I realise that these things are not usual.
I sometimes look down or away from people if I am feeling whelmed.
It is a way of being careful of other people when I am feeling unsure of myself.
I need better strategies than that, and I am working on them, but for today that is roughly where I am at.

I do apologise to anyone for whom I have been difficult. I have not had the understanding to be able to map what was going on until recently and it has taken me a while to start thinking about it in ways which might be useful for other people and for myself in terms of finding ways to be more integrated.

======================================================

I have been working on a paper on 'foundations of innovation'.
I have ended up with two sets of ideas. One around the original concept.
One around the process of trying to describe it and to express it.

1. Foundations of innovation 

What is innovation?
Many things to many people. In the context of education and schools it is useful to talk about innovation as the kind of learning a student might undertake which might be unique to their own journey. Perhaps it might be unprecedented in the context of that school or classroom. It might be something which is new for the teacher also. Perhaps it is a recombination of known domains, or a different kind of expression of those ideas. A new language? A new perspective? Inquisitive work.

What is value?
The opportunity space for innovation has a strong relationship to the kinds of value propositions which exist within a school context and beyond that context to the education sector, communities of parents and potential employers. What is valued within a school day, what is blurry, interesting and invaluable. What is in between? What is valued at the end of a school day, week, term, year, graduation? 

Open tools and collaboration
Open communities and the way that they collaborate and innovate have been a reference point for thinking about contexts where inquisitive work happens. The ideas in progress regarding education and open source software and also about collaboration are at wikiversity. Thanks to Mchua Alexanderhayes Cormaggio, Jtneill, Countrymike, Erkan Yilmaz and watiwara for their thoughts and contributions despite my wobbly wiki practice. I won't restate those ideas here, but beyond just using free open source software there is another opportunity.

Open practice.. but I dont want to be an open source geek..
It is possible to engage in the kind of practice which makes open code possible. It is possible to practice and to develop that kind of collaborative practice. Beyond participation in open source communities the skills required are useful in other contexts. The same kinds of skills are required in a wiki collaboration in any other context where different ideas meet and are worked through to find new outcomes; where there is not a predetermined right way indicated by an authoritative source, but instead are emergent truths discovered through shared practice. 

Attributes of useful collaboration.
In 'emergent' or collaborative spaces we need to use different social skills to make value.
The core elements are that there is an explicit purpose, this makes it possible for participants to feel free to contribute both their individual perspectives and their more standards based, systemic or methodic work. Both can be useful and both are a part of collaborative practice. The systemic and unique flavours of contribution may be available from each participant and may be collected in the explicit purpose.
The process must also be accessible. Participants should understand and be able to comment on the method for refining and working to the purpose. Participants who are able to choose which aspects of themselves are fit for purpose.

Negotiation and winning
This is the area where the interesting collaborative skills are required; the ability to negotiate for ideas in win win kinds of ways. There are techniques for developing these skills.
Cheekily quoting Donna's facilitation and direction skills:

• Facilitating productive harmony between creative and technical people involves getting them to appreciate what they have in common and acknowledge how they are different.
• Plotting a path forward so everyone knows where a project is headed. It's about communication, and compromise. Effective group dynamics are the key to achieving productive collaboration.
• Strategies to facilitate groups becoming functional teams, using tools such as the Myer Briggs Type Indicator, Six Thinking Hats, and applying flow and team formation theory. Seeing things from different perspectives. Trying different kinds of combinations of ideas to make a best fit for purpose solution regardless of the source of the ideas.

Winning in context
But, stepping back from techniques for collaborating on divergent work, in schools there are scoping factors which determine whether the collaborative work feels authentic and useful.

• Some of these scoping ideas are the policies which have been developed to shape the school day.
• Whether the activities are valuable in context of the daily practice and pulse of the school as a flow of people and time, and also, panning back to the experience of school as a journey,
• whether the culture beyond the school day, the wider education sector, community and career context supports and recognises the kinds of thinking and participation, leadership and struggle which happen when people step beyond a known script to make something new.

Geetha Narayaran's powerful ideas
The policies which we use to map and make good learning space in a school based on industrial modelling do not necessarily serve us well in a context where we are interested in student centred learning or open communities of practice. Geetha Narayaran talked about this in her presentation about slowness and wholeness in learning.

Yes but what is really valued?
There is a disconnect between the kinds of value which student centred pedagogy suggests and the line of sight of the wider education system. This means that management of space(OH&S), information(copyright), activities(learning for testing), time(timetable), costs, insurance are defined in ways which are about management of risk. If there is a line ball decision between learning opportunities and reducing risks the risks proposition is likely to win. This means there is always a threat of being out of bounds in doing work which is innovative or unprecedented. In this kind of context it is not surprising that it is difficult to encourage new thinking and practice. 

