Collaborative online note-taking

Wirelessly-connected audience members collaboratively take notes on presentations, using Google Wave.

I’m still wondering what this divided attention implies for the way presenters structure their presentation. Should it become less dense? Should there be pauses to allow the note-takers to catch up? I seem to remember a post by Howard Rheingold in which he and his students negotiated periods of listening and periods of online networking during his sessions, but I can’t find it…

(I have some Google Wave invitations going if anybody want one.)

HT Steven Downes.

JISC publishes funding roadmap for 2009/10

(JISC is an advisory committee to the funding councils. It looks after the ICT infrastructure of the post-compulsory education sector. It is also the funding body for a lot of project work e.g. digital preservation, repositories, interoperability, and research into technology-enhanced learning and teaching. It places an emphasis on innovation and dissemination.)

Press Release

JISC publishes funding roadmap for 2009/2010

UK education is to benefit from over £7 million in grants and funding
opportunities, as JISC launches its investment plan for the academic year
2009/2010.

Over the next nine months JISC will be investing in a range of projects across
universities and colleges to support innovation in research, teaching and
learning to aid the management of institutions. Projects will range from 12
months to three years in duration.

Among the areas JISC will be funding are:
• Cloud computing for research
• Learning and teaching innovation grants
• Business modelling and sustainability for online content and
collections to develop best practice
• A ‘digipedia’ prototype to bring together resources, standards,
policies, case studies, best practise and expertise on the digital
content lifecycle
• Shared best practice for university researchers working with
business and community groups
• Access and identity management

Alice Colban, head of finance at JISC says, “We fund projects across England,
Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland through grant funding opportunities to
universities and colleges.

“In 2008/09 JISC funded over 300 projects across 24 programmes and during
this academic year JISC will invest over £7 million to advance the innovative
use of digital technologies in UK colleges and universities. Grants vary from
£20,000 to over £1 million, which are allocated through a bidding process.”

Sarah Sherman, Bloomsbury Learning Environment Service Manager for the
Bloomsbury Colleges explains the difference that being part of a JISC project
made for her consortium, “The projects we have been involved with enabled
people to take a simple step forward in trying something new with
technology.

“With JISC funding we were able to employ a full time project officer to work
with all six colleges encouraging collaboration across the entire consortium.
The shared funding meant that the benefits of the project were felt by a
wider number of people than would have been possible if a single institution
was funded,” she added.

The Millon+ group report ‘From Inputs to Impact: A Study of the Impact of
Jisc Funding on Universities’, states that even relatively modest awards of
£30,000 can have a ‘profound impact’ and that 44 per cent of the universities
in the study have had unanticipated benefits from JISC funding.

View the funding roadmaps at:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/fundingopportunities/futurecalls.aspx

Access the JISC guide to bidding:

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/fundingopportunities/bidguide.aspx

Sign up to JISC Announce to receive funding calls. Email
jiscmail@jiscmail.ac.uk with your first name, last name and include ‘join jisc-
announce’ in the subject heading.

Read the Million+ report at:

http://www.millionplus.ac.uk/research/from-inputs-to-impact-a-study-of-the-

impact-of-jisc-funding-on-universities

Why I mistrust social without personal

I fret about this these days:

“Lastly, my heart rolled over at the conversation about online social networking, which was consonant with everything else I’ve been hearing on the subject. I blog and I read an immense amount of ‘user-generated content’ – ideas, entire online arguments, artworks – but must I Facebook under my actual name to be a viable bet for my next employer?  Do we have to wear our lives on our sleeves online, or risk seeming one-dimensional? Is there any room for individuals to be friendly, civil, responsible, cooperative, without demonstrating it in a social network? Can we keep ourselves to ourselves if we want to, or will we discover that we have excluded ourselves because the rules have changed? Disturbed by the idea that I might have to come out behind all my social software aliases, and perform some career-oriented identities. This is not my idea of authentic. I don’t want to use my friends and colleagues as my foil. And what about the personal and professional parts of my digital identity – should I give in to the forces which are pushing them into each other? It reminds me of a commission by the Soviet constructivist artist Rodchenko, a worker’s recreation centre. You could busy yourself in a vast variety of pursuits as long as you weren’t doing them alone.”

