Misja Hoebe :: Blog
http://www.koopaladvies.nl/informeel-en-leven-lang-leren-leernetwe  www.darcynorman.net Het is bijzonder druk met nieuwe ontwikkelingen op het gebied van leren in de afgelopen weken. Natuurlijk waren daar de SURF Onderwijsdagen, waar ik al eerder over schreef. Maar er was veel meer dat mijn aandacht trok in de afgelopen dagen.
Ik wil hier graag de aandacht vestigen op een interessant artikel van Stephen Downes over de toekomst van online leren en de oratie van Peter Sloep over hoe we levenlang leren vorm moeten gaan geven. Er zit wel een relatie tussen beide stukken.
Enkele dagen geleden verscheen van Stephen Downes een interessant artikel waarin hij tien jaar terug kijkt, maar ook vooruit kijkt naar de Future of Online Learning. Downes benoemt op een heldere manier een aantal actuele thema’s en neemt daar ook duidelijke standpunten over in. Zoals de onmogelijkheid om sommige websites (bijvoorbeeld YouTube) of services (MSN, Skype) te willen blokkeren binnen de muren van een school. De techniek zal hier altijd ontoereikend zijn. De oplossing is om de gebruiker zelf te laten kiezen wat wel ‘acceptabel’ is, met behulp van zijn netwerk wellicht, in plaats van bovenaf te bepalen wat er niet gezien mag worden.
Downes sluit zijn betoog of met de voorspelling dat onderwijsinstellingen zoals ze er nu uit zien en functioneren, hun langste tijd wel gehad hebben: “Over the last ten years, this model has been seen in many quarters to be obsolete. We have seen the emergence of a new model, where education is practiced in the community as a whole, by individuals studying personal curricula at their own pace, guided and assisted by community facilitators, online instructors and experts around the world.”
En dat brengt mij bij ander interessant leesvoer, dat over vergelijkbare thematiek gaat. Dit betreft de oratie van Peter Sloep (uitgesproken op 14 november 2008), getiteld Netwerken voor lerende professionals; hoe leren in netwerken kan bijdragen aan een leven lang leren. Sloep betoogt dat voor leven lang leren de traditionele onderwijsinstellingen niet goed geoutilleerd zijn. Sloep poneert de volgende stellingen:
- levenslang leren zal nooit tot volle wasdom komen als we post-initieel onderwijs blijven modelleren naar het initieel onderwijs zoals we dat nu geven op scholen, opleidingscentra en universiteiten, en
- initieel leren en post-initieel leren moeten naadloos in elkaar over gaan.
Levenslang leren zal veel beter gedijen in zogenaamde leernetwerken. Wat dat dan zijn, en welke technologie (social software!) daar goed bij past, kun je lezen in de tekst van de oratie.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Socialtech/~3/402179481/being-there. 
Photo credit: Invasion by Henryleelucas
Dave White's recent post, Not 'Natives' or 'Immigrants' but 'Visitors' & 'Resident' slipped by largely without comment, which is a huge shame. It's a must-read post because it does what a lot of people have been trying to do and not managing that well - move us beyond Prensky's seminal dichotomy of Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants. Prensky's metaphors powerfully explain differences in approach and experience between users who have grown up with technologies (the natives) and older users who find difficulty in accessing new technological cultures and practices (the immigrants) as not just a cultural but a neurobiological one. Prensky's arguments are easy to knock down, particularly if you happen to subscribe to a more fluid account of development. What they haven't been however is easy to replace or move forward from. Dave's work probably succeeds in taking the argument forward precisely because it's user-centric, looking at how users engage with technologies. His research points up the importance of 'being there'; the distinction between users who inhabit a space or place online, and users who don't view themselves as having any kind of non-functional engagement with online environments and tools. Dave calls these visitors and residents (as you may have gathered from his academically typical unwieldy title), and if you haven't gone blind already head over to his post to see the initial sketching out of these roles. These are far more granular distinctions, robust enough to cut across socio-cultural differences, and agile enough to encompass a wide range of behaviors and belonging. my initial thoughts on seeing the post still stand: "I think this is a big improvement on the native and immigrant
dichotomy, I really look forward to seeing how it moves forward. It
seems very possible to be a resident on a specific social networking
service or site, but a visitor to other services and in all aspects of
web engagement. I think 'being there' is a useful concept to explore,
& possibly some strait forward measures of engagement. I also think
that peoples conceptions of privacy & being online are worthwhile
exploring in terms of their immersion levels. The Pew data from the end
of last year suggested that the majority (60%) of internet users aren't
worried about how much information is available about them online - I'm
suspicious that if true, this is because the people who are worried
stay off line/confine themselves to visitor-type behaviour."
