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Barbara Lindsey

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landscape.blogspot.com/...ious-is-changing-academic.html

delicious research academia

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 16 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Delicious is the Rome, Jerusalem, and Paris of my existence as an academic these days. It's where I make my friends, how I get the news, and where I go to trade. All this from a little server that does nothing but share bookmarks in public.
  • I've been building a taxonomy -- the way some people use wikis, the way my boyfriend uses that utterly cool personal software, "the brain;" the way my father uses his vertical file, the way my DC friends use their rolodexes -- so I sort out all the information I take in, annexing technology to memory, sorting factoids and spare threads and notable evidence in neat, interlocking piles where I can find information again, draw connections, and create new connections.
  • The forty American history students I teach are instructed to go to my delicious page for writing help, research help, maps, and images relating to the class.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • What's rapidly happening with these shared tags is academics finding each other in rapid numbers. I have some twenty people in my network, at least half of whom I've never met in real life.
  • Every morning, I log into my delicious network and read the links that my small army of admired, clever, canny, eccentric brains has put together for me. What's more, I'm developing what I'd consider an actual working relationship with these other scholars. A few of them have added me to their own networks. Day to day, I watch their reactions to Bush, I get a sense of where their research is going, and they get a sense of mine. It's low-level, low-commitment hanging out with high levels of information exchange.
  • As Hannah Arendt understood, the modern democratic state happened when people in public spaces began interacting, and thus began taking action together. For this reason, she identified the medival carnivals and fair days of Europe as the seat of literature, culture, debate, and politics. The rule goes like this: make a public, get action. Today, Delicious does for the internet what open-air markets did for medieval society. Low key, high-information, continuous-formation community building.
Barbara Lindsey

From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments | Academic Commons - 0 views

www.academiccommons.org/...knowledgable-knowledge-able

wesch social media web2.0 education teaching academic commons

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 31 Mar 09 - Cached
  • The message of Wikipedia is not “trust authority” but “explore authority.” Authorized information is not beyond discussion on Wikipedia, information is authorized through discussion, and this discussion is available for the world to see and even participate in. This culture of discussion and participation is now available on any website with the emerging “second layer” of the web through applications like Diigo which allow you to add notes and tags to any website anywhere.
  • Many faculty may hope to subvert the system, but a variety of social structures work against them.
  • Our physical structures were built prior to an age of infinite information, our social structures formed to serve different purposes than those needed now, and the cognitive structures we have developed along the way now struggle to grapple with the emerging possibilities.
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  • The physical structures are easiest to see, and are on prominent display in any large “state of the art” classroom. Rows of fixed chairs often face a stage or podium housing a computer from which the professor controls at least 786,432 points of light on a massive screen. Stadium seating, sound-absorbing panels and other acoustic technologies are designed to draw maximum attention to the professor at the front of the room. The “message” of this environment is that to learn is to acquire information, that information is scarce and hard to find (that's why you have to come to this room to get it), that you should trust authority for good information, and that good information is beyond discussion (that's why the chairs don't move or turn toward one another). In short, it tells students to trust authority and follow along.
  • at the base of this “information revolution” are new ways of relating to one another, new forms of discourse, new ways of interacting, new kinds of groups, and new ways of sharing, trading, and collaborating. Wikis, blogs, tagging, social networking and other developments that fall under the “Web 2.0” buzz are especially promising in this regard because they are inspired by a spirit of interactivity, participation, and collaboration. It is this “spirit” of Web 2.0 which is important to education. The technology is secondary. This is a social revolution, not a technological one, and its most revolutionary aspect may be the ways in which it empowers us to rethink education and the teacher-student relationship in an almost limitless variety of ways.
  • Even in situations in which a spirit of exploration and freedom exist, where faculty are free to experiment to work beyond physical and social constraints, our cognitive habits often get in the way
  • Most of our assumptions about information are based on characteristics of information on paper.
  • Even something as simple as the hyperlink taught us that information can be in more than one place at one time
  • Blogging came along and taught us that anybody can be a creator of information.
  • Our old assumption that information is hard to find, is trumped by the realization that if we set up our hyper-personalized digital network effectively, information can find us.
  • Taken together, this new media environment demonstrates to us that the idea of learning as acquiring information is no longer a message we can afford to send to our students, and that we need to start redesigning our learning environments to address, leverage, and harness the new media environment now permeating our classrooms.
  • Nothing good will come of these technologies if we do not first confront the crisis of significance and bring relevance back into education. In some ways these technologies act as magnifiers.
  • Usually our courses are arranged around “subjects.” Postman and Weingartner note that the notion of “subjects” has the unwelcome effect of teaching our students that “English is not History and History is not Science and Science is not Art . . . and a subject is something you 'take' and, when you have taken it, you have 'had' it.” Always aware of the hidden metaphors underlying our most basic assumptions, they suggest calling this “the Vaccination Theory of Education” as students are led to believe that once they have “had” a subject they are immune to it and need not take it again.5
  • As an alternative, I like to think that we are not teaching subjects but subjectivities: ways of approaching, understanding, and interacting with the world. Subjectivities cannot be taught. They involve an introspective intellectual throw-down in the minds of students. Learning a new subjectivity is often painful because it almost always involves what psychologist Thomas Szasz referred to as “an injury to one's self-esteem.”6 You have to unlearn perspectives that may have become central to your sense of self.
  • We can only create environments in which the practices and perspectives are nourished, encouraged, or inspired (and therefore continually practiced).
  • So while the course is set up much like a typical cultural anthropology course, moving through the same readings and topics, all of these learnings are ultimately focused around one big question, “How does the world work?”
  • Students are co-creators of every aspect of the simulation, and are asked to harness and leverage the new media environment to find information, theories, and tools we can use to answer our big question. Each student has a specific role and expertise to develop. A world map is superimposed on the class and each student is asked to become an expert on a specific aspect of the region in which they find themselves. Using this knowledge, they work in 15-20 small groups to create realistic cultures, step-by-step, as we go through each aspect of culture in class. This allows them to apply the knowledge they learn in the course and to recognize the ways different aspects of culture--economic, social, political, and religious practices and institutions--are integrated in a cultural system.
  • The World Simulation itself only takes 75-100 minutes and moves through 650 metaphorical years, 1450-2100. It is recorded by students on twenty digital video cameras and edited into one final "world history" video using clips from real world history to illustrate the correspondences. We watch the video together in the final weeks of the class, using it as a discussion starter for contemplating our world and our role in its future. By then it seems as if we have the whole world right before our eyes in one single classroom - profound cultural differences, profound economic differences, profound challenges for the future, and one humanity. We find ourselves not just as co-creators of a simulation, but as co-creators of the world itself, and the future is up to us.
  • I have often found myself writing content-based multiple-choice questions in a way that I hope will indicate that the student has mastered a new subjectivity or perspective. Of course, the results are not satisfactory. More importantly, these questions ask students to waste great amounts of mental energy memorizing content instead of exercising a new perspective in the pursuit of real and relevant questions.
  • When you watch somebody who is truly “in it,” somebody who has totally given themselves over to the learning process, or if you simply imagine those moments in which you were “in it” yourself, you immediately recognize that learning expands far beyond the mere cognitive dimension. Many of these dimensions were mentioned in the issue precis, “such as emotional and affective dimensions, capacities for risk-taking and uncertainty, creativity and invention,” and the list goes on. How will we assess these? I do not have the answers, but a renewed and spirited dedication to the creation of authentic learning environments that leverage the new media environment demands that we address it.
  • The new media environment provides new opportunities for us to create a community of learners with our students seeking important and meaningful questions.
  • This is what I have called elsewhere, “anti-teaching,” in which the focus is not on providing answers to be memorized, but on creating a learning environment more conducive to producing the types of questions that ask students to challenge their taken-for-granted assumptions and see their own underlying biases.
Barbara Lindsey

