I think I first learned about Richard Byrne long ago at an iteach workshop. I subscribe to his blog at http://www.freetech4teachers.com/and found he always has pertinent, helpful ideas for teachers.
He is a Google certified teacher, and has created additional web sites, ipadapps4school, and practicaledtech.com. Practicaledtech.com provides a variety of professional development webinars for teachers.
Eric Sheninger and his work can be found at
Website: ericsheninger.com
Twitter @E_Sheninger
Diigo: esheninger
I stumbled onto some posts of Eric’s several years ago and have found him to be a frequent poster of topics of interest to educators. When I began following him, he was a highly regarded prinicipal of New Milford High School, New Jersey. I have found his tweets to connect me with helpful and interesting links. He was in included in Time magazine’s list of “The 140 Best Twitter Feeds of 2014.”
Sheninger’s most recent book is Digital Leadership: Changing Paradigms for Changing Times. His website includes links to his various social networks, blogs, awards.
You can watch his TED talk to get an idea of his philosophy. His digital citizenship pinterest board is one of note for our class.
The assignment to write rich reflections on Doug Belshaw’s book, The Essentials Elements of Digital Literacies and post them in the book’s wiki was a new challenge. I wrote my reflection of each chapter as I read it. Some may have read the entire book and then gone back and reflected. I felt that writing as I read allowed me to be most honest about that particular moment.
Getting the text into the wiki was an additional challenge. I used Word to type my notes and then wordpress blog post draft mode to write the reflection. I copied and pasted my draft post into the wiki and then used the cheatsheet provided by Chris to format. With some help from a classmate I managed to post some pictures in the wiki, but only the blog post included the linked video. I regret that I cannot locate the tweet or email to credit and thank my classmate and my memory is faulty (perhaps Hailey??).
I think Chris gave us this assignment not only so we could benefit from reading the book, but to expand our own digital literacy and get us thinking about the use of wikis in reflective writing. Getting to participate in the Google Hangout with Doug Belshaw was fantastic.
I liked that this assignment was a change of pace from reading and critiquing. I enjoy trying to puzzle things out even when I’m a bit scared that I’ll just blow up my whole wordpress site. The plugins and widgets were and still are the most challenging part for me. It is always something I can come back to play with more when I want a break from deep thinking on my other assignments.
I am liking wordpress and am thinking ahead of how to either merge previous work into this site or to use it for launching future explorations.
I think Chris assigned it for various reasons: to give us a variety of assignment types, to widen our skills, to challenge us to be brave, and to experience what we may ask of our own students.
My only advice to a future student is to have fun with it and don’t be shy about asking others what they used to cause specific bling in their blogs.
Strangely, the digital citizenship assignment gave me the most difficulty. I say ‘strangely’ because I had explored this topic somewhat in collection 1. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t know exactly where to take it from there. Instead of building upon what I had done, I tried to recreate everything. I did not allow myself to look at how my classmates handled the assignment until it was long overdue and I was stumped with sort of a writing block on it. Meanwhile I became engrossed in the required readings for the collection and felt like I’d gotten ahead of the topic and was tripping over my feet.
Writing is a laborious process for me. I had been told in the past not to worry so much about good writing, just to write and write all I can because eventually the good writing would come out. I wonder if that will happen by the end of this course (the good writing, I mean). I won’t hold my breath.
I think Chris required the digital citizenship assignment because we needed to try to figure out some direction for ourselves in this class. As far as advice for a future student, I really don’t have any for them. If I could figure out how to unblock that writing, I’d share it. I’ve lost count of my edits on it and have left it sit for 10 days now so don’t even know where I’ve left off. It’s my last item for collection 2 and my goal was to complete it over a week ago. Since it’s almost tomorrow, tomorrow will be my new goal for completion. Wish me success.
Because I got stuck on one simple step when blinging my blog, I decided to create a brief video showing what to do. I used Jing to create the video and then uploaded it to screencast. I struggled to get the microphone sound level correct. I am not impressed that I have only a link and cannot embed it in my page here.
Blinging my blog created using Jing–just a link!
I had already created the video four times but didn’t like just having a link, so downloaded screencastomatic to my computer and recreated the video once again, so that I could post it on youtube as well as post the video here:
After completing all the readings, here is my attempt at an appropriate meme, using a photo of my son and granddaughter.
Rich Reflection on Gardner Campbell’s youtube video, No Digital Facelifts: Thinking the Unthinkable About Open Educational Experiences
This video continued Campbell’s thoughts on creating personal cyberinfrastructure. I found it quite inspirational.
Digital facelift is a term coined by Clay Shirky in his blogpost Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. Basically it means that when teaching, we’ll just do what we did before in the classroom, but we’ll put it on the web. Campbell used photo clips from the movie, Brazil to make his point that the one receiving the facelift can be convinced at what a wonderful thing it is, although it is ridiculous and not beneficial at all! I highly recommend seeing the movie Brazil, if you haven’t already. it was introduced to me a few years ago by a friend who felt he was living the life of the main character. The point is that just because the groupthink is pushing to do things a certain way, does not mean it is the best way or that it even makes sense.
