Wade Roush’s transcription of James Surowiecki’s talk at the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies conference on the Unwisdom of Crowds

And a little story from the weblog, Blog Proximal Development

This morning, one of my students asked for an extension on her essay assignment. Clearly, not a very unusual occurrence. However, what made a very strong impression on me was the reason she used. She politely informed me that she needed more time because her classmates have not yet finished commenting on her first draft. Consequently, she argued, she was not ready to proceed because her first draft was still being discussed online. “I’m afraid,” she said, “that I will miss something important if I just go ahead and not wait for more comments.”

And all this from a thirteen-year-old!

Read more here.

Clay Sharky’s presentation at the O’Reilly Etch05 Conference (that I’m going to have to re-read several times to understand, but know is important), and a rebuttle by Vincent-Olivier Arsenault (that I also must re-read).

More Ontologies stuff (and more re-reading) from OLA (OWL Lite Alignment).

Podcasting essentials! Thanks Roland.

Hot of the press . . . small tool goes big time . . . flickr marries yahoo

I assume that teachers who are best equipped to facilitate their students’ learning have the following attributes:

• a rich repertoire of teaching methods and skills
• sensitivity to factors that make particular ways of teaching more or less appropriate
• good control of specific teaching skills
• awareness that the choices that they make concerning teaching and learning objectives and approaches are shaped by their beliefs about the primary purposes of education
• They can make those beliefs explicit and teach in ways that fit these purposes. In this sense their teaching is ‘educative’ (Haigh and Katterns, 1984: 23 - 7).

The capacity to research teaching rests, in part, on a capacity for reflection. Awareness of the manner in which beliefs shape choices is founded in reflection.

Higher education teaching suffers, in America, from not being thought of or even practiced as a profession - with requisite craft, experience, skills and introspection. In talking about what’s needed to be an effective teacher, Haigh does an awfully good job of summing up what’s missing.

Allan Bloom comes from another culture and another class altogether. At the end of The Closing of the American Mind, he writes:

After reading of the Symposium a serious student came with deep melancholy and said it was impossible to image that magic. Athenian atmosphere reproduced, in which friendly men, educated, lively, on a footing of equality, civilized but natural, came together and told wonderful stories about the meaning of their longing. But such experiences are always accessible. Actually, this playful discussion took place in the midst of a terrible war that Athens was destined to lose, and Aristophanes and Socrates at least could foresee that this meant the decline of Greek civilization. But they were not given to culture despair, and in these terrible political circumstances, their abandon to the joy of nature proved the viability of what is best in man, independent of accidents, of circumstance. We feel ourselves too dependent on history and culture (my emphasis).

Bloom’s is not a world of contingencies. He speaks the language of a dominant culture, and participates in it through a fierce dedication to a “life-of-the-mind” - constructing an ideology of thought around an immutable and a-historical canon of self-perpetuating literature. There is no place in his world for relativism or multiculturalism, for these are seen as distractions from true Socratic reasoning and self-examination.

How do we reconcile the world of Ebonics and Bloom’s Western canon, and what are the implications of their coexistence to our understanding of literacy?

These critical thinking skills also happen to address “infomania,” or our information glut. In a world where the half-life of information is decreasing exponentially, Herbert Simon says, “the meaning of ‘knowing’ has shifted from being able to remember and repeat information to being able to find and use it.” More than knowledge, we need to know what it is we need to know in order to actually know something and think/act productively with it – a knowing that depends on both critical thinking and information literacies.

Our literacies travel with us. My literacies could not have helped me survive the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. However, we learn of a remote Indonesian island “primitive tribe” whose members saved themselves by moving to the mountains because their elders were able to “read” the earthquake and understand its likely consequences. Applied environmental literacy.

Literacy is situational because, viewed from Dewey’s theoretical model, no human phenomenon can be understood in isolation from its physical and social environment (see Alain Findeli’s essay, Moholy-Nagy’s Design Pedagogy in Chicago (1937-46).

Literacy is also political. And cultural.

(to be continued)

807 images and counting . . . http://flickr.com/photos/tags/christo/

This contemporaneous flickr image homage to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s artistic whimsy reminds me of two other stunning collective “knowledge building” events - both from Wikipedia (The Gates also has a Wikipedia entry). On March 11, 2004 I searched Wikipedia for “madrid bombings” and saw a single paragraph entry. As the day progressed, and then the weeks, the entry ballooned into many pages that contextualized the bombings with information about al-Qaida, ETA, 9/11, the history of the Moors in Spain, national and international political reactions, and on and on. It was amazing, actually, quite moving to see these pages evolve so quickly and deeply in such a telescoped time frame. I witnessed the same process beginning October 8, 2004 with Jacques Derrida’s death. What began as a simple 2 paragraph post developed instantly into a major appreciation of his life and work and influence. Both instances, and now flickr’s collective The Gates photos (and probably the Wikipedia entry for The Gates as well) were/are views onto the potency and efficiency of collaborative tasking. Models for the classroom.

They begin their paper with an appreciation of hybrid teaching and an acknowledgement that it is poised to become the standard for future college education - the classroom remaining, however, the strategic site for teaching and learning. (Justifying this statement, they pull a 1998 quote from Saskia Sassen, the University of Chicago Professor of Sociology and globalization theorist: “there is no fully virtualized enterprise nor fully (digitized industry,” that even “sectors that are highly digitized require strategic sites.”)

