The good thing about bad presentations, or how I came to love social software

So my last rant reflected my unhappiness at being inundated with crappy powerpointings, but that’s not the only dissatisfaction I’ve had with presentations I’ve sat through in conferences over the last few weeks.

In addition to the dull quality of the ‘lecture’ experience, I’ve been really disappointed with the vision of learning that’s been in the background of some of the presentations, e.g. too many talks on eportfolios that see them solely as a way to create a resume, or just another way to squish students into an artificial assessment framework, too many talks on more and better ways to generate reams of metadata and remove the humans from that sticky operation of sharing and reusing learning resources.

But the good thing about all of these is that I’ve had a series of small epiphanies that have made me a true believer in social software. What’s that brother’s and sisters, can you say it, I BULEAVE! Say it again, I BULEAVE!

Which may sound strange to some, but none who know me well. Yes, I’ve been a blogger for almost 3 years now. Yes, I use flickr, I use furl, yada yada yada. But I was always looking for holes and just a little bit sceptical. No longer. We need software that is obvious in the value it offers its end users so we aren’t forcing them to do things they don’t want to already do. We need software that recognizes users not just as the ‘operators’ of software, but as having identities that are important, identities that are the basis for rich connections and enabling possibilities. We need software that notices and records these conections and interactions in order to add even more value to those users and to other people trying to do similar things. Hallelujah!

And for all my past (and present and current) sins against this, mea cupla. Like Thomas Pynchon once wrote, I’m a slow learner. – SWL

LORNet Conference Day 2 and a modest proposal

Today’s my last day at the LORNet conference in Vancouver, as I have to miss the Friday sessions to attend the fall session of the BC Ed Tech Users Group workshops.

I’ve enjoyed meeting the people at the conference and seeing their work at the poster sessions, but I have really not been enjoying the actual plenary sessions at all. Too much “death-by-powerpoint-no-demos-talk-and-no-show” which anyone who attends academic conferences, especially research-focused academic conferences, has experienced to no end.

It’s pretty easy to complain about this. I won’t go on much more. Alan pretty much has the market cornered on indignation at what a waste most of these sessions are, and I agree. But like Alan, I long to figure out a better model, one which could still preserve all of the good things we like about conferences, and re-invent or do away the bad.

So, here’s my modest proposal. Do away with the formal scheduling of presenting papers altogether. I’m not saying do away with presenting your ideas, but do away with the formal schedule that says “at 2 o’clock everyone should assemble in Room 1400 to hear what’s-his-name drone on about whatever” (sorry, I know I’m sounding dismissive, but there are many hours of my life that I will never get back due to such presentations).

Instead, book spaces with large rooms/halls, and make everyone who wants to present their work do it as a poster session over the course of 1 or 2 days. Offer seating in front of the poster areas if you like, and then let the wisdom of crowds decide which presentations to attend. Make it like the agora in days of yore, with the sages holding forth and the ‘learners’ wandering around till they found the conversation they wanted. See a big group forming and want to find out what the buzz is about – go and find out. Want to stay with that group discussion for the remainder of the conference – great, stay there. No one is coming to your presentation, fine, go to someone else’s, presuade others you have somthing to say, bring them back to your conversation or join the existing one and make it something bigger. Create ways in which people can also connect to these self-forming ‘groups’ via social software – different sessions could have different tags, different chat channels, whatever. Or else pre-create the groups via social software and then have meetups in real space around them. Take the whole conference concept a step futher and adopt a practice like “Open Spaces” whose explicit goal is “to create time and space for people to engage deeply and creatively around issues of concern to them.” Novel idea, eh?

But like I said, a ‘modest proposal’ – what would we list on our resumes as a result of such metings? How would we get publication credits? Right, right, I forgot, the reason for conferences is publishing opportunities, not learning and professional development. And you want me to pay me registration fee why exactly? – SWL

ADL Plugfest 9 Proceedings Available, Some Notable Presentations

http://www.adlnet.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=PF9ProceedT

The proceedings for the 9th ADL Plugfest are now available, including both online video, links to the powerpoints and to some demos.

