Perspectance

I’m in the middle of moving a client’s Joomla website to a new host. The project reminds me of Gary Stager’s learning adventure assignments in my masters program. Professor Stager would assign one new application project each week or so, like “create a composition using Notepad Finale and share it with your learning circle.” If you didn’t know the first thing about music theory or notation, well, that just added a layer of complexity to learning a new technical application. It was hard to fail when the goal was to construct learning. As a result, I grew in my confidence to tackle new technologies using the abundant resources available among others who know a little more. Partly as a result, I do pro bono work in the technical arena if the client can spare the extra time it will take me to figure out how to get the job done. Read on only if you are interested in the chronicle of moving a Joomla site to a new server. (more…)

This word cloud was created by Anne Mirtschin using using wordle

A CPsquare colleague, Jeffrey Keefer is considering the pros and cons of having his college students blog. I got a lot out of being required to blog in our Online Masters in Educational Technology program at Pepperdine, so I replied to Jeffrey’s Twitter request for advice. Anne Mirtschin, another teaching Tweeter I follow, coincidentally had just tweeted her blog post on good student blogging, so I shot that over to Jeffrey. Then today while I was researching something about Ning for another colleague, I discovered this older blog post of Phil Gomes about Ning as a teaching tool. Aside from considering Ning as a blog platform, Phil addresses a central issue of whether to make the college student blog network public or private:

In terms of remaining open:

Certainly provides a real-world experience, and you won’t be too happy in PR these days unless you can handle some level of exposure.

In terms of keeping it private:

Though I did pretty darn well in my undergrad studies, I’m not entirely sure I’d have wanted my instructor requiring that my academic progression be spilled out there for all to see.

My advice to anyone considering blogs for students is to first identify the purpose of the blogging. I think the purpose of required blogging in my OMET experience was first and foremost to afford (make provision for) student reflection throughout the learning process. Our blogs were private - so that just our cadremates and profs could see them and respond to them. It was hard at first “spilling out” reflections for all my peers to see, but was a significant practice to develop. Enjoying a blog network with everyone who was in the same boat strengthened our notion of social learning (a core them for the program), and indeed initiated me to true social networking online. However, I would not have written so freely if the blog would be discoverable later by whoever out in the world might stumble upon my fledgling attempts at public verbage.

Getting back to the instructional design purposes, if the goal is less to encourage student reflection and more about having students engage the world, or learn what blogging is all about, they might be tempted to make blogs public. I would consider the length of the term where blogging will be required, and the potential incentives or disincentives. It takes a good bit of time to generate traffic and more importantly, stresses a person to consider their public digital identity. (I’m certainly struggling with this now even as someone who wants to engage the world.) Perhaps educational technology goals could be met with a menu of blogging options on the continuum of private to public, where some students may simply engage in responding to blogs on a topic of interest or join a social network with an associated profile, while others might start their own blogs on any platform of choice.

I like Ning’s options for having a front page you can keep open to the world and private areas where members can blog just with each other. Others have used some of the big blogging platforms to do this too. Students could be encouraged to do both on a Ning network created for the class that included both options.

Finally, Brian Kelly is enriching the world at his Wordpress site describing experimental Higher Ed institutional use of blogs in the UK. It is rich because of his openness in sharing his processes.

Did you know that there are island vortexes of garbage out at sea? When my family brought this up over dinner last night, besides being fascinated, it struck a nerve. I sensed it has something to do with my absence in the online communities I’ve ventured into, maybe even my inability to write this summer. They said it was like the Sargasso Sea, only with garbage instead of plants. Hmmm…. (more…)

As if I needed one more thing to distract me…I am going to investigate the leading theories that attempt to explain why Twitter has problems keeping up with demand. Maybe it doesn’t even have trouble. Maybe it’s a coincidence that lots of the 30 or so folks I follow seem to complain that Twitter is down and I usually have a “Twitter experiencing problems” message on my Twitterific ap when using my Mac.

Mostly though, Twitter does all I want it to, which is allow me to blurt out 140 characters worth of whatever I am doing and “listen” to same most of the time for the folks I follow. It keeps records, so that if I wonder what others have been up to while I was away, I can visit their logs. And I can track anyone on the whole network who uses a word like emergence or complexity for instance. Pretty amazing that such a large network does work - it all seems like magic most of the time anyway.

But I am curious if Twitter actually has a scaling problem and where exactly to pin the trouble. Help me out here with your comments if you have researched the problem. Look for my report soon.

