It seems that tagging information is useful for more than just organising things (either individually or socially); tags can be art, too! In that vein I’ve just discovered Wordle which can take any series of words – or pull your tags straight from del.icio.us – and let you play with various visualisations. I dragged in my del.icio.us tags, and I have to say I quite like the little word-art picture that resulted:
If you squint, it almost looks like a badly drawn map of Australia! :) What do your tags look like?
Unless you’ve been hiding under a digital rock, you’d know that the best browser in the world has released an even better incarnation: Firefox 3 is here. I could write about all of its improvements, but you can get a fuller version here, suffice it to say it runs faster, takes a lot less memory (20 tabs open suddenly takes about 300mg less RAM for me!) and has some spiffy new security features. And let’s not forget, it’s an open source creation, made by the people, for the people!
To celebrate, Mozilla are encouraging people to download Firefox 3 today, attempting to break the Guinness World Record for most downloaded software in a 24hour period. For those of us in Perth, that 24 hours runs from 1am Wed 18 June until 12.59am Thurs 19 June. So, be part of a World Record and download now! I was the 29005th person to download from Australia, so I know there are a few Aussies who could download yet! And just in case you need one last ounce of motivation, downloading FireFox 3 today will get you a cute little certificate:
Michael Wesch and his 200 students in ANTH 200: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, Spring 2007 collaborated in exploring what exactly a student does these days. Their results make a fascinating video and a timely reminder of the way (some) student experiences are changing:
Some of the noteworthy results from 133 of the students survey included:
“My average class size is 115.”
“18% of my teachers know my name.”
I complete 49% of the readings assigned to me. Only 26% … relative to my life
I will read 8 books this year.” “2300 web pages” “and 1281 facebook profiles”
“I will write 42 pages for class this semester.” “And over 500 pages of email”
Given how many times Wesch’s first video, ‘The Machine is Us/ing Us’, has been used to discuss Web 2.0, I suspect this video may very well find itself as part of the conversations we have in rethinking student engagement in the twenty-first century.
JD Lasica points to an interesting new report from the US National School Boards Association entitled Creating & Connecting /Research and Guidelines on Online Social - and Educational - Networking. The report focusing on ‘tweens’ and teens, and has some really important notes about the role of social networking in forming learning communities and even casual connections between online presence and learning.
As this graph shows, more than half US tweens and teens have discussed education in online social networking:
Likewise, many tweens and teens are not just discussing and downloading, but also creating, uploading and participating in creative projects:
Again we are reminded that education in the twenty-first century has to think about the digital literacies of students and how to allow those literacies to develop in our curricula.
Footnote.com is a new website which allows access to millions of public documents from the US National Archives — as well as documents uploaded by users. More to the point it allows users to annotate documents with notes, translations and so on. This seems like an excellent service for finding interesting class projects. I can easily students annotating historical documents and clarifying difficult handwriting for their own learning while simultaneously contributing to a larger community resource.
Admitedly, there is a registration fee, but it’s not huge and I’d say well worth it for schools and university libraries.
After more than three weeks without an internet connection at home (due to moving houses, previous tenants not disconnecting their phone and a rather slow-moving ISP) I’m back at work. I’m delighted that my first post for 2007 is celebrating the news that the farcical Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) has, at least in its current form, died a quiet death. The moral panic surrounding youth and social networking seems to have eased in the US and with the shift of control of Congress to Democrat hands it looks like DOPA is off the table.
However, as Steve O’Hear notes, some of the damage has already been done with a number of schools blocking social networking sites
As more and more digital videos appear in university and secondary education, finding creative ways to interact with this media is increasingly important. One of the more difficult challenges is translating some of the textual techniques for criticism and engagement into comparable forms for digital video. Being able to annotate video is one thing I’ve always wanted to be able to do quickly and simply without having to resort to using a full-blown video editor. Now, thanks to the mass of videos on YouTube and similar flash-based services, a new option has appeared: BubblePLY.
Using a very simply interface, quick text annotations can be added to any flash-based videos, including those on YouTube, MySpace and Google Video. Check out an example here. The video quality isn’t stunning but for quick projects with minimal training and fuss, I think this could prove a very useful tool indeed!
Australia has taken a great leap towards research results being freely available to all, supporters of the open access movement say. The Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council - with total annual grants worth more than $1billion - are about to announce their first open access policies. “An open access sea change is happening,” said Arthur Sale, professor of computing at the University of Tasmania. “It will take about a year to become fully fledged and unmistakable to all, but it is inexorable.” Federal Education, Science and Training Minister Julie Bishop welcomed the new approach as “well balanced”. She said given the scale of public investment, it was reasonable that research results be available to the community and other researchers, thereby maximising the benefits. Although the ARC policy is voluntary, researchers who decide not to use open access repositories in a timely way must explain why in their final report to the agency. The same approach is expected to apply to NHMRC grant programs. “It is a mandatory policy in that it is easier to deposit than write why not,” said open access advocate Colin Steele, former librarian at the Australian National University. Mandatory open access policies are rare and contentious.
Some time last year, I came up with an idea for the forthcoming Fibreculture issue on “New media, networks and new pedagogies” and it looked a little like this…
“The Open Course Manifesto: Reflections on the Tenth Anniversary of Publication”
Published: December, 2016
This will be a (fictional-)historical reflection on ‘The Open Course Manifesto’ which appeared in an eLearning blog for the first time in 2006, the Movement it inspired. It is written from the perspective of the Manifesto’s author reflecting on (and recounting) ten years of the teaching & learning nexus (or, indeed, nexes) as it has been remediated and reconstructed as a socio-pedagogical phenomena stretching far beyond bounds of the ivory tower of academia. The piece highlights the originary media-forms which facilitated the Open Course Movement-namely blogs, wikis, podcasts, vlogcasts and metamedia-and the institutions which so energetically pushed the movement (especially the Creative Commons Organisation and OurMedia Foundation). Naturally, the controversial ‘CopyRighteous’ bankrupting of the Open Course Movement in 2009 after Warner Brothers sued the Movement after a ninety second excerpt from The Matrix: Reloaded was erroneously placed in under a Creative Commons licensed vlogcast lecture will be revisited, as will the now infamous resurrection of the Movement ‘housed’ as an Incorporated Informatic Form on a Singaporean serverfarm, beyond the legal reach of both US and Australian judiciary systems. Those dramas aside, the central tale is still how a collection of little-known universities open sourced their entire curriculum in an effort to broaden the semi-structured public coursebase to rekindle an adapted ‘clever country’ ethos in the Australian, UK and eventually US contexts. The Movement’s catch-cry, ‘The personal is the pedagogical’, still resonates powerfully today and this reflective piece will offer context to one of the core tales of public teaching and learning in the early years of the twenty-first century.
Now that I’ve actually gotten around to writing the article I need your help! Where do you see eLearning by 2016? Which trends to you see growing (either optimistically or realistically)? Does eLearning mean anything by 2016 … or is it just part of learning by then? I’d really appreciate people’s insights as part of the edublogosphere! Also, if you happen to know anyone who would be interested in leaving a comment, please do pass on the link to this post! (I’d like to cite everyone who offers suggestions in the paper, so if people could leave a full name when commenting, that’d be appreciated!) Thanks for your help and bring on the comments!
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