Daniel Bachhuber's weblog

If I had learned about TEDxNYED earlier than I did, I would’ve totally applied and made my way to New York to attend. Alas, I did not, and get to relive the experience through the posts and videos published online (hooray for the web). Jeff Jarvis ran through a number of things he’s identified as broken, and then offered “Googley” suggestions to fix them. Money quote:

Why shouldn’t every university – every school – copy Google’s 20% rule, encouraging and enabling creation and experimentation, every student expected to make a book or an opera or an algorithm or a company. Rather than showing our diplomas, shouldn’t we show our portfolios of work as a far better expression of our thinking and capability? The school becomes not a factory but an incubator.

Reflecting on the entire post, I have two thoughts that come to mind. First, to what degree are the qualities he observes as broken actually broken, and to what degree are they rhetoric to emphasis the overall message of his presentation? Second, if things are as broken as he says they are, what comes next?

If there are parallels between how the internet has affected the media industry and how the internet is beginning to affect the education industry, then surely there are lessons to be learned from how the media industry reacted and where they failed to. The opportunity, however, is more likely with what can be distributed (lessons, mentoring, accreditation, etc.) than trying to reform command and control. Build the tool for the public to educate itself.

It took way too long, but I finally had my sweet Kilowatts mounted with G3 Onyx AT bindings. The setup is complete with a pair of Dynafit ZZero boots with heat-molded liners which, if you’ve never experienced, I would highly recommend trying at least once in your life. I can’t wait to see how they ski. With CoPress closing down, more on that shortly, my goal is to make it happen more than the once a month I’ve been averaging.

A quick memo for the future: I’ve been able to sneak by the Amtrak baggage czar with a single pair of skis multiple times, but if they catch you with two pairs of skis and boots, they’re probably going to make you check them. Considering I wasn’t schlepping a ski bag, I have my fingers crossed that they don’t get mangled.

A lengthy piece in EDUCAUSE Review has many of the same memes that have been floating around, but breaks the reinvention idea this time into two core concepts: collaborative learning and collaborative knowledge production.

Collaborative learning redefines the information presentation model from that of broadcast, or one-way transmission from transmitter to receiver, to that of many to many. As discussed in the article, it defines how the culture of education process flattens and shifts. Given proper access to intellectual resources, also known as a wireless connection to the internet, students can assist in the role of teaching. More often than not, there are students who pick up any given material quicker than the others. With the established pedagogy, there is no advantage to being a quicker learner; with collaborative learning, being the quicker learner means that other opportunities arise to take a more active role in the teaching process and practice leadership skills. The responsibility of the professor is to be a curator, or act as a master guide to the learning process.

Collaborative learning also implies learning through practical application of knowledge, as opposed to simply being a static vassal to be filled. Choice quote:

As Seymour Papert, one of the world’s foremost experts on how technology can provide new ways to learn, put it: “The scandal of education is that every time you teach something, you deprive a [student] of the pleasure and benefit of discovery.” Students need to integrate new information with the information they already have — to “construct” new knowledge structures and meaning.

Collaborative knowledge production, however, articulates how the dynamics of the web can alter the traditional content production role of the university. Instead of an emphasis on scarcity, it would instead focus on abundance and universal access, and it describes how this might affect intellectual content from course material to academic research. To achieve this goal, however, you need effective tools for distributed collaboration:

What higher education desperately needs is a social network — a Facebook for faculty. But it shouldn’t be a standalone application; it should be integral to the Global Network for Higher Learning. One such project, part of the Portuguese education system, is creating an online community of teachers across the country. The system will use collaborative methods for creating, managing, sharing, and deploying curricula and for tracking the results via a sophisticated learning management system. There are many benefits, including much greater collaboration among teachers and a more consistent measurement of students’ progress.

The real world gives professors collaboration opportunities in their department and with whom they meet, but just think of the potential serendipities a people-indexer like Aardvark could produce.

Most importantly, however, is that all of these ideas are business opportunities, and innovations the efficiencies of the market will be able to capitalize upon a lot quicker than those invested in the ivory towers.

Thanks to Suzi Steffen for sharing this with me.

Plug one: There’s a report making its way around the internet that says the youth are spending less time blogging. Specifically, “28% of the two groups studied — teens 12 to 17 and young adults 18 to 29 — actively blogged.” For 2009, this percentage has dropped off to only 14% of teens and 15% of young adults. The author attributes this drop to a rise in the use of Facebook.

Plug two: Marshall Kirkpatrick floated a related idea the other day that Facebook is now the world’s leading news reader. There are at least a few reasons: Facebook has the largest, most active user base on the planet, Facebook gives you control over who has access to your content which leads to a greater willingness to share, and Facebook wraps the whole creation/consumption experience into a nice, easy to use interface.

That last point is the most critical, in my opinion. As average Joe, it’s much, much easier to publish with Facebook (or Twitter) because there is tremendous attention paid to the experience of how content is consumed on a regular basis. Both Facebook and Twitter have dedicated dashboards for your subscriptions where you get visual reinforcement that other people are coming across your content. With my blog, I have a home page which my dad or mom might read occasionally, and X number of faceless RSS subscribers who may or may not “Mark All As Read” on a daily basis. Figuring out how to use Google Reader to read other blogs almost requires the scientific method, which could be a good thing if you consider yourself a geek but is almost certainly a bad thing if you’re a Normal just wanting to read the national news and your friends’ writing.

Moral of the story: Always take studies with a grain of salt. I suspect The Youth are publishing more than ever, but it’s coming in the form of Facebooking and Tumblring instead of maintaining a blog because the proprietary tools, unfortunately, have better readers right now than the open source ones.

Related to this, I’m hoping to take Ryan Sholin’s lead and write more on my original home space. It’s a muscle I think I need to exercise. I’m also going to take Gruber’s lead and turn off comments because I get way too many comment notifications like, “Hi, cool blog, just curious what spam system you use for cleaning up comments because I am getting so many spammers on my blog.”

?!

This year, Edge’s World Question is “How has the internet changed the way you think?” which, at first glance, just re-emphasizes my perma-”so what” state. I started reading through the 16 pages of essays on the flight this morning, however, and even though the question may be mediocre some of the responses are world class. Stewart Brand has an especially astute observation on how the Internet better enables distributed collaboration:

One’s Guild

I couldn’t function without them, and I suspect the same is true for nearly all effective people. By “them” I mean my closest intellectual collaborators. They are the major players in my social extended mind. How I think is shaped to a large degree by how they think.

Our association is looser than a team but closer than a cohort, and it’s not a club or a workgroup or an elite. I’ll call it a guild. Everyone in my guild runs their own operation, and none of us report to each other. All we do is keep close track of what each other is thinking and doing.

Absolutely the most perfect word.

For the sake of saving an hour of guessing, here are the proper settings for using Google Apps, or Gmail, with StatusNet, formally known as Laconica:

$config['mail']['backend'] = 'smtp';
$config['mail']['params'] = array(
'host' => 'smtp.gmail.com',
'port' => 587,
'auth' => true,
'username' => 'username@domain.com',
'password' => 'your_secret_password'
);

Adding these settings to your config.php file will allow your StatusNet instance to send email notifications over SMTP when your web host doesn’t support sending mail from the server (ahem, WebFaction). The trick is to use the proper port, 587 instead of 25, and to enable authentication.

I’m still trying to configure Google Apps as the XMPP provider for StatusNet too; I’ll put together another post if I can figure that out.