Skip to main content

Home/ beyondwebct/ Group items tagged calls

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Barbara Lindsey

A Brief Interview with Michael Wesch (The Creator of That Wonderful Video...) - John Ba... - 0 views

  • The Web speeds up the process of rebuttal, reply, and revision and calls forth a different approach. The radically collaborative technologies emerging on the Web create the possibility for doing scholarship in the mode of conversation rather than argument, or to transform the argument as war metaphor into something that suggests collaboration rather than combat. Personally, I prefer the metaphor of the dance and that we are all here in this webscape dancing and playing around with ideas. The best dancers are those that find a way to “lose themselves” in the music – pushing the limits of the dance without fear of tripping or falling because they know that it is all part of the dance.
  • On the next 10-20 years and social networking ... I think this will greatly depend on the structure of those social networking tools and what kinds of communication are made possible with these tools. For example, on Facebook there are “walls” and “discussion groups.” Both of these sections are for human communication, but they are structured differently and therefore elicit different kinds of conversations. Furthermore, they are used in ways beyond how they were intended. Even now, as I am answering multiple questions with one long comment at the bottom of a blog post, the structure of the medium is in some way affecting how I am responding. On a forum I would address each question individually in separate threads. These seemingly minor differences are important because all human relationships are mediated by communication.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      "All human relationships are mediated by communication."
  • if there is a global village, it is not a very equitable one, and if there is a tragedy of our times, it may be that we are all interconnected but we fail to see it and take care of our relationships with others. For me, the ultimate promise of digital technology is that it might enable us to truly see one another once again and all the ways we are interconnected. It might help us create a truly global view that can spark the kind of empathy we need to create a better world for all of humankind.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • First, everything including the environment, technology, economy, social structure, politics, religion, art and more are all interconnected. As I tried to illustrate in the video, this means that a change in one area (such as the way we communicate) can have a profound effect on everything else, including family, love, and our sense of being itself.
  • wanted to show people how digital technology has evolved and give them a sense of where it might be going and to give some momentum to the all-important conversation about the consequences of that on our global society.
  •  
    Michael Wesch explains the purpose of his video, The Machine is Us/ing Us
Barbara Lindsey

Schools starting to allow use of digital devices - 0 views

  • "We want them to start modeling what they're going to see when they get out of here," said Lee, who envisions someday replacing students' print planners with online calendars. Most of all, he wants to cultivate what he calls good digital citizenship.
  • Drawing inspiration from fake Twitter accounts that parody celebrities or historical figures, Haines has had his students tweet as characters from George Orwell's "Animal Farm."
  • There is little data on how many school districts across the country have policies allowing the use of cellphones and other digital devices in class. A 2009 U.S. Department of Education survey shows only 4 percent of public-school teachers say a handheld device is available in the classroom every day.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • "Everybody in the technology end of schools are talking about not so much loosening the reins as opening the opportunities for students," she said. "That's the world they live in - not in a classroom, in rows, with books in front of them."
  • "All the conversation, even at the grad-school level, is 'Put away your phones,' " said Sree Sreenivasan, a professor of digital media at Columbia University. "If I was a teacher, and as a parent, I would be concerned. Forty kids, all pulling out their cellphones - that's a total recipe for disaster."
  • "If you stopped and waited for every unknown to be solved, you'd never get anything done," he said.
  • "If a student is cheating, it's the same punishment as if they were using handwritten notes to cheat. If a student is using a cellphone to make threats, it's the same punishment as if they were making verbal threats," Ross said. "Cellphones didn't invent any of (those) things."
  • forcing students to pretend their phones don't exist when they enter school creates an "unrealistic environment" for children.
Barbara Lindsey

Free as in Freedom: The Power of Pull - John Seely Brown - 0 views

  • The 21st century has changed the game completely. The infrastructure is driven by the continual advances in computing, storage and bandwidth. There's no stability in sight.
  • In a world of increasingly rapid change, the half life of a given skill is constantly shrinking and the predictability of future needs is increasingly less certain. We're having to move from stocks to flows. This means we move from protecting knowledge assets to participating in knowledge flows. This means that our learning strategy moves to having a strong tacit component as against a hoarding mindset of stocking knowledge.
  • We're creating a lot of information everyday more in every two days than we did from the dawn of man to 2003.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • We need to rethink how we learn and deal with the tacit knowledge.
  • Dusty wanted to put Maui on the surfing map. Dusty found four peers in the same age group and decided to build a scheme of collaboration - the likes of which the world has never seen. Dusty was the first junior champion ever in Maui and came up with a new genre - aerial surfing
  • Here are some things they did in their learning community:They are willing to keep failing because they knew they could learn from failure.They collectively analysed each frame of videos of the best surfers across the world.The used video camera to capture and analyse their own moves. They deconstruct their own technique by watching each frame of their work on the beach.They pulled ideas from various sports - windsurfing, skateboarding, mountain biking, motorcross, etc. The cool stuff is they've taken ideas from different domains and applied them to their own domain. They've understood the idea of 'spikes', where they've travelled to the expertise hotspots for surfing across the world to learn their trade. Now they're a bit of a spike in themselves.
  • This is an example of deep collaborative learning with each other. They are people that are passionate about a trade and they chase extreme performance with a deep questing disposition. They learn themselves from the things that others are doing around them. They have a commitment to indwelling -- they soak up the world around them.
  • The second story JSB has is about WOW - The World of Warcraft. It's a massively multi-player online role-playing game (MMORPG). There's a reason we need to care. This is the first domain where we've discovered a place where we don't have diminishing returns, we have exponentially increasing returns. The sense of joint collective activity is pretty awesome as one of the TWU students pointed as well. The core of the game is really more the social life on the edge of the game. The edge is often called a knowledge economy. WOW is way too complicated to play without complex analysis tools and dashboards, but these dashboards are tailored to each player to measure their own performance and are a key to their mastery at the game. This is quite curious -- don't managers develop dashboards to look at their people? This is obviously a game changing way to self-reflect. The cool thing that goes is after action reviews -- this is very in tune with the Agile Retrospectives idea. This is an example of blending the tacit and the cognitive. This is collective indwelling and reflection. While they marinate and learn in a social context, they also reflect together when they're done, so they can learn from each other. This is the way grandmasters learn -- they practice with peers and then reflect on what they did. This is the way hackers practice their trade.
  • There's an incredibly rich knowledge economy around this game. On a typical night there are about 10-15000 new ideas coming up about the game. There are blizzard forums, databases, blogs, wikis, videos and what not. The way people absorb all of this is that guilds (player teams) self-organise into being a knowledge refining community to work together, curate content and then collectively learn amongst themselves. This is the idea of a personal learning network (PLN) IMO.
Barbara Lindsey

Smartphones and Tablets Will Take Over in 2011, Researchers Say - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • So-called public clouds — shared by a wide range of users, whether consumers or companies — will be “the dominant technology platform for the next 20 years,” Mr. Gens said.
  • 0 percent of new software offerings will be available as cloud services in 2011, according to IDC.
Barbara Lindsey

