While I have been dipping my toes into the waters of Google Wave for awhile, this month I am taking the plunge (to push the water metaphor) and testing it out with 2 different groups.

The first is at SCoPE where Emma Duke-Williams from the University of Portsmouth is facilitating a discussion around tools for online collaboration. In addition to the usual SCoPE forums, we have been playing with Google Wave as one of those tools (join us as we muck around group:scopecommunity@googlegroups.com).

The second project is much smaller where I am working with two members of my Masters cohort as part of our developing online communities course. We have an experiential learning task to facilitate a week long discussion around (oh, what a coinky-dink) collaborative tools. Talk about synchronicity. So we are using Wave to plan the session.

Google Wave is an interesting mix of both synchronous and asynchronous, something that is becoming more common with web apps. It is synchronous when it needs to be, and it is quite easy to chat and collaborate in real time in Wave. It is also easy to work asynchronously and come back to a Wave after the fact and add on or view an archive of a shared document or artifact. In the past year or two, with tools like Wave, Etherpad and even Twitter, I have been getting the feeling that the distinction we have used in e-learning between asyncrhonous and synchronous is beginning to blur and most of the tools we will use on a regular basis in the future will be able to be both.

Yesterday I had a synchronous chat in the SCoPE Wave with Sylvia Currie where we just happened to be in the same Wave at the same time. I am not sure why, but I find it oddly novel to go into Wave expecting to see asynchronously created content, and then suddenly seeing this little coloured cursor actively typing away and adding content. It’s kind of like walking into what you think will be an empty room and startling yourself when you notice the person working feverishly away at something at the table in the corner.

It’s this synchronous stuff about Wave that I seem to find myself adjusting to. When Sylvia and I started chatting, I noticed that, because you can see stuff as it is being typed, I became very conscious of what I was typing. For someone who is used to writing, rewriting and massaging all my asynchronous contributions to death, exposing the messyness of how my mind works felt disconcerting. When I write, I often start sentences, hit backspace 35 times, start over, move these words from over there to here and hack hack hack (don’t even get me started on my spleling). And knowing in the back of my mind that each keystroke is recorded and archived also makes me very aware of what I am typing knowing that once I hit a key, it is recorded forever in that Wave.

The flip side of that dilemma is that you can see the process – it is transparent, and if I was wanting to see an example of collaborative work when assessing a group project (for example) this kind of transparency into the process is gold.

Also, the archival ability of Wave is something I see as a real strength, but is going to require a mindshift in how I collaboratively work with others. Knowing that every keystroke is archived and can be reviewed at any time makes it slightly different than a wiki where only actual changes are recorded. I think this gives collaborators even more freedom to hack away at my work knowing the original is still there. Now, I am not sure about other people, but I know that editing someones words makes me feel uncomfortable, so instead of changing their Wave content, I find that I end up adding comments as a reply or within their post as a comment. But I am rethinking that after seeing how much crud it adds. I am beginning to realize that adding comments might actually be hurting Wave use by adding clutter. I think that, in the Wave world, we are supposed to liberally edit and change each others content. This is going to require a bit of negotiation between collaborators knowing that all content is fluid, even moreso I think, than with a wiki.

On a practical note, I notice that Google has added some notifications to Wave, which wweren’t there in the beginning. You can now get email notifications when Waves are updated. But I dislike email notifications, so instead I have been using the Google Chrome Wave notifier extension, which is turning into one of my most used extension during my Wave experiments this month. It sits unobtrusively in the top corner of Chrome and shows how many Google Wave updates are waiting for me in Waves I am taking part in. Very useful.

Photo by VespaGT used under Creative Commons license

• 6340 Commentshttp://clintlalonde.net/2010/03/04/viewing-my-mess-mind-with-google-wave/Viewing+my+messy+mind+with+Google+Wave2010-03-04+22%3A16%3A56Clint

I love it when I see teachers like English teacher Jenny Johns at work. Jenny has created a great English lesson using Ning where her students virtually become one of the characters in “To Kill a Mockingbird”.

