When is a MOOC not a MOOC?

 (What MOOC means to me)

I have to admit I would not be drawn to a blog post entitled so vacuously as, "what MOOC means to me"  (so I thought up something catchy and made the real purpose of this post its subtitle). However, it's early days for working out what MOOC means for anyone.  People have different ideas about what MOOC means, period.  Obviously, the most relevant meaning is the one that reaches any one of us personally.  MOOC means a lot to me, I'm going to try to pin down that meaning here, and maybe this will help you get your own grip on what MOOC might mean to you.

John Hibbs and I presented on the topic November 14, 2012, at the Global Education Conference (http://www.globaleducationconference.com/, which Steve Hargadon has pointed out, is a conference on global education, not an international conference particularly).  John has prepared a few documents on his own blog:

• Our proposal, which John mainly wrote, with my feedback and input, is here: http://oregonhibbs.com/2012/10/29/moocs-global-ed-conference-presentation/#more-623
• John's "Willy Sutton" post: http://oregonhibbs.com/2012/11/13/crown-jewels-21st-century-diploma-mills/
• John wrote out his talk for the GEC conference and blogged it here:
  http://oregonhibbs.com/2012/11/14/global-conference-hibbs-prepared-remarks/#more-682

Here are our session artifacts:

• The Bb Collaborate recording is here:
• https://sas.elluminate.com/site/external/jwsdetect/nativeplayback.jnlp?sid=2008350&psid=2012-11-14.0429.D.53B5764000FF19A76D1D92E78857D7.vcr 
• TinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/2012nov14gec
• Our slide show, revised after the presentation:
  http://www.slideshare.net/vances/the-new-frontier-of-mooc 
• The mp3 version of the presentation is podcast here:
  http://vance_stevens.podomatic.com/entry/index/2012-11-15T07_04_05-08_00 

MOOCs for ESOL and language learning

There are two thrusts to the presentation.  One is that an excellent audience for MOOCs might be in ESOL and language learning in general.  To my knowledge, this is indeed an avenue not particularly explored or developed as MOOC, though my own online credentials stem from what might be viewed as one of many precursors to MOOCs.  Dave Cormier takes credit in the "The True History of the MOOC" for invention of the term MOOC in the spring of 2008 (mp3 available, http://www.downes.ca/presentation/300).  He does point out that there have been many MOOC-like configurations for learning since the 19th century, but that the term MOOC to describe them began with his inspiration, which Leigh Blackall says (in A True(er) History of Moocs http://www.leighblackall.com/2012/10/a-trueer-history-of-moocs.html), that MOOC's emergence as a meme for universities and businesses, has become 'irritating'.  I have argued that we had MOOCs before 2008 as well, one example being http://study.com, which offered language lessons to all comers, and which spawned Writing for Webheads, which started leaving artifacts online in 1998 <http://prosites-vstevens.homestead.com/files/efi/webheads.htm>.  So regarding what MOOC means to me, one interest I have in it is as a platform for what we were doing in 1998, when we were experimenting with platforms for teaching people ESOL and other languages for free online.

It was around this time that I became aware of John Hibbs's work in the pre-MOOC era.  John had created a web page from which he launched a virtual ship each year to make a journey around the world hour by hour in 24 time zones <http://www.bfranklin.edu/gld8/gld8.htm>.  He had organized people in different parts of the world to manage the program for that region and in 1999 I was tapped by the Middle East organizer Neil Hynd to make a presentation of some kind.  I remember that the first one I did, I was patched into the stream through a POTS phone line, but in subsequent years John was using Real Player for streaming the audio, Though our team again presented in 2001 from Abu Dhabi using a POTS phone patch, we listened via Real Player. At the time this was impressive stuff, right on the cutting edge. John was one of the first pioneers of free (that was unusual!) online seminars of educators who could meet in real time through his web pages. John's effort stimulated me to do something similar in organizing three WiAOC's (Webheads in Action Online Convergence), each one a 3-day round the clock free all-volunteer online conference that I coordinated in 2005, 2007, and 2009 <http://wiaoc.org>.

Webheads in Action (WiA, http://webheads.info) came about in response to the fact that an emerging community of educators had started overwhelming the ESOL student voices in the original  Writing for Webheads community.  How this happened has been documented elsewhere (e.g. http://tinyurl.com/tacon2012L2g), but again as far as MOOCs are concerned, Webheads began focusing on teachers as opposed to students when it started giving EVO (Electronic Village Online, http://evosessions.pbworks.com) sessions in 2002, and the WiA community grew from there, to over a 1000 members today in just the Yahoo Group alone.  Again, this is not meant to be a description of WiA or EVO, but simply to suggest that if WiA and EVO are considered to be courses, and if 1000 members is massive, then they are definitely open and online, and had we started them 6 years after we did we might have called them MOOCs.  At the time we called them variously groups, communities, and networks (Stevens, 2009).

multiMOOC

Meanwhile I have been teaching a Multiliteracies course for EVO and the last couple of years I've been utilizing MOOC elements in the course at http://goodbyegutenberg.pbworks.com.  It's essential for such a course to have a framework. When I started the course in 2004 I patterned that framework on Stuart Selber's aspects of functional, critical, and rhetorical multiliteracies.  After attending WorldCALL in 2008 and meeting Mark Pegrum there, I divided the course into the lenses through which he viewed the topic in From Blogs to Bombs.  But as I learned more about MOOCs and experienced them more and more firsthand, in 2011 I started dividing the topics of the available five weeks into those suggested in Dave Cormier's viral videos explaining the 5 steps to Success in a MOOC: orient, declare, network, cluster, and focus (this link will point you to all the videos in the series: http://youtu.be/r8avYQ5ZqM0).  Now, in 2013, I have renamed the course Multiliteracies-MOOC (or multiMOOC for short) and Ana Cristina Pratas and I are going to run it even more overtly as a MOOC, as described in the proposal and rationale here: http://TinyURL.com/EVO2013MultiMOOC).  