My School, Meet MySpace: Social Networking at School | Edutopia - 0 views

  • Months before the newly hired teachers at Philadelphia's Science Leadership Academy (SLA) started their jobs, they began the consuming work of creating the high school of their dreams -- without meeting face to face. They articulated a vision, planned curriculum, designed assessment rubrics, debated discipline policies, and even hammered out daily schedules using the sort of networking tools -- messaging, file swapping, idea sharing, and blogging -- kids love on sites such as MySpace.
  • hen, weeks before the first day of school, the incoming students jumped onboard -- or, more precisely, onto the Science Leadership Academy Web site -- to meet, talk with their teachers, and share their hopes for their education. So began a conversation that still perks along 24/7 in SLA classrooms and cyberspace. It's a bold experiment to redefine learning spaces, the roles and relationships of teachers and students, and the mission of the modern high school.
  • When I hear people say it's our job to create the twenty-first-century workforce, it scares the hell out of me," says Chris Lehmann, SLA's founding principal. "Our job is to create twenty-first-century citizens. We need workers, yes, but we also need scholars, activists, parents -- compassionate, engaged people. We're not reinventing schools to create a new version of a trade school. We're reinventing schools to help kids be adaptable in a world that is changing at a blinding rate."
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • It's the spirit of science rather than hardcore curriculum that permeates SLA. "In science education, inquiry-based learning is the foothold," Lehmann says. "We asked, 'What does it mean to build a school where everything is based on the core values of science: inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation, and reflection?'"
  • It means the first-year curriculum is built around essential questions: Who am I? What influences my identity? How do I interact with my world? In addition to science, math, and engineering, core courses include African American history, Spanish, English, and a basic how-to class in technology that also covers Internet safety and the ethical use of information and software. Classes focus less on facts to be memorized and more on skills and knowledge for students to master independently and incorporate into their lives. Students rarely take tests; they write reflections and do "culminating" projects. Learning doesn't merely cross disciplines -- it shatters outdated departmental divisions. Recently, for instance, kids studied atomic weights in biochemistry (itself a homegrown interdisciplinary course), did mole calculations in algebra, and created Dalton models (diagrams that illustrate molecular structures) in art.
  • This is Dewey for the digital age, old-fashioned progressive education with a technological twist.
  • computers and networking are central to learning at, and shaping the culture of, SLA. "
  • he zest to experiment -- and the determination to use technology to run a school not better, but altogether differently -- began with Lehmann and the teachers last spring when they planned SLA online. Their use of Moodle, an open source course-management system, proved so easy and inspired such productive collaboration that Lehmann adopted it as the school's platform. It's rare to see a dog-eared textbook or pad of paper at SLA; everybody works on iBooks. Students do research on the Internet, post assignments on class Moodle sites, and share information through forums, chat, bookmarks, and new software they seem to discover every day.
  • Teachers continue to use Moodle to plan, dream, and learn, to log attendance and student performance, and to talk about everything -- from the student who shows up each morning without a winter coat to cool new software for tagging research sources. There's also a schoolwide forum called SLA Talk, a combination bulletin board, assembly, PA system, and rap session.
  • Web technology, of course, can do more than get people talking with those they see every day; people can communicate with anyone anywhere. Students at SLA are learning how to use social-networking tools to forge intellectual connections.
  • In October, Lehmann noticed that students were sorting themselves by race in the lunchroom and some clubs. He felt disturbed and started a passionate thread on self-segregation.
  • "Having the conversation changed the way kids looked at themselves," he says.
  • "What I like best about this school is the sense of community," says student Hannah Feldman. "You're not just here to learn, even though you do learn a lot. It's more like a second home."
  • As part of the study of memoirs, for example, Alexa Dunn's English class read Funny in Farsi, Firoozeh Dumas's account of growing up Iranian in the United States -- yes, the students do read books -- and talked with the author in California via Skype. The students also wrote their own memoirs and uploaded them to SLA's network for the teacher and class to read and edit. Then, digital arts teacher Marcie Hull showed the students GarageBand, which they used to turn their memoirs into podcasts. These they posted on the education social-networking site EduSpaces (formerly Elgg); they also posted blogs about the memoirs.
Barbara Lindsey

I'm So Totally, Digitally Close to You - Clive Thompson - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • unless you visited each friend’s page every day, it might be days or weeks before you noticed the news, or you might miss it entirely.
  • He developed something he called News Feed, a built-in service that would actively broadcast changes in a user’s page to every one of his or her friends.
  • Instead, they would just log into Facebook, and News Feed would appear: a single page that — like a social gazette from the 18th century — delivered a long list of up-to-the-minute gossip about their friends, around the clock, all in one place. “A stream of everything that’s going on in their lives,” as Zuckerberg put it.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • When students woke up that September morning and saw News Feed, the first reaction, generally, was one of panic.
  • He created a Facebook group demanding Zuckerberg either scrap News Feed or provide privacy options.
  • Zuckerberg, surprised by the outcry, quickly made two decisions. The first was to add a privacy feature to News Feed, letting users decide what kind of information went out. But the second decision was to leave News Feed otherwise intact. He suspected that once people tried it and got over their shock, they’d like it.He was right. Within days, the tide reversed.
  • he bits of trivia that News Feed delivered gave them more things to talk about — Why do you hate Kiefer Sutherland? — when they met friends face to face in class or at a party. Trends spread more quickly. When one student joined a group — proclaiming her love of Coldplay or a desire to volunteer for Greenpeace — all her friends instantly knew, and many would sign up themselves. Users’ worries about their privacy seemed to vanish within days, boiled away by their excitement at being so much more connected to their friends.
  • It catalyzed a massive boom in the site’s growth.
Barbara Lindsey

Web 2.0: What does it constitute? | 11 Feb 2008 | ComputerWeekly.com - 0 views

  • O'Reilly identified Google as "the standard bearer for Web 2.0", and pointed out the differences between it and predecessors such as Netscape, which tried to adapt for the web the business model established by Microsoft and other PC software suppliers.
  • Google "began its life as a native web application, never sold or packaged, but delivered as a service, with customers paying, directly or indirectly.
  • perpetual beta, as O'Reilly later dubbed it
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Perhaps the most important breakthrough was Google's willingness to relinquish control of the user-end of the transaction, instead of trying to lock them in with proprietary technology and restrictive licensing
  • O'Reilly took a second Web 2.0 principle from Peer-to-Peer pioneer BitTorrent, which works by completely decentralising the delivery of files, with every client also functioning as a server. The more popular a file, is, the faster it can be served, since there are more users providing bandwidth and fragments of the file. Thus, "the service automatically gets better the more people use it".
  • Taking another model from open source, users are treated as "co-developers", actively encouraged to contribute, and monitored in real time to see what they are using, and how they are using it.
  • "Until Web 2.0 the learning curve to creating websites was quite high, complex, and a definite barrier to entry," says the third of our triumvirate of Tims, Tim Bray, director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems.
  • Web 2.0 takes some of its philosophical underpinning from James Surowiecki's book The Wisdom of Crowds, which asserts that the aggregated insights of large groups of diverse people can provide better answers and innovations than individual experts.
  • In practice, even fewer than 1% of people may be making a useful contribution - but these may be the most energetic and able members of a very large community. In 2006 1,000 people, just 0.003% of its users, contributed around two-thirds of Wikipedia's edits.
  • Ajax speeds up response times by enabling just part of a page to be updated, instead of downloading a whole new page. Nielsen's objections include that this breaks the "back" button - the ability to get back to where you've been, which Nielsen says is the second most used feature in Web navigation.
  • "Everybody who has a Web browser has got that platform," says Berners-Lee, in a podcast available on IBM's developerWorks site. "So the nice thing about it is when you do code up an Ajax implementation, other people can take it and play with it."
  • Web 2.0 is a step on the way to the Semantic Web, a long-standing W3C initiative to create a standards-based framework able to understand the links between data which is related in the real world, and follow that data wherever it resides, regardless of application and database boundaries.
  • The problem with Web 2.0, Pemberton says, is that it "partitions the web into a number of topical sub-webs, and locks you in, thereby reducing the value of the network as a whole."
  • How do you decide which social networking site to join? he asks. "Do you join several and repeat the work?" With the Semantic Web's Resource Description Framework (RDF), you won't need to sign up to separate networks, and can keep ownership of your data. "You could describe it as a CSS for meaning: it allows you to add a small layer of markup to your page that adds machine-readable semantics."
  • The problems with Web 2.0 lock-in which Pemberton describes, were illustrated when a prominent member of the active 1%, Robert Scoble, ran a routine called Plaxo to try to extract details of his 5,000 contacts from Facebook, in breach of the site's terms of use, and had his account disabled. Although he has apparently had his account reinstated, the furore has made the issue of Web 2.0 data ownership and portability fiercely topical.
  • when Google announced its OpenSocial set of APIs, which will enable developers to create portable applications and bridges between social networking websites, Facebook was not among those taking part. Four years after O'Reilly attempted to define Web 2.0, Google, it seems, remains the standard-bearer, while others are forgetting what it was supposed to be about.
Barbara Lindsey

