tech-ed collisions

Are you living your education or recording it?

In the first post related to this topic, I started to think about the impact that lifestreaming may be having on our lives. I was particularly interested in some of the psychological aspects of what might be occuring. For example, are we 'stepping out of the now' and simply becoming observers of our own lives and not experiencing them to their full potential? Is the way we want to be perceived by others having an impact on what we do and how we would like to be observed behaving? That post was primarily concerned with the broader aspects of our lives and lifestreaming. Now I would like to look at the impact on our education, our lifelong learning journey. How many of us are on Twitter and regularly receive tweets from others who are pushing out little snippets and highly abbreviated quotes from lectures, conferences, seminars etc that they are attending? Do you do it yourself? I have tried but when I think about it, how was it really helping my development since that was what I was there for? How much of an impact is tweeting from a lecture theatre really having on other people's development? After all, those followers are getting mere snippets from an 'observer' in a lecture theatre somewhere who is living a different context to them with different understandings - terms, ideas etc may be clarified in the lecture that aren't passed on by our avid twitterers. The term 'deep learning' often comes up in discussions I hear on the benefits of collaborative learning and 'constructivist' approaches to teaching and learning with avid Web 2.0 colleagues but really how much deep learning is taking place by our twitter friends sitting in a lecture theatre tweeting away on their mobile or laptop. Are they absolutely engaged in a (collaborative) learning process or acting as some sort of heavily filtered conduit to a broader audience that itself, is more than likely only passively and intermittently engaged as those tweets briefly flash across their Twitter client along with all manner of inane observations of other partiallly experienced events? As Professor Barry Schwartz, professor of social action and social theory at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania is quoted as saying in the CNN post 'Do digital diaries mess up your brain?',

...Constant documenting may make people less thoughtful about and engaged in what they're doing because they are focused on the recording process...
OK, so you've attended a lecture or series of lectures and at some point in the future you need to review it - supposedly you really do want to understand some of the important concepts 'delivered'. What do you do? Rather than taking notes you had posted a bunch of tweets but that was sometime ago in your prolific lifestream, which by its nature is in chronological order - not necessarily the best for what you need to do. If you were lucky you may have used some hashtags but were they related to a concept you are interested in, the subject, the course, the conference hashtag? Not trying to bag Twitter here but just trying to point out that possibly we are not as immersed as we could be when we are trying to learn. Twitter is after all just one example and there are many others that take us 'out' (to an extent) of our learning experiences. We maybe recording it using any number of devices - cameras, phones etc. First-person point-of-view (POV) devices may be an exception here as they interfere less with the experience (ie you don't have to be consciously engaged in the act of recording as well as learning/experiencing) and a number of educators are experimenting with these devices to support learning and assessment. They do seem quite well suited to supporting some forms of assessment - but that is demonstrating competence or prior learning rather than the learning itself. As we, as either educators or learners (not that educators are not learners themselves) become more embroiled in technology, it is important that we consider and understand the impact of how we are using that technology and its effect on our learning. We do not want to become mere observers and/or recorders of learning experiences. I am not saying that this sort of thing is a bad thing - merely that we need to be aware of the impact of what we are doing and whether we are really achieving all that we want to. As John Sutter found, it is important not to take on too much and he advises 'tracking one thing at a time'. If we are careful about how we go about it, understanding the implications of what we are doing, then 'lifestreaming' parts of our education could turn out to be a very useful part of our lifelong learning journey.

Filed under  //   Twitter   Web 2.0  

Are you living your life or recording it?

In this, the first of two posts on the subject I am going to examine the impact that 'lifestreaming' may be having on some of our experiences. I have been thinking a bit about this in relation to education for some time but a really interesting post on the lifestream blog on the psychology of lifestreaming and the effect that it may be having on your brain/your life has rekindled that interest. In the second post, I will concentrate more on the implications for learning. So what is lifestreaming? From the lifestream blog:

