November 2008 Archives

I just checked out this video (thanks drs18) of Randy Nelson from Pixar University talk about learning and working in the collaborative age. Fits nicely with the conversations that have been going on regarding blogs@psu as a tool for portfolio and learning communities.

"Proof of portfolio versus promise of resume."

"Interested individuals versus Interesting individuals."

"Depth, Breadth, Communication. Not just emitting tech. Study art, even if I am a computer programmer."

"Collaboration. Collaboration is not a synonym for cooperation. People who are collaborating are amplifying each other."

Erin Long and I spent a few hours today talking to campus IDs about blogs@psu. I had a great time. Right before I am scheduled to speak in front of a group of people, I always start to get the fear. Will I be standing up there blathering about for two hours on my own as the rest of the people in room look at me quizzically, as if what I am saying barely qualifies for English? Will I pass the time flopping like a fish out of oxygen?

I am happy to say that this was not the case. The two hours flew by and were filled with lively discussion from everyone around the table. I started out with yet another iteration of the spiel I have been using about blogs@psu as learning portfolios and lifelong learning communities. We were going to do a how-to, but there was so much discussion, we skipped that part and went right into Erin sharing how the faculty she has worked with have been using blogs.

I am seeing the conversation change. Less talk about the specifics of the tool, and what blogging is (answer: simple web publishing(although don't deny the power of this simple idea, whose effects are still being borne out)) to more talk about the implications this will have for education. Of course it helps that this stuff isn't just theoretical anymore. We have the Comm 180 blogging assignments, the Schreyer Honors College blog portfolio project, English 202C redesign, and of course the teacher education student portfolios.

Lots of talk about student portfolios, not class blogs. We looked at students can maintain their own learning portfolio/repository while still participating in the creation of class blog through the use of tags.

I am a programmer, so please forgive my use of nested parentheses.

Yesterday Cole and I attended Word Camp Ed in Washington, DC. Although we don't use word press to power blogs@psu, I went looking forward to seeing how others are applying blogs to education and to experience a nice geeky unconference. What follows are some unorganized thoughts from the experience.

I now know now why they call Jim Groom the Reverend. He delivered his talk like a sermon, setting forward a call to action with infectious enthusiasm. Cole and I spent a lot of time discussing the ideas he put forth on the car ride home. He talked about a sort of permanent revolution of education and edtech. He talked about how blogs together form a hive, a wholeness. I think about the tag aggregation at blogs@psu and how we have an ecosystem of information. He talked about the need to set student content free from the LMS, where it disappears at the end of a semester. He talked about the flexibility of a using feeds to republish content.

I saw some mind blowing stuff with MIT's Simile. This showed all kinds of data visualization from scraping all of umwblogs.org: Timelines showing content creation, networks of interlinked posts, content from seperate blogs on related topics, really awesome stuff. I need to dig into this much more.

I saw some examples of course-related plugins (see scholarpress.net). Jeremy Boggs, a history instructor at George Mason, demoed adding assignments, adding items to a shedule, and relating them to each other. Provides assignments page, schedule page, microformats like vcal. 1/2 of his students used the vcal. He also used a plugin called WP Book which takes a WP powered course website and puts it into a facebook app. 70% of students reported adding it and using it.

I have to wonder what kind of course-specific functions we should be providing with blogs@psu, which would be most useful, and which would actually be used.

There was also a question about protecting student content. It seems pretty easy to do this with WP. Using pseudonyms for blogging again mentioned. Boggs encouraged his students to do that if they are concerned. The blogging under pseudonym concept is not something I have blogged about a lot, but seems to be an idea that I see popping up here and there in discussion about protecting student content.

Jeffrey W McClurken, chair of history and american studies department at UMW, spoke of using blogs to get students away from the idea of just writing for him. He was interested in getting students to write for a larger audience and writing more and in a different format. He said he tries to keep his students in a place where they are uncomfortable, but not paralyzed, because this is where personal growth happens. Writing in the open is actually part of the learning goal of his courses, and the implications of using an open forum are discussed in class.