Lead article: How did a couple of veteran classroom teachers end up in a space like thi... - 0 views

  • With social networking and media-sharing practices rapidly assuming a central role in our professional and personal lives, teachers have a responsibility to bring these practices into the classroom.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Why responsibility? Even if it doesn't serve a pedagogical purpose? Advance the learning that is supposed to take place?
  • technology uber-fans gush over their embrace of every new gadget, technology and practice, affixing computer-driven activities onto factory-model teaching practices as shiny appendages, resulting in a ‘technology façade’
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Well, I would have a problem making a direct connection between über-fans and factory-model teaching proponents. I would like to think the über-fans lean more towards constructivist practices.
  • This does not mean that traditional literacies of critical reading, thinking and communication must make way for emerging literacies of collaboration, online communication and multimedia navigation. It does mean that we have to transform our teaching to accommodate them all effectively.
  • ...37 more annotations...
  • a tension between their passions and interests and the Academy’s curricular obligations. When woven into the fabric of the classroom, blogs allow the participants to articulate their feelings as a way of addressing these tensions. As well, blogs provide a space where the participants’ interests and passions can bubble forth for the enrichment of the group.
  • By blogging effectively within classroom settings, we can mentor learner forays into public spaces.
  • We wish to emphasise the importance of distinguishing between using blogs as holders of factory-model teaching practices, and taking advantage of their connectivity and transparency to deepen and liberate learning from the confines of stagnant, teacher-centric models. Ignoring the transformative capabilities of connectivity, some teachers using blogs merely reproduce offline practices online. Limiting classroom blogging to one-way transactions of information and directives from teacher to learners may add convenience and efficiency to the classroom, but does nothing for learning itself. Nor does assigning and directing wooden, forced, framed discussions online, which result in little more than mind-numbing ‘busy work’. We belittle and infantalise our students, further rewarding docility and disengagement if we over-direct posts by giving minute instructions as to their content, number and direction.
  • classroom blogging,
  • focusing on emerging pedagogy rather than tools
  • We will examine hyperlinked slow-blogging as reflective learning; multimedia, interactive blogging as action-based learning; and connected, transparent blogging as social learning.
  • Reflection-through-writing is a powerful aid to information retention, which is poor unless the lesson is repeated in a variety of contexts
  • The learner, in the act of writing down what s/he has learned, solidifies understanding and reveals areas of confusion.
  • Traditionally this kind of reflective narrative, found in journals and portfolios, has helped learners gain skill at meta-discourse and take responsibility for learning in liberal arts contexts. Teachers follow progress and detect comprehension gaps while coming to know learners’ styles, contexts and preferences. Learner-teacher interactions through reflective writing can deepen important bonds, an important indicator of effective learning (Raider Roth 2005).
  • different kinds of learning contexts including vocational by inviting learners to contextualise the learning in their own way within personal experience, thereby making the learning their own (
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      An aspect of constructivist teaching and learning.
  • But if limited to the kinds of practices achieved offline, while efficient and convenient, and affording keyboarding practice, this use ignores new literacies of connectivity, collaboration, communication and multimedia expression. It also leaves out learners for whom written reflection is not always optimal or possible.
  • Although a blog organises itself, ordinarily and on first view, in reverse chronological order, the latest post being most prominent, tagging and hyperlinking allow for more associative, lateral ways of organising and connecting thoughts. Even the novice learner can transcend the limits of time and linearity in linking nascent ideas, discoveries and meta-discourse on the learning, replacing ‘…the essentially linear, fixed methods that had produced the triumphs of capitalism and industrialism with what are essentially poetic machines that capture and create the anarchic brilliance of human imagination’
  • Learners can link to practices other than written as they struggle to articulate and thus retain and apply what they have learned. For example, some learners will naturally link to audio rather than to text files of their reflections; others will link to images they have taken that are reflective of the learning process and outcomes.
  • thereby extending the reflective practice into synthesis and analysis and invention
  • If we know we are being read, that our explorations have value out in the world, we tend to take more care with our expression and our thinking as communiqués to the Other as well as to the self.
  • From learner posts, the teacher can point to models and questions, to moments of creative and critical success. Learning deepens, writing strengthens: these successes in turn pull the writer back to the blog again and again, to reflect and to improve thinking and expression skills.
  • That these messages to the self (and by extension, to the class and the world) are archived by date and category (or tag) allows them to take their place in an ongoing narrative of the learning.
  • Linking out connects us to more than ourselves. So, in this time of crumbling communities and the cult of the individual, our learners can, through active hyperlinking within a reflective learning practice, become more self-aware rather than more self-absorbed.
  • In selecting media, learners gain critical awareness of the grammar of image and sound as well as language. They learn to evaluate the impact of visual media on their discipline, on their society and on their lives as they develop skill at understanding structure, the arc of an argument, the use of transitions.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      But don't learners need structured guidance in order to be able to do this successfully?
  • Hendrik and Ornberg have asserted, that ‘…audio is more effective than text for creating a sense of co-presence’
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Reactions to this statement?
  • Students learn the discipline by doing the discipline
  • Evie’s work on the web, and in turn catapulted one of our learners into the role of activist and advocate for a cause about which she cared deeply.
  • By the end of the semester, Evie was not only a committed and involved activist for women’s rights, but a published photographer.
  • And so, the apprentice became the master, the student became the teacher, and Sean’s blog is fulfilling by becoming a valued resource for a teacher in Argentina and for her students as well.
  • Her blogging world and her real world became forever ‘intertwingled’ when she started leaving comments on the blogs of some of the graffiti artists she was following, and they, in turn, left comments on her blog. What followed was a flurry of comments, Instant Messaging (IM) conversations, Skype (r) chats and blogposts each taking Claire ever closer to the very people she has studied and admired and analysed…from afar. After the class ended (and after Claire graduated) Claire’s interest in graffiti continued.
  • But just as in the case of Sean, Claire went from being the observer to participant and now to a creator of graffiti, thanks in part to the connections made via social software tools.
  • it is not difficult to see how a tool such as a blog can keep learners immersed in course content in a way that traditional, teacher and textbook-centric teaching simply cannot.
  • A third, and perhaps most significant, role for classroom blogs to play, then, is in social learning, in the forming of close bonds within the learning community itself and with the outside world. Blogs afford learners a strong sense of belonging to a dynamic learning collaborative, following the apprenticeship model of learning, in which everyone is expert and apprentice to one another
  • The job of the teacher using social software is to create an understanding in and amongst the participants that they need to work together as a social entity, as a collaborative group, that is linked to and communicating among themselves as well as with the world.
  • Student bloggers learn by collaborating with one another through online group projects and through discussions, both formal and informal, that spring up on a central course blog, what we call the ‘Motherblog’, and by linking to one another within their own blogs, and creating feedback loops through the commenting function. Students also learn from one another through the blog archives, which grow year by year. Although we still teach in a departmentalised, semesterised system, the archiving subverts the notion of isolated learning segments by carrying the blog’s accumulated wisdom from group to group, informing the new learners’ experiences by adding context, models and inspiration
  • And unlike a discussion board that might be hosted on a course management tool such as Blackboard, these multimedia posts and comments are archived, hyperlinked and are open and available to all and not just the class.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Critical difference.
  • Learners and teachers bring into the community discussion their own expertise, prior learning, cultural perspectives. They can converse here about what interests them about what they are studying. This kind of informal discussion weaves the threads of collective intelligence, and it helps learners to think beyond the strict confines of the syllabus, seeing connections to themselves and the world.
  • The class uses Flickr to collect and share images to be used in image-only essays and reflections, and in multimedia texts.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      How interesting.
  • As Garrison and Anderson (2003) point out, ‘…a community of learners is an essential, core element of an educational experience when higher-order learning is the desired outcome’ (2003:22)
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      A good rationale for collaborative engagement.
  • Using blogs as a complement to the face-to-face classroom environment not only provides more time on task for the learners, but if left open to world (as opposed to behind a firewall or a password or contained within the shell of a Learning Management System) these tools allow the real world - those crucial informal learning networks - into our classrooms…and the remarkable connections that happen as a result.
  • We can invite the outside world into the course intentionally, by asking experts in our field to participate in time-limited blog-based discussions with our learners. In these ‘blogging invitationals’ our learners can interact with professionals, joining the conversation of the real-world discipline in a meaningful way.
  • Other powerful connections with the world outside the classroom can occur through inter-classroom or inter-school blogging exchanges, or in service-learning initiatives, in which university learners, for example, mentor younger learners via connected blogging and feedback through comments, classroom to classroom, as writing buddies.
Barbara Lindsey