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Socialtech/~3/302862833/young-people 
I'm delighted to announce that the Young People and Social Networking Services report that I have been working on for Childnet International, with the generous support of Becta, is now available from Childnet's digital literacy and citizenship site, Digizen.
It's a pretty comprehensive report, with the whole shebang available for download under a Creative Commons License on site, or from here:
Download fullReport.pdf
and weighing in at 37 pages. The online version breaks the sections up for your viewing pleasure - so you can just dip in to the sections which are of interest or use to you. The report was written from a UK schools and Further Education perspective, although much of the information will be useful to people working outside of these two contexts.
It isn't a completely introductory level document, but should be useful and informative for people who have a responsibility care towards children and young people - including governors, principals and senior management teams, Safeguarding boards and local authorities - people who are making decisions concerning educational provision and resourcing. It will also be very handy for anyone working within the sector and wanting to use internet based services with young people.
What's in the pack?
What are Social Networking Services? looks at where we are in terms of definitions, and splits services up into six main categories: Profile-based services (eg Bebo, Facebook, MySpace); Content-focused services (eg Flickr, YouTube); White-label networks (although I could have written a book about these); Multi-User Virtual Environments (although some of these aren't necessarily social networks - particularly those designed for younger children); Mobile services; and Microblogging/Presence update services (Social Search engines & Lifestream aps also get a mention as adjunct services). The version that's on the site is the short one. you can download the 9 page PDF on site or from here: Download social-networking-overview.pdf
Evaluating Social Networking Services comes in two parts: an evaluation chart which has an online version and an easier-for-me-to-read downloadable version:
Download Sns.pdf
That's designed to be printed off big (well, A3). The services which were kind enough to take part are used as examples to help people make their own evaluations of services. Big thanks to everyone at Bebo, Facebook, Yahoo!, MySpace, Ning, Taking It Global and Google who pitched in and gave permissions. There is also a checklist guide that accompanies the chart, designed to walk you through what to look out for when evaluating services for use with young people. This covers a lot of things, including profile privacy, moderation, customisation, security and access issues, data management tools, and interoperability.
Benefits & Opportunities is a section looking at the potential positives for young people and organisations of using social networking services.
Barriers & Risks looks some of the issues preventing educators from exploring social networking services and some of the e-safety issues involved.
The Ideas and Examples returns to the different kinds of social networking services outlined in the first section and looks at what educators in the UK and around the world are doing. I'd like to continue to develop and expand this section so all suggestions are welcome - and of course you can always enter your fantastic project for this years International Edublog Awards :)
So that's it! Except to again thank the fantastic advisory board who worked on the project, keeping an eye on how the research was developing and what the final report looked like.
http://www.pontydysgu.org/2008/11/sounds-of-the-bazaar-special-in Next Monday we break new ground with our Sounds of the Bazaar radio show. We are producing a special issue of Emerging Sound of the Bazaar entitled ‘Into the Dragons Den’. The programme is a fly on the wall special following the progress of a Dragons Den session organised by the Jisc Emerge project. What’s it all about? Emerge supports a range of projects funded by the Jisc Users and Innovation programme. The projects are mainly focused on developing social software for use in education. Part of the support process has been through a four stage development model. As part of that model, at different times during the project development, project developers get invited to a session where they are quizzed by ‘Dragons’ on the progress of their project.
The Dragons Den session featured on Sounds of the Bazaar is the Preview project which is developing and piloting models for Problem Based Learning in Second Life. Maggie Savin-Baden will represent the project. Paul Bailey and Chris Fowler wil be the dragons. It is going to be great fun.
The programme, whih will last about 45 minutes, goes out at 19.00 UK time, 20.00 Central European Time. To listen to the programme just go to http://radio.jiscemerge.org.uk/Emerge.m3u in your browser. The stream should open in your MP3 player of choice. And if you’d like to chat during the programme Crsitina Costa will be in the chat room at http://tinyurl.com/soundschat. Just add your name in the text field (leaving the password field blank) and chat away.
http://www.pontydysgu.org/2008/11/corporate-reinforcing-greed-fee 
I reallly like this work by Ambjörn Naeve called A greed upon reality - the real (e)state of the economic system. The screenshot is taken from his Conzilla (www.conzilla.org) systems model, although sadly I can’t get it to open on my Mac.