Students made an online resource to provide for context for nearby historical markers

All in all, it was a great time. There are many people thinking the same things as the blogs@psu team with regards to how personal publishing is creating brand new opportunities for education. One attendee was a grad student who spoke earnestly about how her experience blogging enriched her education, and opened opportunities she wouldn't have had otherwise, connecting her to a community around her research interests.

I have switched my default entry editor format to Markdown. If you have ever edited a typical wiki, you get the idea. It is great to take notes using a general text editor (or evernote), then copy and paste into this blog and have the entry nice and cleanly formatted. This has been my workflow for my last two posts.

It is probably a quirk of my geekiness, but I find it easier to type in markdown than use a WYSIWYG editor. That's another point for markdown from my POV.

For the curious: Markdown Syntax Documentation

I met Darren Cambridge at a portfolio conference this past August. Below are my scrawled notes from his session at the 2008 IMS global learning quarterly meeting at PSU. I apologize if they don't make sense due to a lack of connective tissue. Darren's views of portfolio for integration, reflection, and learning represent the kind of thinking we need to incorporate into the heart of blogs@psu.

• Nedcar - netherlands auto maker. large scale use of portfolio for employability.

• choose competencies frameworks defined by employeers

• More than list of competencies with evidence attached

• Samatha Slade's competencies. Check this out. in addition to competencies, includes values, sense of personality, multimedia, personal awareness. profession can be seen in attitude towards life.

• limitation of competency only portfolio:does not include adaptability, career identity - narrative, where am I going? where have I gone?, social capital (my connections).

• professional portfolio can show good work: work that is of high quality and is a "good work", is an ethical, helpful, contribution to the world.

• portfolios to find narrative across the "terrific deal"(Reich) - Across personal, professional, and civic roles. relate all these to professional identity.

• portfolio to show intrinsic motivation and lifelong learning.

• not just resume, not just home page, not just social networking. It is all of them.

• Network self - creating intentional connections

• Symphonic Self - Achieving integrity of the whole

• Darren Cambridge presentations: http://ncepr.org/darren/presentations.html

Louis E. King from University of Michigan was talking yesterday about methods of adding time-synced meta video to aid searches of video repositories. This data including things like:

• thumbnail of frames
• text to speech
• face recognition
• OCR

The demo of the server-based system that managed all this was very impressive and I thought it was blowing my mind, but then my mind was truly blown:

In addition to the sources of metadata I listed above, the system can also take backchannel communication like the activity of a live question tool or twitter and timesync it to the video. So, you can watch the video and view the synced tweets as well as use the tweets to help find sections of video related to particular topic. Cool!

I am at the IMS global learning quarterly meeting today discussing, among other things, repositories for e-learning. Brian Nielsen, Project Manager for Faculty Initiatives in Academic & Research Technologies, Northwestern University is on the stage.

"A technology may be limited not by its characteristics but by a lack of vision on how it may be used in particular contexts" -Brian Nielsen

While not what Brian's intent, I think this explains my stumbling block to working up huge amounts of enthusiasm around learning repositories. I lack a vision of how it will be used.

These repositories are social spaces, but are they being designed with lessons learned from existing social repositories (e.g. flickr, youtube)? Is a participation around these educational resources so small, that various social network benefits don't exist? Is that the problem we are really trying to solve: No link economy, No meaningful (due to small amount of participation) social ratings? Are we trying to make up for this with mountains of metadata? From the institution POV it makes sense. Does it make sense from the POV of the individual instructor?

At Northwestern they use a system called Xythos that provides file sharing with fine grained access controls, versioning, and logging. On the surface, it looks similar to PSU's PASS, except it seems to be used more sharing rather than general purpose storage. Xythos works with blackboard - trust between Xythos and Blackboard with custom plugin they built call File Bridge allows students in class to see certain files instructor placed in Xythos. You can't search across Xythos.

One interesting tidbit is that Northwestern is looking at integrating their student's google services with blackboard with some custom code the way they did with Xythos.