How cognitive surplus drives us to helping one another

Why am I taking my time to write this?  I discovered the other day that it has something to do with Josh Groban, a ‘popera’  singer who Clay Shirky, in his book Cognitive Surplus, says appeals to teenage girls and their grandmothers.  I had never heard of Josh Groban nor imagined that I could possibly have anything at all in common with him.  His entry in Wikipedia doesn’t mention Grobanites (yet), but Shirky dwells mostly on these Grobania fans who have banded together to raise money for Groban’s charities.  Intriguingly, they have a lot in common with Webheads.

The Grobanites are young fans of Groban’s who met through the community on Josh Groban’s website http://www.joshgroban.com/ and at some point tried to decide what to get Josh for his birthday.  After rejecting teddy bears and other fluff, they decided to collect money and give it to one of his charities.  The first year they raised a thousand dollars, the next a magnitude amount higher, and by now they have raised over a million dollars for Josh Groban charities.

Shirky puts this into perspective.  When you donate to a charity there is usually an overhead associated with running the charity, so that  only some fraction of what you give actually reaches the beneficiaries. It’s considered acceptable if a charity retains 40% in overhead, whereas holding back only15% for administration is excellent. With Grobanites, 100% reaches the beneficiaries.

This is because they are all volunteers.  The webmaster is a volunteer; accordingly, the website is a little funky, homegrown, but friendly: http://www.grobanitesforcharity.org/.  Shirky talks about Geocities, one of the first online hosts that allowed just anyone to create web pages, and how at the time he thought Geocities would fail because those web pages were going to pale next to what professionals could do, but Shirky says he was proven wrong.  He had not factored in the heart and passion and the spirit that causes amateurs (in the etymological sense) to care more about having their say than about how their web presence online stacks up against slick professional look and feel (Webheads also utilized Geocities until the site shut down, and its exstant Web 1.0 sites retain that same look and feel).

Shirky goes on to detail how home-cooked websites invite sharing and interaction. This is exactly what we have inadvertently achieved with http://webheads.info, or as an example of 'class roots' modeling and interaction, what we are trying to inspire with http://learning2gether.pbworks.com.

Shirky analyzes such spirited initiatives.  He cites research on motivation, e.g. seminal work by Edward Deci (1972), who gave students Soma-cube puzzles to solve and then left the room to take a break.  There were distractions lying around the room, Playboy and other magazines, so the experiment was to actually to see what the students would do during the experimental treatment, the 8 minute break.  On average, they were intrinsically motivated to spend a few minutes of their free time working on the puzzles.

Permission to use granted under creative commons license; attribution: http://fr.fotopedia.com/items/flickr-3661361368

Then he ran the experiment again, but this time he paid some of the subjects for each shape they were able to create.  During the break he observed that those who were paid spent a minute more of their break time working the puzzles than before, since they now saw this skill as a source of income, whereas those who had no money involvement behaved pretty much as before.  Then he ran the experiment a third time, with the same subjects, without offering to pay for puzzles completed, and he discovered that during the break those he had paid spent on average 2 minutes less of their free time exploring the cubes.  In other words, the introduction of the extrinsic motivator, money, had suppressed free choice and “crowded out” the intrinsic motivator.

Shirky concludes: “Doing something because it interests you makes it a different kind of activity than doing it because you are reaping an external reward.” This research and others with similar findings overturned the intuitive assumption that you get what you pay for, that putting money into a mix would increase the incentive for people to engage in a given behavior.  Deci’s research suggested that this worked only as long as the extrinsic  incentive was there, but if that was withdrawn then the desire to do it intrinsically was “crowded out” resulting in a reduction of motivation to do the task at all, or as Shirky puts it: “increasing extrinsic motivations can actually decrease intrinsic ones.”

Grobanites and Webheads on the other hand work entirely on intrinsic motivation.  Shirky says there are three reasons people engage in such efforts.  First, they crave the autonomy.  Second they want to be perceived as competent.  And third, they want to feel connected. Furthermore, the desire to contribute to society and to help others is also a motivator.  Shirky cites another experiment where people in a town in Switzerland were asked if they would accept a hazardous waste dump in their precinct.  The request was couched in two ways.  For both groups a reason was given why the town had been selected for this, but in one form of the request, it was stipulated that the town would be paid for accepting the wastes.  Of course there was opposition, but the acceptance rate  was significantly higher when the request was made appealing to civic duty rather than when money was used as the carrot.

So money is not necessarily the most powerful stimulus for producing change for the better. People will volunteer to do good when they feel they are acting autonomously and when they will be seen to be competent at what they do.  The third reason, the connected aspect, is the one that Shirky particularly explores in his books. Previously when connecting was hard to do, it was hard for charitable ideas to scale.  It was possible last century for volunteer donors to work through a church group, for example, but if you wanted to organize 100 churches, you needed to hire a manager, an accountant, a publicist, etc. and incur overhead.  But with Grobanites and Webheads, the tools are now available for people with purely altruistic agendas to promote their niche interests voluntarily and scale those interests to reach thousands of others without needing to resort to extrinsic motivators such as money.

Shirky cites work by Yochai Benkler and Helen Nissenbaum to help explain how this works. Benkler and Nissenbaum (2006) write about “commons-based peer production" in which they discuss how the social motivations of connectedness or membership, and sharing and generosity, support the personal motivators of autonomy and competence. Shirky says: “The motivation to share is the driver; technology is just the enabler. This feedback loop of personal and social motivations applies to most uses of cognitive surplus, from Wikipedia to PickupPal to Grobanites for Charity.  Grobanite donors and supporters get two messages: both I did it and We did it.”

