Teaching with Web 2.0, long-tail applied.

I created a power point stack two years ago for a series of workshops I was providing to the faculty and graduate students of Memorial University. This stack has since been used a few times to assist in describing how the Web 2.0 can be used for teaching. Now, two years later I will be interviewed regarding the content of this presentation. Its the long-tail applied to teaching materials... Something I created years ago still has value today. Surprisingly, the presentation does not seem dated. Though, I would add tagging, micro-blogging and Communities of Practice (CoP). The interview is to be loosely based around a number of questions regarding this power point presentation. The questions and related answers are as follows;

Q) Define Web 2.0 and how it can enhance teaching?
A) I like Tim O'Reillys' definition of "What Is Web 2.0" and I particularly like the idea of the wisdom of crowds. I am often amazed at what I learn from my social network. In a nutshell I see Web 2.0 as the read / write web with access to the collective intelligence found within the people who participate in reading and writing to the web. I believe it enhances teaching by having the learners reflect more deeply than they would if the potential for being read by millions wasn't also a part of the web. I believe it is a big motivator in deepening knowledge by being articulate and researching more thoroughly. I believe the act of writing has positive impacts to learning. The web 2.0 also connects you to people who share interests and development of understanding. Many of these people cn become mentors and cohorts in learning.

Q) The "Teaching with Web 2.0" pdf is used for professional development workshops in Colleges?
A) Yes, I have used it a few times... Mostly with Memorial University in NL. It was used for both faculty and graduate level workshops.

Q) Social Constructivism, Progressive Inquiry and the accompanying image. How do these concepts relate?
A) I believe Social Constructivism is a variety of constructivism that emphasizes the collaborative nature of learning. Progressive Inquiry models itself on proven practices in building knowledge. It includes the knowledge of expertise and the importance of engaging this expertise as a learner builds knowledge. Social constructivism, progressive inquiry and the accompanying image all relate back to knowledge building is a social activity... that can be well facilitated by Web 2.0 technologies.

Q) What are the educational uses of blogging? And what are Mash-ups?
A) Exploring the educational uses for blogging is too big a question for a single post. I believe blogging (particularly when you consider mash-ups) should also be described with RSS. Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is the technical protocol behind blogging. A great way to explore blogging and RSS is through a pdf titled "Web 2.0 Ideas for Educators" written by Quentin D’Souza. This pdf also has many great suggestions of how to use blogging in teaching. Mash-ups are the idea of re-combining and modifying existing works to create a derivative work. This has traditionally been the realm of multimedia, yet it can be a very powerful tool for learners to dive deep into content and create something new and meaningful while learning along the way. I believe the idea of the mash-up in education has yet to be explored fully, I do believe the day will soon come where learners will use mash-ups to fulfill assignment requirements.

Q) Why did you bring David Kolb (see pages 12 & 14) into this presentation?
A)I really like the immediacy of Kolb's experiential learning and how it all starts with the first exposure to a subject. Even if the exposure is a glance at an image. The idea of using the poem was to show how a blog could be used with podcasting to encourage listening to, critiquing and writing poetry. And how that would be done with a Kolb based approach. It really is about tying Web 2.0 techniques to solid pedagogical practices. The second example I used was in using the periodic table and how the teacher could post a basic periodic table and engage the students in looking at the table and providing initial reactions through commenting on a blog or creating their own blog post. this would then continue into coloring the periodic table and further examining its contents. All of the experience with the periodic table would bring a greater familiarity and experience.

To build on these topics even further I would suggest everyone read the "Minds on Fire" article by John Seely Brown to be well aligned with how I also see social media, learning and all the related changes.

Current events and BOWEGOV

I have recently been involved in a number of discussions about citizen led and electronic government. In one of these engagements I wrote the following reply to an email. I feel it was worthy of a blog post.

It is hard for me to disagree with most of what you say here. So I wont. I will tell you my story and what I am doing about community issues. Over the last few years my beliefs regarding centralized government have changed. I see Gov't as more concerned with getting re-elected and servicing special interests. They no longer serve the basic needs of citizenship. And with the environmental and economic realities we are all faced with we need to start living with less and think about becoming small, self sufficient communities (Neighborhoods). I also see most people more concerned about what they can get out of a system instead instead of what they can put into it. I believe history will look at the human species at the end of the 20th century at its most selfish and overly entitled. I believe the level of comfort we in the west have become used to is no longer sustainable. This dissonance of what we expect with what we can afford will cause infrastructures to increasingly fail. Our society can no longer afford garbage collection and street clearing like we have been used to... I believe this is just the reality of our time. I also believe there is a huge upside for people at all levels (mental, emotional, financial, spiritual...) to be more involved at a grassroots level with their neighborhood. In a way its all about love.