In it’s simplest form it’s a chronological aggregated view of your life activities both online and offline. It is only limited by the content and sources that you use to define it.
The lifestream blog post basically reviews two interesting stories by CNN on lifestreaming. "Do digital diaries mess up your brain" starts to discuss the impact such services may have on your brain and then looks at some of the psychological implications of it. It seems there are both positive and negatives. The psychological aspects discussed are quite interesting. There is the view that the act of lifestreaming 'takes you out of the here and now'. You stop experiencing life and start recording it. An example is given of people tapped into their mobiles (twittering, messaging, snapping photos etc I guess) as they are at a concert. Many of us have seen this and I am guessing quite a number of us have done something similar. What are we doing here? Are we really experiencing our lives as best we can or have we stepped to one side and are now some sort of observers of them? The CNN article also looks at further implications such as potential benefits from lifestreaming for Alzheimer patients. After all, having a secondary memory to call upon when your primary one is not doing the job sounds quite good! What about your own experiences? Have you forsaken the full benefits of experiencing events etc in your life so that you can record them or tweet about them? If so, do you think stepping out of those experiences so that you could record them or communicate about them, in any way detracted from the experiences themselves? We have probably all been doing this (on occasion) for most of our lives (eg taking photos at parties, on vacation etc) but now we have these ubiquitous technologies that enable us to instantly let the world know what we are experiencing (or at least recording) wherever we are. So 'taking us out of the here and now' is one aspect of what we are doing. We become less engaged and immersed in these experiences as we strive to record them or tell the world (at least what miniscule parts of it could be bothered to listen) about them. What is the impact of that diminished involvement? Are you affecting just yourself or others who are also sharing that experience eg what do your family, friends, colleagues etc think and are you in any way diminishing or altering their experience? What about your behaviour? If you are streaming to the world all sorts of information about you, is that in any way going to affect what you do? You may want to be perceived in a certain way so you might have to adjust your behavior to create that perception. How do you choose what you 'tweet' about. Many social networks and Web 2.0 services allow us to publish and expose parts of our lives. For example, books that we read, goals and ambitions that we have. How we want to be perceived will impact what we express in these networks. Do you try to separate your personal self from your professional self? For example, I know quite a few people who struggle with who they should let into their Facebook network (personal friends, family, work colleagues and other professional contacts). What is the resultant impact on your behaviour - are you living completely as you or as the 'you' that you want to be perceived as? How do you or do you even feel the need to draw the distinction any more between personal and professional? (some do and some don't). The other CNN article that the lifestream blog mentions is 'My week of recording a 'digital memory'. In this article the reporter aims to document every moment of their life for a week. This is right at the extreme end of lifestreaming but is also quite an interesting experiment. On his experience, John D Sutter says:
My issue is that when you set out intentionally to create an e-memory of everything, you end up with too much stuff -- and you miss out on living.
One of his tips is not to record everything:
I used an iPhone to record most of the week's activities. The phone's built-in audio recorder proved particularly annoying to my friends. I put the recorder on the table at lunches, flipped it on during car rides and stuck it in friends' faces at bars. In every instance, the recorder changed the dynamics of my conversations. It made them weird. One friend became so nervous about the fact that I had recorded him talking about relationships that he later texted me in a panic -- asking me to delete the file.
This affirms my previous concerns about affecting the experiences of others. From his experiences, Sutter also recommends only tracking one thing at a time. Taking on too much is too difficult and left him feeling 'scatterbrained'. The post is an interesting read and he has some nice little insights into the experience. While it is unlikely that any of us are streaming so much of our lives into the digital world (yet), it is still very useful to perhaps sit back and reflect on what we are doing and the impact it may be having on ourselves and others around us (and then blog about it ;))

Filed under  //   Twitter   Web 2.0  

Only 10% of IPV4 addresses remain unallocated!

From the Internet Society of Australia (ISOC-AU), comes this important message: 'ISOC-AU has been requested to help publicise the following announcement from the Number Resource Organisation, that the Internet has reached the point where less than 10% of IPv4 remain unallocated. Please circulate this announcement as widely as possible.' 'ISOC-AU has taken a leading role nationally and internationally in raising awareness of IPv6 and supporting discussion since we established the ISOC-AU IPv6 Special Interest Group in 2005. Since then, it has pursued the following major activities to help build understanding of IPv6:

