It's important sometimes to realize that while we are blazing new trails in mainstream education, we are really dealing with the dam of industrial culture finally breaking.

We've been paying attention enough to know why it's breaking. We deserve credit for that.

In fact, we've been waiting for it to break.

But the ideas that fuel me (and I think possibly you) aren't as new as most of my colleagues think. What we are looking at is the transference of a hacking culture to a mainstream population. That's the revolution in a nutshell.

Educational institutions need to turn out more hackers. Because it's the hackers, not the planners, that will save this planet.

So while the idea of the "hacker next door" might be novel to our co-workers, the culture is warmly familiar to us. It's decentralized, it values recursion, iteration, intervention. It sees consumer/producer divisions as quaint. It sees five-year-plans as authoritarian and unproductive. It sees the Machine as an extension of Self.

In a way, it was all so predictable.

But I went back and reread Stewart Brand today and, well, if you haven't read his early stuff recently, treat yourself to it. It will take your breath away. The wisdom of crowds, planner vs. hackers, machines as community builders, it's all there.

From Stewart Brand's brilliant 1972 article in Rolling Stone on the playing and creation of SPACEWAR:

Where a few brilliantly stupid computers can wreak havoc, a host of modest computers (and some brilliant ones) serving innumerable individual purposes can be healthful, can repair havoc, feed life. (Likewise, 20 crummy speakers at once will give better sound fidelity than one excellent speaker - try it.)

Spacewar serves Earthpeace. So does any funky playing with computers or any computer-pursuit of your own peculiar goals, and especially any use of computers to offset other computers. It won't be so hard. The price of hardware is coming down fast, and with the new CMOS chips (Complimentary Metal Oxide Semiconductor integrated circuits) the energy-drain of major computing drops to Flashlight-battery level.

Part of the grotesqueness of American life in these latter days is a subservience to Plan that amounts to panic. What we don't intend shouldn't happen. What happens anyway is either blamed on our enemies or baldly ignored. In our arrogance we close our ears to voices not our rational own, we routinely reject the princely gifts of spontaneous generation.

Spacewar as a parable is almost too pat. It was the illegitimate child of the marrying of computers and graphic displays. It was part of no one's grand scheme. It served no grand theory. It was the enthusiasm of irresponsible youngsters. It was disreputably competitive ("You killed me, Tovar!"). It was an administrative headache. It was merely delightful.

Yet Spacewar, if anyone cared to notice, was a flawless crystal ball of things to come in computer science and computer use:

1. It was intensely interactive in real time with the computer.


2. It encouraged new programming by the user.


3. It bonded human and machine through a responsive broadband interface of live graphics display.


4. It served primarily as a communication device between humans.


5. It was a game.


6. It functioned best on, stand-alone equipment (and diarupted multiple-user equipment).


7. It served human interest, not machine. (Spacewar is trivial to a computer.)


8. It was delightful.

In those days of batch processing and passive consumerism (data was something you sent to the manufacturer, like color film), Spaccwar was heresy, uninvited and unwelcome. The hackers made Spacewar, not the planners. When computers become available to everybody, the hackers take over. We are all Computer Bums, all more empowered as individuals and as co-operators. That might enhance things ... like the richness and rigor of spontaneous creation and of human interaction ... of sentient interaction.

Treat yourself, and go read the whole article now. It should be required reading for anybody going into learning technology.

From email from my co-worker, Jenny Darrow:

I’ve done some thinking about the physical space that we will need to promote and support technology and engagement pedagogies. I’m concerned that our emphasis has been so focused on learning, teaching, and curriculum that we’ve been delinquent in addressing physical space requirements....

She goes onto link to Stanford's Wallenberg Hall classrooms as examples of new design thinking, which I think is exactly right.

What does Wallenberg replace the traditional classroom with? Reconfigurable space combined with media infrastructure. Few assumptions about what your class will be, but many features that can help it be what you want. Here's how they put it (emphasis mine):

We have already addressed some of these issues with a new type of classroom design that allows learners and instructors to control the configuration of their environment. Next we propose to integrate this type of room with other learning spaces to form “flexible agenda spaces” designed to adapt, moment-to-moment to the activity requirements of the user community.

To put it even more precisely, the design avoids planning in favor of an environment that encourages hacking.

It's strange how all these things come together. For programmers, it's small pieces loosely coupled. For architects it's reconfigurable space. For graphics people, it's the move from "design" to "style".

The upshot everywhere seems to be that design is always perfect for last year's ideas. But last year's ideas are not what keeps us moving forward.

If you want to keep moving forward, you're going to have to hack your space. Metaphorical or not.

Might be time to get off Facebook, depending on the level of violation you feel about the recent Beacon revelations.

Far more interesting to me though is Cory Doctrow's observation that you are going to want to get off Facebook at some point anyway, no matter how much you like it. As he points out we shed our skin quite a few times in real-life, so who the hell wants a persistent identity?

 It's not just Facebook and it's not just me. Every "social networking service" has had this problem and every user I've spoken to has been frustrated by it. I think that's why these services are so volatile: why we're so willing to flee from Friendster and into MySpace's loving arms; from MySpace to Facebook. It's socially awkward to refuse to add someone to your friends list -- but removing someone from your friend-list is practically a declaration of war. The least-awkward way to get back to a friends list with nothing but friends on it is to reboot: create a new identity on a new system and send out some invites (of course, chances are at least one of those invites will go to someone who'll groan and wonder why we're dumb enough to think that we're pals).

That's why I don't worry about Facebook taking over the net. As more users flock to it, the chances that the person who precipitates your exodus will find you increases. Once that happens, poof, away you go -- and Facebook joins SixDegrees, Friendster and their pals on the scrapheap of net.history.

What Cory is onto here fascinates me -- because it's not only that creepy guy friending you that's the problem.

Life, or at least modern American life,  is built around the possibility of the social reboot. We move constantly, change jobs frequently, and keep only the relationships worth keeping from those previous locations. We get to redefine ourselves to some extent, by shedding our social skin. We don't always have to be what we were in our hometown, or college, or first job. We can throw away a whole set of the expectations around us with a simple job or location hop. When we start to feel a little too hemmed in, that's often exactly what we do.

And whether or not we admit it, most of us love the freedom.

In modern American life, persistent identity is the exception, not the norm, the province of your brother and Mom, not your friends.

In fact, if I were to define Family, I'd define it as that social application that you can't fix by rebooting. Which is a joy and a burden, of course.

But the problem is in a persistent identity network everybody becomes family. You can't escape them. You can't reboot your locale or your job. You have to blog as a Democrat and have your Republican high school friends read it. You have to deal with the people that will forever remember you as the guy that did the funnel of Wild Irish Rose in Fiske Hall. You have to tell all your Catholic school buddies that your now an atheist instead of just letting that one quietly slip under the radar.

I'm with Cory. The best feature of Facebook is I know at some point I'll be out of it. God save us from persistent identity societies, and long live the social reboot.

Little bit of a Great Harmonic Google Convergence going on here. Jon Udell mentions in passing his rise and fall from the top of the "Jon" results. Stephen Downes replies in a amusing comment that he defeated Stephen King and Stephen Hawking -- only to be conquered by the last of the Norman Kings.

Meanwhile, my colleague at KSC, Jenny Darrow, writes a somewhat frustrated post about people not understanding it's content and connection that will make them findable on Google -- not some secret technical voodoo.

Her response to those that complain their sites are not ranked highly?

I’m not a guru in web analytics but I can tell you a few things that might help you get a higher rank.

Write. Update. Contribute. Link. Reciprocate. Did I mention write?

And she's right, of course.

I'm no Jon or Stephen, but I've slowly floated up past my "Caulfield" namesakes. And while I've always known I'd never displace my good friend Holden, I've left others in the dust: Patrick Caulfield, Pop Artist. Brian Caulfield, Tech Writer for Forbes. Several CEOs. Many VPs. The secondary sites of Emma Caulfield, a Buffy the Vampire Slayer star.

The MANY secondary sites of Emma Caulfield, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer star.

And just a couple weeks ago, I finally made it on to the first page. And I was pretty chuffed with myself.

But here's the thing. Click to the second page of Google results. Five spaces behind me is my wife, an artist. Apart from getting the URL with her name in it, what did she do? She did her art, but she opened it up to the world. She showed pieces half finished, talked about her technique. She hooked into a vibrant community of practice. She announced new posts on a behind the scenes Google Group she's on with other artists. She invited feedback. She acted (sometimes) on the feedback. She shared unreservedly her progress with her technique, and kept nothing hidden.