This is specifically aggravated in contexts where the line ball decision is expressed in a one size fits all from a central system rather than from the line of sight in the classroom which might involve an appreciation of the student, the fit for purpose of the learning opportunity, and dialogue with parents regarding trying new things.

Science, computing, creativity, innovation.
There is a correlation between a culture of inquisitiveness and sharing, and the kind of thinking which makes science, maths, technology, innovation, art, strategic thinking possible. ie We are likely to be trading efficient processing and measurement of students-as-product for the ability to make room for innovative thinking and the ability to value diversity and creative inquisitive minds.

School is currently largely structured as an efficient mechanism for sorting students and also for encouraging habits which fit well with industrial models of work. Compliance, working to rule, delivering to tests, responding with correct answers. These are still useful skills. But they are not the only skills. There are other things we need to practice if we are interested in developing inquisitive minds. If we are interested in being a country where innovation, science and collaboration are a part of our culture.

Balancing economies of scale with room to move
Tolerances for variable time, space, doubt, mess, mistakes, tangential thinking are difficult to manage at scale. With technology also becoming a part of the picture we are managing the scale and complexity of our education system through keeping the structures and results predictable and defined from a centralised perspective. This provides a reliable context for both students and teachers.

Complexity and diversity
Working in experimental ways with students is likely to be more complex. Some students themselves may be more comfortable with a structure which has a known path. It is sometimes nice to know what the target is and to aim for it. There probably needs to be a balance between doing things in ways which are predictable for kinds of learning which does cover a predictable journey, or for students for whom that mode is most useful. There also need to be other ways to be valuable and to learn.

This creative stuff is a waste of time it wont get me into ......
School offers a range of experiences as prerequisites for higher learning and working life.
Some employers are starting to recognise student participation in open source and collaborative practice as an indicator of useful workplace skills. Which kinds of experimental or student centred learning are of interest to which students? How can students tell in advance about the kinds of outcomes which will or *will not* be expected. How is creative work expressed and valued in higher education or industry, how might the techniques which apply out of school be used within a school setting to make this facet of learning. How does creative work evolve when it is made for its own sake as an enjoyable process without assessment? What are the motivators in that context? Is it core learning if it is of personal value?

Cultural exchange
Much of the interesting scope in open collaboration happens when it is possible to share ideas with people who share your niche interest. Speaking in languages to students internationally who are exchanging learning from another culture is a vibrant and exciting possibility. The ability to engage in this kind of open practice is challenged by the risks of interacting with people who are outside of the local education system.

I feel that rethinking the model of education will enable us to develop new strategies for these kinds of situations by including parents, students, teachers and the partners who participate online in the shared responsibility for the learning context. Use spaces which are loggable and generate safety through support.

People v government
The habit in our public information spaces is to look at education as an inert industrial system.
Participants both within the model and people who engage with it from a more maverick counterpoint perspective, commonly define themselves in a kind of yin yang around ideas which relate to the idea of the school as an industrial structure and individuality and freedoms as ungovernable counterpoints to systemic control. There is truth in those positions but there is also a kind of stasis. The people who are charged with being responsible are more defensive and the people who identify with expression and liberty see publically funded works as target practice. The infrastructure is our own. The public both within and without the system need more interesting dialogue and different ways to work together.

With us or agin us
Part of that process is shifting new participants from a perspective where they believe that being an individual in an open context requires that they kick until they have right of way. This kind of energy is very loud in our wider communities. It comes to us in the ways that trade, war, television, and politics are often expressed. With us or against us binary thinking.

I appreciate that the idea of edupunk emerges from the online experience of free speech and participation which is an expression of life and passion and which contrasts with the ways we are currently scoping education. The maverick or rescuer is a role which is particularly powerful in Australian culture, honoring the underdog is an explicit part of our psyche. 

But I think we need a shift from the system, its victims and rescuers (Karpman).
To something where we all take responsibility for ourselves, for our impact on others, and for doing useful things. (Thanks Joan Russell)

Beyond the binary
I agree with Donna that either or solutions are not the only truth possible.
Open collaborative communities find common purpose through negotiation.
They develop their ettiquette, habits and culture through negotiation.
Some of those negotiations are around the best kinds of systems and open standards to comply with in order for the work to have long term and broadbased value. Agreed systems are still important even in open practice. Sometimes the negotiations are around more subtle and personal and transient aspects of participation and value. Sometimes it is about fun and friendship in the process; about trust and what it feels like to be a part of the conversation.