So what am I doing about it?
I try to put into the system more than I take out. This is difficult for it seems to go against the status quo. If something needs to be done i try to do it myself and if people show up to help, that is good. I try to be transparent with what i do by publishing it to the internet as public record and to attract interest. This is what I did with snow clearing in our cul-de-sac. I just started doing it, slowly I was making progress. Others joined in... eventually the municipality also helped. I am learning as much as I can about e-Gov't and self-sustaining communities. I have engaged the internet and others from Bowen who also use the internet to encourage self-sustaining activities and to look for ways the support each other in getting things done. I tag everything related to this with the BOWEGOV tag. This provides a way to begin building a body of knowledge. I choose tagging because it does not force people to use any single platform (the bowen forum is a platform) it gives people the freedom to choose how they engage and if they want their activities to become a part of the collective online Bowen Island intelligence, all they have to do is tag it with BOWEGOV. What comes of this tagging approach, i don't know... I do know it is an ongoing longterm project and i have faith positive results will build. I believe it is a positive step in the right direction. Only time will tell.

Thanks for engaging me.

Ready or not, here they come!

I am still somewhat enamored by the six classifications that the forrester writers can up with for the different participants in social media. I believe this is a solid way to look at the community surrounding your business.

Social Technographics Explained

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: social media)

Ready or not, here they come!

Tagging for Bowen Island e-Government

So my friend John and I have been discussing the idea of using the social media to engage our community about local government issues or even being subversive and getting community projects done without engaging the local government (now that would be progress, grassroots community building, hands on, fully accountable, by the community, oops I'm digressing). So we talked about platform, what platform should we use to facilitate e-Government? Should we use a wiki? some blogs? set up a space using ning or something? None, of these seemed appealing to me cause they are all a barrier to entry. How do we get people to engage in e-Government and leave them alone to use whatever tool(s) they wanted... If we did this how would we bring the community together... Ahhh, then it struck me lets get started with simple tagging. And not prescribe a platform, or in other words the internet is the platform.

So to get started I'm going to propose two tags and use them as you will, the two tags are; BOWEGOV and #BOWEGOV. So how do you use these tags?

1. When ever you write something in a wiki, blog, social space like flickr, facebook, etc. embed the BOWEGOV tag into the text, at the bottom of the content or in the associated tagging field.
2. Whenever you find something on the web related, or of interest, to Bowen Island Community Government use delicious to tag it. remember to use the BOWEGOV tag.
3. And if you use twitter whenever you tweet something about Bowen Island Community Government use the #BOWEGOV hashtag.

This is all you need to remember for now. I will be created some learning resources (OER) for how all this fits together and how it is ONE of our first steps toward our online Bowen Island Community Government

if you're not leading - it's free

A friend of mine suggested I use the tag line "if you're not leading - it's free". Now many aspects of this actually make sense for what I am wanting to do, but I don't believe the tag line is quite there. The ideas that I resonate with and should contribute to my tag line include;

• If you're not leading - it's free
• Web 2.0 is the gaming console for business
• Doing more with less
  
• Capture of tacit knowledge is business intelligence
• The reduction of rituals creates a better solution
• Nimble approaches flatten the organization
• The technology is easy, it's the process that's hard
  

So off I go on my next branding exercise, What is my tag line? I will think of this for a while, maybe add a few ideas, and see what comes from it all...

Why does it matter?

With the current global economic restructuring it becomes very important to do more with less. It is becoming increasingly important to be organizationally nimble while increasingly deliver quality and effectiveness. These organizational attributes will be the way forward. The ability to communicate internally, locally, regionally and internationally with inexpensive and detail rich methods are available within social media and web 2.0 technologies. What I do helps organizations develop the skills and approaches to capture and communicate knowledge using these technologies. What I do helps organizations be more information effective, move quickly into utilizing these knowledge rich tools and, therefore, be better prepared for the coming competitiveness, creativity and flatness of global economics.

* This question is being posed as an exercise created from a previous post on this blog.

This is what pushed me over the edge.