I love this video for a couple of reasons. For one, digital literacy skills are seamlessly embedded into the assignment. This is not a lesson on how to use Ning, it is a lesson about the characters in “To Kill a Mockingbird”, yet it touches upon many issues young people face in a tech mediated landscape. The second reason I love this assignment is that it resonates with the students because it occurs in a space they are familiar with – a social network (note how the instructor has the students “friend” the other characters from the stories).

The video is from the PBS Frontline documentary digital nation.

• 6190 Commentshttp://clintlalonde.net/2010/02/07/to-kill-a-mockingbird-ning-style/To+Kill+a+Mockingbird+-+Ning+Style2010-02-08+01%3A24%3A08Clint

I have just installed a FireFox addon called Dispute Finder. Dispute Finder is an addon developed by Intel Research and UC Berkley that highlights disputed information on a web page and displays alternatives to that disputed claim. It uses both crowdsourcing and curated resources to try to expose you to alternative views about what you are reading.

As my Masters has progressed, I find myself becoming increasingly interested in adaptive learning systems and the role that technologies could play in shaping a users personal learning environment. Now, I am no computer scientist and when I hear words like ontologies being thrown around I have to admit my head begins to ache slightly. The depth of my knowledge of semantic web technologies doesn’t go far beyond a high level flyby of FoaF and RDF . Nonetheless, I remain interested in advancements in recommendation systems, both technical (semantic) and human (folksonomies) and the implications they could have for learning and constructing knowledge.

More and more on the web we are seeing personalized recommendations pop up for us to explore, often based on our past behaviours or, increasingly, recommendations provided to us by our social networks. Amazon recommends books to me not only based on what I have bought or browsed before, but also what other people who have bought or browsed similar titles to me have found interesting. Facebook will recommend friends to me based on who is already in my network, and adjust the information I see about that network based on my viewing habits (and some other variables, I am sure).  When Facebook introduced a real time stream a few versions ago, it did so with a News view and a Live view. At the time I wasn’t sure what the differences were, but after using it for awhile the advantage of the News feed becomes clear. The News feed is content that the system deems to be more relevant to me – it is a filter to help control the tidal wave of network information (I have Clay Shirky in my head saying “it’s not information overload – it’s filter failure“). And most of the time, it is right.

I am intrigued by what it means for learning if some of the construction of these connections is being done by technology, and how educators can assist learners in setting up environments that are conducive to this kind of semi-organic discovery. On one hand, these types of recommendations help to bring order to the chaos and may open up paths for exploration that may not always be obvious. On the other hand, they also set up the possibility of developing echo chambers. If the only information I am being exposed to is information congruent with my own views, then how can I be expected to become a critical thinker? After all, being critical often means being able to discern between two opposing points of view. How can you do this if you are only being presented one point of view?

Which brings me back to Dispute Finder and why I find this project interesting. Dispute Finder seems to depart from the general trend of recommendation engines on the web. Instead of recommending things it thinks I will like, it shows me information that may not be aligned with my own views, which opens up a possibility for me to learn.

via interview with Rob Ennals on Spark

• 6090 Commentshttp://clintlalonde.net/2010/02/06/adaptive-learning-disputes-and-breaking-out-of-echo-chambers/Adaptive+learning%2C+disputes%2C+and+breaking+out+of+echo+chambers2010-02-06+20%3A28%3A54Clint

I love it when The Horizon Report comes out. It takes me back to being a kid in Northern Alberta, anxiously awaiting the November arrival of the Sears Christmas Wish Book at our house. It offered me a glimpse of what could be in the near future. And it excited me.

If you are not familiar, each year the New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative publish The Horizon Report, a look into the future at some of the technologies that may have an impact on higher education in the next 5 years. This year the report has picked the following technologies and estimated a time for adoption for each.