In this course, the syllabus is just a suggestion (orient). Participants decide, each individually, what they want to accomplish in the course (declare). They network with one another to collaborate on shared goals, they produce what I call Me-Portfolios to reflect on how well they have accomplished their goals, and this next time around I hope to introduce some form of badging to help participants focus their goals and vis a vis their accomplishments in the course. In our last Learning2gether event, on Sunday November 11, Jonathan Finkelstein offered to help us envisage and realize that through the LearningTimes BadgeStack facility, http://learning2gether.posterous.com/jonathan-finkelstein-walks-us-through-learnin.

So what is a MOOC course then?

First of all I should point out there there are different kinds of MOOCs, and mine is just one of those kinds.  Lisa Lane has isolated at least three strains in the wild, as shown in this graphic from her blog post here: http://lisahistory.net/wordpress/2012/08/three-kinds-of-moocs/.

In this scheme, multiMOOC would straddle network and task-based. Many people these days would make that distinction in reference to cMOOCs and xMOOCs. The kind of MOOC that I am emulating is a cMOOC, a connectivist one, where the course facilitator lays out a cohesive structure for what is to be learned but, in Siemens's words, does not walk the path for the participants, expecting them to follow <http://youtu.be/VMfipxhT_Co>.  The facilitator instead encourages the participants to find their own pathways through the material.  What George actually says is transcribed in part here:
http://goodbyegutenberg.pbworks.com/w/page/48177073/GettingStarted2012evo

"I’m not aware of any research actually that says linear structure produces better outcomes than more chaotic meandering structure. Our intent, based on our theories of learning is to argue that the experience of learning, making sense of that chaos, is actually the heart of the learning experience, but if an instructor makes sense of that chaos for you and gives you all the readings and sets the full path in place for you then to a degree you are eviscerating the learner’s experience because now you’ve made sense of them and all you’ve told them is walk the path that I’ve formed. When it comes to complexity I’m a great fan of letting learner’s hack their way through that path and getting the value of that learning experience and that sense-making process.”

If the facilitator for whatever reason (too many participants, thinks it's better if s/he stands aside) gives the responsibility for sense-making to participants in a MOOC, then they might negotiate how to make sense of their syllabus with one another.  This is where the massive part of MOOC kicks in.  If the critical mass of participants is correct, then nuclear fission will occur in some people's brains, and they will be driven to blog and tag and comment on each other's posts, and leave reflections up as artifacts on the web. If the MOOC is run by Stephen Downes then it aggregates these posts through a script called gRSShopper <http://grsshopper.downes.ca/description.htm> and publishes them each day in a daily 'newsletter' generated from that aggregated content.  If the MOOC is run by me then we have to replace the word 'massive' in its acronym with something more appropriate to the scale of the venture, say, 'minuscule' for example.

In any event, this addresses the first issue of our presentation, the appropriateness of MOOCs to teaching ESOL and other languages.  Also the kind of MOOC best suited to a communicative and socially-driven endeavor such as language-learning is cMOOC, based on the concept as initiated by Siemens and Downes, with Cormier's contribution of the just-so acronym. As for why anyone would want to run such a course, the Internet is full of sites already where language teachers are competing with one another to share their knowledge with students in the most clever way possible, for free. Stephen Downes was once asked why he would flog himself across the back with a course open to thousands (of course, they didn't know at the time it would attract so many :-) when he could have left it at just the two dozen enrolled in the course at the college, and he replied simply, because he would learn from it.  This is the prime motivator for setting up a cMOOC.

xMOOC vs cMOOC

I thought* George Siemens (2012) had coined the term xMOOC when he added a tentative ? to his remarks about "the well-financed MOOCs by Coursera and edX (xMOOCS?)."  While taking pains to explain that feedback on xMOOCs suggested they were effective in achieving  their purposes, he went on to explain: 

Our MOOC model emphasizes creation, creativity, autonomy, and social networked learning. The Coursera model emphasizes a more traditional learning approach through video presentations and short quizzes and testing. Put another way, cMOOCs focus on knowledge creation and generation whereas xMOOCs focus on knowledge duplication.

(* However Stephen Downes takes credit for that distinction at 61 minutes into this recording: http://youtu.be/DGaUfWkJdi4)

This brings us to the second brunt of John's post, the second thrust of our presentation, and this is that MOOCs, and by this John means xMOOCs, as conceived by Coursera and Mechanical MOOC, might damage hard-earned university branding.  John and I have both enrolled in such courses.  I have experienced the very humanistic gentle reminders and suggestions issued by Mechanical MOOC, http://www.i-programmer.info/news/150-training-a-education/4684-mechanical-mooc-offers-introductory-python-.html, almost as if there was a human there, while John can (and will in the presentation) document very different experiences of frustration with Coursera. John's contention is that in their rush to sign on with mechanical courseware generators, universities might be weakening the quality of their offerings until the purveyors of such courses can improve their quality to the standard of instruction expected from those institutions.  Though written to a different topic, Siemens's quotable "there's no there there" springs to mind from the anecdotal evidence that John reports (Siemens's quotable article: http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2011/07/30/losing-interest-in-social-media-there-is-no-there-there/).

John's is not a voice in the wilderness. Mike James in an article in I Programmer says that "the methods used by the hugely successful courses are little changed from the dark ages" http://www.i-programmer.info/professional-programmer/i-programmer/4494-massive-open-online-courses-fail-students-with-dark-age-methods.html.  James refers to Sebastian Thun's co-professor in the Stanford AI course, Peter Norvig, who had made reference to the dark ages in his TED Talk on the AI MOOC, http://www.i-programmer.info/news/150-training-a-education/4398-peter-norvig-on-the-100000-student-classroom.html.

