Ten Reasons Why

The OpenTextBook link popped up on a few weblogs today, but none of them seemed to be the usual ed blog suspects, so here's the link. Or, rather, the link's a few words back.

Basically, they're co-authoring a textbook online, using CVS (not the pharmacy) to check in the changes to the PDF manuscript. Appears to be a math textbook, but works like "algebra" frighten and confuse the English major in me, so I couldn't read much.

I doubt the publishing giants are quaking in their boots, but it's a valiant effort. They should've used a wiki though. Although common among developers, CVS is still fairly rarified for a mainstream educator or student. It pretty effectively limits the people who can contribute. On the other hand, Wikipedia, has turned into an amazing resource, primarily because of the low threshold to contribution.

The New York Times documents one of those "Duh!" statements that never seems to make it into public policy in any meaningful fashion.

The article's a few weeks old, but it's not like it's an idea that goes stale. That's the point.

Will Richardson, who writes non-stupidly on this stuff, has summarized a conversation about blogging in schools that has been taking place across several weblogs over the last couple days.

I'm far from a Luddite, having made been involved with educational technology for more than a decade, made my living off it most of that time, and have worked with 1500+ faculty in 4 or 5 countries. Likewise, though I've been out of the teaching game for several years, I'll put up five years of teaching several sections a semester of freshman comp or intro lit as reasonable cred to discuss writing pedagogy somewhat intelligently.

All of which is to say that this is stuff I've spent my entire adult life thinking about, so I don't take it lightly when I paraphrase a former President:

It's the writing, stupid.

Will says:

"[I]t seems the characteristics of writing that make it useful are too much in contradiction to what public schools expect of their teachers and students. For writing to be of value, I think, it has to be born of passion. Look at the best writers out there, the ones you read on a regular basis. The reason I stick with them is because of their obvious passion for their topics, their sense of purpose for their spaces. I think of A-list writers like [list of writers]. And I come across new ones every day. They write because they want to, because they want to invest in the conversation, not because they are required to do so.

By its very nature, assigned writing in schools cannot be writing. It's contrived. No matter how much we want to spout off about the wonders of audience and readership, students who are asked to write are writing for an audience of one, the teacher. (A related question might be whether or not students who have become so attuned to the game of pleasing the teacher can even conceive of what it means to write for an audience...) I try my best to pretend it's not so, and maybe on the elementary level where kids are less focused on playing the grade game this may not be as true. But my students drop writing like wet cement when the class is over. And it's because I can't let them write in the first place. I can let them write about their passions, but I can't let them do it passionately due to the inherent censorship that a high school served writing journal carries with it. I can tell them the process will strengthen their writing and their intellect, but I can't tell them I won't assess it or else they won't do it."

Except, of course, that's not what Will said. Substitute "blogging" for "writing," "blogger" for "writer," "blog" for "writing journal" and you have Will's thoughts.

See, what Will is describing is not a problem of incorporating blogging in the classroom, but a problem of teaching writing. And this is nothing new. There's several decades of theory, research, and application in the field of composition that have addressed these problems. And continues to address them, because they're not universally solvable problems and the individual students and student population as a whole keep doing silly things like, oh, I don't know, growing and learning and changing, damn them. ;-)

IMHO, there are only two formal qualities of weblogs that are inherently distinct from other writing forms -- hypertextuality and an expanded audience. (More accurately, these are characteristics of writing on the web, whether a weblog or a corporate website, not formal characteristics specific to weblogs.) I tend to think that, expect perhaps with adult learners, the generation gap makes most of us fairly ineffective teachers of approaches to hypertextuality. Most of the kids grew up on this stuff and understand it better than their teachers ever will. And with regard to an expanded writing audience, I've written about that before in response to Will. An expanded audience certainly changes the way we write, but it may be more of a chiling effect than a boon for developing writers.

The other stuff -- RSS, permalinks, Trackback, threaded vs. flat comments, reverse chronological order, etc etc -- are just features of web publishing software that really have very little to do with what happens between the four walls of the text entry box. Oh, sure, you can talk about social software and how all these features of blogging can create an intertwingly net of loosely joined pieces yadda yadda yadda. But none of that actually works -- for us or for students -- until an individual sits down at a computer and opens a vein. (A reference to a quote from Red Smith, one of the last century's most respected sports writers: "There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typerwriter and open a vein.")

And here's the rub: it really doesn't matter whether you're bleeding on a page or a screen and whether you're calling the result a novel, an academic essay, or a blog. Only us academics get hung up on the sociological and philosophical impact of the form and the tools. To normal human beings, it's all just writing.

