I can lick 30 Tigers today is the story of a young person who determines to take on the world in the form of 30 tigers.  However, upon seeing how many 30 tigers are, one tiger is eliminated because of curly hair.  With each successive iteration of belief of the person’s ability to take on multiple tigers, the number is reduced until finally the person decides to go and have lunch not having taken on the tigers.¹

At its simplest 30 Tigers is about overconfidence, about taking on too much.  Whittling away the opposition is perhaps the best approach for some tasks.  Each time you find a tiger with some ‘quirk’, you can eliminate it.  It’s an interesting approach to life, and one that I think the traditional media have taken to heart.

You see, there’s all these Pirates² out there (not tigers) and they all download music and books and movies and games because they can’t afford to buy them³ and of course that is money lost by the various industries⁴.

Now there’s a number of takes you can make on this.  The Industry⁵ has been whittling away opposition (tigers) to changing their business model.  We have the DMCA, DRM and probably heaps of other acronyms that all point to propping up these Industries.  Each on of these acronyms is a response to a tiger that has been dismissed.  It’s Under Control (the tiger, not the acronym).

On the other hand, each user who is being sued could also be positioned as a tiger.  No single tiger can stand up to this Industry. And the Industry keeps dismissing (or suing) single tigers.  And the tigers roll over⁶.

What would happen if all the tigers roared together?  Probably not much, because there seems to be a divide and conquer strategy going on.  There’s this blanket strategy of suing whomever is around⁷.  It doesn’t matter who (or what) they sue.

But what if we turned it around?  What if we decided that all those new rules and

1. Seuss, D. I can Lick 30 Tigers Today! And Other Stories. Collins, 1969 [↩]
2. And why pirates?  What kid doesn’t like being a Pirate? [↩]
3. There are many reasons why people don’t buy these things and that reason is value, not cost [↩]
4. I along with others think that that money is not made rather than lost, but in a mad digital world, who’s counting?  Oh, yeah, they are. [↩]
5. you know which one I’m talking about [↩]
6. but then, who has the money (or the claws) to fight this Industry? [↩]
7. Even a printer and I wish I had bookmarked that link. [↩]

So hot on the heals of the whole EduPunk rethunking, and to elaborate for our wiki paper, Luke suggested a diagram of what wiki pedagogy was in our course. So I’ve put together a first draft trying to demonstrate how things interconnect in our wiki teaching. There are a number of things that we do slightly differently from other work that I’ve seen.

I think the significant thing that we do differently is start with an empty wiki.  Okay, it’s not completely empty, but we only have the core course information in the wiki at day one.  We are developing a set of tutorials very similar to those found in WikiEducator, but modified for TikiWiki.

This means that students have to start the work. The idea is to get them thinking about how community development is facilitated by technology.  They must not only create the course ‘text book’, but they create the community of students who develop this.  I figure that this is an experience that is important — getting things off the ground without any assumption that things are already going, which I sense is a key thing for established LMS.  Everything is already there for the beginning of semester and all the students have to do is absorb.

But not in this course.  There is very little information about the content of the course.  There is some structure, and we’re getting better at putting this in place to guide students, but there really isn’t much.

The diagram shows some of the things that I think are important in the wiki course.  The Pedagogy is based on ideas about community of practice ideas¹, bringing novices from the peripheries to the centre, providing some pathways for developing knowledge and for developing collaborative workstyles. There’s also a theme of ’students as designers’².  This is in contrast with developing group work practices, because while they are all working together, they are all working separately, so they are really only responsible for their own output, but can build upon the work of others, comment, critique and interact, but not depend on others.

In the diagram, all the tools in the Wiki Learning environment (well, most of them) are listed.  There are really two kinds of tools, which I’ve labeled knowledge production and collaborative.  The knowledge production are generally where thoughts and learnings come together.  These features generally allow the display of developing knowledge and includes images, pages and blogs.  There is generally space to develop an idea in words and pictures.  This is where we assess the more traditional demonstrations of knowledge.

