•  "Why is Google acquiring JotSpot?
  Google shares JotSpot's vision for helping people collaborate, share and work together online. JotSpot's team and technology are a strong fit with existing Google products like Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Google Groups."

I received an email today from JotSpot, where I set up a course wiki a couple of years ago. JotSpot is now a part of the Google family! And they will no longer be billing users! I liked JotSpot when I used it. It worked well and had a nicely designed appearance which I found made working with it pleasurable. In fact, Google and jotSpot have the same graphic appeal.

It is fascinating watching the ongoing web 2.0 maneuvering and empire-building.

From my Bloglines, long neglected, via Will Richardson's Weblogg-ed, I discovered Terry Elliot's Tex2All - the musings, thoughts, pedagogical experiments using web 2.0, quoted poems and pictures of an English professor - like whipped cream on chocolate to my sensibilities!

• Perhaps the metaphor is not particularly well put, but I hope this message is clear–I could not have done any of this had I not invested in creating a technically competent self. I learned in order to teach in order to learn further. [bolding added] This is the technical conversation that we all must be a part of if we wish to be rewarded by the web x.x revolution instead of repulsed by it. I feel empowered because I can do better and faster what I already want to do. And the beautiful thing is that the tools are the perfect extension of the liberal education I believe in. [bolding added] Bloglines has the potential to be used in every research activity my students will ever participate in whether it is within or without the academic community.

http://tex2all.com/?p=32

Yes! He has articulated exactly why I think all teachers should be learning and using the web.

• The Web is way stranger than any of us has possibly imagined. [me adding bolding again] That is why I distrust the new names this courageous Australian school has given for school, classroom, and teacher. They are an trying to shoehorn the Metaverse into an old boot. It is a normal reaction. Most of the time this kind of kludge works long enough for us to find more convivial language and tools to bridge the gap between what is and the unknown. Until now. Heisenbergian uncertainty in the form of the Web has blasted apart our physically limited, socially constrained selves, but maybe we are as Miracle Max once cackled “‘only mostly dead”. If we are all dead, then there is only one thing left to do.

http://tex2all.com/?p=25

If we are only mostly dead, it's time to "storm the castle" and I chose to enjoy that "intensely messy experience" and keep learning to teach and teaching to learn.

Oh - and now I have an even longer blogroll to be behind in ;-)

technorati tags:bloglines, learning, teaching, web2.0, Terry_Elliot

Blogged with Flock

I am going to take advantage of the blogging freedom of not writing an essay; currently, I just don't have the time. However these two papers are too important to leave in my slush pile for some future less busy moment. So here are some of my observations, the kind of preliminary notes I would make during a very early stage in the composition process. I find myself intrigued by the concept of Communities of Practice, (which I continue to research after being deeply involved in an unlabelled one), and learning, and how organisations (and bureaucracies) deal with the human dimension. (If anyone wants to write the paper for me ;-> feel free!)

Attwell's The New Pedagogy of Open Content: Bringing Together Production, Knowledge, Development and Learning

From Attwell's Elgg blog, through the Wales Wide Web

Quotes for Notes for a Future Paper- (not a synopsis)

• Whereas Web 1 was largely implemented as a push technology - to allow access to information on a dispersed basis, Web 2.0 is a two way process, allowing the internet to be used for creating and sharing information and knowledge, rather than merely accessing external artefacts.
  
  Social software is increasingly being used in education and training through such applications as web logs, wikis, tools and applications for creating and sharing multi media and tools for sharing all kinds of different personal knowledge bases including bookmarks and book collections. (pg.3)

• A community of practice involves much more than the technical knowledge or skill associated with undertaking some task. Members are involved in a set of relationships over time (Lave and Wenger 1991: 98) and communities develop around things that matter to people (Wenger 1998). The fact that they are organising around some particular area of knowledge and activity gives members a sense of joint enterprise and identity. For a community of practice to function it needs to generate and appropriate a shared repertoire of ideas, commitments and memories. It also needs to develop various resources such as tools, documents, routines, vocabulary and symbols that in some way carry the accumulated knowledge of the community. In other words, it involves practice): ways of doing and approaching things that are shared to some significant extent among members. (pg.4)

• [A]activity theory does not include a theory of learning, instead, activity theory oriented pedagogical concepts are incorporated in Engeström’s (1987) Theory of Expansive Learning”
  