There’s an alternative term for ’social media’: the ‘live web’, and it’s the suggestion of Doc Searls (wondering what Doc is short for), Berkman academic and winner  of the Google / O’Reilly Open Source Award for Best Communicator. He argues, in a nutshell that over-attention to the social web, as things stand, interferes with any efforts to empower individuals natively because currently personal aspects of our online lives are assumed to follow from social aspects, rather than the other way round. This is going to take me some thinking out, from a teaching and learning context. I’m thinking Argyris on organisational learning, and Schon’s reflective practitioner. Double-loop learning involves not merely learning how to do something, but also examining and possibly adapting the premises of the task or question. This would depend on a neutral, adaptable environment. But as Searls points out, online environments are rarely ours; facebook wants to keep me inside it so it can show me adverts; your iPhone can turn itself into a brick if Apple catches you hacking it.

Much more thinking to do. Meanwhile:

“Here’s my other problem with “social media” as it shows up in too many of the 103 million results it currently brings up on Google: as a concept (if not as a practice) it subordinates the personal.

Computers are personal now. So are phones. So, fundamentally, is everything each of us does. It took decades to pry computing out of central control and make it personal. We’re in the middle of doing the same with telephony — and everything else we can do on a hand-held device.

Personal and social go hand-in-hand, but the latter builds on the former.

Today in the digital world we still have very few personal tools that work only for us, are under personal control, are NEA, and are not provided as a grace of some company or other. (If you can only get it from somebody site, it ain’t personal.) That’s why I bring up email, blogging, podcasting and instant messaging. Yes, there are plenty of impersonal services involved in all of them, but those services don’t own the category. We can swap them out. They are, as the economists say, substitutable.

But we’re not looking at the personal frontier because the social one gets all the attention — and the investment money as well.

Markets are built on the individuals we call customers. They’re where the ideas, the conversations, the intentions (to buy, to converse, to relate) and the money all start. Each of us, as individuals, are the natural points of integration of our own data — and of origination about what gets done with it.

Individually-empowered customers are the ultimate greenfield for business and culture. Starting with the social keeps us from working on empowering individuals natively. That most of the social action is in silos and pipes of hot and/or giant companies slows things down even more. They may look impressive now, but they are a drag on the future.”

The link again.

Via Stephen Downes.

HE Consumer revolution? Be careful what you wish for

The UK Government Department for Business, Innovations and Skills, within which responsibility for universities falls, has released a new framework (strategic direction) document for Higher Education. It’s called ‘Higher Ambitions‘. The emphasis is on competition, markets and students as consumers.

I have little awareness of alternative models for funding higher education and to be honest, you have to look pretty hard.  But Wes Streeting (NUS President) makes sense when he responds, “be careful what you wish for“.

Exemplars of Twitter and social bookmarking in Higher Education

Twitter in Higher Education is a 20 page paper by Tony McNeill, Principal Lecturer in Blended Learning and Educational Technology base in Kingston University’s Academic Development Centre. The case studies begin in Section 2. Dr Sabah Abdullah’s students used Twitter as a broadcast tool in an economics course at the University of Bristol. Dr Monica Rankin used it as a conversational medium in a large cohort learning history at the University of Texas, Dallas. Sheffield Hallam used it to collect feedback; many students tweeted via SMS. The University of Colorado, Denver used Twitter to enhance social presence and so promote involvement, commitment and retention. There’s little in the way of large-scale studies and evaluations but lots of ideas – that’s how it is with very new tools.

On social bookmarking, the ever-creative Berkman Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard have produced something called H20 Playlists, “a shared list of readings and other content about an area of intellectual interest” giving learners a “wide open dialogue”. It enables learners in one community (and H20 is open to all) to gain a sense of who else in the world is thinking about the things they’re thinking about, often from very different perspectives. The video explanation is a good introduction to this ethos, or read Larissa, a Masters student in Library and Information Studies at the University of British Columbia, who explains in more detail what it does. And finally, here’s one of the featured playlists, on remix culture.

