An eclectic mix of tools for creating social sites, including one or two that are simply free hosting sites (e.g. Mixxt) rather than open source platforms. 

Address of the bookmark: http://dzineblog.com/2010/03/top-10-open-source-platforms-that-allow-you-to-build-your-own-social-network.html

I have been greatly enjoying reading David Byrne’s ‘How Music Works’ for the past week or so. It’s a brilliant book that brings together Byrne’s rich and personal experience with a theoretical perspective that neatly captures the intimate relationship between context and musical form: that music is not some abstract and etherial entity that emerges in isolation from its surroundings but a highly constrained and context-sensitive thing that is co-determined by place, history and technology as much as the creativity and expressiveness of the musician, probably more so. 

Byrne’s examination of the effects of recording on how music is played and perceived is wonderful – I think I’ve highlighted every second paragraph or so when he enters this territory. One of the reasons for this is that I see huge parallels between the ways that recording technologies have opened up new adjacent possibilities as well as imposing new biases and constraints, and the ways that online technologies have changed and are changing how we learn. The ways that technologies such as compression or the constraints of the physics of gramophone records made ‘invisible creative decisions’ for musicians mirrors the myriad ways that learning technologies shape and determine how we create learning experiences with them. This is not always for the better – I like a quote from Bix Beiderbecke on the time constraints of records: “For a musician with a lot to say it was like telling Dostoevsky to do the Brothers Karamazov as a short story”. The parallels run deep. Mixtapes, mashups and remixes beautifully echo the overlaid complexities of reusable and open content in a learning context. The ways that conventional music notation fails utterly to capture the sonic palette of modern music, deriving its form from an acoustic era, neatly aligns with the ways that our learning designs draw from patterns of face to face teaching and fail to begin to encompass the many ways that different technologies provide nuances and forms that make all the difference: it’s like playing a Hendrix riff on a ukelele and thinking they are the same thing. Perhaps most interesting of all, the separation of time and place that recorded music allows has led to phenomenal changes in perceptions of music, how it is played, how it is understood and how it is experienced, and has changed not only recorded music but also music that is performed live, how we learn to play, how we pass knowledge from one musician to another. Many things have been lost as well as gained. ‘Recorded music can be ripped free from its context, for better and worse. It becomes its own context,’ he notes. Much is lost in the process – ‘Records may do a lot to preserve music and disseminate it, but they can’t do what direct transmission does….History and culture can’t really be preserved by technology alone’. This is not a bad thing in itself – Byrne discusses the rich interplay between the expansive benefits of being able to hear music from different places and times, and the homogenizing effects of that music feeding back into and, often, destroying or massively mutating diverse musical cultures that were once distinct. But it is different, and it brings its own dynamics of change. In one of many wonderful insights into this process, he describes how early jazz recordings forced drummers to play bells, wood blocks and the sides of their drums instead of snares and kick drums because the thumps of the drums would make recording and playback needles skip, and that upright basses were replaced with tubas for the same reason. Consequently, players who heard the records came to believe that this was how jazz should be played and changed their live performances accordingly. 

The massive changes to music caused by separation of time and space are just beginning to similarly ripple through the more recent separation of time and space in online distance learning. Distance learning is different learning as much as recorded music is different music. When we accompany our lives with soma-like chunks of recordings on an iPod, the music is transformed and divorced from its context and, on the whole, is designed to be listened to in that strange and disconnected way. In fact, it’s different depending on the context we listen – the same music on an iPod, in a cafe, with friends, alone in a room, is different every time. It’s not bad, and it brings a wide range of new possibilities and ways of understanding music, but it is certainly different. When we learn in machine-constructed communities in isolation from our teachers and fellow learners, the learning experience is similarly transformed, ripped from its context and played in different spaces. And it is different for both creators or consumers, just as it makes it different for both musicians and listeners. The majority of modern music simply cannot be played live the way it is heard in a recording – quantization, overdubbing, and the many manipulations that sculpt music played in a studio change not just the sounds we hear but the way they are played and understood by the musicians. Similarly, when we use the technologies of online learning, those of us who are not doing the equivalent of simply standing in front of a microphone and playing (which, in teaching as in early days of recorded music, is a hopeless task doomed to abysmal failure and unnatural-sounding results) are changing how we teach, changing the contexts and ways that  learners learn, and adding textures and mixes that are impossible in a live classroom. That feeds back to systemic changes in face-to-face as well as online learning. The recent trend to the flipped classroom (something many of us have been doing for our whole teaching careers) is a case in point – something that emerged from technology constraints and affordances that now changes the live performance. This is a better change than the converse, for instance that lectures are just content and so can be replayed or transcribed onto a new medium without modification.

Distant education is to live education as recorded music is to live music. Recorded music can never replace the richness of communication, context-sensitivity and transformative engagement of live music. As a musician and a teacher, I love live performance, of being part of a real, human, breathing crowd, of being carried away in an unrepeatable and unique moment. On the other hand, live music can never replace the complexity, flexibility, range, precision and breadth of recorded music, and live teaching can never replace the richness and complexity, breadth and depth of online learning. Both can inspire, engage and transform us.

