What about AUTONOMOUS Teachers?

Have six weeks gone by already? I must have been busy. I was in New York for the TESOL conference there, meeting Webheads galore, and then I stopped off in London on my way back to Abu Dhabi where, on April 7, 2008, I had been invited to present at the Learner Autonomy SIG Pre-conference event here: http://learnerautonomy.org/exeter2008.html, scheduled as part of the 42nd Annual IATEFL Conference in Exeter http://www.iatefl.org/content/conferences/2008/index.php 7th-11th April 2008.

My presentation was a part of the "Autonomy and the language classroom: opening a can of worms!" project, http://learnerautonomy.org/wormsindex.html.

• I am indicated as being 'keeper' of the Technology worm here: http://learnerautonomy.org/wormsmay2007.html (though I was able to pass that off to Deborah Healey back in New York, and now she's got it :-)).
• I produced a paper prior to this: Stevens, Vance. (2007). The Multiliterate Autonomous Learner: Teacher Attitudes and the Inculcation of Strategies for Lifelong Learning, in Independence,Winter 2007 (Issue 42) pp 27-29. Retrieved February 17, 2008 from http://www.learnerautonomy.org/VanceStevens.pdf.
• The paper is also on my site here: http://www.homestead.com/prosites-vstevens/files/efi/papers/iatefl/exeter2008/lasigworm.htm and is mirrored as a blog post here: http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2007/07/multiliterate-autonomous-learner.html.
• My slides are posted here: http://www.slideshare.net/vances/lets-start-with-teacher-autonomy-multiliteracies-and-lifelong-learning/ or http://tinyurl.com/5qmuxd
• Jo Mynard did a nice writeup of my talk on her blog here: http://iateflexeter2008.blogspot.com/2008/04/multiliterate-autonomous-learner.html

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I repeated my Exeter presentation at an event April 12, 2008 at the Abu Dhabi Men's College in Abu Dhabi. I started with a short report from the LA SIG Preconference Event in Exeter, and then did the larger presentation on The Multiliterate Autonomous Learner: Teacher attitudes and the inculcation of strategies for lifelong learning, "with focus in particular on the influence of teacher attitudes towards technology as it might impact autonomy in the newer generations of learners."

• I recorded the presentation in Elluminate and stored the recording online, and you can view and listen to it here: http://tinyurl.com/468qrp.
• I used the Exeter slide show with hyperlinks, http://tinyurl.com/5qmuxd
• A photo album was put up to archive the event, well done, with links: http://picasaweb.google.com/tailearn/IndependentLearningResearchMorning2008

Carla Arena Interviews AdVancEducation for a class project. Like, wow!

Vance's Neighborhood via kwout

I didn't expect a lot from this when Carla asked me if I would record something about Abu Dhabi, the city where I live, for the benefit of an online class that she teaches. I wrote back that I had no idea where to begin, and could she just Skype me and ask me some questions. So she did, and produced the most charming blog posting:
http://explorations.bloxi.jp/a/vance-stevens-talks-about-abu-dhabi/

Of course you can hear the recording at Carla's blog. Amazingly, the posting has attracted well over a dozen comments.

Future of Learning in a Networked World: Gala Dinner in Bangkok

My son found the above video when he Googled 'Youtube' and 'Vance Stevens'. It's from the FLNW event I attended in Bangkok recently, a kind of spontaneous, ad-hoc, movable feast with an unconferency feel to it. I thought this would be a good place to put it, and next day I found a posting in the Learner Autonomy and iLearn group on Facebook with a question getting right to the crux of the future of learning in a networked world. While preserving the identify of the poster (or if he asks me to, I'll credit him here) I decided to post his question here with my comments:

The question

I've been wondering if technology does really enhance teaching/learning or if we just use it because it is out there and looks good in our resume! At a conference, I heard the question: “Do we use technology in ELT because it solves our teaching/learning problems? Or do we use it because it is out there for everyone to explore?

I believe that many(?) of us come from a generation that was not born with computers around and less in our foreign language learning processes. This background surely limits our views on the real advantages of modern technology.

