Batman

Posted on November 12, 2012 by jannmarie

How can you not laugh? But how did we get here, to this?

Before we talk Memes, let’s talk about digital storytelling.

Michael Wesch’s project is a great example of modern storytelling at its best; he calls it Digital Ethnography. “The Vision of Students Today” video was a product of the “Introduction to Cultural Anthropology” course he taught in 2007. This video was viewed more than 1 MILLION times in the first month it was online!

In his article, “A Vision of Students Today (& What Teachers Must Do),” Wesch discusses how this video resonates with students and educators at a deep level and how he could not believe that this “disheartening portrayal” was accurate. Would he have received the same response if he had written a scholarly journal article?

Image taken from Michel Wesch’s video, A Vision of Students Today

The power of media is evident in our society. About $60 BILLION dollars is spent on Television marketing. Only about $30 BILLION dollars (same source) is spent on online advertising. So, yeah, media is king.

Voila! Memes are born.

Funny cats, cute babies, sad high school pictures, movie characters, and the most dreadful of all ,epic fails have all become iconic messengers. As Malcolm Gladwell wrote, “A meme is an idea that behaves like a virus–that moves through a population, taking hold in each person it infects.” And we love them, they are quick to read and if the modality is just right, effective and viral.

So, just to see if you have been paying attention to the most popular of memes, you should check out number the #2 meme here.

Florescent lights of the lms…

Posted on October 19, 2012 by jannmarie

a lonely florescent breakfast

Yep, I love Jim Groom’s description of the florescent light of the LMS.

I completely support the concept of leaving the LMS behind when it is clunky or commercially cyborged. I truly understand the argument for the use of multiple tools and weaving together “whatever” works for instructors. Yet, is this expectation realistic? There are a handful of people I know who can do this…well. Other instructors need the well-structured universe of a standardized tool or “system.”

Good instructors take some risk, great instructors experiment and bring their students along with them. Unfortunately, I think that most people (students and instructors alike) feel that the stakes are too high to experiment. The student says, “I pay too much money for this.” (Whatever this is.) The instructor thinks, “I don’t want to look like a fool.” So, I think the edupunk movement has two-sides to the coin: instructor risk and student satisfaction.

My dilemma now that I am in an employee training field, is that we need to track employee course completion. Has the employee reviewed OMB circular A-21 or has she completed the necessary online training to handle radioactive material? How can we do this on an institutional scale where we can apply reporting and analytics to ensure that we have met the legal training requirements?

yay, legal documents!

Yet what is really interesting to consider is how the edupunk movement can evolve or expand employee training too, not just what we consider “standardized” k-12 education. Todd Hudson at the Maverick Institute considered this when he wrote the article “Lean Knowledge Transfer.” How can we bring a new philosophy into training? He cites the lack of responsivity that formalized corporate training embodies. And that it is better to implement a “lean” approach where the learner is driving the experience.

I do think that the edupunk philosophy is critical to the advancement of education and should possibly be the foundation of all learning:

1. Reaction against the commercialization of education

2. DIY attitude

3.Thinking and learning for yourself. (quoted from Wikipedia)

Ultimately, it probably is time for instructors to get some real-life sunshine and step out of the LMS’s artificial shadow.

Is the LMS Dead? (managingelearning.com)

“Quick” Learning on the Web

Posted on October 15, 2012 by jannmarie

question from the audience

I attended UD’s First Friday Roundtable on Teaching on 10/5 (and had a blast, I might add!) about active learning techniques and my interest was piqued with the idea of “Bookending the Lecture.” Unfortunately, I did not have the opportunity to attend the mini-session to get the gist of what “Bookending” was all about.

For my blog post for #udsnf12 I will tell you about my online learning path to investigate this topic.

“Bookending the Lecture” where to start?

Initial Searches for 10-15 Minute Response Time

I came to absolute dead-ends at Class Central and Makerspace. However, when I looked at HowCast my return search topic was “How to Cast a Spell.” I thought this was interesting, but not quite on topic.

I finally went to google and found 23 results for “bookending the lecture.” The content returned was scholarly so I was able to build a foundation of how this engagement concept fits in with other strategies.