Campbell also used the example of LittleBigPlanet, a Sony Playstation2 game, that includes authoring tools to the extent that users are allowed to become ‘producerly.’ The digital literacy components included along with how engaged the user becomes are just what we’d like to include in education.
Instead of a digital facelift, Campbell detailed three recursive practices to include in our courses, and posited that they create confidence, rather than suspicion:
In regard to the three recursive practices, Campbell says, “Much of the way education is set up militates against each of these, let alone all of them together. And yet we all know that one of the great things about the technologies we use, these information and communication technologies, is that they not only allow these things, they amplify them. They augment them. They turn them up to 11. They make that feedback happen.”
Campbell presented that every student should be an administrator of their digital life–a system administrator. The openness of work has three levels:
Campbell discussed that the invention of the printing press disrupted the world, but that personal cyberinfrastructure is a greater change, more akin to the advent of the alphabet.
Campbell showed a graphic of the Blackboard disucssion board interface and then compared it with the phpbb install from Cpanel, in which the user can have their own avatar, username, signature file–a personal identity. I thought he meant this was a php install to the Blackboard discussion control panel, but found that it is an install to your own web site. I found some plugins for WordPress as well. bbPress looks like a promising alternative for creating a forum.
Elearning support staff created a business math blog for Tim Stickel and I to use for our classes. When I examined it, it does not appear to use a plugin for the forum. Instead, a page was made for each topic, and students reply to that. Surprisingly, the current site looks very different than when we used it. As I recall, we needed help in the past when it would periodically rearrange itself (wordpress updates?) Because our blog is part of the UAF eLearning community, I’m not sure how to set that up myself at their location, but could easily work with eLearning support to do so. I wonder about the pros and cons of using the uaf community.
Campbell discussed the resistance of educators to change their teaching approach and the time to learn how to do it. He described that he was offering a bag of gold–who would not want to take that? I found his points very persuasive. It is obvious that so much of Campbell’s vision is incorporated into our own ED F654 class.
Campbell also spoke of the importance of getting the entire faculty in agreement to create their own personal cyberinfrastructure and then to teach the process to students and incorporate it as a part of every course. This makes perfect sense to me. With our class I am learning how to create personal cyberinfrastructure. Although I am just one teacher, I feel the need to begin somewhere, even if it’s just a module in a course. I don’t feel like I know enough exactly how to do this, but our class is a step in the right direction. He convinced me.
After completing this reflection, I created this meme.
Rich Reflection on the article, “As We May Think,” by Vannevar Bush, published in The Atlantic in July 1945.
I had not initially noted the date of Bush’s article, but was prompted to check it when the introductory paragraph spoke of the war coming to an end and peace approaching. The date was certainly significant to the reading of the piece. Bush was concerned that although there were exciting research and new discoveries, it was difficult to locate the information to assist others in their own research. So much information was being generated, but there was not an easy or clear way to unearth the information.
The bulk of the article was an extremely interesting examination of what were then current innovations, and the directions that Bush could foresee them going. He said that in previous times, complexity and unreliability were synonymous, but that, “The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.” If this had been a work of fiction, we would say he had just provided some foreshadowing to his writing.
Bush began with progress in photography. Almost everything he wrote about is in existence in an improved manner today. He also mentioned facsimile transmissions, which surprised me because I didn’t realize that had been invented that long ago. He went on to discuss television features, which are far improved today.
As I read, I began to feel like a bit of an artifact myself! When Bush described the changes in the process of televisions, I recalled a nostalgic childhood time in the mid-1960s. My dad was an electrical engineer and when color TVs first came out, they were terribly expensive. We could not afford one, but Dad did buy a Heathkit, a color television that he could put together himself. I recall his many hours of soldering resistors to circuit boards. Most of the resistors were small and brown with 3 or 4 colored stripes of red, blue, white, or yellow going around them. I would sometimes assist by handing him the requested resistor with the correct color band order.
Flickr user Jason Rubik posted his photos of a Heathkit and this one shows the resistors I recall:
Other memories that make me feel ancient are the calculators we were required to learn in college. I don’t recall the name, but it seems that they looked like this, although surely this is too ancient!
My first camera was called a Brownie and had been my mom’s when she was young. My parents ‘ photos became slides shown with a projector and a tray for loading them (carousels came later). We attended travelogues at the high school where community members would present slideshows of their travels. Our rotary telephone was a party line and our number was simply 2914. To call our relatives in another town we would ask the operator to dial Mayfair (and some numbers). Enough nostalgia.
