Ruminate

The paperwork’s done and the credit cards are smoking– I can definitely announce I will be at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology (etech) conference again this year in San Diego. I arrive early in the afternoon on Mar. 5 and leave in the morning on the 10th. Will you be there? If so, drop me a line so we can meet up! Unless given a good reason to rent a car for a day or two, I will be hanging out near the convention center the whole time.

I found last year’s conference to be exceptionally valuable even though (or perhaps because) it isn’t an “educational” conference. I’m still chewing on a lot of what I learned there… and it’s nice to get outside of the academic and ed-tech bubble a bit and see what the rest of the world is doing and where things are headed.

[ruminate, etech, etech06, san diego, conference]

I began a small wiki experiment tonight which should provide some good info for upcoming talks about consistency and authority in collaborative authoring structures. I’ll keep you posted on the results…

[ruminate, wiki]

The ebbs and flows of the blog audience are strange. In some ways, I’d love to be an A-lister (at least when it comes to ed-tech-learning) theorizing on the esoterica of social software, the implications of folksonomy, the latest and greatest remixes… but down here on the lower-rungs  of the ladder where I operate from day-to-day, the faculty I work with and the people I present to are really at the beginning of this transformative journey, desiring nuts and bolts information about getting started creating a new learning environment, and managing these new processes given their already exploding workload.

Figuring out the applications and ramifications of Connectivist learning theory may interest me, but judging from the amount of backchannel discussion, the basics of classroom blogging with reference to the familiar world of discussion boards (and the two parts to come about that topic) are of much more interest to my readers. I don’t know that attempting to do both satisfies either audience. Am I here for my faculty or here for my (often) more advanced “peers”?

It also makes me wonder if perhaps many faculty– trying to follow these discussions and derive pragmatic instruction for their classrooms– are either being left behind or feeling forced forward beyond what they are ready for. There is certainly a lot of value left to be wrung out of even “old school” technologies like discussion boards, much less blogs and the newly-revitalized wikis. But I hear regularly from (and see discussion involving) faculty frustrated at being unable to really integrate podcasting (originated by themselves or by their students), or videocasting, or remixing using five different popular technologies… instructors who have yet to really get the whole context of blogging and syndication in their more friendly and immediately useful forms, much less these relatively cutting-edge methods which are fraught with technological difficulty.

[ruminate, edtech, blogging, edblogging, social software]

The problem with Liz and Scoble’s argument (the current trend seems to be to use A-List bloggers names as if you personally know them, so I’m going to do so) about being an “edge case” or an “early adopter” is that both of them want to graft an emotional meaning onto statistical terms, and they are both worse off for it.

Scoble sees “edge case” as a critical appellation, feeling (rightly) that in his past it’s been used as a derisive term standing in for strange, eccentric, radical, etc. It might have been used that way before, but it’s a misuse, and there’s no evidence Liz was trying to insult him.

Liz wants to misapply a temporal element to the discussion. All early adopters are edge cases, by definition. But the reverse is not true. She’s right that an early adopter is someeon who recognizes the value in something before others do. It’s precisely why you can’t call someone an early adopter when they actually are one– you have no way of knowing that they are this special kind of edge case unless their actions/tools are picked up and used by a larger body of people.

It’s very simple: an edge case is someone who does something statistically out of the norm; an early adopter is an edge case whose actions or methods became relatively widespread. All early adopters are edge cases. Not all edge cases are early adopters.

Of course, we all want to see our edge case behavior as being that of the early adopter– it validates our decisions and represents our optimism that we are on the “right” track. The landscape of technology (and educational technology, dear reader who wonders why I’m commenting on this at all) is littered with the remnants of the edge cases who– despite their confidence and enthusiasm– never became the representatives of new movements. There’s nothing wrong with it. In fact, it’s laudable. After all, one has to be on the edge to eventually receive the accolades of being an early adopter.

(Incidentally, in this case I agree with Liz: the average user is never going to read 840 feeds. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to work on changing the products to suit this kind of voracious information ingestion even though I keep up with 500+ feeds myself and feel his pain. And I think Scoble is changing the terms of the discussion when he equates that kind of behavior with seeing the product of rolling together that many– or more– resources as one does in Google News. Reading a few top stories from 700+ news outlets is a very different proposition from actually tracking those news outlets, much less the 10,000 that form the basis for Google News as a whole. Information consumption of various kinds will grow, particularly in very narrow, highly vertical areas, but the average person wants entertainment, and uses the time they could be information processing engaging in passive reception… and happily so.)

[ruminate, information, edge cases, early adopters]

Connectivism is, I believe, a profound new way of approaching knowledge, education, and the learner. It is informed by a powerful metaphor of the network. George Siemen’s latest snippet, though, is a metaphor in search of something new to represent. The bottom line is that his description of “separating knowledge from the learner” is (despite his disclaimer) continuing/distributed/distance education. Recognizing routes for learning other than the formal class is nothing new, and whether your learning comes from reading a few good blogs, subscribing to syndicated feeds, or mailing lists, it’s still a function of time and effort, just as one could achieve the same end in any of the many distance learning courses that use these same tools.

It’s called “distributed education” and it is powerful– people have been explaining how (and delivering it) for many years. In the end, I can spend a few hours a week going to a good class, I can spend a few hours a week having a class bring it to me, or I can spend a few hours a week using the “come to me” web– as long as whatever agents I choose are contemporary in their approach, I gain all of the “new” benefits George outlines in his final sentence. Thankfully, the possibilities of getting what I need using the last method are much greater in number than they used to be, both in the general sense because of the growing number of blogs, wikis, forums, and other syndicated resources, but alsi in the particular sense because these tools are being brought into the contemporary distributed learning environment.

The real “problem” is that knowledge is ultimately still an entity possessed within persons… it’s just much more obvious now that it’s a lot of persons. The network isn’t the knowledge, the medium is not the message. The revolution of social software allows for– as George has recognized in the Connectivism meme– the exposure of this network for traversal, syndication, amplification, and back-/re-feeding. But the content is as critical as the connections, else the connections have no value, and the knowledge is still housed in individuals, though they are much more accessible.

[ruminate, connectivism, social software]