But this article is about what MOOC means to me (to me it means "cMOOC").  However, the extrapolation of the MOOC concept to xMOOC is I think part of what is irritating both John Hibbs and Leigh Blackall.  When Sebastian Thun took the MOOC concept to the point where he demonstrated that he could not only teach Artificial Intelligence in a MOOC, and scale that to thousands of comers, AND assess and evaluate those participants through algorithms developed by Amazon, the proof of concept he had shown was xMOOC.  Thun proved the concept so well that he decided his tenured position at Stanford was beneath him and left there to work for Google and ended up with his own xMOOC, Udacity, (http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/nov/11/online-free-learning-end-of-university).  Thun is fully convinced that he made the right move, and he might be recognized as a visionary for it, and like Stephen Downes he will surely learn from the experience, but the motivation for this effort is more toward the flip side of education from that of cMOOC.  Whereas one obvious limitation of cMOOC is that participants need to be highly motivated self-starters who are driven to learn about a particular topic, xMOOC is addressed more at the masses, the hoards of students for whom expensive Ivy League education (or increasingly, even community college education) is less and less an option.  Candace Thille, director of the OLI at Carnegie Mellon University, worries that this development might lead to a "bifurcation" in educational opportunities in the not-that-distant future, http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/05/10/candace-thille-talks-moocs-and-machine-learning.

Given the downward spiral in the world's economies and shortage of resources, abundance is a word more and more applied to knowledge resources than to natural and manufactured ones, which are approaching scarcity.  Where the ascendancy of knowledge abundance intersects with the increasing lack of natural and economic resources, xMOOCs may well be the most viable path of quality education for learners of the future. John's point has to do with the present state of the quality of THAT instruction, and how that might impact branding of universities associated with the current xMOOC players.

When is a MOOC not a MOOC?

So as not to get off on a semantic battle, technically, a MOOC is a MOOC if it has lots of participants, if it's open to anyone, which means for free (otherwise it wouldn't be open), if it's online, and if it's a course. All of the sites mentioned in this post are MOOCs in that broad definition.

So my conclusion applies to the spirit of MOOC, what I in my heart of hearts feel is MOOC in its pure form.

If I were to conceive of a diagram giving the whole spectrum of MOOC from the 19th century (as Cormier mentions) up through the 20th (with http://study.com and Writing for Webheads) and into the turn of the century (where for example EVO started teaching open courses massively online) - then I would put those early efforts off to the left and place cMOOC as conceived in 2008 squarely in the center, with the current evolution of xMOOCs veering off to the right and into the future.

I would say that open online courses we used to organize and try to scale massively predated a window of opportunity for social networking and aggregation of content that the cMOOCs slotted nicely into.  And I would say that these early efforts depart from what I think of as truly MOOC about as equally as do the later renditions, which though technically massive, open, online, and courses lack a lot of the flavor of the middle-cMOOCs by virtue of not having well developed the connectivist aspects of the 2008 model.

MOOCs in the future: A return to center?

Stephen Downes thinks that MOOCs must evolve in a return to their roots.  He illustrates this for us in a sketch in the Bb Collaborate / Elluminate version of the True History of MOOC (shown in this screen shot from
https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2012-09-26.0742.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350).

The sketch began with MOOCs in the middle and with the entities at the end of each line setting up free open online courses but monetizing some aspect in the form of accreditation, help facilities, etc.  The circle around MOOC indicates that MOOCs utilize OER (open education resources) and the "open web of content" as illustrated in the diagram Stephen inserted and then relegated to the top left corner. Then Steve Hargadon asked in the discussion if these entities (the new xMOOCs) were paying tribute to their roots in cMOOC.  Stephen said off the top of his head, "no" but did note that in something he had come across lately, it was found that the biggest predictor of success at Harvard (apart from getting into Harvard) was participation in study groups.  As others commented, Stephen proceeded to wipe the MOOC from the center of his diagram and put in xMOOC with study groups forming around any given xMOOC.

Stephen then explained, for xMOOC to be truly viable, it will inevitably have to move in the direction of cMOOC.  In his words, “The connectivism model will become the primary model … [xMOOCs] have to grow to become cMOOCS ... They will do that over time." You heard it first there, read it first here :-)

Referenced websites

Blackall, Leigh. (2012). A true(er) history of MOOCs. Open and Networked Learning. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://www.leighblackall.com/2012/10/a-trueer-history-of-moocs.html.

Downes, Stephen. (2012). A true history of the MOOC. Stephen's Web. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://www.downes.ca/presentation/300.

Hargadon, Steve. (2012). Tonight - A true history of the MOOC. Education, technology, social media, and you! Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://www.stevehargadon.com/2012/09/tonight-true-history-of-mooc.html.

Hibbs, John. (2012). MOOCs Global Education Conference Presentation. Ben Franklin. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://oregonhibbs.com/2012/10/29/moocs-global-ed-conference-presentation/

Hibbs, John. (2012). MOOCs For Credit – Coursera & Antioch. Ben Franklin. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://oregonhibbs.com/2012/10/30/moocs-for-credit-coursera-antioch/.

Hibbs, John. (2012). Crown Jewels, 21st Century Diploma Mills, MOOCs on the Moon. Ben Franklin. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://oregonhibbs.com/2012/11/13/crown-jewels-21st-century-diploma-mills/

Hibbs, John. (2012). Global conference Hibbs prepared remarks. Ben Franklin. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://oregonhibbs.com/2012/11/14/global-conference-hibbs-prepared-remarks/#more-682.

James, Mike. (2012). MOOCs Fail Students With Dark Age Methods. I Programmer. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://www.i-programmer.info/professional-programmer/i-programmer/4494-massive-open-online-courses-fail-students-with-dark-age-methods.html.

James, Mike. (2012). Peter Norvig On The 100,000-Student Classroom. I Programmer. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://www.i-programmer.info/news/150-training-a-education/4398-peter-norvig-on-the-100000-student-classroom.html.

Kolowich, Steve. (2012). MOOCs and Machines. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/05/10/candace-thille-talks-moocs-and-machine-learning.

Lane, Lisa. (2012). Lisa's (Online) Teaching Blog. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://lisahistory.net/wordpress/2012/08/three-kinds-of-moocs/.

