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.

Will online facilities at conferences kill off smaller, more localized events where people are within travelling distance of the venue?

I hope I can say in a nice way that I disagree that online components to conferences will kill off localized events. I think the opposite, that online access to any professional development opportunity enhances it for everyone involved. I have given many presentations at normally closed on-site venues where the participants have said afterwards that the demonstration of what it was possible to do online was eye opening for them. So at the site itself, appropriate techniques for interaction are modeled, and the people at the on-site location can see first hand how to set up and use the technologies that can bring the world into their classrooms.

It could be argued that the opportunity to learn more about how to do something truly useful like that would draw people to conferences. People might conceivably in the very near future become less and less interested in conferences where this kind of thing doesn't happen.

People in the audience ought to be able to choose their preferred modality, not have things set up so that coming to the site was the only option for them. Constructing learning environments so that users have choices according to individual differences and learning styles is a major premise of individualized learning which ought to underpin what appears in an independent learning center as well as in real-life professional development. I have argued elsewhere that online participants might benefit more from such occasions from a purely technical point of view by having to DO what was talked about in presentations (about technology) rather than just sitting passively, nodding, taking notes, and then returning to work in the same old way.

I have heard it argued that sitting at home online is isolating and that people participating in conferences in this way are missing out on all the social interaction. Again, as someone with over a decade of experience working with people online, I find the opposite to be true. If all your interactions with people you admire in your profession are done face to face on those rare occasions you are able to coincide in the same physical space, then I hope you do savor the moment. Online, you can interact with such people more or less continually. You find that personalities and intellects are much more accessible over time in this mode, that people get to know one another better and more deeply online, and that when face to face meetings do occur, the benefits of having laid all that groundwork are immediately apparent. Ask anyone who has met an online professional acquaintance at long last – in most cases, it’s a milestone in a friendship that has already formed.

I’m not arguing against the importance of attending live conferences. I go to several in person every year and I find that they feed an important aspect of my professional development. But online venues multiply such opportunities, and it is crucial that we share and share alike in this regard – if I benefit online from a conference given in Minsk or Fujairah then I should give my colleagues in Minsk and Fujairah a chance to benefit in kind when I make my presentation, even at my local conference.

As someone with experience in both face to face and virtual events, I can speak with familiarity and some authority on each. But I find that many people with whom I discuss the benefits of interjecting more opportunities for online interaction in areas that are normally face to face (ranging from conferences to meetings at work) are not particularly experienced in online interaction, might try it once, decide they don’t care for it, and never really move cross that threshold where the benefits start to become self-evident.

That is one great contribution of the Aberdeen IATEFL conference I think, that it seems to have been a mostly positive experience for all concerned, and has got people a few steps closer to that all important threshold. I’m trying here to encourage continued movement to the edge, and counter tendencies toward thinking that, ok, it worked there, but it wouldn’t work here. There are many reasons why the example of Aberdeen, and so many others as well which I could get into if anyone is interested, can and absolutely SHOULD be pursued locally - and thanks to the Internet, globally in the same fell swoop.

Smiles and kind regards,

Vance

Unarticle: Unleashing the transformative power of the unorganized Internet

Webhead Link hangs out midwater near a pod of orcas at Meteora in Second Life while over in Breeze, Sean FitzGerald observes that "students are into different technologies than teachers ... teachers are into email, blogs, and del.icio.us ... students are into texting, IM and MySpaces."

Deadlines are a mother of invention. By March 10 this time around I had neither an article in hand for my 'column' in TESL-EJ nor a clear purpose for writing one (hence this unarticle). But I'm constantly 'On the Internet', too constantly in the opinion of some, and have in mind unleashing a stream of consciousness on the many convergences I'm playing with there at the moment. I'm not sure if you'll feel enlightened or inflicted upon after reading this but here goes.