  • “The pedagogical stance of the activity-theoretical concept of expansive learning differs from traditional types of learning in that:
  • (a) The contents and outcomes of learning are not merely knowledge in texts and the heads of students but new forms of practical activity and artefacts (bolding added) constructed by students and teachers in the process of tackling real-life projects or problems - it is ‘learning what is not yet known’.
  • (b) Learning is driven by genuine developmental needs in human practices and institutions, manifested in disturbances, breakdowns, problems, and episodes of questioning the existing practice.
  • (c) Learning proceeds through complex cycles of learning actions in which new objects and motives are created and implemented, opening up wider possibilities for participants involved in that activity. This perspective on teaching and learning highlights the potential impact of new tools as vehicles for transforming activity procedures.” (pg.6)
    

• There is an increasing realisation of the power of story telling and narrative as a way not just of information transition but as a means of negotiating meanings and developing innovation and knowledge. Such realisation is linked to an understanding of the importance of tacit knowledge, within organisations and within communities (bolding added). Tacit knowledge is defined by Polyani as “knowledge that we do not know we have.” In a study undertaken in 1996, David Orr showed how knowledge about practice was shared amongst photocopying technicians by telling ‘war stories’ (bolding added) in break times. The transfer of tacit knowledge was important because the formal knowledge contained in manuals was inadequate for solving many day to day problems. (pg.7)

• Especially in the case of educational resources we need to consider the aspect of context. What may be a wonderful resource for me to use in a workshop, may be of little utility, and thus quality for someone teaching in a different situation or with a different target group. (bolding added)Furthermore, resources which were created for one purpose could be repurposed and thus given a different ‘quality’ in other contexts. So it may be that we need to redefine quality as not an absolute property inherent in an object, but something to be negotiated in the context of use. (pg.9)
  

• The more recent development and use of folksonomies based not on agreed or imposed taxonomies but on allowing users free keyword descriptions and then on search and aggregation technologies (bolding added) may offer some new insights into this issue. However, searching for photographs on a particular topic on Flickr, the photo sharing service which uses such user driven folksonomies, can be a frustrating process. (pg.9)

Snowden's Complex Acts of Knowing: Paradox and Descriptive Self-Awareness

From the Cognitive Edge's Blog, found indirectly through Stephen Downes's newsletter, OLDaily.

Again, Notes & Quotes, not a Synopsis

• Snowden, D 2002, 'Complex Acts of Knowing - Paradox and Descriptive Self Awareness', Journal of Knowledge Management , Special Issue, July 2002.

  Abstract:

  We are reaching the end of the second generation of knowledge management, with its focus on tacit-explicit knowledge conversion. Triggered by the SECI model of Nonaka, it replaced a first generation focus on timely information provision for decision support and in support of BPR initiatives. Like BPR it has substantially failed to deliver on its promised benefits.

  The third generation requires the clear separation of context, narrative and content management and challenges the orthodoxy of scientific management. Complex adaptive systems theory is used to create a sense-making model that utilises self-organising capabilities of the informal communities and identifies a natural flow model of knowledge creation, disruption and utilisation.

  However the argument from nature of many complexity thinkers is rejected given the human capability to create order and predictability through collective and individual acts of freewill. Knowledge is seen paradoxically, as both a thing and a flow requiring diverse management approaches. http://www.cognitive-edge.com/articledetails.php?articleid=13
  

• The failure to recognise the value of knowledge gained through experience, through traditional forms of knowledge transfer such as apprenticeship schemes and the collective nature of much knowledge, was such that the word knowledge became problematic. (pg.3)

• [A] growing group of authors ...base their ideas in the science of complex adaptive systems. The new understanding does not require the abandonment of much of what has been valuable, but it does involve a recognition that most knowledge management in the post-1995 period has been to all intents and purposes content management. In the third generation we grow beyond managing knowledge as a thing to also managing knowledge as a flow. To do this we will need to focus more on context and narrative, than on content. (all bolding added) (pg.5)
  

My thoughts:

Many people believe, perhaps unconsciously, that if they have access to the content, they "own" the knowledge, and can "use" it - - An "If-I-have-downloaded-the-manual,-I-don't-need-the-course" approach. And, as many courses are taught as a face-to-face vocalized manual, that seems demonstratively clear. (I remember weekends in software courses following step-by-step each how-to in a mandated pseudo-project. By Saturday afternoon, my brain was full and numb. Only a few remnants of "knowledge" would remain a couple of weeks later when I tried to actually do something using that "learning". If I was lucky, I would find someone in the organisation whom I could ask for help intermittantly as I needed it. That was, I believe, "knowledge as flow".) Courses run on the process and individually-owned project approach are closer to knowledge as a flow, as I am beginning to understand the concept. Communities where you can approach trusted colleagues for just-in-time know-how are, I think, the example of knowledge as flow.

