Interview with Alex Hayes from EDUPOV

On  September 15, 2010, the combination TESOL pp107 Multiliteracies course, TESOL Arabia EdTech SIG professional development series, and the regular Webheads meeting each Sunday noon GMT conducted an interview with Alex Hayes.  Alex is the CEO of EDUPOV (http://www.edupov.com/), a company that sells wearable technology for education.  Because it's wearable, it presents itself from the wearer's point of view, or POV. 

Alex left us his PhD proposal to read in preparation for his talk:
https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1_TGVgWsJjbx5f0wxLQPSSjdsAluvF2Bgpnk9XMw1K4Q

In reading this over, if I were a Wordle, the word I would make most prominent in Alex's proposal is CONNECTIVISM. On p.8/16 of his proposal Alex mentions the role of connectivism in networked learning to be one where participants build "a living literacy that embodies electronic connections amongst all other human considerations," which seems quite relevant to the topic of the Multiliteracies course. He says also that his proposed research "posits a Connectivist theoretical framework as most suited to examining  the risks inherent with adding more veillance to flexible education settings." Wearable POV technology is as rich with affordances (for vocational training, for example) as it is fraught with potential for invasion of privacy, especially when the technology is geo-locatable, contains photographs of others, etc.  These latter issues conjure a world of veillances: sousveillance, uberveillance, and of course surveillance, which we already (think we) know about (http://works.bepress.com/kmichael/187/).

This word 'connectivism' stood out for me because although Alex and I have never met in person, we have interacted on numerous occasions.  Alex and some friends of his held a relaxed chat for example as a keynote address at the 2009 WiAOC convergence, which I moderated (http://wiaoc09.pbworks.com/AlexHayes; I haven't located recording yet). Apart from that I have occasionally crossed paths online with Alex sometimes socially but always in connection with some learning event.  This is not surprising because connectivism is how we both learn best (Siemens, 2005: http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm).

Quite a lot of what I know about Alex I acquired not live but asynchronously, through podcasts (http://talkingvte.blogspot.com/, for example).  He is an organizer of conferences in Australia (e.g.http://mobilizethis.wikispaces.com/). Because Australia is a big country with huge distances separating learners from places they would previously have had to go in order to learn, their educational system tends to be strong on distance learning innovation, and the conferences Alex organizes feature speakers discussing how POV technologies help trainers overcome some problems inherent in those distances. Having had this wider context in which to understand Alex's work, I realize that participants in the multiliteracies course I'm teaching might, without this perspective, be wondering what connection his work has with them. 

Thus the frameworks underpinning Alex's work are not so apparent when Alex discusses the products of his work; however, I hope that we are modeling here with one another new insights into connected learning. One good example of connected learning was reported just the other day when a teacher in Brazil had her students blog and then requested comments on their posts through the Webheads list. This message reveals the serendipitous outcome of that:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evonline2002_webheads/message/26545

Another practical intersection of Alex's work and pedagogy is where Alex mentions in his proposal the New Media Consortium's Horizon Report.  The NMC's annual reports of what's new on the near and distant horizon in educational technology make interesting assessments of trends for the near and far future: http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2010/. For example, this trend: "People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to. Life in an increasingly busy world where learners must balance demands from home, work, school, and family poses a host of logistical challenges with which today’s ever more mobile students must cope," http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2010/chapters/trends/ helps explain the prediction that "On the near-term horizon — that is, within the next 12 months — are mobile computing and open content." http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2010/chapters/technologies/

So I invited Alex to talk with us because I too feel that mobile technologies are crucial to the near future, if not the present, of connected learning, which is in essence the field that Alex is working in. I think mobile technology is moving faster than teachers are at this point; for example in Argentina, almost all bars and restaurants have wifi which customers frequently access through their mobiles, which they all seem to have; yet classrooms there block mobiles and seem resistant to technology of any stripe. Where I am in the UAE we are at the stage where all students have mobiles, often more than one, and bring them to class, and use them to get on the Internet, yet teachers here in the UAE are not really exploiting even computer-based internet that much in teaching (I mean, falling short of its true potential; mobile tech hardly at all: Stevens, 2010, http://tinyurl.com/vance2010calico). I noticed when traveling this summer that more and more travelers are carrying smart phone and using them in conjunction with Facebook for what they used to do in Internet cafes.

This question of how what Alex talked about is relevant to teachers touches on the issue of cohesion, which has been raised in the multiliteracies course I'm teaching. There is some suggestion that cohesion could best be achieved if we worked from one learning platform (Desire to Learn, for example) rather than spreading ourselves thin on the Internet (wikis, blogs, Ning, YahooGroup and Grouply).

Cohesion should not be confused with simplicity. Simple things are easy to understand.  For example if I show you black and white and frame these with respect to a color scheme, this is cohesive, and easy to understand.  But if I explain that color is only one aspect of human subjectivity, and that the importance of color might depend to some extent on whether you are right or left brained, and whether your eyes can detect colors in the first place, whether you have a prior schema based on racial prejudices or the color of hats in early cowboy movies, then you might feel that this topic is not so simplistic, though we might be able still to supply cohesion to our discussion.

We would have to provide a platform for our discussion.  If I chose just one then this might simplify our task of discussing the topic, but when the topic itself is multiliteracies and connectivism and how cohesion is achieved when people try to learn and disseminate knowledge on the Internet, then not modeling how that works through some sort of emulation of real life in choice of learning management system could in the long run be detrimental, like presenting simplified native-language based language learning materials as opposed to exposing students to authentically communicative situations.  Of course if the students know nothing of the language then some simplification is in order, but if the topic is multiliteracies and connectivism and new ways of learning and knowing via networked learning environments, rank beginners are becoming fewer and farther between.  Some degree of immersion is appropriate.

One way to draw a distinction between beginner and experienced learners of a topic is to ask whether they are ready to learn on their own.  If they need guidance at the start of their learning path, then the teacher can consider simplifying both the material to be learned and the platform for delivery. But if the learners are capable of driving their own learning, then a real-world simulation might be the best platform for them.

This what I was hoping to discuss with Alex, some of the connections between his work and new literacies, and how we achieve connected knowledge by mobilizing that!

MobilizeThis! and StreamFolio are two initiatives of Alex's I also hoped to get him to talk more about.

• http://mobilizethis.wikispaces.com/
• http://www.streamfolio.com/

Also, Alex and I had both reviewed the slide show here
http://smarterware.org/6561/what-to-expect-from-google-me?
which I intended to ask about with respect to a podcast Alex left online recently at the Australian eLearning09 conference: http://talkingvte.blogspot.com/2009/12/elearning09-alex-hayes-streamfolio.html

This would have been a discussion of interface vis a vis what people actually do when using social networks online. The issue of privacy would have come up (veillance and uberveillance, and Adams's thoughts on distinguishing your networks by strength of ties, and preventing items meant for one set of ties, close friends for example, from getting out into another, a professional network for example). You can judge how closely we came to these goals when you listen to the recording of the interview in Elluminate at: http://tinyurl.com/150910alexhayes.

Tiny URL for this post: http://tinyurl.com/evomlit100915hayes


One further comment, and thanks for this one, not sure I deserve it but I am humbled

New Millenium Professional Development

I’ve been asked to propose a task force to promote the use of pedagogical technology at the place where I work. This has really got me thinking about how to preach to someone other than the choir. I think I'm going to need some help from my community on this one. I'm being asked to really effect change at an educational institute where there is not a lot of awareness of the very latest issues in educational technology and their impacts on learning. How do I start this ball rolling?

The first issue to be addressed before such a task force can be agreed upon is why it is needed? I believe it is needed, but why would anyone else think so? So the first task of the task force should be to determine its scope regarding the nature of the need in the perceptions of those concerned.

