Month: April 2008

Ooops!  I made the mistake of stealing one glance at my aggregator and found this (What is the future of “The World Wide Web?”) from Mark Kramer’s Smart Mobs.  It seems that it was 15 years ago, today, that directors at the CERN lab (birthplace of WWW), signed a document proclaiming that the technology would be available to the world, free of charge. [image ((Prometheos, “Searchology-Web-Graph.” Prometheos’ Photostream. 7 Jun 2008. 30 Apr 2008 http://flickr.com/photos/23351126@N00/534201098/.))]

The BBC News, as a commemoration of the occasion, conducted interviews with several of the key players in the early web (and others), and published comments in Luminaries look to the Future Web ((“Luminaries Look to the Future Web.” BBC NEWS 30 Apr 2008 30 Apr 2008 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7373717.stm.)).  Comments from the following are shared:

• Sir Tim Berners-Lee
• Professor Nigel Shadbolt
• Professor Wendy Hall
• Kai-Fu Lee, Google China
• Dr. David Belanger, AT&T
• Mitchell Baker, Mozilla
• Mark Bernstein, PARC
• Robert Cailliau, CERN
• Robert Scoble, blogger
• Tim O’Reilly

It seems that me and my Deepest Sender window have been estranged lately.  By the way, Deepest Sender, a Firefox extention, is my blog editor of choice.  It isn’t that I haven’t had blogable ideas in my head.  It is that the ideas are too big, or too scattered yet, or I am uncertain as to whether the are even important.  Still working on it.

Mostly, I have been stingily using my days at home to work on a programming project, trying to build a web site inside of WordPress.  I am rebuilding Hitchhikr and the project seems to be progressing very well.  Look for Hitchhikr 2.0 to arise in the coming days.  You can give me a mountain of legos or an interesting problem to solve with computer code.  It’s the same joy.

I have been wanting to share a summary of a study I read about from Stephen Abram’s Lighthouse (Who Blogs) the other day, while Brenda drove me to Charlotte.  I read it on my iPhone, so couldn’t blog about it immediately, and you may well have already read about this from other bloggers, on the very thin chance that you aren’t already scanning Stephen’s Lighthouse everyday.

It’s a bi-annual study, conducted by the consumer intelligence firm, BIGresearch, called the Simultaneous Media Survey, or SIMM.  The focus of this report (BIGresearch’s SIMM 11 Profiles Bloggers ((Wissinger, Chrissy. “BIGresearch’s SIMM 11 Profiles Bloggers.” Simultaneous Media Survey. 12 Feb 2008. BIGresearch. 30 Apr 2008 http://www.bigresearch.com/news/big021208.htm.)) ) is bloggers, indicating in the subheading that they are younger and that a higher percentage of Hispanics and African Americans are blogging than the “general population.” The following table illustrates the ethnic breakdown:

	% of Population	% of Bloggers
White/Caucasian	76.1%	69.7%
African American	11.4%	12.2%
Asian	2%	3.7%
Hispanic	14.8%	20%

It was also interesting to see the fairly significant differences between regular and occassional bloggers’ use of New Media applications compared to the general (18+) population. The  article labels the applications as “Top 5,” though I’m not sure what that means. See the table to the right.

Is is possible that these five applications exceed the usage of e-mail.  I doubt it, but does anyone know?

I’m not sure how useful these numbers may be to educators, unless a case might be made about one of the last findings reported in the article.  It says that:

More Bloggers regularly seek advice from others before purchasing products or services (21.3% vs. 16.8% of adults 18+). 

They are also more likely to give advice. 

But this begs the age-old statistics question, are the bloggers because they are more likely to ask questions, or are they more likely to ask questions because they blog.  It seems that a logical case might be made either way.

What do you think?

