As part of my 4-week Multiliteracies course, and as a recent graduate of the Webcastacademy http://www.webcastacademy.net put on through the auspices of the Worldbridges Network, I have been broadcasting a program of 4 webcasts each Sunday morning at 13:00 GMT. The first two were recorded at over the top bit rates of 128 bps which resulted in 80 mb files and I haven't had time to tinker with them. However, by the time the third week rolled around I thought it would be unconscionable of me if I didn't make a credible effort to get at least one of these webcasts 'out there' in podcast form. So I took a day out of my life (editing mainly) to produce:
Click here to get your own player.
This turned out to be one of those challenging experiences. In the belief that the file could be no larger than 20 mb I chipped away at it in Audacity till the mp3 rendered down to 19.5 mb, but still couldn't get it to upload through the Podomatic website. I think it was uploading, it was just taking a long time, but in the process of working out what the problem could be I discovered that Podomatic allows you to FTP your files, and once they are at the site, you select from a list of the files you have there to post them to your podblog. That makes it much easier, so it was a nice discovery. As I said, I spent the best part of a day on the process but I feel I learned a lot and become somewhat more multiliterate in the process.
Hope you enjoy the podcast. Now that I know how to streamline things, I'll try and clear my backlog. Stay tuned (RSS would be a good way to do that).
Friday, October 5, 2007
Monday, October 1, 2007
Vance's first video production: A teaser for the Writingmatrix K-12 Online Conference presentation
The Writingmatrix group Vance Stevens, Nelba Quintana, Doris Molero, Saša Sirk, and Rita Zeinstejer will present “Motivating Student Writers by Fostering Collaboration through Tagging and Aggregating” at the K-12 Online Conference http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=100. According to http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=83 this year’s conference is scheduled to be held over two weeks, October 15-19 and October 22-26 of 2007, and will include a preconference keynote during the week of October 8. This year’s conference theme is “Playing with Boundaries.” Along the lines of our presentation, content related to the conference can be aggregated at http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/k12online07.
The presenters play with boundaries through the simple expedient of having student bloggers in different countries tag their blog posts with the unique tag term writingmatrix. Searching on that tag in Technorati, the student bloggers in four locations in three different countries have managed to locate one another's posts, leave comments for one another, and have subsequently interacted in other ways as well. The presenters explain how they started the project and how it has branched into other online and even face to face activities involving the students in the participant countries. The presentation is made not only through the voices of the presenters, but with the students themselves lending their voices through their blogs and videos.
The presenters play with boundaries through the simple expedient of having student bloggers in different countries tag their blog posts with the unique tag term writingmatrix. Searching on that tag in Technorati, the student bloggers in four locations in three different countries have managed to locate one another's posts, leave comments for one another, and have subsequently interacted in other ways as well. The presenters explain how they started the project and how it has branched into other online and even face to face activities involving the students in the participant countries. The presentation is made not only through the voices of the presenters, but with the students themselves lending their voices through their blogs and videos.
Friday, September 14, 2007
Cogito. Ergo BLOGo
I think; therefore I blog:
Descartian logic for new multiliteracies
I'm starting my fourth rendition of my annual TESOL pp107 course on Multiliteracies for Collaborative Learning Environments. This course has several components, among which:
The course is about how new literacies are emerging through increasing digitization of communications media and seeks to inculcate the concepts not through a top down explanation of what multiliteracies is or are, but by empowering participants with a familiarity with the tools and through use of these tools stimulate them into making discoveries about how these tools might be applied to their own social and professional lives. These lives overlap of course, learning being essentially a social phenomenon.
The problem in beginning this course ... and I'm not sure about this, I'm only speculating ... but the problem is that it takes a while for participants to 'get it'. But when they do 'get it' it's transformative. That is, the light comes on, and perception of Internet and how it potentially can be used is indelibly altered.
So what is there to 'get'? The course is only a few weeks long. Therefore, participants have to jump in and use the tools. Traditional courses in the TESOL series are run through a Desire to Learn portal. This structures courses didactically; that is, the 'teacher' will propose material to be absorbed in a certain order, and interaction with students takes place through threaded discussion lists. Some but not all students are familiar with LMS/CMS, learning/courseware management systems. Prior experience with LMS/CMS not withstanding, the instructional model is familiar and intuitive, so most courses plow ahead within this paradigm.
I found the D2L lists to be robust in my first rendition of this course but I had assigned a text to read, and this was a good way to discuss it. Still I wasn't happy that we were truly exercising the concepts that we were scrutinizing. Threaded discussion lists are derivative of print media. They are effective in the exchange of prose discourse. But multiliteracies implies much more than that.
In the years that I have taught this course I have evolved my understanding of what multiliteracies are and how best to learn about them. After the second year facilitating this course I abandoned the printed text (i.e. demoted it to optional reading). The main reason for this was that it was not available to all participants, but also, besides becoming dated, as an instance of print media, it was bogging us into talking around the subject. I felt there was more to be gained from doing not as we said, but doing as we did.
I was meanwhile developing a greater understanding myself about how blogs worked and were organized around folksonomies, and how they could be plumbed for knowledge in a distributed learning network. Last year, my third teaching the course, I had each participant not only keep a blog, but follow each other's blogs through Bloglines. This could almost have replaced the threaded discussion lists in substance though perhaps not in logistics, so we continued to do both. This year however, having gained even more experience through the writingmatrix project, and also having heard a couple of David Weinberger's excellent presentations on how folksonomies can be utilized to draw information from meta-tagged Internet resources, I decided with this year's course to take last year's concept a step further and base the most current syllabus on interactions among participants through aggregation of tagged blog entries.
In order to do this I had to issue each participant with a set of tools. But as facilitators are mere cat herders in distributed learning settings, to issue here means to offer, and not all participants are at first predisposed to appreciate the importance of what is being offered. Here is the rationale behind what I have in mind.
First, I feel it is crucial to the development of community that participants get to know one another, and for every other rendition of this course, I've created a community page with everyone's picture and brief biodata. However this year I decided to set up a wiki for that and encourage the participants to fill in their own spaces. Now several days into the course, some of the participants are starting to do that; e.g.
http://portfolios2007.wikispaces.com/BobbiStevens
http://portfolios2007.wikispaces.com/GwenCary
http://portfolios2007.wikispaces.com/SimonGibbs
and of course yours truly at http://portfolios2007.wikispaces.com/VanceStevens
In setting this up, one page per participant, I took it upon myself to tag each page pp107tesol (among other things; the complete tag set I used was aggregation, call, folksonomies, multiliteracies, pp107tesol, social networking, tesol, wikis - and participants are welcome to augment and alter this as each feels befits his/her own page).
