StigmergicWeb

Sign me up, James. This looks brilliant! nonscholae.org

nonscholae.org is a site devoted to the responsible use of blogs, instant messaging and other social software in schools.

Non scholae sed vitae discimus We learn, not for school, but for life - Seneca, Epistulae We believe that these tools and resources should not be blocked or banned from schools. As educators, we should be familiarising learners with these technologies, supporting and facilitating their responsible use and equipping our students with the skills to keep them safe and savvy in the online world.

James is looking for ideas for the site, as well as fellow conspirators. I think this is a great chance for the whole EdTech community to get together and get a little radical!

If podcasts were eggs, we’d have enough now to make a dozen! EdTech Posse Podcast #012 is now available for your listening pleasure, featuring the last bit of our SACE conversation with Dean, Stephen and I (and a special mystery guest!). Enjoy.

I’m sitting in the lobby as the SACE conference winds up. I haven’t attended SACE for a few years because the last time I attended it wasn’t feeling particularly relevant. I’m happy to report that it feels like it has a lot more to offer this time around. Some highlights:

• Stephen’s keynote - “On Being Radical“. I’ve already put my notes on this online, so I won’t rehash it too much. It set a good theme for the conference. I’ve attended conferences before which were too vendor driven and felt more like a trade show than a conference, and There’s a reason, though, why we purchase hardware and software - what are we trying to achieve by doing all of this, and what sort of future are we creating by what we are doing today? Thanks again, Stephen, for getting us started with some consideration of the big picture!
• Dean’s presentation on RSS. I’ve already blogged about it, but Dean has made his presentation available online - watch it, watch it again, and then get other people to watch it. RSS is powerful stuff. The media attention might currently be on AJAX and Web2.0, but RSS is a truly disruptive technology that is going to help to open up the free flow of information in a growing number of areas.
• Sitting in the hotel lobby checking my e-mail yesterday, and looking up to see a fellow conference attendee working on his laptop. As I said hello I took a quick look at his name tag and saw that it was Darren Cannell, who has been on in my RSS aggregator for a long time. We had a nice little discussion afterwards. It was great getting to meet you in person, Darren.
• Initiating a new blogger by helping Shaun get his brand spanking new blog - Of Mice and Middle Years… - set up on edubloggers.org. Great title! (And if you are an educator looking for someplace free to set up a blog, go check out edubloggers.) Now I just need to get Owen blogging. And Donna too!
• My daughter describing the Regina Science Center as “really really really cool!”
• An amazing breakfast conversation this morning with Dean and Stephen. Len Proctor joined us at the end - I wish that he had joined us earlier! Note to self - get Len podcasting. The iRiver was in record mode for the conversation, and I’ll get this edited and out to the world as an EdTech Posse podcast (or a series of podcasts - it was a 2 hour conversation) as soon as I am able.
• Renewing acquaintances and initiating new ones.
• Having time (and free wireless access) to sit and blog in the lobby of the hotel. This is the first technology conference that I’ve been to since NECC 2001 in Chicago that had such extensive wireless access. Kudos to the conference organizes for that!

So, I’ll be on my way to Saskatoon (thanks for the ride, Owen) to catch up with my family and a stay overnight including, hopefully, a chance to see the new Harry Potter movie, then back home tomorrow.

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“

This came in my inbox today from a colleague:

I am looking for some way to organize my life - I am thinking through the web so that I can access it at home or at school.

Whew - that is certainly no small goal. I actually find it somewhat ironic, although the implicit misguided faith in my abilities is nice, that someone would be asking me! All kidding aside, I think this is worthy of consideration since my experience talking to many teachers is that they see learning new kinds of computer technology as just another thing to add to the infinite heap of things I must do. So, I in turn pass this thought on to you - what online tool(s) (and I’ll refrain from using the you-know-what-two-point-oh meme) could someone use to organize their life?

It was great to hear from Rick that I made a guest appearance at AECT 2005

Guess what came up on the screen when David was discussing podcasts? Can you guess? Yup, pardner, the EdTech Posse! The soothing tones of Rob Wall’s voice danced through the crowd. Very fun, and Rob, I’m still amazed that there are listeners, but I’m quickly becoming convinced.

I only wish I could have been there! ;^D

If there was ever a reason for institutions of learning, especially publicly funded ones, to run screaming at full speed away from corporate, proprietary learning content management systems and start to seriously embrace open source solutions, this is it: Press Release: BlackBoard and WebCT announce agreement to merge

The combined Companies’ 3,700 academic clients will create an unparalleled Community of Practice enabling collaboration and innovation around the world

I believe the term they are looking for is not unparalleled Community of Practice, but captive market whose data is locked into our proprietary formats! See the Slashdot discussion of the BB-WebCT union for further incisive commentary.

I’ve been doing a lot of work at school lately putting together screencasts, mainly as a training tool for teachers working with various computer programs, and I notice that screencasts were also mentioned today by Heather Ross and Will Richardson in their blogs. I think that screencasts can be a powerful tool for learning, but I am concerned that we will descend into a period of anarchy with regards to the creation of screencasts, much as we saw in the how many fonts can I put onto a single page maelstrom that we saw at the beginning of the Desktop Publishing era. (I won’t even mention the damage that was done to many impressionable minds when Apple released the San Francisco font on the original Macs - the horror, the horror!) With that in mind, I offer the following modest guidelines for producing screencasts that are effective (i.e. don’t suck):

• Plan ahead. A little outline or storyboard of what you want to do can make your screencasts much more effective by making them shorter and more coherent.
• 3 minutes is the optimum length, with an absolute maximum of 5 minutes. If you are taking longer than that you need to find a way to explain your point with greater brevity, or divide what you are trying to explain into smaller chunks.
• The final version of your screencast should be in flash (.swf) format. There are tools that create Windows Media Player screencasts or Quicktime screencasts. I work in a school that is primarily a Linux environment (yes - it can be done), and resources in Quicktime and WMP formats are not usable. Flash is the closest thing to a universal media format on the web, so use flash as your output format to ensure that you can reach the widest possible audience.
• Audio in screencasts is great, but try to support it with text - don’t assume your audience has sound enabled. If possible, you could even create a version with sound and a text only version to create wider accessability for all potential viewers.
• Using graphics to highlight part of the screen can also be particularly effective when creating a tutorial screencast.

Like any list of guidelines for using technology, there will always be exceptions. But as a beginner starting to create screencasts, you are better off to start by creating short, simple and effective screencasts.

If you are running Linux or Windows, a great little tool for creating screencasts is called Wink. Its freeware, and you can get great results with it. Unfortunately, it isn’t available for Mac.

If you have any tips or guidelines for making screencasts, if you know of any great products, or you have any questions about screencasts please leave a comment.

The EdTech Posse is riding once again with a new podcast:

• Podcast #5 - Talking with Stephen Downes about online learning and Web 2.0 | The EdTech Posse (link to website)
• Podcast audio link

I’ve been reading Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Johnson. One section in particular that I enjoyed was his discussion of how games provide an opportunity for cognitive growth. A good example of this is Planarity, a cunningly simple game that will is so much fun, you might not even realize that you are learning some pretty deep geometry. Warning - This game just took 90 minutes of my life away without my realizing it; I suggest you set a timer or something before you start!