I’ll be conducting a day-long workshop on informal learning in Ottawa on 30 January 2007. The event is sponsored by CSTD and members get a discount. Please feel free to contact me about the workshop and add any questions or issues that you would like to discuss. I’ll be arriving in Ottawa the afternoon of the 29th if anyone wants to get together before the event, and I’ll probably be staying at the same hotel. Participants also get a copy of Jay’s book on Informal Learning (a great read).
Harold Jarche
Public Domain Day
From CopyrightWatch.ca:
Take these examples: Billy Bishop’s Winged warfare : hunting the Huns in the air; Ernest Bilodeau’s Autour du lac Saint-Jean; C.A. Chant’s Our wonderful universe; the Earl of Bessborough’s A week on the Jupiter River, Anticosti Island; Maurice Lalonde’s Notes historiques sur Mont-Laurier, Nominingue et Kiamika; and Mina Benson Hubbard’s A Woman’s Way Through Unknown Labrador are all in the public domain in Canada as of this morning.
Yet a March 15, 1939 letter from Billy Bishop to Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King; the papers of Ernest Bilodeau; C.A. Chant’s astronomical notebooks; Lord Bessborough’s letters and documents pertaining to his tenure as Governor-General of Canada; Maurice Lalonde’s political correspondence; and Mina Benson Hubbard’s exploration diaries; will all be protected from unfettered use by Canadians for another 42 years.
Note that through most of our collective history, copyright has been the anomaly and the public domain has been the default.
Wildlife Photograph Archive
I volunteer as Director of Education at the Atlantic Wildlife Institute (AWI), which is located just outside our town of Sackville:
The AWI is unique among wildlife rescue programs in Atlantic Canada in using rehabilitation to identify and highlight key environmental health issues for public attention and response.
Learning by doing is central to the mission. Wildlife rehabilitation work is a kind of ecological sampling. It helps identify environmental change. Habitat loss, toxicity, and wildlife-borne diseases can all be better understood if we document and study wildlife afflicted by these conditions.
During the past year I started an AWI photo gallery on Flickr as a shared resource of wildlife pictures. We use these photos in our educational programs. I have since created a group photo pool called Atlantic Wildlife Network. Our aim is to have an open database of wildlife pictures that can be used for educational activities. We hope to get pictures of North American animals at different stages of development and from various angles in their natural habitats. We’ll also continue to add pictures of the hundreds of animals that pass through AWI annually.
If you have pictures that you would be willing to share, then please check out the photo pool. Membership is open. I would suggest using a Creative Commons license, such as Public Domain, Attribution-ShareAlike, or Attribution-Non-Commercial. This would make it easy to share and use the pictures without having to check with each copyright holder. Note that Flickr allows you to mark individual photographs with separate licenses.
Please feel free to use those photographs already posted. Thanks & happy new year :-)
And there is now an AWI Photo Blog with more pictures.
Who is Time’s person of the year?
I’m sure that everyone who hasn’t been in an eggnog-induced coma has heard that Time’s person of the year is – You; or those people who control the information revolution:
And we didn’t just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software.
Before we get too complacent with “our” status as person of the year, here’s the view from someone in the education field- infomancy:
When it comes to “me†as a professional, the place where I spend the majority of my waking hours is rather not “we.†Or, perhaps it is a bit too “we†– but the “we†that schools have created to mean “us in the corner twiddling our thumbs and pretending that the Internet doesn’t exist.†See, for me, Facebook is forbidden. Second Life is shut down. Amazon reviews are avoided. Podcasts are against policy. Blogs are…well…banned just might not be strong enough of a word. The word that springs to mind is demonized. So how, then, could Time possibly have meant “me†when they named “you†as the person of the year?
As I look at Time’s description, I notice that I may not qualify as person of the year either:
- Made a Facebook profile? – No
- Made a Second Life Avatar? – No
- Reviewed books at Amazon? – No
- Recorded a podcast? – Does recording a Skypecast count?
- Blogged about my candidate losing? – Nope
- Wrote a song about getting dumped? Never written a song and happily married.
- Camcordered a bombing run? No, I’ve learned to avoid military operations, especially as a civilian
- Built open source software? No, I just try to use the stuff.
Oh well, I guess I’ll have to find my 15 minutes of fame some other way. I assume this means that I can’t put a cool person-of-the-year badge on my site; dang!
Popular posts in 2006
This year saw blogging enter the mainstream and I’ve noticed that I no longer have to explain it to most people. I changed platforms (from Drupal to WordPress), which has made comment spam management much easier. There is no doubt that e-mail spam is a major problem today and now comment & trackback spam have claimed their places of infamy (as much as 93%) on Web 2.0.
The good news is that blogs are frequently cited in the mass media. The bad news is that most teachers in our area don’t have a clue about blogs, the two-way web or how to incorporate these into their teaching. Plus ça change …
This blog has had a constant increase in readership this year [thank you] with several posts getting significant views and comments. I just checked the stats and these are the most popular posts on this site in the past year, as determined by number of viewers. They’re listed in chronological order.
- Teachers’ Roles in Learning & Problem-solving (Nov 2005)
- Learners as contributors – the end of the industrial model (Jan 2006)
- The relevance of the learning profession (Jun 2006)
- Informal learning and performance technology (Jul 2006)
- Blackboard patents the LMS, but does it matter? (Jul 2006)
- Blackboard Sues D2L over LMS Patent (Aug 2006)
- My PKM System (Aug 2006)
- Aliant Connection Speed – the saga continues (Sep 2006)
- Small schools, loosely joined (Sep 2006)
- SmartDraw 2007 (Oct 2006)
A pause for the Solstice
Time to recharge my batteries, focus on our family and stop blogging for a while. Thanks to all the folks who came by here this year and especially those who left comments, as it’s the continuing conversations that keep me going. All the best for Christmas, Saturnalia, Kwanzaa or whatever you may be celebrating at this time of year.
