Serendipity35

Earlier this month the Webby Awards were announced. There are lots of categories, but I'll just point you to a few blogs.

The Huffington Post won best Political blog. PostSecret is the best cultural blog, and FT.com Alphaville won for business blog.

The Webby Awards is a contest for the best of the internet from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences and they announced the winners for dozens of categories covering blogs, websites and video.

Here's a complete list of winners.

One thing I do like about their awards ceremony (in June) is that winners of the Webby Awards must restrict their acceptance speeches to five words.

I wrote about Clay Shirky's newest book, Here Comes Everybody, in an earlier post. Later, I was reading on Shirky's own blog that a reader was creating a webliography with links to sites from the book. If a print book was "hyperlinkable," (Kindle books don't count) it would have this feature.

The reader is a librarian whose blog, My Mind on Books, is a reading blog that is a guide to books (with a focus on consciousness, the mind, cognitive psychology...).

He actually published his guide in four separate posts, but I have waited for him to collect them in one post which you can now access at mymindonbooks.com.

This is what I will call "Reader 2.0" - the reader as collaborator - which is certainly part of the wider web 2.0 shift on the Net.

For chapter 3 of the Shirky book, "Everyone Is A Media Outlet," there are 12 links to go beyond the book. Just on the topic of "mass amateurization" (page 60), you get these 3 links - and an error correction! “Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing” by Clay Shirky, “The Pro-Am Revolution” by Charlie Leadbeater (misspelled “Leadbetter” in the book) and We-think: the book by Charles Leadbeater.

Page 75's reference to "crowdsourcing" gets you a 2006 Wired article by Jeff Howe and
a Crowdsourcing blog which includes excerpts from the upcoming book, Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business.

Blogs are a great way for a reader to extend the reach of a print book. It would be even better to see an open wiki develop around a book with many readers adding additional materials. This has happened in a few instances I'm aware of for books like The World is Flat. There are somewhat useful wikis like Wikisummaries that offers a detailed chapter by chapter summary of the book - useful for someone just wanting to check what it's all about AND for a student who discovers there are no Spark Notes for Friedman's book. More interesting to me are wikis like The Flat Classroom Project that uses Wikispaces for students from classrooms around the world to collaborate on projects and discussions based on their reading of the Friedman book.

This is active reading for students as well as being a resource for the teacher using a particular book in their course. It overlaps in some ways the open textbook movement. More importantly, it gets readers involved with what they are reading.

If you know of any good "Reader 2.0" sites online that extend the print version of a book, please comment with a link below.

Christopher Shamburg is an Associate Professor in the graduate program in educational technology at NJCU. He's also a former high school teacher, a Folger Shakespeare Library Educator. Chris has a new book out this month, but before I get to his book, let me give you a good example of what he is getting students and their teachers to do in English language arts classrooms.

As a Folger Educator, he worked with students and faculty at Washington DC's McKinley High School in a project called "Remixing Shakespeare." You can watch the video of the students doing their Macbeth remixes. It shows how they create original short audio dramas using scenes from Shakespeare.

I've seen Chris do this in a workshop for teachers and he's using open source software (like the Audacity audio recorder/editor) and simple no-tech sound effects (coconut shell hoofbeats & the potato chip crunch of footsteps) as well as the students' recordings of the dialogs and license-free audio sound effects.

There are so many lessons going on with this, including the ethical and legal remixing of other creator's work.

That gives you a sense about the lessons Chris offers in his new book, English Language Arts Units for Grades 9-12, that came out this month. The book has twelve language arts units that integrate technology into interesting standards-based lessons. He uses fan fiction and creative writing, blogging ideas, social bookmarking and podcasting to get into assignments like independent reading projects.

Technology-based lessons sometimes scare techphobic teachers, but these are easy enough to do with very little background. Of course, part of the point is that the students are doing them, not the teacher.

You can download his Shakespeare Remix tutorial and get all the needed resources from Folger, and listen to 3 student remix samples. (You don't need to add the rights management info to your audio as Chris does for this lesson, but it's a great idea to be modeling the proper use of licensing to your students. It's also a good chance to have them realize that research paper bibliographies aren't the only place that needs a works cited page).

