ClintLalonde.net

Trying to balance the ed with the tech

August 16, 2011
by Clint
3 Comments

Informal learning for kids circa 1976

Since my Mom passed away earlier this year, my Dad has been going through boxes of stuff that he and my Mom have accumulated over the years. Bit by bit, pieces of my childhood have been slowly migrating out to the west coast with each family member who makes the trip from Saskatchewan to Victoria.

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.

Wikipedia for kids 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.

Wikipedia for kids circa 1976

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.

Wikipedia for kids circa 1976

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!

Wikipedia for kids circa 1976

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

Wikipedia for kids circa 1976

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.

Wikipedia for kids circa 1976

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

 

August 12, 2011
by Clint
2 Comments

What can Wikipedia do to encourage new contributors?

I find it troubling that Wikipedia is losing contributors. Despite it’s flaws, Wikipedia and the overarching ideals it was built on, still represent the world’s greatest open educational resource. It’s a place built on the Web 2.0 ideals of transparency and collectivism, and I think of the people who contribute to Wikipedia as people who love learning and knowledge.

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?

July 18, 2011
by Clint
0 comments

Distributing Presence (or OMG WTF G+ YASN???)

Like many, I’ve been playing (albeit lightly) with G+. So far, I’ve been impressed with Google’s latest foray into social networking. It is familiar enough to Facebook to feel comfortable, yet has enough interesting new features to make it more than just another Facebook. Like most Google products, I think this is but a starting point and, taken in that light, it’s a pretty good one.

Yes, it is YASN (Yet Another Social Network) to nurture and maintain a presence in, and while it may seem like overkill to blog, tweet, use Facebook, LinkedIn, yada, yada, I am increasingly thinking it important to maintain a presence on each of these spaces, and, more importantly, keep an open and willing attitude to connect with people in my learning network on their terms and in ways that they want. As more and more SN services come on stream, I am starting to develop an attitude of “distributed presence” as a networked learning way of thinking and being.

While many have spoken of G+ being an <insert social network> killer, I disagree (and really when people start talking about something be a something “killer”my hype meter always begins to rise). I am not giving up Facebook because I know a lot of people who are using Facebook will never move to G+. Same with those who use Twitter, or LinkedIn. The people in my network have their favourite SN applications, and rather than force people to come to me, my approach is to try to distribute myself in as many spaces as I can and connect with people on their turf and on their terms. Why would I want to limit myself to a single platform when I know that there are so many people out there that I can learn from that may not use that platform, for whatever reason?

The same can be said for our students. Very rarely are we going to find a homogenous group of students in our class using a single tool. Some may want to connect with you on Twitter, some of Facebook, some on G+, some via IM, some on Skype, some on the institutional LMS or email. If we are going to be student-centric, then we need to be able to be flexible and connect with students where they want.

It’s a lot to keep up with, I admit. And we can’t keep up with every network that pops up (and I think we know which ones are important). But this underscores one of the reasons why I think it is important for educators to have a high level of digital literacy so that when a new tool comes along, it is not an onerous task to pick up and understand what this thing does. Going from nothing to G+ is much tougher than going from Facebook to G+.

I also think it’s important to understand how the web works, and how to be able to cross-post information to multiple networks at the same time. Devote some time to work on a digital workflow that uses tools to streamline the process. For example, a tool like Tweetdeck allows you to post status updates to multiple services at the same time. Bit.ly does the same, allowing me to share content to Twitter, FB, LinkedIn and (I imagine soon) G+. The ability to set up a blog and have it autopost to numerous SN’s is also an example of how to streamline a digital workflow. If past is any indication, this blog post will garner more conversation on my Facebook profile than it will on my blog (and I am mindful of the fact that every time a valuable conversation happens behind a walled garden like Facebook, opportunities are lost, as Audry Waters recently wrote about in her post on circles in G+. Still, I would rather have the conversation with people who are more comfortable talking in a space they feel safe in than try to dictate that the only place we can converse is a place of my choosing).

The other side of this is being able to monitor what is happening on all these networks in a way that gives you an overview quickly of what is happening on each network without having to log into each. Which is where technologies like RSS and aggregators come into play. I use Netvibes, and pull all the streams of my networks into a single portal page that let’s me at a glance, see all the activity happening in my various networks.