Collaborative features are those that let students engage with one another.  There are comments (and this should probably include the forums, but these tend not to get used too much), private messages (where students send a message to one or more — kind of like email in the wiki) and the shoutbox which is like a open messaging system where a single message can be sent to all participants.  The students kind of like that because the shoutbox appears on every page, and quite often someone responds to them in the shoutbox.  It’s like a multi-threaded public conversation in short bursts.  Very twitterish, now that I think about it.

Essentially, students commence the course at the periphery and sometimes on the edges of the community.  Most of them are not well established in the field as we are almost presenting a new area (mobile workforce technologies).  We have IT students, marketing students, MBA students,    We see many of them move into the community of practice through active engagement with knowledge formation processes.  The CoP surrounds the wiki tools in the wiki learning environment. There is an embeddednes about the whole structure.  Everything happens in the wiki (with the exception of providing students with their passwords which we do through the gradebook of Blackboard.)

All of these features allow students to actively reflect on the processes of knowledge development and construction and maintain their activities in a single space.  It’s a whole environment wrapped up in free software.  You can’t get much better than that.

1. Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: legitimate peripheral participation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. [↩]
2. Kimber, K and Wyatt-Smith, C, (2006). Using and creating knowledge with new technologies: a case for students-as-designers, Learning, Media and Technology, 31 (1): 19–34 [↩]

I’ve been thinking about this blog and about my history with blogs and other newer forms of media.  I named this ‘Vicarious Conversations’ because I know myself.  I don’t really like being in the centre, I like the peripheries.  I like to interact vicariously, sometimes reflectively and I don’t always have time to reflect fully before I’m on the next thought.  So I feel like I’ve missed the boat.  But the analogy of backroads seemed to take root while I was thinking about EduPunk.  I think I’ve always been in that category, whether it had a label or not, but I was on the periphery while an undergrad, stayed in the peripheries for most of my (post)graduate education¹, and am still on the periphery as an academic.

In some ways, that’s a conscious decision and it seems to be one that is not an ‘appropriate’ position for an academic in these days of the RQF².  But the peripheries seem to be a useful position.  It’s from the peripheries that things like EduPunk come.  The shifts and changes are more do-able at the peripheries.  They are less noticed and potentially more likely to get going while under the radar.

But the backroads.  I have spent most of my time traveling those backroads.  In reality, I only take backroads when the main roads are congested.  I’ll take the main road at certain times, but other times — keep me away from that traffic.  I suppose it could be seen as taking the path of least resistance.  This is not always such a good thing.  That’s where we do things because we can’t be bothered to change.  But consciously keeping to the peripheries, deciding when one wants to traverse the well-beaten track or when to go the back way is potentially more empowering.

So why have I stayed on the backroads of the blogosphere?  Sometimes, I wonder.  I keep thinking of the ‘Scully Incident’ where Gillian Anderson visited Brisbane and I took my daughter to see her only to be physically removed from the crush of people in such a small space³.  I think being lost in a crowd is frightening.  Being spotted in a crowd could be potentially panic inducing.  The backroads are safe(r), they get you where you’re going, without the frustration of being caught in heavy traffic where you have no control.  That’s where mainstream education seems to be heading — heavily congested with minimal control for the drivers.

EduPunk, while it stays on the periphery, is probably a good place for me.  But it now has a name and a following.  It’s moving to a more central position.  So I ask: “What’s coming next?”

1. Heck, I even went to regional universities to do my research — there’s nothing more peripheral than a regional uni in Australia [↩]
2. While the Howard Gubmint implemented that as the Research Quality Framework, it really meant that those of us at the peripheries were Really Quickly F@#ked [↩]
3. I never did thank the nameless security guard who recognised my panic and pulled me from the crowd — it was probably to protect everyone else, but I thank him, nonetheless [↩]

I’ve been seeing a bit of talk around about EduPunk, and I’m always loath to jump onto the latest meme¹, but I think this time, the name is actually what’s been missing from what I (and Luke) have been doing with the Wiki course.  I’m not completely sure about the name, it resonates with some people, but l feel hesitant at taking that particular label.