Chris calls a lot of this content his "hidden curriculum" - one that values students' interests and experiences, their participation in culture, society, and politics, the effectiveness of real-life experiences, and the importance of connecting learners with the rest of the world.

Though the publisher's target audience for the book is probably pre-service English education students and working high school English teachers, I wish the title didn't set that limititation. Many teachers at levels below 9 and above 12 would find the lessons innovative. And if you teach other subject areas and don't feel tech-savvy, it would be a great book to use for getting into those tools & resources.

Chris' previous book, Teachers as Technology Leaders: A Guide to ISTE Technology Facilitation and Technology Leadership Accreditation was written with Cordelia Twomey and Laura Zieger and addressed the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) standards for initial and advanced endorsements in the areas of Technology Facilitation and Technology Leadership.

That book was designed to walk faculty and administrators through the process of endorsement. Though it has plenty of practical advice on process planning, document preparation, candidate and program assessment for programs that are training the next generation of education technology leaders, the new book is a lot more fun.

You can tell that Professor Shamburg has also spent some years in front of K-12 students and knows what works and what engages them. The teachers may know the Shakespeare, but their students know YouTube, remixing, computers, and the style that makes it all work. It's meeting them where they are with what they need. It's literacies in the plural, and in his presentation he's remixing all of it in such a way that I think students and teachers may find themselves forgetting in the process that this is schoolwork.

Chris recently asked me for some ideas for his podcasting high school students. They're going to make poetry walk "remixes" - music and poetry to accompany a walker in the city or country. He was looking for recommendations for urban poems (preferably online and in the public domain) for them to use. Want to join in? If you find some resources or want to see some he is using, look at his bookmarks at del.icio.us/cs272/naturewalk.

Chris hasn't abandoned reading, writing or the text. His new book isn't a pop education book that kids will want to read, and it has the standards, handouts, assessment rubrics, and resources (many, thankfully & dynamically, online) that educators expect from ISTE publications. You don't write this type of book to make any bestseller list, get on Oprah or earn enough to quit your teaching job. You do it because you love the work and you love learning new things yourself. Teachers need to be lifelong learners even more than many other professions. Chris Shamburg is a good role model, and I'm glad he's sharing it with the rest of us.

ChrisShamburg.com/blog/

The marketing people have been paying more attention to neuroscience than many educators. Neuromarketing studies the sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective responses that we poor consumers have to marketing stimuli. Oh, and they are using functional MRI's to watch things light up in our brains, and EEG's and heart rate, respiration, and galvanic skin response.

OK, there ARE researchers using these tools to study how we learn too, but the marketing folks realize that surveys, focus groups and purchase tracking hasn't given them what they need. It might not be their tests. Sometimes we just aren't very good at knowing what we are thinking, and not very honest at reporting why we do what we do. (Case in point: all the current presidential election polls.)

A week ago, I didn't know neuromarketing even existed. I stumbled upon it on a blog at neurosciencemarketing.com.

A few years ago, I did a podcast series at NJIT about new majors that the university offers. Like neuromarketing, it was about the merging of fields. It's computational biology, biophysics and other interdisciplinary fields. It's crossdisciplinarity too - crossing disciplinary boundaries to explain one subject in the terms of another - the physics of music or the politics of literature.

I don't think this always needs to be a whole new field. It's what happens in classrooms on good days. Connections and crossovers.

I'd hate to think that the marketers are getting ahead of those of us in education in making those connections, but then I read what Nicholas Carr reports on his blog -

At McLean Hospital, a prestigious psychiatric institution affiliated with Harvard University, an advertising agency recently sponsored an experiment in which the brains of a half-dozen young whiskey drinkers were scanned. The goal, according to a report in Business Week, was “to gauge the emotional power of various images, including college kids drinking cocktails on spring break, twentysomethings with flasks around a campfire, and older guys at a swanky bar.” The results were used to fine-tune an advertising campaign for the maker of Jack Daniels.

That is scary, and it's working its way into the curriculum. Neuroeconomics combines neuroscience + economics + psychology to study how we make choices. It's useful to know what happens in the brain when we evaluate decisions and categorize risk versus reward. Its useful to educators and useful to people looking to make a sale.

