Pedagogy of the Compressed

Civic Engagement at NetHui

2011-07-04T20:46:00.000-07:00

I recently spoke at the NetHui conference in Auckland on the topic of Civic Engagement (see post below this one). This is a video of that session; Russel Brown spoke first, then I come on at 21 minutes.

Watch live streaming video from nethui2011digitalcitizenship at livestream.com

ownership blues (or, diversity rag?)

2011-05-22T03:07:00.000-07:00

A few nights ago the "public service broadcaster" TV One had prime minister John Key live on the evening of the governments latest budget. They employed a very weak trope to fill this half an hour: an average white family, 2 kids + dog and mortgage, asking questions to the prime minister from location in their suburban home. In another stroke of brilliant political television the prime minister had been prepared prior to the event with background economic information on the family on the other side of his monitor, as he quite freely confessed. When asked by the scruffy Close-Up presenter Mark Sainsbury how the budget was going to impact them financially the father sort of shyly responded "actually ... not much". Wow! This was to be a thrilling people's counterpoint to the smug pinstriped accountant now sitting in the highest seat of power in New Zealand@!!!! Not. Our public service broadcaster? Controversial budget during tough economic times in a continued global recession plus an upcoming election ... and this is what the public service broadcaster came up with in the face of having the governments leader in the studio. Oh boy :-(

I'm increasingly distressed by the sense that the New Zealand public sphere and subsequently our democracy is a failed modernist experiment in need of revision. Television in New Zealand is truly depressing; and the level of commercialism we seem willing to tolerate just cripples our pride and deepens our inability to grow as a nation. I actually believe that what holds us back from being the truly innovative and sustainable country we would like to believe we are, is the rampant commercialisation and almost total international ownership of our media. When a government comes to New Zealand that can return the media landscape to a more equitable diversity of ownership and use of media, then we can start again on moving forward politically and socially.

Man ...

2011-04-28T19:21:00.001-07:00

its vacant around here. Should dust this place off again perhaps.

Reading ...

2010-07-29T02:40:00.000-07:00

this: Open education: the need for critique

Wish I could go to this...

2010-06-02T04:18:00.000-07:00

but i can't. So I wish them a good conference and will catch some on uStream: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/uc-ip/v3

Meeting Poem: Identity and Access Management

2010-05-25T14:22:00.000-07:00

I was put into the system
I acquired an affiliation
I added my address
entered my emergency contacts
submitted my identity to downstream systems
Some of me was verified for accuracy
read-only
updated

I started
and I would end.

Was I dead?

Yes. No.

Thanks and

2010-03-11T00:29:00.000-08:00

praise: VLC

Monopsony

2010-03-08T18:58:00.000-08:00

In economics, a monopsony (from Ancient Greek μόνος (monos) "single" + ὀψωνία (opsōnia) "purchase") is a market form in which only one buyer faces many sellers. It is an example of imperfect competition, similar to a monopoly, in which only one seller faces many buyers. As the only purchaser of a good or service, the "monopsonist" may dictate terms to its suppliers in the same manner that a monopolist controls the market for its buyers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony

The Internet as Playground and Factory - Ulises Ali Mejias from Voices from The Internet as Play on Vimeo.

Social Media Course

2010-03-03T13:37:00.000-08:00

The past few weeks i've been guiding 9 locals in my neighborhood on a Webdesign with Wordpress course, but they're pretty savvy and inquisitive and I can't get through the course without alluding to RSS, my own Twitter obsession, open source software, embedding media, and getting them somehow intertwined with my own social network(s). This is great but it can get pretty confusing for some, and a bit off the topic of just creating a simple site using Wordpress ... so, i've been thinking about developing a new course for next semesters offerings along the line of "Social Media for ..." something. I haven't figured the right label yet, but it would a fast paced workshop on how to develop your social media network, how to manage and cultivate such a network, and why you might want to do such a thing (personal, marketing, professional networking, etc.)

So it was timely to see gnuchris (a member of a network I sometime inhabit) tweet a reminder of his Planet Talo river of news feed ... where I saw this post by Steven Parker about developing a master course around some networked principles originally articulated by George Siemens:

Amplifying
Curating
Wayfinding and socially-driven sensemaking
Aggregating
Filtering
Modelling
Persistent presence

My experience in the community education centre's Wordpress course really resonated with this idea by George, that

"For educators, control is being replaced with influence. Instead of controlling a classroom, a teacher now influences or shapes a network"

As I work on ideas for this course over the next few weeks I think i'll organize them around these principles rather than any really specific technologies or tools.

(Image Credits: Patch, by VirtualErn. CC-By)

aaahhh...

2010-03-02T17:06:00.000-08:00

I feel as if I may be back, for real. I have a new job here: http://www.creative.auckland.ac.nz its kind of full-circle for me as I started out at the University of Auckland when moving back to NZ 7 years ago, got a bit waylayed at AUT, but am back at where I really wanted to be the whole time. I'm not leaving this time ... so you're stuck with me. I'll try to play nice.

A People's History of American Empire by Howard Zinn

2010-01-27T23:48:00.001-08:00

RIP Howard Zinn

Kill everybody

2009-08-10T20:09:00.000-07:00

"In April, they told us, "In a crowded area, if one person shoots at you, kill everybody."

Beware Auckland City

2009-06-14T21:11:00.001-07:00

Auckland City Council is dominated by free-market and neoliberal proponents. There is an almost desperate need amongst the Citizens & Ratepayers councilors, who constitute a majority on most city boards, to promote maximization of performance and financial productivity as the sole motivating factor behind almost all of decision making. And there is constant rhetorical recourse to making these financial savings for the sake of all ratepayers among this group. The overwhelming problem with this is that by only focusing on a single bottom-line the C & R are selling a short term Auckland to residents at the expense of long term sustainability and the development of a truly world class city. And, lets be frank, C&R are not working for the average ratepayers interests, they're working for the interests of developers, and multinational corporate and business interests. If you look at just who they are and where they come from , you'll quickly see that thats who they are as well; and it's not ratepayers interests, it's their interests that will ultimately gain from the injustices that they're dealing out upon the rest of Auckland's ratepayers.

For example:

David Hay is the son of Keith Hay, a former Mayor of Mt Roskill Borough Council, and is a director of the company founded by his father, Keith Hay Homes, a prominent New Zealand home construction company. Hay is known for the advocacy of Christian conservative values and is one of the founding members of the socially and economically conservative Maxim Institute think tank in Auckland. I also understand from an acquaintance on the Waiheke ferry that at one point in the 1970's he had yoga banned from Mt. Roskill!!!

Aaron Bhatnagar former member of the ACT party and now National party supporter ( he thought it was better for his political career) was reportedly a boy-racer of some repute in his St Kentigern College days in 1990's, seen on numerous occasions speeding down Remuera road in his yellow ... Ferrari! His dad Sir Rajeshewar Sarup (Roger) Bhatnagar was owner of the Sound Plus chain that became Noel Leeming when he and associate Greg Lancaster bought the Leeming business. He was the owner of a number of exotic cars as well as a 50ft launch, Enigma, and a fast catamaran-style launch called FU2, which is used to commute from Auckland to a property on Kawau Island in the Hauraki Gulf.

These two guys run the City Development Committee along with the support of David Rafkin, of whom the Auckland City website says is involved in the "... endless search for productivity and efficiency gains", and John Duthie a career bureaucrat supporting C&R policies and with a pro-development agenda.

Waiheke Waste Debacle

Lets make no mistake on this issue; it was the Citizens and Ratepayers councillors on the City Development Committee, David Rankin the Chief Executive, and John Duthie who sold out an internationally recognized, locally revered, and innovative community based organisation dealing more than effectively with waste issues on Waiheke Island (43% diverted from landfill compared to Auckland's 16%) to an Australian multinational corporation, Transpacific Industries. This is a company that is $2.1 Billion in debt and who's owner, Terry Peabody, threatened shareholders of NZ company Waste Management in 2006 that if his take over bid was not successful he would move in and compete with them anyways. Peabody has other interests in New Zealand, his family owns a number of wineries, the most well known being Craggy Range.

The tender process was skewed from the start towards a change of service provider by undervaluing and under-representing the social and educational processes and value that the current provider has increasingly shown are a significant part of the recycling and recovery process, and by continuously undermining the right of Waiheke residents to speak during the tender process. An email from late 2008 from a employee of Auckland City Council to the consultant writing the initial report on waste on Waiheke was uncovered and widely circulated around Waiheke and showed clearly that there was intent to change service providers and suggested to the consultant that the report need to present a watertight business case for such change. It also acknowledged that this would be a controversial issue on the island. Some dirty tactics by C&R appointed lawyers to eventually disqualify the local company and a glut of misinformation on the waste figures for Waiheke finally cemented the contract towards the outcome that appeared in many eyes to be likely predetermined or at least highly preferred by C&R.

