Visualizing Touch Devices in Education

Took me a while before I watched this concept video about iPhone use on campus.

Connected: The Movie – Abilene Christian University

Sure, it’s a bit campy. Sure, some features aren’t available on the iPhone yet. But the basic concepts are pretty much what I had in mind.

Among things I like in the video:

• The very notion of student empowerment runs at the centre of it.
• Many of the class-related applications presented show an interest in the constructivist dimensions of learning.
• Material is made available before class. Face-to-face time is for engaging in the material, not rehashing it.
• The technology is presented as a way to ease the bureaucratic aspects of university life, relieving a burden on students (and, presumably, on everyone else involved).
• The “iPhone as ID” concept is simple yet powerful, in context.
• Social networks (namely Facebook and MySpace, in the video) are embedded in the campus experience.
• Blended learning (called “hybrid” in the video) is conceived as an option, not as an obligation.
• Use of the technology is specifically perceived as going beyond geek culture.
• The scenarios (use cases) are quite realistic in terms of typical campus life in the United States.
• While “getting an iPhone” is mentioned as a perk, it’s perfectly possible to imagine technology as a levelling factor with educational institutions, lowering some costs while raising the bar for pedagogical standards.
• The shift from “eLearning” to “mLearning” is rather obvious.
• ACU already does iTunes U.
• The video is released under a Creative Commons license.

Of course, there are many directions things can go, from here. Not all of them are in line with the ACU dream scenario. But I’m quite hope judging from some apparently random facts: that Apple may sell iPhones through universities, that Apple has plans for iPhone use on campuses,  that many of the “enterprise features” of iPhone 2.0 could work in institutions of higher education, that the Steve Jobs keynote made several mentions of education, that Apple bundles iPod touch with Macs, that the OLPC XOXO is now conceived more as a touch handheld than as a laptop, that (although delayed) Google’s Android platform can participate in the same usage scenarios, and that browser-based computing apparently has a bright future.

Advertisement

Edupunk Manifesto?

Noticed, just yesterday, that a number of unusual suspects of some online educational circles were using Edupunk as a way to identify a major movement toward openness in educational material. This video doesn’t “say it all” but it can help.

Changing Expectations

Like Lindsea, I wish more diverse voices were heard. Bakhtin FTW!

Unlike Lindsea, I don’t see it as mainly a generational thing or a “teacher vs. student” issue. In fact, I’m hoping that the social movements labelled by the term “edupunk” will move beyond those issues into a broader phenomenon.

The age/generation component is still interesting, to a Post-Buster like me. Baby Boomers are still the primary target of Punk. Lindsea even talks about Boomer classics:

Don’t you teachers remember when you were young? Hippies? Protesters? Implementers of change? Controllers of the cool, anti-establishment, nonconformist underground culture?

Baby Busters (the earlier part of the so-called “GenX”) have long been anti-Boomers. Not that everyone born during those years readily identify themselves with that “Generation.” But in terms of identity negotiation, the “Us/Them” often follows a concept of generational divide.

But I sincerely hope we can go way beyond age and generation. After all, there are learners of all ages, some of them older than their “teachers” (formally named or not).

Call me a teacher, if you really must. But, please, could we listen to diverse voices without labelling their sources?

CC Salon: Creative Community

[Apologies in advance for style. More of a straightforward write-up than my usual prose. Quite possibly, most people prefer this but I feel more comfortable rambling away than “reporting.”]

Went to Austin CC Salon last night. CC Salon is a series of events “focused on building a community of artists and developers around Creative Commons licenses.”

Creative Commons (CC) licenses are tools meant to help creators in maintaining some rights over the “content” they produce (music, text, video…) while avoiding the chilling effects caused by Copyright and the “culture of ownership.” Though the Creative Commons organization was founded by a tech-savvy law professor and CC licenses are a tech-savvy solution to a legal problem, the social and cultural implications behind CC reach far beyond technological and legal contexts.

Last night’s event was held at Café Caffeine, a community-focused café/venue which happens to be in my neighborhood. The same café is host to the Jelly in Austin co-working sessions.

So… What happened last night at Café Caffeine?

A stimulating and thought-provoking event, to be sure. Also an event which provided the kind of casual and open atmosphere that I find most conducive for thoughtful discussion. In other words, I felt that I really was among like-minded people, despite all sorts of differences in our experiences and our approaches to technology and society.

Some of the people involved in last night’s event:

• Rich Vázquez (also)
• Laura Carbonneau
• Chris McConnell
• Tom Brown
• Shannon Lucas
• David Neff

Neff presented The American Cancer Society‘s SharingHope.tv advocacy project and online video service. What made that site impressive, IMHO, was its adequate balance between message and technology. Such an important group as the American Cancer Society getting a high degree of geek cred. In some circles (including CC Salon, one would assume), it’s the best of both worlds.

Neff himself was remarkably enthusiastic, thoughtful, and level-headed in his approach to online video. Uncompromising in his dedication to the ACS mission and as poised as any developer can be in his approach to technological issues. In fact, Neff repeatedly referred to the importance of a respectful attitude toward users. And you could tell, from the way he talked about users, that he truly cares.

Neat!

For his part, Vázquez served as moderator and presented two online services meant to make it easy to find CC-licensed music online: Jamendo (a CC-friendly online music service with “pay what you want” compensation models) and CCMixter (mostly meant as a repository for remix-worthy samples).

In parallel to Vázquez’s presentation, mentions of several recent situations involving Copyright and Creative Commons licenses helped brush a clear picture of what the current “culture of ownership” implies.