I also proposed a set of readings to start us off which included my own thoughts on multiliteracies and especially my collaboration this past summer with Barbara Dieu, a colleague with a good understanding of aggregation and tagging and how it can be used in encouraging students to collaborate and enjoy each other's blog postings (see http://tesl-ej.org/ej41/int.html). Bee (as Barbara is known in the online communities she frequents) applies her understanding of how this works to her http://dekita.org/. These readings would allow students to see how my thinking on the topic had evolved and where it was going. I augmented this with an assignment of literature in other media, to view the very interesting debate between David Weinberger and Andrew Keen, at http://conversationhub.com/2007/07/09/video-david-weinberger-and-andrew-keen/. Here Weinberger explains how information on the Internet is organized around folksonomies, to which Keen is able to counter that this is all a step in the wrong direction in the organization of repositories of human knowledge and intellect.
I then proposed that each student in the course start a blog and weigh in on this debate in a posting which would be tagged pp107tesol.
Once students start blogs and start tagging their postings relating to this course, then the real F.U.N. begins. We can do many things with these:
Secondarily comes the content of this course, which is to understand how this fits into a framework of multiliteracies. It is hoped that reflection on this content will provide the impetus for making numerous postings in participants' blogs, which will give the rest of us something to aggregate. As this system gets under way and is activated for each of us, we can begin to see how classes or other work or study projects can be organized on these principles.
Once this awareness is achieved, participants in the course will have 'got it'. And I hope this will provide some clues as to where I'm heading with my course development so far. There is a method to the madness after all nyaa haa haaarrr!
pp107tesol
Descartian logic for new multiliteracies
I'm starting my fourth rendition of my annual TESOL pp107 course on Multiliteracies for Collaborative Learning Environments. This course has several components, among which:
- A static Web 1.o page at http://www.homestead.com/prosites-vstevens/files/efi/papers/tesol/ppot/portal2007.htm
- A Moodle page at http://www.opensource.idv.tw/moodle/course/view.php?id=23. A big problem with the Moodle this time around is that due to an incompatibility between the most recent versions of Moodle and the SQL dbase running on the server that's graciously hosting us in Taiwan, backup no longer works here, so I'm hesitant to put much effort here until this is resolved.
- Something new, and interesting, a PageFlakes portal at: http://www.pageflakes.com/vancestevens/13498617 . I find I like working with PageFlakes. It has an easy and intuitive interface - you simply select widgets and embed them in your page. One of these works on RSS feeds, so you can display recent content on your PageFlakes portal of whatever sites you want to follow.
The course is about how new literacies are emerging through increasing digitization of communications media and seeks to inculcate the concepts not through a top down explanation of what multiliteracies is or are, but by empowering participants with a familiarity with the tools and through use of these tools stimulate them into making discoveries about how these tools might be applied to their own social and professional lives. These lives overlap of course, learning being essentially a social phenomenon.
The problem in beginning this course ... and I'm not sure about this, I'm only speculating ... but the problem is that it takes a while for participants to 'get it'. But when they do 'get it' it's transformative. That is, the light comes on, and perception of Internet and how it potentially can be used is indelibly altered.
So what is there to 'get'? The course is only a few weeks long. Therefore, participants have to jump in and use the tools. Traditional courses in the TESOL series are run through a Desire to Learn portal. This structures courses didactically; that is, the 'teacher' will propose material to be absorbed in a certain order, and interaction with students takes place through threaded discussion lists. Some but not all students are familiar with LMS/CMS, learning/courseware management systems. Prior experience with LMS/CMS not withstanding, the instructional model is familiar and intuitive, so most courses plow ahead within this paradigm.
I found the D2L lists to be robust in my first rendition of this course but I had assigned a text to read, and this was a good way to discuss it. Still I wasn't happy that we were truly exercising the concepts that we were scrutinizing. Threaded discussion lists are derivative of print media. They are effective in the exchange of prose discourse. But multiliteracies implies much more than that.
In the years that I have taught this course I have evolved my understanding of what multiliteracies are and how best to learn about them. After the second year facilitating this course I abandoned the printed text (i.e. demoted it to optional reading). The main reason for this was that it was not available to all participants, but also, besides becoming dated, as an instance of print media, it was bogging us into talking around the subject. I felt there was more to be gained from doing not as we said, but doing as we did.
I was meanwhile developing a greater understanding myself about how blogs worked and were organized around folksonomies, and how they could be plumbed for knowledge in a distributed learning network. Last year, my third teaching the course, I had each participant not only keep a blog, but follow each other's blogs through Bloglines. This could almost have replaced the threaded discussion lists in substance though perhaps not in logistics, so we continued to do both. This year however, having gained even more experience through the writingmatrix project, and also having heard a couple of David Weinberger's excellent presentations on how folksonomies can be utilized to draw information from meta-tagged Internet resources, I decided with this year's course to take last year's concept a step further and base the most current syllabus on interactions among participants through aggregation of tagged blog entries.
In order to do this I had to issue each participant with a set of tools. But as facilitators are mere cat herders in distributed learning settings, to issue here means to offer, and not all participants are at first predisposed to appreciate the importance of what is being offered. Here is the rationale behind what I have in mind.
First, I feel it is crucial to the development of community that participants get to know one another, and for every other rendition of this course, I've created a community page with everyone's picture and brief biodata. However this year I decided to set up a wiki for that and encourage the participants to fill in their own spaces. Now several days into the course, some of the participants are starting to do that; e.g.
http://portfolios2007.wikispaces.com/BobbiStevens
http://portfolios2007.wikispaces.com/GwenCary
http://portfolios2007.wikispaces.com/SimonGibbs
and of course yours truly at http://portfolios2007.wikispaces.com/VanceStevens
In setting this up, one page per participant, I took it upon myself to tag each page pp107tesol (among other things; the complete tag set I used was aggregation, call, folksonomies, multiliteracies, pp107tesol, social networking, tesol, wikis - and participants are welcome to augment and alter this as each feels befits his/her own page).
I also proposed a set of readings to start us off which included my own thoughts on multiliteracies and especially my collaboration this past summer with Barbara Dieu, a colleague with a good understanding of aggregation and tagging and how it can be used in encouraging students to collaborate and enjoy each other's blog postings (see http://tesl-ej.org/ej41/int.html). Bee (as Barbara is known in the online communities she frequents) applies her understanding of how this works to her http://dekita.org/. These readings would allow students to see how my thinking on the topic had evolved and where it was going. I augmented this with an assignment of literature in other media, to view the very interesting debate between David Weinberger and Andrew Keen, at http://conversationhub.com/2007/07/09/video-david-weinberger-and-andrew-keen/. Here Weinberger explains how information on the Internet is organized around folksonomies, to which Keen is able to counter that this is all a step in the wrong direction in the organization of repositories of human knowledge and intellect.