I take part in a lot of social networks. Some are personally more useful than others to me. But I think it is important that I at least have a presence in as many as I can as there is no way that I can know what people network will form around the technical network, and when that people network will become relevent to me. A distributed presence approach gives me, as a learner, maximum flexibility to follow my learning network wherever it may spring up, be it a discussion this week on LinkedIn, or an interaction next in the comments section of a YouTube video. It’s a loose ties approach to social networks. By maintaining some kind of ambient presence in many social networks, I am ready and able to follow the really important piece of learning networks – the people – wherever they decide to go.

June 23, 2011
by Clint
0 comments

38,944 Words

Last night at 11:55pm, I submitted my Masters thesis to my supervisor to begin the external review process. While there is still a chance that some work will need to be done as it moves through review, a sense of completion is beginning to settle in on me as I realize that, for the first time in almost a year, I am looking at a weekend that doesn’t include work on my thesis.

Well, that isn’t entirely true.

One of the things I am planning on doing is publish the thesis here on my site in something other than a PDF document. I want it open for comments and, with any luck, prompt some interesting discussion. And, quite frankly, this part actually scares the bejebsus out of me. But I do see the thesis as a start, and not the end, of the process of learning for me. Putting it out there to get feedback from my peers is where the real learning happens, and I hope others will find it interesting enough to contribute to the discussion and (gulp) pick it apart where it needs to be picked apart, and add support to where they agree. Ultimately, like anyone who has poured a lot of work into something, I want and hope that it will be useful to someone else, and to find that someone else, it needs to be out in the open and not locked away in some digital repository (although it will be there, too).

How I was going to do this wasn’t exactly clear because it had seemed like a far, far away in time project. Today – not so far away. I did have it in my head to use WordPress and the digress.it framework, which allows paragraph by paragraph commenting. Then, last night after I had clicked submit and was still too buzzed to hop into bed, I think I found the recipe on how to publish an academic paper using WordPress and digress.it, posted by Joss Winn. So, if all goes well, in the very near future this idea will become a reality.

But first, I have a very important matter that needs attending to this weekend.

Bohemia

Bohemia by Paulo Brabo. Used under Creative Common license.

June 3, 2011
by Clint
4 Comments

Serendipity in action

Serendipity. In the simplest of words, it means a “happy accident” (Wikipedia).

Earlier this week, I was thinking about serendipity, spurred by a thoughtful blog post by Matthew Ingram on filters, and how some feel that the digital filters being developed by the likes of Google and Facebook are limiting our ability to serendipitously discover new sources of information, leading to an echo chamber.

Now, I don’t argue that the development of an echo chamber is a danger when we are left to autonomously construct our own networks, but I do think that by having a well developed network we actually create more opportunities for serendipitous moments that are much more relevant to us.

I actually view my network as a serendipity engine > Do We Have Too Many Filters, Or Not Enough? http://bit.ly/lsPa7U
May 31, 2011 8:13 pm via bitlyReplyRetweetFavorite
@clintlalonde
Clint Lalonde

Here’s a story.

About a week ago,  Rodd Lucier passed my name on to a M.Ed getting ready to hike up the thesis mountain. Rodd is familiar with my thesis research on the role that Twitter plays in PLN among educators, and knew that this student might be interested in doing similar research, so he made the connection. This morning I had a Skype call with this student & we discussed our mutual research interests.

Part of the conversation revolved around tweets, and the level of depth contained in 140 characters. It sounds so small. 140 characters. Yet within those 140 characters a lot can happen.

When I first started considering doing research on Twitter, I wanted to do a content analysis of tweets. But, as I played with the Twitter api and began trying to figure out ways of mining Twitter data against a backdrop where Twitter changed the rules each week on how and who can access their data, I dropped the idea. I didn’t want to have my thesis depend on data that I couldn’t be sure I could access. As a result, I decided to move into a more qualitative realm with my research. While I was somewhat disappointed at the time, in the end I am happy with the way I did my research and have ended up with something that, I think, is much more interesting than my original idea. However, there is still something I find so appealing about deconstructing a tweet because I think that so much depth can be packed away within that small package. The simple act of including a link to something else that is much more in depth truly belies the defined nature of a tweet.

