Work is learning. Learning is the work.
communities of interest and practice
I don’t know who TakingITGlobal is and I don’t use my Eduspaces account very much, so I’ve just deleted all of my information and posts. It was fun while it lasted, but I don’t need someone else aggregating my data and my FOAF file. More from Stephen Downes.
So long, and thanks for all the fish …
I recently joined Xing, a business social networking site. In one of the forums I came across an open source social networking system (SNS). Dolphin is Creative Commons licensed, not the more typical GPL for open source, with the following restrictions:
Dolphin is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. This means that you are free to use it the way you need, adapt it, change code, distribute, share with friends or even sell it. You must, however attribute the work as specified by BoonEx. And the specification is dead simple – don’t remove links to BoonEx and the Dolphin Page in the footer of all Dolphin pages, unless you paid for it.
An example website built with Dolphin is the German/English language LearnTube! Community, though it doesn’t have many members yet.
I get a lot of hits on this website from searches looking for open source alternatives to Facebook. I have recommended Elgg, which hosts Eduspaces, or sometimes Drupal, and now I know of another one. I’d appreciate finding anyone with first-hand experience of a Dolphin installation.
Update: It looks like Eduspaces will be shutting down its free service as of 10 Jan 2008. It’s too bad, but a free service still has to pay for the cost of hosting hundreds of blogs :-(Â More on Eduspaces at IncSub.
Some recent threads seem to be interweaving and creating patterns in what is becoming my de facto field of practice – “informal collaborative social learning & work”.
One thread is what Jay Cross has referred to with Hole-in-the-Wall Learning (HiW), which I first came across in the book Design Like You Give a Damn, and this conversation has been picked up by Peter Isackson:
It seems to me that the fundamental key to the success of HiW is the notion of “self-organized groups” who learn on their own. If education is to become truly non-invasive, as Jay suggests, it must refrain from defining both the goals and the means to reach them, entrusting the groups with this task. If educational gurus (authorities) notice that a group is neglecting what is considered “essential” in the curriculum (for whatever reason, whether it’s basic security, survival or inculcating an existing set of values), the group could be challenged to account for why they may be neglecting a certain topic or reminded of the interest in pursuing it. Respecting the self-organizing group and its decision-making capacity is the sine qua non of success. It also happens to be the absolute opposite of the organizational principles of traditional education and training.
The idea of self-organised groups is a key theme in informal workplace learning, which Jay and I experimented with last year in the “unworkshops“. The HiW data is corroboration that we may be on the right path, though these studies involve young children only.
The other thread came via Michele Martin when she described some “new” roles that may be jobs of the future. The roles of Personal Learning Environment Assistant; Social Media Specialist; Online Coach; Social Network Catalyst and Social Network Analyst are ones that I’ve taken on at some time over the past few years. These descriptors are, for me, a clarification of the work that I’m doing.
One on my constant challenges has been in describing my work to others, and these roles can help with that. A current project with the Advanced Leadership Program of the Canada School of Public Service has me in the roles of Social Network Analyst & Catalyst and perhaps later as PLE Assistant. As we develop the online aspect of the wildlife emergency response network with AWI next year, I will assume similar roles and perhaps even that of Online Coach. If we use these terms in our proposals and work descriptions, they will become mainstream and should make it easier to get away from industrial-style roles such as workshop trainer, when not applicable.
The two threads of self-organised learning and some commonly used terms in online collaboration have come together for me and should make it easier to ‘splain just what the heck I do.
Following up from Copy Leftovers, here are some resources focused especially on the Canadian perspective. We should all be concerned and get informed before the Canadian DMCA is allowed to pass.