Was she trying to rank highly? Not at all. She was trying to have a conversation about what she did right and what she did wrong, and trying to figure out better ways of doing it. In the process, through quickly absorbing what other people in her community of practice already knew about the medium of colored pencil work, and by making a creative leap past that (once again, guided by this community), she's invented a new colored pencil technique (involving the use of pastelboard) which allows her to get painterly effects in a fraction of the time standard colored pencil techniques allowed.

How revolutionary is the process? Ann Kullberg, Queen of the Colored Pencil World, said she was absolutely shocked at how much the method improved rendering speed (you have to understand the colored pencil artists are used to putting in as many as 50-100 hours on a work -- Nicole can render similar effects in as little as a day, and often with increased vibrancy not traditionally associated with colored pencil).

Ultimately, her new technique represents an incremental step. But it's an incremental step from precisely the very edge of a community's knowledge, and that's what makes the difference. Nicole has amazing natural talent, but she was able through the network of an online community to do what she does better. She was able to get support for what she did, feedback from artists and buyers, technique advice from experts in the field.

And now she's number fifteen on the Google "Caulfield" results.

But at this point, that's really beside the point, isn't it?

The fact that you're not ranked highly on Google is not a problem. It's a symptom. It's a sign that you are not taking advantage of the Networked Age for professional development or communication.

Fix that, and leave the Google results to heaven.

Sony set out to be the iTunes of book-publishing with its Sony Reader. And Sony built a pretty good technical and marketing replica of that iPod model -- with an initial online offering that was comparable to Apple's initial limited selection, with a desktop piece of software clearly modeled on the iTunes client, with redistribution deals with a number of publishers, and at the center a top notch piece of hardware.

And this week, as Amazon released the Kindle, the Sony Reader became a paperweight. The Kindle sports about 100,000 titles compared to Sony's 10,000. And that makes all the difference -- it's the difference between thinking of books you want to read and finding electronic versions available and having to browse what's available to find out what you can read.

Nobody wants to buy an ebook device with less titles than their local bookstore. That's just insane.

All the same, I can't help thinking of a major flaw in Sony's "iPod for books" formulation of their strategy.

Here's what they missed. When the iPod first came out, people were not primarily loading it up with stuff from iTunes. The majority of people's collections came from either rips of their own CDs or from so-called piracy (I prefer filesharing, but whatev).

An iPod made sense because if iTunes didn't have what you wanted you could get it by hook or crook.

It occurred to me yesterday that if there had been a vibrant book piracy market, the Sony Reader would have been an easy sell. There would be a huge base. If one could grab a copy of I, Robot or Confederacy of Dunces for free off of a BitTorrent site, you wouldn't hesitate to get a Reader -- and the market penetration of the device would then (as with the iPod) start to drive legal sales.

But every month I would look to see if the book my book club was reading was available on the Sony Reader, and every month it was not. Not once.

And with no filesharing market to turn to for unofficial copies, I had to go to physical alternatives.

Well, you might say, at least the author got something out of that. At least the author got paid.

Nope, sorry. Didn't happen. Like most people I know nowadays I use Amazon to order secondhand copies from people around the country. The author didn't get a dime, and neither did the publisher -- I ordered these books secondhand.

I think the Kindle is going to be a big hit, because of a number of design choices they made, but even more because only Amazon has the real force to make the industry wake up. Oh, and 100,000 titles on launch doesn't hurt either.

But as they move forward, it might be good for both Amazon and the publishers to realize it often takes a little unauthorized use to jumpstart an industry -- at least until the gaps are filled in. That's the real lesson of the iPod, and one that Sony apparently missed.

So I saw through someone's feed on Facebook that National Novel Writing Month is going on. This is an improvement -- I usually notice this when it's already over.

I dithered a bit on whether I should attempt it with the month half gone and so many other things in the works here.

And then I thought, what the heck:

http://www.nanowrimo.org/user/259250

By posting this, I ensure people will ask me how it's going, which ensures (I think) that I'll pound out a dozen or so pages today...

Ah, zee blogs...

So I've been away a bit, working on the college's AT vision plan, which I wiki-ed out over a period of a week with some other folks.

That turns out to be interesting from a process standpoint...we did some marathon work on it the past two weeks, and presented it to an appropriate steering committee, and I think the initial perception might have been, given how far along we'd gotten it, that we had been working on it for months by ourselves. And in a shared-governance institution, that can be a problem.

In other words moving too fast and having a working document too early is a very suspicious thing.

We corrected that assumption, but it highlighted a couple things for me:

1. Wikis really do accelerate collaboration, and they do so because they recognize that if you can roll anything back you can avoid having interminable layers of approval in front of decisions. The default mode of Web 2.0, and the new world of media in general, is if it can be undone, don't put a dam in front of it.

2. Both the speed and the attitude associated with this method can be jarring to organizations. I think it's similar to what happened in programming when compile time came down and run-time languages came into their own. There was a period where the organization surrounding the tools lived in a state of cognitive dissonance. If you've ever seen someone make a state change diagram or Yourdon chart for something pulling data from a db and throwing it into a skin, then you know what I mean.

3. But change is inevitable. When it comes to their methods, programmers are some of the most religious people on the planet. Yet the industry changed. Sure, there are still some places you'll find people putting a three month design process before the first script is run, but this has become the exception. And lightweight methodologies like Extreme Programming are no longer seen as fringe methods used by "sloppy" programmers (and heck, it only took a decade, right?).

My point? I guess it's the title. Wiki is to Authoring as Perl is to Programming. (or Python, or VB, or Swing, or MUMPS: no need for a holy war...).

Of course, I'm sure someone has already said this... I was just struck by how much the moment we are in re: wikis matches a cultural moment we were in programming a number of years back....

So there's a front page article today in the Wall Street Journal. The subject? My political blog, Blue Hampshire. The title?

"Have a Laptop? You, Too, Can Sway New Hampshire Race."

 Subtitle?

"Self-Appointed Bloggers
Get Candidate Face Time;
On the Bus With Edwards"

You know, there's so much insecurity in that headline that I'm nervous for the WSJ. I really want to pat them on the head and tell them it'll be all right.

Personally I think the article is a catalog of the traditional misconceptions about bloggers, sort of Andrew Keen without all the bombast. The weird thing is it's not a hatchet job (well, except for the dot portrait that looks nothing like me). I mean, it's an honest attempt to understand this phenomenon through the lens of tradmed. It captures what we do, but then places that into the culture of access, status, centralized control, and nonparticipation that is predominant in tradmed. And the result is that we're portrayed as just reporters running around with less professionalism.

Am I happy about the article though? Extremely. Front page WSJ, man. The people who get what we're about will see that and visit us. The people that don't won't. That's fine by me.

A couple weeks ago I applied for a grant from the Knight News Challenge for creation of a microreporting infrastructure -- an idea I've been batting around for about a year now but haven't had time to implement (check out, for example, this ghost town).

Not sure if I'll get the grant or not, but here's hoping.

The idea is actually pretty simple. A corps of volunteer microreporters report news and gossip as it happens through text messaging or email. Those microreports of one or two sentences are posted in real-time to a common site where they can be community rated and commented on.

The idea is partially informed by a thing I've noticed at Blue Hampshire: occasionally posting a small skeleton story on a site filled with insiders generates a really full story via people volunteering information in the comments.

So in the world of microreporting, if you witnessed an accident (or more likely the aftermath) you might write

Motorcyclist down on West st. In front of T-bird mini mart. Ambulance and cops arriving. Looks like skidded out in turn? Not sure. Traffic routed thru tbird lot.

Which is on its own is worth something -- if you were worried about someone who is late, for example you could check the site, and if you are going somewhere you could make sure you avoid West St.

But the real benefit would come with user comment and ranking. If it's an important story, readers would push it to the top. If multiple reports come in, readers would be given a facility to group the reports. But most importantly, people could correct and expand on the stories. A reader listening to the police scanner could fill in details. If someone a day later heard something about the accident, they could add it. A person familiar with that intersection might also comment about whether there was a pattern of such things.

Assuming people did this non-anonymously, under their own names, a reporter or blogger could look at the original microreports plus comments and with a couple calls for verification very quickly put together a story.