So, back to the conversation, which included a bit of this type of discussion on the nature of depth represented in a single tweet. The conversation ends with me sharing my thesis research library and agreeing to keep in touch. I get off Skype, fire up Twitter and what is the first tweet I see?

Ismael Peña-López has posted an amazing deconstruction of a Tweet I posted last night: http://bit.ly/luRWAp #ds106radio #etug
June 3, 2011 8:09 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite
@brlamb
Brian Lamb

Seriously serendipitous. And an excellent read about how much context and depth you can pack into 140 characters.

May 16, 2011
by Clint
2 Comments

If you have never failed, you have never lived

One of the most powerful assignments I had as part of my Masters program was the one I received the worst grade on. I went into the assignment with my partners knowing that it was a risky assignment; an experiment, but felt that I knew the instructor well enough, and had faith that she would be able to see the intent of what we were trying to do, that she would appreciate the fact that we were taking a risk. She did and, even though the grade I received was the lowest of my Masters,  it turned out to be one of the assignments where I learned the most.

I was thinking about this assignment as I read Failure is an Option, the latest article from Faculty Focus, and how failure is just not an option in our society – in school, at work, in anything we do.

But instead of using failure as a valuable teaching tool, education discourages it as, well, a sign of failure. A student is measured at various points along a course on how well they have mastered the material. Since each assignment is graded based on its proximity to success, and the final grade is determined by the aggregate of each individual grade, failure is preserved and carried with the student throughout the course. The result is that students become failure-adverse, demoralized by failure, and focused more on the grade than the education.

When failure is not an option, the stakes are high. And when the stakes are high, no one is willing to take a risk because, well, a risk means there is a chance you can fail. Hello attitude of “I-just-need-to-study-enough-to-pass-the-test”. Hello passionate argument about how that B+ NEEDS to be an A- because that B+ isn’t good enough and will bring down a GPA. Hello, mediocrity.

I was musing about this on Facebook when a friend of mine posted a link to this great little video – a video that reminds me that failure IS an option, and sometimes, it is actually the best option. Because if you have never failed, then you have never lived.

May 12, 2011
by Clint
2 Comments

Leveraging the power of the network

School of Fish

I’ve been thinking about the network effect a lot recently, and how this ability to create and leverage a large network of peers is really one of the most powerful affordances of the web that we, as educators, have at our disposal.

I marvel at how someone like Alec Couros can, with a couple of tweets, leverage his network of 12,000 educators to engage with his students, and have them leave comments on his students blogs.  A student taking an education course from Alec gets connected to his global network of educators. Alec’s students don’t have one teacher – they potentially have 12,000.

But it has taken time for Alec to develop this network. You don’t get connected to 12,000 educators overnight by using some kind of automated process. You get connected by engaging with the network, by participating and contributing. That takes time and effort. It’s an investment that is sometimes a hard sell to people who cannot see the benefits of developing a network.

But I’ll bet it is an investment that a group of scientists in Guyana are happy they made.

You see, by making the investment to develop their social networks and connect with other ichthyologist (scientists who study fish) on Facebook, this particular group of scientists was able to tap into that Facebook network and use that network to help them identify 5000 species of fish in less than 24 hours. I’ve added the emphasis.

Last month, a team of ichthyologists sponsored by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History performed the first survey of the fish diversity in the Cuyuni River of Guyana. Upon their return, they needed to identify the more than 5,000 specimens they had collected in less than a week’s time in order to obtain an export permit. Faced with insufficient time and inadequate library resources to tackle the problem on their own, they instead posted a catalog of specimen images to Facebook and turned to their network of colleagues for help.

In less than 24 hours, this approach identified approximately 90 percent of the posted specimens to at least the level of genus, revealed the presence of at least two likely undescribed species, indicated two new records for Guyana and generated several loan requests. The majority of people commenting held a Ph.D. in ichthyology or a related field, and hailed from a great diversity of countries including the United States, Canada, France, Switzerland, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Guyana and Brazil.