The 21st Century Learning Initiative : The History of Education 2000 and the Explanatio... - 0 views

www.21learn.org/...history.php

education Britian reform

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 07 Jan 10 - Cached
  • The application of "market principles" quickly destroyed the concept of a community of learners that extended beyond the school and effectively turned each school against its "rival"; a preoccupation with the assessment of pupils as a way of monitoring teachers led to even more "teaching for the test," and the relegation of information technology to that of a vocational skill.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 07 Jan 10
       
      Are there similarities with the US system? Is this change of perspective necessarily bad?
  • Barbara Lindsey on 07 Jan 10
     
    "By 1988, with increasing pressure with every subsequent year, Education 2000 became evermore isolated by a whole series of legislative proposals made by a Government whose educational policy was increasingly to become prescriptive, centralized, and based on assumptions that originated in the 1950s. Teacher education courses were reorganized to focus far more heavily on subject content and classroom practice, at the cost of a hefty reduction in all aspects of the course dealing with educational theory, purpose and philosophy. Her Majesty's Inspectorate was abolished as being too much on "the side of the teachers," and replaced by a more rigorous assessment and evaluation system. "There is no such subject as education," said Margaret Thatcher, "only subjects to be taught.""
Nicole McClure

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

www.educause.edu/...6069

shared by Nicole McClure on 10 Nov 08 - Cached
  • 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
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      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.
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  • 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.
  • 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
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      What is the timeline?
    • Nicole McClure
      Nicole McClure on 14 Nov 08
       
      That's an interesting question - sometimes I think we are already on the other side of this, meaning we've already passed it in some ways. Last night I was out for dinner at the Main Street and I saw something that was a little crazy. My husband and I were using my cellphone to look up words that would help trigger a creative name for his new company - a UConn professor (who shall remain unnamed :)) was using his iPhone for something other than a phone call - and the women at the table across from me were also engaged in half converstation - half text message/email, etc. The reason that I bring this up is that all of these people, myself included, are NOT part of the millenial generation (way past I'm afraid!) and we were using this stuff. As history goes - if the "grown-ups" are using it, the kids are over it and on to something else.
  • Immersion is the subjective impression that one is participating in a comprehensive, realistic experience.
  • 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.
  • Inducing a participant's symbolic immersion involves triggering powerful semantic associations via the content of an experience.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      Felice's Utopian City
  • 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.
  • 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
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      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
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      Not too far in the future!
  • 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.
  • 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.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      One of the most difficult skills to master.
  • 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
  • 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
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      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
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      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
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      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
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      Much better
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      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
  • Notion of place is layered/blended/multiple; mobility and nomadicity prevalent among dispersed, fragmented, fluctuating habitats (for example, coffeehouses near campus)
  • 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
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      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?
  • Guided social constructivism and situated learning as major forms of pedagogy
  • 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
  • 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
  • Multipurpose habitats—creating layered/blended/personalizable places rather than specialized locations (such as computer labs)
  • Neomillenial Versus Millennial Learning Styles
  • Emphasis is placed on implications for strategic investments in physical plant, technology infrastructure, and professional development.
  • 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.
  • 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
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      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