Roger Scruton’s classic article on the perils of kitsch. It is a defence of art as moral compass fighting off a self-reinforcing feedback loop of comforting shorthand fake-emotion that, like junk food, fails to nourish. I am particularly drawn to the idea that kitsch art is herd art. Scruton’s horse is a little high but there’s a lot of good stuff here that is as relevant as ever in the era of the lolcat and ’10 things you need to know about…’.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.city-journal.org/html/9_1_urbanities_kitsch_and_the.html

A fairly straightforward and pleasantly informal show-me introduction to transforming XML files into something else – in this case, into HTML documents. Aimed at those who already know a little about programming though others should be able to follow the logic with a little effort.

Address of the bookmark:

Delightfully simple overview of actor network theory – (almost) everything you need to know in 3 minutes. 

Address of the bookmark:

This is a great TED talk from Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist (that I’ve started to read and am enjoying immensely), summarizing some of the main ideas in the book.

There are many useful ideas and surprising facts and arguments presented here but the central concept is that the fundamental distinguishing characteristic of humans, that they trade and exchange things, leads to ever-increasing efficiencies of use of time and the (literal) breeding of innovation, in an ever-accelerating virtuous spiral that means the world gets to be a better place to live for nearly everyone nearly all the time, notwithstanding local variations and occasional reversals. His view of the emergent collective is particularly insightful and, though not as subtly argued as Bloom’s masterly ‘Global Brain’, makes a lot of sense and the simile that ideas literally reproduce sexually is memorable and worth examining. This is an original, poetic and compelling retelling of a very old idea that borrows heavily from Adam Smith and Leonard E. Read and that echoes many of the things W. Brian Arthur, Stephen Johnson, Kevin Kelly and others have been writing about technology and innovation recently. 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex.html

The University of the People aims to be a truly open university, intended for those that cannot afford a university degree, especially in developing countries. It is not completely free but there is just a single enrolment fee and, soon, small fees for each online exam taken. For those that cannot afford the nominal fees, it links to a marketplace for micro-scholarships and offers some scholarships of its own, and offers a sliding scale of fees depending on where you come from (people from developing countries pay less). Entirely unaccredited so far, with only a couple of undergraduate degree programs, it has a way to go. Its website has an endearingly amateurish feel and the blurb rather vaguely describes a clunky and unimaginative pedagogical model, with online exams that are not going to win it friends or trust. Perhaps the most telling sign that it is not playing in the big league is a very unfortunate turn of phrase that is proudly trumpeted throughout the site, that it is ‘tuition-free’. However, inability to use the English language and dubious pedagogical underpinnings aside, the idea is very worthy, the economic model is interesting and the intentions seem good. An interesting and possibly complementary alternative to the much-hyped mechaMOOC phenomenon (I say ‘mechaMOOC’ because I want to distinguish the new breed of MOOCs coming out of Udacity, Coursera etc from the original connectivist MOOCs that are a very different and much cuddlier kind of animal).

Address of the bookmark: http://www.uopeople.org/

I’ve referred people to this work by Heinz Dreher many times over the past few years but usually forget where the original paper resides, so here is a bookmark to this interesting research. It provides a useful literature review that covers some of the earlier work on automated free-text assessment from the 1960s onwards but, more interestingly, reports on Heinz’s own work on a system that helps markers and students by giving primitive but useful formative feedback.

I’m also fond of an older paper from the 1990s by Dave Whittington and Helen Hunt that compares a number of methods and suggests high correlations between human and automated markers, available at http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cse590D/04sp/papers/whittington-hunt.htm

In all instances it is, of course, pretty easy to game the system once you know the algorithms it is using. However, as a sanity and consistency check, automated systems are a useful tool.

Address of the bookmark: http://espace.library.curtin.edu.au/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=20152&local_base=GEN01-ERA02

Biz Stone and Ev Williams, founders of Blogger and Twitter, have launched two new (invite only while in beta) sites. Both are accessible with a Twitter login. From what I can tell, Medium is primarily a curation/collection technology that uses collective processes (votes, apparently) to bring things to the fore, while Branch allows topic-oriented conversations to develop from Twitter. 

The really interesting thing for me about this, especially given the couple’s enormous success so far in designing winning technologies, is how neatly they fit with the taxonomy of social forms that Terry Anderson and I have developed and that, by happy chance, forms the backbone of a book we’re writing. There is a huge trend towards topic-oriented sites right now and away from net-oriented sites. This is about sets of people with shared common interests, not social networks. Social networks are (optionally) there in both the new tools and they are not going away any time soon, but the main social form that matters here is not the network, but the fact that a lot of people are interested in the same thing. Branch is particularly interesting as it allows invited people to talk about something: so far, very much like a traditional discussion-oriented group, acting as a neat way to make it easier for topic-oriented groups to form out of looser networks. However, others from beyond that group can follow the conversation, so it acts like the classic goldfish bowl (one of my favourite ways to liven up a classroom-based lecture) but on a grand scale.  

ps…

I’ve just been playing with Branch – wow. This is good: incredibly neat and smooth transition between sets, nets and groups, delightful interface. One thing that particularly stood out for me (because it confirms my feelings about the thinking behind Twitter and why it is not even close to being like Facebook) is a quote from Ev Williams at the branch http://branch.com/b/the-volatility-of-social-spaces

Address of the bookmark: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2012/aug/15/twitter-founders-new-branch-medium

Whenever I visit a new country, region or city I visit McDonald’s as soon as I can to have a Bic Mac and an orange juice. Actually, in Delhi that turns into a Big Raj (no beef on the menu) and in some places I substitute a wine or a beer for the orange juice, but the food is not really important. There are local differences but it’s pretty much as horrible wherever you go.