All this is precisely what drives Webheads, an amateur movement of educators with accumulated cognitive surplus who truly enjoy helping one another, and benefit from being helped in the bargain. As Benkler and Nissenbaum suggest, Webheads have a strong feeling of belonging, of membership in a group with a funky name "webheads". The group's members are overflowing with sharing and generosity, as is evidenced time and again in their thousands of messages posted at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evonline2002_webheads. This leads many of us in this group to realize what Sir Ken Robinson calls our element, "the place where natural aptitude and personal passion meet," and to define our epiphanal aha! moments.

This leads into Shirky’s chapter on "Amateur Motivation, Public Scale", which begins “Amateurs are sometimes separated from professionals by skill, but always by motivation … Keeping a large group focused can be a full-time job ... Organizing groups into an effective whole is so brutally difficult that, past a certain scale, it requires professional management … salaries … bookkeeping and all the rest of the trappings of a formal organization ... As always, high hurdles to an activity reduce the number of people who do it, and the hurdle of large-scale coordination has largely separated amateurs from professionals ... when pursuing an intrinsic goal in public required considerable work, the amateurs largely opted out of public action. We have always wanted to be autonomous, competent, and connected; it’s just that now social media has become an environment for enacting those desires rather than suppressing them

"… Back when coordinating group action was hard, most amateur groups stayed small and informal. Now  that we have tools that let groups of people find one another and share their thoughts and actions, we are seeing a strange new hybrid: large, public, amateur groups. Individuals can make their interests public more easily, and groups can balance amateur motivation, and large coordinated action more easily as well.

“Globalization isn’t necessarily about size; it’s about scope. Now that the difficulty of coordinating interactions has fallen, it is entirely possible to have a tiny global organization. Geography still matters, but it is no longer the main determinant of participation.”

These ideas are echoed in Lawrence Lessig's book Remix (2008), available now as a free eBook: http://www.archive.org/details/LawrenceLessigRemix. Lessig talks about two distinct economies, commercial and sharing. Purely sharing economies thrive on just the dynamics that Shirky describes; i.e. a set of social values where members are essentially paid for their surplus time in recognition for competence and generosity. Lessig also discusses what he calls hybrids, or ventures that incorporate vestiges of both economies. Whereas there have been some ventures that have succeeded in going from commercial to sharing and visa versa, Lessig cites many more instances in which this has proven impossible. Some of the studies cited by Shirky, notably Deci's, give crucial insights into why this is so.  If projects are started as sharing ventures, attempts to monetize them simply suppress the motivations that gave them their traction.

So why am I writing this?  For the three reasons noted,  I am intrinsically motivated to do so even though my extrinsic motivators are telling me that I’d better get working on things more relevant to my paycheck.  And why do participants in a large community of Webheads invest so much of their cognitive surplus in joining me in sharing with one another?  Because, as with Grobinites, there’s no money involved.  They have not come to see the good they do as being a part of the money economy.

Now why did I know all that instinctively? Why do so many others pursue the same altruistic goals without demanding the most obvious extrinsic compensations? Because it's the natural thing that humans have always tried to do for one another. Shirky, Lessig, and others are just, after all this time, telling us why we do it, and why in our connected era, it is now possible to help one another on the scale on which we can now help one another by putting into play our inherent intrinsic motivators.

Notes:

• There has been a lot of Internet traffic on Shirky's citing Deci's Soma experiments to explain how intrinsic motivators can be crowded out by extrinsic ones: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=deci+soma+shirky  
• There's an interesting dialog between Dan Pink and Clay Shirky where they discuss Shirky's ideas on cognitive surplus, published here: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/05/ff_pink_shirky/all/1. In this dialog, Shirky reveals his favorite episode of Gilligan's Island.
• Dan Pink's books are about intrinsic motivation as a driver that is often not properly utilized in business and in education, and he talks about those four books here: http://www.edtechcrew.net/2011/08/24/ed-tech-crew-171/

References

Benkler, Y. and Nissenbaum, H. (2006). Commons-based peer production and virtue. The Journal of Political Philosophy 14, 4: 394-419. Retrieved May 1, 2011 from http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/papers/jopp_235.pdf

Deci, E. (1972). The effects of contingent and noncontingent rewards and controls on intrinsic motivation. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance 8, 2:217-229; Received 23 September 1971.
Available online 26 August 2004, doi:10.1016/0030-5073(72)90047-5 (Elsevier Inc.) More info here

Lessig, L. (2008). Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy. New York: The Penguin Press. Available as eBook from http://www.archive.org/details/LawrenceLessigRemix.

Robinson, K. (2009). The element: How finding your passion changes everything. New York: Viking Penguin.

Shirky, Clay. (2010). Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. New York: The Penguin Press.

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Reflections on a teaching philosophy

When applying for teaching jobs, you are often called on to write a mini-essay stating your teaching philosophy.  Sometimes you are forced to be overly concise (state your philosophy of teaching in 150 words or less) but I just started one for which there are no guidelines. 

Obviously, it needs to be something someone can pick up off a pile and read in a few minutes, so it can't be too long. 