Educational Leadership:Giving Students Ownership of Learning:Footprints in the Digital Age - 0 views

www.ascd.org/...prints_in_the_Digital_Age.aspx

web2.0 willrichardson pln digitalfootprint socialnetworking Glastonbury

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 12 Dec 08 - Cached
  • This 10-year-old probably still needs to learn many of these things, and she needs the guidance of teachers and adults who know them in their own practice.
  • We must help them learn how to identify their passions; build connections to others who share those passions; and communicate, collaborate, and work collectively with these networks. And we must do this not simply as a unit built around "Information and Web Literacy." Instead, we must make these new ways of collaborating and connecting a transparent part of the way we deliver curriculum from kindergarten to graduation.
  • Younger students need to see their teachers engaging experts in synchronous or asynchronous online conversations about content, and they need to begin to practice intelligently and appropriately sharing work with global audiences. Middle school students should be engaged in the process of cooperating and collaborating with others outside the classroom around their shared passions, just as they have seen their teachers do. And older students should be engaging in the hard work of what Shirky (2008) calls "collective action," sharing responsibility and outcomes in doing real work for real purposes for real audiences online.
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  • we educators must first own these technologies and be able to take advantage of these networked learning spaces. In this way, we can fully prepare students not just to be Googled well, but to be findable in good ways by people who share their passions for learning and who may well end up being lifelong teachers, mentors, or friends.
  • So what literacies must we educators master before we can help students make the most of these powerful potentials? It starts, as author Clay Shirky (2008) suggests, with an understanding of how transparency fosters connections and with a willingness to share our work and, to some extent, our personal lives. Sharing is the fundamental building block for building connections and networks;
  • In all likelihood, you, your school, your teachers, or your students are already being Googled on a regular basis, with information surfacing from news articles, blog posts, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, and Facebook groups. Some of it may be good, some may be bad, and most is beyond your control. Your personal footprint—and to some extent your school's—is most likely being written without you, thanks to the billions of us worldwide who now have our own printing presses and can publish what we want when we want to.
  • This may be the first large technological shift in history that's being driven by children. Picture a bus. Your students are standing in the front; most teachers (maybe even you) are in the back, hanging on to the seat straps as the bus careens down the road under the guidance of kids who have never been taught to steer and who are figuring it out as they go. In short, for a host of reasons, we're failing to empower kids to use one of the most important technologies for learning that we've ever had. One of the biggest challenges educators face right now is figuring out how to help students create, navigate, and grow the powerful, individualized networks of learning that bloom on the Web and helping them do this effectively, ethically, and safely.
Barbara Lindsey

Dr. Mashup; or, Why Educators Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Remix (EDUCAUS... - 0 views

