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Funding agencies and journals should require authors to submit and openly publish protocols as submitted to the IRB.

There are a bunch of reasons for this. First, IRB protocols should be public. Right now, it’s treated on the one hand a bit like the Napoleonic code: it doesn’t matter what others have decided, the board decides entirely on the basis of your submitted application. This has some real negative implications.

First, the same protocol may be accepted at one campus and rejected at another. Or research in the same stream (or seeking to replicate) may be rejected at a later date.

Second, the IRBs have to make an original determination each time wasting, in many respects, the efforts of other competent IRBs who have already made a determination. They don’t need to be bound by earlier determinations, but don’t you think it would be worthwhile to be at least aware of them?

Third, when applicants feel as though they are handled unfairly, a transparent system is better for all.

Fourth, the best way to learn to do ethical research is to be able to observe the process from the periphery, and listen to the queries of IRBs and the responses by researchers. Releasing the approved protocols may not get at that deeper conversation completely, but it at least provides a small window.

Fifth, the protocols are an excellent way of “indexing” open data. Open research data often is published with codebooks and other ancillary material, but IRB protocols in many ways are the ideal introduction to an open collection of data, explaining why it was collected, how it was collected, and how it might be used.

For these reasons, among others, there should be open repositories of IRB protocols. Now, we could just try to convince individual IRBs on campuses to open up their process and publish protocols they approve, and I hope that they might. But IRBs are by nature a conservative group, intended to protect, not to disrupt. In many cases, they are made even more conservative by the institutions that they are housed in, and concerns by that institution either that they might be sued by subjects or that they might be investigated by federal regulators. (Those regulators, naturally, have access to the protocols and the decision process of the IRB once an investigation or audit begins, but they might not want to provide any sort of “probable cause.”)

Individuals might be encouraged to submit their own protocols to a repository, and in fact, self-archiving has made an important impact on the way publishing happens. But there are enough open questions surrounding this that it’s a hard place to start the ball rolling.

Funding agencies, and more recently journals, either insist on or facilitate the sharing of research data. In many ways IRB protocols are an important part of those research data. If funders required that IRB protocols be shared just like any other research data, and if journals provided authors the resources to share these protocols, it would revitalize in some ways the role of scholarly publishers and it would make for ethical oversight that was more robust and transparent.

But what if you were not IRB approved? It may be you didn’t need pre-approval of research by the IRB, and as I argue in the article above, I think this should be the case for much of the research that is currently placed under some level of review by IRBs. But if you don’t have to have IRB approval, I think funders should still require you to talk about the ethical considerations of your research, and journals should require you to publish this online when you do not have an IRB-approved protocol to provide.

What this does is creates an environment in which ethical post-review is encouraged. Certainly, when it comes to drug trials–and even to invasive forms of research of vulnerable populations in the social sciences–there should be some sort of oversight before the research occurs. But even after it occurs, peer-reviewers and the reading public should be able to see how the researchers weighed the needs and rights of subjects against the importance of their research questions.

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What happened? Well, at least pedagogically, I was fine with it. To recap, I was concerned that students were more interested in grades than they were in the actual material. I speculated that replacing the grades with badges would at least move them from focusing on entirely arbitrary markers (letters) to markers that were more explicitly tied to learning objectives.

I still think grades suck, of course. Grades are grand for beef, and actually pretty handy for deciding what restaurants to avoid, but as a tool for learning I think they take away more than they add. Realistically, though, I can’t get away from grading on my own. Unless I can convince all my colleagues to move in that direction, my experiment threatens to be merely a distraction for students, or in the worst case, a good way for them to ignore my course. Purely in terms of learning outcomes, I think being able to get totally away from grades would be great. But that wasn’t the case here.

Not learning, but ranking

The main problem is that more than just the students see the grade. It acts–in fairly limited ways–as a reflection on their skill. Now, to my mind, we simply shouldn’t graduate students we can’t stand behind. I frankly would have no problem “advising out” those students who are not performing at an elite level. I think it would better serve both those who left and those who stayed. But that’s not a realistic option (at least not in that extreme a degree).

Without getting into details, since I can’t simply unilaterally make a course pass/not pass–which is at least closer to ungraded–I ended up saying you get either an A or an F. Really, I intended to give As to everyone, short of really utter non-completion. I think I can say, without naming names, that people got As who really weren’t doing graduate-level work. I was clear in my narrative summaries of their work that this was the case, but they still ended up with As. At least one of my fellow faculty members found this contrast to be wrong, and I can understand why.

Pass and Forget

Many of the courses in our online programs are taken serially, and so I don’t have to compete for attention with other courses. That wasn’t the case this summer, and I suspect that students paid more attention to the courses where they were still “fighting for a grade.”

A lot of the work on pass/not pass grading going back several decades looks at courses in similar contexts. Being the P/NP course in a world of graded courses means that for some students (generally those who are not already high-achievers) the time and effort will be put to the graded courses, as they are afforded a certain degree of prestige as well as attention from students simply because of their grades.

Don’t Picture an Elephant

My intention was to make students think less about grading, but because they needed to keep track of the number of points each badge was worth, and whether they had crossed a certain threshold, they ended up thinking more about it. For some, the idea that the grade would be either an A or an F, and nothing in-between, raised their anxiety level, even after I made clear that an “A” was granted for even minimal completion of work.

In the end, by doing something out of the ordinary, I ended up focusing students more on the grades and grading structures, not less.

The (Non) Solution

So, what’s a person who hates grades to do? I’ve always been considered a “hard grader.” Perhaps that’s why people have been so focused on grades in my classes. Clearly going the other way, and becoming the Oprah of As (You get an A! You get an A!) hasn’t worked out. Two possible alternatives:

Maybe the simple solution is to provide a grading rubric, but simply make it easy to get an A. That doesn’t seem like a good solution. It seems like it contributes to the “menace” of grade inflation. But if I don’t really care about grades, I’m not sure why I should care about their inflation. More importantly, although I don’t get the issue of people dwelling over an odd grading structure, I still have to contend with pulling attention away from courses with a stiffer climb up the grading ladder.

The other alternative is to go old-school. The course is graded on a curve. The top 20% of points-earners get an A, the next 40% get a B, the next 20% get a C, and the next 20% get a D or F. (Come on, you don’t really expect me to curve around a C, do you? I’m not that old.) Of course, this means that students are going head-to-head Paper Chase style, rather than cooperating and collaborating nicely. That sucks, but maybe it is what is needed to get folks to step up their game.

So, for next semester, I’m back to grading meany. A curve (and not a saving one) it is, at least in the course where I’m dictating the policy. That will be more familiar ground for me, and probably also for the students.

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Over the last few days, I’ve been exploring Google Plus a bit, in my spare time, along with a quarter million of my closest friends around the globe. There are already a lot of reviews… that’s not what this is. I find it to be an interesting entry point, and I’m curious to see what happens with it. As I said on Twitter, I’m cautiously optimistic about its future.

That said, I’m curious what that future will be. A lot of people worry, rightly so, about the privacy implications of Google properties all combining their connections to users and assimilating us all into a massive, Google-controlled borg. But if anything, the opposite is also a concern.

I work a lot with Google documents with teams, and I find it to be a really useful tool. What works for ad hoc collaboration, however, doesn’t work as well for continuing collaboration or managing groups. If I have a group or organization, keeping track of project teams and the like who want to use Google Docs is a nightmare. Not only does it tend to be fussy with non-Google emails, it’s a pain to create groups in Google and then invite them to a document.

The biggest missing feature in the Googleverse is effective management of groups. Google Groups certainly isn’t it. And I was hopeful that Circles might be.

And it could be if you could share circles. Right now, I can create circles to indicate who is who and who sees what in my update streams. Cool. But no one can see what my circles are. As I noted in an early post on G+, that’s a good thing. I wanted to know this before I created, say, a circle called “people who annoy me.” All of us have people like this in our lives, and for one reason or another are forced to interact with them, and we probably could group them this way in our head. Nonetheless, we wouldn’t want this–or many other groupings–to be public.

I am thinking back to other social networks that attempted to create classes of connections that require a whole range of negotiations. It’s hard enough for me to divide people between “friends” and “associates”–if on top of this I had to then justify that decision to people who are in those two groups, I assume I would have very few of either.

So, as a default, I’m fine with the title and grouping of circles remaining private by default. (Although it’s not as clear that this is true of the latter case, since you can find out the list of people who have access to a particular post, and perhaps surmise some group boundaries that way.) But I want the ability to make my circles public, and perhaps to have people in the circle be able to add new people to the circle.