I have mixed feelings when I see myself or others struggling with technology. Our heavy training was not on technological competencies and it seems we cannot leave those tasks to more technically competent co-workers from the computer science department. As foreign language teacher/advisors, we are expected to add all these new skills to our old bag of tricks. I bet it's time to make our discipline a multi-disciplinary profession.

At times I see how we bend technology for our own sake and we tend to believe that it is just a nicer, faster and more colorful way to achieve the same academic goals we have already 'achieved' with a pen, paper, chalk a board or a book in our hands.

Thanks for any comments this may raise.

My reply

Your comments get right to the point, and I'm happy to say the answer is YES, technology does indeed enhance exactly what you already know how to do with a pen, paper, chalk, etc. Pens, paper, chalk are in fact technology. Sometimes these are the most appropriate technologies to apply to a given pedagogical nut you wish to crack. I myself use a board marker and whiteboard (slightly tech advanced from chalk etc, but does the essentially same thing). In part 2 we'll ratchet up the technology scale ...

You might say that a WIKI is a tech advancement over that and in some cases, where you want to preserve your chalkboard, and let students write on it AFTER class, and say embed video or audio in it, or have students record with Audacity and embed their own audio, and bring that to class next time and start from there, might POSSIBLY be an improvement over the old method where the board is erased at the end of the day.

No matter what the metier, workpeople are constrained by available tools and knowledge of those available. Nowadays when so many new tools are coming online, it's good for teachers to know what's available. How do you do that? You join a community, for example Webheads at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evonline2002_webheads where you can LISTEN to conversations on what tech is available and how teachers are using it, the same way you would learn a foreign language, just go where it's spoken and listen, and when you feel comfortable, join in.

This would give you a better knowledge of what tools to use. After that it would be up to you to decide, with your improved knowledge of what tools you could alternatively use, which ones would be best suited to the pedagogical nuts you wish to crack.

I think that any reasonable argument would reach the conclusion that it's best to at least KNOW what is available and then consider from that perspective whether it's best to continue using the tools you have available now or to try out some new technologies if those appear better suited to the job at hand.

The most important point, as you have pointed out, is that the job at hand has not changed. Your methodology does not change. You can and should continue to teach using the techniques you find effective. The question which you asked and which we all should seek to answer from an INFORMED perspective, is when does technology HELP what you are already doing, and when might it get in the way.

So no, we don't use it just because it's there, but because it's there, we should seek to inform ourselves what is out there, and use that which will help our students achieve a better grasp of whatever it is we are trying to teach, or more correctly, what it is we are trying to help THEM to LEARN (which is another issue, relating more to the autonomy side of our discussion).

As with learning a foreign language, it's not enough to go to a country where the language is spoken, you must go with intent and desire to learn that language. With technology, teachers must WANT to learn it – that is accept that it might be a valid addition to a bag of existing tricks. At that point, where you are truly receptive (where you are AUTONOMOUS, another way of putting it), you find that it's all around you, and if you converse with others trying to learn it, easy to pick up.

Hope that helps, and sorry for the delay in replying,

Vance

New Millenium Professional Development

I’ve been asked to propose a task force to promote the use of pedagogical technology at the place where I work. This has really got me thinking about how to preach to someone other than the choir. I think I'm going to need some help from my community on this one. I'm being asked to really effect change at an educational institute where there is not a lot of awareness of the very latest issues in educational technology and their impacts on learning. How do I start this ball rolling?

The first issue to be addressed before such a task force can be agreed upon is why it is needed? I believe it is needed, but why would anyone else think so? So the first task of the task force should be to determine its scope regarding the nature of the need in the perceptions of those concerned.

In helping the task force to approach such an analysis, I could suggest many things that my colleagues might want to read. It would be easy to go overboard here. I suppose I should select a baker’s dozen items that I think people should read, but thinking this through just a bit more, perhaps I should think of this as a baker’s dozen number of topics. Each topic would have a set of background readings, one of which would be the one I would recommend be read if one wanted to read just one thing on that topic. The other readings would be available in case the first reading succeeded in piquing interest in the topic.

