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http://headspacej.blogspot.com/2006/10/scary-minefield-of-ideas.html

I guess this is supposed to be a good news story, and really it's just a relaunched school district site, but the slant of the article just seemed so wrong somehow that I wanted to post it -- County education Web site unveiled:

"Already in place in some Pajaro Valley schools, in a month, every student and teacher in the county will have free access to subscription encyclopedia sites that are aligned with California state education standards and are designed to keep kids from culling half-baked or just wrong information in a general Internet search.

On Google, for example, typing Martin Luther King Jr. pulls up www.martinlutherking.org, a site that acts as platform for white supremacists.

'The great myth is that if it's on the Internet, it must be true,' said Thom Dunks, director of technology for the county office. People think of porn and that which is harmful for kids, but there's also a whole minefield of ideas out there.'"

Yeah, porn is one thing, but imagine kids having access to IDEAS! Lock the doors! Shutter the windows! They just don't get it.

Update: Although this Martin Luther King Jr. reference was just used as an example in a quote, and this humble blog is certainly no "big gun of ed-tech", I like Tom Hoffman's idea to knock the odious site off the front page of the google results. Just paste the links into a post to boost the legit sites and we'll see if it has any effect:

Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.

http://headspacej.blogspot.com/2006/10/recommender-systems.html

Stephen Downes linked to this older (1999) page on Recommender Systems in his recent paper on Learning Networks and Connective Knowledge. It pre-dates the social-software boom, but still acts as a nice overview and notes the value of recommendations in finding people in addition to movies, books and other items:

"Although currently recommender systems are mostly used for finding things, such as books and CDs, Resnick thinks that one promising application may be recommending people. You could use recommender systems to find the right consultant or colleague - or even a potential mate."

Most people sharing a learning goal in 43 Things aren't necessarily looking for people to collaborate with (although there is functionality to form explicit groups to pursue a goal together). It could be used as a sort of recommender system for finding people ("I'm looking for people sharing my goals"), but it looks to me like it's being used more as a recommender system for things you might like to do or learn. The network that emerges around a goal does loosely connect people to each other, but that may not be as valuable as the connections between the artifacts themselves: the entries outlining what their experiences have been in pursuing the same goal, why they decided to pursue it, what they hope to accomplish, how the learning helped them, pitfalls to avoid, etc.

Perhaps it's more important as a way of finding content (advice, resources, opinions, possible applications) than as a way to find like-minded people. The primary "pivot" is the goal itself, with the people associated with each goal as secondary pivots. It is interesting to find out what other goals someone is pursuing besides the one you share with them -- that function is more exploratory than the process of figuring out if you want to pursue a specific goal.

http://headspacej.blogspot.com/2006/10/elgg-for-professional-developme

Dave linked to this story a while back, and I finally got around to checking it out: Saugus Union School District creates hot spot for collaboration, distance learning. The cool thing about this approach is that a school managed to get educators excited about social networking for themselves -- as personal professional development and as a communication tool -- before wading into the oh-so-scary world of students using the tools. Now that they're seeing the benefits, they want to get kids using it too. From there, it probably improves the chances of getting kids really learning as part of the wider web...help them learn in a safe place first and then gradually open things up. Elgg makes that progression relatively easy with flexible permissions. While I'd love to see schools diving straight into the deep end, this kind of approach probably makes more sense for most institutions.

http://headspacej.blogspot.com/2006/10/new-systems-for-sharing-learnin

I think the intersection between learning goals and social software is heating up. The popularity of 43 Things must be contributing to the interest, and maybe some of my babbling here has helped moved things along, but I think there was probably a certain inevitability about it -- in environments where people are deciding what to learn, who to learn with and figuring out how to go about it, these tools could be really valuable.

George Siemens introduced the U of M's Virtual Learning Commons a few weeks ago and linked to a backgrounder on the project. I had it saved in Bloglines for too long, and thankfully Brian nudged me to take another look at it. It's a system for students to post their learning goals as a way of recording them, finding related resources and connecting with others who share the goal. It seems to be pretty slick, and even in the current closed mode (registered students only) with relatively few participants, it looks like there could be the critical mass to make it useful. George's note about it:

"It sets learning in a conversational spaces...knowledge as a pathway through connections with others...learning as a constant in life. I'm confident that this implementation of social learning (integrated with institutionally provided academic support) is a first indicator of more prominent trends. Learning not as an explicit task...but as a constant action."