What sort of a circle would that be? I now have a circle called “QUICM students” that includes past and present students in the grad program where I teach. I took a first stab at dropping people into that group, but I know that there are others I’ve missed. I need something that is much more akin to traditional group management. Others in the group need to be able to add members from the outside, and perhaps with some groups, they need to be able to add themselves.

I don’t see that this is a big push away from Circles, and I really hope that G+ develops in that direction. Without some way of creating and managing groups, it will lose out on a function that is missing not just from their social networking effort, but from a lot of Google applications. One group I am working with has decided to use ManyMoon as a way of managing this function, and others turn to other approaches. But a robust group management feature would be a great addition to G+.

If that group/circle identity management solution could also be cleanly integrated with Docs, with Reader, even with Groups (which might become superfluous in this case), I think we would have a platform for distributed collaboration that would be helpful to businesses, to educators, and to anyone else who wants to get things done in a group.

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It’s no secret: one of the reasons I wanted to have kids is for the toys. It’s so much more socially acceptable (and fun) to buy Legos and light sabers for your kids. But the irony is that kids don’t want toys, they want the real thing. Sure, they’ll settle for the cardboard box fashioned to be a car, but if you turn your back and they have access to your keys, watch out!

My son loves the idea and the practice of vacuuming. I’m not sure why–perhaps because it is such an unusual and rare thing to see in our house. He’s not alone in that. I spoke with a janitor at the American Natural History Museum who noted that kids come from around the world to the museum and the they universally are drawn to his broom and dustpan. They think it is far more awesome than some stuffed black bear or 6,000-year-old dinosaur bones. (I got that right, right? Carbon dating is just Satan’s Tivo?)

And there is a whole market of vacuums for kids that “really suck”! And when I say really suck, I mean that they have some sort of weak sauce sucking mechanism that makes it seem like they are some kind of vacuum.

So, faced with the possibility of spending well over $100 on a toy Dyson, we did what any sane person would do, and bought our two-year-old a cordless vaccuum. He vacuums, and actually manages to help clean up the house.

Is it dangerous? It’s not like we are giving him his own blender or microwave, but yes, I’m sure somewhere on the box it says something like “not appropriate for children under 4.”

And even though he loves his toy power screwdriver, he runs around the house saying “screw everythiiiiing!” and attempting to do just that. So, it may be a year or two until we turn over a real power screwdriver. But we will, and probably not before he is all that much older.

Because in a world full of toys, the best ones are also tools.

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michaelzimmer: Right now: I supposed to be working on a journal article (tenure), but instead I’m writing a blog post (impact).

halavais: ∴ impact ≠ tenure RT @michaelzimmer: I supposed to be working on a journal article (tenure), but instead I’m writing a blog post (impact).

kfitz: @halavais @michaelzimmer Okay, that’s creepy. I literally just proofed the paragraph of the book on the relationship btw tenure and impact.

coffee001: .@halavais @michaelzimmer In some surreal version of the future, people will get tenure for blogging.

halavais: Let me fix that for you: “In some surreal version of the future, people will get tenure.”

coffee001: You have a point. Depends on the country you’re in, though.

snurb_dot_info: @coffee001 @halavais Someone needs to create an ‘I have tenure and I blog’ bumper sticker.

coffee001: @snurb_dot_info @halavais …for that, they need to have tenure and a blog. Not yet a combination that’s common over here.

halavais: Yep: http://www.cafepress.com/jamtoday RT @snurb_dot_info: [] Someone needs to create an ‘I have tenure and I blog’ bumper sticker.

dancohen: Fairly sure if I buy this “I have tenure & I blog” t-shirt I’ll get beaten up, but I’m not sure by whom http://bit.ly/h8pWw8 (via @halavais)

thinkingshop: @dancohen @halavais Not good for crowds containing #adjuncts & grad students (the other 70% of the teaching population)

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I don’t care about grades. It’s not that I hate them, but I do hate that students seem so captivated by them. At least at the undergraduate level, and for students who were aiming for law school or med school, where the GPA seems to have a strong effect on admissions, I kind of understood it. But I completely do not get it among graduate students.

In order to reduce the focus on grades, I tried delaying letter grades until the end of the semester, providing more narrative feedback. I would provide feedback, but no scores or letters on students’ work. There is some indication that this can be effective, particularly with formative types of assessment (see Kitchen et al, 2006), but it really didn’t work at all well for me. It increased anxiety and concern over grades rather than decreasing it, resulting in students who were even more concerned with grades than with the material.

So, I’ve effectively thrown out grades. I see no pedagogically-driven reason to issue them, and a number to get rid of them. As long as students meet some minimum requirements in my courses this semester, they get an “A” in the course. I’ve replaced this with badges, which I will write more about soon.

Pass/Fail

There is a low bar of participation–what I would consider something like 20% of the expected contribution–in order to get this A. But isn’t this just pass/fail? I suppose it is, to a certain degree, although not formally so.

A lot of the work around doing away with letter grades is about 40 years old at this point. Sgan (1970), for example, found that the would-be grades of students taking a course pass-fail were lower than the students in the same course opting for a grade. However, this was at Brandeis where not all courses were pass-fail. In such a situation, it makes sense that a student might focus more of her energy on the graded courses. It’s also worth noting that this gap disappeared by senior year, when the students taking a course actually did very slightly better (there was no significant difference in what they would have gotten as a grade).

For our online program, students generally only take one course at a time, providing less of an issue of attention management. But I’ll be curious how it works out for our on-ground program, where students may be taking several courses at once.

Assessment vs. Evaluation

It’s important to note here that there are two things moving hand-in-hand. On one side is questions of thinking about students’ progress and effectively changing the course material to meet the students effectively. The other is communicating student progress (and the acceptability of that progress) to wider audiences. This is the divide, as Cizek (2005) has it, between assessment and evaluation.

Of course, one is related to the other–or at least can be. One can assign letter grades based on an assessment of a portfolio of work done in a class, course, or program, for example. But it is a necessarily abbreviated form of communicating the work accomplished or skills gained, rather than providing an instrument for improving learning.

Cizek notes that letter grades, no matter what they are grading, are “consistently inconsistent.” Any measurement should be both reliable (consistent) and valid (measure what we are interested in) and letter grades are almost never either of these things. This isn’t news–educational researchers have known this for at least a century. There are ways of making grades more explicitly reliable, though often at the risk of being less valid. The application of multiple-choice tests tends to push in the direction of reliability (at the cost of creating a whole generation of students who are highly skilled at taking multiple-choice tests and little else), while grading on participation in class may get at what we really want to evaluate, but it very difficult to do fairly and consistently.

For me, letter grades do a poor job of communicating what they are supposed to communicate. If I see that a student has gotten an A in “Introduction to Interactive Communication,” what does that really tell me? Especially, if I don’t know what the other students received as grades, or what was expected of the students. It’s an empty indicator.

On the other hand, students strive to get that A. Some say that a high GPA at the very least demonstrates an ability to be able to follow directions and plan your time reasonably well, but I’m not sure even that is the case. The student with a high GPA simply demonstrates that she is capable of achieving a high GPA–any correlation with other skill sets seems almost accidental.

It’s when that letter grade evaluation crowds out any room for actual assessment and self-knowledge that it deserves to be more than just ignored or disdained. If we want students to learn better, we need to destroy letter grades. Grade inflation may provide the seeds of letter grades’ own demise, but I plan to hurry it on as best I can.

First Seven Weeks

One of the courses I am teaching this semester runs on an accelerated seven-week schedule, and so has just concluded. Everyone who was registered in the course received an A, as promised. One person withdrew from the course, but no one else failed to meet the minimal requirements.

As a whole, the performance of the students in the course was well above that of those in previous versions. I secretly kept letter grades (not reporting them) and the grade average for the course would have been significantly higher. It’s hard to attribute this entirely to throwing out grades in favor of badges. We had a few students who would have done well no matter what, I think.

Among the highest achieving students in the course, the work was ridiculously good and they worked especially hard. At least one expressed relief that they didn’t have to perform to a specified level, and so they took advantage of this and really went all out. I’ll note that two of the other students in the course felt “intimidated” by the level of these leaders, and this seemed to be a bit inhibiting.

The average student in the course did, I think, marginally better than they have in other courses. I’ll note that–having sent out the final evaluation–a number of the students in this group emailed back asking what their grade was. The syllabus for the course put it pretty clearly:

There is no compelling evidence that letter grades enhance student learning. For that reason all students who meet minimum requirements will receive an A in the course. I expect that most of you, if not all, will go beyond the minimum requirements not to improve your grade, but because you are interested in learning more.

