The JavaScript, web-based collaborative real-time editor, EtherPad, the latest version, became available to all on 3 February 2009. It permits up to eight people to work simultaneously on the same document.Among its features are:No account requiredThe only really real-time collaborative editor on the webEdits highlighted in author's colorInfinite undo historySyntax highlighting for editing code Every keystroke backed upA chat boxAll you do is open a document and flick the code to those in your group who will participate collaboratively.Check it out:http://etherpad.com/

In Christine Martell’s recent post, Continuing to Process, she carefully relates how she is processing her thoughts and feelings during what is a difficult time for her right now.I identify with what she so clearly says - the difficulty, the discomfort in deciding how to figure out how to move forward and how this relates to visuals. She displays her colourful creation of fish with paint on paper.She speaks of the difficulty in writing coherent blog posts in a highly creative time. In my comment on her post, I wondered if this may be related to the linear nature of coherence, in contrast to the spatial nature of creativity."Lots of figuring out how to move forward in alignment with long term goals, despite short term challenges" is extremely linear in its propagation. I think you are on track to say that "visuals are particularly effective in helping to see overview and complex systems", and that "creativity is messy".I look on linearity as something that is often fostered by our education systems and perhaps how we tend to look on how we should think. The spatial approach, which is what you speak of in "messy" and visual "overview", is not linear but occupies space, a cloud. It is difficult to conceive a linear mess, and for good reason, and so easy to associate a blot with a mess.I also believe that this may be a reason why word clouds and the software that creates them (in Wordle, say) have become so popular, more so recently than linear poetry. We talk of a line of print. It’s not a cloud of print. Such an array is messy and difficult for the linearly thinking in us to make reasonable sense of.But accepting that it’s alright to have mess, that it’s alright to arrange words in an ink cloud rather than a linear pencil, is a start to understanding how creativity needs space. It cannot be (easily) squeezed into a pencil line, for it lies more comfortably with the ink blots and the cotton-wool clouds.Think cloud, rather than line.It’s more creative.It’s also more comfortable.