Now

Last weekend a community meeting on Waiheke about what can be done now drew nearly 200 people to discuss a way forward through this injustice. There is a mixture of feeling on the issue, from welcoming in Transpacific Industries and presenting them with a charter of conditions that our community expects them to live up to if they are to provide a waste service on the island, to direct action and civil disobedience upon the new contractors arrival. There is a substantial legal challenge that is developing and either way the issue is not going to lay down and it will quite possibly expand to become a sore thumb in the upcoming process of Auckland Supercity-dom and demonstrate how incompetent (and possibly corrupt) the current C&R cabal of Auckland City really are at creating a future vision for the city and its residents.

Shame on them ...

2009-06-12T18:52:00.001-07:00

Auckland's Citizens & Ratepayers councillors on the City Development Group have sold Waiheke's internationally recognized community based not-for-profit waste management organisation down the river by awarding the result of an absolutely awful tender process to an Australian multi-national corporation. The multinational came in with the lowest cost - gee! who would have figured that it would be very hard to undermine the community based organization on that ground by a multinational?! ... but the tender process took almost no account of the social, educational, and community aspects of dealing with waste on an island. As John Stanfield, board director of the local organisation Clean Stream says in this report on Campbell Live, dealing with waste is about dealing with people's behaviours and thats exactly what CleanStream did. TPI will just have people back to the old days of chucking stuff willy-nilly into a bin. Real shame that these bastards (and make no mistake - they are evil bastards) have no idea about social capital and can only see financial bottom-lines as the answer to every problem. I'd be a bit scared if I was TPI - there is quite a lot of talk about civil disobedience around the island and enough old greenpeace campaigners, protesters, social media activists, and lawyers to make this all get ugly for the company and Auckland City. If they wanted a smooth transition to a Super City then this wasn't the way to go about it.

Yea, right.

2009-06-02T20:44:00.001-07:00

Yea, right., originally uploaded by pumicehead.

Auckland City is wasting our waste

2009-05-11T15:19:00.000-07:00

Its not often that I use this blog for "local" matters but this is really getting up my nose so I'm essentially reposting this here in case there are any locals reading. But also ...I reckon that this is an educational issue as well and education is one of the predominant themes of this blog. Waiheke Island has over the last 5 years taught me about recycling. The Waste Resource Trust, the local organization that deals with our waste has educated me about what it means to seperate out my recycling, enlightened me on just what it means to actually deal with an entire communities waste, how to re-use waste that would otherwise just get shipped to a landfill in Auckland, modelled how to run a not-for-profit organization that employs 22 people in a community enterprise, and made me think about how my choices as a consumer impact the environment and the economy ... and now some beauracrats in Auckland City want to take that all away from me (from us) and centralize it by giving the contract for what we do better to an Australian company who's share prices are plummeting! So ...

Join us in the protest and to bear witness at the council meeting
Thursday 14 May, 9am, meet at Aotea Square City. Outside the council
building we will be singing the Waiheke Does it Better song and beating
our procession drum.

It’s not too late to save our waste, every person helps.

This Thursday Auckland City Council City Development Committee will vote
whether or not to give our waste resource to multinational company
TransPacific Industries (TPI). By choosing TPI the council is
ignoring local democracy.

TPI is an Australian owned multinational that has recently suspended
trading on the Australian stock exchange and whose share prices have
plummeted from $14.00 to around $2.00.

Visy, another multinational, that will recycle our recycling is
struggling to find markets for their low grade products (because they
co-mingle recyclables and compact them together) and is wanting a
government bail out.

We will lose local jobs, local income, local innovative solutions and
local decision making and be forced to use an unsustainable recycling
system replacing one of New Zealand's leading recycling projects.

One of their plans is to freight our green waste to Puketutu Island in
the Manukau Harbour for mulching and then sell it back to us. We think
this is ridiculous because we already process our green waste on
Waiheke. This will cost more money and cost the climate.

Join us in the protest and to bear witness at the council meeting
Thursday 14 May, 9am, meet at Aotea Square City. Outside the council
building we will be singing the Waiheke Does it Better song and beating
our procession drum.

We will have spokespeople for media and we will then go up to the
meeting at 09.30 to bear witness to the Council decision. We are trying
to get speaking rights at the meeting.

If you can come, please take the 08.00am ferry, dress well and warmly
and we will gather together on the boat to be briefed. If you are in
town meet in Aotea Square at 09.00 sharp.

Go to www.waihekedoesitbetter.org.nz for more
information. Keep checking back - updated often.

Keep Your Wheelie Bins In Auckland Central from Scott Ewing on Vimeo.

Transcendent Man II

2009-05-08T22:17:00.000-07:00

Transcendent Man

2009-05-06T21:26:00.000-07:00

No colours any more ...

2009-05-03T15:43:00.001-07:00

This page is black because black saves more energy on a computer monitor than white ... yea right! Nah, its black because ... well I like black ... and on the inside I think I'm kind of a dark moody guy and bloggings about the inside isn't it? These guys reckon

"... a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen"

and that if the Google search page was black then something like 750 Megawatt hours could be saved per year ... and thats a lot, isn't it? (I don't pay the electricity bills in my house so I have no idea.)

Possibly I also have no idea because the language of ordinary life has become so confusing lately ... there's numbers like megawatts, incomprehensible carbon calculations, offsets (what the hell is an offset!?), there's parts per million levels of all kinds of stuff in the air, the water, the blood, and in huge pools of industrially farmed pig shit, there's global exchange rates, trade deficits, floating interest rates, and industrial averages. What's a poor boy to do? Yea, yea ... I know ... Wikipedia yadda yadda yadda.

Capitalist swine flu

2009-04-30T03:13:00.000-07:00

Published Apr 29, 2009 3:35 PM

Every disaster—whether earthquake, flood or epidemic—exposes the fault lines in society.

Such is the case with the possible pandemic—worldwide epidemic—of a virulent flu caused by a newly mutated virus. This human version of swine flu has hit Mexico most severely, with the United States a close second. It has rapidly spread to a dozen other countries.

Politically, the greatest threat is that right-wing demagogues will try to scapegoat Mexicans, especially Mexican immigrants, for the epidemic’s spread. This is a serious political challenge to progressive forces in the U.S. It will require a redoubling of the already necessary effort to build solidarity between immigrant and U.S.-born workers, a solidarity that will be emphasized at May Day events across the country.

The attempt to blame Mexicans is not only despicable, it is way off. Look at these facts.

ABC News reported on April 28 that “Mexico’s first suspected case of the swine flu was detected in the remote farming village of La Gloria” a month ago. Some 800 of the 2,000 people there got sick. “The most likely way that this young boy got the infection was from another person who had been in contact with the pigs,” said Dr. Kathryn Edwards of Vanderbilt Medical Center.

What ABC failed to report was that the pigs were on a nearby industrial farm run by a subsidiary of Smithfield Farms, the anti-union, polluting, factory-farm monopoly based in Virginia and North Carolina. For years, the communities around these farms have been complaining about the unhealthy conditions and stench from thousands of pigs and their waste crowded into small areas.

Historian Mike Davis, a professor at the University of California at Irvine and author of “The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu,” wrote in the Britain-based Guardian newspaper of April 27 that the “fecal mire of an industrial pigsty” was the likely environment in which a new flu virus could develop. Smithfield, wrote Davis, will ferociously resist any efforts to change its dangerous but highly profitable production processes.

An experienced writer on these issues, Davis also mentioned three obstacles to an efficient and effective defense against any pandemic: the weakness of the U.S. public health system, the negative attitude of the U.S. and other wealthy countries toward promoting cutting-edge public health facilities in the poorer countries, and Swiss-based Roche Pharmaceutical’s patent on the flu medicine Tamiflu, which prevents poor countries from developing generic anti-viral medicines.

The first lesson of this is that the U.S. has a disgraceful record regarding health care. The trillions spent on war should be used instead to set up a world-class national health system and bypass the overpriced, profit-guzzling health care industry.

Secondly, don’t blame Mexicans for this outbreak. Investigate Smithfield and take action against the polluters.

Next, pressure from imperialist banks over the last 30 years has forced poor countries to cut their public health outlays. This has not only debilitated health care, it has increased the danger of pandemics. Instead of criminalizing immigrant workers and militarizing the border with Mexico, the U.S. should be supporting Mexico’s efforts to improve its health system—especially since U.S. corporations like Smithfield are making huge profits there, by super-exploiting Mexican workers.

