Dave’s Educational Blog

Community Curriculum - eight days into the course.

July 16, 2008 – 11:24 pm

I thought I might contribute the the we are media project by making a reflection on my current teaching practice. I’ve spent most of the last two weeks working on “educational technology and the adult learner” a course being delivered to education students here on PEI. The course had no existing curriculum and it gave me a real chance to take a run at actually making the curriculum come out of the community interactions that were happening in the classroom. I’ll be making a series of reflections on this, tonight, an overview of goals.

There were three main goals that I was hoping for from the course… all hoping to change the focus from ‘the material’ to the ‘experience’.

A Reverse Curriculum
An archival record of learning directed, organized and created by the students… there was no other curriculum outside of the sketch syllabus posted in my last post, much of which was layed aside as community interests moved us to more natural ground. The reason i like to think of this as a reverse curriculum is that it tends to develop out of the interests that the students show during the course and they get to record and create the material as part of their daily practice. It is part creative zone, part class note record and part review space. The constant revisitation of the material for sorting, upkeep and improvement also serves to reinforce the material.

This also means that the students are, in effect, creating the work in the classroom with a specific audience in mind. Them. Six months from now. The students were repeatedly encouraged that they would forget some part of the work they were doing and that their inclass ‘book building’ (drupal book… essentially a wiki) should be directed at themselves, months from now, coming up with an idea and needing to be reminded of it. It’s also been a really nice live model of the pros and cons of live co-creation of knowledge.

One deep skill per student
Over the course of the uh… course, we’ve covered all of the standard issues, tools and strategies in the social software and desktop technology space that can support learning (list in forthcoming post with more details on curricular content), but, instead of expecting broad based reportable knowledge on each of these skills each learner was responsible for finding something new during the first week of the intensive course (ostensibly that they hadn’t heard of before) and present it to the class in week two. Students were very strongly encouraged to teach us ‘in context’ and prepare the material in such a way as to give us a clear sense of the context that they were writing from. This serves a variety of purposes

1. The literacies that are learned from searching, learning and presenting a tool/strategy/method in a short period of time with only a community and the internet to lean on are critical to life long learning
2. The first attempt at delivering this kind of content can lead people back to ‘old habits’ and a classroom can be a safe place to try new delivery methods.
3. One deep skill, well understood, is more likely to inspire the confidence that the other three things you might have seen during the class are also adoptable when they become necessary in your practice

Community Literacies esp. Community commitment
Maybe the most important part of the of a course like this are the community literacies that are accumulated through a community enquiry into new material. The learners found that they could work together and rely on each other. They wrote nightly reflections and commented and helped each other with their work and reactions to the course. the sense of ‘competition’ between students evaporated. A sense of responsibility to the work at hand became stronger as the students found less and less direct guidance coming from the front of the room.

They also got a sense of how I relate with my own online community and how that serves me in my own professional and, indeed, personal ways. Knowing that we have a community to rely on can be as much an emotional support to our practice as a technical one. Each student has remarked, in one sense or another, how their nightly blogging (closed, sadly) has allowed them to understand that they weren’t alone in their moments of frustration or overwhelmedness. Thinking of your professional life as something that can contain a community that can do all those things can be a very powerful realization.

What we didn’t do.
What we did not focus on was outlining the ‘takeaways’ that students needed to bring out of the course itself, at least, not in a communal sense. There was a palapable sense from the first day that the students themselves came from very different backgrounds and any focus on particular outcomes outside of the somewhat ephemeral ones stated above lead to the kind of co-depency and artificial structure that tend to be superimposed on the learning process in order to bureaucratize it.

In a very real sense, each of those students will be taking a very different set of takeaways from this course, related to what they themselves put in, how they contributed to the community and where they are going to take those new literacies when they go back to their own professional practice.

There was no guided step by step instruction from me. All learning happened by suggestion, and mostly with modelling and contextualization after the fact. A rather jarring way to learn, but by the second week, the learners were willing to tackle any new task with no real prompting.

More on the specific breakdown of actual curriculum covered and ‘class leadership’ concepts that evolved in future posts.

Most useful thing I said during the course? READ THE PAGE. The students use it as a talisman for confusion, the stop, they breathe, and try again. Just an amazing group to spend two weeks with.

Posted in rhizomes | 8 Comments »

Community as curriculum a syllabus (starts tomorrow)

July 7, 2008 – 1:12 am

Here’s the syllabus for the course i start tomorrow morning. It’s my first shot at what a community curriculum course might look like. It takes into account some of the realities (moodle and angel are the prevaling course management systems on the island) tries to bridge traditional learning and then hand the learning over to the student by the second week.

The syllabus is pretty much out of date as soon as I post it, as I’ll be tinkering with it, and adjusting it to the feedback of the students and my own experiences in the course. I would, therefore, LOVE some feedback from you folks to help refine where i can. 2 week course, 10 3 1/2 hour sessions, 27 students, educators (and, I guess, educators to be) across many different professions.

Welcome to Educational Technology and the Adult Learner.

This is a course comprised of adult learners looking to acquire and refine skills directed toward teaching future adult learners. Key to this course is the concept of networking, in the community sense rather than the technological. Each of you in this class will be a primary part of your classmates’ curriculum and learning experience. In a world where technologies change very quickly and what is new or current is always fluid, a focus on ideas about technologies and strategies for drawing on and collating resources is more sustainable than an emphasis on teaching mastery of any specific technologies.

Therefore, while a sufficient quantity of tools, training and tricks will be presented to satisfy the technophile, this course is an exploration of what the technology can facilitate, educationally and professionally. It is only through the use of new technologies that certain kinds of knowledge building and community-based learning can occur, and these are the specific literacies that are emphasized in this course. The goals of learning to approach and assess new technologies on the fly, and to utilize Web 2.0 skills to filter the mass of ‘newness’ and focus in on the applications that will most satisfy a learner/educator’s curricular goals will also be primary.

The course is broken down into two major sections; week 1 and week 2. The first week is focused on group work and research. Learners will be expected to explore three different learning platforms/environments and both evaluate the systems and produce learning materials that will work in each one. Week 2 will focus almost entirely on ‘community curriculum’, wherein learners will research and present one learning object that is relevant to their own environment, and classsmates will be required to respond and interact with those pieces.

Community Grading Rubric

Personal Learning Plan - Students must submit an eportfolio (My Work - top of website page) and will be assessed on their ability to complete a personal learning plan developed during the course. This portfolio will include reflective blog posts as well as upkeep of the (My Planning Page - top of website page) with relevant acquired literacies.

Course participation and Group Work - Students are responsible for responding to the work of other students (Reflections for review - top of website page), specifically commenting on reflective posts and commenting on their learning object plan. They are also responsible for the learning objects created by the group during the first week of the course.