Bill Ferriter | Teacher Leaders Network - 0 views

  • Doesn’t Pink talk about this in A Whole New Mind?  Here’s a quote: “While detailed knowledge of a single area once guaranteed success, today the top rewards go to those who can operate with equal aplomb in starkly different realms. I call these people “boundary crossers.” They develop expertise in multiple spheres, they speak in different languages, and they find joy in the rich variety of human experience. They live multi lives—because that’s more interesting, and nowadays more effective.” (Kindle Location 1692)
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      This is where we should shine!
  • Recently, I've tinkered with a system to assess my students' participation in Voicethread conversations.  Essentially mirroring the reflective aspects of Konrad's blogging handouts, I've decided to ask my students the following four questions while we're working with a new Voicethread: Highlight a comment from our Voicethread conversation that closely matches your own thinking.   Why does this comment resonate---or make sense to---you? Highlight a comment from our Voicethread conversation that you respectfully disagree with.  If you were to engage in a conversation with the commenter, what evidence/argument would you use to persuade them to change their point of view? Highlight a comment from our Voicethread conversation that challenged your thinking in a good way and/or made you rethink one of your original ideas.  What about the new comment was challenging?  What are you going to do now that your original belief was challenged?  Will you change yoru mind?  Will you do more researching/thinking/talking with others?
  • The cool part about assessing Voicethread presentations this way is that each question essenitally forces my students to interact with our conversation in a really meaningful way.  To craft careful answers, they must truly consider the comments of others---an essential skill for promoting collaborative versus competitive dialogue---and compare those comments against their own beliefs and preconceived notions.  That's metacognition at its best! What's even better is that when students know that these questions form the basis of our Voicethread assessment from the beginning of a conversation, participation level rise remarkably.  While students are looking for project reflection comments, they often end up highly motivated to share their thinking with peers. 
Barbara Lindsey

Planning for Neomillennial Learning Styles: Implications for Investments in Technology ... - 0 views