It's all just the same blood.

 

Google will begin searching on academic university repositories. Begs the question: what comes first, the search or the content?

As I explored the ADL site while thinking about the previous post, I stumbled across this nice list of learning object repositories.

Here's another directory of learning object repositories from UT-San Antonio.

Yesterday, the ADL announced a new reference model for Content Object Repository Discovery and Resolution Architecture (CORDRA).

What I wonder is when (if?) all of the repository and discovery work in the learning object crowd is going to come together with the repository and federated search in the library space. And who's going to do it?

Hmm. Maybe I should. :-)

The Chronicle has an opinion piece titled "The Infodiet: How Libraries Can Offer an Appetizing Alternative to Google."

At the recent ALA Midwinter Conference, Roy Tenant of the California Digital Library referred to The Google Lesson: the number of results aren't as important as how the results are presented. He said that librarians and library systems vendors have historically put more emphasis on delivering the most results instead the most relevant results. Roy dropped another jewel that partially explained this phenomenon:

"Only librarians like to search; everyone else likes to find."

From yesterday's Washington Post: Students Fill Grade Book On Teachers at Web Site. The article is about Ratemyteachers.com, another site that allows students to review teachers from their school:

Critics, including many teachers and principals, said the site's ratings are unscientific, not to mention hurtful. Many school districts across the country, including Montgomery County and Loudoun County, have blocked access to ratemyteachers.com from school computers.

I think that there's a great potential for this kind of service to provide students, parents, and administrators with valuable (if unscientific) feedback. However, it's accompanied by a great potential for immature abuse.

It strikes me that what's lacking from this kind of service is a social software-like reputation system like Slashdot uses. E.g., the community needs to be able to mod up or down the comments. Of course, the hole in that approach is likely that the small sample size may not be large enough to effectively moderate itself.

Will Richardson writes:

Forget all that stuff I said about moving too fast. I've decided I'm going to create one Web log a day as a surprise "gift" to various clubs and teams and teachers.

Great idea for a school! Eighty percent of them will never get used, but the twenty percent that do will probably use them really well.

The Invisible Adjunct points to an excellent op-ed article in the New York Times on higher ed costs [free registration with NYtimes.com required] by one of my favorite thinkers, Stanley Fish. Fish writes:

If there is a crisis in college costs it has not been caused by price-gouging or bureaucratic incompetence on the part of universities; a better analogy would be the mass circulation magazines of the 1950's like Collier's and Look, which folded at the very point when they had more readers than ever. The problem was that production costs far outpaced the revenues from subscriptions and advertisers, and every new reader actually cost them money.

Well worth the read.

I also heartily recommend Fish's collection of essays, There's No Such Thing As Free Speech (And It's A Good Thing, Too), which I just recently re-read.

Interesting resource with some good links worth following up on: Collaborative Learning Environments Sourcebook.

John Kruper writes a remarkably well-balanced entry, Blogs as Course Management Systems: Is their biggest advantage also their achille's heel?, on his weblog, The Electric Lyceum:

The moral of the story? While blogs and other "lightweight" community publishing systems will surely find their way into the motivated educator's hands, their impact will remain limited until they are married to the more mundane (and decidedly not pedagogically-valued) class management features that are the bread and butter of "traditional" course management systems.

The interesting question then becomes, from which end of the spectrum will this post-revolution revolution emerge? Will blogs grow class management wings? Or will commercial course management systems shove blogs inside the courses alongside their documents and folders? Of course, don't count out the possibility that an entirely new species may emerge, one that is natively optimized along both dimensions!

I've always thought that the idea of replacing course management systems with weblogs just illustrated that the person making the suggestion didn't understand the role of course management systems at the institutional level. Kruper hits the nail on the head, though.

FWIW, weblogs won't take on course management functionality because weblog vendors aren't going to be competitive in that vertical (and they know it). Course management system will eventually integrate with existing weblog tools or incorporate blog-like publishing, though.

Slow week due to post-vacation brain getting back up to speed.

This should entertain you for a while: an Educational Technology Wiki that's been mentioned on several other sites this week.

(What's a "wiki" you ask? A wiki is a "collection of web pages which can be edited by anyone, at any time, from anywhere." Yeah, it sounds funky, but it's fairly self-policing most of the time.)

Evan Kirchhoff responds to the Chronicle article, "Can Grand Theft Auto Inspire Professors?"

For all you ed bloggers out there, I highly recommend Ev's blog, 101-280. He's not always writing about education, but he's a remarkably clear-headed thinker. Plus, I once had dinner with him at a Ukranian diner.* I don't know why that's relevant. I just like people to know I frequent Ukranian diners.