Part of what I wanted to achieve using the wiki when I got the GEL Fellowship was to get away from the coprotisation² of education.  I’d only been using BlackPlank³ for two years, but it really got me that its design was not really user centred.  Nothing I wanted to do could be done.  There are still things that I want from an LMS that aren’t there, particularly given that I had just come from an institution that had an in-house designed LMS that did do what I thought was great for communicating with students.  And it was so simple I called it a minimalist design in my PhD.  But BlackPlank seems to be maximalist — it wants to be everything to everyone.

I will admit to squeeing over the demonstration of BlackPlank 8 the other day — the gradebook finally looks usable from my perspective and it doesn’t change much from the student’s perspective⁴.  But before this turns into a rant against the established LMS in our institution, I’ll get it back to a rant against the establishment in general.

EduPunk.  Whatever the label may be, that’s what I am.  I can’t be otherwise while using a wiki and getting students to create their text book for a course.  I’m wondering if I should include the theme of EduPunk somewhere in the paper that Luke and I are (re)writing, given that it’s already been rejected from one journal for not being ’scientific’ enough.  Part of me wants to say ‘to heck with the established journal publication route’ but that won’t give me tenure⁵.

Why do we talk so much about student empowerment, student engagement, student centred learning only to be enmeshed in a standardised system with monolithic be-everything-to-everyone-tools?  I get the feeling that the term EduPunk is a response to that dichotomy and an attempt to bring coherence back to our lived experiences as learners and teachers, because that’s what we do!

Just like the sun, peeking out from behind the Opera House, EduPunk seems to lighten things in a tantalising way — not quite fully shining on the establishment, but hinting at possibilities.

1. That’s what LiveJournal is for [↩]
2. I really must stop mispelling that word [↩]
3. Maybe I should say Blackboard, but board … plank … there’s an analogy in there somewhere [↩]
4. I don’t actually remember asking to see what students see, I was so excited seeing something that was usable  particularly for my large classes of 300+ [↩]
5. I must remember to make or find a list of open journals — and publish only there from here on it — to heck with the established route [↩]

My favourite story as a child was one of Dr Seuss’s stories was The Glunk That Got Thunk. I have been trying and trying to find this and when I noticed a whole swag of Seuss books in the local bookshop, I went on a search to find that story. Thanks to the glory that is the Intarweb, I managed to find out that it’s one of the stories in I Can Lick 30 Tigers Today And Other Stories. It’s one of the ‘Other Stories’.

But what was it about that story that so entranced me as a child. One thing is that the lead character is a female, a very imaginative individual (although the story is narrated by her brother). It’s a story about the power of our imaginations, that we can imagine anything, from friendly little things to a Glunk.

Now the Glunk wasn’t quite that friendly and got up to all sorts of mischief, including long distance calls to his mother to share his recipe for Glunker Stew¹. Try though she might, the young girl cannot Unthunk the Glunk. Of course, as a story of the 1960’s, the hero of the story is actually the narrator, the brother. He manages to help her finally Unthunk the Glunk.

In my search for this book, I came across a number of different interpretations, one of which was that too much imagination can be a bad thing, but I always believed that it was a story about the Power of Imagination and my reading of it is that there is even more Power in Collective Imagination.

So what does this have to do with New Media?

Well, I’m glad you asked. You see, I do spend quite a bit of time reading lots of stuff on the web². And in many of the stories, there’s this belief that there is power in collaborative endeavours.  One of the most pervasive occurrences of the Internet era is the shifts in process that allow collaboration and sharing. Indeed the foundation upon which the World Wide Web was based is the idea of allowing multiple people access to a shared repository of information (Berners-Lee, 1990).

From this foundation, which is based upon sharing, we can envisage greater collectives.  Not the Borgian style collective of the Star Trek universe, but sharing ideals and ideas (via websites and blogs, no less).  So here we are, with a collective imagination of unforeseen power and it’s being broken.  I think there are people out there actively trying to unthunk the internet.  People like the MPAA and the RIAA (and here in Australia, we have ARIA and MIPI et al).  They want to unthink the sharing capabilities that we possess.  All in the name of protecting copyright.