This article was first published on Futurelab in January 2008. I've reproduced the text of the article here. Some links to resources are now no longer current.What is an online learning community?Since the end of last century, government initiatives throughout the world have sponsored the development of online learning communities in schools and other learning institutions.A community can be classified as a group of people, each with different expertise and with access to diverse resources, in which a sharing occurs so that individuals within the group can benefit from each other.Wikipedia defines an online community as "a group of people that primarily interact via communication media such as letters, telephone, email or Usenet rather than face to face"[1].An online learning community can be described as a common place online where its members can engage in community activities in areas of learning guided by a leader. It is widely accepted that such communities hold promise for the effective sharing of skills and knowledge. This review looks at a number of key factors important to growing successful online learning communities and provides some relevant strategies for this.Non-participating members of an online groupOne behaviour in online groups that has been extensively studied is that of the non-participating members, termed the ‘lurkers’. Etienne Wenger[2] calls them Legitimate Peripheral Participants.Lurkers are widely known to be among the majority of defined members and they have been found to make up over 90% of most online groups. They are perhaps the most important members in view of their potential to contribute to online groups.Blair Nonnecke and Jennifer Preece have studied the ‘silent participants’ of discussion forums and have extensively researched[3] many of the reasons why lurking occurs. Though these have implications for the expected success of collaborative learning, it would appear that lurkers are not necessarily non-learners.Takahashi et al have found that intentional learning seems to occur with so-called active lurkers[4]. If lurkers can be identified, it is found that some of them can be enticed to become active participants. Non-active lurkers are apt to be members with online capability but who do not log on. Though proportions vary from group to group, non-active lurkers tend to make up the largest proportion of all members in an online group.Perceptions of online student communitiesIn a series of in-depth studies with online student communities,Caleb Clark examines and identifies key learning success factors[5] in working with those. He cites findings confirming that the technical infrastructure and user interface (the online environment) "must provide the means to communicate social cues and information", and other studies by Kaplan[6] and by Schwier[7] reinforce these results. For instance, Clark asserts that "just because it's online, doesn't mean the effects of (page) design disappear."Clark’s work is well sourced, and within it he develops three guiding principles:online learning communities are grown, not built online learning communities need leaderspersonal narrative is vital to online learning communities.Clark identifies that "online learning communities grow best when there is value to being part of them". He further elaborates that, "one of the hardest things to do in any online community is to get people to give information. One reason is that people just don't naturally think their way of doing things has value, when in fact it is the very heart of a community's value! This is especially true in online learning communities where the exchange of information is key to keeping students coming back." He stresses the need for doing the groundwork that makes for successful student engagement in online collaboration, an opinion also shared by Mohr and Nault[8].Clark contends that "leaders are needed to define the environment, keep it safe, give it purpose, identity and keep it growing". He gives a set of mantras for teacher/leaders in any online community: all you need is love control the environment, not the group lead by example let lurkers lurk short leading questions get conversations going be personally congratulatory and inquisitive route information in all directions care about the people in the community; this cannot be faked understand consensus and how to build it, and sense when it's been built and just not recognised, and when you have to make a decision despite all the talking.He cites confirmation that "personal narrative is vital to online learning communities. Personal stories and experiences add closeness, and provide identity, thus strengthening online communities."William Klemm has a more pragmatic approach[9, 10] to student participation, one that tends to coerce the engagement of post-secondary students in online collaborative learning. A minimum level of online participation as well as a deliverable piece of work relevant to the community activity is a mandatory course requirement. Many universities adopt a similar approach in order to ensure minimum online engagement of each student in collaborative study.Challenges to student learning in online communitiesMarcy Bauman reports on the challenges[11] posed in working with online communities. She identifies that "many of the interaction strategies both [teachers] and students use face-to-face simply will not work online" and she gives reasons for these.She identifies that "students often do not have the necessary skills to survive in an online class" and that persistence, application and other key skills that are required to learn from the online platform may not be there in every student. These are quite different from the assumed equivalent skills required of the student in a face-to-face environment.Bauman recognises that "in face-to-face classes, it is rare for students to be put in the position of having to rely solely on the written word in order to perform the work of the course". She further justifies this by outlining that "when all the information comes to students via texts, they need to become proficient in reading those texts for meaning, and in order to be able to use the information they read in another context", a circumstance not unknown to distance educators. She asserts that "this kind of reading is demanding in a different way than the kinds of reading students usually do in their classes; it requires considerably more effort and commitment than students may be used to giving to their reading."Bauman elaborates on the difficulties faced by the teacher, highlighting the lack of verbal and visual clues from students leading to a lesser understanding of student "attitude" while there is a need to monitor this feature. She explains her guidelines for growing communities within a class of students:communicate frequently with the class make as much interaction public as possible create a space for non-classroom-related interaction understand the limitations and strengths of the technology you're using in terms of fostering interaction ask questions often, and interact with students in the forum you have devised for class interaction.E-learning manuals and e-books elucidating much of the common practice upheld by Clark and also by Bauman are becoming more numerous. Many of them are freely available online such as the eBooks from The eLearning Guild[12].References (some links are no longer current) 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_community 2. http://www.ewenger.com/ 3. http://www.cis.uoguelph.ca/~nonnecke/research/4. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=958160.958162 5. http://www.noendpress.com/caleb/olc/3Principles_Online_Comm.pdf 6. now not available - www.learningcircuits.org/2002/aug2002/kaplan.html 7. http://cde.athabascau.ca/ISEC2002/papers/schwier.pdf8. http://www.astd.org/LC/2004/0504_mohr.htm 9. http://technologysource.org/article/creating_online_courses/ 10. now not available - cid.byu.edu/tutorials/EightWays.pdf 11. now not available - kolea.kcc.hawaii.edu/tcc/tcc_conf97/pres/bauman.html 12. http://www.elearningguild.com/related posts - >> ( 6 ) ( 5 ) ( 4 ) ( 3 ) ( 2 ) ( 1 )

