I'm Jack Sparrow. Who knew??

Thanks, Lesley!

Now I have to rent the movie...


I did this TWICE and came up the same way both times. I think I'm gonna go back and do the "which Horror Movie Monster are you? quiz.

Still Alive!

Ya. I'm still here.. still reading the EVO bloggers. Mostly I'm writing over in my Cognitive Dissonance blog. Lately we've been working on a discussion of media classification and the notion of Quantum Cognition.

I'm having fun, but I'm not sure how much in-road I'm making on the group.

Silly But Fun

Everybody needs a lil fun ...

Take the quiz at dicepool.com

Avocado Redux

I was reading Nancy's Post on and was put in mind of the class I designed for Week 2. To refresh the idea, we had a group of adult students in a graduate level special education course. The teacher has been unhappy with the outcomes of previous online classes and wanted a different way to engage his students.

Lord, how they floundered. Unwisely, we allowed the students to pick their blog software. Everybody had a problem replying with comments because most chose blogs that require login to comment and they hated having to have an account on ALL the different blog servers.

But the last 5 weeks have been miraculous. Students have left the teacher gasping. They write. They reply. They assimilate. They rip, mix, and burn. Gone are the three sentence discussion board "I think the subject had problems just like Sam said" posts. Next week is spring break for us so the students don't HAVE to blog.

I'll be watching to see if they actually do. Any bets?

Eide Neurolearning Blog and Learning Styles

Eide Neurolearning Blog and Learning Styles

Wow. I LIKE this post.

As an educational technologist I'm asked to justify all my silly notions all the time. This post does a great job of listing what blogs can and should do for people who are using them in learning environments.

In conclusion, it looks as if blogging will be very good for our brains. It holds enormous potential in education, and it could take societal communication and creative exchange onto a whole new level.

Ya. I think the EVO2005 folks would agree with this.

Btw, I'm using my "Blog This" applet to see how well it works .. First time for me. I'm excited.

Six Weeks So Soon?

For all my curmudgeonly complaints, I have to say this has been a blast.

Thanks to the coordinators and my fellow participants. I keep coming back to see if anybody's left comments .. and I still have a HUGE list of blogs to watch -- without even going out into the branches that most of us have made into other areas.

Nancy, Lesley, Sarolta, Marco ... and all the others who've worked so hard and contributed so much to the course. It's been an honor to play with you here in the the blogosphere ... I hope you stay in touch and keep writing in your blogs.

NL

Unsatisfactory

Part of this post is my lack of breakfast talking.

I missed my breakfast because I hurried to get to the office by 7am local time to participate in the Learning Times event this morning. I came to the office because none of the setups in my home actually work because the machines I can expose to the outside world are all linux based. My windows machines are not sufficiently hardened to be exposed. In my haste, I forgot that the university for which I work has changed their policies on access and my machine is now "behind the wall" and Elluminate is blocked.

While the experience with EVO2005 has been generally positive -- I'll do a full critique later -- this LearningTimes/Elluminate thing has been a hugely frustrating experience. Even when I managed to get connected, it was on an unsupported platform and I could not take full advantage of the participation.

I would recommend that this platform be abandoned until the issues of firewall and platform compatability can resolved. There is no way I could recommend use of this platform under the circumstances.

And I'm PARTICULARLY pissed because I missed my breakfast in order to be closed out of the experience AGAIN!

On Community

At the Northern Voice conference last weekend in Vancouver, Stephen Downes offered this theory of community.

A Theory of Community
a system defined by three major components:

1. a means of organizing input and experience
   
2. a mechanism for putting that experience into context,
   
3. a means of creation, of becoming part of someone else's experience
   

The idea here is that community is defined by the relations between its members, not some inherent property or quality – defined semantically, not syntactically

I like this. It helps explain how a random group of bloggers is not a community, but a group like ours is. Granted Downes has this in a blogging context, but he really is talking about communities in general.

See The New PR Wiki for a whole raft of Northern Voice resources.

Something I Found

Well, something that somebody else found, and somebody ELSE built upon until I listened to it this morning and wanted to pass on to somebody.

I follow about 250 blogs now in my Sage aggregator. I get a lot of linkages. Jeanne Sessum's Allied blog is one of them. And she probably follows 500. She's always got cool stuff in there that makes me think.