In helping the task force to approach such an analysis, I could suggest many things that my colleagues might want to read. It would be easy to go overboard here. I suppose I should select a baker’s dozen items that I think people should read, but thinking this through just a bit more, perhaps I should think of this as a baker’s dozen number of topics. Each topic would have a set of background readings, one of which would be the one I would recommend be read if one wanted to read just one thing on that topic. The other readings would be available in case the first reading succeeded in piquing interest in the topic.

Not all of the recommended items would be readings per se. A couple would be videos or other media. Sometimes these are more approachable than readings. The various media would illustrate the emergence of multiliterate approaches on the Internet.

Putting off for the moment coming up with the readings, here are the baker’s dozen of topics I am thinking to choose. Many of these items overlap and impinge on other items in the list (RSS is a major component in blogs for example, yet both topics are important enough to be treated separately, and the concept of blogging could accordingly stand alone apart from other asynchronous collaboration media mentioned in item 12.)

1. RSS and push/pull technologies and feed readers
2. Aggregation: tagging, Del.icio.us, and folksonomic classification systems as opposed to taxonomic ones
3. Podcasts: harvesting them primarily, but also producing them, as vital resources in ongoing professional development
4. Paradigm shift: multiliteracies and new learning heuristics
5. Blogging and microblogging
6. Digital storytelling
7. Social networking
8. Distributive learning networks: communities and connectivism
9. Web 2.0
10. Informal / just-in-time learning
11. Synchronous communications: instant messaging, online presentation venues incorporating interactive whiteboard, voice, and video
12. Asynchronous collaborations tools: blogs, wikis, Voicethread, Slideshare and similar, Google docs and similar, Google notebook

How can I expand and fine tune my list of items? I will engage my community of practice, my social network, my distributed learning network, my community of colleagues, most of whom I have never met face to face although we’ve been interacting for the past 5 or ten years. I have asked them for their advice.

This is in fact the key to staying up on the new technologies. It’s a question of keeping attuned to a network of people with something worth sharing. In the most recent age of print literacy one would encounter needed resources in libraries and through journal subscriptions, where the network would consist of a range of static authors.

In the new age it is possible to interact with writers and thinkers directly, but though this is possible and with emerging technologies this possibility can be exploited with great benefit to all concerned, for those who are hesitant to get 'up close' at the very outset, it is not absolutely necessary to interact with people synchronously any more than it is necessary to meet an author of a book or journal article. However, the crucial difference nowadays is in knowing where to find that network of people with information to share most relevant to the individual. It turns out that these people are less frequently publishing in traditional media. So the first thing to learn, as it is with what we should be teaching our students, is HOW we stay on top of things, given new developments in technology having major impacts on both literacy and learning.

So the first challenge of this task force should be to develop a core of educators where I work with a greater awareness of what the new technologies are and their potentials for education, what some people characterize as having transformational potentials. Once consciousness has been raised to a requisite degree, the task force can then begin identifying areas within existing curricula where these technologies might apply. It would be hoped in this phase to involve teachers within those departments who could in turn be made aware of the affordances made possible by principled use of technology in the service of the teaching goals of the various departments.

If anyone reading this has any ideas on how I can better approach this, or if you can think of other topics for my baker's dozen, I'd really appreciate your comments.

I am posting this in draft form in order to hopefully elicit comments and suggestions, but I intend to change this, for example to fill in the readings, at some point in the near future.

Tiny URL for this post: http://tinyurl.com/2kkb3v

Meanwhile, Tom Robb was kind enough to send me a copy of his chapter:
Helping teachers to help themselves. In: Hubbard, Philip and Mike Levy (Eds.). Teacher education in CALL. 2006. xii, 354 pp. (pp. 335–347).
More about this book here: http://www.benjamins.com/cgi-bin/t_bookview.cgi?bookid=LL%26LT%2014

Robb suggests that supporting teacher autonomy in technology at the program level would benefit from the following elements:

• Survey of institution's technical support environment
• Hire a (CALL or technology) specialist
• Recognize and reward self training and innovation
• Set up a faculty development program
• Budget for training and resource personnel (equal amounts on human, hardware, and software resources)
• Encourage networking
• Provide release time and funding
• and finally, the kicker: brute force, require the use of technology
  

Also Kim Cofino lists diverse aspects involved in "the shift to a 21st century learning environment" in her post: Making the shift happen, Always Learning (Feb 24, 2008):
http://mscofino.edublogs.org/2008/02/24/making-the-shift-happen/

1. Vision and philosophy - "Expecting teachers to change their practice, without providing a thought-out vision and philosophy for why they should change will only result in frustration."
   
2. Leadership - "at some point, school leadership needs to clarify and confirm that this is the direction the school is heading. There needs to be an official acknowledgment of the vision and philosophy and clear expectations that change will happen."
3. Paradigm shift and transparency - "you also need to develop a clear framework which details exactly what the roles are for each individual involved ... - each person on staff will be responsible for some aspect of this transition and they need to know how they fit into the bigger picture."
4. Curriculum and professional development - "Embedding this new model for teaching and learning into the curriculum development process is a natural way to institutionalize change - if it becomes part of our curriculum, it becomes part of our teaching and learning practice."
   
5. Staffing and equipment - "Why would we hire someone with no teaching load - someone who just “helps” people all day? Unfortunately, without the human support (which can range from being a teaching model in the classroom, to curricular or pedagogical support, to technical support, to a “safety blanket”) the technological troubles can end up feeling insurmountable for teachers new to this model of teaching and learning - exactly what you don’t want."
   
6. Infrastructure and communication - "Once staffing and equipment are sufficient, clear infrastructure and communication strategies need to be put in place ... Having resources and knowing how to access them or how to get support are all very different things."
   
7. Resources - "To help teachers and administrators cope with the rapid pace of technological change, developing easy to use resources (like “how to” sheets for both students and teachers, or common rubrics and assessment tools) can make the use of new tools far less intimidating."
   
8. Reflection and adaption - "Another important aspect of reflection is sharing our successes. Finding consistent ways to publicize success - not only within the school, but also to the wider school community, helps teachers gain confidence, explore new areas of teaching and learning, and promote positive attitudes towards this change. We can often get bogged down with solving problems, but sometimes the solution is sharing success."

Cofino's post provides numerous links to additional resources for developing the various aspects which must be addressed in accomplishing such a shift.

Ustream I stream we all stream for Worldbridges

We had a great time at the usual Webheads weekly chatfest last night. Nelba is thinking to organize a blog camp in Argentina and has put it on the agenda for our next weekly chatfest (Dec 30, 2007, noon GMT at http://www.tappedin.org and WiZiQ), Bee is filling her sabbatical with an itinerary of such events starting with one like this one http://www.icvet.tafensw.edu.au/ezine/year_2007/dec/report_elearning07.htm, and which she describes more thoroughly here: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evonline2002_webheads/message/17432; and of course there were overtones of multicultural holiday foods and music. Many people seem to appreciate the 'musical gift' Dennis offered here: http://www.d-oliver.net/Happy-Holidays-2007/Webheads/ (hope he's got trackback in; he'll see that I've linked to his post!).

Afterwards, some of us moved over to Worldbridges at http://edtechtalk.com where we had a play-about with http://ustream.tv. Jeff has archived the event at http://www.webheadsinaction.org and at the WebcastAcademy Solstice 2007 Webcastathon archive. Here are a few links associated with the recording (if you can't get it to play, try: 'Open in a Popup Window'):

• Jeff's posting at the Worldbridges Webheadsinaction site is here: http://www.webheadsinaction.org/node/278
• We were a part of the WebcastAcademy Solstice 2007 Webcastathon, archived here: http://www.webcastacademy.net/node/1583
• The URL at Ustream.tv (use this one and you can resize the screen, for a smaller but less pixilated image than the one below): http://ustream.tv/recorded/P,hFgOkTs35KR18liPoGpA

Facing up to Facebook

Heather made a posting to one of the lists I follow in which she said that she was considering using Facebook with her students, and did anyone have any thoughts on how she might do that. Someone was quick to respond with a posting citing a litany of paedophilia encounters on social networking sites. The posting was perhaps meant as a warning about such sites, but was more likely a case of someone passing on something they had seen lately on the topic, though they didn't know much more about it than that.

