Monthly Archive for April, 2010

The folks at SIAST kindly asked me to do the opening keynote for this year’s Tlt ‘10 conference. Whenever someone asks me to keynote I really want to give them something new, partly out of a sense that they deserve it but also because for me, doing talks is one of my main forms of intellectual expression, where I get to work out new ideas and try to figure out new ways to communicate old ones. But as much as I wanted to, I just couldn’t this time; I am just too zoo’d with stuff at work etc.

So I dusted off my “Becoming a Network Learner: Towards a Practice of Freedom” talk that I originally delivered in December 2008 during my trip to Colombia.

Still, I did try to introduce some new material, which you can see in slides 53-59. The first two new slides simply tried to explain my “Open Educator as DJ” as another form of PLE workflow, but one which sees teaching others as one of the goals of learning on the network.

The other new stuff, which is more important, but MUCH more raw, has been prompted by concerns that have been niggling me for years. I am not sure if these are “essential” effects of using the net, but I have experienced, and others have noted, that the net can lead us to pay possibly too much attention to the immediate, and not enough reflecting on what has happened or where we want to go. I take the emergence of the GTD movement to be very much an early reaction to this by people deeply immersed in learning/working with technology. I also worry about the phenomenon of the “echo chamber,” that diversity in our networks doesn’t just magically “happen.”

So I tried to suggest that “on top” or “alongside” or “as part of” our PLE we need to incorporate techniques, practices (and tools) to help counterbalance the tyranny of “now” and “me”, to help learners realize that part of learning is looking at where you’ve been which helps with pattern recognition, reflection, and building an awareness of how we learn (meta-cognition.) And similarly, that we need to adopt practices to help us focus, build attention, stay on track amidst the the myriad distractions whose existence is part of the value of the network! (I think this is similar, though maybe not identical, to what Pat Parslow is getting at in this post on “Navigating your personal learning seascape.”) The solutions I seek aren’t about closing your laptops or turning off your cellphones, but instead are ways of inserting some meta- activities or tools into your regular activities in the hope of improving attention, reflection, pattern recognition, diversity.

So, “examining where we’ve already been” might take the form of a plug-in like Wikipedia Diver that records and visualizes your wikipedia sessions, to simple suggestions like one Mike Caulfield made a few weeks back to make reviewing your browser history a regular activity. Using your blog as a constrained search engine, or even just searching your “outboard brain” are other examples of  simple practices we can insert into our existing network flows that I think will increase reflection, help us learn what we know, know what we’ve learned.

And what about moving forward – how to do this in a way that doesn’t fall prey to either the tyranny of the now (helps us know and follow through on our intent) but also isn’t just an echo chamber. I have few answers here – I DO think the whole GTD-type movements, Inbox Zero, etc, are speaking to this and skills we can help network learners adopt. Similarly the idea that people need to become personal project managers. Counter-balancing the “echo chamber”? I am leery to suggest that this is solely a network problem – we see this in many aspects of life. And just like there, I think there is no substitute for choosing to engage The Other, to listen to those you don’t agree with or identify with, in order to build understanding and empathy. Can we technologize such a thing. I don’t know.

As I said, very raw, but I put them out here, raw as they are, in case they resonate with others and they can start to build on them. So what do you think – are their techniques, practices or technologies that you can suggest to insert into a network learner’s workflow that will help counterbalance these effects and help cultivate attention, meta-cognition, reflection, intent? Is this even a problem, or if so, is it perhaps not specific to network learning but just learning in general? Please help me clarify my own thoughts on this. I am a slow learner, and am intuiting more than I can effectively communicate or prove here. – SWL

A little while ago I posted a query on twitter:

If you haven’t seen Google Moderator, it is a fantastic system that you can use to gather and vote on questions before (or during) a meeting or class. Unfortunately, using this US-based app for an upcoming meeting will likely land me in crap, so I set out trying to find alternatives.

There are definitely a number of similarly hosted alternatives; Uservoice, GetSatisfaction, while not identical, can facilitate this sort of thing, as could Ideascale and YouSuggest. Problem is, they run afoul of the same set of alleged privacy bugaboos that means I can’t use Google Moderator (and frankly none of them are quite so sweet as it). (N.B. I say “alleged” because the irony is that the meeting I want to elicit questions for is precisely on this question of BC institutions abilities to use 3rd PArty US-based software!)

So I kept looking for Open Source or at least locally-hostable options and found the following ones too:

• Question2Answer – http://question2answer.org/
• OSQA – http://www.osqa.net/
• Stacked – http://code.google.com/p/stacked/ an Open Source clone of the Stack Overflow site)
• Idea Torrent – http://www.ideatorrent.org/
• Berkman’s Live Question Tool (which, while allegedly Open Sourced, does not appear to have source code available, too bad)
• Backchan.nl from MIT – https://launchpad.net/backchan.nl (again, promising, but where’s the code?)

None of these are perfect replacements for what Google Moderator does – the ones focused on customer feedback/software development tend to be overly busy and not clearly dedicated to the issue of crowdsourcing questions to be answered live during a meeting/class. So I will keep looking. But I thought I would share what I found in case it was helpful. If you know of a good alternative please let me know! – SWL

This morning I logged on to twitter to see that, adding insult to the injury that is the absence of Flash, Apple has decided to also ban the Scratch app from the iDevice line (iTouch, iPhone, iPad.)

Now I only recently got an iPhone, and I do like it a lot, but more and more my generative proclivites have found me running into walls, heading down dead ends, as I think up things I’d like to do with my phone.

Which led me to tweet this morning:

Simple, right? Let Apple know how cranky their users are at not being able to use some staple aspects of the web using their own mechanism. (Yes, “the web” – yes, I know it’s a format developed by a commercial firm.) Take it a step further – make the one thing the app can do is send an email to sjobs@apple.com with a polite request for their great line of products to start supporting Flash, Scratch and other ubiquitous and more generative environments.

Simple… if I had the chops to develop an iPhone app! Which a quick excursion into Apple Developer Land convinced me I do not, at least not anytime soon (though I’ll add it to the LONG list of things I would like to learn how to do, someday.)

But for an existing developer? Seems like it would be child’s play. Probably violates some part of the Developers agreement or would itself get banned from the App Store, but hey, that would make the point just as well. So – any iPhone developers out there want to take this up? Indeed – has someone already? Wouldn’t surprise me, it’s not that original an idea. But the vision of seeing the Top Downloaded App on the App Store be “iProtest” (feel free to use that really tickles my happy mutant bone. Let me know if you do build something like this – I’d sure download it, and spread the word. – SWL