Interestingly, Evan was also someone I met on the listserv mentioned in the last post. It must be Future Culture week here on 10RW.

*For the record, it was in Manhattan, not Ukraine.

Check out this rendering (I don't know what else to call it) of a Neruda poem. Run your cursor over each line, and it is auto-translated. [link via DangerousMeta]

It's hard-coded with some simple onMouseOver properties in a <span> tag for each line. Would be nice if there were a way to roll your mouse over them again and translate them back, but I'm sure that's possible with some Javascript. An app that extended on this idea, by allowing a teacher to input the original and translated version of a poem and then generating the code to allow mouseover switching of the lines, would be a nifty teaching tool for translation.

David Carter-Tod is live-blogging the Blackboard Building Blocks Developers Workshop.

I'm not, of course, because I'm busy being one of the people putting on the workshop. And I'm not a Java developer, so it's all over my head anyway. :-)

Update 2:35pm: The newly-founded Building Blocks Open Source Group is blogging the conference.

The title of this article, "Better Off With or Without Your CMS?" (from Syllabus), is a bit misleading, because the authors (Steve Ehrmann and Steve Gilbert of the TLT Group, both of whom I worked with on an Annenberg grant project back in the mid-90's) don't ever raise that question. The questions they do raise are much more valuable: "Do you have any way of knowing how much educational value your college or university currently derives from its use of a CMS? Do you have a strategy for increasing its value in a course or across the curriculum?" They provide a set of five general assessments an institution can undertake to answer those questions.

The assessments and examples that the Steves provide reinforce what has always been my mantra regarding education & technology: It's not about the technology, it's about what you do with it. Maybe I picked that up from the Steves years ago. :-)

Every school with a course management system should be conducting regular evaluations on its use, and feeding the results of those evaluation back into faculty development programs.

Hey, I'm going to the MERLOT International Conference 2003 in Vancouver next month.

I've never been to Vancouver. :-)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has released a report on Internet Blocking in Public Schools. [link via Boing Boing]

I haven't read the whole report, but the abstract tells me enough:

• The use of Internet blocking software in schools cannot help schools comply with the law because schools do not and cannot set the software to block only the categories required by the law, and because the software is incapable of blocking only the visual depictions required by CIPA. Blocking software overblocks and underblocks, that is, the software blocks access to many web pages protected by the First Amendment and does not block many of the web pages that CIPA would likely prohibit.
• Blocking software does not protect children from exposure to a large volume of material that is harmful to minors within the legal definitions. Blocking software cannot adapt adequately to local community standards. Most schools already have in place alternatives to Internet blocking software, such as adoption and enforcement of Internet use policies, media literacy education, directed use, and supervised use.
• Blocking software in schools damages educational opportunities for students, both by blocking access to web pages that are directly related to state-mandated curriculums and by restricting broader inquiries of both students and teachers. Teachers and students 17 years or older (most high school juniors and seniors) should be exempt, yet suffer the consequences of CIPA implementation.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, an article titled Scholars Who Blog:

Is this a revolution in academic discourse, or is it CB radio?

[link via Gallowglass]

Great lead. :-) But the story seems to focus on wannabe talking heads, the *pundits of the world, those scholarly few who salivate at the idea of being a guest commentator for CNN or FoxNews. Nary a mention of using weblogs for actual teaching and learning.

Wow! I've been busy and missed a lot of activity over this discussion in the last couple of days. I wish I had time to respond in depth to all the good thoughts, but I don't. So linkage and an exhortation to Go read these! will have to suffice.

UPDATE (05/29/03: 10:05AM): Corrected one of the attributions, based on Joe Luft's comment to this post.

UPDATE (05/29/03, 10:20AM): for those of you coming from Online Learning Daily (thanks, Stephen), the list has been expanded to include the earlier posts in the conversation and is in roughly chronological order.

Will Richardson (who started all this!): Legal Issues of Student Publishing
Greg Ritter: Student Publishing and Privacy
Greg Ritter: Student Publishing and Privacy, Take Two
James Farmer: Student Publishing
James Farmer: More on Student Weblogging
Tom Hoffman Joe Luft: Publishing and Privacy
Ann Davis: Writing to Learn (Ann, I've seen this same reaction in college students, so it's not limited to elementary school age!)
Tim Lauer: Student Publishing and Privacy
Tom Hoffman: Class Weblogs and Privacy
Will Richardson: Student Publishing Cont.

Trying to collect this list makes me realize that we still lack a good technology for tracking cross-blog discussions.