The most immediate inspiration for this unarticle came from a community I've been enjoying interacting with lately, a group of engaging Antipodeans who just recently held an unconference. In case you were wondering, an 'unconference' according to Wikipedia, and these days, what's not according to Wikipedia, is "a conference where the content of the sessions is driven and created by the participants, generally day-by-day during the course of the event, rather than by a single organizer, or small group of organizers, in advance." <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconference >

In order that their unconference would not be uneventful however, someone did take it upon themselves to set up a wiki for it <http://talo.wikispaces.com/swapmeet07a>, and watching this wiki grow over time was a lesson in the wisdom of crowds: how a group of people can organize themselves into a viable focus while working through a Web 2.0 online tool which participants edit from computer workstations in countries all over the world, with little apparent editorial control over the process.

For an excellent example of how wikis undergo change over time, and how a distributed network operates to mediate both vandalism and radicalism, check out the fascinating screencast of the evolution of the article in Wikipedia on 'Heavy metal umlaut": http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/umlaut.html .

The impetus for this particular unconference was a "Swapmeet" or face-to-face gathering of teachers in Adelaide, whose participants would fly in from other parts of Australia and New Zealand, but because they convene throughout the year via a listserv (called TALO, Teaching and Learning Online) their group includes many educators in many parts of the world far, far from Adelaide. Some of these people wanted to be included at a distance, and since the group's domain of interest is to enhance collaboration through connectivity, they had the wherewithal to do so. So these participants used the availablity of online tools which made possible for anyone in the group to write on various free online spaces so that each could contribute something to the unconference agenda and thereby make the on-site events accessible no matter where people happened to be checking in from.

You can easily see where the participants came from by visiting the Frappr map that was until just recently on the front page of the wiki (till someone found it distracting and relegated it to a link in the sidebar <http://www.frappr.com/teachandlearnonline>). A Frappr map is one where multiple participants can place their pins on a world map and then upload a picture and shoutout so that the map displays this information next to where on the planet each person comes from. The site can generate various scripts which anyone whose technical skills have reached copy/paste can paste right into their own website.

OK, granted, you have to have a website, but these days - where with just a slightly higher level of functional computer literacy than copy/paste anyone almost with a mouse and an Internet connection can set up a blog or a wiki (ok, a large number of post-preschoolers under 30) - this is not considered rocket science.

It's hard to describe the congealing power of having people's pictures and shared vignettes start popping up all over the map, but a click on that Frappr map link will illustrate the concept. And the ensuing display is only one of several scripts that one can choose from. It's also possible to enhance your site with a scrolling slide show of people's photos simply by pasting the associated script to your writeable web space. Whatever the display Frappr allows people to then view the show and, if they want to add their pictures, to do so and so make their personal mark on the collective project. Frappr is an excellent tool when you want to elicit pictures from throughout your community. If the pictures reside with you then other tools such as Bubbleshare will allow you to post them online and then copy scripts to paste to your web space, again giving you various display options.

When I last visited the unconference Swapmeet wiki I didn't see the Frappr map there which I had intended to cite in this unarticle. I was disappointed only for a few moments (I only later noticed its link in the sidebar). It is the nature of wikis that each step in the editing process can be recalled. I discovered that by simply clicking on History I could pull up previous versions of the wiki (yep, every last one) and find the map I was looking for from an edit at about the time I remembered it had been there.

This technique of paging through its wiki revision history allows one to observe the development of the unconference project. Anyone can click on the History tab and see the 200+ iterations of the process since Leigh Blackall started sketching out some ideas for the gathering on Feb 18. You can see how, from Leigh's rough outline, tables grew into which people posted their photographs and proposals of what they might like to discuss. Once the online element became apparent and on-site participants realized they'd have to accommodate numerous time zones, a schedule was posted where people could write-in their availability, and the community discussed various ways of contacting one another synchronously. In the end they settled on Breeze, an enterprise product with a nice interface but many limitations. Learning about the advantages and limitations of such interfaces is one reason that community members find it so important to constantly engage in online experiments with one another.

