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From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments Posted January 7th, 2009 by Michael Wesch , Kansas State University Tags: * Essays * Teaching and Technology * anthropology * Assessment * information revolution * multimedia * participatory learning * Web 2.0 2 Comments | 9313 Page Views Knowledge-able Most university classrooms have gone through a massive transformation in the past ten years. I'm not talking about the numerous initiatives for multiple plasma screens, moveable chairs, round tables, or digital whiteboards. The change is visually more subtle, yet potentially much more transformative. As I recently wrote in a Britannica Online Forum: There is something in the air, and it is nothing less than the digital artifacts of over one billion people and computers networked together collectively producing over 2,000 gigabytes of new information per second. While most of our classrooms were built under the assumption that information is scarce and hard to find, nearly the entire body of human knowledge now flows through and around these rooms in one form or another, ready to be accessed by laptops, cellphones, and iPods. Classrooms built to re-enforce the top-down authoritative knowledge of the teacher are now enveloped by a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where knowledge is made, not found, and authority is continuously negotiated through discussion and participation.1 This new media environment can be enormously disruptive to our current teaching methods and philosophies. As we increasingly move toward an environment of instant and infinite information, it becomes less important for students to know, memorize, or recall information, and more important for them to be able to find, sort, analyze, share, discuss, critique, and create information. They need to move from being simply knowledgeable to being knowledge-able.

mike wesc purpose driven research project on anonymity kansas uni ethnography/social anthropology on web 2.0 trends

Perpetual Beta Posted on March 27th, 2009 by Harold Jarche It hadn't really occurred to me before that pilots are an almost inextricable aspect of Enterprise 2.0. Of course the 'iterate and refine' concept can be implemented in other ways, but I think it's fair to say that organizations absolutely need to get good at running pilots, if they're not already there. It is a key facet of the path that leads to improved organizational performance. So says Ross Dawson in pilots as a key instrument for improving organizational performance in a complex world. If you take the cynefin approach for working in complex environments you first Probe then Sense and then Respond in order to develop emergent practice. There are no good or best practices that will work for your context in a changing complex environment, so probing (AKA: piloting or Beta releases) is necessary to see what works. However, changing from a highly designed approach to an agile method is difficult. I previously recommended that instructional design adopt agile methods but even in the programming world, letting go of old ways is difficult as Sara Ford at Microsoft explains in how I learned to program manage an agile team after six years of waterfall.

Social Software Introduction When the web was originally introduced to the world it was seen as a means of dramatically improving the way in which people communicate and socialise. Tim Berners Lee, inventor of the worldwide web, saw it as a place where people could share information through a series of hyperlinked pages. "In 1989 one of the main objectives of the WWW was to be a space in which anyone could be creative, to which anyone could contribute." (Tim Berners Lee, 2005) Unfortunately, although the web became an excellent repository of information, it became a place where only technically adept users and organisations would author content. The arrival of new services (often referred to as 'Web 2.0') has helped to remove many of the barriers preventing users from participating. Thanks to this wave of new services we have seen a massive rise in the uptake of web authoring and collaboration. The term this new wave of social activity has been given varies i.e. Social Software, Social Media and Social Computing. The key word is 'Social'! Social software tools, such as blogs, wikis and bookmark sharing services, offer exciting new ways to communicate and collaborate online. Their potential is already being keenly explored in teaching and learning, but they also offer considerable possibilities for research and the business and community engagement (BCE) sectors within higher and further education, since their flexibility and ease of use are particularly well-suited to collaboration across different sectors. As a recent article explained, "The advent of social software has brought a new culture of sharing, and this time around, people are willing to give up some of their knowledge..." (Tebbutt, 2007). Furthermore, social software's increased emphasis on multimedia, as well as text-based content, means that universities can find new ways of harnessing and making their knowledge and research accessible, thus creating what has been described as "a new form of acade

As a follow on to the discussion of social learning and formal learning in Long Live … great post by BJ Schone - Have LMSs Jumped The Shark? I constantly hear people (across many organizations) complain about their learning management system (LMS). They complain that their LMS has a terrible interface that is nearly unusable. Upgrades are difficult and cumbersome. Their employees' data is locked in to a proprietary system. Users hate the system. It's ugly. (Did I miss anything?) We've recently seen LMSs shift to include more functionality, such as wikis, blogs, social networking, etc. I think they're heading in the wrong direction. I don't really understand why LMS vendors are now thinking they need to build in every possible 2.0 tool. If I want a great blogging platform, I'm going to download WordPress (it's free and has a huge support community). If I want a great wiki platform, I'm going to download MediaWiki or DokuWiki (also free and they have huge support communities). And when it comes to social networking, as a co-worker put it, "Do they really think I'm going to create a 'friends' list in the LMS? Seriously?"

