And it’s crossing a track (the Internet), and there’s a train (people) heading towards the level crossing.  It’s going to be a mess, the truck will be wrecked.  The train will probably be badly damaged, but the track?  It will be fixed.  It will stay there.  It’s not going away and there is too much value to be had from the track, whether another truck comes along and attempts to cross the track while the train is there is anybody’s guess.  There will always be trains on the track.  But trucks?  There’s heaps of them, some of them manage to cross the track without getting in the way of the trains.  But the trucks who insist upon right of way when there’s a train bearing down on them have only themselves to blame for the damage, to train, to tracks.  They will eventually pay.  They may say the level crossing lights didn’t work, but eventually, we realise that the truck that flies in the face of a train deserves no sympathy.  We should not make trains stop for trucks.

Censorship is a truck too.  It will make a mess, but eventually, the trucks realise that the train is bigger than anything they have encountered.  They need to be wary of trains.  Trains are the only things that are bigger than trucks.

I think this analogy needs work.

Semester is all but over and this poor neglected blog needs an update.  Actually, it needed an update as well as an update, but that’s another story.

As I sit here catching up on the last of the marking and preparing for the exam marking, I’m pausing to consider the reflections that my undergrad students submitted (as well as the ‘official’ evaluation, which I hope to never use again, but that’s another story, which I will get to later).

I must preface these remarks with the caveat that I’m making some big assumptions about ‘Gen-Y’, ‘Net Natives’ and any other label that could be applied.  That said, I’m constantly amazed by students. Sometimes you get students so engaged that they take up what I give and spin it back to me in ways that I never considered.  These students are few but they make it all worthwhile.  For instance, one of the things I purposely do is not give a precise definition of ‘Informatics’, because I really want students to start defining their world for themselves.  We give hints and clues and show them examples, but the definition is really up to them.  Which is why this kind of reflection really impresses me:

[Informatics] involves answering the fundamental questions, looking into why we do things and how we take technology and things around us to get it done, it looks at communication and thinking as well as the construction of ideas, templates and data in addition to systems, theory, traditions and recording. It is endless as to what informatics can teach us and it is important that we grasp the concept as it can’t be defined into a phrase and regurgitated.

That student will go far in Business.  Another student came to similar conclusions:

The importance of information presentation, sharing, visualisation, contextualisation and manipulation is now more important to me than ever before. I believe that informatics will become increasingly important, as the link between people, information, and technology becomes more engrained in society.

I’m not sure that the order of those tasks is right, in fact I think it should start with manipulation and end with presentation, but all of the key points are there – the whole range of what we want students to learn.  These are impressive outcomes and make me glad that I do things in the way that I do.  It kind of makes up for the two or three students who feel the course is a waste of space, but that’s another story.

Which I really should think about.  Apparently, at least one student did not like that I use the phrase “but that’s another story” as much as I do and I have been seriously thinking about why I say it so much, particularly in this course.  It occurred to me that that phrase is almost a verbal hypertextual link.  It’s the kind of link we see and then we may open the page in another tab for when we have time to follow it up[1].  I don’t think I’ve realised just how much the web has influenced my thinking, but it’s really evident in that phrase.  And it really became evident when someone wrote in the ‘official’ evaluations that I should stop saying it.  They were quite emphatic and used UPPER CASE with all of it’s implications.  But it wasn’t until then, that I did realise the kind of mesh thinking that I do – it’s the kind that is needed to help students, at least those who are engaged, to make the leap to higher levels of thinking about technology.  It’s the kind of thinking that is needed not just in business graduates, but in all graduates and, quite possibly is one of the things missing in our current crop of politicians.  Linear thinking is not really helpful for solving the complex problems that we face.  It’s the kind of thinking that leads directly to the our current method of ‘official’ evaluation, where students, shielded by anonymity, get to throw whatever shit they feel is their due because the bucket that is their head wasn’t filled in the way they think it should have been. I find it quite incredible that we rely on these evaluations. It’s not like they have studied teaching and learning for over a decade and reflected upon the range of ways in which people learn.  There’s a kind of cognitive dissonance between having to elaborate what you learned and ticking a box, the unthinkingness and the immediacy of the ‘official’ evaluation gives rise to a petty approach to evaluations which leads to a simple, ‘I don’t like this course so I’m going to give it a low evaluation’ or ‘I got a low mark, well, take this you doody lecturer’[2].  But the reflection, where students are not anonymous gives much richer feedback, for example:

I don’t feel that the science/language of informatics content was at all relevant in the business setting. Discussing the debate of whether you can use facebook or dailybooth at work was not particularly useful. Ditto being shown a lot of fun websites early in the semester was not a great use of lecture time. If I go to a lecture, it’s because I want to learn new skills and important information relevant to my degree. Discussions of where the internet is headed do not have a lot of relevance for my career in business or many others’.

While I tend to disagree with most of this, the student has elaborated a great deal of information about the way some students view technology[3] and it is this view that we try to get students to rethink.  Language is important everywhere and the future of technology is directly responsible for where business may be going.  In fact, there are so many stories of business leaders missing the point, which leads some to contemplate the idea of ‘felony interference with a business model’ as being a chief reason for many industries’ problems.   Perhaps, if we keep going down this ‘official’ evaluation pathway, we’ll end up with academics being charged with ‘felony interference with student thinking‘ which simply beggars the imagination and that, hopefully, will never be another story that I allude to.