Nicholas Carr is the author of The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google and he writes that "all the machines hooked up to the Net are merging together into one giant, incredibly powerful computer - the World Wide Computer. Our own personal PCs, not to mention our cell phones and gaming consoles, are turning into terminals hooked up to that big shared computer."

I think utility computing is going to send equally big shock waves across society. In fact, we can already see the early effects all around us – in the shift of control over media from institutions to individuals, in people’s growing sense of affiliation with “virtual communities” rather than physical ones, in debates over the security of personal information and the value of privacy, in the export of the jobs of knowledge workers, and in the growing concentration of wealth in a small slice of the population. All these trends either spring from or are propelled by the rise of Internet-based computing. As information utilities grow in size and sophistication, the changes to business and society - and to ourselves - will only get broader and more intense.

We are changing the machines, and the machines are changing us.

As a high school student and undergrad, I was a cineaste and hoped to go to film school. That didn't happen, but I read a lot about film, took film courses and watched a lot of movies anywhere they were showing in New York & New Jersey. I still try to keep up via Netflix and go to the movies just about every week, but the past year, what has really gotten me back into thinking, reading and talking about films has been podcasts.There are a lot of podcasts available about movies, films, and cinema - and, yes, there is a difference.

First up is "The Treatment" with Elvis Mitchell. It's one of a bunch of great podcasts available from KCRW. In Hollywood speak, a treatment is a brief overview of a script that people sometimes use to pitch a movie idea. Mitchell gets big guns into the studio - directors, writers, actors - and they talk widely about film. He's got the background. He was film critic at The New York Times.

It's a professional podcast, as you would expect knowing the host and KCRW. I like that the shows run a comfortable half hour (though when they are really interesting, you wish for an hour).

Next up is Movies 101. It's kind of Ebert & Roeper style (whatever happened to their podcast show?) with three hosts. Bob Glatzer is a film critic and Dan Webster is a Spokane film critic, and Mary Pat Treuthart is a law professor, film buff and Dan's wife. This show also comes out of a public radio (KPBX and KSFC). The shows run under 30 minutes and cover a few films that are in the theaters.

If you want some short (around 5 minutes), insightful reviews of current films, subscribe to the film reviews at KCRW. The reviewer is a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic from The Wall Street Journal, Joe Morgenstern.

"Out of the Past" is a monthly podcast with an academic sound and feel. The hosts, Clute & Edwards, have focused their aim at film noir. They are academics and their analysis is academic. But they don't sound like radio show "hosts" and the show's production is somewhere below pro and above homegrown. The shows run around 30-60 minutes.

The mix of films is diverse. You'd expect films like The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity and such - maybe not immediately Blade Runner, It's A Wonderful Life or Batman Begins. Good stuff.

The podcasts from the Film Forum in New York City. This one takes me back. A long time ago I used to attend film showings at the Film Forum. These podcasts vary widely. Some are just a brief intro to the film being shown (Coming Home introduced by producer Jerome Hellman or Mary Beth Hurt's odd 5 minute intro to Woody Allen's Interiors) to great free form film stories (Peter Bogdanovich intros his Targets with a tribute to Boris Karloff; Isabella Rossellini on Blue Velvet).

Watching the Directors is a podcast has been going since May 2006 and has 40+ episodes online. This is cool homegrown podcast done by a couple. Joe & Melissa watch lots of movies, have taken some film courses and apparently love making lists. Each show focuses on a director (Hitchcock, Woody Allen, Scorsese, George Lucas, Spielberg, Mel Brooks, Akira Kurosawa...) Some shows also have a companion "Ten Quiz" for that director. Not a whole lot of information on the website about what it's all about, but listen to a few episodes and you'll catch on.

I starting to think of them as this nice couple you know who are really good company at the movies. You watch a movie, then you go out afterwards to get something to eat and have great conversations about what you watched.

They are not pros. That's part of the appeal. Their site says, "Our kids' college fund is going to Netflix." (Unfortunately, the contribution link to PayPal didn't work.) And they also do a podcast called "Watching Theology" that looks at a single film through a theological/philosophical lens.

Many film courses are learning in the dark, but you can join these and listen on a walk in the sun or while you prep the garden for your Jersey tomatoes.