I’m reading The End of Theory, a thesis article written by Chris Anderson editor of my favorite magazine, Wired. Loving it. Identifying with the principles; like finally, something written to my sense-making style of living and being. Citing Google’s search engine technology, Anderson asserts that the applied mathematics of data analysis provides a more complete construction of the way things are than tedious empirical experimentation.

I am not done reading yet, but suspect we live our lives empirically testing out what the data of a trillion attention points seems to show. “All models are wrong”, and “Out with every model of human behavior from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology.” These challenges to sacred ologies draw me further into Hansel and Gretel’s woods.

“Data without a model is just noise”. Righto! We go through life with models our empirical little selves have tried, tested, and concluded into belief systems. We have models of the way the world is. Then along comes data, which must be disequilibrious to even attract our attention. Aha, I propose, before I finish reading the article, that the DATA is getting our attention somehow because of its aberational qualities - and we are compelled to integrate the information - make sense of it. Maybe this is just the way I work. But what if it is the way most of us work and construct realities. What then are the implications?

I hold dear somehow nevertheless draw me in.

Del.icio.us offers at least three ways to display your tags. The first two involve a simple toggle-between with one click, but the bundled tag cloud could suck hours of life force depending on how ADD you are and how random chaotic your tagging style has been. If you already have a del.icio.us account, go ahead and explore the possibilities now. You can always toggle back and return after a B12.

Bundling your tags will help you stay organized and help others find your stuff.

1. If you have a lot of tags already, it helps to copy a list of them, print them out and decide which big folder categories you want.
2. Use highlighters to color code all tags you want to go into a particular category. Some will want to belong to more than one, and that’s ok too. It does not matter whether a bundle name is an existing tag or a made up word. And don’t obsess; you can return and change things or leave some tags unbundled.



3. Scroll down to the bottom of your tag list and select tag options, bundle tags. If you don’t see this, you are not logged in.
4. Follow the directions on that page. It’s helpful to work with only one bundle at a time because the tags you select to go into a category get highlighted as you use them. Also, if you were to type a bunch of bundle names first without putting tags into them, they disappear because, as noted near the bottom, “Empty bundles are automatically deleted.”

Some Web 2.0 tools are so familiar that I forget most people do not already know about them. I’ve decided that from now on, anything I end up explaining more than once might as well be explained here. Del.icio.us is one of those Web 2.0 tools that elicited a “Where has this been all my life?” reaction when I first discovered it seven months and 425 saved links ago. Now I am an evangelist.

Del.icio.us lets you save favorite web links to their server instead of your own computer and even provides a bookmarking icon for your toolbar. If you move between computers, your favorites are always accessible on the web. Friends and colleagues can subscribe to each other’s favorites in case they share common interests.

As you save a link, you have the option of making a note about the link. Another field lets you type in a word or two, or as many as you want, to describe it -and this is called tagging. These tags are then hyperlinked for you in a sidebar list to the right. Anyone visiting your Del.icio.us page can quickly see what you have been valuing on the Net. We are what we eat in some respects. (I tag, therefore I am?)

It’s been one of those weeks full of sparkler conversations played out during catch up with long neglected others. As I sat down to fish out the followup links I promised people, it occurs to me that blogging about the sparks and saving the links here might bring small relivable joys. Before I light the match, I need to paint a backdrop that will hang against other things I have in mind to illuminate soon.

The color of my restless clouded mind settled into dark sky at the Northern Voice bloggers conference in B.C. last month. Brilliant stars filled my gaze for three days, and I felt small and quiet in their presence. All the topics I think about, like community, social media, instructional technology, reflective practice, the emerging self, freeing and being visual, these bloggers live, breathe, and write about. Technologies I have wanted to play with like liveblogging, videopodcasting, and light painting were in use while they spoke. Packed rooms and lecture theaters glowed with laptop screens as everything that occurred was tapnoted tagged and transcribed. Participants are still twinkling and Flick’ring their reflections.

One of the people I needed to catch up with this week was Sam Gladstein, cutting edge e-learning director in the Edmonds School District, and one of my earliest mentors in online curriculum development. He taught me Blackboard, but has recently been exploring Web 2.0 and Open Source possibilities that would afford more classroom collaboration, storytelling, and student and teacher ownership of content. I told him I would send him links to the work of some of the people I met at the Northern Voice conference:

• Jim Groom, an instructional technologist who uses WordPress multi-user blogs with faculty and university students in Virginia.
• D’Arcy Norman on Eduglu, “a way to make sense of an individual’s distributed content in the context of a course.” and last but not least,
• CogDog Alan Levine who is far more imaginative than even his cool 50 Web 2.0 ways to tell a story which he presented for recording live on Ustream later.

Sparkler photo credit: pbouchard on Flickr