Thanks Joan for the link to the Horizons Report 2006 (This links to the pdf so beware of download time). This seems like a rich source for a discussion surrounding the topic that seems most pertinent as we discuss instructional design options with faculty: Why should faculty use social computing as part of the distance education classroom?

I don’t necessarily agree with the cited key trends as basis for WHY we should be implementing tools for social collaboration education, although they are evidence of the culture in which we are operating. The trends they list are:

Dynamic knowledge creation and social computing tools and processes are becoming more widespread and accepted.

Mobile and personal technology is increasingly being viewed as a delivery platform for services of all kinds.

Consumers are increasingly expecting individualized services, tools, and experiences, and open access to media, knowledge, information, and learning.

Collaboration is increasingly seen as critical across the range of educational activities [and]….knowledge is becoming a community property, and the construction of knowledge is becoming a community activity.

- Horizons Report 2006, p. 3-4

So at the same time that consumers students are expecting individualized services, the technology to support such endeavors is also becoming commonplace and students are becoming familiar with the process of dynamic creation of knowledge. But the real crux of the decision about social computing is the final trend that “knowledge is becoming community property and the construction of knowledge is becoming a community activity.” Nothing could better sum up the case for orienting students to expectations of how they will need to function as citizens of a knowledge community. However, if in our practice, we are “old school”and operating outside of this paradigm, it’s hard to even understand how critical it is to contribute to a “community of practice.” The knowledge that we create is often meaningless to us, impossible for us to really utilize, unless it is contextualized in a social experience, and so much of our learning is tied in with interpersonal communication. To ignore that in distance education is to go back to rows of desks with a teacher at the front writing in chalkboard and never listening for any feedback or letting students work together.

As for where the Horizon Report Key Trends lead—social computing is not their only technology they report on. However, I would argue that it will be the most powerful to implement in instruction. Certainly, other tools that allow students more choices in how they receive information will be beneficial in other ways, but participating in the construction of knowledge and sharing that with an audience will be a critical skill.

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Hey, I LIKE what you’ve done with the place! AECT Drupal is gathering new members and new content by the day.

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What responsibility do institutions have for information posted on blogs that are required as part of course work?
How can blogs for educational purposes be managed to minimize potential problems?

Mike refers to Trey’s post about articles being for sale at Amazon.com. Of course we all know the Catch-22 of academic publishing—to develop professionally and get tenure, you must publish and are–to a large extent—subject to the guidelines of the publisher. If one tries to negotiate with the publisher, unless you are somebody big, you are not likely to retain copyright. As I’m learning from my slow nightly perusal of The Future of Ideas, copyright is not really the best way to promote the dissemination of innovative ideas.

This whole discussion reminds me of a discussion a year ago…Rethinking Academic Publishing…however, nothing really came of that. AECT, entrenched in the old, is not going to be quick to change its publishing ways…(wait a hot minute—Ed Tech R&D is available on Amazon for….$255.65!!!!! whereas through AECT is just $95 for non-members Something, my friends, *IS* rotten in Denmark).

But even if AECT wants to prositute its publications to Amazon, there are a number of peer-reviewed, free internet journals pertaining to educational technology. Here’s my del.cio.us collection…

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‘Increasingly, any piece of information you could ever need is just a mouse click away.’- W. Ken Woo from article Beyond Borders in THE journal

Or another way to look at it is increasingly, if information is not a mouse click away, people lose interest in it, thus creating an incorrest assumption that ONLY important things are online.

But not so much with Skype Beta, except for having set me up with Pamela. Yes, Skype Beta is really annoying in many ways, so I went back to the Skype site so see if they had any updates.

And at the very bottom of the screen, I saw a link to Pamela, advertising call recording. The link you are hooked up with from the Skype screen is to a 30-day trial of the Professional version, and it takes a little digging to find the cost if you do find yourself enamored—it’s only $20.

So I tested it and smooth sailing. Recently, I had been looking for a solution for how a professor could have students record an Internet call to turn in as a class assignment. Skype had to be immediately ruled out, because there was no easy way to have students record. This is pretty cool, and it puts it back in the running, though the seamless call recording feature of gizmo makes that a more viable candidate. (However, I have had problems connecting to gizmo at all at home, possibly due to router settings and suggested fixes from tech support haven’t helped; and at work, where over the school LAN I could connect to someone else, but we couldn’t hear each other).

We also tested ivisit, which I think is awful in terms of interface and charges a subscription fee, I believe, to talk to more than one person at a time. It does offer video (though Skype apparently has gone there with 2.0), but we had the same problem at work that we had experienced with gizmo—something about the LAN settings prevented from hearing anything, although we were connected. In contrast, I have never heard of anyone having any issues with Skype.

So, back to Pamela– call recording, blogging/podcasting– I am optimistic about Skype once again…

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I set up my first wiki. I have been invited to participate in other wikis (and last I checked the entire world still has an invitation to wikipedia) but I’ve never “gotten” them. Wikis are a little difficult to get your mind around. That’s because it requires a completely different understanding of ownership– a collective one. When you set up a wiki, if you are doing so in the true spirit of the wiki, you are not the owner.