I responded that this was exactly the reason WHY educators SHOULD be taking an interest in social networking sites like Facebook. Some commonly cited analogies are that you don’t keep scissors out of your classroom, you teach people not to run with them. What if adults 'blocked' streets and tried to keep children from crossing them instead of teaching them HOW to cross them? Sure, the kids would be safe for a while, if a bit ignorant, but eventually they would encounter streets, and they’d have to work out, probably from emulating a seemingly wiser peer, how to cross them.

Kids are encountering Facebook among other social networking sites. They are not going to revert to postcards and letters at this point. Means of communication, literacies, language, conceptions of technology … all evolve and change and there is no forcing a return to a more comprehensible time no matter how convenient that would be for parents and teachers. In fact, if we older folks want to remain relevant to kids, we have to meet them in their space (My Space?). We need to act as guides there. It is our responsibility as parents and teachers, if we wish to have an impact on how this new generation develops, to make an effort to understand what is going on with social networking, even to the point of joining in, and discoursing with people young and old from an informed perspective, offering insights gained from greater experience in life, but understanding that the world changes and those who prosper change with it.

A good guide has to learn the terrain. To be a guide in Facebook you need to get an account. It’s easy and intuitive, though even I balk at installing Super Walls and accepting Vampire Bites. If you’re fortunate enough to have a fervent user in your family or distributed learning network, you might learn how tagging works with photos, or how professionals are using it to network. I found out about the recent Edublog awards ceremony in Second Life through a Facebook announcement, and Curt Bonk has started a Bonkian YouTubian Researchian network (pretty Bonkian alright - Curt, to me, is a 'seemingly wiser peer'). I’ve been teaching a course on multiliteracies for TESOL and we have been using a book written by Stuart Selber. Through another Facebook contact who discovered that Stuart had a Facebook acct and who added him to her friends list, I added Stuart to mine and he accepted. I sense that my next Multiliteracies course is going to have an interesting dimension to it as we now have the possibility of discussing the concepts with the author of the book via Facebook, can’t wait!

Heather made an important point. Apart from suggesting that she get her students started in Facebook (they most likely already ARE started .. Facebook is now what we have to ask students to log out of instead of MSN, as used to be the case a year or two ago.) … but apart from that, letting them get on with it is exactly the point. If you want to hear something interesting listen to Konrad Glogowski’s K-12 Online presentation at http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=166, or what I was actually thinking of, his conversation with Women of Web 2.0 at http://www.edtechtalk.com/node/2661 where he explains how he did just that in his PhD research, got his students blogging and let them go for a month and then researched what they said about their school work. Guess what, they didn’t say ANYthing about the syllabus. BUT (and his students are 8th graders) they wrote cogently and engagingly about what interested them, and they dialoged with one another, and considered audience and argument to a much greater degree than one would expect from more traditional ways of teaching 8th graders.

Konrad cited the work of Ray Oldenburg who coined the term “Third Place” in the context of being not home and not work, but a place of “broader, more creative interaction" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place (why, when I want to know something, can I invariably find out more about it in Wikipedia? - another social networking site that certain segments of education really need to face up to). Konrad has an interesting blog post on turning classrooms into Third Places: http://www.commun-it.org/community/konradg/weblog/454.html . So what Heather is suggesting then is creating a Third Place that might overlap a little with her class, where students could get away from the ‘work’ place (the ‘second’ place) yet co-mingle the second and third. This is what Konrad did. When he saw that his students were not discoursing on the classroom in their blogs, he started bringing up their blog posts in class, making their postings a part of the discourse of his classroom, as he put it. One of my take-away quotes from listening to that conversation was Konrad’s contention that “writing is a social artifact” – think about it, and then think about Vygotsky and constructivism, and check out what George Siemens says about Connectionism next time you’re on Google.

The lesson for us is that in order to remain relevant to our students, we have to acknowledge their discourse, and absorb it to some extent into our dealings with them. To watch that boat leaving the pier and not make some effort to leap aboard, or reach it, is just going to widen the gap between us and our students.

MEANWHILE - This just in ...

... and regarding my previous posting, feeling experimental, a possible breakthrough in the ongoing saga of achieving long-sought recognition from Technorati that I as a blogger exist. Finally, an email from someone at Technorati apologizing for the long delay in getting back to me but they have made a small adjustment to their system and from now on but not including previous postings (that's fine with me) my blog should start appearing in their listings. No, the trick provided by David Warlick mentioned in the previous post didn't work, but if Technorati has fixed the problem, this posting should. If you find it after a search on one of the tags here, leave me a congratulatory comment!

WOW of the Week: Recidivism in teacher professional development

Having listened twice to Derek Wenmoth's Professional Learning Networks keynote “Holding a Mirror to our Professional Practice” at the recent K-12 Online Conference http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=181 I was all ears when Derek was interviewed on a recent Women of Web 2.0 webcast #51 http://www.edtechtalk.com/node/2594

Derek said a couple of things during the conversation that I thought were well worth blogging. For one thing he said that in New Zealand they had selected individuals in institutes to receive funding in hopes that this would enhance technology at the entire institute through a trickle down effect, but post-studies revealed negligible evidence of trickle down. This doesn't suprise me given the tendency in many institutes for there to be just one or a few people really interested in technology and the majority of people at those institutes either ignoring them or at best largely avoiding the issue. This seems to indicate that funding the norm is not necessarily conducive to the spread of technology at educational institutes and that an institution-wide kick would be needed in order to impact change.

The second thing that Derek said that really grabbed me was to relate how a colleague had been studying the effects of programs of professional development and had come to the conclusion that in cases where teachers did not pursue a course of PD beyond a particular salient event, they were likely to revert to teaching in the way they had been taught within a certain number of months (was it 7? I'll listen again).

Given the vogue in considering learning networks as ecologies, here is a case of ontogony recapitulating philogony, or the offspring or product of a training program reverting to features inherent in a long line of previous trainers. This is to say that something more than a one-off course or training session is needed in order to really cause change in teaching methods. Calling forth a phlosophy of Zen and the Art of Maintaining a Respectable Commitment to Professional Development, it behooves us to realize that change must come from within. It is something that must be worked at continually, through blogging and reading blogs for example, or listening to podcasts such as the one I refer to here, through podcasting oneself occasionally, and through familiarity with what is involved in doing all that in order to inculcate similar learning heuristics in students by MODELING for them, through a teacher's personal professional development habits, what techniques and methods will help keep learners (lifelong-learning students and peers) connected to professional learning networks wherein new-age knowledge resides.

In conference presentations lately I have developed a set of ten aspects of change that are required by educators in order to undergo the shift in mindset that will lead to paradigm shift appropriate to integration of the latest technologies into educational settings. If a picture is worth 1000 words, then the one shown here represents what I normally have to say on this topic. The slide pictured is from the show here: http://docs.google.com/PresentationEditor?id=ddkc6v4f_40cvxvjm

Incidentally, I realize that I have two lists of items numbered 1-5 (hey, do the math!). The problem is that I was not able to get Google Presentation to number a second column of bulleted items consecutively after the first. If you know how, you might leave me a comment.

Who's in charge here? WiZiQ and Elluminate

Late breaking news Dec 18 - I've heard from both Elluminate and WiZiQ by now and have finalized this piece. I'll reconcile this blog with the most current version eventually but for right now, to read the latest version of this article, please visit:
http://prosites-vstevens.homestead.com/files/efi/papers/tesl-ej/07dec/wiziq_elluminate.htm
or Tiny URL: http://tinyurl.com/23lbgo

Incidentally, if you wish to comment, please read the latest version and leave your comment below. Soon, the version here will mirror the latest version in its temporary location.