It seems like Bonnie B. is implying that my dissatisfaction with the "everything's a weblog and weblogs are everything" mentality means I want people to spend big money on enterprise software. Maybe she didn't read my follow-up or the comments to that follow-up where I pointed Lindon at dozens of open source options, as well as the commercial ones?

Anyway, Bonnie asks "Why administer a half-dozen different systems if you can offer the same functionality with a single system?" Ah, but that's a misleading question. It presumes the "same functionality" exists, and that ability to achieve the "same functionality" is precisely what I'm questioning.

When you shoehorn a technology into a purpose for which it wasn't designed (e.g., driving a nail with a saw), you may eventually reach the same goal, but you're not getting the same functionality. I might eventually drive the nail into a board with a saw, but my experience would be much improved by using the right tool. The price for the difference in functionality is often paid in frustration and lack of effectiveness.

Bonnie recognizes this in the next paragraph, complaining about the situations where institutions are "trying to use [the product] for lots of things it's not very good at." Of course, Bonnie's complaint is the same argument I made to James about his vision for a weblogs -- he was talking about using them for things they're not very good at. In fact, I began using the "don't drive a nail with a saw" adage several yearsa go while providing training for my company's commercial solution, precisely to discourage customers from "trying to use it for lots of things it's not very good at."

When introducing a new technology like weblogs to users -- particularly to educators inexperienced with using technology in their teaching practice -- I've had the most success by introducing the technology in the context for which it was designed. Inflating the value of the technology -- trying to shoehorn it into functionality for which it wasn't designed -- while you introduce it is a recipe for disaster. In my experience, the users' frustration level goes up, effectiveness goes down, and they turn away from the tool quickly.

This is true regardless of the whether you're talking free or commerical tools or about tools with general or narrow purposes. It's not about price or purpose; it's about application. When you misapply a technology, the users' frustration and resignation occurs whether the institution has spent six figures on the software or downloaded an open source app for free. There's a point when attempting to "get the most bang for your buck" (by hammering those nails with the saw you already have) ceases to provide a return on your investment and becomes an obstacle in and of itself.

[NOTE: the timestamp on this post was changed on this to reflect post time, as opposed to draft time. I really dislike that MT defaults to initial draft as the timestamp. :-/ ]

James Farmer makes some good comments in my previous post on Student Publishing and Privacy. In particular he says, "Were you more mortified cos of possible legal consequences or the pressure on students? I don't quite get your main concern."

I'm all for using weblogs in education, particularly in the writing classroom or (probably more importantly) as a way to bring writing to non-writing classrooms. And there are many disciplines where assignments require public "performance" -- dance, music, theater, journalism (writing for the school newspaper), etc. So no reason we can't make writing a public performance as well -- that's a terrific idea because it can really change the concept of audience for the emerging writer.

However . . .

I believe teachers may be on shaky ground if we make evaluation of the student's writing part of the public performance, which is what I saw Will doing with his students.

There are a few concerns here:

1. The legal concerns. FERPA prevents distribution of a minor student's "educational record" without parental consent. What defines an "educational record" isn't clear, but in my experience most districts interpret it liberally to err on the side of caution.

Posting to weblogs might be considered public performance and parents usually don't accuse districts of FERPA violations because the star student in the school play was listed in the program. Of course, that program with the student's name isn't distributed world-wide either. :-/

However, once you start posting evaluations of student work (by teachers or peers, like Will did) to a publicly available weblog, I think that districts would be right to worry about the legality of making evaluation of assignments public.

With kids under 13 you might run into COPPA violations as well. Again, parental consent is the key.

2. The ethical concerns. Legal issues aside, I find exposing a evaluation of a student's work -- even informal evaluation such as peer reviews -- to the entire world to be problematic. Even if feedback on writing assignments is provided constructively, it can be apparent which students have excelled and which are having trouble. Students who receive poor evaluations, or even feedback that makes it apparent their writing skills are not strong, may suffer more and feel shame if those evaluations are posted for anyone in the world to see.

3. The pedagogical perspective. As a writing instructor, one of the hardest things to overcome is the lack of confidence the vast majority of learners feel about their writing skill. In my classes, I always endeavored to provide a "safe" environment in which the students can explore their writing skills. Part of creating that sense of safety is the understanding that "drafts don't count." No one but your teacher and your peer review group sees them. Assuming the peer review group and teacher can provide constructive feedback, this idea of a low-risk draft should ideally provide the student with the freedom to experiment more. Making the drafts available online for the world to see works against the idea of a low-risk environment; some students may feel additional pressure to perform in the draft phase of the writing process because that's being made public. And they shouldn't -- drafts shouldn't "count." But making the draft phase -- and particularly the evaluation of those early phases -- available to the world may make them "count" more for students who are already intimidated by writing.

