30Mar/08
Steven Bell notes an article in the NY Times, The Professor as an Open Book. This article highlights one of the issues I have struggled with the most as an instructor at a small college that caters to traditional age students. My facebook profile, for example is not invisible but you have to be specifically searching for it to find it. Of course, since my students are facebook-addicted, it was inevitable that it was eventually found, but I told all my students that my policy was that I would not "friend" them until they graduate. I see them in a classroom several times a week, so it's not like we need to develop rapport. It's not an issue of being hip or accessible--there are just not enough levels of access in facebook. Someone is your "friend" or they are not, and although I don't do anything of interest in facebook, I am actually linked to people I know. I know, I know, that's SO old school. Even worse, many of my "friends" in facebook are family. Those are the people I have to worry about putting up suspect content that will reflect poorly on me, a la Doctorow's analysis.
Actually facebook bores me these days, and there are plenty of other venues where I broadcast (this blog, another blog, twitter). They don't require "friending" me to have access to my thoughts and interactions. I treat these as public representations of myself, but I have majorly cut down on how much of myself I put out there because of a new sense that I have a private identity to protect. Which is pretty funny if you think about it...I'm willing to say whatever if I know no one cares, but suddenly I am aware of a potential audience and I want to preserve my credibility with them...so I blog less.
But what is the responsibility of a teacher in this time of collapsed private versus public identity? How do other people navigate their online versus face-to-face identity with students?
24Mar/08
Wow, now that I have my blog home all set up again, I'm so inspired to comment on the massive comments in my aggregator. Through a chain of reading, I see Nate talking about Clarence's post, which discusses the concept of how students should be assessed in a world where the classroom walls can extend globally and where collaboration can be made transparent through wikis and other web 2.0 tools.
In the original post to which they refer, the author relays an exchange that highlights a huge issue not just with the web 2.0 world of assessment, but with group assessment in general:
Jeff Utecht: How would you assess a student who changed a single word?
Ryan Bretag: Think about contributing one word from a poetry standpoint, how critical is one word? Writing in a hypertext society makes that one word critical.- From the Strength of Weak Ties.
If a group of students is working together and one student serves as the student who conceptualizes an idea, and the other students work diligently to carry out the idea at the direction of the first student, did the self-selected/group-elected leader contribute more? And now, when collaboration takes place through a more transparent record, for example, if you use a wiki, how do you ascertain individual student's contributions. One of the references on The Strength of Weak Ties is to a wiki that uses a framework of significant contribution versus constructive modification. The creator of that rubric, David Kuropatwa noted previously on his own blog the distinction between these two varieties of contribution and the special challenge of "constructive modification" as a critical thinking process is addressed. In determining assessment strategies, one could also do as Ben Wilkoff did and turn it over to the students to discuss.
I encounter more often the issue raised by another blogger who noted failure to integrate wikis in a way that led to student creation of content.  Even the earlier example of the math wiki is very structured, with questions I assume were determined by the teacher for students to answer.
Not in these posts and discussions but in society at large, I see a lot of confusion about the purpose of a wiki. And for that matter, a lot of suspicion about externalized collaboration in education. Though a wiki is in written form, it is, for me, at least, an externalization of thought process and collaboration. At its most elaborate (for example wikipedia), it can be a valuable resource, but most of the time it will reflect information that is targeted for a specific community. In some cases, the information gathered might have outlived its purpose (not unlike, by the way, many websites!). The wiki exists not to document forever and ever, but to provide an opportunity for collaboration as those collaborating make connections in their own minds and developed their own questions, ideas, and analyses. That too is the power of the wiki, that it can change and grow as its purpose and function expand. Wikis offer an opportunity to externalize the work of a collective mind, which directly contradicts the typical education model which requires us to assess each student purely for their individual contribution (most of the time). And there are a lot of students and teachers experimenting with how to make it work.
12Sep/07
I fortuitously aggregated upon the essay Vernacular 2.0, which discusses the development of user expression as it has morphed from the 90s into the 2000s. First, her observation: "The space that we’ve researched as a new medium for the last ten years has turned into the most mass medium of them all" rings so true that it gives me pause. But the internet is not mass media as we understand that even somewhat neologistic term, given the relatively short context of "mass communication." Thus, should a construct of mass communication whereby a few formulate and communicate messages to many be modified? Has what we call "new" media, for lack of a better term really, actually been just a new mass communication tool that has flipped all the rules of mass communication around? Maybe this is just semantics. Certainly, with the direction that "new" media has gone, with the proliferation of tools at the "common" person's disposal, the power of mass communication is placed in the hands of a whole lot more people. Whether their message will be part of a mass communication message will depend on a number of other factors, but certainly the whole "famous to 15 people" may be true. (Although this confounds the meaning of fame and suggests it has nothing to do with mass anything but instead social distance?)