First off, you can join the Facebook group, Fair Copyright for Canada, which already has over 10,000 members. I have also been saving articles on del.icio.us relating to Copyright. Consider that Canadians pay for their RIGHT to copy digital media every day, according to Michael Geist:
The Copyright Board of Canada last week released its proposed tariff for 2007 for the private copying levy. The numbers remain unchanged: 21 cents per CD-R. As prices have dropped, however, the levy now frequently comprises a significant percentage of the retail price. Consider the purchase of 100 blank Maxell CDs. Future Shop retails the 100 CDs for $69.99. The breakdown of this sale is $48.99 for the CDs and $21.00 for the levy (even worse is a current Future Shop deal of 200 blank CD-Rs from HP, which retails for $59.99. The levy alone on this sale is $42.00 (200 CDs x 21 cents/CD) which leaves the consumers paying $17.99 for the CDs and $42.00 for the levy).
According to Steve Jobs, the music companies sell more DRM-free music than anyone else:
In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.
On a lighter note, you can watch this video of a puppet saying why we should Stop the Canadian DMCA, with some interesting recommendations on what to do with our politicians.
The title comes from Mark Pesce’s presentation in September on Mob Rules, which I found via Will Richardson. That means that everyone in the edtech field has already heard about it. Anyway, this is an absolutely fascinating read, even for someone already immersed in all this Web 2.0 stuff.
The whole idea of the Mob is intriguing and seems bang on to me. “Now that 3 billion people are connected with mobile phones, the old rules have really changed”, Pesce says, and I agree, that it’s not about the technology:
Before we get all hippy-dippy and attribute agency to something that we all know is really just a collection of wires and routing boxen, we need to clarify what we mean when we use the word “net”. The wiring isn’t the network. The routers aren’t the network. The people are the network. We had social networks ten million years before we ever had a telephone exchange; we carry those networks around in our heads, they’re part of the standard “kit” of our cortical biology. We have been blessed with the biggest and best networking gear of all the hominids, but we all share the same capability. The social sharing of information has played a big part in the success of the hominids, and, in particular, human beings. We are born to plug into the network of other human beings and share information. It’s what we do.
From now on, anything that is top-down (bureaucracies, hierarchies, advertising) will be circumvented by the networked Mob. Pesce also says that “The Mob does not need a business model“, as is obvious with P2P file-sharing. No one makes any money and The Mob doesn’t care.
My comments don’t do this article justice so take some time to read it and some of the others on the website.
One final note; a little bit of déja vu occurred as I was reading this. I was downtown earlier in the day, and tried to find an open wi-fi connection, hoping that I wasn’t too far from the Café. The only open connection was called “Free Public Wi-Fi”and it connected me to this site – Meraki. I had never heard of it, and didn’t connect as it was fee for service, and I wasn’t ready to give out my credit card number. Anyway, about 20 minutes later I read this on Pesce’s post:
Four months ago, a small startup in Silicon Valley named Meraki (Greek for “doing it with love”) for unveiled a cute little device, a wireless router that they simply named the Mini. Inside it has a RISC CPU running a custom version of LINUX which handles all of the routing tasks. That’s where it gets interesting. You see, Meraki have pioneered a new technology known as “wireless mesh networking”. You can power up a Mini in anywhere you like, and if there’s another Mini within distance and these devices can reach nearly half a kilometer, outdoors it will connect to it, share routing information, and route packets from one to another all without any need to configure anything at all. Add another, and another, and another, and all of a sudden you’ve created a very wide area WiFi network.
Small world, big Mob.
I’m digging back into wikis for a client; reviewing my bookmarks and following trails of links in this growing field. For instance, WikiMatrix has dozens of options listed and includes a selection wizard to help you select a wiki. In reviewing some saved posts in my aggregator I re-read Nathan’s post on using wikis in a pharmaceutical company, with this advice on a content strategy:
I also checked enterprise-strength wikis at SocialText and was a bit frustrated that the section on Pricing & Licenses does not include any prices. My request yielded a response that someone from sales would be contacting me shortly. We’ll see if I get a clear answer or just a sales pitch.