The ABOVE version should appear here within a day or two: http://tesl-ej.org/ej43/int.html

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I wrote this in a hurry and posted it Nov 24 which was right before a publication deadline for TESL-EJ, as this article is intended for the On the Internet column in the December 2007 issue. But the deadline has since been extended to Dec 16 (and slightly beyond) and so there is time to get feedback from the developers at Elluminate and WiZiQ prior to the new deadline. This is being solicited, and also, WiZiQ have meanwhile announced the following enhancements to what I used to write my article:

1. More Documents: Support for Word Documents and Excel Spreadsheets.
2. Attendee rights: Off by default; presenter can transfer audio or video control selectively.
3. Two-way video: You and your attendee can share each others’ live video during the session.
4. Whiteboard Tools: The drawing and writing toolbar now includes a “Delete” button. “Undo” and “Redo” also added.
5. New Look and Feel: Panels for chat, attendee list and audio, video settings now occupy the right side.

There is more information at WiZiQ's blog here: http://wiziq.typepad.com/wiziqcom/2007/12/vc-update---mic.html


Meanwhile, here's the article as currently submitted to the December 2007 issue of TESL-EJ

Meanwhile still, Michael Coghlan informs me that "the latest version of Elluminate (v.8) has full duplex for up to 4 speakers if you choose to enable that feature." He says he most often opts to leave it off, and this was discussed last night at Webheads, Svetlana wanting to replicate a f2f classroom online, and me pointing out that the technology wasn't up to it because of feedback when participants don't wear headphones (moderators always having to troubleshoot that one) and also DELAYS ... in a meeting the other day we had one participant appearing rude interrupting other speakers (on full duplex) when in fact he was simply experiencing delay and was responding at appropriate junctures ... we have also experienced this when attempting guitar jams online .. impossible to synch up).

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A recent Women of Web 2.0 webcast http://www.edtechtalk.com/WomenofWeb2.0 (and subsequent podcast, on the Worldbridges EdTechTalk channel http://www.edtechtalk.com/) discussed the hottest Web 2.0 applications these days (obvious grist for an On the Internet column editor). Honorable mention went to NetVibes <http://www.netvibes.com/>, VoiceThread <http://voicethread.com/#home, and WiZiQ <http://www.wiziq.com/>, among others.

This article is an attempt to compare the free and open source, social networking Web 2.0 tool WiZiQ with Elluminate, one of its more successful enterprise counterparts, not just as per features of the two programs, but regarding the use of each tool that the design of each respectively forces or allows

WiZiQ currently is all the rage on Webheads and Learning with Computers, two email lists with around 1000 tech using educators interacting constantly in dozens of email messages each day (message archives viewable online or via RSS feeds from http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evonline2002_webheads/ and http://groups.yahoo.com/group/learningwithcomputers/, repectively), and it's also a popular topic in the edublogosphere. For a quick overview of WiZiQ, there's a slick promotional video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Yty0cPzlcU. What WiZiQ is and why is it so popular with tech-crunching educators is what I have been reflecting on recently, in conjunction with the critical issue in education of who exactly is in change here?.

First I should explain that WiZiQ is a free presentation software working entirely online, no download to your computer, that allows you to interact with other participants in a common virtual space. The space contains a whiteboard, which users can turn into multiple whiteboards, and upload PowerPoint slide shows to one or more of them. The slide shows are hosted more or less permanently at WiZiQ where they can be searched on by content, tags, or groupings, a feature reminiscent of Slideshare <http://www.slideshare.net/>. Users can also converse synchronously in full duplex, and if the moderator has elected to enable web cams, he or she can select one to display from participants who have theirs on. On the down side, there is no web tour, though URLs can be posted to the text chat.

All sessions are automatically recorded and are available at the URL where the session was hosted. Sessions can be hosted by anyone registered with WiZiQ and anyone registered can attend any other session to which they have been invited. The system is similar to Skypecasting, where any registered Skype user can start one, and only registered Skype users would be able to attend, which seems not out of the ordinary in the case of Skype, since you need the software on your computer and a Skype ID to skype (the verb) someone anyway.

WiZiQ takes advantage of registration in a way not exploited by Skype, however. WiZiQ has set itself up as a social networking site. Users can update their profiles with concepts they are interested in (i.e. tags) and presumably this will help link up users with common interests, though the system is new and (at time of deadline) we haven't yet found how a tag which many users share evolves into a more formal 'group'. The system does allow members to create and join groups, and to form networks of associations between users. For example, if you set up a session, you can choose to invite everyone in your group or limit the invitation to selected members in your network and they will all receive a message which not only informs them of your session, but to which they can conveniently reply. This is a feature that seems to work well with WiZiQ, though I have received messages from people I didn't realize I was networked with. WiZiQ is clearly a work in progress, under development, but with social networking sites, unless you directly probe the developer, many of the features will become apparent only after extensive usage and interaction.

One reason that WiZiQ has attracted so much attention is that educators are always on the lookout for free tools that promote synchronous interaction coupled with information dissemination within a network, especially one that lends itself to a formal venue, such as a class or a 'presentation' online. WiZiQ is the first product of its kind to emerge since the recent DimDim effort http://www.dimdim.com/, a similar, and open source, project which somehow seems to have receded from the periscope views of the instructor networks mentioned above. In that project, network members such as Moira Hunter had been working closely with the developer of DimDim. In the case of WiZiQ, the developer Harman Singh, appears to be similarly approachable, and responds personally to feedback from users.

Preferences vary, but one popular choice of an integrated set of online presentation tools has been Elluminate http://www.elluminate.com/. Although Elluminate is not free, it is often used for free by educators when they participate in sponsored or funded online conferences or sessions, or work through a community like Learning Times http://www.learningtimes.org/, which has provided free access to an Elluminate "Meeting Room" on its left sidebar for years. Learning Times has also been gracious in providing access to Elluminate meeting rooms for individuals and events which in turn provide educational services for free. For example, they have donated their services as sponsors of two WiAOC Conferences now http://wiaoc.org/. Elluminate itself has just started offering free 'rooms' to educators, but supplies each with only enough bandwidth for three participants: http://elluminate.com/vroom/.

Elluminate has proven to be a very robust platform despite being heavy on the front end at low bandwidths (it checks to see if the most recent version is on your computer and takes a few minutes to install the latest, and then it checks three proxies -- your browser, Java, and Elluminate itself -- which must all be set correctly, but which you would notice only if trying to connect from behind a firewall). Once connected, it generally works pretty well. It's cross platform and fairly intuitive to use, which is to say that in practice few complain of problems figuring out how to use it. The room will have been assigned a URL, but once this is given out, guests can enter the room with or without a moderator present. The moderator can assign other moderators to share power, and can remove those privileges as easily. The moderator can also grant individuals the right to use mics or web cams. With Elluminate, speech only works one direction at a time, but this works well since it imposes a turn taking order. The moderator can also 'take back' the mic in case a participant neglects to relinquish it (resulting in too long a silence).

Whereas only one web cam can be shown at a time, as long as the moderator has allowed it, participants can self-select to broadcast whenever the cam spot is available, and a preview mode allows for preening prior to going prime time. Participants also have access to a whiteboard onto which they can superimpose text, paint graphics, or image files from their personal disk drives, and a moderator can upload PowerPoint or other prepared materials, and can drive web tours in such a way that all participants visit the same URLs. Elluminate also allows moderators to share applications, for example a browser window. This differs from a web tour because with application sharing, the moderator can scroll and all participant windows will scroll as well.

Unlike WiZiQ, recordings are not made automatically, but when activated the recording is hosted on Elluminate servers, where it can be played back by anyone with access to the URL. As with WiZiQ, if there is a way to save a copy to a personal computer, I am not aware of it. However, some users make Camtasia versions of recorded sessions which can serve as personal archives or be hosted privately <http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp>, and word on the street is that TechSmith has released the only slightly outdated version 3 of Camtasia Studio as a free (as opposed to trial) download: http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/11/22/techsmith-offers-free-camtasia-studio-download/. Camstudio, the open source version of Camtasia, should work just as well <http://camstudio.org/>.

