Projecto MEDEIA

Alexandra Samuel, Harvard Business Review, June 17, 2011. People are pretty quick to cheer for the use of social media to advance human rights and democracy, as in the care of the right to drive campaign underway today in Saudi Arabia. But why the hesitation when the wrongdoing is on the other side? Alexandra Samuel, for example, calls the citizen surveillance of the riots in Vancouver "troubling" and she argues, "I don't think we want to live in a society that turns social media into a form of crowdsourced surveillance. When social media users embrace Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and blogs as channels for curating, identifying and pursuing criminals, that is exactly what they are moving toward." Well - I disagree. It's the very same act to record a police officer beating a helpless civilian at the G20 protests and to record a thug in a Canucks shirt smashing a car window with a newspaper vending machine. And my response - to protect the right - is and ought to be the same. See more from Dvaid Eaves, the public shaming website, and the identify the rioters page. [Link] [Comment]

Bob Sprankle, Tech & Learning, June 17, 2011. Bob Sprankle describes the LiveScribe pen, which does three things:
- takes notes on a special pad of paper
- records audio in the environment as notes are being taken
- replays the associated audio when you tap the pen at the right position on the notes
Great idea, he writes, but what happens when the teacher (or anyone else) says "you can't record me?" What are the copyright implications? Will people hesitate to speak openly if they know they're being recorded? Or even, "Are we lumping tools like the LiveScribe pen in a 'Wiretapping Law' legal category, when they should be seen instead as Assistive Technology tools protected by laws such as IDEA?" Via Sylvia Martinez. [Link] [Comment]

Dave Winer, Scripting News, June 9, 2011. I resubscribed to Dave Winer recently and I must say I'm really enjoying the new Dave Winer. There's a sense of history and perspective to his writing that wasn't there, say, five years ago. This post is a case in point, reminding people that freedom of speech is not an absolute and that Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' of the marketplace is a myth. Both have to do (in different ways) with network structures, and network structures are not a given. We build them, we shape them, we determine how they function. "We need to have a collective consciousness that isn't completely insane." Quite right. And sometimes - sometimes - when we tweak the rules of how our networks operate, it's so we can keep ourselves on an even keel, preventing the disruptions, distortions and disturbances that impair, rather than aid, cognitive function. [Link] [Comment]

Eric Hellman, Go To Hellman, June 9, 2011. Eric Hellman is a bit sceptical of the new initiative. "On June 2, our Metadata Overlords spoke. They told us that they'll only listen when we tell them things using a specialized vocabulary they've now given us at the schema.org website. Although we can still use our stone tablets if that's what we're using now, we're expected to migrate to a new Microdata Thingy, assuming that we really want them to pay attention to our website metadata supplications." Well, yeah, it's a bit high-handed. On the other hand, we've been needing embedded metadata forever now. Microformats didn't catch on, RDFa had a niche following - maybe this will turn the tables. If this gives us a widespread implementation of an open graph, then there is plenty of goodness there. On the other hand, do read the notes below the video. [Link] [Comment]

Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus, June 9, 2011. Because colleges and universities are not distributing usage data, the sector "is failing to demonstrate how collectively we are making use of innovative IT developments " - whether in the area of social media, institutional repositories or in other areas " - to support its teaching and learning and research activities." So argues Brian Kelly, suggesting that the failure to support its position with data leaves the sector vulnerable to attacks like "Universities spending millions on websites which students rate as inadequate," which Kelly described last year. " "Let's open up access to our usage data," he argues, "so that the value of use of IT across the higher education sector can be demonstrated." [Link] [Comment]

Adam Warren, TELic, June 9, 2011. This will apply especially to British readers but will be of interest to the wider lecture capture community. "JISClegal have released a series of seven short videos, orginally presented as a live webcast. They cover the legal, technical and accessibility issues, and include an instructional 'How To' segment, panel discussion and Q&A with experts from JISC Legal, JISC Digital Media and JISC Techdis." The seven videos range in length from 4 to 32 minutes. [Link] [Comment]

Chuck Klosterman, Grantland, June 8, 2011. I've always found it odd that the same people who dislike lectures are those people who enthusiastically endorse storytelling. Me, I see them as being much the same, but it's all in the presentation, I guess. At the same time., while I have no fondness for basketball whatsoever (too many goals, too many penalties, too much showboating) I can't resist a good story, and that's what I found here in a new blog called Grantland. Via Kottke. It's like what Vicki Davis says, learning about life on the athletic field. For me, the lessons about hard work, practice and playing through the pain all came from sports, and have given me whatever grit I have today. [Link] [Comment]

