Tag: Social Discourse

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Are we there yet?

I like to see that Nate has done somehting with the idea of collecting threads, but I have one question about his solution – how is it more accessible to the non-bloggers? Those of us who subscribe by RSS can get updates and even make changes to the wiki but what about others who are still more comfortable with subscribing to an email list?

Nate is probably right that the overhead would be a major burden to – and yes, it might possibly even kill – my journal idea, but just because we have an option does not mean that we have addressed all the concerns. That is what needs to happen at some point if we are to find the right balance in this type of communication between groups within our group (AECT).

I found another idea over at Weblogg-Ed that looks promising. There is a link there to a conversation tracker at blogpulse by Inteliseek. Unfortunately I have not been able to get it to work. I am thinking that they only track a subset of blogs, but if the tool could be used for AECT related blogs or Education related blogs it would be a very interesting start.

On another note, I am starting to wonder if I should take a sabbatical (as a student) to work on this stuff for a while without having to worry about classes. Any ideas? 🙂

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Education

First Claim explained

Anybody in class reading my site will probably read PeiJu’s blog also, but just in case I highly recommend her Explaination of the first claim. I think she has hit the nail right on the head.

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Education

EduBlog Digest

Okay, I’ve been thinking more about this than I should have (it woke me up at 4:00 in the morning) and I have a great idea for how to keep good blog dialogs visible – we should publish a journal of blogversations which are academic in nature. I’m not sure how to get this all down in writing, but I’ll try to summarize my thinking here and see what we come up with together.

“Articles” would consist of all the blog posts, comments and trackbacks of an idea that grew into a conversation. Each piece of the conversation would be attributed to the author of that piece and at the bottom of the conversation would be a list of contributing authors – everyone with a trackack into the conversation – with links to their blog pages. All content would be licensed under an appropriate CC license. The editors might have to seek permission sometimes from some potential contributors if they have too restrictive of licenses on their sites. Off the top of my head I can think of two such conversations from Nate, this one and quantum cognition. Obviously there are plenty of others out there, but those were just the first two examples that came to mind right now.

The structure of the journal would be to have an editorial board who would help to monitor and gather conversations as they emerge. We would need to have standards about what constituted a conversation (ex. at least two posts each from at least two authors) and then add those conversations to the journal that met the criteria as well as updating conversations in the journal that have grown since they were included. Besides the articles we might include an editorial piece that is just for the journal not more than once a month that talks about trends that the editors are seing in educational blogging.

The journal needs to be syndicated in blog friendly format (RSS) and non-blogger friendly format (email distribution when new articles or editorials come out) so that non-bloggers can be exposed to the rich conversation in a format they are comfortable with. When new articles are mailed out we can send links to those articles that have been updated since the previous mailing.

I have more ideas about the structure of the database that would support the journal but I’m not sure I have the know how to make the software to power the journal (we might be able to modify WP or something). Beyond that we would need hosting and a domain (EBD.org?) before we could really get under way. Maybe we should write a grant to fund the endeavor. By now my post has become confusingly complex so let me know what you think about the idea and how you would be willing to participate.

This is the type of site that we could advertise .

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Advertising this Party

I know Nate is serious about Getting off the porch and so am I. I said before that we are not getting our message out to the right audience just because it is on the web and thus universally available. I started talking about presenting at AECT in Orlando only to learn that Nate was ahead of me there with the Overlay and the Strategic Task Force. Since then I have realized that between now and October is at least one lifetime in the blogosphere if not two.

I think that finding some way to keep these good conversations visible in some ongoing way would be useful but I continue to contend that we also need to send the invitations into the established venues of communication. A presentation in October is too long to wait. We should still do that, but before then we should publish something. Here’s a radical idea – why don’t we actually advertise? Get an ad in TechTrends or ETR&D listing the topics of some good academic conversations that we have had in our stadium and invite people to visit us.

This would be print, so the conversations would have a different type of life, but the ad could point people to a website which teaches how to join the blogosphere as a reader, provides links to the conversations in the ad along with all the blogs that have participated in any of those conversations and teaches them how to begin writing a blog when they are ready to contribute in that manner. Perhaps it should provide a link to the aect-members list of blogs so they can get a dynamic list of bloggers to look at. The point is that we have to advertise our party in a way that will get to people, but email is not easy and definitly not persistent. We need it in print!

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Education

Seriously Funny

I have never laughed so hard as when I read Don’s partita in D. I could never do it justice in summary so let me just say that it is well worth the read – especially the last paragraph:

To turn to a musical metaphor, let’s look at a modern History 101 class. The chief instructor who knows all the notes has just been given a new synthesizer (think PowerPoint) that has all the range of his old saxophone, which he never quite mastered but at least it was familiar, but adds bagpipe, harmonica and peddle steel guitar to his possible instrument range. He has of course never been given any instruction on any of these instruments, but his father was a big Hank Williams fan and his mother watched soap operas while she ironed. The instructor has also been provided with a graduate student backup group. Two of these also have no musical training but one isn’t bad on the thumb piano which the university provided her and the other is working hard on the slide trombone which he found after last years homecoming rally. The third graduate assistant actually has some background, having taken tap lessons between the ages of 8 and 14, but has lately developed an unfortunate interest in late 70’s acid rock. So there we have our quartet, and it really is Bach, or maybe Mozart, they’re playing. And there really is an audience trying to make sense out of it.