If we are each both system and individual
It is possible to share responsibility as a community. It often involves contention, especially in stages where there are lots of new participants who are learning the ropes.

I can win some things. Our team progress is important.
Using more adaptive frameworks which help us all to share responsibility for our learning and impact on others through that process is the journey we need to make in order to make effective open practice a skills based answer to the challenges and risks we face, and enable a shift from the closed fence based and externally effected management of risks and opportunities.

Teflon systems and negotiating with trains
I appreciate that often negotiation of freedom is subsumed by the sheer mass and momentum of education as a social engine and flow of people and resources; as a system under law; as part of an economic rationalist economics. But I feel that we need to step out of the traditional roles and experiment in partnership with students, parents and the wider community to make a different pattern.

Some questions
What choices can students make?
What happens if we re-examine copyright and look for new ways to make value?
How do students learn to express constructive collaborative power and voice?
What happens if some students are wikipedia bureaucrats who have developed excellent skills through practice. Can we value and build on those skills? Can we learn from them? Do they want to mix school and wiki life?
What happens if there are community languages and ideas which might be useful to hear in Australian schools? Indigenous languages? The ways that the mix of cultures makes us who we are.
What happens if school architecture is renegotiated?
What happens if parents teachers and students work together with mentors and other students overseas to make the internet a tool for bridging understandings and making friendships in other nations?
Can we be patient and work through the questions and find other ways?

If yes then how?
If we have a preference for 'yes' in terms of making opportunity, how do we shift our 'blame' conversations so that we let go of the provider consumer division.
Is it possible for us as Australian citizens to understand public infrastructure as a powerful mechanism which supports our diffuse interests and to find the aspects of it which are useful and to partner with it.
Is it possible for those of us who work in the sector to find ways to make a commonly valued step forward from diffuse opinion? How do we refine those skills and processes?

What if gov is more meshy
These pieces of infrastructure are the tools we have for making things 'in the public interest'.
The popular dialogue around them is very polar partly because the role of government is not fashionable in an economic rationalist dialogue. There has been a reduction in the real value and practice and the clarity of purpose around government and public practice. I feel that there is a revival through the kinds of commitment that the current government is contributing to try and deliver on their goals. To invest in infrastructure, community capacity. These are useful things. Our public mechanics need to be healthy and supported to be useful in maintaining open standards and infrastructure for open practice. For helping us negotiate a complex society.

Honesty regarding scope and intent
If these ideas are too hard then we need to at least be aware of the shapes of the patterns we are making and to be honest and authentic about what we intend and what we effect with the choices we make around risk and value. We need to accept the consequences of those choices for our ability to manage diversity and innovation.

==== 

2. Sharing these ideas
So all of that is the first part.  The concept.
The second part of the learning through this process is that I am struggling to express these ideas in ways which feel useful for other people. I have found it tricky to negotiate well. I realise this is a supreme irony, but I am happy to recognise that I am a work in progress. That even with some experience in collaboration I am finding it hard to read the cues or to be clear about what my purpose is, where it might overlap for others, where it might be divergent. Where divergence is just fine. Thanks to the wikiversity people for patience..

This is what I am learning as a part of my trying to do something new. To think something new, and to share it and try and make it useful. I value the opportunity to make these mistakes and hopefully to learn from them.
To work towards being a useful collaborator and to seek out people with similar goals and practices.

I think the contention is worth the potential shift in model as I think it does provide us with the foundations for innovation, but also for open participative communities and cross cultural dialogue.
We need the skills to be able to hear diverse perspectives and to negotiate with those perspectives in ways which take into account the consequences of our choices. As a global ecology. As a global society. How we share leadership and how we negotiate different kinds of winning.

For an example in action visit an online MMORPG like Runescape which
has a strong word based filter on in game chat.

http://runescape.com/
(You can create a free account but expect to go through a tutorial
before finding yourself in a space where people are speaking.
Saturated name space is also an interesting culture shaping factor.)

The language used to communicate in those kinds of spaces includes
game item shorthand, sms shorthand and rewangled language designed for
expression in the negative spaces between the filtered words.

The filter in this space also ignores whitespace so normal sentences
can be blocked because the combinations of 2 words makes something
which gets *****. This does change how people speak/write in those
spaces. People are also more adept at enterpreting ***.

It is a game going through interesting times at the moment due to
people trading game items or accounts for real money. The game company
is responding by locking down the game economy which is having
interesting impact on the community/play.

Changing from a supply demand based economy to a defined value economy
will be an interesting social and economic experience for the kids in
the western countries where the game is hosted.

Watching virtual spaces become more integrated with wider economics
makes me want to ask questions about how societies would like to
define their economies in online contexts and what these kinds of
decisions contribute in shaping our wider cultural interactions.