Not all of the recommended items would be readings per se. A couple would be videos or other media. Sometimes these are more approachable than readings. The various media would illustrate the emergence of multiliterate approaches on the Internet.

Putting off for the moment coming up with the readings, here are the baker’s dozen of topics I am thinking to choose. Many of these items overlap and impinge on other items in the list (RSS is a major component in blogs for example, yet both topics are important enough to be treated separately, and the concept of blogging could accordingly stand alone apart from other asynchronous collaboration media mentioned in item 12.)

1. RSS and push/pull technologies and feed readers
2. Aggregation: tagging, Del.icio.us, and folksonomic classification systems as opposed to taxonomic ones
3. Podcasts: harvesting them primarily, but also producing them, as vital resources in ongoing professional development
4. Paradigm shift: multiliteracies and new learning heuristics
5. Blogging and microblogging
6. Digital storytelling
7. Social networking
8. Distributive learning networks: communities and connectivism
9. Web 2.0
10. Informal / just-in-time learning
11. Synchronous communications: instant messaging, online presentation venues incorporating interactive whiteboard, voice, and video
12. Asynchronous collaborations tools: blogs, wikis, Voicethread, Slideshare and similar, Google docs and similar, Google notebook

How can I expand and fine tune my list of items? I will engage my community of practice, my social network, my distributed learning network, my community of colleagues, most of whom I have never met face to face although we’ve been interacting for the past 5 or ten years. I have asked them for their advice.

This is in fact the key to staying up on the new technologies. It’s a question of keeping attuned to a network of people with something worth sharing. In the most recent age of print literacy one would encounter needed resources in libraries and through journal subscriptions, where the network would consist of a range of static authors.

In the new age it is possible to interact with writers and thinkers directly, but though this is possible and with emerging technologies this possibility can be exploited with great benefit to all concerned, for those who are hesitant to get 'up close' at the very outset, it is not absolutely necessary to interact with people synchronously any more than it is necessary to meet an author of a book or journal article. However, the crucial difference nowadays is in knowing where to find that network of people with information to share most relevant to the individual. It turns out that these people are less frequently publishing in traditional media. So the first thing to learn, as it is with what we should be teaching our students, is HOW we stay on top of things, given new developments in technology having major impacts on both literacy and learning.

So the first challenge of this task force should be to develop a core of educators where I work with a greater awareness of what the new technologies are and their potentials for education, what some people characterize as having transformational potentials. Once consciousness has been raised to a requisite degree, the task force can then begin identifying areas within existing curricula where these technologies might apply. It would be hoped in this phase to involve teachers within those departments who could in turn be made aware of the affordances made possible by principled use of technology in the service of the teaching goals of the various departments.

If anyone reading this has any ideas on how I can better approach this, or if you can think of other topics for my baker's dozen, I'd really appreciate your comments.

I am posting this in draft form in order to hopefully elicit comments and suggestions, but I intend to change this, for example to fill in the readings, at some point in the near future.

Tiny URL for this post: http://tinyurl.com/2kkb3v

Meanwhile, Tom Robb was kind enough to send me a copy of his chapter:
Helping teachers to help themselves. In: Hubbard, Philip and Mike Levy (Eds.). Teacher education in CALL. 2006. xii, 354 pp. (pp. 335–347).
More about this book here: http://www.benjamins.com/cgi-bin/t_bookview.cgi?bookid=LL%26LT%2014

Robb suggests that supporting teacher autonomy in technology at the program level would benefit from the following elements:

• Survey of institution's technical support environment
• Hire a (CALL or technology) specialist
• Recognize and reward self training and innovation
• Set up a faculty development program
• Budget for training and resource personnel (equal amounts on human, hardware, and software resources)
• Encourage networking
• Provide release time and funding
• and finally, the kicker: brute force, require the use of technology
  

Also Kim Cofino lists diverse aspects involved in "the shift to a 21st century learning environment" in her post: Making the shift happen, Always Learning (Feb 24, 2008):
http://mscofino.edublogs.org/2008/02/24/making-the-shift-happen/

1. Vision and philosophy - "Expecting teachers to change their practice, without providing a thought-out vision and philosophy for why they should change will only result in frustration."
   