Elluminate lends itself well to a variety of styles of presentation. It works well with informal groupings where people just want to meet and discuss while sharing collaborative resources, and it works well for people who want to make more formal presentations but open participation to more audience interaction during or after the presentation. In my experience I have never thought it necessary to restrict anyone's access to the tools while moderating a session, though I have attended sessions where moderators have preferred to lock it down and force participants to request attention before being granted access to the mic once the moderator had notified them that such requests would be attended to (when the moderator has wished to restrict access during the presentation itself). Elluminate allows participants to raise hand icons to request attention, to clap hands, present a thumbs up or down, and control various other emoticons and graphical whiteboard icons as well, again assuming these have been allowed by the moderator. Elluminate, in other words, works well for moderators who wish to encourage peer to peer collaboration throughout a session, as well as for moderators who feel the stakes are high enough for them to exercise enough control to enable them to stage-manage an event.

However, what I have been reflecting on with regard to these two applications -- WiZiQ and Elluminate -- is not so much the descriptive differences between them, but the philosophical ones, the assumptions behind what a presenter's purpose would be which must have driven design of each system. What particularly interests me is WiZiQ's approach, so different from that of Elluminate, to the role of the presenter/moderator. Two other differences have been mentioned and are not really part of my reflection, though each is an important crucial difference in its own right. These are the fact that WiZiQ is free and is being developed obviously in hopes of attracting a following, and presumably feedback such as I am providing here, and secondly its social networking features, very interesting, but not a focus of this review.

A WiZiQ session develops very differently to an Elluminate one. First of all, the moderator will schedule a session, as is the right of anyone who has registered with WiZiQ beforehand. At this stage the moderator can elect to enable the web cam feature for the upcoming session in addition to voice. The moderator can schedule any amount of time for the session up to two hours (and I believe that once in the session, the moderator can top up the session with more time if needed).

However, the role of the moderator in WiZiQ is very different from that of the moderator of an Elluminate session. Most crucially, in a WiZiQ session, the moderator must be pro-active in driving the interaction from the point of appearing on time for the session to begin with. Let's say the moderator has scheduled the session for noon, and has invited a number of participants from his or her network. Those people will receive an email saying that the session begins at noon, and no one, not even the moderator, can enter the session before then. The moderator is then in a position of having to upload materials to the whiteboard with participants present who have been informed that the session was to begin at noon. One way to avoid this would be to not invite anyone from the moderator's network, so there would be no system-generated emails, and the moderator might then invite participants through a separate network to arrive for a presentation set to begin at 12:30, or whenever the moderator expects to be ready. However, this would obviate benefits inherent in the social network features, so what is needed here is the ability of the moderator to get in beforehand and set up the session.

WiZiQ allows for fully duplex voice chat, as you get with Skypecasts, which start similarly to a WiZiQ session. WiZiQ at least deals with one problem with Skypecasts - in WiZiQ participants arrive muted until granted permission to speak. This is both bane and boon, boon to the moderator who is the sole participant who is able to speak until he or she decides to start granting others the mic, and bane in case the moderator is not there for whatever reason. In that case participants must text chat, as there would be no one available to allow them to talk. With Elluminate, it should be recalled that participants who gather at a working Elluminate room will be fully voice empowered unless a moderator arrives who wishes to switch them off.

Because of its simplex, one-person-speaks-at-a time functionality, Elluminate users do not encounter the problems faced by users of Skype and WiZiQ when everyone is able to talk at once -- these issues being background noise and feedback. With Elluminate, it might also be recalled that users in general need little or no training in order to participate, but with Skype and WiZiQ considerable time and effort often has to be expended on mic etiquette. Users of duplex synchronous voice chat tools need to wear headsets so that their mics don't pick up what others are saying from the speakers and feed it back into the voice stream with delay, giving an echo effect that can disrupt speech in the person trying to speak. In worst cases, this can cause high-volume whine until the offending user self-mutes or is muted. Similarly when participants are in an area with loud background noise, they need to mute their mics when not speaking so that the noise doesn't distort the conversation being played to everyone else.

If the moderator has to deal with sound issues while trying to present, this increases task load, so a course of least resistance for moderators is to simply leave the default settings in place, so that everyone but the moderator is muted. The moderator then opens up one mic at a time in response to a hand raised, the icon provided for participants to get attention. Similarly, if the moderator has activated web cams for the session, then the moderator's web cam will appear from the moment it is switched on, but for others to have the cam, the moderator must select that person and pass web cam control on. If the moderator is on the ball, this might be a good way to ensure that anyone who is speaking is pictured while speaking, but then the moderator would be taking on a role of director or puppeteer, constantly switching between speakers and web cams by granting the appropriate privileges at just the right juncture in the presentation.

Another odd thing happens in WiZiQ when the moderator grants voice permission, and that is that permission to use a microphone brings with it permission to have moderator control over whiteboards, including the option to create new ones and toggle from one to another. It's hard to second guess the developers of the product on this one, but the ramifications are several-fold. In particular, the moderator cannot grant many participants microphone privilege without a corresponding increasing in chance of chaos occurring with whatever presentation materials are on the screen. If the moderator stopped on a particular slide for example and invited comment and then threw the floor open to all participants, all participants might start seeing the slides and whiteboard changing without anyone knowing who was making the changes, and when the moderator regained control there might be a few whiteboards more than when the chaos started.

So it must have been assumed in designing this system that the moderator would not think to do this. In our experiments with this system we have found that the moderator would be in any event unwise to un-mute all mics due to the sound issues mentioned earlier, so the system seems to have been designed with less flexible view of how a moderator might want to conduct a session than that allowed by Elluminate.

What then must a moderator do in order to make an effective presentation in WiZiQ, and what would a group do in order to hold an effective brainstorming session in WiZiQ? These are important questions to raise at this time, while WiZiQ and perhaps other similar products are under development, and while the developers are still in a position to respond to feedback from the educational community.

In its present rendition, WiZiQ is designed for a moderator who wishes to have control. In practice, that moderator is kept a bit busy to be both moderator and presenter. There are a lot of balls to juggle, trying to sort out the duplex audio issues, manage the web cams, plus toggle the whiteboards, in addition to making a presentation which entails conversation with participants. Even in Elluminate, where moderation is not quite so hands on, moderators find it convenient to work in tandem, one person presenting and another handling the back channels. This is possible in Elluminate because one moderator can appoint another (but is not yet an option in WiZiQ). It might be wise for WiZiQ to go the same route, and provide this option to the main moderator. Also, it would help to allow moderators finer control over privileges, instead of bundling such a wide set of privileges with anyone who is able to use a microphone.

So to answer the first question above, to make an effective presentation in WiZiQ, the moderator needs to keep control of it, and this is best done by withholding control from others, or by being careful and abstemious in how that control is parceled out. In my experience with similar tools, and due to my idiosyncratic personal learning and presentation style, I do not take as great pleasure in participating in discussions where participants are not free to interject as in those where they have this right. Here preference of style would be a matter of personality, but with Elluminate one has the choice of adopting the approach one prefers. With WiZiQ that choice is made of necessity.

As to the next question, how best to run a brainstorming session with more relaxed participants, WiZiQ would be a good choice for this because it is free, and would likely be adopted by members of a community, who might also wish to take advantage of its social networking aspects. In such a community, where members would interact over time, they would likely get to know one another and would educate each other in proper use of the tools (how to mute mics and wear headsets for example). WiZiQ appears to me to have its strengths in situations which would benefit from access to social networking tools, and connectivist philosophy.

