Full Circle Associates

Regular live-blogging caveats apply:

D’Arcy Norman
Going to show three examples.
Weblogs.ucalgary.ca – started off after Nvoice 2005. Downloaded Drupal and installed, not knowing if students would use it or if faculty would care. Needed a place to play with the tools. For months in languished. Over the last year two profs are running course in it. We use Blackboard on campus. (Editorial non comment on BB). Conversations on BB suck, but it doesn’t feel right. What these two profs found they could do some interesting things. We use Drupal with the concept of groups. At the top we have a groups tab. All the groups in the system. They aren’t defined by the institution, but whomever is using the system. A professor. A student. The profs created groups, students enroll and they are given a reading topic. They find articles, synthesize and write a blog post. Then they comment on each others stuff. They are doing cool conversations. Amazing stuff, and stuff that they tell us they were not doing at this level with other tools.

Copied and pasted this for a specific project with the teacher of education. The students are in schools doing practicum. They do review notes. Used to be in a blue binder and then they can’t keep adding notes while prof has it. Closed the blogs space and now they can add their stuff. They could determine who could see what. Small groups to have semi private content. What surprised D’Arcy – it has the same groups tab, because anyone can create groups, they created groups like “special topics epiphany” and 12 people joined it. Every time they blog on it, it goes in there. They don’t have to search for it, but go to areas people have self identified as emphphanic moments. Research groups, social events. Their own subtopics. Little ad hoc groups, self-assembling on the fly. Changing the learning environment. No longer “you shall log in to Blackboard and post three posts and by the way, it disappears after the end of the course. In this self-aggregating, self forming community, which persists afterwards. They push to retain the community after graduation and still participate, keep in touch. Like Anil was talking about. You can do this. Scaling it up to 400,000 students this fall. You can keep in touch with 12 students, not 300 if you want.

PEAK: Calgary health region. Practice Enhancement Achieved through Knowledge. The idea is for Canmore hospital. A doc may have a question about something, may not have time to research. A social FAQ manager. A team of researchers go out and find info, synthesize results and put it back. Personal Learning Project library. You can see when questions submitted, which are answered/unanswered. Practitioners are using this as part of their practice. They don’t usually get the chance to get this sort of communication and support.

Q: Have you looked at interconnecting classes over the year cohorts?
A: Sort a hurdle. Some profs want each year to start fresh. Some profs create new groups for each semester but old groups are still there. All the previous writings are available. How do you give new research topics if all of the previous stuff is there. Prof actually has to do their job. More locus of control for students to do original stuff.

Q: On the groups. Assuming you do want year to year, how can you increase focus on current information and less on old groups. So folks don’t lose attention.

A: We use a logic called “views” that weights chronological order.

Drupaled.org – languished. A few in higher ed drupal community, set up an adhoc group. Stuff at Penn State, U PEI, UBC. Trying to get a group together.

Chris Lott: Qualitatively we are living at a different time. Our students are chahing. The information ecology has changed. We have not been adapting to those changing ecologies in education. Particpatory culture, change in tech, bandwidth and growth of information. 50 Exabits (50,000 libraries of congress, 2 all the words spoken since the dawn of speech)

3. Advances in learning theories. If you are outside of the education institution, it may seem like we are not taking these into account. Connected knowledge, connectivism are taking this change into account. How do you take a student who may be used to a passive environment into active, into a culture of participation, into digital and iformation fluancey. Different. Being able to say I need to go to the bathroom and being elegant in the language. That issue will dwarf the technical access divide.

Critical thinking – we talk about it all the time, but do we really know what it means. Emerging pedagogy taking into account the changes. Not the information I store but the ability to maneuver the network, community learning groups, tied to external CoPs,, which allows them to create for themselves their personal learning environment beyond the bounds of the institution. We don’t control semester to semester, but we are invited into their environment, the third space, the space of being a lifetime active learner beyond the intuitions. Ad hoc interaction. The student archives and creates, with ties to needs ofr ID management, to keep their portfolio active. That is happening with Web 2.0, social software and education can’t be blind by that. http://www.chrislot.org/wiki

A lot of obvious problems. What is critical thinking? An incremental approach which does not sever academia. Disruption. New blood. New thinking. Computers are stupid, humans are smart, separating fad, charting the unmapped territories. A whole new way to work with students and encourage learning that we’ve never had before.

Q: Many people work within technology in a university. I work in the classroom. I haven’t been able to bring tech into non tech department. They say go to computing.