Virginia Yonkers, friend and fellow blogger, will often think nothing of leaving a comment as long as a post on my blog. I welcome her thoughtful comments for they are often incisive and force me to think, which is always useful.She is a parent who, like me, has children attending school. Her blog’s persona is one of a thinker, so it’s not surprising that she waxed the eloquent against my recent post on Home Study and Homework.Virginia reports of homework being used as a means of learning content. I empathise with her when she recoils at the lack of time learners appear to have today, to consolidate what they learn in class. Are kids getting too much homework? Are teachers pushing the learning of content out of the classroom and onto kids as homework? What do you think? Here’s our conversation: Virginia:I have given this matter a great deal of thought lately as my kids have constant homework 7 days a week. In New York State, homework is mandated from primary school to high school, at least 15 minutes per night per year of education. As a result, by grade 4, students should be doing 1 hour and 15 minutes of homework per night.The question is, when do children get the chance to decompress and let their minds soak in what they have learned from the day. Having 6 1/2 hours of constant input, they are NOT computers and do need some time to process what they learned.On the other hand, homework gives parents the chance to see what their children are doing (if the parent is responsible enough to do this).On the other hand, this year my daughter has had a teacher who uses homework as a way to "get through content" that they don't have time to do in class. They are expected to be able to do the work on their own and not given the chance to ask questions (they are graded on what they handed in) rather than using the homework as a way to identify those areas they may need work in.So I feel that, yes, there is a place for homework, yes, grading does give students the ability to identify areas they need to work on, but not at the expense of giving them some time to process what they have learned nor to use in place of good teaching.Ken:Kia ora VirginiaThe parents (I believe) are probably more important than the teacher when it comes to attitude towards learning. They are the cultural background of the learner in most instances. Their influence, as much as it wanes in the teenage years of the learner, has a powerful influence on the way these precious people think. Getting through content is another matter. I think the teachers have been the subject of much misguided advice where content is concerned and it's still going on.A teacher who knows well that content is essential has to weigh this against the current belief that content is not what's wanted. This applies to all the past (and successful!) techniques that were used in the classroom to convey such content as was necessary to the learner. They cope with this by removing content from their classroom and relegating it to homework. Content is dealt with by a "Learn this."So-called rote learning has been eschewed by many and still is. So much so that anything that smacks of rote learning gets the same treatment. Poor learners I say, for they get to the crossroads in their learning, only to find that they cannot understand concept or theory because they simply are not familiar with the content that's required - sigh.related posts - >> ( 1 )

Hannah praising Kashin - Auckland ZooWell done! Good thinking! Fantastic idea! Terrific score! Great result!These are plaudits among many that are part of the vocabulary of the supportive parent or classroom teacher. They’re often used with the learner who is striving to achieve.Clear-cut recognition of this quality praise works so successfully that many teachers use it even if the learner isn’t putting in much effort and is only making some show towards what might lead to possible achievement. So why give such encouragement to learners who aren’t really achieving?Good teachers discover, perhaps through long experience, that support and encouragement given to a potential learner usually bring forth a good result. Even a reluctant learner can be encouraged to engage in learning when given praise of the right kind.In a recent study, Izuma et al have gathered evidence that suggests the brain's reward system works just as well for praise as for money.A privileged opportunityIn 1993 I was privileged to meet and listen to the experience and advice of Ormond Tait, former Principal of The Correspondence School, New Zealand (TCS), one of Australasia’s largest distance education centres. Tait’s expertise in working with distance learners is legendary.He gave frequent seminars on distance learning to teachers at TCS, despite his busy timetable. Tait’s empathy for the distance learner was real and passionate. He held the opinion that distance learners are at a severe learning disadvantage nearly all the time, an impediment that sets them apart from most learners in the classroom.One major difference that he often stressed involves teacher approbation. The learner in the classroom can receive encouragement in many ways. A smile, a nod showing that the learner is on the right track, a kind word of encouragement, a comment on a returned assignment, are all signs of approval that the classroom learner can receive, perhaps several times during a lesson. The distance learner may not have the benefit of any of these plaudits during a similar period of study.Straight adviceTait’s advice was implicit. Do not lay on praise with a trowel. That is just not enough. Praise in the distance learning environment has to be heaped on with a shovel. In this, most elearners have similar dispositions to the distance learner. For the most part, the distinction between these two sets of learners lies in how the learning resources are delivered and the nature of these.Both categories of learners can experience the same feeling of isolation. In many ways Ormond Tait’s advice on encouragement applies as much to elearners as it does to distance learners.The dangers of over-praiseUnexpected or spontaneous praise is a powerful motivating force for the learner. But it is widely accepted by classroom teachers that praising for achievements that come too easily, or for doing things that the learner may want to do anyway, can be ineffectual and even lead to problems with some learners.While over-praise in the classroom may lead to feelings of unwanted smugness and self-satisfaction in the learner, such attitudes are rarely brought about through praise in distance learners.Studies by Meyer (1992) indicated that, in a classroom environment, praise that comes automatically can quickly become ineffective. As young learners mature they become sophisticated in the way they interpret the social significance of praise. While these suggested guidelines could be expected to apply in some way to distance learners, the opportunities for their occurrence are less likely.The danger of criticismTait’s contention always was that much more praise and encouragement, and certainly no criticism, was the balance most likely to achieve results with the isolated distance learner. Criticism is so demotivating that it should never be used in a distance learning environment. It is very likely the same applies directly to the elearning environment.So where do the avenues for plaudit lie?Clearly the elearner and the distance learner share some commonality in respect to praise deficit during periods of study. With elearners, however, the computer interface has the potential to afford some feedback that is not there for the distance learner. And while learners in a classroom environment will ask questions in an attempt to interpret teacher feedback and understand its context, this doesn’t happen when learners are working with computers.Early studies by Meyer, Mittag, and Engler suggested that learners tend to accept feedback from the computer at face value, and that it can make a difference to their self-perception and motivation. This indication could be taken as good news for elearning, for it provides a valid avenue for encouraging the learner.My own experience in working with elearners is that computer feedback can provide some measure of encouragement that fills the obvious gaps for the isolated distance learner. But there are other avenues for providing praise that can also provide effective learner support and foster engagement.Telephone, mobile texting, email and standard letters have all been shown to provide useful results when feedback is positive. Direct chat through an LMS, the use of video conferencing or face to face contact using Skype with webcams provide suitable opportunity for learner-teacher contact to give appropriate learner support.Tait’s rule about criticism applies equally to all of these. The maxim is keep it constructive and keep it positive at all times.Reference: Meyer, W.U. (1992). Paradoxical effects of praise and criticism in perceived ability. In W. Strobe & M. Hewstone (Eds.), European review of social psychology (Vol. 3, pp. 259-283). Chichester, UK: Wiley.

