Webheads http://webheads.info has just finished its second almost-annual, universally global, completely free, online conference. http://wiaoc.org. I say 'just' but the conference, which we also term a 'convergence' ended ten days ago. And I'm just now finding time to blog it.
It's not that I'm lazy or spaced out, but the convergence took all spare time from me for many weeks leading up to it, and when it ended I had desperately to attend to odds and ends I'd been holding at bay, like spending time with a neglected family and creating exams and giving and marking them plus a backlog of student assignments, and finalizing grade reports (which I just now finished; hence my return to posting here).
And finally I'm looking forward to having time for some reflection. I'm at the stage where suddenly a halcion summer has appeared as a gently spreading plateau at the end of a long uphill struggle, and I'm staring ahead at three months of being able to spend time on my own projects for a change.
I have some interesting projects in the works. I just emerged from a planning meeting at my workplace and discovered that it is being assumed that my role in upcoming development in courses I teach will be to implement a web 2.0 multiliteracies, blogging, social networking component in a syllabus that focuses heavily on transiting from Office 2003 to 2007 (should I introduce Open Office? that would be a thrust too far I'm afraid). I had blogged my plans for this curriculum component much earlier here: http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2007/02/multiliteracies-and-curriculum.html but it has only now been confirmed to me that this is what I'll be working on next term.
I'm elated at that because it fits in with courses I'm giving in Spain this summer, and perhaps in Sudan in August (see http://www.vancestevens.com/papers), and I've been doing courses and workshops lately in web 2.0 and in particular an interesting project on writingmatrix which I just posted on in a self access learning list.
The question on the self-access list was how to keep students learning English over the summer, in particular how to encourage them to engage in "conversation/interaction of meaning/substance"
I suggested for "written conversation/interaction of meaning/substance -- Keep blogs?
"The teacher could promise to comment on them from time to time during the summer. The teacher could manage this task by using bloglines, http://www.bloglines.com.
"To learn how to start blogs students and teachers can use this tutorial:
http://www.homestead.com/prosites-vstevens/files/efi/blogger_tutorial.htm
"But students could seek out students from other countries and have some fun making new friends this summer by joining in the writingmatrix project. To do this your students simply tag their summer fun postings writingmatrix. Then they can use http://www.technorati.com/ (search on tags) to find other blog posts with the writingmatrix tag. When they find another blog they like of someone else in the writingmatrix project they simply leave a comment and perhaps invite that person to view their blog."
I further noted that "at http://wiaoc.org/ project members organized a presentation entitled Writingmatrix: CONNECTing students with blogs, tags, and social networking, http://writingmatrix.wikispaces.com/. The other teachers are Nelba Quintana and Rita Zeinstejer (from Argentina), Doris Molero (from Venezuela), and Sasha Sirk (Slovenia).
I put my slides explaining the project online here http://www.slideshare.net/vances/vance-writingmatrix-wiaoc2007/ and the other contributions are posted at http://webheadsinaction.org/node/174 .
A recording of the presentation at WiAOC can be found here:
http://streamarchives.net/node/48
"This is an attempt to utilize the social networking aspect of blogs (via the simple means of tagging posts in such a way that identifies each posting as being that of another student in the project) to enable students to make friends through blogging. If it works for you or your students I'd appreciate having your feedback."
Then to check on the project I went to Technorati and did a search on writingmatrix: http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/writingmatrix
I was looking to see what students had posted but I came upon a blog post that mentioned writingmatrix but was tagged wiaoc 2007: http://maryhillis.blogspot.com/2007/05/wiaoc-2007.html. Mary Hillis had visited the convergence but found she really liked our presentation, the one mentioned above, and another one on blogging by Carla Arena, Erika Cruvinel, and Ronaldo Lima. It is gratifying to see that aggregation based on tagging is working and is indeed putting like-minded students and teachers in touch with one another.
I left a comment of course.
And if Mary stops by here, "Hi Mary!"
Someone responded to my list posting, asking "How do you tag?"
Here is my response:
What are known as TAGS in social networking might be called something else in various blogs and wikis. For example, in Blogger they are called LABELS in English and Etiquetas in Spanish Blogspot blogs, and probably something else in German. There’s a good article on Tagging at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tags. This explains the concept but doesn’t tell you how to do it.
I’ve also seen tags called ‘categories’
Technorati focuses on blogs and analyses what’s out there according to their tags (among other features).
We have a project where we try to get kids late teens to tag (or ‘label) their blog posts writingmatrix . To find the post I visit
http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/writingmatrix
and there, just grabbing one at random, http://leonardobravo726.blogspot.com/2007/05/welcome-to-my-blog.html, I find it’s one of Doris’s students from Maracaibo. Doris works at URBE. This students tagged his blog posting efl, introduction, urbe, and writingmatrix. I found it by requesting tags for writingmatrix. If you searched all blog posts tagged efl you’d probably turn up thousands, but if you were looking for URBE for example, you’d find fewer, and some of these would be tagged writingmatrix as well.
I just tried http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/writingmatrix+AND+urbe and got 4 hits but I’m sure there are more. We still haven’t learned how all this really works. We need teachers in this mix to help us figure it out.
Still playing around, I tried http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/writingmatrix+urbe and got 29 hits, so I think this is the correct syntax.
I've tagged this post in a number of ways. You can find my tags below where it says 'labels for this post.' You might be able to find my post (this one) with a technorati search on writingmatrix but I also used wiaoc2007 and vance among many other tags.
I just tried http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/writingmatrix+AND+vance and got 5 hits, but none of them what I was looking for (this post, at least not yet ;-) (and same results for http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/writingmatrix+vance). There were surprises.
One of the teachers in the project is starting a tag project on serendipity, and serendipity is exactly where this leads. And if you think this is fun, wait till we get on to del.icio.us. That’s where the kids will really get carried away (find out who’s reading their posts, who’s tagging them, what they’re tagging them ;-)
I just tried http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/serendipity
And got 32,000 hits, starting at 15 min ago. This is a case where I would recommend Rita try TWO tags serendipity+writingmatrix to narrow down the field. Right now there are no hits in that combination, which means it would probably work VERY well if she has her kids do it the multiple-tag way.
You can also tag flickr photos, google maps (I think, or if not there must be 3rd party software that allows it), and at least half the stuff if not 99% of what you can put up on the read-write web 2.0. So students can take pics during their hols and post them online and tag them writingmatrix or whatever and their friends can find them.
You’ll find you have that opportunity (to tag) on almost any web 2.0 site. It might take some looking for but it’s worth doing.
Showing posts with label multiliteracy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label multiliteracy. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
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:
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'.
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.
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 ...
- Enterprise and Open Source software
- An overview of Web 2.0 tools
- Social Networking
- Implications for classroom (i.e. project) management
---------------------------------------
Example software products following the first three models of development and implemention are:
MS Office –-> Open Office –-> http://docs.google.com/
---------------------------------------
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).
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:
- achieving appropriate levels of digital competence in a changing world
- 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:
- ability to subscribe to podcasts
- 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
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.
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