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A word for today, and beyond!

Sheryl brought this word to my attention, "lagniappe" (Diigo: delicious4educators, Front Page, comment 11, 2008.12.09). It means a little something extra and, as she put it, "more ephemeral."

Wesch introducing YouTube at the U.S. LoC

Billed as "an excellent backgrounder to social media, user-generated content, and online communities through the lens of anthropology" by Alec Couros (2008.08.03), this YouTube video resonates in a similar post by D'Arcy Norman (2008.08.06). The video represents a June 23, 2008, appearance of Professor Michael Wesch at a U.S. Library of Congress (LoC) podium to display and describe his and his students' findings from ethnological investigations into YouTube as participant observers (Wesch, 2008)

Wesch describes media such as YouTube as neither content, nor tools of communication, but rather as a landscape that mediates human relationships. He suggests that changes in "the mediascape" correspond to changes in human relations (approx. 12 of 55 minutes in), reflecting manifestations of participatory culture and networked individualism. Eschewing Powerpoint, he and his students remix dozens of independent video productions to portray a mediated state under tension between personal expression and social aspiration:

• individualism and community,
  
• independence and relationships, and
• aggrandizement and authenticity.

"More info" in the YouTube sidebar provides a timeline for the video itself (Added: July 26, 2008). However, you've got to see the presentation to believe it!

Reference

Wesch, Michael (Dir.). (2008). An anthropological introduction to YouTube. Retrieved September 9, 2008, from http://youtube.com/watch?v=TPAO-lZ4_hU

Diigo bookmarking for Learning with Computers

To increase visibility of a Learning with Computers group discussion going on in Diigo, just one of several venues in which members of that group interact, I'm going to cross-post here a bit that I wrote there:

I'd like to offer some reflections based on observations and suggestions that other participants have made already. To those I will add a few of my own ideas about collective bookmarking.

Joao Alves (among others) urges us to adopt the "tags Diigo suggests...[, and]... agree on a special tag for the group like 'LWC' that we would always add to every bookmark we tagged" (message 5).

Recommended tags are a start, but I'm always curious about who recommends them, and what for. I suppose they represent collective practices that may be more spontaneous or less focused than ours. LWC sounds quick, and easy to remember, yet may be quite obscure to other Diigo uses who don't already know that it stands for Learning with Computers.

After many hours on screen, I prefer tags with greater visual definition than all CAP's, so CamelCase is my favorite for MultiWordTags. I'm not sure, however, whether Diigo defeats capitalization. If not, I'd prefer something like LwC.

Joao goes on to suggest,"Organizing tags in topics or bundles like in del.icio.us would be helpful to find the most relevant site about the subject we are interested in." Though bundles in del.icio.us are quite powerful in that they enable multi-purpose uses of individual tags, as well as consolidation of similar ones, I have a distinct impression that bundling may work better with single word tags.

Having done most of my bookmarking in del.icio.us, up to now, I've hardly ever felt a need to double or triple up on words, since searching for intersections or conjunctions between tag sets in del.icio.us is a given. I'm looking forward to finding out whether Diigo offers such powerful search options.

Mary Hillis points out: "... [Y]ou could simply use quotation marks for "lesson plan". Maybe this is another advantage of using Diigo" (message 4), and Joao agrees: "... [Q]uotation marks are very useful to write tags that have 2 or more words. I have always appreciated this feature in Flickr" (message 5). The use of quotation marks to demarcate exact phases may be common to Ma.gnolia bookmarking as well.

Earlier on Susana expressed preference for using nouns as tags (message 3), a preference we share to some extent. I tended to use plural forms for countable nouns. I still do sometimes hoping that bookmarking tool search engines will recognize the word noun as a subset of the category nouns more readily, perhaps, than they recognize the word nouns as a derivative of the tag noun.

If such search parameters aren't available yet, they should be. Otherwise, generic web searches for exact quotations and partial character strings may more than suffice for finding content for which interpretation into special terminology is unnecessary.