The work, Ambjörn says, is mainly based on the New(tonian) economics provided by Lisa H. Newton: Permission to Steal - Revealing the Roots of Corporate Scandal.
http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/publicphilosophy/newton/default.asp
http://benwerd.com/2008/11/links-are-context-so-are-link-a Chris Sessums has written about the educational WordPress Multi-User hosting provider Edublogs’ switch to inline context ads. These turn words within each blog post into ads, without the original author’s knowledge or permission. This is annoying in the wild, but takes on another meaning entirely when the blogging service is marketed for students and teachers:
For example one student mentioned the word “energy” in her blog entry and I found a pop-up link directing me to Exxon/Mobile. Hmmm? I thought and I read on. This same student also mentioned “college” in her entry wherein a hyperlink associated with the University of Phoenix popped up. I found this rather odd, since the student was currently enrolled here at the University of Florida.
The rest of Chris’s post is understandably angry. Links in blog posts are part of the flow of the text; they provide context. The link above allows you to read Chris’s blog so you know I’m not misrepresenting him. The following sentence in isolation:
I hope the criminals in our society receive the sentences that they deserve.
Is different to this one:
I hope the criminals in our society receive the sentences that they deserve.
By auto-linking words to sites for money, a new thrust or subtext can be added to the post. In other words, with this kind of advertising - even when it’s been marked out in the user agreement and everyone knows it’s there - advertisers are buying a little bit of your intention. (Users may not always understand the full scope of what they’re agreeing to, as they don’t see the ads themselves.)
Print publications often have very separate advertising and editorial departments, for similar reasons. Ads on pages should be clearly marked out as being such, and they should never, ever, ever infringe on the actual content itself. This on any site is bad; on a site for use in education is clearly immoral.
As a footnote, one of the user forum posts Chris highlights says this:
Content Links in the middle of my posts which include unauthorized advertisements is unacceptable. One of the reasons I moved my blog to Edublogs was to avoid ads in my blog, and this is even worse than Adsense found off to the side which people can easily ignore.
There is a very simple consumer protection maxim that it’s worth remembering for any product: if it seems too good to be true, it is. Everyone needs to make money; if you’re using a commercial product with no clear business model, ask yourself how they’re going to claw back their investment - it’s not always going to be in the ways you’d like.
http://www.pontydysgu.org/2008/11/edublog08-awards-our-nomination Firstly, many thanks to Martin Weller and A J Cann for your kind nominations for Pontydysgu for best group blog for this years Edublog 2008 awards. Much appreciated here at Pontydysgu Towers.
We also greatly appreciated Martins comment: “they’re Welsh, they like edupunk, they do a crazy internet radio show and have challenging posts. What more do you want?.”
And now on to our nominations (although we may come back with more in different categories later this week). For best individual blog we nominate ictology by Ismael Peña-López. Just watch that man’s live blogging. Awesome.
Our best resource sharing site nomination goes to Zaidlearn - just look at this list of 90 posts about learning tools.
And here is our nomination for best educational use of audio. This goes to Andreas Auwarter and all the students who work on the wonderful Bildung im Dialog website. With limited resources, Andreas uses podcasts to teach students from all disciplines storytelling, media, production and much more. OK - it is in German. But it would be great if the Edublog awards could acknowledge the work being done in other languages than English.
http://www.pontydysgu.org/2008/11/mangaging-information-or-maturi There have been a number of reports in the wake of the failure of public services to prevent the tragic death of child in London. The story below from the Guardian looks at the impact of the introduction of Management Information Services in social services in the UK. What it reveals is that professional workers are forced to spend increasing amounts of time completing tick box tracking report forms on computers. The result is not increased efficiency and effectivenesss but a failure to sharing information with those that need it. The MIS becmes the centre of attention, not the task - in this case the protecion of vulnerable children.
This is not limited to social wok. Studies we have carried out in the eduction sphere reveal the same tendency. Professional wokers are being diverted away from what they see as their job in the requirement to fill in tracking reports on ill designed Management Information Systems. The inormation held by the MIS is seen as primarily for tracking and funding pruposes. raher than helping with the work. Littlle attention is paid to how an MIS might assist in developing and maturing knowledge. Natural knowledge sharing and development processes, through dialogue and networking are left behind. Often staff develop their own informal systems, to exchange the knowledge that they need, in parallel to official procedures.
We need to review the purpose of such systems. Do we develop systems to help professional wokrers in their job or merely to collect infomation? What is the purpose of the information being collected? Who is it for and why? How can we design systems based on the abilities of ‘knowledge workers’, rather than relying on the number crunching outputs of the machine? And what approaches are need to the design of such human oriented systems? These are not just academic questions, as the report below tragically reveals.