2. Leadership - "at some point, school leadership needs to clarify and confirm that this is the direction the school is heading. There needs to be an official acknowledgment of the vision and philosophy and clear expectations that change will happen."
3. Paradigm shift and transparency - "you also need to develop a clear framework which details exactly what the roles are for each individual involved ... - each person on staff will be responsible for some aspect of this transition and they need to know how they fit into the bigger picture."
4. Curriculum and professional development - "Embedding this new model for teaching and learning into the curriculum development process is a natural way to institutionalize change - if it becomes part of our curriculum, it becomes part of our teaching and learning practice."
   
5. Staffing and equipment - "Why would we hire someone with no teaching load - someone who just “helps” people all day? Unfortunately, without the human support (which can range from being a teaching model in the classroom, to curricular or pedagogical support, to technical support, to a “safety blanket”) the technological troubles can end up feeling insurmountable for teachers new to this model of teaching and learning - exactly what you don’t want."
   
6. Infrastructure and communication - "Once staffing and equipment are sufficient, clear infrastructure and communication strategies need to be put in place ... Having resources and knowing how to access them or how to get support are all very different things."
   
7. Resources - "To help teachers and administrators cope with the rapid pace of technological change, developing easy to use resources (like “how to” sheets for both students and teachers, or common rubrics and assessment tools) can make the use of new tools far less intimidating."
   
8. Reflection and adaption - "Another important aspect of reflection is sharing our successes. Finding consistent ways to publicize success - not only within the school, but also to the wider school community, helps teachers gain confidence, explore new areas of teaching and learning, and promote positive attitudes towards this change. We can often get bogged down with solving problems, but sometimes the solution is sharing success."

Cofino's post provides numerous links to additional resources for developing the various aspects which must be addressed in accomplishing such a shift.

All I know about Blogging and Microblogging

I've been participating in the http://groups.yahoo.com/group/blogging4educators/ EVO session, where I've been helping moderate this past week http://blogging4educators.pbwiki.com/Week3, culminating in a WiZiQ chat recorded here: http://tinyurl.com/39tkth

Someone wrote early in the week asking what they should blog about. My reply seemed to be appreciated by the group, so I thought I'd blog it and tag it in such a way that it would fit in with the experiments the group is conducting on the Writingmatrix model, finding posts created as part of a group by tagging them, in this case b4echallenge, and then finding the posts by searching on the common tag in Technorati.

On the purpose of blogging
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/blogging4educators/message/445

Ideally you should pick as a topic for your blog something that you would like to have an online conversation about. I've heard people (who don't know better) say things like "blogs are just online journals, aren't they?" This implies a one-way information transfer. If that's the case you might as well put up a static web page. Of course blog software can make it a lot EASIER for someone to put up a 'page' somewhere. But thinking of a blog in terms of unidirectional information flow misses the point considerably. A good blog will invite comments. If you turn 'trackback' on in your blog then you can see when other people are linking to you from their blogs. Appropriate use of TAGS (labels or categories in some blog software) will reveal your blog to people who search Technorati or Google Blog Search for blog posts on topics of interest to them.

So, true, the topic of your blog can be anything that interests YOU. But if you think of it in terms of Web 2.0, read-write, many-way conversation opportunities, then this might help you to direct your postings to things that are of interest to others as well.

This interest doesn't have to be popular. Blogs and other web 2.0 tools address the great need lacking in conventional publishing for vehicles for communication on niche issues, what has been called the 'long tail'. It may turn out that what interests you might be of great interest to someone else. A blog is a good way to find that other person, other people, and discover and communicate with a small but dedicated group.