I’ve supported Creative Commons (and use a CC license for this site) for several years and see it as a leader as we move to a digital economy. Larry Lessig’s presentations are usually quite informative, but it’s obvious that he put a lot of effort into his TED Talk this year. As Larry says, this talk is “Somethings old, somethings new, lots that’s borrowed, none that’s blue.”
He points out that we are living in a society where most of our children are doing illegal activities (AKA piracy) because we haven’t figured out this whole digital universe yet. Let’s get it right for our kids
Take 20 minutes and watch the presentation on how creativity is being strangled by the law.
Update: Don’t believe me? Here’s what Garr Reynolds has to say:
The 18-minute constraint forced Larry into making the best talk I have ever seen him make. He nailed it. His content was good, the argument was logical (even if you do not agree with it) and his visuals and the way he effortlessly controlled the visuals behind him is the perfect demo for the way it should be done.Â
Trust is something that you have to work at every day. Yesterday I got some comment spam referring to a Squidoo page. I use the Squidoo service and have created a few lenses, so I thought I’d forward evidence of the spammer to Squidoo’s administration. They quickly responded:
We’ve reviewed and locked these lenses, along with the accounts responsible for them.
Squidoo has a zero tolerance spam policy (http://www.squidoo.com/pages/tos) and we appreciate your help keeping a few bad actors from ruining the web for the rest of us!
I now trust Squidoo to take action on spam. As it becomes more difficult to hide on the Net (for better and for worse) it makes sense to be trustworthy through your actions. The latest Carnival of Trust reviews ten excellent articles on the issue of trust:
In each Carnival of Trust, a theme emerges; in this one, it’s policy on trust. Issues of policy and trust in health care, in direct marketing, in marketing, in leadership.
This week I’ve noticed that everything seems to come back to our artificially created systems. If I’m waiting for a decision it’s because of poor information flow at some bottleneck in a hierarchy. If I’m not able to take action on an idea that would help many people it’s due to some artificial construct called a regulation or policy. No one is responsible; it’s the system. I feel blocked at every turn and I’m not alone. Mark Federman sums it up best with his thesis pitch:
I make the observation that almost all organizations that we have in our world – be they business corporations, non-profits, volunteer organizations, sewing circles, soccer clubs, schools, religious organizations – they all look like factories. By this I mean that they are Bureaucratic, Administratively controlled and Hierarchical – in other words, BAH! I suggest that this is not because it is human nature to be BAH, but rather this is an artefact of the Industrial Age that was mechanistic (with roots in the Gutenberg Press), industrial, fragmented, and functionally oriented. Now, as I look around, I observe that we are no longer in the Industrial Age. Rather, we are living in a world in which everyone is, or soon will be, connected to everyone else – an age of ubiquitous connectivity. This brings about the effect of being immediately next to, or proximate to, everyone else – in other words, pervasive proximity. I therefore ask the question, what form of organization is consistent with the ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate world of today, rather than with the 19th century?
We are in desperate need of new models for living, working and learning. Rob Paterson has been discussing the messy world that we now live in and how modern armies cannot win against insurgents or stabilize failed states. Dave Pollard & Jon Husband recently talked about the value of leadership. Leaders may be required in hierarchies but are they necessary in wirearchies?
The great work of our time is to design, build and test new organizational models that reflect our democratic values and can function in an inter-connected world. Failure by our generation to do so will leave the next one to deal with the reactionary forces of corporatism; something our children are already facing.
I listened to the EdTechTalk Weekly webcast last night; something I’ve missed for several months. The Weekly highlights things of interest to the educational technology community. I noted UNESCO’s listing of free and open source courseware tools as well as a directory of free web and mobile applications (I like free).
There was also a discussion, or perhaps a brouhaha, around James Farmer’s criticisms of EduCon 2.0:
… the real, overarching issue I have with all of this is that it’s humming to the choir and ignoring the difficult, unpleasant, messy and sometimes just darn impossible questions that make up the reality of successful teaching and learning in any different context …
I think that we need more critical discussions in our field and be open to criticism from within. If your friends can’t give call you to task, who can?