Second Life (Stevens, 2006) was another place where successful encounters occurred (though speaking of limitations, only for those with the computing power and bandwidth to get in-world and stay there). Participants in the Second Life sessions were able to explore and appreciate the builds of some of the unconference participants, and either text chat to one another in-world, or carry on conversations in Skype on the side. Second Life is rife with scripted objects that can be shared by participants who 'drop' them someplace where others can pick them up and keep them in their inventories. One of these scripts allows avatars to wear small headsets that when in range of others with similar headsets will allow them to initiate Skype calls with one another.

Stephen Downes <http://downes.ca/> put himself down for a Skypecast at the TALO Swapmeet wiki. His Skypecast was scheduled for 2:30 a.m. my time but another mediating aspect of the web 2.0 is that, unless you wish to interact personally at every such event, you can often attend them asynchronously. Stephen for example can be relied on to record his presentations and post them to his website where they can be downloaded as podcasts (Stanley, 2006). Folks interested in educational technology can avail themselves of an almost endless supply of such materials. Endless is considered here to be more listening material than a human with a job requiring even minimal attention, and interests outside of a profession, could possibly want to listen to in a conceivable available listening lifetime.

The principle of podcatching, as it is sometimes known, is that you identify podcasts online that you would like to listen to regularly and then subscribe to their RSS feeds. In order to access the feeds you run an aggregator, for example iTunes or Juice. The aggregator visits the source of your subscribed podcasts and determines if there are any there you haven't downloaded yet, and if so it fetches these automatically and stores them on your computer as mp3 files. With iTunes you can then synch with your iPod so that collections of files can be transferred to your mp3 player for you to listen to at leisure. If you want less automaticity and more control over the transfer process without having to enter the brain of an iTunes software designer, you might find that another aggregator is more intuitive for your purposes. In any event you end up with a set of mp3 files on your listening device which you can play back later at your convenience.

Listening to podcasts has benefits for those wishing to improve their skills in educational technology similar to those operating in language learning. Harvesting podcasts would be a great way to learn a language, and many such podcasts exist which purport to teach languages. Some of these that I have heard waste a lot of bandwidth with native language as opposed to target practice. For example, I might hear, "Good morning, today we're going to learn more idioms in French," etc. and so on for several minutes in English, which is not teaching me anything about French. The problem in fact is that this is teaching. As someone has said, I love to learn but I hate to be taught. Teaching is when someone else decides what you should learn. Whereas it is understood that novice learners might benefit from some degree of control over what is deemed good for them, mature professionals should be at the other end of the spectrum.

John Higgins once defined authentic language as any instance of language not created by a teacher for the purpose of teaching languages, and this is the kind of language that I feel is particularly appropriate to mature learners of a language, whereas the other is inefficient and therefore wastes time for learners who wish to cut to the chase. Therefore, choice of podcast in a target language for me would be dictated by genre and subject matter, with inauthentic instructional materials being appropriate only if I were just beginning to learn that language. Once over the beginner threshold podcasts can be quite valuable. I can listen at leisure. I can replay. The original recordings are on my computer where I can have fine access to them. I can use Audacity for example to trim away parts of the recording that I'm not interested in. I could even compile a collection of edited recordings and podcast them myself. Many source recordings have been put online under Creative Commons license, so that their reuse in this way on a personal, non-commercial site, would be perfectly legal. As a teacher of a language course I might assign my students to locate, edit, and repodcast samples of shareable language that they had found most useful to them personally. I would then encourage my students to share with one another their findings in a system of aggregation of each other's podcasted and blogged content as outlined here: http://www.vancestevens.com/rss_edu.htm.

Generally speaking anyone thinking to use such techniques with students needs to become familiar with the techniques themselves. This is where there are parallels between learning educational technology and learning a language. Not all effective language teachers are native speakers. The same applies to currently practicing teachers using educational technology in almost any context, since the generation that grew up without ubiquitous access to computers has not yet been supplanted by the next. Marc Prensky <http://www.marcprensky.com/> places a digital divide between digital natives and digital immigrants (Prensky, 2001). The latter he says will always speak with an 'accent' yet most educational professionals today are in this position of having to shift from 20th century ways of "connecting" to 21st century modalities; i.e. online with each other and affectively with students (another of Prensky's mantras: Enrage me or engage me: Prensky, 2005).

