http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/51089.html

If you have an interest in e-learning or blended learning then the chances are that you have come across my friend Curt Bonk at some point in your career. If you haven't been to one of his remarkable presentations, you should find the time to do so. It's not hard as he is in great demand as a keynote and invited speaker and he has been known to average one every couple of days for years on end. You might not immediately recognise him from his picture as, chances are, he'll be dressed as a wizard, a Jedi knight, Darth Vader, one of the Borg or any one of a number of ingenious (if conspicuous) disguises. He'll probably be throwing things (nice things) at you while displaying a multimedia extravaganza of densely packed information in a slide show behind him while talking with remarkable coherence and speed about stuff you really ought to care about. You'll probably be called upon to participate, if only as part of a crowd. I have called this Curt Bonk's Wall of Sound in the past because of its massively parallel layers of rapidly presented information with barely a pause that you feel more than absorb. I've also called him a human hypertext because there is so much information there that you tend to pick out snippets and link them with others that come seconds or minutes later rather than following the linear narrative that runs too fast to completely absorb. It's not that he flits from here to there: it's just that Curt bombards you with so much stuff that you tend to construct your own path through his talks. They don't quite capture the atmosphere, but there are videos of some of Curt's talks  on his site.

If you're interested in e-learning and you've missed the presentations then there's still a very good chance you've read some of his work – Curt's output in a year is roughly equivalent to what most people in this area produce in a whole career. It's mostly high quality academic stuff, generally flawless, always interesting, generally fitting the mould that all of us academics tend to follow. But now Curt has produced something different, something that is the textual equivalent of his presentations, a set of stories and ideas that burst from the page with all of Curt's customary zeal that drives his presentations.

The World is Open: How Web Technology is Revolutionizing Education is (explicitly) in the same kind of territory as Friedman's The World is Flat, but applied in an educational (in the loosest sense) context. Like Curt's talks, it is dense with fantastic stuff, stories, research findings, hey-wow statistics, examples and ideas. Like Curt's talks, it travels at a furious pace, packing a mass of knowledge into a small space and, given that the book is pretty long and Curt is remarkably well-informed, that's a hell of a lot of knowledge.

This is not a view from the edge: Curt is right in the thick of the revolution and makes an extremely persuasive point that the changes wrought by technologies that emerged just a few years ago are not something to think about tomorrow, but that affect and profoundly influence what's happening today. For the mass of educators stuck in a model of teaching and learning that has barely changed since the nineteenth century, this should be a wake-up call. The world of learning has radically changed and, as Curt rightly says, it is open and accessible to all (well… at least, most people in developed nations and a massively growing number elsewhere).This is a very detailed snapshot of the world of learning and education on the cusp of change and a guidemap for those who have either not realised that things are different now or who see the changes but are confused about what to do.

It took me a while to get into the swing of the book, partly because I was reading it like an academic (it's not an academic book and doesn't pretend to be) and partly because Curt is talking about things that I'm pretty familiar with. I agree with pretty much everything he has to say on the subject. He's preaching to the converted here but, after a while, I was swept along with it anyway and, as is the nature of such things, there's plenty in it that was unfamiliar to me. However, the real joy of the book is that it reminds me at every turn of the page of why I love this job of teaching, how the things we do can really make a difference, how big change is possible, how amazing it all is. It's refreshing and revitalising. This is a cornucopia of ideas, examples, inspirations and explanations about how to help everyone learn more, learn better, learn more enjoyably. Curt is a fantastic teacher and researcher himself and is about as much of an expert in the field as anyone can be so none of this is wild speculation or fantasy. Just because he foregoes the academic niceties on this occasion doesn't mean that it is not backed up by a firm foundation of sound pedagogy and very solid research.