Community as Curriculum project plan - Students are responsible for choosing one educational technology tool, technological method, or community plan and developing a project plan for including it in their own practice that includes a learning object as well as the reasoning for its inclusion in their own context. This will be then be presented in a ten minute presentation to the class. All materials will be released creative commons so that all students can use this material in their classes.

Community Curriculum

When dealing with a discipline where knowledge is a moving target, or where differing ideas of what is good or best practice can co-exist quite comfortably, it can be very helpful to use the community of learners itself as the curriculum.

This is especially true of the field of educational technology. What may be ‘true’ or ‘current’ in one year might be entirely outdated and left behind in the next. Every day new best practices are developed and new efforts are made to push the envelope a little further. The traditional reaction to this is to try and ‘keep current’ with all the work that is going on. This is, however, a mistake. They key is to find a community of trusted people from whom to learn, and to whom you can contribute.

This course is designed to simulate and, hopefully, emulate this form of curriculum building and model these life long learning skills. Each student will be responsible for contributing to the curriculum, and for participating in the development of other student’s work.

Day 1 - Self Assessment, goal setting and ‘helper tools’

The purpose of the first day of classes will be to take a good look at our existing practice. We need to identify ‘transparent technologies’ in the classroom and make a distinction between these and the helper technologies that we will be employing to keep track of information and work throughout our course. Goal is to get students to set objectives for themselves.

Introduction

1. Introduction to the general concepts of ‘educational technology and the adult learner.’
2. Personal Learning Plan and the community rubric.
3. Personal reflective responses.

Activity - Tagging ourselves - paper edition

DIscussion - Groups - What literacies do we need?

Activity - Tagging ourselves - digital edition

Outputs - First draft of personal learning plan, groups selected, tagging explored, first reflection written.

Didactic pieces by dave. (time dependent)

tagging - connecting the pieces.

Structure - All collaborative work comes down to whether the ’structure’ is working. Fantastic work by students and instructors can easily be lost by not taking 30 seconds to consider where your work fits into the whole.

Goal Setting

As this community of learners that makes up this course will necessarily be at different levels of experience in teaching generally and the facilitation and use of technologies in particular, it is necessary for each student to chart out their own learning path through the course. It is also the responsibility of their colleagues to help them with advice and to learn from different people’s goals.

We will each fill out a “Learning Plan” which will include a variety of goals that the individual student will be attempting to achieve during the course of this course, and, at the end, what goals they might set for themselves as they leave the course.
Helper Tools

Del.icio.us - This tool will allow us to share a variety of tools and websites while we are working our way through internet research. It will also keep a record for you of the websites that you visited during the course.

Skype - is an instant messaging and VOIP (voice over IP) tool that allows for a variety of community style interactions. It can be essential for getting information quickly.

Google - Seems silly maybe, but effective use of google can find the answer to most any question

Technorati - And when google doesn’t seem to get you the answer, try the blogs. There is a huge educational technology blogosphere… use them.

flickr - Photos are great, and a tool like flickr can bring alot to a classroom. Having students take digital snapshots of busted engines might seem strange, but its a great record keeping tool.

youtube etc… - video sites can be a great resource for training materials.

Screencasts - I think this might be the most useful teaching tool available to the educator when dealing with technology.

This Website - See some things missing, like blogging and wikis… they are included in the course website, I decided to go that way because I’m comfortable with this technology. Comfort is important.

pageflakes - Just to illustrate the possibilities outside this website, I’ve included a pageflakes page that will aggregate the course content as well.

Self Assessement

Self Assessment is a critical part of any fruitful learning experience. It is necessary to understand what tools we bring to the table before we take the time and effort necessary to develop a new set of literacies. It’s important to remember that this should not only include ‘technical literacies’ which, while important, are often not as critical as teaching skills, organizational skills, the ability to focus on a task or any other of the myriad of skills that professionals acquire and perfect over the course of their careers.

Day 2 - Community Learning

Learning to use educational technologies in a vacuum, that is, without the value of a filtering community is very difficult. What most successful educational technologists are doing is finding communities of educators with like interests, and learning from them. Choose groups for formal educational project.

Didactic pieces by dave.

Blogging - An introduction to blogging, both as a useful source of knowledge and as a way of creating effective community.

Rhizomatic Knowledge and Connectivism - How curriculum can be formed when things are changing quickly.

Day 3 - Moodle

Moodle is a content management system and more specifically a Virtual Learning Environment, a Learning Content Management System and a Course Management System. There are other names for it, but, suffice it to say, it stores your courses online. It is open source and free to download and install on any given server that you can find. Our moodle course http://moodle.upei.ca/course/view.php?id=585 Moodle planning.

Didactic pieces by dave.

Discussion Forums - Discussion forums (aka bulletin board system, threaded discussions) can be a very effective participation tool. Students can be given a variety of different power situations and it can be used for a variety of ‘process’ tasks.

Wikis - Wikis can be used for many different things, from schedule building to creating online resource repositories.

Setting of objectives.

1. Create an audience for the exercise

2. create exercise in moodle

Day 4 - Angel

Our Angel Sandbox http://sam.hollandcollege.com/section/default.asp?id=dave_cormier_s_sandbox

ANGEL’s web-based teaching and learning tools allow educators to Get Perspective on student performance, Take Action to interact and intervene, and See Results of student achievement.

We will be approaching Angel with much the same plan as the one we had for Moodle. The intent will be to assess the ways in which the learning management systems are similar and to discover ways in which general strategies can be applied to any learning scenario.

Didactic pieces by dave.

Reading the page - Learning to use software can often be as simple as reading the text that is on the page. Most professional software systems have that information present… too often left unread.

Doing it Live - There are a variety of reasons to have syncronous or asynchronous sections to a course. Live chat, streaming and twitter can be helpful, but sometimes giving people the time to think is essential.

Day 5 - Evaluating tools and projects (day 2 - day 4)

Throughout this week we will have evaluated and created learning resources using two content management systems as well as explored the idea of online community learning. The groups will spend this day creating learning reflections and solidifying the work that was done in the three platforms into a definitive format for the learning portfolios. 2 modules

Day 6 - Community learning and Community Curriculum 1

The first part of this day will be to reflect on the work from the week before. We will then spend considerable time preparing for incorporating the community curriculum project. The instructor will present his two last contextualized pieces, and the students will model and discuss various productive ways of engaging with the prsentation in preparation for the student presentations for the rest of the week. The first few students who are prepared to present this day should present in the second half of the class.

Day 7 Cool Tools and Community Curriculum 2

This day will start with a whirwind tour of some of the more cutting edge tools available for teaching. The Openhabitat project and the living archives project will be featured prominently as well as some potential use cases from a variety of educational contexts.

Day 8 Teacher Stories and Community Curriculum 3

Several educational professionals from different contexts will be invited to present (via skype) to the class. Jennifer Maddrell has just completed teaching a 24 hour course with transit tranining authorities for the State of New York. There are many literacies that can only be acquired through experience, the purpose of this class will be to explore and catalogue those experiences wherever possible.