  • annual Australian IPv6 Summits - http://www.ipv6.org.au/summit/
  • IPv6 for e-Business - http://www.ipv6.org.au
  • supporting development of the Australian Government IPv6 transition strategy which will provide for full implementation of IPv6 on Australian Government services by 2012
  • participation in the international IPv6 Forum and global IPv6 Summits and events representing Australia
  • membership of the Asia Pacific IPv6 Task Force representing Australia
  • regular updates to the National ICT Industry Alliance on IPv6 - see http://nictia.org.au'
So.... what to do about it. There is quite a bit of information on the Web about IPV4 and IPV6. TCP-IP is the commincations protocol that the Internet uses - you may have occasionally seen numbers like http://66.102.11.99 appear in your browser instead of domain names (www.google.com). IPV4 is the addressing system in place at the moment and what the Number Resource Organisation is telling us is that only 10% of those addresses are left available. What is potentially problematic is determining exactly when they will run out. Geoff Huston has developed an interesting model for predicting when we will run out and you can see the updates on that prediction here. So, at the time of this post, it appears to be somewhere between 8th September 2011 and 31st August 2012. This isn't an exact science though and there are many factors that could impact this. Governments and other important Internet related organisations around the world have been working on this problem for a long time and are looking at implementing a new addressing scheme (IPV6) which greatly expands the number of available addresses. What we need to do now is start monitoring these developments and planning migrations to the new environment. Most likely your technology providers will know about this and have strategies or plans in place. You might like to check with them at some point though.

Filed under  //   Internet  

Tweak the tweet: a lesson in standards development

This should be interesting for all those interested in standards development. Standards development for me is all about consensus building (to state the bleeding obvious) but the way consensus (or at least more or less general agreement) is reached on many of our standards can take months or years even. A justification for the standard may be developed, use-cases created, issues are examined in intricate detail by experts. There can be 'raging' academic debate over minor nuances in terms and expressions. Email lists play host to (sometimes) furious and boisterous? discussions between leading proponents of obscure points of view. Drafts are published, votes are taken, there may even be a face-to-face meeting in some exotic location. Editors are engaged to produce faultless works of academic excellence and the standard may eventually be published (with an appropriately important looking version number) to some obscure website tucked away behind a payment gateway and safely out of reach of its intended audience.
Actually, some standards are even open (need to carefully define what open means here) to the 'public' - or at least free to access if you can find them. Using, or implementing them can also be a major challenge. The pursuit of academic excellence and absolute correctness leaves us with documents that are incredibly difficult for us mere mortals.
OK- enough of the satire, but hopefully it illustrates a point or two. Many of our standards do take quite some time to develop and experts have to be employed to ensure that this often difficult work gets done correctly. Usability is also a concern for some of us who have tried to implement various (not all) standards and specifications.
Now, getting to the point of this post - crowdsourcing and the 'wisdom of the crowd' is becoming quite well accepted. The ability to get things done very quickly using the power of the Web and the enthusiasm of the crowd is amazing to watch. What has this got to do with standards?
Well...take a look at what is going on over at Project Epic. From their website, Project Epic are:

