(Alec Couros is sitting beside me, and he just fired up his powerbook - perhaps the urge to blog this is too powerful to resist?)

Learning as a network phenomenon:

• web of user generated content
• social networks and communities - entails a genuinely portable and owned identity
• networks of interactions (aggregate, remix, repurpose, feed forward) - don’t just take what is there, but take what is there and then work with it to create something new. (Hmm - we could call this stigmergic!)

Three principles of effective e-learning:

• interaction - participation in a learning community
• usability - simplicity and consistency
• relevance - a.k.a. salience, that is , learning that is relevant to you, now

Collectively, these are quite radical ideas.

Interaction Guerrilla Tactics

• if interaction isn’t provided, create it, blog it …
• if your software doesn’t support interaction, add it (javascript, RSS)
• use back channels to route around blocking (Gmail, Flickr, IM, more)

(Alec thinks we should send Stephen a skype message for feedback right now - :^D )

Relevance - just in time learning instead of just in case learning

Properties of successful networks

• Diversity (many objectives)
• Interwoven (many activities)
• Open (many minds)

(boing! its all about the ants! Stephen elaborated on this in his presentation in Heerlan - more on this later, I hope)

The metaversity - the MacGyver model of eLearning; take a few different tools, and duct tape them all together (actually, I think MacGyver used chewing gum most of the time). Stephen’s diagram is described as “radical”

To be radical is to grsp empowerment and define a vision based on that empowerment for a better, freer society.

So, an answer at last to the questions “How did we get here?” and “How did these things come to be?”

It happened because we made it happen. Becuase we wanted to believe there was some good in the world.

Great ending - Stephen missed his calling, I think he should be a preacher. Hmm - I suppose he is in a way, and I’m definitely in the ‘Hallelujah’ corner.

UPDATE - Stephen has posted the audio and powerpoint for “On Being Radical“

Back in mid August I gave a brief presentation on DIY eLearning systems, and amongst the many helpful and provocative comments Leigh Blackall got down to business: Tell us how it went then? Where to from here?

OK, Leigh - its a bit late, but here’s my report. The first part is easier to answer. Most of the other presenters were from the Computer Science field, and talked a lot about ontologies. My background is in education and, long long ago, in genetics - I know jack about ontologies. Luckily, a quick referral to Wikipedia cleared things up. An ontology, within computer science, is part of the product of an attempt to formulate an exhaustive and rigorous conceptual schema about a domain. Ontologies are useful, I suppose, when attempting to create a model of a phenomenon, but I suppose there is a danger of mistaking the map for the territory. And ontologies don’t seem, from my reading of Christopher Alexander (A City is Not a Tree) and Clay Shirky (Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links and Tags), to scale well to large complex systems. Shirky, in particular, shows that ontological, tree-like hierarchies work very well with specific restricted domains, such as the periodic table in chemistry, but falls short when trying to inform us about the classification of knowledge.

So amidst all of these people talking about ontologies, I felt kind of out of place with my nice little eLearning Processes Using Small Technologies Loosely Joined presentation. Despite my misgivings, I received some really nice feedback, not only from the educational technology types but also from the computer science guys. What impressed me most was the way that both perspectives complement each other to look at some of the problems of eLearning. I found myself challenged by trying to understand the other discipline’s perspective.

Now the tough part - what next? Stephen Downes recently presented on Principles of Distributed Representation (powerpoint and mp3 available for download), and he points out that some of our traditional beliefs about knowledge are inadequate. Speaking of knowledge, he specifially mentions five characteristics of knowledge that are downright counterintuitive:

• Knowledge is subsymbolic
• Knowledge is distributed
• Knowledge is interconnected
• Knowledge is personal
• Knowledge is emergent

Read Stephen’s transcript for the full details, or listen to the audio. The bottom line is that our tools for teaching and learning need to match the characteristics of knowledge. I happen to think that a lot of the small technologies I spoke of at the symposium do just that.