David Weinberger, Joho the Blog, June 8, 2011.
I sometimes feel like I'm the only person in the world who defines 'open access' as non-commercial access. I honestly don't get how people think charging for a resource somehow makes it 'more free', and I'm pretty sure there's a sizeable foundation-type lobby making sure that the 'open-as-commercial' perspective holds sway. Well, I haven't drunk the commercialism Kool-Aid, and consequently, I reject the proposal coming forth from the so-called 'LOD-LAM Summit' to create a 4-star definition of openness. If you can block access to something and demand payment for it, it's not open. It is certainly not 'more open' than the non-commercial form of openness that most people actually want to use. Give the types of licensing names, not rankings. Anyhow, for the rest of the world who disagrees with me, here's the draft version of the four-star system, above is a video of MacKenzie Smith of MIT and Creative Commons discussing the system, and the LOD-LAM Blog. [Link] [Comment]

Helge Scherlund, E-learning News, June 8, 2011. Here's a dilemma for you. If you are one of those many people - legions, actually - who believe the lecture is a poor pedagogy, especially in the online learning environment, then what do you do when your end users - students - declare lecture capture to be the most important technology of the day. After all, we are supposed to be driven by end-user needs, aren't we? So should we put down our social networking and interaction tools and go out there and start coding (or acquiring, depending on whether you're Desire2Learn or Blackboard) lecture capture tools? [Link] [Comment]

Umair Haque, Harvard Business Review, June 8, 2011. Why is the work we're doing in education so important? Here's HBR's Umair Haque (one of the few redeeming voices in that publication) explaining what an economic recovery won't fix:
- Stagnation. Median income has stagnated for decades
- Disemployment. We're mostly creating McJobs
- Insecurity. Nearly half of Americans are financially fragile
- Toxicity. The industrial age economy's addicted to harm: in order to profit, it's more often than not got to trample on people, nature, or society
- Pointlessness. They don't care not just because the work they do feels pointless, but because, in human terms, it mostly is
- Dumbification. Educational attainment has slowed in recent years
- Dehumanization. As I've noted, GDP has long decoupled from more meaningful measures of welfare
None of these will be solved by industry and commerce; they will be addressed only as we rethink what we stand for as a society. And that takes education. [Link] [Comment]

Steve Hargadon, Infinite Teaching Machine, June 8, 2011. The old "Edubloggerworld" network is being transitioned to Teacher 2.0. Steve Hargadon introduces the new site (your old login will still work; I tested). "Through this community, with online events, interviews, and workshops, our goal is to have educators help each other become re-energized about finding and following their passions--as a part of their careers and in their contributions to the world." [Link] [Comment]

Ian Quillen, Education Week, June 8, 2011. This is interesting: "The Association of Educational Publishers and Creative Commons announced Tuesday an initiative that would create a standard coding language for all searchable educational content on the Web." Funding has been provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates and William and Flora Hewlett foundations, both of which also fund Education Week, and involves support for the common core standards in the U.S. The official announcement was posted yesterday."Adoption of the education metadata schema by the search engines and by content providers will be voluntary, but because of the implicit support of the major search vendors and the participation of both commercial and non-commercial providers, widespread acceptance of the framework is anticipated." The project is related to the schema.org initiative, an effort by major search providers to standardize search metadata. [Link] [Comment]

Unattributed, Lunch Time Leaders Podcast, June 8, 2011. Among the stuff I'm playing on Ed Radio today includes this interview with George Couros talking about connecting with students and what he learned from the restaurant business (which speaks to me, because I spent a lot of time working in restaurants), and whether he has ever let someone break the rules. The interviewers are children, unnamed unfortunately, and they do a great job pressing Couros, especially in the latter part of the interview. Also from Lunch Time Leaders I played this interview with Story Musgrave, a former NASA astronaut. Also, Lyn Carson describes Deliberative Democracy on Australian radio. Plus, Mickey McManus on Design as Literacy (see also his post on Huffington Post). Over lunch I played the Teachers Teaching Tecahers podcast on the Framework for Success in Post-secondary Writing. [Link] [Comment]

Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, June 7, 2011. I upgraded to Windows 7 at home a number of months ago, but only this week installed it in the office. It seemed like a good time, and with the benefit of hindsight, to describe in some detail the software environment I have set up myself. The article isn't done, but I figured that after a couple day's worth of work I had something to share - and could benefit from advice. [Link] [Comment]