But there’s a problem with their imaginative abilities.  And I don’t think their unthunking abilities can equal the power of the collective imagination of connected people.  Forget the fact that they don’t want us to place shift nor time shift³); what they don’t realise (or maybe they do and dismantling the internet is what they are actually aiming for) is that as soon as we have access to something, there is a copy of it.  We cannot view, listen, read, hear, see, think, click, load, indeed any activity done on a computer as each activity is an act of copying.

Getting back to the Glunk.  The internet (and maybe even the personal computer) is a Glunk in the eyes of the traditional distributors of media (and just try to distribute without copying, oh, but they own the copyright, not the artists, funnily enough).  They are desperately trying to unthink it.  They have achieved an incredible amount towards this goal, (eg the DMCA, Canadian Copyright reforms deforms, the rewriting of Australian copyright, ad nauseum).  They are really trying to break the internet and getting ISPs on board to do their dirty work (see multiple posts at Techdirt tagged under recording industry).

But for the rest of us, I think the traditional distributors are a Glunk that got thunk by artists⁴, some of whom still seem to believe it’s a fuzzy friendly thing, not the ravenous beast that it is.  Ironically, it seems to be feeding off the morals of various governments as well as a collective dis-imagining made possible only by a lack of critical foresight.

References

Berners-Lee, T., 1990, Information Management: A Proposal, http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal-msw.html [Accessed: September 3, 2006]

Seuss, D. I can Lick 30 Tigers Today! And Other Stories. Collins, 1969

1. Glunker Stew seems to be a bizarre concoction that only a Glunk could like [↩]
2. otherwise known as faffing around [↩]
3. Place shifting includes putting things on your iPod; Time shifting includes recording things on video (either disk or tape [↩]
4. This may be a huge assumption on my part, but I wasn’t around when it started, so I could be making everything up. [↩]

I’ve been seriously thinking about the wiki course I teach.  Mobile Workforce Technologies used to be Information and Communication Technologies but has had a complete make-over in the last two years.  Part of what is not included is more focus on the business and social processes and less on the technical aspects.  This can only be a Good Thing (TM).  The change in name and focus allowed the change in pedagogical process to happen.  There was also the fellowship which paid for it, so I can’t discount that.  The opportunity to ‘rethink’ provided by the e-learning fellowship was beyond measuring¹.

But I get the sense from a lot of work that’s being done on the use of wikis in learning environments that there is a focus on continuity of the wiki, building upon what previous students have done.  While that is admirable and very useful, I seem to be focusing on a different approach.  One of the things I’ve noticed, particularly in the wikis that I have started only to have them go nowhere (see for instance Information Systems Research).  How do we get people to start engaging in these new tools?  The build it and they will come approach does not seem to work all that well.  I’m pretty sure that building and maintaining communities are two very different activities.  Having an idea is good, but engaging people is hard.

Which brings me to one of the essential differences about the way I use wikis for teaching.  They always start empty.  Not completely empty, but with some instruction and some direction.  I’ve been trying to figure out (and consequently teach) how to get people into new processes.  I figure that coming into an already populated space is kind of easy, but building from scratch? Well, now that requires slightly different approaches.  I suppose it’s similar to implementing any new version of software, new website, new anything really, but to consciously go through the process as a learning exercise is valuable.

The main difference between the learning environment and the work environment, I suppose, is the level to which participation (contribution) is mandated.  In a work environment, it can be relatively easy to refuse to use certain technologies², and in the learning environment, we give a reward for (contribution) participation and actually make it mandatory.  I think this forces students/learners to reflect upon the processes of building and implementing new technologies/processes.  I think that will be a required part of their reflection - consider what worked to get people in, what didn’t work, how the process shifts your frame of reference, how people may accept or reject the changes and what could be done about that.

Hmm, yes, need to rewrite the contribution (participation) requirements as well as the reflection requirements.