So if one were to make the choice right now which client one were to choose, it would depend perhaps on how much money one had (WiZiQ is free), how high the stakes were within one's community (Elluminate is more stable and robust, and more flexible with regard to role of moderator), and whether or not the social networking possibilities with WiZiQ were worth exploring. WiZiQ is developing an enthusiastic following, and as part of a community of users that includes its developers, the possibility at this juncture of influencing the course of development is additionally encouraging.

Perhaps this article can contribute to the development effort. In order to encourage feedback I have blogged it at http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2007/11/whos-in-charge-here-wiziq-and.html. If you feel you have anything to contribute to this discussion, please visit the blog and add your two cents, and/or leave comments at the 'official' WiZiQ blog at http://wiziq.typepad.com/. You can also subscribe to Elluminate blog reviews at http://www.elluminate.com/rss/blogs.xml.

Who are you, and what do you do?

Jeff Lebow and Dave Cormier often start their interviews with this question, and now they've got all their webcasters doing it. In case I'm asked ...

I'm Vance, and I aspire to doing significant work in the area of educational technology as it applies to formations of what I used to think of as communities of practice but which I am now starting to view more as distributed learning networks. My oeuvre explores the nature and ecology of those networks through application of emerging (also referred to as ‘transformational’ and ‘subversive’) technologies in appropriate ways to the intersections of the knowledge within those networks and the pedagogies that are felt to best impact students (e.g. constructivist, connectionist).

Update: I have characterized this oeuvre in a book chapter:

Stevens, V. (2014). Connectivist Learning: Reaching Students through Teacher Professional Development" in Son, J.-B. (Ed.). Computer-assisted language learning: Learners, teachers and tools. APACALL Book Series Volume 3. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. http://www.cambridgescholars.com/computer-assisted-language-learning/.

A pre-publication last-draft version of the chapter is available here: http://tinyurl.com/small2014

My more recent work has involved Web 2.0 technologies and the many ways, such as through RSS and the blogosphere, that content can be tagged in evolving folksonomies over the Internet and then aggregated in such a way that it becomes knowledge within a distributed learning network. I have been exploring with likeminded peers and students, often students in the online environment, how this knowledge can be most effectively distributed throughout our respective networks, and how these networks can merge into broader yet ever more inclusive wide-networks.

Access to such networks requires an expansion of 20th century concepts of literacy into multiliteracies models. I have been working extensively within a multiliteracies construct, teaching courses on the topic, and practicing wherever possible multiliterate approaches to information dissemination throughout my own learning networks, including those of my face to face students. I have sought to be a change agent, achieving some measure of success in the broader distributed educational community, while making some inroads in the more local one where I work.

Locally I've had perhaps most impact on my own students, where I have been able to model for them heuristics that they can pursue in their own quest for knowledge in a world where the jobs we are training them for haven’t been invented yet, and where the information needed to perform those jobs must be gleaned from online communities of practice which in turn filter content through distributed learning environments, and aggregate and remix this content into knowledge applicable to whatever real-world environment our students find themselves in when they need to perform tasks they desire to do in a decreasingly predictable future.

Application of the expertise to do this requires an evolution in perception of pedagogy that I feel that educators are tending to, at a greater pace in some parts of the world than others. Whenever possible I try to take advantage of opportunities to help others to reflect on their practice and consider possible applications of technology to enhance their ability to achieve whatever they are trying to accomplish in the classroom, whether it be from a teacher’s or learner’s perspective.

That's my current theory at any rate, but I expect to be changing it due to unforseen developments in the near future, which I'm hoping I'll be equipped to adapt to through appropriate perspectives on knowledge acquisition and dissemination that I am trying to understand and apply today.

A 2010 follow-on to this post appears here:
http://advanceducation.blogspot.ae/2010/02/who-are-you-and-what-have-you-done.html

Teachers as Change Agents: A Conversation with Doris Molero

Doris Molero, one of my WritingMatrix partners in Maracaibo, Venezuela, has invited me to chat with her students in Venezuela about tagging and RSS and using these tools to connect on line as we’ve been doing with the WritingMatrix project: http://writingmatrix.wikispaces.com/

Me: http://scott-in-vietnam.blogspot.com/2007/10/scotts-trip-to-vietnam.html

I found it when I was looking for blog posts on a conference I recently went to
Its conference tag was GLoCALL
I looked in Technorati at this URL
http://www.technorati.com/search/glocall?authority=n&language=en
That's a search on blogs with the tag GLoCALL
So when I found this blog guess what??

Doris: What happened?
(checks out the blog …) Looking good in that Vietnamese hat!

Me: You guessed it. I found my picture there by surprise - just now
I'm leaving a comment now

Doris: What a small world!!!!

Me: the world has got smaller due to tagging
Are your guys blogging and tagging?

Doris: Yes... adding blogs to reader...
We are not using Technorati...
We are having trouble with internet and Technorati doesn't open
We are aggregating in Google reader

Me: looks like lots of nice posts in Technorati
I think if it were me I would IDENTIFY people whose blogs i like first, using Technorati and then follow THOSE in Google Reader
How are your guys finding blogs to follow?

Doris: but we don't have time for Technorati now... so we are adding and following in Google reader...since everybody is using Blogger... and are familiar with Google things... they have posted in Sasha's students blogs... and they have received some comments... this week we are going to start interacting more... this group is working on podcast for their final project...
they have to put a podcast together and post it in their blogs... as well as interact with the guys in the project.. as you can see it's a lot of internet skills and use of the language as well as critical thinking and all those things...

Me: for some reason none of my posts are coming up in Technorati, only my Slideshare tags, nothing from Blogger, and I’m looking in any authority too

Doris: I don't understand Technorati much... that's way we are using Google reader...you can always find blogs in Google by writing the right tag

Me: Blog Search?

Doris: yes

Me: (trying it out) yes, mine appear here
ok, I like this better

Doris: Yes... but how do you cope with teaching a syllabus and teaching how to work all these tools at the same time...?

Me: try to write the tools into the syllabus
become influential in other words
be a change agent

Doris: it's very demanding...sometimes it's frustrating ... so we got we the flow ... not everybody will be able to ride the wave but things are going to be accomplished ... and the more we use it the better and the more things students will learn...
Did that sound right...

Me: did you hear Konrad Glowgowski's talk at k-12 online?
http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=166

Doris: This is going to be the subject of my research.... how we can integrate more techno tools in our learning for life.... but some people just want to learn English... multiliteracies... how do we say that in Spanish...? it's a whole new way of looking at things...

Me: you should look up Glowgowski's talk because he quoted a lot from someone using the metaphor of flow and it was on that topic

Doris: well, It just occurred to me....
I love your F.U.N philosophy, though...
lots of teachers love control... and chaos ...it's something they can't control

Me: that's what's F.U.N. about it
someone said "I love to learn, I just hate to be taught"

Doris: that's what I meant by going with the flow... sometimes we want to control everything and have plans we can to carry out perfectly... we have to learn to relax and go with prior knowledge... trust each other..

Me: I think people learn better that way once they have become mature and responsible
How about your students? Can they learn through self motivation?

Doris: some of them are very nervous... some of them get frustrated... some of them love it... at the end of the level most of them agreed that all they did was worthwhile ...

Me: most people hate to pack and travel, but love where they end up, and have good reflections on the experience

Doris: they are university students and want to graduate in different fields... so English and technology is like something extra they have to worry about... but they say it's better than to have classes in the traditional way

Me: in the future there will NOT be LESS technology, and MODELING that technology is SOOOO important, like what you are doing
We are teaching people to take jobs that have not been invented yet
School no longer prepares you for a predictable future.
Check out David Warlick's K-12 keynote for more in that vein
http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=144
to prepare for your future you need to know HOW to learn
and how to FIND information
and for that you need technology
and you need to know how to use it

Doris: That's the spirit... and that's exactly what I'm writing in my research

Me: and another thing David said: bringing people into school and forcing them to leave their networks behind, to cut them off from their networks, is an insult to them
David's keynote makes the point quite dramatically

Doris: networking... such a new idea for many
Especially in the English classroom, a lot of new things at the same time...

