Bit By Bit

Seedlings @ Bit by Bit Podcast: Show 31
May 4, 2008

Links from the show:

• 21st Century Information Fluency (Moodle Course) shared by Cheryl
• Scratch
  • Mike Richard and his daughter’s Addition Scratch Project

“Geek of the Week” Links:

• Diigo (shared by Alice)
  • Seedling’s Diigo Group
• Taboo Firefox Add-On (shared by Bob)
• Read the Words (shared by Bob)
• MooUrl (shared by Cheryl)

Music:

• “And So We Strive” by Stuart Lawson

Technorati Tags: education, cheryloakes, alicebarr, bobsprankle, seedlings, SEED

 

 Seedlings @ Bit By Bit Podcast: Show 31 [56:02m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

(cross-posted at TechLearning)

I’d like to recommend two books I’ve enjoyed lately. The first one, I’ve already mentioned here: We Are Smarter Than Me by Barry Libert and Jon Spector (and thousands of others). The second book is: Wikinomics by Don Tapsott and Anthony D. Williams. Both books show a very clear picture of where many businesses (and other areas) are heading into in the 21st Century: Crowd Sourcing. Simply put, the power of many hands can accomplish great things, that otherwise might not be accomplished. Here are two great examples to share with staff and students to help them see the power of Crowd Sourcing:

Ten Thousand Cents
This project will amaze any audience. In short, thousands of people were asked to “replicate” a small piece from a larger picture with an online drawing program, in isolation from each other and with no idea what the larger picture was (a $100 dollar bill). Each “artist” was paid a penny for their effort. Click on the image below for a larger view to see just how close they came to creating a replica of the original. According to the site, “the project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, ‘crowdsourcing,’ ‘virtual economies,’ and digital reproduction.’” Imagine asking one person to draw each of those ten-thousand pieces; that would be torture. Asking thousands of people to do it was a “fun” and effortless exercise that could be accomplished in 1/10,000 of the time it would take one person to do it. Crowd Sourcing is “Barn Raising” brought to a whole new level.

The thing I like about this example is that you do in fact see the flaws, but all in all, there’s no doubt that this artwork represents a $100 bill. It’s a great visual representation of how Open Source projects probably play out: that most of the goals are quickly attained, and then further “tweaking” will need to take place to iron out the bugs. It also reminds me of what I read from Chris Anderson in his book, The Long Tail about Wikipedia: because of the extensive amount of entries Wikipedia holds, it is much more true than it is false. In other words, because of it’s size, statistically you have a better chance of landing on accurate information than inaccurate. Is this what Stephen Colbert means by “Truthiness?”

It’s interesting to see the chart at the site that shows the average time users spent from each country working on the artwork. For instance, participants from the United States on average spent only 2 minutes and 48 seconds drawing compared to participants from Egypt who spent on average 31 minutes and 54 seconds. Draw you own conclusions here.

Artemis Eternal

Another site that recently caught my eye is the “Artemis Eternal” project led by Jessica Mae Stover: a short Scifi-fantasy movie that is quickly moving along in production through the power of Crowd Sourcing. Stover is getting her funding by people who share in her dream of creating a movie that is unencumbered by the six companies who control most of the media. According to the site, the project is “engineered to create a great film in the short term, and in the long term disrupt and evolve the system; ours is a story about questioning society’s expectation and what we accept as normal. What happens next depends on you.” There are three levels of contribution: $1+, $25+, and $100+. Varying degrees of credit is awarded depending on the contribution. Fund raising on the Internet is nothing new, but what is groundbreaking here is that Stover and her team are creating a large budget movie from community funding and allowing anyone to witness its progression (the production timeline itself is worth taking students to). Already the project has raised $40,000 of the $100,000 needed.

Again: many small hands accomplishing something prodigious, changing the way business is done.

What are some other examples that you’ve seen of Crowd Sourcing?

