Timbuckteeth by numbers

A very useful new stats tool has been lauded on Twitter in the past couple of days. TwitterFriends looks like a really useful service for serious twits - if you want to find out how much impact and influence your own tweeting is having on the Twitter community. TwitterFriends provides some quite impressive statistical results, including breakdowns of the 'size of your relevant net' - the number of people you have replied to in the last 30 days, and how many have replied to your tweets. TwitterFriends will also provide you with mean scores (averages) of the number of tweets you send every day, the replies you have sent, how many links you have posted, and how many re-tweets you have sent. There is even a 'green' feature, measuring in 'milliscobles' the cost of your tweeting and following. One of the best features for me though, is the ability to follow individual conversations by isolating them from the main stream and showing every tweet right back to the first one.

Finally, for the visual learners among us, there is a Twitgraph representing data mapped across a spiderweb graph to show your overall activities (CQ=conversation quotient, RQ=Retweet quotient and LQ=Link quotient) including your Twitter ranking. You can even compare your own stats to a friends through graphic overlay. Now those of us in education and training need to work out how these features can be harnessed to enhance learning.... Give it a go - I think you'll like it! (Image source: digital-photography-school.com)

Changing the architecture?

I couldn't help cringing as I read an article on Fortune Magazine online today by Jessi Hempel. Entitled 'Web 2.0 is so over. Welcome to Web 3.0', Hempel stalks the concept of Web 2.0, pounces from behind and then narrowly misses before crashing painfully to the ground. The tagline says it all: Facebook and Twitter may be more popular than ever among users, but what are they worth?

It's not about the use and popularity of social networking and blogging that is so important to Hempel, as ... wait for it.... how much money they can make. In this respect, s/he suggests, Web 2.0 has been an abject failure. Well, perhaps Web 2.0 is a failure financially, but Hempel is clearly missing the point about Web 2.0 tools and services. This is an argument reminiscent to the banal ramblings of the likes of Andrew Keen, tinged with a smidgeon of bitterness that he failed to become an ultra-rich member of the Silicon Valley Set. Hempel suggests that while we are Facebooking each other, we are ignoring all the pay-per-click ads that are loitering on the sidebars of our screens. Shame. Ironically, the Fortune page on which the post appears is positively teeming with strong-arm ads such as '1 Rule to a Flat Stomach', 'End Back Pain in 2009' and a link to seduce readers to 'try Fortune for free for 2 issues!' (Personally I found it hard to ignore them).

Well, I have some news. The whole point of Web 2.0, is that it's not about making profit or screwing over the opposition. It is not about creating killer applications either. That's because Web 2.0 is not and has never been about tools or services, many of which have been around almost as long as the Web itself. No, Web 2.0 is more about how people are connecting, sharing and communicating using the tools and services. There never was a revolution on the Web. It was always an evolution - a gradual transition across the web from a 'quagmire of stickiness' to an 'architecture of participation'. Web 2.0 is about user-generated content and community. Web 2.0 is rich and exciting because anyone can participate and contribute. If and when Web 3.0 comes along (and some would argue it is already here) it will still be about making connections, sharing and contributing. This will be done in a more intelligent and economic manner we hope, but it won't make any more money than any of the social networking tools have done. Let's leave that for the likes of Google, eBay and Amazon.

Web 2.0 services that have survived whilst others have fallen do so because they are popular and supported by their users (Wikipedia is a classic example of users funding the resource). Those that fail are subject to a virtual natural selection process - the survival of the most relevant. If it's good, it will survive somehow. Let's keep Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 (yes, and Web x.0 too) as a means of creating and maintaining our communities of interest and practice, and stop worrying about whether we can make money out of them, shall we?

Through a glass... darkly

Just read a superb blog post from Stephen Downes who I reckon has been polishing his crystal ball. He usually has his finger on the pulse where technology trends are concerned. Called 'What not to build' and hosted by his Half an Hour blog site, this post is likely to be a strong contender for 'Most Influential Blog Post' in the 2009 Edublog Awards and we're still only in the first week of January. Although it's a lengthy blog, and takes some ploughing through, 'What not to build' is well worth the effort, because Downes has successfully identified all the stuff you would waste your time building, because it's either been done to death, or us financially unviable. He then takes on to some of the current technological 'fads' (he includes the iPhone here!!), before moving on to the really edgy stuff that is 'out there' that will make someone a millionaire if they can pull it off.

Context aware systems, location dependent devices, surface technologies, personal health systems, distributed systems and cloud computing are all in there, and all expounded upon with insight and seasoned with common sense. Probably the best bit for me is Stephen's last section which identifies the 'dead' technologies. Although these (paper, transport, telephones, TV and radio) are fairly controversial, he ends by qualifying his choices in his commentary on what the world may look like in the next decade or so. Well ... through a glass darkly ... we shall see whether he's right.

(As a side note, Stephen is courageous. He is obviously not screening his reader comments, because it looks like the blog has already been spammed).

This time it's personal

Today turned out to be a Personal Learning Environments sort of day for me. Firstly, I read a cracking blog by D'Arcy Norman on PLEs which showed some nice diagrams and conceptual maps of his take on PLEs accompanied by some neat explanations. D'Arcy refreshingly takes a connectionist view that the connections to people are more important than the technologies that connect.