So I have worked as an architect in computer systems for over 10 years. I have held many titles in this role; technical architect, systems architect, end-to-end architect and enterprise architect. The technical or business focus of the role is what changes from title to title. Over the last five years I have used agile approaches within architecture and as Web 2.0 technologies mature and become increasingly accessible, a less ritualistic and agile approach to architecture makes increasing sense. I also believe architecture should be an involved part of the development culture and should be more pragmatic and aligned with agile methods. This approach creates an order of magnitute increase in communication from within the development team and with all the external stakeholders. The Web 2.0 toolset provides this increase in communication with the added advantage of providing a searchable repository for the communication. Essentially these tools replace the overly ritualized document creation that takes place in traditional architectural approaches and also creates a searchable repository that contains both the explicit and tacit knowledge in and surrounding the architecture. All good.

So what happened the other day that sent me over the edge... I was spinning around in the traditional document creation process and I was reviewing some changes and I came across this gem (see image). Somebody took the effort to make the comment that there was a typo. Now I can see the positive side of this in that the document quality was increasing but I couldn't believe the non-collaborative approach. My perspective was if this was in a wiki the typo would have been corrected by the first person to find it and the built-in wiki versioning would have captured the change event. The amount of cognitive cycles saved by only the finder making the change would have held big benefits. For I wouldn't be looking at it and thinking about it, the change would have been made at source of discovery. In my mind this is a micro example of the positive and cascading effects that using Agile and Web 2.0 approaches within architecture could have. Massively collaborate on developing the architecture as needed, let the technology and social media record the history and the tacit knowledge found in the related discussion.

Enterprise Architecture and Web 2.0

I'm going to be spending a fair bit of my time over the next while developing curriculum around how Web 2.0 technologies have become a required tool for enterprise architecture (EA). There are a number of influences to this newly formed realization;

1. Agile (and nimble) approaches are becoming a must have for enterprise architecture.
2. Documentation heavy approaches overly ritualize a process that can be duplicated and greatly improved by using wikis.
3. The deep dive technical discussions that influence and describe architecture are better captured on video and with photos of the whiteboard.
4. The best place for architecture should be embedded in the development culture. It cannot be mandated.
5. Good enterprise architects are really hard to find. And most are attracted to emerging approaches and technologies. (there architects for god's sake)
6. With all the belt tightening going on, architects need to be able to do more with less. [so get rid of the costly (and useless) rituals]
   

My first steps are to start gathering reference material toward this work. You can see some of that here already... One item that has come to mind is to define what is the enterprise and what is enterprise architecture.

• a company, business, organization, or other purposeful endeavor; an undertaking or project, especially a daring and courageous one; a willingness to undertake new or risky projects; energy and initiative; an active participation in projects
  en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enterprise
• A system of business endeavor within a particular business environment. An enterprise architecture (EA) is a design for the arrangement and interoperation of business components (eg, policies, operations, infrastructure, information) that together make up the enterprise's means of operation. [ICH].
  www.balancedscorecard.org

What do I do?

I utilize Web 2.0 technologies to facilitate corporate learning, professional development and to support K12 students in developing connectivist learning skills. I encourage people to use the tools of social media and the resources from the internet cloud to capture knowledge both explicit and tacit. I believe these approaches to knowledge capture are beginning to extend the tools for Business Intelligence and Knowledge Management. I agree with Brown and Adler that understanding is socially constructed and that the Web 2.0 provides the participatory media to facilitate this social construction of understanding.

* This question is being posed as an exercise created from a previous post on this blog.

Learning Environments (DIY)

I believe the concepts within these two images need to be thought about as anyone explores the use of Web 2.0 technologies for learning;

Progressive Inquiry


Personal Learning Environments

CMS Toolbox or Trap?

I like this article... It is part of the growing dialogue about using CMS for learning. And how they actually limit learning and course creation. Here are a couple of good quotes from the article;

the standardized nature of integrated commercial systems is limiting pedagogy.

Web 2.0 applications that encourage social construction of knowledge (Wikispaces, BubbleShare, Ning) are freely available and may provide more creative instructors with better options than any LMS currently available.

Who am I?

I'm a person who is enamored by Open Educational Resources (OERs) and free cultural works. I believe that utilizing web 2.0 and collaborative technologies is emerging to be the most effective approach to learning, life-long learning and professional development.

* This question is being posed as an exercise created from a previous post on this blog.

The Brand Gap

I came across this slideshare stack and felt it would be a good thing to look it through.

