Blog of Brad

NMC 2008 Summer Conference sound bites

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 21:25:49 -0500

Diana Oblinger

how is collective intelligence taken into account in learning structures?
we are a learning society, not information society.
cannot separate learning from context. context = technology, participatory culture.
wrap metacognitive activities around assignment.

Henry Jenkins

age of spreadable media (introduce your media into their conversations) versus sticky media (draw them in and don't let them go)
remix has been the norm until romantic era
technical access digital divide gap issue of the 90s was from when we thought about internet as access to information, a digital library. Now it is about participation, connecting to people, creating relationships. Literacy of participation should be central. Jenkins challenges us to incorporate this into our teaching and every thing we are doing. (broccoli and mac-n-cheese discussion finally settled)
The part in Moby Dick where they discuss the story of Jonah and the Whale reminds of when the characters in "Clerks" discuss all the private contractors that must have been killed when the rebels blew up the death star in Return of the Jedi.

Kurtis Scaletta on blogging in education

link to presentation
a blog may encompass many different genres. Blog is really a tool, just like a wordprocessor may be used to write many different types of letters.
usually a student blogger will start with one genre, but the longer they blog, the more likely they are to start to experiment with other genres.
Students blogs not add much value if used fo ra single course or semester, but value will be realized over time and semesters.

I think I might finally understand digital storytelling and education

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 22:16:28 -0500

I attended the NMC 2008 summer conference last week at Princeton, NJ. There was a lot of sessions and discussion about digital storytelling. At first I was having a hard time wrapping my head around all the excitement over digital storytelling coming from the education realm. I understand the enthusiasm around digital storytelling in the democratic media sense. I can appreciate it as a art form. But why so much talk of the intersection of digital storytelling and education?

I got my answer on Friday afternoon. Joan Freedman and Michael Reese from John Hopkins did a "five minutes of fame" session where they talked about what they termed as a "humanities lab". They had a class about the Vietnam War era of American history which included a scheduled lab. The students had several multimedia assignments they had to complete during the semester. One assignment was to write and record a protest song. Another one was to create a propaganda poster. It hit me as I saw the examples of the students' work. These students were forging an emotional connection to the subject matter. They had to put themselves in the mindset of the people of the time, and to actually experience that time in some small measure. I could see that it was indeed a much deeper experience than the more purely intellectual experience of simply reading and writing about a subject. In some way they were actually touching the subject matter. This goes beyond simply translating an essay or report into a video. This was something else.

I saw many examples of video/audio/music assignments at the conference. Some were just a typical paper turned into a video. Some seemed to lack any real content, IMHO. But there is a third category.....

During Henry Jenkins closing plenary, he played the opening of the clip below. Check it out.

Imagine the relationship the person who wrote that song had to have to the novel in order to create it. Imagine how that relationship was deepened by that act of creation. Now, that video is not an example of a class assignment. And it may be beyond what we could reasonably expect a student to produce. But the idea still holds. This is about students forging a new relationship with the subject matter through the act of creation.

This has kinda totally changed my view on education. Maybe my view was far too limited to start with. But wat really is the point of education? Especially a humanities/liberal arts education? Isn't it really at its base about fostering relationships with learning in general, and flaming passion around the concepts of the subject matter in particular? How are these goals being met by current teaching practices? This is a topic I want to explore more.

Of course, it is generally difficult to assess this kind of student work, especially in any sort of standardize way.

Another issue is supporting students in this kind of media creation. The John Lennon Education tour bus (http://www.lennonbus.org/) was on hand at NMC. Its staff can help people with no experience with music or video create music and video. And of course, there is the Digital Commons at Penn State, which is pretty much the same thing, but not on wheels. So, I feel like this is more and more of a non-issue.

I have no idea if what I am writing here makes any sense, or if this has been blatantly obvious to you all for a while now. What do you think? Let me know.

Links for my presentation at web 2008

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 17:03:53 -0500

Syndicating content with embed codes

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 15:27:41 -0500

Watch this screencast from Brian Lamb: (original link)

Pretty cool. What we are basically talking about here is a decentralized model for writing content in one's environment of choice, then allowing that content to be dynamically republished in many places. For example, you could author a piece of course content in your blog, then have that content show up in the various course sections in your LMS. Better yet, a group of people could author content in wiki, then have the content appear in various other "static" contexts on the web. Update the wiki page, all the other content gets updated too. The screencast does a better job of explaining it than I can do right now.