Introducing Edupunk The concept of Edupunk has totally caught wind, spreading through the blogosphere like wildfire. This post summarizes several recent posts and offers something like a definition (I would like to think that true edupunks deride definitions as tools of oppression used by defenders of order and conformity): "edupunk is student-centered, resourceful, teacher- or community-created rather than corporate-sourced, and underwritten by a progressive political stance. Barbara Ganley's philosophy of teaching and digital expression is an elegant manifestation of edupunk. Nina Simon, with her imaginative ways of applying web 2.0 philosophies to museum exhibit design, offers both low- and high-tech edupunk visions. Edupunk, it seems, takes old-school Progressive educational tactics--hands-on learning that starts with the learner's interests--and makes them relevant to today's digital age, sometimes by forgoing digital technologies entirely."

Composica 4.0 is a social e‑learning authoring system that offers real-time collaboration among team members and provides a powerful programming- free WYSIWYG environment to create and deliver high-quality interactive e‑learning 2.0 content with embedded social media.

"I suppose it was inevitable. At a time when even The Chronicle is asking whether Blackboard can be replaced by WordPress, a slick demo of a super-cool product like Wave was bound to trigger breathless speculation about the demise of the LMS. Equally predictably, the most enthusiastic predictions that the LMS will be replaced are being made by people who have already replaced their LMS. It is not terribly shocking to read Jim Groom predicting that this time the LMS is REALLY doomed!!!! (I mean that to be taken affectionately.) If you are comfortable teaching a class using WordPress or PBWiki or [insert hip and free Web 2.0 technology du jour], then there is a good chance that you will be comfortable teaching a class with Wave."

"What is a wiki? A Wiki can be thought of as a combination of a Web site and a Word document. At its simplest, it can be read just like any other web site, with no access privileges necessary, but its real power lies in the fact that groups can collaboratively work on the content of the site using nothing but a standard web browser. Beyond this ease of editing, the second powerful element of a wiki is its ability to keep track of the history of a document as it is revised. Since users come to one place to edit, the need to keep track of Word files and compile edits is eliminated. Each time a person makes changes to a wiki page, that revision of the content becomes the current version, and an older version is stored. Versions of the document can be compared side-by-side, and edits can be "rolled back" if necessary. The Wiki is gaining traction in education, as an ideal tool for the increasing amount of collaborative work done by both students and teachers. Students might use a wiki to collaborate on a group report, compile data or share the results of their research, while faculty might use the wiki to collaboratively author the structure and curriculum of a course, and the wiki can then serve as part of each person's course web site (excerpt from my contribution to a Business 2.0 article --Stewart.mader 11:35, 14 Dec 2005 (PST))"

"Journalists everywhere are starting blogs and entering the next phase in the history of journalism. Whether you call it Journalism 2.0, or a shift in media consciousness. It's pretty clear, the game has completely transformed. Transformation for the Better As the future of journalism unfolds, we're beginning to see just how beneficial this shift is for the writers out there. 1. We can interact directly with our audience. 2. We can write for a small audience, about what we care about. 3. We can profit directly, and immediately, from our writing. 4. We can build a reputation for ourselves, outside of an institution. The challenge is that journalists have to overcome a radical shift in thinking: whereas in the past we just concentrated in writing, and our business did all of our marketing and publishing. Us journalists of the future have to become a one-man journalistic machine. We have to take our writing from the idea to the audience all by ourselves. In blogging, there are a lot of things you need to consider to hit that mark of success. Suddenly, it isn't as easy to just write and publish blog posts! Know these most important tasks you need to do for your blog:"

" Details last edit by sleslie sleslie Sep 1, 2010 8:54 am - 138 revisions hide details Tags * clwe * loosely coupled * ple * plwe * small pieces * web 2.0 Protected A Collection of PLE diagrams As preparation for a workshop I am giving this fall I thought it would be interesting to collect together all the diagrams of PLEs I could find, as a compare and contrast sort of exercise. If you have others, I'd love to know about them. You can log in with the guest account (edtechpost_guest, same password) or email them to me at edtechpost@gmail.com."

Wordle is a toy for generating "word clouds" from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

example of blog based course

Purpose of the Experience Innovation continues to occur on the internet at an extremely lively pace. What was once the realm of email, FTP, Gopher, and the Web is barely recognizable a mere 10 years later. Keeping up with the speed of innovation and maintaining a familiarity with the most recent tools and capabilities is handy in some professions and absolutely critical in others. This course is designed to help you understand and effectively use a variety of "web 2.0″ technologies including blogs, RSS, wikis, social bookmarking tools, photo sharing tools, mapping tools, audio and video podcasts, and screencasts.

Looking for something similar for Keynote ;-) ...

"Using Twitter in a face-to-face Workshop I've just been reading yet another article that expresses the view that Twitter is a trivial, inconsequential tool and has no place in learning, so I thought I'd write this posting on my experiences of using Twitter in a face-to-face Workshop."

"A free resource from the Social Learning Academy How to use Twitter for Social Learning "It's amazing what you can learn in 140 characters!""

The result of 12 months research by the European Commission - Institute for Prospective Technological Studies on the impact of Web 2 innovations on education and training in Europe.