Watching what is effectively a stockmarket crash in a game is
interesting, but thinking about how virtual spaces shape economic
thinking into the future is the related wider set of questions.

Those who create the rules of the game in online spaces do not
participate in governance based on social or national interests except
in as far as they want to retain good subscriptions. This game has
previously banned large numbers of players for cheating by using auto
accounts or breaking game rules. They are pretty strong on shaping the
character of the space.

Kids have grown up watching the rules change around the economies they
participate in.
The rules are perhaps more changeable and transient. Their civic role
is more as a subscriber than a voter or particpant. Perhaps these
experiences contribute to future/current adult ideas about what is
economically interesting or possible and where control of economies
happen.

Economies which are contained within bubble of a single company's
choices are an interesting phenomenon. Snow Crash was an exploration
of these ideas some years before we could practice it. Games answering
the challenge of free and open participation with restrictive social
controls are an interesting phenomenon. Watching the same choices in
play in our wider community makes me wonder what other strategies we
are not trying (online, offline or in games) which might help us model
free and responsible online communities.

Interesting times

Stephen Downes posted a blog post and note to facebook about starting an online journal.
The quotes in this post are from that post from Downes.

".. I think that when people talk about 'peer reviewed publications' they have a point, and that point is, that a piece of writing is not merely popular, but also, respected and recognized by a particular academic community.
We need such mechanisms because there is too much to read, too much even in narrowly defined disciplines. And there is no particular mechanism for identifying that which is important within a particular discipline. The popularity-based systems, like Slashdot and Digg, cater to certain communities, sure, but tend, eventually, to what we might call a scholarship of the middle - no particular discipline, no particular level of quality, no particular virtue."

Slippy from Utah State has been working on something similar.
Artichoke is talking about quality in student blog posts and comments.
The folks at educationau are working on similar thoughts although they dont describe it as a journal, the thinking is similar but the goal is more to make the edu sector community conversations more visible to the communities which make them rather than making a specific publication.
Peter Shanks has been doing related work on his unwrapping subjects and Training O2

Outside of the education sector similar conversations happen in other situations.

Conversations around trying to control for quality often happen where a project has developed sufficient 'value gravity' for people to want to be disruptive in the space and for others to want to protect it or a certain way of approaching it.

When a project is small/new people feel they have the freedom to choose to engage in the systems relevant to furthering the goals of the project and also to contribute their individual ity in a constructive fashion.

As projects become bigger the project attracts interest from more people who wish to further the purpose in different ways and also from people who disagree with its choices or purposes. Often the projects face choices around controlling who can participate or who is more credible. Any of the free negotiation spaces face this kind of challenge.

Campaigns wikia was one where people were talking about presenting an issue, posting the for and against of those issues and negotiating possible forward ideas. Basically an opportunity for providing qualitative politics rather than quantitive political input. Other folks were interested in posting the campaign details of individual standing politicians. The representation of the existing politicians ended up being the function which  took over the function of the site in terms of realestate on the front page and overall structure. This was partly because people could agree on what to put on those pages, and partly because there are people paid to put that kind of information into public space.

From the 'knowing what to put there' aspect, the issues pages struggled.
Issues like gay marriage or digital rights attracted people who felt passionately about their perspectives and who did not have a stronger commitment to making something new out of politics. Negotiation is a skill and a choice that the wider purpose is as important as my pov. I found this hard too. And I think on both fronts Campaigns wikia struggled with the state of play that our community reached in terms of expecting to be able to participate constructively in negotiated projects with binary non-negotiable perspectives. People understood the freedom to participate, but did not value the constructive role of a diversity of perspectives  sufficiently to make the pages something which people could generate community energy and discourse around. Perhaps politics in abstract terms is the hardest nut to crack and politics in specific applied terms might be easier to unpick but basically I think we have 'work to do' here.

Developing our skills in constructive pov are the skills which I feel we need to develop most in order to let go of fences as a means of ensuring quality. I think these skills are the skills we need to be able to employ if we want to get real data back into the decisions made on our behalf. In politics but also in education and in valuable projects generally.

ISO standards for example. The ooxml process has struggled to keep the focus on negotiating the fit for purpose of the proposal. POV has been louder than purpose. The proposal does not resemble a standard proposal in many ways but the fast track process was seen as an opportunity to push it through. Standards processes will be important for open source and participative development. Important areas for us to develop skills in authentic negotiation of fit for purpose. This particular proposal has been I hope, a wake up call on that front.

