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Year 2009: Current Passions I spend most of my time these days writing my next book. It is about "what technology wants." I'm posting my thoughts in-progress on The Technium. I solicit comments there, which in turn influence my ideas. It is a wonderful way to craft a book. Writing in public is more work, but it makes the book better. The final draft is due to be delivered in October 2009, and will most likely be published by Viking/Penguin sometime in 2010. In order to finish this book on deadline, I've drastically cut down on travels and speaking, but when I do, I am represented by Monitor Talent. In addition to The Technium I post to 9 other blogs, detailed below. All these bits are consolidated into one uber-blog I call my Lifestream. Anything that I write on any blog will be posted in this stream. (Anything written by other authors on my blogs will not be posted here.) This is an easy way to keep up with what I am working on, thinking about, conjuring with. I am exploring Twitter. My handle is kevin2kelly in case you want to follow.

Join the world's first and largest social networking site dedicated to education and educational technology. Launched in 2004 and with over 20,000 members there is something in here for everyone interested in education.

T&L blogger Ryan Bretag recently sat down with his students and asked them about 21st-Century Learning strategies. Their suggestions are amazing. Read the whole piece here: http://www.techlearning.com/blogs.aspx?id=15776 Some snippets: Each discussion point started and ended with the focus on learning. For example, the students talked about creating a learning environment that was about learning not just memorization. To do this, they wanted to seek out partnerships both locally and globally in order to build connections that would foster a "learning to learn" movement where students are learning for learning, open to learning, and innovative. Clearly, textbooks were not fast enough nor diverse enough in their eyes. They longed for ways to interact with materials that were updated frequently and offered a wealth of perspectives. In fact, a good portion felt there was a need to move beyond the textbook because "information changes to rapidly" for textbooks to be the main source in the classroom. Along with this, information and resources needed to come in a variety of formats if the curriculum was going to remain progressive and current: narrative, fiction, digital, multimedia, and non-fiction.

Changing Nature of Physical Spaces Each Saturday I meet my friend and colleague, Scott McDonald, at a local coffee shop for an hour or so to discuss some emerging research topics we're working towards. Each week we are amazed at the number of people in Saint's sitting on their laptops working - most of them are doing browser based work like google docs, Facebook, and the like. It is rare that I see anyone not using the browser as the primary mode of work. That is a big change from even a year or so ago. The same can typically be observed if you walk onto our campus and into the student union building. You see table after table of students on laptops, living in their browsers - Facebook, gmail, and ANGEL seem to be what I see. Rarely do I observe work happening in "real" applications. I am guessing that will only get more common as the Blogs at PSU gain wider adoption for writing and students begin to weave google docs into their daily workflow.

Sheffield Hallam Uni have published a review of current literature regarding the application of technology to deliver and support the use of feedback as part of a project exploring impact of learning technology on students' engagement with feedback.

Voices Carry I was feeling really restless early last week about our ability to run and manage new and emerging services in a World where change happens at a pace that is nearly out of control. I thought my post, Why Run a Service would be a signal that I've come to a conclusion that there are real reasons to try and keep up. I didn't honestly expect it to strike the chord it did, but when you ask people interesting questions you sometimes get more interesting questions in return that demand to be explored. Lots of killer conversation going on in the comments of that post … one particular thread emerged about how encouraging open writing and blogging can generate greater depth of connections within our community. That last word is the really important piece to us - how we work to engage our community to embrace these emergent trends is what we think will ultimately make what we do more interesting and important. The more they participate, the more we can contribute opportunities to change teaching and learning.

A review of the current and developing use of Web 2.0 technologies in higher education from an international perspective. It looks at how Web 2.0 is being used in both learning and teaching and learner support in five countries (Australia, The Netherlands, South Africa, United Kingdom and United States of America) as well as the drivers and inhibitors to use and looks at some of the ways in which we expect higher education practice to develop as a result.

At the 2007 EG conference, Kevin Kelly shares a fun stat: The World Wide Web, as we know it, is only 5,000 days old. Now, Kelly asks, how can we predict what's coming in the next 5,000 days?

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.

