I just came back from New Mexico, and I loved it! Of course, it helped that my cousin was a very advanced travel agent who loves New Mexico, but you can see why. Just look at these -

Can you see the village on the mesa?

 

 

This is the the village itself, which has been inhabited for hundreds of years.

 

 This is a modern Albuquerque suburb in the Sandia foothills; see the similarity? History lives on.

 

 

We rode the tram up to the top and it was beautiful, despite some clouds below us.

In Santa Fe, there is a gallery that has a whole environent called "The Awakening". It was a powerful experience being inside it. 

 

The whole trip was wonderful. There is so much beauty there. The colours of the houses and highway walls and bridges were all from the same palette - beiges, red-browns, golden yellow and turquoise - and the designs were often Native American. Plus the lovely clear air!

I learned that the world hold many delightful surprises, and new Mexico is one of them. 

 

September is here, and the post-secondary courses I teach start next week. I have to finalize some decisions about how I'm going to use blogs in these courses, and I've decided to come clean here. I sense there is an understanding of how blogs should be used academically, and that I may be breaking some of the "rules", but here's what works for me, as a teacher.

http://www.cbc.ca/photogallery/_world.html

Why Blog?

I want my students to extend their class talk and/or discussions beyond the class time and space. I want them to see each other more clearly and see how they are learning and can learn from each other. I believe that

Blogging accelerates inquiry by linking us to a wide range of resources and thus the greater conversation within our discipline as apprentices and experts, and it provides a place for the class to engage in discussion, in reflection and in learning construction outside of class. Class never ends. Learning spills into the hallway, out the door and across the campus often in a much more leisurely, thoughtful way than it has in the past. Hyperlinking allows a student to connect statements made three weeks ago to things she's thinking today, bringing to light the development of ideas, of skills, of practices, and grounding them in the rest of her life. Hyperlinking allows associative, non-linear ways of organizing ideas, helping students make new connections. The mix of media invites in multiple literacies--all of which can be explored, examined, compared, and connected around the clock. Students can see their own points of reference and how they intersect with those of their classmates and teacher. I know of no other way to make the learning outcomes this rich, this real, this lasting.

bgblogging: Creativity and Community in a Web 2.0 Classroom--Not As Easy As It Sounds?

I don't want posts that are essays, but I do want posts where students are learning not just content but a kind of public academic and/or business tone and style. I believe that because of the incredibly rapid development of of Web 2.0, and the reluctance of many academics to acknowledge its power and importance, young people are developing habits of undisciplined writing and self-exposure. I don't want to stop their exploration of this, the world's most powerful communication tool, but I want them to also develop a kind of disciplined sense of their presence in a public and (mostly) permanent forum. Here is the reality of blogging:

I am sitting alone, face-to interface with my online computer, and I feel safe and private, like I would in a washroom, but it is a public space, much more so than public washrooms are public. What I write is public anywhere on the World Wide Web, and can be linked to and popped into prominence anywhere and any time. That's just reality - and think how popular reality shows are!

Joan Vinall-Cox :: Weblog :: Shaping The Rhetoric for Blogging

I think there is a need for students to learn an (already existing) genre of blogging, and some academics have been discussing how this can happen, as I relate here - http://elgg.net/vinall/weblog/30918.html

Already some businesses are using blogs for both marketing and communication with clients/customers, and many pundits are sure this will only increase. I think so too. So I want to encourage my students to learn how to be relaxed yet 'correct' and/or appropriate when they write publically (on the web) for real purposes, either academic or professional. That's an 'extra' for their learning in this course.

Why Elgg?

I have decided to use Elgg's Community blogs again because they offer so much. I'll require my students to tag all their posts using their last name or a suitable user name, so I'll be able to easily see what each has done using that tag within Elgg. This is especially helpful at the end of term. I do give marks for blog posting in the course blog, and I do require correct spelling and grammar, although I do hope to 'hear' the students' relaxed, thinking voices.

Elgg's tags facilitate my teaching tasks. It also helps students to find each other's work if they remember someone as writing on a topic and can't remember how long ago it was. The pictures/images associated with each student's post facilitate that memory, and the tags help them search..

Perhaps the most important aspect of Elgg is my students' ability to mandate the level of privacy for each of their individual posts. All posts can be set to be private, seen just by the Community, seen just by Elgg members, or fully public. This level of control gives the students the most freedom, although I have experience students using "Private" and not understanding that I couldn't see their work, and so thought they hadn't done anything!

Elgg also allows the uploading of files which can be linked to from within posts. This is a useful way of "handing in" assignments. I used to use WebCT, and liked it at the time, but now would rather have students on an Elgg Community course blog, and a wiki than behind Blackboard's walls. For one of the courses I'll be teaching, I require the students create MP3s, and link them to their Elgg posts. There is a problem in that storage space is limited, and MP3s can be quite large, but that is easily overcome by using some of the file storage space available on the web. I read the TechCrunch post on storage - http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/01/31/the-online-storage-gang/ and will probably get the students to use some of those or the free 25 GB MediaMax unless they have other suggestions.