Ben Werdmuller, benwerd, June 7, 2011. I think we need to manage the message a bit. This is the conclusion I draw after reading Ben Werdmuller's analysis of the 'crusade against college'. "There's been a lot of buzz in tech circles about college being a waste of time," he writes, giving a number of examples. But "if we are to lose faith in college degrees, how can we best represent what an individual is capable of?" Moreover, "if you take salaries away and look only at the overall education of a person, and the overall knowledge of our global society at large, don't universities have some inherent value?" He argues, and I agree, that they do. But - and here's the key point - maybe college (properly so-called) isn't the best way to achieve this end. Leaving aside the other (unsavory) purpose of the college system - to create an elite ruling class - it seems to me that while we may say 'college is not for everyone' we also want to say that 'a college education is for everyone'. The world does not divide naturally into geniuses and dullards; we divide it that way, and contribute in great measure to the creation of each. [Link] [Comment]

George Couros, The Principal of Change, June 7, 2011. I really like the concept of an 'Identity Day', the idea that "that every single student and staff member would share something that they were passionate about and create some type of display or presentation to show this interest." Of course, for some of us, every day is Identity Day. :) Via Kelly Alford, who adds, "Identity Day shows how powerful social media is and how it can create the change in education we so desperately need." [Link] [Comment]

Sadhana Puntambekar and Roland Hübscher, Unknown, June 7, 2011. The authors argue, "by broadening the scope of scaffolding (in complex learning environments) we seem to have missed some of the key features that are crucial to successful scaffolding." Scaffolding was originally defined "by Wood, Bruner and Ross (1976) as an 'adult controlling those elements of the task that are essentially beyond the learner's capacity.'" But as the concept of the scaffold is moved into the classroom context, the individualized support is not possible. There's a quite good table showing this different starting on page 12. Scaffolds have become more task-focused, more like "permanent supports." The authors write, "we would like to emphasize that a 'support' becomes a 'scaffold' only when it is adaptive, based on an ongoing diagnosis of student learning." It's a good point and an interesting point. They identify four essential features these new supports may be missing:
- an ongoing diagnosis of the learner's changing knowledge and skills
- the dynamic and adaptive support provided to an individual learner
- a transfer of responsibility from the "scaffolder" to the "scaffoldee."
- scaffolding that is provided is based on an analysis of the process.
Via Stian Håklev, who also offers a summary of the article. [Link] [Comment]

Barry W. Cull, First Monday, June 7, 2011. What is the impact of reading digital text? It has a different character. "Skimming and jumping around from place to place within text is not limited to online reading, this type of reading appears to be the most common type of reading online." And it may have a different impact. "The process of reading on screen tends to be cognitively different from the process of reading on paper, in terms of brain activation, the contextual environment, cognitive focus, comprehension, and reading speed." But maybe the largest impact is on what happens when we are not thinking about reading. "Maryanne Wolf pointed out that 'the mysterious, invisible gift of time to think beyond is the reading brain's greatest achievement' ... By its ability to become virtually automatic, literacy allowed the individual reader to give less time to initial decoding processes and to allocate more cognitive time and ultimately more cortical space to the deeper analysis of recorded thought." In other words, we have to be more explicit about our reading practice when reading online, for various reasons (such as the nature of digital text, the volume of information, or the paratext) and this changes what we think about what we are reading. [Link] [Comment]

Tony Bates, e-learning and distance education resources, June 7, 2011. Tony Bates summarizes the proposal for a new Ontario Online Institute ("tucked away on the Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities ‘In the spotlight' web page is a single line: June 3, 2011: Moving Forward with the Ontario Online Institute. This links to the report of the Special Advisor to the Minister, Maxim Jean-Louis). I've mentioned this process here on a number of occasions, as I was one of those consulted. The report recommends "the establishment of a not-for-profit corporation whose primary role will be to facilitate, enable and fund support for online learning in Ontario, rather than regulate, control or acquire assets, working alongside and leveraging existing ‘assets' within the system. It will not offer credentials nor duplicate or replace existing services (such as quality assurance)." There was (remarks Maxim jean-Louis in another document) a strong degree of consensus around this particular recommendation.

Note: in a summary last week I highlighted Tony Bates's article "For-profits, student loans, new rules, and how these affect students in the USA, Canada and the UK", but included the wrong URL. This is the correct URL, and my apologies to Tony Bates for the mix-up. [Link] [Comment]

Kathy E. Gill, MediaShift, June 7, 2011. When you upload content to display on third party websites like Twitter, Facebook or Flickr, you necessarily give up some of your rights to that content. At the very least, the third party website has to have the right to display the content, otherwise, what's the point? But how much more do you give up? If it's Twitpic or Twitter, you grant them the right to license your work to third parties, including (say) newspapers with whom they may be affiliated. But other sites, such as Flickr, don't assume such extra rights, and even allow you to apply your own licensing to the work (such as Creative Commons licensing). This article is a good overview of the different licensing conditions offered by different photo sharing sites - they are not all created equal - and as a bonus links to a detailed comparison of the different terms and conditions. [Link] [Comment]