connect.educause.edu/...44592

web2.0 mashup educause

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 01 Dec 08 - Cached
  • Remix is the reworking or adaptation of an existing work. The remix may be subtle, or it may completely redefine how the work comes across. It may add elements from other works, but generally efforts are focused on creating an alternate version of the original. A mashup, on the other hand, involves the combination of two or more works that may be very different from one another. In this article, I will apply these terms both to content remixes and mashups, which originated as a music form but now could describe the mixing of any number of digital media sources, and to data mashups, which combine the data and functionalities of two or more Web applications.
  • Electronic transmission has already inspired a new concept of multiple-authorship responsibility in which the specific concepts of the composer, the performer, and, indeed, the consumer overlap. . . . In fact, implicit in electronic culture is an acceptance of the idea of multilevel participation in the creative process.2
  • It is common to assume that remakes or reworkings are inherently lesser forms of creation than something that is "original" and that free reuse somehow degrades the value of the source. Modern copyright law and the intense social stigma associated with a term such as plagiarism speak to such assumptions.
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  • In his recent Harper's article "The Ecstasy of Influence," the novelist Jonathan Lethem imaginatively reviews the history of appropriation and recasts it as essential to the act of creation.3
  • He asserts that visual, sound, and text collage "might be called the art form of the twentieth century, never mind the twenty-first."
  • Lethem concludes: "Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses."
  • It's no mere coincidence that the rise of modernist genres using collage techniques and more fragmented structures accompanied the emergence of photography and audio recording. Reading Walter Benjamin's highly influential 1936 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,"4 it's clear that the profound effects of reproductive technology were obvious at that time. As Gould argued in 1964 (influenced by theorists such as Marshall McLuhan5), changes in how art is produced, distributed, and consumed in the electronic age have deep effects on the character of the art itself.
  • The result has been a flood of work created by largely anonymous media artists who are reimagining the iconography of popular culture, unearthing forgotten artifacts and contextualizing them anew. One only has to spend an hour surfing YouTube.com to get a sense of the subversive fun being had by hundreds of thousands of culture mashers.6
  • he statement "users will never add metadata" was becoming a mantra at gatherings of increasingly frustrated learning object promoters (again, I was often present) and when most learning object repositories were floundering, resource-sharing services such as del.icio.us and Flickr were enjoying phenomenal growth, with their user communities eagerly contributing heaps of useful metadata via simple folksonomy-oriented tagging systems.
  • Educators might justifiably argue that their materials are more authoritative, reliable, and instructionally sound than those found on the wider Web, but those materials are effectively rendered invisible and inaccessible if they are locked inside course management systems.
  • It's a dirty but open secret that many courses in private environments use copyrighted third-party materials in a way that pushes the limits of fair use—third-party IP is a big reason why many courses cannot easily be made open.
  • Pageflakes (http://www.pageflakes.com/), another RSS-based personal portal, supports a number of education-specific templates for tracking grades and displaying class schedules along with resources; pages with such sensitive information can also be made private.13
  • nother Pipe that Hirst has created is the "OpenLearn Unit Outlinks Search Hub Pipe," which extracts "all the outgoing links from a course unit, then feeds these into a Yahoo Search pipe, which uses the domains as search limits for the search."20 In other words, this Pipe can create a filtered search of trusted domains that are relevant to a particular course, and the filtered search will adjust automatically as new links are added to the course materials. Of course, this added functionality requires open content and a reusable data format in order to work properly.
  • If the course unit in question is locked away in a course management system behind a password firewall, Pipes cannot access the data required to create the customized search. As with content remixing, open access to materials is not just a matter of some charitable impulse to share knowledge with the world; it is a core requirement for participating in some of the most exciting and innovative activity on the Web.
  • . Working with the Scottish students they could then find out the stories behind these artefacts and create a Google Map which tracks these stories geographically, historically and anecdotally."21
  • All too often, college and university administrators react to this type of innovation with suspicion and outright hostility rather than cooperation. Witness the recent case at Harvard, where students, frustrated with the quality of the official institutional Web portal, decided to build their own portal, entitled Crimson Connect (http://www.crimsonconnect.com/), using RSS feeds and, for the most part, existing free software tools. University officials responded by demanding the removal of material that had been syndicated from password-protected course pages.25
  • those of us in higher education who observe the successful practices in the wider Web world have an obligation to consider and discuss how we might apply these lessons in our own contexts. We might ask if the content we presently lock down could be made public with a license specifying reasonable terms for reuse. When choosing a content management system, we might consider how well it supports RSS syndication.
  • Two of my favorite YouTube clips are the remix of The Shining's trailer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVjl7gK4HGU) and the mashup of the original Star Trek TV series with a Monty Python song (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEnyT0_BjxA). These two videos themselves illustrate the difference between a remix and a mashup.
Barbara Lindsey

Wired Campus: Lev Gonick: The Wiki Way and University Leadership - Chronicle.com - 0 views

chronicle.com/...-way-and-university-leadership

wiki higher ed

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 10 Feb 09 - Cached
  • Universities are inherently conservative organizations. Perhaps Clark Kerr said it best when, after witnessing 20 years of social upheaval, he described universities’ deeply-rooted tendency toward stasis. In The Uses of the University, written in 1982 when he was chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, he wrote: “About 85 institutions in the Western world established by 1500 still exist in recognizable forms, with similar functions and unbroken histories, including the Catholic church, the Parliaments of the Isle of Man, of Iceland, and of Great Britain, several Swiss cantons, and 70 universities. Kings that rule, feudal lords with vassals, and guilds with monopolies are all gone. These seventy universities, however, are still in the same locations with some of the same buildings, with professors and students doing much the same things, and with governance carried on in much the same ways.”
  • A decade after the birth of the commercial Internet, a specter began to haunt the hallowed ivory halls of the university campus (and much else around the globe). The DNA of the Internet respects no boundaries, has little use for hierarchy, and flaunts the communication paradigm in which every message needs to have a messenger.
  • In the gold rush that followed the birth of modern computing, universities were among the few institutions to serve as checks on software companies’ attempts at control. Colleges around the globe invested in standards-based technologies and open-source solutions to prevent domination by any one entity.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 10 Feb 09
     