As usual, I digress. What Lialina's Vernacular 2.0 article brought to the forefront of my thoughts is the increasingly intensified expectations for web presence today. An early assertion in the article, picking up from earlier observations about home page construction and early user expression in web environments is about the usurping from ordinary users:
"It is also clear now who owns the home with the garden and who are the gnomes grimacing on a manicured lawn in the company of plaster ducks and real flowers." - From Vernacular 2.0
Ok, pulling that quote out of the context that abruptly requires you, the reader, to head to the essay and figure out why we're talking about gnomes in the first place, but essentially the idea is that a home page was never analogous to a home, but to a gnome hanging out in the garden outside the home. Enter Web 2.0 interfaces: google pages, myspace, etc., and suddenly the garden gnome/traditional home page is a duck out of water among the corporatized, more standardized designs.
Certainly, on the one hand, the availability of these tools has given users a whole lot more robust usability. Whereas with a standard traditional web page, if the page got big, one struggled with file management underneath the surface, today it is possible to set up a CMS and create a database-driven web-site, where the user doesn't have to concern themself with back-end data management. But I hear what Lialina is saying loud and clear, and for me it begs a larger question: what skills are necessary to move from an amateur to a specialist in "new media?" If you have students developing a home page, which is so 1995, is this a valuable skill and necessary step in the process of learning, or is it so old school as to be obsolete? My web design abilities grew up simultaneously with the medium, to an extent, so to me it has been a natural progression, but if one were to come in without that context, does the whole big world of creating art, objects, communication, etc. for the web seem overwhelming? Or does it seem touch-of-a-button easy as all the message-creator needs to do is learn to exploit existing tools? Which is it? Or can it be both?
3Sep/07
So digging around a little more about rapleaf, they have an about page.
Reputation and Privacy
Build your reputation. Control your privacy. Empower yourself.
FACT: Your reputation online (and offline) will dictate certain benefits and services on the internet.
Will dictate benefits and services to me on the internet? Seriously?
1Sep/07
Post subtitle: The end of unsolicited invites
Do I now have a personal vendetta against Quechup? Yes.
The question is why?
All they did was ask to see who else from my contact list was in Quechup. So I obliged. I've done it with facebook and had no problem. I did it with Linked in and was pleasantly surprised. Instead Quechup does something different.
They spam your entire contact list without telling you they are doing so.
I thought that was SO CUTE, that I would post about how sad that is, that a social networking site would engage in such a practice to build their network. I even went through the steps that I had gone through a second time in order to see if I might have inadvertently check off: SURE EMAIL MY ENTIRE CONTACT LIST. I didn't do that at all. But I suppose now my entire contact list will be invited again.
Why does it make me so irate? I don't know. I only checked out Quechup because I was invited, no doubt through the same duplicitous practice. I am angry because I like to know who I have agreed to email. I don't email forwards to people, I don't mass invite people. And then this fecockt social networking site goes in and violates my principles to advance their aims. It sent emails to people's cell phones, it sent emails to companies that I had reported errors or problems to, it sent emails to people I haven't talked to in years. And I intend to show my gratitude as best as I can by alerting anyone I can, to avoid this site--because it is just a front for a spam operation, as far as I am concerned.
And guess what: Other people had the same problem: here, here, here, here, and here...
Ok, I have a new respect for how viral they are, and I wonder what other sneaky stuff they are up to. Gone forever is good will toward invites for me. Seriously. Keep that in mind other would-be-community-developers. New policy: I no longer accept unsolicited invites and will educate others accordingly.
20Feb/07
Though somewhat idealistic, this video: Web 2.0: The Machine is Us/ing us (which I originally found through another blog) is a great demonstration of the use of new media to demonstrate a concept...about new media. Why do I call it idealistic? Maybe because of my post earlier today about a substitute teacher facing jail time because a school didn't have antivirus software installed, and it didn't occur to her to immediately pick up the evil computer and fling it across the room to cast its demons out. So on the one hand, we, as end users of a computer are more empowered than ever before, what with having access to all this xml goodness. And on the other hand, we have a society that's "not quite there yet" in terms of both understanding these increasingly more complex tools and refereeing the human behavior surrounding the digital capabilities.
17Jul/06
What *is* the difference between a wiki and drupal? Fortunately, D'Arcy Norman has already explored this topic in as much technical detail as is necessary. The truth is that the issue is control. A wiki requires a certain degree of loss of control, whereas with a CMS like drupal, there is a much less open nature to the processes available to the casual user. But I don't think open-ness is necessarily a required characteristic of a wiki; services such as pbwiki allow wikis to be both private and public. If you were creating a specific project with a specific group, such as a group project in a class, it would be inappropriate to use a completely open-to-the-world wiki for the endeavor.