  • Research indicates that each of these media, when designed for education, fosters particular types of interactions that enable—and undercut—various learning styles.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      How much do we know about our students' learning styles? How do we know this?
  • Over the next decade, three complementary interfaces will shape how people learn
  • The familiar "world to the desktop." Provides access to distant experts and archives and enables collaborations, mentoring relationships, and virtual communities of practice. This interface is evolving through initiatives such as Internet2. "Alice in Wonderland" multiuser virtual environments (MUVEs). Participants' avatars (self-created digital characters) interact with computer-based agents and digital artifacts in virtual contexts. The initial stages of studies on shared virtual environments are characterized by advances in Internet games and work in virtual reality. Ubiquitous computing. Mobile wireless devices infuse virtual resources as we move through the real world. The early stages of "augmented reality" interfaces are characterized by research on the role of "smart objects" and "intelligent contexts" in learning and doing.
  • ...48 more annotations...
  • This immersion in virtual environments and augmented realities shapes participants' learning styles beyond what using sophisticated computers and telecommunications has fostered thus far, with multiple implications for higher education.
  • Beyond actional and symbolic immersion, advances in interface technology are now creating virtual environments and augmented realities that induce a psychological sense of sensory and physical immersion.
  • The research on virtual reality Salzman and I conducted on frames of reference found that the exocentric and the egocentric FORs have different strengths for learning. Our studies established that learning ideally involves a "bicentric" perspective alternating between egocentric and exocentric FORs.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Could we make the argument that this is one of the main goals of language programs?
  • But what is so special about the egocentric perspectives and situated learning now enabled by emerging media? After all, each of us lives with an egocentric perspective in the real world and has many opportunities for situated learning without using technology. One attribute that makes mediated immersion different and powerful is the ability to access information resources and psychosocial community distributed across distance and time, broadening and deepening experience. A second important attribute is the ability to create interactions and activities in mediated experience not possible in the real world, such as teleporting within a virtual environment, enabling a distant person to see a real-time image of your local environment, or interacting with a (simulated) chemical spill in a busy public setting. Both of these attributes are actualized in the Alice-in-Wonderland interface.
  • Notion of place is layered/blended/multiple; mobility and nomadicity prevalent among dispersed, fragmented, fluctuating habitats (for example, coffeehouses near campus)
  • Guided social constructivism and situated learning as major forms of pedagogy
  • he defining quality of a learning community is that there is a culture of learning, in which everyone is involved in a collective effort of understanding. There are four characteristics that such a culture must have: (1) diversity of expertise among its members, who are valued for their contributions and given support to develop, (2) a shared objective of continually advancing the collective knowledge and skills, (3) an emphasis on learning how to learn, and (4) mechanisms for sharing what is learned. If a learning community is presented with a problem, then the learning community can bring its collective knowledge to bear on the problem. It is not necessary that each member assimilate everything that the community knows, but each should know who within the community has relevant expertise to address any problem. This is a radical departure from the traditional view of schooling, with its emphasis on individual knowledge and performance, and the expectation that students will acquire the same body of knowledge at the same time.26
  • Peer-developed and peer-rated forms of assessment complement faculty grading, which is often based on individual accomplishment in a team performance context  Assessments provide formative feedback on instructional effectiveness
  • Multipurpose habitats—creating layered/blended/personalizable places rather than specialized locations (such as computer labs)
  • o the extent that some of these ideas about neomillennial learning styles are accurate, campuses that make strategic investments in physical plant, technical infrastructure, and professional development along the dimensions suggested will gain a considerable competitive advantage in both recruiting top students and teaching them effectively.
  • Net Generation learning styles stem primarily from the world-to-the-desktop interface; however, the growing prevalence of interfaces to virtual environments and augmented realities is beginning to foster so-called neomillennial learning styles in users of all ages.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      What is the timeline?
  • Immersion is the subjective impression that one is participating in a comprehensive, realistic experience.
  • Inducing a participant's symbolic immersion involves triggering powerful semantic associations via the content of an experience.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Felice's Utopian City
  • The capability of computer interfaces to foster psychological immersion enables technology-intensive educational experiences that draw on a powerful pedagogy: situated learning.
  • The major schools of thought cited are behaviorist theories of learning (presentational instruction), cognitivist theories of learning (tutoring and guided learning by doing), and situated theories of learning (mentoring and apprenticeships in communities of practice).
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      What kinds of learning environments do you prefer and what kinds do you create for your students?
  • Situated learning requires authentic contexts, activities, and assessment coupled with guidance from expert modeling, mentoring, and "legitimate peripheral participation."8 As an example of legitimate peripheral participation, graduate students work within the laboratories of expert researchers, who model the practice of scholarship. These students interact with experts in research as well as with other members of the research team who understand the complex processes of scholarship to varying degrees. While in these laboratories, students gradually move from novice researchers to more advanced roles, with the skills and expectations for them evolving.
  • Potentially quite powerful, situated learning is much less used for instruction than behaviorist or cognitivist approaches. This is largely because creating tacit, relatively unstructured learning in complex real-world settings is difficult.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Not too far in the future!
  • However, virtual environments and ubiquitous computing can draw on the power of situated learning by creating immersive, extended experiences with problems and contexts similar to the real world.9 In particular, MUVEs and real-world settings augmented with virtual information provide the capability to create problem-solving communities in which participants can gain knowledge and skills through interacting with other participants who have varied levels of skills, enabling legitimate peripheral participation driven by intrinsic sociocultural forces.
  • Situated learning is important in part because of the crucial issue of transfer. Transfer is defined as the application of knowledge learned in one situation to another situation and is demonstrated if instruction on a learning task leads to improved performance on a transfer task, typically a skilled performance in a real-world setting
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      One of the most difficult skills to master.
  • Moreover, the evolution of an individual's or group's identity is an important type of learning for which simulated experiences situated in virtual environments or augmented realities are well suited. Reflecting on and refining an individual identity is often a significant issue for higher education students of all ages, and learning to evolve group and organizational identity is a crucial skill in enabling innovation and in adapting to shifting contexts.
  • Immersion is important in this process of identity exploration because virtual identity is unfettered by physical attributes such as gender, race, and disabilities.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Don't agree with this. We come to any environment with our own baggage and we do not interact in a neutral social context.
  • Thanks to out-of-game trading of in-game items, Norrath, the virtual setting of the MMOG EverQuest, is the seventy-seventh largest economy in the real world, with a GNP per capita between that of Russia and Bulgaria. One platinum piece, the unit of currency in Norrath, trades on real world exchange markets higher than both the Yen and the Lira (Castronova, 2001).14
  • Multiple teams of students can access the MUVE simultaneously, each individual manipulating an avatar which is "sent back in time" to this virtual environment. Students must collaborate to share the data each team collects. Beyond textual conversation, students can project to each other "snapshots" of their current individual point of view (when someone has discovered an item of general interest) and also can "teleport" to join anyone on their team for joint investigation. Each time a team reenters the world, several months of time have passed in River City, so learners can track the dynamic evolution of local problems.
  • In our research on this educational MUVE based on situated learning, we are studying usability, student motivation, student learning, and classroom implementation issues. The results thus far are promising: All learners are highly motivated, including students typically unengaged in classroom settings. All students build fluency in distributed modes of communication and expression and value using multiple media because each empowers different types of communication, activities, experiences, and expressions. Even typically low-performing students can master complex inquiry skills and sophisticated content. Shifts in the pedagogy within the MUVE alter the pattern of student performance.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Would like to see research on this.
  • Research shows that many participants value this functionality and choose to access the Web page after leaving the museum.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      More could be done with this.
  • Participants in these distributed simulations use location-aware handheld computers (with GPS technology), allowing users to physically move throughout a real-world location while collecting place-dependent simulated field data, interviewing virtual characters, and collaboratively investigating simulated scenarios.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Much better
  • Initial research on Environmental Detectives and other AR-based educational simulations demonstrates that this type of immersive, situated learning can effectively engage students in critical thinking about authentic scenarios.
  • Students were most effective in learning and problem-solving when they collectively sought, sieved, and synthesized experiences rather than individually locating and absorbing information from some single best source.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      How does this 'fit' learning goals and teaching styles in our program?
  • Rheingold's forecasts draw on lifestyles seen at present among young people who are high-end users of new media
  • Rather than having core identities defined through a primarily local set of roles and relationships, people would express varied aspects of their multifaceted identities through alternate extended experiences in distributed virtual environments and augmented realities.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      How is this different from current experiences for individuals working within/across different social groups and boundaries?
  • one-third of U.S. households now have broadband access to the Internet. In the past three years, 14 million U.S. families have linked their computers with wireless home networks. Some 55 percent of Americans now carry cell phones
  • Mitchell's forecasts25 are similar to Rheingold's in many respects. He too envisions largely tribal lifestyles distributed across dispersed, fragmented, fluctuating habitats: electronic nomads wandering among virtual campfires. People's senses and physical agency are extended outward and into the intangible, at considerable cost to individual privacy. Individual identity is continuously reformed via an ever-shifting series of networking with others and with tools. People express themselves through nonlinear, associational webs of representations rather than linear "stories" and co-design services rather than selecting a precustomized variant from a menu of possibilities.
  • More and more, though, people of all ages will have lifestyles involving frequent immersion in both virtual and augmented reality. How might distributed, immersive media be designed specifically for education, and what neomillennial learning styles might they induce?
  • Mediated immersion creates distributed learning communities, which have different strengths and limits than location-bound learning communities confined to classroom settings and centered on the teacher and archival materials.27
  • Neomillenial Versus Millennial Learning Styles
  • Emphasis is placed on implications for strategic investments in physical plant, technology infrastructure, and professional development.
  • such as textbooks linked to course ratings by students)
  • Mirroring": Immersive virtual environments provide replicas of distant physical settings
  • Middleware, interoperability, open content, and open source
  • Finding information Sequential assimilation of linear information stream
  • Student products generally tests or papers Grading centers on individual performance
  • These ideas are admittedly speculative rather than based on detailed evidence and are presented to stimulate reaction and dialogue about these trends.
  • f we accept much of the analysis above
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      But have they made the case for its educational value?
  • students of all ages with increasingly neomillennial learning styles will be drawn to colleges and universities that have these capabilities. Four implications for investments in professional development also are apparent. Faculty will increasingly need capabilities in:
  • Some of these shifts are controversial for many faculty; all involve "unlearning" almost unconscious beliefs, assumptions, and values about the nature of teaching, learning, and the academy. Professional development that requires unlearning necessitates high levels of emotional/social support in addition to mastering the intellectual/technical dimensions involved. The ideal form for this type of professional development is distributed learning communities so that the learning process is consistent with the knowledge and culture to be acquired. In other words, faculty must themselves experience mediated immersion and develop neomillennial learning styles to continue teaching effectively as the nature of students alters.
  • Differences among individuals are greater than dissimilarities between groups, so students in any age cohort will present a mixture of neomillennial, millennial, and traditional learning styles
  • The technologies discussed are emerging rather than mature, so their final form and influences on users are not fully understood. A substantial number of faculty and administrators will likely dismiss and resist some of the ideas and recommendations presented here.
Barbara Lindsey

