Among other speakers at our Internet2 Day was Doug Van Houweling, President and CEO of Internet2, etc. Just about every discussion of Internet2 seems to come back around to video delivery. I was hoping Doug, speaking on the topic “Beyond Tomorrow’s Internet” would help open peoples’ minds to some real innovative ideas. Unfortunately, while his notes about partnerships, neutral nets, and the nuts and bolts of Internet2 becoming everyone’s bandwidth were well taken and on-point, when he had a chance to talk about innovation he fell right back into the same old song and dance I’ve seen a dozen times before.

Doug’s house of the future was essentially my household with some Jetson’s style video layered on top. So you have kids surfing the net and using IM and eyeball cams, and you have work and downloads happening with impressive speed. But beyond that it was just more video: high def videoconferencing, video phones, high def delivery of movies, high def entertainment delivery and storage. I’m not denying that most of these are good things that will happen. They are happening now, they’ll just be happening faster and with more clarity.

But that’s exactly the problem. When it comes to communication, there’s a reason George and Jane Jetson’s video phones haven’t become ubiquitous, and it’s not about bandwidth. It’s because people don’t want them. Videophones are a dead idea. Videoconferencing, no matter how high-def, is a highly constrained technology. The fourth wall remains, the high transactional distance remains in full force. Video conference works in certain settings and with a certain definition of “works” that is usually based on there being no other technology available. But adding increased clarity and more frames-per-second will have almost no effect on that rate of success. Videconference is simply a very poor educational tool that is highly desired by those who don’t have it, valued by those who have nothing else, and easy to understand by those who don’t use it.

No matter how speedy and how many pixels there are, the heart of videoconferencing is hollow. You can make it bigger, you can make it faster, you can make it sharper, but it doesn’t make it better. It has an undeniable hold on the imagination of administrators (and when it comes to entertainment it makes great sense), but ultimately it’s just what I’ve started calling “polishing the poo.” No matter how lacquered and attractive, it’s still a turd. It’s not innovation.

[ruminate internet2 videoconference poo-polishing]

Our Internet2 Day demo went quite well (a few photos here– I actually did present despite the picture of me in apparent stasis). Our basic question was: if you had Internet2 connectivity right now (we do in fact have access to Internet2 bandwidth, but since it doesn’t go anywhere except to other Internet2 participating institutions it isn’t particularly useful) what would you do with it?

Doing a demo on this question is a bit tricky– we don’t spend time developing for extremely high-bandwidth, so anything we did would have to be theoretical, but it was important to me that we tie it to real practices. So we basically came up with a demo that talked about creating a unified interface that would pull together the three main segments of a future classroom interaction:

1. “big data”, video, visualization space
2. interactive, synchronous classroom space
3. interactive collaborative space

All three of these are achievable now, but bringing them together cohesively is the big-bandwidth dream. Not incidentally, the three pieces align perfectly with the “arc of technologies”: broadcast, transaction, and transformation.

My idea to do real-time scanning electron microscopy and analysis was scuttled because the remotely controlled scanning electron microscope was being used for a different session right after ours. So we decided on a hypothetical class bringing together remote biology and geography students to study the Avian Flu. The basic layout was:

• Center-stage was the big data channel for scientific presentation (lab techniques, field techniques, visualization of the virus, microscopy, and GIS visualization of viral spread). I provided a narration of a few minutes of video presenting these modes, some simulated.
• Stage right we had the Elluminate! live classroom where I worked with the remote students on analysing the potential spread and detection of Avian Flu in relation to population centers and migratory bird routes from Southeast Asia. The “remote” students were actually in the audience on laptops representing students from all over Alaska, some along bird routes, some near high population centers, some neither. With Elluminate they interacted using voice, whiteboard interactions, text chat, and various presence indicators (hand raising, emoticons, etc).
• Stage Left was a GroupSystems collaboration session facilitated by colleague Bob Briggs allowed the students to collaborate on a divergent brainstorming session about facts and factors based on what they had learned that were important to everyone as well as to their specific location, then a convergent session to create a clean list for further learning, research, study, writing, etc. with a goal of creating a place-based resource on Avian Flu for their communities.

There were only two minor technical flubs on the part of the sound and light stage crew, but they were basically invisible to the audience anyway. The important things were we were on-time, the transitions all worked seamlessely, and we were able to hammer home the most important messages: creating a learning environment that allowed for creation of new meaning, place-based relevance in the learning environment, reaching a distributed cohort across disciplines, real-life examples of the educational arc, that much of this was available now and that Internet2 could be about more than just video (more on that in my next post). I may have ranted a little bit towards the end in reaction to earlier speakers that kept talking about making the location of users irrelevant (equal access) where I want to see the location take on a new, important relevance in learning!

[ruminate internet2 bigdata]

I’m late in noting the hiatus of Stephen Downes’ blog (and site), the announcement coming– as it did– during a busy time. So I add my voice to the chorus of farewells, but would like to note that it’s with only a touch of selfish sadness at this particular river of information drying up for a while. Whatever the circumstances, Stephen is hopefully doing what all innovative thinkers must do from time-to-time– stepping back, contemplating, and eventually moving in a new direction (or back in the same direction with renewed vigor and insight). I wish him great success!

[ruminate downes edtech edblogging]

Off in a few minutes to Etech. Sold out, with activities going late into the night– it should be a great time. Buttressed at the beginning with a visit by Link and Gabby (friends from California) and ending with a Seattle sojourn with ex-Alaskan Kirsten– I am looking forward to an intense bout of getting away from it all.