Day 9 Special Issues and Community Curriculum 4

There are a variety of ’special issues’ that will no doubt be referenced a various point throughout the course but will be covered in more detail during this class. They include internet security, creative commons licensing and adapating for learners with a disability.

Day 10 Bridging to the future and Community Curriculum 5

The first part of this class will be taken up by the remainder of the community curriculum presentation. The remainder will involve reflecting on the work that was done, a review of the planning page to examine what literacies were acquired and to develop strategies to maintain as many of those literacies as possible.

Posted in rhizomes | 3 Comments »

Be the Media - Being a critical friend and community participation

June 30, 2008 – 11:42 pm

I sent a skype over to Beth Kanter after having read about the Be the Media project over at her blog.

The Be The Media Project is a community of people from nonprofits who are interested in learning and teaching about how social media strategies and tools can enable nonprofit organizations to create, compile, and distribute their stories and change the world.

It’s a very interesting network knowledge building project and I told her after half a heartbeat that I would love to be able to tag along for the ride in whatever way possible. She asked that I be a ‘critical friend’ for the project… see here, here and here for some ideas about what some people think this means.

I’ve managed the first part of the commitment to being a critical friend, I’ve reviewed the planning and worked my way through the ideas that are there… all the more convinced that this is a really cool project. We’ve tried this kind of thing at Edtechtalk before… i have very fond memories of the ‘live barnstorming’ session from a few years ago when we tried to create a new media curriculum, live, in a wiki. I’ve since been in any number of community builds. Some have worked very well… and others have been less successful.

Critical friend contribution - two questions.

How are you contributing to people’s feelings of ‘responsibility’ to the knowledge creation process?
The biggest thing that I work for in my social communities, and look for in community partners is their ability to invest their own sense of responsibility into the work that they are involved in. Much of our societies/y’s generally tends to sell their sense of responsibility for money or praise, or to a communal normality like common space or blood. There is a very strong sense of hierarchy in these kinds of community with parental kinship relationships, medieval manorial/manager interactions and expert/novice associations filling much of the interaction space.

A community based responsibility model can explode many of those power structures, and find people moving to take over the tasks that need to be done, and taking ownership to both change things they think need changing, log and tag those changes in case the majority thinks they need to be reversed or thrown into a parallel contruct, and make the necessary connections between one bit of knowledge/information and another to create that magic rhizome soup.

But this works best when people feel a clean responsibility to the work at hand. There is a good start there with the personal profile ‘what module would you most like to contribute to’ section. I think the transition between voluteerism there and action by the leadership team is crucial.

What are your thoughts about the lifespan of your knowledge creation?

One of the critical thoughts that went into the community as curriculum article that Beth mentioned in a blog post last week was that the when the community is the curriculum knowledge must always be emerging. It is constantly in flux and only by aggregating and assessing the community in real time, with constant new connections and renewed re-evaluation can the curriculum stay ‘current’. It is through an assessment of those ties, and those trust relationships, in addition to the ‘does it work for me now in this context’ practical evaluation that knowledge gets assessed.

For this project… how is the knowledge going to be nourished? Is there a sense in which you are thinking about some bits being ‘higher level’ maybe longer lasting bits and other bits being more transient bits. Some pieces being jumping off points and others being destinations.
In a sense I’m talking about curation… but not in the sense of antiquities… it’s an inverse curator… instead of one person with deep knowledge keeping old things old, it is many curators with wide knowledge keeping the new things juggled to the front. tags. tags. tags. tags. Man do i love tags in wikis. Particular community contributed tags. The more the community is involved in the tagging process… the more depth to the knowledge connections.

if that makes sense.

And, if you’ve made it down here… do check out the excellent wiki orientation.

Thanks very, very much for having me on this journey.

Posted in Be The Media Project, rhizomes | No Comments »

Opensim/Drupal integration for education - proposal and call for help

June 24, 2008 – 11:05 pm

Well… i’m finally getting my teeth back into opensim and finding that there are a couple of things i’d like to get built over the next couple of months. We’ve already gotten a good start on the automated installer for opensim, but what i’d really like to do now is attempt an integration with drupal. I’ll be keeping my running requirements list for that integration on the openhabitat project page and will hopefully pop a few updates into here from time to time.

What I need
I need two things.

1. I need a good drupal/opensim programmer. Someone familiar with both platforms who can spearhead the drupal integration (or, if you like opensim integration).
2. I need some sense that there are other folks in the British Higher Education community who would find this integration compelling for an application to the emerge community for extra funding.

Why would we need this?
Opensim is an opensource Multi User Virtual Environment. It allows you to have much of the functionality from something like Second Life, and you can host it on any server you like, or, if you like, on a desktop in your classroom. The one issue, is that if you would like to tinker with it a little, you currently pretty much have to do it from the command line on the server. What I would like to see is an integration with a content management system (my preference is drupal, but the code could easily be repurposed) so that a teacher can do stuff like track users and install different ‘presets’ for training purposes.

Why would we need this — slightly more technical explanation.
There are currently two flavours of opensim, the ‘grid server’ and the ’standalone server’. My work with opensim over the last 9 months has led me to believe that the standalone server is far better scaled to the average educational use… but, sadly, much of the work towards creating a user interface has tended to side with the larger grid server installations. Standalones are more manageable, and provide an easier entry point for the ‘average’ person and really allow for alot more functionality.

so… if you’re interested and interested British Higher Ed person (I’m looking at you emerge community or anyone else for that matter) … just send a comment here and I’ll pick up your email address and get back to you. Same goes for if you are that drupal/opensim person out there. If you don’t want your comment posted, no worries, just indicate in the title, and I’ll delete it after getting your email address.

Posted in habitat, opensim | 6 Comments »

Openhabitat Opensim

June 19, 2008 – 9:32 am

Well… time to put rhizomes aside for a bit and move onto working on some of the other interesting projects that I’m privileged enough to be involved in. It’s been quite a spring really… my partner has been on bedrest for the past 13 weeks, and with conferences and projects and writing I really haven’t had much space to think…

I’ve spoken about openhabitat in the context of how I find it interesting as a knowledge node, but not so much as a project. Basically, there are two courses being taught at two English universities using Multi User Virtual Environments (MUVEs)

The project will generate solutions to the challenges of teaching, learning and collaboration in MUVEs. These solutions will be primarily in the form of guidelines, models and exemplars but will also be supported by the development/appropriation of software tools and services in and around the MUVEs themselves.

My main role in the process is to support the opensim side of the equation. Opensim is an opensource MUVE server that allows folks to have their own MUVE installed on their own server thus sidestepping some of the downtime and money-for-upload issuesassociated with some of the commercial servers as well as having local installations that can be installed inside school firewalls and, indeed, on each computer in a computer lab.