My Unconventional Move

Course blogs are so new that I haven't seen this debate yet. Does the class exist after the marks are added to the transcripts? Can the course blog, should the course blog, disappear after the course is finished? I haven't seen other teachers who use blogs talking about what happens to course (not individual) blogs when the course is over.

I want to take down the Community blog from last term. The course is over; some students used it briefly after the course, but, along with the meetings in a classroom, it's no longer relevant. Even though there were many excellent posts, and the vibrancy of the writing and the community are clear, I want to take it down. I want the new students to start fresh without looking at what others have said. I'll play them some of the assignments, but I want them to think through the questions on their own and within the context of their own class. I want to make use of the transitory feeling of blogs, and avoid the permanence of previous thought. We've crossed the road, and got to the other side; can we let a new group cross the same road without looking at the other side prematurely?

What do others think?

One of the things I love most about teaching a course that excites and intrigues me is waking early with my mind weaving possibilities. It's a joyful experience, rife with pleasure. It is both the most selfish and the most generous aspect of teaching. Selfish because of its creative joy. Generous because it's what you want to help the students learn how to do themselves. Thinking, not rote learning.

image from http://www.karinephoto.com/images/water_dance.jpg

I think this way. Thoughts rise and surface in my mind. I need a real project with the freedom to design how it is accomplished. Teaching is perfect for this. I need real experiences and objects, plus concepts about how I can weave them together to activate students' minds. For example, this morning I woke up thinking about the course wiki for my Oral Rhetoric course. My ambition is to to take the class from oral storytelling to posting an MP3 of their story online, with a series of graduated exercises, some practice in professional presentations, and an understanding of Ong and McLuhan on the impact of recording media on how we humans think and communicate. I use a Wikispaces wiki and an Elgg Community blog to supplement the classroom.

I woke with a sense (no sounds and only brief glimpses of bits of visions), a sense that I needed a new wiki page. I remember trying a few word combinations for a title, and settling on "Sights, Sounds and Descriptions of Rhetoric". While trying out the words, I was also shaping what I wanted to have happen on the page.

I am committed to introducing students to and reinforcing their use of the emerging communication possibilities of the web. After all, they are living with them, and will be working with them for the rest of their lives. I also believe, from my own experience as well as my theoretical readings, that each person constructs their own knowledge, increasingly by learning how to find and understand connections. So that's what I want to invite the students to accomplish for themselves.

After I created the page in my course wiki, I "seeded" it with an invitation for students to add to and/or organize the page (like Wikipedia) and added three examples, with somewhat bibliographic references with the links to the online examples, one newspaper article, one radio archive, and one historical video - description, sound, and sight. My title was my thinking!

My way of thinking is why I chose to write an arts-based narrative inquiry, with ethnographic and phenomenological aspects. It allowed me to think my way, based on classroom experiences, and theoretical concepts that make sense within the context of my experiences. This kind of thinking, and the training I got in exploring how it works, allows me to sense/imagine possible learning experiences using words, a sense of the visual web objects, and a feel for how the students might engage.

School is about to start. Learning, theirs and mine, is about to start. I'm excited.

Dr. Tony Karrer has reviewed some rather prophetic posts and papers on the time-limited utility of LMSs (AKA CMSs) here  in his eLearning Technology blog. He quotes

• Jay Cross's take on the implications of the paper in LMS, we hardly knew ye ... :
  
  

• LMS create a walled garden in an era when walls are falling down. Why not use
  the real internet and real internet technology rather than some hokey
  oversimplification? Furthermore, how can you manage serendipitous learning that
  is inherently unmanageable?
  

• I get the feeling that Jay and I are responding to what is happening out in the world of corporate use of LMS products

and concludes

• Of course, The Innovator's Dilemma of Learning suggests that this solution may not not come from any of the big LMS players (see also Do You WANT an LMS? Does a Learner WANT an LMS?).
  

 

My own experience has follow that path. WebCT, when it was still small, was a wonderful scaffold for me as a teacher while I learned how to use the web in my teaching and what I could do there. This was at my primary institution where great planning and interface set-up had taken place and  students' names were dropped right into the couse, and templates and help were available. Then I encountered an educational institution with an installation of WebCT, when it was still small, was a wonderful scaffold for me as as teacher as I learned how to use the web in my teaching and what I could do there. This was at my primary institution where great planning and interface set-up had taken place,   students' names were dropped right into the couse, and templates and help were available.

Then I encountered an educational institution with an installation of WebCT where only a high level techie could get a course up and running. At the same time I discovered the Beta version of the wiki Jotspot, and so used that with the class all on one Blogspot blog. It worked! I liked it and felt I was adding to students' learning by having them use learning tools that they would be encountering in their personal and business futures.

Now I use Wikispaces, an Elgg Community Blog, and, of course, email. Plus, RSS and the browser, Flock, add to what's available outside the LMS's "walled garden". The LMS, as far as I'm concerned, is dead.