Marlene Woo-Lun just forwarded to me a post from LM-Net (about 9 million librarians online), apparently posted by Donna (taglines) Baumbach, of University of Central Florida. ((Baumbach, Donna. “Web 2.0 Tools – Need Your Input.” E-mail to LM_NET Mailing List.25 Apr 2008.)) The message is thanking more than 600 LM-Net members (school librarians) who contributed information for a giant wiki site on Web 2.0 tools — Web Tools 4 U 2 Use.  This is possibly the largest and best organized new-web resources site I’ve seen, and I’ve del.icio.us’ed it already.

The headings include:

• Audio & Podcasting
• Blogs
• Calendars, Task Management, & ToDo Lists
• Drawing
• Photo & Photo Sharing
• Portal & WebPage starting tools
• Presentaiton Tools
• Quiz & Polling tools
• RSS & Aggregators
• Social Bookmarking
• Social Networks, and others.

This amazing resource site was created for the Florida Library Media Supervisors’ Conference (couldn’t find URL) in May 2008.  I hope that it continues to be available to us.

Thanks Donna!

A while back, I received an e-mail from Martha Barwick, who is working an internship project through Johns Hopkins University and ISTE.  They have established a wiki for the discussion of ISTE NETS refreshed standards and their implementation.  The project is…

…looking for individuals or groups to collaborate … in discussing the NETS-S and how the refreshed standards are being represented in lesson plans and classrooms around the nation and world through a collaborative wiki. (They) are also interested in how states, schools, and organizations are adopting or adapting the refreshed standards.

You can join the conversation at:

•  http://nets-implementation.iste.wikispaces.net/

Select [Edit This Page] to add your idea or comment regarding the implementation of a specific standard or a grade level range.

If this visual strikes your teacher-imagination, then you need to check out the Constructing Modern Knowledge 2008 event, organized by Gary Stagger.  His faculty includes Cynthia Solomon (Monsignor Haddad Middle School), Melinda Kolk (The Constructivist Consortium), David Wagner (Tech4Learning), Sylvia Martinez (Generation YES), and John Stetson (..finest educator I’e ever met – GSS).  Attending would also give you a chance to hear Peter Reynolds, Bob Tinker (a personal hero of mine), and Alfie Kohn.

I like that this appears to be an attendee driven event, but Stager suggests that among the possible topics will be:

• Creativity and learning
• Constructivism and constructionism
• Project-based learning
• 1:1 Computing
• Problem solving across the curriculum
• Student leadership and empowerment
• Reinventing mathematics education
• Computer science as a basic skill
• Storytelling
• School reform
• Tinkering
• Effective professional development
• Sustaining innovation

This post was live-blogged, so please excuse typos and awkward wording

This is a typical avatar, and this is a typical user…funny, picture of Keith Richards. First game that was in any way immersive was Stellar. Compare that to Crysis, a new, nearly photographic quality virtual world game. Avatars! Exploring & Building Virtual Worlds on the Internet by Bruce Damer is a book about the history of virtual worlds. The top players are:

1. Active Worlds
2. There.Com
3. SecondLife

The Wannabee’s

1. UnrealEngine2 Runtime
2. 3B
3. Multiverse

Keep your Eyes on

1. OpenSim – Open Source Software
2. Croquet
3. Cobalt
4. Project Wonderland

Multiverse is working on a concept related to pear to pear sharing, where you can move easily from world to world with one avatar.

Educationally?

• Mark designed a vritual expo to promote cross-cultural understand of students from around the world.  It’s a wheel looking thing where each spoke goes out to a pavilion of a country, with teleportation doors that take you to regions of, say Canada.
• Also created a virtual art gallery with mockups of famous art work, clickable to web paes about the works of art.
• MarsBase 2021 is a quest about the first scouting mission to Mars with problems to be solved, by students who are working together.
• SciCenter/BioLearn is also in Active Worlds where student can conduct experiments.
• River City Project has been very successful, a simulation of a small town with some health issues, and students study the environemnt to find the cause.
• Quest Atlantis has students working to recapture the wisdom of ancient Atlantis.
• Global Kids Project has students in SecondLife in the Teen Grid.