information scientists, computer scientists and computational linguists at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of California, Irvine. We specialize in societal transformation in conjunction with technology use; computer-mediated communication studies; software engineering and architectures; information security; network security and computational linguistics with a deep commitment to understanding the domains for which we design and study.
So what are they up to and what have they done? The ReadWriteWeb blog has this great post on Project Epic's 'Tweak the Tweet' initiative where they have got together with a bunch of hackers from around the world to create a new hashtag syntax for Twitter for use in emergencies such as that in Haiti. From the RWW post, the syntax is pretty easy to learn and gives a few examples:
Every tweet should contain at least one main tag like #need [explain need], #offering or #injured [name]. You can find a full list of main tags here. In addition, tweets can also have data tags like #name [name], #loc [location] or #contact [email, phone etc.]. These tweets can also contain often used keywords that don't need the hashtag sign like food, supplies, road, hospital or help. Examples Here are some real-world examples of this new syntax being used in Haiti: * #haiti #need security #loc General Hospital PAP #contact @thehatian * #haiti #need water #loc Orphanage Foyer de Sion #contact @robinbauer #src @AnnCurry * Can you deliver beans rice water to orphanage? #Haiti #Need Food #Contact: @childhopeintl #Loc: Delmas 75, Rue Cassagnol #14, PaP BLESS YOU
The Project Epic website has more details on the initiative here. This 'standard' of course is not a real one as it hasn't gone through all the ratification processes by formally recognised standards bodies yet, like many other examples, may become a defacto standard - one which the crowd actually intentionally uses. The Twitter hashtag itself and other elements of Twitter (eg DM, @ etc) are other great examples.
Now, it should be said that we use standards and specifications all the time without even knowing it - I wouldn't even be able to count or identify the number of standards in place to support the writing of this post for example - but I am not intentionally using all of them. Like many great standards they are just there, implemented somewhere in the background enabling me to post something that could be read almost instantly in almost any place in the world. However, in writing this post, I have only used two bits of a standard (I should say that for this post I am not distinguishing between a standard and a specification) intentionally and overtly - the rest are behind buttons etc in my wysiwyg HTML editor. They have been the italic tag and the break tag in HTML.
Back to the twitter tags, something has to be said about the willingness of the crowd to intentionally and quite willingly use those 'standardised' tags, and that is their simplicity and usability.
'Tweak the Tweet' looks like a great initiative and it will be interesting to see how it is adopted. In a disaster situation it will be interesting to see if those involved have the poise to remember its syntax when they are sending out their tweets. I guess the real use will be by applications that may be developed to support their use. They have been developed so that computer applications can easily interpret the tweets so we need applications that can support both the creation of the tweets and the reading of them (I feel an iPhone application coming on).
So now to the really important point of this post - how long has it taken to develop this 'standard'? Really it has happened 'in the blink of an eye' when compared to general standards development. Likewise with Twitter tags in general. The crowd is able to build consensus incredibly quickly when the need arises and as can be seen, it is quite good stuff. It is relevant, easy to use and can have amazing adoption rates. The RWW post even mentions the word 'metadata' - Amazing! Normally I would expect any standard or specification involving 'metadata' would take an age to develop. There are some important lessons to be learned here for standards developers. While many standards and specifications require enormous amounts of rigour and examination, it is interesting for us to look at what can be achieved in a very short period of time when the need arises and we have a motivated 'crowd'.

Filed under  //   Twitter   standards  

Twitter stats - do they influence you?

As an occasional user of Twitter every now and then I get a message in my email letting me know that someone is following me. If it's someone I know (ie have an existing relationship) I will generally follow them with out much further thought - after all it is someone that I already know either personally or via some social network. If I don't know them however, its interesting to look at how I seem to be deciding whether to follow them or not. The message from Twitter provides me with a link to their profile and also a little information about them - their Twitter name, a thumbnail of their picture, the number of followers they have, the number that follow them and also the number of tweets they have posted. Without going to their profile, this little amount of information seems to be a big factor on whether I follow them or not. Firstly, their name - if it is known by me eg a person, brand or company name then I can make an immediate decision on whether I am interested or not. Their picture also has an impact. Unless their name is known by me, I find myself unlikely to follow a picture of some obscure symbol/brand or other inanimate object. Twitter is a social tool and I am interested in people so a human face is likely to hold my interest for maybe a few more nanoseconds. Onto the statistics. Really if they are following over a thousand Twitterers and not many are following them, I am probably not even going to bother. The most I will do is just delete the message that they are following me. If they have thousands of followers you know that there is going to be very little personal communication however if they are a person who has a lot of credibility and who I am interested in, then they may be very worthwhile following - after all, they (or someone working on behalf of them) have started following me. If almost no-one is following them and they are following a very small number of people, I will check their profile out and give some serious consideration to following them. You never know, they may have some really interesting things to say and could just be getting started. The number of Tweets statistic seems to be less important to me at the moment. If there is hardly any then maybe they are just getting started. If there are thousands of them though, that is a bit of a warning to me. Which brings me to the sweet spot. I seem to be drawn to those who have up to a few hundred followers and who may be following a similar number of people. As an aside, I am also interested in the ratio between following and followers. Extremes in either direction don't seem right to me. The exception may be some sort of information/news feed that pushes out information that is really useful to me, which brings me onto news/information services. I still find it quite amusing how old-world media and journalists have joined the bandwagon - especially those that lambasted the social web not too long ago. Of course anything at all that identifies them as Web 2.0 marketing experts or anything similar just tells me to completely disregard them. Get rid of these and Twitter will be a better place. So... do Twitter statistics influence your decision making at all on who to follow in Twitter?