1. Mobile Computing (1 year or less)
2. Open Content (1 year or less)
3. Electronic Books (2-3 years)
4. Simple Augmented Reality (2-3 years)
5. Gesture Based Computing (4-5 years)
6. Visual Data Analysis (4-5 years)

Scott Leslie from BCcampus is one of the advisors for the report. This year he travelled to Austin, Texas for the release of the report and created this video, which features interviews with members of ELI and NMC about the technologies in the report. It’s a nice piece of work from Scott that adds useful context around the reasons why these technologies were chosen.

Some things strike me about this list.

First, mobile computing has arrived at Camosun, at least if the connectivity stats coming from our IT Services department are any indication. Last week I was speaking with some members of the department who said that they have had to increase the number of available IP addresses for our wireless network twice this fall to meet the demand of wireless apps on campus. If you are not familiar with how networking works, each device that connects to the wireless network requires a unique address. These are pulled from a limited pool of addresses. Once that pool runs out, no more devices can connect to the network until a device returns an address to the pool. I don’t think that it’s a far stretch to imagine they will be significantly upping the pool again this fall. So, we know the students are connecting. How much of that connectivity is being used for learning & teaching is the unknown.

Second, of all the technologies on this list, simple augmented reality is the one that has me the most excited. I have been playing with augmented reality apps on my Android phone for the past 6 months and can see huge potential for education should they take off. Here is an example of augmented reality in which data pulled from the web is overlayed on top of what you see through your camera phone, kind of like a heads up display you might see in a car.

Imagine scanning the horizon with your smartphone and having geographical information pop up on the screen – the names of those mountains in the distance, the number of salmon that spawned in that creek last year, what developers hold development permits for that parcel of land over there. Very possible, and useful, information.

The barrier I see with this right now is that there is no standard for delivering the information. While many augmented reality browser are being created, the layers are not compatible with each other. Kind of like the early days of web browsers where websites would only work in either Internet Explorer or Netscape. Here’s hoping we learned from that mess & some open standards begin to emerge as the augmented reality market matures.

As for the other technologies, ebooks have to catch on at some point and you have to think sooner rather than later. 2010 has been dubbed by some as the year of the e-reader, with numerous options now on the market. The advantages of ebooks are numerous – cheaper, easier to update, they don’t use trees, you can increase the font size (a big one for me after spending a term frustrated trying to read 9 point type in a textbook), annotate, snip, republish yada yada yada. They have to catch on, don’t they?

After having lived with a Wii for the past year, I can also see the appeal of gesture based computing, especially in the areas of simulations. I can imagine a carpentry simulation someday swinging something akin to a Wii remote to simulate hammering a nail into wood, complete with tactile feedback where the remote vibrates as you strike the nail.

Of course, there are many qualifiers, maybes and outright unknowns whenever you try to predict technology and trends. But one thing seems certain – the innovation train is not stopping, and that makes for very interesting times to be working in educational technology.

• 5933 Commentshttp://clintlalonde.net/2010/01/27/2010-horizon-report/2010+Horizon+Report2010-01-27+07%3A28%3A39Clint

Earlier this week, as a response to a post by David Warlick, Stephen Downes posted on his attempt to find origins of the term “personal learning network”. This, strangely enough, got me thinking about the origins of the term.

I was surprised that, for as common as the term has become in my own PLN, the source of it was so hard to identify; that it was a generic enough grouping of words that a meaning seemed to evolve almost organically over time, thanks to contributions by a number of different people (which, I acknowledge, was somewhat the point of Stephen’s article).

Still, I have used this term in academic papers and have often searched for a definition of the term that would be useful as a citation. Recently, I used the 1998 Daniel R. Tobin article Building Your Own Personal Learning Network as a source. In the article, Tobin defines a personal learning network like this:

An important part of learning is to build your own personal learning network — a group of people who can guide your learning, point you to learning opportunities, answer your questions, and give you the benefit of their own knowledge and experience.