Just as a non-native speaker of a language who wishes to teach it would have to become fluently familiar with that language, so digital immigrants wanting to use educational technology need to familiarize themselves with the practices and concepts of what they wish to use with students. Podcasts can play a role in helping language learners become familiar with a language since learners can immerse themselves in (and re-mix, rewind, re-purpose, replay) recorded instances of authentic language. What many teachers of these languages and other subjects are beginning to realize is that the same holds true with educational technology. Ed tech is like a foreign language to many with concepts not immediately grasped. Educators can use the same techniques that they could later pass on to their students to intereract with peers slightly more ahead of the curve discussing these concepts in terms that become more understandable the more one listens to conversations in which the concepts are discussed.

One good podcast site, where one can access a steady stream of conversations that guide interested peers into (the more you listen) the decreasingly arcane world of educational technology, is the Worldbridges network <http://www.worldbridges.net/> (Lebow, 2006). Another clearly explicated podcast site with a long history of frequent updates is that created by Wesley Fryer, Working at the Speed of Creativity <http://www.speedofcreativity.org/>. Wesley's job (at AT&T) requires him to travel from state to state in the USA presenting at conferences and teacher in-service gatherings on topics offering advice on practical applications to education of the most popular Web 2.0 tools. His presentations are pitched at practicing teachers, and delivered in terms that presume little prior knowledge. Wesley introduces his podcasts with home-made digital audio snippets in productions that are as slick as they are folksy, making for easy listening on a wide range of weighty yet approachable, current, and pertinent ed tech topics.

Wesley was also one of the organizers of the recent K-12 Online Conference <http://k12onlineconference.org/>. Unlike the unconference mentioned at the start of this unarticle (which is gradually evolving into an article) the K-12 Online Conference used a wide spectrum of tools similar to those used by the community pulling together the TALO Swapmeet. The organizers of both conferences used free Web 2.0 tools such as wikis, blogs, podcasts, Skypecasts, YouTube, and Flickr and Frappr photos to present content (and SurveyMonkey to evaluate it). But what set the K-12 conference apart from other online conferences proliferating on the web was their extensive use of social networking and aggregated content. Artifacts for the conference were tagged and aggregated in a number of ways; for example using Technorati to create a network of associated blog posts that is still updating <http://technorati.com/search/k12onlineconference.org/>, del.icio.us links tagged on k12online <http://del.icio.us/search/?all=k12online >, and David Warlick's Hitchikr which aggregates artifacts tagged k12online2006 <http://www.hitchhikr.com/index.php?conf_id=113>.

One highly positive development over the past year or two in use of Internet in educational technology has been the steady proliferation of opportunities for educators to come together to share and exchange expertise at free events where sophisticated use of Web 2.0 tools is what needs to be understood in order to enable participants to interact with one another. These events are about professional development but unlike face-to-face venues where participants could easily take passive roles in sitting back and being told about the latest technologies, participants in online events have to do what is being inculcated. Normally, people who are adept at adapting Web 2.0 tools to collaboration in education try their best to help bring everyone else up to speed in order that all may participate, and a typical reaction of newbies to such sessions is of how positive the experience was, that new friendships were formed, and like-minded peers were found at last from outside the immediate and often constraining confines of the physical walls that still delineate most institutionalized educational settings.

One such event that has been ongoing for several years now is the TESOL Electronic Village Online sessions <http://evo07sessions.pbwiki.com/> (Hanson-Smith and Bauer-Ramazani, 2004). This is another grass-roots effort at professional development through using technology at a distance which has grown in scope and popularity in recent years. Although based traditionally in YahooGroup portals and instant messaging and online presentation tools, the individual sessions have been branching into many other venues lately such as blogs, wikis, webcasting, and Second Life. The most enthusiastic participants express views suggesting transformative experiences have occurred after taking part in these sessions. Less sanguine reactions would still applaud the trend whereby quality professional development is available to interested educators at no cost and at their convenience over the Internet, without the hassle of registration formalities or the inconvenience and expense of travel.