"That is not to discount the systems whereby content is selected and reified by the masses. I am a regular reader of such lists and they are a constant source of amazement and amusement. High quality content does get selected by the crowd, but not all of it, and not reliably within a certain discipline."

The crowd are the authors. The crowd are also the audience. If a journal is a selection of specific members of the crowd, that is a choice you can make now. That is a choice we are all making now. Sometimes we choose people because their perspective will be innovative, sometimes because it is close to an important project or process, sometimes because it is a voice which takes time to listen to a broad range of inputs, sometimes because there is heart or wit or something more directly inspiring about the writing of the author. Some people write as a finished work, and some people write as a thread and comments naturally flow from it.

We could probably do with a few ways to unpack the why of the choices of our peers, but these things can be learned perhaps. Tags are generally informal and personal ways of sharing information. Specific tags are also being used to map to specific materials or events.
Sarah Hayman and Nick Lothian have been talking about the potential for flow between folksonomies and taxonomies for finding  and sorting information.

"Historically, as I mentioned, content selection for academic materials has been by means of 'peer review'. The process varies across journals, but in its most typical instantiation, proceeds as follows: a writer submits a manuscript to an editor, who reads it. The editor, at his or her discretion, sends the manuscript to a small committee of reviewers. The reviewers rate the submission for appropriateness for publication. They will often recommend changes and improvements. A final version is drafted, and it is typeset and published."

This also occurs with conference papers. These events are interesting because they are organised with the goal of attracting people interested in specific topics. Their fit for purpose is finding things which people will feel they have discovered through the event which they might not have experienced otherwise. If there is value and energy outside that event which is missed, other events are likely to occur which look at other voices. The choosing approach makes them a kind of broadcast media.

Barcamps are an interesting flip for that kind of approach. They have open invitation with people coming to both listen and contribute something and there is no keynoting or important person loading on the voices present. Foo camps were the original form and were informal meetings between a closed list of invited people. They each have different kinds of value/challenge in terms of fences and quality, signal and noise. Business model.

"But what constitutes 'being a paleontologist'? Traditionally, we have required some sort of certification. A person needs to become a PhD in paleontology. Then they need to be selected by an editor of a journal to sit on a review board. This qualifies them to review publications in paleontology."

This is a pattern which suits broadcast media too. This is a means to identify who should be heard, what is authoritative. The costs of the processes are intended to be returned to the person by their exclusive access to voice. I would suggest that there is less commitment to these processes in contexts where peers are able to have effective voice in other ways.

"And in other cases it is by choice, as no PhD programs exist in a new area of study or invention. This was the case, for example, in internet technology. It had to be built, first, before people could become experts in it, while the people who built it became experts by building it."

Yes. Open source practices are more like this. The proof of quality is evident in the feel and focus of the community and project which has been generated. Perhaps it is easier to find these communities because the practice is visible and the quality is tangible in the sense of good effective code, but I do also see the same kinds of clarity or authority in the informal education networks online. It is true that some excellent folk are not so visible online and you have to work a bit harder to hear them and that people can function in specific threads online which means that we can miss the important conversations which are quite close by.

"Members are selecting not only a submission, but also the person. This means that to a degree, the candidate's previous body of work will be assessed as well as the actual submission. The role is not of 'gatekeeping' but of recognition."

This assumes a person is always right and authoritative. It assumes that people who sometimes write stuff which is not useful will not contribute something useful.
It assumes that there is one purpose. I think the kinds of material which would be chosen in this way would be likely to be a median pick because youre looking for someone who usually writes in ways which agree with existing members. This is likely to build a 'school of thought' approach to the journal. There might be value in printing a school of thought publication.
It would be something where the people in that group are prepared to invest their time in corrrecting/editing material and publishing it for their own purposes. People looking for that line of thought might be interested in that publication, but I think education and many fields are looking for a different kind of authority now and so thejournal might not get a bulk readership in the same way that traditional journals might have.

We are looking for authority with regard to our own specific purposes and thinking. Context is important. So for me the interesting part of the process would be the method for finding people who are interested in starting a journal on issues I am interested in. I would like to collect the kinds of ideas that some people have been talking about and would be interested in seeing what else theyve been reading on a specific line of thought, if we agreed on material which contributed to that debate then we could publish a journal of that debate to date. This would not be a collection of reliable members but would be a collection of pivotal posts or thoughts on a specific line of thinking. They would produce different kinds of collections. I think there would likely be less language editing on this type of journal but that referencing to sources would still be important. For me this would be a nice way to capture some of the good things which happen in transient places like blog comments, and enable people to collaborate arround a purpose rather than a membership.