The brain is a really complex organ. It has an astonishing ability to learn, and the speed of this is often taken for granted.Yesterday I read a series of articles on wine tasting and how the nose can quickly become sensitised to the subtleties of aromas present in wine bouquets. One paper from RealScience gave us this: "You don't need wine-tasting classes to detect subtle differences between pinot noir and cabernet sauvignon. Just pour yourself a couple of glasses and sniff. Your brain itself will quickly make you a modest wine expert. And you can drink the lesson plan. A new study (2006) from Northwestern University shows that the brain learns to differentiate similar smells through passive experience. This sheds light on how we learn to identify thousands of smells from birth."The long and the short is that by sniffing specific wines, the nose can become acutely sensitive to a particular aroma and can learn to recognise it in just a few minutes. What’s even more astonishing is that the memory of the bouquet can be retained for 24 hours or more with little or no effort.Apparently this is all due to a special part of the brain called the orbitofrontal cortex, which is to do with sensing smells, as well as emotion and motivation.It's all in the noseSo what’s so special about sniffing wine?It’s all to do with learning. What’s more,it seems that this particular type of learningis extremely fast and facile, being rapidly updated by further sensory experience.It’s what’s called neural plasticity.In a brief discussion with Stephen Downes on knowledge and learning, we came to the conclusion that it was too easy for a learner to get stuck in a habitual rut. It required some considerable acumen and strength of thinking to lift oneself out of that into a facile learning mode. "Learning is practice and reflection", said Stephen.But with the old orbitofrontal cortex, it would appear that updating according to change, from whichever way the wind blows, happens almost instantly. Learning anew and quickly is customary for that part of our brain. Perhaps the rest of it that’s to do with thinking and learning could learn a thing or two from sniffing the bouquet from a glass of cabernet sauvignon!

Ever get irritated using your favourite browser? Are you often not able to find what you’re looking for? WolframAlpha could be your solution.My son, Jack, kept me in the loop with this new development:WolframAlpha a thoroughly intuitive machine that does more than just the thinking for you. Still in its infancy, WolframAlpha is a powerful computational engine as well as an intuitive tool - less content, more computational.Stephen Downes describes it as not the sort of thing people will browse through, or even use as a search engine, but if you want the miscellanea formerly found in the World Almanac, this is your source.Stephen Wolfram, scientist, inventor, author and business leader, created WolframAlpha to make the world’s knowledge computable.Check out Stephen Wolfram’s introduction to WoflramAlpha.It is impressive!Or check out WolframAlpha for yourself!