Secondly, I joined a new site which has been set up by Cristina Costa over at Learning Journey. It's a Ning site focused on Personal Learning Environments and Digifolios (read e-Portfolios) which as I write this post, already has 48 members. It looks very exciting and seems well worth joining in. The site hosts a workshop which will be delivered on 12 January. The blurb reads:

We live in an era of individual “personalization and customization”. The read and write web has helped develop a new concept - “do it yourself and your own way” . The phenomenon has had implications in our society at different levels - from the way people learn to the new, emerging jobs and employment needs. The workshop aims to help members become aware of the way the web can empower the individual not only to learn, but also to present what, how and with whom he/she learns.

The target audience for the workshop (which spans 6 weeks) is teachers and trainers who know a little about Web 2.0 tools and maybe are using them in real teaching situations. Join up here if you would like to take part.

Dialectical innit?

Well let's have a little New Year's fun shall we....? There is an absolutely hilarious app available called The Dialectizer which turns any web site text content into.... Elmer Fudd, Swedish Chef (remember the Muppets?), Jive talk, Redneck or... yeah Cockney, innit? Below is a blog post of mine from New Year's day which has been dialectized into Cockney... It's particularly nice to 'ave anuvver pop' at the pomposity of some Post Modernist writers.... :-)

Have yer ever tried ter read a post-modernist paper by say, Lyotard, right, Derrida, or Foucault, and fought 'wot the chuffin' hell were that all about', isit?

Characteristically, post-modernist essays are verbose and full of dense vocabulary, but tend ter say right wee. I keep a copy of Foucault's 'Archaeology of Knowledge' on me shelf for one reason only - ter show me students 'ow not ter write if they want their reader ter understand. Below is an extract from a post-modernist essay. Right. Spot if yer can understand it:

"If yer examines the bloody capitalist paradigm of context, yer is faced wiv a choice: eever reject surrealism or conclude that consciousness is capable of intent. If prematerial sublimation 'olds, we 'ave ter choose between semantic theory and Derridaist readin'. In a sense, Debord uses the term ‘capitalist capitalism’ ter denote the dialectic, and therefore the failure, of postconstructive sexual identity. “Society is intrinsically dead,” says Lacan; 'owever, right, accordin' ter Hanfkopf, it ain't so much society wot is intrinsically dead, but ravver the stasis, right, and subsequent absurdity, of society. Lyotard’s analysis of semantic theory states that government is part of the bloomin' definin' characteristic of sexuality. It could be said that Sartre promotes the use of the bloomin' neocapitalist paradigm of discourse ter analyse and modify consciousness. If one examines semantic theory, one is faced wiv a choice: eever accept the neocapitalist paradigm of discourse or conclude that society, peraps surprisingly, 'as objective value, right, but only if reality is interchangeable wiv 'am sandwich; uvverwise, right, Lacan’s model of the materialist paradigm of narrative is one of “Debordist situation”, and so fundamentally used in the service of maintainin' the bloomin' status quo. The main theme of the works of Burroughs is the bloomin' bridge between class and sexuality. However, the bleedin' subject is contextualised involvin' reality as a paradox.

The bloomin' primary theme of McElwaine’s critique of Lyotardist narrative is not, right, in fact, right, discourse, right, but subdiscourse. In a sense, Foucault suggests the chuffin' use of the neocapitalist paradigm of discourse ter deconstruct 'ierarchy. The main theme of the bloody works of Burroughs is a self-supportin' totality, do wot guvnor! Therefore, right, the bloomin' subject is interpolated into a means ter include 'am sandwich as a reality.

The premise of structuralist deconstruction implies that the purpose of the observer is social comment. In a sense, the chuffin' subject is contextualised in that it includes consciousness as a totality. Well, did yer understand any of that, isit? If yer did, yor (in the words of the bloomin' post-modernist) 'dissemblin''.

Yer see, right, the bleedin' abstract above is completely meaningless and were generated by a French Tutor program called the chuffin' Post Modernism Generator. The program takes stock phrases and sentences at random and simply Emperor Mings them togeffer. Have a go yorself at generatin' yor own nonsense post-modernist essay. I guarantee yer won't be able ter tell it apart from the real fin'! Honest guv!

Teaching with Twitter

Most would agree that Twitter was one of the social networking phenomena of 2008, and has enjoyed exponential growth in popularity. The microblogging tool has obvious potential to be used in formal learning, both in traditional online classroom settings and - through mobile technologies - for mobile learners.

Ever since I first began to use Twitter I have been thinking about how to harness the potential of microblogging for the benefits of my own students, and have tried out several ideas to exploit it already. Below are my 10 top uses of Twitter for education:

1. ‘Twit Board’ Notify students of changes to course content, schedules, venues or other important information.

2. ‘Summing Up’ Ask students to read an article or chapter and then post their brief summary or précis of the key point(s). A limit of 140 characters demands a lot of academic discipline.

3. ‘Twit Links’ Share a hyperlink – a directed task for students – each is required to regularly share one new hyperlink to a useful site they have found.