Convenience, Communications, and Control: How Students Use Technology | Resources | EDU... - 0 views

  • They are characterized as preferring teamwork, experiential activities, and the use of technology
  • Doing is more important than knowing, and learning is accomplished through trial and error as opposed to a logical and rule-based approach.2 Similarly, Paul Hagner found that these students not only possess the skills necessary to use these new communication forms, but there is an ever increasing expectation on their part that these new communication paths be used
  • Much of the work to date, while interesting and compelling, is intuitive and largely based on qualitative data and observation.
  • ...34 more annotations...
  • There is an inexorable trend among college students to universal ownership, mobility, and access to technology.
  • Students were asked about the applications they used on their electronic devices. They reported that they use technology first for educational purposes, followed by communication.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      All self-reported. Would have been powerful if could have actually tracked a representative sample and compared actual use with reported use.
  • presentation software was driven primarily by the requirements of the students' major and the curriculum.
  • Communications and entertainment are very much related to gender and age.
  • From student interviews, a picture emerged of student technology use driven by the demands of the major and the classes that students take. Seniors reported spending more time overall on a computer than do freshmen, and they reported greater use of a computer at a place of employment. Seniors spent more hours on the computer each week in support of their educational activities and also more time on more advanced applications—spreadsheets, presentations, and graphics.
  • Confirming what parents suspect, students with the lowest grade point averages (GPAs) spend significantly more time playing computer games; students with the highest GPAs spend more hours weekly using the computer in support of classroom activities. At the University of Minnesota, Crookston, students spent the most hours on the computer in support of classroom activities. This likely reflects the deliberate design of the curriculum to use a laptop extensively. In summary, the curriculum's technology requirements are major motivators for students to learn to use specialized software.
  • The interviews indicated that students are skilled with basic office suite applications but tend to know just enough technology functionality to accomplish their work; they have less in-depth application knowledge or problem solving skills.
  • According to McEuen, student technology skills can be likened to writing skills: Students come to college knowing how to write, but they are not developed writers. The analogy holds true for information technology, and McEuen suggested that colleges and universities approach information technology in the same way they approach writing.6
  • he major requires the development of higher-level skill sets with particular applications.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Not really quantitative--self-reported data back by selected qualitative interviews
  • The comparative literature on student IT skill self-assessment suggests that students overrate their skills; freshmen overrate their skills more than seniors, and men overrate their skills more than women.7 Our data supports these conclusions. Judy Doherty, director of the Student Technologies Resource Group at Colgate University, remarked on student skill assessment, "Students state in their job applications that they are good if not very good, but when tested their skills are average to poor, and they need a lot of training."8
  • Mary Jane Smetanka of the Minneapolis–St. Paul Star Tribune reported that some students are so conditioned by punch-a-button problem solving on computers that they approach problems with a scattershot impulsiveness instead of methodically working them through. In turn, this leads to problem-solving difficulties.
  • We expected to find that the Net Generation student prefers classes that use technology. What we found instead is a bell curve with a preference for a moderate use of technology in the classroom (see Figure 1).
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      More information needs to be given to find out why--may be tool and method not engaging.
  • It is not surprising that if technology is used well by the instructor, students will come to appreciate its benefits.
  • A student's major was also an important predictor of preferences for technology in the classroom (see Table 3), with engineering students having the highest preference for technology in the classroom (67.8 percent), followed by business students (64.3 percent).
  • Humanities 7.7% 47.9% 40.2
  • he highest scores were given to improved communications, followed by factors related to the management of classroom activities. Lower impact activities had to do with comprehension of classroom materials (complex concepts).
  • I spend more time engaged in course activities in those courses that require me to use technology.
  • The instructors' use of technology in my classes has increased my interest in the subject matter. 3.25 Classes that use information technology are more likely to focus on real-world tasks and examples.
  • Interestingly, students do not feel that use of information technology in classes greatly increases the amount of time engaged with course activities (3.22 mean).12 This is in direct contrast to faculty perceptions reported in an earlier study, where 65 percent of faculty reported they perceived that students spend more time engaged with course materials
  • Only 12.7 percent said the most valuable benefit was improved learning; 3.7 percent perceived no benefit whatsoever. Note that students could only select one response, so more than 12.7 percent may have felt learning was improved, but it was not ranked highest. These findings compare favorably with a study done by Douglas Havelka at the University of Miami in Oxford, Ohio, who identified the top six benefits of the current implementation of IT as improving work efficiency, affecting the way people behave, improving communications, making life more convenient, saving time, and improving learning ability.14
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Would have been good to know exactly what kinds of technologies were meant here.
  • Our data suggest that we are at best at the cusp of technologies being employed to improve learning.
  • The interactive features least used by faculty were the features that students indicated contributed the most to their learning.
  • he students in this study called our attention to performance by noting an uneven diffusion of innovation using this technology. This may be due, in part, to faculty or student skill. It may also be due to a lack of institutional recognition of innovation, especially as the successful use of course management systems affects or does not affect faculty tenure, promotion, and merit decisions
  • we found that many of the students most skilled in the use of technology had mixed feelings about technology in the classroom.
  • What we found was that many necessary skills had to be learned at the college or university and that the motivation for doing so was very much tied to the requirements of the curriculum. Similarly, the students in our survey had not gained the necessary skills to use technology in support of academic work outside the classroom. We found a significant need for further training in the use of information technology in support of learning and problem-solving skills.
  • Course management systems were used most by both faculty and students for communication of information and administrative activities and much less in support of learning.
  • In 1997, Michael Hooker proclaimed, "higher education is on the brink of a revolution." Hooker went on to note that two of the greatest challenges our institutions face are those of "harnessing the power of digital technology and responding to the information revolution."18 Hooker and many others, however, did not anticipate the likelihood that higher education's learning revolution would be a journey of a thousand miles rather than a discrete event. Indeed, a study of learning's last great revolution—the invention of moveable type—reveals, too, a revolution conducted over centuries leading to the emergence of a publishing industry, intellectual property rights law, the augmentation of customized lectures with textbooks, and so forth.
  • Both the ECAR study on faculty use of course management systems and this study of student experiences with information technology concluded that, while information technology is indeed making important inroads into classroom and learning activities, to date the effects are largely in the convenience of postsecondary teaching and learning and do not yet constitute a "learning revolution." This should not surprise us. The invention of moveable type enhanced, nearly immediately, access to published information and reduced the time needed to produce new publications. This invention did not itself change literacy levels, teaching styles, learning styles, or other key markers of a learning revolution. These changes, while catalyzed by the new technology, depended on slower social changes to institutions. I believe that is what we are witnessing in higher education today.
  • The institutions chosen represent a nonrepresentative mix of the different types of higher education institution in the United States, in terms of Carnegie class as well as location, source of funding, and levels of technology emphasis. Note, however, that we consider our findings to be instructive rather than conclusive of student experiences at different types of Carnegie institutions.
  • Qualitative data were collected by means of focus groups and individual interviews. We interviewed undergraduate students, administrators, and individuals identified as experts in the field of student technology use in the classroom. Student focus groups and interviews of administrators were conducted at six of the thirteen schools participating in the study.
Barbara Lindsey

