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’
I’ve been reading George Siemens blog for a year or so and it’s often one of the most interesting in the educational blogosphere.
I missed the Connectivism online conference, I see.
But it looks like he’s got a book together, not coming out, but congealed and connected. It’s online; it’s got a Wiki, and a photoset on Flickr.
Cool…
Twitter: A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing? Answer on your phone, IM, or right here on the web!
Now the 2nd time I’ve heard about Twitter…I’m interested in it because it captures the gap between web2.0ers and simple surfers, browers and shoppers. The immediate question: “Why would anyone want to do that?” typifies the paradigm shift in thought and understanding. People are doing it along with commenting on Flickr, cruising MySpace and gambling in SL, and in droves.
I can’t think of anything comparable from my younger days, I mean comparable in terms of relating, and socializing.
What is an online course? What is an online education?
When it was launched in 2002, MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) was emphatically declared to be a limited online offering. “OCW is not about online degree programs. It isn’t even about online courses for which students can audit or enroll,” wrote Phillip D. Long. It was intended to be nothing more than “the content that supports an MIT education.”
The understated message in an initiative such as OCW is that an MIT education is not equivalent to the resources that support the education, that it consists essentially of the contact with the professors and the community that develops among the students.
We talk about learning in terms of design and environments more than in terms of lesson plans and classrooms. The mix of course, content, people and place seem to be shifting dramatically. This has to do with how technology expands complexity, the ways information is co-created and disseminated via Web 2.0, how Web 3.0 (SL) releases us from the dichotomy of real/virtual, and how underneath all this the nature of information and knowledge is changing.
What’s worth learning and who’s at the center of it. This symposium on personal learning environments is available via text and video. There’s still some work to be done on PLEs. I’ve just started working with Zoho’sWriter, part of a suite of office productivity tools. And am I’m trying to bring Citeulikeinto my PLE. I access these via browser links; the locust of control is my browser(s).
I think I blogged about this paper on participatory culture earlier. And I just commented on a discussion about crud and not crud. From an equity, social justice standpoint, yes I want everyone to participate, create, feel empowered. And I’m concerned about the gap in participation.
But from a philosophical, political and educative point of reference, it seems to be just another episode in the American Dream show of celebrity and spectacle. Anyone who has achieved anything has had to buy into the notion of quality, of good, better, best and crud. Dewey, Delpit, Socrates all advance both participation and expertise.
I don’t have a problem with crud, as long as I’m allowed to call it that without being ostracized as an elitist. I’m certain there were artists as brilliant as Picasso at the time, who..well…didn’t get a break. I should be able to feel ethical about appreciating expertise, particularly because I do articulate an understanding of how sociocultural context allows certain kinds of expertise over others. Naming crud has to be a part of that discourse, otherwise I’ve abandoned it.
I just tried out
http://zoho.com/, a web-based office suite with added features like a notebook where you can drag and drop text, pictures, videos all in one interface.
Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us at YouTube is a fascinating digital ethnography.
A demo of an “interface free” computer.
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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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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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?