And lastly, the monopoly on new drugs held by a few privately owned pharmaceuticals impedes the development of a worldwide supply of generic medicines. For the health of humanity, medical knowledge must be shared and all countries be free to manufacture their own medicines.

This all points to one conclusion: that the capitalist system as a whole is an obstacle to protecting the life and health of humanity when faced with swine flu or any other possible pandemic.

Articles copyright 1995-2009 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

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Email: ww@workers.org
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-------------------------------------------------

More along this same line here: http://blog.peta.org/archives/2009/04/mexican_flu_far.php

And quite simple expressed here by Mike Davis: http://socialistworker.org/2009/04/27/capitalism-and-the-flu

Spells and the Nether World

2009-04-19T02:26:00.000-07:00

From reading: http://leighblackall.blogspot.com/2009/04/coorperatives-taking-over.html

"A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented."
The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx / Friedrich Engels

... and believing that the pirates are leading the way.

aaaargh!

2009-04-17T17:36:00.001-07:00

Maybe they should have made them walk the plank into a sea of zeros and ones. And ... whats up with that hat!@? Shouldn't it have 3 corners on it and be a bit more beat up?

RSS and Archive.org

2009-04-08T16:52:00.000-07:00

While I'm a huge fan of Archive.org for the hosting and archiving of podcasts and audio artifacts one of the things that has always been a bit of a let down about the site is the general lack of RSS. While most other sites are now creating RSS feeds for every imaginable content view, Archive.org only has RSS for newly added items to the entire site. Not much help if you are trying to use the site to host podcasts for an event or a project and want those podcasts embedded in the project blog. This recently came up for me specifically in developing the Waiheke Podcasting Project on the Ning platform. After looking at a variety of free podcast hosting solutions I still considered Archive.org to be the most preferred. Not only are they a non-profit organization like we are, they just seem like the best place to store heritage style artifacts to describe our community because they have some solid sponsorships and a good reputation for the work they're doing. Also for our project a big plus was that they don't have a limit on the amount of podcasts that can be hosted there or their file size. This worked well for us because although Ning was going to be great as a community podcast site, it only allows 20MB uploads of audio and there is a limit to the amount of audio each user can have on the site.

All the podcasts that we hosted on Archive.org have a tag applied to them ... so this was halfway towards where I needed it to be. As long as members of the project uploaded their podcasts with the "waiheke podcasting project" tag then we could get a page that displayed all the posts. But how to get this into Ning? The solution was to use a service called Feed43. Feed43 is a free online service that converts any web page to an RSS feed on the fly. It's not as simple as just pointing the URL you want turned into RSS at Feed43 though, it requires a bit of tweaking but the results are pretty good and I now have an RSS feed from the Archive.org page that aggregates all the "waiheke podcasting project" tags, and displays them on our Ning page.

How It Works (the expurgated version)

Basically Feed43 goes off and grabs the URL you provide and displays the HTML generated from that page... so if you're scared of the sight of web page blood and guts then this might not be the job for you. From there you need to try to identify some unique HTML classes or IDs or whatever that is used to display the title, the URL, and any other descriptive information that you're interested in to generate your feed. This is called the search pattern and Feed43 uses the results of these patterns to create a fully formed RSS feed. There's a bit of mucking around in this bit and I didn't really have much luck with my trial-and-error start to this process until I had a good look at the tutorial - then it started to make sense, so I'd suggest doing that if this is something you need to do. Once you've got a result that looks like a nice feed Feed43 will generate you a URL that you can use as an RSS feed to link to from your blog or Ning site!

The LOC

2009-04-07T15:33:00.000-07:00

The Library of Congress now has a YouTube channel. Some fascinating stuff in there including this very strange experimental sound film made for Edison's kinetophone -- a combination of the kinetoscope and phonograph -- but apparently never distributed.

Public Schools and Public Libraries

2009-04-04T20:11:00.000-07:00

This kid has fortunately spent way too much time in the library. I love his description of the vid as well: "I aggressively compare public schools and public libraries". Italics mine.

I've also recently been quite impressed with the new search functionality of the Auckland City Library with its visual relationships graph of keywords you search for and the ability to subscribe to an RSS feed of individual searches (here's a feed for the above young learner: http://search.aucklandcitylibraries.com/rss.ashx?q=deschooling&refx=&uilang=en). Also the University of Auckland beta library catalog has the ability to login and "tag" individual items which is just great I reckon. Viva la bibliothèque! I say.

One year on ...

2009-04-02T14:34:00.000-07:00

I just realized that its been about a year since I posted to this blog. I did have another one going for a while .. a Wordpress that I hosted and administered myself ... but I'm over that and back on board with the concept of freeranging. I've also just set up my first Ning site for a project at work. Wow! that thing is fantastic. Reminds me a bit of blogger in fact. More on that later. Good to be back.

Democratizing Innovation

2008-02-20T23:11:00.001-08:00

Homebuilt recumbent construction detail 1, originally uploaded by xddorox.

... was a book that I read a few years ago now by Eric Von Hippel. Someone brought up the notion of "democratizing innovation" on Wikiversity the other day which reminded me of how it would make another good reading group, so I've started one for it here: Eric Von Hippel:Democratizing Innovation

Now there's a good chance that I won't be able to participate in this reading group all that much but I like the idea of Reading groups on Wikiversity and I've been involved in creating one before, so I created this one because I think that Reading groups are a great model of a learning project that can work well in the Wikiversity environment. This book appealed to me for such treatment because it may be of some relevance in helping us understand the processes involved in the development of large scale collaborative wikis and, in particular, the development of Wikiversity. I was driven by a desire to establish the reading group in the chance that others over time may find it useful to have structure already in place to discuss this text. This was greatly assisted in this case by the text being freely available in PDF format under a Creative Commons license.

This is one of the features of wiki based Reading groups that I really like, the fact that the group can exist over long periods of time and experience fluctuations in activity but because of the written nature of the discourse it doesn't suffer from the temporality of the face-to-face Reading group which is dependent on synchronous interactions around a specific text. So starting the group now, even though I probably won't actually take it much further at this point, has I think merit in the long term for my own learning process and for Wikiversity.

And this is also what I'm finding particularly interesting lately -- how I'm starting to use Wikiversity as my predominant learning environment, call it a Personal Learning Environment if you have to ... but also possibly in a form that I've not seen discussed in other PLE discourses. The fact that I'm creating projects that I may not at this point have time to participate in immediately, but anticipate that if others do start contributing I will be inspired to participate myself is quite unique I think; it's as if i'm setting myself and others up a space to potentially learn. But I don't consider myself a "teacher, i'm more a technologist, but I am a learner and I want to learn in communities where-ever possible so what better way to facilitate my own learning than by creating a space where a community can form around, in this case, a text?

The other thing is that this is something quite different to what Wikipedia is all about.

While Wikipedia is a great resource for a part of the learning process, it is not so good at being a space for working through the personal or communal process of learning, for journaling, recording, keeping bibliographies, etc and for the kind of free discussion of any idea that comes up. This does happen in Wikipedia, but not really out in the "open" so to speak; mostly these kinds of socratic learning experiences and debates happen in Wikipedia talk pages, where pretty much anything goes, and they are behind the scenes for most readers, and rightly so. Wikipedia is about creating quality encyclopedia articles, not facilitating the spaces where ugly old learning may take place. Ideas in Wikipedia articles need verification, they need sources, written/published sources ... while in Wikiversity, they don't. Ideas, debates and opinions should be out in the open.

I think that Wikiversity may truly be the big sister to it's brother Wikipedia one day and that some of its recent critics will have their words forever quoted from wiki history pages or listservs. I'm working in that direction from now on, from the position of both creating a space for my own individual learning, but also in creating spaces where others can participate along with me, or even without me.

Podzone Country

2008-02-04T11:53:00.001-08:00

Simphone093, originally uploaded by pumicehead.

I've just got back from lovely Riverton, New Zealand ... way down the South Island -- next stop Antarctica. Down there I met Chris Diack an empassioned radio broadcaster who has turned a small caravan into a mobile Low Power FM broadcasting unit that also streams his morning breakfast show out on the internet for rebroadcast to other small town radio stations. Amazing guy, with a great idea and just enough string, chewing gum and the required amount of kiwi determination to pull it off. The podcasting workshop was presented to residents of Riverton to develop content for their site http://www.westernsouthland.co.nz. The handout for the workshop is a resource I've been developing on Audacity on WikiEducator. You can find that here: http://www.wikieducator.org/Using_Audacity .