Such a system would allow the reporter or blogger to focus on story selection, verification, and storytelling rather than the more mundane work of finding and assembling the smaller pieces from which such stories are composed.

I'm not saying this would always be the case -- obviously there will always be a place for traditional source-building and investigative journalism. But for local stories in small towns, which are written on ever-shrinking budgets, the efficiency gained with such a system might make it possible to continue to provide the coverage which helps to hold small communities together. And that, to me, makes this an idea well worth trying.

There's a story that Will Robinson tells, perhaps apocryphal, Â about a student that took their first draft of a paper, and posted it to Wikipedia. After a week or so they took it down, newly edited, fact checked and sourced.

Well, maybe this will work, and maybe it won't, but I'm involved in writing an academic technology vision statement (along with compratriot Jenny Darrow), and I couldn't help but think of that story. Why labor in the dark when so many people smarter than me read this blog?

So I'd like to invite any of you that read this and have ideas about what an Academic Tech Vision document should look like to comment over at:

http://atvision.pbwiki.com

The password is highway61. You can upload your own idea of a vision plan, or comment on ours. The idea is, if this is sucessful, to create our plan in a way that is a testament to net-enabled methods of creation.

And it it fails... well, I think it's a noble act to attempt to eat your own dogfood. So we'll soldier on. But I really do invite all the people that stop by here occasionally to comment or post their own idea on the wiki... that crowd includes, but is not limited to, Stephen Downes, Jon Udell, Jim Groom, Martha Burtis, Andy Rush, Leigh Blackall, Bernard Lunn, Royce Robertson, Richard Nantel, Jeff McClurken, Artichoke, Nils Peterson, Harold Jarche, Scott Wilson, Jerry Slezak, Gardner Campbell, Bill Fitzgerald, etc. (sorry I don't have time to link all those names).

Actually looking at that list of people who have commented or linked here, I'm suddenly struck by how blessed this blog, at less than six months old, has been. It's kind of overwhelming, really: you get any two people from that above list together, and you probably have a brain trust. Three and it's a think tank.

So let me add that whether you help Jenny and I out with comments or not, I'm really just stunned how gracious people have been with their comments and links to date, and grateful.

So maybe see you over there? (And if you want to sport a link to the project and invite your own friends to help, as always, very much appreciated...)

http://atvision.pbwiki.com

password: highway61

(The best address to reach me at is caulfield.mike@gmail.com if you have any questions. And yes, after I get this done, I WILL finish the Pecha Kucha project.).

So we're about 20 hours into this week, and so far I've spent over 10 of those hours on drafting an academic technology plan for my institution.

I have trouble explaining why it's so hard to draft, but perhaps if you've ever tried to tie a policy document into the greater fabric of policy documents at your college or large corporation, you'll understand. What seems to be happening is I'm coming at this downward, from the broad objectives of the college, and then trying to fit my thinking into that framework. Like all policy documents, it has to be a bit of a magic trick -- I have to show how the aims of the college have led to this approach to technology the whole time.

But of course, my understanding of technology doesn't really descend from the aims of the college. It comes from a lifetime of solving problems using computers and networks, from ten years of applying technology to "academic" problems, and from political blogging, where it's become really apparent to me that even in areas where problems are not technical that a creative orientation to technology can quite literally allow students to change the world.

So here, completely off the top of my head, 15 minutes before the meeting where I will present my tortured institutional draft of the AT plan -- here is what I would *like* to it to say:

We'll use technology to help students and faculty to change the world. Sometimes that means pulling together people to colloborate and solve a sticky problem. Sometimes it means providing a service that no one has thought to provide. Sometimes it means setting up a Learning Management System to automatically import a student roster so that a professor can spend that time with students instead of Excel. Ultimately if you can show us an interesting problem, we can tell you how technology and network thinking can address it better. The more it would improve the world relative to the effort required, the higher it goes in the queue.

We'll graduate students who think creatively about technology and loose processes. Today's world belongs to the systems analyst, the person who understands that a loose process is as much a machine as a tightly programmed circuit board. The person that understands where it makes sense to encode a process in a circuit board, and where it makes sense to encode a process in a short verbal agreement. The person that knows how to evaluate a process as a whole, and swap out the defective or inefficient bits, and improve what they do incrementally. Our students when confronted with a task won't ask where the application is that can do it for them -- they'll assemble new and old technologies in front of them, like a chef reverse engineering a recipe. And they'll start to mix.

We will bring our own institution (and our learning) into the Networked Age. The Information Age has been supplanted by the Network Age. And while that network is technology-mediated, the ramifications of this transition exceed technology. Students will graduate into jobs that don't exist yet. They don't need facts. They need to learn to use the network to learn. We'll stop teaching them in ways they will never encounter again, and embrace our mission of showing them ways to learn which they can use over their lifetime. This means more wikis and less lecture halls, more Just-in-Time learning, more distributed knowledge. What they need is on the network. Let's show them how to get it.

Well, time's up --  Have to head to this thing now. That's not complete, but it's amazing what you can write in 15 minutes if you start from the direction you entered the issue. And it's amazing how many hours it takes to write against the grain....

Been trying out Brightcove as a video service. Test film follows below:



If anyone has any thoughts on the use of Brightcove, please share.

I think this video does a nice job of showing what a museum a university education has become:



(h/t Andy Rush)

If I go often to the well of what's going on in the Politics 2.0 and Reporting 2.0 space, it's because few areas are going through such a radical high stakes change.

Not change in a political sense, mind you. Much of the change going on is a rather frantic bid to make sure that new technologies don't erode existing power structures both in media and politics. But the stakes involved and the very real wakeup call received by the establishment in 2006 has led to a situation where the political space is ahead of the curve in use of new technologies and organizational principles.

So it's no surprise that we see a glimpse of the new world of work today from Huffington Post's Off The Bus group of reporters (disclosure: I'm one of those reporters).

It was a normal subject they covered today: Sen Obama's campaign did a massive door-to-door operation this past weekend. The average coverage of this would be to send a reporter out to one of the 40-odd cities where this canvassing was taking place.

Off the Bus had a better idea: since they have dozens of reporters already in these locations, why not ask them all to stop by their local event, and get some basic information about the canvass -- people involved, why they were there, basic turnout numbers, doors knocked on, general level of commitment of people talked to.

It was information a local person could gather in about 30 to 60 minutes, both by talking to the organizers and tagging along for a couple door-knockings. And since the people tagging along were local, they could put the information in context.

Off the Bus set up a Survey Monkey form, and mailed it out to any of their reporters who could spare the half hour. One blogger was responsible for compiling the data and putting it together, but the data was made available to all involved (in fact, the raw reports were made available to the general public).

And what was the result of this? Well, it was a mixed bag. The reporters were in many places stonewalled by the Obama campaign. Where they did tag along though, they found that for the most part support for any candidate was far softer than what polls have shown, and that people as a whole are tired of talking about the Iraq war.

Briliant? Groundbreaking?

Perhaps. Perhaps not. But look at the mechanisms and philosophy on display: radical transparency (in making all reports viewable), distributed tasking, use of simple online tools such as Survey Monkey, multi-literate reporters taking video, writing copy, all coordinated through a Google group, and done at almost no cost -- because the reporters are already in place...

This is not just the future of reporting. It's the future of our networked world. In fact, it's the present already in many industries where need for the coordination of people with different specializations exists.

Do our students know how to work this way? Are we teaching them?

I'd argue that projects like UMW Blogs do just that, showing people through that ecosystem of Google Reader, WordPress, and MediaWiki the power of the network.

(and you can add any of my previous endings here -- you know the screed. Why in the world would we send kids out into the networked world with a Blackboard^TM understanding of life?)

So after all the political stories I've labored over, I finally made front page on Huffington Post -- with a story I wrote in 5 minutes while downing my morning coffee.



Oh well, I'll take it! Thanks to the Off The Bus crowd who have been pushing hard to get these stories by amateurs like me better placement.

Finally got around to listening to this. It's good. It's nascent, but maybe that's why I love it so much:

http://learnonline.wordpress.com/2007/09/20/10-minute-lecture-george-siemens-curatorial-teaching/

It's not a total solution to the sage-on-the-stage v. guide-on-the-side but it's a great rethinking, and it's very practical to implement.

It's also refreshing that Siemens approach is not kick-against-the-pricks* (an approach I'm often guilty of) -- his approach respects that there is not here a complete historical break with previous teaching, but an accenting of things that were always a part of good instruction, and now need to be accentuated because of the realities of a highly networked world.