1. The Griffith E-Learning Fellowships have since become the Blended Learning Fellowships but I’ll always think of myself as a GELF-ling [↩]
2. bLotus Notes, I’m talking about YOU! [↩]

After jumping on the FireFox 3 bandwagon, like millions of other intrepid internauts¹, I have spent the better part of the week trying to get it to work exactly how I want.  There were a number of small quirks that really really, no really, bugged me.

The main problem was the consistency with which FireFox3 logged me out of everything every time I closed it or it crashed.  It was becoming old so very quickly.  Today, I think I spent about 4 hours poking and prodding a whole raft of preferences and addons trying to find which setting would restore my ability to stay logged into delicious and citeulike and gmail and wordpress and everything else.  I think I narrowed it down to a TOR plugin, which since I rarely use, I uninstalled.  Now at least I seem to stay logged in.  I’ll see how that goes.

Which brings me to my next realisation for the day.  I spend way too much time tinkering with technology instead of writing about it.  This includes what I do and learn within (and about) the screenface² and what I work out about how people learn and teach with technology³.

Thus we have a post about learning and thinking with technology. Maybe I should start a category named that and then actually use it to post.

1. okay, that word sucks, big time, meh, read the rest of the post [↩]
2. To really grok what I mean by ’screenface’, you may have to read a few sections of my PhD … until the paper is finally accepted somewhere. [↩]
3. I suppose that also includes the flexible and the blended and the downright contrary versions of learning [↩]

It seems that I got so far behind in the Designing for Flexible Learning course that I am finally getting around to Week 4 just as the course is heading into its last week.  I’ve just read the reading¹ and figured that if I really want to experience flexible learning, I should just keep going at my own pace.  After all, part of what Annand (2007) points to is that we need to provide flexibility for students².

The question that was posited for this ‘exercise’³ was

• How can distance, correspondence and/or online learning create flexible learning opportunities in your context?

Wow.  That’s a big question.  Considering my PhD was partly related to this, I could theoretically write a dissertation on it.  Harking back to that effort, the whole premise of my thesis was that technologies, such as email, can provide added value to a learning situation.  The context of that study was a predominantly distance institution that provided a study guide, a minimalist web page and an email list.  While I didn’t focus specifically on ‘flexibility’ of learning⁴, the underlying assumption was that technologies contribute to flexible learning environments and that an online environment (eg a discussion list) was inherently flexible.  One of my stated findings pointed towards the “potential utility of online learning as a highly accessible pedagogic practice”⁵.

Turning my attention to my current context, I have realised this semester, that in an attempt to provide flexible learning opportunities for ’students’⁶, I seem to have overwhelmed myself with maintenance activities.  In some ways, I think I have become too flexible and allowing students too much leeway to get things done.  There seems to be a tradeoff between flexibility and accreditation.  The whole notion of accreditation is based on (in part) comparative achievement of a cohort.  If we are to maintain the accreditable outcomes for students, we must forfeit some flexibility.  Learning can (and does) happen anywhere, but accreditation comes with a cost.

So what kinds of flexibility am I providing for students?  I think there are a number of points in the undergrad (Business Informatics) course that point towards flexibility:

1. separation of skill competencies from critical competencies
2. linking of skills and critical competencies
3. collaborative processes and assessments (building on both skills and critical competencies)
4. a range of activities that are assessable (providing many opportunities for success) and
5. a detailed structure (and study guide) that links it all together.

While not all students achieve the high level of critical competencies that I’d like, nearly every student⁷ increased their level at entry in skills, critical thinking or both.  I’ve often wondered how to base student learning on their entry level, but for accreditation requirements , we need to state the outcomes and measure against a theoretical set of criteria.

The requirements for the course are competencies in Technologies (knowing how to operate a computer via an online skills based system) and in library literacies (an online tutorial about our library), contribution to a collaborative information repository (a mini wiki in BlackBoard), a business analysis using basic functions of a spreadsheet plus writing a report and a presentation for it (but not giving the presentation).  There’s also a fifty percent exam (an accreditation requirement) in which we use the SOLO taxonomy to measure student achievement in two questions about business and topics from the course.