Alexander Hayes and Leo Laoshi interview - FLNW08

2008-01-15T15:14:00.000-08:00

The Future of Learning in a Networked World un-conference has kicked off with this excellent interview by Alexander Hayes and Leo Wong, a teacher and blogger working at Soochow University outside of Shanghai. Leo talks about using Web2.0 tools in education in China and his experience joining the TALO group about a year ago. I've cleaned up the interview a bit and created Ogg and MP3 formats for download here: http://www.archive.org/details/AlexanderHayesAndLeoLaoshiInterview-Flnw08.

For more info on participating in FLNW 2008 events, see the wiki here: http://flnw.wikispaces.com

Image Credits: CC-By

keitai shousetsu / modalities of text

2007-12-11T13:56:00.000-08:00

Just had to re-blog this fascinating story from the Sydney Morning Herald called "In Japan, cellular storytelling is all the rage" about how half of Japan's top-10 selling works of fiction in the first six months of the year were composed and serialized primarily on cell phones! Sounds like the books then get picked up by publishers, fleshed out, and printed as paperbacks. Interesting thought in relation to Leigh Blackalls' recent post, Time to read helps one to listen. Perhaps the reading of singular texts will take place anytime, anywhere, come to you instead of you coming to it, and involve into a kind of distributed process that involves multiple delivery platforms and modalities. The author/publisher becomes a type of multi-media composer who stiches together and uploads artifacts and coordinates synchronous and asynchronous interactive nodes, all of which make up a singular yet evolving work.

Photo Credits: Author - Newlearnscope Image: Mobilephone Mosaic

The Emergence of Internet Television in New Zealand: TVNZ ondemand

2007-11-21T13:55:00.000-08:00

Earlier this year TVNZ released its latest strategy document entitled ¨Inspiring on Every Screen¨. Theres a funny section in there called “It's 2011”, which provides a gloriously utopian account of the TVNZ of the future where a range of delivery mechanisms and new media outlets, controlled by the State sponsored broadcaster of course, are set to capture the viewers who are slipping through the cracks of the more traditional core channels. The new digital, broadband and mobile platforms that will have been made available are said to engage people and communities in such as way as to enable TVNZ to “truly become one with the public”. On a similar high note the piece ends with the superlative soundbite: “We are TVNZ. We are New Zealand.”

Cool eh? Well, until you're forced to consider that there may be a few others waiting in the wings to upset this beautiful little media applecart... but they can dream I suppose

Anyways, this paper: The Emergence of Internet Television in New Zealand: TVNZ ondemand
I wrote for a Media Industries in NZ course that I was taking at the University of Auckland looks at the TVNZondemand web site that is pretty much the first real web offering out of the gate for the new TVNZ strategy, and also takes a look at one of the new entrants that are fragmenting the traditional TVNZ audience: YouTube.

Photo Credit: The TVNZ Television Centre by Robyn Gallagher (CC-By)

Ivan Illich: Deschooling Society

2007-11-18T17:53:00.000-08:00

"The most radical alternative to school would be a network or service which gave each man the same opportunity to share his current concern with others motivated by the same concern." -- Ivan Illich.

I've started a reading group on the English Wikiversity for discussion of Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society; if you're interested in reading and discussing this work then please register an account on Wikiversity (or don't -- you can edit anonymously if you wish). The text is available online through a link from that page, but should also be readily available from most libraries. Each chapter is broken down on the wiki with a space for notes and space for discussions, but being a wiki you may edit and modify this structure as you see fit.

Photo Credits: Empty School by xaxl4

Tumblelogs

2007-10-29T15:08:00.000-07:00

A tumblelog is a kind of micro-blogging platform that favors quick mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumblelogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, this format is frequently used to share the author's creations, discoveries, or experiences without providing a commentary. I'm becoming quite enamored of this form lately; for me it's acting a bit like a kind of blogging del.icio.us + twitter; i'm currently friends with only one person jtneil who is also tumbleloging about educational technology. From my brief investigation Tumblr seems the best platform currently available and even at this early stage has some very simple features available. I can see this progressing into text messaging capabilities quite quickly and making Twitter look obsolete. I need more friends on the platform to really test it out, so if you're interested create a Tumblr account and look for me ... pumicehead.

More Wikimedia hacks - Instant Commons

2007-09-24T20:07:00.000-07:00

In light of the preceding post I think it's also worth mentioning the Instant Commons as well. Another great hack around the MediaWiki software that will allow any MediaWiki installation access and usage of any uploaded media file from the Wikimedia Commons. Instant Commons-enabled wikis will cache Commons content so that it would only be downloaded once, and subsequent pageviews would load the locally existing copy rather than the Wikimedia foundations servers. If this could be combined with some localized search interface ... perhaps using Grub to index Commons content ... now we're talking.

There's an test of Instant Commons available here.

Image: Instant Yakisoba (CC-By-SA)

Wikimedia Quality

2007-09-18T15:39:00.000-07:00

Inevitably one of the first queries that arises during conversations about authoring content using wikis is the question of how to ensure quality. Generally the response wanders around the nature of the wiki-way and collaborative development models - ie, the community will create quality in articles over time, vandalism will be removed and, for Wikipedia at least, Neutral Point of View (NPOV) will be adhered to by authors and editors.

The scale and increased importance of a source like Wikipedia though has meant that while this model of creating quality actually works quite well, there is little indication of it within articles themselves besides perhaps taking a look at their history over time and inferring from that at least a level of interest and support for the creation of a quality resource. The Wikimedia foundation though has decided it's time to tackle this growing issue head on, and to enhance the MediaWiki platform and Wikipedia with software to assist in the designation and evaluation of articles for quality. Wikimedia Quality has been created as a portal to discuss current work in this area and to solicit thoughts and feedback from interested parties.

Currently there are two projects that are investigating this area. The first is an extension to the MediaWiki software called FlaggedRevs. The goal of this revision tagging tool is to allow a subset of editors to identify the most recent version of an article that has been checked for vandalism, or even gone through an in-depth review process. The second is called Article Trust and is being undertaken by Luca de Alfaro is an Associate Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Cruz's research studies the patterns in Wikipedia article histories and his team has created software which colorizes Wikipedia articles according to a value of trust, computed from the reputation of the authors who contributed and edited the text.

I think that also what is important to note in the development of this initiative is how the Wikipedia project is now at a point where resources and time are being applied to tasks around future scalability of this massively significant project. Tackling the quality issue is a great place to start and I will be following it with keen interest.

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/criminalintent/339344589/ (CC-By-SA)

eXe 1.0 Released

2007-08-17T17:05:00.000-07:00

Today marks a bit of a watershed for me - the eXe team has released the long awaited 1.0 version of the eLearning XHTML Editor.

Whew!!!

The highs and lows of working on an Open Source project could fill a large, large... blog post, but all I can say is that at the moment it feels pretty good. It feels good to have been part of something that has had input and impact on a global scale. Along the way the eXe team has physically been places: Australia, Ghana, USA, India, Netherlands, Peru and the US talking about eXe, giving workshops, participating in the community, and we've met heaps of people from all over the world online as well. So here's also a huge "cheers" to all those people who asked questions on the forums, filed bug reports, translated eXe, blogged about us, stopped by IRC to have a chat, or even just downloaded it and gave it a shot.

Its not easy. No way is it easy. Making software completely from scratch is a hard yard and you can see why a lot of it just languishes on Sourceforge. But making Open Source software can be incredibly rewarding if you can pull it off. And I think that we may have done just that ... time for a beer.

What I learnt on my summer holiday...

2007-07-12T19:18:00.000-07:00

In order to get a little up to speed on some of the basic concepts of tourism I have been reading an overview of the field by Arthur Berger called, "Deconstructing Travel". It's a gentle introduction to the main areas of tourism research and investigation via Cultural Studies. I'm guessing that its a quite popular book for introductory courses in the area given that there were three copies of it in the library. I'm actually looking for intersections between my interests in learning and my new position inside a travel research institute.

Well it wasn't long before Berger suggested some links between tourism and education. In chapter one he suggests that what tourists are primarily consuming are experiences that they believe will educate and entertain them. If being a tourist has a degree of educational experience about it (and I think that anyone who has traveled would agree that this sensation is often quite remarkably vivid after some travel experiences), then in nations where that experience is increasingly mediated by a sophisticated tourism industry, what is the role of teaching in the industry? Is the educational experience an inadvertent one, or is it something that a country could, and should, consciously supply to its visitors? In effect 'teach' to its visitors.