Pegrum, Mark. (2009). From Blogs to Bombs: The Future of Digital Technologies in Education. UWA Publishing, Crawley, Western Australia.

Selber, Stuart. (2004). Multiliteracies for a digital age. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Siemens, George. (2012). MOOCs are really a platform. Elearnspace. http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2012/07/25/moocs-are-really-a-platform/

Stevens, Vance. (2009). Modeling Social Media in Groups, Communities, and Networks. TESL-EJ, Volume 13, Number 3: http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/past-issues/volume13/ej51/ej51int/.

Stevens, Vance. (forthcoming). Learning2gether: Wiki-based worldwide teacher professional development Paper presented at the annual TESOL Arabia conference in Dubai, March 9, 2012. Submitted for publication in the proceeds. Version available online: http://tinyurl.com/tacon2012L2g.

Tracey, Ryan. (2012). The future of MOOCs. E-learning Provocateur. http://ryan2point0.wordpress.com/2012/11/26/the-future-of-moocs/

A cookbook for 21st century project management

I just returned to Abu Dhabi from the CALICO conference in Amherst where I talked about my chapter in the book for which I was a section editor and that was featured on CALICO’s portal web page prior to the conference https://calico.org/page.php?id=452;. The book is on CALL in limited technological contexts and my chapter  “Shifting sands, shifting paradigms:  Challenges to developing 21st century learning skills in the United Arab Emirates” discusses not limited technology per se, but limited experience with the latest uses of technology causing educators to not exploit its full potential and benefits.  I point out in my chapter what some of the hurdles are preventing teachers from embracing the new technologies and I set forth a strategy for overcoming them.  In a nutshell the strategy explains how we can be change agents by getting our colleagues to interact with us using 21st century Web 2.0 technology tools and writing use of these tools into the curriculum where they are taught by teachers whom we help to familiarize with some of the uses and affordances of these tools.

I posted the slide show outlining the chapter at Slideshare.net, direct link  http://tinyurl.com/vance2010amherst. I put the full text of my final draft of the book chapter itself at Google Docs and create a tiny url for it at http://tinyurl.com/vance2010calico.  The text is hyperlinked from the slide show, and I linked to the slides from the Google Doc. I hope to make a slidecast for the slide show and podcast that at http://vancestevens.podomatic.com/ if I can find a spare moment.  This would further model my ideas for teacher training, and for helping students acquire the multimedia skills essential to communication in the 21st century.

The paper articulates what is needed for several projects I’ve got going at the moment.  The slides would probably get me through several talks I’m giving in Brazil and Argentina in July and August this summer.  For example, in my presentations at BrazTESOL I’ll be talking about some of the affordances of teaching and learning through a PLN (personal learning network) and the social networking, tagging, RSS, and paradigm shifting associated with that concept.

I know I need to couch all these topics, unfamiliar to many, in terms that teachers can easily understand, to help them see the benefits and importance to them. It won’t be the first time I have addressed such audiences; for example, explaining tagging to Ministry of Education English teachers at their most recent Nile TESOL Conference, where they were in Cairo and I presented online from Abu Dhabi  http://justcurious.posterous.com/powerful-ideas-and-tools-for-getting-the-most-0.

I wrote the book chapter in 2009 after having proposed a set of technological innovations to a previous director of the department where I work, but I have since got my teeth into some other projects, which I hope will help teachers learn more about the technologies they might be using with students as they prepare to teach from materials I am writing in conjunction with one of these projects.

Curriculum for students

In curriculum development, I am helping to develop a computing support course to students in an intensive English program at the Petroleum Institute.  My part of this project is to create curriculum introducing tools such as Google Docs and Delicious to support an English dept. focus on collaboration, team building, and Internet search.  The problem for teachers is that in order for them to effectively teach these skills to students they have to themselves be experienced users of the tools.  As this is not yet the case, I will need to find ways for the English teachers to use the tools in the run-up to these components being taught.

My plan is to create documents for them in Google Docs, create a project tag, and show the teachers how we can track latest versions of shared documents pertaining to our own collaboration and find them online via Delicious and other tools that will track tags.

Community building and professional development for teachers

I’ve been speaking and writing at length for much of the time I’ve been at the Petroleum Institute on these tools and on my many experiments with how they can be used with students as well as teachers in their professional development, but it is only recently that there has been wide enough interest among colleagues with whom I work face-to-face to allow me to take my ideas mainstream.

One manifestation of this interest is where colleagues and I in TESOL Arabia are rejuvenating the TESOL Arabia EdTech-SIG with emphasis on online potentials for promoting the “three C’s” of collaboration, communication, and creativity.  Jim Buckingham and I kicked off this latest phase in a joint presentation recently at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi where we connected with Phil Cozens presenting on-site that same morning in far-away Ras Al Khaima http://justcurious.posterous.com/modeling-and-demonstrating-professional-devel.  We used the Adobe Connect platform that PI recently purchased and where I have been granted permission to set up and conduct online meetings.

Since that success, those interested in taking the lead on promoting use of such tools in the UAE have met online to discuss leveraging them to help bring teachers up to speed with technology throughout the UAE.  To this end we might have regular online training sessions this coming year, and the English teachers at the PI might want to get involved, in part as a preparation for teaching the intensive English course in the Fall.  So these developments could play into one another.

A further opportunity for teacher training will arise when I teach my PPOT (Principles and Practices of Online Teaching course on Multiliteracies online again for TESOL from September 3 to October 6, 2010 http://www.tesol.org/s_tesol/sec_document.asp?CID=664&DID=2642. I am planning to run the course in conjunction with a face-to-face continuing education course for colleagues at the PI where the live audience can benefit from interaction with the distributed one and visa versa. If English teachers at the PI take advantage of that then this will serve to ground them in some of the tools and competencies they’ll need to most effectively teach the materials I’m creating for our students.  One of the English teachers completed my previous rendition of that course http://tinyurl.com/21centuryskills4pdo, so we’ve made a start here already.