courtesy WordleAnd I thought the word ‘metacognition’ was too heady and ghastly sounding for the blogosphere. I felt guilty about referring to this ugly term in my Middle-earth posts.Now we have a full blown discussion about it half-way round the Globe! Tony Karrer spawned a debate on what he refers to as metalearning. As usual, he made me think, but not specifically about what he was posting about.MatacognitionWikipedia (I’m a great fan of this site) defines metacognition as:cognition about cognition, or knowing about knowing. It can take many forms; it includes knowledge about when and where to use particular strategies for learning or for problem solving.I had a strong hunch that metacognition was closely related to, if not the same as metalearning. I’ve since discovered that metalearning is a more specific term, though it has a range of meanings.Meatalearning in educationWhen it comes to educational aspects, Wikipedia quotesDonald B. Maudsley, defining metalearning as,the process by which learners become aware of and increasingly in control of habits of perception, inquiry, learning, and growth that they have internalized.The above description explains the brand of metalearning I’ve become more familiar with.Metalearning in teamsWikipedia makes a distinction when metalearning is used in the context of performances of teams and relationships:(T)he dynamic process whereby a system (relationship, or organization) manages to dissolve limiting dynamics such as point attractors and limit cycles that impede effective action and evolve liberating and creative dynamics represented by complex attractors whose trajectories in phase space, by never repeating themselves, can portray creative and innovative processes.If you can make sense of that on first reading, you’re a genius!Having spent half an hour at least, thinking and researching the meanings behind these words and phrases, I found they took me back to a topic I’ve revisited several times on this blog in the last year. Complexity seems to find its way into everything I look at to do with successful teams and sustainable communities.After unpacking the seemingly garbled sentence, I found that it offered a lot to do with thinking and learning involving teams and relationships. It seems that metalearning is a well established study, applied to the way teams and organisations perform.LosadaFormerly initiated by Marcial Losada, metalearning is the study of how groups of individuals in a team contribute to its performance. Metalearning does this in a way that enables a team's thinking to evolve uninhibited, so that new ideas can emerge.By understanding and controlling the balance between the external and internal references to do with that thinking, the results can lead to high performance in business teams. I began to wonder if this is really what Tony Karrer had in mind when he wrote his post.The Losada ZoneThe various ratios of positivity and negativity involved in human interaction that can exist, lies within what’s called the Losada Zone. Negative feedback can act as a warning signal, whereas positive feedback encourages the status quo. Losada found that high performance teams have a so-called P/N (positivity/negativity) ratio that is high (5.6), medium performance teams have a lower ratio (1.9) and low performance teams come in with a still lower ratio (0.36).Such a ratio is a measure of and is related to the connectivity potential within a team. The Losada Line (at 2.9) signifies the lower limit, separating people who have the potential to achieve a complex understanding of others from those who have a lesser ability to do this. Those who succeed are said to be above the Losada Line, and those who fall short lie below it. The terms ‘flourish’ and ‘languish’ are used to describe the two states.Frequent innovationHigh performance teams possess creativity and are capable of recurrent innovation. They tend to work along the lines of complexors. Coined by Marcial Losada, the complexor describes the form of outcomes of successful teams in the recursively intricate way they emerge and evolve. Intimately mapped on to complexity theory, the characteristics of complexors resemble fractals, elaborately regenerating themselves.Point attractors, though not the exact opposite of complexors, are outcomes that are akin to the fate of a wind-up toy. Effectively they refer to performances that decay, lead to inaction and go nowhere.Where to from here?It appears that metalearning applies to and can be applied to the performance behaviour of teams. Becoming aware of the need for openness and being receptive to new ideas in a way that permits these to be advantageously and constructively considered is something that, presumably, can be learnt by members of a team or community.Earlier in May, Jay Cross posted Become a Chief Metalearning Officer. Having thought more about all this, I have three questions:Is it possible that by managing and applying specific learning processes, a better performance can be reached in teams that are already partly on the way to attaining success?Does this special type of learning lie within the province of the individual's control?Can this sort of ‘management’ be controlled and executed by a manager?If the answers to these questions are in the affirmative, perhaps we can use metalearning to help our world.video