*Note on the phrase "kick against the pricks": Since it seems this phrase is less known than I thought...."Kick against the pricks" is a Biblical phrase meaning roughly "rebel against authority despite immense pain". It comes from a metaphor involving oxen and sharp pointy sticks. Kicking against the pricks represents an ideological yet futile rebellion against authority for the sake of doing the right thing, rather than out of hope of possible success.

It comes to me not through the Bible, but through the awesomeness of Nick Cave.

...and it's not even that hard.

I've said before that one of the fundamental things the university has not come to terms with is that in an environment where failure is inexpensive, undergraduates can be pushed to solve real problems, rather than to practice solving problems they might encounter once they get out of college.

In the world of net-enabled education, this is possibly the most important differentiator. And it will change the face of undergraduate education.

The product that colleges will be giving you in twenty years is not a degree, but a reputation. The number of students that have done something significant and public in undergrad will hit a critical mass, so much so that the reputation of colleges will be largely determined by what they helped their students do while the students were under their mentoring.

Here's the thing: people in higher education often object -- "But our students aren't that smart! Not everybody can be an entrepreneur!"

Or they say something else with more syllables, but they mean that.

They are wrong.

Case in point -- the hottest New Hampshire political blog right now is not Blue Hampshire or GraniteGrok. It's New Hampshire Presidential Watch, a blog run by a St. Anselm's undergrad.

What is it that attracts visitors? Incisive political analysis? Horse race statistics? Round the clock reporting?

Nope. What the kid who runs it does is take all the emails and other info he gets from all the Presidential candidates, and does the painful but absolutely essential work of organizing it into a single calendar. And because he's become the destination site to find out who's in the state, candidates now send him the updates. And because he now has an audience, he *can* do political reporting, and be read by thousands.

No algorithms. No advanced marketing plan. Just someone saying to a kid, you know, I wish I didn't have to go to 16 different sites to figure out who was in town, and the kid thinking: I can solve that.

The talent is not in the compilation of these materials. It's in that impulse: I can solve that. And because this impulse is what fuels the new economy, this kid will never want for a job. He will graduate Saint A's, and the degree will be a footnote to what he already accomplished.

He'll graduate with a reputation.

You can call it service, or entrepreneurship, or academic engagement; in truth, it's all three.

What you can't call it is idealistic. It's here and now. It's happening. And there's absolutely no reason not to embrace it.

The end is near. And that's a very very good thing.

Radiohead is offering it's newest album on it's website for advance download.

The revolutionary thing? You pay what you want for it. Two dollars, ten dollars. Whatever. You make the call.

The experiment has even got mainstream investing sites abuzz, saying that if this works, it could be the end of the pricefixing era of music.

Sometimes though, history needs a push. I'm going over to get the new album right after I finish posting this.

You should come with.

Update:

I told you I was serious:



This is me buying the album for about 5 bucks American (damn that exchange rate!).

That's a decent deal for a Radiohead album (if it was the new NP's album, it'd be more).

You should go do it.

I know it's good form to say where you've been when you disappear off the face of your blog for two weeks.

Answer: bilge-pumping.

That said, we'll try to do better next time.

Now onto to other things.

A side project I do got some news coverage this past Sunday. And it was a pretty nice article in that they represent our political community site fairly well. (I wish sometimes they'd focus on how hard it is to do this with so little spare time, but oh well).

But the hook in these things is always so predictable I have to laugh. Here's the final paragraphs:

"Bloggers are the new key influencers in the community. National bloggers are shaping opinions. They are engaged in the daily dialogue of national affairs and some voices are very influential," Hynes said.

He said in New Hampshire for the 2008 election, three or four influential bloggers have emerged with "tier one" access to candidates – i.e. press credentials to cover events and interview the candidates – when many believed the blogging trend had plateaued.

"Bloggers will have a marginal effect, but a lot of races are decided in the margins," he said.

I hate to pick on this article, because it got more stuff right than most. And they are just quoting Patrick Hynes a "blog outreach consultant" (Wow!) for John McCain. But much of the article follows the same philosophy, ticking off a list of types of access the campaigns give us, and saying isn't it crazy? The world is upside down!

But it's the press that has the battery wired backwards.

The reason blogging works is not because we're so influential that we get access. The reason it works is that we don't care about access. Frankly, we're not corrupted by it. I receive so many invites to blogger conference calls I route them to a special folder. I hardly ever go. Why should I, when it's just the candidate repeating the same talking points they just put out in a press release?

And I think it drives some campaigns crazy, but I don't write stories off of press releases either. And although I get invited to "surrogate" events, for the most part I don't go. I have no desire to see so and so's daughter tell me how great their Dad is. Sorry. I just see that as another commercial.

Patrick Hynes, the blog outreach coordinator quoted, doesn't know me, but I know his candidate. And that's by design. I took a $119 video camera to an event of McCain's last Sunday, and I sat in the back row, listening and filming.

I've been thinking about what I heard, and how he reacted to the audience questions. I've been thinking about which issues he dodged and which he didn't, and how this might differ from his last spin through New Hampshire. I've been thinking about the reaction of people around me -- people I might add that were the audience, not fellow reporters in some "press pen".

All that "access"? Let's be honest. The access beyond see the candidate in a Town Hall setting is spin control. It's entry into the PR ecosystem.

And I have very little interest in it. Strip away credentials and access, and I'd argue what you get is better reporting.

Via Udell, a link to a paper that attempts to refute David Hockney's theory that the sudden shift to photographic styles in the Renaissance was due to the use of optical projection.

It's an interesting paper because it introduces what seems to be a new method of objectively measuring geometric deviations of paintings from "reality", and applies that geometry to a chandelier that figures prominently in Hockney's book :

In Sect. I we introduce the basic mathematics of homographies and plane-induced image registration. In Sect. II, we apply digital image registration to detect and measure geometric imperfections in the painted chandelier. The analysis of photographs of a representative sample of surviving 15th-century dinanderie is conducted in Sect. III. Finally, in Sect. IV we judge the abilities of contemporary realist painters in the absence of optical aids by testing the perspective of paintings of elaborate chandeliers done “by eye”. We find the accuracy comparable to that in the Arnolfini painting.

I haven't sorted through the method yet, and in all likelihood I doubt I'll be able to add anything to that side of the debate. But the fascinating part of the article is toward the end.

Underlying the arguments of Hockney and Falco is the assumption that good perspective cannot be easily achieved “by eye,” that is, without the help of optical devices.

To test their assumption, as part of our research, British realist painter Nicholas Williams painted two chandeliers entirely “by eye.” Figure 6 shows one of the two chandelier paintings he realized for us. Our perspective analysis applied to this painting resulted in a good but, as expected, imperfect alignment of arms. The average measured deviation was about 8.55% the image width, of the same order of magnitude as that of van Eyck’s chandelier. This experiment confirms that realistic-looking structures can be painted merely by eye, without the help of optical tools of any sort.

This part of the experiment shows more than a little historical naïveté. They took a 21st century painter, who has seen photographs and realistic paintings every day of his life, and found that he can paint photo-realistically.

What they of course miss is that to a person in a pre-photorealist society the process of mapping a three-dimensional reality onto a flat plane is considerably more difficult -- that is, if such a notion even occurs to them.

Technology changes us. It changes what is possible to think. Take a top-notch mathematician trained before the computer and ask them to model the growth of lemming populations in a limited resource environment and watch as they drive themselves slowly insane in pursuit of the solution. Take an average Excel user or the most novice programmer of today, and watch how effortlessly they stumble into the algorithmic thinking that is crucial to the solution.

Does this prove it was possible for the mathematician to have come up with the solution on his own? Quite the opposite. The computational thinking that is now taken for granted in our society evolves not from native cognitive abilities, but from a cultural store that finds it's birth in giving machines iterative instructions where output states become inputs.

Such historical thinking is crucial to Hockney's premise. In the history of computing, one notes that Turing and Post came up individually with their theories of computing in 1936 -- and from there the logical progression is to ask what was happening, technologically, that led two people to individually come up with the same model at the same time.

Hockney has before him a similar conundrum -- the sudden explosion of photorealistic technique in Rennaissance art. And he searches for the technology that may have made such photographic thinking possible. He concludes, based on various effects of darkness and light, restricted focus, and orientation that optical projection technology may have been largely responsible for this sea-change in technique, and more importantly, this sea-change in thinking.