From here I decided to try YouTube with Zero results!

Searches for 1 Week Response Time

a week or longer…

I then decided to go directly to the source and ask Kathy Pusecker, the director of the Center for Teaching and Assessment of Learning.

As I was waiting for Kathy’s email response, I went to the ASTD (American Society for Training and Development) web site. Again, searching specifically on “bookending the lecture” resulted in zero results. But then a little chat window popped up and asked if I wanted to chat! Well…yes, I did as a matter of fact. And, again, no resources for this very specific concept.

Now I am starting to feel like I am looking for the elusive Sasquatch.

I received an email back from Kathy and she pointed me to the Google docs they created for the event. At last, I can see the resources the Center for Teaching and Assessment of Learning used for this very specific topic. Now I have some resources to enable additional searching ideas.

I also went out on a limb and started a LinkedIn discussion with my ASTD group and asked the following question:

Have you used an active learning technique called “bookending the lecture?” If so, what activities did you incorporate?

And as of today, 10/15, five days later, I do not have any replies.

My takeaway from this exercise is that it is important to ask your community for help, even if you do not get a response. The point is to ask.

Connectivism in Action Part 2

Posted on September 28, 2012 by jannmarie

My dance with National Council of University Research Administrators-NCURA’s social web network.

courtesy of aka_serges photostream on flickr

I first looked at their Twitter feed and found that the majority of tweets (and I mean almost all) were pointing followers to their “YouTube Tuesday” sessions. The second most tweeted subject by NCURA was about conference dates and conference related things. OK- on the surface really good stuff, but not immediate texts and links that I am interested in. Now I dig a little deeper and look into their 456 Followers.

Note: this is where the idea of Connectivism gets real. I am taking a respectable organization’s twitter account and peering into their followers AND I am allowed to. I am not hacking, this is public knowledge. Wow! It is like looking into someone’s contact list.

Behind Door Number 1: Trustworthiness

I see that John’s Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is following NCRUA, but decide that this Tweeter is focused more on health related topics and not general research related ideas, which is what I am searching for. So, although they are incredibly trustworthy, they do not meet my “follow” criteria.

Door Number 2: Lacking Tweets!

I click on another follower of NCURA’s tweets and see that this person has only tweeted 3 times, which again, does not meet my criteria. The tweeter I want to follow from this group will be an active twitter allowing me to learn something or attempt to build a professional connection.

Door Number 3: A winner! Trustworthy & Lots of Tweets that meet My Professional Needs

Next up is HarvardOSP or the Office for Sponsored Programs at Harvard University. At last, real potential. They only have posted 58 tweets, but it looks like this is a new account and is very active for September.

Furthermore, their content is exactly what I am looking to find : educational resources on the web, funding opportunities and critical issues in my field, news. I think this Tweeter would be a great one to do my next layer of connectivity research.

Door Number 4: Way off Topic

My next Tweeter to research was a woman with a very promising scientific profile. She also had 288 tweets. Awesome, or so I thought. When I dug further, many of the tweets were personal, some political and several had a lot to do with the Mars Curiosity rover, which is interesting , but not what I want to follow. So, she did not meet my criteria.

Door Number 5: Off Topic…again

Found a promising tweeter that is also followed by NCURA and HarvardSOP, so I thought, “Perfect!” a real person I can follow. Unfortunately, his postings were a lot about sensationalistic news items and fewer references to research development.

During my review of other resources/websites that I stumbled upon I found other golden nuggest of information and resources.

For some of these I know that I will have to sift through the (yes, I have to say it) the Connections, I will find valuable opportunities to learn and connect with others in a way that I did not realize.

This is so, so, so very cool. I cannot tell you how much this assignment has meant to me, to my professional life.

My overall observation? It takes a lot of digging to find gold.

Connectivism in Action Part 1

Posted on September 28, 2012 by jannmarie

“Tools are extensions of humanity, increasing our ability to externalize our thinking into forms that we can share with others.” –George Siemens

courtesy of wlonline at Flickr

Completing this week’s blog assignment for Mathieu Plourde’s Social Networking class at UD #udsnf12, has taken me to a deeper level of understanding of the Internet’s capability to build bridges and expand my knowledge, to build my Personal Learning Network.