I was writing one like that just now and I realized that my philosophy of teaching suggests that:

1. I should myself write in the way I would expect of those whom I teach; in other words, I should ‘transfer’ or carry over from my personal habits (my blogging for example) into my workplace and professional spaces.
2. I should not treat my writing as something I do for an audience of one.  I should direct it at a wider audience.
3. Writing like this is obviously directed at a purpose (to get a job for example, or to get a high mark) but its true purpose should be directed at the search for wider knowledge.
4. When teachers write about their profession (or when anyone writes about their true passion) that act of reflection should be pumped into the ongoing peer conversations around that topic.
5. My articulation of the teaching philosophy I am trying to convey can be improved on the basis of feedback I might receive by doing the above.
6. When writing is personal in addition to purposeful, writing becomes a joy, a liberation, and it becomes better writing, writing that writers want to improve through a process based in peer appreciation and feedback.

With that in mind, here is my short philosophy of teaching …

I love teaching.  In fact I thrive on it.  I realized this was so when I had completed my first 20 years of teaching and went into CALL software development and then worked on the management team of a language center.  Working in an office, I felt a kind of withdrawl. I missed teaching so much that I started doing it on a volunteer basis online, just to be working with students and to explore and learn myself how learning takes place online. 

I teamed with colleagues I met online to work with our shared students at first, but eventually other teaching peers began getting interested in what we were finding out about online learning, and gradually started to join us. So in 2002 I set up a course to model for them how to make their students feel a part of a community online by applying those very techniques in the new course I was facilitating.  This small community of teaching peers, which we have since called Webheads, has sustained itself to this day and now has well over 1000 participants in its associated communities, and touches thousands more through its larger extended networks.  Many who have encountered our community have said that this association has produced an epiphanal moment in their teaching and learning careers.

Several aspects of my teaching philosophy can be gleaned from this story.  First, it’s a story, and I believe that story-telling is an appropriate technique in helping learners to consolidate and internalize their learning.  In this story I started out talking about teaching, because I was asked to write about my philosophy of teaching. But as soon as I could I turned that word over onto its flipside, learning. At one point I used the word facilitating  in place of the word teaching.  Then I mentioned ‘teaching peers’ to soften the concept of teaching, and level out its hierarchical overtones. 

A major role of teachers should be, in my view, to facilitate learning environments which enable students to tell their stories. In a language or writing class, they might do so overtly.  But in other classes this might mean that the teacher strives to enable students to relate the material to how they envision themselves in the context of their own stories.

I like David Warlick’s idea of a teacher as ‘master learner.’  I often cite that phrase in conjunction with Stephen Downes’s distinction between teachers and learners. Downes says that teachers model and demonstrate, whereas students practice and reflect.  If you consider teachers to be master learners then you could argue at one extreme that there is no such thing really as a teacher, only learners.  At the other extreme, you could say that teachers are really learners in disguise -- master learners -- who constantly percolate the processes of modeling, demonstrating, reflecting, and practicing.

Language is not something in my view that can be taught, like a scientific principle or theorem.  Most of us know for example that e=mc2, or how to calculate the length of a hypotenuse of a triangle.  Many of us have been taken through the proof of that theorem, but I would think only a tiny fraction of all students who have regurgitated that proof on a geometry test have actually learned it, or can explain clearly what would happen to time if light were ever to exceed the speed of c (or even what happens as it approaches that speed in the vicinity of a huge mass the size of a black hole, which in turn would be tending toward the size of a pea, a flea, and so on). Similarly many have been taught some expressions in a foreign language (for example, “frère Jaques, dormez vous?”) possibly without knowing hardly any other French.

I said in a plenary address once that there was no such thing as a language teacher, only language learners.  Here we must distinguish teaching from training.  It is possible to train someone to speak a grammatical subset of a language. In how many languages can you (1) greet people? (2) thank them or express dislike? (3) negotiate food and a place to stay? (4) speak to them about topics of concern to them or to you? (5) talk politics? or (6) understand a wide range of media in their language? As all language learners know (or find out, if it’s their first time), these tasks chart a progression (from 1 to 6) of increasingly difficult and complex skills. It is possible to train people to do the first three with some degree of competency (as you can train them to sing Frere Jaques). But the last two require that the learner has taken the training further through curiosity and motivation to learn the language. 

This is what I mean when I say that language at this level cannot be taught.  I mean that someone who succeeds as a putative teacher to such learners is creating contexts in which they can more efficiently and successfully learn.  This then is the true work of a teacher, to motivate students to want to learn, to challenge them, to construct environments whereby learning will best take place, to model the behaviors of good learners according to what the teacher has found works best as a master learner, to demonstrate, to practice what is learned, to reflect on what he or she is learning, to do, and to model for the students how to do, all of the above.

-------------------------------------------

And my brief philosophy of teaching ends there.  That is about the right amount of prose for a job application. It reads like a story, it’s neatly ended.  But there is of course more. When I was writing this out, freewriting as it were, I continued in this vein …

Like others, I love to learn but I hate to be taught.  To be taught implies a teacher with a long ruler standing over fidgeting students bent over desks except when called on or to sneak furtive glances at the clock on the wall.  In my perception, a learning space should take on much more pleasant, more flexible dimensions.  Ideally it should be a space that learners want to go to (there have been studies of such spaces, such as children’s museums, space centers, etc. where people go voluntarily to learn).  Using Web 2.0 tools it is possible to construct such spaces online where students feel motivated to treat each other as collaborators in and audiences for projects.  The Internet allows us to scale such efforts out to highly significant dimensions, so if technology is available, it can be used for this purpose. But even if IT tools are not available, the focus of learning (as facilitated by teachers) should be on collaboration and appreciation of individual strengths, with deficiencies rectified in ways that students can see lead to success and progress.

