http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/31870.html

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Via Stephen Downes, an interesting posting from Ruth Reynard in Campus Technology. The article explores potential abuses of blogs in education. It is very notable that the education referred to lies very firmly within the traditional institutional context. Most of her recommendations relate to fitting blogs with traditional institutional values and norms, including issues such as learning objectives, assessment and structured use of the environment.

Although blogs can be useful in such a setting, it seems to me that she has rather missed the point.

The remarkable value of blogs comes not from their support for annotated postings, but from their connections with each other. The blog is a fundamentally network-based environment that achieves meaning through being part of its piece of the blogosphere ecology. If we choose to constrain this then we are missing out on a wealth of connections, serendipitous encounters and new opportunities for learning that were simply not an option before this kind of technology came about.
Created:Tue, 14 Oct 2008 12:51:57 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/28585.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1379

Mind-blowing talk by Sugata Mitra on how kids aged 6-13 can and do teach themselves and, most importantly, each other. All that is needed is access to a connected computer, which Mitra’s team provided across India through public holes in the wall.

There were no teachers or formal curricula of any kind. Not even a start page, just a search engine. The kids are able to teach themselves without anyone telling them to do so, without any teachers save the other children (often with younger ones teaching older ones) and of course the creators of content on the Web.

A central observation is that the kids learn as much by watching and talking about it as by doing – typically in groups of about 4. It makes no difference whether they are controlling the computer or not, they all learn as much. Results in tests were closely comparable to those achieved in schools and incredibly cost-efficient. The educational effect has no correlation with any other factor that they could measure apart from access to a computer in a group.

A nice example, the first thing non-English speaking kids did after figuring out the computer interface (which took very little time) was to find out about and learn the English alphabet.

Mitra concludes with four important points, each of which is elegantly proven in the video:

– remoteness affects the quality of eduction (largely because of poor teaching by teachers who do not want to be there – there was very little correlation with any other factor).

– educational technology should therefore be introduced into remote areas first – many of the studies that have been performed are in places where education is already pretty good, so the gains are modest. Where teaching is bad, educational technology has a more important place. He uses a lovely quote from Arthur C. Clarke – "Teachers who can be replaced by a machine should be"

– values are acquired, doctrine and dogma are imposed (some delightful evidence of this, using a bottom-up process for identifying value statements)

– learning is a self-organising system

This is a stunning piece of work. Anyone connected with education should see this.

Mitra sums up that education and pedagogy should be digital, automatic, fault-tolerant, minimally invasive, connected and self-organising. Brilliant.

Created:Mon, 15 Sep 2008 01:20:16 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/28561.html

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Excellent NY Times article exploring the big issues in social networking. Great stuff on ambient awareness, microblogging and issues of trust and privacy. A must-read for social software newbies.
Created:Thu, 11 Sep 2008 18:38:54 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/28296.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1377

An interesting approach to trust and reputation, a wiki in which every word is attributable to its author. I like the principle and the example site (wikigenes) looks good – a decent editor, use of ontologies, rated ranking of text and authors, automated insertion of gene images and so on. Of course, some of this is customised for the site and it is still a bit buggy in its use of CSS etc. The ranking idea at this fine-grained level is potentially useful, if abusable and perhaps a bit too high-threshold to be widely used, especially for snippets – who would give five stars for a correction, for instance?
Created:Sat, 30 Aug 2008 07:23:30 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/28044.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1376

A nice Ning-alike system for building and hosting social applications, with some good (albeit Flash-based) widget authoring and a good set of pre-built widgets and templates to make your own social site for (ad-supported) free. I still much prefer Ning, but this is a useful and usable alternative that is perhaps a little friendlier and quicker to come to terms with.
Created:Mon, 04 Aug 2008 17:19:02 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/28045.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1375

Interesting new search engine that claims to index three times as many pages as Google and displays the results according to analysis of content. Just when we thought the likes of Alta Vista, Infoseek and the rest were dead and buried! It seems pretty fast but, frankly, it would benefit from a few of the ‘superficial popularity metrics’ that it explicitly rejects (but, oddly, seems to use a bit). The results may be relevant but, without the wisdom of the crowd, provide little hint as to their quality. I like the three column display for most purposes (though my poor little eee PC is less than pleased and it is not easy to decide whether to read across or down) and the fact that it collects no private data is reassuring but inevitably reduces the relevance of the results.

It’s a good system and I suspect I may use this for complex and precise queries when Google fails but it is not likely to take much market share until it pays more attention to the collective mind.
Created:Mon, 04 Aug 2008 15:38:15 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/27840.html

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Google is entering the immersive social world. This is not exactly a competitor to the likes of Second Life, HiPiHi, OpenSIM or Wonderland, but a lightweight 3D chat system that is easily embedded on a Web page – at least, it is if you happen to run Windoze. If not, tough. This doesn’t feel like a typical Google application. Though small and easy, it is ugly, closed and clunky, the opposite of what has made Google great in other areas. It has support for static multimedia and embedding stuff from YouTube etc, but no real-time sound. There’s a big menu of objects to populate your space and a decent collection of avatars, but this is not a space for authoring. It may be OK for small groups, but there appears to be a limit of 20 people in each space.

What I really like is that it enables easy, low-threshold, rich collaboration in real time, embedded in a wider context without big downloads and separate environments. It is also nice that Google is thinking about integrating it with the desktop, the browser and its own gadgets.

What I really dislike is that it appears to largely ignore any standards (apart from pulling in stuff from elsewhere) and of course it relies on a single service provider.

