It is a touching video about hope, featuring a composition created to mark the day by poet Shane Koyczan (he of We Are More fame from the opening ceremonies of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics).

What a wonderful, inspiring project, which will (thanks to YouTube) be seen by thousands of people around the world. And, perhaps, one person who just might need to hear this message at the most pivotal moment of their life.

Here is Shane talking about how the project came about.

As I was reading Electronics and the Dim Future of the University by Eli M. Noam I couldn’t help but feel I had stumbled upon a very prescient academic. This article resonates just as strongly today as it did when it was written in 1995.

First, before I start cherry picking quotes from the article, let me say that I am not someone who relishes the fact that higher education may be in trouble. I’m not an anarchist or revolutionary who believes the system must break down in order for something new and better to rise from the ashes.  I passionately believe there is an enormous amount of societal value in having strong, publicly funded institutions of higher learning like universities and colleges. Which is maybe why I react the way I do to what I see happening in the webscape. It both exhilarates and terrifies me.

The question is not whether universities are important to society, to knowledge or to their members — they are — but rather whether the economic foundation of the present system can be maintained and sustained in the face of the changed flow of information brought about by electronic communications. It is not research and teaching that will be under pressure — they will be more important than ever — but rather their instructional setting, the university system.

I am sure there are other academics who thought like Noam in the early days of the web, but as I read his 1995 article, I was struck by how many of his points have appeared, or are appearing, on the 2012 learning landscape.

 If alternative instructional technologies and credentialing systems can be devised, there will be a migration away from classic campus-based higher education. The tools for alternatives could be video servers with stored lectures by outstanding scholars, electronic access to interactive reading materials and study exercises, electronic interactivity with faculty and teaching assistants, hypertextbooks and new forms of experiencing knowledge, video- and computer-conferencing, and language translation programs.

Hmmm, Kahn Academy? YouTube EDU? Flat Earth Knowledge? Open courses?

A curriculum, once created, could be offered electronically not just to hundreds of students nearby but to tens of thousands around the world.

MOOC’s? University of the People? P2PU? Saylor?

In any event, the ultimate providers of an electronic curriculum will not be universities (they will merely break the ice) but rather commercial firms.

Udemy? Udacity? Code Academy? Straightline?

Today’s students, if they seek prestigious jobs or entry-restricted professions, usually have no choice other than to attend university. However, this is a weak and mostly legal reed for universities to lean on, and is only as strong as their gatekeeper control over accreditation and over the public’s acceptance of alternative credentials. When this hold weakens, we may well have in the future a “McGraw-Hill University” awarding degrees or certificates, just as today some companies offer in-house degree programs. If these programs are valued by employers and society for the quality of admitted students, the knowledge students gain and the requirements that students must pass to graduate, they will be able to compete with many traditional universities, yet without bearing the substantial overhead of physical institutions.

Open Badges? Instructor certification?

Now, granted, I haven’t lived in this world of academia as long as many of you (okay all 3 of you) who are reading this, and I might be suffering from a case of — (oh dammit, what is the word – that term that refers to each generation feeling like they are the generation that is living on the cusp of some GREAT CHANGE)….anyway, you get the idea.

Or maybe I am not far fetched in thinking that the world of higher ed is on the cusp of a shakeup. That we have reached some kind of tipping point. Or, as John Naughton notes in The Guardian article that led me to Noam’s article and inspired this post…

Some things have happened recently that make one think that perhaps the water might be reaching boiling point for traditional universities.

Photo credit: Frog in a pot 1 by jronaldlee. Used under Creative Commons license.

Hundreds of posts sitting unread in Google Reader, our PLN sharing dozens of shiny new links on Twitter & FB, forum posts, a new edition of your favorite journal published – the firehose goes on and on.

It’s that feeling that Alexandra Samuel refers to as FOMO, or Fear of Missing Out. Shirky says it’s caused not by information overload, but filter failure, and the ability to manage this flow of information (or cognitive load management) is one of the essential skills future knowledge workers will need to succeed. So, just like the food we put into our body, we need to be critical and discerning with the kind of food we put into our brains.

This food metaphor forms the interesting premise of a new book by Clay Johnson called The Information Diet, which I have just begun reading (the physical book is due out early in the new year, Kindle version is available now).