I then proposed that each student in the course start a blog and weigh in on this debate in a posting which would be tagged pp107tesol.
Once students start blogs and start tagging their postings relating to this course, then the real F.U.N. begins. We can do many things with these:
- We can look for postings tagged pp107tesol at Technorati, by searching on http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/pp107tesol. There are ways we might need to fine tune here, and we will explore such considerations as we proceed with this course.
- We can aggregate each other's postings by subscribing to each other's blogs in a newsreader or aggregator. Last year we used Bloglines. I think that this year I will use Google Reader just to explore its capabilities. I am becoming enamored with the whole range of Google services, and I like the way that Google Reader fits in as an additional tool accessible through one login for Gmail, Blogger etc.)
- We can comment on each other's postings and see to what degree this kind of conversation can supplant or augment our other threaded discussions.
- We can tag each other's postings in http://del.icio.us and explore together how social bookmarking works. It is interesting for example to tag your own URLs and see who else has read and tagged them as well, and what other tags they are using.
Secondarily comes the content of this course, which is to understand how this fits into a framework of multiliteracies. It is hoped that reflection on this content will provide the impetus for making numerous postings in participants' blogs, which will give the rest of us something to aggregate. As this system gets under way and is activated for each of us, we can begin to see how classes or other work or study projects can be organized on these principles.
Once this awareness is achieved, participants in the course will have 'got it'. And I hope this will provide some clues as to where I'm heading with my course development so far. There is a method to the madness after all nyaa haa haaarrr!
pp107tesol
Friday, August 3, 2007
Some reflections on the future of online vs f2f conferences
George Siemens asked me to address five questions regarding differences between online and face-to-face (f2f) conferences in the humanities. George has recently held two very successful online conferences (the Connectivism Online Conference, February 2006 - http://umanitoba.ca/learning_technologies/connectivisim/ and the Future of Education Conference, June 2007- http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/moodle/course/view.php?id=12) and he wrote me as coordinator of the first two Webheads in Action Online Convergences, http://wiaoc.org held in November 2005 and May 2007 to prepare brief statements which he might use in an article on the topic he is writing for Educause. Once I started writing out my answers I realized that I was working on a full-fledged blog post,
George was interested in our second quasi-annual WiAOC conference, but this event must be understood in perspective of the first in November 2005, which at the time was a truly pioneer effort. Nowadays it seems that online conferences have almost come of age, and we are seeing an era of really significant conferences such as George’s, whose content is on par with a convention you might attend at the cost of hundreds of dollars, with the advantage of the online one being that it’s not only free but interactive and subject to replay on demand (that’s not true of all online conferences of course – some charge fees, but George’s conferences and the WiAOC events have been scrupulously free and open source, and it is in fact this kind of conference that my comments here particularly address).
It is clear that the open-source spirit contributes to the level of knowledge in the distributed learning network of which readers of this blog post are hereby a part. This is in keeping with George’s ideas on connectivism, articulated in many places (the just mentioned conference for example), where he postulates that the viability of the network is more important in many respects than the knowledge contained there, in so far as knowledge is not static, but grows and develops in rough proportion with the vitality of the network. As an example, I’ve traveled this summer with several FOE presentations on my iRiver and in my writings I’ve been citing them. I snipped a bit of Cheri Toledo’s presentation into a short sound file which I’ve placed online (at a wiki, to give it a url) and now I cite it like I would any other reference, and embed it in articles I try to write multiliterately; eg in my blog posting here: http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2007/07/multiliterate-autonomous-learner.html . I’ve even found a corroborating statement in a WiAOC presentation (Konrad Glogowski and Christopher Sessums
Now, regarding George’s questions: his first was “Why WiAOC? What did we intend to achieve with the conference when we initiated it?”
As a start on an answer, I refer to an article I wrote after our first WiAOC online conference (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) where in the conclusion I say
“What the Webheads in Action Online Convergence seeks to achieve is to bring professionals together in a happy medium where those with the requisite skills can assist those who would like to learn more to achieve greater familiarity with computer-based communications and social networking media, in order that our community of practice can utilize available technologies to work most efficiently and productively (and in order to be worthwhile, more effectively than if such tools were not used).”
To that I might add that we also seek to contribute to the archive of knowledge in our domain of interest, and to the concept that such knowledge should be free, easily accessible, and shareable in the spirit of creative commons. Finally we (or to be more accurate, ‘I’ and a few of my most kindred spirits) simply seek to drive a cue ball into the network and enjoy the spectacle of watching all the pieces fly like particles of atoms generating higher quantum levels of energy through the ongoing chain reaction in the context of critical mass of participants in our converging networks.
George’s second question was: How has the community reacted?
Webheads is a truly unique community that has been the subject of at least three PhD dissertatons (Steele, Johnson, and Costa), and is a part of others that I know of (Gonzalez, Stuckey), and all these studies indicate that Webheads distinguish themselves with an uncommonly high level of support for one another within a context of learning so informal that it is at times cloaked in social and empathetic banter.
Webheads are a community with no institutional support or funding whatsoever, apart from grants of online presentation and meeting spaces from entities serving education which maintain such spaces and have shared them with Webheads at no cost to the community. We are also a community which has sustained a schedule of regular weekly online meetings since 1998, over 500 consecutive and well-attended weekly meetings so far, and listserv traffic amounting to numerous messages each day for the past ten years, entirely through the support of the hundreds of individuals who sustain the community through their continued interest.
The two conferences we have put on have been a logical evolution of our desire to interact with one another in such a way as to increase the level of knowledge within the group, and members in general realize that the increase in knowledge for them personally is worth the time each puts into interacting through these conferences and other online activities. So as regards our conferences, community members not only calculated that the time and effort involved would be well rewarded, but others outside the community have been attracted and made the same calculation, and this has served to bolster the community with infusions of more knowledge.
As for logistical support the community reacted superbly to the first conference. For the second one I thought that though there was healthy interest expressed by many, fewer people actually came forward to help, possibly because they are becoming slightly jaded with the cue ball approach (mine) as opposed to the more studied and scholarly approach (e.g. George’s) which now that the pioneers have crossed the plains, is more in keeping with and surely more appropriate to the established practices envisaged for the territory as it goes mainstream.