I have a couple of development goals that I would like to get accomplished during the course of this project. 1. I’d like to be able to finalize a ‘plug and play’ version of the server. Something that can be put into any computer and simply start up a server. We have a version of it now, but… well… it’s not too terribly reliable. 2. I’d like to get some version of a server installed on a USB drive. This would allow for the ultimate in portability, a personal world that you could take and move from your home to the classroom, without the need of supporting a server. 3. I’d like to create a preinstallable ‘distribution’ of opensim that had the training for opensim built into it. It could be the started version that you would load up if you had a new group of folks that needed to learn about opensim and then you could simply dump that version when you were ready to start working on your own world.

For now, I’ve set up a little sandbox for people in the community to drop into an opensim world and see what it’s all about. I’ll include the ’superfast’ instructions and then add some of the other options at the bottom. There are a variety of ways of doing this… see

To get into my opensim with existing Second Life client
1. Find the shortcut to your secondlife client on your desktop (either on your desktop or in your second life client) right click on it and click ‘properties’
2. Change the Target: to “C:\Program Files\SecondLife\SecondLife.exe” -loginuri http://openhabitat.org:9000 and Apply and OK
3. Lauch client using shortcut button you just changed
4. The temporary creds are ‘user’ ‘one’ ‘password’ (five users… user one user two user three) but i hope to do away with those in the next week (email me for username and passwords instructions after this) Also, if you need more instruction getting in, feel free to do the same.

Looking forward to digging in

Posted in habitat, opensim | 1 Comment »

Rhizomatic Education : Community as Curriculum

June 3, 2008 – 10:08 am

Below is my paper as it appears in Innovate - Journal of Online Education. Many, many thanks to the fine folks there for all their help.

The truths of which the masses now approve are the very truths that the fighters at the outposts held to in the days of our grandfathers. We fighters at the outposts nowadays no longer approve of them; and I do not believe there is any other well-ascertained truth except this, that no community can live a healthy life if it is nourished only on such old marrowless truths.

The increasingly transitory nature of what is lauded as current or accurate in new and developing fields, as well as the pace of change in Western culture more broadly, has made it difficult for society in general and education in particular to define what counts as knowledge. The existing educational model with its expert-centered pedagogical planning and publishing cycle is too static and prescribed to accommodate the kind of fluid, transitory conception of knowledge that is necessary to understand the simplest of Web-based concepts. The ephemeral nature of the Web and the rate at which cutting-edge knowledge about it and on it becomes obsolete disrupts the painstaking process by which knowledge has traditionally been codified. Traditional curricular domains are based on long-accepted knowledge, and the "experts" in those domains are easily identified by comparing their assertions with the canon of accepted thought (Banks 1993); newer concepts, whether in technology, physics, or modern culture, are not easily compared against any canon. This lack of a center of measurement for what is "true" or "right" makes the identification of key pieces of knowledge in any of these fields a precarious task. In less-traditional curricular domains then, knowledge creators are not accurately epitomized as traditional, formal, verified experts; rather, knowledge in these areas is created by a broad collection of knowers sharing in the construction and ongoing evolution of a given field. Knowledge becomes a negotiation (Farrell 2001).

Knowledge as negotiation is not an entirely new concept in educational circles; social contructivist and connectivist pedagogies, for instance, are centered on the process of negotiation as a learning process. Neither of these theories, however, is sufficient to represent the nature of learning in the online world. There is an assumption in both theories that the learning process should happen organically but that knowledge, or what is to be learned, is still something independently verifiable with a definitive beginning and end goal determined by curriculum.

A botanical metaphor, first posited by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1987), may offer a more flexible conception of knowledge for the information age: the rhizome. A rhizomatic plant has no center and no defined boundary; rather, it is made up of a number of semi-independent nodes, each of which is capable of growing and spreading on its own, bounded only by the limits of its habitat (Cormier 2008). In the rhizomatic view, knowledge can only be negotiated, and the contextual, collaborative learning experience shared by constructivist and connectivist pedagogies is a social as well as a personal knowledge-creation process with mutable goals and constantly negotiated premises. The rhizome metaphor, which represents a critical leap in coping with the loss of a canon against which to compare, judge, and value knowledge, may be particularly apt as a model for disciplines on the bleeding edge where the canon is fluid and knowledge is a moving target.

On Knowledge

A clear definition of the word "knowledge" is difficult yet key to any search for shared understanding. Indeed, as Hinchley (1998) notes, "Like other cultural assumptions, the definition of ‘knowledge’ is rarely explicitly discussed because it has been so long a part of the culture that it seems a self-evident truth to many, simply another part of the way things are" (36). However, the concept of knowledge is fluid and subject to cultural and historical forces (Exhibit 1); as Horton and Freire (1990) argue, "If the act of knowing has historicity, then today’s knowledge about something is not necessarily the same tomorrow. Knowledge is changed to the extent that reality also moves and changes. . . . It’s not something stabilized, immobilized" (101). The word itself is thought to have multiple origins, drawing from forms of "to know," "to recognize," and the Old Icelandic knà, meaning "I can." The combination of these origins suggests a relationship of knowledge, power, and agency that is grounded in both the social and the political spheres. Knowledge represents “positions from which people make sense of their worlds and their place in them, and from which they construct their concepts of agency, the possible, and their own capacities to do” (Stewart 2002, 20).

Information is the foundation of knowledge. The information in any given field consists of facts and figures, such as may be found in the technical reference manuals of learning; in a nonrhizomatic model, individual experts translate information into knowledge through the application of checks and balances involving peer review and rigorous assessment against a preexisting body of knowledge. The peers and experts are themselves vetted through a similar sanctioning process that is the purview, largely, of degree-granting institutions. This process carries the prestige of a thousand-year history, and the canon of what has traditionally been considered knowledge is grounded in this historicity as a self-referential set of comparative valuations that ensure the growth of knowledge by incremental, verified, and institutionally authorized steps. In this model, the experts are the arbiters of the canon. The expert translation of data into verified knowledge is the central process guiding traditional curriculum development.

Changing Knowledge

New communication technologies and the speeds at which they allow the dissemination of information and the conversion of information to knowledge have forced us to reexamine what constitutes knowledge; moreover, it has encouraged us to take a critical look at where it can be found and how it can be validated. The explosion of freely available sources of information has helped drive rapid expansion in the accessibility of the canon and in the range of knowledge available to learners. Online access to thousands of primary documents may be provided via the Internet for less than it costs to provide far fewer examples in a traditional textbook package (Rosenzweig 2003). In addition to this increased accessibility of primary documents, a new breed of user-generated content has emerged on collaborative Web sites and in other online venues. Web sites such as EdTechTalk, The Webcast Academy, and the Open Habitat Project collate the work of a variety of professionals to create snapshots of the knowledge of a particular field as it is seen at a given time (Cormier 2008).