Amazing. If I'd had a laptop with wifi this morning I might have blogged from the coffee shop that I was thinking about privacy issues related to Will Richardson's post last week of the online peer review his students are conducting in public on weblogs. But, no wifi, so you'll just have to take my word that I was ruminating on this over latte an hour ago.

So what's in my news aggregator this morning? Will ruminating over legal issues of student publishing!

I'm glad he's thinking about it. Frankly, as a former writing instructor, I was mortified to see the student's peer reviews publicly available. First, from a writing pedagogy perspective, I think you risk significantly increasing the pressure on the students, many of whom are already intimidated by sharing their work with a small group. Second, I would be concerned that it is treading dangerously close to a FERPA violation, since this is making a students work and, more importantly, the teacher's evaluation of their work publicly availably. Thin ice!

Absolutely nothing! Say it again!

James Farmer responds to my previous comments about weblog hype:

"[T]he reason I'm interested in Weblogs as VLEs actually comes out of a frustration with other tools and a weblog is a KM tool already, no? Also, and I'm probably quoting out of cotext here... 'every professor wants to be (and, granted, sometimes has to be) the duke of their own little fiefdom.' So... cool! In educational terms ego's as important as it is anywhere else, isn't that what weblogs are good for. OK, you get lots of reinventing the wheel going on... but that's the same as everywhere else.

A weblog is a personal publishing tool, not a knowledge management tool. And, as D'Arcy Norman pointed out last week, knowledge management is "unpossible" anyway.

By definition, re-invention isn't innovation. Instead, it's usually wasted energy. That re-invention happens frequently doesn't make it valuable.

I certainly don't object to people cobbling their own solutions, particularly if they feel that existing solutions don't meet their needs . . . or can't be made to meet their own needs. However, I believe there are many existing commercial or open source solutions that are designed to meet (or could be used to meet) any of the needs people are attempting to force weblogs into solving.

Over the last several months, I consistently see people attempting to use weblogs to solve problems that have already been solved by other means or attributing wondrous innovation to weblogs that, had they researched the landscape a bit more, they would have found are neither that wondrous nor that innovative.

As a former professor of rhetoric and composition, and someone committed to the value of writing across the curriculum, I see tremendous educational potential for weblogs. I've always believed that writing is one of the best paths to learning. I think some of the faux innovation is coming from people, particularly technologists, who never thought of using writing in their classes starting to see the potential. And, of course, that's only a Good Thing™.

However, I believe the urge to turn personal publishing systems -- weblogs -- into something they're not inflates the value of the technology and damages its credibility. I would rather see people focusing on the ways personal publishing makes a real difference in pedagogy rather than trying to use weblogs as a platform to re-invent every tool, but the kitchen sink . . . particularly since weblogs are a pretty lousy platform for doing that.

David Carraher suggests ways shortcomings of education could be addressed through weblogging technologies.

Oops. Unintentionally posted the draft of this post before I finished writing. (Hence the first comment -- no, it wasn't a test. Edit notice: I have now deleted the first half-sentence of my comments to avoid further confusion.

Maybe I'll get around to commenting in detail on Carraher's post later, but here's the short version: Another example (grrrr) of the frustrating "Everything is a weblog and weblogs are everything" mentality!! The benefits Carraher talks about in his first point are primarily benefits of writing, not weblogs, and don't have to rely on technology any more complex than a pen and paper to achieve.

James Farmer: Educational Weblogs: Whats & Whys

I realize that James' four-page essay is a really bare bones kind of introduction to weblogs for getting The Currently Un-Bloggy Educator Types interested. Hence the list of all the things you can use a weblog for: a virtual learning environment, a professional publishing tool, a news ticker for you, a news ticker for your course, a knowledge management tool for your faculty, a filing cabinet, a course website, a project management tool, a coffee-maker. etc.

And all of it is (mostly) true...technically. The "news ticker" stuff applies to news aggregators, not weblogs. Radio Userland includes a news aggregator, but that doesn't make the aggregator part of the weblog. Nit. Picked. Moving on. . .

While the rest is technically possible, it falls under the "everything is a weblog and weblogs are everything" mentality that continues to make me cranky.

Briefly, here's why that mentality irks me: you can drive a nail with a saw, but you'll get better results with a hammer.

There are already tools for virtual learning environments, course websites, professional publishing, knowledge management, file management, project managements, making coffee, etc.

