That widescreen shot is the office. It’s small. I have a little oil heater I plugged in to keep it warmer through this winter. I’m hoping I won’t need to install an air conditioner this summer, but perhaps I’ll have to get a window unit.

Readernaut, and willfully putting it out there that I’m sharing my notes on my reading, is kinda the same approach as me sharing my workouts and meals — it’s keeping me (somewhat) honest. Plus, at least I can see where I”m progressing with my reading.

Oddly, I’m making better access on the paper books than I am the kindle books on my iPhone. Well, maybe not oddly. It’s a lot easier size/format to read and highlight.

I’m anxious to start knocking out some reading and annotating with the iPad. I hope they make that awesome.

I had a reading plan last year that I completely failed. I’m hoping you’re inspiration + Readernaut + regained focus will = knowledge increase.

Always enjoy your updates.

Cheers,
Brian

I’ll take 10 separate, but interoperable systems that each do their own thing very well, over 5 mashups that further cloud the environment.

As you mentioned with Wave, there is no clear definition. While I appreciate flexibility, I also appreciate definition.

This workflow might be the beginning of that definition…but I’m not sure.

I do agree that we are in store for great things, as we begin to define what we should use all these tools for, and how best to use them for specific purposes.

I also wonder if the human brain will begin to evolve to allow us to grasp the meaning more quickly, making the organization and definitions unnecessary.

I, too, am interested in what Ellen (or even Tom) might say on this matter on one level, but you’re taking this conversation where I wanted it to go, and I’m very happy about that. While I don’t know if any industry is functional or stable from the vantage point of having standards processes that work for all stakeholders — we know there’s a lot we can do in the learning industry, across the board, to be better. I’m all for everyone making as much money as they can in this space, but I’m also for all of us focusing on the same goals — which is improving the human condition. Period.

I can understand why people are hesitant to be fully transparent, because without context for it there’s no incentive to do so — there’s no reason why one organization should embrace transparency if it’s against their survival interests because their competitors are not transparent. However, being open and civil to other players in the game, considering what we’re all trying to accomplish, assuming the best of intentions and allowing for derivative works on the standards we put out there allows for emergent behavior that fills in a lot of gaps, accelerates incremental innovations and encourages everyone to participate and share openly about what’s working.

I personally believe with all of my heart and mind that we’re about to finally hit an era of accerlated growth and opportunity in the learning technology space. If everyone can keep their wits about them and hold out just a little bit of faith, even if it feels justified to withhold it — I think we’re in for a really good ride.

Buzz is interesting in some ways for this kind of activity, but I’m afraid it starts to get unmanageable when you have so many comments responding at the same time — the interface becomes a constraint to how much you can follow, where Twitter (more like Tweetdeck or TweetChat) accomodates that rapidfire activity well.

Still… Marcia turned me onto what #journchat does for a summary. Someone acts as moderator, favorite-ing what they feel are the big points that emerge and then they simply cull those favorites in an organized way, based on the structure of the chat. That ultimately might be the easiest and straight-forward way of doing it.

Doesn’t make it the best way — doesn’t mean you can’t have a community that’s interested in pouring through the tweets to derive the juice from the fruit, either.

This is the problem with the anti-flash zealotry. While it’s possible to build equivalents using newer browser capabilities and standards, there isn’t a consistent or easy way to do some of these things using an authoring environment. I laugh a bit when I hear people say ‘You can do that in X, don’t need Flash for that’. Some people can, but platform to platform making it consistent is a serious pain. This is one of the powerful features of a runtime that is ‘mostly’ consistent.

On the flip side, there’s plenty of stuff being done in Flash that doesn’t need to be. Since reading the us v. them stuff about iPad and Flash the past few days I’ve been trying to put together a visualization.

On one side of this visualization are things (or probabilities) that shouldn’t probably ever be built in Flash, on the other side are things that the browser doesn’t do well by itself and have a high probability of being best implemented in a plug-in runtime (flash or other). In the middle is the gray area. I think there are a lot of misunderstandings at the heart of this debate. At the extremes there is plenty of zealotry fanning the flames. Regardless, there are likely ways to better define the situations where tools like Flash could be well employed, and when tools like Flash are doing little more than helping you to paint yourself into a corner.

