This Nature article says “right now there are around 6.4 million articles on Wikipedia, generated by over 250 million edits from 5.8 million contributors.
About a month ago I began noticing that Wikipedia was the 1st hit on many Google searches. And I’m reading a printed book, a 2006, 2nd edition, which references Wikipedia. Something’s happening over there, participatory culture, the social web…somethin’
An informative article about the latest controversies surrounding MySpace.
What is MySpace? Why is it important? How big is it (and its cousins such as Facebook)?
What is the controversy over MySpace? Is it that site in particular or as a genre of web-based-social-networks?
What is the direction of your current research on new media, and how does it relate to the controversy?
What do ’social networking software programs’ provide participants? What’s their down side?
What skills do students/children learn in working in social networks? How does these contribute (or not) to their development?
and more.
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This paper is chock full of ideas nicely pulled together:
informal/formal learning, bricolage, peripheral participation/lurking, social software/learning management systems to name just a few. I’m increasingly intrigued by conversations that distinguish issues of learning from issues of teaching.
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In a recent post George Siemens asks, “Why not focus on fostering exchange and dialogue?”
Just yesterday, I was emailing with colleagues in instructional technology services and a faculty member about managing the knowledge we were going to “produce” working with a cohort of faculty and their technology projects. Why not post your questions to our Blackboard discussion board, rather than emailing them to that person who’ll answer them. The mental model of KM came to me because I had no other. Perhaps that’s not knowledge management at all but fostering exchange and dialogue? Intuitively I agree with George about fostering characteristics like these and those of learning ecologies and spaces. It’s challenging to foster that in my immediate surroundings. His post cites a list of knowledge behaviours. And they are good ones. If we’re living in more pragmatic times rather than the idealogical ones of the late 20th century, then yes linking outside my clique to see if they’ve got something we can use, makes sense.
It’s difficult notion though for those us say 40+ years old, particularly if we, as I have, identified ourselves to any extent with those ideals/ideologies and cliques in the past. As I remember quite clearly saying in the late 80’s, “There’s not such thing as a lesbian who sleeps with men or a vegetarian who eats chicken.” I can look back now and see that the era of identity politics was coming to an end…
So is the world flat or just pragmatic?
Read more about it at Academic Commons
And at the Institute for the Future of the Book, there are some interesting posts in their blog If:bookblog–”the life and after life of vinyl records” & “interactive books are closer than we think.”
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When I “discover” something what I’m often saying is that I had the time/decided to take the time to snoop around an application. That often happens when I’m doing somthing else on the computer, and I need a mental break. Sometimes though I actively seek out what else the tool can do because I’ll want to be able to show and tell others.
And sometimes I’ll be using a tool, like Writely, and I’ll have a problem to solve and I’ll see if Writely can solve it. Or visa versa, I’ll be working with a tool and wonder what other affordances it allows given the task I’m doing. In these examples, the former happens more often than the latter. I was talking with our intern about allowing ourselves time for these kinds of non-formal learning experiences. My latest discovery was Networks in delicious. I knew Jim Julius had a delicious account and I kind of thought there should be a way to get easy access to that other than stumbling on our shared Tags. Then I saw the Network link, emailed him asking what his user name was, and now he’s in my network. So by going to http://del.icio.us/saurilio, you’d also be able to get to http://del.icio.us/jjulius.
Many edubloggers have their del.icio.us bookmarks linked to their blogs. I’m supposing then that I could add them to my network to. Overwhelming? Well that’s where tagging and bundling come in.
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This Educause article by Bryan Alexander entitled Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning? gets me to thinking. It’s the question mark really. I’m wondering too what to make of all this. And diving in myself hasn’t yet given me much clarity. Maybe it’s because of that hammer looking for a nail thing: Here are all these cool tools, now let’s find a situation to use them in.
But what’s driving us old folk to hang out on this edge? My initial and continuing interest lies in distributed learning/distance learning.
I have no doubt that it’s an approach to learning that meets real needs and solves real problems. And so maybe my thinking should drift back in that direction. And I should follow up on that previous post about transactional distance and its relevance to Web2 and social computing. In this post where I connected up with a distributed conversation on online communities, I got a taste of something very interesting–a conversation that transcended location and to a certain extent time.
In a paper about informal learning, Smith suggests that informal education (not learning) is driven by conversations not curriculum. Education he argues intends to foster environments that produce learning.
To that end, isn’t the edublogosphere and the distributed conversations it generates informal distributed education?
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Christopher Sessums does some nice reflecting on the social software/web2 paradigm in this post.
He only touches on transactional distance though.
“A transaction is a mutual exchange between parties. Moore recognized that in a course high in structure, such as a pure lecture course, there is generally little dialog between educator and learner and transactional distance is maximized. Conversely, as dialog is increased, the structure decreases, thereby minimizing the transactional distance between educator and learner.”
While the theory is used in distance education I wonder to what extent it can also be applied to web 2, particularly in the edublogger domain. It might be worth exploring one’s experience of geographical distance as a starting point. I’ve often shared a personal story in support of distributed learning, the one about interacting more with my mother since email. For the past 28 years we’ve lived no less than 3,000 miles apart and in many ways I’ve never felt closer to her as a result of email. A colleague shared a similar story about being separated from her partner for over a year.
There’s a lot to chew on. There’s personality type/learner preferences. I think maturity and psychological development play a role too in that until fairly recently working adults were the primary consumers of distance education (I like the term distributed learning). However, Pam Tate at CAEL points out the profile of an adult, for educational purposes is rapidly changing.
And then there’s the comparison to our experience of transactional distance in familiar educational settings. How does that experience of TD impact learning in a 500 seat classroom? For some learners I can imagine it’s perfectly acceptable and preferred. I’d guess though that they’d be above average students, more field independent, and intrinsically motivated.
Add to that scenario, virtual office hours and a thriving online exchange of discussions and group work. In the former, the lecturer is actually available more often because the technology makes that more feasible and cost effective. In the latter, the technology enables pedagogy that is impractical in a face to face setting. The other student, the one who’s more field dependent, now has a place to land.
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CogDog and others had some interesting thoughts on online-community building. It got me to thinkin’ and to add a bit too. In the process I started reflecting about this community, the blogosphere, I’m now hoping to actively enter. So to continue with my thoughts…. I did a lit review 2 years ago on social presence in online courses. My position was that the term “lurker” suggests a negative or unwanted behavior and that there may be both social/personal benefits and positive learning outcomes associated with this kind of engagement. There’s more to this of course, particularly in crosscultural settings where learners’ language skills vary. The underlying assumptions are based in Bandura’s social learning theory and a western orientation to social presence.
So I got to thinking about the blogosphere, what a blog is and how we use them. Does the term “lurker” apply? Or is it outdated or not relevant? Do tools like trackingback, counters, technocrati facilitate another kind of social presense? In an online course, communicating via talking/posting is perceived to build social capital, how is that different in the blogosphere?