After watching the video, I whipped up some mt templates to do the same thing. Look in the little "metadata bar" under the titles of my entries. An embed code for every blog entry.

While you are at it, check out the sidebar of this blog. An embed code for the headlines of the blog. Instructions on how you can add this to your blog are forthcoming.

I need to add this to blog pages as well.

Update: Thanks to a comment from Brian, I fixed the embed link. It wasn't working right in firefox.

Steak Knives

Fri, 30 May 2008 16:35:23 -0500

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has been using the same analogy for a while. I just came across it while catching up on my reading in Cole's blog from Berkman@10.

I like Jeffrey Veen's (2 year old) take on it the best:

I found Wales particularly interesting as he put to rest Wikipedia's notoriety as a prototypical Web 2.0 application, especially when people assume that the moniker Web 2.0 refers to a set of technologies. There are virtually no technical innovations, he explained, as most of the underlying pieces were invented over a decade ago: Ward Cunningnam invented the wiki over 10 years ago, for example.

Rather, Wikipedia is a social innovation and Wales used restaurant design as a metaphor. Your new dining establishment intends to sell steaks, so therefore you'll need to provide sharp knives to your customers. Knives are also weapons and people could stab one another with them, so rather than booths and tables, you'd better lock your customers in individual cells to prevent that behavior.

Absurd, of course. Society has built up a collective set of agreements to ensure this sort of thing doesn't occur. Community software, however, often resorts to those sort of draconian constraints to require or forbid specific activity.

The success of Wikipedia can be traced back to exploiting the community trust, and backing it by social norms that have emerged as the site has grown and evolved. But more interesting is the attenuation that the community has developed for these emergent patterns and the methods they use to build on them.

Sometimes I encounter a little bit of anxiety when I discuss blogs@psu. My response has generally been the same: culture, not technology.

Changes

Fri, 23 May 2008 13:02:06 -0500

Last week, my wife and I welcomed two foster children into our home and family. Amazing Journey.

The new scene around our place

Blogging at the Smeal TechFest

Wed, 21 May 2008 16:09:21 -0500

Last week I did a presentation with Mike Hofherr at the Smeal College of Business TechFest. I spoke to faculty from the College about blogs@psu and how they can integrate into their teaching. I was happy that the session ended up being more of a discussion with those in attendance than just me reciting my spiel. Mike had some good examples of how using blogs increased motivation among his freshman seminar students. I wish I could have captured more of the discussion by blogging right afterwards, but life events did permit it (Perhaps more on those events in my next post). Below are my slides, but most of the action happened out of the slides, with discussion and demoing, and looking at examples online.

Digital versus Physical

Sun, 11 May 2008 22:13:05 -0500

Yesterday I had the fortune to visit the Frida Kahlo exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. While I am far from an art buff, I remember learning about some of her paintings in Junior High art class, and feeling an affinity for her work. Of course, I have seen her paintings reproduced in books, magazines, and online. They do not compare to seeing the actual work. Kahlo was able to create a sense of physical depth in places that made the figures seem like they were sticking out of the frame. At one painting in particular, I put my head next to the wall to make sure what I was looking at was in fact only 2-dimensional. I have experienced this effect at other art exhibits. This is something that I have never seen with a photograph, or any reprint of a painting.

This got me thinking....

When I think of most art these days, my thoughts immediately go to the digital. Even if it is something created by hand, my first idea would be digitize it, put it online. It almost didn't seem real to me if it is not published online. I think that attitude of mine may have changed yesterday.

I already mentioned above that all the qualities of the original paintings can not be captured or reproduced, but there is more.....

A section of museum was dedicated to photographs from Kahlo's personal photo albums. While I feel these probably could be reproduced rather faithfully, I found myself absorbed by the these photographs in a way that I probably wouldn't be if they were digital displays. Some of the photos were torn. Some of the photos had handwritten notes or doodles added to them. Not only were the frozen images enabling me to peer through time, but knowing that these actual prints had travelled through time as well made the experience that much more powerful. The physical size of the prints also had an impact: straining to see the small ones, seeing the details and texture of the paper on the larger ones.

I wonder what will live longer: the pictures I upload to flickr and my blog, or the pictures I print I store in albums. If I were to suddenly be gone, what happens to my digital pictures?