I think some of these same guidelines / principles could also apply to proprietary tools like the iPad. Any encapsulated development, that doesn’t future proof the content in open containers, is inherently temporary. How temporary is relative, but if we don’t consider closed tools, compiled files, and disposable hardware as temporary then we’re living under a magical delusion. On a device that lives on ‘there’s an app for that’ — double whammy –

Aaron, there is a difference betweened empassioned debate and then what is going on with html5. It has select individuals trying to dictate what they want everyone to agree to. Empassioned debate in my world means compromise at some point. I’m not sure what is good for “Us” is to commit to a standard by one guy (goole employee), and I’m not sure what is good for us is to have flash/actionscript dev be frozen in similar “empassioned debate.” just my 2 cents.

So based on that I can see Adobe’s concern with opening it up as a free standard if those are the types of people who join and then fracture/fork working groups. This was only to your “open up the spec and attach it to html5″ idea. Well what and when is html5 set in stone? This rolling google style beta thing will not work for a standard longterm.

IF adobe went with making it an open standard then I think a key would be to get their devs to be writing back into the webkit trunk to make sure that the browser can handle the execution well. They already gave mozilla tamarin so they are connected there. IE will of course be a problem forever. Possibly also create some rules in the standard charter to prevent endless years of arguing and applying a more business attitude such as every 18 months we roll out an update to the standard.

Also if Adobe rolled out a hybrid compiler tool in flash/ flash builder that converted the logic into js/svg etc they could own the next generation of development. They already have a c+ compiler to AS, which i think fed into the AS to iPhone byte code app ability.

Meanwhile, about open. There are two aspects of openness being discussed:

1. Open and transparent participation in spec development vs. giving “members” a period of time, usually years, where they have advanced knowledge of the emerging proprietary standard. Open participation, even if non-paying participants can’t vote on ballots, helps startups, researchers, and other impoverished innovators to bring new technology to market that integrates immediately with systems already in place…. See More

2. Unrestricted use of the standard in terms of derivative works. Again this aspect of openness takes away from the value proposition of a members-only standards consortium. Derivative works could also cause market problems if multiple versions of the standard propagate. The upside again is freeing innovators. In the case of learning technology standards, where disparate, relatively impoverished communities of practice are still trying to figure out how to make technology work in their particular context, derivations also facilitate experimentation and ultimately broad adoption. The cost of interoperability problems that result from multiple versions of the standard are minor compared to the likelihood that an accredited learning technology standards will never be adopted, ever. (There are dozens of examples of learning technology standards, each taking many man years to create, that were never implemented in a single product.)

Bottom line, the reason LETSI.org is pushing for open standards (open on both ends, as it were) stems from a belief that teaching and learning remain a technological backwater, compared to the impact the Internet has had on other aspects of our lives. Ours is not a functioning, stable industry at this point, where the traditional standards process can work well for all stakeholders. Tipping the standards tradeoffs toward openness may help learning technology evolve more rapidly, driven by innovators who need to “play without fear”.

What if Flash were to become a standard? Adobe could still monetize the IDE, much like Microsoft does with Word (yes, I know that there are several flaws with the example, roll with me a bit here), while the format each tool produces could be an open standard.

Adobe already opened the SWF format, allowing other entities to compile to SWF format. They’ve acknowledged they make their money from the IDE at this point, not from the Player.

I think it would be better to restate the proposal as “What if the SWF format were to become a standard that didn’t require browser plug-ins?” Technically this is already possible… since the SWF format is open, browsers can be written to natively handle SWF files, just as they do SVG, canvas, and even the lowly PNG.

It’s probably such a big task that browser vendors simply aren’t interested in the headache. Plus, Adobe has absolute control over the Flash Platform’s features, even if they allow others to compile SWFs without Adobe tools. This means Adobe would have control over what browser would be required to implement in their native Flash handling. No vendor wants to be told what to do without having their own input on the matter (see canvas and SVG). I’m sure Apple’s already tired of dealing with Flash Player in OS X; what’s the incentive for putting it in their other products?

But, Adobe’s control over the Flash platform is precisely why they’ve been able to innovate, much like Apple’s ability to push forward because of complete control over operating system, hardware, and iWhatever mobile apps. Microsoft lags so much because (among other issues) they have to work with a bazillion hardware manufacturers.

I agree with a lot of what you’re saying, I just think it’s a pipe dream at this point.

