November 9, 2011
Presentation
The Role of Educator in a Networked World
Stephen Downes, November 9, 2011,
for EC&I 831: Social Media & Open Education, Alec Couros, Online, via Elluminate
In this presentation I revisit the 'role of the educator' discussion I offered last year for the same course, offering a point of view stressing a new approach to learning, and drawing out the consequences of that in a series of new roles for educators, leading to the conclusion that the role of the educator itself will be unbundled in the world of online learning.
Why Kids Can’t Search (maybe we need to think of seeking?)
Alan Levine,
CogDogBlog, November 9, 2011.
I simply agree with Alan Levine here: "Kids can’t search because the questions we are asking ar enough big enough. Let’s stop patting ourselves on our backs for our critical thinking superiority." Not that I sell my critical thinking superiority short - I think I'm a much better reasoner than a 6-year-old. But we as adults have a chronic habit of confusing indifference with inability, a habit we should cure. If we cared to, that is.
OERu UStream
Various Authors,
USteam, November 9, 2011.
The the OER university founding anchor partners have been having their inaugural planning meeting in New Zealand. This site provides access to UStreams of the live meetings (this afternoon / evening ) and recordings (from yesterday). The meeting agenda is available online, and you can follow the web discussion under #oeru on identi.ca and twitter.
[Link] [Comment][Tags: Open Educational Resources, Discussion Lists]
Launch of New COAR Website
Various Authors,
Website, November 9, 2011.
By email from Birgit Schmidt, this notice arrives: "The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) is pleased to announce the launch of its new website. The website includes fresh content, added Web2.0 functionality, and an updated look and feel. The site reflects a great deal of input from members. In particular, it includes:
- Online discussions hosted by working groups such as the Interoperability Forum
- Published documents by COAR working groups, such as The Case for Interoperability for Open Access Repositories, a new Open Access briefing paper
- A global map of COAR’s members and partners
- Announcements of upcoming events
- Links to the COAR Facebook page and Twitter presence
- RSS feeds to new content
[Link] [Comment][Tags: Twitter, RSS, Learning Object Repositories]
Reflecting on #socialartists and #change11
Nancy White,
Full Circle Associates, November 9, 2011.
You won't want to miss this retrospective post from last week's guest, Nancy White. The post is a rich tapestry of links to blog comments, background readings and discussion of last week's themes. She reflects first on the process of participating in the #Change11 course, and then expands on the idea of "social artistry" that caught out collective imagination during her week. She traces the concept back to its origins in the work of Etienne Wenger and quotes on the topic at length from David Wilcox. She also draws out the closely associated concept of habitus, drawing from Vanessa Vaile, who said, "I see strong traces of habitus in Digital Habitats." According to Wikipedia, habitus is "the set of socially learnt dispositions, skills and ways of acting, that are often taken for granted, and which are acquired through the activities and experiences of everyday life." But if you really want more, you'll want to see Bourdieu's The Logic of Practice. See also this post on setting norms.
Who Influenced Blogworld?
David Armano,
Logic + Emotion, November 9, 2011.
I killed my Klout account yesterday, reasoning that a reliance on bad data is worse than a reliance on no data whatsoever. And today I saw this article from David Armano documenting the league-table list of "influencers" at a recent conference produced by a market analysis company called Radian 6. My challenge to this is twofold: first, what value is created by producing rankings of people involved at a conference? And second, what is the legitimacy of the basis for these rankings? Armano's connects suggest how easily they the data can be skewed: "My presentation was full of short, sticky phrases and frameworks—designed for tweets and social note taking. This is no accident—I would not be worth my weight as a communicator if I were not able to break down communications into memorable bits worth sharing." The tools that do the measurements begin to shape the messages they measure - and not for the better.
The Social Graph is Neither
Maciej Cegłowski,
Pinboard Blog, November 9, 2011.
I like this article a lot. It captures many of my own misgivings about social networks and adds a number of new ones I hadn't considered, and does so with a turn of phase leaving many memorable quotes in its wake. To cast the thesis in a nutshell, the author argues, first, that human relationships are too complex to be captured in a predefined set of fields or relations, and second, that because these services need to observe your every behaviour for marketing purposes they create an environment that is profoundly unsocial. "Imagine the U.S. Census as conducted by direct marketers - that's the social graph. Social networks exist to sell you crap. The icky feeling you get when your friend starts to talk to you about Amway, or when you spot someone passing out business cards at a birthday party, is the entire driving force behind a site like Facebook." See also Ross Mayfield, who proclaims that "page rank is dead." And D'Arcy Norman, who on moving his content, opines, "If it’s less 'social' (if tapping into a corporately-monotized social graph makes it social), it’s also feeling more… valuable?"
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