Working in groups? A must-see.

JORUM is a UK Higher Education service to encourage the creation of online resources and materials by the community. Because these things involve an investment of time and thought, authors can make them available under a CreativeCommons licence to the community for reuse and/or repurposing.

Via the eagle-eyed Matt Lingard at LSE in his post on the JORUM Teaching and Learning Competition winners, here’s a series of videos from the Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (Bradford, Leeds, Brunel) on Making Group Work Work.

“Rob, Vikki, Shireen, Muzz and Delia have been randomly selected to work together to develop a presentation entitled ‘The barriers to learning’. It’s not an easy ride. The following 10 episodes show the journey, from their first meeting through to their impressions of the presentation and working together.”

Click on Episodes to see them; each has a number of discussion points and some have commentaries (audio and text). If you have some trouble, there’s also support with accessing the videos (top section of the menu).

More about the awards, including more winners and runners up.

Update: watch the videos above in conjunction with this perceptive and somewhat machiavellian piece on participant behaviour at meetings by Venkatesh Rao (via Stephen Downes)

Technophobia and other responses to technology

You may have heard of Michael Wesch, professor of anthropology and digital ethnographer, known for his outstanding videos about the impact of information and communications technology on global society (particularly university learning). After listening to his keynote at the 2009 Association of Technologist Conference, I went to Wikipedia to find out more, and there I learned that in 2008 he had won something called The John Culkin Award for Outstanding Praxis in the Field of Media Ecology from the Media Ecology Association. So, because Michael Wesch’s videos are important and he has been called ‘the explainer’, I went to see who had won the award before and since.

I came across the best-articulated piece of technophobia I’ve encountered in a long while (and I don’t use technophobia in a rhetorical pejorative sense but a straight descriptive one). It references Postman, Debord, Ellul and Mumford (you can see most of their pictures along the top of the Media Ecology Association site), and I understand technophobia a lot better now. Here it is.

Michael Wesch is more interested in rethinking things.

Two such different winning presentations for an award overseen by an organisation which included Marshall McLuhan. Is the medium the message?

Twitter is a force to be reckoned with

Time to update my Twitter workshop handout.

The Guardian was gagged by an injunction and could not report on the response to a Parliamentary question about Trafigura, a company connected with dumping toxic waste in Ivory Coast.

The Today Programme on BBC Radio 4 (08:52 or thereabouts) and The Guardian report that Twitter can’t be gagged. As Today’s commentator Joshuah Rozenberg observed, the legalities of injunctions were drawn up for a world without a read-write web. More from the BBC.  And from the aforementioned Guardian piece:

“While the Guardian was prevented from reporting the question – from MP Paul Farrelly to a minister – until law firm Carter-Ruck withdrew its opposition at lunchtime today, Twitter wasn’t: instead of suppressing the story the attempt backfired. Factor in the Streisand effect, and starting here the topic spread across the internet and became the top trending topic on Twitter. The Guardian editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, tweeted the gagging order with the question “Did John Wilkes live in vain?”. The gagging order was lifted after Carter-Ruck dropped its claim.

But Twitter had already alarmed a variety of platforms, and the question about Trafigura got picked up by a number of prominent blogs, including Guido Fawkes, Richard Wilson’s Don’t Get Fooled Again, and Adam Tinworth’s One Man and His Blog. Finally, mainstream media caught up, with The Spectator pushing the story.

It might be a bit too exaggerated to call it a historic moment, but surely the real-time web passed its test today.”

Simple conclusion (addressing opinions still held about the worthlessness of Twitter): Twitter is not trivial. Sometimes it hosts trivialities, sometimes it is politically important.

What about educationally important? I’m not sure (although see the handout above for some ideas) but shouldn’t we give it some consideration?