I’m curious to meet other educators who might be at Etech– it’s not a traditional conference for the ed folks (I’m eternally grateful that the Big Kahuna recognizes its value for me and has paid my way two years in a row), but you never know. If you’re involved with education, educational technology, etc. and will be there, drop me a line!

“Getting away from it all” entails conference blogging and such, of course. Check out everyone’s contributions with Technorati, flickr, del.icio.us, etc.

[ruminate etech edtech]

David Wiley writes:

I think we may know how to mashup “even unpopular tools,” depending on
what one means by mashup. By mashup, I mean utilizing a wide range of
individual tools (like flickr, delicious, technorati, etc.) and
aggregating the results of those uses into a collection of data that I
can do new things with. If this is what we mean by mashup, I think that
RSS and our imaginations give us most of the answers we need.

I agree with David, though with two rather large caveats: ease-of-use and federated data sharing.

RSS does give us the base to remix using different tools, but the ease-of-use and integration can stand a lot of improvement. This is also a matter of conception and terminology: simple aggregation is relatively easy, even for the non-technically inclined, but real remixing still has a long way to go, particularly if students are going to be able to synthesize, remix, and share. I still find myself having to go through contortions (custom programming) just to achieve relatively simple integration from different sources.

Finding a way to federate data is also going to become more and more important. It’s an interesting feature of many social tools that they thrive as they scale… the more users, the better the experience will be for each. As early pioneers  like flickr and del.icio.us are joined by dozens of competitors, the fractured store of data impacts the whole system.

Ultimately, for example, it shouldn’t matter if a user chooses del.icio.us, furl, spurl, or others as their front-end to manage their bookmark data, the core of that data should be federated across systems. Rather than compete in the zero-sum game of locking users in, these services should compete in terms of interface, features, and data mining techniques to the pool of aggregated data.

If there is no sharing, then all the remixing tools in the world become weakened (if not irrelevant) because people will be operating solely within their own, limited ecosystem and an artificially stunted folksonomy.

[ruminate, social software, remix, rss, edtech, federate]

Alan’s post about the ugly phrase “blogs in education” was stuck in my aggregating craw (literally, my “To Contemplate” newsbin) for a while because my agreement with his main points wasn’t aligning with my own language.

The fundamental truth is this: the blogging activities encouraged and demanded through classroom activities should ultimately prove to be just one of many parts of the student’s blogging activities. In the beginning it may be directed and contrived– that’s the standard part facilitated by giving them opportunities to practice. But to really work, it should finally become part of the practice of blogging.

The blog (singular– not a dedicated class blog, even if it starts that way) is the student’s space. They own it just as they own their notebooks from which they share pages and entries in the context of the class, while other writing– reflecting, observation, commentary, etc.– exists as independent artifacts that make sense in other contexts but have little or nothing to do with my class.

I want students to blog and share that blog space with me and their classmates; I want them to allow me the privilege of sharing their space for a short time. The real success, for me, are students who recognize the myriad of selfish benefits that are part of blogging and continue doing so after my class is over– for the day, for the week, and for good.

“Blogs in education” is ugly. “Using your blog and learning” is sublime.

[ruminate, edblogging, blogging, edtech]

Here’s an interesting post with some nice anecdotes and links to classroom blogs that have spawned independent student bloggers and blog activities in later classes. It’s great to see productive practices taking hold and students shaping the environment to their needs.

I also like the concepts of “scribes” and the math dictionary. I will be passing these on to a few folks right away.

[ruminate, edblogging, math, edtech]

Thanks to D’arcy for the pointer to the Simpsomaker where I created my Simpsons’ alter-ego– Blog Guy (slightly altered to include amazingly life-like scraggly beard)

Speaking of The Simpsons, last night was one of my favorite episodes (Homer becomes Internet journalist, wins Pulitzer, finally makes up stories that get him spirited away to Wonderland-like “The Island” where those who know too much are kept in a constantly drugged stupor) where Comic Book Guy complains:

There is no emoticon for what I am feeling!

[ruminate, simpsons, blog guy]

My son, in 7th grade, is doing your typical 7th grade science project– find a topic, do some research, create a display of some kind, make a presentation. I’d like to see this activity, which carries significant points, be a little more innovative, but this is my second child so my protest reserves are low and this can be a great activity.

Unbelievably, though, in addition to a selection of books, he is limited to using a few dozen selected, vetted online (and necessarily– since chosen ahead of time– generic, and shallow) resources. The “summarize the Britannica” exercise has become a “summarize one of these selected resources” exercise.

Why are teachers so intent on keeping kids out of the deep end of the pool instead of teaching them to swim? I saw a news segment about 6 month old infants being taught to swim and survive if they fall into a pool, but my 13 year old, who manages an online “clan” of gamers, can’t look for original resources on the web? How about providing a rubric for evaluating resources and letting the students take a stab at it? Have the students provide a printout, a link, and their own evaluation? At worst the teacher can reject a resource. At best, Galen could include information like the emergent use of ragworms as a model for a new method of endoscopy– which is pretty darn cool!

It’s ironic that this project stresses choosing a topic that is important and interesting to the students, relevant, timely, etc… but the students are fed musty resources from the Hallowed List of Approved General Reference Materials.

[ruminate, pedagogy, authority]

From George Siemens comes a link to a collection of resources on Gaming in Education. George also writes:

The adaptive nature of many gaming environments mimics real life - we
mak a decision and it changes things, which means our next decision is
based on an altered environment. Many learning approaches often fail to
capture the “altered state” because decision are made in a vacuum.

Very true. An important aspect of many games, too, is that these alterations and necessary responses happen in a short– usually artificially accelerated– timeframe. This is where the potential of games for engaging the emerging generation becomes great.

[ruminate, edgaming, edtech]