One of the problems I’m encountering from this course is that students who think they know a lot about computers believe the course will not teach them anything and they often fail to become critical users of technology.  Another problem is the desire of students for facts.  They do not like that I do not provide a ‘powerpoint’ presentation with lots of dot points that they can simply remember.  It seems, in some ways, that they do not desire ‘flexibility’.  However, upon reflection, these students are typically straight from school and have perhaps been programmed to accept the memorisation of facts as exhibiting ‘learning’.

I’m tempted next semester to introduce them to Bloom’s taxonomy as the underlying philosophy of the course⁸, although I found a really interesting twist on Bloom on Flickr where the triangle was turned upside down.  I like this because it’s really where I’m focussing on in this course, on the so called ‘higher capabilities’.  It’s like I told students at the start of the course:

There are no facts here, just new ways of thinking.

I suppose, getting back to the question, my teaching becomes very much about flexible learning opportunities because the students in my course are so diverse that there needs to be opportunities for success for all of them.  That to, me, is truly flexible.

1. Annand, D, 2007, Re-organizing Universities for the Information Age, The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, Vol 8, No 3, http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/372/952 [↩]
2. I’m tempted to stop using the term ‘student‘ altogether in favour of ‘learner‘ as ’student’ implies enrolment at an educational institution [↩]
3. I can’t really call it ‘week’ as the ‘week’ was in April and it’s now June [↩]
4. I just checked, I mentioned ‘flexible’ 4 times [↩]
5. To read the abstract (with a link to the dissertation in its entirety) go here [↩]
6. Okay, I’m a learner, but they are students.  I suppose that arises from what Annand highlights as one of the problematics of the current educational paradigm in universities - cohort based learning [↩]
7. The cohort size was just under 300, so that’s a pretty good achievement [↩]
8. Thanks to Barbara Dieu for reminding me of this, see http://www.wikieducator.org/ELT_Resources/visual_and_critical_literacy [↩]

In this second post about Mapping Pedagogy, I’m realising that I’m focusing on an almost atomistic view of the technologies. Part of this project is to take all of the things¹ we use or have used (and maybe forgotten) and see what they can contribute to a flexible learning environment. I think we have much potential to do some things simply. There seems to be a tendency towards the more complex solutions as that is, apparently, what students want.

The animated gif is probably one of the first multifaceted image technologies that we have. While single images give a good display, a single snapshot of a state, the animated gif provided our first glimpse into process. The potential was there (although I cannot remember an instance) to show the steps involved in a process for achieving an outcome. These have mostly been replaced by the video, but the simplicity of the animated gif provided a glimpse into possibilities.

Animated gifs could tell a story in a few short images. Take the image in this post. It tells the story of the evolution of the computer interface. The original image showed Bill Gates leaning on a Windows machine that had the word “Windows” written on it ². But over his shoulder was a Mac Plus. Bill had one before the rest of us. The animated gif focuses our attention on just a portion of the original image, giving some control over perception and understanding.

I like animated gifs, although many of them are distracting rather than focusing.

1. The technical term [↩]
2. The image is allegedly for Teen Beat magazine, but listed at ‘Rights managed’ at Corbis.com [↩]

Where would we be without the static web page¹? This bastion of forgotten technology is probably one of the best places to start with my project because we seem to have moved on from it and yet not.

I see the static web page as a holder of critical information, a pointer to things needed. The static web page allows us to provide necessary information, the needful things. Where there are facts and figures to remember, the static web page comes in handy. Overviews and standard procedures are wonderfully served by the static web page.

I think it is useful for students to find that unchanging information is unchanging. Pedagogically, the structure of a course or program or activity should be unchanging at one level (the most broad level) so students (and their teachers) can chart their progress and improvement against a set standard or set of criteria. So the static web page points to expectations of students about what is to be learnt and, at the same time, what teachers/instructors expect - the outcomes of learning.

There are other ways of communicating this information, but, if we are focussing on technologies, the static web page and its traditional counterpart, the paper page, provide clear paths to learning outcomes.

1. This is part of my Mapping Pedagogy project. [↩]