It would be interesting if there were enough people really animated in the LETSI community to see what a content tool would look like that fully adopted web standards AND was really usable. I don’t know that LETSI is big enough for that yet or is even the right vehicle to do that work… but LETSI is what its members make of it. That is one of the very beautiful things about LETSI is that it will adapt to its membership while the members support common goals of interoperability and open standards allowing for derivative works.

All that said, Ethan, empassioned debate always looks like political jockeying. If we all want to get over the politics-as-usual, we’re going to all need to come to grips with the fact that many (if not all) of us are trying to do the right thing. We lose sight of it, and it’s to our discredit when we do. Apple and Adobe are capitalistic, proprietary giants in one sense — operating on a plane of standards that includes things like HTML5, ECMAScript, SCORM, IMS-CC and standards organizations like the W3C, ADL, LETSI, IMS, ISO, IEEE, etc.

Everybody has their own agenda. Rather than quibble about it, we need to just accept it and re-frame the debate in terms of why what’s good for “me” is also good for “you” and even better good for “us.” Whomever can make that argument the best means everybody stands to win, as long as it’s an inclusive debate.

I’m concerned with the speed at which stuff gets done in a standard process. Just me but i don’t trust the ego’s i see over in the HTML5 dev community. They are all angling to own the process. Not much open-ness over there from what I see at all.

One thing it would do is move the flash tooling from Adobe as the top builders of the content. I could see Flash Builder really becoming that tool if it tweaks the interface a bit for smoother drawing tools etc-it has the code thing down. (little more of an artist/animator interface gui)

Maybe if Letsi was in charge of it, I’d believe it would not sink into a tar pit of political jockeying.

So Feynman “stopped trying to keep up with the scientific literature or compete with other theorists at their own game, and went back to his roots, comparing experiment with theory, making guesses that were all his own…” [p. 186]. Thus he became productive again, as he had been when he had just been working things out for himself, before becoming a famous physicist.

I kinda think there’s room for “awareness” though. One of the troubles going so deep on your own is that while you’re increasing your personal learning, you’re also potentially (and nowadays quite probably) replicating another whole set of of efforts. You could benefit from a periodic heads-up if it was easy enough for you to see… what others are doing currently; what they’ve done. It could help you focus your energies going deep in directions others haven’t travelled, or travel them again with that context.

http://www.friesian.com/feynman.htm

http://screencast.com/t/Mjk5MjIxMzk

Going virtual in some ways makes it easier to do asynchronously, and you can get the visual of how they’re doing and how much they’re doing and that’s a motivator for me. Or a clue to kick them in the butt to do something.

I’m defintely happy about the 10lbs, but right now I feel like losing the weight is just easier — it’s the newest weight. There’s a whole lot of weight that’s been around a lot longer and that’s gonna be harder to take off. Not sure of the actual biomechanics in this theory, but that’s my theory.

At any rate, Steve, thank you SO MUCH for all your encouragement and support. It is so very very needed to have the courage to stick with it through bad days to know both that people really want you to succeed; and because you’re sharing what you’re doing, you are accountable to others to share what’s going on. Helps keep you on the path both intrinisically and extrinsically

I totally subscribe to the idea that if I can do this consistently for a month or two that it becomes habituated. That’s what I’m trying to enforce. This week will be clutch. If I can lose another pound from last week — three straight weeks of progress would be clutch for my motivation. I don’t care if it’s only one pound a week — as long as there’s progress, I’ll stick with it. I’m most afraid of the plateaus until my behaviors are more engrained.

Thanks, as always for the support, Dave. My approach in being open about this is pretty simple. I’m a big guy. It’s hard to hide that if you meet me in person. I’m struggling with things everyone else struggles with (except Philip Hutchison — that dude is a rail). Awareness is so important for learning, and fundamentally what I’m working through is a learning problem — I need to develop and mature my sense of awareness about what, how and how much I eat and exercise.

You’ve taken the ‘do it with someone else’ suggestion into a whole new direction (for me at least) and I am impressed. I need to do the food monitoring thing, though since I eat practically nothing that comes with a barcode, I’ll have to be extra honest

thanks for sharing, and keep up the good work.

I would suggest two other supports to your plan. The first is what Ken Cooper (the USAF MD who developed the original aerobics program) called “the training effect.” He had data to support the contention that after about six weeks of regular exercise, the cumulative improvements in fitness become such that the habit had begun to set in–you’re physically doing better, mentally doing better, and developing a pattern that’s a virtuous cycle.