Today I found this audio file that's as good a representation of the potential as any I've heard. It's significant because the original audio was just the voice. One of the people who heard the mp3 took it and put the piano behind it.

Ack. My addendum: My apologies to STWC for NOT linking to his blog entry instead of just the audio ... Man, I *meant* to do that ... I claim "brain cloud"

Stavrosthewonderchicken's Empty Bottle blog

I should probably do the "language warning" (he swears a little) and the "adult content" warning because he talks about youthful transgressions of the pharmaceutical variety.

... Pete's Slings and Arrows questions the value of blogging in education. Well, education is about making connections. Blogging allows us to extend those connections outside our selves, beyond our comfort zone, into the area where new connections happen ... It's all about the linkages ...


People of Earth, remember.

ePortfolios.

i) What are e-portfolios?

The construct e-portfolios is a simple extension of the "artist portfolio" where an artist keeps representative samples and exemplars of his work. In the digital age, it only makes sense that this construct move online and become part of wider communities of practice. This is especially true for education and technology where more and more professional practice occurs in a digital format.

I particularly like the opportunity to reflect and explain in the online portfolio. In the classic portfolio, the artifacts spoke for themselves -- the artist's inclusion of this or that work goes unexplored and unexplained. As Helen Barnett points out, the electronic portfolio allows for that reflective exploration of an artifact. Why is it included? What does it represent to me? What significance does it have?


ii) How can they be of use to me and my classes?

It would be easy to consider the artifacts of a class as being the grist for a portfolio. But from an educational standpoint, the value of class related artifacts rests in their ability to trigger reflection ("Oh, my! I'd forgotten I'd done THAT!") and to add a level of meta-cognition to the eduational process. ("Final Exam: Pick the 3 most important artifacts you created in the course, and explain why each is significant individually, why they are significant as a group, and how they reflect the changed state of your understanding of the content. Place (at least) those three artifacts and your paper in your permanent portfolio.")

I think the REAL value -- and I've seen this happening as I've been assembling my own portfolio -- is that months, or years, later, the portfolio becomes a powerful tool for synthesis and evaluation. I wish I'd had mine longer. I'd really like to have some of the artifacts from my early computer days. Pictures of my first computer (the one I built), the software I created to measure program complexity, the presentation materials from my first conference, pictures of the ships I helped build -- all of those are lost now.

Helping students -- especially those in secondary or post-secondary education -- to form the portfolio habit would be immensely useful for many of them.

iii) What relationship is there between blogs and e-portfolios?

Blogs can serve as repositories for portfolios. My portfolio is stored in a TextPattern blog. One of the artifacts is my "professional" blog space -- Cognitive Dissonance -- and serves as a repository of all my formative writings relating to distance education. In a certain sense, a blog becomes a portfolio in the absence of other artifacts, the same way a diary becomes a marker for reflection and synthesis. The public nature of the blog or portfolio means that everybody has the opportunity to build a little place to show the world what you are and where you've come from.

Online Portfolio

A few weeks ago, I came across Dr Helen Barrett's ePortfolios for Learning I was really impressed that she'd done a LOT of work looking at various portfolio tools from the perspective of ease of use, portability, etc. I'd been toying with the idea that I needed to get my own materials together. Last May I graduated with my Ph.D. and the artifacts of my graduate school days were slipping out of my control as I migrated from computer to computer, harddrive to harddrive.

I already owned a domain and rented private server space, so I repurposed it to be



Feel free to visit (click the graphic) and explore my site.

One of the key elements in the portfolio is the twin construct of selection and significance. This idea is that one doesn't include EVERYTHING in a portfolio -- only select those things that are somehow significant. I didn't included every web page I ever created ... only those that were somehow significant to me. Likewise, I chose artifacts of my evolution as web designer -- even leaving some of the embarassing stuff up -- and educational designer. There's still a lot to do, but I feel like I've made a good start.

The underlying software is a blog engine running TextPattern but it branches out as needed into my WordPress blog and even into coded spaces.

Let me know what you think of it.

How to use a Button

This post is part of my tutorial on how to use a button.

At this point,

1. I've created a small graphic to use as a button,
   
2. I've created my audio file.
3. I've uploaded both to a server.
   

Now I just need to use them in a link

End of Week 4

I've been such a derelict this week.

On the one had, I was looking for an excuse to play with mp3 files. Finally made my first one and it's not bad.