When I have free reign to facilitate as I like (when I construct and facilitate my own online courses for example), I am able to tailor curricula around individual needs. I do this in part by letting students define their learning goals and document their progress in what I am now calling me-portfolios in open spaces of their own construction (not using a kind of e-portfolio software designed to place the entire e-portfolio into a single proprietary server space). In this way, when I have freedom to construct my own courses, I balance learner needs vs. a variety of choices in my curriculum to keep course materials flexible, adaptable, driven by students, and by their response to teacher trial and error. 

Sean Banville articulated this give and take in teaching quite well in an interview with  Larry Ferlazzo, reported in Larry’s blog here: (link). Sean referred especially to face-to-face language teaching, where teachers must listen carefully to students and then move in one of any number of possible directions either thought out and prepared in advance, or (and this is where it becomes an art) invented spontaneously.

Another important aspect of teaching is that it is necessary to have two general philosophies, or approaches, one for mature learners with developed literacy skills who can understand and articulate the metalanguage of learning and dissemination of knowledge, and another for learners without sufficient experience to enable them to express as well what they wish to accomplish in their learning environment.  I most often encounter the first group in online environments, where people tend to self-select to be there. Many of whom I am referring to as online students are in fact teaching peers carrying through on their master-learner roles, and for these learners I try to model how to use technologies to help them discover and learn what THEY want to know, and extend their learning through productive networking.  I often find that one of the rewards of working with such learners is that I am able to learn from them (again, in my role as master-learner).  Here, there are usually many opportunities to show-through-doing that to teach is to model and demonstrate, and to learn is to practice and reflect.  

For the less mature learners, the young men and women I teach in my day-to-day teaching at tertiary level in Arab countries, my over-riding goal as a teacher (as opposed to trainer) is to model and demonstrate for them the literacies I feel they will need to reach the next level. This involves giving more discrete guidance, much of it directed at affecting change in the culture of the learning environment itself.

One more important aspect of teaching is the role of doubt and confusion.  If my courses include many instances of realia and options, students can be confused at first.  I tell them, reassure them, that confusion is the state where learning begins.  If there is no stress or tension, then it is possible that training is taking place, but not necessarily learning in its optimal self-questioning sense.  So confusion serves a purpose and can be anticipated in stages where learning is most strongly internalized, and can be dissipated where interactions between participants are rich enough to help them resolve that confusion.

And now, as Auden said about great poems, never completed, only abandoned, I must leave off my exploration of teaching philosophies, or I would never actually complete any job applications ;-).  However, if the topic interest you, won’t you continue this conversation in the comments section below?

Coda:

I didn't get the job but my teaching philosophy got two retweets!
http://screencast.com/t/iSFXJX65y71

Original links:
http://twitter.com/ozge/status/67529362387374080
http://twitter.com/WackJacq/status/67538421492613120

Yes, I accept pay in karma :-)

Hold Presses:
This just in, here's a teaching philosophy in action from a teacher in my PLN, linking her students to the world from a class somewhere on the planet. This just popped up on my computer while I happened to be editing this blog post ...

This is what she was doing:
http://classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=56473

Transforming learning with creative technogogy: Achieving the aha! moment

In starting this article about the interplay between technology and pedagogy, I wanted a term to combine the two whereby pedagogy would come first.  I googled 'pedagology' and got no hits.  Great, I thought I had coined just the term ... until I realized there is a term andragology, meaning the study of the science of andragogy.  Therefore, pedagology would logically be the study of the science of pedagogy, so I tried the term in reverse.

When I found that the reverse-term 'technogogy' got 22,000 hits, I realized I'd come across the word before. There are many blogs containing that term, and many of the hits are related to ELT, for example Nik Peachey's Web page at http://www.technogogy.org.uk/. There is a posting by Zaid Ali Alsagoff (well known for his blog on Web 2.0 resources: http://zaidlearn.blogspot.com/) defining technogogy as "the convergence of technology, pedagogy and content in the transformative use of technology to foster learning," http://elearningmalaysia.blogspot.com/2008/01/technogogy-convergence-of-content.html.

Zaid has added here the notion of 'content' to otherwise the same definition in the first paper he is aware of on Technogogy, a keynote cited as Idrus, R.M. (2005). “From Facilitation to the Transformation of Learning: From Pedagogy to Technogogy,” from the 5th International Educational Technology Conference (IETC2005) in Sakarya, Turkey (see the correct link in Idrus and McComas, 2006).

It's not surprising that ELT practitioners should be in the lead on co-opting a term such as technogogy, but I still find it remarkable that I can have all this information at my fingertips before I'm but halfway through my first cup of coffee in the morning.  It's not at all remarkable to be using Google, even though it does make possible access to knowledge that when I was younger would have required hours of tedious research through card catalogs and Reader's Guides available only by going physically to a brick and mortar library across campus or across town.  More remarkable still is that the library gave us access only to works that had made it through a publisher as arbiter of what we can find in the library; yet the Internet gives us access to a lot of that plus the extended knowledge of anyone with the wherewithal to post to a blog or wiki.  And it's not as Andrew Keen (2007) would have us believe, that this exposes us to a lot of "amateur" drivel ... well perhaps it does, but then publishers let in a lot of drivel as well, but theirs isn't subject to the scrutiny of anyone with the wherewithal to leave a comment, and in aggregate, it's that free-for-all crowd sourcing of opinion that gives the blogosphere its edge in currency and credibility. 

