here you go!

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000786.html

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier06/lanier06_index.html

Apologies if you've seen this too many times now, but it is really worth the read. Actually, the important bit is not just the initial article by Jaron Lanier ("DIGITAL MAOISM:

The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism", though you do have to read it for the rest to make sense) but more the ensuing discussion by the likes of Yochai Benkler, Clay Shirky, Esther Dyson, Jimmy Wales, George Dyson, and Howard Rheingold.

I especially liked Benkler's, Shirky's and Dyson's responses. Lanier's piece seems shaky, and, as a number of commentators point out, over-generalizes and actually mis-characterizes Wikipedia's processes. And yet his piece still resonates with many of the commentators because it picks up on both over-hyped terms (the "hive mind") and some real phenomenom of both the web and user generated content and challenges us to think about them. What emerges is some really interesting commentary on the individual in the networked world, collective action, collectivism, voting versus persuasion and bottom up versus top-down systems that is incredibly pertinent to those of us trying to envision and build new technologies for learning, thinking and collaborating. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000778.html

http://electroplankton.nintendods.com/flash.html

Brian and I have been trading links on wigged out music makers and visualizers recently. It started when he pointed to opening in his furl feed, which I replied back to with the whitney music box.

These are cool, but I dig even more things like Nintendo's ElectroPlankton, really the only reason I would consider buying one of these Nintendo Dual Screen handhelds, though with a 7 year old son I am sure that will change ;-) And from a slightly different angle, I admit to coveting toys like Alesis Air FX Sound and Effects Controller or the Korg KPE-1 KAOSS Pad Entrancer. One of the reasons I love things like these - you can put them in the hands of non-musicians and see their eyes light up as they start to mangle and manipulate sounds to make new ones, something they never thought they could do. In my life, turning myself and other people onto the joy and power of making music is as powerful as any other teaching/learning I have done. Hallelujah! - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000777.html

http://eyespot.com/ and http://www.onetruemedia.com/otm_site/public_home

Via Mark Oehlert's post I came across these two new tools with the promise of "online video editing tools" and I just had to check them out. With more and more services popping up allowing people to share and find media, this is another logical step, online remix tools, and one that I am interested in as well because I don't have any video tools of my own (or ANY skills with video for that matter, making myself a perfect test candidate) (read more...)

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000776.html

http://www.ldu.leeds.ac.uk/dragndrop/bloguse/

Back in 2003 I created what's become one of the more popular things on the EdTechPost site, the 'matrix of blog uses in education.' For whatever reason it's gotten lots of links and traffic over the last 3 years, but what has been especially gratifying is when people have picked it up and actually done something new with it (like, you know, re-used/re-mixed it!)

The first example I found a year or so ago was the Dutch site Frankwatching, which took the original sketchy document and translated it into Dutch, along the way making it much more fetching to the eye.

But I was really blown away by a recent example emailed to me by its creator, Tony Lowe. Tony, through a company called Webducate, has developed a number of flash-based tools for creating learning content. Using one of those tools, Dragster, he created an interactive version of the 'matrix of blog uses in education' with a cool innovation - in addition to a pre-existing list of "uses," which the user can drag and drop into their chosen quadrant of the matrix, it allows you to create new ones on the fly to then be placed there.

In an email Tony writes that in future versions people will be able to save completed exercises and look at a gallery of others' work, but even as it is now I can see this being a useful tool to use with faculty or others in workshops to brainstorm different uses they can make of blogs and blogging and help them see it as an activity and process, not an end product (which was a main goal of the 'matrix'). - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000775.html

http://solstice.eplt.washington.edu/Say_Hello_to_Solstice

Oren Sreeby wrote me today to let me know about the recent open sourcing of Solstice, a Web application development framework for Perl which the University of Washington has developed to power their suite of Catalyst tools. Solstice itself is just the framework used in the development, but the team is also apparently at work to open source the actual web tools themselves. This is exciting news as people who have seen the Catalyst tools will know that they represented an early and quite innovative approach to providing teaching and learning tools (including a much lauded eportfolio tool) that wasn't simply replicating the same CMS over and over again. Ed Tech Perl developers, are you listening? - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000774.html

http://www.reload.ac.uk/plex/index.html

Exciting stuff, the first beta of the Plex tool is available for download now. The Plex tool is being developed at the University of Bolton by Phillip Beauvoir, Mark Johnson, Oleg Liber, Colin Milligan, Paul Sharples and Scott Wilson and is the output of the JISC-funded Personal Learning Environments project. Scott Wilson has also posted a powerpoint presentation on the new tool as well. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000773.html