Another venue to continue with this trend for professional development is the upcoming second Webheads in Action Online Convergence scheduled for May 18-20, 2007 <http://wiaoc.org>. The first one <http://2005.wiaoc.org> was reported in an On the Internet column in Stevens, 2005. This is a free online conference where pretty much anything goes. Whereas the organizers try to make things as clear as possible for attendees, participants and presenters are encouraged to explore as many modalities for communication and interaction as possible in an effort to help each other learn the tools, so there is a tolerance for experimentation at the expense of a simple one-stop interface. But part of what there is to learn about Internet literacy is how to personally organize the morass of information accessible online through efficient aggregation. So the conference will attempt also to show participants how order can be gleaned from what what would otherwise seem chaotic on the Internet by utilizing many of the social networking features so appropriately employed at the K-12 Online conference while carrying on the work of the community largely associated with the annual EVO events.

If you have sustained sufficient interest to read this far into this unarticle you yourself are likely to have undergone many changes in the way you have found yourself working in the past year. Those most prone to staying abreast of educational technology are probably finding themselves adopting new work habits monthly or even weekly. For example, I wrote first drafts of this in Google Docs so that I could access it from any computer on the Internet whereas a year ago I might have been using an application on my local computer and carrying files around on a flash disc. When completed I pasted it to my blog <http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/> where it might attract comments; whereas before I would have put it in a static HTML file and posted it to a Web 1.0 page and had the TESL-EJ editors get it from there. That I absorbed these techniques and eventually changed my behavior in this and other ways I use the Internet came about in part from listening to innumerable podcasts that gradually pre-disposed me to try out working in alternative ways that have since become second nature. The other most significant part of my professional development comes from constant interaction with other teaching professionals online, and tapping in to a Venn diagram of numerous overlapping distributed learning networks.

Staying abreast of developments in educational technology requires that you go pro-active and utilize the many opportunities for professional development that abound on the Internet. There is no shortage of such opportunities and they are becoming more numerous and more easily accessible. You don't need to travel to participate, you don't need to pay, and you don't need to wait for someone else to organize an event - you can organize it yourself or in the case of an unconference, unorganize it by letting the participants organize it themselves. New technologies making these scenarios possible have been termed subversive and disruptive because they challenge old ways of doing things and suggest many new alternatives. This unarticle encourages you to experiment and explore, and perhaps we will meet online one day through one of the means mentioned here.

Some time ago I coined the term "firewall in the mind" to refer to cases where transformative technologies are utilized in ways characteristic of whatever technology had previously dominated, before the potential of the new medium was fully explored. Papert (1980), in his book Mindstorms, used the analogy of early movie-makers who shot scenes straight on, to replicate how a viewer might experience a play from an (albeit front-row) seat in a theater. Now, static Web 1.0 pages are considered analogous to a theater view of the Internet, where the audience observes but is not expected to interact. An example of that would be the appearance of this unarticle in the static web-based TESL-EJ online journal <http://tesl-ej.org/>.

It makes sense to me, as editor of the On the Internet column in TESL-EJ, to push the envelope ever so slightly and blog my present and future contributions to this column. That way readers will have a chance to themselves explore one of the more transformative aspects of the Internet, its ability to foster audience participation in the form of conversations. Blogs invite comments and RSS subscriptions, and both are now possible at the blog location of this post: http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2007/03/unarticle.html

References

Hanson-Smith, Elizabeth , and Christine Bauer-Ramazani. (2004). Professional Development: The Electronic Village Online of the TESOL CALL Interest Section . Vol. 8. No. 2

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

Papert, S. (1980). Mindstorms: children, computers and powerful ideas. Brighton, The Harvester Press.

Prensky, Marc. (2005). Engage me or enrage me. What today's learners demand. Educause Review, Sept./Oct. 2005. Retrieved March 10, 2007 from: http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0553.pdf

Prensky, Marc. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon 9, 5. Retrieved December 27, 2006 from: http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf#search=%22prensky%22digital%20native%22%22.