Bush goes on to talk about the amount of storage space that microfilm takes, the cost of creating, mailing, and printing the microfilm. I am probably a bit of a dinosaur myself because I printed this article so that I could write my notes and underlines on it. I realize there is an app for that, but until I learn it, I am most efficient with my old method.
Bush’s vision of a future investigator in his laboratory is amazingly accurate (part 3 of article). The author‘s predictions put me in mind of smart homes, tablets in use at the checkout , debit card sales, simple Excel logic formulas to extrapolate information from a database.
In part 6 Bush says, “Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing….The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association.” Today’s search engines have solved that problem!
Bush’s description of a “memex” is remarkably accurate. In part 7 Bush continues, “…associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing.” This is certainly apparent in today’s search engines, or with online purchases, or reading choices.
Bush describes the user building a trail of his interests through a maze of materials, associated in various ways (I thought of prezis).
In part 8 Bush describes a user with access to “the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities.” He envisions “a new profession of trail blazers, whose who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world’s record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected.”
His next description of access to information through methods other than tactile is certainly present in today’s medical world.
I agree with Bush that man’s “excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if the prove important.”
TopMedia has posted the youtube video, “10 Future Technologies That Will Change the World.” This is just one example of many visions of what is to come.
Michael Zappa has created several infographics with his vision of the near future in technology. http://www.example-infographics.com/envisioning-the-near-future-of-technology/
Some of my classmates may still be around fifty years from now and they will have quite the stories to tell.
Rich Reflection for Gardner Campbell’s article, A Personal Cyberinfrastructure, and his youtube video, A Personal Cyberinfrastructure Revisited.
Despite the initial definition from the American Council of Learned Societies, I began reading Campbell’s article uncertain about the topic. It soon became clear that he was discussing first how schools began using learning management systems (LMS) due to the difficulty in learning HTML to create their own web content. Many of the digital literacies we’ve discussed are not encouraged within the LMS because it is so structured and does not provide the opportunities for creativity that students need.
Campbell says, “The medium is the message. Higher education almost completely ignored Marshall McLuhan’s central insight: new modes of communication change what can be imagined and expressed.”
Campbell presents the idea of students purchasing web space from a commercial server and each student creating his or her own digital presence on that site and expanding upon it throughout their college career. It is immediately apparent that our own ED F654 class has a similar model. Campbell says, “Students would frame curate, share, and direct their own “engagement streams” throughout the learning environment.”
In addition, Campbell states, “Pointing students to data buckets and conduits we’ve already made for them won’t do. Templates and training wheels may be necessary for a while, but by the time students get to college, those aids all too regularly turn into hindrances.” As he continues, “Many students simply want to know what their professors want and how to give that to them. But if what the professor truly wants is for students to discover and craft their own desires and dreams, a personal cyberinfrastructure provides the opportunity.”
From what I can see and have experienced in our class, I think there is a lot of truth to his ideas. The barrier is in educating and training the faculty so that they can appropriately model the example with their own personal cyberinfrastructures. I hope that over time faculty will become increasingly open to this approach. The second barrier to leaving the LMS is the lack of ease in grading. I cannot imagine the nightmare our own instructor goes through trying to track each student’s varied assignments in differing places and submitted at differing times. If he has a logical system for managing that, I would like to know it!
It will probably be a major hurdle to shake off our Blackboard LMS at UAF. The various LMS have become big business and will not lose their lucrative customers without a fight. If the LMS is used simply as a place to aggregate grades, perhaps something cheaper and simpler could be used. Getting faculty to agree would be a major difficulty, just because in my experience, that is the way of faculty.
I particularly liked the end of Campbell’s article: “Those of us who work with students must guide them to build their own personal cyberinfrastructures, to embark on their own web odysseys. And yes, we must be ready to receive their guidance as well.” The recognition that we as faculty are constantly learning from our students as well is important.
In the video portion, Campbell discusses cyberinfrastructure as being a network as an artifact. The cyberinfrastructure itself becomes interesting because it reveals something about the way one finds meaning in the world.
Campbell takes his original cyberinfrastructure ideas even further and advocates operating your own server. Although most people think they cannot run a server, it’s no more complicated than running a computer, according to Dave Winer at http://ec2.forpoets.org/He argues that we should do this at some level because you can build a better artifact by running the server yourself as well as have a better level of understanding of how the internet works.
I think this is a great idea for political reasons as well. If individuals learn to set up and operate their own servers, voices cannot be silenced.
In Campbell’s discussion of Dave Winer, whose blog is at http://scripting.com he also quotes him as saying, “What we want is a distributed publishing system operated by its users. This is the holy grail of the internet, the goal we’re all moving towards.”
Campbell ends with”‘Communication is publishing; it is a distributed means of having a voice that can address the public. The ideal is a distributed publishing system operated by its users. This is more important now than ever.”
Note–I may not have the video quotes verbatim, but made my best attempt to capture them accurately.