I suspect, therefore, that these students just didn’t read the syllabus carefully. Or perhaps they just didn’t believe it. Nonetheless, the large group of students “in the middle” of the class did better than their counterparts in other courses.

It was not all good news, of course. Several students ended up on the trailing end. In a normal course, they would have failed, or at least would have received a very low grade. I’m still undecided what the A means to them. They know they did poorly in the course (I told them), but the reflection to the world is still an A on their transcript. I suppose I see this as the only negative outcome of what I’ve done, and I don’t think it is that negative. I’ve given failing or very low grades to students in the past who have just gone on to retake the course with another instructor or finish their programs with low (but passing) grades.

I suppose in some sense this is “passing the buck,” to other faculty members. On the other hand, it could be seen as merely being as accepting as possible. I know from experience that having low-performing students in a course lowers the level of discourse and is frustrating for many in the course. But short of raising the bar for passing (and re-introducing the concerns over getting over that bar rather than exploring and learning), I’m not sure how to address this issue.

In sum, the positives far outweigh these negatives. We’ll see how this goes for the courses that are new, and not nearly as well planned.

Cizek, G.J. (2005). Pockets of resistance in the assessment revolution. Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice 19(2), 16-23.

Kitchen, E., S.H. King, D.F. Robison, R.R. Sudweeks, W.S. Bradshaw, & J.D. Bell (2006). Rethinking exams and letter grades: How much can teachers delegate to students?

Sgan, M.R. (1970). Letter grade achievement in pass-fail courses. The Journal of Higher Education 41(8), 638-644.

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There is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the present moment. A man’s whole life is a succession of moment after moment. If one fully understands the present moment, there will be nothing else to do, and nothing else to pursue. Live being true to the single purpose of the moment.

Everyone lets the present moment slip by, and then looks for it as if he thought it were somewhere else. No one seems to notice this fact. But grasping this firmly, one must pile experience upon experience.

- Yamamoto Tsumetomo, Hagakure

Last week I went to the Digital Media and Learning Conference in Long Beach. Normally, I blog my presentations for conferences, and that should be easier now that I have trimmed my conference schedule a bit. (That is really hard for me to do, since I learn more at conferences than through most other forms of scholarly communication, but I need to refocus some of my attention on my own research and practice.) I was on the hook for two things at this conference, a workshop on setting a research agenda for badges, and an ignite talk on killing the traditional transcript. The first went better than expected, but needs a bit of digestion. The second went OK, but also needs a lot more thought.

The accidental talk

But I am going to write a little about the third. I had been scheduled for an Ignite talk on Friday, as I said. Ignite is a bit of a variation on pecha kucha–you have to present using 20 slides, each of which auto-advances every 15 seconds. It is a formalism that leads to some great presentations. There are informal elements as well: a culture of fast talk and high energy. It seems like a rhetorical form ideally suited to our shortening attention span.

On the day of my presentation, we had joked that we should switch decks and present each other’s work. Given the first presentation, given by Erin Knight and Philipp Schmidt, was on badges, which is part of what I was presenting, this wasn’t a completely bizarre idea. This came back to haunt me the next day when the ignite MC, danah boyd, called on me to fill in for a missing presenter. Never one to say “no” to a challenge like that, I jumped in, trying to riff off of slides I’d never seen before.

Now, as the short clip of the end of the talk shows, it wasn’t a very good talk. I ended up not staying with the slides as well as I would have liked. And the argument, formed as it was on the fly, lacked not just nuance, but cohesion. But despite the carnivalesque nature of the presentation, with me as geek, I actually found some stuff in my own meandering that I liked. As a fan of bibliomancy and similar randomized approaches, this is hardly surprising. But I thought I might flesh out some of the ideas that came up as a part of the talk.

The power of surprise

I may have already told this story. As a graduate student, I liked to really over prepare my lectures. I probably spent eight or ten hours of prep for every hour in the classroom. This meant that my research productivity went way down, and I went without much sleep. More importantly, although I think my lectures were generally fairly interesting and thought out, they were essentially performances. They demanded the attention of the students, but I suspect they lacked the excitement and interaction of the classes presented by some of the other grad students in my department.

For a time, another graduate student by the name of Dougie Bicket worked just outside my office. On more than one occasion, I would come out of my office a bit flustered, not having managed to stuff my eight hours of prep in before an afternoon class, and Dougie, would say something along the lines of “why not just have them form dummy media companies that have to deal with the current issues surrounding content ratings,” or something that sounded equally sensible, off the cuff. And these class ideas were successful–not invariably, but often enough to make them worthwhile.

The time crunch became more pronounced when I started as a professor, but I quickly learned that the courses for which I prepared the least were often best. Yes, there needed to be some structure, and the lack of knowing just what would happen was a bit nerve-wracking, but the lack of planning created a gap that both I and the students needed to fill dynamically.

Process vs planning

I tend to be very outcome oriented. I think a lot of that comes from a background in traditional systems development: figure out what it is you want to make, break it into its constituent pieces, and build it out. 

At least in places where people know what they are doing, software development rarely follows this linear path these days, but these sorts of systems-based approaches remain the dominant ideology for course design. We specify objectives, break them into their components, attach assessments, and once the entire course is planned, we “deliver” them. This is particularly true for online courses.

I also should say that I tend to recoil a bit when people say they are process-oriented. This probably comes from an aversion to consultants who come into an organization with no content-specific knowledge, and require a bunch of meetings that have very little to do with actually getting work done. I don’t have a lot of trust in a “talking cure” for most organizations. In theory, I certainly agree that process is important, but as a practical matter, a process-orientation is too often an excuse for not really knowing what you are doing.

Just do it

So, if I am not a big fan of structured, hierarchical planning, and not a plan of more organic, process oriented planning, you might reasonably ask what sort of planning I am a fan of. I won’t go so far as to say “none” because that isn’t true, and I will explain the sorts of preparations I think are worthwhile below, but generally speaking, I think a flexible response is most important. 

Judo is different from many “soft” martial arts. It does have a small number of kata–or “forms”–but there is a much greater emphasis on applying techniques and combinations of techniques in response to the current situation. A major part of the daily practice of judo is not endless repetition of abstract forms, but randori–a sort of random play that trains the judoka to be aware of her situation and respond accordingly.

This, after all, is what we want from students, and what we should model in our own behavior.

The “teachable moment” is much pursued among teachers. My aim is to fill my days with teachable moments. But to do that means opening yourself up to surprise, and risking utter failure. It means being willing to fall on your face at any moment, and knowing that you will on a regular basis. It is not a conservative stance, by any means. If you are doing it right, it should make you nervous when you walk into the classroom. What’s going to happen? 

Again, if you are doing it right, your students will also not know exactly what to expect. This can be a little unnerving for some of them, but frankly, life is about not knowing what is coming, and choosing the path that may not always be safest.

Mindfulness

How do you get where you want to go without planning it? Pay attention to where you are looking.

That may seem a bit too obvious. As each year passes, I realize more and more that everything I ever needed to know about teaching I learned in a judo dojo. Although I no longer practice judo, I was very lucky (and it was mainly a result of happenstance) to study with some very gifted teachers in the United States and Japan. One of those teachers was Rick Bradley, who made certain that we looked the right way when executing a throw. The natural tendency was to look down at the floor, where you intended your opponent to fall. Instead, it is important to look almost in the opposite direction, as this determines where your head is, which in turn guides the position of your body, which ultimately causes your opponent to end up where she belongs.

Something similar has probably been said to dancers and baseball players, but rarely educators. We too often have our eyes on the goal, and not our head in the game.

So the most important element of an unplanned course is to be as actively aware of your environment as possible. That means thinking at every moment about what might be learnable in the current situation, and be ready for that to change at every moment. This means less focus on your plans for two months, two weeks, two days or two hours, and to focus on the next two minutes. How do you fill those two minutes with surprise and discovery?

Of course, you will still plan a bit; humans are planning animals. All I am suggesting is paying more attention to what you can do in any particular moment to illuminate lightbulbs. Education should not be a war of attrition, but a series of lightening surgical strikes.

Reusable patterns

What sort of planning do I endorse? The creation of objects and tricks.

Objects are thing to learn with. This certainly applies to physical objects. I am not alone in seeing Legos as not just as excellent learning objects, but as an example of the form. Do they have a specific object? You could certainly identify some developmental goals met by playing with Legos, but it is also an activity that is very open ended, offering more than a single desirable outcome.