As if the point needed more illustration, nothing quite exemplifies the differences between the training/corporate elearning communities and the higher ed community, or between the state of the advanced research community and the state of actual practice in the field, (or between the military and everyone else), as does looking through proceedings such as these. I almost get whiplash from the contrast between some of my current conversations in higher ed (where the boutique model of production is so entrenched I sometimes get push back at the notion of an instructor wanting to re-use any content, at all) and this, where orderly lines of SMEs and instructional designers are expected to crank out content based on specific processes, protocols and procedures, yes sir!

Still, lot of potential interest here – from the Wednesday sessions, one can find a presentation on “XML Content Formats for SCORM” from a number of luminaries, including Canada’s own Roger St-Pierre from the DND, and John Townsend, head of HarvestRoad. It is interesting to see where folks such as these have got in practice with using XML for content markup (not just metadata) and then subsequently displaying it in multiple formats. As Stephen Forth points out in the question period, the control that, say Boeing, can exert on its content production model seems like a luxury to many of us. Townsend’s ‘devil advocate’ comments in his part of the presentation (especially the comparison of higher ed to being ‘near anarchy’ in its production models) was especially appreciated by me.

Another notable presentation was from Rob Ferrell of IBM who presented on IBM’s efforts on the “Dynamic Assembly of Learning Objects.” Ostensibly, if you go back far enough, this was one of the early motivations for the notion of learning objects, at least in the training communities. Interesting to see working code and architecture of how this can work in practice. Not sure that I’m convinced all of the obstacles to this happening regularly can be overcome, but clearly it’s not just a theory any more.

Finally, also of note for being a lone voice in the wilderness of this mechanized view of learning is David Wiley’s keynote to the ‘Working on Simple Sequencing and Navigation’ thread within the Plugfest. David makes the important point that things like SCORM don’t solve all the problems – they help with things like interoperability, and are necessary constraints that instructional designers must work within, but at the end of the day the fact that an object validates as a SCORM package does not mean it is effective learning (or reusable!)

Anyways, lots of stuff to ponder here. Happy viewing! – SWL

YABP (yet another blogging presentation)

http://www.edtechpost.ca/gems/adeta_blogtalk.ppt

The above points to the powerpoint slides for an online presentation I just gave to the Alberta Distance Education and Training Association (ADETA). Likely nothing new there for the old hands, but I promised James I would post it once it was done. Like everything else on this site it is posted under a Creative Commons license, so reuse as desired.

I tried to build on the work I did a few years back on the ‘Matrix of Uses’ for blogs in education – truth be told I haven’t spent a lot of time since then focusing on the issue, so don’t know if my thinking has progressed that far.

In a nutshell, my messages were
– focus on ‘blogging’ as process and not ‘blog’ as noun
– blogging is important in representing a number of significant ‘firsts’ (easy XML publishing tool, easy personal publishing, networked writing, easy way to create identity online)
– yet important to learn the lessons these ‘firsts’ teach irregardless of the specific manifestations (I know I’ll catch flak for that one)
– represent a move towards bringing our educational life online and are online lives together (for better or worse, you decide)

It’s hard when you don’t know your audience/can’t even see your audience. I ended up with too much background and not enough time for the meat. Maybe someday there will be enough awareness of blogs as a phenomenom that all of us can forsake all the introductory comments, but it still feels fringe enough to me when I talk to educators ‘on the ground,’ so to speak, that I feel compelled to include it in these kinds of talks. – SWL

UThink’s Blog Directory Page

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/ (then follow the ‘Blog Directory’ link – for whatever reason, MT is gawking on the actual URL)

You’ve likely seen the UThink site before, the University of Minnesota’s MoveableType-based blogging site. But I wanted to point out the ‘Blog Directory’ sub-page on that site for the little things it does right to direct new readers to existing blogs.