Thus the foundations upon which we are working are changing as well as the speed at which new information must be integrated into those foundations. The traditional method of expert translation of information to knowledge requires time: time for expertise to be brought to bear on new information, time for peer review and validation. In the current climate, however, that delay could make the knowledge itself outdated by the time it is verified (Evans and Hayes 2005; Meile 2005). In a field like educational technology, traditional research methods combined with a standard funding and publication cycle might cause a knowledge delay of several years. In the meantime, learners are left without a canonical source of accepted knowledge, forcing a reliance on new avenues for knowledge creation. For instance, a researcher exploring social software use must rely at least in part on online knowledge repositories because current information on the terminology used in these areas is simply not available in any exhaustive or definitive form in books or peer-reviewed articles (Nichol 2007). Information is coming too fast for our traditional methods of expert verification to adapt.

In fields frequently affected by the gatekeeping practices of the traditional publishing industry, professionals in fields such as the science of spectroscopy are turning to online community learning spaces or collaborative document holders such as wikis. The wiki, or any collaboratively constructed document for that matter, solves a number of issues inherent to the expert-driven model as it has the capacity to be more current than any expert-assessed content package or traditional publication can usually be. Wikis and similar tools offer a participatory medium that can allow for communal negotiation of knowledge.

Collaborative knowledge construction is also being taken up in fields that are more traditionally coded as learning environments. In particular, social learning practices are allowing for a more discursive rhizomatic approach to knowledge discovery. Social learning is the practice of working in groups, not only to explore an established canon but also to negotiate what qualifies as knowledge. According to Brown and Adler (2008), "The most profound impact of the Internet, an impact that has yet to be fully realized, is its ability to support and expand the various aspects of social learning" (18). Several communities on the Internet offer some idea of what can be accomplished in a participatory social learning environment where knowledge is being negotiated (Exhibit 2). Social learning is particularly valuable in fields where the parameters of knowledge are constantly shifting and a canon has not yet been solidified. Educational technology is one such field. Alec Couros’s graduate-level course in educational technology offered at the University of Regina provides an ideal example of the role social learning and negotiation can play in learning (Exhibit 3). Students in Couros’s class worked from a curriculum created through their own negotiations of knowledge and formed their own personally mapped networks, thereby contributing to the rhizomatic structure in their field of study. This kind of collaborative, rhizomatic learning experience clearly represents an ideal that is difficult to replicate in all environments, but it does highlight the productive possibilities of the rhizome model (Exhibit 4).

These changes have sparked two primary responses among purveyors of traditional educational knowledge. One has been to attack these new sources as flawed as has been the case in the history department at Middlebury College (Jaschik 2007). These critiques of collaborative knowledge verification, premised on assumptions of validity rooted in the traditional strictures of academic publishing, reveal an essential misunderstanding of the place of socially constructed models in the new knowledge landscape that challenges traditional notions of canon just as the influx of content about women and ethnic minorities challenged certain canons of traditional knowledge in the 1990s (Banks 1993). An alternative response to changing knowledge foundations has been to engage in a flurry of discussion about intellectual property rights, debating the merits of various Creative Commons licenses and trying to determine the means by which content creators’ intellectual property rights can be protected even as content is distributed freely (Wiley 2007; Downes 2007; Bornfreund 2007).

Both of these responses are inadequate: the first, obviously, because it denies the legitimacy of a rhizomatic knowledge-creation process that is already overtaking traditional models and the second because it relies on the old notion of knowledge as resident in a particular individual and frozen in time, reified by publication. However, if knowledge is to be negotiated socially, then the idea of individual intellectual property must be renegotiated to reflect the process of acquisition and the output constructed by that process. What is needed is a model of knowledge acquisition that accounts for socially constructed, negotiated knowledge. In such a model, the community is not the path to understanding or accessing the curriculum; rather, the community is the curriculum.

The Rhizomatic Model of Education

In the rhizomatic model of learning, curriculum is not driven by predefined inputs from experts; it is constructed and negotiated in real time by the contributions of those engaged in the learning process. This community acts as the curriculum, spontaneously shaping, constructing, and reconstructing itself and the subject of its learning in the same way that the rhizome responds to changing environmental conditions:

The rhizome is an antigenealogy. It is a short-term memory, or antimemory. The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots. Unlike the graphic arts, drawing or photography, unlike tracings, the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectible, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 21)

With this model, a community can construct a model of education flexible enough for the way knowledge develops and changes today by producing a map of contextual knowledge. The living curriculum of an active community is a map that is always "detachable, connectible, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits":

If the world of media education is thought of as a rhizome, as a library à la Eco [in The Name of the Rose], then we need to construct our own connections through this space in order to appropriate it. However, instead of that solitary groping made by Brother William, we see as our goal the co-construction of those secret connections as a collaborative effort. (Tella 2000, 41)

In the practical example of Couros’s class, students created their own rhizomatically mapped curriculum by combining their blogs with information to which Couros pointed them and linking the combination to the particular knowledge that they discovered through discussions with key people in Couros’s professional community. In accessing Couros’s professional network, students had the opportunity to enter the community themselves and impact the shape of its curriculum as well as their own learning. The role of the instructor in all of this is to provide an introduction to an existing professional community in which students may participate—to offer not just a window, but an entry point into an existing learning community.

Conclusion

In a sense, the rhizomatic viewpoint returns the concept of knowledge to its earliest roots. Suggesting that a distributed negotiation of knowledge can allow a community of people to legitimize the work they are doing among themselves and for each member of the group, the rhizomatic model dispenses with the need for external validation of knowledge, either by an expert or by a constructed curriculum. Knowledge can again be judged by the old standards of "I can" and "I recognize." If a given bit of information is recognized as useful to the community or proves itself able to do something, it can be counted as knowledge. The community, then, has the power to create knowledge within a given context and leave that knowledge as a new node connected to the rest of the network.

Indeed, the members themselves will connect the node to the larger network. Most people are members of several communities—acting as core members in some, carrying more weight and engaging more extensively in the discussion, while offering more casual contributions in others, reaping knowledge from more involved members (Cormier 2007). This is the new reality. Knowledge seekers in cutting-edge fields are increasingly finding that ongoing appraisal of new developments is most effectively achieved through the participatory and negotiated experience of rhizomatic community engagement. Through involvement in multiple communities where new information is being assimilated and tested, educators can begin to apprehend the moving target that is knowledge in the modern learning environment.

References

Banks, J. A. 1993. The canon debate, knowledge construction, and multicultural education. Educational Researcher 22 (5): 6-7.

Bornfreund, M. 2007. Copyright licensing for learning objects. Paper presented at the Copyright/Copyleft: Issues of Education Conference, University of Manitoba, September. http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/conferences/copyright/Marcus_Bornfreund/Marcus_Bornfreund.html (accessed May 27, 2008).

Brown, J. S., and R. P. Adler. 2008. Minds on fire: Open education, the long tail, and Learning 2.0. Educause Review 43 (1): 16-32 http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Review/MindsonFireOpenEducationt/45823 (accessed May 27, 2008). Archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5XebnBMZ4.