Yes, clearly these include open educational objects, but they also include simulated and real environments. Museums and zoos, of course, but also malls and  theme parks. Not to mention urban areas, farms, and nature preserves. Although most virtual environments do not provide the richness of these physical environments, they still provide a learning context. Most classrooms represent nowhere near as involving an environment.

Power of expectations

Students react to this in a couple of ways, sometimes simultaneously. Many are excited by the opportunity to shape their own learning. Many are anxious because they cannot predict just what is expected (since the main expectation is that they find their own way). Many students have spent so much time in 19th century classrooms that they don’t know how to operate outside of those constraints. As a result, they have difficulty not just in my classes, but also in most working environments that are not likewise stultifying.

So, I try to make that transition as easy as possible, but only to the degree that it doesn’t compromise on the ideals of taking risks and finding new paths. Teaching in the moment doesn’t mean you have to toss out the syllabus, the textbook, or the classroom–though it helps! It does mean being open to disruption, and inviting tangents. And if you ask any one of my students, they will tell you I love a good tangent.

No related posts.

Yes. Here are some options:

1. ICM Salon

For those students who are on campus and are willing to attend several major talks this semester, I am willing to do a one-to-three credit “salon.” Basically, you would be expected to show up to the events, tweet them, and do a short blog entry for each at the one-credit level. At the three-credit level, you would be expected to do a significant research paper based on the ideas of one of the presenters.

2. Badges

Students in my classes will be exposed quite a bit to the idea of learning badges this semester. I’m doing at least two papers based on these ideas. If you would be interested in contributing to a literature review on badges and learning, let me know. Likewise, if you want to get your hands dirty on a django project building around this idea, would be happy to work with you on it.

3. Association of Internet Researchers web projects

There is some need for designing various pieces of web presence for the AoIR, including–potentially–its main site. If you are interested in this, I cannot guarantee that your designs or coding will be adopted, but it would be a good (credited) portfolio piece if they were.

4. A Course at Peer2Peer University

The Peer2Peer University School of Webcraft is running a number of courses this semester. It is a free, peer-led learning environment. If you would like to receive credit for your work in one of these courses, talk to me and we will make the appropriate arrangements.

Related posts:

1. Independent A
2. Independent Western America
3. Ah, spring

I suspect there will be some generational spread, with serious Apple fanatics needing the new-new, they may end up giving their current device to kids, parents, and significant others. I am not one of those who goes out to get the new thing right away; I prefer to let others beta test. I wish I had done the iPad sooner–it’s a great device–but I suspect that the “marketable features” that are required to push many to upgrade won’t be enough for me. That said, if I did upgrade, my current iPad would stay in the family.

But what about all those single Apple fanboys out there. Will we see a flood of second-hand iPads on eBay? A lot of these devices have been sold, and given that they are solid-state devices without a lot of moving parts, I can see how they could have a long useful life beyond their first owners.

Part of this thinking is a result of the sea of iPads I saw installed at the Delta terminal at JFK last week. One use of iPads seems to be obvious: micro-kiosks. With a bit of tweaking, these seem to be the obvious replacement for the public telephone, or for use anywhere you see interactive kiosks now. Museum displays, floor directories, employment forms at Target–you get the idea.

The downside is the nastiness of the screen after being touched frequently. It’s bad enough when it’s my own hands that have caused it. Ick.

And they also seem like the sort of empty control panel for any manner of interesting devices. Yes, hackers love the eees for the same reason: they are cheap and easily interfaced and programmed.

But the eee and similar devices, besides being much cheaper than the iPad, are also much more easily hacked and tweaked. Sure, you can jailbreak your iPad, but–as a couple of students asked me recently–why bother? There isn’t much you can do with it once you do. Many net top devices already have a linux variant installed, and Loading the iPad with something else is not trivial.

That said, there is a great deal that can be done with HTML, javascript, and a good back end. So, if there is a prediction in here, I would say expect to find iPads in unexpected places, and affixed to other stuff.

Related posts:

1. iPad Goes Back to the Future

Oh, the whole world. The children have the run of everything. To set up specific playgrounds would be like setting up a table-sized aquarium in the depths of the ocean. It would really be pointless.

- RA Lafferty, “Primary Education of the Camiroi”

Related posts:

1. A short run of “Much Ado”

So, down the oubliette with the beginnings of my syllabus:

Mobile and locative applications

This is a course designed to make you think about the world as a place that is Internet-enabled, and give you some of the skills you need to design for that world. What does it mean to work and play in a mobile world and how does this relate to designing and building applications based on places and interfaces that go beyond the mouse and keyboard?

This course is offered in a peer-based studio format. As part of this course, you are expected not only to learn how to do new things, and demonstrate your ability to do those things, you are also expected to create materials that teach others how to do something new.

This course organizer is Alex Halavais. He is an associate professor in the interactive communication program at Quinnipiac University. More information can be found on his blog: http://alex.halavais.net

Course Meetings

The course is scheduled to meet Tuesdays from 6:30 to 9:10. In addition, there will be open studio hours from 4:30 to 6:30 on Tuesdays, in the great room at 430 Mt. Carmel Avenue. You are expected to spend the required hours on the course, but the time spent physically in the classroom/studio is flexible.

Course Communication

There are three main ways we will communicate as a group. The instructional material, badge requirements, and any other course documents will be kept at the course wiki at XXX. We will also be using a mailing list, hosted by Google Groups. Please go to XXX to join the group.

Social Contract

When you sign on as a participant of this course, you promise to:

* Be timely in your interactions with the community. If a week goes by, and we haven’t heard from you, something has gone wrong. If you can be with us physically in the hack sessions, that is best; if you cannot, we should hear from you virtually at least weekly. When it comes to responding to questions relating to the learning objects you design, or asking for evaluation for a badge you have designed, you should be especially quick in responding. I would like you to be willing to respond to requests for evaluation within 72 hours, and I will endeavor to do the same.

* Be here to learn. I know, many of you have a degree to earn, and a job market to wrangle, and the like. However, the purpose of this course is to form a learning community. That’s what is the most important thing for me, and if it isn’t the most important thing for you, please choose another course.

* Be willing to teach. This is a community, and I expect you to contribute to the learning of your fellow participants. I applaud your sponginess, but please honor the community by being willing to help your fellow classmates, and not just take what you can from it. This is particularly true for the badges you author, but across the board, I hope that you are willing to pitch in, answer questions, and help where you are able to do so.

* Strive to acquire the minimal skill set detailed below. That is, acquire the five necessary badges and at least five of the substantial skill badges.

As the organizer of this course, I promise to endeavor to embody those principles in my own work during the semester.

Badges

You may have already noted some talk about a badge system. Basically, badges indicate your skills and abilities. If you have ever gotten a Boy Scout merit badge, or been SCUBA certified, or gotten a driving license, or won a Foursquare badge, you already have a rough idea of what a badge is.

For the purposes of this course, we will be focused on badges for particular skills. For example, one of the badges I expect you to earn is the MediaWiki Editor Basic Concepts badge. To do that, you have to demonstrate that you understand how to do some basic things with the markup syntax of MediaWiki. When you submit evidence of having accomplished these tasks, a number of endorsers will acknowledge that you have accomplished earning the badge, and you will be able to show the badge on your home page on the wiki, or anywhere else you choose to do so.

There is an early tutorial on how to earn a badge and how to create your own badges. Anyone can create a badge for anything, and some time during the semester, you will create your own badge.

There are two lists of badges that you should take special note of on the wiki: the “necessary” badges and the “substantive” badges. These are badges that we agree as a community are required for the course, in the first instance, and that represent significant and substantial skills in the area of locative or mobile media in the second instance. If I agree that a badge and associated learning materials are particularly strong, I will add them to the approved “substantive” list.

Expectations, Grading, and Credit

Everyone who enrolls in the course is expected to endeavor to complete all the necessary badges (five) and at least five of the substantial badges, regardless of the way in which they are engaged in the course.

This course is offered for three graduate academic credits at Quinnipiac University as ICM500. If you are not an interactive communications graduate student and would like to enroll for credit, please contact Phillip Simon about arranging to take the course as a non-matriculating student.

As an experiment, this course is also being offered at Peer2Peer University, an open structure for engaging in peer learning online.

I don’t believe the A-F grading system is an effective way of engaging learning or providing feedback. For this reason, anyone who completes the minimum requirements at QU will receive an A in the course.