"It is possible for a journal to become too much of a clique, for the members to select only each others' papers. If so, then the people who are being left out can found their own journal. Because nominations are public, it will be easily evident which journal is the most difficult to get into because of quality, and which are the most difficult to get into because of exclusivity."

If the criteria are about finding people who usually write in ways you usually agree with then the resulting community will be looking for that kind of normalising characteristic. It will be a fence around a group of people who agree sufficently.

If the collection is organised around defining a mix of perspectives on an issue and perhaps even on crafting some common ground between them as a part of the process then this is a piece of the kind of thinking process which I think we need to develop good skills in.

Will this work? I think it will. It might not work for any particular journal - some journals may simply not attract readership because the writers admitted were not of a high quality, or because the members make poor choices, or because the subject area is simply not useful or inappropriate. It will take a certain amount of momentum to launch a journal, a momentum that can be gained only by having qualified people and quality ideas to begin with.

Swap it around to distributed publishing thinking. A journal could be published to meet the reading needs of its authors. Its success will be based on whether the participants find enough value in the process to put the effort or $ in to producing an outcome. If that publication sells more copies then the participants get a greater return on their efforts.
It is successful for different people at different stages of that process.

Every time we make a fence around which voices are valid we are losing an opportunity to develop skills in crafting better collaboration and negotiated pov. We do need ways to capture perspectives in a more coherent and durable way which are representative of pivot points in our communities. The publishing functions of conferences are able to do this to some degree. Barcamps and foocamps have not really produced published outcomes at this stage. For materials which are explicitly focused this kind of Howard Rheingold Flashmob approach might be useful. For personal journeys it would be interesting to see these kinds of aggregations of specific learning journeys be able to be published as a single person's lulu book or to be able to view the reference paths of a range of people on a topic and to view their perspectives based on the sources they have looked at.

I think a traditional journal approach is possibly missing some of the adaptability and diversity of content and purpose which people are able to employ now. Something with more of a themed mashup approach would be more interesting to read for me. 

a thread in fabric
irregular and woven
system and journey
context and choice
sharing and comparing

Designing the works we make as spaces for new minds, voices and hands.
Legacy of freedom.

Kat Jungnickel from Studio Incite talks about fingertip knowledge as the kind of skills which are tactile and about physically being able to do things; think woodcraft, welding, music, making custom hardware, bike riding unicycle riding. Because this is a very personal kind of knowledge I think the partner to this knowledge is how we recognise people's unique expertise as a distributed community. I think this is true of education technologies too.

There are social skills, mixes of time, place, people, tools and ideas which people mix to make a conversation or a learning experience. Because these are subtle and personal customisations for specific contexts this means they are diverse. As a community we are developing social skills around finding and filtering for our own personal purposes the collective diversity available. I think this is where literacy exchange comes in.

TALO Teach and learn online google group is a good example of a broad mix of people dropping in bits of situated expertise. This site is too. Wikispaces. Some people collect this kind of aggregated knowledge.
I use delicious as my sense of context, I tend to browse rather than to subscribe to feeds, I looks for specific lines of thought, I use Google alerts on those ideas. Other people use MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter, more people based networks. I process the information I am capable of processing in my way. Other people will be finding different ideas and people by using tools with different ways of making connections and different criteria for ranking. The diversty of approach makes our communities more robust, better informed, more flexible.

It is trickier to keep that sense of exchange and access to diverse expertise from anywhere in the offline spaces we have. For example there was a Jimmy Wales presentation in Adelaide where participants in a forum discussed wikis in education. Prior to the event we did not know that one of the active wikipedia bureaucrats is a student at Christian Brothers College.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bureaucrats

How do we find these voices easily. How do we socially structure our listening so that these voices are
apparent to us. It feels like a collective social literacy to know as a community 'where our towel is'.

I guess the great thing is that these kinds of connections are happening online, the challenge is to take that appreciation of people having something to offer from their context and choices and to find ways to hear and see that offline. A kind of listening.

Part of the change will be about how people participate in technology training. Are courses about teaching a specific tool to a group, some might be, but perhaps we need more classes which are about tackling a specific idea with a range of tools. If people both students and teachers can bring their own niche literacies and fit for personal purpose information to a class then there is a shift in expectations. The teacher is a participant, perhaps with skills in balancing the social momentum and balance of a learning context, but different literacies from a tool perspective are audible, results could be a mix of use options which might give all participants more than one way to tackle the core idea. This means in a future situation if there is no internet, or there an accessibility issue or a learning challenge each of the participants has some of that appreciation of different ways to tackle the same idea, and perhaps a network of people with niche skills/interests/hobbies/passions.

