I owe Rudy Rucker a lot for his instantiation of wetware, a concept I used as a Leitmotif in every class I taught in the last 6 years at W&L. In today’s blog posting he links to his Writer’s Toolkit, which looks like it’s an education in itself. Just yesterday I was unpacking a box of scifi books and stumbled on Freeware, and thought how it would be worthwhile to reread the whole -ware series, and now I have a pony for that project. Here’s a bit from what he calls “my ever-growing cumulative email interview“:

Science fiction is writing that analyzes some fast-changing aspect of society by extrapolating current trends into the future or into an alternate world. Traditionally science fiction has certain standard tropes that it uses, but new ones are being developed all the time — I’m thinking of things like blaster guns, spaceships, time machines, aliens, telepathy, flying saucers, warped space, faster-than-light travel, holograms, immersive virtual reality, robots, teleportation, endless shrinking, levitation, antigravity, generation starships, ecodisaster, blowing up Earth, pleasure-center zappers, mind viruses, the attack of the giant ants, and the fourth dimension. I call these our ‘power chords,’ analogous to the heavy chords that rock bands use.

When a writer uses an SF power chord, there’s an implicit understanding with the informed readers that this is indeed familiar ground. And it’s expected the writer will do something fresh with the trope.

In an email exchange with Bryan Alexander yesterday I confessed that I dispair of formal education –its short-sightedness, hide-boundness, bloated pomposities… a familiar litany. There’s plenty of grist for that mill in recent postings to blogs I’ve been following.

Alex Halavais relates a sad tale of administrative mindlessness, all too common on campuses:

We have a new “mobile classroom” for the School of Informatics lab, consisting of a gaggle of tablet PCs for classroom use. However, unlike some mobile classrooms, we have neither a cart nor a wireless hub to allow for this to be wheeled into a classroom. Central computing won’t allow rogue wireless hubs.

The problem is that they also have decided not to provide access to the wireless network in the classrooms. The reason: they say that professors didn’t want students to have access. That they found email checking too distracting…

Cutting off wireless in the classroom is not a pedagogically-driven decision, it is an indication of how broken higher education is right now.

Konrad Glogowski’s Blog of Proximal Development offers a sunnier take on student activity, but concludes with a quote from George Siemens that rings some of the same changes:

…classroom blogging is primarily about responding to texts and not producing them… blogging allows students to think through texts and ideas, that it enables them to use their own writing and that of their peers as a cognitive tool.

This approach is very new. Our students are used to the transmission model of education and have never been told that writing helps process and synthesize ideas or that we learn best when we write and have to defend, reorganize, refine, and further develop our thoughts. They have never been told that interacting with texts composed by others can be a very effective way of thinking through a problem. George Siemens is right: “Our most limiting challenge is our existing views of learning.”

So where’s the hope? Stephen Downes offers what one of his critics (Stuart Yeates) disparages as “a radically different method of distributing resources in education”, detailed in any number of postings and talks available on the Web, via Stephen’s Web, and centered upon the notions of Learning Networks and Personal Learning environments. But how to get those who should hear what Stephen Downes is articulating to commit the time to listening/reading/thinking about what he’s saying? Snagging irresistable snippets is one possibility, and I have a few bits from his recent presentation to the Open Source for Education in Europe conference in Heerlen, Netherlands. If there are any Information Architects out there, these should be captivating enough to encourage a listen to the whole talk:

• the Metauniversity (0:40)
• software and content must be open (0:06)
• more finely-grained content authoring tools (0:38)
• need good personal resource aggregators (0:22)
• If I have content in front of me, I want to mess with it (0:49)
• describing the interface: students in control (1:34)
• feed back into the system (0:18)
• information architecture for the Metauniversity (1:09)

Last night’s Antique Phonograph Music Program from WFMU included the 1925 recording of The John T. Scopes Case (3:00), which ought to be more accessible in these parlous times. I also happened upon Noah Adams’ NPR Timeline program, Remembering the Scopes Monkey Trial.