The bulk of the book's organisation largely follows Curt's WE-ALL-LEARN model for understanding the mass of stuff that's out there. After the introduction, the main part of the book consists of what Curt calls 'Openers' – a nice play on words that captures both the fact that these are things that are making the learning world open and that he fills the chapters with things that might start us thinking about doing things differently – rather like conversation openers, if you like. The full expansion of WE-ALL-LEARN is:

1. Web Searching in the World of e-Books
2. E-Learning and Blended Learning
3. Availability of Open Source and Free Software
4. Leveraged Resources and OpenCourseWare
5. Learning Object Repositories and Portals
6. Learner Participation in Open Information Communities
7. Electronic Collaboration and Interaction
8. Alternative Reality Learning
9. Real-Time Mobility and Portability
10. Networks of Personalized Learning

I find the acronym a little forced: WE-ALL-LEARN may be memorable but, though I've heard Curt talk about it, read the book, visited the site and more, I still can't for the life of me remember what more than one or two letters stand for and had to copy and paste the definitions into this review. It is interesting that, though they cover each aspect in turn, the chapter titles are different (and more entertaining!) than the acronym's expansion. That is perhaps reasonable as the book  is not an encyclopaedia and needs to tell a story. The framework does give a bit of structure to a very complex and evolving web of change and it keeps the book organised, so I'm fine with it.

Any review should highlight the things that the reviewer wishes were different: the book is great and all I can offer is nit-picking here:

• Curt finds it really hard to look on the negative side of all this wonderful stuff. He pays lip-service every now and then to the possibility that this is not for everyone, that there are digital divides, that most of these technologies can be used really effectively by bad people, that the economics of Free are a bit shaky, that the crowd is not always that wise, that it is hard to sort the wheat from the chaff, that we need to rethink our attitudes to plagiarism and so on. He does spend some of the final visionary chapter, Treasures and Traps, talking about risks as well as how to overcome them but, even then, the grimy shadowy stuff is dealt with in far less detail than the good things and his heart is just not in it. While it goes against the grain for Curt to consider the Dark Side, this is in keeping with the revolutionary fervour of the book: he is on a mission to change the world, to motivate and mobilise. The bad stuff has been copiously written about elsewhere anyway.
• I have a technical quibble with the word 'Web' in the title which, given that real-time mobility and portability is the R in WE-ALL-LEARN and the second A is for alternate reality, and many other technologies are discussed that are not even similar to the Web, is misleading for a techie like me. This is about many forms of networked technology and how they are changing things, a web (in a generic sense), not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee invented, nor its offspring. 
• My final quibble is that there are more exclamation marks per page than my Brit sensibilities are adjusted to accommodate for. However, the exclamation marks and superlatives get a lot easier to accept after the first couple of chapters and it is hard not to get carried away with the massive energetic flow of it after a while.

This book is not aimed at me: I know where Curt is coming from, I have the t-shirt, I'm already not just a convert but an apostle like Curt (albeit of a lowlier kind). Even so, the book left me energised and enthused, excited afresh by the many extraordinary possibilities latent in technological affordances, inspired to try anew to make things different, make things better. If you are an educator who has been wondering about how to make sense of all this gushing surge of new and scary technologies that we might use in education, someone who is interested, perhaps a little sceptical but open to exploring new directions, this book is a must-read. It is packed from head to toe with inspiring ideas and very practical guidelines about how to get real and lasting value from social, open, ubiquitous, mobile, immersive and many other modern technologies, not just in the future but now. A particularly appealing aspect is that it is firmly focussed on human connections and enhancing, not replacing, interactions with real people in real places. 

If you're a lifelong learner (who isn't?) this is also a great place to start finding out about the massive range of help that is available to you. The opportunities beyond Google and Wikipedia are many and varied, and this book is full of ideas and examples of ways to learn outside the institution.

Given the stance of the book (including two pages extolling the virtues of my friend Terry Anderson's approach in creating the freely downloadable and highly rated book, The Theory and Practice of Online Learning) it is a touch ironic that this is a book that is very much in the traditional mould – not expensive, but printed on paper and certainly not free. It's a double-whammy because a few specific technologies he talks about have been superceded, changed, merged, or gone the way of all things and this is sure to get worse. The irony is not lost on Curt and he has a solution. He is, as I mentioned before, a prolific writer. In writing this book he discarded about as much as he kept, not because of quality issues but because there was just too much to print. As a consequence and in keeping with the spirit of what he is writing about, he will be releasing a similarly copious e-book for free that keeps the same structure but that has completely different content. Curt mentions this in the paper book, but it won't be available for a little while. He has promised to put it on the WE-ALL-LEARN site for anyone to download. I'm looking forward to that. If it's half as inspiring as the paper version, this will be a great bargain and maybe even more current. The WE-ALL-LEARN site is also an excellent source of up-to-date links, current information, ideas, and suggestions. It's well worth visiting even if you are not getting the book.