In thinking back towards an earlier post I made about James Farmers' Community of Enquiry graphic it occurs to me that the difference between educational experiences mediated by an online environment or an institution and travel as an educational experience is probably that the traveler doesn't particularly want the "teaching presence" to be all that up front. As Berger points out in reference to Aristotle, people like learning new things, even if that learning comes disguised as entertainment. So, perhaps technology could play a role in blending this 'teaching' a bit more subtly into the background so to speak and make the experience of learning on the move, and more importantly learning that shifts radically with changing locales and geographic contexts, somewhat less intrusive and more like entertainment. As technology becomes more and more mobile and more and more people travel with it in their backpacks, hotels, cafes, cars, etc., then the possibility of tapping into this educational potential of both the tourist and the technology becomes even greater. Hmmm... i'm starting to like this job more and more every day.

Photocred: The Accenture Interactive Network by Luisvilla License: CC-By

It's been so long darlin'...

2007-07-08T14:58:00.000-07:00

New job. That's my excuse. I'm now no longer held safe in the arms of Open Source software development grants and have moved to a new position as a Research Officer (whatever that is) at a place called the New Zealand Tourism Research Institute (NZTRI) at the Auckland University of Technology. I'm still in the eLearning game, and the Open Source game so don't count me out just yet ... I need some time to get my head around this tourism stuff though: travel/learn ... sounds like a beautiful thing to me.

photocred: Sky by Aoifejohanna.

And on that farm he had a blog ...

2007-05-27T15:48:00.000-07:00

From the "picking out small pieces of other people's blog posts to regurgitate on my own" category comes this graphic from James Farmers presentation on using Blogs as a PLE:

which I think is worth a thousand words (could use a bit more colour but, ok...) I've just given it 75 so if you'd like to add the other 925 then you can view the full presentation, here.

Where there's a will, there's a wiki.

2007-05-13T20:30:00.000-07:00

There's been some discussion over on the WikiEducator google group about whether there needs to be a wikilearner.org ... about whether WikiEducator is just reproducing traditional pedagogical practices and principles. I don't subscribe to the "one pedagogy to rule them all" approach in this epic battle, and think that WikiEducator is doing some fantastic stuff... but I do think that there may be a place for a wikilearner.org (or something along those lines.) A few weeks back after a conversation with Leigh Blackall along the streets of Vancouver I reserved the domain name wikilearner.org just in case we wanted to give this a shot. What follows is basically a post I made to the WikiEducator mailing list/group today.

I've been conspicuously quiet on this one... particularly on my 'intentions' ... which are mostly good ;-)

I am / we are thinking about how, or why a wikilearner.org card might be played out. It seems to me that there is definitely a black hole appearing here ... which is something along the lines of, "can you 'learn' on this platform' and if so, how? (Which, of course, implies .. can you teach? should you teach?) It also reminds me of the age old question posed by Freud: What do women really want? Well.. replace 'women 'with 'learners' and you'll get it from the perspective of a bunch of educators and technologists running around with good ideas, tools, and desires. What those learners really want may tell me more about my own psychologies/philosophies/pedagogies than i'm willing to admit.

I'm very appreciative of the benevolent goals of Wikieducator, it's focus on the Free Culture movement and developing societies. Personally, I see it as a site for "educating the educators", developing robust "content" in the more classical sense - the result of which is essentially a print based model, stemming from the lessons of distance education but replacing the printing presses with distributed, collaborative authoring tools. I don't see anything 'wrong' with that, and I'm more than happy to partake in that vision. But the truth of it for me is that I co-exist with a very very very digital-native (even though I hate that term) - so native in fact that the terminology doesn't even apply to him. "There was something before digital, Daddy?" And, to tell you the truth, I want make something that might end up contributing towards how he and his buddies learn and teach. Fortunately, i've got some time (he's only 2.75 yrs old.)

I don't know how and if "curriculum" applies to him.

I also spend a great deal of time lingering on the IRC chanell for Wikiversity as well, and engaging in conversation with that group as well, as do some others on this list. What Wikiversity is ... is mostly "what Wikiversity is about" ... a great struggle for self-identity. If my psychology was more up-to-date i'd probably have a great term to explain this in tems of some evolving stage of development. It's kind of painful to watch sometimes, but it's also a wonderful space full of some cutting edge thoughts and ideas about using the platform for learning in a networked world, (see: http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WCR), etc. The problem with Wikiversity is that it's a 'versity' and it scares the pants off of people ... i'd never try to "learn" there. It's also currently stuck on the same MediaWiki software that runs Wikipedia ... that's a serious drawback at the moment, because what's good for the goose is not, in this case, what's necessarily good for the goslings. How they will break this bond and fly away from the nest is yet to be seen. Some smart guys over there though, and backed by some heavyweights in the wiki game.

So it seems to me that between these two .. there is a grey area that should really be a very colourful area. Think of it as the little brother or sister of it's parents WikiEducator (the Mom/Mum/Id) and Wikiversity (the Dad/Superego). I think that this is the area that a wikilearner.org might fill, a space that is carefully oriented towards learners in a networked world, that balances content with creativity, an online learners mirror stage (excuse all the psychology references please!). It still needs it's parents for the most part but it may not need all the baggage they bring with them.

This wiki platform isn't the be-all-and-end-all but it's the best manifestation of Berners-Lee's original intent we've got; it's the second half of his dream come true, but it's probably just one bit, one skill, in something larger. So maybe we are nearing the need for another experimental space here ... and maybe a wikilearner.org is it. It wouldn't/shouldn't be about content development though.. that's what WikiEducator and WikiBooks do best. It should be about the activities of living and learning online. Not about all the worlds knowledge in one place, but about the subtleties of discovery, the moments of clarity, and the power of peer-produced creativity; it should be about harnessing the spaces in between teaching and learning (and it shouldn't be anything near a varsity), it should be equally about teaching/learning how to navigate the metaverse, as how to sharpen a chainsaw; how to manipulate a mesh-network, as how to manipulate a solar cooker. So, there's my 0.10 c worth.

brent.

Image: Where to find a good wiki

What do wiki want?

2007-04-09T10:01:00.000-07:00

I'm off to Vancouver, Canada from April 11th - 14th for the Tectonic Shift Think Tank hosted by the Commonwealth of Learning. This event will bring together an international group of educators and technologists to identify the transformative opportunities for MediaWiki and related FLOSS technologies for eLearning. Leigh Blackall from Otago Polytech will be there along with various other and sundry wiki fanatics, tech heads and educators to bash out how the wiki platform, specifically MediaWiki (which runs Wikipedia amongst others) can be transformed to accomodate teaching and learning mo' better. My hastily concocted vision is up here, but I thought i'd extend an invitation for any of the people who actually may read this blog (does anyone read this blog?) to add your vision to my page so that I can present them at the meeting as well. What would you like a wiki to do for you as an educator, as a learner, as a consumer or producer of Open Educational Resources? Let me know and i'll put it on the table and we'll make it happen!

Image: Sedimentary, my dear Watson, by: Sean Stayte

iPod ... meet eXe

2007-04-04T09:14:00.000-07:00

iPod Video, originally uploaded by Alexandre Van de Sande.

One of the areas we are continuing to explore with the eXe project is making educational resources available in a variety of formats, including mobile content delivery. In the 0.23 release of eXe, we've added a prototype of an export function that writes the Notes format used by the Apple iPod. There are several limitations imposed by this format, including being restricted to unstyled text, a strict page size limit, and a design that makes it difficult to include images or audio. However, even with these severe limitations, certain types of read only resources are still usable and are now very portable.

The File > Export > iPod Notes menu item in eXe will prompt for a folder to be used for the export. Within that folder, it creates a new folder with the current eXe package name that contains the table of contents and all of the pages. Simply copy that new folder to the Notes directory of an iPod to make the resource available on the go.

If you don't own an iPod but have some other kind of mobile device that you'd like to be able to get your eXe content onto, try the Text export under the same menu.

Scraping, feeding and spitting out ... or "How I learnt to stop going to conferences and love the Real"

2007-03-21T14:03:00.000-07:00

"As Western technophiles enamored by the affordances of the tools of networked society and rhetorically situated inside a 'global culture' the quick upload is the vector of desire. The fantasy of products consumed by the mass Other creates a sort of compulsive drive to upload, express, share, tag, intersect, etc. Speed and immediacy have become our drug because they imply the lessening of mediation, negotiation, or the possibility of control."

I said/blogged that last year after my first encounter with an FLNW as it somewhat clashed with the pace and networking capacity of the island I live on. And while at that time it all seemed to me possibly a bit of a culturally insensitive 'shoot first upload immediately and ask questions later' style affair ... it was turned out to be one of the most interesting, inspiring, and engaging encounters of my 'professional' life -- so much so that I can't even stomach the thought of attending yet another *fest style conference.