Technorati Tags: bitbybit, bobsprankle, crowdsourcing, wikinomics

(cross-posted at TechLearning)

Yesterday, I was browsing in a used bookstore and found something more than the hand-me down literature in the bookshelves. Posted on two of the walls in the shop was an exhibit of what was described as “found art.” It was in fact a collection of all the things that were found within the pages of the used books. I guess people sell their used books but forget to take out what they leave inside as bookmarks. There were all kinds of things: grocery lists, receipts, baby photos, to-do lists, even a very intense and personal love letter. Scanning the artifacts gave me the feeling of an anthropologist, but it also made me uncomfortable, thinking that the exhibit was a breach of privacy. Surely, the people who had left these things did not intend for them to become a wall display. Some of the artifacts were most likely from local people who had either traded in their used books or sold them to the store. What would their reactions be if they returned to the store to find their baby’s photo on the wall? What would the response of the author of the love letter be? Would the original owners have the right to reclaim the pieces or have they rescinded that right when they handed over the books without carefully inspecting them for these personal effects?
Like it or not, much of our lives are now like those walls, whether by choice, or by chance: open to review and examination on the Internet.

On the positive end of the spectrum, an example of this may be how many of us are now learning in public in ways that were never before possible, through tools such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, etc. Though this approach of putting your learning out there for all to see can be daunting and challenging, I firmly believe the rewards are enormous. As a personal case in point, I believe that I am a better teacher by reflecting on my practice in public, opening up my professional development to a larger network of participants —my learning network— for feedback, challenges, and even accountability.

On the “not so positive” end of the spectrum, an example may be a photo posted on Facebook of some youthful indiscretion, that just doesn’t go away, could potentially even become “viral,” and may have a compromising outcome on future opportunities (such as college admission or employment). While many of these “youthful indiscretions” are not new, the public and global spotlight on them has evolved far beyond what existed when my generation was “young and stupid.” If you “messed up” in the days when I was in high school, chances are whatever public thrashing or judgement you received would eventually “fade away” and certainly couldn’t be “Googled” years later, when you were older and wiser and had “cleaned up your act.” No matter how hard we try to warn the “digital natives” of the potential negatives of giving the skeletons in their closets a global stage, I suspect that these incidents will continue to increase. The tools just make it too easy, with decreasing time for the opportunity of sober reasoning between the click of a cellphone camera and its post to email, MySpace, or YouTube.
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Still Rezzing after all these years…

The fact is that this technology is going out into the world in a state of marginal readiness. It does wonders. It’s marvelous. But it’s a mess.
Seymour Papert (The Connected Family)

The title of this post is a quote I heard one day when I was in Second Life. It was uttered by an avatar who had teleported near where I was standing. He said this to another avatar when she asked him why his shirt and pants said “MISSING IMAGE.” This is a common occurrence in Second Life as sometimes the servers that run the virtual world are “lagging behind” your activities and movement. Sometimes you may get a message that lets you know that “Your clothes are still downloading.” The term “Rezzing” in Second Life usually is used in the context of waiting for a texture or object to load. When you’re waiting for your clothes to finish downloading, it’s nice to have the backup of the “MISSING IMAGE” in the interim.
In a sense, isn’t so much of the Internet “still rezzing?” Most of the tools we use are either still in “beta” or are an early draft in a long lineage of “updates.” Many of the technologies that we think are brilliant today will be replaced with even better realizations in the future.

We are working with a medium still in flux, perhaps forever in the process of becoming the instrument we dream of. And yet, most of the time, we are forgiving. We’ve become accustomed to websites being “down,” browsers crashing, incompatible applications, constant problem solving. Our response to technical issues is to find alternatives, seek upgrades, reconfigure. I’ve yet to meet anyone who’s given up on the Internet because of its problems. We understand that the Internet is still evolving.

I wonder if this acceptance of “evolution” for the technology is also allowed for the people using the technology. We welcome the revision of “Web 2.0” but are we also allowing for people’s “Personal Growth 2.0?” In a world where much of our learning and exploration is now carried out in public arenas, are we accepting of revisions and addenda of thought and understanding?

Ewan McIntosh has an incredible keynote for the 2006 K12 Online Conference called, “Personal Professional Development” in which he says:

“I think we don’t know what we don’t know. So why should we be afraid of putting our views, at that particular moment, forward. If someone ridicules it in 36 hours, or in 36 months, or 36 years, does it really matter? Can we still learn from that experience? So is the fear that we’ll do something stupid justified?”

