i’m sorry, i just don’t know

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.

So I’m in Anaheim for a conference and it’s a bit surreal, to be honest.  Flying in, I saw the plumes of smoke in the hills around LA.  There is smoke in the air.  Ash on the cars.  The news shows the homes that have been destroyed.  And yesterday, while I was at the Disney store, I heard a lady (shopping for Disney paraphernalia) chatting on the phone about how her insurance company would cover their hotel and food costs until their home was rebuilt.  She was so casual.  On the news today I saw an evacuee station at a local school.  There were stations for water, food, clothing, and an acupuncturist/massage therapist.  I’m surrounded by fire and destruction, at Disneyland.

So it only took me 4 years, but I finally have a focus for my dissertation.  I’m going to look at 3 systems that support online resource-sharing around open educational materials.  Open Learning Support (OLS), a discussion environment that wraps around MIT’s OpenCourseWare materials, Ozmozr, an aggregator/share tool, and 51 Weeks, a tool being built to aggregate conference goers’ blogs, and photos that also incorporates a synchronous/asynchronous chat.  No link yet to 51 weeks… it’s under development.  It will deploy at the OpenEd 2007 Conference in Logan, Utah in a couple of weeks.

So why is it that dissertation writing requires so much junk food?  My dog is dying to go run in the park and I can only sit on the couch eating candy corns, typing.  This process better not take too long or I’m going to gain fifty pounds.   How many calories does typing burn?  Maybe I’ll start a new exercise fad… micro exercise.  Measure your exercise output in nano-calories.

I presented at AERA this week. It was the SIG IT online learning session. I talked about OLS (a discussion environment) compared to Ozmozr (a social information filtering system). The point: over 2 years, OLS users (4093 of them) shared 509 resources with one another. In 3 months, 273 users shared 411 resources with each other. I thought that was pretty cool. I got one thoughtful question regarding how carefully we considered the context of our learners. The other question I got was how we moderate these shares “Who makes sure these are quality resources that are being shared?” Um… the community. Of all of the people I talk to about this, I think it makes the least sense to professors.

There was one guy that talked about social presence as connected to the expertise of users in a CMC environment. He was interesting. More social presence seems to correlate with perceived expertise.

The other papers talked about things like learning/thinking in online discussions. When will our field stop doing research on just how to tweak discussion environments to hopefully encourage more critical thinking and/or learning? Do facilitators make a difference? Nope, but maybe it was our instrument. If students label things as “hey this is an extrapolation of your idea”, or “this is a disagreement with the previous post” does it make a difference? Yes, well, maybe. If we tell the students that they’ll be evaluated by our fancy rubric, does the magic happen? Yes, but what we’re ignoring is that our students really don’t give a hoot about our content, and our system doesn’t help them care more about it, it just teaches them how to play us better.

I sat in a roundtable session on Tuesday. There were 55 tables, all people talking about their research (i.e. stuff they made up to get a grant that they need to get tenure). I became a bit nauseated, actually (and no, Mom, I’m not pregnant). How much of this is actually adopted or used after these papers are published? How much of it makes an impact for more than the 16 kids they had in their study (assuming there was any effect of their treatment)? Of course, every student is worth a million dollars in grant money, but I just wish that some of these folks would look beyond their tiny samples and see what kind of impact they could make on a larger scale.

So there.

Our discussant actually used a comic strip to ridicule the writing style of my paper. He said there was too much math? I don’t recall using any math, actually. I do have a table in there that adds resources. Perhaps that was what he was talking about. But, it’s good feedback, I suppose… time to revise the writing style again. He also suggested that Ozmozr may be a solution searching for a problem.

Rob asked me to marry him this weekend I said yes, of course, and haven’t taken the ring off since Saturday, even though it is too big. I suppose I’ll have to take it off to get it sized, but I’m putting it off. My friend Jim mentioned that it was a bit backwards… buying a house before getting engaged, but it just worked out that way. Rob and I are as happy as is possible I suppose. I’d highly recommend engagement to anyone contemplating it.

I’m moving out of my apartment on Saturday. Rob’s birthday is on Sunday and it is Easter. We’ll go to my parent’s for dinner. Monday I check out of my apartment and Tuesday I fly out to Chicago for AERA. I’m the secretary/treasurer for SIG ATL/EST so we’ll have a business meeting and several sessions to podcast through the week. I’m presenting some research on Ozmozr in Friday. Which, I’d like to mention, was accepted by SIG IT. The proposal on the MOCSL tools I submitted to ATL/EST was brutally ignored Other than AERA business, I intend to visit the Robie House, one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses, sing karaoke with Anne and Krista, and eat lots of pizza.

The following Monday I’ll fly back to Utah to sign papers on the house and then turn around and get on a plane to San Francisco for Web 2.0. This is the first conference I’ve attended in over 2 years that I’m NOT presenting at. I get to be a participant. Attend sessions. Network. Etc. I can’t wait. And of course, shop in Chinatown. I’m pretty sure I’ll not have time for Alcatraz (again) but one day I will.

Then I get to come home finally. We’ll paint the house and move stuff from the garage into the house. I expect that I’ll be ready to sit still for a bit after that, and maybe pick out flowers for my wedding

So yesterday I was kissed half a dozen times by a lovely gentleman from the Netherlands as we made our acquaintance at a reception. I ate some unidentifiable finger food, and I tromped around downtown Montreal all day, ate at Pinot Rouge- an overpriced Chinese restaurant, and was kissed another half dozen times by a lovely man from New York. Not such a bad day, eh? (note the appropriate usage of the local term “eh”- I’m doing what I can to fit in with these Canadians)

Sessions I attended:
How to write an OpEd piece… very interesting, after the initial 20 minutes of credential touting. Really, why do academics think that we care what fellowship they received 15 years ago or what journals they’ve been published in. I can understand if they are applying for a job, but my hell, it was just a panel discussion.

Symposium on something to do with Learning Objects… So there was this guy there who made the following statement: “All knowledge can effectively be displayed using abstract syntax trees” ALL knowledge. Yep, that’s right folks. ALL knowledge.