Sure you can shoehorn a bootstrapped solution on the cheap with a weblog. (Two footwear metaphors in that sentence!) And the education field has a tendency to always want to bootstrap their own solution. I think part of the reason for that is the decentralized nature of academia -- every professor wants to be (and, granted, sometimes has to be) the duke of their own little fiefdom.

My opinion is that the education field wastes a lot of time and effort bootstrapping half-assed solutions (driving nails with a saw) when resources could be better devoted to implementing a specific solution (use a hammer, ferpetesake!). I know, harnessing those resources in academia is never simple, but I wish people were less concerned with kludging together solutions with gum and chicken wire, and more concerned with fundamental change of the structures that lead them to the gum and baling wire in the first place.

Sebastian Fiedler, in Seblogging: Paper Draft for BlogTalk 2003:

"We can observe almost in real-time how individuals use personal Webpublishing technologies to facilitate and feed their own change and learning processes. Watching this rich fabric of learning conversations unfold makes you wonder why people still believe that e-learning is all about content delivery and the production of polished instructional products. People in the personal Webpublishing realm successfully learn outside any institutionally organized system of instruction."

Amen, brother.

I certainly don't keep a weblog for your benefit, dear readers (although I hope at least a few of you enjoy it and get a wee bit of value from it). I keep a weblog because it provides an incentive for me to read and think about things that are of interest to me (like technology in education). It's like a kick in the ass, except for my brain. :-)

However, I do revel in getting a comment or trackback or the unforeseen referrer in my logs. I recognize that feedback loop makes keeping a weblog more interesting than a keeping a journal that just sits on my desk (or my computer desktop). It keeps me motivated.

You may or may not know that I have an MFA in Creative Writing, although I don't do much writing these days. I've often thought that I would like to experiment with writing fiction in public -- not weblog-as-fiction a la Flight Risk, but just working on a novel out there in public, perhaps via a weblog. Why? To see if that feedback loop might jog my creative side as it does my intellectual side.

Harlan Ellison used to do this schtick (and may still) where he would set up a typewriter in a storefront window and crank out a short story while people stood around and watched. Fiction as a spectator sport! Except Harlan didn't solicit feedback from the other side of the storefront window as he wrote; with the Web you could.

Sadly, though, my intellectual side is more courageous and secure than my creative side. ;-)

Jim McGee: Weblogs in learning settings and Weblogs and knowledge management are two good annotated compendiums of lots of recent links on these two topics.

(This post is an "outboard brain" moment, e.g. I'm really posting it for my benefit, not yours, dear reader, so that my soggy ol' inboard brain doesn't forget about these links.)

Dave Winer, Starting Weblogs at Universities: "Here's how you get weblogs started at a university like Harvard or Dartmouth. First, know that universities thrive on having their experts visible outside the university. Not just publishing in academic journals, which most alumni don't read, but being called in as experts on radio talk shows, esp NPR....So how do you get your professors on the radar, as acknowledged experts who can communicate to everyday people? With a weblog of course."

I think the key phrase there is "at a university like Harvard or Dartmouth." My gut feeling is this approach won't work at a institution that's not a "blue chip" university. This approach (as well as a load of other Ivy League approaches) isn't going to translate to John Doe Community College or Southwest Backwater State University.

It's odd that there's so much going on with education and weblogs -- more than I've seen at any point in the past -- but Dave seems totally oblivious to it. He's still thinking like a software company CEO and programmer, not like an educator. Or maybe he's hanging out with too many lawyers!

Bonnie points out that Chandler, the open source alternative to Microsoft Outlook being built by the Open Source Application Foundation, actually contains a Chandler release, codenamed "Westwood," that is geared to higher ed.

Neat.

Stephen Downes, of Online Learning Daily writes an editorial for After 5 titled More than Personal: The Impact of Weblogs. For the most part it's a really dead-on summary of weblogging development. However, this part doesn't seem accurate:

"Blogs form an ideal medium for the distribution of professional development and other learning resources. Some initiatives have already started as places such as Maricopa College and the University of Calgary are experimenting with the use of RSS to distribute learning objects and learning object metadata."

This seems like a leap. Weblogs don't equal RSS, and neither of his examples, MLX nor CAREO, are weblogs. Nor are, for the most part, the MLX and CAREO objects being presented to students through weblogs. Curious. I suppose that technically one could syndicate their own learning objects from their weblog (or other kind of repository) and the RSS feed (e.g. the metadata) could be collected in a separate metadata repository. This is what DLORN does, as I understand it. Is that what he's thinking?