This is such an incredible example of what social networks and networked learning are capable of doing; connecting large groups of people in diverse locations together to do amazing things. I mean, they used Facebook to identified 2 new species of fish! That’s a pretty dang impressive feat.

But this project would not have been possible if this group of scientists had not invested the time beforehand to develop a robust network of scientists within their social networks.

The network is a powerful, powerful thing.

Note: I am not clear as to who the project lead was for this project, it was a bit unclear in the Smithsonian article, but I believe it was Brian Sidlauskas at Oregon State University. And a tip of the hat to All Points West on CBC for this story.

Photo: School of Fish by wizetux. Used under Creative Commons license.

April 20, 2011
by Clint
6 Comments

QR Codes

I’ve been messing around with creating QR codes (PDF). We’ve been talking mobile lately at work and brainstorming different strategies we can start using quickly to get people thinking mobile, while providing some useful services to the students & faculty we serve. So, I wanted to see just how difficult it was to create a useful QR code. Turns out, not difficult at all.

A little searching found a number of sites to create QR codes. After trying a few, I stumbled upon the QR Code and 2D Code Generator by Keram Erkan that generates a huge variety of QR codes, including codes that will create links to a variety of websites, send emails, and even automatically hook your mobile device to a wifi network (how useful/popular would that be for students on campus?)

So, here is my first QR code, created in about 30 seconds. I’d appreciate it if you have a mobile device to give it a try and let me know if it works (I’ve tested on my Android powered HTC Magic running Barcode Scanner). This QR should take you to my About page.

About Me QR Code

April 18, 2011
by Clint
0 comments

Playing with an iPad

iFuture - What's Next For Apple

I’m generally not a big gadget guy. I don’t have the desire to have the latest and shiniest, mostly because I am cheap and being on the gadget cutting edge costs more than I am willing to part with. I was late to the game with a smartphone, just got an ebook reader this Christmas, and bought a netbook around the same time the original iPad was released. So, this post might sound very 2010 for many of you.

I got an iPad. No, not an iPad 2, an iPad. Old skool. 5 of them landed in our department last week so we can test out the educational potential of the device. So, of course, I immediately downloaded Angry Birds, a cultural phenomenon I had not had the pleasure of experiencing until last Friday.

That out of the way, I spent some time on the weekend poking around the device. Much has been written and reviewed about the iPad so I won’t go into details here save for a couple of specific things I noticed about the device:

  • The screen orientation is crisp and fast. My Android phone takes a few seconds for the display to orient when I flip the phone. The iPad was instant.
  • The keyboard is more comfortable than I was expecting. I am a hunt and peck typist so it works for me. Others in our unit who are more classically oriented typists said they found the keyboard a bit more difficult.
  • The brushed aluminum finish felt slippery in my hands. I have an out of the box model, and can see where a cover or skin of some kind would make me feel more comfortable handling it and stop the “this thing is going to slip out of my fingers” feeling.
  • Setting up Gmail was painless. However, I couldn’t get it working with our corporate Exchange server, but that could have to do with our exchange server setup and not with the app or device.
  • The web experience is okay. I am not a big fan of Safari as a browser. It does the job, but the lack of ability for me to add-on extensions means that the browser is just that – a browser. I’m used to my browser being a tool and that possibility doesn’t seem to exist in Safari in the iPad. Other than that, the internal sites our unit is responsible actually worked pretty well, although my testing of Moodle consisted primarily of logging in and checking out content & navigation.
  • WiFi seemed iffy. I tried reading in bed one night. My bedroom is at the other end of the house from my wireless router, so the signal is fairly weak. But my laptop, Kindle and Android phone can all get a usable wireless signal while I am in bed. The iPad couldn’t. The signal was too weak for the device.

Okay, onto some more educational applications. I wanted to do was to see if there were any Moodle apps available, and there was – mTouch+ for $2.99, so I made the purchase and installed the app. It didn’t work – at all. I tap the app icon, it flashes briefly on the screen, then closes down. That’s it. I’ve posted in the developers forum, but so far haven’t heard back. I’ve also heard getting a refund on an app is difficult.

I had better luck with the next apps I installed – a 3d interactive Brain and an interactive periodic table. Both of these worked like a charm, and in a couple of minutes my daughter was rotating around a 3d model of the human brain.