1. I currently have about 5 tabs of that category open write now, and I’ve only got 18 tabs open [↩]
2. yes, that is my interpretation of the low evaluations [↩]
3. the student actually received a good mark because they elaborated their views quite well and did get me thinking about ways to improve the course [↩]

Two things.

1. This: Does street art make people become bikies? (found via @Tarale)
   

Why is there this huge push to regulate culture?  Graffiti causes you to become a bikie?  Oh, so I must be a bikie?  Having participated in many graffiti activities, and almost getting a second place in a Graffiti competition[1], I can most assuredly say, I am not a bikie! Okay, yes, I used to ride a motorbike, and a big mob of us used to go riding out around Alice Springs, but I’m not what anyone would call a bikie.  Besides, the biking happened years before the graffiti.  The thing that will make Graffiti artists criminals is the criminalisation of graffiti.

Here’s a thought: rather than fining, jailing, remanding, punishing them, let’s try educating them.  I don’t mean educating them about the horrors of graffiti, I mean educating them about the artform.  Let’s get them together with artists (some of whom have problems making enough to live on) and have them learn about composition and colour and all of the concepts that lead to pleasing artforms[2].  Let’s pay the artists, let’s get them working on all the ugly structures and bits of our community.  Let’s start them on the shipping containers and trains.  Think about how much more pleasing it would be to wait for a long train to pass if it was decorated with images and colour.  Let’s get some retired/out of work engineers to train aspiring artists on safety around these behemoths.  Let’s harness their creativity and need to make their mark to enhance our lives, not force them into a life of ‘crime’.

2. This: Lawrence Lessig – Getting the Network the World Needs at OFC/NFOEC 2009

This video is both inspiring and depressing for similar reasons as above.  Why ARE we criminalising our youth? Why is there this push to control everything, to maintain the status quo, to deny the evolution of culture?  In some ways, I, too, believe in copyright, but I’m a copyright minimalist.  I believe we should get back to the original purpose of copyright, as set forth in the Statute of Anne, which was to stop the commercial exploitation of a creative work without the permission of the creator and that it was a very limited time (initially around 14-21 years).  My reading of the Statute of Anne is that it was done to protect creators from publishers.  We really need to ensure that creators do get recognition and some financial reward for their works.

But what we have now, and what’s hinted at in Lessig’s talk, is that the publishers have slowly manipulated copyright, both the law and its application, to their benefit.  Whenever we do anything creative, we have to hand over the copyright to publishers so the can ‘protect‘ our work.  What they do is another word starting with P and that’s profit[3].  Why are publishers exploiting the creators so heavily?  Why are they always saying they’ll protect our works, but not us? Can we please change the rules back?

Inspired?

That all sounds so depressing and it is.  Criminalising our youth is depressing.  The inspiration comes from our youth.  The ways they are shaping what we know are inspiring.  I love seeing how people (regardless of age) rethink the things they see things and that is central to what it is I love about my job.  But it’s all becoming too hard.  If we aren’t careful, learning will become a criminal act, because there isn’t an idea in the world that can’t be said to have its genesis somewhere else.

1. We did win second prize, until they found out what FIGJAM stood for, then we were disqualified [↩]
2. of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so I’ll say no more about that [↩]
3. Question: Are publishers Ferengi bound by the Rules of Acquisition? [↩]

I’ve been playing around with this blog for quite some time now and I still haven’t found a particular focus.  There are way too many things that I think about and way too many things that I do.  There are way too many ideas that I find interesting and way too many things that I want to do.

I think I should document some of them and find the common thread, even though I think I know what that thread is, it’s too nebulous.  I think I need to develop some coherence, so when people ask ‘what’s this blog about?’, the answer is more than ’stuff’.

So what AM I interested in?

1. Learning
2. Technology
3. Technology for facilitating learning (AKA learning technology)
4. Internet technologies (the shiny)
5. Things that go beep in the day
6. Things that make connections easier (although I am less than likely to use those connections)
7. Following trends
8. Not necessarily ‘being first’ but ‘being there’
9. Facilitating learning
10. Learning how people learn
11. Learning how people learn about technology
12. How people share ideas
13. Soaking up the wealth of information/knowledge that’s out there
14. The intersection between what I know and what you know
15. Everything around that intersection
16. Things that prevent people from learning (the flip side of filtering technologies)

So with all that, you’d think I’d have plenty to say.  Why am I not saying it?  Possibly because of points 6, 7 and 8.  The connections between what we know (point 14), individually, are endlessly fascinating.  But, it seems that I have these whole conversations in my head, vicarious conversations, and I never get around to writing them down.

I wonder if there’s a plug in for wordpress that can take vague thoughts and make them into a coherent post.  Now that’s something I’d be ‘first’ to!

I received an email from the Dean of Teaching and Learning the other day, and didn’t quite get around to responding.  Someone mentioned that they had dobbed me in for this particular email, so I responded in the positive.  The reason for the email is secondary, because I took the opportunity to blow my own trumpet, something I am not really good at.  But apparently it worked.

I included in the email an apology for not responding and gave a link to the reason.  That reason was the time spent on developing the presentation for the lecture this week.  I think that was a good move, because, now, at least one person is impressed by the work that I do.

My next trick was to try to embed the outcome of all that activity here.  One plug-in installation later and here it is.

Specifying the size in the code didn’t seem to have an effect, so if that’s too small, you can view it full size.

Can you hear my trumpet?