Yesterday I cleaned out the office I've been in for the last 2 years, at the institution where I've been employed, initially part time, then full time, since 1972. I am ambivalent about leaving but I want to focus my energies on the web. I believe we are at the beginning of the most significant development in human communications ever, and that it must be intergrated into education as quickly as possible. I can focus on that more if I steer my own course, so I'm moving out and moving on. When I look back through the mists of time I see myself then - and now I have become a woman with a computer ;-> looking forward to seeing what is around the bend!

You Send It - http://www.yousendit.com/ - is a free service for sending files larger than your email application allows. My daughter recently used it for a file too large for her Hotmail account, and I simply clicked on the link sent to me and was able to download the file with no problems.

With large sound or video files, this is ideal.

Joan

While scanning through TechCrunch - http://www.techcrunch.com/ - I found a description of a beta free online course management system - nuvvo - http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/01/16/nuvvo-takes-on-open-source-m I took the "tour" and was fascinated. With this app, anyone can set up and charge for courses without an institutional broker. A direct teacher-to-student link can be established. Ha! I thought. The educational establishment better watch out! All those part time teachers might set up their own courses and be better paid. So much is available on the web for anyone who wants to learn. But sometimes, it seems to me, learners need experts to give them the "big picture", show them what they can learn, and alert them to gaps in their knowledge. Schools (when operating well) do this. Now, with nuvvo, I could envision individual teachers teaching independently. When I enthused about nuvvo to my computer mentor, she reacted vehemently. Where I saw an opportunity for the individual teacher, she saw a channel for scam artists. Because she deals more with applications than I do, she has had experience with students who find out that the course they took, and paid a high price for, does not have a recognized credential. They may have learned the content, but they can't use the diploma to advance within the educational establishment. So 2 views, the positive and the negative. I still think its a fascinating development in the webworld!

On Tuesday I gave a lecture on [File does not exist] to about 150 students on the business and educational uses of blogs and wikis. I roamed around the web using Google, Google's Blog Search and Technorati discovering various business uses of blogs and wikis, from information-sharing to marketing, from intranets to interactions with clients. All very interesting. And, of course, I used my Furl, del.icio.us, and Bloglines accounts to access my research on the educational uses of blogs and wikis.

The educational uses of blogs and wikis are my area of interest. Like many others, not knowing html code and how to use ftp software were barriers to my being anything other than a web reader for a number of years. I did learn how to use WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web authoring software - if it was very simple - like Mozilla's Composer. And I did get friend to show me (sometimes repeatedly) how to use ftp. And I believe many people who have had only that experience of the web don't know what's possible today. Many have been frightened once, and they're staying away.

The Read-Write web, the Social web, Web 2.0 - this is a very different web space.  It's also a new kind of literacy. While it's very easy to set up a blog and engage in blogging, many people don't know that. While there are inexpensive and free wiki applications that make creating web sites easy, many people are still in the typewriter / print mindset. They feel uncomfortable writing on books, let alone editing a wiki. Yet blogs and wikis are the most accessible collaborative and communication tools that we humans have ever had.

Business is making use of them, and I believe that education isn't making enough use of them.  The youth are on the web, it's true, but I am constantly amazed at how narrow their knowledge is, and I'm worried about how some use the web.

Education can make use of the web in a number of ways:

• Having students blog about what they are learning gives the quiet ones a chance to be read, and not just by the (judging) teacher, - by their peers as well. And blogging allows students the learning that writing about something brings, and it develops their writing by giving them a broader (and arguably a better) audience.
•  Students can work collaboratively by co-authoring a wiki or by writing a section of a wiki to create, with their classmates, a course text or course studynotes. Again, with a wider audience and more of a purpose than simply performing for the teacher in the privacy of an assignmen, they can become learning communities
• Teachers who blog can share their knowledge and experiences of pedagogical uses of web applications with other teachers.

Today I was reading Konrad Glogowski's blog - with a wonderful title - blog of proximal development - a post called Community Responds. His class has been blogging for a while, and one of the students wrote a post on how formulaic and kind of bland some the other posts were, how they didn't have much of a personal voice. Konrad was pleased to discover that this rather critical post was responded to by others in the class, not by flaming the author or going silent, but by acknowedging his point and writing that the author's tone was inappropriate. The author agreed.

Cyberbullying has been decried in the news - and here we see a teacher creating an atmosphere where students have learned how to communicate clearly, directly, and in a socially appropriate manner. If we in the educational system assume that students already know how to use the web (many don't) just because they are the web generation, we are leaving them in a Lord of the Flies (My)Space where they don't learn how to communicate in a positive and appropriate manner.

I enjoyed preparing and giving my lecture, though I miscalculated my time and had to rush at the end. (Especially embarassing  because a student from my Oral Rhetoric class was in the audience as I demonstrated this fallibility.) I hope more students and more teachers learn about the Read-Write web, and learn to explore and share in a productive and pleasurable way.

 I think it was Polyani who said that although we shape our tools; they also shape us. I don't simply believe this; I know it from my own experience and from watching students over the years. What I believe is that teachers and other educators must take the impact of the computer and the internet, especially web 2.0 into account as we attempt to pass on the collective wisdom from the late age of print to the beginnings of the networked globe, the developing global villiage.

It was the word processor that freed the writer in me. Before I struggled with and learned how to use word processors, spelling, editing, and typewriting simply overwhelmed me. There were just too many barriers between me and the words flowing onto the page. As soon as I learned how to use a word processor, my behavior changed. I began to write and get published. I changed my tool, and the new tool changed me.

Previously I have written about noticing a change in the behavior of students over the years in freewriting exercises, which you can read about here - http://www.collegequarterly.ca/2005-vol08-num02-spring/vinall-cox.html

Peter Schilling has written a very interesting article called Technology as Epistemology
http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/technology-as-epistemolog He says, and I find this very insightful -

"What it means to master a field of study has changed. Rather than developing an encyclopedic knowledge of all literature on a single topic, today's students need to know how to find, evaluate, and contextualize information in numerous, different formats on more interdisciplinary topics, but they also need to know how to locate and use the underlying data as well as the technology to sort and present it. To teach the history of the English language today, for instance, an instructor would most likely want to train students to use popular Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and create data layers of audio files demonstrating the pronunciation of Old English and Old Norse town names, point data for the town's location, data relating to the slope and aspect of northwestern Britain, and have knowledge of the military technology of pre-Norman England. Reading a book or listening to a lecture on the topic is no longer sufficient. An educated person today knows how to access and use appropriate tools and the appropriate data as well as understands the abilities and limitations of each. It is likely that the way in which they know these things -- as well as the ways in which they go about finding, assimilating, and representing information -- utilize specific areas of their brains. Photoshop and other such tools change the way we process visual data."

As a world, we are developing new tools and thus altering our perceptual patterns, and we need to be fully aware of this.