Like almost every ‘directory’ it has an alphabetical list of all the blogs on that site, but really, is that helpful? Sure, if you want to troll through hundreds of pages looking for interesting titles, but typically not. What is helpful, though, is how they highlight “Recent Posts,” “Blogs with the most comments” and “Blogs with most Posts” – yes I know this reinforces so-called ‘power laws,’ and that ‘more’ doesn’t always mean ‘better,’ but as someone coming in from the outside to this server, these provided great starting points to explore this sub-universe within the blogopshere.

This seems to me to be part of the trick in rolling out blogs in academic settings – they have their uses if they are only being read by the instructor and the rest of their class, but blogs have stood out precisely because the network the create and participate in is not formally bounded (as say a CMS-based threaded discussion is.) So you need to (or at least are able to) grow the readership/network; one way to do this individually is to use all of the tricks that existing bloggers do (post on other people’s comments, post links to other people’s posts, blogrolls). But pages like this directory page also serve as an institutional means to grow the community, and are aimed at (but not restricted to) the next grouping ‘up’ from the course level, the institution-wide audience. – SWL

What are the ‘Deficiencies’ of Current CMS?

On a pretty regular basis I hear griping from people in the edtech blogging community about how terrible CMS platform X is, or how they are being forced to settle on the functionality provided in CMS platform Y. Rarely, however, do people get specific about what they can’t accomplish in the existing CMS (I’m referring to the existing market leaders – you know who I mean.) So here’s your chance – use the comments below to tell me, and others, what you think is wrong with the ‘majors’ right now, & more importantly what you need to accomplish but can’t in your existing CMS environment. I’ll start things off:
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‘Blogs in Education’ roundtable discussion topics

http://www.edtechpost.ca/gems/
etug_roundtable/roundtable_discussion_topics.htm

Tomorrow the B.C. Ed Tech Users Group gets together for its bi-annual face to face sessions. I’m hosting a short half-hour discussion on blogs in education, in part as a follow up to the online ‘blogtalk’ we did back in October. The roundtables are just supposed to be loose discussions but I threw together two possible topics, as well as pointers to a few examples of higher ed class blogs that I like. If anyone has comments on pointers to where these discussions have already taken place online (specifically the ‘inside or outside the firewall’ one) I’d love to hear them.

The only problem with doing this roundtable is that I’m going to miss the other ones that are going on at the same time, most notably Brian’s on wikis in education. As always, feel free to re-use if there’s anything useful here.- SWL

Living in Parallel Worlds: Blogs and Course Management Systems

http://www.syllabus.com/news_issue.asp?
id=155&IssueDate=11/12/2003

Blogs are ‘outside’ the CMS. Should they be? There’s really two questions here. One involves the functionality involved in creating and maintaing a blog, what we typically think of as the blog software itself. Should this remain outside the CMS? No, it’s an obvious candidate for inclusion and you should expect to see it in a CMS near you soon. The second, far more interesting question, one that actually doesn’t seem to be asked in the article, is whether student blog content should remain inside the walled off ‘silos’ as a few have called them, or whether they should be out in the wild like all the rest of the blogs. This is a far thornier issue, and in my experience gets to the heart of some of the resistance to using blogs that I’ve seen so far. – SWL

Internet FAQ Archives

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/

It’s difficult to believe, but I expect there are now many users on the Internet who have never participated in one of the oldest forms of ‘online community’ – Usenet Newsgroups. In large part I expect because of the influx of spam, but also with the rush to other forms of communication and community, Usenet groups don’t get the recognition, nor I expect the trafffic, they did in their heyday…
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Draft paper on using community software for rich constructivist education

http://tecfa.unige.ch/proj/seed/catalog/
docs/sevilla03-schneider.pdf

This 39 page paper (draft 1.5) by Daniel Schneider is well worth the effort. On top of the ton of good thinking on why traditional CMS don’t suffice and what roles the instructor might play within different pedagogical designs, the paper was worthwhile simply for introducing (at least to me) the term “Community, Content and Collaboration Management Systems” (C3MS) to describe packages such as Plone, PostNuke and Drupal. As the author notes, these are often discussed as ‘content management systems’ but this term belies much of their true nature as collaborative and community-building content management systems. – SWL

– via [Kairosnews]