George’s third question was: What lesson have we learned in conducting the online conference?
Going from the above, it seems that in order for us to continue we will have to meet the more refined expectations of increasingly sophisticated audiences. When we started with WiAOC in 2005 we were in proof of concept stage, the concept being that free online conferences can and should be put on as creative commons endeavors, without fees, funding, or compensation for anyone involved, and that what was perceived to be in the best interests of all concerned would sustain the endeavor. Having proved the concept and seen that it has occurred to others to mount other free online conferences also (in various guises ranging from unconferences to regularly scheduled webcasts and seminars, some associated with simultaneous f2f conferences, to full fledged free conferences such as George’s two and the K-12 Online Conference http://k12onlineconference.org/ ), we are now in position to assess what works in these conferences and what doesn’t.
One thing that doesn’t work as well as it might is having one person too predominantly at the helm, and for the next WiAOC one, I will seek a much wider base, with many tasks and responsibilities delegated from the outset. It seems that for the first one, we went at it as it occurred to us, I documented what we did, and for the second one in 2007 I attempted to steer in the same rut of the first. But I found this so overwhelming as to have perhaps compromised some aspects of the interface, so certainly, broader community support must be engaged from the start.
Secondly, I think we can assume that people will be able to cope with the technological requirements necessary for participation in greater droves than before, so that we can devote more of our energies into developing our interface as opposed to explaining it.
Finally, I think in selecting that interface we will chose a more integrated one, such as Drupal, which can bring together many of the features of submission and vetting, coaching, scheduling, etc. under one portal, plus serve as a venue for the conference itself. The real possibility of using a Drupal portal emerged this past conference through our ongoing association with Worldbridges, but next time if we can count on it from the start, we can plan our efforts around that single venue.
One thing I probably wouldn’t change much is the way we select our presenters. At the moment, the WiAOC has very flexible criteria for accepting submissions. My goal is to accept as many presentations as 72 hour-long time slots over a three-day conference will allow. My idea, which has so far been borne out, is that presenters will strive to meet the expectations of the worldwide audience and prepare quality presentations once their rough sketches are accepted, so our vetting rubric is designed to let in anyone with a seemingly viable idea. So far we’ve been fortunate in that quality of presentations has been quite high, plus we invite a half dozen known speakers to ensure that there will be exemplary presentations throughout the conference. The result is a kind of
Yet another advantage is that our format creates opportunities for those at the edges of our converged communities to come forward and enjoy limelight. It reaches out to all parts of the community and encourages participation and greater group cohesion, where everyone has a chance to have a voice. This is a unique aspect of WiAOC that sets us apart from other online conferences (but not from unconferences). I think it serves our networks well to maintain these differences (between conference styles) rather than to find one formula tending to homogeneity (or worse, mediocrity). One draw of the present offering of online conferences is that each is so different to one another, none is a repetition of the previous, which gives our community members the broadest spectrum of offerings over many different conferences.
George asks, “Are there any drawbacks to online conferences?”
Apart from the very real consideration of digital divide issues, those who ignore online conferences entirely often say that the main reason they travel to live conferences is to interact with peers socially and meet them face-to-face, and perhaps have a meal or a coffee together. Intuitively, this would seem to be a reasonable position, but in fact, interaction online can be much more intense and multi-dimensional than is possible face to face. Is that surprising? You meet people online on an intellectual plane not really possible f2f, where personality, appearance, who can get a word in during the question period, who can best dominate the floor (or where speakers pontificate and the audience sits and listens, or checks email, or glances through the program …). These all tend to constrict the level of interaction possible. For people who dominate meetings at work, surely f2f is preferable, but for the quiet majority, online might be more appealing, and effective. It’s cheaper, more interactive, recorded, and playback enabled.
Another thing that people fail to realize until they’ve experienced it, is that interaction online paves the way for more fruitful f2f interaction later. Given that proven aspect, any tendency to ignore online conferencing on the premise that it does not support the interpersonal benefits of f2f meetings (while living out of a suitcase in a strange and expensive city) would be ill advised. Note that this does not suggest that f2f conferences should be avoided, only that online ones most emphatically should not be.
George’s last question is: What lessons can traditional conferences learn from your experience? i.e. what needs to change with F2F conferences?
One regular f2f conference that is adapting well to the online environment is the IATEFL one. I participated in February of 2006 in a British Council conference called ICT in ELT: putting the 'Learning' back into 'E-Learning' which was actually held face to face at the Manchester Conference Centre, 12-17 February 2006: http://www.britishcouncil.org/seminars-english-0563.htm . The presentations given at the conference were recorded and placed online, and I was invited to participate in the reverse direction, presenting to the f2f audience from a distance. Although the conference was therefore in theory open to worldwide access, in that year the organizers seemed hesitant to advertise it too widely. There were doubts about what the server could handle, what the reaction of the on site participants would be, and just general worry about what was being got into. However, the sky did not fall, on the contrary the online component proved both popular and manageable and the following year some of the same organizers of the Manchester event implemented in the IATEFL conference in Aberdeen, a totally free and open parallel virtual conference which met with enthusiastic response - not just response ... acclaim! (this is where one begins to see the benefits of this to the institution), and this year they are institutionalizing their Virtual Strand even more assiduously during the 2008 conference in Exeter, with two keynote addresses being planned at a distance.
This is one conference that is grappling with the fear of other f2f ones … if conferences are free and online then won’t f2f ones disappear? Doesn’t that threaten the institutions that put them on, and whose raison d’etre is sometimes that one annual conference, plus perhaps a scholarly journal that is becoming less and less relevant given the tendency to publish online? The answer is of course not, no more than software companies who sell their wares will disappear in the wake of those who create open source equivalents.
There is perhaps a parallel in the music industry. The commercial model of that industry is that music is created, packaged, and sold in the package, and any attempt to disseminate that music outside this system is depriving someone (not often the artist) of rightful revenues. This is not true. For art to be sought after and valued it must be first experienced. The traditional vehicle for that was the radio station, which became arbiter of what music would succeed in the industry, and sometimes on the basis of corruption, not strictly on taste. This actually served to constrain the art (if not the industry), because in that system there would be few chances to hear most music apart from radio stations and music stores, and there would be minimal or no play for small niche bands in the long tail ignored by the media power brokers.
Enter the Internet and the rest is history. Now even fringe musicians have many online outlets to get their music heard. But the record companies are crying foul, litigating against free dissemination of music, and trying to exert control on the system in such a way that revenues flow back to them. But the cat is out of the bag. People have tasted the free music. They will not go back to the concept of paying exorbitant prices only to sample a limited range of music, without expanding their knowledge of musical genre.