    even more interesting are the comments.
Barbara Lindsey

Foreign Language Faculty in the Age of Web 2.0 | Educationload.com - 0 views

educationload.com/?p=87

web 2.0 faculty foreignlanguage manuela

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 28 Jan 09 - Cached
  • A keyword search for the word “tech%” and “computer” in the Modern Language Association (MLA) job list1 returns over 43 relevant ads out of 236 job postings (as of November 20, 2007): “familiarity with teaching-related technologies” (tenure track in Spanish, Missouri); “experience with technology in the classroom” (tenure track in French, Michigan); “ability to use technology effectively in teaching and learning” (tenure track in Japanese, South Carolina). The wording varies slightly from one ad to the next, but the message is the same: job candidates are well advised to have an answer ready when asked how they use technology in the classroom.
  • The history of educational technology in higher education provides ample support for the claim that technology should never outstrip pedagogy.
  • many Web 2.0 applications are powerful socialization and communication tools. As such, they have an incredible educational potential for foreign language instruction.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Sadly, this potential often fails to be realized because of the widespread belief that these tools are somehow inherently educational. The iPod might have an instructional potential, but it is the educators who arrange and structure instructional events around it to make learning happen, not the instrument itself. To realize the instructional potential of technology requires a set of skills that can only be acquired through adequate instruction and practice. Just as speaking a foreign language is not a qualification to teach it, knowing how to use a technology does not mean that one knows intuitively how to use it as a teaching tool.
  • a recent MLA report on the status of foreign language instruction in higher education3 underscored that most incoming foreign language faculty would be teaching at the undergraduate level. The report calls for the integration of technology training in the graduate curriculum, asking departments to “take the necessary steps to teach graduate students to use technology in language instruction and learning.” The report, which called for drastic transformations of foreign language academic programs nationwide, also emphasized the importance of providing graduate students with a good pedagogical basis.
  • Few graduate programs include such training as a part of the curriculum. As a matter of fact, pedagogy itself often represents a negligible fraction of graduate program requirements.
  • Because the field of language technology is at the crossroads of technology, instructional design, and languages, it calls for the close collaboration of experts in each area. Today, language centers are the only campus units where such a wide range of expertise can easily be found.
  • The role of language technologists goes beyond teaching what a blog is and how to set up a browser to display Japanese characters. It includes sorting through novel technologies, evaluating their instructional potential, researching current educational uses, and sharing findings with educators. The most promising applications available today were not designed for instructional use and do not come with an instruction manual. To use them in the classroom requires the ability to redirect their intended purpose and, more importantly, to think through possible consequences of doing so.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 28 Jan 09
     
    Technological skills and understanding how to employ Web 2.0 tools to successfully support pedagogy are vital for foreign language faculty today
Barbara Lindsey

FSEM 100C6- Toys as History - 0 views

toysashistory09.umwblogs.org

blog student-centered higher ed

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 23 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Our readings for this upcoming week’s meetings have all been chosen by you and your classmates in our FSEM workshop.
  • This well-selected item offers an analytical framework to consider and raises relevant questions for our discussion of the other articles and links listed below. Key themes include objects and toys, their relationship with the formation of identity, and our own explorations of the object, toys, and playthings that children (and adults) share.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 23 Mar 09
     
    Great use of blog for class collaborative work.
Barbara Lindsey

» Oral Interview Essay FSEM 100C6- Toys as History - 0 views

toysashistory09.umwblogs.org/...oral-interview-essay

Course blog higher ed students syllabus

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 23 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 23 Mar 09
     
    Great example of course blog with student work, detailed assignments, etc.!
Barbara Lindsey

The Way We'll Be - 0 views

www.zogby.com/...Readreviews.cfm

distance learning survey education

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 01 Dec 08 - Cached
  • a prominent pollster, John Zogby, says in a book being released on Tuesday that it won’t be long before American society takes to distance education as warmly as it has embraced game-changing innovations like microbrewed beers, Flexcars, and “the simple miracle of Netflix.”
  • The factor that will close that “enthusiasm gap” is the growing use of distance education by well-respected universities, Mr. Zogby predicts in the book, The Way We’ll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream (Random House).
  • Mr. Zogby says polls detect signs of society’s emerging resistance to big institutions, and its de-emphasis on things and places. “We’re redefining geography and space,” he says — and a widening acceptance of online education is part of that trend.
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  • “There’s a sense that those who define the standard haven’t caught on yet,” he said.
  • His polling also points to other challenges that colleges will face as they race to serve a worldwise generation of 18-to-29-year-olds that Mr. Zogby calls “First Globals.”
  • Only 27 percent of respondents agreed that “online universities and colleges provide the same quality of education” as traditional institutions. Among those 18 to 24 years old, only 23 percent agreed.
  • An even greater proportion of those polled said it was their perception that employers and academic professionals thought more highly of traditional institutions than online ones.
  • Yet in another national poll in December 2007, conducted for Excelsior College, 45 percent of the 1,004 adults surveyed believed “an online class carries the same value as a traditional-classroom class,” and 43 percent of 1,545 chief executives and small-business owners agreed that a degree earned by distance learning “is as credible” as one from a traditional campus-based program.
  • As with changing perceptions about other cultural phenomena, “these paradigm shifts really are moving at lightning speed.”
  • Mr. Zogby also highlights the emerging influence of the First Globals, whom his book calls “the most outward-looking and accepting generation in American history.” First Globals, he says, are more socially tolerant and internationally aware.
  • First Globals, he writes, who are shaping what he says is nothing short of a “fundamental reorientation of the American character away from wanton consumption and toward a new global citizenry in an age of limited resources.”
Barbara Lindsey

Ping - Google Goggles, Searching by Image Alone - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...20ping.html

google data images smartphones mobiles

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 20 Dec 09 - Cached
  • It’s not hard to imagine a slew of commercial applications for this technology. You could compare prices of a product online, learn how to operate that old water heater whose manual you have lost or find out about the environmental record of a certain brand of tuna. But Goggles and similar products could also tell the history of a building, help travelers get around in a foreign country or even help blind people navigate their surroundings.
  • But recognizing images at what techies call “scale,” meaning thousands or even millions of images, is hugely difficult, partly because it requires enormous computing power. It turns out that Google, with its collection of massive data centers, has just that.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 20 Dec 09
     