From a community perspective it means we are less wedded to a single means of delivery. And that it is possible to be more adventurous. Peter Ruwoldt is a teacher at Grant High School in SA. Students are able to work with computer recycling and network wrangling. Both of these activities are challenging because recycled tech is feisty stuff and diverse. Some of it is easy to get going, some tech is recalitrant. Learning about which tech tends to be good to get going and which things are symptoms of a feisty box are not a kind of learning you can deliver. Similarly with computer networking. The problem space is pretty well limitless, and so the challenge is to try things, and see what happens. To learn about things which conflict with each other and different ways to tackle getting the network to work. If it breaks fix it.

This is a challenge of/for information management. Where are the good resources, they might not all be authors. How do we find and keep connected with distributed and changing voices which are useful and authoritative in niche interests. Signal to noise is a challenge. Learning to hear the voices which make good fabric on a theme when you need that theme.

Libraries may change from being centres of authoritive information to being more of a hub for information about human choices. Which people or flavours of activity trend towards specific technologies and references. Customers as indicators for where to send the next people who come through the door. These are probably old school skills for librarian folks just in a different context. The resources people use are one attribute which helps to map to good stuff. Librarians were at the hub of the information, now they are at a hub of questions and choices? Strategies for distilling subtle and negotiated information without losing that subtlety will be valuable. Privacy will be a challenge with learning this kind of stuff. danah boyd's thoughts on identity are important for this aspect of who we are socially. How we choose around access freedom, safety as achieved with learning social skills or as achieved with content blocking.

I also think skills in making and reconciling plural truths are important and being able to negotiate situations where more than one person has a valid truth. We need to learn both what it means to speak in a context where others will also need room to have a different opinion for us all to have freedom. We also need to be able to listen gently – As if we live in a small apartment with paper walls.The internet is like mechanical esp. We can hear each other very well now and as with copyright the new proximity of the social space is something we will need to be careful with to enable us to be sociable diverse and free.

IMHO Our new world will be about how we learn to govern ourselves in the local sense as in communities of interest. And how those skills filter out to more broad contexts and help to provide more subtle social environmentally wise and pluralistic debates and outcomes for governance generally.

via Bill Kerr and Slashdot 

I think my concern is about technologies and literacies in general where the tool is so complex that commitment to the tool becomes a major part of the learning. This is not bad in itself, but it does make situations where the people who advocate use of the tool have invested a lot of time in that space, and like having conversations about windows, mac, linux, or photoshop, gimp, fireworks the conversations around the technologies are very embedded in the amount of skill, time and money the person has invested in their tools.

The challenge in an educational context is that there is an ethos which underpins choices which is about 'the right tool for the job' fit for purpose, and learnings as a good which can function beyond the scope of the tool used to teach.

In game life when you start to play a game you are a n00b.  There is no hedging about it. Most games are complex and you usually spend some time with a friend and/or tutorial learning the ways of the space youre buying into. All good. you are buying into the space because you like the community, the story, the feel of the place, or you feel you can do well in the competitive structures it has to offer.

In tools we use in education I feel the critical thinking around fit for purpose has become meshed with the tutorial, literacy conversations. People talk about literacy as a step through from n00b to competency. The trouble with this view of literacy is that it is scoped by the tool of choice and does not include ways of adapting the learning to different tools where the tool is not the best fit for purpose given a learner's personal skills, goals and resources.

ie if there is a problem it will be because the learner does not have what it takes(experiences, access, resources), not because the tool or the learning scoped by the tool is not a good fit for that learner. The learner is implied to be lacking in a literacy with the tool, to be a n00b. the learning is not seen as something which has a wider value or function or responsibility than what can be offered through the tool.

I am working as a usability person on a website at the moment. So I am looking at our site from the perspective of who would find this difficult and how can I deliver this information in a way which get to everyone. How can iI do that in an efficient way. What choices keep more people in the loop and what choices offer something special but need to be complemented with alternatives for people who cannot participate effectively in that way. This is probably what I take with me into the literacy and technology spaces. A concern about a responsibility to take the information to the person in the form which best suits them. To be up front about costs and requirements. To be explicit about downloads operating systems etc. I found the Action Learning in Second Life heavy going because I was bringing these thoughts with me. 

I was thinking last night about the Ingots method for competencies in desktop applications.  It strikes me that a similar model would be useful for Second Life and other 3d or 'world' based technologies.

A matrix of 'I can' would enable educators to scope their projects to a specific set of skills in a tool. Bronze Ingot or similar where the person can do specified things in the space which means they have the prerequisites for a specific course.

This means the skills that are required are overt and the educator can target core learnings within the scope of those skills. This makes the skill set aspect a defined target, something the student can win at, to a depth which is agreed before the course between teacher and student. 