As Stephen Downes has pointed out, “content is free.” If there is money to be made in this new age it is in adding value to that content. So to mount a viable business model, a way to retain commercially viable relevance in an era of free content, is to restructure business so that it sells something other than the content itself; e.g. tickets to concerts, souvenirs, song books, hardware involved in more efficient delivery of the music to the device of choice, and so on.
Professional organizations may be ideally altruistic but their method of content distribution has long been patterned on the music industry model, where there is a financial impediment to both acquiring the content, and mounting it in the first place. Again the Internet has intervened to present options for people to create and access content leaving f2f conferences in a similar position to media moguls in that they must find novel ways to adapt or face irrelevance. This is especially true in education, given the nature of knowledge dissemination over the Internet. Those organizations and their conference offshoots that fail to adapt will become the ones least interesting to the most innovative educators. Do people go to conferences to become aware of innovation? If so, professional organizations need to be modeling these innovations, not constraining them on the one hand while paying lip service to them on the other.
In at least one professional organization of which I am a member, you could divide the stakeholders into four camps. There are an increasing number of innovators who are integrating the latest techniques in their teaching practices, a larger and growing number in the second camp who want to know more about these innovations, and probably a decreasing but still substantial number of members in a third camp who are satisfied with the status quo or who are developing along traditional lines. In the fourth camp there are the business office managers of the organization. These people are not all educators. There is an executive director, a network specialist, and staff who take their lead from the executive director. In this organization there are tensions in what is good for the organization and its financial viability and what would be possible if conferences were opened up to Web 2.0. That would be difficult in any event because this organization’s conferences are all in hotels where Internet is priced beyond the means of educational presenters. The tensions are apparent also in the protection of the proprietary aspects of the many professional training opportunities available through the organization, and even free ones available there might require a registration that could result in unwanted emails. The part of the organization responsible for its financial fluidity is thus at odds with the ultimate goals of the first two camps, the innovators and the wannabes, and there is risk of alienating these two camps unless the organization adapts.
So to get back to the last question, and the conclusion of this posting, there is a need for professional organizations to move to models which are able to do better what these organizations were created for, and that is: disseminate knowledge across networks. If there exist mechanisms to do this more effectively and efficiently over the Internet than at f2f conferences, then these conferences must capitalize on their strengths, which include the personal networking that takes place at big conferences, and adopt the better features of the online environment as enhancements to on site participants,
For example, even the f2f experience is enhanced when outside voices are brought into the mix, as when on site delegates as well as online ones have the opportunity to interact with presenters they are listing to in text chats that the presenters are following and occasionally responding to, or for on site and online participants to blog their reactions to sessions they are sitting in (often before the session is over). This could be accomplished for the conference goers if a part of their fees went towards wifi available to all at the conference venues.
On site participants need not have to make the choice that’s bane to all big conferences with numerous parallel sessions, having to choose just one session to attend and miss the others. Why not attend one presentation and while there monitor another via a laptop computer. Perhaps f2f participants would be more (not less) inclined to pay for the richer experience of actually being there it that experience were enriched even more through techniques that, let’s face it, we should all be using in our classrooms; e.g.
- creating virtual communities within even the f2f class,
- connecting the students to the outside world,
- multitasking in multiple venues including the f2f one,
- connecting with other participants on site and online via social networking tools,
- and making better sense of it all by aggregating content,
rather than being constrained in a f2f conference always to an inflexible, static timetable, to your immediate surroundings and to the company of those sitting next to you.
How are the students gonna learn if the teachers won’t?
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Writingmatrix Update
I have recently returned from a brief holiday in France and Spain after delivering a series of lectures which I documented at http://www.vancestevens.com/writing.htm. There you can find links to Elluminate recordings of the lectures, links to the slide shows, and texts of the lectures I gave (more or less) illustrated with the graphics from the slide shows. Eventually Bobbi and I will link photos from our trip from there.
Meanwhile, the Writingmatrix project is getting interesting. This morning, Webheads held their usual chat at noon GMT this morning (each Sunday noon GMT for the past 8 years) in Tapped In http://www.tappedin.org . This morning some of the chat was about Writingmatrix. Webheads are bloggers and are very interested in this project. Some said they would like to join us at a live chat to be held later this evening (in the USA; Monday a.m. in Europe/Middle East, Asia).
Now, why am I writing all of this here? The reason is I wish to conduct an experiment. I am going to TAG this post writingmatrix and webheads. Then it should appear in the Technorati searches on those tags at the following URLs:
In this way, anyone who is already in the project and who has put the RSS feed of the output from those searches in the aggregator (like Bloglines) will be able to find this post.
The second part of the experiment is to acknowledge the work of one of the students, Matias Basilico, who has left some interesting posts on the concepts that make Writingmatrix effective in helping students in different parts of the world find each other's writing and collaborate on it.
The concept being experimented here is that of Pingback. By linking to Matias's posts in this way he should be alerted in his blog. There should be a link in his blog back to this posting.
And there is! Have a look below his posts. So it works!
And also I want to see what this code does. Technorati says: See your posts here
To contribute to this page, include this code in your blog post:
writingmatrix
Meanwhile, the Writingmatrix project is getting interesting. This morning, Webheads held their usual chat at noon GMT this morning (each Sunday noon GMT for the past 8 years) in Tapped In http://www.tappedin.org . This morning some of the chat was about Writingmatrix. Webheads are bloggers and are very interested in this project. Some said they would like to join us at a live chat to be held later this evening (in the USA; Monday a.m. in Europe/Middle East, Asia).
Now, why am I writing all of this here? The reason is I wish to conduct an experiment. I am going to TAG this post writingmatrix and webheads. Then it should appear in the Technorati searches on those tags at the following URLs:
In this way, anyone who is already in the project and who has put the RSS feed of the output from those searches in the aggregator (like Bloglines) will be able to find this post.
The second part of the experiment is to acknowledge the work of one of the students, Matias Basilico, who has left some interesting posts on the concepts that make Writingmatrix effective in helping students in different parts of the world find each other's writing and collaborate on it.
- http://mbasilico.blogspot.com/2007/07/pingback-tracking-distributed.html
- http://mbasilico.blogspot.com/2007/06/rss-organize-and-update-your-content.html
The concept being experimented here is that of Pingback. By linking to Matias's posts in this way he should be alerted in his blog. There should be a link in his blog back to this posting.
And there is! Have a look below his posts. So it works!