I'm still engaged in a variety of different dialogues with some of the participants; some face to face, some via IM, Google group posts, blog posts/comments, Wiki Talk pages, or Skype; i've loaned one my spare bedroom, and I often track their Flickr photos and add my Del.icio.us tags to networks I know they're lurking/participating in. No doubt we will be called a bunch of bloody navel gazing, tech, geek, nerd, self important anti-socialist wankers! at some point (yea, yea, ... "First they mock you, then they fight you, then you win." yadda, yadda, yadda.) But I'll say that FLNW #1 changed my life a bit, it definately changed the way I think about a lot of things in the world of networked teaching & learning.

There's a curve somewhere, on some mathematically adept sociologists graphing software that would explain/rationalise some of the criticisms of swapmeets, unconferences, and hyperactive networked literacies ... it peaks at a point, then flattens out and along the way some people will get runover, and others age indiscriminately, their mousing hands succumbing to arthritic pangs, their predictive txting dictionaries falling miserably behind the vernacular. I know that all this TALOing stuff doesn't sprinkle pixie dust on schools along the way, there's a heap of soap-boxing going on, but it does act like a magnet for some of the outcasts, outside thinkers, luminaries, geeks, nerds, artists and other passionate sociopaths who on one level see learning as some kind of metanarrative glue for almost everything we do in this world. What I really like about it all is that it's never about the "best practice", it's not the "tried and true", the "path most trodden" because personally I'm not really in it for those things. My world doesn't seem to work like that, I mostly feel like I'm making it up as I go along, i'm suckered in by emergence. And so for that reason I'll go along for part deux if I can regardless of any critics or naysayers. I may not actually make it physically, but if not I'll be a virtual support crew - headset strapped on, aggregating and directing flows of data thru chanells ready for the stuff or not. Because, after all, I am enamored by the fantasy -- there isn't really any escaping it.

Good NetVibrations!

2007-03-20T10:25:00.000-07:00

I've tried a plethora of Feed Readers, Aggregators, personal homepages, whatever you want to call them... I've tried Sage and Aggreg8 for Firefox, Google Reader, Protopage, Straw and Liferea for Linux, as well as some others back in the day on for Mac whos names I can no longer remember... but for the past year or so I've been stuck on Netvibes. For a while I thought I wanted a standalone application, but I'm not sure why. All the stuff in the reader comes from the Web anyways so integrating it into the browser seemed the best route to go, so after overcoming my attraction for the standalone app I went for Sage. I still recommend Sage to quite a few people. It's really simple and works well with Firefox, is easy to install and does autodiscovery of feeds which is a real plus for newbies who fear the orange button. But it gets a biut unweildy when you start getting hundreds of feeds going! Then I tried Netvibes. Netvibes has a fantastic drag and drop web interface, is really easy to add feeds (including autodiscovery -- autodiscovery means that you can just point it towards a web page and it will try to find out whether there is a feed associated or not.) It also includes a simple way to group my feeds with a tab interface along the top and you can also add a heap of "widgets" that have been created by the Netvibes community, including things like pulling in your Flickr photos, Del.icio.us bookmarks, weather widgets, and my new favourite - the Remember the Milk widget, etc, etc. I like also that they keep plugging away at it. A new feature appears almost every month or so and so far they've all been really useful and not gratuitous. Just today I noticed that you can now actually view the site that the post came from, from within the Netvibes interface. This is really handy because sometimes I need to go to the site to get to the article (most notably for me on Stephen Downes site) and i'm sick of opening tabs or new windows to get there. This feature allow me to switch effortlessly between the feed view and the actual site. Nice!

There's a whole other part of Netvibes that I've not really looked that far into, what they call the Netvibes Ecosystem. From what I can tell it's a place for all the third party modules, etc, but there's also an option on your feeds to be able to share them via email, IM, or some cut'n'paste code for your blog or web page which could be really useful.

The country where I quite want to be

2007-03-16T21:51:00.000-07:00

Finland, Finland, Finland,
The country where I want to be,
Pony trekking or camping,
Or just watching TV.
Finland, Finland, Finland.
It's the country for me.

Lyrics by Michael Palin.

Forget watching TV ... if I was in Helsinki right now I'd be txt messaging the MobilED Helsinki server. Basically it goes like this: the server receives an SMS search query, looks it up on a MediaWiki they've got setup, then calls you back and reads the article found from the wiki to you! Teemu and co have just got the basic functionality up and running.

Find out more here: http://mobiled.uiah.fi/
and if you're going to be in Helsinki anytime soon drop Teemu a line - he says he'll give you the # to txt to try it out. Nice job Teemu!

Ceci n'est pas une pipe

2007-03-12T16:00:00.000-07:00

It seems that even more these days i'm swamped by information that is of interest to me (RSS feeds, blogs, etc) or that i'm obliged to read (a.k.a., email.) It's getting pretty critical for those of us who spend a lot of time in here to be able to sort through this stuff, to slow this flash flood of a data flow down a bit and try to just irrigate the bits of our brains that we're currently into cultivating. To this end I spent a few hours over the weekend looking into Yahoo Pipes which is a really cool idea and one that I suspect will be a dominant geek meme next year as others jump into this space as well (there's already a few). Basically Pipes is a relatively simple GUI for creating aggregate RSS feeds; it's a bit more dynamic than that, there's some neat stuff you can do besides just combine feeds like doing content analysis on a feed for dominant words, or allow user input into a hosted Pipe to create searches across focused data sources.

So why would you need this? Well I suspect that a huge part of the literacy of networked learning will be about acquiring the skills on just how to manage your personal learning by being able to alternate between broad and narrow approaches to information. Search is generally the broadest approach but with the sheer amount of information currently available even the best boolean searches are often thwarted. Which is why establishing narrow, focused approaches to information acquisition through network protocols like RSS, Atom and then creating specific content interactions with applications like Pipes will be crucial for learners as they become more specialized in their subjects and pursuits. The interaction with content and data that the learner engages in will be in creating connections between content and data sources which for a lot of people equates to what learning is all about anyways.

These skills are not easy to explain (I've helped create two tutorials on Boolean in my life and it always confuses students) - i'm still having a hellishly hard time explaining what RSS it to most people and why it's so valuable let alone something like Pipes, but I think that it's time we start developing some basic resources on how to do these things: how to subscribe to a feed, how to tag resources in social bookmarking systems then subscribe to the feed of this tag, etc. We'll need to make all this as simple as, well... looking at a picture of a pipe.

I've got it in the pipe to do so on WikiEducator and Wikiversity as part of the Networked Learning resources ... it's just that with all this stuff to read I get so little time these days :-)

Second Life, second rate

2007-03-09T09:00:00.000-08:00

I'm not a huge fan of Second Life for a couple of reasons. One is admittedly that I'm mostly a text guy - i like being locked in discursive struggles over meaning making which is why I prefer chat, IRC, blogging and tagging over having to negotiate moving through virtual worlds. The second reason though why I'm not a huge Second Life afficianado (and I have been in there a dozen or so times) is that I find it's model to be so completely last century that it I think that they'll suffer from the Tivo "first mover" effect before too long. While being the first to market has it's advantages it also has the disadvantage that others who follow can learn from your costly mistakes. I think Second Life has made a mistake -- which is strange, since the example was all around them.

I have no doubt though that for another generation of highly networked youth, spaces like Second Life will be where they prefer to inhabit, where they play and where they work and learn. I just think that a highly centralized, proprietary and highly commercialized 'service' is not where it's at - it didn't work for the internet as we mostly know it today, and I don't see why it will be what the Web3Ders of tomorrow will want either.

For this reason it was interesting to see Tim Wang's post: Arts Metaverse Constructed on Open Croquet. Tim's group at the University of British Columbia, who have already done work on the UBC island in Second Life, are now moving into developing for the Open Source Croquet system. Croquet is:

an open source software development environment for the creation and large-scale distributed deployment of multi-user virtual 3D applications and Metaverse that are (1) persistent (2) deeply collaborative, (3) interconnected and (4) interoperable. The Croquet architecture supports synchronous communication, collaboration, resource sharing and computation among large numbers of users on multiple platforms and multiple devices.

There are a lot of advantages to Croquet over Second Life (some are mentioned in Tim's post) but the most obvious and powerful has to be that it is truly Open Source and that there is the possibility for the server power required to run these kinds of enivonments to be distributed over the network, ie. decentralized. If Croquet can start getting some real backing by developers like the UBC is doing and other organisations who start looking beyond the fancy graphics and more at the long term implications of supporting proprietary and centralized services then this platform could make Second Life look second rate.