I have been welcomed into the rabbit hole and have found helpers along the way. I was afraid of the volume of information (still am a little), but now understand how to filter it and make it work for me.

And, now, thanks to this assignment, have seen the proverbial light by reading George Seiman’s artile on Connectivism. Matthias Melcher (who Seiman refers to in his article) even states that Connectivism is too broad of a concept to be harnessed with the restrictive label of a “learning theory.” That Connectivism expands this parochial notion of education and pushes us to reach beyond the walls of an educational building, a teacher, a formal learning experience.

This is revolutionary stuff, my friends. This is MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), this is OER (Open Educational Resources) . This is the Web, or as Connectivism likes to describe this experience as the neuronal network, where uncertainty is certain and the paths are many. (At least, this is my current interpretation.)

I began seeing these connections when I started the first part of this assignment by researching professional organizations and their use of social media tools. The one I finally decided to review is the National Council for University Research Administrators (NCURA), which subscribes to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Linked In. Now for the fun part!

It’s not you, it’s the web…

Posted on September 21, 2012 by jannmarie

Or should I ask, Can I Control Information Overload with Filters and Tools?

First of all, I love Clay Shirky! He really brings the message home, whatever he investigates. However, in his Web 2.0 Expo talk in NY (that we watched for Matt’s EDUC #udsnf12 course), I did not like his claim that

“all the solutions [web/email filtering solutions] are temporary…you have to take the volume increase for granted.”

No, I do not want to take the volume increase for granted! Yuck! Yet, hearing this is liberating. It’s not me, it’s the flow. I am not incapable. I just don’t have the right combination of filters set up. This concept is freeing, really and truly. I will have to keep modifying my set up, but when I get overloaded, I know that it isn’t me, it’s the flow. As Shirky puts it we are in “post-Gutenberg economics.”

So, in order to manage this phase of info gluttony, I have investigated the following tools:

IFTTT (If This Then That)-an old adage from programming language, eh? I just started using this, but I think this tool will really help me increase my klout score. Is your ego interested in this? Did the Web 2.0 makers come up with this digital expression of online worth? We shall see… Yet, I do like IFTTT because it allows me to (1) post in multiple places with one expression, (2) it also brings all the information I want together into my google reader-this alone will be awesome. (PS-be sure to check out article below–it looks like IFTTT is dropping TWITTER!)

Netivbes: I was totally enamored with PageFlakes (RIP) until they went belly-up and I lost everything I aggregated in there. I really liked their simplicity. But a new tool came along and now I can do just about everything in Netvibes. I am still learning the extent of this tool and am very excited to do more than collect urls and see my feeds from Facebook, Twitter, etc.. The aggregating tools in Netvibes are immense and I need to figure out how to best utilize them.

Tweetdeck is OK, but I “think” it can do the same thing as Netvibes. I think this tool would be really helpful if you had more than one Twitter account. I would like to hear other opinions about this.

I LOVE LOVE LOVE Hootsuite!! I ~~think~~ know I am going to really like Hootsuite! This may be my “go to” tool. I really like the straightforward interface and adding in all kinds of apps. I added my youtube subscriptions and they play right in Hootsuite! Awesome! And there are about a million more apps to add in like Evernote too!

So, what’s the difference between content curation and content aggregation? Well, this site really helped me out http://socialmediatoday.com/johnsouza/559293/content-curation-vs-content-aggregation-basics and from that I have the following understanding.

From Secret Sculpture Garden

Content Curation means sharing other people’s content and information with my friends and connections in some awesome and very deliberate way, like using a website. Curation has my personal touch on it.

Content Aggregation means pulling a bunch of information together and not sifting through it to get the good stuff. This is usually via some sort of search process or aggregator that automatically pulls information in.

I am seeing the differences between the two in this way. Content Aggregation is like throwing a bucket of paint on the wall while Content Curation is like using many colors to create a beautiful mural.