Cormier, D. 2007. Membership, collaboration and the interwebs. [Weblog entry, March 24.] Dave’s Educational Blog. http://davecormier.com/edblog/?p=95 (accessed May 27, 2008). Archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5XebgJkGU.

Cormier, D. 2008. Rhizomatic knowledge communities: Edtechtalk, Webcast Academy. [Weblog entry, February 29.] Dave’s Educational Blog. http://davecormier.com/edblog/2008/02/29/rhizomatic-knowledge-communities-edtechtalk-webcast-academy/ (accessed May 27, 2008). Archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5XfE5yYAY.

Deleuze, G., and F. Guatarri. 1987. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. London: University of Minnesota Press.

Downes, S. 2007. Understanding me. [Weblog entry, October 14.] Half An Hour. http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2007/10/understanding-me.html (accessed May 27, 2008). Archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5Xec3eUaX.

Evans, N., and J. Hayes. 2005. Review of Textbook of Endodontology. International Endodontic Journal 38 (12): 949.

Farrell, L. 2001. Negotiating knowledge in the knowledge economy: Workplace educators and the politics of codification. Studies in Continuing Education (23) 2: 201-214.

Hinchley, P. H. 1998. Finding freedom in the classroom: A practical introduction to critical theory. New York: Peter Lang.

Horton, M., and P. Freire. 1990. We make the road by walking: Conversations on education and social change. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Ibsen, H. 1882/2000. An enemy of the people. Tr. R. Farquharson Sharp. http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext00/aeotp10.txt (accessed May 27, 2008).

Jaschik, S. 2007. A Stand Against Wikipedia. Inside Higher Ed, January 26. http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/01/26/wiki (accessed May 27, 2008). Archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5XecVR535.

Meile, L. 2005. Selecting the right OM textbook for the right course. Decision Line 36 (3): 16.

Nichol, H. 2007. Academia vs Wikipedia…again. [Weblog entry, October 24.] The Business of Knowing. http://thebusinessofknowing.blogspot.com/2007/10/academia-vs-wikipediaagain.html (accessed May 27, 2008). Archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5XsmiN7j1.

Rosenzweig, R. 2003. Scarcity or abundance? Preserving the past in a digital era.The American Historical Review, June. http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/108.3/rosenzweig.html (accessed May 27, 2008). Archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5XeceCRlv.

Stewart, B. 2002. Techknowledge: Literate practice and digital worlds. New York Studies in Media Studies 7. http://www.egs.edu/mediaphi/pdfs/bonnie-stewart-techknowledge.pdf (accessed May 27, 2008). Archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5Xed19AOc.

Tella, S. 2000. The concept of media education revisited: From a classificatory analysis to a rhizomatic overview. Media Education Publication 8. http://hrast.pef.uni-lj.si/~joze/podiplomci/FRI/mep8/Tella_mep8.pdf (accessed May 27, 2008). Archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5XedAvMUG.

Wiley, D. 2007. Misunderstanding Stephen. [Weblog entry, October 13.] Iterating towards openness. http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/381 (accessed May 27, 2008). Archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5XedHwkrA.

Copyright and Citation Information for this Article

This article may be reproduced and distributed for educational purposes if the following attribution is included in the document:

Note: This article was originally published in Innovate (http://www.innovateonline.info/) as: Cormier, D. 2008. Rhizomatic education : Community as curriculum. Innovate 4 (5). http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=550 (accessed June 2, 2008). The article is reprinted here with permission of the publisher, The Fischler School of Education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University.

Posted in rhizomes | 10 Comments »

Living Archives - Reflections on an Educational project

May 25, 2008 – 4:29 pm

Project launch - Monday May 26th - 10am Studio Theatre, Confederation Centre of the Arts, Charlottetown, PE, Canada.

Preamble
Living archives started as a conversation with Elizabeth Deblois about what we could do that might be interesting for the 2008 anniversary of the publication of Anne of Green Gables. She wanted to do something with technology and kids, and I’d been looking for a good project to bring some of the interesting things I’d seen on the intertubes here to the Island.

Outline of the Project
Living archives (video introduction… see all eight pro-videos for full scope of project) is a history project for middle school students headed up by the University of Prince Edward Island. The students searched through local archives and museums for information that would allow them to contextualize 19th century PEI. Following the idea that the creation of materials forces a more profound examination of materials and focuses that research the students were to create a ‘textbook’ in a variety of formats including text, images, video and Opensim. We had three classes of students, eight months and were funded by the Canadian Culture Online Partnership Fund (PCH) and had a fairly large group of project partners all listed at the bottom of each of the living archives web pages. Sometime in the next few months I’ll post a more detailed project management review…
We invited some Seniors, heritage professionals and in french, musicians (Margi Carmichael but the microphone was turned off ) and storytellers from the community to come into the classrooms in order to try to bring some context to the research they were doing. They also spent some excellent time in the field at the Archives and the museums as well as coming to the University.

Initial Reflection
We had a number of reality checks on this project, a number of unforseen challenges that forced us to change directions or pull back to our ‘bare minimum requirements.’ The experiences of the community at large talking about their projects and my own edtech project management experience led me to only claim to be able to deliver the bare minimum of what i thought possible… in some cases we blew that away - hundreds of blog posts and images - and in some other cases we didn’t get as far as we would have hoped (peer training videos, opensim). So planning for small, make-able successes and allowing for the increase in scope to happen based on events rather than trying to force it worked out well for us.
The students and the teachers involved have all reported a very high level of satisfaction… even though we forced them a little hard through the development phases of the project. A little more work done on standardizing the language used in the web interface would have saved us many, many hours of pain and misery. There is a sense, I guess, where the scope of this project overshadows the simplicity of its basic structure. Any project like this one (where the development of curriculum and configuration of software and people workflow are done during V.1) should plan for V.2 of the project and actually show how simple it would be to integrate into the mainstream school system. I will write a report that suggests a number of ways that this could happen, but it’s not at all the same as having done it. The NO 1 response we’ve been getting from people is “WOW great project, hardly sustainable though is it.” It could be sustainable, but more on this later.

The Students
This is where the real success was in this project. The students took a very passionate approach to the work that they were doing and got very involved in researching the history. They also became committed to the idea that their work was going to be published and that it mattered how good the writing and the research was. There were several stories in this project where school folks or parents commented on their amazement on how involved the kids were and how excited they were to ’study’. I really enjoyed the work that I got to do with the kids and was constantly amazed at how quick they were to adapt and how well they dealt with adversity. I was also (though i shouldn’t have been) quite taken aback at how much peripheral knowledge they acquired during the course of their work.

