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

Modeling social media in groups, communities, and networks

I'm filling in this placeholder with links to my presentation at the AVEALMEC/ARCALL online conference on Social Networking, November 5-8, 2009, http://avealmec.org.ve/.

• The complete schedules and PDF promotional documents for this conference are here: http://avealmec.org.ve/moodle/
• This link gives a good overview of presenters with links to their presentation recordings http://avealmec.org.ve/moodle/course/view.php?id=4

My presentation is entitled Modeling social media in groups, communities, and networks. The presentation took place November 6, 2009, at 18:30 GMT.

• The writeup is here:
  http://tinyurl.com/vance-socialnet09
• The presentation recording is here: http://tinyurl.com/vance091106wiziq
• The slides are posted here: http://www.slideshare.net/vances/modeling-social-media-in-groups-communities-and-networks-socialnetworking-2009-online-conference
  

As the presentation was on knowledge dissemination and sharing throughout networks, it naturally touched on Creative Commons, so I took care to license the presentation with the attribution 3.0 license. I selected jurisdiction to be USA but I could have left it "unported"; anyone know what ramifications that would have?


Modeling social media in groups, communities, and networks by Vance Stevens is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at advanceducation.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://vancestevens.com.

If you have any comments on the presentation, you are most welcome to make them here.

Personas and the multiliterate curriculum vitae

I just posted this to YouTube:

"In a multiliterate society as it is emerging in the 21st read-write century, it may be that curriculum vitae in formats such as this one will replace the paper-based versions prevalent in the 20th read-only century. The distinctions between centuries were made by Lawrence Lessig, and Personas is an M.I.T. project from http://personas.media.mit.edu/ designed to reveal anyone's webpresence."

(Incidentally, I'm fortunate to have a unique name; all the output shown in this screencast is about me, but it doesn't work like that for everyone ;-)

Another interesting site that will aggregate content on your name is http://addictomatic.com

To make the screencast, I used Camstudio to produce an almost 400 megabyte AVI file. I then used VideoSprintLight (reviewed here: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/convert-video-files-to-dvd-mp4-vcd-mpeg-windows/) to create an MP4 version of only 77 megabytes.

It was crucial to do the conversion on my PC because I was having trouble (facing 4 hours upload time, not counting timeouts and retries) to upload the AVI directly to YouTube, and I figured I'd have the same problem sending it to Zamzar, or ConvertFiles, or Media Converter.

Social Networking for students and teachers who only know Facebook

Struggling with my muses on a challenging project, I confided in a Facebook update: "I'm trying to write teaching materials to explain social networking to students and teachers who know little about the topic beyond Facebook. It's difficult."

To my surprise my off-the-cuff remark brought numerous comments (my social network in support; thanks, social network :-)). I decided that these responses deserved more elaboration than would be possible in a comment on my own status update (hence, this blog post).

Basically I'm trying to update what my colleagues and I have been teaching as "computer literacy" for the past several years. Our students' sophistication with computers changes year to year, and what seemed reasonable five years ago as an introduction to computing might seem simplistic and outmoded today.

I was fortunate to have been given the opportunity to revise some of the materials we introduce to students as "computer literacy" and thus articulate some of the concepts which I think our students should be aware of in order to consider themselves technologically literate in the 21st century, where there is general agreement among educators who concern themselves with such matters that a new skill set is emerging to prepare young people to be able to adapt to “jobs that haven’t been invented yet.”

My materials include a lesson on Google Docs (a popular example of doing in the ‘cloud’ something we have till recently been doing almost exclusively on our PC’s). This lesson also gets the students into the Google system, which they’ll need for the lessons involving Google Reader.

Google Reader is one of the topics in my lessons on Social Networking. These lessons focus on three key concepts: RSS, tagging, and aggregation.

The first lesson has us taking a look at aggregation, an excellent illustration of which can be found at http://addictomatic.com/. I have our students put in ADNOC and OPEC as these are safe and also could lead to a discussion of how this works (if students explore some of the aggregators used, which reveals a lot about what aggregators there are and how they work).