I've also experimented with a greatest common denominator strategy that works, I imagine, rather like a bundling strategy for similar tags. Take, for instance, collaborat, a tag I tend to favor in de.licio.us to capture the essence of collaborate, collaboration, collaborative, and collaborators. Nevertheless[,] I realize that tags such as collaborat, like the tailor-made one Susana mentioned, edudiigolwc, call for awareness-raising, if not public definition and explanation, in order to be of use to wider and wider groups of bookmark browsers or connoisseurs.

Tag clouds added to blogs, for instance, or provided in group bookmarking tools themselves, for example: de.licio.us and Ma.gnolia, are means of raising awareness. Yet Diigo, as options for individual commentary, comments earmarked for groups, and discussions like this one illustrate, affords ample opportunities for explanation in situ to those wish to elaborate for the benefit of a community such as the Learning with Computers cohort. What a pleasure it is!

(How should we use the tagging system to better organize our group bookmarking, message 6, 2008.06.24 [JST])

Blogged with the Flock Browser

The Learning with Computers group venue @ Diigo is public. Please feel free to share comments here, or join us there.

Social capital: a definition to ponder

As a quick cross-link to, and reminder of, another discussion just starting on the Online Facilitation mailing list, here's a definition to ponder:

... social capital consists of connections within and between groups who tend to share core ideas and values. It is measured by the level of voluntary involvement in civic organizations in formal or informal networks of associates or friends when professional information, personal or emotional assistance is needed....

[of] Social Capital, onlinefacilitation, Message #10185

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Forgot to Enable Request for Follow-Ups

Forgotten to enable follow-up notification on a peer's blog in the Blogging for Educators workshop (My Blogging Projects), I may have. Nevertheless, I've captured my reflective response here:

You've committed to starting two blogs, in addition to this one, I suppose. More power to you!

The proficiency levels of your students may dictate whether you task them with blogging, individually. However, the linguistic and technological proficiency of incoming students may be a mystery.

If I may cut to the chase, whether you require technical word verification on student posts, or moderate comments; you suggest that you will encourage "students [who blog] to see their class blog as an E-portfolio."

Since I'm keen on portfolios, I wonder how you may guide your students to articulate portfolios on their blogs. I'm looking forward to sharing your vision.

Cheers, Paul
22 February 2008 19:12

Quick Captures from Eduspaces

With free services, I gather it's better not to keep all of your eggs in one basket. Now that I've decided to opt out of forced migration from Eduspaces.net to EducatorsCentral.org (a projected TakingITGlobal service), and thanks to limited investment in Eduspaces over the past couple of years, it has been relatively easy to self-migrate those bits of content and resources that I had concentrated in Eduspaces to other free services, before my Eduspaces account gets deleted:

1. Profile information (c. 2006):
   
• Self-description,
• Interests, and
  
• Skills; and
  
2. RSS feeds (5) to:
• Eduspaces communities (3):
1. Blogs, wikis, and social software for teaching and learning,
2. Communication and Collaboration Online, and
   
3. eportfolios;
• CiteULike: Tag socialsoftware
• Wordpress blog: EdTechPost
  

Proceeding in a small pieces loosely linked fashion, I have updated and relocated the RSS feeds described above. They are now in a temporary PageFlakes page (currently private),

The Eduspaces community links (above), also updated, will probably break down by the second week of March 2008, due to the service migration detailed in a previous post (Any Elgg users out there?, 2008.02.14). The same goes for the hot-linked keywords listed under interests and skills in the profile information that I've cut and pasted in below (Who am I...).

It may be possible to update those links once the actual migration from eduspaces.net to educatorcentral.org occurs, by replacing all of the domain names in the link URLs. However, I plan not to rebuild dozens more links - at least not anytime soon.

Who am I?

An educator and a learner, a parent and a child, a colleague and a friend.

Interests

collaboration, community, culture, development, education, language, learning, moodle, open source, portfolios, reflection, software, teaching, technology, tools

Main Skills

collaboration, communication, facilitation, learning, reflection, teaching

Any Elgg users out there?

