Turning off comments to stop the spamming.

C ya!

After realizing I couldn’t move clips even though they uploaded, I did end up reuploading all my media, after making pages for each era instead of using posts. I could have used posts and faked the dates to organize them correctly, but pages seemed more discrete and appropriate. More time was spent redoing than doing, except for the writing.

Finding the clips and exploring the themes was the most satisfying part of this project, exploring the connections between the history and the human relationship to technology. Thinking like a historian again. Sometimes I think I don’t spend enough time doing that in my job, and I really wanted the chance in my final project.

So enough. Go take a look.

Except the marking (we say “grading” in the U.S., but same thing).

We’ve got assessments, yes indeed: http://eci831.wikispaces.com/Assessments . Sans rubric, but we got ‘em. And Alec is great at feedback, in comments and Twitter and meetings — just having him put my post in a wiki page or laud it on Twitter was enough to make me smile.

But, man, what’s my grade? how’d I do? where could I improve? what should I do next now that the class is over? how did I do on one element versus another? were there times when I should have switched gears?

I was raised in that “get an A” culture. Do a task, get a mark. If I had been doing poorly, I think I would have gotten an email from the instructor. (I don’t think I would have heard it from my colleagues without some kind of formal peer review process — we were all busy being supportive of each other.)

I know, I know, the whole idea of open education was to get away from marking and that kind of thing. But this is a graduate-level class where there will be a grade at the end, and where tasks counted for specific weights. I don’t mind working beyond my comfort zone (duh), and I did it without belly-aching all the way through, and it really is my only only only concern, and I know I shouldn’t be hung up on performance, and maybe it’s just ego, but ….

What’s my grade?

But heck, I tried it and it was fun. No, I’m sorry — that’s wrong. I have been feeling terrible about how long I went on. It was supposed to be 5 minutes, it should have been 6.5, and I went on for almost 15. That’s an imposition on everyone, took the class late, and I feel awful about it, really awful. My own learning is not always the most important thing.

Next time, less prep, just do it.

My real Summary of Learning was done over the whole course and can be seen here, as a MindMeister concept map. You know how I love concept maps.

Here’s the recording of the Pecha Kucha, as a slidecast. Audio got cut off on the last slide, but no big deal.

Horror. I am a word person. I like language. I find lists perfectly acceptable. The closest I’d ever gotten to visual representation of words was a calendar grid, or possible drawing a line across my notes from one word to another to show relationship.

I don’t draw. When I was in high school my art teacher drew a picture of a brain, then another much smaller one next to it. He explained that this was a girl’s brain, and that’s why girls can’t do art. I’d like to say I got over that….

I could do layout on the high school paper, no problem. I did some visual stuff in college — lighting design was my thing. That kind of spatial and color stuff I could understand. Then came the web, and I made web pages.

But the concept map thing sent me into a panic. I forced myself to do it, of course, using that awful Cmap program. I began to realize it was mostly words, just arranged differently. I kept working with it. I did the assignment. When I was done, I vowed I’d never do it again.

So then Dr Couros assigns a Summary of Learning, as an “artefact”. My first thought was (gasp!) a concept map. What the hell had happened? I wanted to track my progress — surely this blog is already doing that. Surely a simple list or outline would summarize my learning. I could explain in words.

But no. The right tool for this job, if I’m going to do it, is a concept map. So I found something better than Cmap, and though I’m still not thrilled with MindMeister (ironically, because it doesn’t let me use enough images!), it will do fine.

Very brave, I thought. I hate vegetables, so I eat them. I detest exercise, so I go walk on a treadmill several times a week. And I can’t stand concept maps, so I’m doing one for my Summary of Learning.

Our presentations yesterday in class featured my brave and wonderful fellow students Jamie Forrest and Angela Byrnes talking about professional development, and mentors Tania Sterling and Lyn Hilt talking about social media for teaching and administration.