There's more about trackback and pingback in section 4.1 here:
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: http://tesl-ej.org/ej41/int.html

On tagging:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/blogging4educators/message/625

Tags are a concept it took me a while to get my mind around, and some have asked 'how do I do it?'. At the bottom of your blog post you'll see a field where you can write in tags for your post. In some blog softwares these are called LABELS or CATEGORIES. Essentially you're meant to write in a few words (or strings in computerese) there that best describe your post.

After a while you'll find that a lot of the words you use repeat themselves in such a way that they develop a classification system, and in aggregate with millions of other people doing the same thing your classification system forms a 'folksonomy' (a word similar to taxonomy, which is a pre-ordained classification system).

Powerful tools have been developed to feret out tags from among the millions of posts created in the blogosphere. We use Technorati but there are 12 more tools listed here: http://mashable.com/2008/02/03/13-tools-for-tracking-discussions-in-the-blogosphere/

We have found that by using a tag unique to a project we can 'aggregate content' (or 'find all the posts on the topic'). This can be used in classrooms as with the writingmatrix project.

You should definitely label, tag, or categorize your posts. This is very important. You can have as many labels as you like except where blogger, for example, limits you to 200 characters. In any event, you should tag ALL posts you create in conjunction with this post by the tag (label or category). Tags are essential, key, to the social nature of blogging. You will see how it works if you start tagging your posts right away.

Pay attention to how to delimit your tags. In blogger you delimit with a comma. This means your tags can be more than one word. But many sites have you delimit with a space (so tags are one word, or one_word like this - if you space delimit in blogger you will end up with one long tag, but you can go back and fix it, don't worry).

Also, you should ensure that your blog is public (unless you want it to be private). In Blogger you go to settings to make your blog public. If it's public it can be found by tag search engines such at http://technorati.com - if it's not public it won't show up on the searches we do.

On Writingmatrix
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/blogging4educators/message/719

This week I'll be talking about the Writingmatrix project, which you can read about here:
http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dr22kn2_24dpqdgg . At that link, there are links to many recorded presentations and publications already made about this project.

There's a LOT you could read there so I'll briefly explain that teachers in different countries had students blog and tag their posts with a unique key word, 'writingmatrix'. The students in these countries then used http://technorati.com to find other blog posts (with ANY authority) tagged 'writingmatrix'. They browsed the available blogs with intent to find some that interested them and then they left comments in each other's blogs, or tagged them in http://del.icio.us, and/or linked to them from their own blogs (causing the link from their post to appear in the blog they linked to) and writers developed audiences in this way and met online in other ways as well.

The beauty of the project was that it was totally spontaneous, no pre-arrangement with anyone is necessary, and in fact anyone here can do a Google or Technorati search on 'writingmatrix' and see what comes up and/OR tag a blog post 'writingmatrix' and find it in the Technorati listing later. We could do the same with the tag 'blogging4educators' and if you want to double your fun you can tag your posts both ways, plus add any other tag that occurs to you.

I have made some screen casts about Google Reader. One of them shows how you can search on blogging4educators in Technorati (and follow the feed on that SEARCH in Google Reader).
http://213.42.148.233/file.php/83/internetsearch/google_reader_manage_feeds.swf

On Microblogging
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/blogging4educators/message/737

Someone wrote expressing disappointment that it was taking time to develop a following through blogging. I replied:

• Remember that blogs appeal to NICHE interest. Persevere. Blog from the heart.
• Be sure you TAG TAG TAG. People use searches like Technorati and Google Blog Search and others (Google 'blogsearch') to find postings on topics that interest them. Tags are key to their finding your blog.
• Twitter is emerging as a tool for getting you on the map. This is a good article on how Twitter can help drive traffic to your blog:
  http://www.problogger.net/archives/2008/01/23/9-benefits-of-twitter-for-bloggers/
  

I've tagged more perspectives here: http://del.icio.us/vancestevens/twitter

And finally, getting down to the nitty gritty ...
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/blogging4educators/message/805

Someone wrote to ask:

i'm on blogger and i can't find my blog on technorati. i only see it as a link on one of my friend's blog. i can't find it on google either. :( so clearly i haven't checked something properly. do you happen to know what?