I wasn't even aware until this week that my very own Passaic County Community College had been nominated in this year's eduStyle Higher-ed Web Awards. It's "people's choice" voting and you can help recognize the best of the higher-ed web by voting.

The eduStyle site is a good way to get a look at a lot of very well-designed college websites and features. Very useful if you're considering a redesign yourself.

We are in the category for "Best Sub-site" which covers those sites that colleges use for special promotions or to drive a special audience to the main site or a program. Ours is called "Passaic County Community College - 100 Reasons" and it has one hundred reasons from serious to rather whimsical to consider the college. It has a nice Flash banner that goes through a half dozen reasons at the top and then many other reasons - people, programs, activities - some with links to interest prospective students.

You can give us a vote at edustyle.net/site.php?site=1087 or just take a look at the PCCC - 100 Reasons site if you're tired of the election process due to the Democratic primaries dragging on...

The Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University may look at quick glance as a version of the MIT OpenCourseware project. I think there are some significant differences.

"Through the OLI project, Carnegie Mellon is working to help the World Wide Web make good on its promise of widely accessible and effective online education. OLI grew out of collaboration among cognitive scientists, experts in human computer interaction and seasoned faculty who have both a deep expertise in their respective fields and a strong commitment to excellence in higher education. The project adds to online education the crucial elements of instructional design grounded in cognitive theory, formative evaluation for students and faculty, and iterative course improvement based on empirical evidence."

The MIT site offers materials from many of their courses which students and instructors can access and download. The OLI site is more involved in actually taking a course and working through an online environment.

The OLI courses include some interesting online instructional components like cognitive tutors, virtual labs, group experiments and simulations. The OLI researchers study the effectiveness and usability of the courses to improve the courses, and to contribute to effective practices in online learning environments. There is assessment and evaluation built into all courses. One objective of the project is to build a community of use for the courses in order to direct course development and improvement.

It's interesting that the courses are designed in a modular format, so you could use the courses as designed, or modify the content and sequence to fit your needs.

The first courses on the site are typical large lecture format courses (Economics, Statistics, Logic).

Will the most important impact of OLI be "increased access to education" or modeling effective online courses and course materials? The latter is something that the MIT effort lacks, so I am hopeful that OLI and other efforts will work towards both goals.

Take an online tour of the Open Learning Initiative

Every once and awhile I go to a site like YouTube and do a wildcard search. Enter an asterisk as the wild card in their search box and it looks for ALL videos. A few weeks ago it came up as 79,600,000 videos. (Just now I tried & it and maybe they are disallowing wildcard search; it said "1-20 of millions.") It's overwhelming.

And it's spring cleaning time, so I started going through my RSS feeds for blogs and deciding what to thin out. I have had to do this before. I have been a longtime user of Bloglines, but a few months ago I started adding a few feeds to my Google Reader since I use Gmail, Documents and their calendar (which now syncs with the Outlook calendar on my school office computer) every day. I'm starting to ignore my Bloglines feeds, and if you do that for a few days or weeks, the amount of UNREAD posts is frightening.

(Still not sure about what RSS is all about? Watch this simple and plain English video explanation.)

Using Google Reader means I need to snip away at my existing Bloglines feeds. But what to prune away?

Pruning #1 Right off are the blogs that post multiple short posts each day so that I can't keep up with reading. They must be part of this current interest in Twitter and other microblogs that I just don't get.

Have you tried Twitter? Users post all day with short bursts of "news" updates: "I'm having some soup; heading to a meeting; at the gym; just saw the new Porsche drive by." You can sign up with your mobile number and enter text either via the form on the site, or send text messages to the service. Depending on your privacy settings, the messages will be displayed right on their public page or just on your private page, visible only to you and your friends. I don't need to follow anyone that closely, and no one would want to follow me either.

#2 Then there are a few bloggers who have turned too commercial for me. There are two educators in particular that I have followed for a few years that I just dropped. Reason? Their posts have just become a series of tales about all the conferences and workshops they are doing. And their resource links are the same old wine in new bottles. They work hard at finding new ways to title the same talk on Web 2.0.

#3 If you want to have a blog, you have to blog. There were 7 blogs that haven't had a new post in more than a month. At least they don't pile up, but, alas, farewell.