What I like about the tact of Johnson is that it is not simply a rant against technology and social media, but instead is a much more holistic and, in my opinion, realistic view of information consumption. This balanced view is reflected in a recent blog post by Johnson on Facebook & Twitter.

It turns out that networks like Facebook and Twitter are perfect for consuming your socially proximate information. They’re not bad for an information diet, they’re critical to having a balanced one. But only if you use these tools smartly and proactively — by eliminating cruft, and consuming deliberately from these sources. Granted, spending the day on Facebook is not great for your information diet. But eating bowl after bowl of fiber-one cereal is probably not great for your food diet either.

Sure Twitter and Facebook are no substitute for being physically present with your loved ones, and having meaningful social interactions with them. But as long as you are deliberate about both (there are some great tips in the book about this) then you can use these tools to your advantage. So let’s not dismiss the tools because they’re technical, or out of some kind of strange generational preference. The problem is rarely in the medium itself and usually in either the habits of the user, or the system that supports it.

Reading this reminded me of the excellent Stillness in Motion session at this fall’s ETUG workshop, which I found immensely refreshing  and inspiring. Facilitated by Ross Laird of Kwantlen University, Brian Williams of  DIYDharma and  Scott Leslie  of  BCcampus, the session focused on how to be mindful about the ways in which we interact with technology.

Since that session, I have found myself asking a very simple question whenever I fire up my computer: what is it that I want to do right now? And I’ve found that asking this one simple question has made me much more productive when I get on. It brings my purpose front and centre, and I find I am less likely to get distracted down a rabbit hole when I take that brief moment to really clarify what it is I want to do before I mindlessly plug in.

Sure, I still find myself with a few dozen tabs open in my various browsers, email client up and running with constant notifications coming in, Tweetdeck firing away in the corner on my second monitor, but it is a start. And at least I find I am getting that one thing done that I wanted to get done.

I hope that The Information Diet will help me find a few more nuggets like that to make me a more concious information consumer.

Like Chad Skelton, I’ve found myself using it more and more for reading things other than books using the Kindle personal document service. If you are not familiar with the service, each Kindle comes with an email address that I can email documents to as attachments. These are then converted to the native Kindle format for reading on my Kindle. Excellent for when I have a PDF or long Word document to read.

Shortly after I began using my Kindle, I discovered a service called klip.me, which is a handy little bookmarklet/browser add-on that let’s me send webpages to my Kindle, stripping out most of the crud (ad’s, distractions, etc) giving me a nicely formatted Kindle document. I’ve had the add-on running for the past 6 months or so. It has turned my Kindle into more than just an ebook reader and is the primary reason I use my Kindle each and every day.

Last week, Chad had a very interesting post about Instapaper that got me thinking.  Instapaper has a service that allows you to email articles directly from Google Reader to your Kindle. So, I went to see if klip.me had a similar service and, lo and behold, it does. Even better, I can set up an automatic delivery schedule right to my Kindle via my Kindle personal documents account. Sweet.

What this means is that now every morning at 5am, klip.me crawls my GReader account, aggregates the latest 50 posts, and delivers them directly to my Kindle. For the past week I have been waking up with a nice, tidy personal newspaper delivered right to my Kindle in time for breakfast. Wonderfully convenient.

klip.me also has a service that will send my calendar and a weather forecast to my Kindle, but so far I have resisted these services. I want to keep my Kindle as a reading/consumption device &  don’t want it to be an all purpose device (that’s what a tablet is for). But to have a service that sends me articles from GReader to my Kindle? Awesome!

And a note to klip.me – I’d happily pay for this service to ensure it sticks around. Please, tell me how I can give you money because it isn’t obvious on your site.

Heard there will be a social media policy in the NHL..good thing most our my tweets are about food,napping or video games #dontwanttobefined

September 14, 2011 7:54 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@grabs40

Michael Grabner

Interesting, and telling, hashtag on this tweet from Michael Grabner of the NY Islanders.

Now, the NHL is not the first major sport to enact a SM policy for players. And true, these people fall into the realm of public figures, but for me that doesn’t diminish the fact that this represents a chilling intimidation practice that I think is being carried out in other workplaces as well.

But don’t we have rights?