I was waiting for this question.

Technorati and http://blogsearch.google.com/ search blogs to help you find ones you you are looking for but don't know about yet. I haven't used blogsearch that much and I don't know whether or not it searches for tags in blog postings.There is information here that says it utilizes blog 'structure' http://www.google.com/help/about_blogsearch.html but I found no mention of tags. A search on blogging4educators only turns up 19 results. I turned the safe filter off, and got the same.

Notice point 5 at the above URL. It points to information about pinging
http://www.google.com/help/blogsearch/about_pinging.html

Now, how does Google or Technorati know that a blog exists? It has to at some point ping that blog. A ping is like a sonar packet of data that one server sends another, which the receiving server acknowledges and returns a ping to that effect. So to start the process your blog has to ping Google or Technorati and say, yoo hoo, here I am. Normally the search engines troll blog sites and look for blogs, ping them, and once they've found them, follow them, but in case you have to go proactive, there is information on how to do that here:
http://www.google.com/help/blogsearch/about_pinging.html

I know more about this with Technorati. Technorati searches on TAGS in blogs, but you have to be sure your blog is PUBLIC (somewhere in your settings you can make it so). This will enable it to communicate with blog search engines (i.e. ping them and answer pings). If it still doesn't show on listings, you might have to manually send a ping to the search engine.

David Warlick has some information about how you can do that with Technorati here: http://hitchhikr.com/index.php?mode=faq#2

Also, you can register with Technorati. Once you've done that you can 'claim' your blog. If you follow this procedure you'll eventually reach a point where you can ping Technorati. Yoo hoo, I'm here !!

When we were experimenting with writingmatrix we had a lot of people, including me, who could not get their blogs to show up in Technorati listings despite numerous attempts using all the tricks mentioned so far. I wrote them to ask what was going on. They wrote back that they would look into it. Eventually they came up with a tweak on their interface whereby you can adjust the level of authority you want your blog results to be invested with. If you are researching latest developments on a vexing physics problem you might want to weed out hits where the poster is not known. If you are dealing with first time bloggers (educators, that's us!)
then you want to see posts of blogs of students and colleages with zero 'authority'. So now Technorati have made it possible to search on posts with ANY authority. This is what you want. You can see how to adjust this in my screencast given in the wiki for Week 3:

- Managing Feeds in Google Reader (3.5 mb)
http://213.42.148.233/mod/resource/view.php?id=13029 or
http://213.42.148.233/file.php/83/internetsearch/google_reader_manage_feeds.swf

When I do a search in Technorati on blogging4educators tagged posts with ANY
authority http://technorati.com/search/blogging4educators?authority=n&language=en I get 48 hits. If i change this to 'a little' authority that number reduces to 8 hits.

What is 'authority'? According to Technorati, authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has - from http://support.technorati.com/faq/topic/71

At our level of blogging, use ANY authority in your searches.

This probably sounds more complicated to some of you than you wish it was, but this is the reality as far as my colleagues and I in the Writingmatrix project have been able to work it out over the past several months. On the up side, my posts are now showing up in Technorati listings ;-) So try some of the hints indicated above and let us know if it solves your problem (and if not, that's ok too, because your feedback will help push us to the next level of discovery)

In summary: How to get involved in Writingmatrix

Writingmatrix is a very minimalist project, as Paul Allison says, it's "Using the web as it is".

1. Have your students blog.
2. Have them tag their posts 'writingmatrix' (plus any other tags they want to use)
3. Have them check technorati for posts on writingmatrix with any authority
Just use this link: http://technorati.com/search/writingmatrix?authority=n&language=en
With any luck they'll start seeing their posts in there (oooh there's one of mine!)

4. Have them find posts in there that they like (455 listed at the moment)
5. Have them comment on those posts
6. Have them link to posts they like in their blogs

In reality, the teacher might want to come to grips with the concepts above in order to understand what to do if the students' blogs aren't showing in the listings.