Update: something a little more concrete – Professor of e-learning Gráinne Conole’s discussion (Oct 09) about using Twitter with students; from it, Dr Alan Cann on Twitterfolios – an excerpt from that:

“Martin Weller commented:
I know, having tried to force-feed reflective practice, and having had it force-fed, that it doesn’t really map onto conventional teaching very well ‘Now reflect on your answer’. Students get fed up with this, and feel it is playing a game – they know if they say ‘I think I could have done better at this’, then they’ll get marks. Whereas if you said ‘I think I did everything right’ you won’t. It feels like a prisoner playing at contrition to get past the parole board…maybe just give students tools such as blogs, and get them to read people who are good, reflective bloggers, and they may pick it up in a more subtle form.
I’ve shied away from blogs and “learning logs” based on the negative reception they seem to generate, recorded in the work of Gráinne Conole and at the OU (don’t use the “B-word”: Exploring students’ understanding of how blogs & blogging can support distance learning in HE, ALT-C 2007, 169-178). Maybe I need to rethink this. Jim Groom supports the idea of the blogfolio (This ain’t yo mama’s e-portfolio part 1, part 2) and cites Barbara Ganley: “Twitter to connect, blog to reflect”.

In response to Martin, I commented:
A subgroup of this cohort are active Twitterers, and their tweets capture precisely this “stream of consciousness style of reflection”.
Hmm. Blogfolio? Maybe. Twitterfolio???

David Andrew commented:
I did find myself writing more reflective notes than I normally do – then I realised that they were in the form of the way I use Twitter – I think Twitter is maybe the best way of encouraging reflection.”

Help with media

At Goldsmiths we have a well-appointed Digital Media Suite (see its staff’s site) and Media Equipment Centre (with a loan collection) staffed by friendly and knowledgeable technicians and technologists. In Goldsmiths’ Learning Enhancement Unit, learning technologists can discuss with you about different forms of media used to support different kinds of learning, with reference to examples and research findings, and we can work with you to design different learning experiences.

At a national level, JISC provides information from its advisory service based in Bristol. From them I received this today by email:

Hi all,

Tomorrow (Wed 7th Oct) at 13:30 we will be available online for our second online surgery. <http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/surgery/>

JISC Digital Media are providing fortnightly one-hour online help and support sessions to answer any queries you have regarding digital media. Queries regarding any aspect of still images, moving images (including video), audio and how they can be used for teaching and learning are welcome. Technical, workflow related or general queries will be answered and there are no limit to the number of queries that can be asked. No query is too simple to be explored.

Hope to see you online,

<http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/surgery/>

———————-
Zak Mensah, e-Learning Officer
JISC Digital Media – A JISC Advisory Service

Still images, moving images and sound advice

Free Helpdesk for UK Further and Higher Education:
<info@jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk>
Online advice documents: <http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/>
Hands-on training: <http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/training/>

Jots from the Future of Technology in Education 2009 (p.m.)

Blogging from the Future of Technology in Education 2009 a free one-day conference on 2nd Oct 2009, Royal Geographical Society, Kensington Gore, London, hosted by the University of London Computer Centre with the aim of getting people together.

See the previous (a.m.) post for info about tags, twitter, watching it all on video etc). What I didn’t mention is that DR from ITS is next to me.

Will McInnes – Our Social Tomorrow

Themes.

Fragmentation. Explosive unbundling. Authority can change rapidly. Internet is agnostic about hierarchies of the physical world. People are scattered across the web. Widgets mean that online identities are homeless. Tapestry metaphor (seems to contradict the homelessness metaphor).Data. Nike+ widget in his partner’s shoe.

Coke bottle designed so that even if it were smashed in pieces, it was recognisable. Can we do this with educational identities?

(Unreal – everybody is laughing because he said his cat died.)

Continuous partial attention. He dug out some of the backchannel comments from twitter.

Communities. How does one make a community? Communities aren’t drag and drop. Digital tumbleweed is rolling through a lot of social media sites. Communities are more a matter of gardening than construction. Organic. Flicker personally greeted every new registrant, but most sites are like big cold warehouses. 1% do a lot of creation, maybe 9% edit or comment, and the rest are consumers. The 1% are very valuable, and need to be nurtured (but who nurtures the nurturers – isn’t this circular?)