Stanley, Graham. (2006). Podcasting: Audio on the Internet Comes of Age. TESL-EJ, Volume 9, Number 4: http://tesl-ej.org/ej36/int.html

Stevens, Vance. (2006). Second Life in Education and Language Learning. TESL-EJ, Volume 10, Number 3: http://www.tesl-ej.org/ej39/int.html

Stevens, Vance. (2005). Behind the scenes at the Webheads in Action Online Convergence, November 18-20, 2005: TESL-EJ, Volume 9, Number 3: http://tesl-ej.org/ej35/int.html

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Note: This unarticle has been published in the On the Internet column in the March 2007 issue of TESL-EJ: http://www.tesl-ej.org/ej40/int.html . There is also a static web version of the article here: http://www.homestead.com/prosites-vstevens/files/efi/papers/tesl-ej/07march/unarticle.htm . All were the same on March 14, 2007, except that the web articles have full-size screen shots (1389x608 pixels, if you download them - otherwise they're appx 600x300 in the web page displays).

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Multiliteracies and Curriculum

The computer-culture in the UAE, where I teach Arab-national first- and second-year college students, tends to be high relative to other countries in the region. Still, with developments in the field racing ahead in the year 2007, teachers as well as students are challenged to keep up with concepts driving the emerging literacies. There is an opportunity in the courses I teach now to revise the literacy aspects of our curriculum to help learners understand some of the ramifications of evolving uses of the latest technologies.

Basic premises

In the materials I'm involved with, the focus is to raise learner awareness of changes to the social structure of software. I don’t intend to call it exactly that at this introductory level, but perhaps a good starting point, one directed at a wider sophisticated audience, is Time's declaration of YOU as its person of the year.

In recognizing all of us as people of the year, Time has acknowledged that there has been a dramatic shift in alignment of control over the power structures traditionally used to convey and arbitrate media. One aspect of this shift is that software (and publishing and other social orders impacted by that software) have moved from the enterprise model into a more user-centric one where normal people and smaller, even individual, entities and groupings have increasing power over software and the Internet, and over content provided in both domains. This shift has important ramifications for the way people can now work both individually and collaboratively with software running either on their PC's and/or over the Internet.

ENTERPRISE AND OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE

I look at software as falling into these main categories: Enterprise, Open Source, Web 2.0

Enterprise software can be characterised by companies like Microsoft, which create software for sale and profit and guard its code, revealing only what is necessary to allow others to design products that will work with it, in such a way that the company retains control over the process and retains its dominance over aspiring competitors. One result, apart from satisfaction of the shareholders in the company, is software that sometimes gets 'published' without adequate testing, so that users are vulnerable, and the company, as in the case of Microsoft, is constantly having to supply patches, since the real testing of the software occurs only after it has been purchased and shipped.

Many software developers have responded with their support of an alternative Open Source model of software development. In contrast to the enterprise model, the software is developed by interested parties seeking not profit, but mainly to enhance their standing within a community of developers by being associated with the creation of the best possible software for a given task. The code is not guarded at all. It's made publically available in the hope that others in the community will create improvements to it. The result is generally software that gets thoroughly tested during the development process, so there are rarely unanticipated surprises for end-users (and if there are, the community learns about it quickly and moves together to correct the problem). Open source software is not created for profit, but business models are emerging whereby money can be made developing refinements and specific implementations of open source resources for companies whose profits rely on using that software effectively.

Open source software is by definition freely downloadable, but where it has to be set up on a server, this might be inconvenient for some users. Again the community has tended to share resources, so that server-based services are sometimes made available to all users. The concept has broadened into what has come to be known as Web 2.0, or the read-write Web. Lawrence Lessig has gone so far as to characterize the 20th century as the read-only century and the present one as the read-write century. Lessig's point is that whereas the enterprise model dominated media distribution until only recently, we are rapidly entering an era where this is no longer the case. It is important that this development be better understood by its beneficiaries (all of us) as the impacts are far-reaching in the way we organize ourselves productively through our understanding of what it means to be 'literate'.