Tagging

To organize and promote such courses and show how the many parts of the overall endeavor are loosely joined, I am starting to conceive of a cookbook for 21st century project management.  Here is its first item, a recipe for getting a project off the ground using open education resources.

1.       The first thing you should do is agree on a tag for your project.  For example, the one we agreed on for the TESOL Arabia EdTech SIG was taedtechsig.  Some of us had already been using uaedu which seemed like a nice choice until we tested it in Twitter and with Spezify and found it was already in use and that some of the hits were not especially educational: http://twitter.com/#search?q=eduae and http://spezify.com/#/eduae.  Similarly, we found that edtechsig produced hits from NileTESOL in Cairo http://spezify.com/#/edtechsig. Now this brings up another point.  If we wish to aggregate content only for us then we need to create our own unique tag (taedtechsig produces no competing hits, thereby fitting this bill).  However, if we wish to call attention to colleagues in Egypt to what we are doing then we could use their tag, and our content will appear when they attempt to aggregate their own.

So two affordances of tags can be immediately seen.  First, they can help you aggregate content on your topic.  That is, if we want to see content placed on the Web related to this topic, we can use certain tools to locate and pull into one place content where its creators have used that tag, and second, if we want to create content and bring it to the attention of colleagues in a common endeavor,  we can tag it, and hope they will be able to find it.

For TESOL Arabia EdTech SIG I will use the two tags that will cause content I view or create to aggregate with other content tagged taedtechsig, and also I’ll tag the same content edtechsig in an effort to get the attention of our colleagues in Egypt.

2.       The second way to loosely join the disparate parts of a 21st century project is to tag them.  Tagging can be done initially by creators of content. However, consumers of content can also tag content they find online using Delicious or Diigo, or other such tools.

Delicious for example can be used to illustrate to both teachers and students how quickly a web site tagged by one user can become known to another.  Delicious is a great way for anyone collaborating on a project involving Internet research to see what has been found by team members, or a way of aggregating content on a tag; see for example, http://delicious.com/tag/writingmatrix.

As another example, both creators and consumers of content on Flickr can tag there. In other words, if I post a photo on Flickr I can give that photo (or set of photos) a tag. However, I can also tag photos I find interesting on Flickr (assuming I’m logged on to Flickr, and that the photo has been granted a creative commons license allowing others to tag it).  Many are familiar with this same concept from Facebook, where we can tag photos of friends there, and the site provides a means for seeing on one page all the photos tagged for a particular user.

So to summarize this as a recipe in the cookbook, once your group has settled on a tag, then all members should tag as many sites used by the group as possible. This can be done by both creators and consumers of that content. Group members who create content (post photos or create blog posts, for example) should apply the agreed on tag to that content.  Those who view that content online should tag it using their preferred social bookmark system.  Then search tools such as Spezify and Delicious and Diigo can be used to find content as it aggregates around that tag.

Another important use of tags is as ‘hash tags’ or #tags in Twitter.  Using #tags has affordances beyond a simple search.  You can search in Twitter and find #tags (and other content matching your search) but if you use #tags then you can click on them to bring up all content using that #tag.

The 3 C’s

Use of these techniques puts the “3 C’s” of 21st Century Learning into your online projects and those of your students.  The three C’s are communication, collaboration, and creativity.  Here are a few ways that these are addressed through the cookbook for 21st century project management.  These lists are simply starters; they could be added to endlessly.

COMMUNICATION
(how you can communicate with others in your group using these techniques)

• Create a tag for your project
• Create a portal and link all of your stuff here
• Create a #tag
• Tag all sites and associated sites in Delicious and Diigo
• Tag other artifacts as needed
• Set up Tag Games to see what others are tagging

COLLABORATION
(how you can work with others online)

• Wiki for content (like this one!)
• Etherpad clone
• Ning Alternatives (see http://tinyurl.com/ningthing)
• Cloudworks
• Spruz
• Mixxt
• Grou.ps
• Etc. etc.

CREATIVITY
(some ways you can be creative and innovative using Web 2.0 tools)

• Wordle
• Wallwisher
• Tag Gallaxy (works only with Flickr)

In an attempt to crowdsource additions to this list, I've created a wiki here:

http://21centuryskills4pdo.pbworks.com/FrontPage

If you'd like to add more tools, visit that link and add them, and I'll synch the lists from time to time
(must be a better way :-( Vance :-))

Thanks to these tweeters in my PLN :-))

To teach is to learn: Modeling, demonstrating, reflection and practice

Recently, a member of my personal learning network has asked me to advise her on a training strategy for introducing CALL to teachers in Algeria. I've had some experience with her situation; though it is universal across cultures for appropriate uses of technology to be misunderstood by educators, particular contexts have their particular concerns. I've long been trying to make inroads on computer literacy and multiliteracies in Oman and the UAE, and even in Tunisia in 2004: http://prosites-vstevens.homestead.com/files/efi/papers/tunisia2004/mahdia.htm.

One problem with the Tunisian event was that its organizers could not articulate beforehand what it was they wanted me to do there. They wanted me to show them how to teach online, so when I arrived I implemented a program whereby I got the participants blogging, and I took pictures and put them online, and tried to get the teachers acting as a community. I got some resistance at the time in the form of: OK, we don't know what we want, but this isn't what we expected! Blogging? They did it and many enjoyed it, but the majority didn't see the point. However, now, six years later, the YahooGroup I set up for them still functions and I'm still in touch off and on with some of the teachers I met there via some of the artifacts we placed online way back then.

I think I've been modeling this form of training ever since. I've just had an interesting experience with my students, on the occasion of International Earth Day April 22, 2010. Events of this nature are gaining traction where I work; there was another barely a month ago: http://justcurious.posterous.com/arzanah-campus-participation-in-the-march-11

To organize the project, I created a wiki for them using Etherpad technology. Etherpad is a company that's been absorbed by Google and the technology is now apparent in the greater collaboration speed of Google Docs. The code for Etherpad is open source so it's been replicated at other sites now that the original Etherpad no longer functions.