Is Google Reader better than Bloglines? Each has some small advantages/differences. For Google Reader, for me, having in front of me when I open my Gmail is good. Subscribing and categorizing feeds in folders is equally easy. There are small things that matter (maybe just to me) like: in both I can email someone a blog post but in GR I can select my own subject line (in Bloglines, it creates an uneditable one for me. Choose either (or comment below with your own favorite reader) but if you read blogs on any regular basis, use a reader.

A year ago, Apple launched a new version of the iTunes Music Store which included an iTunes U link and 16 colleges whose podcasts can be accessed directly from the iTunes application. Happily, NJIT was one of the initial 16 schools.

Since then, they have also opened up the iTunes U area to "educational" organizations that are not universities. You can find podcasts in the "Beyond Campus" area from the NY Public Library, the Museum of Modern Art, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and others.

My updated list of schools below have partnered with Apple, Inc. to use iTunes U. This list was first posted in January 2007 when we launched our own instance of NJIT on iTunes.

Though I am no longer at NJIT or involved in iTunes U, I try to keep up on schools that offer a public face in iTunes U both to see what they are offering and to download materials. Although a lot of content is specific to a school (admissions, sports etc.), there are also public course materials and speakers that have a much broader appeal and real educational value.

This list is not official, definitive or complete - but I'll keep at it here until one that is appears.

If you know of a school that has a public presence on iTunes U, please add a link with a comment at the bottom of this entry and I'll add it to the list. NOTE: These are public sites, not those schools that have podcasts available in the iTunes Music Store but only as password-protected content for their own students. Of course, all these sites will require the free iTunes software to access and play or download content.

1. NJIT on iTunes U information & launch page or open directly in iTunes
2. Bowdoin College
3. Penn State on iTunes U
4. Stanford on iTunes U
5. Duke Digital Initiative - Open Duke University's Fuqua School of Business
6. Harvard Extension School
7. University of California at Berkeley
8. Sacramento State - open in iTunes
9. Arizona State University
10. Texas A&M
11. Ross School of Business at U of Michigan
12. Santa Monica College
13. University of California at Berkeley
14. Queens University (Canada)
15. Wellesley College
16. Georgia College and State University
17. Rollins College
18. Radford College - open Radford
19. Gordon College - open Gordon College
20. Lafayette College
21. Virginia Tech
22. Guilford Tech Community College
23. Concordia Seminary
24. Otis College of Art & Design
25. College of William & Mary
26. Villanova University
27. Florida Tech
28. Ohlone College
29. Texas Tech
30. Wilkes University
31. Seattle Pacific University
32. Abilene Christian University
33. Reformed Theological Seminary
34. Southwestern College
35. University of Michigan
36. Vanderbilt University
37. New Mexico State University
38. Agnes Scott College
39. Aquinas Institute of Theology
40. East Tennessee State University
41. UC - Davis
42. University of Washington
43. University of Wisconsin Milwaukee

We welcome your comments below with the URLs to other schools with public access to iTunes U. Though some schools are listed right within iTunes, there are plenty more that are not, so this list hopefully broadens the exposure of all the schools. James Welsh has created a wiki of participating schools (which is a better 2.0 idea than this post) at http://itunesu.pbwiki.com/ that you can also check out.

Free the knowledge!

"Published knowledge is old knowledge.The art of intelligence in the 21st Century will be less concerned with integrating old knowledge and more concerned with using published knowledge as a path to exactly the right source or sources that can create new knowledge tailored to a new situation, in real time.”

From Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace (You can access that free online, but it's a 600+ page pdf so...)

That passage was written by Robert Steele in his essay “Creating a Smart Nation.” (Steele is a former CIA operations officers and Marine Corps intelligence official whose firm, Open Source Solutions Inc., works under contract for various intelligence agencies). Educator Will Richardson quoted it on his blog last month and I scribbled it down in my notebook. Steele is writing about national security and intelligence, but I'm thinking about it as it relates to open knowledge and open textbooks and open everything else.

It's a thought-provoking line. But I'm not sure that I fully agree with it.

It's the idea that knowledge often is old as soon as it is published (in the traditional publishing sense). I really enjoyed The World Is Flat and recommend it to educators all the time - but we know that many of his statistics and examples were outdated by the time the galleys were approved and the copies hit the street.