I'm feeling kind of silly today, so... via a chock-a-block wiki page from the always fabulous Jenny Levine came a link to the great community building exercise, the Librarian Trading Cards flickr pool (collect them all!), which in turn led to the amazing set of flickr toys and specifically the trading card maker that's been used to create all these nifty cards (you know, my english profs used to just slam me for run on sentences, but I don't care, it's more fun this way!) And I just couldn't help myself,, so here's El Guapo's card (the photo for which was taken by my 6 year old son, it's amazing how few photos of myself I actually have on my computer, oh yeah, those run on sentences again...) - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000772.html

http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/repomman/index.html

To keep going on the apparent 'open source repository' theme today, this JISC-funded project appears to be using Fedora and Sakai to investigate automated population of metadata based on contextual information provided by the portal environment, to examine the boundaries of personal versus institutional digital resource management, and to develop some workflow aroud common repository tasks based around Service Oriented Architecture. Phew. Fedora is a different approach than DSpace, though both originated from the library/institutional repository world, and yet in my earlier investigations it too seemed to also have some limitations to its effectiveness as a LOR. Early days yet for this project, but maybe some promise in moving it closer to serve those (and other) needs better. And you just gotta love the name. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000787.html

Photo by inkognitoh.

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000790.html

http://www.prowe.ac.uk/index.htm

JISC-funded project that sets out to examine "in what ways could wiki and wiki-type environments be useful and useable as personal and informal repositories to support professional development within part-time tutor communities of practice?" While I think a lot of us already participating in the edublogosphere might think the answers self-evident, I am definitely looking forward to the results when they come out latter this year, especially if they come up with any useful insight into fostering adoption that isn't to simply "wait for older faculty to retire" or "give faculty more PD time and training." - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000789.html

http://www.imsglobal.org/altilab2006/

If you're an elearning standards geek then there's lots to sift through in this collection of presentations from the recent Alt-i-lab 2006 sessions in Indiana. And if you're not, then be warned that forcing yourself to go through these is likely to aggrevate any masochistic tendencies you may already harbour.

Part of me really wants some of these developments to come true, to deliver the promised 'plug and play' elearning environments described herein, and in my rational moments I know that 10 years really isn't that long for a field like this to coalesce around an open set of interoperability specs. And yet it would be hard to fault a newcomer looking at these presentations for wondering if this represents what is still to be done, how anyone manages to develop quality online learning experiences now (and how many PhDs will be required to operate the CMS of the future)? - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000791.html

http://www.futurelab.org.uk/research/

opening_education/social_software_01.htm

I wanted to like this paper but was frustrated with the first 12 pages or so, mostly because it is just review of the 'social software' field and forrays into how knowledge and learning are changing à la Downes and Siemens. Nothing particularly wrong with it, just nothing that new.

But it was worth sticking with for the practical suggestions in section 4, "How Do We Move Towards 'C-Learning’?" especially the section on what educators can do...

"You can plan your curriculum as though education does not stop at the classroom walls."

Doesn't get much more succinct than that! Or this line - "In particular, schools should not expect students to leave the 21st century in the cloakroom."