Tris Hussey (tris.hussey@gmail.com) on September 10, wrote about an imminent threat to the freedom of podcasters in his newsletter A View From the Ilse. In it he linked to the popular blog, Boing, Boing, for its take on the situation, which is an urgent call to podcasters. It reminded me of the American DOPA law. Then I went downstairs and the my morning paper, the Toronto Star, and encountered Michael Geist's article on the secretcy around the threatening international treaty. This is scary stuff, governments and bureaucracies fighting to control freedom of speech. It's even more disapointing, IMHO, because it's the kind of censorship of the web we see China trying to impose, done with none of the openness I expect of my government.

I feel like Cassandra yelling vainly to the truly blind control freaks. The horse has left the barn; too late to close the barn door. The genie is out of the bottle. Pandora has opened the box. The web is a communication tool that is almost impossible to control. The music industry found that out. TV and movies are trying to get a business structure in place before they face the same problems the music industry found itself in. Even AOL had to give up being a walled garden and move out into the open. These people making these treaties in secret or making the American DOPA law in public, do they know anything about what they are dealing with?

Communications have changed fundamentally with the advent of the web. Copy&paste,  P2P, ripping, mash-ups: these are all the new vocabulary describing what can be done now, and what will be done, even bythose who don't consciously notice that they're doing it too and think they can control it in others. Creating the CreativeCommons was a smart move; it acknowledged the reality of a world where anything I put up on the web can be copied and re-used by anyone.

We live in the age of bricolage. We always have, but now it's more noticible because of the ease of "borrowing", copying, and re-using. People quote others' words, sample others' music, make visual allusions to others' movies, and copy the fashion statements and/or designs of others. We learn from each other by copying; it's a very valuable human trait. The current problem is that we've have a very rigid and controlled representational system, caused by the complex technology and required skills, which created an economics of scarcity. Now we are transitioning to a multimedia communication system, the web, where consumers are becoming prosumers, and the technology is getting cheaper and easier all the time.

I hope this secret treaty that threatens the freedoms of podcasters doesn't get signed into international law, but whether or not it is, I have no doubt that it will ultimately fail. The genie is, indeed, out of the bottle. 

My three community college sections have their individual wikis set up and the students seem mostly quite competent at accepting the invitations to join their various wikis. Each is private - I'm still on the free month Wikispaces provides, and think the future $5.00 U.S. a month is worth it for the privacy. I'm not so sure I'm happy to be running 3 separate wikis spaces, but copying and pasting keeps that fairly efficient.

What I've focussed on this week is a small writing assignment that they are working on in pairs. I've reviewed what I hope they've learned in high school about the structure for essays -

• Introduction - "Say what you're going to say"
• Body - "Say it in detail with examples"
• Conclusion - "Say what you've said"
  

because they will need it in other courses. Next week I'm going to get them to review what they written, comparing it to the required structure, and then show they how to format their work so it looks impressive, in the hopes of influencing the opinion of their other professors. The same kind of stuff I've been teaching for over 30 years.

What is new - and Web 2.0 about what I'm doing - is the use of the wiki, which I see as potentially useful for students beyond the classroom. I've also had them set up accounts in del.icio.us because they will be working in a computer lab at school, and, most of them, on another computer at home, so they need a social bookmarking tool. These are all students studying the performing arts, and they are (almost all) handling all this web work in a fairly relaxed way. Every year, more young students are more competent, in a general way, with using the computer and the web for communication. Seeing that confirms me in my belief that we teachers, we 'leaders', need to rush to get (at least partially and in some areas) 'ahead' of the students, so we can 'guide' them, and thus pass on at least some of our cultural heritage, which includes how to behave in a public space and basic civility, IMHO.

The other interesting aspect of leaving an LMS, is what it means to teachers. I admit that I chose to avoid my college's LMS because they are bringing in a new version, and I didn't want to invest the time in learning it while I'm teaching in a program that doesn't have its students on laptops. Yesterday, in a wired workspace for teachers, I overheard a conversation on the use of WebCT Vista. A very experienced and tech-savvy teacher commented that the changes were less technological than cultural. The way they've configured Vista, there really is a lead teacher and those teaching other sections of the same course must conform to his or her version in a manner different from the previous set-up with each individual teacher on their own, more or less.

I've only heard one person point that out so far, and I do know teachers who really like using an LMS, and, of the ones who don't, most of them just don't like using computers. What intrigues me is that with the Blackboard patent wars, which I see as about control as well as economics, is that Vista is about institutional control. I think, seeing DOPA and the secretive attempt to set up an international treaty and the rush by the music and movie industry to set up online business models that will encourage conformance to copyright, that the powers-that-be have finally twigged to the power of the web.

When those in control didn't see or understand the web, they ignored those sillies on the fringes doing weird things on the (what is it called?) Internet. Now, with the business sections of most papers running all kinds of articles on web businesses and the usual suspects ranting about the dangers of the web (safer than bars, in my opinion) suddenly this free space is being eyed by those who feel the need to impose control.

In most ways, I am a conforming middle class woman, but I think. And I find that thinking helps me learn. And I want to help my students think and learn. I believe that ultimately it is good for them, society and the economy if we can think. We need some freedom for that, not license, but the freedom to figure things out our own way. That's how we make connections and construct knowledge. That's how we advance as individual and as a society. And that's why I;m using wikis rather than an LMS, for my freedom and my students'.