The result should be that your students' blogs appear and that they attract some attention in the form of comments, links back, and so on.

Let us know if it works (or if it doesn't and we'll try to figure out how we can improve the system). And if you already KNOW, been there done that, then we want to hear from YOU.

Ever Inquiringly,
Vance

The Future of Learning in a Networked World, and the Reality

The session reported in the previous post was really great. Shortly afterwards I reported to Webheads something like this (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evonline2002_webheads/message/17653):

I said, in so many words: Starting on a good note, we had an excellent session in Ustream. It was set up and running by Kim Cofino who is to be Jen Wagner's guest on Women of Web 2.0 this week. She'll be worth listening to. She has twittered me recordings of the session here:

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/TKRcHIoaxJPcdL2rwLIJW5.VBYK3cgTY (view in popup
if any problem), and http://www.flickr.com/photos/superkimbo/sets/72157603729759649/

Doug Symington was kind enough, not to mention being on the ball enough, to webcast the event, and we're hoping to enlist him for a similar favor on Jan 18.

Now, for the downside, you never know what you'll encounter when you go on these gigs at schools in strange places, in this case in a foreign country. We were asked to prepare presentations, or at least to be ready to address the issue of reading in the context of the school we were visiting, and we thought we were promised wireless. That didn't seem to have been registered beforehand, but no problem, we were walked up to the IP dept where someone dutifully typed in our fixed IP addresses. We returned downstairs and prepared to set up our session. I had the usual ambitious mix of online venues planned and was trying to reach Skype, when someone noticed my browser swimming and said, Skype? You won't be able to skype here, that's locked down. Meanwhile edtechtalk.com chat room was not getting anywhere, Java chat apparently locked down too.

I tried Elluminate. There are three proxies to configure, your browser, Elluminate itself, and java. I hit all three in succession. My computer is slow, so this took some time. Over the course of an hour of trying different browsers, and rebooting the computer, I realized that this kind of traffic was also blocked on the ports we were given to use. Meanwhile, the Ustream had started and our session had begun.

I couldn't reach Elluminate as promised but talking in Ustream I directed traffic to my slide show at
http://www.slideshare.net/vances/reading-and-the-internet-228977/. Doug Symington, via the Twitter and Skype and Worldbridges networks of Kim and Justin, our tech-hosts, had smoothly twigged to our change of plans and was webcasting the event as if we had planned it that way, despite my inability to reach him in our pre-arranged venues. So cool the way the network works.

But that is the reality of the networked world as it is, and the experience got us all reflecting on the state of learning in the online environments we find presently. Someone asked on the futureoflearning listserv how we found the facilities at ISB and I replied that it was impressively endowed with technology, but we had trouble with the firewalls. Kim responded that we would have had any kind of connectivity we wanted had we requested what we needed in advance, but I hadn't intended my comments to reflect on her or her school. So I dashed off an email that I thought was worth blogging, and here it is.

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I didn't mean to complain about anyone or facilities or turnout at what has been an incredible experience. I was simply characterizing the nature of the beast. There is so much we can do through systems we know and control ourselves, but turning up on site with a laptop and trying to connect in the familiar ways is never going to work they way you expect unless you have a clear and robust connection to the Internet, and that doesn't happen in many schools anywhere. So connectivity problems are to be expected and I'm always impressed that things work so well.

Kim and her colleagues were switched on and accommodating. I had arranged for a webcast but our webcaster, Doug Symington in Vancouver, was already in the Ustream that they had set up for us at ISB so it was but a hiccup on my part to try (and fail) to reach him through Skype etc but discover he was already there and streaming through this network of which Kim and Justin were already a part.

Anyone turning up almost on spec to attempt complex Internet logistics through a firewall is going to be thrown off stride a notch, but the wonder of it all is that it connects and works. Hopefully the FUTURE of networked learning will entail more of a superhighway rather than this potholed road we sometimes find ourselves bumping along on, but we are on the road, and it's great to meet and have opportunities to work productively with its denizens along the way.