The description of their classes’ twice-a-week meeting is worth quoting in full:

The physical studio is a computer lab where the class members gather to share information, work on their designs, and present projects for periodic review. The Internet studio site includes an avatar-scaled review space for synchronous meetings - new this year - and a website for asynchronous communication. This latter site includes links to each student and faculty member’s email and website, a bulletin board, the course description and syllabus. The syllabus, distributed only on the website, provides online links to readings, eliminating the need for excessive copying or for placing readings on reserve in the school library. In addition the class website features links to relevant webpages and to other related information. By adding the online learning requirement to an advanced level design studio, the instructors “virtually” double the amount of student/teacher contact.”(my emphasis)

Levine and Wake break down the benefits of hybrid teaching for their studios courses between the practical and the theoretical. Practically, they are able to increase, in quantity and regularity, instructor and guest feedback which allows students to incorporate those feedbacks throughout their design processes. Deeper two-way peer-to-peer feedback is supported via public web pages, giving students opportunities to comment on, learn from, and be inspired by each others’ works. Additionally, the class bulletin board captures the discussion and feedback that is normally forgotten along the way of a traditional studio course, becoming a valuable resource for the students throughout the semester. In their particular design studio scenarios, the hybrid system embodies “the subject of the design studio” because it can accommodate both the representation of the eventual physical bricks and mortar space (in the classroom) and the virtual space that is composed of drawings and images. Theoretically, “the class embraced the parallel track investigation as a Platonic/Artistotelian debate. Cyberspace provides a location for design without compromise. Like the Great Pyramids of Giza, these spaces are built unconstrained by concerns for physical labor, expense of materials or size of construction. Conceptual works, like those of Ledoux and Boullée, can be realized in virtual space, and the visitors to those realizations may explore at their own pace, led by their own interests. Such pure architectural form and conceptualization is rare these days, and the opportunity to explore such forms as half of the complementary space points to an important opportunity arising through complementary virtual architecture.”

This is a five year old article. What might Levine and Wake be doing now?

Some tools appear to be new, but in practice replicate the paradigms of the tools they were designed to replace. Antonio Dias de Figuereido, Professor of Informatics Engineering and Information Systems at the Faculty of Science and Technology of the University of Coimbra, Portugal put this forcefully in a 2003 call for chapters of a book he was editing, MANAGING LEARNING IN VIRTUAL SETTINGS: THE ROLE OF CONTEXT.

In spite of massive technological progresses, the practices of education have remained almost unchanged for the last two centuries. Inspired by the machine paradigm of the Industrial Society, education was viewed as an industrialized way of "delivering" knowledge. Now, as learning and education extend into cyberspace, and the dawn of the Knowledge Society is announced, we seem to be unable to break away from those outdated practices, into practices that value community, interaction, context, organic processes, variable geometry, complexity, flux, change, and many other attributes that radically distinguish our era from that of our industrial-age ancestors. Attempts to improve education at the distance through the use of technology, namely e-learning, suffer from the absence of sound educational paradigms that could, indeed, support genuine renewal.

Technology does not and should not drive education, but it always has and should continue to enable it. (Printing, for instance, allowed mass, public education to replace a system of apprentiship.) We are fortunate that our technologies and our pedagogical principles are in alignment, but despite the theories that stress interconnections and collaborations over exclusivity, we tend too often to choose or use tools in ways that manage rather than facilitate social actions and interactivity. It is, therefore, not surprising that we embrace learning technologies which, according to Oleg Liber, professor of e-Learning at the Bolton Institute of Higher Education, do not provide learners with tools to organize themselves, [they] do not easily permit group learning, [they] do not easily support group or problem-based learning and [they] do not easily integrate with the wider internet, instead crating a ‘learning ghetto.’ On the internet, people are meeting each other in chat rooms, running Weblogs, engaging in various eGroups, answering each others’ questions on ‘Ask’ websites, and sharing resources using peer-to-peer systems: none of these features is typically available in leading VLEs.
But they are available elsewhere.

William J. Mitchell, professor of Architecture and Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, begins chapter 2 of his 1995 book, City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn, like this:

My name is wjm@mit.edu (though I have many aliases), and I am an electronic flaneur.
I hang out on the network.
The keyboard is my cafe.

Of course, Mitchell doesn’t only hang out on the network; he teaches and consults and lectures and writes and attends conferences and symposiums and, even, cafes. But in 1995, evoking the urban denizen spirits of Baudelaire and Benjamin, he identifies another gathering place, vastly undeveloped and under populated at the time, but sufficiently stimulating to capture his attention: the virtual network. Mitchell’s hanging out probably made it easier for him to do things that he was already doing or even things that he already wanted to do, and his enthusiasm for the experience indicates a breezy assimilation of the notion that communities no longer depended upon propinquity.

But what’s evolved since 1995 is the sophistication, speed and ease of interaction and exchange, the demise of geographical dominion over those interactions/transactions, the pervasiveness of new communication tools and the mass digitalization of information - which, together, enable us to digitally represent, use, share and create scholarship, research, documents, data, experiences and ourselves (think avatars). Because of what passes through them, these gathering places are no longer simply places to hang out with like-minded colleagues - they have become sites of dynamic group social activity and practice that symbiotically connect and shape the experiences and core learning behaviors of a coming generation of students who are accustom to and comfortable with a style of communication that, even in 1995, was not possible. I suspect that the challenge to us today is to recognize the implicit value of the sites that networks make possible. Their authority rest upon core social impulses: to play, compete, share, collaborate and communicate. Our work is to develop ways to exploit them as potential learning pods.
The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring - Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society