And also I want to see what this code does. Technorati says: See your posts here
To contribute to this page, include this code in your blog post:
writingmatrix
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
The Multiliterate Autonomous Learner: Teacher attitudes and the inculcation of strategies for lifelong learning
For April 2008 I have been invited to present (perhaps online) as part of the "Autonomy and the language classroom: opening a can of worms!" project for the IATEFL/LASIG: Learner Autonomy Special Interest Group's lead-up to the Exeter IATEFL conference. See the Can of Worms link at: http://learnerautonomy.org/wormsindex.html
and mention of me as 'keeper' of the Technology worm here: http://learnerautonomy.org/wormsmay2007.html.
This article has since been published in the IATEFL LASIG Independence, Winter 2007 (Issue 42) - some articles are previewed here: http://www.learnerautonomy.org/articles.html. My article appears here: http://www.learnerautonomy.org/VanceStevens.pdf; no it doesn't, not any longer - had to go to the Wayback Machine to find it and bring it home, here:
http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/archive/VanceStevens_multiliterateAutonomousLearner.pdf
This article briefly addresses the role of technology in learner autonomy, with focus in particular on the influence of teacher attitudes towards technology as it might impact autonomy in the newer generations of learners.
Expert systems and learning networks
The promise of CALL or computer-assisted language learning has from its inception been to somehow set learners on a path of independent learning. The model for doing this has changed drastically over the years. Stephen Downes characterized the evolution of this model in the talk he gave at WiAOC 2007 <http://wiaoc.org> and <http://webheadsinaction.org>, entitled Personal Learning the Web 2.0 Way.
Reduced to its essential dichotomy, the earlier models were algorithmic whereas more recent ones have become increasingly connectionist. Downes harked back to the notion of expert systems, the idea that computers could somehow be made to embody a Socratic dialog with learners, or program them into mastery of certain subject matter (e.g. Programmed Instruction, Mastery Learning).
And this dichotomy lies at the heart of autonomy for a new age of learners. If autonomous learning is akin to teaching people how to fish (as opposed to fostering dependencies on feeding behaviors) then a cutting edge knowledge of how one fishes for information in distributed learning networks (e.g. on the Internet) is crucial to staying afloat and healthily sustained in the quest for autonomy in any kind of learning, not just language learning. Fishing for information in this day and age entails, among other multiliteracy skills, a working knowledge of syndication (RSS), aggregation, tagging, and folksonomies (the taxonomy of tagging), and using these in conjunction with knowledge derived from discoveries percolated through communities of practice. Therefore a working knowledge of tools facilitating contact and collaboration within distributed learning networks is paramount, as described for example in a recent article by Dieu and Stevens (2007).
Multiliteracies and Paradigm Shift
As these concepts are relatively recent developments in a fast-changing world of information surfeit and dissemination, where notions of multiliteracies and transliteracies are emerging to characterize the competencies required for effectively coping and communicating in the 21st century, many teachers in the digital immigrant generation (Prensky, 2001) are simply not keeping up. Many teachers still conceptualize technology as working along the lines of an expert system, something that can be purchased shrink wrapped and which students can be plugged into for learning outcomes to be realized. This may work in some cases for short-term learning goals but not as a strategy of great value towards attaining competencies directed at lifelong learning.
This is but one of the many paradigm shifts that teachers in particular are having to grapple with as we head inexorably into the 21st century. I say teachers in particular because there are so many of us who are of the age where we can recall when using computers to develop learning algorithms was state of the art, before Internet became ubiquitous. Now that Internet is for the fortunate few 'always on' the greatest potentials for technology in learning are rapidly shifting to connectionist models. The challenge for teachers, especially those whose use of technology has lagged behind latest developments, is being able to switch mindsets away from the expectation that computers should provide solutions to problems in education in algorithmic ways.
The expert model is intuitively understood by a generation brought up on western scientific logic, and such logic does not readily suggest nor accept network solutions. To Cartesian-logical minds, network solutions might appear counter-intuitive until experienced. How, for example, can a wiki work unregulated and 'bottom up' to create an encyclopedia that is in many ways superior to the traditional 'top down' authoritatively published ones. Yet wikis and other social networking tools have had startling impacts on constructivist learning when applied appropriately in educational contexts. Their benefit to learning, says Downes, is beyond articulation or description, but is rather, ineffable.
Who are the new learners?
Meanwhile, a younger generation of learners is emerging which is increasingly liberated from 20th century mindsets. Lawrence Lessig (2006) created a buzz recently when he contrasted the read-write 21st century with the read-only 20th. A similar notion was conveyed in Time Magazine's declaring You as being the person of the year (Grossman, 2006). Lessig's contention is that the 20th century was a pendulum swing toward concentrating power in the hands of the few who controlled media whereas the new century is seeing the pendulum swing back to power being restored to the voices of the many who have taken back control of the new media. This is the context in which today's learners are experiencing social networking as a matter of course. They are the digital natives, the twitch generation (Prensky, 1998), the ones who are in increasing numbers being born into households where Internet is as common as TV was to the current generation of teachers. The expectations of these digital natives is such that, when confronted with last-generation mindsets, another of Prensky's mantras might apply: enrage me or engage me! (2005). Or worse, antipathy - teachers who fail to adapt could be regarded as irrelevant.
Or even worse, detrimental. There is anecdotal evidence to suggest that teachers who do not model appropriate uses of technology predispose their students to avoid technology in turn, whereas teachers who use technology in their classes positively influence their students to experiment with technology in finding solutions requiring them to apply their skills as autonomous learners and problem-solvers.
One bit of support for that is from Cheri Toledo's (2007) presentation at the recent Future of Education online conference. Kathy Clesson (as heard on the recording) said that she found in her district that students whose teachers used CMS's and Web 2.0 tools in their teaching tended to be the ones whose students became most comfortable with using technology in their ongoing teacher training whereas an avoidance by teachers of technology tended to harbor concomitant discomfort and avoidance in their students, who did not feel that technology was very relevant to their work.
Relating this to learner autonomy
Autonomous does not mean isolated or 'by oneself' - an autonomous learner is one who self-starts him/herself in the direction of a learning strategy in which, these days, a learning community might figure highly. Therefore learning strategies leading to community and network building might be productive in producing autonomous learners, some of whom would also work as teachers. It stands to reason that one who prepares others to be lifelong learners should him or herself be one.
We can find models of behaviors we would like to impart (to students) in teachers who take advantage of as many learning opportunities as are available in their distributed learning networks which they nurture and explore (i.e. are themselves autonomous vs. those who complain of too few opportunities for professional development when in fact such opportunities abound from no matter where in the world we are, online, which suggests that such teachers are either working under critical duress or are themselves not particularly autonomous).