After Frustrations in Second Life, Colleges Look to New Virtual Worlds - Technology - T... - 0 views

  • It turns out that virtual worlds are at their best when they look nothing like a traditional campus. Professors are finding that they can stage medical simulations, guide students through the inside of cell structures, or pre­sent other imaginative teaching exercises that cannot be done in a physical classroom.
  • OpenSimulator, and it is essentially a free knockoff of Second Life
  • The most ambitious attempt to build an education-friendly virtual world is a project called Open Cobalt,
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • led by researchers at Duke University
  • Any college with a spare server and some staff time can use the OpenSimulator software and play God to a virtual world.
  • The main request is the ability to limit access to students in a course, which the group can do.
  • To counter these new options, Linden Lab is testing a product that would let colleges install a world on their own servers and limit access to students and professors. Case Western is among those trying it out for its virtual campus.
  • Maybe 3-D online environments are just one of those technologies that sound cool but never fully materialize, like personal jetpacks. Trying to make the World Wide Web look like the real world misses the new kinds of things the Internet can do.
  • "We don't ­really understand what we can do and what we can't do with this tool for education yet, so it's more exploratory now," said Peter J. Ludlow, a philosophy professor at Northwestern University who studies virtual worlds. "We know there's something here, but we don't know what yet."
  •  
    It turns out that virtual worlds are at their best when they look nothing like a traditional campus. Professors are finding that they can stage medical simulations, guide students through the inside of cell structures, or pre sent other imaginative teaching exercises that cannot be done in a physical classroom.
Barbara Lindsey

Web Site Allows Students to Rate Professors : NPR - 0 views

  • I even go so far as sending my students the link to my rating. That way they can do it and I'm making it easy for them to do. That's when the site becomes useful, because in the aggregate you can look at how that professor performed.
  • She sees negative comments as opportunities to improve her teaching. Most students post to the site unprompted by their teachers, and a lot of them go there to talk smack.
  • My mother could be rating me. My worst enemy could be rating me. I could be rating myself. My colleague with a grudge against me could be rating me. And that called into question the whole legitimacy of the site.
Barbara Lindsey

The Associated Press: Aid groups enlist Google to help in Haiti effort - 0 views

  • Over a normal Google Earth screen of Haiti, blue spots appear showing where Haitians have settled. Some are named by street, zone or landmark, and others are simply numbered as "IDP" — internally displaced persons — camps.Each blue spot can be clicked on, calling up an information box that gives a site's longitude and latitude, commune and estimated number of families and individuals. The details are updated regularly so that, in theory, charities and government officials can foresee aid shortfalls, and potential dangers such as landslides and floods.
  • "It gives you a quick snapshot: 'Hey, look, there's no water there,'" Kelly said. "When something happens, the initial questions we ask are: 'Where is everyone? How are they living? What services are they getting?'"
  • "A lot of time and effort goes into logistics. If you don't know what's coming, where to take it, you are in trouble," Kelly said. "We need to understand, not in month three but in week two, where people have moved and what their conditions are. This is going to cut through a lot of bureaucracy."
  •  
    Aid workers, with the help of Google Earth, are uploading key information onto the Web to illustrate the needs of hundreds of thousands of people left homeless by Haiti's earthquake - an innovation that could significantly boost the ability to respond to future disasters.
Barbara Lindsey

Web 2.0 Storytelling: Emergence of a New Genre (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE - 2 views

  • A story is told by one person or by a creative team to an audience that is usually quiet, even receptive. Or at least that’s what a story used to be, and that’s how a story used to be told. Today, with digital networks and social media, this pattern is changing. Stories now are open-ended, branching, hyperlinked, cross-media, participatory, exploratory, and unpredictable. And they are told in new ways: Web 2.0 storytelling picks up these new types of stories and runs with them, accelerating the pace of creation and participation while revealing new directions for narratives to flow.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Do you agree with this statement?
    • loisramirez
       
      I also agree with the statement. A story in this age can take a life of it's own (or many, depending one the variations created), it allows a constant input by others and consequently the evolution of the text and the author as well.
  • To further define the term, we should begin by explaining what we mean by its first part: Web 2.0. Tim O'Reilly coined Web 2.0 in 2004,1 but the label remains difficult to acceptably define. For our present discussion, we will identify two essential features that are useful in distinguishing Web 2.0 projects and platforms from the rest of the web: microcontent and social media.2
  • creating a website through Web 2.0 tools is a radically different matter compared with the days of HTML hand-coding and of moving files with FTP clients.
  • ...44 more annotations...
  • out of those manifold ways of writing and showing have emerged new practices for telling stories.
  • Web 2.0 platforms are often structured to be organized around people rather than the traditional computer hierarchies of directory trees.
    • loisramirez
       
      I think this is a very important feature, since the web is not as static anymore and more people friendly, we as users feel more encourage to collaborate and create our own content.
  • Websites designed in the 1990s and later offered few connecting points for individuals, generally speaking, other than perhaps a guestbook or a link to an e-mail address. But Web 2.0 tools are built to combine microcontent from different users with a shared interest:
  • If readers closely examine a Web 2.0 project, they will find that it is often touched by multiple people, whether in the content creation or via associated comments or discussion areas. If they participate actively, by contributing content, we have what many call social media.
  • But Web 2.0's lowered bar to content creation, combined with increased social connectivity, ramps up the ease and number of such conversations, which are able to extend outside the bounds of a single environment.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Does the definition of Web 2.0 given in this article help you to better understand your experiences thus far in this course?
  • Another influential factor of Web 2.0 is findability: the use of comprehensive search tools that help story creators (and readers) quickly locate related micocontent with just a few keywords typed into a search field.
  • Social bookmarking and content tagging
  • the "art of conveying events in words, images, and sounds often by improvisation or embellishment."4 Annette Simmons sees the storyteller’s empathy and sensory detail as crucial to "the unique capability to tap into a complex situation we have all experienced and which we all recognize."5
    • loisramirez
       