The Technology

Drupal
Our main platform was based on a build out of Drupaled done by the fine folks at funny monkey. Due to circumstances beyond all of our control, we ended up getting started 4 months late, so things were built very quickly. The key requirement from the platform was workflow. There needed to be a way for the work to start out in a private garden ‘work area’ and be promoted to public. I saw that sense of ‘graduating’ the work as critical to the success of the project. Too often in a straight out blogging project you end up with ‘first draft’ work published to the website and it never gets reviewed as the work feels ‘done’ as soon as it’s published. In our situation publication was something that the students needed to earn. I would definitely do this again. Our ring leader here was a WAC professor and Montgomery scholar from NYU who worked tirelessly with the teachers and students. I’m not sure how she feels about having her name posted, I’ll ask her and update the post if necessary.

The biggest problem we had was in not having a fully refined requirements list at the outset… this was not really anyone’s fault but it really hurt our first couple of months and added a great deal of frustration on the ground. It took us a very long time to figure out that we were missing an efficient and simple teacher interface… we’d done a pretty good job with the students… just not for the teachers. Fortunately, our project manager (saviour) and our teachers persevered. If i had this to do again and I would hire a student teacher to go to the classroom once a week to reinforce the training and report back difficulties with the interface.

This idea of reportage, too, was problematic. When I think of the problems we had - wyziwyg, language standardization, insufficient training in terms of available workflows - a good (read: simple) reporting system would have gone a long way to improving the day to day feelings of all people involved in the project. There was too much distance between development and user and that extra body, that student teacher may have been the missing link that could have pulled that together.

All that being said, we managed to create a french and english version of drupal. We got literally hundreds of posts from the students, the excellent people at PARO digitized many hundred of images (not to mention the job they did facilitating the research with the kids and giving them the research tools that they needed), we created 10 3D artifacts that are available on the website, close to 100 videos, and build on the work that is currently being done in the UPEI library integrating drupal and fedora. We’ve zipped this version up (cleaned of project specific content) and will be posting it soon.

LIVING archives MUVE in Education (Opensim) see detailed reflection here
“Why didn’t you just use second life?” oh wow… am i ever happy we didn’t. First of all, it’s been very exciting to be around at the beginning of an excellent open source community. The opensim people have been hugely helpful, and we managed to get 3 very cool houses built and get the student work inside those houses.
With Second Life you are caught either on the Teen grid (no parents or adults) or on the adult grid (no teens) and, if you have a case like ours, (half of our students were 12) you get nothing. Zilch. So, in moving to opensim we managed to keep all of our data internal, created default student accounts for the kids to use, and now have no worries about possible after effects.
As the opensim with alpha software posts lays out… we had alot of challenges. But, as further work being done (say with openhabitat) is showing, it can be really helpful to have your own, personally controlled virtual world at your finger tips.

Other tech
We bought video cameras (and microphones with short cords doh!) three rear projection smart boards a couple of computers per classroom and upgraded some of our hosting hardware on the UPEI side. Had this project started six months later, I would have bought 20 eeepcs for each school and we would have been cooking with gas. Some of the computers we used were… not new… and crashed if you tried to keep two separate windows open at the same time.

Idea developments
Had some excellent help with this. Funny monkey had a great deal of influence on the webdesign… i take it for granted now because i’m so familiar with it, but the public/private website with a built in eportfolio and video/blog/audio publishing tool is second to none. Elana Langer is responsible for the increase in scope of the project as well as large chunks of the video. The folks at PARO are responsible for giving us the sense of what is possible from a research/archives perspective. Mark Leggott at the library told me about the grant opportunity with PCH and was a great deal of help in writing my first grant. Sandy McAuley was super helpful with the pulling the educational research together and getting the training and Lesson plans planned, and posted. Stephen Downes is responsible for whatever elegance this project has as he explained to me that some pieces of the project were together and that, really, they should all be connected and should look back at each other.

Project management
Bonnie Stewart is responsible for pulling together pretty much every piece of this project. Without her energy, patience and perseverance none of this would have gotten done.

ohzz… There are bunches of people and cool stuff I’m forgetting, but oscar is sick and I need to have my presentation done by launch time. SORRY PEOPLE AND COOL STUFF I FORGOT. ttys.

Posted in Research notes, opensim | 5 Comments »

Surfacing –> where exactly have i been for two months…

May 12, 2008 – 1:04 am

Well… it’s been quite a ride. For those of you who are interested in the good/complex of the my life on the personal side, do check out http://cribcronicles.com.

Professionally, things have been moving on apace. I have great hopes that I’ll be able to deal with each of these issues over the next several weeks but for now I’m just going to try and break the silence.

Living Archives
The project has gone really well overall. We’ve had far more successes than we’ve had challenges we couldn’t overcome. The best comment i heard was from one of the principals who said “there are kids in that class that have never really been engaged who are excited about learning”. We should have our version of the website to hand out to folks in the next week or so for you guys to download and try out in your own schools if you are interested. No promises, but it is pretty good.

Openhabitat
I’m working with some fine folks (though not as closely as I’d like, time being what it is) on MUVE’s in education. If you drop by http://openhabitat.org you’ll get a sense of the great work that’s being done there. For my part, I’m working on the interactive website that were using as well as doing some work with opensim… an automated server install and some precanned training material. Fun stuff

Ukanskills
I’m working with another group of folks over there (UK) on this project. I’ve been working on two systems (that’s i’m hoping to fold into each other) to store and deliver different versions of curriculum and learning objects in a cool web2 kind of platform. More on this soon.

Innovate Online
I’ve been working on an article on rhizomatics for the last eight months. The very good people at Innovate have been patient enough with me (for whatever reason) and, all things being equal, the article should be appearing in next months special edition on the future of education

Edactive Technologies
I’ve managed to get the company through which i do the majority of my consulting work incorporated and am almost to the point where my professional online life is organized. It’s been a bit of a silly journey, but as the contracts have started to get more significant, I’ve had to take the company itself more seriously. I’m not sure if i’m going to be ready to ‘go it alone’ anytime soon, but i am at least in a solid position to take on contracts. I’m part of an excellent network of very good people.

Educationbridges
The non-profit is, i hope, finally on the horizon. We’ve been looking to get company set up and running to take care of Edtechtalk and potentially allow us to broker some educational projects… Looks like we might finally have the pieces we need.

UPEI
My day job (web technology specialist) at the university has been lots of fun. We’ve been trying to move the university to more dynamic, interactive drupal based platform. We’re about 90% done the initial grunt work and are looking forward to starting to use some of the more interesting and interactive sides of the platform in the next little while

Presentations
Pretty thin this year. With Bon on bedrest, i’m not really in a position to head out until late ‘08 at the earliest. I am speaking three times at a conference in june at the university which i plan to ustream… but just bits and pieces this year i think. Probably not a bad thing.

oh. and i’ve started a new blog. http://plywoodviolin.com

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Rhizomatic Knowledge Communities –> Edtechtalk, Webcast Academy

February 29, 2008 – 12:51 am

The idea of a rhizomatic knowledge community draws on a strong current tradition of random ideas and solid scholarship. There is a sense in which we all understand the way that these types of things come together… certainly every time i hear George Siemens talk about network theory and connectivism, I see people nodding their heads… “yes I’m a node in my community,” “yes I decide that things are good because other people that I trust say that they’re good”. These things are, in a sense, the common sense that I heard someone at my workplace today claim was not so common.