With the exception of a few experiments with film, I don't think I have printed a picture since 2001. Really, all of this is to say that in addition to uploading every picture I take to flickr, I am going to make an effort to print the select ones. This really dovetails nicely with my latest adventures with photography. Most of my photography experience comes from the days before the DSLR. In addition to high school english, my dad taught photography classes. I never wanted for a SLR, various lenses, dark room equipment. I spent a lot of time with these in high school and college, but then slowly fell out of practice, probably because I became enamored with the immediacy, the informality, the sharability, the unpretentiousness of point-and-shoot digital. I recently pulled out the film camera, lenses, flash. I am going to see if I keep up with it for a while. If I do, I will consider investing the money in the digital equipment. Unfortunately, I don't think any of my lenses will work with modern cameras.

Digital has tons of advantages. I still plan to share my pictures digitally. I also plan to make some prints. The photo printing services that tie into flickr or the book print on demand service like lulu.com show a strengthening marriage between physical and digital media.

Another topic of interest: The social aspect of everyone gathering in meatspace to experience Kahlo's works.

Eternal Sonata

Thu, 08 May 2008 17:48:56 -0500

I am working my way through Eternal Sonata on xbox 360. I feel compelled to mention this because of the game's rather unconventional setting. It takes place in the dreams of Fredric Chopin on his deathbed. The gameplay is a pretty typical japanese rpg style, with a few enjoyable twists. The game is broken into chapters, and in each chapter you are given rather wordy explanation about some aspect of Chopin's life. While you play you can see facets of chopin's experience manifest themselves in the dream world. The game has great elaborate visuals and awesome music. If you like the gameplay of typical turn-based RPGs (not for everyone, I know) then I would recommend it. I am having a lot of fun with the game, and I am learning a little bit about an important composer and 19th century European history.

That is all.

BS Breakfast begins to re-awaken

Fri, 02 May 2008 10:45:58 -0500

Check out the wiki page

An ecard for you

Fri, 02 May 2008 10:40:51 -0500

Tweet Meet

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 18:47:26 -0500

I attended today's tweet meet at the golden wok. Great to meet some new people from around the University that are in to thinking about online community. I would say about half the people there I had not met previously, and did not follow on twitter. Twitter continues to catalyze new relationships. This was some real social networking.

The discussion opened up some branching thoughts. As always, I find the revelation comes someone puts into simple words something that is so intrinsic it is not easily verbalized. James Howell mentioned that he started using facebook to friend the students that he advises because he found that interacting in facebook was less intimidating for them than using email. When communicating with someone through facebook, larger identity is more naturally carried along with the message. As more and more of us become accustomed to crafting our own online identity as well as parsing the online identities of those we interact with, receiving an email message may seem cold and faceless.

There was also some talk of separating one's professional identities from one's more familiar identity. I think there is definitely some room for overlap, especially in light of the idea above. I am not saying that maybe different views into one's life should be offered, e.g. a view tailored to colleagues vs. a view tailored to friends. However, creating an impenetrable wall between the various aspects of your online self may one day soon be widely perceived as inauthentic.

It was great getting to meet everyone. Hopefully more events like this are to follow.

Cake for online communities

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 10:43:59 -0500

Cake for online communities, originally uploaded by Brad.K.

A cake to celebrate online communities. Thanks, Yvonne!

Blogs for faculty e-portfolios

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 15:10:48 -0500

I just sat in on a presentation by Loanne Snavely and Ellysa Cahoy of the University Libraries on the topic of using blogs@psu as a platform for faculty e-portfolios. Happily I was available to answer some of technical questions the audience had, but more importantly Loanne and Ellysa opened my eyes to just how much utility the blogs@psu can have for faculty. I am really inspired to roll out some the new features that have been germinating for so long.

Some choice (to me, at least) ideas from the presentation:

Portfolios can include reflection on teaching and research. The root of much reflection is transient, an insightful interaction with a student in class, for example. If these insights are not captured, they disappear. Think more traditional blog as a repository for this content.
E-portfolios provides easy access to electronic and multimedia achievements.
If you are using a web site as part of the promotion and tenure process, you want something more static than a typical blog - static front page, no comments. Items from the "more fluid reflections blog" can be selected to move to the portfolio site.
permalink is a great feature - allows you to easily point someone to a specific item in the portfolio.

This all tells me that we are doing at least some things right with what we are providing with blogs@psu. It is a good feeling. A blog is not just a blog.

jabber server at PSU

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 19:20:22 -0500

PSU jabber server in alpha/beta

Check it out. I think this is really useful. IM has become such a popular communication tool around the office. It makes a whole lot of sense to start using a tool where it is easier to find users, is supported, and is secure.