First, you must complete the following five necessary badges:

* M&L Apps Social Contract Signatory Badge
* MediaWiki Editor Basic Concepts Badge
* Helpful Colleague Badge
* Basic Open Learning Resource Creator Badge
* Badge User and Maker Badge

In addition you are expected to earn a minimum of five substantive badges during the semester. These represent some knowledge, skill, ability, or experience involving mobile or locative media. For example, if your create a piece of hardware that can tweet to the web when something happens in the physical world, you would earn the Basic Sensors badge. In each case, the evidence required to earn the badge can be accomplished by completing materials in the unit(s) associated with the badge.

The initial set of substantive badges include:
* Mobile Web Standards
* Mobile UX
* Kiosk Planning & Design
* Geocaching and Collaborative Mapping
* Geocoded Web
* Google Maps
* 7Scenes Basics
* Basic AppInventor
* AppInventor Web Services
* Blinky Lights (using Audrino)
* Basic Sensors for the Web

It is expected that you will complete the required badges within the time period of the course. Because most badges require endorsements from your peers, continuing beyond the agreed period of the course is impossible. For this reason, incompletes will not be granted. Likewise, if you have not completed a substantial number of badges, including all of the necessary badges, by the midpoint of the semester, you will receive an email from the instructor recommending you withdraw from the course.

Schedule

As a studio course, this class does not have a schedule as such. However, you are required to complete the Social Contract and MediaWiki Editor badges before moving on to more substantial badges. You are also required to complete all five necessary badges before the midpoint of the semester (for QU students).

Beyond those constraints, you are welcome to engage the material as you like. There are many factors that may influence your choices. For example, you may need to order a book or hardware to effectively complete a badge, and that may take some time to arrive. Likewise, although Google claims a one-week turn-around on AppInventor accounts, if you plan on creating an Android-based app, you should probably apply for that account right now, with the knowledge that it will be at least a week (if not longer).

For work that requires outdoor activities, you may want to wait to later in the semester, or for a warm spell, if you are local to Connecticut.

Also, doing things together is more fun. So, I hope you will chose to work in tandem on projects. Each individual is charged with creating their own evidence for a badge, but if you prefer to collaborate while learning working through the learning units, I strongly encourage it. Particularly for doing things that are community-based, working in a group can be a significant multiplier, and it may be possible to demonstrate work on a communal object.

Texts & expenses

Each badge requires you know how to do something. Materials needed to learn how to do this will be assembled on the course wiki. They may draw from open access materials out on the web, or they be entirely original. Each person who creates a badge should assemble the materials necessary for people to learn the skills represented in the badge.

While these need not be original in all cases–curated materials are fine–at least once during the semester, you must create original, open access materials that teach us how to do something in the mobile and locative realms.

It is important, whether curating materials or creating your own materials to respect authors licenses, copyright, and intellectual rights.

You are going to need web space to host some of the projects in this course–feel welcome to use whatever space works and is appropriate to the need. Likewise, as you are creating your own materials, you will may find that the most current and accessible materials are actually available in books. Libraries can be slow in acquiring such books, so you may find yourself purchasing technical books (or camping out at your local bookstore).

Some of the badges require access to particular hardware or software. A preference will be shown for free and open software, when available, but even open hardware often has an expense associated with it. (I will have a limited amount of hardware you can play with in our physical meetings.) Enough badges will be available that it should be possible to avoid such hardware or licensing expenses, but I hope small expenses won’t dissuade you from learning experiences.

Finally, I do encourage you to collaborate with others in the class to assemble these resources. An Audrino board or electronics kit can be shared among multiple people, as long as you are careful with it, and likewise other resources can be effectively shared.

Related posts:

1. What makes up a badge?

As part of my courses in the coming semester, I am abandoning standard grades and instead using badge-level assessments. As part of each course, students can earn any number of badges for demonstrated abilities. These are generally badges that require you to show that you can do something. That ability must be assessed–often by peers.

Starting with the “data” end, what kind of information must a badge hold? We talked through a lot of this in Barcelona, and I’ve been thinking a lot about it since. What appears below shouldn’t be seen as the consensus of that group–though I found the discussion valuable, a number of the items below are certainly not commonly agreed upon among those, e.g., at P2PU who are talking about badges. At a basic level, a badge should be transparent (everything that went into getting the badge should be as visible as possible), and it should be imbued with the authority and reputation of those who were the evaluators.

Process

First, I should briefly describe the process. In the first courses, this process will largely be implemented “manually,” but you will see that there are many opportunities to automate some of these processes.

1. A person is nominated (or nominates themselves) by filling out all of the information on a form except for the endorsements.

2. Endorsers go to the form and indicate whether they feel that the candidate qualifies, for those that require endorsements–some may not. Note that “bots” may act as the endorsers, and check automatically whether something has occurred. In that case they behave just like human endorsers. Note also that the system that records this application should in some way verify the identity of the endorsers. We won’t be do that initially, but eventually, something (e.g., OpenID check) should provide an indication that people are who they say they are.

3. Once the endorsements are complete, a person may put this badge wherever they like on the web, with a link back to the page to show that they have earned the badge.

Nomination / Evidence Form

So, what is on that form? (With * items required.)

1. Name of the badge*

A short description of what the badge signifies: e.g., “Javascript Expert.” If it is a bootstrap badge, this should be clearly indicated in the title: e.g., “Javascript Expert [bootstrap]” (see #9 below).

2. Issuer of the badge*

Eventually, this may be something like “School of Webcraft” or “Quinnipiac University.” For this initial round, it is likely to be “ICM” for the ones I am doing.

3. Version of this badge*

Date-time last updated the badge.

A unique ID for the badge is formed with #1/#2/#3, e.g., Quinnipiac University/Ph.D. in Social Computing/2011-12-25-7:00:00.

4. Badge Image*

For the purposes of standardization, I will say 250x250px PNG representing what the badge stands for.

5. Description

A textual description of what the badge represents. The idea is that it is reasonably brief–say, less than 200 words.

6. Recipient*

Who is it that is claiming the badge.

7. Nominator*

Who is it that nominated this person for the badge?

By default, any badge can be self-nominated. If for some reason you want to exclude this possibility, it could be listed as a requirement in section 9: E.g. “Candidate is nominated by someone other than themselves” or “Candidate may only be nominated by a member of the track team.”

8. When nominated*

Nomination timestamp.

9. Requirements & Evidence

This is the meat of the form. It includes 0 or more requirements, with links to evidence that those requirements were met. Each requirement includes a record like the following:

a) Textual description of the rubric for assessment. What needs to be shown, and how is an evaluator to decide whether it meets the standard. Outside examples may be linked, including former examples of successful badge earners.

b) Textual description or link to the evidence of assessment. (If a link, we’ll probably need to find a way to archive that link for posterity. Easier with some things than with others; e.g., video.)

c) Nominator’s comments on the work and why they think it qualifies.

d) Qualifications to endorse. For example, you might require that people have the badge they are endorsing, or that they have a badge that qualifies them as “instructors” in the skill (e.g., to get the “pilot” badge, you need to be endorsed by at least one person with the “pilot inspektor” badge, or to get a a QU-PhD badge you need endorsements from three people with the QU-Faculty badge). You might also require that people have a badge that verifies their identity. So if I have the Verisignature–ReallyMe badge, maybe it qualifies me to endorse more badges. C is a list of required badges–there may be more than one.

e) Number of qualified endorsers required. This could be zero or a thousand.

f) List of
1. Endorser name
2. Date of endorsement
3. Comments on endorsement

Note that there is a necessary and automatic exception here in the case where there do not exist in the world the number of qualified endorsers listed in D. In that case, you must be endorsed by as many qualified endorsers as currently exist. It is then clearly indicated that the badge is a [BOOTSTRAP]. At some future point you might want to re-try the badge to get a non-bootstrapped version, once there are enough potential endorsers.

10. Issued Date-Time* (or PENDING)

11. Expires Date-Time

12. Recipient’s Comments & Notes

13. List of community comments

An Example Badge Template / Form

Now certain elements of the above are part of the template of a badge. So, if I nominated someone for the “Good Discussion Summarizer” I would end up with a template that included:

“Good Discussion Summarizer”
The Human Fund
1999-8-14-09:00:00

[Some Cool Badge Art that I don't have time to dummy up at the moment]

The good discussion summarizer is issued to someone who has demonstrated that she is consistently capable of summarizing a brainstorming or other discussion in an academic setting, both verbally and textually.

Recipient:

Nominator: Alex Halavais (2010-12-2-18:55:03)

Badge Requirements, Evidence, and Endorsements

1. Statements from three members of courses in which the recipient is enrolled attesting to her abilities to accurately summarize materials. Endorser must hold the “current student” badge. (No evidence beyond the endorsements required.)