It's also part of the reason why learning has become networked, shared and increasingly open and available.

The quote sent me looking into Robert Steele, which led me to Open Source Intelligence. OSINT involves "finding, selecting, and acquiring information from publicly available sources and analyzing it to produce actionable intelligence." To the intelligence community, "open"means overt and public sources and not the covert, cloak & dagger stuff of our movie and novel imaginations. This is intelligence from newspapers, magazines, radio, television, government documents, many resources on the Web like Google Earth, blogs, wikis, geospatial software like a Geographic Information System (GIS), conferences, academic papers, and who knows what else. (Reminds me of the character Robert Redford played in Three Days of the Condor.)

Think about that list of resources above. How different is it from where we want students to go for information?

What about that "old knowledge?" It's hard for me to not integrate prior knowledge to build the new knowledge. Some theorists might call this building schema. Schema is a good word here - from the Greek "σχήμα" meaning shape or plan. Schemas (or schemata) show up in a number of fields. Most people are familiar with a schematic diagram that represents the elements of a system using abstract, graphic symbols. In computer science, there are data models to represent the relationships of a set of concepts, or an XML schema to define the structure, content and the semantics of XML documents. Our old buddy, Kant, used it in philosophy for "referencing of a category to a sense impression through time" (and I still don't get it - I was always more of a Locke fan).

Certainly we put aside old knowledge when it is outdated or disproven. Today we have access so so much new knowledge that filtering is a key skill. We old-timers that try to keep up with the new probably have more trouble. If you just ignore the new, or if you're young and just accept the new as true knowledge, life is simpler.

Take that pesky Wikipedia (which I frequently link to here on the blog). There's old knowledge there. Lots of it, copied & pasted from all over the place. But there's also much that is new being recorded as it happens. (Check the Barack Obama history page on Wikipedia and see how often it is being updated and hacked.)

I'm convinced that we need to first educate the educators and then have them teach their students how to filter and sort the good new knowledge, remix it with the old and have strategies for interpreting the inevitable conflicts that will occur. Information literacy and critical thinking may seem to be old terms, but much of what we need to teach in those areas is brand new.

We also have to make the new knowledge known, as we have always done with the old knowledge. The mediums for transmitting that knowledge may be themselves new. Publishing the content may be posting it online.

A friend nicely told me that he was getting a little tired of me talking about "open everything" on this blog. Perhaps, I have focused on that category a bit much of late. Still, how can we discuss all that I'm talking about here and not get into open: education, textbooks, knowledge, courseware and all the rest of it?

I'll close with a return to Robert Steele and that opening quote. There's a place for the old and the new. You can download his book free online, and you can pay Amazon.com $22 for a hardcover copy of On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World. What I don't feel there's a place for today is only the old information, or only the new.

"The problem with spies is they only know secrets," says Steele. The problem with education is...

Reading Tim's thorough dissection today of the blog getting a million hits in April is illuminating, but it doesn't address what gives me the most pleasure from the numbers.

Last year at this time, I wrote a post called "Bookmarklets and Favelets" about using social bookmarking tools and sites. It's a very average post with a useful list of links to social bookmarking sites. The week it was posted it probably has about 100 direct hits. (The number at the end of each post tells you how many people actually linked directly to that post. A hit on our home page probably leads someone to read the latest post but that post doesn't get any "credit" for that in the count.) I looked at it today - 21, 333 direct hits. The post has a life.

I thought briefly about being a journalist when I was an undergrad. If I had ended up making it to the big show - say at the New York Times - I would write pieces that people would read and then throw away. True, some pieces get reprinted, clipped out and saved (I still do that all the time), anthologized or end up in books, but the vast majority disappear. That's depressing.

This post (and hopefully some others that are much better) will be read more in the months to come than it will be read this month when it is fresh and new. I like that a lot. Traditional (and paid!) journalists are also reaping this benefit of online publishing. Their writing gets read again and again online long after it appeared in print on paper.

I guess Tim & I could think of getting hit on a million times in another way too. I checked the dictionary and found "hit on" (No, not to make, especially sexual overtures to) also means to discover or meet especially by chance. That's a perfectly serendipitous way of looking at this.