I inflict this on myself because The McDonald’s Experience should, on the whole, be a pretty consistent thing the world over: that’s how it is designed. Except that it isn’t the same. The differences, however, compared with the differences between one whole country or city and another, are relatively slight and that’s precisely the point. The small differences make it much easier to spot them, and to focus on them, to understand their context and meaning. Differences in attitudes to cleaning, attitudes to serving, washroom etiquette, behaviour of customers, decor, menu, ambiance, care taken preparing or keeping the food etc are much easier to absorb and reflect upon than out on the street or in more culturally diverse cafes because they are more firmly anchored in what I already know. Tatty decor in McDonald’s restaurants in otherwise shiny cities speak worlds about expectations and attitudes, open smiles or polite nods help to clarify social expectations and communication norms. Whether people clear their own tables, whether the dominant clientele are fat, or families, or writers, whether it’s a proletarian crowd or full of intelligentsia or a place that youth hang out.  Whether people smoke, whether they drink. How loud the music (if any) is playing. The layout of the seating. How people greet their friends, how customers are greeted, how staff interact. How parents treat their children. There’s a wide range of different more or less subtle clues that tell me more about the culture in 20 minutes than days spent engaging more directly with the culture of a new place. Like the use of  the Big Mac Index to compare economies,  the research McDonald’s puts into making sure it fits in also provides a useful barometer to compare cultures.

McDonald’s thus serves as a tool to make it easier to learn. This is about distributed cognition. McDonald’s channels my learning, organises an otherwise disorganised world for me. It provides me with learning that is within my zone of proximal development. It helps me to make connections and comparisons that would otherwise be far more complex. It provides an abstract, simplified model of a complex subject.

It’s a learning technology. 

Of course, if it were the only technology I used then there would be huge risks of drawing biased conclusions based on an outlier, or of misconstruing something as a cultural feature when it is simply the result of a policy that is misguidedly handed down from a different culture. However, it’s a good start, a bit of scaffolding that lets me begin to make sense of confusion, that makes it easier to approach the maelstrom outside more easily, with a framework to understand it.

There are many lessons to be drawn from this when we turn our attention to intentionally designed learning technologies like schools, classrooms, playgrounds,  university websites, learning management systems, or this site, the Landing. Viewed as a learning technology about foreign culture, McDonald’s is extraordinarily fit for purpose. It naturally simplifies and abstracts salient features of a culture, letting me connect my own conceptions and beliefs with something new, allowing me to concentrate on the unfamiliar in the context of the familiar. Something similar happens when we move from one familiar learning setting to the next. When we create a course space in, say, Moodle or Blackboard, we are using the same building blocks (in Blackboard’s case, quite literally) as others using the same system, but we are infusing it with our own differences, our own beliefs, our own expectations. Done right, these can channel learners to think and behave differently, providing cues, expectations, implied beliefs, implied norms, to ease them from one familiar way of thinking into another. It can encourage ways of thinking that are useful, metacognitive strategies that are embedded in the space. Unfortunately, like McDonald’s, the cognitive embodiment of the designed space is seldom what learning designers think about. Their focus tends to be on content and activities or, for more enlightened designers, on bending the tools to fit a predetermined pedagogy. Like McDonald’s, the end result can be rather different from the intended message. I don’t think that McDonald’s is trying to teach me the wealth of lessons that I gain from visiting their outlets and, likewise, I don’t think most learning designers are trying to tell me:

• that learning discussions should be done in private places between consenting adults;
• that it is such a social norm to cheat that it’s worth highlighting on the first page of the study guide;
• that teachers are not important enough to warrant an image or even an email link on the front page;
• that students are expected to have so little control that, instead of informative links to study guide sections, they are simply provided with a unit number to guide their progress;
• that the prescribed learning outcomes are more important than how they will be learned, the growth, and the change in understanding that will occur along the way.

And yet, too many times, that’s what the environment is saying: in fact, it is often a result of the implied pedagogies of the technology itself that many such messages are sent and reinforced. The segregation of discussion into a separate space from content is among the worst offenders in this respect as that blocks one of the few escape routes for careful designers. Unless multi-way communication is embedded deeply into everything, as it is here on the Landing, then there is not even the saving grace of being able to see emergent cultural behaviours to soften and refine the hegemonies of a teacher-dominated system.

Like McDonald’s, all of this makes it far more likely that you’ll get a bland salty burger than haute cuisine or healthy food.