After repeated problems I was forced to take my laptop in to be repaired.

Here is the story of what I was figuring out when I got the bad news about my drive - it's toast and I may have lost all my unbacked-up files and my programs.

http://webtoolsforlearners.blogspot.com/2007/02/when-my-computer-crashed.html 

 I recommend staying efficient about backing up because I may have lost years of work.

I'm working on a borrowed computer while waiting to get my laptop back with a new more powerful drive. I still don't know what if anything of my work and my programs will be saved and the implications are beginning to hit home. I've lost (misplaced temporarily?) my external mind.

I'm thinking about getting an external drive to use for backup, and that's influencing my metaphoric thinking. I'm also thinking about an external drive rather than using a disk for backup because I am much better at organizing material on my computer than organizing material stuff. I might use Box but I'm a little squeamish about putting financial records online, even in a "private space". I'm thinking about these possibilities, because I keep catching myself thinking, "Oh, I can use ... (document, image, sent message, etc.) to build ... something I want to use for my business or my fun --- and I won't know for a few days whether I will ever have access to any of those again. Years of work that I use as templates for new projects, and a couple of current almost finished projects - gone. (Although maybe retrievable, I hope.)

I’m finding Google a wonderful survival help, with the personalized Google homepage I “wasted time” on a couple of weeks ago, setting up widgets and frequently used links. I’ve also discovered Gmail as a very handy alternative to my Mail application on my iBook. I had a Gmail address just as a kind of backup, but I rarely used it, and rarely checked it. I was using webmail after my drive died and I had to take it to the repair shop, but I disliked going to 2 separate webmails, one of which was ugly and very slow. I remembered Tris Hussey - http://blog.larixconsulting.com/blog - writing about Gmail and how regular email addresses could be forwarded to it. It’s easy, and much better than my 2 webmails. What’s really wonderful is that you can use Gmail to send from your address of choice too.

So my PLE is wounded, but not destroyed. All my web stuff is there. But, oh, I miss my data, my documents, my images, my PowerPoints, my almost completed projects, my business records, my Mail folders, especially my Sent mail. Now I have to start many things from scratch, instead of using and adapting previous work.

Guess that will teach me to back up, eh?

In case you haven't caught it through Mark Federman's blog - http://whatisthemessage.blogspot.com/2007/02/problems-of-new-media-book.html - or Stephen Downes's - http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=38809 - check out this YouTube offering on reactions to new media

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRjVeRbhtRU  

Felderman's blog post makes a most important point about how people 'see' any new form of media too.

This morning, I read an article in the Toronto Star - http://www.thestar.com/News/article/181021 - about a principal discovering that "he was the subject of ridicule, crude remarks and illustrations on the popular networking site Facebook." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook The students taking part were suspended for calling their principal names, for suggesting he, what the Star delicately describes as, "perform a sex act" and they eroneously blamed him for a new School Board policy bannning cell phones at school.

The students couldn't see the problem because they didn't use school computers or time to do this. The spokesperson for the School Board referred to their policy that "[u]sing computer technology to communicate inappropriate, demeaning, harassing, or threatening messages" would lead to being "disciplined". At least one of the students suspended says he had never written or even read in the forum; he'd just accepted an "invitation" to join it when it was formed.

There are many questions and problems in the specifics of this story, but I just have one point to make: Why are we surprised at the behavior of some digital natives  online, when we watch what happens on some/many TV news shows, in sections of most newspapers, and in popular celebrity magazines? If it's acceptable behavior for "adult" public media to name-call and slander, these young people must think, why not for them in the forums they set up among themselves.

Through a message from Oleg Kuzin in the Halton Peel Comunicators Association Listserv, I found a Macleans article on cheating in universities and it made me thing about the experience of a fellow teacher. A few years ago, this fellow teacher told me about discovering that a student had taken most of an essay directly word-for-word off the web. She, the teacher, had been checking on the content of a few of the essays by putting sentences in quotations in Google, to see if any essays had been plagiarized. She found a few, but what especially upset her was that this particular student was one she had respected and liked.

She reported the four she had discovered to the head of the program, and was pleased that he seemed to take it seriously. There had been occasions in previous years where she had been actively discouraged from reporting plagiarism officially. This time, however, they had a meeting where most of the students expressed contrition and accepted their zeros and the threat that next time they would be failed in the course not just the assignment. 

The student she had respected had a different attitude. She was angry. She didn't even pretend not to be, and she demanded the right to do the assignment again. Two weeks later, my friend took the replacement essay, ran a couple of the sentences through Google, and found that this was plagiarized too. The student was failed.

My friend figured that she had done more than 10 hours of extra work for one assignment in one course just to discover that students were trying to fool her, and at least one blamed her for being a "troublemaker". There was also a small sense that the administration thought she should have been able to prevent the plagiarism.

She had given her students a lesson on what plagiarism was, and shown them how to use a free online site to footnote and create a bibliography easily. She had built a webpage to explain what plagiarism was and how to avoid it. She even told them they could quote over half the required words in their essay. She didn't see how she could have done anything more, and she was discouraged and depressed.

She felt like she was being punished for their cheating.