Gaming. Toyota prius presents miles per gallon; that number becomes a driver of their behaviour when driving. Optimising that number becomes a game. Like beating your tomtom’s ETA. Can their be a score or metric that taps into some notional basic human motivation? (ACTION – Adam for 3DGraduate, or the Gold Award). blipfm has props; social currency.

Realtime. Google and Facebook rumoured to have tried to buy Twitter because it’s a cauldron of realtime reactions. Realtime demands different things from us.

Transparency. Rating and reviews. Apparently shallow but profound in their impact on organisations (there was was a TwitPoll for the morning’s speakers). Powerful in helping to accomplish some goals. E.g. it’s very helpful to know what your one-star products are. Can we harness this in education (Uh-oh ratemyprofessor. Uh-oh that prostitute rating site Harriet Harman flagged).

Will McInnes raises a lot of questions most of us have already asked, but in an entertaining way.

Physical internet. Wii. Streetview. Barcode scanner on my phone which can work out where I can get hold of something based on my GPS location. Nike+ goes in your shoe, you can do stuff based on your location (what stuff? What stuff?)

Online curating. Via filter blogger enthusiasts and scholars on Twitter or elsewhere.

James Clay (Uni of Glouc) the future of learning

Asked questions online and wordled them for the presentation. No one definitive thing will change or hinder learning.

We start each academic round in October. Put your hand up if you need to get the harvest in. Our ways of doing things are embedded in the past and we just tweak (but actually it has always been thus, and look how far we’ve come).

Institutions are constraining.

Is everything really learning? I don’t think it’s helpful to think of everything as learning. The kinds of learning we want to foster in HE are conscious, reflective forms.

There’s something illustrative about James Clay talking slightly wistfully about educational revolution from the front of the auditorium, as an authority figure. Why are elearning conferences still like this? Something’s working…

GPS – location-based learning is a new dimension (reminds me of Pearls(?) which does the same for the Wed).

Ereaders are going to change the way that learners learn.

James Clay has a mifi which provides connection for 5 people.

Battery technology has to change. Where are the power sockets for charging in secure places?

Specialist tools v. universal tool. (In my bag is a phone, an mp3 player, a reader, a camera and a laptop. Al of the above play mp3s, three of them have cameras, 4 of them can present documents. But I got them for their specialist interfaces. e.g. I can’t listen to an mp3 on my reader or my camera or my phone in the rain and easily scan through a podcast. Yes, this is an environmental disaster.)

Institutions have to stop saying No as a default position, and start looking for solutions.

How to stop worrying and learn to love the Internet – Nick Skelton Uni of Bristol

Seminal Sunday Times piece by Douglas Adams in 1999 on how everything which already existed in the world you were born into is fine, everything which you experience as new when you’re an adult is to be suspected until 20 or 30 years have passed without incident.

Tim Berners Lee: the internet doesn’t connect machines, it connects people. It has a social purpose not a technical purpose.

How can we see the future?

Unis are going to be transformed by the internet. They’re about knowledge, learning and ideas. The internet is dominating knowledge, learning and ideas. TED. RSA. University of Oxford Podcasts.

TED’s self-definition is also a pretty good definition of a university. TED is less exclusive than it was.

New collaboration tools threaten existing hierarchies.

Information – in 10 years our problem has switched from having too little information to having too much. (The poor quality of blogging is perhaps partly attributable to a complacency about information, a willingness to devolve fact-checking to the reader instead of it being something good writers do). Information you don’t have, or can’t find, is useless.

It’s trivial to copy information. Anything online will leak. One response to that is for institutions and individuals to say no to recordings. This is futile. Ian Tomlinson at G20 and Little Brother who recorded his abuse by police officers.

What is artificially secret becomes public – “Student beats chating charges for posting work online” (Chronicle of Higher Ed) even though tutor complained that they would have to set new exams.

Attention and reputation are the currency that matters.

We’re doing now what we thought was inconceivable 30 years ago. Maybe we ask the students to watch a video presentation before turning up, and use the lecture hour for question and answer and group work (but aren’t students already supposed to do reading before lectures? And how many do)?