We had a similar interesting experience with the accommodating Thai teachers in Khorat. Our program of blogging etc required that they have Google accts but the Google spam guards attempted to thwart us when they detected multiple attempts from the same computers to start Gmail accounts, so almost half the teachers were not able to proceed through the gatekeepers at Google's website. What to do? The IT dept suggested that we reconfigure proxy2 to proxy3 etc, and lo and behold all these teachers were going into browser settings and figuring it out. It was a hiccup but in the end another hurdle smilingly overcome.

I found Elluminate blocked from Khorat (and also my own Homestead site with the handout I'd prepared for the workshop) but Adobe interactive presentation software worked (flash memory to the rescue on the latter issue) and I was able to connect with Alex who'd announced his Adobe session in the wiki. BUT 20 min into that my LAN password expired and I was thrown out of there. It was my excuse to go to lunch, but again, I don't wish to appear to be complaining about these techno challenges. The wonder of it is that we put people in touch around the world despite significant challenges.

Things can't improve until we describe the pitfalls. The wonderful thing about progressing through an environment like what we found in Thailand (and what I find in many countries I visit throughout the world) is that we have a chance to step outside our ivory towers and discover the reality on the ground that covers most of the planet, and then find means of coping with what is there. I really don't mean to be whinging about what we encounter at one site or another. My message is intended to be two-fold. One (fold?) is to acknowledge and describe the situation, the reality as it exists, and the other is to marvel at how people overcome obstacles to achieve the connectivity for which there is an overwhelming desire. By overwhelming, I mean to suggest that the movement for net neutrality is eventually going to overwhelm obstacles to it. Or at least I hope so.

Future of Learning in a Networked World

I had the good opportunity this January 16-19 (2008) to take part in an interesting peripatetic unconference, the second annual run of the TALO-sponsored Future of Learning in a Networked World http://flnw.wikispaces.com/, a traveling road show that got under way about that time in Bangkok, Thailand.
I happened to have this week with no students and with nothing more worthy to do, and so I flew to Thailand at my own expense to engage in an act of edu-tourism, and share with many educators and students in that country whatever expertise I have in return for 'gala' evening meals and other gestures of good-will.
On Jan 16 we were at the International School of Bangkok, an incredibly well resourced educational setting where we met Kim Colino http://www.kimandalex.com/kimabout.html and Justin Medved http://medagogy.edublogs.org/. Kim is going to appear on Women of Web 2.0 this Wednesday January 22, and when she does I'll put the link to the podcast here (at the moment their archive reaches up to Jan 8, but Kim's chat will likely be linked from here: http://www.womenofweb2.com/weeklychats.htm).
Some of the artifacts we produced from this session were:

• Slides of my presentation on Reading on the Internet: http://www.slideshare.net/vances/reading-and-the-internet-228977/
• The Ustream.tv recording made during the session (2 hours: first hour, a great conversation, then my presentation): http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/TKRcHIoaxJPcdL2rwLIJW5.VBYK3cgTY
• Pictures from this event: http://www.flickr.com/photos/superkimbo/2197528680/in/set-72157603729759649/
• The wiki we made on going to Suranee http://rong-rien.wikispaces.com/

Also, there was at least one blog posting on the session at http://ddraig-goch.blogspot.com/2008/01/networks-enable-discussion.html. This link will create a 'trackback' to Mr. Harrison's post, assuming that he has the feature turned on. A trackback is where his blog informs him each time that someone else in the blogosphere links to one of his posts (he'll see links to this post, and any others linking to him). The trackbacks generally appear beneath a blog post under the heading: Links to this post. When someone references this post with a link to it, for example, their blog pings mine, and the link where the ping originated is appended to my blog.

There are more links, updated in June 2013, here:
http://vancestevens.com/papers/index.html#080116

I used this post to show the folks at SUT how to embed the Ustream recording here, and also how to edit the all important TAGS or "labels" for this post.

My students want to see how to do this so to show them I'm embedding the code here for my slide show</>

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