Up next was the Kindle app. I have a Kindle and Kindle account, so wanted to give reading on the iPad a shot. The Kindle app installed & synced up nicely with my Kindle account, giving me access to the books I had already purchased on my Kindle. Excellent. The reading experience on the iPad was quite nice, but I did have some glare from my bedside lamp that was a tad annoying. But other than that, the short period of time I spent reading felt comfortable. And once I got t eh hang of the highlighting tool, I was able to highlight and annotate passages in my e-book, which I hope will synch back to my Kindle (haven’t tested that yet).

The WordPress app was installed next, which (at first blush anyway) seems identical to the Android app I have on my HTC. There is no WYSIWYG editor, so you are very limited in terms of formatting a posts, but it does the job. You can also moderate and respond to comments.

But the real highlight app in my first few days of using the iPad is Flipboard. First and foremost, Flipboard is a beautiful RSS reader that pulls content from my Google Reader account and gives me a nicely formatted reading experience. But in addition to being an RSS reader that can pull and compile feeds, Flipboard also connects to both my Facebook and Twitter feeds and aggregates the links being shared by my networks and presents those articles to me in a nice package. It’s like an iPad version of Twitter Times or Paper.li, and I found that the way that Flipboard works, it was very easy for me to scan accross numerous links and articles and pick out the ones that were relevant to me. The visual presentation of Flipboard made it easier to discover relevant information from my network.

So far, my experimenting with an iPad has been pretty high level try a few things for a couple minutes and move on, but I can already see some places where this thing could fit into my life. For example, at work taking notes in a meeting the iPad is much less intrusive than having a laptop sitting open on the table, although trying to access our internal Sharepoint collaborative site was (not surprising) an exercise in frustration.

Any recommendations for education type apps that I should try out?

Photo: iFuture by YiyingLu. Used under Creative Commons license.

April 13, 2011
by Clint
0 comments

How Today’s Higher Education Faculty Use Social Media for Work and for Play

Pearson has just released some new research on the social media habits of higher education faculty called Teaching, Learning, and Sharing: How Today’s Higher Education Faculty Use Social Media for Work and for Play.

The impressive stat that pops out in the executive summary is the statement that “over 90% of all faculty are using social media in courses they’re teaching or for their professional careers outside the classroom”. Wow. 90%. That’s an awful lot of tweeting, status updates, blog posts and user videos being created and consumed in academia.

As part of the research, Pearson decided to do a social media contest among respondents, where they asked respondents who said they were using social media in teaching to submit a video via YouTube. The winning video is from Krista Jackman from the University of New Hampshire who explains how she uses Twitter in her class.

While there is a lot of interesting stuff about using social media in the classroom (no surprise that the ability to consume video on YouTube is seen by most faculty as the killer pedagogical app of the educational social media world) , the piece I am interested in in the context of my thesis is the professional development piece. According to the study, 78% of faculty have reported using at least one social media site for professional development (which was something I was beginning to witness at my previous institution just before I left). YouTube  (57%) was the most common,  followed by Facebook (45%), Blogs (38%), LinkedIn (33%), wikis (28%), Twitter (13%), Flickr (11%), SlideShare (7%) and MySpace (6%).

If we dig deeper into that YouTube number, I suspect that the high percentage reflects a consumption, and not a participatory, model of YouTube use among faculty. The study did not ask the faculty to discriminate between posting or visiting only with the professional development use section of the study. However, they do ask faculty to make that distinction with regard to their personal (not classroom or professional development) use of social media sites. When asked to differentiate between visiting a site and posting to a site, only 8% of faculty reported having posted something on YouTube. The study didn’t say whether the term “posted” referred to posting a video, or posting a comment to a video.

I want to write more about this (like where are the more grassroots social media sites that are not mentioned in with the 800 pound gorillas? Where are the Ning’s, the SCoPE’s and the Skype for the Classroom’s?), but I am tired and am using this blog post as a way to procrastinate writing what I really should be writing right now. So I’ll leave it to you to dig in a see if you agree that there seems to be a lot of social media consumption and much less participating happening by faculty on social media sites, which is probably in line with the participation rate of the general population.