This is what Howard Reingold, in his list of 5 crucial new literacies skills, calls 'network awareness' (Rowell, 2010). It's access to that network of advice and opinion, trusted because it's vetted by peers who comment, that is the truly remarkable aspect of what you can find on the Internet.  And yet you still hear (or I do) very knowledgeable people, professors, remark that computers are isolating, when undoubtedly the opposite is true.  It's because computers are anything but isolating, because they bring people together in innumerable modalities, that they are transformative in learning.  Yet this is not widely accepted as fact due to the ineffable nature of the process.  Technogogy has to be experienced to be understood, and many simply do not grant themselves the opportunity to experience it; therefore they never achieve that aha! moment.

It's widely noted that there is lack of transfer between the social networking people do in their private lives and that which they apply to their professional environments.  Therefore, use of Facebook, for example, to track friends and relatives and share photos and pithy observations is not necessarily to experience social networking in a transformative way for learning (though it is certainly transformative in the way people deal with relationships nowadays -- breaking up is much harder to do when you have to update your status, redefine your friends and friends of your ex-friend, and cull through your photos posted online ;-).  It's often the case that people who delve into social networks for buying books online, shopping at eBay, couch surfing, or finding apartments and good restaurants do not transfer these social networking skills into their professional spaces.  This ability to transfer social networking skills from social to professional settings is just one of 10 paradigm shifts required of educators noted in Stevens (2010, see the revised version online, as presented in Slide 3, June 10, 2010: http://www.slideshare.net/vances/shifting-sands-shifting-paradigms).  

People who expose themselves to Web 2.0 technologies generally want to learn more about them, but those who do not blog, or use Google Docs, or bookmark with Delicious (to give a few entry-level examples) often cannot fathom what the fuss is about.  Their ways of doing things seem perfectly fine to them, and if they are teachers, their students have been doing very well for years with the tried and true techniques, thank you very much. Teachers who don't buy into social media or use it to any great extent for their own learning can hardly be expected to model its use for their students. 

Many students (and their teachers) in my own face-to-face workplace tell me don't feel they need Google Docs when they can share flash drives and email attachments.  They don't need Delicious when they can bookmark in their browsers on their own computers (remember when organizing and sharing those bookmark files was our sole means of social bookmarking?).  They don't see the value in blogs, resist blogging themselves, and don't see why they should refer to others' blogs to leverage their own learning. Because they tend to be not predisposed to utilizing social media with each other, let alone with students, it follows that proponents of the use of transformative technologies in education are often preaching to the choir, to one another via their PLNs, or personal learning networks, and only those who have experienced the affordances of transformative networked learning firsthand can really understand what the benefits are. 

These technologies only become transformative when their use becomes second-nature to the point where we and those around us use them in our normal workflow. When that happens, ways of thinking and doing change in dramatic ways.  When the culture of an institute or network of peers changes significantly in such a way that what was once merely desirable is not only possible but opens new possibilities, this is transformative.  Having had one aha! moment, users of transformative technologies tend to have another, then another.  Doors open to other doors, and then things become possible that were concealed behind doors which were obscured by other closed doors before.  Insights occur to those who have been through those doors that can't occur to those who have not opened even the first doors to see what is on the other side.  Once the doors are wide open, imagination is freed, creativity is given fertile ground in which to thrive.  Leaps are taken and then more leaps, and the connection with those left behind is sometimes lost as those who are delving into new technologies absorb more of the new cultures and make more and more connections that those who have not experienced those aha! moments are at a loss to understand.

Thus the real loss to an institute when Web 2.0 and other educational technologies are not encouraged is the potential for creativity.  This is a loss that cannot be measured because it would be a measure of what would have happened 'if only.'  Transformative creativity cannot occur in an institution where professional development is driven top down and limited to the ideas of people only within the confines of the institute, and often only to those with power to push their agendas.  It thrives in an environment where conversations among stakeholders are to some extent socially networked, held in open spaces where everyone has a voice.  Transformative development occurs within communities of practitioners intrinsically motivated to open doors and discover what lies beyond the doors they find on the other side, who have access to common spaces where they can share stories about their learning journeys.

In a recorded 15-minute multimedia keynote, Shelly Terrel says “when we want to transform education we have to share our stories and show how we became the innovative, passionate, motivated teachers we are today.” She acknowledges that we are not all like this, that many of our peers need encouragement, but that sharing stories is key to transforming education to the point where we break out of existing cycles: 
http://teacherbootcamp.edublogs.org/2011/03/04/considering-the-curriculm-teachmeet-newcastle-keynote/

There should be no teacher left behind, but those still in the "cycle" that Terrel decries often don't know where to begin to bridge that gap. Colleagues in this situation often tell me they would like to bridge it, but feel hesitant to make those leaps. They feel vulnerable in social networking systems that frankly, few of us fully understand, or worse, leave newcomers exposed to failure and ridicule. Often overworked teachers argue that they don't have time, that they need training (when what they need to know can be found readily online, along with communities of like-minded-peers eager to help them).  They might rationalize that the leap really isn't necessary anyway. They don't see the need for it because those who have moved through multiple doors to the other side seem so far out of touch with the 'real world' left behind.

Whether this is a problem for those who incorporate educational technology in their teaching or for those who do not depends on who is controlling the paths to the doors of discovery.  If those in control are progressive, there is impetus for everyone to move ahead, and those most progressive will put in place scaffolding to help the ones who wish to learn and develop.  But if those in control have not experienced themselves the affordances of new technologies that facilitate social learning, then they might cling to the status quo and find it against their vested interests to encourage progressive use of those technologies, and those who attempt to use them anyway might find little sympathy or cooperation from their immediate peers.  Lacking support from their immediate workplace, advocates of teaching through technology will experience frustration unless they connect with like-minded educators in the world at large, as many do!.