Snowden's Three Heuristics

• Knowledge can only be volunteered: it cannot be conscripted. (pg.5)
• We can always know more than we can tell, and we will always tell more than we can write down. (pg.6)

And my favorite!

• We only know what we know when we need to know it. Human knowledge is deeply contextual, it is triggered by circumstance. (pg.6)

Embrace Paradox!

• [K]nowledge is paradoxically both a thing and a flow (pg.6)
• In general, if a community is not physically, temporally and spiritually rooted, then it is alienated from its environment and will focus on survival rather than creativity and collaboration. In such conditions, knowledge hording will predominate and the community will close itself to the external world. If the alienation becomes extreme, the community may even turn in on itself, atomising into an incoherent babble of competing self interests. (pg.11)

I wonder if there is not only "Knowledge hording" but also "knowledge rejection".

• The ability to convey high levels of complexity through story lies in the highly abstract nature of the symbol associations inthe observer's mind when he/she hears the story. It triggers ideas, concepts, values and beliefs at an emotional and intellectual level simultaneously. (bolding added) (pg.12)

This is what makes real communities of practice so efficient and effective!

An important point -

• The sheer number of informal and semi-formal communities within an organisation is too great to permit formal management. (pg.18)

This takes me back to the first heuristic - "Knowledge can only be volunteered: it cannot be conscripted" (pg.5) and allows me to skip to the end, missing much of great value, which I heartily recommend you read for yourself!

• In the new "complexity informed" but not "complexity constrained" third generation, content, narrative and context-management provide a radical synthesis of the concepts and practices of both first and second generation [of management of knowledge]. By enabling descriptive self awareness within an organisation, rather than imposing a pseudo-analytic model of best practice, it provides a new simplicity, without being simplistic, enabling the emergence of new meaning through the interaction of the formal and the informal in a complex ecology of knowledge. (pg.23)

I have not outlined Snowden's model, because I think you need to read the whole paper to 'get' it. What I am hoping to do here is entice you to read it by offering tidbits that resonated with my own experience.

There you have it - my notes towards an unwritten essay!

technorati tags:Attwell, COP, Communities_of_Practice, learning, knowledge, Snowden

Blogged with Flock

I love the fall colours, and the beauty of autumn.

technorati tags:fall06, colours

Blogged with Flock

 

 

 

 

In November, everything crashes -
files are lost,
cars slide into each other,
suiciding squirrels shut down generators
and I
    am late for school.

In November, people weep -

assignments fail,
teachers and students snarl,
work done is less than hoped,
and more,
    much more, is required.   

In November, we fear -
even if Christmas ever comes,
even if spring only hides behind
the winter we have to endure,
we have lost
    whatever we came here to find.
 

I've just finished reading The Dilbert Blog: Good News Day (found via Tex2All.com) It is an amazing story, (much shorter than it looks from the scroll bar because of all the Comments).

Adams tells us -

• As regular readers of my blog know, I lost my voice about 18 months ago. Permanently. It’s something exotic called Spasmodic Dysphonia. Essentially a part of the brain that controls speech just shuts down in some people,
  

He describes its effects -

• The weirdest part of this phenomenon is that speech is processed in different parts of the brain depending on the context. So people with this problem can often sing but they can’t talk. In my case I could do my normal professional speaking to large crowds but I could barely whisper and grunt off stage.

He describes his efforts and his rationale for how he works at 'curing' himself

• My theory was that the part of my brain responsible for normal speech was still intact, but for some reason had become disconnected from the neural pathways to my vocal cords. (That’s consistent with any expert’s best guess of what’s happening with Spasmodic Dysphonia. It’s somewhat mysterious.) And so I reasoned that there was some way to remap that connection. All I needed to do was find the type of speaking or context most similar – but still different enough – from normal speech that still worked. Once I could speak in that slightly different context, I would continue to close the gap between the different-context speech and normal speech until my neural pathways remapped. Well, that was my theory. But I’m no brain surgeon.

