October 2009 Archives

Chris Long is hosting a dialogue between his students and students from Boston College over at his Digital Dialogue blog. In addition, Marina McCoy, philosophy professor from Boston College, is now guest posting on the blog. There has been talk of the power of blogs to extend (remove?) the boundaries of the classroom, and thanks to adventurous folks like Chris Long and Marina McCoy, we are actually seeing it here at PSU and BC.

What Chris Long is doing at Digital Dialogue is fascinating and I have been trying to get my head together to write about it here for quite some time. The Digital Dialogue is a place for Dr. Long, his undergraduate students, his graduate students, and now Dr. McCoy to, "co-author a living document". Comments are open to the world. Next time Dr. Long is teaching, his students will continue to build on that document. Perhaps students from this semester will continue to participate in the shaping this document in semesters to come. The posts and discussion on the blog shape the discussion in class. The class is really much more of a two way experience than it has been before the blog. The students are now writing for an audience other than just the professor. They are writing for the whole class, other philosophy students, and potentially the whole world. This has changed the character and quality of the student's work.

Dr. Long has an outstanding presentation on the pedagogy of blogging based on his experience using blogs in teaching to encourage community, ongoing critical reflection, writing for an audience, all the while blurring boundaries between "student and teacher, semester and lifetime, practice and theory, world and classroom."

I believe we are seeing an emergence of a new model for teaching and learning.

My knowledge of what is going on at Digital Dialogue is based on discussions I've had with Chris and seeing his presentation. Chris, if you are reading this, don't be afraid to correct me. I'd hate to be misrepresenting what you are doing.

One more thing, for the open educational resource crowd: With all this discussion and material being captured, and the world being enabled to not only view, but participate, the Digital Dialogue is an open educational resource. Not only is Marina McCoy and her class able to take advantage of this OER, but they are in turn adding to it and helping build it. This is not the typical OER model of a bunch of text book pages or multimedia assets. This is something different.

Links:

• Digital Dialogue
• Christopher Long: Welcome BC Students to our Digital Community
• Marina McCoy: Rhetoric and Soul Leading

I have had an account at the google wave developer sandbox for a while. Unfortunately, I have not been able to get in to the "real" wave yet. Google hasn't added me and the invites I have been sent have not arrived yet. I am looking forward to getting there and using wave to collaborate and communicate with more people. In the meantime, perhaps I can assuage my longing by doing a little writing about google wave to clear up what I see as a general misunderstanding of wave that is displayed in many conversations I have been having and in many posts I have been reading.

First off, Wave is not a service like facebook, twitter, gmail. It is what I am going to call a platform/protocol. It stands alongside things like the web, email, IM, gopher. Wave isn't an application with a certain set of features. Wave is a protocol/platform to develop realtime and asynchronous interactions. So, you can start using wave with a group of people to collaboratively edit a document. But what if you have some tabular data? You can paste that in, and assuming someone has written a robot to do so, and you have added it to your wave, and the data can be automatically turned into a graph. The others you are collaborating with on this wave can see the graph, add data, alter the visualization. Play chess on a wave? There is a gadget for that. Whiteboard app? There is a gadget for that. Administer a quiz to your students with a wave? I don't know if there is an extension for that, but there could be. Someone just has to write it.

Second, As a platform wave has potential for all kinds of functionality. Saying that wave is or is not an LMS replacement is like saying that the web is not a replacement for an LMS, or that a telephone is not a replacement for an LMS. Wave may, like the web, be a good platform to build an LMS on, or, like the telephone, it may not be. I am reserving judgment on that right now. This whole issue is confused because the only wave client the world has seen (as far as I know) is a web-based client. Many people use gmail or other webmail applications, this doesn't mean that email is a web-based application any more than wave is.

Third, waving doesn't have to mean saddling up with Google. Google is building the first wave server and wave client, but the wave protocol is open. Just as there are a variety of web server software, web browser software, SMTP servers, and imap clients, so it could be too with wave. Again, people just need to write it. There is no technical reason Penn State could have it's own wave server, with Penn State users using wave clients of their choice, to communicate with people both at Penn State or anywhere else in the world (just like PSU hosts its own email system now that sends email to and receives email using any other email system in the world). Whether or not Penn State should want to do that is another story.

I am not saying that wave will be as revolutionary as the web. I am not saying that wave won't become just as important or more so than email and web are today. I am just saying that I don't know, and much of the confusion I see from people on the wave concept comes from people evaluating it the same way they would a new web application like google docs, when this is not what wave is at all. Criticizing wave right now doesn't make sense. Lest we so easily forget, watch the video below to remember what the web was like in the 90's.

Today, Matt Meyers, Erin Long, and myself flooded the zone at the CIC CIO Tech Forum. I gave a broad overview of the Blog platform at Penn State, followed by Erin and Matt digging deep into the examples of English 202C design and the Bio 12 Open Courseware, respectively. The overall take away was that there are a lot of uses for a flexible, lightweight publishing platform that sits in the center of the University.

60 second DIY flash diffuser, originally uploaded by Brad.K.

Inspired by this. Not sure if it is actually effective. Need to do more tests.