So here at http://typewith.me/GzXAtU8oml I introduced the concept of wiki and writing collaboratively on the web, by anyone, for free without passwords. This concept is set in the context of a practical site where students can see that they can contribute (on the typewith.me site, they all wrote in their session descriptions, prompted only by a note in the wiki asking them to do that). A model for project management is established, where participants can collaborate and communicate and display creativity (the 3 c's of 21st century learning).

The Wikispace site http://earthbridges.wikispaces.com/Earthcast+2010 was the wiki used for organizing the event in the first place. In looking at the history of this wiki we see how the seed was planted and how it grew into a full-blown project and successful event with hundreds of collaborators around the world on April 22, 2010. (This led my students into a discussion of how a wiki's history protects it from vandalism, and how that works with Wikipedia; with Jon Udell's viral screencast on "Heavy Metal Umlaut" serving as an instructive example: http://jonudell.net/udell/gems/umlaut/umlaut.html).

For our portal I created the much easier to remember TinyURL:http://tinyurl.com/earthcast10pi. Now we've expanded the notion of Web 2.0 with the concept of creating URLs that are mnemonic and shortened (especially important if you want to tweet them).

If you look at the content of the typewith.me portal site you find that Twitter is well represented here. It is one of the ways we announced our event, and there is evidence here of responses on Twitter, so we weren't working in a vacuum, far from it. By connecting students with real people, Web 2.0 makes learning relevant to them.

An even more direct connection with real people was achieved using Adobe Connect, which was slotted into another event, the 24-hour "earthcast" webcastathon at http://earthbridges.net. Through this event, more contact with students and other teachers was made via Java chat, live streaming, and Skype backchannels. Participants become aware of the world of knowledge seekers available to them, and how to contact and keep in touch with them.

The Adobe Connect event produced a recording, so an archive was made here: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/6357041. More archives were created in the blogs that I keep and was writing in to announce the event, which might have (or might still) attract comments; e.g. http://justcurious.posterous.com/earthcast-2010-at-the-petroleum-institute-abu. This post illustrates one of the wonderful affordances of Jing, http://jingproject.com, the free webcast tool that gives your images and screencasts URLs which you can embed in an email to your post@posterous.com so the picture comes out displayed in the blog post (I still marvel at that!)

Archived recordings, blog posts, and site portals preserve the event online after it has ended and give participants a greater understanding of the importance to them and to others of the phenomenon in which they took part. Further learning could occur if the students themselves would write blog posts, and accumulate these and other artifacts appearing online through aggregation on their tags, but this is the next level of understanding of how the web works and hangs together as a cohesive networking device and repository of knowledge (and how that knowledge is accessible through personal learning networks) - see http://justcurious.posterous.com/powerful-ideas-and-tools-for-getting-the-most-0

One such tool modeled, demonstrated here is Delicious, which uses common tags for keeping track of links pertaining to the event and for communicating socially what links others are finding. The common tag for the event my students participated in was earthcast10. That tag can be searched in Twitter at http://twitter.com/#search?q=earthcast10, and to get a good illustrated overview of what how the event was celebrated around the world, visit http://spezify.com/#/earthcast10.

These tools taken in and of themselves can appear too numerous and overwhelming to beginners, but when pieced together into a project such as this one, how the components work together is easily understandable. The idea is for the teacher to model the use of each part, to bring tools to bear on an as-needed basis, and the learners learn by using the tools. The learners in this case had conceivably used or heard of none of these tools beforehand. The tools were simply placed before them and they used them as they needed them. They aren't hard to use and they work well for what people want to accomplish. It's not necessary that each person know about all of the tools, but only that someONE knows about these and others and can place the tools near the learners where they are needed, and model the use of the others as they come in handy.

In my own experience working this semester with students I find that it would help if they had some preparation in the course of their traditional classwork, because depending on the nature of the project, they don't necessarily see the affordances of the tools, and can end up not taking advantage of them. I have tried to address this by mainstreaming some materials I use with my students, here: http://issuu.com/vances/docs/social_networking_2009_lessons1-3.

When students respond to the modeling, demonstrating, and reflection put into practice, the result can be a transformative learning experience. And to make it happen teachers need to be connected in order to create and be available for opportunities to collaborate on projects such as this one, into which students can be drawn. In Downes's scheme, where teaching is to model and demonstrate, and learning is to reflect and practice, I model the learning part by creating posts such as this one, where I reflect on the experience and try to understand how it happened, and then put the next iteration into practice with my students. My own addition to the Downes scheme is to teach is to learn, by which I mean it's a percolative process, one that true teachers model as they re-learn how to learn, and then show the way to students, whom we are training for jobs and careers that haven't even been invented yet.

coda

To cap a busy day I participated in a second Adobe Connect event on April 22, as one of the panelists on a Virtual Round Table discussion of EVO's global training camp. Here I got to articulate some of these views having just come away from the Earth Day event. A recording should appear eventually here: http://virtual-round-table.ning.com/events/panel-discussion-evos-global. This topic of teacher training and how to inculcate the "culture" of learning necessitated by changes we face in the 21st century figured heavily in the discussion.  The word culture was introduced there by Barbara Dieu, and it speaks to the difficulty of the task to realize that a person of her calibre and expertise, a world-reknowned leader and frequent speaker on the educational applications of social media, appears unappreciated and marginalized in her own workplace.

Eventually I'll podcast the recording of this discussion at my Vance's GeekSpeek http://vance_stevens.podomatic.com/. Podcasting is perhaps a third level of a CALL training strategy, what I am now calling SMALL, or social media assisted language learning. There will be a discussion of that topic at the next Virtual Round Table panel on which I will sit later today: http://virtual-round-table.ning.com/events/panel-discussion-connected-and. This should be an interesting discussion because Stephen Bax will be there, and we might discuss whether CALL has become essentially normalized, and would SMALL be the next challenge for computer-based language learning?  Stay tuned to find out more :-) ...

