January 2009 Archives

This morning, I went to a session on Digital Storytelling with Bryan Alexander.  This was a one-hour version of what he normally does in eight hours.  Still, it was effective in demonstrating the power and fun of digital storytelling.  More specifically, he talked about Web 2.0 Storytelling.  The difference is that there were people who used Web 1.0 ideas to tell stories, but they weren't as dynamic as what is possible today.  Bryan used "Dreaming Methods" as an example of a Web 1.0 storytelling site.  I think it's worth mentioning because I like the look of the site.  Plus, not everything needs to be collaborative to be enjoyed.

With our Web 2.0 tools, it is easy to add to or change what someone else has done or break off and start our own story.  In addition, stories can be told through a series of photos, 140 character twitter posts, video, audio, and interactive media.  To demonstrate his point, Bryan had groups of people at his session sit together, use a wiki, and write a story around an image that he uploaded.  He gave us five minutes to write the story.  The time limit is actually important because (as I have found in the past), resource constraints can add a game-like element to an activity.

After we were done and had discussed some other tools and ideas, we came back to the stories, but this time, the groups shifted.  We were tasked with changing one of the other stories that had been written.  It was fun both times.  Our first story was based around an image of some kind of memorial stone.  We made up a few lines about a group of people who return to the stone every year, even though they have started to forget why.  It's a kind of comforting social ritual of mourning.  Our second story started off with a Second Life error message about missing body parts and the people who started the story talked about missing their telepresence brain and needing to improvise.  We added some parts about borrowing someone else's brain and taking it to a party (pardon the damage, but the party was fun).

And it was fun.  Bryan did a very nice job once again and there are some other ideas from his session that I plan to return to in the coming weeks, including some online audio and video editing tools.

I've mentioned Michael Wesch a couple of times before.  I got another chance to hear him speak at the Educause Learning Initiative meeting today.  His main idea that instead of making students "knowledgeable", we need to make them "knowledge-able".  In other words, instead of worrying about the massive amount of content that we need to cover (with little regard for how much students can retain), we should help create the kind of people who will be better able to research, critique, analyze, synthesize, and create. 

I'm not doing his talk justice.  He does it so nicely and uses his students to illustrate what he means.  In his own practice, he has done things like creating a question as the basis for part of the entirety of a course and then working with students to explore the issue.  He gave an example question: "What is the bias in YouTube and how does it manifest?".  That becomes the basis for a weeks-long investigation into the types of video in YouTube, who produces it, what messages those videos convey, etc...  During this investigation, Wesch exposes students to what other scholars around the world are saying through the magic of RSS feeds and a class NetVibes portal.

Another example is a discussion in class about billions of people around the world (I believe he said 3 billion) who are are living on less than $2 per day and that 27,000 children will die of starvation today.  Why do so many people live on so little?  This leads to a discussion of resources, colonization, violence, resistance, etc... which culminates in his world simulation project.  The simulation takes place in a room and uses a lot of props to represent resource, money, and force.  The simulation works out differently every semester, but it appears to do a good job in demonstrating why some things happen the way they do.
 

The Horizon Report is a view of trends in the educational uses of technology and what is in store in the near future. The report is a joint effort of the Educause Learning Initiative, the New Media Consortium, and other leaders in the field (Cole is on the advisory board). 

During the 2009 Educause Learning Initiative meeting, ELI and NMC released the 2009 Horizon Report.  Topics in this year's report include "mobiles" (a range of devices in the space intersecting cell phones, iPods, and small computers), cloud computing, location-aware everything, the personal web, semantic-aware devices, and smart objects. 

If you haven't read one of the horizon reports, have a look.  It's an interesting take on where education technology leaders see where we are, what is happening, and where it can take us.  More importantly, it gives us some ideas of where we need to go so we are prepared for and can take advantage of these new tools.  We may even have a chance to shape their development, which is an exciting idea.

I'm in the middle of a pre-conference session at the Educause Learning Initiative meeting in Orlando, Florida.  A few quick thoughts before we start up again.

The first half of the session was run by Gardner Campbell.  Brilliant guy.  He was talking about using Web 2.0 tools to move toward more authentic forms of assessment. After giving us some initial thoughts, we broke into groups at our table and discussed our biggest challenges.  Hannah and I talked about the challenge of scale.   How do you move to 350 students blogging all semester?  Gardner said that he skims entries and looks for themes during a semester, but he doesn't try to read and grade every posting.  That isn't practical given the time and resource limitations of faculty.  What he asks students to do is blog over the course of a semester and then select their five best posts and submit them as part of a kind of portfolio.  I was also thinking that in addition to their own work, students should identify a good post that was written by another student.

The other thing that I wanted to jot down is a book that Gardner mentioned: Falling for Science.  It's a collection of essays that Sherry Turkle has put together where she asked her students to write about the object that got them interested in science.  The essays talk about topics like personal meaning, inspiration, and emotional attachment.  It's an interesting example of exposing insight that wouldn't be measurable by standardized testing.  They are also collections of self-directed learning outside of the traditional educational system.  I think Carla would enjoy it, if she hasn't read it already.

Over the past couple of years, I've had the opportunity to plan some events that are focused on teaching and learning with technology (lower case since it is about the topic, not the TLT organization).  These include the 2007 and 2008 TLT Symposiums and the Learning Design Summer Camp as well as some smaller events.  I've developed a research interest in these types of events, mainly because we have been able to get people really engaged in these events when we loosen the reins and let the community take over.  The results have been impressive and surprisingly creative. 

I'm presenting some information about the Learning Design Summer Camp process at the Educause Learning Intiative meeting next week in Orlando.  I thought I'd share the drafts of the two posters that I'll be using.  If it looks like a Keynote presentation, well, um, what can I say?  I did a debriefing presentation in Keynote that several other people liked, so I thought I'd stick with what works.