This is Google doing ‘me-too’ rather than innovating in a big way. There are plenty of good systems out there like IMVU and Twinity and it is hard to see much in Lively that makes it different. It is encouraging that immersive spaces are hitting the mainstream and starting to live in browser space, but what we really need is something like this that is genuinely distributed, interoperable and connectible.
Created:Thu, 10 Jul 2008 18:12:53 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/27600.html

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Very interesting confirmation of what we already know about the use of social networking sites. Highlights include:

"Women and the 14-24 year old demographic are more likely to use Myspace and Facebook than other demographics"

…

"Men and the 25-34 year old demographic are more likely to use LinkedIn and Flickr than other demographics"

It is notable that the ones men like typically involve less direct communication and that, by the time we get to men of my age, almost no social networking happens at all.

Oh dear.

In society at large my demographic is probably the one with the most power and money (not me of course). I wonder if we are beginning to see a surge in collective/network power that will grapple that from us? Not soon enough I reckon. However, I guess that I should not get too enthused by this: the graph stops at 9% of the overall population. And 90% of those studied were from the US, which is hardly representative.
Created:Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:56:05 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/27594.html

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This is a very neat application and a wonderful example of the power of the collective (a combination of multiple independent people’s activities and algorithms). By comparing pictures on Flickr that have geolocation information supplied with those that are unknown the authors can fairly accurately guess the location at which photos were taken.

How cool is that?

Of course, they get it wrong pretty often, but they reckon they can do about 30 times better than chance, which is no mean feat. What we see, therefore, is a means for collective human intelligence to augment (but not replace) individual human intelligence. I love this stuff.

Now all we have to do is to find an educational application.

I think it shows an interesting feature of collective applications in general, which is that they are inherently fuzzy. I would never trust one that told me with authority that it had the answer to what I seek. Google, the archetype, is pretty good at finding the right things when fed with appropriate keywords, but not perfect. It, and applications like this one, can offer choices that help us to narrow down the search but, ultimately, it is we who are selecting the right things for our needs. While systems can help by offering interface cues (e.g. list position in Google) the final arbiters are us. If we don’t get the definitive answer first time, we must find more evidence or improve our search. A skill for the twenty first century that we all need to learn is therefore fine-grained decision making, to successfully judge the value and validity of a relatively small selection of competing resources or ‘facts’. Synthesis and analysis come next, but they are subordinate to using the collective wisdom of the crowd.

It bugs the hell out of me that there are those who believe that the Google generation are getting dumber because of Google. These are higher order skills than we have ever had to deal with in the past. Collective intelligence gives us a shin-up, a means of climbing the intellectual ladder to give us a head start. But rather than making us dumber, it should just put us higher up so that we can be smarter.

The trouble is, there are still educators who are trying to perpetuate and assess skills that the collective is more than capable of surpassing. This is pointless. Requiring students to repeat knowledge that they can easily get from Wikipedia or Google is like assessing basic arithmetical skills on a graduate level mathematics course when the students all use calculators. We might mourn the passing of mental arithmetic skills but let’s get over it and move on. Or, if we think it is so important to develop mental skills which don’t rely on technology, let’s scrap this whole stupid book idea and, while we’re about it, let’s stop writing too. These things are so bad for our mental acuity and we rely on them too much.
Created:Fri, 20 Jun 2008 07:04:18 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/27590.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1369

Donald Clark on typically good form, this time laying in to stoytelling and narrative as a learning method. I particularly like his notions of various activities (including blogging, wikis, social networks and games) as non-narrative learning. He also throws in sports and reality TV shows like Big Brother.

I think he is right up to a point – at least, we tend to construct our own narratives in a far bigger way when faced with such things and engagement is fundamentally social, at least latently. And it is true that most of life does not have the neat plots of authored stories.

However, as a (late) baby boomer, I have a bit of a fondness for narrative and I don’t think it is entirely misplaced. What I find interesting is how popular narratives are changing and becoming more like the non-narrative forms that Donald is keen on. I am a fan of Steven Johnson’s ‘Everything Bad is Good for You’ which makes a compelling point that TV shows (in particular) are becoming far more complex and requiring far deeper imaginative involvement than earlier examples of the genre. Yes, they still have neat plot lines, albeit massively intertwingled, but the best of them challenge us in utterly different ways. Compare the latest Battlestar Galactica with its wan forebear for instance. This is a show that is packed with moral ambiguities and deep shades of grey that challenge us to engage at a deep ethical, emotional and intellectual level, to explore and raise doubts on what it means to be human and to delve the depths of the psyche. Yes, it is enriched by the numerous sites and blogs that surround it, but as a learning object it stands alone pretty well. And it does this very intentionally through the narrative form, not by taking me on a journey but by forcing me to engage in a dialogue. The same is true of a decent novel, play, poem or piece of music. Traditional narratives, at their best, are not about leading but about conversing. And, like any good learning experience, they provide this conversation in a safe environment, taking away some of the chaos in order to communicate more effectively about the things that matter (at least to the authors etc). Traditional narrative is as much about what is not chosen as what is chosen. It invites us to look at an artificial world and to see how it relates to our lives and the people and things we know. A story is metadata, often massively complex and ambiguous, but at its heart just a model that enriches or makes it easier to understand our own reality. So yes, let’s embrace the social, but let’s not forget the value and opportunities that the guided dialogue of a good narrative provides.
Created:Thu, 19 Jun 2008 21:56:37 GMT