How can these two worlds be bridged?  How can teachers who are making transformative use of technogogy in teaching reach those who need assistance in understanding how to at least learn about the potentials for professional development and appropriate uses with students? Of course this is happening as we speak.  The gap is narrowing, more people are making the leaps required.  As Elizabeth Hanson-Smith used to say, in case anyone doubted this trend, "there will always be more technology" (personal communication with anyone who happened to be in hearing distance).

Resistance to advances in technology in education are not unique to this century. When I was involved in setting up a language department in Oman in the mid 1980's we allowed newly-hired teachers to choose whether to have on their desks a typewriter or a computer with WordStar, a word processor popular at the time.  Many chose typewriters, though those vanished rapidly over the next few years.  Of course, word processors were revolutionizing writing, not only in terms of speed, ease of revision and correction, and variety of text genres that an individual could produce, but how writing was taught as well. At those times there were teachers who clung to the notion that students should write out each revision of each paper they were working on, something to do with penmanship.  I argued at the time that it was hypocritical to be teaching a process of writing that those teachers themselves were no longer using.

Change comes slowly, and is facilitated through constant and patient modeling by those who are incorporating new technologies in their own working lives. Terry Freedman made a good presentation on change agency for the first K-12 Online conference (Freedman, 2006), and Kim Cofino has produced excellent posts on affecting change when administration is fully behind the process (e.g. Cofino, 2008).  Other presentations archived at the K12 Online conference web site include inspiring examples of how schools can transform their learning environment through embracing Web 2.0 and encouraging its use by students and teachers, and throughout the community at large (Carozza, 2009; Curtis, 2009).

More such examples abound in conversations in the podosphere. For example, in the episode of 21st Century Learning found at http://edtechtalk.com/ETT21_148 you can hear Peter Smith, head of the Middle School at St Andrews School in Savanah Ga., explain how the school recently underwent accreditation and were told they needed to upgrade their technology, so they gave iPads out to students and teachers, on the understanding that everyone would document their discoveries in open forum spaces. The process that allowed students and teachers to evolve how the devices would be used is an excellent example of how a learning community institutionalizes tranformative learning.

The iPad rollout was transformative because it avoided the top-down model of change agency.  Results would likely have been different had teachers been introduced to iPads in a presentation by management staff, given a one-off workshop, and told they had better start using them if they wanted to keep their jobs. Instead they were given the opportunity over time to model best practices and learn from one another.  Only by going through an experiential learning process can the ineffable be shared.

Twitter is a good example of a tool that those who don't use it find difficult to comprehend, because only through using it are its affordances understood.  I myself didn't see the value in Twitter until its use was finally modeled for me. In this excerpt from Stevens (2008) I attempt to elucidate the ineffable in describing how ...

I 'finally got' Twitter when I heard Jeff Utecht's presentation entitled “Online Professional Development,” podcast as part of the 2007 K-12 online conference: http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=205. Jeff recorded his presentation as a description of what he was doing at his computer in Shanghai while walking us through how he was using Skype and other social networking tools to connect with his professional network from there. So he was crafting his presentation as a live Skypecast, and he mentioned that he had just put a message out on Twitter inviting anyone online to Skype-in and discuss with him how they were using these tools themselves. A few minutes later, he had a bite, as someone responded to his tweet and spontaneously joined him in Skype. The presentation then became a conversation which illustrated how Jeff's network functioned in connecting him with other educators to further each other's professional development through taking advantage of such opportunities to learn from one another. That was when I decided to start using Twitter myself.

Another good example of how modeling technology alters approaches to problems and changes the nature of the solutions people take for granted is webcasting.  I first connected teachers online with participants at a face-to-face conference at the 1999 TESOL conference in New York, and the following year in Vancouver I was invited to give a live demonstration with student voices and avatars online as an "invited speaker" to an even larger audience.  In the years that followed my fellow online teachers and I appeared with our distance students often at both face-to-face and online conferences.  In 2002 in Salt Lake City we were asked if we would require an Internet connection for our CALL-IS Academic Session.  Most other presenters said that it would not be necessary but I insisted on it, and once the connectivity had been granted it then became possible to webcast the event live, which we did; so again an environment that had been perceived as localized became one that was opened up to the world because we took advantage of the technology that was available and let that transform our thinking about what then became possible. Because this leveraged our ability to model and hence to inform others, our use of technology in this way allowed those present to experience the process and thus became an example of creative technogogy, in Zaid's sense of "convergence of technology, pedagogy and content in the transformative use of technology to foster learning." 

Flash forward and we find that my colleagues at annual TESOL conferences are now taking advantage of this capability as a matter of course.  There is a list of webcasts planned from the 2011 convention in New Orleans here: http://www.call-is.org/info/course/view.php?id=22. The technology being used (Elluminate) is almost the same as it has been for the past decade, but the acceptance of it, familiarity with it, and understanding of what it does for the learning environment are now all generally understood, and the acceptance and use of synchronous presentation tools to connect peers with one another to produce learning outcomes is not at all uncommon now.  A transformation has taken place.

This example of webcasting illustrates how a personal (or professional) learning network works.  PLN is another of those terms that causes eyes to roll when you try and explain the concept to someone who is not in the habit of connecting with peers online. My own network extends not only into groups of people with whom I interact in listservs and Nings and other forums, but over communities where people meet in online spaces for presentations and conversations often resulting in podcasts.  Sometimes I join them live but given the tendency for these gatherings to be recorded, I am quite happy to download the podcasts onto my mp3 player and join in the proceedings at my leisure asynchronously.