The research paper may be right about the irregularities in the painting for all I know. But in structuring their final test they show that they have very little understanding of cultural history. The briefest look at Derrida, the history of fractals, or the development of the slow-motion action shot in film would have demonstrated to them the fallacy taking a modern painter to prove a historical point. Technology, and the cultural store that evolves from it, changes us. My eight year old paints cups from life in a way that was simply not available to the Ancient Egyptians. My four year old concieves of quick events happening in slow motion. Both of them have a conception of language impossible before writing -- and my four year old can't even spell yet.

The ultimate thing to take away from Hockney is not whether the Masters "cheated". It is to better understand the fluid boundaries between technology, culture, and our own cognition. Hockney may or may not be right about methods or particular paintings. But his impulse is right on target.

I had intended today to write today about the odd fracture in the recent ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, a fracture between Chris Dede's "technology as world changer" intro, and the rather pedestrian "technology as customer service" bias of the questions posed by the actual report.

I say "intended", because when I went to pull a paragraph out of the document to demonstrate Chris's line of thought, I found that this freely distributed PDF had been secured against all copy operations.

You want to cite the ECAR report? Start typing.



I know, I know. I'm supposed to be delighted this is free. I'm supposed to be thankful I even get to cite it in my blog.

And I suppose making me retype that quotation will just make me appreciate the report all the more, right?

Give me a break. This is ridiculous. To write a stirring intro about how the free flow of information is revolutionizing the world and then distribute it in a PDF format that disallows copy operations?

Unbelievable.

But yeah, I won't be citing it. Mission accomplished.

"I will be arguing, and this is a controversial opinion, that Madison's support for democracy comes not because of a belief in the innate wisdom of the majority in society, but because he believes that in the absence of objective answers it is better for the honor of the individuals in society to allow everyone to participate..."

We're having a Symposium on Citizenship here at Keene State, November 6-9. And since we are putting together a blog on the event, we thought it might be a good idea to go out and get some video of some of the speakers talking about their presentations.

We started with Dr. Sander Lee, who will be presenting on James Madison and Democracy (we'll get the date and time soon) Renee Staudinger, a student intern of ours, filmed it with our lo-fi guerilla vlogger equipment (and did a splendid job -- thanks Renee!).

Here's the clip:

For more on Dr. Lee, check out his personal page. This will also be available on the Citizenship Symposium site (on KeeneWeb) as soon as we whip that site into shape. I've also x-posted this on KeeneFeed, a sporadic blog about Keene State that we're trying out here.

The hardest thing to answer when you're trying to start an institutional blogging community is what the legal ramifications of it are.

It's not only hard to answer -- it's impossible. It's a legal question. You're not supposed to answer it.

The problem is that it's hard with this sort of thing to start from a default position of strength. Without other institutions doing it, you're forever the person that has to prove the negative: that there are not legal issues large enough to forgo the venture.

And unless you have a web-savvy lawyer on your side, you're kind of stuck.

Until now. Because while I follow the good practice of never giving legal advice, I also follow the practice of pointing to the behavior of people smarter than me. So I plan to send this link around a lot:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/

That's right. Harvard Law has a blogging area that's almost an exact policy match to the UMW/KeeneWeb model.

And if the suits down at Harvard are listening to Weinberger (or whoever is at Berkman now), I'm feeling pretty good about our little venture.

Definitely check out Harvard's Weblogs: not only is it a key bookmark that you are going to want to mail around, it's a great example of a motley weblog community in action: you can read an analysis of contingency fees, a defense of Britney Spears, admissions talking about their favorite moments from admissions phone calls, and a discussion of Samuel Johnson-themed beer labels.

So... are there any further questions?

So, deciding I had not reached my full geek potential, last night I started a league in Fantasy Congress.

Fantasy Congress is like Fantasy Football -- you pick a team out of all available members of Congress and the Senate, and during a specified season your team competes -- if my Senators "stats" (for legislation passed or co-sponsored) beat all the other Senators stats, I win in that "position", and so on.

It's actually a litttle more complicated than that, but you get the idea.

So I started thinking -- would this be useful at all in a politics classsroom?

My first thought was no. Because the model is wrong. It's a lousy model to compute effectiveness.Â

To cite just a few examples: co-sponsoring is rated too highly in the formula relative to authoring legislation. And attendance, which has very little to do with congressional sway, is in the formula, as is level of news coverage, which tends to favor presidential candidates, regardless of their congressional duties. And "Mavericking", the act of voting against your party, is often a sign of strength, but it also occurs where weak politicians find themselves sitting on districts with rapidly changing red-blue demographics -- giving points for bowing to that pressure seems just wrong.

So that was my first thought.Â

My second thought was that any kid who left an American Government class able to articulate what was wrong with Fantasy Congress's model of congressional power would leave with knowledge superior to that of 99.9% of Americans.

Where the professor in a class has enough knowledge to assist students in critiquing underlying models, a bad model can do you as well as a good one. I still love the Cognitive Arts dream of highly engaging, highly accurate simulations. But failing that, get an inaccurate simulation and have students critique it. They may learn just as much.

So, like the WordPress junkie I am, I've been trying to recruit other Keene Staters here into my fold. Trying to get me some co-bloggers.

And so it was I broke the will of one Jenny Darrow, who leads and implements much of the Academic IT initiatives over here.

Her first posts are up and the third one is music to my ears. Here's the thumbnail sketch:

The point is that we (anyone over the age of 35) assume that students don’t need support with any kind of technology, that somehow by some miracle they know how to configure their bluetooth access, create a blog, subscribe to syndicated content, create digital presentations, etc. It’s not a wrong assumption -- it’s just not entirely accurate.

Agreed. I've often railed against the mindset that turns higher education's abdication of responsibility in this regard into a "blinking VCR clock" joke. Students come to us with certain skills. They always have. Our job is to take those skills and help them refine and focus them. And if we lack the institutional capability to do that -- well, it's really not that funny.

We assume that because kids are blogging, they are blogging effectively. That these are binary skills, stuck either in the on or off position. But it's not that simple.

But then Jenny goes further, because she goes to the 2007 Horizon Report and pulls the money quote from it:

Although new tools make it increasingly easy to produce multimedia works, students lack essential skills in composition, storytelling, and design. In addition, faculty need curricula that adapt to the pace of change and that teach the skills that will be needed—even though it is not clear what all those skills may be.

This is exactly right. And if we are going to teach them how to tell stories in this new media landscape, we are going to have to see new media as more than a bolt-on to existing courses, and certainly as more than a specialization within a major. We are going to have to see new media as a set of dialects in which all graduates must be fluent.

And if that means we have to set our VCR clock in the process, so be it.

Oh, and fellow rebels, go give Jenny some newbie love. For or against, it doesn't matter...just enough feedback to nurse that blogging addiction....

Some day I'll get tired of admitting how far ahead of the pack UMW is.

Today is not that day.

So to paraphrase that guy with the egg...

This is your Italian course:



And this is your Italian course on WordPress:



Click the above image to check out a module a UMW Italian professor put together on the Vespa scooter. In the module you watch some vintage Vespa commercials (in Italian, via YouTube), and answer a series of questions about the Vespa based on the commercials.

How can you not want to take that class?

Jim Groom has more details.

OK, we're not godlike. We ain't Jim Groom.

But we are launching our own WordPress MU intitiative: KeeneWeb.

Our particular angle is going to be less academic, and more creating community on campus, community outreach, and (hopefully) getting some tradmed attention. We have some really talented people on our campus, it's just hard for the outside world to see them. I hope this will change that.

As far as rollout tactics: we're blessed (and yes, "blessed" is probably not an exaggeration) with a provost who gets it, and wants to use a blog to communicate the decisions, trends, and issues that arise in the course of his day. So that gets us to blog as publication. Somebody's going to read that.

Then the hard part: blog as conversation. The only arrow I have in my quiver here, at least to start, is intense personal lobbying of those on campus that might want to get on KeeneWeb and start replying to what the provost writes in his own blog.

But I can be a tireless lobbyist. So perhaps this will work.

Putting together a Web 1.0 website was a relatively set process. You did the paper prototype. You got buy-in. You made up three designs; they picked one. You chopped, diced, wrote, and implemented. You rolled up. You rolled out.

Putting together a Web 2.0 site is much harder. It's more like starting a fire. You rub sticks together or strike the flint, you get a spark and try to fan it. You curse, and repeat. But when it takes off, it can really take off.