But, again, what worked best for me went beyond what was said or even how it was said. My comfort level had more to do with a sense of belonging. Related to communitas. A community of experience, potentially the basis of a community of practice.

Overall, I hope CC Salon will become the basis for community building in Austin as elsewhere. Predictably, a significant portion of last night’s informal gathering was spent discussing legal, financial, and technical issues. But, clearly, these are people who are adept at crossing bridges in order to link people into actual communities.

Some random notes I took during and after CC Salon.

• Exposure to CC
  • Importance
  • Methods
    • QR-Codes for CC content
  • Possible outcomes
• Grassroots etiquette
  • Crowd’s shared values (not just “wisdom of crowds”)
  • Efficient in transition period
• CC in academia/education
  • Related to Open Access
  • Citation practice
  • Citation software and services (Zotero, RefWorks, Google Scholar)
  • Following links between references
  • Scholarship as “remixing”
• Random idea:
• CC musicians
  • Jams
    • Trying each other out
    • Playing together
    • Playful musicking
  • Shows/concerts/gigs
  • Band
  • Music community
    • Kalmunity-like?
• Mixing
  • Playful mixing
  • Audio editing (Pro Tools, Audition, Audacity…)
  • iLife GarageBand for CC?
  • Songbird for mixing?
  • CC loops
  • CC tracks
  • GB-like FLOSS project

Obvious Concept: Confidentiality (Draft)

In response to Émilie Pelletier, who replied to my previous post on “intimacy.” That previous post of mine wasn’t  well thought out and I hesitated before pushing the “Publish” button. But given Émilie’s thoughtful response, I’m glad I posted it. It makes for a somewhat more “interactive conversation” (!)  than the typical blogging session.

What seems in what I describe is that “social media” are about managing the way “content” is transmitted (on Twitter, YouTube, del.icio.us, Facebook, BitTorrent, LinkedIn…). In this sense, “social media” are quite easy to understand, even though the diversity of “social media” systems  available obscures this simplicity. Hence the cyclical discussions about what constitutes “Web 2.0” and what is coming next.

The “obvious concept” I was trying to describe in my previous is a simplified version of the concept of “intimacy” we all seem to have in mind. Émilie did a good job at describing important dimensions of intimacy in social life and I should address those later. Admittedly, my use of the term “intimacy” was quite confusing and not at all obvious. The concept I tried to describe seems to me rather obvious but it doesn’t make it easy to describe or name. I know, some people might jump at this and say that what is easy to understand must be easy to explain. Yet many concepts are rather easy to grasp and quite hard to explain, especially in a “one-way conversation” such as a blogpost.

Anyhoo.

“Intimacy” isn’t such a good word for what I meant. I didn’t want to use “privacy” because it’s being used for slightly different purposes, in those social media. I could have worked to define “privacy” more precisely but I thought the term itself would have prevented further discussion since “privacy” is so well-known, in “social media.” Again, I agree with Émilie that “intimacy” isn’t more accurate, but it seems to have worked in making people think. Nice!

Come to think of it, “confidentiality” would possibly work better. In these same social media (e.g, Facebook), «confidentialité» is the translation of “privacy” but there are differences between the two concepts. Putting “trust” and “confidant” in relation to “confidentiality” gets closer to the slightly more subtle transmission management I had in mind. Some items are shared “in private” based on a level of trust that nothing will leak out, neither the content nor the fact that content was transmitted. Other items can be shared through controlled (semi-private) channels with the intention of “spreading out” the item and making the transmission known. Quite frequently, such transmission is more effective at “becoming viral” because content is properly contextualized. The “contract” of any transmission of information has such rules embedded in them and “sharing content online” is simple enough a process to be formalized in these ways.
The other dimension we tend to embed in “online content transmission” is what’s often called “reputation” or “authority” in those same “social media.” Again, very simplified versions of what happens in communication broadly, but the simple social models work well in those simplified “social media.” The “receiver” of the content may trust the “sender” based on a series of simple criteria. Trained to think that we should never “trust information” based on the sender, I used to (and still) react negatively to notions of “trust,” “authority,” or “reputation.” Slashdot’s concept of “karma” seemed somewhat better at the time because it sets apart the social capital from a notion of “blind faith.” I now understand more clearly what role trust might play in receiving content, especially in preventing malware to spread or managing our concentration. Simplified, this concept of trust is only indirectly about the value of the content itself. It’s more about assessing the risks involved in the content transmission event. In other words, we should only open email attachments from  people we trust and, even then, we know there are risks involved in opening attachments.

So, going back to the obvious concept I’m circling around. What Facebook just did in terms of privacy controls  does seem to connect with what I have in mind. Not only can we group contacts but we can finally use these groups to manage how widely some content may be distributed. Neat and rather easy. But some dimensions could be added to make content transmission approximate a bit better the sophistication of social life. For instance, there could be ways to make intermediate receivers understand how widely the content can be “redistributed.” Is it “for your eyes only” or is it “please distribute to all like-minded people?” An easy step to take, here, would be to add a type of license-control reminiscent of Creative Commons, on user-generated content. There could be something about the original creator of the content (“I’m only posting this because I like, I don’t claim ownership”). Ratings, which are so common in “social media” could be added and fleshed out so that a creator could key her/his work in the right frame.

Ok, I’m rambling even more now than before. So I’ll leave this post as-is and see what happens.

No, I won’t even replace all those quotation marks or correct my mistakes. RERO.

Do with this post as you want. I’m just thinking out loud.  And laughing on the inside.