This is an important paper. It is both academically respectable, readable (though a little longish for time constrained Deputy Ministers and the like) and 'gets it' without being fanatical or evangelical. Send it on to those who can help affect this change. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000792.html

http://www.dr-chuck.com/sakai-map/index.php

Want to know where Sakai is in production and who the other partners are? Check out this map from Chuck Severance, recently named the head of the Sakai Foundation. An interesting point that Dr. Severance points out in this short video is that 46% of people paying into the Sakai foundation are not in fact implementing it at all yet, either as a pilot or in production; he explains this as being about people paying to "make the market a better place." Here's hoping it does. Would love to see a similar map of Moodle adoption throughout the world! - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000793.html

http://www.walrusmagazine.com/

article.pl?sid=06/05/16/0247214

If you've never read it before, I highly recommend The Walrus as one of the best Canadian "general interest" print mags out there (they post back issues online). In the June issue they published a piece by former Saskatchewan premier Roy Romanow titled "A House Half Built" on the shaky future of Canadian federalism that I thought to point to, in part because of our national holiday tomorrow, and in part because I was reminded of it again by this recent discussion on Ulises Mejias blog Ideant about "Socialist Software".

The part of Romanov's piece that stuck in my mind was actually not by him, but a quote by former Saskatchewan deputy Attorney General, John Whyte:

"A nation is built when the communities that comprise it make commitments to it, when they forego choices and opportunities on behalf of a nation...when the communities that comprise it make compromises, when they offer each other guarantees, when they make transfers, and perhaps most pointedly, when they receive from others the benefits of national solidarity. The threads of a thousand acts of accommodation are the fabric of a nation...."

Now if I was really smart I would somehow connect this back to the great discussion that unfolded on Ideant, but I'm not, and I have to go enjoy my July long weekend (plus our washer just exploded and we've water all over the basement, oy vey!). But I am left with a nagging feeling that the social interactions fostered by 'social software' are all too solipsistic, or at best are an "echo chamber," and that the way in which we interface with them, sitting in front of screens typing away, allows us a safety that one does not get when there is real territory, real resources, real people involved, staring you in the face. But then I'm also someone who always thought Samuel Johnson's refutation of Berkely was pretty good too. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000780.html

One of my other destinations last week was the BC Educational Technology Users Group annual Spring Workshop, this year held at North Island College's lovely Comox Valley campus.

If the workshop schedule was actually reflective of current practices in BC, then you'd be led to believe we have almost ubiquitous adopting of elearning 2.0 in the province - 2 different wiki workshops, a podcasting session and blamb's always entertaining and educational social software tsunami (with guest D'Arcy Norman, who we keep letting into the province, but I told him he better just move out here or else we'll start asking to see his papers!) BCcampus' Executive Director, David Porter, has a good writeup on one of the wiki sessions as well as the invigorating opening session by journalist Mark Schneider over at his new blog.

And as D'Arcy has mentioned, I also made my small contribution, a Web 0.1-ish session on our new service, SOL*R. More to come on that soon, but so far I have avoided being pelted with rotten fruit, always a relief when rolling out new services. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000779.html

www.edtechpost.ca/gems/coppul-lor3.ppt

Pheew! Back home now after a hectic (for me) week of travelling and talking, one of which was a talk I gave to the Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries (COPPUL) Distance Education Forum on the feasibility of using DSpace as a general learning object repository.

I have been pretty hard on this idea in the past, so I was glad to be given the opportunity to revisit the idea in more depth. And while it might not seem so from the slides, I actually found myself softening to the idea, in part because of some innovations from MIT and others to accomodate learning materials. But my main message, which was perhaps buried a bit at the end of the talk, was that it is one thing to evaluate DSpace against an abstract set of functionality that a LOR should have, (which is kind of what I did here) and quite another to say that it will solve the problems of finding, sharing, remixing and reusing learning content, a question some would say has already been asked and answered a few times. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000781.html

http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/

Conf2006Vancouver/Conference Sessions

My only regret about going to the BC ETUG sessions last week is that it coincided with the Sakai conference being held just across the Straight in Vancouver which would also have made for an informative few days.

Alas, all is not lost, as the good folks there are posting their slides and podcasts of the sessions to this wiki. See also their conference 'facebook', a great idea for any conference, but especially one like this trying to create community.