Teachers who explore and exploit the many opportunities for interaction with peers in the online environment are much more likely to adapt the techniques they themselves use for professional development in their own classes and thereby MODEL these practices for students. As Downes notes in slide 22 of the presentation that has sounded the tonic chord for this article, "To teach is to model and to demonstrate. To learn is to practice and reflect."
It is possible to conclude that teachers who practice autonomy in their own professional development formulate heuristics for harvesting knowledge within their personal learning spaces, and thus stand a better chance of inculcating the desired behaviors in their students, thus increasing the likelihood of producing potentially autonomous and lifelong learners. But it is a percolative process. In order to teach (to model and demonstrate) one must constantly learn and re-learn, and this means that one must practice the behaviors one models (how else to model them?) and reflect on the ramifications of those behaviors, as we do in writing and reading this article, from each of our nodes connected to one another through our interlaced learning networks.
References
Dieu, Barbara, and Vance Stevens. (2007), Pedagogical affordances of syndication, aggregation, and mash-up of content on the Web. TESL-EJ, Volume 11, Number 1. Retrieved July 3, 2007 from: http://tesl-ej.org/ej41/int.html.
Grossman, Lev. (2006). Time's Person of the Year. Time Magazine, Dec. 13, 2006. Retrieved July 3, 2007 from: http://tinyurl.com/3chjkb.
Lessig, Lawrence. (2006). The Read-Write Society, a keynote given 15 September 2006 at the Wizards of OS4 conference, http://www.wizards-of-os.org/programm/panels/authorship_amp_culture/keynote_the_read_write_society.html; recording retrieved June 30, 2007 from: http://phalacrocorax.informatik.hu-berlin.de/fr/09_20h_ReadWriteSociety.mp4.
Prensky, M. (1998). Twitch speed: Reaching younger workers who think differently. Across the Board, January. Retrieved July 3, 2007 from: http://www.twitchspeed.com/site/article.html.
Prensky, M. (2001). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. On the Horizon 9, 5. Retrieved July 3, 2007 from: http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf#search=%22prensky%22digital%20native%22%22.
Prensky, M. (2005). "Engage me or enrage me," What today's learners demand. Retrieved July 3, 2007 from: http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0553.pdf.
Siemens, G. (2005). Connectivism: Learning as network-creation. Retrieved July 3, 2007 from: http://www.learningcircuits.org/2005/nov2005/seimens.htm.
Stevens, Vance. (2006). Revisiting multiliteracies in collaborative learning environments: Impact on teacher professional development. TESL-EJ, Volume 10, Number 2. Retrieved July 3, 2007 from: http://www.tesl-ej.org/ej38/int.html.
Toledo, Cheri. (2007). The Future of Teacher Education: Herding Cats and Chasing Targets. Presentation given at the Future of Education online conference. Retrieved July 3, 2007 from: http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/foe-2007/Cheri_Toledo/.
and mention of me as 'keeper' of the Technology worm here: http://learnerautonomy.org/wormsmay2007.html.
This article has since been published in the IATEFL LASIG Independence, Winter 2007 (Issue 42) - some articles are previewed here: http://www.learnerautonomy.org/articles.html. My article appears here: http://www.learnerautonomy.org/VanceStevens.pdf; no it doesn't, not any longer - had to go to the Wayback Machine to find it and bring it home, here:
http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/archive/VanceStevens_multiliterateAutonomousLearner.pdf
This article briefly addresses the role of technology in learner autonomy, with focus in particular on the influence of teacher attitudes towards technology as it might impact autonomy in the newer generations of learners.
Expert systems and learning networks
The promise of CALL or computer-assisted language learning has from its inception been to somehow set learners on a path of independent learning. The model for doing this has changed drastically over the years. Stephen Downes characterized the evolution of this model in the talk he gave at WiAOC 2007 <http://wiaoc.org> and <http://webheadsinaction.org>, entitled Personal Learning the Web 2.0 Way.
- Slides:
http://www.slideshare.net/Downes/personal-learning-the-web-20-way - Audio Part 1: http://streamarchives.net/node/84
- Audio Part 2: http://streamarchives.net/node/83
Various instantiations of algorithmic instructional models have so far failed to produce a credibly expert system. This is because, in Downes's view, knowledge does not derive from algorithmic processes but from connectionist ones. That is, apart from the most discrete learning goals (how to perform long division for example) knowledge is not linearly derived in series of if/then junctures but is pattern driven, as embodied in networks. In other words, instances of knowledge reside at nodes which online comprise distributed learning networks, and to become knowledgeable is more a matter of developing competencies for accessing those nodes and systematizing the information available there than of mechanically following algorithms down pre-scribed paths, which is what an expert system by definition has us do.
Siemens (2005 as but one example) makes similar observations in his writings on connectivism, where he asserts that the network itself is more important than the meaning it contains: "Those theorists most closely aligned with the new landscape are also those who most readily acknowledge that the process is one of coming to know, rather than of knowing."
And this dichotomy lies at the heart of autonomy for a new age of learners. If autonomous learning is akin to teaching people how to fish (as opposed to fostering dependencies on feeding behaviors) then a cutting edge knowledge of how one fishes for information in distributed learning networks (e.g. on the Internet) is crucial to staying afloat and healthily sustained in the quest for autonomy in any kind of learning, not just language learning. Fishing for information in this day and age entails, among other multiliteracy skills, a working knowledge of syndication (RSS), aggregation, tagging, and folksonomies (the taxonomy of tagging), and using these in conjunction with knowledge derived from discoveries percolated through communities of practice. Therefore a working knowledge of tools facilitating contact and collaboration within distributed learning networks is paramount, as described for example in a recent article by Dieu and Stevens (2007).
Multiliteracies and Paradigm Shift
As these concepts are relatively recent developments in a fast-changing world of information surfeit and dissemination, where notions of multiliteracies and transliteracies are emerging to characterize the competencies required for effectively coping and communicating in the 21st century, many teachers in the digital immigrant generation (Prensky, 2001) are simply not keeping up. Many teachers still conceptualize technology as working along the lines of an expert system, something that can be purchased shrink wrapped and which students can be plugged into for learning outcomes to be realized. This may work in some cases for short-term learning goals but not as a strategy of great value towards attaining competencies directed at lifelong learning.