“A government computer system intended to improve the handling of child abuse cases has led to social workers having to spend more than 100 hours for every case filling out forms, cutting the time they have to make visits.
Reports by two universities have revealed that the Integrated Children’s System (ICS), launched in 2005 following the death of Victoria Climbié, is so laborious it typically takes more than 10 hours to fill in initial assessment forms for a child considered to be at risk. A “core assessment” takes a further 48 hours on average, according to government-commissioned research by York University. The system, which cost £30m to implement, creates deadlines that further restrict the time available for family visits.”
“But the pressure on social workers, effectively tied to their desks by bureaucracy, reveals systemic problems in child protection. “Workers report being more worried about missed deadlines than missed visits,” said Professor Sue White, who is studying five child protection departments for the University of Lancaster. “The [computer] system regularly takes up 80% of their day.”
ICS replaced a system where social workers wrote case notes in narrative form, which many argue made it easier for different officials to quickly pick up the details of complex cases.
In the review by the University of York of the first authorities to adopt the system, the use of tick boxes was criticised because of “a lack of precision that could lead to inaccuracy”. It added that the system “obscured the family context”.
The level of detail demanded by ticking boxes “sacrificed the clarity that is needed to make documentation useful,” it concluded.
“If you go into a social work office today there’s no chatter, nobody is talking about the cases, it is just people tapping at computers,” said White.
One social worker interviewed by White’s team said: “I spend my day click- clicking and then I’ll get an email from someone else - say a fostering agency- asking for a bit more information on a child: ‘Could we please have a pen picture of the three children’. It’s horrendous.
“It’s impossible to get a picture of the child,” said another. “It’s all over the place on the computer system … That coupled with the number of people involved in the case makes my life very difficult.”
Eileen Monroe, an expert on child protection at the London School of Economics, said some local authorities are petitioning the government to allow them to drop the system. “The programme is set up to continually nag you, and the child’s misery just doesn’t nag as loudly.”"
 I like to consider myself a liberal-minded person, open to various perspectives and points of view quite different than my own. With this premise in mind, I want to share a situation which I am having great difficulty wrapping my head around. As part of my course on integrating technology into the secondary curriculum, I have students create learning logs as a way of introducing them to weblogs and their many uses. I gave students an opportunity to pick from a number of free, online weblogging applications. Several of my students chose to host their learning logs using Edublogs which seemed at the time to be a reasonable solution. As I was reading through students weblogs I found links embedded in their content that seemed rather odd. For example one student mentioned the word "energy" in her blog entry and I found a pop-up link directing me to Exxon/Mobile. Hmmm? I thought and I read on. This same student also mentioned "college" in her entry wherein a hyperlink associated with the University of Phoenix popped up. I found this rather odd, since the student was currently enrolled here at the University of Florida. I left a comment on her site asking her why she chose these odd links, only to find that when I returned to her content, the links had disappeared. I checked my other student learning logs in Edublogs and found a similar pattern. It then dawned on me that these links were being added to their content without their notice. I quickly dashed a note to Mr. James Farmer, the CEO of Edublogs, asking what was going on here. Were these hyperlinks intentionally being embedded? Was there a disclaimer that users of this free site signed acknowledging that hyperlinks to different advertisements would be embedded in their content? What was going on? I never heard back from Mr. Farmer, so I decided to go see what information I could find about this situation on the Edublogs site. I found a forum discussion where several Edublogs users were concerned about this practice. Here is a sample of what they said: I was updating one of my blogsites this weekend. I noticed that when I changed the theme "ContentLinks" ads started randomly appearing. I cannot have this on my school's blogs. I changed the theme back to "Borderline Chaos" which doesn't appear to have the pop-ups. Is this a feature on all themes now? Is there a way to turn it off? If I become a supporter, would this feature be removed? I also noticed this issue. I'm using the "Blue Moon" theme. I will try changing my theme. If this is a new edublogs policy, there should have been some notice ahead of time. This is unacceptable for a school blog and I am quite offended by having these ads forced uppon us! Edublogs, do you have an answer?? Content Links in the middle of my posts which include unauthorized advertisements is unacceptable. One of the reasons I moved my blog to Edublogs was to avoid ads in my blog, and this is even worse than Adsense found off to the side which people can easily ignore. Please remove these or let us know if they are here to stay, I will move my blog to another more school friendly blog host if thats the case. These comments were made 5 months ago when this new "feature" was turned on. They mostly continue in this vein from a handful of the hundreds of Edublogs users. Mr. Farmer offered this response to the situation within the forum as follows: Apologies for this, it was a bug in our system and should be fixed now, we have been experimenting with (extremely occasional) advertising in order to support Edublogs and you can find more information here: http://edublogs.org/forums/topic.php?id=5303&replies=3
It should be fixed up now.