In the second lesson we have a look at blogs, but as observers only. It seems unreasonable to require teachers to themselves create blogs in such a short time, though this could be a technique any teacher could use to work with students on these materials. As observers we follow blogs through their RSS feeds, so I’m suggesting some blogs I hope will intrigue our students. I also have some practical examples of RSS at work (RSS is a KEY concept, absolutely essential).

Another key concept is that of tagging. For this I use Delicious, adapting materials I've already created some time ago.

This brings me to the last lesson. I was thinking of a lesson on how to develop a network of worthy peers. Social Networking is much talked about, I heard the term repeatedly on mainstream TV news just this morning, on both Al Jazeera and BBC. So I think students and teachers might be primed to learn more about it, but the hurdle for most people (the trick, or the hard part) is seeding that network in such a way that it develops into something that will feed you the kind of information that will transform your learning (which is what some people say it does).

One web application that’s having a great impact on information dissemination is Twitter. I’m thinking at the moment to create that final lesson on Twitter. Again this would iinvolve students as observers (in illustration of concepts introduced here). It wouldn't be necessary for our teachers or students to create their own Twitter accounts but they would be able to see other people’s Ttwitter streams and follow those in RSS and tag them in Delicious.

In both blogs and Twitter you can see where people who have interesting things to say are getting their information. This is in fact how you leverage your own network, since you can find others whose blogs and Twitter feeds you can explore. My post just previous to this one (http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2009/08/new-webheads.html) described how Twitter Mosaic could be used to plumb the networks of other respected colleagues, who could in turn plumb yours.

I published this post on August 27, 2009. Meanwhile I got this from my Twitter stream, which I can't possibly absorb in its entirety but which I pop into now and then for whatever pearls have been cast before me and frequently emerge with something spot on. This is an article published September 1 in Times Higher Education on exactly the topic I'm getting at here. As Russell Stannard explains, "The idea of Twitter is to network with other people who are working in the same area as you. You send 'tweets' of interesting articles, websites and the like, and you receive similar tweets from the people you follow. Soon your Twitter account becomes a constant flow of interesting information from people who are plugged into your area. So how do you create these networks? It’s probably here where most people stumble. The easiest way to build up your contacts is to 'piggyback'. You search for well-known people who are working in your area then click on all their followers. You can guess that most of the people who follow them will be interested in similar things to you." http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=407984&c=2

I couldn't have said it better myself! Thus your network is seeded, and it flourishes when you start interacting with it (going from passive to active would be the next step, but is outside the scope of my too brief introduction).

Icing on the cake: I see from my Twitter feed Sept 2, 2009 that colleagues in my network are actually reading this article. Thanks Cristina, and others re-tweeting!

And finally, this late-breaking addendum (Sept 10, 2009)

I've published the materials I alluded to here and I'm ready to share the URLs.

Basic Computer Literacy: http://issuu.com/vances/docs/computer_literacy_2009_lessons_1-3

Social Networking: http://issuu.com/vances/docs/social_networking_2009_lessons1-3

I'd appreciate any feedback, but keep in mind that they are pitched at my work context of EFL students just entering college. The materials are meant to be used in a classroom context where video media cannot be counted on to function, and pitched at students AND teachers who are only slowly emerging from a paper-based and teacher-centric pedagogical environment. That latter stipulation means that for the teachers themselves this is their first contact with some of the concepts here and they can't be made to feel that they are fish out of water when 'teaching' to a class of students who are in general have not embraced web 2.0 and social networking. So for people already learning through social networks, it's scaled back a bit, but I'm sharing in case you have a need for such materials, and also in case you might give me ideas for improvement.

Also I was working on a 4th lesson in social networking, "Starting your own network," when I ran out of time (I needed to get the materials into teacher and student hands AND realized teachers would run out of time in the 3 weeks allocated to the course originally). However, I plan to add that fourth unit at a later date. An inkling of what is to come can be found here: http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2009/08/new-webheads.html