Evidence: (NB: this would be left blank.)

Endorser:
Comments:

Endorser:
Comments

Endorser:
Comments:

2. Evaluation of a video of the candidate reviewing a discussion. Endorser must hold the “Good Discussion Summarizer” badge.
Evidence (Link to video or audio of summarization):
Endorser:
Comments:

3. Evaluation of a textual summary of the same discussion. Endorser must hold the “Good Discussion Summarizer” badge.
Evidence (Link or Pasted Text of a summary):
Endorser:
Comments:

Issued: PENDING
Expires: TBD

Candidate comments:

Community comments:

The nominator would fill out some of these, including, perhaps, being one of the endorsers.

Other Issues

The natural question is how would endorsers know to find the form? There are lots of possibilities here, including informal or direct invitations, and a queue of badge candidates needing assessment. But that is a solution that does not have to exist in the badge process itself (necessarily). The idea is to keep this piece as simple and light as possible.

Happy to hear any thoughts you might have. As I said, I’m going to take it for a test run in the Spring semester. I’ll likely just have people do it manually on the wiki, unless I find time over the break to code a simple form system that can handle the pieces. And I’ll point to the course and the badge description (as well as some of the early badges) as I write them up.

As a final note, this doesn’t in any way take away from the efforts of the Mozilla Badge Backpack approach. Indeed, one of the advantages to that system is that it might provide the opportunity for several dissimilar badge systems to work together. In this case, what would be passed along to the Backpack is just an image of the badge, its name, and a link back to the form that demonstrates how it was earned.

Related posts:

1. Another non-course

Related posts:

1. Teachable moment
2. Alex Halavais Quotes

Related posts:

1. Mozilla Drumbeat: Enter the Lizard
2. The disadvantages of an elite education
3. Site meter v. Mozilla

Overall, it was an outstanding conference, and I wanted to mark why both in terms of the content (which should find legs in other places) and the structure (which is finding its way slowly into other conferences).

Why I Conference

I think for most people, the main thing that holds them back from going to conferences is that they are expensive: in terms of registration costs, travel costs, and–probably most importantly–in terms of time and logistics. This is certainly the case for me. Also, like many others, I am introverted–while I like people in theory, actually being around them, especially if they are not people I already know pretty well, is uncomfortable. And on top of all of that, I have a soon-to-be-two-year-old who doesn’t want me to leave, and it’s very difficult because I would rather stay with him as well.

With all that, why go to conferences at all? There are a few reasons, but personally I judge the success of a conference by two main criteria. The first is whether I learn new things or get new ideas from being there. Now, I have yet to have gone to a conference where I didn’t learn at least something (even if it was only “I don’t ever want to go to this conference again”), but there needs to be a particular saturation of ideas in order to make it worthwhile. And secondly, if there is a tangible collaboration or opportunity to work together either at the conference or coming out of the conference, and if these have a good chance of coming to fruition, I consider the conference a success. Most conferences are designed explicitly to meet the first criterion, and implicitly to meet the second.

By those two goalposts alone, Drumbeat was one of the best conferences I’ve been to, and I would go again in a minute. It managed to neatly strike the balance between drawing together likeminded people (including, to echo Rafi Santo’s comment, people who may not have previously known they were likeminded) and put together some diversity of thought and background. There was certainly some feeling of “drinking the Koolaid”–Mozilla represents as much a movement as it does a topical area, and there are some sometimes unspoken, and often shouted, underlying ideals in play. These ideals are ones I share, but it is always difficult to walk the line between coordinated movement and groupthink.

There were also those at this conference who come from the Open Ed world, where “Ed” is still pretty operative. They think seriously about the way materials are shared and how they can be improved, but are often not so radical when it comes to the alteration or avoidance of educational institutions. And I think some of those present from the technical community think about learning in a very particular and practical way. They may recognize that there are more than purely technical skills in play when it comes to designing and building software (and hardware and movements) but some have not thought about what this means outside of a fairly limited range of training opportunities, or at least see learning through the lens of what they have experienced as learning.

In all, there seemed to me to be just the right amount of common ground and uncommon territory. At times, I felt like there was some preaching to the choir, or a bit of redundancy, but this was surprisingly rare, and that allowed people to come more quickly to some of the deeper questions and problems that needed to be addressed.

What Worked and Didn’t

As someone in the midst of planning a conference, I think it’s worth briefly noting what things worked at Drumbeat and what things did not.

First, what did not: I think there were two technical details that the organizers would agree that just went wrong. The first was the lightweight WiFi infrastructure. Yes, I recognize that not having internet is not the end of the world, but for a conference like this, it is really important to be bathed in the glow of high-speed access. I also know personally how hard it is to plan for 400 people who are not just briefly checking their mail, but constantly tweeting, uploading photos, and trying to slip by streams of media in some cases. Most providers look at the number of attendees and make certain assumptions about usage that are just way off. But I am kicking myself for spending the hours after I arrived sleeping off the jetlag rather than heading out to Orange to pick up a PAYG SIM for the iPad.

Acoustics, especially on the first night, but throughout, were terrible. If you weren’t trying to make sense of discussions as they were amplified by cavernous, ancient rooms, you were outside fighting against the scratch-and-roll of the skateboarders or the real tweets of the birds. I feel particularly bad for those for whom English was not their first language, at a largely English-language conference. That said, there are tradeoffs to be made, and it was likely worth the hassle for such a great venue.

I recognize and appreciate the openness to chaos, but it would have been great, especially as the second day trailed on, if there could have been a bit more discipline with the schedule. Given the calls to end the repressive factory nature of schools, calling for bells or chimes is probably misplaced, but I did miss the gentle cowbell we had at the IR conference this year reminding us that the next session was getting started. So, Drumbeat: more cowbell!

Finally, as the conference wore on, it started to feel like we were missing some people here. In particular, the Prof. Hacker crowd would have been a welcome middle ground between some of the more academic people, some of those working in informal learning, and some of the techies. There are people out there who live and breathe this stuff and who weren’t at the conference. I suspect it’s because it didn’t quite make their radar–or because Barcelona was a long haul–and that’s a shame.

There was too much right to list here. This was not, strictly speaking, a BarCamp–they front loaded with more scaffolding than is normally the case–something I think was necessary given the size (number of people) and scope (breadth of participation). As I noted above, I think there were opportunities for even more scaffolding, but I was really glad to be freed from the stand-and-deliver. There were a few plenary sessions, but these were universally excellent and short–two attributes that likely run together. Most of the sessions were organized around structured conversation, something missing from most academic conference, where it swings pretty wildly between presentation (sometimes fine, but often boring and unproductive) and unstructured conversation (often excellent but sometimes without clear goals or outcomes). I think Drumbeat did a nice job of zeroing in on semi-structured conversations with a dedication to making outcomes and building tangible and intangible products.

Facilitating this requires a bit of self-reflection, a bit of a reminder of why we are putting up with small bumps along the way, and quite a bit of “follow me.” And so it is important to note just how important the dedicated organizers were to making it work as well as it did. The sessions were exciting because those leading them were excited about what they were doing–and knew what they wanted out of it. And it only functioned smoothly because of a really dedicated group of volunteers.

Fantastic conference food and drink, as you would expect in Barcelona. And it’s hard to beat the setting, both in terms the structures we met in and being able to walk in the city. And if anyone does a conference in El Raval again, I think they should designate a tiger team of bag snatchers with a prize for the most competent, or invite local pickpockets to run a session on what we can learn about theft as social engineering.

No Respect for Authority

It seemed to me that there was a great charge of revolution in the room at a number of moments, with the traditional school and university structures firmly in the crosshairs. Two of the plenary speakers were proud dropouts of traditional educational institutions, and there was a general feeling that we can do it better ourselves. As Cathy Davidson noted in one of the early talks, we needed to find the “joy in insurgency.”

And you will find no one more responsive to that general feeling than I am. But I think it is worth tempering. After all, I am a high school dropout with a Ph.D.–a condition that probably reflects my intermediate position on the issue fairly well. Are schools and universities broken? Of course they are, always have been, and always will be. IE is broken too. The solution, however, was not to throw the browser out with the bathwater, it was to make a better browser. (Oh, and BTW, Firefox is broken; there is nothing fundamentally wrong with brokenness, as long as you are also always in the process of fixing, and the ability to fix is not impeded.)