And where it gets truly amazing circles back to the beginnings of human speech and preliterate oral culture!!

• The day before yesterday, while helping on a homework assignment, I noticed I could speak perfectly in rhyme. Rhyme was a context I hadn’t considered. A poem isn’t singing and it isn’t regular talking. But for some reason the context is just different enough from normal speech that my brain handled it fine.

  Jack be nimble, Jack be quick.
  Jack jumped over the candlestick.

  I repeated it dozens of times, partly because I could. It was effortless, even though it was similar to regular speech. I enjoyed repeating it, hearing the sound of my own voice working almost flawlessly. I longed for that sound, and the memory of normal speech. Perhaps the rhyme took me back to my own childhood too. Or maybe it’s just plain catchy. I enjoyed repeating it more than I should have. Then something happened.

  My brain remapped.

  My speech returned.
  

I'm truly happy for Adams, and grateful for the pleasure and insight I get from Dilbert, but I'm even more grateful for this story, and what it makes me wonder about.

I wonder about our brains and language

• When I say my brain remapped, that’s the best description I have. During the worst of my voice problems, I would know in advance that I couldn’t get a word out. It was if I could feel the lack of connection between my brain and my vocal cords. But suddenly, yesterday, I felt the connection again. It wasn’t just being able to speak, it was KNOWING how. The knowing returned. (Bolding added.)

Our minds are mysterious, our behaviors sometimes baffling. We can't always control what we say, as Freudian slips show, the cliche "foot-in-mouth" describes, and the singing stutterer demonstrates. But poetry, rhyme and rhythm, are perhaps more than just the basis of the earliest human recording technology.

Our preliterate ancestors told stories in rhyme and rhythm, the beginnings of our human way of sharing knowledge in a public way. I've always thought the rhyme and rhythm were there to support memory, to help the tellers of stories be able to keep the details in their minds. I've never wondered about why rhyme and rhythm, poetry would help memory; it just seemed obvious that it would. But maybe it's more than that. Just as a baby is fascinated by sounds that link together, just as she or he babbles and loves nursery rhymes, maybe our species in its infanthood followed this pattern too.

Maybe our pre-literate ancestors babbled sounds, found vocal patterns, and created meanings through sound, rather than through the simplistic image (or so it seems to me now) of matching sounds to objects. Maybe sound, our first perceptual sense, active within the womb, came to be the womb of language. Maybe early language was an art form, the beautiful babblings, that moved through feelings and linked sounds in an emotionally satisfying manner with emotional tones and nuances. Maybe onomatopoeia is where our speaking was birthed into language, long before concrete words and abstract representations came to be spoken and written. Maybe they are simply recent technical extensions of language that was born through tone and tonality and appealing aural patterns, the magic and mystery of meaning.

And I hope Scott Adams continues to speak with pleasure and ease, and perform his art.

 From Tex2All

 

• So…my education becomes what I want to learn and what I need to learn. Who is in charge of that? I am or want to be or should want to be. The time for the expert to be ‘on tap’ rather than ‘on top’ is upon us. This new teacher’s job is to create the conditions under which he or she is no longer to be trusted or depended upon. Of necessity.

  My point in this is simple even though it must be clear by now that I am at the same time pretty clueless: the ground underneath our feet is shifting every second as evidenced by the simplest of words-education. The danger is that our sunglasses are firmly ensconced on our heads and our blinders securely affixed to our bridles. Where the hell can we go except straight ahead as the fissures we cannot see widen on the left and on the right. There really isn’t much of an incentive for most of us to shake off these shackles even if we wanted to do so. This makes me believe in my darkest hour that change can only come via catastrophe. May we end with a prayer: God deliver the best minds of my generation for they seem content to broadcast onto the dead air stories as useful as buggy whips and as pitifully unnecessary as carbon paper in a binary universe. God help the rest of us as we pull our load down an apocalyptically shifting landscape. 
  

Oh Yes!!!!

Those who ignore our shifting semiosis are condemned to irrelevance. If the educational institutions don't move forward into/ onto the web,  they will have lost their purpose.