It was in the course of listening to one of those that I came to know about an online service with potential for webcasting, Spreaker Online Radio, http://www.spreaker.com/. The podcast I was listening to was Parents as Partners on the EdTechTalk channel http://edtechtalk.com/node/4909. Cale Birk, principal of South Kamloops Secondary School in Kamloops BC, was saying that he could hardly expect his staff to come on board with Web 2.0 if he didn't "roll up his sleeves" and get in there with it himself.  As such he is an exemplary model for leading his school and community forward towards the transformation of learning into a mode where stakeholders don't just learn, but learn how to learn in the new age of digital literacies. He mentioned Spreaker as of one of the tools he uses to set up online recorded tutorials for teachers and students in his school, so that if he can't explain something to them live, he can at least put it online and show them asynchronously when they land on one of his web sites. 

Once you've experienced a few times the serendipitous workings of a PLN, you won't find the following to be entirely coincidental, but when I checked out the site and landed on live broadcasts, I found that Worldbridges (http://worldbridges.net/) founder Jeff Lebow (see Lebow, 2006) was featured in a broadcast he appeared to be recording at that moment, so I sent a tweet out to my network to let them know that Jeff was trying out a new webcasting tool, and I included the link where people in our PLN could go to listen: http://twitter.com/VanceS/status/43956127871938560. Meanwhile, Sean Banville retweeted my post, and Jeff tweeted right back what amounted to a review of the product: http://twitter.com/jefflebow/status/43957560960757760. Thus works the system whereby, as David Weinberger (2002) puts it, small pieces are continually loosely joined.

Harking back to the fact that there are technologies we use in one aspect of our lives that we don't apply in our professions, the big question is: why is this technology not being used as a matter of course with students? Synchronous voice technologies are being used to link classrooms in different parts of the world using free programs such as Skype or WiZiQ (e.g. the annual earthcast at http://earthbridges.net/, Youth Voices at http://youthvoices.net/, and the Flat Classroom Project at http://www.flatclassroomproject.org/, to give just three examples).  Still, relatively few teachers are familiar with those technologies, and often the technologies that enable them are blocked in schools.  If this is inexplicable considering the potential for enhancement to learning, then the main problem is lack of understanding of how peer to peer interactivity can transform a learning environment, one symptom of what I have called elsewhere the "firewall of the mind" (Stevens, 2001).




















Photo credit, Barbara Dieu: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bee/5737375/ (shared here per creative commons: attribution, noncommercial, share-alike)

When that happens, when we as teachers apply social networking skills to learning from one another as a matter of course in our day-to-day workflow, and then apply those same techniques in practicing our profession with students, in the normal routine of teaching our day-to-day classes, a transformation will have truly taken place.  For that to happen there will have to be general acceptance of creative technogogy applied to curriculum and syllabus design. Experience shows that such change comes slowly, but that it will come. Happily, in an environment where teachers and students are networked and sharing knowledge, the ecosystem is such that people in general help one another to achieve their learning goals. You might rightly say that this is the goal of teaching  with or without technology, but when we share and model digital literacies skills with one another, aha! moments occur to bring us closer to the ideal, and these are greatly facilitated through social aspects of creative technogogy.


References

Cofino, K. (2008). Making the shift happen. Always learning. Retrieved on March 28, 2011 from http://kimcofino.com/blog/2008/02/24/making-the-shift-happen/

Curtis, P. (2009). Building A Web 2.0 culture. Multimedia presentation at the K12 Online Conference 2009. Retrieved on March 28, 2011 from http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=457 .

Carozza, B. (2009). Embracing Web 2.0 for the Administrator. Multimedia presentation at the K12 Online Conference 2009. Retrieved on March 28, 2011 from http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=455.

Freedman, T. (2006). Overcoming obstacles: Selling Web 2.0 to senior management. Paper delivered at the K12 Online Conference 2006. Retrieved on March 28, 2011 from http://k12online.wm.edu/overcomingobstacles.pdf.

Keen, A. (2007). The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture. Crown Business. 240 pages. 

 
Rowell, L. (2010). An Interview with Howard Rheingold. eLearn Magazine (n.p.). Retrieved March 28, 2011 from http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?article=111-1&section=articles.

Lebow, Jeff. (2006). Worldbridges: The Potential of Live, Interactive Webcasting. TESL-EJ, Volume 10, Number 1. Retrieved March 28, 2011 from: http://www.tesl-ej.org/ej37/int.html .

Rozhan M. Idrus and Karen McComas. (2006). From Facilitation to the Transformation of Learning: From Pedagogy to Technogogy. A keynote given at the Third International Conference on eLearning for Knowledge-Based Society, August 3-4, 2006, Bangkok, Thailand. Retrieved March 28, 2011 from:

http://www.ijcim.th.org/v14nSP1/pdf/p5.1-9-fin-58-keynote-Rozhan-%20Karen.pdf.)

Stevens, Vance. (2010). Shifting sands, shifting paradigms: Challenges to developing 21st century learning skills in the United Arab Emirates. In Egbert, J. CALL in Limited Technology Contexts, CALICO Monograph Series, Volume 9. pp.227-239. Revised version available from http://tinyurl.com/vance2010calico.

Stevens, Vance. (2008). Trial by Twitter: The rise and slide of the year's most viral microblogging platform. TESL-EJ, Volume 12, Number 1. Retrieved March 28, 2011 from: http://tesl-ej.org/ej45/int.pdf.