One thing I find troubling is that almost everybody else used proprietary HTML <EMBED> tags so I can't listen to their MP3s. I wonder if they realize it...

Aparently they didn't.

Standards (and the ways in which Internet Explorer subverts them) can be an nasty problem. I've been a thorn in the side by insisting on trying everything in Linux on a Firefox browser, I know, but it's one of the best ways to find those things that will cause problems in cross-platform environments.

I've spent part of this Sunday afternoon listening to audio clips (I have to do a lil work but I *can* extract the links from the source code and plug them into my audio player). Every day Sarolta does something else cool. I loved listening to the story about the hotel. And thanks, Nancy, for making a link I could click on to load it. It was a relief.

The real value for audio in education will be as podcast, I think. Being able to subscribe to audio feeds and download them over night -- or even during the day while I'm engaged in my office. The challenge will be in creating audio that's not lecture. Rob Reynolds over on Xplana Radio (http://www.xplanaxine.com) is one of my favorite educational podcasters because he makes really short essays and posts them in audio and print. It's nice to be able to load my MP3 player and take them on my morning commute.

In Week 5 we should have fun. . . I'll share my own ePortfolio ...

Audio post

OK. A first try at posting an audio link.

MP3 Audio

An old negative ...  

Some years ago, my mother sent me an envelope of old negatives. These are the old Kodak Safety Film negatives in a large format. Tonight, I found the envelope and put the negatives in the scanner.

I remember the day my mother took this picture of me. It was a lovely sunny summer day and I was sitting on a green wool blanket on the beach outside our house. I'm playing with the pipes in my father's piperack and I can still smell the tobacco residue and the pines above me. I think there were chickadees... but I had no idea what the smells or sounds meant.

This negative is over 50 years old. It scanned pretty well, don't you think?

Mary Harrsch - a reflection

Personally, I was disappointed.

Once again, Learning Times tripped me up. I was able to hear Mary's lecture but when she went "driving around" my browser wouldn't follow. Even after I released the firewall and reprogrammed my router to accept the extra ports required, the only time I saw any of the graphical content was when it got put on the Whiteboard. It sounded sorta interesting.

The other problem I have is this notion of getting everbody in the same space at same time so we can all sit around and listen to one person talk. Granted the text chat was there, but the presentation mode ... sitting at the feet of the master ... seemed like we weren't really taking advantage of the opportity to get in and get our hands dirty.

The material sounded like it was pretty good, but couldn't that have been offered .. say .. in a blog, or as some other kind of publication rather than having Mary walk us thru it. The questions that people were asking seemed pretty decent .. and some of the follow on blogging I've read says that the majority of people liked it and got a lot out of it.

Myself, I can't help but think this glass was half empty. While that means it was also half-full, I would have liked to use that other half glass.

Ideas for using RSS in class:

- Put a technorati key-word watchlist together and post the link to it to the class for use in their aggregators.
- Cross link all the blogs in the class to a single aggregator stream.
- Build a del.icio.us tag list and feed it into an aggregator.
- Teacher publishes work, assignments, content on RSS to the members of his/her class.

Ah, well.

NL

Picasa - Hello - Blogger

A Quick Test of Bloggerbot and Hello 

Learning Times == Frustration

Man, I hate this stuff sometimes.

First, lemme just say, I've attended these LearningTimes sessions with the Digital Divide Network before. They always worked just fine.

Not today. I started trying to log in a full hour before the session. The session is almost over now and I just can't make the darn thing work. And I am REALLY pissed off because I'm a big Will Richardson fan and wanted to be in this session.

I know it's being recorded. I know a transcript of the chat will be made. I know that none of that is as good as being there and participating. It makes me crazy.

Second. I'm an expert. I build computers. I administer networks. I program in 9 languages. I've been involved in the internet since before there WAS a world wide web.

Last. I FINALLY solved the problem. It was the router on my home network. I wouldn't pass the packets back thru the firewall and didn't give me any kind of message to tell me what the problem was.

Bottom line.
1. Two hours that I'll never get back
2. I'm aggravated beyond all tolerance
3. I have a re-inforced notion that these kinds of "we'll pretend it's a classroom" environments are just not worth the cost.

Week 2 Assignment and Reflection

This is my second week assignment. I'm supposed to write an article on the various kinds of information found in the student and teacher blogs from Bee's grid and design a blog-course for ESL.