I don't intend to include all that follows in the course, but as background and illustration of how these models apply in the real world, we can draw from the following cases:

Thomas Freedman in his influential book The World is Flat discusses how IBM gave up developing its own enterprise rival to Apache server and instead contributed its best engineers to the Apache community in order to be able to resume a business model on which the deliverables would be enhancements to the Apache kernel. That’s just one example of the power of community to produce a superior product (for free) compared to a commercial, patented, closed-source one.

Another good example is characterized in the Blackboard vs. Moodle approaches to development of learning management systems (background information regarding this controversy abounds on the Internet; here is a link to a Feb 2007 article in the well-respected T.H.E. Journal).

My own perception is that Blackboard is becoming regarded in the Open Source community as an old-school Goliath who’s made waves and rocked boats by taking out patents on certain aspects of LMS’s that other developers consider open source and unpatentable. On the day its patents were granted Blackboard brought suit against one of its competitors, Desire to Learn, for royalties owed under the new patents. This has sent shivers down the rest of the open source CMS community in case Blackboard were to use its fait accompli at the patent office to go after users of Moodle and others, including end users, for not paying royalties to the patent holder. But now we see this being reversed one slingshot at a time. Blackboard is seen to be undermining its own potential customer base at the cost of its reputation in the educational community, and more recently there are moves afoot to have the patent decisions reversed.

While this is going on, Sakai, another white horse open source project, is reaching fruition. If you agree that Moodle, arguably the strongest open source rival to Blackboard to date, scales well to enterprise settings despite its lesser polish, then seemingly the only real argument for paying licensing fees to Blackboard is that it might be worth the costs (to some customers) for an LMS solution that appears more crisply enterprise in a Web browser. Sakai apparently looks the part, slick and groomed for enterprise, yet has been developed for free distribution as an open source project by educational entities each taking responsibility for developing different parts of it. It seems that this could be a rather large nail destined for the coffin of closed-source enterprise ventures.

I find this of great interest in my own work context, but I see these two examples appearing, if at all, as text boxes in the materials I envisage , whose purpose would be to make the point that open source is on its way to significantly augmenting if not replacing the enterprise model of software development.

So to continue with a course outline, I am thinking ...

1. Enterprise and Open Source software
2. An overview of Web 2.0 tools
3. Social Networking
4. Implications for classroom (i.e. project) management

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Example software products following the first three models of development and implemention are:

MS Office –-> Open Office –-> http://docs.google.com/

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AN OVERVIEW OF WEB 2.0 TOOLS

There are many hooks for a wider understanding and use of Web 2.0 tools in modern curriculum settings. Collaborative Google spreadsheets might be used in portfolio/project work for example. I’m not sure if you can format in Google docs to the extent you can in MS Word, but the potential is certainly worth exploring.

The two most salient Web 2.0 tools with application for our students are blogs and their close cousins podcasts and wikis, though there are many more -- online collaborative calendars, for example. I hope to list a few more here eventually; meanwhile:

• Many listings of Web 2.0 tools are linked from my Moodle course on Multiliteracies for Collaborative Learning Environments (guest access welcome).
• A well illustrated example of how the younger generation sees these tools as being used in various modalities ranging from social collaboration to enterprise project management can be found here: http://www.wsjb.com/RPC/V1/Home.html
• I have just come across a good listing of "Digital Literacies & Emerging Educational Technologies" at this wiki: http://couros.wikispaces.com/emerging+technologies

SOCIAL NETWORKING

Aggregation

The concept with greatest implication for collaborative and project work in education (and beyond, in the real world of collaboration and project management in the workplace) is that blogs and wikis can be aggregated.

I have an explanation of how this is accomplished at http://www.vancestevens.com/rss_edu.htm. This document explains how blogs for a class can be aggregated via an aggregator (e.g. Bloglines) in such a way that they can be efficiently read/followed by the teacher and others in the class, or by manager and co-workers in an enterprise project venture.