Stevens, V. (2001). Implementing Expectations: The Firewall in the Mind. Plenary Address delivered at the 'Implementing Call in EFL: Living up to Expectations' conference at the University of Cyprus, Nicosia May 5th - 6th, 2001. Retrieved March 28, 2011 from: http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/cyprus2001/plenary/index.html.

Weinberger, D. (2002).  Small pieces loosely joined: A unified theory of the Web.  Perseus Books. Preface and chapters 1 and 2 available from http://www.smallpieces.com/. 

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Notes 
This post was completed and submitted to TESL-EJ to appear in the On the Internet section March 29, 2011
TinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/advanced-aha

This comment appeared on my wall in Facebook (thanks :-)

Communicating and conversing with your students the Web 2.0 way

This was posted to the Posterous blog Enhancing Student Performance and Professional Development Online on Oct 27, 2010; Posterous ceases service on April 30, 2013

 

Before we begin, let's set up a back channel for this class in http://edmodo.com

We can brainstorm here about parts of a computer we want to cover in the lessons we're preparing together.

 

Here's the plan for today, as I flesh it out in my office Wed a.m. prior to meeting everyone at noon.  The plan is essentially to Model and Demonstrate a set of spaces online where we can interact with our students, and have you Practice in those spaces, and Reflect on what you have practiced.

 

In order to start this I had to find an appropriate space in which to write.  I like Etherpad because I can save revisions (and revert to them) and also it has a slider to enable me to track writing process or find a previous version, so it's constantly preserving your work.  You can copy paste, link to, or download any version.  

 

Google Docs is a great space but it's a little difficult to set up where you can do all that.  I've noticed that students can wipe out all work up to a point inadvertently in Google Docs, and you might not be able to get it back.  Etherpad is a better tool for working on the fly with students, since it's easily revertable to almost any prior state.

 

Disadvantages of Etherpad are (1) that it doesn't do graphics (so you might find it convenient to move from Etherpad to Google Docs), and (2) its instability (sometimes).  First you have to find one.  To find this one, I used my delicious acct http://delicious.com/vancestevens/etherpad

 

http://tinyurl.com/esppdo is a shared Google Doc (its greatest affordances are when used as a Web page and shared purposefully with small groups). Here we'll find the other Etherpad clone list I found and tag it in Delicious so it shows up at the delicious link above.

 

Now we've introduced several tools already for class interaction and cohesion:

 

• http://Delicious.com

• http://tinyurl.com

• http://edmodo.com

• Etherpad (clones)

• http://docs.google.com

 

All of these are excellent tools for conversing with your class.  

As examples of how this works with delicious, we'll look at these links:

 

http://delicious.com/tag/eflgames

http://delicious.com/tag/tll-mobiles

http://delicious.com/tag/comp020pi

http://delicious.com/tag/comp030pi

http://delicious.com/tag/comp020pi04 

http://delicious.com/tag/comp020pi50 

http://delicious.com/tag/comp020pi04me

http://delicious.com/tag/comp020pi50me 

 

We'll use a delicious tag for this class esppdo10

During the course of this lesson, and afterwards, as you hit on sites you think will be useful to us as a group, please use Delicious to tag them esppdo10

 

Now let's try an experiment. I'll set up a Google Doc and everyone can write on it

• The parts of a computer (or is it digital camera?) you want covered in class

• The questions you want the students to address

• An address of a search at http://images.google.com or Flickr where we can see pictures of each object

• Help us format this as an exercise for students

 

Once we've got the groundwork laid, we'll start a new Etherpad and paste the content of the Google Doc into it.  We can then do the exercise as the students might do it in class.

 

Sometimes I'll do this in class, copy something from a workbook and paste into Etherpad.  You can find an example of this at this link http://delicious.com/tag/comp030pi and I wrote a blog post about it, which I'll tag so it comes up at http://delicious.com/esppdo10

 

When I work with students, I need to broadcast URLs to them in such a way they can reach them quickly. 

• As we've seen, one way to do this is to tag them in delicious.  However, in class, delicious can sometimes take several minutes to propogate what you've tagged through the network so that it shows up on your class computers.  

• Another way then is to create a TinyURL.  This works instantaneously.

• Another way is to use Edmodo (or Twitter, or Yammer) to broadcast to them

• You can also set up a class space that you or everyone can write to quickly.  This could be at your Moodle or Bb course, in a Google Doc, or in a class wiki (either one that is shared with the class, or that only you can write to).

• Can you think of other ways? If so, write them here ... 

 

Before class I'll take these precautions:

• I'll SAVE a copy of the pre-class revision as a fallback in case of disaster or vandalism during the class (this hardly ever happens, but good to have a saved version we can revert to)

• I'll back up my work here: http://tinyurl.com/esppdo (mainly in case this Etherpad becomes inaccessible at an inopportune time, I'll be able to recover quickly in another Etherpad space).

• I'll email the link to this document so everyone coming to class can see what we're doing today (once you get the link you'll be able to write on the document, for example you could write questions, or add useful information - in case of anything untoward or inappropriate or accidental, we'll have the saved and backed up versions to revert to).

 

The last thing during this class, I will create a Posterous Blog (actually already created here:http://esppdo.posterous.com.)  

• I will show you how to create such a blog and how to password protect it if you wish (in case you want to make it private, not public, for just your class).

• I will register those present as contributors to this blog.

• I will email a copy of this document as way of creating a first posting 

• Once you see how easy that is I will invite you to email your reactions to and reflections on what you have learned today to the address esppdo@posterous.com

• I will encourage you to comment on these postings so that you can see how Posterous works to combine blogging in both web and email spaces into a kind of forum that promotes conversation in your class.

 

Hope you enjoy it :-)

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