i’m sorry, i just don’t know

Today mom and I went to the flower market that was just outside our hotel.  I’ve never seen so many lovely blooms in one place.  Did you know there are dark red hydrangeas?  And here, you can get an amazing arrangement of roses, lilies, and astilbe for 12 euro?  In the states, that same arrangement would cost nearly $60.  It was lovely.  We moved from there to the “clothing” market, which was just fabric… lots and lots of lovely lovely lovely fabric.  It was wonderful.  I found the fabric for my new kitchen curtains that my mom will likely have to make.  From there we went to the church where a choir and orchestra was practicing a Bach concert.  I’ve never heard lovlier music.

This morning I met with Paul Kirschner (a.k.a. angel of mercy) who has helped me come out of my dissertation writing funk.  In a true display of cognitive apprenticeship, he intends to help me actually wade through the last bits of my PhD work (or, if you want to look at things differently… through the REAL bits of my PhD work).  For the first time in months, I feel unblocked and free to write away.  I intend to start as soon as I get home.

A new study by MarketingVox found that 1 in every 4 online users are using social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Linkedin, etc…  About half of those log on every day.  Let me repeat that… every day.  Now that is some “stickiness.”  These folks come back daily to engage with their friends and colleagues, by playing games, joining groups, finding and sharing resources, and build out their online identity and reputation.  If only educational software had such stickiness.  Really, can we please start leveraging these systems to support teaching and learning?  Please?

Let the fear of online predators in MySpace be gone, or at least be managed in a less reactive manner.  I can’t tell you how many teachers and administrators I’ve spoken to who just see these environments as the devil… unable to see their potential for teaching and learning.

I attended several sessions about wikis and gaming in education so far at ICLS.  I’ve noticed a couple of themes… First, I’m finally starting to see researchers using existing tools to support learning (second life, wiki software, etc).  Perhaps the tools are finally in a stable enough state for the kinds of projects researchers are trying to conduct.  Or, perhaps researchers decided to put their resources to better use and instead of building systems from scratch, modifying existing systems to fit their needs.  Several of the wiki projects I’ve heard about did just that… they like the idea of wikis, but needed to modify existing software before it was useful.

Vanessa Peters from the University of Toronto used wikis to facilitate collaborative knowledge building among high school students.  Two things were of most interest to me.

1)Students who participated in the wiki knowledge creation project scored significantly higher on assessments than students who did not - It’s nice to see an actual finding that supports what we’ve all believed since wikis came about.

2)On average there were 50 revisions before students got to the actual content creation on any given page.  Things like changing the title, formatting, etc… before any content was added.  This actually mirrors what it takes to get me working on any piece of formal writing.  I will spend an hour getting the font right, choosing just the right words for the title, setting up my page numbers, etc.  I’ve long since accepted this as an odd quirk I have, but maybe it’s not just me.  Perhaps there is some value in that time spent “setting things up” that I’ve overlooked or taken for granted.  Maybe I’m setting up the second stimulus that Yrjö Engeström talked about on Wednesday.

Treasuremytext.com will archive and share your text messages. Sign-up is a bit confusing, but for the person who enjoys being the object of voyeurism, this is the app for you. I’ve signed up, but have yet to successfully get my text feed working. And because I know how spectacularly interesting my life is, you’re all welcome to subscribe to my text feed. I’ll be a little puzzled, frankly, if anyone really does.

So, beyond all of that, I’d love to get my hands on this data and do a little discourse analysis. There is so much reactionary stuff out there where people are worried that texting is making our youth stupid. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that all of these people are over 30 and have no particular use or experience with the wonders of texting. In my humble opinion, this assumption is just that… an assumption. In my humble opinion, texting, like I/M is just another literacy. I heard about a study where they tried to see if texting is an addiction. For heaven’s sake. What is it that caused the older folk to freak out whenever a new, pervasive technology comes along? Is it really that threatening?

(4 hours later…)
Revised Review: In order to use this service, it looks like I have to actually go through the step of forwarding my text messages. Boo. Hiss. I’m not going to ever do that. No one would. Give me apps that fit in nicely with what I already do or don’t give them to me at all.

Blackboard just won a lawsuit against a Canadian-based learning management system called Desire2Learn and is well on their way to becoming evil.

In 2006 Blackboard was awarded a patent that covers a single person having multiple roles in an LMS: for example, a Teaching Assistant might be a student in one class and an instructor in another. <http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/02/1217219&tid=155> Mr. Small (the trial lawyer for Blackboard) said Blackboard never claimed to have invented the course-management system. What the company did invent, he said, is “a course-management system where a single user with a single log-on could have multiple roles across multiple classes.” For instance, a person who was a student in one course and a teaching assistant in another could log on once and access all of his course materials.- Francis Long of Knowplace

Blackboard promises to play nice with open source or as they say “home-grown” course management systems as long as they aren’t bundled with proprietary software. But we’ll see. Having multiple roles in an LMS is often critical for the LMS administrators to function. So, to quote another organization that I watch with doubtful hopes that it won’t take over the world, to Blackboard I say…”Don’t be Evil.” -Google.

Researchers out of Leeds, England found that if you want to convince someone to do something, show them how horrible it will be if they don’t do what you’re suggesting.  link to article  They found that when a message was framed negatively, people were more likely to be convinced.

Messaging.  Do it.

I mean… Messaging, if you don’t do it you’ll be really really sorry.

AACE has pulled together a pretty good repository of journals and conference proceedings.  Some, I hear, are freely available.  I haven’t found one yet, but should be able to get to them if I VPN in through my university’s library.

JCMC just put out an issue dedicated to social networking sites.  Articles cover blog behavior, dealing with I/M interruptions at work, and of course, social networking sites.  You Tube, Facebook, Creative Commons, political discourse online, and more.  Happy reading.

So there are apparently pills you can take to improve your cognitive performance.  Sort of like steroids for your brain.  They were developed for people with severe memory and concentration problems.  Now healthy young college students are taking them to help boost their brain power (enhanced memory, concentration, planning abilities etc…).  An article in Nature raises the ethical questions involved with the rapid advancements associated with psychology and the neurosciences.  link to Nature article

So Google announced a project called Knol where people can author articles on any subject about which they seem to know something. In contrast to Wikipedia, there is only one author whose reputation and identity are emphasized. This obviously is meant to be competition for Wikipedia which takes a more collaborative approach to article development. I’ll be interested to see a comparison of article quality once Knol is actually released.

Here’s what I like about knol, as it’s been explained…

• Support for Creative Commons content licensing
• Peer reviews of each article
• Recommendations for related articles
• Identity and reputation management for the author (I think this will at the least encourage the generation of tons of content).

Here’s what concerns me about this… Google is the indexer of content - this project also makes them content generators. Which content do you think they’ll list first in a search? It gives them a LOT of power, and LOTS of opportunities to generate revenue via ads. Google is, after all, a really big, cool, helpful ad agency.