I took two different kinds of notes. For Jamie and Angela’s presentation, I wanted to pick up tips for the Program for Online Teaching, my volunteer professional development group. I appreciated the shared survey especially. I should survey our faculty more often, but when I do I often discover they want things we can’t deliver, like other faculty teaching them to click here and click there. I’m hoping the idea of how-to sheets, which Jamie and Angela proposed, could make that sort of thing easier. (At our college, we have one faculty “trainer”, and her only real specialty is Blackboard, though she also knows Elluminate and Camtasia. We don’t have anyone among our computer people who likes Web 2.0 or knows that much, or if anyone does they aren’t in a position to help. I was inspired to share more tools at department and committee meetings, if I can figure out how to “sneak it in”.)

Both Tania’s and Lyn’s presentation helped me with teaching, and during Tania’s presentation I went off on a trail in my head. As they say on Monk, here’s what happened:

Tania mentioned students tweeting during a lecture. It occurred to me I haven’t done that – not that I don’t allow it, but that my students tend to only bring their laptops on lab days, except for the two or three who take notes on theirs. When I have had the chat open for lab days, they say silly things, and I see them on the screen. Once they did discuss something about the class, which was great.

Tania put this in the context of assessment and instant feedback. That made me think of Cross and Angelo’s simple and quick Classroom Assessment Techniques, which I used to use all the time but have lost track of. Then I remembered David Merrill‘s keynote at ED-MEDIA in 2009, where I watched the Twitter feed behind him on a big screen as he spoke. Quite a dispute went on there, and I thought it got kind of rude a few times, but the idea was interesting. What if I lectured and students tweeted? Behind me? That seems worse than turning your back on the class to write whole paragraphs on the board….

But…I do sometimes lecture, as often as I’ve said I wouldn’t. And I usually prepare a few visuals, Zen slides, to illustrate my points. Usually the slides are visual primary sources: examples of art, architecture, etc. But on lab day, students find their own sources and combine them for their own quick presentations, posting their visuals on the WordPress site I use for the class.

It hit me while listening to Tania. Why should I go find the visuals for my lecture? Why can’t my students do that, on the fly? During the session, someone in the chat mentioned Wallwisher. I’d never heard of it so I went to look. Oooh, a board where you don’t need to log in but can add a picture, video, or 160 characters of text! They could use that! I could lecture and they could illustrate what I was saying by adding, say, Gothic cathedral pictures, and I could then see what they had posted immediately and talk about it and we could discuss and….

Today was a lab day. So I made a wallwisher wall, despite warnings in Twitter that it might be a little dicey as a web app and Lyn Hilt herself recommending stixy.com:

(I did try stixy, but they made you upload images, and I wanted them linked since students would be quickly finding and posting).

I told students they could try the Wallwisher wall or just do their usual work on the WP blog. They started working, then Wallwisher went down during class, not once, but twice.

So my enthusiasm has dimmed since last night. But you know, it’s about the teaching, not the tools. The students easily switched back to the WP blog, even though it wasn’t as cool. No one minded trying something and having it fail. I’ll find a better tool, and I’ll use it for lecturing someday. I love the idea that they could illustrate my lecture — I have a really strong feeling that will be cool on so many levels: less work for me, more interactivity for them, and that possibility of things going in unplanned directions (which is what I love about teaching live).

It may not have been a good thing today, but it will be a good thing.

Well, I’ll tell you.

I had this great idea to create a survey for department chairs about how they are dealing with online issues at my institution. It was one of those things where you get an idea and stay up drafting when you should be sleeping. This morning I put it into Survey Monkey (I won’t link them — I’m mad at them), and created all these complex questions when after the tenth one, it told me I can only have ten questions for a free account and would I like to upgrade?

NO. After grou.ps and drop.io and goodness knows how many other wonderful web apps are now going to paid models (no link for them either), I did not want to pay a dime. Public employee, public institution, public employees being surveyed for public purposes in the public good — forget it. Felt only a little better when Dr Couros told me:

Typed it all over again in to Google Forms (no link!), and it only saved the first two questions. Had to do it all over again. Took two hours. Thought I’d relax by working on my final project…

Posterous. My tech of choice for my final project, which now, after much angst, should somehow tie together film clips into themes about people’s responses to technology, and what we’ve learned from those, in the last century (and you thought I didn’t have a direction yet).