courtesy the hummingbirdDean Shareski’s post, How The Book Destroyed Community, embeds a video of Rory McGreal who posits that the book is the biggest destroyer of human community, especially learning commmunities. While I agree with Dean’s reflective stance on this matter and respect his discretion, I found McGreal’s cover hard to digest.McGreal maintains that the book first caused people to learn without the aid of community - that when the book first came into its own as ‘the portable book’, people found they no longer needed community to help them learn about things - that they could easily pick up a book, and without the community, learn all they needed to know on their own. He maintains that because of the book 'no community is necessary'.Shred of truthWhile there are some threads of truth in these ideas, McGreal delivers a sermon, not unlike that of a preacher who wishes to admonish the book with a controlled restraint on the fire and brimstone. I wonder he's ever thought of how the book came to be published in the first place.Is the arrival of a brand new book the effort of a single person working on his or her own, composing, writing, printing, bookbinding and distributing? Is it true that 'no community is necessary'?William Blake would have come close to achieving this amazing feat. Blake was an engraver, artist, craftsman and poet who also published his own writing. But he was an exceptional person.Books are rarely written, printed, bound and distributed by the authors, never mind the paper making, unless perhaps as a community activity in school where the book becomes an agent of learning in more ways than one.A book of verseIn 1994, I published a collection of verse on a limited budget. The book displayed the publisher’s name, Linneth, a composite of my wife’s first name and mine. There was no way I could publish the book entirely on my own. I approached a printer in town, who made a living through the support of local communities. The printer employed some of these people, but did not own a paper factory. So paper had to be bought from a manufacturing company employing people from communities in another town.My good friend, Kevin Meehan, who had a small part-time printing business supported by friends and acquaintances, helped me print the cover. A book-binding company in town assisted me to get the pages bound with the book-cover. This firm was also supported by communities as some of their members were employees.These processes involved some industrial involvement, some cottage industry and some amateur effort. None of that industry could have existed on its own, and all of it contributed to community. The amateur practice was me, for I wrote the 72 pages of verse in the first place. I supplied the printer with a Word file of the text typed by me, saved on a floppy bought new from the local electronic store.Much of the verse I wrote was about my family and of the communities around Wellington where they live. Without community, much of the writing in the book would never have happened, let alone have been published. As well, most of what I had learnt that took me out to these community industries came from books, including the phone numbers of key people involved.Communities everywhereThis story of my little book of verse is not unique. But it gives small mention of the library communities within a country and throughout the world that are supported by the book.I come from Dunfermline where I was raised as a child. It is also the birth-town of Andrew Carnegie who gave away most of his fortune to fund the establishment of many libraries, schools, and universities throughout the world. While Carnegie's money was for building libraries, he never paid for a single book. He believed that books should be provided by the communities through the work of local councils.So I wonder how 'the portable book' could possibly be charged with the destruction of communities. It seems that it’s doing the exact opposite by supporting communities, allowing them to come together, and providing the basis for community activity and input as well as offering a reason for networking to grow and exist within these communities.What I’ve described here are aspects to do with the book that not only foster community activity but also bring communities together in the same way the production of many other technological artefacts do. There are many other aspects to the book that contribute to communities and how they exist, function and grow. Just ask anyone from Fair Isle what contribution the book makes to that community today. It is hardly one that’s on a road to destruction caused by the book.Biting the hand that fedSadly, McGreal’s approach is typical of a view shared by some people. In the long past history of the book, people with similar dispositions burned bibles, books and booklets by the billion. Not only do they eschew and denigrate the technology that brought them to where they are, they also wish to forget how it got there in the first place.That they are so embittered about what the book did or did not give them is sad. Biting the hand that fed gets a little sympathy from me if only for their state of mind. I’m powerless to do anything about that.Nor can I do much about their understanding of causality.What I challenge, however, is the way that some of them seek to persuade others to share their same jejune and narrow point of view.video Rory McGreal

So most of what I'm covering here has probably already been covered by the indefatigable Jane Knight, but I'll risk redundancy and give it a shot. TiddlyBackPack: I've been a fan of TiddlyWiki for a while and guess I just didn't make the leap to thinking about putting it on a USB drive. My issue though revolves around updates. Say I use this send out a manual, a great use for a wiki, then I have static copies of a wiki...I guess it'd be good for organically growing a collection of information but it really does pull out the collaboration aspect of wiki-dom doesn't it? Clipmarks: I'm starting to feel the outlines of this class of tools that includes Zotero, Evernote and Clipmarks among others. I do like the clip-to-blog feature in that it seems to allow some more overt attribution for sources and data. I also think that the ClipCast feature is pretty interesting. The metadata and functionality embedded in this app is fairly impressive. goosh:This one goes out to all my homies who remember the Mighty Command Prompt. C>  goosh is the "unofficial google shell". Just try it. ;-) Click here for an article on this from Emily Chang. MokaFive: I've talked before about USB-based solutions like Mojopac, U3 and Ceedo; now with all of these solutions maturing and all converging toward a more robust virtualization set of products - we seem to have an entry coming the other way - from virtualization to the USB. MokaFive has even gone a step further and created the iPhone Sentinel which allows you to "run LivePC™ virtual machines off your iPhone! iPhone Sentinel makes your iPhone appear as a disk drive on your computer, allowing you to install any software you want on it." I am impressed. I still think that we have gone past the mark in terms of how we are thinking about "mobile learning" (whatever the hell that means). I think and I have said before that we have started down that road from a hardware point and not from a user experience point. Can you technically make a course run on a cell phone? Sure. Will I kill you if you try to make me take that course on the cell phone? Yes. These are the same mistakes that we made with e-learning - we horribly neglected the new and different affordances of first computer-based training and now Web-based training and finally mobile training. We thought "we know ISD and we can use this authoring tool, therefore we can make good e-learning" neglecting all the while to give any thought to the fact that adding "E" wasn't just a semantic exercise but was a liminal moment that should have caused us to stop and examine our design principles. Anyway, I digress - I think these mobile products offer the ability to for learners to take their data and applications with them and do have much more satisfactory experiences than typical m-learning interactions. Red Delicious: An iPhone app for managing your delicious bookmarks. Great. Normally I'd yawn but I might give this one a try for the simple reason that as I talk to more enterprise people about 2.0 tools, delicious is one that they consistently seem to be able to understand quickly.