If you are contemplating transfer of your blog, communities, discussions, feeds, friends list..., and associated online material to the service provider taking over old Elgg accounts from eduspaces.net, you probably ought to have a long hard think on the part of the new service agreement about publicly accessible content:

... [W]ith respect to Content you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Service, you grant TakingITGlobal the following world-wide, royalty free and non-exclusive license, as applicable:

• With respect to Content (including photos, graphics, audio or video) you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Service, the perpetual, irrevocable and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other works in any format or medium now known or later developed.

TakingITGlobal,
Terms of Service and Privacy Policy,
7. Materials submitted or made available for inclusion on the service,
retrieved February 14, 2008 (bold emphases added)

I gather that you have until February 27, 2008, to state your preference for migration to the new service by filling out a form when you log in to eduspaces.net. After migration to the new service provider scheduled for the second week of March, if you go for it, the domain will become educatorcentral.org (Eduspaces, personal correspondence, February 12, 2008).

When you login to Eduspaces, you immediately get directed to a form requiring a decision. If you don't decide when you log in, you can carry out no activity in your eduspaces account. If you opt not to migrate; you will "get removed" at the time of the migration (misja, Eduspaces account migration, c. February 8, 2008), or have your "account deleted" (Eduspaces account migration [php form]).

Then links to your account and associated content may become obsolete (as, I suppose, may the links in this post). Thank goodness I haven't invested much in Eduspaces.

Vox Privacy Zones & Blended Learning

This illustration was originally for a private group on Vox that colleagues and I use to conduct and collect discussions related to our teaching, where I wrote "This graphic represents four out of five privacy levels that Vox affords. The fifth level, zero of four if you will, is public" (personal correspondence, October 14, 2007). As you might guess, we are all quite keen on the fine-grained privacy controls that Vox provides on every post. We are interested as educators in adopting and adapting or subverting those privacy controls for use in teaching situations.

I have a bit over a month to decide whether to take the leap to teaching with Vox in a new class starting in April. However, in face-to-face discussion last month (January 2008), a colleague who had introduced students to Vox last year suggested that the friends and neighbors display features, along with automated recent post and comment feeds for groups, could quickly outgrow both individual and group blog display spaces.

Only so many (three to five?) recent contributions will remain visible in automated Vox feeds. So, while perhaps suitable for groups of up to a dozen members, for classes any larger than that, aggregating everyone's individual contributions in a single group might not work so well. Especially in the space of class meetings (blended face-to-face & online learning), fresh comments and posts from group members would quickly disappear from view.

Do any of you have experience using Vox blogs in blended learning environments, or any thoughts on trade-offs between community building and learner privacy? If so, I'd love to hear them.

"Lessons from Geese" (jamsoun, 2006)

Running the risk of making this blog media heavier than it already is, I'm going to add an inspiring video entitled Lessons from Geese that Vicki pointed out in the current Electronic Village Online workshop, Blogging for Educators (message 419, 2008.01.21)

Lessons From Geese
Uploaded by jamsoun

(Dailymotion,
c. 2006)

Whether the lessons presented in that video are examples of collaboration or cooperation, they definitely are inspiring for groups of people working together. I can hardly wait to watch it again.

New Label Subsumes B4B

Yo! I've up and changed the labels that I use on this experimental blog. This post marks a turning point in the labels (or tags) that I use:

• From "b4b" - for Blogging for Beginners,
  
• To "b4b/b4e/lwc" - for all of the previous B4B posts, plus:
• New ones for Blogging for Educators, and possibly
• Residual or new posts earmarked for Learning with Computers.

Education: "next big killer app."

The next big killer application for the Internet is going to be education.

John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems
(gleaned from a BCcampus expo. post
by Sandy Hirtz: May 9, 2007)

How a Japanese mouse works

Here is a bit of comic relief from chronic mousing syndrome:

1-click Award by Recuit Media Communications
(Web Creative Awards, Recruit Co., Ltd., 2006)

Thanks to Graham Stanley on Learning with Computers for pointing it out (February 28, 2007).