I read stuff like this and I worry. I worry about how much power organizations have over their people – of employers over employees – and how that power manifests itself and extends into the personal lives of the people and forces them to be silent. I worry about things like freedom of expression and the guarantee that, in Canada at least, we have (emphasis mine):

… freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication.

I think there is a danger here as social networks become more entwined into the fabric of our lives – that if you choose to engage in a social network, be ready to have what you say scrutinized by the company you work for. The corporation owns you by virtue of the fact that they give you a paycheque, and you may be one keystroke away from getting Dooced. It’s sad that the example of Heather Armstrong happened almost 10 years ago, and in that time we have evolved our thinking in a manner which doesn’t view what the company that fired Heather as wrong, but instead have shifted the focus onto the importance of “managing” our digital identities through the lens of what our employers, present and future, may find acceptable.

Save anonymous for those who need it

I find this style of control by an employer over an employee not only wrong, but also dangerous for social media because it not only silences people from speaking and having a voice, but it also reinforces/forces anonymity on the net, something I am generally opposed to. People who can’t speak publicly as themselves will just take on anonymous pseudonyms or adopt elaborate codes to conceal what they are really saying. Not to say when there are not legitimate needs for people to be anonymous on the net (fear of political persecution, for example), but bending to the social media will of an employer is not one of those reasons. Let’s save anonymous for those who need it and make authentic the default.

Let’s be real

I acknowledge that sometimes I have a naive view of social networks, and that how I wish they worked is often in conflict with how they actually work. I think they are at their most powerful when people using them are real people, free and unencumbered to be real people, full of foibles and contradictions that real people exhibit. They are not afraid to post a half baked thought or something that might be viewed by some as controversial or provocative. That they have the opportunity to use their social network accounts to provide an accurate reflection of who they really are as people and not as corporate or political autobots.

Real and virtual – it’s all the same

In a perfect world, I would have the same level of freedom to express myself in a social network as I would have in the real world. That is to say, I should have the freedom to be bound by the same social conventions that bound my expressions in real life. In my heart, I would hope that this is where we are heading as a society. That actions on social networks are judged in the same manner as actions in real life. If you are an ass in real life, then chances are good you will expose yourself as an ass online. It is only in this way do I believe social networks can truly be “authentic”.

But when we begin to closely tie our online identities with those of our employers, and they begin to call the shots (both explicitly and implicitly), we lose this authenticity, and we lose who we truly are. When authenticity begins to get questioned, trust erodes, and when trust erodes and motives get questioned all the time, we grow tired and cynical and, most likely, withdraw. Disengage from the network because it loses value for us. And if that happens, I believe we have lost something that is hard to replace, and squandered a truly unique opportunity in our human evolution to connect at a very deep level with other human beings; human beings full of contradictions, who make mistakes, who post half baked ideas, who continually evolve and change throughout their lifetime. Who are real and truly authentic.

A few days ago my sister arrived at my door with the latest bounty – a box chock-a-block full of informal learning circa 1976.

The complete Childcraft collection circa 1976. Published by World Book Encyclopedia (which we also had, and which I also cherished), I spent hours pouring over the books from the time I was 8 or 9 until I lost my way as a teenager to other vices. But for my formative learning years,  this was how I got my info fix when I wasn’t in school.

I loved these books, and going through them over the last few days made me realize just how much these books taught me. These were my gateway to the world. These were my Internet.

A favorite of mine was the special section of the Human Body book which had a transparent overlay of a boys and a girls body. Flip the transparent from page to page and you could overlay it like an onion skin over top the various systems of the body. I thought it was the coolest thing ev-ah!

Each year Childcraft would release a new volume. 1976 was a banner year. It was the year the dinosaur issue arrived.

The only thing that would have been cooler is if they would have had a Star Wars yearbook.

As I pour over these, I am again struck at what an amazing time we live in, and how our kids won’t really know it as an amazing time because for them, it will just be a time. They will have no frame of reference for what life was truly like PI (pre-Internet), just like I have no frame of reference for what life was like pre-TV, pre-telephone or pre-power. And I wonder if someday my daughter or son might wander over to the Internet Archive and view the Martha Speaks or National Geographic Kids website from 2011 with the same kind of nostalgia for learning that I have experienced over the past couple of days flipping through these books.