Now Mark is showing a video of a possible project a student might do about Van Gogh’s Stary Starry Night, with Don Mclain playing in the back ground.  It’s a Machinima of the building of something.  One wall, copied to another wall and another.  Now various shapes are being made, but evidiently he’s put an affect on the video to make it look paint-brushed — amazing.  It’s becoming a village — perhaps the villae from the painting.  Trees are now being makde, and a back drop.

Excellent presentation!

Live blogged, so please excuse typos and awkward wordkings.

David Gratton, of Danat, is doing a session now called, Implementing Social Networks for Efficient Capture and Generation of Knowledge.  His company built TOOD, which was a pre iTunes media delivery system.  Gratton is talking about himself and what he’s accomplished.  He says, “This is important to you today,” or “This is not important to you.”  I think he’s leading up to talking about profiles.

Gratton, has just quoted Stephen Downes,

         “How you use content is much more important than how you describe content.”

He’s talking about building social networks around repositories of content.  The repositories capture people who capture content — for better knowledge sharing. Capture fo the communitis IP.  The content may be conversations, or it may be something we want to share.

Anywone heard of Web 2.0? 😉    You really need to be about Web 2.0.  The Internet has be about community all along, Usenet, forums, chat rooms, geocities Home page and webring and e-mail.  To say that things have changed is wrong.  What’s changed is that the barriers are gone.  What’s changed is the syndication process — RSS.  I understand what he’s saying.

We shouldnt be talking about the features of social networks.  They’re all different.  But they’re about:

• Identity,
• Presence,
• Relationships,
• Conversations,
• Groups,
• Reputation, and
• Sharing, [diagram] ((Smith, Gene. “Social Software Building Blocks.” [Weblog nForm] 4 Apr 2007. nForm User Experience. 23 Apr 2008 http://nform.ca/publications/social-software-building-block.))

Linked in is about Identity.  Wither, Bebo are about presence.  Relationships are in many of the tools and conversations — Twitter is entirly about conversations.  Groups is a major part of Facebook and Basecamp.  Reputation comes out of forums.  The number of posts, replies and ranking.  Crowdtrust is a new one out of Vancouver.

So how do you apply this stuff?

Gratton is now describing the social network that his company built.  It appears to be an interface for conversation, that is designed to automatically generate metadata about the content, so that the back and forth is not just for the sake of the immediate problem, but it is generating, organizing, and storing content.

Hmmm! what might this look like as a tool for capturing content through the conversations of teaching and learning.  Students and teachers ask questions and give directions, other students and teachers respond.  The whole thing turns into content.  turning discussion into content.

Live blogged, so please excuse typos and awkward wordkings.

I’m sitting, at this moment, at the VSS conference in Vancouver, with the whole day to learn and converse. I’m a consumer today, Ian Jukes hits the stage in just a minute, but it was serendipitous to see Kevin McCluskey as I walked in. Kevin is with the New Brunswick DOE, and I’ve worked with him before in Fredericton — he’s traveled just about as far to be here as I have.

At breakfast, I sat with two educators who are DL (distributed learning) educators. They live about 300 Kilometers from Vancouver, and many of their students simply live too far away from any town to regularly attend class. So they have students using online curriculum, resources, and guidance — K-12.

Watching a video now from the association, but no audio. Perfect. These folks understand 😉

Ian Jukes is a master of visuals. He said it! These kids are “Digital Natives.” They speak digital as their first language. Again, as I’ve said so many times before, what worries me about the native/immigrants distinction is that some teachers may find this to be an excuse not to adopt the new information landscape. “I can’t learn this. I’m an immigrant.”

Jukes is make the point very well, though — leading into brain stuff. Our kids brains are different because of their information experience.

The very first thing to understand is that when we come into the world, only 50% of our brain wiring is done, that 50% is developed as a result of our experiences. I read something about this the other day, about plasticity, I think was the word. Over the last four years, we’ve found that almost everything that we thought we knew about the brain was wrong. We know that we can not change our memory capacities (this is good news). Ah! Neuro Plasticity. That’s the word. Wikipedia calls it Synaptic Plasticity.