Modeling your PLN: Backchanneling with Students

When many of us think about PLN, or Personal Learning Network, what we envisage involves colleagues sharing information in a social network or community of practice (see http://delicious.com/vancestevens/PLN and http://delicious.com/vancestevens/PLE for numerous examples; and I've always liked Scott Leslie's nice collection of PLE diagrams: http://edtechpost.wikispaces.com/PLE+Diagrams.

We less often think about setting up PLN's with students, but at http://tinyurl.com/vance-socialnet09 I list one of the ten paradigm shifts that I think educators must make as they move into facilitating learning in the 21st century as being "transfer [or] using technology and social media in one walk of life and then transferring those heuristics for learning into the classroom and other teaching situations. For example, people who frequently use Facebook or Twitter might tend not to use social networking or backchanneling in the classroom, because they don't see how to transfer what they do in one part of their life to how they manage their more formal teaching and learning environment, because it's not in the curriculum, etc."

Educators backchannel through their PLNs but in fact we should all be doing this with students (see "Where 3 R's meet 3 C's" about what we should be teaching as 21st century life skills: creativity, communication, collaboration - http://www.britannica.com/bps/additionalcontent/18/34037342/The-Three-Rs-Meet-the-Three-Cs). We should be modeling how we network in order to show students how they can do the same in order to become productive knowledge workers in those jobs in the future that haven't been invented yet, as articulated in http://webheadlink.wordpress.com/2007/01/08/jobs-that-havent-been-invented-yet/.

The problem is where networks might collide, as when we mix our social networks on Facebook or Twitter with the very different worlds of our students, and risk distracting clutter in our professional networks if students are allowed into them, or suspicion of impropriety at worst.

Twitter itself has introduced a solution: LISTS. Now you can create a list for your students or separate classes of students and add them to the appropriate list without having to "follow" them. In this way, they don't appear in your Twitter stream, but you can open a LIST and catch up with what they are up to that way.

There are other means of backchanneling in classrooms. Edmodo is one which I have used with students. It works well if people in the class monitor it, but the problem is, it isn't 'real'. We go to Twitter every day in the course of our normal workflow. You check Edmodo only when it occurs to you. Your students do the same. It lacks traction. But many teachers use it as a backchannel tool similar to Twitter, and because you need a code to join a group, it's safe for students.

Another good backchannel tool is Etherpad. This tool was so good that Google bought it to use its technology in Wave. Consequently the tool at http://etherpad.com is shutting down this month (http://etherpad.com/ep/blog/posts/transition-update). However its code has been released as opensource (http://code.google.com/p/etherpad/) so it has already been resurrected in other implementations, and its code will live on as part of Google Wave, which could serve as a model for backchanneling with students or on any kind of project in their productive lives in the future (though a tool that would be effective with students needs to be a lot simpler to use than Wave is right now).

You can use Delicious or Twitter or Google to find other sites that have used the Etherpad code already; e.g. http://twitter.com/#search?q=etherpad and http://delicious.com/tag/etherpad. Readers of this post could help one another by leaving links in comments below to sites that use the Etherpad code; for example: http://piratepad.net/ and http://typewith.me/.

As to why we'd want to backchannel with students, I've found a couple of articles that explain the rationale and suggest some tools:

• This one is something of a classic: http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2008/twitter-for-academia/
• Here's an article that talks about 9 ways Twitter can be used in the classroom: http://derekbruff.com/teachingwithcrs/?p=472. These include note-taking, sharing resources, commenting, amplifying, asking, questions, helping one another, offering suggestions, building community, and opening the classroom
• For backchannel tools: http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2010/01/five-platforms-for-classroom-back.html. The tools introduced are Chatzy, Todaysmeet, Edmodo, Present.ly, and Google Wave
• I've got almost 200 bookmarks for Twitter here: http://delicious.com/vancestevens/twitter, many of them mentioning ways Twitter can be used with students.

This posting derives directly from my PLN.  It was originally a response to Lori Teng's comment on my post in one of my other blogs here: http://justcurious.posterous.com/how-to-start-your-pln-on-twitter.  If Lori hadn't commented on that post, and triggered in my brain all the synapses there I'd been storing up related to backchanneling with students, this article would never have been written.

This post therefore is yet another example of how a PLN works to cause us to model and demonstrate for one another, to reflect on and practice what we are learning, and to percolate how we develop our knowledge back into our communities and networks in an ongoing process of lifelong learning.

NOTES:
This post figured into a presentation I gave for a TESOL Arabia chapter event April 10, 2010.  The blog posting for that event, including a link to its recording, is here:
http://justcurious.posterous.com/modeling-and-demonstrating-professional-devel

Here are some Twitter reactions to this post:
http://screencast.com/t/NjI5YWY0M

Modeling social media in groups, communities, and networks

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

AVEALMEC Conference on Social Networking November 5-8, 2009

In the picture you can see a group of people I'll be joining in early November at a conference with infinite heart but no walls. But I'm having a heck of a time getting the slide show done for my presentation there because I'm so distracted. I'm up before dawn. I was looking for graphics till late last night searching Google Images and Flickr and Creative Commons for images I can use in my presentation. This alone could take hours wandering through other people's flights of fancy, which they have elected to SHARE; to allow me to put online if I will only acknowledge their hand in their own work, to pay forward to the community (Mireille's term on Webcast Academy). Creating a slide show for a respected audience is a journey where every step takes you halfway there; you never arrive!

I stop to reflect here, how did I KNOW about Creative Commons, and what it means? How did I know I could find CC images at Flickr and the Creative Commons website, and turn the license filter on for Google Images? Did I read that somewhere or hear it word of mouth? Yes, I did, but not in a book or in any traditional media. As we speak, Twitter is constantly bleeping my radar, and even my Gmail is flooding me with messages on the latest SCoPE seminar, The Art of Teaching (looks to be a great one). I just joined the Educator's PLN Ning ... now that's kind of a mirror within a mirror, messages are coming through for existing participants to Twitter in more (yet another layer of mirror within mirror).