The Macleans article on cheating in universities is quite comprehensive and, I would say, fairly accurate. But the conclusion I drew from reading it is that there is no good solution, that this is a cultural problem and that the large classes and the de-personalized system that we have developed for undergraduate university augment it.

From CATHY GULLI, NICHOLAS KOHLER AND MARTIN PATRIQUIN | Feb 9, 2007

• Experts say the reasons for cheating among today's students extend from on-campus competition, to more fluid notions around what is unethical, to a cultural generation gap between students and professors. "In this knowledge-worker age, it's now increasingly tied to doing well in school so you can get into better grad schools so you can get better jobs -- so the pressure to do well is really high," says Stephen Covey, author of The Speed of Trust. "There's strong data that within companies the No. 1 reason for ethical violations is the pressure to meet expectations, sometimes unrealistic expectations." The same, he says, holds true for school. Over the last two decades, too, North American universities have seen their mandates shift from institutions of learning, remote from the more quotidian aims of finding work and putting food on the table, to the necessary condition for entree into the corporate world. "I think there's a lot of students these days who have bought into the message that you come to university for a credential -- to get a better job, to make more money," says Christensen Hughes. As Covey says, students "get the degree, not the education."
  

I recommend reading the whole article.

I'm more or less back to normal in terms of getting my computer fixed - new hard drive, bigger RAM, - and adding back what was saved in terms of my files. It's been a frustrating wake-up call. So much of what I do is copmputer-based, and making my work environment reliable is very important.

For a detailed version of what I recovered, what I lost,  and what new patterns I will now follow, check out my WebTools blog - http://webtoolsforlearners.blogspot.com/2007/02/after-crash-final-accounting.html

Tony Karrer, in his eLearning Technology blog, has an excellent overview of the developing impacts of technology on education http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/2006/02/what-is-elearning-20.html  He says, "I do believe the next few years are going to be times of incredible experimentation with many-to-many communication approaches as part of learning initiatives" and I agree. In fact, I have been exploring and experimenting with much of what he describes, as I discussed here.

The first comment on Karrer's eLearning 2.0 post speaks about how difficult it is to get others to understand the possibilities and patterns of using web2.0 in setting up learning structures. Yup. Know what he means. Journalism teachers who aren't interested in aggregation!!!! Students who think blogging is "silly"! People who would rather collect multiple versions of documents rather than use a wiki or Writely!

What we have here is a paradigm shift that is ragged, as different people "get it" at different times. We also have a cadre of resentful resisters who fear that their current skill set would become irrelevant, who block rather than upgrade their skills. But it's irresistable. The change is here and moving faster and faster, and most of the digital natives "get it".

Wikinomics - http://www.wikinomics.com/ - by Tapscott and Williams looks at the impact of web2.0 on business, and can be a big help for people who want to "get it".

 

 

From Alja Sulčič  at http://ialja.blogspot.com/2007/02/living-web-20.html  - I think through Stephen Downes (but I kept the link, not the source - sorry.)

• I'm really amazed at what big part Web 2.0 plays in my life (and I in its life). In just a few years it has entered our lives from different doors and it's growing stronger and more powerful days by day. And for this reason I agree with what Michael Wesch pointed out in his video - we really need to rethink a lot of things. Among these things I think that rethinking ourselves is one of the key points. We are being linked in previously unthinkable ways and our lives are being changed. What kind of changes is that bringing us? Are the changes improving our lives or crippling the social aspect of our analogue real lives as some fear?
  
  The answers to these questions are many - and there should be. For me the most important changes are the feeling of connectedness, the feeling of responsibility, the need to share and the trust systems that the users of Web 2.0 are building among each other (just take for example Wikipedia). These are the changes I find most valuable and that I hope I (and others) will be able to keep and use not just for a better and more useful Web 2.0, but also to build a better future - together, by connecting are ideas and constructing new worlds.
  

She says so well what I believe; the web, especially the read/write or social web, web 2.0 is changing us while we are creating it.

The theory behind Open Access for research is that when the public has funded, through taxes, research, it ought to be publically available.

Michael Geist has written about this immense change as it is happening in research now. In his article, _ http://www.thestar.com/article/185609 - he points out that -

• Researchers are increasingly choosing to publish in freely available, open access journals posted on the Internet, rather than in conventional, subscription-based publications.

  The Directory of Open Access Journals, a Swedish project that links to open access journals in all disciplines, currently lists more than 2,500 open access journals worldwide featuring over 127,000 articles.

  Moreover, the cost of establishing an open access journal has dropped significantly.

Geist's article covers what is happening in various locations around the globe, as well as Canada.

 

Check out this great 4 & 1/2 minute video demonstrating and explaining how the semiotic experience is changing. It is really wonderful.

• Neat video by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Kansas State University.

  The video presents a broad overview of the difference between 10+ years ago on the web and the social web of today (”Web 2.0″) — focusing on how HTML was used for defining structure and stylistic characteristics (”form”), whereas XML has separated form and content, facilitating data exchange for all kinds of mash-ups.

I found the reference in
TechCrunch - http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/02/12/the-web-20-we-weave/

The video is on YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

If anyone can tell me how to use the embed code, I'd appreciate it.