I also got an e-mail about Learning Flow and Lee Kraus explains what it's for:

"LearningFlow is a web-based application that allows (you) the learner to identify learning goals, then associate resources from across the web to that particular learning goal. The goal can also be shared with others interested in learning that goal."

It's also got a pretty nice, simple interface and some cool features for sharing goals. The kicker with any system like this is that it depends on large numbers of users and goals to start being really valuable. Until you have a few people sharing a (often quite unique) learning goal, it's just a place to store yours. So we'll see if it catches on. Elgg integrated this kind of functionality last year as well, in the context of a much richer feature set -- I should ask Dave if he's received any feedback about it.

Update: Roger Stack is paying attention to these goal-based networks as well. He describes a cool program at his school where mentoring/counselling groups have formed around areas of interest.

http://headspacej.blogspot.com/2006/10/groups-and-networks.html

I've been enjoying Stephen Downes' recent writing, talking and showing on the distinction between groups and networks. On Half an Hour, he has two solid posts called Groups and That Group Feeling, and digs in really deep on a full-length paper: Learning Networks and Connective Knowledge. In multimedia territory, he's also got a video explaining the differences (Google Video), as shown in this whiteboard full of goodness, and also audio of one of his talks in New Zealand (mp3), covering somewhat broader territory.

I like how the concept of the personal learning environment pops up in all the right places, but I've been stewing on other personal connections to some of these differences between groups and networks. I got thinking about the kind of angst I had after blogging here for a year. I had been naively (and egotistically, I guess) expecting some sort of community to form around my blogging experience, but I didn't know what it should look like. I thought it should feel like joining and belonging to a group. At that time, Seb Paquet wisely pointed out that I had actually become part of a network, but Stephen's ideas now have really helped clarify what exactly that meant.

I also realized that some of my initial investigation into 43 Things was misguided because I was looking for people learning in groups; something more like the classroom discussion boards in the courses I had been taking. I thought that once you found a bunch of people who shared a learning goal, you would really have to become a "group" to learn much of anything that mattered. I noticed that there wasn't much evidence of conversation or interaction between the people sharing a learning goal and interpreted it as a potential weakness of the site as a learning space. But of course the people sharing a learning goal are part of an emergent, informal network. Stephen's main network words all apply: diversity, autonomy, openness, and connective. There is the potential for powerful learning, but it won't look like a cohesive, unified group of people busy learning something together.

The third thing that popped into my head was my grown-up hockey experiences. I played as a kid, up until I was 16 or so. In recent years, I've half-heartedly started playing again. Last winter, I tried two very different formats. I played a few games for a local old-timer's team, and I played noon-hour drop-in hockey a dozen or so times. It hit me last night that the contrast between the two formats is very similar to Stephen's differences between groups (the old-timer's team) and networks (noon-hour drop-in).

The team was all about unity (us vs the bad guys), coordination (scheduled games, annual fees, obligation to show up, set lines), closed (you had to be invited) and distributive (core group ran the show, stars were central). The noon-hour drop-in hockey was all about diversity (whoever shows up today plays, regardless of skill level or age), autonomy (you decide when you want to come, when you want to rest), openness (everyone welcome every time), and connective (over time you talk to many more individuals than you would have on a single team).

While it is true that there are benefits to playing on a team -- added motivation to support your teammates, more cohesive relationships, and beers after the games -- I found that the drawbacks way outweighed the benefits for me. At drop-in hockey, I played more often, learned more (more ice time, more variety), spent less money, met more interesting people, and just had more fun. It may be a personality thing (some people really do seem to thrive in groups of all kinds), but I think networks make more sense for me.

http://headspacej.blogspot.com/2006/09/space-blog.html

So interesting to see someone's personal reflections on life in space: Anousheh Ansari Space Blog. Not sure if it counts as citizen journalism when she paid $20 million to get up there, but there's just something so cool about photos from the space station showing up on Flickr.

http://headspacej.blogspot.com/2006/09/xapped.html

Web sites aim to open doors -- some positive coverage of the work being done by the new corporate parent of the company I've worked for since 1999.

http://headspacej.blogspot.com/2006/09/u-of-m-ltc.html

George Siemens is going through Ch-ch-changes and moving over to my old alma mater the University of Manitoba as a research associate in their Learning Technologies Center. Looks like a great move, and I'm sure we'll all see the benefits of George being able to devote even more energy and time to this field. Congrats!

http://headspacej.blogspot.com/2006/08/paradox-of-choice-and-usability

Interesting Interview with Barry Schwartz, who I've been paying close attention to for his work on decision-making and the paradox of choice. He makes the point that our institutions (health care, for example) are trying to move toward offering more choice (and not always for altruistic reasons), but that in many cases, people aren't properly prepared or supported in making these new decisions. A fair bit of the article deals with design issues, and how more choices on screens/pages isn't always better either...but I was most interested in his comment about choice in post-secondary education:

"And you see this all over. In the domain I know best, the world of academic institutions, increasingly, especially in the more selective places, they essentially don’t tell students what to do. They give you this gigantic list of courses, 'Take 10 of these and you will have met our liberal arts requirement. We don’t care which 10.' Here are these 18 year olds who don’t know squat, and people who do know something aren’t willing to tell them what they ought to do."