Daniel Pink now, right versus the left. I’m seeing my keynote slides crumbling away 😉

So how do you reprogram your brain, “It takes several hours a day, seven days a week.” It’s what’s happening to kids. It’s “digital bombardment,” and it’s changing their brains.

Ian gives a minute of rest every eight minutes or so to share with each other what we’ve heard. This is very brain oriented activity. Some people are struggling with some of this stuff. Is this the first time that our brains have changed. I don’t think so. The difference is that now we know it.

Now he’s showing different MRIs of kids pathways compared to adult pathways, based on the same activity. Kids brains are wired differently. “Game play is reshaping our children’s brains.”

Jukes is sharing some very interesting information about reading, that we (oldsters) typical read in a “Z” pattern. Our youngsters read in an “F” pattern. You can read about this from info design guru, Jakob Nielson, F-Shaped Pattern for Reading Web Content.

Jukes is closing down now. The key question is, “How does this information affect how and what we teach?

I’m not sure if anyone who will be attending the annual conference of the Virtual School Society of British Columbia actually reads my blog.  But, if so, I’ve just registered the conference on Hitchhikr and set the conference tags to laaa08 and laaa2008 — the title of the conference is Learning: Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere.  You can hitchhike to the conference by going to:

      http://hitchhikr.com/?id=362

If you are attending the conference, and plan to blog about any of the events there, then add the following code to your blog article set to HTML or Source mode.

Technorati Tags: <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/laaa2008" rel="tag">laaa2008</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/laaa08" rel="tag">laaa08</a>

[Image] ((M, Andriy. “Vancouver Kaleidoscope.” Dubesor’s Photostream. 19 Jan 2008. 22 Apr 2008 <http://flickr.com/photos/dubesor/2203315868/>.))

This is more of a diary entry than anything else. Yesterday was a good day and exhausting. I did the opening keynote address, which came to about and hour and forty minutes, and then a roundtable conversation with about fifty Colorado Springs educators. On the spectrum of ed 1.0 and ed 2.0, I’d say that these folks are out ahead with momentum, partly due to the leadership of the school district. At lunch I was exhausted, with three more roundtables to do. I was worried. But as each session started, with anywhere from thirty to fifty in attendence, my energy returned as ideas started to bounce around in those highschool classrooms. And I’ll add what a treat it was to be working in high school classrooms. Information everywhere with posters and all kinds of memorabilia — and Greatful Dead posters too.

I’m especially greatful to Nancy White, the Media Services Director for the Academy District 20. We had some conversations about the roll and function of a virtual librarian for a virtual high school. Sometimes I feel like this puzzle of figuring out school 2.0 (for lack of anything else coming to mind to call it) is actually a huge egg with a really hard shell, and I just can’t penetrate that shell for answers. I look for soft places in that shell, and our conversation about what a librarian/cybrarian might do for a virtual school really felt like a soft place. Still working on that one.

I also got a chance to voice some of my quandary about social networks, as someone asked me to share my opinions yesterday. I went ahead and spilled the beans, what I’m really thinking, for the first time — leaving the room absolutely silent. I guess I’d better think about it some more 😉 Or maybe it’s the altitude.

Today, I fly up to Denver and then on to Vancouver, where Ian Jukes will pick me up at the airport and take me on a tour of, what’s been described to me as one of the most beautiful cities in North America. Can’t wait, though I’m not sure my energy level will continue to stand up to the very active mind of Mr. Jukes. I’ll watch his opening keynote tomorrow morning and then will have a day to figure out how to follow him on Thursday.

With the biggest part of a major writing project behind me, I’m in the mood to build something, and I’m thinking of doing a re-work of Hitchhikr using WordPress as the shell. I’m not sure I can do it, within the WP framework, but I’d be most thankful for having the layout done for me, and a choice of themes, keeping it as simple as possible.

I think I’ll start that now!