So George Siemens and Stephen Downes are leading a course entitled "Connectivism & Connective Knowledge." The course has an insane number of students (something like over 2,000) - probably speaking to both the interest in the topic and the reputation of the two leaders. Now sometime soon, I hope to have an interview with George Siemens about this class - details when they become available - but I did want to go ahead and point to one of the lessons from the class so far. We all talk a lot about networks these days but few of us - actually damn few of us - know more about networks than Valdis Krebs. Thanks to CCK '08, we now have this post outlining Krebs' talk on networks, this copy of slides on the same and this recording of the presentation - do say nothing of the follow-up discussion of networked learning between George and Stephen.

This is nice - this allows me to tie up a couple of loose tabs - the image at the left came from here but it was made with this - a generator that lets you make your own Demotivator posters. I hate those Motivator/Successories posters and Despair, INC does a great job poking holes in that stuff. All that is just preamble to the obligatory coverage of the latest Technorati "State of the Blogosphere" report. So, aside from the shocking fact that there are more blogs than ever, what is interesting here - actually there is a lot to wade through so here are my high points: I do like this image -mainly because  - in the best ego-surfing modality of the blogosphere - this blog seems to be one of the 76,000 blogs with a Technorati Authority of 50+ (now granted, I just squeak in with a 68 but hey a win is a win).   As I sit here writing this blog post with my Twitter open, my Yammer going, Facebok up and going, meebo online, having already pushed photos up to flickr - I also totally grok this quote from the report "The word blog is irrelevant, what's important is that it is now common, and will soon be expected, that every intelligent person (and quite a few unintelligent ones) will have a media platform where they share what they care about with the world." Seth Godin. The report goes on to break down into "Who the Bloggers Are" (interesting stat - 59% have been blogging for 2 years or more), the What and Why of Blogging (here I like the breakdown of blogging styles - most bloggers - almost 80% consider themselves sincere, while only 1 in 5 consider themselves snarky), the How of Blogging, Blogging for Profit and Brands Enter the Blogosphere. So there ya go. Dig through it at your leisure but it does seem that the blogosphere is alive and well and IMHO, rapidly converging with other publishing modes.    

You tell them you can do something incredibly useful like troll it for professionals in your field that it might be valuable for you to follow. Jane Hart has posted the "100+ (E-)Learning Professionals to follow on Twitter." Now that looks like using a blog and not twitter but now since somehow (Jane probably just needed someone in the O's) I squeaked onto the list, I am watching my Twitter followers light up with new folks thus broadening my community of practice. So ask those folks if they think it might be valuable to somehow pick the Top 100 people in your field and then be able to follow them via something like Twitter and learn from them along the way.

Socialtext 3.0 came out today and geez did Twitter light up. I checked out the site and watched the 60 second video and then went to blip.tv and watched the other videos and yeah, more impressed than when I started. According to the site, Socialtext 3.0 is comprised of three parts: Socialtext People - Social networking for the enterprise Socialtext Workspace - Group-editable wiki for easy, flexible, enterprise-wide             collaboration Socialtext Dashboard - Customizable home pages that let each person           decide where to focus their attention.         Socialtext 3.0 delivers connected collaboration with context, both           internally within the organization and externally with customers and           partners in extranet communities. It is built on a modular and integrated           architecture that enables rapid integration with other enterprise systems           and makes other enterprise applications social.     Think Twitter, Facebook, Wikis and more all rolled up in a nice, neat appliance that I can just install behind my firewall - a CRITCAL feature for those of us in government service! Watch the videos, read the press - I'm signing up for the 14 day trial - I'll let you know how it goes.