Funny, though. Since these things have arrived, my daughter has kept this dog-eared yearbook close at hand.

Which goes to show, no matter how much things may change, little girls will always want a puppy.

I wonder why it is losing contributors? Maybe after 10 years, the shiny factor is wearing off as it becomes one of those things in our life that kind of fades into the background. It’s always there, now serving a primarily utilitarian role in our lives. Like power or plumbing, we don’t notice it all the time because it is just there, and we have come to expect that it will always be there.

Maybe there are less contributors because, after 10 years and 3.7 million articles, there isn’t as much to actually edit or contribute these days. Sure, there is a lot of new information being generated every day in the world, but maybe the knowledge base has been pretty well built and now all that needs to be done is gardening. The low hanging knowledge fruit has been picked and we are now getting into topics and details that only those who are highly knowledgeable in those areas could contribute something new to?

Or, perhaps as the article suggest, it is difficult to edit or add an article to Wikipedia? Sure, in theory anyone can add or edit an article, but in reality it does take a bit of technical know-how to edit a Wikipedia article correctly. And then there are the protocols and procedures that Wikipedia has put in place that need to be followed. Unless you have done a bit of research into how to actually author or edit a Wikipedia article, it seems to me that there might be a barrier there for new users to figure out how to do it right.

I could be wrong with that last bit, which is why I’d be interested to hear your experiences with editing Wikipedia. Do you do it? Do you find it difficult? What could Wikipedia do to make it easier for you to add or edit articles?

Reading the results of the Going 24 Hours Without Media research has left me wondering exactly what it is students are craving for with their use of technology and media. Is it the technology they crave,  or is it what the technology enables?

The study asked close to 1,000 students from around the world to abstain from using all media for 24 hours, after which time they were asked to “report their successes and admit to any failures”. What the study discovered was that students found it difficult – sometimes even impossible – to unplug for 24 hours, and they often used the metaphor of addiction to describe how they felt when they were not plugged in.

Needless to say, mainstream media has been picking up this study and presenting it with headlines like students are addicted to their gadgets or that tech addiction symptoms are rife among students.

Now, I’m not going to dispute the fact that many of us love our gadgets and tech, but I do wonder if some of this media coverage misses a deeper point. The point that maybe it isn’t the tech or the gadgets or the media we are “addicted” to. Maybe what we are “addicted” to is something that is deeply human; the sense of connectedness to other human beings that these devices enable. Maybe what we are “addicted” to is nothing technical at all, but rather what the technology enables – the ability to fulfill one of our basic human desires and needs; that as social animals we need to be connected to each other.

Isolate any human being from other human beings and we will go mad. We can’t do it. So is it any wonder that when we feel disconnected, we feel isolated, lonely and depressed? Being connected to one another is essential for our survival, so should we be surprised that when we disconnect – not from the devices in our life, but from the people in our lives – that we feel disoriented and confused, upset and agitated? Being disconnected goes against our very nature as social animals.

I don’t want to be dismissive of this study – far from it. This is an important study that illustrates just how deeply this stuff is permeating into our lives. And I do not want to paint over the important point it makes about just how mediated our lives have become. We do need to think – and think deeply – about how the ability to be connected to each other 24/7 is changing us. Instead what I want to challenge is the notion that this is an issue of being addicted to technology, gadgets, or media, but instead cuts to something much deeper, something that hints at the very essence of what it means to be human.

It is not a matter of simply being “addicted” to my smartphone, or Facebook or Twitter. It’s much more complicated than that. I find the “addiction to technology” argument a distraction from what is really going on, which is that the ways and levels with which we communicate with each other have become much more complex, nuanced, interconnected, and vitally important to our well being. And we are responding in a most human way to this kind of ubiquitous connectedness – by feeling panicked, frightened and depressed when something that is so vital to us is threatened and taken away.

To me, the results of this study tell me far more about how critically important the human need to feel connected to each other is, rather than how important it is for us to feel connected to our devices.

Ahead of their province wide conference on Privacy and Cloud-Based Educational Technology happening on April 4th, BCcampus has released a background white paper on Privacy and Cloud-Based Educational Technology in British Columbia (PDF).