Another support, one I recall reading in Consumer Reports Health newsletter, is that weighing yourself daily correlates very well with success. It seems to me that’s much like the apps you’re using–the regularity makes the monitoring habitual, the habitual monitoring helps to instill an awareness.

I’ll tell you, I was very impressed with Freshbooks. If I had the volume and the need to be on the road a lot, I would’ve easily gone that route.

You’d be really surprised how quickly you can read some books (that are less dense) on the Kindle app.

Been thinking about getting a Kindle. Wasn’t sure I could handle reading on my iPhone for a long period of time, but I should probably give it a go as you seem like a smart guy who knows what he’s talking about! ; )

Rayanne Langdon — Queen of Hearts, FreshBooks.com

If you are a fan of “don’t do this” or Failblog, here are a few for you:
- don’t sign people up in the community and let them find out via email confirmation
- don’t lock down the community by requiring moderator approval of contributions. (you do have another job, right?)
- don’t respect worriers. Communities are self correcting. And, your corporate policies all apply to communities just like they do to email and phone conversations.
- don’t be autocratic. Communities are a team sport
- don’t try to drive communities with external reasons for being and doing.
- don’t let executives take over. Period.
- don’t erect elitist barriers or protocols. Your best idea may come from someone you least expected to contribute.

Thats a start.

A great starting place http://communitiesofinquiry.com/papers_cp

Cognitive presence and online learner engagement: a cluster analysis of the community of inquiry framework by Peter Shea http://www.springerlink.com/index/V218M6Q74501813P.pdf

ONLINE COMMUNITY OF INQUIRY REVIEW: SOCIAL, COGNITIVE, AND TEACHING PRESENCE ISSUES by Garrison
http://www.ucalgary.ca/~nvaughan/coiissues.pdf

Building Sense of Community at a Distance – by Rovai
http://www.whateverproductions.net/Rovai-2.pdf

THE PROCESS OF COMMUNITY-BUILDING IN DISTANCE LEARNING CLASSES by Brown
http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/jaln/v5n2/pdf/v5n2_brown.pdf

There are tons of papers, but Shea et al include research, not just quoting of other thinkers.

1) I happen to agree that participation has some accountability, as it does in the physical world; I’d like to hear other perspectives on this. You mention that research shows participation increases cognitive presence — you got a link handy? Not doubting you, but I think it helps to be able to tack down what we’re all accepting on trust, right?

2) I think there is some overlap in the concerns, some real and some merely objections. Important that we distinguish what’s a trolling objection and what’s a legit concern. I hope I can snag some security ppl in this discussion or an ensuing one to help put context around stuff we as facilitators of learning might ignore or find cumbersome.

3) Methods to facilitate and encourage learner-learner interaction is a solid question I’m very interested in. Good pull.

4) This goes back to overcoming objections, and there are a lot of ppl we can pull in to help. I have some experience here and can share; again, the more people contributing to this thread, the better.

I’m hoping we build up a context arsenal that makes it easier for all of us to effectively build communities and keep them evergreen.

In creating this proposal, some questions remain for the audience to ponder – perhaps they are worthy of our future discussion (if they fit where your agenda is going).

1)Should participation in Community 2.0 have some accountability? If so, how? If not, why not (since research shows participation increases cognitive presence in online classes/training).

2)What are the “use of social media” privacy concerns for institutions of learning (i.e. FERPA) and organizations with security clearance issues and how can we work around them?

3)If we determine students benefit from being involved in Community 2.0, both intellectually and affectively (affect not effect), what are concrete steps to encourage learner-learner interaction using the Community?

4)What are ways to encourage Community 2.0 among the more “social media resistant” learners?

Wow, that took a lot of explaining to get to those four topics…good thing I didn’t have to do this in 140 characters!

Ideally, we can start to cobble together a table where given the reason for having a community, we can share what tools we’re using, what kind of people resources we have facilitating it, how big/active the community is and what kind of costs and time commitments it takes to keep it going along different phases.

That’s the kind of information that benefits everyone, and it’s (for me) hard information to get without sharing among peers who are already doing it or are thinking about doing it.

That’s the sweet spot, I think. We have all the tools available to solve common tactical/operational concerns. We just need to connect our crafts (like BSS or Learning Ninjas) to the work.

I look forward to more opportunities like this – maybe the gathering and facilitating of these collaborative efforts and share sessions is something we must lead? Let’s discuss more.