Cheers, James The link then takes you to another forum post which is dated "8 months ago" which suggests that this feature was in the works longer than Edublogs users were aware: Andrew and I have been giving Edublogs and revenue some serious thought of late.
In particular we've been trying to figure out how we can best support the growth and development of the site - both in numbers of users and in terms of functionality (we've got much bigger plans than the forums up our sleeves).
We're thinking about the costs of servers and of development and support staff.
As you know, we've got Edublogs Campus - but as you may not know, it's actually a really competitively priced product... for the amount of support, development and server space it occupies it doesn't really pay for more than itself.
So, we tried the 'Supporter' route and while we've had some great feedback from a lot of people on this and quite a few of you signed up it's not coming anywhere close to paying the hosting bills at the moment.
For example, our monthly hosting costs are around $3.5K, 'Supporter' is $25 (annually) and we've had about 30 - 40 people sign up for it.
I know that improving it still further will assist... but you can see where I'm getting at.
So, we're considering trying out some adsense, in the same way that wp.com do it.
What this would mean would be that:
- You would never see any ads
- Your students would never see any ads
- Your regular readers would never see any ads
- There wouldn't be any ads in feed readers
- Noone who has bookmarked you or types in your URL would see any ads
- No logged in Edublogs users would ever see any ads
In fact, very few people would see ads at all, but enough search engine visitors might in order to help us cover the bills and continue to grow and develop Edublogs.
And (and this makes us very different to wp.com) if you are an Edublogs Supporter there would never be any ads on your site ever.
And of course no Campus sites would have ads either.
I have to be honest, I was first very opposed to the concept (as you might have guessed!) but something I've figured out over the last few months of talking about it to people online and face to face is that not many people actually care.
I have never, for example, heard of a user saying that they don't want to use wp.com because of their ads, or that they'd choose Edublogs over wp.com based on their ad policy (that I mentioned above).
Also, our idea with this is that we try it out temporarily and if it doesn't work out or upsets people too much - we'll look into other approaches.
But at this time we'd love to hear your thoughts, so please, um, let us hear your thoughts below :)
Cheers, James
While Mr. Farmer offers a cogent explanation for the need for revenue to support free, online hosting of Edublogs, he never says anything about embedding advertisements in user created content. I am not opposed to advertisements on free online applications. However, there is a big difference between placing an advertisement on a free site and placing an advertisement in the user's content. Huge difference. Major fucking difference. By doing such, Edublogs has crossed a line that is highly unethical in terms of having user's unknowingly endorse corporations or advertising content within content they have generated. Again, having a widget or a sidebar filled with advertising content is one thing; embedding advertisements in user generated content is another. The differences are not in the same ball park, not in the same area code, not in the same hemisphere.
What makes matters a tad worse is the defensive posture assumed by Edublogs and "drmike -- Volunteer Support Guru." They seem to be missing the point. Very few users are complaining about adverts. What users are concerned about is the way in which this situation is being managed. Since "drmike" is an anonymous unpaid professional, I suppose... you get what you pay for. You might think with the new advertising revenue being generated by Edublogs, they could afford to hire a less cynical customer relations person.
While I am not a legal scholar, I have requested legal counselors to consider this situation and will be reporting on their findings in the near future. I am not sure how "in-line" advertising in this manner will lead to better service for users, nor are users given any indication of what these services might be.
Overall I am quite perplexed by this situation. My students using Edublogs report feeling violated and that their content is being mis-represented by the hosting service. Myself and my students are clearly okay with advertiser-supported services. What we do not like is having words or brands put in our mouths that we have not chosen to support. Legally, in certain circumstances, this action is close to vilification or libel and it should not be tolerated by any user of any free service unless you have legally agreed to allow the host to do so.
While I am clearly late to this discussion, I am angry at myself for not looking into this before recommending it to my students. There are many free sites used by my class that advertise, but none, zero, zilch, nada, that embed advertisements in the content created by us, the users. And why haven't other free applications done this? I can only guess it was for legal and ethical reasons loosely considered by the Edublogs administration.
More to come...
Image from here and here
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