Professional Development Opportunities Over Video via the CILC The Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration (CILC) is a great resource for not only identifying and/or announcing classroom collaborative projects, but also for finding professional development providers for your school and district who present over video. I'm pleased to announce that five of my educational presentations / workshops are now being offered over video (H.323, Skype, iChat or Google Video) via the Professional Development Marketplace of the CILC.

Videos for PD The following are links to educational videos I use for professional development workshops and presentations with teachers. If you know of other videos that should be included in this list, please add a link as a comment to this page. Some of these videos are hosted on YouTube, TeacherTube, or other sites as embedded Flash media - Tips for downloading offline copies of Flash videos are also available.

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.

Turning a College Lecture into a Conversation with CoverItLive Alfred Hermida by Alfred Hermida, April 13, 2009 Tagged: coveritlive, journalism school, social media, twitter, university of british columbia Journalists who also teach will know that one of the challenges of teaching a large, undergraduate class is the sheer number of students. It can be hard to foster a discussion in a lecture hall, where many students may be too intimidated to speak up. So instead the lesson often becomes a lecture, as the professor stands up in front of the class and talks at them for the best part of an hour. In this instructor-centered model, knowledge is a commodity to be transmitted from the instructor to the student's empty vessel. There is a place for the traditional, one-to-many transmission. This is the way the mass media worked for much of the 20th century and continues to operate today. But the emergence of participatory journalism is changing this. Most news outlets, at the very least, solicit comments from their online readers. Others, such as Canada's Globe and Mail, use the live-blogging tool CoveritLive both for real-time reporting and for engaging readers in a discussion, such as in its coverage of the Mesh conference in Toronto. Tools such as CoveritLive or Twitter can turn the one-to-many model of journalism on its head, offering instead a many-to-many experience. The same tools may also have a use in the classroom, as a way of turning the traditional university lecture into a conversation.

SmartPen as Digital Ethnography Tool Mar 11th, 2009 by Prof Wesch This little smartpen from livescribe just might revolutionize my note-taking in seminars, discussions, and ethnographic interviews. If you have never seen it before, check out some of the demos on YouTube. In short, it records audio as you write and links what you are writing to the audio (by recording what you write through a small infrared camera near the tip of the pen). When you are done recording you can actually tap the pen anywhere on your page and the pen will play the audio that was recorded at the time you were making that specific pen stroke. Students are already sharing lecture notes in the community section of livescribe.com. As recording devices become increasingly embedded into everyday objects the days of protecting lectures from being recorded seem numbered.

Twitter: it's a medium not a platform It tweets but it ain't Twitter It tweets but it ain't Twitter So I am on a panel talking about Twitter, while Jemima 'mistress of multi-skilling' Kiss is Tweeting to the few enterprising students who are Tweeting while another is broadcasting it on Qik. Then Anthony Thornton from IPCmedia says "Twitter is a not a platform, it's the medium for short-term communication". And he's right. I have been active on Twitter for a month or so. It is a micro-blogging service that limits messages to 140 characters, but you can link out to other webpages and thus include video/stills.

Twitiquette is not enough DateThursday, May 1, 2008 at 07:46PM Three days of student information system training (as a participant) has given me the opportunity to use Twitter for an extended amount of time. I really, really, really was hoping to get hooked and discover what all the educational excitement is about this tool. But all I am left with are questions about being "Minnesota nice" in a micro-blogging environment and why anyone would use Twitter. I freely admit that I am not the most social of creatures. I am uncomfortable in environments where I don't know the social norms, the accepted rules. So after feeling edgy for a couple days, I started doing a little digging about Twitiquette. (I thought I was clever in inventing the term, but others beat me to it.) Here's a very short list of sources: * The Twitter Fan Wiki, the etiquette page * Stuart Ciske's 5 Essential Twitter Truths. * GrammarGirl's Twitter Style Guide. * David Jakes Tragedy of the Commons * Global Geek News Blog. Twitter Etiquette (Thanks to Darren Draper for last three links.)

12 eLearning Predictions for 2009 : eLearning Technology Last year I laid out in January my Ten Predictions for eLearning 2008. In my post, 2008 2009 - written in December 2008, I looked at how well I did in those predictions, and my results were pretty good, not perfect. So, let's try it again this year ...