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 :-)

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.

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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