    Google unveiled a smartphone application called Goggles. It allows users to search the Web, not by typing or by speaking keywords, but by snapping an image with a cellphone and feeding it into Google's search engine.
Barbara Lindsey

Forget E-Books: The Future of the Book Is Far More Interesting | The Penenberg Post | F... - 0 views

www.fastcompany.com/...say-so-long-book-we-know-it

ebooks books

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 25 Dec 09 - Cached
  • But technology marches on through predictable patterns of development, with the initial form of a new technology mirroring what came before, until innovation and consumer demand drive it far beyond initial incremental improvements. We are on the verge of re-imagining the book and transforming it something far beyond mere words.
  • Like early filmmakers, some of us will seek new ways to express ourselves through multimedia. Instead of stagnant words on a page we will layer video throughout the text, add photos, hyperlink material, engage social networks of readers who will add their own videos, photos, and wikified information so that these multimedia books become living, breathing, works of art. They will exist on the Web and be ported over to any and all mobil devices that can handle multimedia, laptops, netbooks, and beyond.
  • where there's chaos, there's opportunity
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • For the non-fiction author therein lie possibilities to create the proverbial last word on a subject, a one-stop shop for all the information surrounding a particular subject matter. Imagine a biography of Wiley Post, the one-eyed pilot from the 1930s who was the first to fly around the world. It would not only offer the entire text of a book but newsreel footage from his era, coverage of his most famous flights, radio interviews, schematics of his plane, interactive maps of his journeys, interviews with aviation historians and pilots of today, a virtual tour of his cockpit and description of every gauge and dial, short profiles of other flyers of his time, photos, hyperlinked endnotes and index, links to other resources on the subject. Social media could be woven into the fabric of the experience--discussion threads and wikis where readers share information, photos, video, and add their own content to Post's story, which would tie them more closely to the book. There's also the potential for additional revenue streams: You could buy MP3s of popular songs from the 1930s, clothes that were the hot thing back then, model airplanes, other printed books, DVDs, journals, and memorabilia. A visionary author could push the boundaries and re-imagine these books in wholly new ways. A novelist could create whole new realities, a pastiche of video and audio and words and images that could rain down on the user, offering metaphors for artistic expressions. Or they could warp into videogame-like worlds where readers become characters and through the expression of their own free will alter the story to fit. They could come with music soundtracks or be directed or produced by renowned documentarians. They could be collaborations or one-woman projects.
  • Serious literature, and even perhaps much fiction will however, will be published in old book form…or maybe in the current “text on screen” form. The point of reading fiction IS to imagine your own characters and use your imagination…that’s why you read rather then watch a video about it!
  • Traditional books (especially literature) will be relegated to smaller, specialty houses and self-publishing, in its infancy, will boom!
  • The question is, how will the media companies (not just book publishers) respond? We're already seeing the effect on newspapers, as their ad revenue (and business model) collapses. Perhaps history can offer another analogy: When home refrigeration became affordable, it posed an existential threat to the large ice-delivery companies. Some of these firms manufactured ice by the ton in order to warehouse and deliver it at retail. They saw the threat, but not the opportunity - didn't realize the value of their core technology, the ice-making equipment itself. They saw only the falloff in their retail delivery logistics model. Had they licensed their chillers, they could have made a fortune. Likewise, buggy-whip-makers could have retooled as purveyors of leather goods for automobiles.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 25 Dec 09
     
    But technology marches on through predictable patterns of development, with the initial form of a new technology mirroring what came before, until innovation and consumer demand drive it far beyond initial incremental improvements. We are on the verge of re-imagining the book and transforming it something far beyond mere words.
Barbara Lindsey

Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUC... - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...162420