I’ve found his definition of a personal learning network useful, and his personal example of developing training sessions in Brazil a helpful anecdote to understand the concept of personal learning networks. But Stephen’s post did make me curious as to where this term came from, so I emailed Tobin with a link to Downes post asking if he was the originator of the phrase or whether he had another source for it. His response (10 minutes later) was:

Hi, Clint -

I don’t know if I coined the term “personal learning network” or not. I don’t know of any earlier references to the term, but that doesn’t mean that someone else didn’t use the phrase before I did.

The article was written in 1998, but I didn’t post it to my website until 2001, so that may help with the confusion on dates.

What I was referring to was my informal network of colleagues and professional acquaintances to whom I could turn if I needed information, i.e., people who could help me learn whatever it was that I was seeking. I still have a large personal learning network and am part of many other people’s PLNs as well, although none of us use that term. When I started using the phrase, I wasn’t particularly thinking about this in the sense of a virtual, PC-based network — in fact, in 1998, there weren’t many websites or discussion baords (sic), wikis, etc., that could be used for this purpose. Back then, one of the few that I knew of and used regularly was a list service started at Penn State for training and development professionals. It was later stopped and transferred to Yahoo Groups.

I hope this is helpful.

Best regards,
Dan Tobin

From there, I did a bit more digging and discovered a 1999 article written by Dori Digenti (Collaborative Learning: A Core Capability for Organizations in the New Economy. Reflections, 1(2), 45-57. doi: 10.1162/152417399570160) which uses the term “personal learning network” along with the acronym “PLN”. The use of the acronym is important to me because it denotes a very precise and specific conceptual meaning attached to the phrase “personal learning network”. And it is an acronym that I often see used to replace the phrase “personal learning network” in my network.

In the article, Digenti sets up a six phase model to build and develop collaborative learning competency in organizations. In phase six of the model (Enhancing Interdependence p. 53), Digenti speaks specifically to idea of personal learning network, and uses the phrase as an acronym.

As technology and change gain momentum, no professionals can claim enough mental bandwidth to maintain learning in all the necessary endeavors they are engaged in. An organization can sustain its collaborative learning only by building interdependence among members. This is where the personal learning network (PLN), born of series of learning collaborations, can be a valuable tool for enhancing and building interdependence (Digenti, 1998a).

The PLN consists of relationships between individuals where the goal is enhancement of mutual learning. The currency of the PLN is learning in the form of feedback, insights, documentation, new contacts, or new business opportunities. It is based on reciprocity and a level of trust that each party is actively seeking value-added information for the other.

The first paragraph, where the term personal learning network is introduced, contains a reference to a 1998 unpublished manuscript by Digenti called “The Learning Consortium Sourcebook”. I could not find that work , but I wonder if this might be the source of the term personal learning network as I understand and use it today?

The paper then goes on to describe how to develop a personal learning network, and there are two points that Digenti makes that resonate strongly with me. First, you have to give to get (p 53).

How do you build a PLN? First, it is important to overcome the hesitation around “using” people. If you are building a PLN, you will always be in a reciprocating relationship with the others in the network. Ideally, you should feel that your main job in the network is to provide value-added information to those who can, in turn, increase your learning.

Second, it takes time and work (p 53).

To have a truly valuable PLN, investments in time and resources are essential. This requires an extension of the typical transactional business mind-set. If, as a business manager or change agent, we “do the deal” and fail to consider building our PLN, we have lost much of the value of our interactions. This is particularly true in the activities of collaborative learning, where each project we engage in should enhance and broaden the PLN of each member.

Now, this was hardly an exhaustive academic search for the term, so I suspect that there are more uses of it from around that time stuffed away somewhere. But it appears to me that the phrase “personal learning network” as I use and understand the term today may have originated in the work of these two authors around 1998-99.

• 5332 Commentshttp://clintlalonde.net/2009/10/08/on-historically-defining-personal-learning-network/On+historically+defining+Personal+Learning+Network2009-10-08+21%3A30%3A37Clint