Inspiration from Claudia

In comments on my draft blog plan, Claudia Ceraso inquires about students' cross-blog reading and commentary, homework, RSS feeds, and the relationship between course blog and wiki. I'd like to respond between the lines of her inquiry (excerpts in italics, below):

• I understand from your post that drafting may be done at home, blogging will be done at the school. How about the reading of each other's posts and comments? Will that be homework? Will you be encouraging students to use RSS feeds?

That is correct, students will probably do a large part of their blogging in class - especially those without access from home. A number of additional computer laboratories will go online by next fall, so opportunities to do homework in the lab's will multiply. Another option, perhaps better suited to students' lifestyles than mine, is that of blogging from ubiquitous mobile phones. Those who wish to do that can send pictures and blog stubs from almost anywhere.

I consider reading and commenting on one another's blogs part of blogging, hence my rather optimistic projections of three to five student posts per week. Were they to devote their time to generating RSS feeds, I'm afraid that they would do much less communicative writing than they need to. English majors with the computer skills to generate feeds already may be few and far between.

• Does the wiki already exist? How do the course wiki and blog relate to each other?

Yes, the wiki exists - just barely (it's not open to the public). I'm setting up a PmWiki and find it much slower going than Wikispaces, especially while B4B continues. To describe the relationship between planned course blog and counterpart wiki in few words is a challenge.

Suffice it to say for the moment (almost 12 hours into a constant keyboarding day) that I expect the two parts to be closely interconnected (for example: blog feeds on the wiki): the wiki to contain more mutable, less time-sensitive material than the blog (for example: grammar references); and the blog to serve not only as a model for learning bloggers, but also as a gateway to a local blogging community (as will the wiki).

• I am particularly interested in these questions because I am thinking about my own blog plans adjustments for 2007.

• I am adding a wiki to my FCE blog for students as from next April, so I hope you keep posting about how your project develops and the students' response to it.

(Fri Feb 23, 03:25:00 PM JST)

I had visited and bookmarked Claudia's FCE wiki not long before I found her comments on my draft blog plan. I'm looking forward both to returning for a closer look at the wikispaces she has started, and continuing to peruse her ELT Notes blog, which has been in my blogroll almost as long as any other but B4B!

"Sustainable Discussion" - "Moveable Feast"

Over in the Learning Times Green Room (TM), a discussion about "'Lurking' in online classes" continues. Whether I like the connotations of "'lurking'" or not, that Green Room Comments space reflects neither class- or course-based organizational principles. So I have no qualms about coming and going there as time and interest permit.

Of particular interest, I find, in a return visit and review of recent comments, is an analogy of participation in online discussions as a form of respiration, inhaling and exhaling. I had glossed over that anatomical analogy in hasty previous readings. After another long, deep inhalation there, I exhale here as previously (Learner-centered approaches challenge standardization).

Among those Green Room Comments also is speculation that "sustainable discussion" might be a new turn of phrase. However, I find that it has been around since at least 1996 (Google search) for discussion of sustainable environmental practices.

Yet it seems that there is room for reappropriation and redefinition of the phrase "sustainable discussion" with respect to online learning environments. So, why not give it another go, here or there - making it some sort of "moveable feast"?

Class-Based RSS for Reading & Writing

This post begins by recapping Parry (2006) and continues as a virtual dialog digesting and reflecting upon larger chunks of Parry's article (a Blogging for Beginners workshop task-related reading).

Recap

Laying the groundwork of an argument for class-based RSS feeding, Parry (2006) points out need for learners to make effective use of two distinct sets of analytical reading skills, especially in online venues: "one, the quick analysis to find what is worth reading, and the second, a switch to slow analysis to carefully consider what has been found" (Parry, 2006, Helping Students to Become Better Readers to Become Better Writers, paragraph 3). He argues that RSS supports the first, and saves time for the second. Rather than provide an RSS tutorial, Parry points out a number of other guides, and concludes by claiming "RSS alters the transmission (reading and writing) of digital knowledge, and thus is critically important to any classroom instruction which requires digital composition, but especially projects which involve blogging" (Parry, 2006, Conclusion).