This is but one of the many paradigm shifts that teachers in particular are having to grapple with as we head inexorably into the 21st century. I say teachers in particular because there are so many of us who are of the age where we can recall when using computers to develop learning algorithms was state of the art, before Internet became ubiquitous. Now that Internet is for the fortunate few 'always on' the greatest potentials for technology in learning are rapidly shifting to connectionist models. The challenge for teachers, especially those whose use of technology has lagged behind latest developments, is being able to switch mindsets away from the expectation that computers should provide solutions to problems in education in algorithmic ways.
The expert model is intuitively understood by a generation brought up on western scientific logic, and such logic does not readily suggest nor accept network solutions. To Cartesian-logical minds, network solutions might appear counter-intuitive until experienced. How, for example, can a wiki work unregulated and 'bottom up' to create an encyclopedia that is in many ways superior to the traditional 'top down' authoritatively published ones. Yet wikis and other social networking tools have had startling impacts on constructivist learning when applied appropriately in educational contexts. Their benefit to learning, says Downes, is beyond articulation or description, but is rather, ineffable.
Who are the new learners?
Meanwhile, a younger generation of learners is emerging which is increasingly liberated from 20th century mindsets. Lawrence Lessig (2006) created a buzz recently when he contrasted the read-write 21st century with the read-only 20th. A similar notion was conveyed in Time Magazine's declaring You as being the person of the year (Grossman, 2006). Lessig's contention is that the 20th century was a pendulum swing toward concentrating power in the hands of the few who controlled media whereas the new century is seeing the pendulum swing back to power being restored to the voices of the many who have taken back control of the new media. This is the context in which today's learners are experiencing social networking as a matter of course. They are the digital natives, the twitch generation (Prensky, 1998), the ones who are in increasing numbers being born into households where Internet is as common as TV was to the current generation of teachers. The expectations of these digital natives is such that, when confronted with last-generation mindsets, another of Prensky's mantras might apply: enrage me or engage me! (2005). Or worse, antipathy - teachers who fail to adapt could be regarded as irrelevant.
Or even worse, detrimental. There is anecdotal evidence to suggest that teachers who do not model appropriate uses of technology predispose their students to avoid technology in turn, whereas teachers who use technology in their classes positively influence their students to experiment with technology in finding solutions requiring them to apply their skills as autonomous learners and problem-solvers.
One bit of support for that is from Cheri Toledo's (2007) presentation at the recent Future of Education online conference. Kathy Clesson (as heard on the recording) said that she found in her district that students whose teachers used CMS's and Web 2.0 tools in their teaching tended to be the ones whose students became most comfortable with using technology in their ongoing teacher training whereas an avoidance by teachers of technology tended to harbor concomitant discomfort and avoidance in their students, who did not feel that technology was very relevant to their work.
Relating this to learner autonomy
Autonomous does not mean isolated or 'by oneself' - an autonomous learner is one who self-starts him/herself in the direction of a learning strategy in which, these days, a learning community might figure highly. Therefore learning strategies leading to community and network building might be productive in producing autonomous learners, some of whom would also work as teachers. It stands to reason that one who prepares others to be lifelong learners should him or herself be one.
We can find models of behaviors we would like to impart (to students) in teachers who take advantage of as many learning opportunities as are available in their distributed learning networks which they nurture and explore (i.e. are themselves autonomous vs. those who complain of too few opportunities for professional development when in fact such opportunities abound from no matter where in the world we are, online, which suggests that such teachers are either working under critical duress or are themselves not particularly autonomous).
Teachers who explore and exploit the many opportunities for interaction with peers in the online environment are much more likely to adapt the techniques they themselves use for professional development in their own classes and thereby MODEL these practices for students. As Downes notes in slide 22 of the presentation that has sounded the tonic chord for this article, "To teach is to model and to demonstrate. To learn is to practice and reflect."
It is possible to conclude that teachers who practice autonomy in their own professional development formulate heuristics for harvesting knowledge within their personal learning spaces, and thus stand a better chance of inculcating the desired behaviors in their students, thus increasing the likelihood of producing potentially autonomous and lifelong learners. But it is a percolative process. In order to teach (to model and demonstrate) one must constantly learn and re-learn, and this means that one must practice the behaviors one models (how else to model them?) and reflect on the ramifications of those behaviors, as we do in writing and reading this article, from each of our nodes connected to one another through our interlaced learning networks.
References
Dieu, Barbara, and Vance Stevens. (2007), Pedagogical affordances of syndication, aggregation, and mash-up of content on the Web. TESL-EJ, Volume 11, Number 1. Retrieved July 3, 2007 from: http://tesl-ej.org/ej41/int.html.
Grossman, Lev. (2006). Time's Person of the Year. Time Magazine, Dec. 13, 2006. Retrieved July 3, 2007 from: http://tinyurl.com/3chjkb.
Lessig, Lawrence. (2006). The Read-Write Society, a keynote given 15 September 2006 at the Wizards of OS4 conference, http://www.wizards-of-os.org/programm/panels/authorship_amp_culture/keynote_the_read_write_society.html; recording retrieved June 30, 2007 from: http://phalacrocorax.informatik.hu-berlin.de/fr/09_20h_ReadWriteSociety.mp4.
Prensky, M. (1998). Twitch speed: Reaching younger workers who think differently. Across the Board, January. Retrieved July 3, 2007 from: http://www.twitchspeed.com/site/article.html.
Prensky, M. (2001). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. On the Horizon 9, 5. Retrieved July 3, 2007 from: http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf#search=%22prensky%22digital%20native%22%22.
Prensky, M. (2005). "Engage me or enrage me," What today's learners demand. Retrieved July 3, 2007 from: http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0553.pdf.
Siemens, G. (2005). Connectivism: Learning as network-creation. Retrieved July 3, 2007 from: http://www.learningcircuits.org/2005/nov2005/seimens.htm.
Stevens, Vance. (2006). Revisiting multiliteracies in collaborative learning environments: Impact on teacher professional development. TESL-EJ, Volume 10, Number 2. Retrieved July 3, 2007 from: http://www.tesl-ej.org/ej38/int.html.
Toledo, Cheri. (2007). The Future of Teacher Education: Herding Cats and Chasing Targets. Presentation given at the Future of Education online conference. Retrieved July 3, 2007 from: http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/foe-2007/Cheri_Toledo/.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Frappr Map for Writingmatrix and thewebisflat
I'm placing here a Frappr map looking for a home. I'm putting it here so I can tag it (label it) writingmatrix and thewebisflat. From those two tags, I'm hoping that Technorati will be able to locate it in conjunction with two of my projects:
- Writingmatrix, http://writingmatrix.wikispaces.com/ and
- Summer courses in San Sebastian, Spain http://www.vancestevens.com/writing.htm
If you are involved in either of these projects, please add yourself to the map here!
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