I'll let you all know how it goes.

We are reaching the end of our evaluation process here on my eportfolio committee. So in a month of impassioned pleas, I hope y'all forgive me one more. This is the last push.

But I want to do it this time by telling a story.

I want us to pretend it is 1985, and we are considering two competing products for the library. Let’s say that the need is to teach students how to do research circa 1985, and we’ve decided to spend some money on a product to do that. The plan is to develop a “research curriculum” and to get a tool that helps us better understand students’ research ability.One product is called “Thingamajig” and is billed as a replacement for the NYT Index, ERIC, Dialog, and the card catalog. It replaces the Library of Congress system with its own “superior system”, and collates material from multiple subject indexes into its own aggregate database. It has maybe a tenth of the resources available in the library as a whole, but they are well arranged.

In order to do research students log into this tool and use the special Thingamajig™ search tool. Then they give the Thingamajig call numbers to the librarian, etc. And because all their work is logged in the Thingamajig system, we can very easily assess whether these students are starting to get the hang of “research thinking” – Thingamajig can log and score everything done inside of it.

The other product, which we’ll call ResearchRank, just gives some standard ways of assessing student work and pumping out reports. For the actual work, it lets students use the same things they would use outside of the institution: The NYT index, ERIC, Dialog, the card catalog, etc.

In fact, as new resources become available for doing research, ResearchRank doesn’t care – if the professor can understand how the student is using them, he can assess them.

Which is the better product? Which serves the student better?

All of these eportfolio template products we’ve looked at exist in a Thingamajig mindset. Rather than let students use tools that have a broad application outside the boundaries of our college
, they push the student to think of eportfolios as dependent on

institution-specific technology. They keep the student in an unempowered mindset. They force the student to see technology in the wrong way.

To return to our example, imagine it’s 1987 and you’re a professor hiring for an assistantship. You have to chose between two students.

The first student comes in. And when talking about research they tell you how great they are at research – they are, after all, proficient in Thingamajig. They tell you how they used the specialized undergraduate templates to do research in Thingamajig. Are you familiar, for example, with the “Essay Research Template for Political Themes #5”? They did an excellent project using that.

The next student comes in and tells you about subject indexes, the problems of restricted vocabulary, how much they hate the quirks of ERIC, and how low they’ll get a result set on Dialog before they print the list. They tell you a neat system they devised using colored post-its to keep track of where quotes came from. And they tell you about the time it failed and they ended up citing Richard DREYFUSS on particle physics.

You’d choose the second student in a heartbeat. Sure, maybe Dialog rolls out a new version in 6 months, and those skills are irrelevant – but the second student has demonstrated an ability to solve real world problems with real world tools. They understand how to interact with technology – technology extends their will rather than limiting or defining it. And because they have to construct their own environment, they don’t confuse the process of research with the parameters of some school-bought tool.

You’d choose the second student. So would I. And we’d be absolutely right to do so.

The real world tools of reflection today are numerous, but they are not in TaskStream, or ePortaro. They are wikis, blogs, video-sharing sites, Flickr, del.icio.us, etc. We can show students how to use these tools to better understand and represent their experience.

Or we can buy them a Thingamajig.

I really think that’s the choice we’re looking at here.

Heard of Pecha-Kucha? It's poetry slam for the design crowd. Haiku for the business world.

It's the solution to Death by Powerpoint. Here's the rules:

• Each pecha-kucha participant delivers a PowerPoint presentation


• Each presentation must comprise of 20 slides, no more, no less


• Each slide must be displayed for exactly 20 seconds


• Consequently, each presentation is exactly 6 minutes and 40 seconds long

(h/t Downes)Â

Now what I would propose is this -- anyone reading this post

• Make a Pecha Kucha entry about some aspect of Learning 2.0


• Post it on slideshare or youtube or whatever...


• Tag it on del.icio.us, etc. as PK_Learning2.0

 And let the games begin. I know it would be a lot cooler to get in a room with some gin and tonics and do this, but baby steps, right?

We want to go guerrilla video over here, and inspired by the Stanford ePortfolio crowd, we got a couple of SmallWonder cameras from TigerDirect. The idea is that they are less intrusive than a traditional camera, more portable, and easier to use, and that sets the video threshold to a level where people are more likely to grab them on impulse to film something.

We'll see. So far I've been really impressed with the ease of use, and I'm pretty certain I will be buying one myself for my political blogging. Maybe tonight, given how much I like this thing so far...

Here's our first test clip:

What would happen if instead of encouraging students to build yet another fake bookstore project we had encouraged them to write wikiscanner?

They'd have changed the world, that's what.

What if instead of having statistics students take multiple choice tests on data analysis we had them examine earmarks or deficit spending using ManyEyes?

They'd change the world, that's what.

What would happen if our Modern Language students translated popular foreign blogs into English, or our film production students organized to film every presidential candidate's appearance within 20 miles and post the video on YouTube or Blip.tv? What would happen if our chemistry students went to the Salvation Army Store and bought historical toys to test them for lead, then posted the results?

We do a lot of real world projects at the college I'm at -- in fact, it's one of the most admirable facets of the college. We're truly a leader in this regard.

But my belief is we can (and will) will go much further along this road in the coming years.

Why? Because in the old world there was a real cost to real world projects. Very often you were putting students at the helm of something expensive -- equipment, time, something. Putting inexperienced students in charge of those resources was at best a risk, and at worst a danger.

And we built our educational system around those parameters. In the manufacturing economy, you had to run students through simulations of work, because failure was EXPENSIVE and publication RARE. Products required expensive investment, equipment, resources. And even more purely intellectual products had physical limits on them:  in the non-networked economy, publication was the privilege of the few, and outlets for one's findings were hard to come by. There wasn't really much of a publication tier for undergraduates.

So, in many cases we waited until people were in graduate school or in industry to encourage them to do things with real impact. And we spent our time in college with them preparing them so they wouldn't fail when they eventually did engage with the world-at-large.

There are (and were) exceptions, and many of them. There are stunningly good programs at my college that put students in Art and Architecture and Safety Studies in positions where they do great work, real work, in service to the greater community. And when I see such things, I'm just inspired and proud.

But I'm saying in our net-enabled world, we can make such learning the norm, and not the exception.

The reason why is simple economics. In a networked information economy, failure is cheap. Production is cheap. And if you produce something worthwhile, distribution is free.

Film students don't have to tie up the professional grade camera (at least not for everything) -- they can film events on a $100 USB device. Statistics students don't have to pay for database access or tools -- there's a wealth of public data out there, all waiting for someone to sift through it. Translation of a foreign blog takes only a student and a computer.

The other day I wrote an application that posts to twitter every time a bill or resolution is passed in the House of Representatives. It took me two hours. It didn't cost a dime.

There are literally thousands of worthwhile projects out there, just waiting for a student to take them on. But students aren't familiar enough with the landscape of real-world needs to know where these opportunities are.

If we want real academic engagement, we have to treat undergraduate education the way we treat our most successful graduate programs. We have to see a major part of our role as pairing interested students with interesting problems. We have to be a bit of a matchmaking service. Because that's how we are best going to help our students change the world.

UMW has put together a tools section for incoming freshmen and new faculty. The idea is to present to them six free low-threshold tools which will be their tools of the trade for the years to come.

The tools are:

Firefox, WordPress, del.icio.us, Google Docs, Google Reader, and Flickr.

As much as I like to tell people the task of choosing tools never ends, this idea of a standard toolbelt is incredibly powerful, and it's made even more powerful by presenting it to incoming students. While the specific tools chosen here are perhaps replaceable, the technologies represented are not. The key concepts of modern information literacy are all here: tagging, category-based navigation, syndication, conversational media, trackbacks, collaborative workspaces and loosely coupled media.

And it's important for kids to know (and for the college to tell them) that a person who does not understand these concepts is as illiterate today as a person who couldn't operate a card catalog or an subject index years ago.

It's perhaps even more important to tell students that they will meet many challenges in the coming years, but that a good deal of these challenges can be met using these tools. The power is, after all, with them.

I'm at an eportfolio workshop at Stanford. More on that later.

The weather here is beautiful, much milder than in New Hampshire. I had no idea.

On the other hand, there is a "What to do when there's an earthquake" card in my hotel room. So perhaps a mixed bag.