What is our role? (who is “our”?)

“The Edgeless University” JIC

Kevin Kelly “New Rules for the New Economy”

ideasandohdears is Nick’s blog.

Peter Robinson Oxford University – Pocket University

Refer back to Peter’s talk back in summer.

Laptop ownership is 90% at Oxford. Facebook dominates social lives at Oxford – by far students’ favourite website.

Podcasts break down the silos in universities – particularly when students begin to create audio.

PR is a great believer in audio – often no need for video, which increases the work, bandwidth hugely and limits how learners can engage with the piece ie not on the move, driving, walking.

Legal issues loom large – in order to move fast they had to check and approve every single piece they recorded and posted. Big challenge. HoD sign-offs.

Unbundling the university – Douglas Hine – School of Everything

Distinction: between the future of educational institutions and the future of the things we value education for. Education cannot be circumscribed by any single institution. Learning certainly can’t.

We aren’t good about predicting which technologies are going to take off. Video phone calls didn’t take off. SMS, unhyped, did take off.  Who’d have thought that Twitter would be perceived to be as important as it is?

Innovators and technology consumers are not superior to the other parts of the adoption cycle – ‘laggards’ is insulting.

Needs drive uptake and activities. We should be looking at dissatisfactions and unmet desires, rather than at the behaviours of people who just like new technologies.

For example mztek.org meets needs of students dissatisfied with facilities on their Media and Arts courses. Pippa Buchanan’s DIY Masters. Accessing teachers, mentors, fellow students. Thinking about where to get accreditation from. Self-organised alternative to higher education. Another example – the Economics PhD student who needed better maths but couldn’t get it within his institution. Another example – the SmartWork Company, Anne Marie McEwan finds it less frustrating to teach through her own teaching practices than through a university. Another example AlterFutures meetups for students.

Obstacles and objections which came up in a Demos seminar. According to the banking model of education, you deliver content and hand out units. But learning is not just about scaling up, but also about scaling down and self-organising through meetup or schoolofeverything.

What with all the scaling up and scaling down, what might be left in the middle for some universities might be a crisis.

Qualifications and accreditation need a rethink. Currently they function as a valid currency, portable achievements. What about the role of genealogies and recommendatiions.

(From Twitter – notgoingtouni.co.uk.Compare and contrast with the Peer to Peer University and the University of the People.)

Digital Identity – Shirley Williams, Uni of Reading

Digital identity map shows different categories of the trail you use on the Web.

Sometimes you can’t remember how to access the account on which the embarrassing information about yourself, posted years ago, is hosted.

The idea that your ’social graph’ will be worth as much as your house.

The social revolution needs you – Lindsay Jordan, Uni of the Arts

metablog – a blog about blogging (ACTION – plunder heavily and use as example for blogs and blogging workshop)

tweader

Community is important. Reciprocity. The need to nurture a network of people to help us learn – leading and learning by example – and enabling other people to do the same.

Need for action and vision, vision and action.

Panel on virtual worlds

Look at K0 report in virtual worlds.

Bloke from life sciences background says that 2nd Life hasn’t given him anything he can’t get in real life.

More pro bloke – 2nd Life can break barriers of distance, is a start in simulation – training paramedics for example. Students can access simulation outside class time. It’s relatively cheap. And a third area – imaginative ways (unspecified)

Evan from JISC RSC – collaboration and face-to-face is very important, and students would entirely miss this in a virtual environment. Analogy between simulated patients and real patients might not be helpful. Interrupted by the pro bloke reminding about flight simulations (which is of course different again).

Qu: simulations are quicker and cheaper to set up in 2nd life than in other environments. (But only some things can be simulated.) Another panelist queries the claims of relative cheapness and quickness. The pro panelist authoritatively talks about a research study comparing different ways of learning surgery, including the finding that those who went into an operating theatre were paralysed by fear. In second life they were relaxed enough to experiment and learn.

There are sensory input devices for Second Life.

Good idea to watch this one on the vids - website (http://fote-conference.com/) for the presentations in a few days.