I’ve been happily finding, converting, and uploading clips. Posterous has been happily converting them to flash, so long as I obeyed its rules. (Happy Posterous people are happily helping me when I don’t know the rules.) I’m thinking I would like to happily move some of the clips together into the same post, adding the explications to one big post instead of having them in separate posts.

Well, I can’t. Not with anything approaching ease, anyway.

So what to do now? Reupload all the previous media into its appropriate post?

I’m not going back to WordPress for this. It takes forever to get WP to learn how to center a video clip. See Jaron Lanier below? Four tries with the code <div align=center>, when <p align=center> and the html tool didn’t work. It converts nothing, making for slow, slow Quicktime loading. When it agrees to add media at all. Forget that.

So now I am not-as-happily working on my not-as-easy-as-I-thought project.

(Posterous, of course, is a blogging platform, not a presentation platform. Somewhere I have a half-written post about it being a bad idea to force technologies to do things other than the things they were intended to do. Maybe I should go back and read it.)

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming…

I am reminded of the French Revolution (occupational hazard, I’m afraid). In 1789 the middle class rose up, supported by some of the elite clergy and nobles. They established a republic. The following year, the pundits responded. A famous discussion ensued, in print, between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. Edmund Burke, in Reflections on the Revolution in France, derided the French for throwing out the baby with the bathwater. A supporter of the American Revolution on the grounds that the colonies had created their own culture over a long period, Burke felt that abandoning tradition was not a good foundation for government. In The Rights of Man, Paine responded that natural rights were more significant than tradition, that oppression must be overthrown.

What neither man understood at the time, of course, was that the revolution was far from over. As people voted, the government became more and more radical. In the next few years the world would seen the arrest and beheading of not only a king and queen, but numerous “counter-revolutionaries” under the dictatorship of Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety. The tyranny of the common people terrified middle class intellectuals and elites alike. By 1799, middle class control was reasserted, and the result was a dictator who ruled as a king, but by the rule of law.

History didn’t end there, of course, but it speaks to people who call the game too early, or who are loathe to change their mind. The initial stage of our internet “revolution” was the web developing under unusually open circumstances, growing to allow extraordinarily democratic participation for anyone who had access, and access increasing as the price of electronics and communications lowered.

A January New York Times’ article on Jaron Lanier points out that then, in 1999, many visionaries advocated free everything. Downloading copyrighted material and using it for oneself or for creative purposes was seen as acceptable, and many argued that opening music and writing in this way would lead people to buy once they had a taste. But they didn’t buy, and now these non-customers feel entitled to deprive creators of money by using “open culture” as an excuse for stealing. Are we in a time of mob rule?

I am reading Lanier’s book, You Are Not a Gadget. I have already read similar critiques of the internet, including Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows (because I liked his other books and his Atlantic article), William Powers’ Hamlet’s Blackberry (because Dr Couros tweeted it), and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (because I always wanted to). But Lanier’s view connects most to what we’re doing this week, because he directly critiques “open culture” in its various manifestations. He is concerned about extreme groupthink online, the loss of individualism, and the creation of second-level mashups instead of original content.

Here’s five minutes of him on the impact of social media. It’s not as good as his book, but will serve as a snippet:

You can, oddly, find a lot of Lanier’s book on Google Books. And I got it at the library — I didn’t buy it. I feel a little guilty about that now.

I do not mean to counter Dr Couros’ enthusiasm about openness, and I do want, as I said in chat during our last class session to “teach the world”. Like Dr Couros, I am employed at an institution that is funded by the public. I have begun to feel like I’m stealing if I don’t share what I do freely and openly! And I have read many intelligent arguments against Lanier’s view, promoting the goodness of people in groups, the idea that no content is really original anyway, etc. I despair at articles about the web closing, because the big companies are taking it over. I want the web open and free, but perhaps I should consider that “free as in liberty” is more moral than “free as in beer”. My own beer, of course, I will happily give away.

Edmund Burke believed that the French Revolution could not work, indeed true democracy could not happen, because groupthink leads to tyranny, opening the door to dictators. Paine had more faith in the goodness and rationality of the crowd. I see these arguments, and many like them, playing out in these discussions of the internet revolution in general, and open culture in particular. I think that only in analyzing both sides can we get anywhere near the truth while we’re in the middle of such a transformation.