Three Large Tender Morsels for Digestion

To require students to write papers and then post them to a blog or website misses the point. In fact, this often results in frustrated students, because understandably they fail to see the relevance of such writing. Instead, productive classroom blog projects focus on teaching students how writing for the internet requires a different type of authorship—again, an important lesson in how context shapes meaning.

(Parry, 2006, Why it Matters for Student Writing, paragraph 1)

The point Parry makes about relevance to learners is a point well taken. Simply transferring learners' papers to blogs won't necessarily foster awareness of or engagement with blog audiences. However, if they're first time bloggers, and one of their initial tasks is to introduce themselves, blogging a previously written piece of introductory writing may serve to bootstrap inter-personal communication by almost immediately supporting commentary from group, class or community members. Blogging a prepared piece of writing at course onset also may provide a baseline, or sample, and serve as a proto-portfolio component, indicating learners' initial interests and writing abilities.

... In order to be successful authors in this space, students need to construct content that takes advantage of the iterability and citationality that the web offers.... This type of citation and appending comments to citation is crucial to becoming critically engaged readers and writers.

(Parry, 2006, Why it Matters for Student Writing, paragraph 2)

Granted, there is a lot more opportunity to experiment in writing spaces such as blogs than there is almost anywhere but in wikis - "Weblogs on steroids" (Tomei & Lavin, 2007, cited in Wikis and websites and blogs, oh my! B4B message 319). Nevertheless, starting with a prepared text at first (say something already composed in a notebook or with a word-processor) could provide learners with a ready-made platform for experiments with the kinds of web-based functions that Parry finds advantageous.

... By using RSS, you can syndicate all of the students blogs; every student in the class will get the class “newspaper” with headlines and synopsis of each student's writing, allowing them to scan all of the posts at once, and then decide which ones are most relevant, and select them for close reading. Furthermore, RSS can facilitate commenting, as most blogs will allow you to syndicate the comments to a specific post, so that students can post to a blog and continue to follow up on the comment thread. Again, this will help students to realize how writing for the web is a matter of continuous conversation rather than static paper design.

(Parry, 2006, Why it Matters for Student Writing, paragraph 3)

The third and final bit of Parry that I cite above (Why it matters..., para. 3) seems based on an assumption that learners within a group, class or community have individual blogs - as opposed to simple posting or commenting privileges on a group or class blog, and at least commenting if not also posting privileges on one anothers' blogs. To extend the newspaper analogy, it seems educators then need to assume two inter-related roles: first, as editors and publishers of the learners' stories through RSS newspapers; and second, particularly in case they are teaching learners of English as an additional language, teachers of newspaper reading skills.

References

Parry, David. (2006). The Technology of Reading and Writing in the Digital Space: Why RSS is crucial for a Blogging Classroom. Retrieved January 26, 2007, from http://blogsforlearning.msu.edu/articles/view.php?id=6

Tomei, J., & Lavin, R. (2006). Autonomy Arising from Community: Experiences with Weblogs and Wikis [Keynote (trademark) presentation]. Kumamoto University: January 14, 2006.

Filtering and Journalling (LwC definitions)

Whilst scouting neighboring tribes in the blogosphere, I found a blog among MaryH's listings called Learning with Computers [LwC]: A community blog for the Learning with Computers Yahoo! Group.

What first caught my eye on that blog were a couple definitions posted there by one of MaryH's blog mates, which distinguish two different purposes of blogs:

The Filter Style Blog vs The Journal Style Blog (July 28, 2006).

In retrospective, those definitions makes this blog sound like a combination of both styles, a combination which I hope the blog title "potpourri" accurately reflects.

Although the LwC blog apparently has gone into hybernation (since October 2006), a comment linked to the filter vs. journal definitions (above) points out a typical filter blog that is still up and running, namely: The Generator Blog

Looks like some of the generators filtering through there are worth checking out. Two more generators have shown up since I started this blog entry!