Here’s a photo, by Rockcliffe View, of what I wished the Tantramar Marshes looked more like this year, but alas we have no snow (yet).
Myths, Research & Sharing
Once again, Will Thalheimer nails what is passed off as corporate research as actually the propagation of a myth (meme?), asking:
Is it plagiarism if you steal a lie?
The culprit in this case is Forrester Research. The previous culprit was NTL. Will is doing the field a great favour by holding us to high standards of research and citation.
My own experience is that a lot of corporate research is fluff that is sold for very high prices. Many researchers, like Will or Stephen, or practitioners like Jay, make their work available for free, in order to encourage peer collaboration. The free information and research is just as good, if not better, than the “research” that is sold as fancy white papers to large, unsuspecting organisations. I find that it’s worth your while to pay for research that is contextual to your particular circumstances or to hire a researcher to look specifically at your field or region. Generic research, sold in +$1,000, one-size-fits-all packages, is probably not worth it.
Caveat emptor
Open Source – you get what you pay for
Elgg is a social networking (like MySpace) and learning (not like Blackboard) platform that I use and have implemented for clients. It is free and open source, under the GNU Public License or GPL.
Recently, Ben, the main programmer for Elgg, has been getting some comments about the lack of documentation for Elgg. He has responded, correctly, that the voluntary developer team has not been able to complete all of the documentation but volunteers are always needed and appreciated. Dave, the concept guy behind Elgg, has set things straight with his post, Understanding Open Source.
I think that these misconceptions about open source being free and fully supported come from the now common phenomenon of free web applications, like Gmail or Skype. Perhaps the average user doesn’t know that there can be a difference between “free” and “open source”. Initially, it may not make much difference to the user, but it can be important later.
Open source software is released under a variety of licenses such as the GPL. Free software that is not OS is owned by someone else and only its use is made available for free, under certain conditions. With open source, the rub is that the community has to stay involved to make the software better. If you’re looking at OS software, check out the size and involvement of the developer and supporter communities first. With free software, you usually have to give something away in order to use it. Quite often it’s your privacy, as you do not own your data, or you may have to put up with advertising on your application. Someone has to pay.
Open source gives you something extra though, and that is the ability to take the whole application, source code and all, and move it or even modify it. For instance, my website uses WordPress, an OS blogging platform. If I am not satisfied with my host, I can take the whole application and set it up somewhere else. I cannot do that with Gmail or Skype. Therefore, I own my data and the application that makes my data available to my readers. With almost 1,000 posts on this blog, this data is becoming quite important to me as my knowledge base. The decision to use an OS system as well as an OS database gives me a certain amount of flexibility, evidenced by my switch from Drupal to WordPress this year. My only costs were labour. I could not have taken my data out of a proprietary system (like Blackboard) as easily.
Using open source requires a commitment. That commitment may be less with the more popular programs (OpenOffice, Firefox) which have corporate or foundation backing. The little guys need your help, but you can also have a lot of influence on smaller projects.
So if you’re using open source applications, get involved; because you get what you pay for.
Five Things Meme
Dave Cormier has slapped me with a meme, kind of like a chain letter, to write 5 things that you may not know about me.
Memes can be very powerful and some can actually be dangerous, and if you want to know more about memes and memetics, listen to Sue Blackmore’s presentation at Pop!Tech. This meme is fairly safe, even though there is some (friendly) coercion that if I don’t pass it on I’ll not be part of the group. Interesting things, those memes.
So here are 5 things that you may not know (or don’t want to know) about me.
First of all, Dave, I don’t have a secret love of armadillos; sorry :-(
In chronological order (drum roll please):
- I played Frosty the Snowman in the school play in grade 2 and was a celebrity for the rest of the year
- I was on our school team on Reach for the Top (we lost)
- I played piccolo in a military marching band during university (it was easier than carrying a rifle on parade)
- I met Pierre Trudeau one evening in 1977. I had a blind date for a dance in St-Jean sur Richelieu and my date was a personal friend of the Prime Minister. My French at the time was very poor while my date’s English was passable. Trudeau told us this was a great example of his vision for bilingualism; an anglophone trying to speak in French to a francophone speaking English. Vive la différence!
- I was an amateur vintner in Germany, after a friend passed on a very small plot of about 200 vines on the local hill that was covered with “real” vineyards. It cost me about $10 a year to lease it from the town. All I ever made was bad vinegar, but the grape-pressing party was great.
I’ll pass this along to another five people, but don’t feel guilty if you decide not to reply:
Hal – I’m certain that you have done some interesting things
Jay – because you have lots of spare time ;-)
Jon – to know more about you
Karyn – to get a different cultural perspective, from across the pond
anol – for another cultural perspective, across a different pond
If you’ve already been tagged, then of course you’re off the hook :-)
Moving from Furl to del.icio.us
I’ve been using Furl as a social bookmarking tool for a few years but the RSS feed has not worked since September 2006. I decided to try to transfer my Furl archive (+800) to del.icio.us. I used the export as Mozilla bookmarks function in Furl and then saved the page as an HTML file on my desktop. In del.icio.us, I used the import/upload function and uploaded the file. It worked quite well and saved my files with their tags. One glitch was that all of my imported bookmarks were marked private and I had to individually change the settings to public. The other problem was that del.icio.us only imported about 500 of the bookmarks. However, I have most of my bookmarks in del.icio.us and will be using it as my primary tool for sharing web pages because it seems to be more collaborative and the RSS feed works.