      I also agree with this comment, something as simple as a keyword can trigger a memory and bring back information that we have learned.
  • Web 2.0 stories are often broader: they can represent history, fantasy, a presentation, a puzzle, a message, or something that blurs the boundaries of reality and fiction.
  • On one level, web users experienced a great deal of digital narratives created in non-web venues but published in HTML, such as embedded audio clips, streaming video, and animation through the Flash plug-in. On another level, they experienced stories using web pages as hypertext lexia, chunks of content connected by hyperlinks.
  • While HTML narratives continued to be produced, digital storytelling by video also began, drawing on groundbreaking video projects from the 1970s.
  • By the time of the emergence of blogs and YouTube as cultural media outlets, Tim O'Reilly's naming of Web 2.0, and the advent of social media, storytelling with digital tools had been at work for nearly a generation.
  • Starting from our definitions, we should expect Web 2.0 storytelling to consist of Web 2.0 practices.
  • In each of these cases, the relative ease of creating web content enabled social connections around and to story materials.
  • Web 2.0 creators have many options about the paths to set before their users. Web 2.0 storytelling can be fully hypertextual in its multilinearity. At any time, the audience can go out of the bounds of the story to research information (e.g., checking names in Google searches or looking for background information in Wikipedia).
  • User-generated content is a key element of Web 2.0 and can often enter into these stories. A reader can add content into story platforms directly: editing a wiki page, commenting on a post, replying in a Twitter feed, posting a video response in YouTube. Those interactions fold into the experience of the overall story from the perspective of subsequent readers.
  • On a less complex level, consider the 9th Btn Y & L War Diaries blog project, which posts diary entries from a World War I veteran. A June 2008 post (http://yldiaries.blogspot.com/2008_06_01_archive.html) contains a full wartime document, but the set of comments from others (seven, as of this writing) offer foreshadowing, explication of terms, and context.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Consider how these new media create rich dissertation and research opportunities.
  • As with the rest of Web 2.0, it is up to readers and viewers to analyze and interpret such content and usually to do so collaboratively.
  • At times, this distributed art form can range beyond the immediate control of a creator.
  • Creators can stage content from different sites.
  • Other forms leverage the Web 2.0 strategies of aggregating large amounts of microcontent and creatively selecting patterns out of an almost unfathomable volume of information.
  • The Twitter content form (140-character microstories) permits stories to be told in serialized portions spread over time.
    • loisramirez
       
      It is also a great way to practice not only creative writing but due to the 140 character limitation; this is a new challenge for a writer, how to say a lot in a just a few words.
  • It also poses several challenges: to what extent can we fragment (or ‘microchunk,’ in the latest parlance) literature before it becomes incoherent? How many media can literature be forced into—if, indeed, there is any limit?"
  • Facebook application that remixes photos drawn from Flickr (based on tags) with a set of texts that generate a dynamic graphic novel.
  • movie trailer recuts
  • At a different—perhaps meta—level, the boundaries of Web 2.0 stories are not necessarily clear. A story's boundaries are clear when it is self-contained, say in a DVD or XBox360 game. But can we know for sure that all the followers of a story's Twitter feed, for example, are people who are not involved directly in the project? Turning this question around, how do we know that we've taken the right measure of just how far a story goes, when we could be missing one character's blog or a setting description carefully maintained by the author on Wikipedia?
  • The Beast was described by its developer, Sean Stewart: “We would tell a story that was not bound by communication platform: it would come at you over the web, by email, via fax and phone and billboard and TV and newspaper, SMS and skywriting and smoke signals too if we could figure out how.
  • instead of telling a story, we would present the evidence of that story, and let the players tell it to themselves.”15
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      How might your students who come to your courses with these kinds of experiences impact the way you present your content?
  • In addition, the project served as an illustrative example of the fact that no one can know about all of the possible web tools that are available.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      How might we address this conundrum?
  • web video storytelling, primarily through YouTube
  • Web 2.0 storytelling offers two main applications for colleges and universities: as composition platform and as curricular object.
  • Students can use blogs as character studies.
  • The reader is driven to read more, not only within the rest of that post but also across the other sites of the story: the archive of posts so far, the MySpace page, the resources copied and pointed to. Perhaps the reader ranges beyond the site, to the rest of the research world—maybe he or she even composes a response in some Web 2.0 venue.
  • Yet the blog form, which accentuates this narrative, is accessible to anyone with a browser. Examples like Project 1968 offer ready models for aspiring writers to learn from. Even though the purpose of Project 1968 is not immediately tied to a class, it is a fine example for all sorts of curricular instances, from history to political science, creative writing to gender studies, sociology to economics.
  • it’s worth remembering that using Web 2.0 storytelling is partly a matter of scale. Some projects can be Web 2.0 stories, while others integrate Web 2.0 storytelling practices.
  • Lecturers are familiar with telling stories as examples, as a way to get a subject across. They end discussions with a challenging question and create characters to embody parts of content (political actors, scientists, composite types). Imagine applying those habits to a class Twitter feed or Facebook group.
  • For narrative studies, Web 2.0 stories offer an unusual blend of formal features, from the blurry boundaries around each story to questions of chronology.
  • An epistolary novel, trial documents, a lab experiment, or a soldier's diaries—for example, WW1: Experiences of an English Soldier (http://wwar1.blogspot.com/)—come to life in this new format.
  • epigrams are well suited to being republished or published by microblogging tools, which focus the reader’s attention on these compressed phases. An example is the posting of Oscar Wilde’s Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young (1894), on Twitter (http://twitter.com/oscarwilde). Other compressed forms of writing can be microblogged also, such as Félix Fénéon's Novels in Three Lines (1906), also on Twitter (http://twitter.com/novelsin3lines). As Dan Visel observed of the latter project: “Fénéon . . . was secretly a master of miniaturized text. . . . Fénéon's hypercompression lends itself to Twitter. In a book, these pieces don't quite have space to breathe; they're crowded by each other, and it's more difficult for the reader to savor them individually. As Twitter posts, they're perfectly self-contained, as they would have been when they appeared as feuilleton.”21
  • A publicly shared Web 2.0 story, created by students for a class, afterward becomes something that other students can explore. Put another way, this learning tool can produce materials that subsequently will be available as learning objects.
  • We expect to see new forms develop from older ones as this narrative world grows—even e-mail might become a new storytelling tool.22 Moreover, these storytelling strategies could be supplanted completely by some semantic platform currently under development. Large-scale gaming might become a more popular engine for content creation. And mobile devices could make microcontent the preferred way to experience digital stories.
  • perhaps the best approach for educators is simply to give Web 2.0 storytelling a try and see what happens. We invite you to jump down the rabbit hole. Add a photo to Flickr and use that as a writing prompt. Flesh out a character in Twitter. Follow a drama unfolding on YouTube. See how a wiki supports the gradual development of a setting. Then share with all of us what you have learned about this new way of telling, and listening to, stories.
  • The interwoven characters, relationships, settings, and scenes that result are the stuff of stories, regardless of how closely mapped onto reality they might be; this also distinguishes a Web 2.0 story from other blogging forms, such as political or project sites (except as satire or criticism!).
  • in sharp contrast to the singular flow of digital storytelling. In the latter form, authors create linear narratives, bound to the clear, unitary, and unidirectional timeline of the video format and the traditional story arc. Web 2.0 narratives can follow that timeline, and podcasts in particular must do so. But they can also link in multiple directions.
  •  
    By Bryan Alexander and Alan Levine
« First ‹ Previous 41 - 60 of 70 Next ›
Showing 20 items per page