I think that a hard stance against the university is strategically the wrong way to go. As Mitchell Baker noted in her brief introduction, one of the successes of openness is that it kills with kindness. I thnk that in the case of free and open software, that means adoption by commercial software producers, and for open learning, it means universities and schools that embrace open learning as obvious rather than a radical concept. This is not total war; the objective for me is a quiet but unstoppable change that leads to the crumbling of structures that do not adapt, not their explosion.

There is too much good in universities to throw them out, and although there is a certain strategic value in both rhetoric and actions that challenge its existence, at least in current form, as leverage in making substantial changes, I still think there is so much that the university model represents that is good that the most valuable approach in one that is probably more familiar to those in Barcelona, opening up the institutions that are traditional, authoritative, and highly structured, so that we may walk off with their resources, ideas, people, and capital. Since only the last of these is really alienable, we are not robbing, but liberating.

Just Do It

One of the reasons I like this group more than most is the willingness to, to borrow from the esteemed Tim Gunn, make it work. As academics, we are extraordinarily good at talking, and not always as good at actually doing. This is a problem worth building our way put of, and the people at Drumbeat are essentially learning bricoleurs, willing to disassemble, take the parts that work, and repurpose them. This is necessarily a process of experimentation, and of research through practice. I’m going to drop this 30-minute presentation right in the middle of the blog post because it embodies this spirit better than I can.

This presentation, by Aza Raskin, includes a nice overview of what participatory design means (not just what it is) and was quickly put on my “must watch” list for our starting students. (If the mention of jQuery freaks you out, feel free to abandon half-way through!) I think most of the people in the room were thinking about prototyping socio-technical systems in the form of web software, but it is equally true of design in other contexts. The push to prototype your way through a project–both as a way of creating and as a way of getting people “co-excited” about an idea–is important.

I think the one-day prototype needs to find its way into our learning environments far more often.

Turn up the base

A lot of the direction here was toward learning for us by us, and that is fine. But it is worth noting that those at the conference did not represent all learners. I think one of the more inspiring plenary talks was by Anna Debenham. (Assuming I get the chance to edit it down, I’ll post that talk shortly.) There were a few other young people at the conference, but it would have been great to see more. Of course, youth are not the only target, and they may not even be as much of a special case as they are often considered. Some have suggested we need to stop treating adult education like education for kids–I think we also need to stop treating learning environments for kids like education for kids.

The other problem is that we may be designing for users that do not yet exist. Of course, this is always the case to a certain extent–users are a moving target–but particularly when it comes to learning, our ultimate aim is to change the users, even when they are ourselves. So, it’s important to get an early view from potential users, but is also difficult. When we are successful, our systems help to co-create new kinds of users.

Given that difficulty, it is especially important to do two things. First, we need to create resources that assume very little about the end user, and make it as simple as possible for them to customize the tools and materials that we create. The second is that they need to know about those tools as soon as they have a bit of resilience and polish–advertising matters. Firefox was important as a piece of software, but putting it into people’s hands was another project, at least equally as important.

Moving Forward

We covered a lot of ground in this meeting, and although I have not been involved in its planning it is clear that a lot of people spent a lot of time on both the projects presented and on organizing the conference itself. It takes a great deal of scaffolding to provide a conference that is this open to tinkering. There were, throughout the conference, calls to make sure that this was not a one-off or end-point, but rather a starting point. Despite efforts to encapsulate one unifying starting point, what I saw was a broad spectrum of starting points. As I continue thinking about the conference, I’m going to be focusing on one aspect that really got me excited about moving forward: badges. I am sure that others found their own pet projects, and I hope that in many cases these were different than the projects they had going in.

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As far as I’m concerned, it’s a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity. If this is what you’re trying to get The Sun away from, then I think I’d like to work for you.

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Maker Faire was anything but a let-down. I think it would be fair to say it felt like going to Disneyland for geeks. (Presuming, for the moment, that Disneyland isn’t Disneyland for geeks.)

I shot the short video above for one of my classes. Since I didn’t really do credits, here’s some linkage to some of the people and things you see in the video… (If you are missing, just let me know!)

• Maker Faire NYC
• All Exhibitors
• ShopBot
• “Test Drive” by Zapac (theme music)
• New York Hall of Science
• Brooklyn Aerodrome
• Madagascar Institute
• Thundersteeds
• Mousetrap
• Liquiduslux
• Soldering is Easy
• New Youth City
• The Open Organization Of Lockpickers
• Windowfarms
• Boswyck Farms
• Science Spin
• Fairytale Fashion
• Book Copier
• Zeugen
• Shapeways
• RepRap

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This came up in a discussion we’re having in my seminar on participatory learning, and I found myself having to try to articulate my position more clearly. On one hand, it’s hard to argue with the core idea: when a generation has used digital tools their entire life, they are more familiar and comfortable with the tools. But then Prensky (who is still most frequently identified with this position) goes well off course, in my opinion (pdf):

All 21st century kids are programmers to some degree. Every time they download a song or ring tone, conduct a Google search, or use any software, they are, in fact, programming. To prepare kids for their 21st century lives, we must help them maximize their tools by extending their programming abilities. Many students are already proficient enough in programs like Flash to submit their assignments in this medium. Schools should actively teach students this technology and encourage them to use it.

First of all, I’m not working in the schools, but I am doubtful that a substantial number of kids are Flash users. Are there some? Of course. Just as there were kids when I was in school who could program. But we did not represent the norm.

Second, I would argue strongly that this is a slope that does not exist. Doing a Google search is not programming. Downloading a song is not programming. This renders the word fairly meaningless. If it is programming, then so is changing the channel on the television or buying a drink from a vending machine–”digital immigrants” are generally adept at both.

What is more important is that young people are happy to be thought of as “digital natives,” and probably think of these things as programming. I think part of the issue is that when I watched TV as a kid, I recognized that the production process was outside of my hands, but that it was achievable. It was clear who the producer and consumer of the message was, and although I might have access to an instant camera, what I produced with it was different from what a professional produced.

I think that we assume that the wall has been removed–but really it has just been replaced. It used to be that you could fix your car engine. You still can, but mainly be replacing black-boxed parts. Likewise, you can download and install iPhone apps, but most kids are not producing them. (Yay, AppInventor, and if it gets widely used, that is a good thing, but it is emphatically something that adults are bringing to kids, not something native to their experiences as consumers.)

So, I think the boundaries have moved a bit, but are much less obvious. I don’t feel like an immigrant. I create these technologies and don’t just adopt them. And, in fact, in many cases us “immigrants” lead the way on new tech. Kids may now all have cell phones, but I hasten to remind you, us “over 30s”–in some cases way over–had them before the kids did.

But we also recognize things like the fact that the iPhone and Facebook are walled gardens. Those who have lived in the technologies have accepted this as part of the ideology of tech: something that has always been, and remains unexamined.

So, whenever someone busts out the “digital native” talk, my skepticism levels start peaking. It’s not that the opposite is true, and that kids don’t know technology. It’s that the phrase–intended to spur institutional change–hides a multitude of ignorances.

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But I am also interested because they are engaged in new ways of thinking about assessment and certification. As the name implies, learning in the program is largely peer-to-peer, and assessment needs to follow that model. At the same time, employers and others want to know whether someone is qualified, and we need to have a way of indicating that someone who has been through the school knows their stuff.

This plugs into a larger issue I have with the potential for experimentation in academia. The School of Webcraft is an exciting exception, but it’s really hard to start a school. Much harder than, say, starting a business. Part of the reason for that is that learning and education are hard to do. But there are also some pretty big barriers to entry and these are tied directly to accreditation of learning.

First, students don’t want to go to a school unless they feel pretty comfortable with the quality of the education they will receive. Unfortunately there aren’t a lot of good metrics for this. Accreditation from a traditional accrediting body is one of these. But these bodies tend to be very conservative and focus on process, not on outcomes. I might have a high school or college that can produce much more capable graduates, but if it isn’t accredited, there isn’t an easy way for potential students to know whether their time is well spent.

Equally importantly, the switching costs for students are extremely high if the school isn’t accredited. In other words, not only are they taking a risk on the quality of their education while at the school, even if the quality is great, another school is unlikely to accept their “credits” if it isn’t accredited.

And perhaps the biggest problem of all is the idea that the 4-year degree, in higher ed, is your accreditation to work. It doesn’t even really matter what the degree is in. Wouldn’t it be more sensible–and more fun!–if you could make up your own degree? Yes, many universities have individualized degrees, but what that really means is that you can choose which 40 courses you want to take at that single institution. What if you decide you want to learn how to sail for a year? How does that fit in with your degree? What if you have a natural talent in programming and want to be recognized for that without sitting through ten courses.