I think this is the sort of thing that 43 Things is providing for people who are trying to figure out what learning to pursue -- advice of others who have already pursued the same kinds of things and the support of others choosing the same goals. Things like professor-rating sites also add more to the mix in helping individuals make better-informed decisions about their learning. I expect lots of growth in this area...

http://headspacej.blogspot.com/2008/06/edubunk.html

I had limited my involvement in the "edupunk" discussion to a few pot-shot comments from the outside, both on Stephen's post, and over at Brian's. It was fun, especially when an anonymous commenter tried to make the point that there was nothing in the world more punk than education. Seriously. Stephen and Brian might be the closest to actually being punks in the field (relatively, and in the best way), but I suspect they're both smart enough to see the hilarity of government and corporate employees (teachers, tech coordinators, etc) trying to co-opt the identity and ethos of a musical/political movement that was dedicated to tearing down the establishment.

There were a few posts on the theme that made sense to me, even one from (gasp!) a very smart student. I'm not sure I understood the criticisms I saw or the associated rebuttals, but much of it seemed to miss the point. Today I enjoyed Leigh's reflections and ranted a little in response...most of what appears below is from that comment.

If you’re going to consider punk as a sort of watered-down label for “alternative”, minor boundary-pushing, or low-grade anti-authority views (kept to yourself, mostly), then it can almost be married to the edu- prefix without being automatically oxymoronic, but that really misses the point. In practice, it seems to mean that these are people within the education system who sort of wish they weren’t, but don’t really want it to change much either. No whiff of revolutionary fervor. It also evokes a sort of mid-life crisis about our chosen field, perhaps wistfully remembering our younger days of idealism and techno-dreams...then looking around at what’s been accomplished with our ed.tech network-friends and asking hopefully (and collectively), “We’re still cool, right?”

Real punk, with a strong affinity for anarchy and disdain for authority of any kind...well, that is the opposite of education (not learning, which is something different altogether). If you bring punk into a conversation about the education system, you basically have to pull an Illich and suggest that the whole thing be dismantled. Or better yet, dismantle it yourself. If being an edupunk is about tearing down a dysfunctional system and replacing it with something that lets everyone learn what interests them most without institutional coercion, sign me up. But finding new ways to get your students to perform better on standardized tests (the aim of most education, sadly)? That's not even a valid evolution for learning, never mind revolution.

That's not to say that there isn't fantastic work being done in the field -- it's just not transformative or revolutionary, and you might even argue that the impact has been negligible in schools so far. Punk never really changed anything either, so maybe this actually supports the edu-punk connection. Anyway, what words could we use to better describe what the best people in ed.tech are trying to do? They’re DIY, change agents, hackers, mercenaries, members of skunkworks, tinkerers, inventors, synthesizers, mentors and facilitators, moonlighters working underground or on the side from their day jobs. A few might even be pretty rockin'! Some of them (thankfully) are borderline shit disturbers. But they’re not really punks.

I did some thinking about this a few years ago when I started my Lifestylism project. I just liked how the word fit what I was trying to do, and thought I might have even made it up...but then found out that it had a fairly long history in anarchist literature. In this context, lifestylists are people who are aware of the problems (inequality, exploitation, etc) in society and choose to deal with those problems only within their own lives -- making choices informed by that awareness, but not making any effort to change or confront the system itself. Of course true anarchists dismiss these people as cowards, because growing organic vegetables and recycling is nice and all, but the lack of social action will never bring about revolution (the anarchist's goal).

I'm not an anarchist, and I identified strongly with their derided concept for lifestylism, even after I understood it better. I don't want to tear down the system, and I think I can make a difference by aligning my lifestyle choices with my values as a quiet form of activism. I think most of the people who like the idea of being "edupunk" feel the same way about their work. The goal isn't to destroy the system, or even to create a better system to replace it -- the goal is to find ways to make our work (and the impact of our work) reflect our values better.