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/51047.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1405

Some useful ideas, good introduction to some important stuff across the spectrum from social technologies to PowerPoint.
Created:Wed, 09 Sep 2009 20:26:16 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/50992.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1404

Excellent. The centralisers and greedy absorbers may be about to experience a bit of a downturn. This has already happened in several countries and seems to be heading towards North America too. For all of its brilliance (giving credit where credit is due, Facebook is in many ways state-of-the-art in its design of self-organising social spaces) the centralised model it insists upon is not. Shunning interconnectedness, networkability and open standards except where it lets them suck you further to the centre is either a) doomed to eventual failure or b) going to take over the world. I really don’t see the latter happening. Centralised models are simply not resilient or flexible enough in the long term, no matter how well built a system might be to negate some of the more pernicious effects.

I like the Yeats quote in this article but hope that the lines that follow in the poem don’t come to pass:

‘mere anarchy is loosed up on the world’. What we actually need is a federated model using well-defined standards and protocols that do not lock us into one provider, which put real control into the hands of end-users, and which allow a highly variegated and interconnected ecosystem to evolve.
Created:Sun, 06 Sep 2009 17:43:35 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/50976.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1403

“…these huge changes will also seriously threaten the ability of universities to provide all the things beyond teaching on which society depends: science, culture, the transmission of our civilization from one generation to the next.”

Many interesting things about this development and others like it. On the one hand it is wonderful that the approach puts learners in control, provides materials and community, all for a single low fixed monthly price that lifts barriers to education for many that would otherwise be excluded. The model makes perfect economic sense as long as there are not too many students like the one described in this article, who worked 18 hours a day to get her qualifications. On the other hand it is another step towards the commoditisation of the creation of knowledge, a market-driven approach in which only the strong will survive.

I’m currently reading Howard Bloom’s magnificent ‘Global Brain’ which makes a forcible point for the need for diversity generators: non-conformist approaches that send out feelers into the evolutionary landscape and explore possible futures and different ways of being. Market-driven colleges of the type described in this article are what Bloom calls conformity enforcers: despite catering for individuals so well they must necessarily avoid the unprofitable avenues and, in so doing, reinforce the status quo even more than our traditional institutions (magnified still further by their use of bought-in commercial educational course offerings).

For all their many many faults, our traditional universities are pretty good diversity generators: the ivory tower is not all bad inasmuch as it affords scope and freedom to explore beyond the boundaries of practical and economically viable concerns. Most of the time this leads nowhere but, just occasionally, it enables breakthroughs that simply wouldn’t happen in a more pragmatic world. More importantly than the exploration of ideas new to the world, perhaps, is that it also offers that space for anyone who is able to join in – a space for young people in particular to grow and explore their boundaries and, sometimes, to leap over them. Our universities and colleges are in desperate need of reform but, in the process, as a society we must keep their valuable functions.

I hope we in the institutional sector of higher education find another battle ground to fight on than in the increasingly crowded space of cheap and flexible courses. Apart from anything else, we will certainly lose that battle.

Universities still have a dominant role in the creation of at least some kinds of new knowledge so it would make sense to take advantage of that. When universities first formed it was because they made it easier for people to come and hang out with great scholars and become part of a rich scholarly learning community. I reckon we should return to our roots here. What universities (at least currently) can offer that education-as-a-commodity brokers cannot yet aspire to is the opportunity to not only read the books but to hang out with the people who write them.

However, this might change.

An interesting and growing trend is that many of the great and the good in the guru category are reaching out beyond the walled garden into networked communities, notably in blogs and social networks that have little or nothing to do with the institutions in which they work. Most institutions short-sightedly offer very little support for that kind of outreach (I am very lucky to work for two that do). What they *can* (and sometimes do) offer is the opportunity to be part of gurus’ small groups, rather than just their broader networks. If I were running StraighterLine then I’d probably want to start to poach that territory too. Once that starts to happen then the old gang needs a pretty good strategy to deal with it.
Created:Sat, 05 Sep 2009 22:04:35 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/50878.html

I've just spent three rewarding and exhausting days at the IEEE Social Computing Conference in Vancouver.

It was an odd experience for me as by far the majority of papers and presentations seemed to have a lot to do with computing (most predominantly various forms of network analysis and visualisation, plus a fair bit on technologies of privacy and security) and very little to do with 'social'. One of the more spectacularly glaring omissions was any notable use of social technologies before, during or after the conference, apart from a few bottom-up initiatives. In fact, given that this was a computing conference, use of computers was altogether pretty dire, with the most appallingly designed registration process I have ever encountered, that suggest its designers had never considered users let alone followed anything like a user-centred design process. The conference website is something out of the 1990s. At least the network was fine, but that was provided by the hotel.