Via SmartMobs, regarding our millenials:

“Young people don’t see “tech” as a separate entity - it’s an organic part of their lives,” said Andrew Davidson, vice president of MTV’s VBS International Insight unit.

“Talking to them about the role of technology in their lifestyle would be like talking to kids in the 1980s about the role the park swing or the telephone played in their social lives — it’s invisible.”

The more you get into "tech", the more you realize there's no such thing. As any systems analyst will tell you: there are processes, and some pieces of them are automated and some aren't. Some pieces have hardware components, and some don't. Some storage is on paper, and some on tiny electric switches.

The process is inviting your friends out for a drink. It's not using the telephone in drink invite mode. You don't start out and say I need a product to invite my friends out for beers and optionally gin and tonics. And we don't really worry that the phone is from one vendor, and the cab you take down to the bar is from another.

What we say is -- hey, wouldn't it be neat if instead of having to call everybody seperately I could communicate with them all at once? And slowly that process evolves...

What's my point? I suppose it's that from a process standpoint, if we see our personal algorithms as the higher order application, loose coupling has been the norm, more than we realize. And given the worldview of the current crop of kids, we're likely to get back to that. And that's a good and powerful thing.

So we watched a presentation yesterday by True Outcomes, and of course I had to hold my nose a bit. I come from the "merit badge" school of Roger Schank, that ideally assessments fall into to the category of "Student X can build a fire, and we know that because he built a fire" (or in Schank's case because he completed a case-based simulation of building a fire). Align a curriculum more towards doing and less toward demonstrating "qualities", and a lot of assessment headache goes away. In a doing culture, assessment is healthy, because it maps onto real world goals -- can this person solve a real world data import problem using a scripting language? Yes? Great! Merit badge!

But "displays knowledge of data analysis techniques and an understanding of how to automate data import processes"? Mapped onto a one to five value rubric?

That's assessment, and it happens most often when we think the student can't do anything of value.

That said, I loved the True Outcomes presentation. Why? Because it was pure assessment. There was no eportfolio product attached to it (or rather, the presentation product attached to it was so slight as to be insignificant). What's more, the students don't even have to submit into it -- there's a simple option called "Observation" (as opposed to electronic submission) where professors can assess student work outside the program. So if students want to do an eportfolio project in WordPress or Google Documents they could conceivably do it, and just have the professor save a copy of the artifact to local storage somewhere. They want to videoconference it or Skype it in? Again, not a problem. The system doesn't care.

The point here is that with assessment loosely coupled, the process can be fluid, and defined by the individual needs of the professors. Because the portfolios can be based on an unconstrained worldware approach, professors sold on a Web 2.0 approach are free to push the pedagogical envelope, and let students do things in Blogger, WordPress, or YouTube.  Professors who don't want to invest time in those things can tell the students to do something or other in MSWord.Â

By not tying the assessment product to the pedagogy, you make sure that you are not hindering your more forward-thinking professors. And you guarantee that as technology evolves outside the college that you'll automatically benefit from those advances -- whether or not you buy the most recent vendor upgrade.

In short, you make evolution possible.

Anyway, I'm very happy about this development. If your institution is currently looking at eportfolio/assessment solutions, I'd suggest that you consider looking at True Outcomes, and put to rest the assessment bit. Then, with the vendor no longer hanging about, suggest a worldware approach to eportfolios and the like.

I'll keep you all updated on how that goes here.

Here. (h/t S. Downes)

So my thought for the day: What are we doing to make sure this situation does not repeat itself with PLEs and PKMs?

I just got back from YearlyKos, where I was an "expert" on a panel on local blogging.

It was the middle panel of a series of three on the issue (local blogging is THE hot topic right now). I thought our panel went pretty well. We got into interesting issues, we had an active audience, and there was good back and forth between the panelists.

However, at the end of the day, we were still people up on a stage talking into microphones to an audience.

DavidNYC, the moderator of my panel, was frustrated with that: it seemed awkward and counterproductive. He suggested to the next moderator that she take all the chairs off the stage and put them down with the audience. She did.

The result? The crowd was forced to move in, and the panelists to project their voices, but in return the whole mood changed. The tone became more conversational. The experts tended to make shorter answers and let the audience follow up with questions. Questioners tended to drone on less, pontificate less. The conversation flowed more naturally, with less pronounced turntaking and more interaction.

Blogging is a new thing, but the proponents of blogging aren't a new kind of person. There's always been people with enough guts and imagination to take the chairs off the stage and see what happens when everybody is amplified equally.

Here's to them.

Prometheus, holding a torch, enters a small office in a corporate IT department. At the desk is Fred, who looks up when he enters.

Prometheus: Behold, I bring you fire!

Fred: Great! We've heard about the fire market. Very exciting. So is that it? That flaming stick you're holding? That's the product? How many do we need?

Prometheus: Well, no. By "bring you fire", I mean a set of skills by which you can create your own fire at will.

Fred: Yeah, sorry, that's not going to work. What if our personnel changes? They'll take these skills with them, and we'll be stuck looking for skilled workers to replace them. How much does a firemaker cost? Do we have to pay relocation? You see the problem...

Prometheus: Yeah, but I mean, it's fire. I'm bringing you fire.

Fred: What if we ASP it? When we need fire, we'll have an SLA with you that you'll bring us fire within 20 minutes.

Prometheus: But it's not a product or a service -- it's a set of methods. The amazing thing is anybody can make their own! I can teach you..here, you take two sticks like this...

Fred: Oh, there we go! Why didn't you say so? The sticks are the product, right? How much are the sticks?

Prometheus: Um, nothing. Free. You can use any sticks you want.

Fred: That doesn't sound very safe. Can you supply approved sticks?

Prometheus: No, but I can show you how to select sticks that are appropriate for...

Fred: Once again, there you go with all these skills. What happens if the person you show how to select sticks leaves? We don't want firemakers. We want a firemaking product.

Behind Prometheus, A Systems Vendor enters, holding shrinkwrapped box.

Vendor: Behold, I bring you the Fire Management System.

Fred: Finally!

Prometheus (sulking off): I'm going back to my rock...

So Leigh Blackall is my new favorite edublogger (Sorry Jim!).

If you want to know why, you can listen to this podcast.

Favorite thinker? Not sure. Thinker? It's odd, but I feel these observations are just so obvious. I'm not sure I ever had to think them up, or that Leigh had to think them up, or that Jim had to think them up, or that Jon had to think them up or that even Roger had to think them up.

So it's really unfair, but I don't think of this stuff as shockingly brilliant. What I'm shocked by most often is why it's not just obvious.

I mean, I put all this Web 2.0-speak on top of my explanations, but what I want to say most often to people is -- so have you ever tried to accomplish a real world goal? Yeah? Well, it's like that.

All the same, when ideas become so obvious that you can't remember when you first got them, it's very often because history is hurtling towards an inevitable change. So a historical frame is useful. Leigh does a nice job with that. If you haven't check out his stuff, I highly recommend it.

You can start with this if you want:

Here's the thing it's 2000 all over. Eportfolio is the new LMS.

Watching a recent vendor presentation I thought "I can't believe this is happening again."

That single phrase. In a loop. In my head.

Because remember -- this happened once before. The LMS vendors came in with an assessment and management tool, and told us it was an elearning solution. At the time, I was on the other side of the equation, with a company trying to sell award-winning goal-based scenario software to colleges who were saying but we already HAVE an elearning solution. It's called Blackboard. Or WebCT. Or whatever.

And so Blackboard, an assessment and management tool, determined the pedagogy of colleges for eight or so years. Because teachers wanted to import rosters, we put students in a closed box and told them it was elearning.

When it wasn't. The truth is the kids were doing more elearning on MySpace than in Blackboard.

How do we avoid it again? How do we avoid imposing something that is just pedagogically WRONG on a new set of students because we need to meet some institutional assessment needs?

There's only one way -- loosely coupled assessment.

If we are going to talk assessment, we are going to have to segregate it. Your assessment tool should ONLY assess.

We don't need to talk more about student needs wth vendors that supply assessment tools. We need to talk to them less about student needs. It's not their business.

Literally: it is not their business.

In fact, we should remove student needs entirely from the equation.

The students know they can get far bettter solutions to their problems for free elsewhere. They don't need a eportfolio system to post thier resumes on.