Part of my attraction to the concept of the rhizome has to do with the hours I’ve spent in the side garden fighting with Bishop’s weed(not my post… but my feelings exactly). It’s a nasty little garden weed that grows frighteningly fast wherever it’s dropped, it seems to grow and expand to fill whatever space is available, and is frighteningly difficult to control. It’s actually quite a cool ‘plant’ if it makes sense to talk about it in the singular… it’s a connection of intertwined roots underground, with big leafy stalks that pop up wherever it might be convenient to grab the sunlight. There’s no precise centre, no ‘central’ plant that you can kill to get rid of it all… just a network of leaves and roots that suck up nutrients where available and deliver them to the rest through whichever root/stalk is nearby. It’s an incredible survivor and very much has a mind of it’s own. Those weeds that you see there are what you’d pull out of about a cubic foot of soil… maybe less.

That, in my mind, is what were looking at with knowledge right now. We have this incredibly dense, complicated underlayer of connections too complicated to really sort out or root out. These communities are created by the introduction of the tiniest bit of root into the right kind of habitat and then are only bounded and understood by the limits of that habitat. They adapt and adjust to the habitat that they are in, popping up in the most convenient places and connecting wherever possible. Together, they make ‘a plant’ but no piece of them is essential or permanent. The loss of any given root, stalk, leaf or flower is not relevant to the whole. Love the rhizome. Lets look at a couple of examples.

Edtechtalk
Edtechtalk is alot of things… in a sense it is a website created by jeff lebow and I a little less than three years ago. It’s also a community of eleven interactive webcasts that run every week out in the ether of the internet. It’s also a running conversation in a community skype chat, it’s also a collection of over 500 podcasts on every subject related to educational technology I can imagine. Each of those shows has a slightly different take on the industry and yet everyone of those shows is bounded by a concept we call ‘worldbridgyness’… There is an openness a willingness to have everyone engaged in an open discussion on any given topic that infects each and everyone of those shows. There is a sense in which in working together and helping each other we make connections between each others ideas and the ideas on the site contain a certain similarity of flavour that would allow someone to recognize them as kin.

A person could, if they wished and were willing to follow through the various connections of tags and headlines, find out a great deal about what’s going on in educational technology. I feel pretty comfortable saying that a large part of what’s going on in the industry is available from at least one of those shows, and, in the majority of cases has been has been covered by a variety of shows. The trick is that what is considered cool or new or interesting might change by the week/month/year as people try it out, as new ideas come on board as new technologies are released out into the wild. At any given time, there is a sense that what the range of ’should’ choices are are covered somewhere in that network of ideas that is edtechtalk… it’s amorphous and tangled and no one central idea is holding all the pieces together… but as a whole the rhizome does a pretty good job of offering me the knowledge that I need.

Webcast Academy
Webcasting, like Educational Technology, is another field that is changing at a wild pace. The truth is, the field is not a particular large one and before products like Ustream popped their head into our event horizon, we were one of the few pods of live internet streaming out there outside of the HUGE companies. The kind of webcasting that is ‘taught’ at the academy is a ‘homegrown’ webcasting. We are not so much interested in creating picture perfect NPR quality audio, but listenable interesting audio that is controlled by the people who put the show on.

The fun part about this community is that, different from edtechtalk, it was created to fit a particular purpose. Through the starting of EdTechTalk we realized that other people were going to want to webcast and we needed some place for them to go to learn. The academy is now on it’s ninth or tenth session, much of it currently guided by people who were taught in the earlier sessions. When we started, we were using some products that aren’t even on the market anymore… the best practices continue to evolve as the community expands and the ‘knowledge’ really does live in the communication between the membership on that site.

As opposed to what?

There is one critical difference now that makes this possible. The long tail. We can throw hundreds of fanatical people at any given topic given the access provided by the web. Hundreds of people from around the world can work on a given topic and, by force of work done, research combined, instincts matched and connections made, be equivalent or better than those who may have tried to acquire knowledge in a more traditional way… clearly some fields are better served by this… fields that are changing quickly, that depend on uptodate current information from which to draw the conclusions that morph into rhizomatic knowledge.

Posted in rhizomes | 4 Comments »

Opensim in education (with alpha software)- lessons learned

February 20, 2008 – 4:57 pm

just some quick notes… so i don’t forget them. More will get posted at openhabitat.

Well… for those of you following, the second run at it went MUCH better than the first one. We rejigged our plan, forwarded our initial goals to the front end, used a little more scaffolding, and the whole process skimmed along quite nicely.

So, when your working with alpha software, it helps if you’ve got two things going on in the computer lab. What we did this time is that we took four students and used them to develop our workflow live and in cooperation with the students. What we did this time is that we had the students roughly cut into two, and one group worked on editing their blog posts and the other was working in opensim using the workflow developed by the students. Groups of three, two coaches and one ‘driver’ who was actually trying to get the initial ‘quest’ accomplished. So important, i think, to have a nicely strucutured activity to complement more freeform fun in the MUVE… and to forward the structure. Play seems to be automatic and, so far in my experience, isn’t encumbered by more early structure as it seems to in a standard website.

The degree to which every student i saw on Monday had a full set of computer literacies was astonishing. Every one of them seemed to be able to move forward and backwards, navigate up stairs etc… I may have missed one or two students, but the ones i saw were quite proficient. They also seemed to be able to recognize flaws in the system quite easily, which was also useful. Several students expressed a desire to be part of the debugging process.

As always, don’t panic. We had several issues that cropped up, much much fewer than last time, but the fact that the team was willing to work together kept things pretty steady. Our decision to make the MUVE part of a larger project was gold for this part of the exercise.

1. because of the potential for vast literacy differences from class to class, establish workflow and goals at the beginning of the project with the students who will be using the software.
2. have two things going on so that you have a fallback lesson already running if the cutting edge tech starts to fall apart. You don’t really want to be sitting there with a bunch of worksheets (boring) to fill the time. A class planned with two concurrent activities one technologically dependable, one more risky, makes the transition to the ‘other activity’ seemless and much less painful.
3. forward the structure to the front end of the lesson. Unlike other social networking sites, students don’t seem to feel ‘restricted’ in their play by having a heavily structured exercise as their introduction.
4. ask for volunteers for gathering debugging information. Some students seem very keen, and valuable information can be lost in the drama of the moment.
5. Make your MUVE part of a larger project. whether your muve is proprietary or on an unstable platform, it’s nice to have the canonical information in another venue… and it diversifies the project. Many people will never see the muve… and if they can visit the website, with video of the MUVE, it helps spread out the reach a bit

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