Lots to digest here; a good presentation on small institutions implementing Sakai, (though clearly the concept of 'loosely coupled' is understood a little differently here.) But that's just nit picking, lots of exciting things going on, but it left me wondering about two things. Why were there only 3 Canadians in the facebook for a conference hosted in Canada (presumably the rest are just shy?) and is there a whole segment of the edu-blogosphere I don't know about that is simply buzzing about this conference, because I haven't heard a peep in my aggregator. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000783.html

http://www.learningtools.arts.ubc.ca/index.htm

must...get...back...to...work...just...one...more...post...

Like I said, "affable tools for rich media manipulation" - a few years back I wrote about the availability of some Flash-based authoring tools from the UBC Arts Computing group. Since then, they have created many more; in addition to the original timeline tool, they've developed a multimedia learning object authoring tool, a vocabulary memorization platform,' a language pronunciation tool and a very cool character stroke recorder for Asian characters.

In the past these had all been freely available, but only in a version hosted on the UBC server. Now all of these tools are available for free download so you can install them on your own server and offer them to faculty for use in your own environment. I am also looking forward to working with these guys to integrate these tools with SOL*R and to see them work with other environments. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000782.html

http://projectpad.northwestern.edu/ppad2/index.html

Staying with the Sakai-theme for a bit (but in fact the more interesting theme emerging for me is "affable web-based tools for rich media manipulation," more to come), in the Sakai wiki I came across Project Pad from Northwestern University. It is a suite of audio and video annotation tools, including tools to annotate quicktime a/v files, flash movies and mp3 audio streams, still images, and do audio transcription. The suite includes two tools for searching and managing content stored in external digital media repositories such as Fedora systems, Z39.50 library catalogs, and Google and uses the Common Query Language. And it looks to be becoming integrated with Sakai. Not sure this is a flickr-killer (but who says it needed killing anyways) but maybe one alternative worth investigating for those attracted by some of that functionality (it is actually much broader) but uneasy with sending their faculty off to 3rd party commercially hosted services. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000784.html

If posts by the cogdog, blamb AND Jon Udell weren't enough to convince you, then take MY word too and run, don't walk, over to Gardner Campbell's blog to listen to a 45 minute recording from their latest faculty academy on using a 3rd party hosting solution and application 'control panel' as a way to inexpensively support faculty innovation and experimentation. (And for the record, this hasn't changed my mind at all about podcasts, though Brian's right, Gardner's voice is remarkably soothing to listen to ;-)

I must admit to feeling a little dissatisfied with the discussion about 'enterprise computing' -type questions (around minute 20 and following, and in the questions and answers in the end) but it's not a simple complaint either.

First off, they really should be commended for adopting a mechanism that greatly increases the authentic assessment of new technologies, part of the aim that's described in the first 20 minutes. And in regards to the 'enterprisey' issues, some stock also needs to be placed in the retort of how enterprisey these systems should have become anyways. This has come up a few times in conversation for me over the last weeks - while the use of computer technology in teaching and learning isn't that new, this beast we call the 'course management system' is barely 10 years old...do we really believe we got it right the first time, in just 10 years, and that the model will never need changing? So there's a lot to be said in general about an approach that stays flexible, especially in light of Web 2.0, which if anything could be described as massive, non-stop disruptive innovation, the only constant being change. Sure, we thought the internet in general meant that, but now it really seems to be unfolding in front of our eyes.

So I'm left both inspired but wanting to eat my cake too - can we not have this flexibility and experimentation AND the guarantees of service we seem expected to provide? (I liked Gardner's response about trust and agreeing to a certain amount of risk, but I've never seen that calm down an irate professor during exams when the system goes down.) Udell's comment regarding Ray Ozzie's speech really resonates for me here - "In his vision of the future of enterprise software, services are delivered on demand, they produce value in incremental steps, and they’re paid for when -- not before -- that value is proven."

Still, Gardner and his crew are to be totally commended for their approach - maybe instead of a 'learning management operating system' we might start thinking about a control panel for instructor-controlled (or student controlled, how about sticking that in your pipe!) mix- and matchable lightweight apps that already had the connectors to the SIS and authentication systems built in (or can these be the same thing?) - SWL

(the first step to dealing with your problem is admiting you have a problem...My name is Scott, and I am a blog addict...really, I'm working on my other machine right now as I write this!)