Me: David says that there are two kinds of people:
those who are connected
and those who are not
and those who are have POWER
that the other group has not
so by putting your students in touch with others
to teach them how to connect
is to empower them

Doris: it took me a long time to fully understand it myself
but connecting is more than just connect... it means to be able to do... and to do you have to understand first...

Me: yes, how to USE those connections to learn
or more accurately to know
because according to Stephen Downes, George Siemens, and others
what we 'know' is the sum total of what we can connect to
If you are connected then you theoretically know everything that the network knows
IF you can access that knowledge
and that's what we need to teach today
not facts, connections

Doris: new concept for many people... especially because you have to leave your controlling everything...
now how do we convince teachers of that.....? that's elemental... teachers are change agents

Me: I guess, get people connected
and they will learn it on their own
you can't teach them
there is no such thing
they have to be put in a position where they are willing to learn it

Doris: my guys are working... and they will start demanding more of what they have been using sometime... we have to wait for the right time... so everything runs smoothly...?

Me: speaking of time
I have to go
nice talking to you
connecting with you and your students
will chat later some time

Heading for Hanoi

Tomorrow I fly to Hanoi, arriving after an overnight flight, and then give two presentations the next day and the day following, and then return to Abu Dhabi, arriving in the wee hours, and teach bright and early the following day. More information can be found here:
http://www.geocities.com/vance_stevens/papers/index.html#071103

I have just published the slide show of the first presentation. This is the first time I have used Google Docs Presentation. I am blogging the slide show to see how it looks.

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddkc6v4f_40cvxvjm

What do you think?

Motivating Student Writers by Fostering Collaboration through Tagging and Aggregating

Hi Folks, I've just returned from a week in the states. Busy week, I settled my parents' affairs and bought their house off my siblings, so in a week I became once again a home owner. But my inlaws will move in there, so I hope not to be involved so much in home maintenance. Well that's another story. Meanwhile, back here in the UAE I'm waking up at 4 in the morning, which is good because it's a great time to blog. But I'm also falling asleep on the floor of my office at 4 in the afternoon, which is also good, because cat herders like catnaps occasionally.

This past week's activities in Texas made me miss the first week of the K-12 Online Conference. Our Writingmatrix project caught the attention of Wesley Fryer, one of my podcast heros. Wesley left this comment at our conference presentation node http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=162: "Wow, what a GREAT presentation on so many levels. This was the best example of a “blended” presentation I’ve ever seen," and he followed up with reflections on our presentation podcast here:
http://wesleypd.blogspot.com/2007/10/pd-reflection-on-motivating-student.html

Meanwhile Nelba, one of our Writingmatrix project members and co-explorer in the world of social networking, has gone down the path of exploring pingbacks and trackbacks. I've got mine activated, so let's see what happens if I cite one of her blog postings here, this one a brief reflection on the Writingmatrix participation in K-12 Online:

http://englishvirtualcommunity.blogspot.com/2007/10/webmatrix-in-k12-online-conference.html

There, a link to this post should now appear in the one above.

While I was flying, Nelba and Saša participated in a fireside chat on our behalf of Rita, Doris and I. Here's more information from http://www.geocities.com/vance_stevens/papers/index.html#071020

13:00 PM GMT Saturday, October 20 - The Writingmatrix group Vance Stevens, Nelba Quintana, Doris Molero, Saša Sirk, and Rita Zeinstejer present “Motivating Student Writers by Fostering Collaboration through Tagging and Aggregating” at the K-12 Online Conference “Playing with Boundaries.”

Presentations at this conference are all asynchronous except for the live chat events. The presentation itself can be found at these web artifacts:

• A presentation teaser (5 min): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHjlCY0BCNo
• iPod ready http://k12online.wm.edu/writing_matrix.mp4 (38:02 Run Time; mpeg4, 76.6 MB)
• Original http://k12online.wm.edu/writing_matrix.wmv (38:00 Run Time; wmv, 8.2MB - haven't checked, but I think they may have the file sizes reversed on these two)
• Audio only podcast version: http://k12online.wm.edu/writing_matrix.mp3 (38:01 Run Time; mp3, 34.9 MB)

Here's what our presentation was about ...

The presenters play with boundaries through the simple expedient of having student bloggers in different countries tag their blog posts with the unique tag term writingmatrix. Searching on that tag in Technorati, the student bloggers in four locations in three different countries have managed to locate one another's posts, leave comments for one another, and have subsequently interacted in other ways as well. The presenters explain how they started the project and how it has branched into other online and even face to face activities involving the students in the participant countries. The presentation is made not only through the voices of the presenters, but with the students themselves lending their voices through their blogs and videos.

Now, I'll wrap up this post with a couple of discoveries. The first is the Jing project from http://www.screencast.com. This is a tool, free at present but perhaps for a limited time only, produced by Techsmith, the makers of Camtasia and Snaggit, which captures images or videos from your desktop in a very nice interface, easy to use, which allows you to save the capture either as a swf file which you can keep as a file on your computer OR as a hosted file almost immediately available.

To give you an example, I wanted to show Nelba how Technorati now allows you to calibrate the authority of the posts you view. The problem was that we would tag our posts 'writingmatrix', and have our students tag them the same, but only a few of those posts would appear when we would search Technorati for posts with 'writingmatrix' as their tag. In fact, the default search on tags with Technorati is to return hits on posts with 'some authority', and this returns ten posts at present on Technorati when you search on 'writingmatrix'.

The problem is that if you ask a student to create a blog and tag a post 'writingmatrix', that student's first post is vested with zero authority and at the default settings would not appear in hits returned by students searching on that tag elsewhere in the world. So Technorati added a feature that allows you to return posts with 'any authority' and if that setting is used, you get 1000 hits when you search on 'writingmatrix', which is what we want, because it means we can see the hundreds of students who are trying to reach one another through this mechanism. This also generates a URL which you can use to aggregate posts with any authority, and now I need to change out my aggregators on Pageflakes, Bloglines, and Google Reader with one's like this, which return posts with any authority:

http://technorati.com/search/writingmatrix?authority=n&language=en

Now, if you want a visual example of how this is done, here is my Jing screencast:
http://screencast.com/t/M33ixayEN2J

What a morning. It's truly the dawn of a new day out there. I've got to get to my more mundane daytime job now.

Talking Multiliteracies Webcast Sept 30, 2007

As part of my 4-week Multiliteracies course, and as a recent graduate of the Webcastacademy http://www.webcastacademy.net put on through the auspices of the Worldbridges Network, I have been broadcasting a program of 4 webcasts each Sunday morning at 13:00 GMT. The first two were recorded at over the top bit rates of 128 bps which resulted in 80 mb files and I haven't had time to tinker with them. However, by the time the third week rolled around I thought it would be unconscionable of me if I didn't make a credible effort to get at least one of these webcasts 'out there' in podcast form. So I took a day out of my life (editing mainly) to produce:



Click here to get your own player.

This turned out to be one of those challenging experiences. In the belief that the file could be no larger than 20 mb I chipped away at it in Audacity till the mp3 rendered down to 19.5 mb, but still couldn't get it to upload through the Podomatic website. I think it was uploading, it was just taking a long time, but in the process of working out what the problem could be I discovered that Podomatic allows you to FTP your files, and once they are at the site, you select from a list of the files you have there to post them to your podblog. That makes it much easier, so it was a nice discovery. As I said, I spent the best part of a day on the process but I feel I learned a lot and become somewhat more multiliterate in the process.

Hope you enjoy the podcast. Now that I know how to streamline things, I'll try and clear my backlog. Stay tuned (RSS would be a good way to do that).