In any given day I read and listen to a lot of different things, many of which turn out to interdigitate in unexpected ways. Today’s cases in point: I read a blog posting at Savage Minds pointing to STSWiki, which got me started thinking about History of Technology again (I taught a course on that subject in 1999). If I was setting out to teach a History of Technology course in 2005, I’d do it differently: I’d surely use the Wikipedia page as a springboard –and have the students do projects which would extend the page and pages it links to. And I’d also use STSWiki as an adjunct, following how the site develops as members of the conversation elaborate on the beginning.

That’s just obvious, but how did we get there/here?

That question was uppermost in Stephen Downes’ recent opening keynote “On Being Radical” at the Saskatchewan Association for Computers in Education –PowerPoints also available… This from one of the last slides:

To be radical is to grasp empowerment and define a vision based on that empowerment for a better, freer society…
“…a society where knowledge and learning are public goods, freely created and shared, not hoarded or withheld in order to extract wealth or influence.”

The whole presentation, like everything I’ve heard Stephen Downes do, is continuously and consistently interesting and fresh –not just the same ideas over and over.
I extracted three quotations:

• on openness (:30)
• a radical notion (1:05)
• is it radical to… (3:25)

Doug Kaye’s keynote address at Portable Media Expo (about ten days ago) offers a quick update of the directions of the absolutely essential ITConversations (“Listener-supported audio programs,
interviews and important events”). He covers some of the same territory as that traversed by Stephen Downes, and their perspectives are complementary. I extracted one bit from his very interesting talk, on the value of free (1:40).

I’m taking the plunge into a project to scan and annotate the best of my collections of Nova Scotia Faces, something I’ve been meaning to do for many years. I’m not sure just what the overall structure of the enterprise will be, and I’m in no hurry.

I’ve listened to r0ml Lefkowitz’ OSCON 2005 keynote (The Semasiology of Open Source [Part 2]) several times, and grokked more with each hearing. It’s a tour de force of allusion and connection, and I decided to snip out some bits that really should have a wider listenership. They pretty much stand alone, though the ones I’ve chosen aren’t mostly about the nominal subject of the changing meanings of Open Source.

He makes repeated use of a favorite bit from Princess Bride: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” (Inigo Montoya [Mandy Patinkin]). This gets across the essence of semasiology very memorably.

To get something of the flavor of a bout with r0ml, here’s a (partial) summary of last year’s OSCON talk (1:43) –and the whole thing is available, and extremely worthwhile.

He discusses Don Knuth’s development of the language APL, and as an aside, mentions Knuth’s instantiation of the term “Web” (0:27)

He really gets going with the example of the history of reading (5:15) –the percentage literate refers to the ability to read the code of programs. He ends with a farrago on reading aloud, and silently (8:13), citing Saints Isidore, Augustine, and Ambrose …and Charlemagne and Alcuin of York too.

Now that’s a Keynote!

You might be interested in r0ml’s blog (Taking IT Personally), and perhaps also in the Wired News story on Isidore, patron saint of nerds.

Dave Pollard’s How to Save the World keeps poking me with reminders of the Canadian perspective that I so admire –minimally tainted by infection with the global power trip that most Americans don’t even notice, and with lots of basic good sense, eh? His posting yesterday, on being ahead of the times around oneself, gets it just right. And he concludes:

I am announcing the start of a new Movement. It is the Movement of People Too Far Ahead For Their Own Good. Or, for short, the Too Far Ahead Movement. And since most movements have an icon, or a secret handshake, or some other quiet acknowledgment of mutual membership, like the ‘V’ sign of the 1960s Peace Movement, the Too Far Ahead Movement should have a gesture, too.