The level of commitment to the tool in approximate hours and skills is defined.  The kind of learnings separate to the tool skills can be understood as a distinct idea.
This also makes it possible to pull those two factors aside and to also look at functional and resource aspects of the profile of the tool. Costs, 'materials' good for people with hearing challenges but for people with motorskills or limited vision it might be good to have an alternative where the world can be spoken.

An exciting example of this kind of parallel comparative development  is a peer in the Action Learning program Peter R Whitehouse SL 'Wonko Whizenhunt' who is developing a space in Second Life and making parallel spaces as MOO and MUD. I think that this means a MOO could be used as a spoken alternative to an SL context for accessibility purposes. WW is doing the comparison to look at the levels of investment and time per learning in each of the contexts. Either way the idea that SL is a tool and being compared with others for aspects of learning is great.

http://www.terrace.qld.edu.au/ 

I feel that SL has much to offer but that the business model of investing into the tool, both as a skill and as a technology means that some social scaffolding is missing from the conversations about its use. I am hoping that some honest discussion about hours and skills and investment required to enable a cohort of students to participate in building could be developed, and that it could become a part of the conversation around time invested v kind of learning possible.

eg. Bronze 3d ingot means you can be an effective and chatty audience, you can move around and share an idea.

Silver 3d ingot means you can make things like clothes and buildings

Gold ingot means you can make interactive or challenging scripted items

Each of these kinds of skill levels needs to have a rating for how much of the activity can be done without 'inworld' costs. If there are costs the resources including paypal credit card and amount of ingame equity required should be explicit. 'outofworld' resources like hours, bandwidth, possible operating systems and alternative delivery mechanisms available should be explicit too.

It is not that other modes and tools do not have costs, it is that they are traditionally mapped in a course profile. Currently the conversations I have around these issues are hard work because people see the challenges that new users face in a very 'game n00b' kind of way.

A n00b cannot comment because they dont know enough about the environment. The n00b is at fault for their lack of comprehension and commitment to a context and this limits their ability to generate meaning from the experience. It is accurate, but it is a shift in the responsibilities, and it is a discussion new people can never win.

The student needs to be able to win. They need to know what they are getting themselves in for, what skills they need to commmit to to get the value from that course. 

A commitment to a gold level of participation with ongoing subscription is a different level of commitment to joining a tour group or watching an immersive powerpoint session. Educators need to be able to be frank about the tool, the investment required in the tool, and the kind of learning which can be shared as a part of that scale of course.

Currently I feel that the conversations are disjointed because new users feel clumsy and have no sense that they can possibly comprehend the tool in a length of time proportional to the tour they have chosen to come on. Scoping the level of skill for that job gives them a sense of success regardless that they do not know how to do things which are not relevant to that course or learning experience.

This also makes it possible to be explicit about courses where building and scripting are a part of the whole, and using advanced skills are required for participating in the space in more sophisticated ways. People will be up for those kinds of skills where they can see that their long term commitment to the tool will be useful for their wider purposes. The cohorts for these courses are likely to have done prerequisite units. They will be able to see whether the assets they make ingame will be available to them after the course before they commit to it.

All of these kinds of social scaffolding are easy to lose in a context where educators and students are all learning about the new tools. It is a journey within the tool context, perhaps these kinds of distinctions are tricky to map early on. But for the tool to be useful long term we do need to be able to plan and scope in ways that empower students to make good choices. It does need to be clear from the beginning whether the tool and the student group and the learning goal and the time frame etc are all a good match.

There will be situations where the tool is the topic, at least in part, and students will be buying into that directly. It is agreed up front that the participants will have the vision motorskills computer software bandwidth and time to give to this focus. All good. This means you can explore functionality specific to the tool. It is also the kind of situation where the students will want to know about their rights to the assets they have made and the spaces they have contributed to. They are making a tool based investment.

The other situation is where a tool is recommended as a means of communication or learning for a general student populace. In these situations the tool needs to be effective for all students or alternatively the learning objective should be able to be delivered in a range of ways and not be scoped by the specific tool especially where one tool is likely to cut some students out of the running. Ongoing dialogue in this kind of mixed learning context would help to refine what kinds f situations or learning are a good retrun on investment for people who's value set is based outside of commitment to the tool as a skill set or a business model.  These kinds of parallel or mashup learning situations do help to unpack where a tool is working well, or where students find other methods more effective. In general education I feel it is important to include this kind of choice because it is the kind of learning which informs us about the best tool for the job part of literacy.

• Persistence
• Searchability
• Replication
• Invisible audiences

Danah Boyd, social networking MP3

Being able to speak to an invisible audience and ethics around being a responsible audience.