Grinding thru the various blogs was, I suppose, a reasonable exercise. It was a good way to see the pedestrian applications of blog software in (what I assume) were ESL applications. There was a rather narrow range of application in both sets of blogs. I didn't see a GREAT deal of meta-cognition being applied to the blogging experiences across the 8 blogs I looked at. The majority of them were diary-like -- with a greater or lesser emphasis on the various coursework and assignments. I can't throw too many stones here -- the posts for my blog in this course follow basically the same format -- and this course is, after all, BSL (blogging as Second Langauge) training.

I felt a little cheated, tho, that nobody in the sample had done
a) A Newspaper style group blog.
b) Used the language/blog combination to write fiction
c) Engaged in a larger examination of what they thought about their thinking about blogging and learning English.

I was sympathetic with the one teacher who went on hiatis from blogging because she wanted to break out of the "blogging because my audience expects it" rut. I write a regular weekly column about Distance Education in my Cognitive Dissonance blog, and there are times when I wonder if it's all worth it myself.

The second part of the task is to design a course that has in it, a blog.

Now, in the first place, that's a backwards assignment. We should be designing the instruction and only THEN deal with whether a blog is an appropriate channel for adding to the class based on an instructional goal. But .. I'll suspend my disbelieve (and design sense) for the purposes of the argument. :D

Since I don't teach ESL, I'm going to take the liberty to write about the application of a blog in a Masters Level Special Education program. It's particularly pertinent because the faculty member who is teaching the class (and whom I am supporting in getting this thing rolling) wants to incorporate blogs into his class.

(i) the public you will be dealing with
- the class is 10 adult students, new in the field of special education.

(ii) their level, their communicative competence
- they are, generally, classroom teachers who wish to get an MA in Significant Disabilities
- they generally have limited technological expertise

(iii) your setting, degree of formality of instruction
- the teacher is a "hard-core classroom lecturer" who is having trouble adapting to the online melieu. He needs to find ways to let go and allow the students to learn without getting his digitized powerpoints in the way

(iv) access, amount of time you can spend on it
- target goal is to spend about an hour a day of teacher time, about 20 minutes a day of student time.


(v) curricular constraints, institutional support, technical resources
- topical constraints are largely limited only by the content requirements of a rather liberal syllabus. The course will have the services of an expert technician and blogger to aid the teacher and student in determining valid applications of the blogging tools.

(vi) your common needs and objective
- All of us share the common need to connect on a more personal and regular basis. When dealing with the often emotion-charged material -- especially in the field of Significant Disability -- it's important for the students to be able to communicate with each other and construct their own meaning out of the material, the relationships, and their "day jobs"

The teacher has decided that blogs will be a good way for students to produce some extended writings on selected subjects over the duration of the course. Some of the topics will be assigned, others will be more open.

This is coming up on the end of the second week of EVO-2005. I'm not as involved this week as last, in large part because of more immediate demands on my time and resources in the Real World. In addition, the exercises (and group acitivites) this week seemed a bit weaker than the week prior and I just couldn't work up enough "oomph" to participate in them. I *did* want to get up and meet in TappedIn last Wednesday, but I overslept -- the session was at 5am local time here.

The coming week, I'm hoping that I'll be able to be more engaged in the group work and that I'll find an assignment I like. :D

Eat your own dogfood

Man.

Every once in a while I come across an example of what NOT to do that's soooo egregiously bad, I just HAVE to point it out. I don't like to do it, because next time it could be me -- the gods know *I* make enough of my own trouble and karma will get me for throwing these rocks, no doubt.

But this one is a classic teaching moment.

The Six Laws of the New Software.

His laws are

• Single-idea


• Collaborate


• Disappear (this refers to interface design)


• Simplify


• Release


• Comply

To read this I had to switch to a different machine that had acrobat on it because

1. the default pdf reader on my linux machine wouldn't cope with the display


2. this thing is 17 pages of pretty densely packed text.


3. in a proprietary format


4. using a menu structure to manage page turning


5. written by (apparently) one guy

Now I appreciate that he's talking about software development. But the difference between programming computers (writing software) and programming people (writing manifestos) has a lot of parallels.

If you wanna talk the talk, then you gotta walk the walk.

End of today's lesson in what NOT to do.

Oye.