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Education

Not To Be Picky

I do not intend to poke holes here for the sake of argument. I just thought I would share this discussion that I have been passively enjoying at Cognitive Dissonance, but I think it is not just trivial to note that when Nate is talking about the Science of Baking he inserted a provision “baking — that is, applying heat to food in a closed box” in his definition of baking halfway through his analogy that was absent in his original definition “baking — that is, the transfer of heat into food within the confines of a box.”

I don’t consider the addition of the requirement that the box be closed to be a critical fault to the argument. Actually I think it helps to illustrate Nate’s point that we need to nail down a common definition of “learning” before we can productively argue about what makes learning happen. We need to confine our definition to a manageable scope. We will not make any headway in increasing our understanding of learning if we spend all our time arguing that learning takes place everywhere in unpredictable ways because I cannot manage all learning or all its ways. I can talk about learning and whatever is consistent about that or I can talk about what happens in a classroom (which is a lot more than just learning) but I cannot confuse “learning” with “what happens in a classroom.” I could argue that cooking is just chemistry but then I have to deal with all kinds of chemical reactions that were not considered cooking before. Maybe cooking is chemistry involving food that is intended for ingestion.

Whatever the case let us make sure that we do not inadvertently insert small new conditions in our definition in the middle of our argument because if we do our argument will not be sound.

P.S. I should note that this is not a critique of Nate’s argument, but an illustration of his excellent point.

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Education

Academic Status of Blog Posts

Nate has some interesting and accurate thoughts on the academic states of blog posts. Roy had some interesting thoughts to add as well.

As for myself I think that there is little we can do to encourage bloggers to post meaningful content because it is their own content. That is the beauty of blogs. We control only what we subscribe to. If I deem the content of a blog to be frivolous I am free to not pay attention to it. Anyone who wants to join in serious discourse will already be motivated to ensure that they are posting worthwile thoughts. Nate has argued, rightly I think, that having high qulaity discussions will attract wider participation and will elevate the status of blogging in the academic community. The key is that it is an individual choice.

There will always be people who blog recreationally. It is no different than any other media, we have professional journals and then we have non-academic publicaitons. We are responsible to be professional if professionalism is the purpose behind our blogging. We do not need to worry about those who have no professional objective to their blogging because, in the end, a good idea is a good idea regardless of its source. Those who wish to put serious content on their blogs must trust that it will be recognized as such.

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I Understand

I think I finally understood Nate’s position after reading this today. Where I have been questioning him up until now I no longer question because I recognize his perpective and his push.

Well said Nate. It is especially important for those trying to develop reputations to take the risks that will build those reputations. This does not mean that the ranked players should not participate, but it means that taking the risks on new technologies is less important for them personally. It is not so important for the current leaders to lead in the new areas but it is an excellent opportunity for newer players (like me) to explore a leadership role in a new area like this.

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Education

Don’t Ignore a Good Question

Matt put a good question on his blog last week in response to Paul’s post. I just read the question again and realized that I had missed something the first time I read it.

“Why make learners go through the cognitively challenging task of reading, comprehending, thinking of a response, composing the response, and finally typing the response?”

There is benefit to forcing users to take the time to read, comprehend, think and then compose a response. There are times when that is not important, but sometimes it is and the designers of social software should consider what is important for the tasks they are supporting as they make decisions about what kinds of interaction to support.

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Education

Breaking In

Nate has some great (and mostly accurate) things to say about Stature and Zero-Sum Games. If you go read his post make sure to read Ward’s comments as well, he has a valuable perspective to add.

I notice that while we have a mutual goal we seem to disagree a little bit on the proper approach to attaining that goal. I agree that the blogosphere does not operate under the same principles as traditional publishing. That fact that in traditional publishing “the number of voices is restricted by the economics of speaking” while “the blogosphere removes that economic barrier” is a salient point. The area that we seem to disagree on is in the rules governing diffusion and adoption.

Nate disputes the value of having people with stature in AECT joining the blogosphere. His argument is that their stature does not carry over to the blogosphere and I agree. The reason that I believe it is necessary to have such “ranked players” joining the blogosphere is not because their stature is useful in the blogosphere, but rather because they have social and professional stature within AECT. While publishing in the blogosphere is a different animal (probably a dog if Alan has anything to say about it) than publishing in traditional journals, diffusion and adoption of blogging by people within AECT is the same as diffusion and adoption of internet courses by people within AECT. In each case there are some adventurous people who stay on the cutting edge of technology but widespread adoption does not take place until some of the established people begin adopting the practice. When the ranked players begin using blogs more people who are slower to adopt new ideas will view them as a legitimate outlet for expression and information gathering. Admittedly that presupposes that there is enough good content. If there is enough good content already then a higher profile and broader participation are all that is lacking, if there is not enough good content then we have very little to recommend what we are doing to our friends in the field.