A: I got into this because I am a poet. Our fluency is about that. Insinuate into programs. Anthro, English. If you are a publishing poet and teaching poetry and you don’t know about poetry blogging, we need to present these new opportunities. It is not a tech thing, but a learning thing.

Q: What’s your opinion on the danger of dissociation of distributed knowledge. Promoting an active life long approach, but relying on flat forms that are not life longed and not owned by the student. Each new application in each new environment.

A: Aspect of balance. New kinds of active learning does not mean we abandon all the old forms. Decisions. Come up with at set of tools, identified by function, not name of tool. Interchangeable. Realizing when we rely on services, even the biggest services can go away. What do you do. If institution sponsors it. Long term commitment not sure institutions are ready to make.

Ideally the institution should not have to provide that. The library – their job do to that. Would love to see the library reinvented as social learning spaces, serious about archiving. Starting point.

Q: In teaching teachers to integrate. Some embraced – history teachers, but general resistance for profs, point it to their TA’s instead. How do you bridge that for older teachers, or younger with classical approaches.

A: We work with those who are willing to work and the tide will rise all ships (or some will drown and float away)

Q: Librarian, teaching information literacy, hard to sell. So how do you sell the fluency?

A: Literacy is disconnected from the technology. PPT, blah, framing an argument, yay? They don’t kn ow you need the literacy first, but the fluency attracts them.

Q: I teach HS, just finished university. One of the problems is getting students out of high school, where HS did not have resources to integrate tech. The cost of uni and everyone willing to take the time to get into this. A bit idealistic until you can build the foundation in secondary school for a natural progression.

A: Ideally yes. But the other thing is, we have a lot of Alaska Native students. Not about taking time out from work or job as a student, but direct integration into the curriculum. Given a perspective shift on how to use it. Gigantic underserved.

A: work with faculty of education who are affecting K-12.

Jon Beasley- Murray
I’m not in educational technology, teach Latin American Studies at UBC. Thanks to Brian getting into the blog business, getting a little too positive so will try and have a few negatives.

The one ideas is to trying to see where we are getting anti-social software. The software is anti social. In Anil’s talk, passed over the obvious critique that this software is meant for the fragmentation of existing communities, missing national attention. Positive side to that, through blogs and such one can construct counter communities. Anti social communities that question certain forms of sociality and community. Most of all, through blogs, because they are excessive, optional, frivolous, unimportant and a little bit risky. I want those qualities to remain. Honeymoon between institution and blog implies some sort of marriage just being consummated. Prefer to maintain tension there.

Ways I use my blogs for research and teaching. The most recent post I made is an antisocial gesture here at UBC. We are told we are on some great trek to the future. Why is the notion of trek so attractive to admin. Also the founding myth of the apartheid state of South Africa when the term was first used for UBC.

My blog is not on Brian’s site, on blogger and not part of the institution. Marginal place to direct pot shots from. I like the fact it is not on my CV., not institutionally recognized. I had to update my CV on a university form to categorize all of my life to get points. The blogs weren’t on the CV. There was no space for them and I don’t want there to be a space. Extra liminal marginal space to think beyond the institution.

Second, think about student blogs as a space beyond, excessive, where students can take their own position on what we are doing in the classroom. I get my students to set up a blog for the courses they are taking that I’m teaching. They have the option of a UBC blog or external blog. None of them have chosen UBC. That’s the idea. They have ownership of the space. I have no power to delete their postings, tell them what color, what icons. It is their space where they answer back. I teach a course on bad Latin American literature and they like it. I tell them in the classroom why they should not like it, and then they tell me in their blogs why they DO like it. With the comments, others can chime in. Constructing a counter community, a back chat outside of the class. Enable disruption, critical thinking.

Q: You mention your blogs are separate. On Chronicle of Education, still an issue of people getting fired. How do you handle that from a tenure perspective.

A: It is one of the risks. The jury is still out if grad students who are going on the market, Chronicle of Higher Ed. Balance recklessness and risk with making it manageable. It is a risk also for students. Maybe we wait a while till we are hiring people and they HAVE to have a blog. It is always going to remain risky. Taught a course on Civil Rights in LA. A student’s paper doing a critical analysis of an article. He was critical. Second comment was from the AUTHOR of the paper. The author googled her name, discovered this jumped up student had seen her paper as poorly constructed, etc. The student was exposed to this possibility. Fortunately the author was kind. They could have written a much more unfriendly comment.