Tags

Blogs can be tagged, and tags also can be aggregated. One device for doing that is http://del.icio.us/ . Jon Pederson has developed a good explanation of how del.icio.us can be used to good effect by educators: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=ad62vwjv8zm_6fh3r2s

The concepts of tagging and aggregation lie at the heart of social networking. For example, my son posts family photos at his Facebook acct and tags the ones of me DAD. I then get an email that tagged photos are available. I get the URLs of only my photos but the whole albums are available as long as the owner has indicated that s/he trusts me with them. I don’t think we need to introduce our students to Facebook here in the Middle East, but participation in social networking sites like Facebook illustrate how the concepts work in a social context.

Podcasting

Podcasting is one highly productive example of how these concepts can be focused on two important literacy goals:

1. achieving appropriate levels of digital competence in a changing world
2. and staying abreast through lifelong learning.

In order to access podcasts, one needs to have a working knowledge of using an aggregator such as iTunes or Juice (a level of knowledge akin to knowing how to drive as opposed to knowing how to build or repair a car).

The working knowledge needed is two-fold:

1. ability to subscribe to podcasts
2. and to occasionally refresh subscriptions.

Internet search skills are needed to locate desired podcasts in the first place, and some multimedia and file management skills will help in downloading, storing, retrieving, and playing the files retrieved. A computer is all that is essentially needed for this, though most people like to transfer their files to an mp3 player and listen to them while away from their computer.

Although the only skill levels needed harvest podcasts are at the level of those needed while driving, higher education is pursued in order to achieve greater understanding, in the case of driving, of the mechanics and physical forces involved in converting energy to produce the torque to propel the car, etc. Similary, among the goals of a computer literacy course should be some understanding how RSS and aggregation works, and in theory how one can create one's own blogs and podcasts, and disseminate these to a wider audience through social networking skills.

Again, I have a Web document covering aspects of these issues: http://www.vancestevens.com/casting.htm

Conclusion

Enterprise is the ‘beyond’ application of these principles. But I think that blogs and wikis could be very well worked into current curriculum in student collaborative projects and in all aspects involving reporting findings from Internet search. These techniques and concepts could become built into those modules, and enable the class to pull together while learning about team techniques based in social networking concepts.

In not only social and enterprise but also in educational project/class management contexts, I think that these concepts are important because they show the way teams are learning to work together using the latest shareable Web-based technologies once they have achieved the requisite level of computer literacy.

Merry Christmas 2006 to Friends, Family, and Community

It's the dawn of a new day, literally, a windy, rainy dawn in Abu Dhabi. It's CHRISTMAS day, and one of my New Year's Resolutions is to start using this blog more (I have several, blogs and resolutions) ... but I've started THIS one, as a central location to pull together some of my other projects (in which case if you want to track what I'm up to you could do so via this blog's RSS feed, in theory).

Right now, my project is Christmas. In Abu Dhabi, we work the day before and after Christmas, but our gracious hosts always grant us the day itself off. There is therefore a rare chance for pause and reflection in what is otherwise a routine work week.

I intend this blog to be about education, in particular adVances made possible through adVancED techniques in EDucation as facilitated through principled use of the read/write Web 2.0, but as I'm just starting out I'll introduce it as our annual season's greeting card. At this time of year, I try and spend time with family, friends, and community, and this post is addressed to all three.



Family: Dusty flew out from California and Glenn drove in from his workplace in the desert of Abu Dhabi, so the four of us were together again this Christmas, as you can see from our picture above or here: http://www.prof2000.pt/users/vstevens/homepage.htm#061225

Friends: For my friends I would like to offer a special holiday treat. The gift, properly wrapped, should appear below, and you can unwrap your gift by clicking here http://www.rsc-yh.ac.uk/advent/ or on the picture:

Community: For my friends online, educators all, we have our Wiki: http://happywebhead2006-7.pbwiki.com/ . Year after year we have what we call F.U.N. in this community, as you can see at the link and in the picture below.

You can click here or on the picture to see Vance's elf dance

Meanwhile, my family Bobbi, Glenn, Dusty, and (me) Vance and the cat, Musky, wish everyone a happy holiday season, and perhaps in this coming year, at last, an ascendancy of the common people, especially those in the groups listed above, whose collective activities online and elsewhere contribute to the realization of peace in the world.