Filed under  //   Twitter  

Review 2.0?

My last post for the year in this blog and I'm going to keep it very brief. In the world of 2.0, I only have one comment this year and that's for this:

Media_httpblogseducat_mtdfv

What were they thinking? Looking back though I can't really think of too much that was really all that memorable. Probably for me Natal stood out above anything that I have come across. I like the way that a number of mobile platforms are going - it's good to see some competition for the iPhone/iPod Touch. Cheers, and all the best for the Christmas break (obviously using that term with a degree of hesitation now).

Filed under  //   general  

Google's view on ISP filtering

Maybe I should rename my blog to 'Google Watch' or something like that because I often find myself commenting on them. Anyway, here's their view on the proposed ISP filtering. My first reaction was it's great to see a measured response on what is a very heated subject for many. We seem to hear lots of views expressed about the Government's heavy handedness approach in this area and how its easy to play the child safety line (after all, who can possibly argue against that). Looking at Google's views though, without all the emotion that you see in other posts, it does seem that the government is going beyond that of other Western democracies. I just hope this isn't the thin end of the wedge. Education, as often stated, is the answer, not the type of regime that could find its way in if this approach is expanded.

Filed under  //   Google   Internet  

Google's real time search

Well it was only a matter of time really. Here's a nice video of Google'e real time search: In the past I have talked about searching the past and the present, drawing a distinction between traditional search engines,which basically crawl 'historical' content (even though it may have been created quite recently, and searches on services like Twitter, which capture what people are thinking or experiencing 'now' (or pretty dammed closed to it anyway). These services have highlighted a bit of a challenge to the old search engines but obviously one that the engineers etc over at Google were up for. Cheers

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Filed under  //   Google   search  

ePortfolio trademarked?

Not sure what this means but it seems that the University of Iowa has trademarked the term ePortfolio™. On their website they claim to have built the first eportfolio in 1996. I don't know if that is true or not but the following statement is certain to raise some interest and concern:

The College of Education designed the first ePortfolio™ in 1996 and The University of Iowa now holds the trademarks for the following terms: ePortfolio™, Digital BackPack™ and Cyber ToolBox™.
Now, as you can see the term ePortfolio in this instance has an italic red 'e' at the front. I am not sure if this is part of the trademark's definition or they have trademarked the word eportfolio. Some more information would be useful. At first glance, and without any further information, it seems quite worrying to me that someone would be doing this. The term digital backpack is one that I have heard quite often too. The other trademarked terms there do not seem to have colours/italics etc associated with them. ePortfolio is a generic term that is often used to describe an array of functionality and applications. A lot of time and effort has been spent in this area and I am wondering what the implications of this are for those who rely very heavily on the term. I wonder if this will finally stop me switching between the spellings eportfolio, ePortfolio and e-portfolio?

Filed under  //   eportfolio  

Searching the past and the present

Google's great as a search engine when it comes to the past but what about the present? I'm not simply talking about what you might find on Google News as they trawl through traditional media (eg newspaper) sites and link to articles that have appeared on those sites (quite recently) but more about what people are thinking and experiencing right now. When I want this sort of information I go to Twitter. This post from the Search Engine Watch blog covering the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco describes what Microsoft is up to in this area with Bing. Looks like they have signed deals with Twitter and Facebook. On the Twitter side of things, it seems that there will be a Bing Twitter search using information such as number of followers and retweets to help filtering. You might be able to check out the beta at http://www.bing.com/twitter/search. I tried and it didn't work - got a message saying 'Twitter search results not currently available' but at least you can look at some sort of Twitter tag cloud. On the Bing blog I think I found out the reason why - its only available in the USA at the moment. If so, the error message could have been a bit more helpful. When I first saw the SearchEngineWatch post I sort of jumped to the conclusion that the Twitter search results would be available in their general search but the Bing blog suggests that it is a separate interface just searching Twitter. If so, then I don't see what the big deal is as there are plenty of other ways to search Twitter.

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Filed under  //   search