Q: Noticed about academic community, as much lip service paid towards open dialog, the amount of archived commentary and critical review of work outside of traditional pub streams is almost non existent. The notion of a public dialog about veracity, quality of work doesn’t happen. It happens chatting at conferences, with people you trust. The promise of blogging, esp with students, academics are going to be faced with more open, critical response. Unconstrained and not like typical academics.

Q: he’s describing accurately the N American academic tradition. Impression that in other cultures more efforts to engage with the public editorial space. Is your impression in other academic cultures, non north am, no western, the engagement with the public thourgh the blogosphere is happening.

A: Huge, important issue. The different ways of relating with public, intellectuals, different in France, Argentina. Against some versions of the public intellectual as well. Problematic category. The university wants you to serve the community in more and more trite ways, a market orientation. We have consumers, not students. I want to disrupt that a little bit too. Challenge that blogs and this tech pose for the institution.

A: Chris: the public conversation is happening more and more. But we are all working in a niche.


Sylvia Currie:
I’m totally an asynchronous multitasking person, so I have to stay focused. I have two parts because torn about what to focus on.

First, show you an online community called SCOPE but we can’t remember what it stands for m. I want to look at this, because we have some problems we need to solve, all around the creation of boundaries and how we extend beyond that. Then zone in on a seminar discussion taking place on blogging in education. Very active discussion. Trying to pull out highlights.

ScoPE
We started a couple of years ago, an open international online community. The pulse of the community is scheduled facilitated conversation (volunteer from community). We also envisioned at the time ongoing conversations. What we’ve found is that is not happening. One of the initial designs was based with an earlier online community from 1999. Relying on my old expertise and started to build in some areas we though would be useful, but haven’t been used. This is one example. Kaleidoscope. People can do whatever they want. Pose a question. It just hasn’t happened. People are doing that on their own blogs outside of the community. So we want to find ways to extend beyond that boundary. People are reading seminars through RSS feeds, familiar with what we are doing but not actively contributing. Who are these people and how do we keep track of them.

We created this SCOpe bloggers feed, the known blogger members and feeding that in. Mini step. Another example – we have this community library. The stupidest idea every. We have a podcast repository. Find this place to deposit a link to a podcast so other knows about it. No one has done anything there. Latest news – no news!

The seminar discussion over the past couple of weeks, about 40 active contributors who are posting, a whole lot of others reading. I like to include them as participants. Hard time keeping up.
One, pulling resources into a wiki. We usually do this alonga seminar. Have something substantial at the end of a couple of week. Example of a blog from Moosejaw. A terrific example of blogging in younger grades. She has a classroom blog, innovative. Kids Skyping. That is going ot get to their parents, community, more aware of what students are doing. They did a project to figure out what thousand looks like. Wiki and asked people to post their names until they reached 1000. One student’s blog. “About the blogger”, first time actually seen a blog for young young grades.

Messy map Mind Meister collaboratie mind map for key items from discussion. Next step will be to collaboratively write a book about blogging in education together. Create a space, you all can join. We are finding there are many great ideas.

Here are Sylvia’s Big Questions at http://www.wiki.northernvoice.ca//Social-Software-in-Education
What makes a successful student blog?
How do instructors design for collaboration?
Is there danger of new tools, old rules trend?

Q: I’m a SCOpe meber. International community, diverse view, but often similar challenges.

A: when I think of my own work at Aboriginal College. What I do here is at one end of the continuum and there at the other. The basics. So many concerns about privacy, about students posting things that might reflect badly on the institution. You come across people from other countries and it does not even come across their mind. How did we get so wrapped up in these issues.

A: Chris –making community from anybody. Be inspired. Commit an act of literature now. How do you MAKE community.

A: It depends on the kind of community. Through the history of online communities, the ones that have worked are communities of interest and support communities. CoPs have not worked. Hard to get them actually happening. Finding the right balance between the community and individual benefit. You have to figure out the ROI for the individual to participate in the community. For support and COI it is natural. “I need to engage to do what I want to do.” With CoP’s you don’t need to engage in a CoP. (NOTE: I would disagree with that. Maybe he is talking about mandated CoPs, not organic ones.)

A: D’Arcy – is it more about top down or bottom up. That’s what matters. By doing what they are doing, they are members of the community

A: Chris, new tools allow CoPs to emerge.

A: You talk about course management systems, RSS is that interstitial moment between the class, these spaces, nerve endings that link a community or campus outside a classroom, but integrated it into it. It is a different kind of space, about learning, about how you learn, anyplace, anytime. It’s a livable thing in some real way.