In the first video, Mark Yim talks about lessons learned from teaching engineering at the GRASP Lab. Some of my favorite quotes include:-"Technology changes people" and the "Thumb Generation" - imagine how you point at the sky changing because of how you use technology- "We have to change the way we teach to do an impedance match with the way students learn." The second video is of Chris Lehman of the Science Leadership Academy. Inspirational - really -School 2.0 "creating the schools we need today" -"Stop thinking that schools should be just like business. Stop thinking that everything that a kid does can be measured by a test" -Sign on the wall at the MIT Media Lab "lifelong kindergarten" -Recall-based learning is obsolete in the Age of Google

The 10 most challenged titles of 2007 were: 1. And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell 2. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier 3. Olive’s Ocean by Kevin Henkes 4. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman 5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain 6. The Color Purple by Alice Walker 7. TTYL by Lauren Myracle 8. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou 9. It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris 10. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky Click here to see what you can. If they ban books, the dinosaurs will win. 

the Google 2001 Index Search page and just as an extra, here is a link to the archive of e-Clippings when it lived as a newsletter....

If you live outside the U.S. or maybe you live inside the U.S. but you aren't a citizen or maybe you're from the U.S. but you live abroad....then go ahead, watch the video as well....this is going to impact you too.

2008-10-16 21:30:10 -0500 Originally uploaded by S1lvers Family.MAKN BACN....stay tuned....

I had posted before about SlideRocket and how kewl and shiny it is (I still think its cool and shiny) but now I've also done an initial glance at 280 Slides and while it may be a bit less shiny..I think that users might find it more comfortable to use. 280 has a less flashy tool set than SlideRocket but excels in exposing its capability to export presentations to PPT 2007, PPT 97-2004, Open Document or PDF. I also love the way that you can publish your slides to Slideshare from within 280, email it or get a link and/or embed code. I like the "Notes" feature and the ability to suck in video and photos not just from your desktop but from the Web as well. I think that between the two, folks who like Keynote or who want to do Keynote-like presentations will like SlideRocket and folks who are interested in going quite so edgy and who are interested in ensuring that they have local copies of their slides will gravitate to 280. I like 'em both....

(LINK) Check out #1: "Read at least 100 blogs regularly. Not every post, but a variety. Extra hint: go OUTSIDE your particular passion circle." ..and #22 "Thank people endlessly. Be so full of humility and thanks and gracious awe at the fact that people share time with you (while not being one of those put-down artists) that your work comes off as perpetually fresh and energized and useful."

(found via TechCrunch) On one level, SonicSwap is a service that makes use of YouTube's API to allow users to upload their iTunes playlists and play songs and videos via YouTube's API. But now all that good brain fertilizer from the SCORM 2.0 workshop has me thinking....so we build this platform...YouTube for learning...and then we publish the API and people can use the platform and can assign rights using the platform...and others can pull objects thru the API via the platform...now I haven't gotten the iTunes piece figured out yet....but I'd love to see more innovation like this and like Udutu's work  in our maket space....so what gets your vote for most innovative learning tool?

I need to get better at being able to track down stuff I find via Twitter so I give credit where credit is due...so whoever started this....thanks! I just wanted to list some of the resources for creating comic strips and the like: Strip Creator: Used to create the strip at the left...couldn't figure out though if I was supposed to be able to save the image or what.... MakeBeliefsComix: needs some UI work....couldn't figure out how to resize the thought/word balloons in order to be able to see the characters... Pixton: Looks really sophisticated but these clauses from the TOS give me great pause:"By making Submissions to the Website, you hereby assign and transfer to PCI all your respective rights, titles and interests worldwide in, to and associated with your Submissions, including copyrights, trade-mark rights, and all other intellectual property rights, free and clear of all liens, encumbrances and interests of third parties.         PCI hereby grants you a limited license to use your Submissions for non-commercial purposes. In the event you wish to use your Submission for any commercial purposes, you must first contact PCI and seek its express written agreement to do so." ...I'd rather have a more straight forward relationship...some subscription model.... Speech Bubble Generators List from AllWebDesign: now what do you think you'll find here? :-) ..and another cartoon bubble editor...