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  

Wikimedia to adopt Creative Commons Licence

The Wikimedia Foundation has just announced important changes to its licensing regime. The Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License will be used to "support greater interoperability and re-usability of Wikimedia content. The current GNU Free Documentation License will continue to be supported." The full press release is published on the Wikimedia Foundation website here. In essence:

All Wikimedia content can be used for any purpose, as long as proper credit is given and modifications are made available under the same terms. This open access approach to copyright is supported using a license which explicitly grants everyone those freedoms. The decision will result in all of the Wikimedia Foundation's projects moving from the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) to the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License (CC-BY-SA) as their primary content license. The GFDL, which has served Wikipedia since its inception, will continue to be supported where possible, but not to the detriment of interoperability.
I guess this simplifies things for supporters and users of open content. The original licensing was geared more towards licensing software and so not 100% compatible with the content on Wikipedia. Creative Commons wasn't around when it started up so I suppose this would have been the best option available that was inline with the creators philosophies and views on content. How does this fit in with your own views on content or the way you work/teach/learn? Are you allowed to use or recognise the value of open content and how to use it? Apparently Wikimedia has over 6 million articles across it sites which will make a nice addition to the 160 million or so CC licensed resources that are already out there. Used with an understanding of how to assess the validity/accuracy etc of content, open content seems like a good thing to have at your disposal.

Filed under  //   Creative Commons   Web 2.0  
Posted May 25, 2009

letting the world know where you are/another nail in the privacy coffin

yet another great service from Google - Google Latitude. Using it, your friends etc can know where you are at any time. You can have your location updated automatically or you can set it manually (great for those who need to be in two places at once!). Of course its all opt-in and Google has paid quite a bit of attention to privacy etc. It runs on your mobile and to a limited extent, on your computer - it seems you can manually set your location in the iGoogle widget. Anyway, here's where I am:

Media_httpblogseducat_pfcoj
Of course Google aren't the only ones that offer this type of service or recognise the privacy challenges and marketing challenges related to that. The ubiquitous nature of Google makes it hard to ignore though. Cheers, Jerry. update: when I installed it on my phone I actually read the terms and conditions - scary stuff! (note - I did the highlighting)
July 4, 2008 Mobile Terms of Service By using Google's mobile products and services ("Services"), you: 1.  Agree to be bound by these terms and a) the YouTube Terms of Use (m.google.com/tos_youtube) for YouTube-related Services, b) the Google Maps Terms and Conditions (m.google.com/tos_maps) for mapping, local and location-based Services, and c) the Google Terms of Service (m.google.com/utos) for all other Services, as updated from time to time. You may use the Services only as set forth in these agreements. Do not use while driving. 2.  Acknowledge and agree that third parties may offer Services, and that you may be subject to third party terms and that third parties may enforce terms against you. Google is not responsible for third party changes to the Services. 3.  Consent to the collection, use, sharing, and onward transfer of your data, including but not limited to voice and location data, as outlined in the Mobile Privacy Policy (m.google.com/privacy). Location data may be from mixed sources and may not be accurate. Use at your own risk. 4.  Acknowledge that certain Services require phone service, data access or text messaging capability. Except as otherwise noted, Google does not charge for the Services, but carrier rates for phone, data and text messaging may apply. The Services may contain third party content.  Any required attribution or notice for the third party content may be found at www.google.com/m/legalnotices.> Still pondering whether or not to accept these terms.

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Filed under  //   Web 2.0   privacy  

both the old and the new adapting to change

Interesting to see in the news feeds today stories on Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia both facing challenges to improve their accuracy. This article from Techtree reports on Britannica inviting online collaboration from both their expert contributors and the public to keep its reference material updated. More detail can be found at Britannica's blog. At the same time Wikipedia is facing challenges of its own and as this article from Times Online suggests, is considering 'pre-approval of changes' on biographies of living persons following recent problems. The potential for inefficiencies and delays is causing some concern however Wikipedia to ensure it meets its obligations to avoid gossip, defamatory material etc.

Filed under  //   Web 2.0   Wikipedia  

from the JISC: IP rights in a Web 2.0 world

Nice work again from the JISC. This time on IP rights in a Web 2.0 world. There's a great animation explaining rights from three different perspectives and a free diagnostic tool nicely licensed using CC of course!

Filed under  //   IP   Web 2.0  

Social Media explained

Looking for ways to explain what social networking, Twitter, podcasting etc is all about? Commoncraft do a great job of this with simple, cartoon like videos where they manipulate paper cutouts and a voice over using clear, plain English. Here's one on social media:
Social Media in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo. CommonCraft offer a number of free to use videos from their commoncraft show as well as licensed videos that you can purchase. They do a really great job of explaining concepts that might be complex to some, in a really simple easy to understand manner.

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Filed under  //   Web 2.0  
Posted June 3, 2008

do you have time for social networking?

Here's a great article aimed at people working in museums but I am sure it's just as interesting for anyone working in any cultural institutions or really, anyone with an interest in social networking in general. Written by Nina Simon, 'How much time does Web 2.0 take' looks at what you might be able to accomplish through social networking based on the amount of time you can devote to it per week. Have a read and work out if you are a participant, a content provider or a community director. There are some great suggestions in here on how you could promote your institution online and help those seeking information or trying to discover you.

Filed under  //   Web 2.0  

Powerhouse Museum collection on Flickr

From the Powerhouse Museum comes the news that they have joined the Commons on Flickr. From their website:

"The Powerhouse Museum is the first museum in the world to release publicly-held historical photographs for access on Flickr, one of the largest online photo communities in the world. The Museum joins the world’s largest photo library, the US Library of Congress, which released its first photos for public access on Flickr in January this year."
This means that there will be some fantastic historical photo collections from them posted up on Flickr. Rights associated with them are easily understood and whats more, they have geo-tagged many of the photos so that you can view them on a map. The mapping service is the Yahoo! one - I had a look and while the satellite imagery is great, the map itself didn't have much detail but I guess that will come. Users are encouraged to tag and comment on the photos and that information will ultimately be fed back into the collection records. Another great initiative  from the Powerhouse Museum!

Filed under  //   Web 2.0  
Posted April 9, 2008

Good practice guidelines for social network providers

The Home Office in the UK has just release a report entitled 'Good practice guidance for the providers of social networking and other user interactive services 2008'. It's probably a must read for providers of social networking services and many others. Educators and parents should all find something of interest in it. Part 1 of the report provides some background information on social networking and some of the potential dangers for younger people such as bullying, self-harm and other threats. Part 2 makes some recommendations for good practice while Part 3 provides some safety tips. Although a UK report, the Australian Communications and Media Authority had a role in its development so those of us in Australia should at least have a read to see where ACMA's current thinking is on this really important issue.

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Filed under  //   Web 2.0  
Posted April 7, 2008