seelybrown openeducation educause

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 10 Jan 10 - Cached
  • The most profound impact of the Internet, an impact that has yet to be fully realized, is its ability to support and expand the various aspects of social learning. What do we mean by “social learning”? Perhaps the simplest way to explain this concept is to note that social learning is based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions. The focus is not so much on what we are learning but on how we are learning.5
  • The openness of Wikipedia is instructive in another way: by clicking on tabs that appear on every page, a user can easily review the history of any article as well as contributors’ ongoing discussion of and sometimes fierce debates around its content, which offer useful insights into the practices and standards of the community that is responsible for creating that entry in Wikipedia. (In some cases, Wikipedia articles start with initial contributions by passionate amateurs, followed by contributions from professional scholars/researchers who weigh in on the “final” versions. Here is where the contested part of the material becomes most usefully evident.) In this open environment, both the content and the process by which it is created are equally visible, thereby enabling a new kind of critical reading—almost a new form of literacy—that invites the reader to join in the consideration of what information is reliable and/or important.
  • viewing learning as the process of joining a community of practice reverses this pattern and allows new students to engage in “learning to be” even as they are mastering the content of a field. This encourages the practice of what John Dewey called “productive inquiry”—that is, the process of seeking the knowledge when it is needed in order to carry out a particular situated task.
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  • A very different sort of initiative that is using technology to leverage social learning is Digital StudyHall (DSH), which is designed to improve education for students in schools in rural areas and urban slums in India.
  • many students in the United States and in many other parts of the world are already involved with online social networks that include their friends. John King, the associate provost of the University of Michigan, has attempted to bring attention to this phenomenon by asking how many students are being taught each year by his institution. Although about 40,000 students are enrolled in classes on the university’s campus in Ann Arbor, King believes that the actual number of students being reached by the school today is closer to 250,000.13
  • Through these continuing connections, the University of Michigan students can extend the discussions, debates, bull sessions, and study groups that naturally arise on campus to include their broader networks. Even though these extended connections were not developed to serve educational purposes, they amplify the impact that the university is having while also benefiting students on campus.14 If King is right, it makes sense for colleges and universities to consider how they can leverage these new connections through the variety of social software platforms that are being established for other reasons.
  • Hands-On Universe (HOU) is also designed to promote collaborative learning in astronomy (http://www.handsonuniverse.org). Based at the Lawrence Hall of Science, University of California, Berkeley, HOU invites students to request observations from professional observatories and provides them with image-processing software to visualize and analyze their data, encouraging interaction between the students and scientists. According to Kyle Cudworth, the science director at Yerkes Observatory, which is part of the HOU network: “This is not education in which people come in and lecture in a classroom. We’re helping students work with real data.”16
  • the emphasis is on building a community of students and scholars as much as on providing access to educational content.
  • The site serves as an apprenticeship platform for students by allowing them to observe how scholars in the field argue with each other and also to publish their own contributions, which can be relatively small—an example of the “legitimate peripheral participation” that is characteristic of open source communities. This allows students to “learn to be,” in this instance by participating in the kind of rigorous argumentation that is generated around a particular form of deep scholarship. A community like this, in which students can acculturate into a particular scholarly practice, can be seen as a virtual “spike”: a highly specialized site that can serve as a global resource for its field.
  • The power of peer review had been brought to bear on the assignments
  • longtail
  • An example of such a practicum is the online Teaching and Learning Commons (http://commons.carnegiefoundation.org/) launched earlier this year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
  • The Commons is an open forum where instructors at all levels (and from around the world) can post their own examples and can participate in an ongoing conversation about effective teaching practices, as a means of supporting a process of “creating/using/re-mixing (or creating/sharing/using).”20
  • We are entering a world in which we all will have to acquire new knowledge and skills on an almost continuous basis.
  • Light discovered that one of the strongest determinants of students’ success in higher education—more important than the details of their instructors’ teaching styles—was their ability to form or participate in small study groups. Students who studied in groups, even only once a week, were more engaged in their studies, were better prepared for class, and learned significantly more than students who worked on their own.6
  • We need to construct shared, distributed, reflective practicums in which experiences are collected, vetted, clustered, commented on, and tried out in new contexts.
  • We now need a new approach to learning—one characterized by a demand-pull rather than the traditional supply-push mode of building up an inventory of knowledge in students’ heads.
Barbara Lindsey

Social Media is Killing the LMS Star - A Bootleg of Bryan Alexander's Lost Presentation... - 0 views