I finally grokked this when I was reading a somewhat older post on Kairos entitled Aiming for communal constructivism in a wiki environment. The writer identifes the “failure” of the wiki in her course as stemming from her retention of ownership throughout the course of the semester.

However, isn’t the very act of setting up a wiki for a group, in and of itself—imposed and thus not an organic movement of a group’s ideas to an electronic space. Thus, ideally an instructor would not create one for the class, groups of students, when the appropriateness of the tool struck, would create their own.

BUT

This presupposes that would-be collaborators are comfortable with the wiki environment. I must say, playing around with PBwiki, I truly fell in love with how intuitive its “wikistyle” was. For example, [ingenious] would create a new page with the name ingenious. However, then I came home and tried to generalize this knowledge to wikipedia only to discover, not all wikis are created alike. For the technophile, this is minor bump in the landscape. However, for many, it will cause anxiety, frustration, and confusion.

Looking around seedwiki (another free wiki hosting site) a little bit, I got the sense that most wikis are not on the towards radical constructivist on a continuum of potential philosophies fueling wiki iniation. One I looked at looked like a draft of an e-portfolio. Is a one-author wiki still a wiki?
Another was an intermediate school’s student handbook. This is what I mean about authenticity of the wiki environment. I can’t imagine a group of kids sat around and said: “You know what our school needs, it needs our student handbook online.” However, the handbook is in the voice of the students, which adds a different spin on the entire concept of what a handbook is. The language does reflect an ownership over the policies and procedures they are writing. Is that wiki enough?

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Am I the only one who is starting to find the plethora of ways to connect with others agitating—particularly when outside of finding people online who use social bookmarking, flickr, etc, in my real world life, I know almost no one who uses, embraces, cares about these things?

Am I the only one who is suspicious of social tools being bought and integrated into corporate overworlds? Linked by EdTechPost who mourns the inability to import furl tags to del.icio.us, I discoverd that del.icio.us was bought by yahoo. Since that happened in December, it is basically ancient Internet history, but I am often the last to get a memo about these things. Combined with flickr, yahoo seems like it’s bulking up to compete with google’s massive Internet empire. Of course there will always be room for the new innovations, I hope.

Am I the only one who finds networking endeavors like 43things exhausting? Are we so disconnected from people in our physical proximity that we need to connect our goals to “DRINK MORE WATER” (it’s not even a concrete goal!!!) with the other 435 people who have stumbled across the site, seen it in BOLD BIG letters in the tag cloud and thought (with great originality)…that sounds like a good goal.

I’m not opposed to developing online connections. I just think the reason we need to develop them is the ones in our real world are so shitty. Yes, I know—it’s a different world. But not so different from my vantage point. I don’t think concepts like 43 things are in and of themselves tools that promote authentic, deeper connections. Certainly, it could be a starting point, but so could a discussion thread. But just as there is a world out there that uses, embraces, and evangelizes these things, there is a very real world out there that doesn’t care and isn’t interested.

And somehow we have to design instruction that appeals to the social-Internet crazy, the social-Internet indifferent, and the social-Internet unaware (and any other levels of experience/interest)…

Preparing a session on RSS, social bookmarking, etc. RSS–I get what is applicable to education about it. I haven’t used its full capabilities, and even now, I struggle with integrating my usage of information with various aggregators and such. And through a conversation with Nate last weekend, I had a duh! moment where I first learned that podcasting isn’t just fancy jargon for downloading mp3s, it’s the combination of mp3s and RSS that comprises “podcasting.” (I still say it’s jargon, buzz, a candidate for bullshit bingo, if you will). So preparing to describe the applications of RSS for IDs and in turn, how they can pitch it to their faculty won’t be challenging.

However, social bookmarking…I ran into a post about it over on Infocult, just when social bookmarking was coming to its status of “all the rage.” I tend to agree with the first commenter:

As one of those people who suffers through a large enough bookmark list that I need gdesktop to get through it…I’m not sure I really see the *point* of social bookmarking to begin with.

However, there were other commenters who explained how they were integrating social bookmarking into their instruction.
I know it is super-cool to be able to present an audience or a class with your del.icio.us tags—but how useful is it? How has social bookmarking changed how you teach or design instruction?

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The ability to organize the information is power. If we give our students sheets of 100 math problems and don’t show them how to apply that math in a real world setting, then we are not showing the students the power that math brings to the table.-From Scott Adam’s Blog

Exactly, but then how can you convince faculty who are insist that their course doesn’t have real world applications—that that answer is not good enough? Even leaving it open to students to derive the real world connections and making that reflection on where the content can be applied in a real setting an integral part of the course can make all the difference in helping students develop the ability to apply strategies from diverse disciplines to their problem solving. The most annoying part of the curriculum in high school for me was having calculus and physics not only separate courses, but the content taught as disparate and unrelated. Both courses might have made a lot more sense with physics concepts being taught concurrently with the math concepts.