A few speakers asked people in the audience about their use of various social systems and it was more than slightly bizarre to be among the minority of delegates using big players like Facebook, Digg, Flickr and Twitter, let alone less popular social apps. I find it almost incomprehensible that some social software programmers can be so utterly divorced from the use of the things that they are studying and developing. Except that, as a breed, computer scientists are not known to be the most sociable of people.

Despite this gaping hole, there were some great people and there was some good stuff to be found there including fine sessions from Ben Shneiderman, Bebo White, Barry Smyth, a big contingent of creative folk from MIT MediaLab, and many more. There was some fascinating research relating to the use of sensors and wearable devices and even the mainstream of network analysis and visualisation papers, as well as those considering privacy, security and access control, held some great potential insights and discoveries. Again, however, it was depressing to see how few had performed any follow-ups or studies with real people to find out what social factors might be lurking behind the effects they were seeing in the abstracted data or how their designs might be used by real people. A panel hosted by Jenny Preece followed up Ben Schneiderman's talk in considering the big ethical and related issues that social software engenders, which was refreshing and a necessary counterpoint to all this abstraction of humans into nodes and edges, but it stood out from the mainstream themes as a distinct oddity.

The conference certainly helped to inspire me with some ideas, refinements of ideas and issues I'd not thought about well enough before, so it was well worthwhile, but if that was 'social computing' I hate to imagine what it might be like without the 'social'!

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/50755.html

Terry Anderson and I are leading a small project at Athabasca University in Alberta, Canada taking a design-based research approach to exploring ways of using social software for learning.

We need someone with a computing degree or equivalent experience to extend and improve aspects of Elgg, as well as to integrate and mash it up with other systems (specifically Moodle and the Project Wonderland immersive environment). PHP and/or Java programming experience would be useful. The post holder will also research and evaluate the effectiveness of interventions using the software so will need to be a great communicator, ideally with experience of participative approaches to design and/or qualitative and quantitative research methods.

The things we are trying to do will hopefully be of benefit to anyone in education who wants to use Elgg as their social software. We hope this will be ground-breaking work that will lead to publications etc, so it would be good for someone wanting to break into learning technologies research.

This post can be remotely located, but occasional visits to Edmonton, Alberta would be required, and Canadian residents and citizens will be considered before anyone else.

Full details are available at https://athabascau.hua.hrsmart.com/ats/js_job_details.php?reqid=469

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/50936.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1402

Some great ‘hey wow!’ statistics and facts about social media use of the sort one tends to see a lot in keynotes. Not all of the facts are reliable or significant but there’s a very good list of sources to verify their plausibility and, while we might quibble with the odd detail here and there, the overall message is clear: this stuff is *big*.
Created:Fri, 21 Aug 2009 23:26:00 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/50555.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1401

It looks like the 3D Web is nearing reality. The current generation of general-purpose immersive spaces (e.g. Second Life, There, Wonderland, OpenSim etc) are clunky, poorly-interoperable, resource-hungry monoliths that help to show the potential but are really not ready for mass adoption. These two initiatives (WebGL and O3D) should be exactly what is needed to build a truly standards-compliant and open immersive web. I recall similar arguments in the early to mid nineties about VRML and later X3D but maybe this is the bit of the puzzle that means we get the real thing at last!
Created:Fri, 07 Aug 2009 20:47:00 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/50297.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1400

A good list of the current main players in mobile social networking, with some intelligent commentary on functionality, affordances, weaknesses, prognosis for the future etc.
Created:Thu, 30 Jul 2009 01:33:01 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/50298.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1399

A collective approach to social networking. Instead of explicit friending, the system finds people like you and clusters those into your network.

I guess the big issue is the control that the creators exert in the choice of aspects that are considered in establishing similarity. You can select styles which establish the context that is of interest to you at a given time, each of which uses a set of explicit questions to find out about you (valuable info!). I suspect it could have some potentially interesting applications in education, especially on the informal and lifelong learning front, if it were to be open-sourced. Not so useful as a closed service like this.
Created:Wed, 29 Jul 2009 22:29:33 GMT