openedconference.org/...1037

bryanalexander socialmedia CMS Web2.0 education methods roml 5395

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 27 Aug 09 - Cached
  • Unfortunately, this margin and that niche don’t map well onto each other, to the extent that education extends beyond single classes and connects with the world.
  • CMSes offer versions of most of these, but in a truncated way. Students can publish links to external objects, but can’t link back in. (In fact, a Blackboard class is a fine place to control access to content for one concerned about “deep linking”) An instructor can assign a reading group consisting of students in one’s class, but no one else. These virtual classes are like musical practice rooms, small chambers where one may try out the instrument in silent isolation. It is not connectivism but disconnectivism.
  • professors can readily built media criticism assignments into class spaces. These experiences are analogous to the pre-digital classroom, and can work well enough. But both refuse to engage with today’s realities, namely that media are deeply shaped by the social. Journaling privately, restricted to an audience not of the writer’s choosing, is unusual.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • We’ve seen an explosion in computer-mediated teaching and learning practices based on Web 2.0, in variety and scope too broad to summarize here. Think of the range from class blogs to Wikipedia writing exercises, profcasting to Twitter class announcements, mashups and academic library folksonomies and researchers’ social bookmarking subscriptions. CMSes react in the following ways: first, by simply not recapitulating these functions; second, by imitating them in delayed, limited fashions; third, by attempting them in a marginal way (example: Blackboard’s Scholar.com). CMSes are retrograde in a Web 2.0 teaching world.
  • CMSes shift from being merely retrograde to being actively regressive if we consider the broader, subtler changes in the digital teaching landscape. Web 2.0 has rapidly grown an enormous amount of content through what Yochai Benkler calls “peer-based commons production.” One effect of this has been to grow a large area for informal learning, which students (and staff) access without our benign interference.
  • Moreover, those curious about teaching with social media have easy access to a growing, accessible community of experienced staff by means of those very media. A meta-community of Web 2.0 academic practitioners is now too vast to catalogue. Academics in every discipline blog about their work. Wikis record their efforts and thoughts, as do podcasts. The reverse is true of the CMS, the very architecture of which forbids such peer-to-peer information sharing. For example, the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies (RCCS) has for many years maintained a descriptive listing of courses about digital culture across the disciplines. During the 1990s that number grew with each semester. But after the explosive growth of CMSes that number dwindled. Not the number of classes taught, but the number of classes which could even be described. According to the RCCS’ founder, David Silver (University of San Francisco), this is due to the isolation of class content in CMS containers.
  • If we focus on the copyright issue, then the CMS makes for an apparently adequate shield. It also represents an uncritical acceptance of one school of copyright practice, as it enforces one form of fair use through software. However, it does not open up the question of copyright. Compare, for example, with the Creative Commons option increasingly available to content authors in platforms such as Flickr or WordPress. That experiential, teachable moment of selecting one’s copyright stance is eliminated by the CMS.
  • Another argument in favor of CMSes over Web 2.0 concerns the latter’s open nature.
  • Campuses should run CMSes to create shielded environments,
  • Yet does this argument seem familiar, somehow? It was made during the 1990s, once the first Web ballooned, and new forms of information anxiety appeared. Mentioning this historicity is not intended as a point of style, but to remind the audience that, since this is an old problem, we have been steadily evolving solutions. Indeed, ever since the 20th century we can point to practices – out in the open, wild Web! – which help users cope with informational chaos. These include social sifting, information literacy, using the wisdom of crowds, and others. Such strategies are widely discussed, easily accessed, and continually revised and honed. Most of these skills are not well suited to the walled garden environment, but can be discussed there, of course. Without undue risk of exposure.
  • Put another way, we can sum up the CMS alternative to Web 2.0’s established and evolving pedagogies as a sort of corporate model. This doesn’t refer to the fact that the leading CMS is a business product, produced by a fairly energetic marketplace player. No, the architecture of CMSes recapitulates several aspects of modern business. It enforces copyright compliance. It resembles an intranet, akin to those run by many enterprises. It protects users from external challenges, in true walled garden style. Indeed, at present, radio CMS is the Clear Channel of online learning.
  • The academic uses of realtime search follow the pre-Web pedagogy of seeking timely references to a classroom topic. Think of a professor bringing a newspaper to class, carrying a report about the very subject under discussion. How can this be utilized practically? Faculty members can pick a Web service (Google News, Facebook, Twitter) and search themselves, sharing results; or students can run such queries themselves.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 01 Oct 09
       
      This is very interesting
  • Over the past near-decade CMSes have not only grown in scale, but feature development. Consider the variety: gradebooks, registrar system integration, e-Reserve integration, discussion tools, drop boxes, news alerts. Consider too the growth of parallel Web 2.0 tools: wikis, blogs, social bookmarking, podcasting.
  • Now to compare CMSes and Web 2.0: imagine an alternate history, a counterfactual, whereby the world outside academia had Blackboard instead of Web 2.0: § White House health care reform debates: each citizen must log into a town-hall-associated “class,” registering by zip code and social security number. Information is exchanged between “town classes” via email. Relevant documents can be found, often in .doc format, by logging into one’s town class.
  • § Iranian activists collaborate via classes, frantically switching logins and handles to keep government authorities from registering and snooping. § “Citizen media” barely exist. Instead we rely on established authorities (CNN, BBC, Xinua, etc) to sift, select, and, eventually, republish rare selections of user-generated media. § Wikipedia, Flickr and Picasa, the blogosphere, Facebook and MySpace, the world of podcasting simply don’t exist. Instead, we rely on static, non-communicable Web documents, and consult the occasional e-Reserve, sometimes on a purchased DVD. § The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) maintains fan clubs, small, temporary groups where fans of certain bands and artists can sign in and listen to time-limited, DRM’d music. “It’s like tape trading, but legal!” says one promotional campaign.
  • Once we had Bertold Brecht writing plays for radio, neighborhood-based radio shows, and the stupendous Orson Wells; then we moved on, through payola, and onto Kasey Kasem and Clear Channel.
  • For now, the CMS landsape is a multi-institutional dark Web, an invisible, unsearchable, un-mash-up-able archipelago of hidden learning content.
  • Can the practice of using a CMS prepare either teacher or student to think critically about this new shape for information literacy? Moreover, can we use the traditional CMS to share thoughts and practices about this topic?
  • Now your iPhone can track your position on that custom map image as easily as it can on Google maps.”
  • What world is better placed to connect academia productively with such projects, the open social Web or the CMS?
  • CMS. What is it best used for? We have said little about its integration with campus information systems, but these are critical for class (not learning) management, from attendance to grading. Web 2.0 has yet to replace this function. So imagine the CMS function of every class much like class email, a necessary feature, but not by any means the broadest technological element. Similarly the e-reserves function is of immense practical value. There may be no better way to share copyrighted academic materials with a class, at this point. These logistical functions could well play on.
  • It makes for a separation from the social media world, a paused space, perhaps one fertile for reflection. If that works for some situations, then it works, and should be selected… consciously, not as a default or unreflective option, but as the result of a pedagogical decision process.
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