The Brand Gap

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: design brand)

I came across three important questions;

1. Who are you?
2. What do you do?
3. Why does it matter?

I will be answering these three from a personal perspective in compelling ways over the next few days... But what does this have to do with technology and education? Well... reframe it in the development of OERs and it becomes;

1. What are you?
2. What lessons do you provide?
3. Why do they matter?

From an OER perspective I believe these questions should be answered concisely while also being compelling to attract the learners attention.

Commoncraft does a great job of explaining Web 2.0

Commoncraft really has created a good set of videos to understand the web 2.0 and all the related technologies. They also do a good job of keeping up with the new technologies as they mature and gain popularity.

Good introduction to Web 2.0

Even though this video was created a couple of years ago it still covers the subject very well. It goes through all the main concepts within the read write web.

6:48.68 vs 0:32.36

It was just getting way to frustrating. Wanting to just quickly check my email between tasks, somewhere between putting some finish to the new windows and picking up the boy from pre-school. Booting the computer, then loading Outlook and hitting send/receive, was no longer something I could do between tasks. So I got into the habit of doing the quick check on the cell phone. Then I started to wonder what is the difference in time? So here are the timings, and the cell phone could have lapped the PC 12 times;

Laptop (6:48.68 minutes)

1. press the ON button
2. load XP
3. login
4. load Outlook
5. press Send/Recieve

Nokia (0:32.36 minutes)

1. press the ON button
2. load Symbian
3. load mobile gmail app
4. accept network login

Another communication task moved from the computer to the cell phone. How long will it be before I no longer need the computer at all?

WIkiEducator Quality Assurance

I formally announced the first draft of the WikiEducator (WE) featured works in the google group. After a considerable amount of discussion in May 2008 WE decided upon a number of aspects for the Quality within WE. The three main themes are;

1. Featured Works
2. Contribution Levels
3. Maturity Models

Items 1 & 2 have progressed the most with some conceptual work being done by reviewing eMM from a WE perspective. I intend on reviewing the eMM again to add criteria to the featured projects and featured institution. You can see how this will fit when you review the respective featured works. I plan on providing further depth to how the eMM fits with all this in the near future.

I'd really like if people could review and provide discussion around these five featured works;

1. Featured Learning Resource
2. Featured Collaboration
3. Featured Reuse
4. Featured Project
5. Featured Institution

I also created a portal called the Quality Assurance Framework. The purpose of the portal is to provide the foundation (or framework) for all the QA initiatives within WE.

Please take the time to review and provide feedback. Please participate and participate often!!!

Should twitter based spammers be called spitters

Today I become fed up with someone I was following on twitter. I started following them and the tweets I got were great and full of nuggets every now and again. Then all of a sudden they started tweeting at an increasing amount. And they weren't the personal musings you'd expect but links to here, re-tweets to this... It was obviously no longer a single person. They became spam in my tweet stream, they filled up my tweets page, how annoying. So I no longer follow them... This did prompt the question in my mind, what is a twitter based spammer called? I figure it should be spitter!

Most EduPunks are paid by the establishment

I have been taken by this EduPunk term. I grew up in the 70's and associated with the music scene of that time. I listened to the Sex Pistols, I still look back at the depth of rebellion Sid Vicious incarnated. I have mind blowing memories of Joey Shithead and the Skulls [before they became DOA (our most famous Vancouver punk bank)] playing during my high school graduation year. No true Punk would consciously take money from the establishment they rebelled against. Yet, this current set of EduPunks mostly work for traditional established education institutions. I strongly suggest you trace most people writing about and considering themselves EduPunks back to where they derive there livelihood. They are not EduPunks! They are masquerading as Punks, and as long as people clutter up the blogosphere claiming to be EduPunks while also being paid by the establishment can only perpetuate these flawed traditional education structures. If they were true Punks they would leave their day jobs and use their mindshare to disrupt the structures they claim to be rebelling against. Hypocrites the lot of them!!!!

Do bounties work?

The "work" I am doing with WikiEducator is in trying to fill out the the multimedia resources available for OpenOffice / Ubuntu learning. We had offered a $1500 CDN bounty for each 3 -5 minute multimedia component developed. This seems like a good offer, but I wonder if the idea of OER and wiki collaboration includes the concept of money. I always believed that OER and wiki authorship was a volunteer activity. And when you throw $$$ into the mix everything becomes skewd...