Vance's first video production: A teaser for the Writingmatrix K-12 Online Conference presentation

The Writingmatrix group Vance Stevens, Nelba Quintana, Doris Molero, Saša Sirk, and Rita Zeinstejer will present “Motivating Student Writers by Fostering Collaboration through Tagging and Aggregating” at the K-12 Online Conference http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=100. According to http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=83 this year’s conference is scheduled to be held over two weeks, October 15-19 and October 22-26 of 2007, and will include a preconference keynote during the week of October 8. This year’s conference theme is “Playing with Boundaries.” Along the lines of our presentation, content related to the conference can be aggregated at http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/k12online07.



The presenters play with boundaries through the simple expedient of having student bloggers in different countries tag their blog posts with the unique tag term writingmatrix. Searching on that tag in Technorati, the student bloggers in four locations in three different countries have managed to locate one another's posts, leave comments for one another, and have subsequently interacted in other ways as well. The presenters explain how they started the project and how it has branched into other online and even face to face activities involving the students in the participant countries. The presentation is made not only through the voices of the presenters, but with the students themselves lending their voices through their blogs and videos.

Cogito. Ergo BLOGo

I think; therefore I blog:
Descartian logic for new multiliteracies

I'm starting my fourth rendition of my annual TESOL pp107 course on Multiliteracies for Collaborative Learning Environments. This course has several components, among which:

1. A static Web 1.o page at http://www.homestead.com/prosites-vstevens/files/efi/papers/tesol/ppot/portal2007.htm
2. A Moodle page at http://www.opensource.idv.tw/moodle/course/view.php?id=23. A big problem with the Moodle this time around is that due to an incompatibility between the most recent versions of Moodle and the SQL dbase running on the server that's graciously hosting us in Taiwan, backup no longer works here, so I'm hesitant to put much effort here until this is resolved.
3. Something new, and interesting, a PageFlakes portal at: http://www.pageflakes.com/vancestevens/13498617 . I find I like working with PageFlakes. It has an easy and intuitive interface - you simply select widgets and embed them in your page. One of these works on RSS feeds, so you can display recent content on your PageFlakes portal of whatever sites you want to follow.

The course is about how new literacies are emerging through increasing digitization of communications media and seeks to inculcate the concepts not through a top down explanation of what multiliteracies is or are, but by empowering participants with a familiarity with the tools and through use of these tools stimulate them into making discoveries about how these tools might be applied to their own social and professional lives. These lives overlap of course, learning being essentially a social phenomenon.

The problem in beginning this course ... and I'm not sure about this, I'm only speculating ... but the problem is that it takes a while for participants to 'get it'. But when they do 'get it' it's transformative. That is, the light comes on, and perception of Internet and how it potentially can be used is indelibly altered.

So what is there to 'get'? The course is only a few weeks long. Therefore, participants have to jump in and use the tools. Traditional courses in the TESOL series are run through a Desire to Learn portal. This structures courses didactically; that is, the 'teacher' will propose material to be absorbed in a certain order, and interaction with students takes place through threaded discussion lists. Some but not all students are familiar with LMS/CMS, learning/courseware management systems. Prior experience with LMS/CMS not withstanding, the instructional model is familiar and intuitive, so most courses plow ahead within this paradigm.

I found the D2L lists to be robust in my first rendition of this course but I had assigned a text to read, and this was a good way to discuss it. Still I wasn't happy that we were truly exercising the concepts that we were scrutinizing. Threaded discussion lists are derivative of print media. They are effective in the exchange of prose discourse. But multiliteracies implies much more than that.

In the years that I have taught this course I have evolved my understanding of what multiliteracies are and how best to learn about them. After the second year facilitating this course I abandoned the printed text (i.e. demoted it to optional reading). The main reason for this was that it was not available to all participants, but also, besides becoming dated, as an instance of print media, it was bogging us into talking around the subject. I felt there was more to be gained from doing not as we said, but doing as we did.

I was meanwhile developing a greater understanding myself about how blogs worked and were organized around folksonomies, and how they could be plumbed for knowledge in a distributed learning network. Last year, my third teaching the course, I had each participant not only keep a blog, but follow each other's blogs through Bloglines. This could almost have replaced the threaded discussion lists in substance though perhaps not in logistics, so we continued to do both. This year however, having gained even more experience through the writingmatrix project, and also having heard a couple of David Weinberger's excellent presentations on how folksonomies can be utilized to draw information from meta-tagged Internet resources, I decided with this year's course to take last year's concept a step further and base the most current syllabus on interactions among participants through aggregation of tagged blog entries.

In order to do this I had to issue each participant with a set of tools. But as facilitators are mere cat herders in distributed learning settings, to issue here means to offer, and not all participants are at first predisposed to appreciate the importance of what is being offered. Here is the rationale behind what I have in mind.

First, I feel it is crucial to the development of community that participants get to know one another, and for every other rendition of this course, I've created a community page with everyone's picture and brief biodata. However this year I decided to set up a wiki for that and encourage the participants to fill in their own spaces. Now several days into the course, some of the participants are starting to do that; e.g.
http://portfolios2007.wikispaces.com/BobbiStevens
http://portfolios2007.wikispaces.com/GwenCary
http://portfolios2007.wikispaces.com/SimonGibbs
and of course yours truly at http://portfolios2007.wikispaces.com/VanceStevens

In setting this up, one page per participant, I took it upon myself to tag each page pp107tesol (among other things; the complete tag set I used was aggregation, call, folksonomies, multiliteracies, pp107tesol, social networking, tesol, wikis - and participants are welcome to augment and alter this as each feels befits his/her own page).

I also proposed a set of readings to start us off which included my own thoughts on multiliteracies and especially my collaboration this past summer with Barbara Dieu, a colleague with a good understanding of aggregation and tagging and how it can be used in encouraging students to collaborate and enjoy each other's blog postings (see http://tesl-ej.org/ej41/int.html). Bee (as Barbara is known in the online communities she frequents) applies her understanding of how this works to her http://dekita.org/. These readings would allow students to see how my thinking on the topic had evolved and where it was going. I augmented this with an assignment of literature in other media, to view the very interesting debate between David Weinberger and Andrew Keen, at http://conversationhub.com/2007/07/09/video-david-weinberger-and-andrew-keen/. Here Weinberger explains how information on the Internet is organized around folksonomies, to which Keen is able to counter that this is all a step in the wrong direction in the organization of repositories of human knowledge and intellect.

I then proposed that each student in the course start a blog and weigh in on this debate in a posting which would be tagged pp107tesol.

Once students start blogs and start tagging their postings relating to this course, then the real F.U.N. begins. We can do many things with these:

1. We can look for postings tagged pp107tesol at Technorati, by searching on http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/pp107tesol. There are ways we might need to fine tune here, and we will explore such considerations as we proceed with this course.
2. We can aggregate each other's postings by subscribing to each other's blogs in a newsreader or aggregator. Last year we used Bloglines. I think that this year I will use Google Reader just to explore its capabilities. I am becoming enamored with the whole range of Google services, and I like the way that Google Reader fits in as an additional tool accessible through one login for Gmail, Blogger etc.)
3. We can comment on each other's postings and see to what degree this kind of conversation can supplant or augment our other threaded discussions.
   
4. We can tag each other's postings in http://del.icio.us and explore together how social bookmarking works. It is interesting for example to tag your own URLs and see who else has read and tagged them as well, and what other tags they are using.

The tools by which this takes place need to be acquired now. The main tool is to have a blog of some kind, and then to tag postings in that blog so that they can be found by others looking for posts tagged pp107tesol.

Secondarily comes the content of this course, which is to understand how this fits into a framework of multiliteracies. It is hoped that reflection on this content will provide the impetus for making numerous postings in participants' blogs, which will give the rest of us something to aggregate. As this system gets under way and is activated for each of us, we can begin to see how classes or other work or study projects can be organized on these principles.

Once this awareness is achieved, participants in the course will have 'got it'. And I hope this will provide some clues as to where I'm heading with my course development so far. There is a method to the madness after all nyaa haa haaarrr!

pp107tesol