What might be a good gesture to acknowledge the presence of another Too Far Ahead person? We could use something exotic like the ‘be seeing you’ gesture from The Prisoner. But I’m leaning towards something subtle — say, a simple nod with eyes closed and closed right hand to right chest…

This crossed my bow at more or less the same time I was reading Peter Sandman’s absolutely essential Flu Pandemic Preparedness Snowball. Besides being a super-fine piece of writing, it has a really important point to make about being a True Believer, under the heading “Be nice to the newbies”:

Anyone who has ever been an activist knows how demoralizing it is to start winning. You had this solid “in” group of fellow fanatics. Everyone knew everyone else; everyone knew the facts and the issues; everyone knew how special you all were to care so deeply, to keep plugging away despite your neighbors’ obliviousness. Then you made some progress, and suddenly there were strangers coming to your meetings, asking stupid questions, offering inappropriate suggestions, making everyone uncomfortable, sometimes even usurping leadership… the last two weeks have seen an explosive increase in newcomers to bird flu sites. These latest newbies are in the early stages of their adjustment reaction. Some are frightened and urgent; some are skeptical; nearly all are ignorant. Some of the oldtimers are feeling crowded and a little contemptuous, and it’s showing… As a fellow fanatic put it to me a few days ago: “The mainstream is finally starting to pay attention, and some of the flu geeks are getting upset. They haven’t quite figured out why. They just know they’re in a bad mood.”

Sandman goes on to suggest practical steps and considerations for flu geeks, or (in the general sense) for anybody who awakes to being a person Too Far Ahead For Their Own Good.

A friend asked

Libraries and librarians are quite taken with this whole Information Literacy jag, particularly since some universities seem to be rewriting mission statements to include some mention of a goal of producing students who are “Information Literate”. I am therefore trying to use this fixation on information literacy training as a springboard to promoting the idea that libraries should be promoting “spatial information literacy” through a mix of direct instruction, online mapping services, and curricula development. I am curious as to where you would see spatial information literacy vis-a-vis information literacy – merely a subset, or perhaps almost a superset, since spatial information literacy seems to involve skills that go beyond the searching/evaluating/assessing that figure prominently in the descriptions of information literacy that I’ve read. Do you have any words of wisdom on this that you’d be willing to share?

So here’s what I came up with (and I’ve opened up comments on this one, in case anybody wants to engage):

Continue reading →

Much as I admire George Siemens’ work, exemplified in passages like

Our changing learning context is axiomatic. We see it in any form of information – from newspapers to radio to TV to the internet. Everything is going digital. The end user is gaining control, elements are decentralizing, connections are being formed between formerly disparate resources and fields of information, knowledge is developing rapidly, and everything seems to be “speeding up”…
http://www.connectivism.ca/blog/35

I can’t help feeling that these essentials of Constructivist learning aren’t as much to the fore as they deserve to be:

• managing the Information one has, and finds –so that it can be retrieved, repurposed, reorganized (the management tools are pretty ad hoc and idiosyncratic, and not very well interlinked)
• constructing and distributing the Outcomes of the searches one does, the learning one experiences, the insights one encounters (this communication activity is arguably what the Web is really for)

Not that I’ve been so very systematic about either myself… but that’s exactly what I mean to work on, now that my time is much more my own. And not that I know just what I’m after building, though lots of the fragments slide in and out of focus as I unpack boxes of books and files and maps and images…

I really do mean to explore and construct and distribute, and I aspire to doing something exemplary with hyperlinked materials, with the primary objective of encouraging others to do likewise.

The last 7 weeks or so has been liminal: a time of disrupted routines, with the house sold, housesitting for vacationing friends, commuting over the Blue Ridge every day, and now finally relocated and unpacking, reconstituting spaces and finding that many of those routines are no longer necessary or relevant. Every bit of unpacking is a skein of contingencies: where to put what, which to banish to the barn as less than essential, how to create spaces for things that are essential… and where did I pack this or that necessary item? My former life is fading rapidly, but the new is just beginning to define itself. I expect to use this space for all sorts of things, but I’m not quite ready to define them yet. Maybe after the rest of the STUFF is dealt with…