I really did intend to create something for my final project that would be useful to my fellow faculty members at my institution. I said I’d create units intended to be for a Teaching Online class I will never get approved, but that could be used as part of the Program for Online Teaching. (POT is the volunteer professional development group I founded of faculty volunteers who volunteer their time to voluntarily help other faculty teach online — did I mention no one is paid for this? and yes, we named it POT on purpose.)

So I posted it as a proposal. After some searching and playing and trying, I decided on WordPress over Posterous and other things. I can adapt the Atahualpa theme in a different way for this blog, so I began doing that. I set things up, some tabs and stuff. I mapped it all out on pages and pages of lined paper, in pencil (that’s my way).

I checked with my network. I got approval from my professor. I bought Jing Pro. Then I started creating the tutorials. Wrote a script for the first one, did the screencast, yuck, re-did the screencast. I posted it. I looked. Here it is, with a screencast on the Help page. I was overcome with ennui. I tweeted. I was not having fun.

Why did this happen? It seemed like such a good idea, but I felt absolutely dull doing it. I wonder now whether this was because of the crisis we’re having at my college, where we’re all horribly overworked this semester catering to powers that be and just feel like hell. Or maybe it’s that I’m spending my spare time reading dystopian technology books that I really would like to spend more time analyzing.

Mind shift. I love film. When I took the CCK08 class, my final project used movie clips. Every time I watch an old movie I haven’t seen, I make connections to what’s going on now (it’s a historian thing, I guess). I have new ideas these days, things I want to express within the context of this class, about technology and communication. So I tweeted again:

He said it sounded fun and interesting, and I was much happier. I went back to the previously rejected Posterous (I like using a new technology for a new thing — maybe WP was part of the problem too). Now I’m collecting film clips and quotations and I’ll decide where it’s going as I do it. Less planning, but it will come together the more I think about it.

Now my project fits the time I have to do it, and it feels luxurious, so I can develop ideas as I go instead of starting with ideas I already had. And even if it’s not immediately and obviously useful to my job (either as history prof or POT director), I’ll learn a lot more doing this.

In a “regular” class, I’d be a student and Dr Couros would be the expert. I would write a paper, and he would critique it. Perhaps he’d tell me an argument I made wasn’t fair, or he’d point me to another source. Peers would review it, and give me feedback. I could do a rewrite until the product has some finish to it. I could have the same kind of certainty as when I wrote a history paper in college. I defy anyone to read my masters’ thesis on medieval and early modern woollen technology and tell me I missed something. (Indeed, I defy anyone to read it, period.)

But a 12th century fulling mill is not going to come along and comment on how I portrayed its character or ideas in my thesis.

Blogging is designed to be “draft like” — the ideas posted are supposedly understood to be unfinished. But how brave can we be posting such unfinished ideas, where those whose work we critique can critique our work immediately? Doesn’t this extreme openness restrict the “draft” nature of blogging, the feeling that it’s OK to be wrong?

It’s like writing a paper criticizing the Communist Manifesto and having Karl Marx leave a comment saying, “Well, Lisa, what I really meant by “working men” was…”

And unlike Marx, the people whose ideas I criticize are all educational technology media types. They have Google Alerts and other devices set up to track every time someone mentions them. In 2008, as part of the Connectivism class, I blogged a critique of an article by Barry Wellman, whose work I thought had moral implications. He emailed me directly, and the very few exchanges we had were not very pleasant. He’ll probably know now that I mentioned him again — oh goodie.

If someone with my experience is freaking out, what must less experienced bloggers feel? I realize that Dr Couros himself thrusts us into the limelight via Twitter. That doesn’t normally happen — I’ve been blogging for years on my own blog, announcing my own posts myself in Twitter and linking them into Facebook. Only rarely has anyone whose ideas I’ve analyzed so much as stopped by.

Oh, I realize the benefits — don’t get me wrong. A 12th century fulling mill would not be able to give me good advice, help my thinking or point be toward better resources. I know it’s helping me learn.

But this is getting pretty damn weird. Learning in the open has never been something I feared before, but now…