Helping the Needy get Nerdy

2007-02-21T18:55:00.000-08:00

What an amazing idea. All I can say is watch this kid. Three years he's been in the Free Geek program! That's as long as a lot of us will get tertiary education. He's moving through programs in the organisation, he's learning about open source, programming, linux, about hardware, about philosophy, sharing, work, community, rites of passage, politics, organisation,... I mean what more could you want really? All run on the idea of free. That free stuff's going a long ways these days. Imagine that!? A free education! What next?

See more about this amazing organisation: http://www.freegeek.org/

Not for the Feint of Heart

2007-02-20T19:57:00.000-08:00

The eXe team, of which I am part, is now automating the eXe builds and will be regularly releasing some experimental versions of the editor. These versions are not recommended for normal usage but they may fix some of the known bugs (... or possibly introduce new ones!!!). If this is not your cup of tea then please visit the Eduforge download page to get the officially released and stable packages.

We're on a mission now to really ramp up this thing towards a 1.0 release so if you do decide to help test these packages, and we hope that some of you can, then feedback is most welcome! If you have problems, please be sure to let us know by either emailing us or using our ticket tracker, being sure to specify the (pre)release and revision number of the package you are using.

You can access the experimental builds here: http://exelearning.org/files/nightlies/

(photo - author: klareralt License: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0)

Personal eschatologies, or when to call it quits

2007-01-19T15:04:00.000-08:00

Late night walking from the pub on Waiheke led to talk about when to call all this quits. I don't know what students want anymore, don't know if I care that much any more, and more and more I feel my identity (and my mores) being subsumed in some enormous peer-produced machine (that was supposed to be so much better than the old machine - more just, more democratic, but somehow i can't tell one of the 50,000 or whatever number not to go, to run away to Canada or NZ like a good american would). Ok, so perhaps I do still care -- i can't help it, openness pays the bills and makes me feel good at the same time so that can't be all that bad.

Some have taken to desperately deleting things but thier artistic temperaments are still recombining and recreating at the same time like some perverse perpetual motion machine. (I'm listening to these by the way - free and in my favourite format.)

Is it just me or do things seem faster now? Is that 2.0? Twice as fast?

When my grandkids txt me an address to thier Olfactoripedia page where they've collected a variety of their farts from the past month - I'm quitting. I don't know about you...

In the red corner...

2006-12-06T01:39:00.000-08:00

I'm a Red Hat Linux user, now a Fedora user. I've tried a few distros (Suse, Ubuntu) but I always come back to Fedora. I've recently upgraded to Fedora Core 6 at work, and for the past three weeks now I've been having the Linux desktop time of my life! I've been a pretty much solo flyer w/ the penguin for 8 years now and i've suffered through my share of disastrous desktop mishaps and configuration nightmares that 8 years of Gnu/Linux has had to offer, but the day has come with the addition of the new OpenGL-based compositing window manager Compiz that the Gnome desktop has become the finest desktop out there. It's effects are of equal if not superior quality to even a Mac desktop, and the usability of the desktop is superior to both Mac and Windows. (I've yet to see Vista and it's Aero effects, but from a couple of quick reads it appears to be focused on transparency - one of the least interesting features of my new Fedora desktop - and shiny translucent buttons, something else I've never been partial to).

At first I thought that Compiz would be just a heap of processor hungry eye candy, but actually the kind of tactile, sensory, stimulus that it provides has really added a level of psychological transference and proficiency to the whole desktop metaphor/interface/experience, and I now find myself pining for it on other desktops I use that don't have it and now seem so geometric, linear, and rigid.

It occured to me that kids would absolutely love this desktop! When you drag windows they kind of wobble as if they're elastic, they spring into place when maximised, and corners can be peeled back to reveal what's behind them. While this all just sounds like a bit of fun, it's organicism blurs the mathematical rigidity that we've become used to and makes the experience just a little softer, a lot more tactile, and to be quite honest less 'computer' like.

Switching between multiple desktops
(haven't experienced multiple desktops? you're missing out!)

Bending back a maximized window to see what's behind.

I could go on about all the small features that I think are often overlooked but create a better HCI in Gnome than any Windows desktop has - for example small but repetitive actions like renaming files: how a right click > rename on a Gnome desktop highlights just the part of the file before the extension, so the user doesn't end up removing or having to type the file extension as part of the renaming act; or the ability to mouse over a sound file and have it play right in the environment that makes previewing and sorting lots of sound files on your desktop a breeze ... but i'm not going to do that here (perhaps in due course, here: http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Topic:Linux_Desktop)

I want to stick with this idea of "kids" for a second. The one thing that was formerly lacking on Linux machines and that was the 'kid-killer' was games. There were few games ported to Linux. There are more games now, but the thing is that I don't think kids are playing all that many games on the computer anymore. A PS3, Wii, or X-box will do games far better than a pc will, so game playing is moving to specialised hardware platforms with graphics exceleration up the wazoo and controllers that are designed for the actions.

A computer that's not being used for games, but that is being used by kids for homework, communication/socialising/networking etc, has Linux written all over it. Not only is the interface now more customizable, more tactile, more usable, and more impressive than the more expensive competitors, but as John "Maddog" Hall expressed in last years LinuxConf2006 - Linux teaches you twice (if nor more). Linux has many lessons. It encourages experimentation and lifting the lid, it's built on benevolent principles like sharing and openness, it provides support in the form of real people of whom you can ask real questions and almost always get a response (unlike waiting in a hold queus), and it's always trying to innovative in some aspect. It moves man! I'm on my 5th significant upgrade of Fedora since the introduction of Windows XP - and things happen, things get better every release. The idea of waiting (and saving $) for a release every 5 years is just out of step with how technology moves - with how kids move.

If you've never given it a try I think now's the time.

Training Packages Unwrapped - more like unleashed!

2006-11-23T13:01:00.000-08:00

Peter Shanks has been at it again. Not long after releasing his FlickrCC app (see previous post here), he's released Training Packages Unwrapped which presents units of the Australian NTIS Training Packages in a variey of easy-to-use formats. Along with a basic HTML view you can also export as moodle frameworks, tiddlyWiki's and wikiversity ready text, CSV, and XML! This is a fantastic idea, and executed with a simplicity that lots of educational software lacks. Hopefully we can get something like this going with similar unit standards in New Zealand. Problem with NZs ones are that they're currently only available in Word or PDF which will be considerably harder to siphon through than Australia's which came in RTF I understand.

Leigh Blackall has already done some experiments importing the Wiki text export into Wikiversity ready for people to add real content around (see http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Design_and_Develop_Learning_Resources). I think that both Leigh and I see this as being the real benefit of this idea - that the export acts as a kind of support around which real content and learning can be scaffolded in actual learning environments whether they be in Wikis, or in Moodle, a TiddlyWiki on your desktop, or whatever presentation/delivery system you wish to use. If we could start convincing the powers responsible for producing these things that Word Evil / XML good then we'd be halfway there and people like Peter could move on to even more interesting stuff.

Copyright, Creative Commons and Turnitin.com

2006-10-07T20:32:00.000-07:00

I'm taking a postgraduate course at the University of Auckland called Media, Sound and Music. I suggested to the class that instead of using the horrible university LMS called Cecil, we use the social networking environment called Last.fm because it's an environment based around listening and talking about music. I created a group for the class and we've been using the forums to hold discussions, post links, etc.

On Wednesday of last week I posted this to our class forum:

Copyright, Intellectual Property and Turnitin.com

I'm going to bring this up here because while not related to music it is an interesting issue in regards to intellectual property debates and copyright -- and because for this course, we are 'required' to use Turnitin.com.

There has been some discussion, primarily amongst some American high school students, that claims (quite rightly I think) that students have intellectual property rights to their writing and that this makes problematic Turnitin's compilation of student texts. While Turnitin.com claims fair use (not even sure if we have a fair use law in NZ... anyone?) institutions such as the U of A are requiring students to give away their work to be used by a third party, for-profit vendor. I'm not that good on copyright but I reckon that if I was to apply a Creative Commons license like the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/) to my work, which it would seem that I'm perfectly legally allowed to do as I automatically own the copyright on anything that I produce, this would actually prohibit this work from being submitted to Turnitin.com, because arguably their database, that includes all our aggregated work in electronic format, is supporting the efficacy of their business model - which to me would violate my 'non-commercial' clause.

In an open letter from the Writing Department of the Grand Valley State University in Michigan they also pointed out that use of such services:

"...emphasizes the policing of student behavior and texts over good-faith assumptions about students’ integrity, and can shift attention away from teaching students how to avoid plagiarism in the first place."