The most salient characteristic in my estimation is the extremely easy way one can create hyperlinks and format text in wikis. At the same time, as D'Arcy points out, creating a hierarchical navigation is a pain. Mediawiki can create one at the top of the page automatically as a table of contents, but I hate this feature from a usability standpoint. Basically, there is a reason we don't use anchors heavily in websites, why bring this back with wikis?
What specific task or project would creating a wiki be a logical choice for?
9Jun/06
This is just an informal post to list some of the issues and questions that came up in the course of our workshops today on RSS feeds, blogs, social bookmarking and podcasting (and every place I use blogs in this post, feel free to replace with dynamic social collaboration tools). I don't want to lose these thoughts, and I will if I don't write them down. So in no particular order:
-I was surprised about the initial perceptions about blogging and particularly myspace as largely negative and mostly irrelevant to education. There was mention of the association of myspace with crime (I'm guessing the resonating effects of the Taylor Behl case).
-The question was raised---why is it that a child who would freak out if their mom invaded the privacy of their room is willing to post all kinds of private information (name, address, school, etc) in an online forum such as myspace?
-It was expressed that blogging content is not reliable information (fair enough) and thus information from blog sources may not be appropriate for the classroom. This is an interesting one. I'm going to take this a little farther with a RL (real life) analogy. If we were all sitting at the corner store, having a glass of soda on the porch and having a conversation, how would we know whose information to trust? The "blogosphere" is not really all that different---the information is as credible as the source, and all netizens must develop the skills to be adept at evaluating the source. Looking at who is authoring a site, who connects to or comments on their site, what sources they refer to---this is how we can start to construct a perspective of what is "true" using a variety of information sources.
-The above leads into the larger point---we cannot just think of blogs purely as CONTENT. They are dynamic. The information is updated with regularity. The style is colloquial. It is PROCESS, not PRODUCT driven. The perspective of the writer is hopefully changing, growing, developing over time. The affordances built into a blogging platform allow for discourse and quick linking to original sources and other commentary. The interactions with others through the medium; the links to the words of others; belonging to a community of discussion--this is the larger picture of the potential of these RSS-fueled media.
-Internet 2 ≠Web 2.0
- A lot of concerns about privacy, and what is appropriate and not appropriate for students to discuss openly. When confidentiality, privacy, building insular trust in a class is critical, blogging/podcasting/etc is not appropriate. Are controversial topics appropriate? Where do free speech lines get crossed?
-For educators preparing professionals in the community (nurses, teachers, etc.), even if blogging is not integral to the course, discussion of one's representation of self online could be key, as inappropriate content online can derail a career.
-Can .swf files embedded in RSS feed be automatically detected and downloaded to a podcatcher (Juice)? Are there any restrictions on the type of embedded media that can be dowloaded via a podcatcher?
-My own question---is blogging behind password protection still blogging? Or is it something else? This is only an issue at this point because Blackboard is so backwards in terms of not providing any kind of blogging space that would be worth using, and because they do not provide a way to link RSS feeds from discussion boards. (In other words, our choices at my institution are a basic discussion board or a wide-open-to-the-world blog.) When those features are added, I hypothesize that the majority of educators interested in blogging will step back behind their content management system for student discourse. And that's ok. But we still need to understand what is going on with all that information is out there in the blogosphere.
-The progression the use of these tools need to take is for students to become adept at finding useful information to their process of lifelong learning, to create their own content, to participate in educational communities that sustain the curiosity that convinced students to enroll in a course in the first place.
Some things we did not talk about nearly enough:
-Use of these tools for communication is fundamentally changing how we interact with others. There is no way around this, once you start digging in. In addition, once you start to "lurk" and comment on blogs, these changes begin.
-I do not like to the buy into the myth of the "millenial" students, who are basically cyborgs at this point. That is way too simplistic. These students--perhaps more than older students who understand what we are giving up and sacrificing in the way of privacy, and who have certain conceptions of what constitutes a "trusted source"--NEED space and guidance in reflecting on the nature of information and communication in the age of ICT.
-The truly positive side to these social communication and collaboration tools in terms of connecting isolated individuals with various needs (whether it be educational, community support in dealing with an illness or life difficulty, friendship) and providing a space, not connected with geography, to form human ties.
-If one believes that most of what is on blogs is useless drivel and too much information, what sources of information do you trust and why? We give a lot of credence to information that is "published" because it has been peer-reviewed. In a heavily read blogging site with many readers, isn't that also "peer-reviewed" to some extent? Are experts always acting in the interest of simply deploying truth, or are there other factors at play?
All in all great audience participation and questions.