As a bit of a sidenote, I have to admit that I'm getting really bored with the "everything is a weblog and weblogs are everything" mentality. Not accusing Downes of that here (although I think he's teetering on the brink), but I think the hype surrounding weblogs as a panacea to ... well, everything, is really beginning to miss the target. (Note to self: write more about that at some point.)

[Note: once again MT's draft feature bites me in the ass. The timestamp on this post has been updated to note when it was actually posted, not when it was drafted.]

George Siemens of elearnspace has posted an Open Education interview with Lawrence Lessig.

The obvious pull quote: "Education has to become part of this debate [about copyright]. Unless it makes its interests apparent, people will not think about the significant costs to education that increased copyright protection will produce."

I was somewhat disappointed that the first half of the interview was spent re-tracing a lot of typical Lessig issues that we could get from any of a gazillion other interviews with Lessig. Only about a quarter of the questions had to do with the impact of the ongoing intellectual property debate on education or universities.

Jim Flowers responds to my thoughts on the Georgia bill that would require publishers to make digital copies of their printed works available to educators who are meeting the needs of disabled learners. Jim points out that there are potentially some tricky implementation issues in this bill. He's right, there are some hefty implementation issues that are not specifically addressed in the legislation (or poorly addressed).

Some specific issues he raises are:

For example: What about out of print texts that are provided by copying? What about small presses with titles still in use (100 per year) by classes of obscure topics? What format shall we prepare these files?

I've lumped these questions together

I noted the "legacy texts" issue as well in my previous post. Legacy texts, e.g. those that went to press, oh, probably more than 8-10 years ago, will be difficult to provide in any useful digital format because the source files, if they ever existed (!), are either in an antiquated digital format or no longer saved. Scanning in printed works can be expensive and frequently doesn't put the content in a digital format that is that much more useful for a disabled user to work with (e.g. a scanned page can't be read by a screen reader).

Publishers are not going to be reticent about providing digital files because of the format, though, but because of the risk of copying/distribution posed by releasing the digital source files to your analog product. C.f. Napster, RIAA, etc!

Would a publisher find a "business decision" to avoid sales in that state agreeable? And, when would a publisher know they are selling to a state student (Amazon, other web sites don't discriminate) -- is that publisher then liable?

Well, since a Georgia state law holding, say, a New York publishing house liable for damages for violating the rights of the Georgia disabled would

And, since ADA laws already protect the "print access disabled" does a state law add any value?

Absolutely!

Walk into the Office for Students With Disabilities at any campus and you'll find that they manage all kinds of technology for magnification, scanning, text recognition, etc. Fifteen years ago that was the only way to get things done. Today, a blind learner has her own laptop with a capable screen reader, but can't use that technology at hand to access her educational materials because the content isn't available digitally. Or there's technology that will highlight words/phrases for learners with reading disorders (e.g. dyslexia) to help them read better, but requires the content in a digital format. But, as far as education goes, the ADA puts the burden on the educational institution to make the educational materials accessible -- so it becomes the responsibility of the institution to convert the texts for those users.

Why should the educational institution bear the costs of the publisher's inaccessible content? Particulary when all contemporary content already exists in a digital format somewhere?

This is what interests me so much about this law -- it shifts the burder from the consumer (the learner) and the middleman (the educational institution) to the producer (the publisher)...which is where the responsibility for accessibility should live.

An Education in ©opyright Law: A Primer for Cyberspace:

"Some recent copyright legislation such as the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act and TEACH Act concern web-based education. This work provides an overview of U.S. copyright law including the new legislation and related issues."

From the recent issue of LIBRES. Interesting that a good overview on U.S. copyright law comes from an Australian library journal. [link via Free Online Scholarship News]

Jim Flowers writes:

Suppose you are a professor, a publisher, or a software/hardware company that provides materials used for instruction in a college (private or public), technical college, or university. Suppose further that the legislature passes a law requiring you to provide, on ten days notice, an electronic version of those materials so that students who are "print access disabled" can access the material (and, there electronic version can have no differences in content/context from print version).

What would you do?

Answer: I would applaud!

Apparently a bill, HB 1020, of the Georgia General Assembly would require the publisher to provide the material in digital format.

Please note that a "print access disability" does not mean you don't have access to a laser printer! It refers to "a condition in which a person's independent reading of, reading comprehension of, or visual access to printed material is limited or reduced due to a sensory, neurological, cognitive, physical, psychiatric, or other disability recognized by state or federal law." E.g. blindness, reading disorders, etc.

This certainly puts an onus on the providers of print material, but since no commercial print material makes it to press these days without beginning its life as digital bits, the onus isn't that large (except perhaps legacy texts).