I recognize students don’t always know what they need to know, but I think this is only barely a defense of four-year programs designed to teach a “model student” who doesn’t really exist.

So, yes, open educational resources are important, and all sorts of experimenting both inside and outside of traditional institutions is important. But the real power comes when learners can seamlessly move among institutions, building personal learning histories that not only improve their abilities, but make those improvements visible to others.

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The Risks

We should start with the risks, because many find it difficult to assess the risks of blogging in their own name. You have to be willing to accept that what you write will never be able to be fully unwritten. Your current friends, neighbors, and employers will be able to find it. Some make the mistake of assuming that others will never look. That is a possibility, but nothing you should depend on. You should assume that whatever you put on your blog under your own name will be found by the public. Treat it like publishing in a major newspaper–it may not be ordinarily encountered by as many people, but it is findable by just as many people.

And it will be found not just by your contemporaries, but by your great grandchildren. I’ve always said that it won’t be long before we have our first president who had a Facebook account. Along the way, I think and hope we will become more forgiving of various transgressions, but I think this recent article in the New York Times provides some nice examples of how your past stays with you online. Am I particularly proud of papers I wrote when I was still a student? No, but neither am I ashamed of them. Yes, I cringe a little when I see something I wrote when I was a little younger–like this post on fighting blindfolded that I never could have imagined would be sucked up by Google and still accessible nearly two decades later. It’s the same feeling I get when I see photos of myself or hear my voice recorded. But in all, I am willing to risk large chunks of my life being on display, not just to people I know today, but to people a century from now, when tastes have changed, and the word “chunk” in the line above has become offensive. I’m willing to stand by my words and risk not being hired by someone because I’ve mentioned that I am sympathetic to anarchist ideals, or because I like a particular band, or because I teach in a particular way, or because I’ve made stupid errors in spelling, grammar, or thinking.

Blogging under a pseudonym does not remove this possibility. Maintaining your private identity is very difficult to do, and someone with time, resources, or determination can probably ferret out who you are. But not using your own name, or providing too many personal details, can at least reduce this risk.

The Advantages

There are also significant advantages that you potentially give up by blogging under a pseudonym. I suppose the most obvious is that you have an opportunity to shape how people see you. When people Google your name, what do they find? If you are blogging–and your name isn’t particularly common–your blog is likely to show up fairly high on the list of responses. As a result, people I know have been recognized as experts in their fields, and have found opportunities that they might not otherwise have found.

The idea of personal branding still has some icky connotations of self-promotion and egoism. There was a time when only celebrities and public figures needed to manage their public image, that line of thinking goes. I don’t think this is the case. We take showers because most of us do care, even at some minimal level, of what other people think of us. It’s considered an essential piece of being sociable. This sort of impression management has simply grown more digital. So, it makes sense to groom your impression on the web, and blogging and using social media under your own name is a great way to do that.

It also makes you much more trustworthy as a participant in the social web. People want to know you are a real person, and you are standing behind your actions. As Fezzig correctly notes, “People in masks cannot be trusted.”

The Decision

I still advise students to choose a good professional pseudonym when they start out. Given that I think that there are significant professional and personal advantages to engaging in social media under your own name, why do I push them in this direction? There are a few reasons.

At the most extreme end, some of my graduate students are professional journalists, and required by contract not to publish on the web. This runs against my requirements, and puts them in a bind. I ask them to still do this, but to do so under a pseudonym. This bends the rules a bit, but so far, everyone has been fine with that.

You can always go from pseudonym to real name, when you decide to take advantage of those opportunities blogging under your real name brings, but you can never go the other direction. So, the risks are much lower starting out if you choose a name to write and engage under, with the potential of “coming out” down the road.

If your name is John Smith, blogging and engaging under your real name is probably already pretty anonymous. You might actually benefit by instead blogging as “SmithyTheArchitect” since it creates a brand that is findable.

Finally, you can do both. It’s harder to keep things straight, but you can produce material that you are particularly proud of under your own name, and engage in other ways under a pseudonym. Doing so means keeping separate online lives for each identity, which can be supremely difficult, but some choose to go this route.

Naming Right

In the end, I manage to convince about three quarters of students in my courses to engage pseudonymously, and the other quarter use their own names. If you do choose a pseudonym, think seriously about the image you want to project. Corndog1991 may be your handle from way back on AoL, but it might be time to upgrade. Run your name (and domain) by others to make sure you are not missing some obvious connotation, and that it is something memorable and not easily mis-spelled.

In the end, it is your decision: I just want to make sure that you know the risks and rewards–as much as it is possible–at the outset.

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VAS is basically a way to make comments on a video. If you’ve used the commenting feature on Viddler or on YouTube, you get the general idea, and VAS can be used similarly. It can also allow you to link to images or video from a particular point on the timeline.

You might ask why, with Viddler and YouTube providing these services, another is needed. I’ll give a clear example: what if you want to annotate–as I do for an upcoming course–The Matrix. You can try uploading the film to some of the various video hosting sites, but you won’t get far.

One solution would be to get your own Flash or HTML5-based video player. You could use Flowplayer or Kaltura to either pull comments from a database as the video plays or lay them over the video itself. This doesn’t get you out of the issue of The Matrix, though. If you want thousands of people to comment on it, you will be hosting content that is copyrighted and that will last for all of five minutes.

VAS works by modularizing the process. It consists of three parts:

The first part is an XML file containing associations between particular times in the video–down to fractions of a second–an HTML segment that may contain plain text or HTML markup that links to other resources, and an indication of what File and Time this might be a reply to. The author of the association, and the time the association was made are also included in each annotation. Finally, for the XML document as a whole, there is metadata for the film itself, optionally including the name, year, and similar information, along with a link to a page with more information: IMDB or Wikipedia for example.

Because this is a framework, the VAS structure can be implemented with any player, but it makes sense that its first implementation is built as an interface module on the internet’s friendliest player: VLC. As a practical matter, reading VAS files and displaying them is not dissimilar to any of the half-dozen formats for subtitling that already exist on the web. But because there are more than can possibly be displayed within the film itself, the VAS interface provides a view to the side that is threaded. For textual comments, it fetches the comment and displays it. It is able to thread comments when they are indicated as replies. The interface also allows users to add comments to a current annotation file as they watch the film.

Because the interface can load and view multiple VAS annotation files, it can act as an aggregator. And just as RSS has OPML to link to multiple RSS files, you can aggregate multiple VAS files to that you can view the annotations of everyone, or just your friends and family.

Unlike web-based viewers, however, because VAS uses VLS, you are able to view the film itself in a copyrighted DVD format, layering the annotations on top of the film. For cult classics, you can find and exchange MST3000 style comments, or if you are part of a group of film aficionados you can add your own “if I were the director” tracks. The uses for education are limitless.

* You probably haven’t heard of it because it doesn’t exist. Won’t someone create it, or suggest ways that it can be done with existing software?

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Predictably, the comments bemoan the state of modern education. If Princeton represents our best and brightest, how sad is it that they don’t know who Stevenson is? After several comments in agreement, the backlash begins. Should freshmen know every defeated presidential contender over the last five decades? Inevitably, someone posts that they don’t need to know because they can always look up his bio on Wikipedia.

You probably think you know where I come down on this. After all, I’ve suggested many times before that the nature of knowledge is changing, and that formal expectations of what people should know is changing. That said, I am a little disappointed that these four were not aware of Stevenson. I wouldn’t expect them to be able to provide the details of his biography (after all, that is what Wikipedia is for), but I would expect them to have at least a rough idea of how he fits into the fabric of our history. In other words, I would expect that in their studies before reaching university, they might have already had the opportunity to look up his bio on Wikipedia, and might remember enough to know roughly who he was and why he was “famous.”

The fact that these things exist outside of our heads is only an advantage if we actually use them. Most of what I’ve learned I’ve forgotten, but it leaves some indexical trace, some broad map of the world that will allow me to reacquire these things in the future. So the question is how our most elite student manage to get through high school without ever finding the need to google Adlai Stevenson, and how we can change that.

I’m convinced that part of the reason they never ran into Stevenson is that he doesn’t make a big splash in the textbooks. The fault isn’t in a particular textbook, or even the Texans who decide what counts as history, but in the existence of textbooks at all. Textbooks, and the tests and regents exams they spawn, focus on sufficient knowledge: if it isn’t in the book, it doesn’t matter. The work of a school, no matter at what level, is to create the conditions that lead students to discover things on their own. And somewhere are the conditions under which a student will encounter Adlai Stevenson as more than a presidential loser.

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