This is a pedagogical decision/stance which I just picked on as another angle to think this thing through... well, more for XXXX really, but I do think that there's an interesting parallel between what is going here and issues around the copying of music, questions of copyright and intellectual property. We're all making digital artifacts for most of our courses while at university and I think that we need to think critically about the consequences (small as they may be at this point) of allowing our digital artifacts to be distributed to services like this without even really questioning the ethics or implications.

What do you think?

Readings:
The Politics of Plagiarism Detection Services
Issues Raised by Use of Turnitin Plagiarism Detection Software

------

On Thursday we got this course email from the professor:

Hi everyone,

I've raised the issue of turnitin.com with colleagues for consideration.

For the purposes of this course, you DO NOT have to submit a copy of any of your further coursework to turnitin.com.

If you wish you can send me an electronic copy (pdf) version but you do not have to do that.
Make sure you have a copy of that file or another hard copy just in case it should get lost.

But for FTVMS 738, simply one hard copy by the due date is fine.

thanks

---------------

I'm not going to wax on about this too much ... i think the correspondence speaks for itself. While initially I thought that I was annoyed by turnitin.coms assumption that they could make use of my digital artifact for their business model by obfuscating the details of the model inside a rather lengthy EULA (which includes your agreement to be tried (extradited?) in Alameda Country, California for reverse engineering their technology!), in the end I was more annoyed at the institutions subtle implication that we were all plagiarizing in the first place and that it was easier to farm this dirty work out to a third-party than educate students about plagiarism. My fees are paying for this service?

I'm tempted to bring this up on a larger institutional level as well as start promoting the understanding and use of creative commons licenses amongst students as a way to protect the rights for their work not to be used by such authoritarian surveillance systems.

There is a little problem for me though here, and I'm caught in a bit of a quandry about it. I actually don't agree with the non-commercial license for the licensing of open content. You see the non-commercial restriction can have the effect of closing an open educational resource (OER) to just the type of use that the I'd like to promote, that of developing societies and those with low bandwidth issues. The non-commercial restriction would not, for example, legally permit a local community institution to package a print version of my content for resale on a cost recovery basis for printing, packaging and overhead. Secondly, the NC license is incompatible with other free content projects. You cannot mix material with a free content license (usually GNU Free Documentation License) with material that has a Creative Commons license with the NC restriction. This prevents OER projects gaining economies of scale by taking advantage of the explosive growth of free content from other open projects like Wikipedia. (see this recent speech by John Daniel: Exploring the role of ICTs in addressing educational needs: identifying the myths and the miracles). So I guess for my assignments i'll consider covering them by the NC license to keep this little piece of power in my pocket (and to prove a point), but for everything else i'll just go Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5.

Control-C, Control-T, Control-V

2006-10-07T02:09:00.000-07:00

First person to explain what this title means wins a free web browser.

micropedagogical dump #1

2006-10-05T13:12:00.000-07:00

micropedagogies - mobile pedagogies adjusting to shifting environments, landscapes, users, locations, devices. As opposed to 'grand narrative' pedagogies. users/learners/students provide the input. Pedagogies that emerge in response to environments: a vestibular system for learning situations.

Instead of grand narratives of teaching and learning, pedagogies emerge as far more mobile and fluent adjustments towards environments and user/learner demands or requirements. A range of strategies and tactics enable the teacher/facilitator in this approach to guide learning environments towards efficacy and to spin the technologies provided by many sources towards the learning experience. The teacher is a technologist (this is not new - they always have been!)

An example: Flickr - the popular image sharing site provides a range of fairly simple tools for the upload, tagging and simple manipulation of images and text. It also provides an environment for adding notes, comments, starting groups/discussions and supplying licensing on user generated content. There are multiple ways in which Flickr may be used as an environment to generate discussion, learning, creation. Pedagogical approaches (learning designs?) towards an environment like Flickr become valuable approaches that can be shared amongst teachers (without all that pesky XML!). A pedagogy of the compressed.

FlickrCC

2006-10-02T18:45:00.000-07:00

FlickrCC is a great hack by Peter Shanks using the Flickr API to search and retrieve images from Flickr that are covered by Creative Commons. Just a couple of weeks ago I really needed something like this for a class project where I was applying some apothegms on top of images for a presentation. Because it was so time consuming/clunky to search Flickr itself for CC images I ended up just using pictures that weren't covered by an open license and hiding them behind a private label. Disappointing, because it ended up being a good slide show to walk through an interesting article that I would have loved to have made public. I'm so enamored by Flickr for education that I'm hoping to aggregate more hacks and tips on how to use it in educational settings. Think of this as the first tip.

tagged flnw

2006-09-28T14:11:00.000-07:00

Some photos i've taken on my mobile device the last couple of days in Wellington mostly in relation to the FLWN discourse that has been emerging over the last week. The cafenet photo of my laptop showcased against the architecture of a Wellington plaza was taken, transferred through infrared to my laptop, then uploaded using the cafenet wireless network to Flickr in less than 2 minutes.

A heap more images from the FLNW wanderers can be found here: http://flickr.com/photos/tags/flnw

speed, culture and networked learning

2006-09-24T00:56:00.000-07:00

I've spent last night and part of Sunday loitering with the open space conference called The Future of Learning in a Networked World – a merry (mostly) band of technotravellers winding their way across the breadth of Aotearoa, serendipitously landing on my front yard in as it rolled into Waiheke Island. The conference participants were invited by John Eyles to the island and I met up with the participants on Saturday night at Hekerua Lodge. After the wine ran out Teemu, Alex and myself headed out to my local, Molly Malones in Surfdale, where we fortunately met up with another part of the group that had gone out for a quick meal. Last call resulted in us picking up some more bevvies as well as local character Greg, and heading back to the lodge to continue the discussion we'd started in the pub.

Greg, originally from Pahea in the Taranaki (birthplace of Poi-e) brought up a fascinating local story that has recently made the local papers and stirred some interesting local discussion. A few weeks ago a high tide at Matiatia eroded part of the foreshore, revealing a skull and a few bones from a Maori burial ground (urupa) that is known to have existed on the foreshore. This has led to some reconsideration of the impending development of the Matiatia area which has been pushed ahead in order for Auckland City to recoup the costs of buying back the land from a private company that it had sold it to 5 years previously. Stimulated by this issue the conversation segued into a discussion of how the digital artifacts, created by us in the present, may be 'unearthed' by future generations. How will these artifacts be interpreted in future social, political, and economic contexts?

Many indigenous cultures, including Maori, have unique conceptions of who owns knowledge artifacts and how such knowledge is transmitted to groups outside of the original producing group. This approach to knowledge is thrown into relief in a networked society that privileges the easy distribution and transmission of digital artifacts whose use outside of our immediate control is often unknown. As Western technophiles enamored by the affordances of the tools of networked society and rhetorically situated inside a 'global culture' the quick upload is the vector of desire. The fantasy of products consumed by the mass Other creates a sort of compulsive drive to upload, express, share, tag, intersect, etc. Speed and immediacy have become our drug because they imply the lessening of mediation, negotiation, or the possibility of control.

While we privilege speed other cultures on the other hand may prefer to take their time on these things. This is probably due to a distinctly more invested relationship to histories and knowleges that are threatened by colonialism and various attempts towards erasure that is so much a part of colonialist tactics. Maori language (te reo) for example was discouraged harshly from being spoken in schools through most of the last century in New Zealand and is now a highly contested landscape both politically within New Zealand, but also amongst Maori themselves.

There are a lot of issues at stake here about encouraging others to put themselves and the products of their work or actions online en masse in the hope that the network will make something useful out of it all. An approach where we chuck it all into the blender may have unforseen consequences and I think that it may be a worthwhile pursuit to investigate what some of the consequences are, particularly when our constituents are young people or adolescents whos ability to anticipate the future is arguably not at its most robust. There is for an example an interesting debate going on here currently in the US about the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA), which in some aspects an issue that is closely related.

I guess the point here is that we should remember to drive responsibly (not that I was on Saturday night, but thats another blog) if we're going to drink in all this juice. This may require us to slow down a bit and examine our own practices in light of perhaps what others around us think and perceive of these practices, as well as what the implications of our work may be for future generations.

same job, new place, new blog

2006-09-21T00:34:00.000-07:00

I'm finally getting around to getting a new blogging space going ... and this is it. When I left the University of Auckland I left my old blog Newped behind. I didn't feel it was right to keep logging into the old server while i was out of the institution, and I kind of wanted to start a blank slate. newped was already taken on blogspot so i had to fish around for something else and well, this just came to me turning the corner from princess to shortland street about in front of the Graphic Novel cafe so here it is. I think it will be a bit different than what newped was... we'll see. Theres still quite a bit to do around here - and this post is mostly just a test, but grab my feed and i promise to produce. cheers.