Having worked extensively in a Deaf education environment, and also with some Deaf/blind learners, I'm all for legislation that puts the onus of accessibility on the purveyors of content, instead of making analog-to-digital conversion an issue the institution has to deal with.

Accessibility should take place on the production side, not the consumption side. Georgia has it right!

I was invited to the Open Education conference call that was scheduled for this afternoon, but like David Carter-Tod, missed it. Thanks to David for posting the link to the Open Education presentation on DLORN (Distributed Learning Object Repository Network) by Stephen Downes. The DLORN system is live apparently.

UPDATE 04/30/03: As Stephen points out in a comment on this post, the presentation was authored by George Siemens (of eLearnspace) and Stephen together. George did the Open Education part, Stephen the DLORN part.

A Return to Common Sense: interesting article posted to Internet Time Blog.

As learning becomes increasingly central to our lives and more complicated, a growing array of templates, methods, blends, objects and knowledge repositories have been created to facilitate wider distribution of information. This is both useful and inevitable, but is it all that learning should be? This article looks back at memorable times when learning was enjoyable, meaningful and relevant. It looks at both formal educational and training settings as well as at informal, real-world learning events that can happen anywhere at anytime. Nine common sense learning principles, often overlooked in many of today's programs, are presented for possible inclusion in future programs and events.

Oh my. This hits a little too close to home. :-)

This article from eSchool News online says,

"Officials from the Detroit Public Schools (DPS) say a groundbreaking $75 million contract to outsource the district’s entire information technology (IT) department to local computer firm Compuware Corp. has paid off to the tune of $3 million in IT-related cost savings per year."

I'm no IT management guru by any stretch of the imagination, but having worked in the technology departments of academic institutions, I don't know why more school districts (and colleges and universities) don't do this. It's extremely difficult for academic institutions to recruit and retain good IT professionals because they can't compete on salary, benefits, and job satisfaction with the corporate sector. So outsource to the corporate sector to run the IT and let them absorb the costs through economies of scale that an individual university or district typically can't attain.

Will Richardson, over at Weblogg-ed (why two G's, man? ... oh, wait I get it, a play on "weblogged"?), posts an XML subscription list of the RSS feed addresses for everyone he's aggregating through SharpReader. Since I just started using SharpReader last week, this is bonus! Thanks, Will!

Note to self: export and post your own SharpReader subscription list to share.

From an article in the Seattle Times:

Only 3 percent of the freshmen at the 146 most selective colleges and universities come from families in the bottom quarter of Americans ranked by income. [link via Kairosnews]

That's a bleak statistic at first glance, but I can't help wonder what the result of this is. The criteria they used to pick the 146 universities is "most selective," but I expect that correlates well to "most expensive."

What would be really interesting is to compare the post-college success of the students from the families in the bottom quarter of income who went to those exclusive schools to those from the same income group who attended less exclusive schools and those who didn't attend college (probably controlling for those who go on to graduate schools).

I suspect that what one might find is that while college is still a significant indicator of your long-term success, your undergraduate institution probably isn't a great predictor of that success.

(Of course, I'm sure someone way smarter than me has already thought of this and done that study. I just haven't seen it.)

Stephen Downes is aggregating education weblogs and presenting the RSS feeds on a single web page. Good idea!

I'm not quite sure I understand Laura Gibb's ire in this Xplana article, as I've always been an advocate of not driving a nail with a saw or cutting a board with a hammer. E.g. right tools for the right goals.

Course management systems are designed to provide an authenticated, protected online environment in which to deliver and manage a course. Every course management system I've seen has the capability to make the content available to the public or to link from within the secured environment to content outside that environment. These systems are not designed to be content repositories, nor are they designed to be content-authoring or "website"-authoring tools.

I think it's important to make a distinction between the course environment and the content or the content authoring. The course management environment uses authentication to assign role-based permissions, deliver assessments, track student assignments and grades, identify users in communication spaces, prevent abusive behavior from people not enrolled in the course, etc. While most have some simple forms-based content authoring tools, the vast majority of content is (and should be) authored outside of the course management environment. Securing the course environment -- the virtual space in which the teaching and learning is delivered -- doesn't have to affect the openness or availability of the content unless the only place you choose to store the content is inside the secured environment.

CETIS, a UK-based standards organization, has launched a new pedagogy forum:

The new Pedagogy Forum is specifically set up for the UK FE and HE [ that's "further ed" and "higher ed" --g] communities to look at the pedagogic implications of interoperability standards and provide requirements to the specification process.

This should