4. ‘Twitter Stalking’ Follow a famous person and document their progress. Better still if this can be linked to an event (During the recent U.S. Presidential elections, many people followed @BarackObama and kept up to date with his speeches, etc).

5. ‘Time Tweet’ Choose a famous person from the past and create a twitter account for them – choose an image which represents the historical figure and over a period of time write regular tweets in the role of that character, in a style and using the vocabulary you think they would have used (e.g. William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar).

6. ‘Micro Meet’ Hold discussions involving all the subscribing students. As long as everyone is following the whole group, no-one should miss out on the Twitter stream. All students participate because a sequence of contributors is agreed beforehand.

7. ‘Micro Write’ Progressive collaborative writing on Twitter. Students agree to take it in turns to contribute to an account or ‘story’ over a period of time.

8. ‘Lingua Tweeta’ Good for modern language learning. Send tweets in foreign languages and ask students to respond in the same language or to translate the tweet into their native language.

9. ‘Tweming’ Start off a meme – agree on a common hash-tag so that all the created content is automatically captured by Twemes or another aggregator.

10. ‘Twitter Pals’ Encourage students to find a Twitter ‘penpal’ and regularly converse with them over a period of time to find out about their culture, hobbies, friends, family etc. Ideal for learning about people from other cultures.

Here are some useful links to others who have used Twitter in formal learning:

David Parry: Teaching with Twitter (Video)
Alan Lew: Twitter Tweets for Higher Education
Melanie McBride: Classroom 2.0
Judy O'Connell: Twitter - a Teaching and Learning Tool
Gabriela Grosseck and Carmen Holotescu: Twitter for Educational Activities
Carmen Holotescu and Gabriela Grosseck: Using Microblogging in Education
Nicole Melander: 14 Days of Twitter

If you have any other tips or applications for Twitter or any useful links to share, please feel free to do so.

Cartoon source


Learning with 'e's by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

About time

If I was a politician or a head of state I would have made a New Year's speech by now. (How can you tell if a politician is lying? You can see their lips moving). Thankfully I'm not a politician or a head of state, but that won't stop me. Here's my New Year speech:

On the first day of a new year, my thoughts are already turning to a very busy term of teaching which starts next week. We are now in the 10th year of this new century, and soon the 'noughties' will be gone for ever. As I think back over the changes that I and others have made in our teaching practice during the last decade, I marvel at how far we have progressed as teachers, and how much our students have changed.

One significant change for me in these last 10 years has been the shifting of control from teacher centredness to a form of self-organised learning. Not only are they more knowledgeable about technologies. Students are increasingly taking control of their own learning, and this is due to a large degree to new learning technologies and social web tools that have emerged. Yes, I know other factors have driven changes too, but new technologies and the rapid evolution of the Web can claim a large part of the influence.

What of the new technologies and tools? A few years ago a wiki would have been a Star Wars character. A blog was completely unknown - or perhaps a misspelling of a designer label for clothing. Podcasts were also unknown, because there were no iPods to neoligise. Mobile telephones were not so much items you could put in your pocket or handbag, but instead resembled housebricks with aeriels attached. They were extremely limited in functionality and prohibitively expensive. In 1999, e-mail was already a well used method of communication, but in the university, Pegasus reigned as the dominant tool. Virtual Learning Environments were slowly beginning to emerge, but were confined to the very basic FirstClass type systems used by the likes of the Open University - essentially glorified e-mail systems. Videoconferencing was just emerging as a visual medium for teaching, and the common connection was through ISDN2 - two digital telephone lines which were expensive to run and with only one provider to call upon to install it. Interactive whiteboards were all but unheard of, and digital projectors were large and cumbersome, many with three lenses - green, blue and red, that had to be manually converged to get a decent picture. Most people still relied on Kodak and other processing specialists for their photographic needs, because digital cameras were still expensive and not widely available. The only places you could store your pictures were on the hard disk of your computer, or more likely, in a photo album. And who among us can now do without memory sticks? 10 years ago I was still reliant on bulky, small capacity 'floppy disks'.

I could go on but I won't. I think I have made my point that in the last 10 years, technology has progressed very quickly. It is both worrying and exciting to think that many of the tools and technologies above will be improved, surpassed or made redundant in the next few years. It's no wonder then that many teachers are running hard and fast to try to keep pace with the changes, and many fear they are falling behind. Most are desperate just to keep their heads above water, and struggle to integrate these new technologies into the curriculum. And yet the new technologies and services enable sharing and collaboration beyond the wildest dreams of the early constructivist theorists.

The web has opened up so many new possibilities and opportunities it has all but blinded us as to how far we have come in 10 short years. What we now call e-learning is the future of education. More teachers need to grasp the opportunities afforded by mobile technologies, social web tools and digital technologies. Those of us who are at the vanguard of new learning technology use need to become better at being change agents. Change scares people. But time and technology wait for no-one. There is no respite, no temporal layby. Teachers need to see the benefits if they are going to be persuaded to adopt and embed technologies into every day teaching. If we get it right then we seal the future success of learning for a generation. If we get it wrong, we will have to spend a long time putting it right again.