LwC logo used with permission

Learner-centered approaches challenge standardization

In Thoughts on "Lurking" in Online Courses, an on-going Learning Times community discussion where I've been playing the role of a legitimate peripheral participant, Alan Sellig points out how, for virtually every educational stake holder other than learners themselves, learner-centered approaches challenge instructional standardization - especially for credentialing purposes (January 22, 2007).

I understand how technological approaches to educational endeavors manifest, perhaps by default, all kinds of IT standardization techniques. However, I don't understand why, in our enthusiasm or haste to adopt and adapt instructional technology, we don't recognize and remove as much of the IT industrial overburden as possible.

To do so could not only clear pathways, but also open broad avenues - perhaps even expose frontiers - conducive to learner-centered learning. In the weeks to come, I am looking forward to discovering ways that educational blogging might do just that.

EVO: B4B Database and Identity - A Cautious Approach

The following are snippets from email that I'm representing here as a cautious approach to construction of online identity:

When I first browsed the b4b database about a week ago, there were entries in it whose "names" were a jumble of letters and numbers, followed by no more information whatsoever.

So I decided to approach the database ever so cautiously. It wasn't until yesterday that I discovered all of the entries included at least a nickname and some other information.

... I recommend the same course of action to students and teachers with whom I work, basically: "Provide no more information than is necessary until you know what's really going on in any online environment."

... Though I may be failing miserably, I do want to be able to keep the extents and locations of online identities to an affair that I can manage on the whole, rather than one needing updating in all of the particular instances.

(personal correspondence, January 23, 2007)

B4B EVO: Database, Personal Info. & Trust

It has taken a couple days for me to get around to reopening the b4b evo Session Participants' database to take another look at what's there in response to a moderator's question asking which information I consider personal (personal correspondence, Jan 17, 2007, at 04:55, JST).

As part of this point by point reflection on b4b evo backchannel messages, I'd like to suggest that, among other items of info. collected in the database, full names, gender, Yahoo ID and Skype names are personal (no Hotmail MSN for me, thanks, but that would be, too).

If there is order to these reflective pieces, it probably entails ease of collecting thoughts, exploring group moderator proposed work-arounds, and responding to requests for explanation or assistance.

The original post in this reflective series raised an issue of "ambivalent trust" (Jan. 18, 2007, 14:54 JST). Here I'd like to explore a couple of recent interactions that rekindled thought-fires regarding trust.

The first of those interactions was run of the mill. That is, when applying for group membership, I supplied the Yahoo! (R) Groups' interface with a concise rationale for asking to join the b4b group.

In return, I got an automated, "Please give us more information, or wait," sort of message. Though the application form had allowed only a few more characters (200-250 character limit?), I didn't want to wait and succumb to a foreseeable avalanche of introductory messages. As I noted later:

...I had hoped that gaining admittance to the group prior to the weekend launch would enable me to avoid a huge backlog of posts, come Monday morning....

I'd never wish that kind of reading load on EFL learners unless I wanted to extinguish their enthusiasm, or to train them to ignore the majority of posts from their peers.

(personal correspondence: January 15, 2007, 21:12:10 JST).

So I wrote back right away to demonstrate humanity, to show that I wasn't some sort of spamming robot, and to find out whether more info. really was necessary to do so. In short, it wasn't.

However, the possibility of surrepititious humans gaining access to the group retraced synapses when I opened the group database. I figured that anyone who could pass the human screens would have access to all the information earlier arrivals had posted there. That was well before I'd even browsed the hundreds of introductory posts that had already arrived to see who's whom.

When I had last checked the group participants' database (Tue., Jan 16, 2007, 9:58 am JST), there was still an ID in the database for whom automated searches of all messages retrieved no messages. With 160+ participants now on list, I can say neither that I know everyone, nor that I've even scrolled, paged, and scrolled through all of the database records to double-check who's there.

In reviewing that database today, however, I have discovered "Actions" (Edit/Delete) controls which I consider a plus because they enable participants to update their records without dependence upon group moderators. If any personal info. that participants' list changes (or gets abused), they apparently will be able to manage it to some extent, as long as group owners permit access.

The short story ends here; I did go back and add a limited amount of info. to the database. Participants photos will probably be the next point I take up.