Certainly, I have posted plenty of blog entries that were not my best writing, were “thoughts in process,” or just got things plain wrong. Still, I believe that each publication made me a better writer, teacher, thinker. I believe that allowing for public scrutiny and opening my ideas and reflections up to comments from the larger community has helped me advance further in my profession than if I exercised them in private. I am both appreciative and better for the assistance I have received along my professional development journey. I trust that I can explore my ideas in the blogosphere and be allowed to update and refine those ideas without any single post definitely representing who I am.

Perhaps this same opportunity needs to be afforded to the “not so positive end” of the spectrum. As we move to a more public and everlasting capture of what used to be personal or inaccessible, perhaps we will allow for revision and become more open minded about mistakes and poor choices made by our young “digital natives.” Certainly we will keep educating and fostering an understanding of responsible and ethical conduct on the Internet. But hopefully we “digital immigrants” will come to understand that the results of a simple Google search does not define the entirety of the individual.

——————
“Missing Image” Credit:
James, Wagner. “New World Notes: The Second Life of Babylon: An Iraqi Scholar Embraces the Metaverse.” Second Life: New World Notes. 12 Dec. 2007. 22 Apr. 2008 <http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2007/12/the-second-li-1.html>.

Technorati Tags: bitbybit, bobsprankle

Reflection on “Step by Step- Building a Web2.0 Classroom” by Drew Murphy (K12Online07)

This is an amazing presentation by Drew Murphy and serves as both a great intro for beginners and also an excellent model for people who help lead others through the Web 2.0 maze. Drew models excellent ideas and methods to engage students (Vinnie Kebobolous is not to be missed!)

One thing that Drew said that really hit home with me was that “the Internet is incredibly abstract.” I need to remember this first and foremost when training teachers and also remember that everyone is showing up with different skill sets.

Drew breaks the skills necessary to operate in the Web 2.0 World into 10 skills that are an excellent place to start and get everyone on the same page. He organizes these ten steps into 3 categories: “Explore and Participate,” “Deconstruct and Reconstruct”, and “Connect and Create.” These three categories will serve as an excellent menu for my curriculum. Some of these, I’m already incorporating, but Drew really helped me to become clear on the necessary skills to teach explicitly in the lab.

It was interesting that he started with such a detail as “tabbing” —teaching teachers/students to use tabs in their web browsers. In the lab, I use both Safari and Firefox with the students. I use Safari with the younger students because links will (by default) open in new windows and Firefox because they will (by default) open in new tabs. I’ve done this to keep is rather simple for the younger students, but Drew got me thinking. Since I want everyone to end up using Tabs, perhaps I need to just “bite the bullet” and use this feature with the younger kids right at the beginning.

I love Drew’s quote: “It’s all about Media… so Be the Media.” If we want to engage students, this is imperative. He gives some great ideas on how to do this, but encourages “us to be ourselves”. Also, it is essential to remember that while the tools are “cool” the emphasis is really on building community.

Technorati Tags: k12online07, bitbybit, drewmurphy, bobsprankle

Reflection on “LMS 2.0 - Engaging Learners Using More Advanced Techniques and the Odd Mash-up inside Moodle” by Jason Hando (K12Online07)

Jason really got me thinking out of the “Moodle-box” with this excellent presentation. I’ve long wanted to use Pageflakes for my students, setting up some “widget-type” games. The thing is that I really want to keep my students within our moodle page, and not heading off to Pageflakes where they might then drift off to other people’s pages. Even though I’ve embedded flash items in my moodle, I never thought of brining Pageflakes right into the moodle page!

Bringing in the slideshows also makes perfect sense. Rather than sending students elsewhere, all my presentations can be placed right within the moodle page, and they can play it at home for parents as well. Mostly, I’ve been using Keynote for my presentations with students, but that really doesn’t make sense because then I’m the only one with the copy of the presentation.

This little tutorial is a great example of the benefits of going to the K12 Online Conference. These three mashups that Jason showed just saved me hours of trying to learn it on my own. Having the visual (video) shows me the solutions quickly. Had this been at a F2F conference, think of all the time it would have taken to get this little nugget of info (travel, etc.). Here, I have it within 10 minutes and then can go off on my own for another half hour and return to the video if I need a refresher.

Technorati Tags: bobsprankle, k12online07, bitbybit, jasonhando