So enough of letting assessment vendors tell us what facilities we will be forced to use in their walled garden, and expecting us to be excited about it. Enough with assessment vendors selling us "environments". What we should be doing is describing the the enviroment that might exist -- students using Wordpress, Blogger, S3, GDrive, email, messaging, etc. And then we should ask if they have a tool that can evaluate that. How will their tool interface with the learning environment we've constructed?

Anything else is insanity.

I'm attending an EPortaro demonstration in about 50 minutes.

If you read this blog at all, you can probably guess what I think about such eportfolio solutions. It's 2000 all over again, with vendors coming in to save us from the big, bad internet.

Still, my opinion is probably the minority one on my commitee, so there's a good chance we are going to pick SOME eportfolio vendor, despite my efforts.

If you know anything good or bad about EPortaro in particular, please email me at mcaulfield at keene edu. Or leave a comment.

Thanks.

I love talking the theory, but it's even nicer to see practical notes from people implementing solutions. From a recent post over here, some Wordpress MU as class-space experimentation...

Teachers are finding WordPress MU easy to use and I’m very happy to see that. Currently, Teacher Assistants are recording students as they read their writings in class using Audacity. We are using inexpensive mics with noise canceling, and I have to say, I’m impressed with how well they work. It’s not easy to cut out the ambient noise in a working first grade classroom.

That's right. A first grade classroom.

I've been a frequent critic of primary and secondary education, and that's unlikely to stop. But I've been impressed in the past year with how much faster things seem to be moving down there than up at the university level.

It's not just scattered notes like the one above. The percentage of thought leaders in the Learning 2.0 space that are focussed on K-12 is extraordinary.

Why? One would think if you can run a blog and wiki with first graders that surely this should be cake for a university classroom.

More as a way to start this conversation, here are a few hypotheses:

1. K-12 (and particularly K-6) does not have the subject problem -- there is no issue that writing belongs in one discipline, video in another, and history or math is seperate from each. Holistic approaches aren't thwarted by an org-chart that divvies up the student.

2. K-12 is behind on the LMS wave, and having not been infiltrated by LMS vendors, they are more able to think out of the box, rather than in terms of what new LMS modules are available.

3. There's just more teachers than university professors, which creates the critical mass needed to get a movement going.

4. They don't have a developed IT department or large IT budget -- and hence are able to experiment more with an ad-hoc bricolage of tools, especially free ones: i.e. technology decisions are not treated as budget decisions.

Those ideas are all possibly wrong -- but I'd love to hear other takes on this phenemenon. Unless higher education gets its act together, it is quite likely the college freshmen of tomorrow will be entering a far LESS enlightened tech environment than the one at the high school from which they came.

Via bavatuesdays, I learn of CommentPress.

Obviously there are other non-WP group annotation tools. What's really striking to me here, however, is how powerful the fit is between the CommentPress approach to text and the best bits of traditional literary exegesis.

So great is the fit, as a matter of fact, that I half wonder if CommentPress could become the first step toward faculty blogging -- rather than the other way around...

The most invigorating job I ever had was working for CognitiveArts programming learning "simulations". Founded by Roger Schank, CogArts was truly a company with a mission -- to revolutionize education through technology rather than simply extend the current system. And we pushed the envelope in every way we could. I worked with a large team of programmers whose goal was to make the ultimate Choose-your-own-adventure multimedia learning experiences.

The core idea was simple: people learn by doing, so learning should simulate doing in a low risk environment. Schank's favorite talking point was this "Which would you rather your airplane pilot have -- 90 hours of the flight simulator, or 90 hours of book study?"

Simulations would generally lead a person through a "goal-based scenario": perhaps as a Governor's economic advisor they had to make decisions for a hurricane torn state on things like price controls and rationing, and observe the effects of the action. Perhaps they had to negotiate a house price as part of Harvard Business School Publishing's Negotiation class.

The key to the system was failure-based learning paired with just in time instruction. Students would be encouraged to develop expectations about what would happen as a result of their actions. When they failed, they would be provided with context-sensitive instruction, and encouraged to try again. It had been shown in a number of studies  that by providing the bulk of the instruction after failure that you could get retention of information significantly higher.

The system was later copied (often poorly) by other corporate training companies, and is now a pretty standard offering of most custom elearning vendors (although I would argue that the desire of many vendors to push such modules into a one-size-fits-all assessment harness profoundly degraded the experience -- at CogArts we built an LMS that was precisely tailored to the needs of our scenarios).

This autodidactic gaming approach to elearning seems miles away from the PLE and the Inverted LMS (I still haven't quite resolved if those are the same thing yet -- please excuse my transitional use of both terms). The Inverted LMS is inherently social and collaborative; the CogArts model was solitary and self-taught. Indeed, if there was one flaw with what we did at Cognitive Arts, it was probably that in the move from CD-based non-networked learning to web-based instruction we were not radical enough in our rethinking of the social element of education.

Despite that, I'd argue that simulations are very close to the PLE/Inverted LMS in theory. Why?

Because both focus on learning by doing. Where there is high-risk to real life failure simulations make a lot of sense. And where the definition of success in a field or task is very narrowly defined, simulations shine. The flight simulator, one of the first computer applications ever built, still remains the model here.

But the web has introduced us to plenty of low-risk ways to engage in disciplines. And that's where the new approach comes in.

An example? At CogArts, one of the apps I admired most was the "Is it a Rembrandt?" simulation, which provided students with detailed pictures that could be faked paintings or undiscovered Rembrandts. The students, through learning about Rembrandt's style, had to make the call. Experts were there to give them the just in time instruction should they fail -- explaining this or that about brush strokes or subject matter.

I'd still pay good money to use that sim -- I think it remains a wonderful way to learn, and one that appeals to our gaming culture. Put software like that in a current high school, and you're going to blow the doors of education. In a good way.

But what is striking nowadays with the web is how it supplies plenty of real low-risk problems for students to engage in. The Rembrandt simulation was built during a mid-90s rash of discoveries that certain Rembrandts were fakes. Ten years later if such a thing happened, there'd be a good chance you could get hi-res photos of detail from the fakes, if you asked nicely.

So what happens then? You gather your students, you put up a wiki and series of student blogs, you roll your sleeves up, and you get your class analyzing the paintings. Google becomes your just-in-time learning application, which is cool, because that's what your JIT solution will end up being in real life. Success or failure is determined, as in life, somewhat fuzzily by the reaction of the experts in real life: if you can get them to engage with your work at all, that's a high level of success; if they actually start agreeing with you or noting things as valuable insight, even better.

I miss both producing and playing with the Schank software, just because of how much fun it was, and if I could buy those titles shrink-wrapped from the local Staples today, I'd spend my own money to buy a title a week. Heck, I may go home tonight and play the Cable & Wireless simulation, which I still have a disc of somewhere. In a perfect world the government would fund more of these sorts of simulations.

But the brilliance of the internet is how much it matches, for a certain subset of problem, the perfect learning environment CogArts was simulating in its courseware. As with the simulations, on the internet you can try out ideas without much risk, you can get information from Google on a Just-in-Time basis, and you can talk to experts about the validity of your decisions. And, yes, it's a lot fuzzier, and I certainly don't want my pilot to have put in 90 hours of BLOGGING, but for certain types of learning (and possible for most learning), it's a preferred method of engagement.

This just in:

July 25, 2007 (Computerworld) -- Millions of documents, both government and private, containing sensitive and sometimes classified information are floating about freely on file sharing networks after being inadvertently exposed by individuals downloading P2P software on systems that held the data, members of a House committee were told yesterday.

Among the documents exposed: The Pentagon's entire secret backbone network infrastructure diagram, complete with IP addresses and password change scripts; contractor data on radio frequency manipulation to beat Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) in Iraq; physical terrorism threat assessments for three major U.S cities; information on five separate Department of Defense information security system audits.

I've been wondering for a while in whether Google Docs would be a good choice for the college's Content Management System. It's a wonderfully simple way to share docs, it's cross-platform, remotely accessible, and free, as in beer.

One of the objections I've heard while kicking this idea around is that it might be dangerous to have our documents "out there", in the Wild, Wild Web.

I'd actually argue the reverse -- anything on a employee's machine is already out there: in our P2P world, the web is us.

Google Docs (or something similar) actually has the advantage that it dissuades users from downloading materials to their hard drives, the major source of leaked materials. Combined with the right cache settings and some SSL action, it could be, I think, a far more secure environment than what we have now.

The one catch? We need the SSL; Google Docs seems not to have it. But perhaps it's coming?