The report is based on questionnaires and interviews conducted by BCcampus with a cross section of institutional stakeholders (instructors, teaching and learning centres and IT administrators) at 9 BC post-secondary institutions (25 were contacted) in the Fall of 2010.

The paper highlights some of the concerns and benefits post-sec institutions in BC are grappling with when considering using cloud-based applications and services (specifically those hosted in the US), and illustrates some examples of how BC post-sec’s have addressed these issues within their institutions.

Some institutions are afraid to authorize any “web 2.0” technologies because of privacy concerns, some have used workarounds, and some have just gone ahead and implemented institution-wide technologies to the best of their ability.

If you are involved in IT or EdTech in BC, this report is well worth the read and provides some real-life examples of how post-sec institutions in BC are addressing the ambiguous issues inherent with the big elephant in the room. As the report notes:

All (post-secondary institutions) have one thing in common: the need for clarity around what is or is not aligned with B.C.’s privacy legislation.

This ambiguity is reflected in one of the questions raised by Vancouver Island University:

Getting clear-cut responses from the Office of the BC Privacy Commissioner is important to  enabling post-secondary administrators to provide correct advice and guidance on FIPPA  related questions. What can the BC government ministry [responsible for FIPPA] do to  facilitate this?

Gina Bennett from the College of the Rockies also reflects this clarity concern.

According to Gina Bennett at COTR, FIPPA requirements aren’t well understood. “[Postsecondary institutions] use extreme caution, they don’t act -out of fear– or they fly under the  radar,” when they consider using cloud-based services or social media.

But my favorite Gina Bennett quote has to be this one, which nicely encapsulates one of the big picture issue that are at stake here.

“I wish we could have ‘openness people’ rather than ‘privacy people” at institutions. We  should be all about sharing. What is the purpose of the academy if not for sharing ideas?”

Hear, hear.

Photo: Descending Clouds by Gary Hayes used under Creative Commons license

On Tuesday, February 8th at 10pm, I received a phone call from my Dad saying my Mom had a heart attack and passed away. Her health had been in decline for the past 2 years and, even though these things are never expected, part of me had been preparing for this moment since that rushed Christmas trip to Saskatchewan 2 years ago.  At that time, I remember being shocked when I walked into her hospital room and seeing that my Mom had gray hair. Weekly trips to the hairdresser for a bright red or orange rinse had been on Mom’s appointment calendar since 1982. I had never seen my Mom with her natural hair colour. At that moment I knew things had changed and that the phone call I received from my Dad Tuesday night was inevitable.

Last Wednesday morning at 10am found my sister and myself in the Calgary airport, waiting for a connecting flight to Regina to begin the terrible task of planning a funeral for a parent. I checked my email and discovered a message from Mary Burgess, Director of the Centre for Teaching and Educational Technology at Royal Roads University. She was offering me the newly created position of Manager of Learning Technologies. Less than 12 hours after hearing that my Mom had died, I was being offered a dream job with one of the premiere post-secondary distance learning institutions in the country.

Congrolences: a phrase said to someone when two life-chaging events at opposite ends of the emotional scale occur in a short period of time. I think I need to add that to Wikipedia. Or, at the very least, the urban dictionary.

I accepted the position. Since then, the knowledge that I am joining such a wonderful group of people in CTET at RRU has carried me through some of the darker periods of the past week. Already the reception I have received from Mary, Tracy and others at CTET & RRU during an especially difficult time has served to underscore the fact that this is truly a wonderful group of people working on an equally wonderful slate of projects in one of the most beautiful spots in the world.

There is another set of emotions at play here as well, as I prepare to leave Camosun College, a place that I have been associated with (on and off) for over 15 years. I have some very deep, long term relationships with this institution and the people here. From my time in the Applied Communication Program, to my stint as the station manager of Village 900 radio, to my work in Distributed Education, I have worked with a number of very talented, generous and wonderful people. I will miss them greatly, but take solace in the fact that I am a 5 minute walk from my home to campus and to many of the friends I have here, and many of those friendships spill over outside of the institution. Those will continue.

But right now, I do feel incredibly fortunate to have this new opportunity in front of me. And I know that, somewhere at this moment, my Mom is feeling pretty proud of her son.