I'm not sure what's going on with George Siemens's and Stephen Downes's CCK09 at the moment but I heard on EdTech Weekly that it had only a few hundred participants, not bad for a free online course, but down from its mega-status of thousands in its initial rendition. I know that Alec Couros is giving an interesting Open Course at the moment (which I had every intention of joining but never did), and Leigh Blackall is starting one as well, both of these inviting participants from anywhere, for whatever reason or benefit they hope to gain from it. I've never met either Alec or Leigh, but I've invited both to give keynote talks at WiAOC free online conferences, and both readily agreed. Why? Heike Philp has offered to try and set up a live synchronous discussion online with anyone her PLN suggests. Someone said, ok, I'd like to talk with Noam Chomsky. So she asked him, he agreed, she set up the discussion, and now anyone can replay the recording. News about all these events reaches not just me but everyone in my extended social network in ways we didn't have available last year, last month, yesterday even ... how about tomorrow, Google Wave anyone?

These events and courses have a wonderful dynamic, one that I apply instinctively to the EVO Multiliteracies course I'm about to moderate again. I don't really have time for any of these courses, nor for preparing for my ALVEALMEC presentation for that matter. My professional development cup runneth over with creative juices that spill in all directions. Matt Montaigne is one of these teachers who seems to be everywhere at once, pushing people forward in their learning with this project and that (Earth Day webcasts, for example, on the Worldbridges Network). I was surprised to hear him say on a recent EdTechTalk shows that these efforts were chaos, he gets them started and then they just surge this way and that and leave messes that no one sees and no one mops up, but enough energy reaches the target that the impression is one of sustained and directed effort. Why am I surprised? I'm like that. I imagine many creative people are, minds as cluttered as an artist's atelier. It would be interesting to sound some of the other presenters at this conference on social networking out on exactly that topic.

This is how energy is harnessed and channeled in a PLN. It's messy. And while trying to focus on meeting an arbitrary deadline to prepare slides for a presentation to be given two weeks hence (if it were two days, I would be genuinely focused; there's nothing like a real deadline!) I am moving all over the network that brought me to this point. If not for the network, I would not have been given the opportunity to make the presentation. If not for the network, I'd be able to actually put this presentation together in a timely manner. But you can't have the upside without the downside, so we need to get used to it, and revel in it!

Seth Godin has introduced the notion of "tribes" as being groups of people who congeal around an idea that some dominant figure within that tribe leads. Switching conventional notions on its head, charisma he says, is not what the leader needs to attract followers, it's what the leader gets from the act of leading others, or better said, moving to the forward position where the leader appears to be at the head of where the tribe was going in the first place. It's an interesting concept, and hopefully a tribe is something that can be subsumed in the framework of the talk I'm giving at AVEALMEC.

In this brief posting I've again taken a step leading me only halfway to my destination. But each step needs to end (even as the destination shifts like an amorphous paradigm. Wasn't it just there? Where is it now?) so I'll wrap up this thought. Where have I arrived in this step? This posting has been about the role of a network of peers and their peers which is constantly channeling us information which we can use to convert to the knowledge that makes us interesting enough that others will invite us to speak at gatherings ranging in formality from conferences (online or face to face) to ad hoc discussions (again, online or face to face).

If you follow this out to its logical end, it means that any of us in the network is potentially interesting enough, and therefore no better than, anyone who is speaking to them at a conference. I say potentially, because the information is there, but it has to be aggregated and processed into knowledge, and then be communicated effectively. Some people are better at that than others, or simply have more time. The network provides the information but the better the network the more time it consumes. Those of us who are getting used to that reality are reveling in it, and exuding an energy that makes us want to share our passion with others, like those who created and shared the graphics that I'll put in my presentation, as part of the scaffolding on the launching pad I am trying to create for the talk I plan to give at AVEALMEC.

The more I learn about this conference, the more I see of the buildup and the accumulation of artifacts on the web, the more I anticipate being a part of it. I'm looking forward to savoring the aggregation of content and hearing what the speakers have to say. This conference has a very appealing look and feel. It's being done right. Congratulations to those putting it on! For more information: http://avealmec.org.ve/

Personas and the multiliterate curriculum vitae

I just posted this to YouTube:

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

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

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

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

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

Social Networking for students and teachers who only know Facebook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The New Webheads

The Webheads "gallery" (the one here: http://vancestevens.com/papers/evonline2002/webheads_evo.htm) has become well-known within certain distributed learning networks. Webheads arose in a Web 1.0 era and its webmaster-maintained artifacts have long been overtaken by Web 2.0 ones.

I stumbled on Twitter Mosaic http://sxoop.com/twitter/ via one of Hala Fawzi's blogs: http://englishonlinects.blogspot.com/.

Voila! The new Webheads gallery (happily most of those spam followers seem to have been filtered out when their accounts were suspended; I wonder if this updates live :-). Incidentally if you don't want someone appearing in your mosaic you can click on that person's avatar to delete it from the final result, simple.

This visualization has allowed me to see my personal learning network in a new light. This is the first visualization that I've become aware of where I could picture my network so clearly. Each thumbnail has a mouse-over that not only reveals a Twitter user name, but lets you click on the user name and pull up a Twitter profile. At that profile I can have a look at the follower's posts and if I think I'd like to see more posts like that, I can conveniently follow that person right then and there.

Anyone can do the same. That is, you can pull up my network in this way (you don't need my password) and I can pull up yours. So if I want to see who is in your network I can generate a mosaic like this and I can click on people and follow them if I have that much respect for your network that I would go to that trouble (and I just did that with someone in my network to test it out, respect!).

A final comment, I've discovered that at least two people in my network are no longer of this world. That's sad on one level, but on another, there's more respect again in networks where people can remain virtually after they have gone, where the work they have accomplished lives on in a sort of immortal online presence.

Get your twitter mosaic here.