Musings on education, techology, and life..
After an immensely frustrating conversation a few days ago in which various stereotypes were thrown about w/r/t techies, women, leadership and more, this frame from Clint LaLonde’s fabulous intro video for a Brian Lamb keynote (hey, where’s the archive of the presentation?) caught my attention.
I have to admit: I’ve never been a big fan of Dave Eggers. Planks of jealousy, I suppose– hard not to be jealous of his juggernaut ride to fame, positive critical reception as a genius author, brilliant and beautiful wife, and the general perception that he is cooler than all the rest of us combined– reinforced with a thick paste McSweeney’s cliquishness and and my annoyance at his barefoot appearance on some C-SPAN BookTV panel. Puhleeeze. But this speech genuinely moved me. Not only is the 826 Valencia project simple and amazing, but the obviously nervous Eggers was endearing, even earnest. I feel guilty at my smallness when it comes to Eggers and how it has colored my feelings about his writing and other work when he demonstrates the passion and sincerity I sorely need to cultivate in myself!
I try to limit my political posts, but Keith Olbermann is on fire!
As I struggle with trying to update a video embedding plugin on a blog it doesn’t hurt to keep in mind what it used to be like, not so long ago. Although I wasn’t into the technical details back then, I remember using a Mac Classic and text-catting with a friend on the other side of the desk. And the TI-99/4A with its awesome application cartridges, the Commodore and Vic 20 churning away to save files on tape that I had typed in from a magazine (peek, poke) so I could play a game. Or the first time I used QEMM and Desqview and could switch between multiple applications– Sidekick and Lotus Symphony, I think… with 16 colors! And all the hours I spent on a VAX terminal, writing papers in LaTeX with TPU and processing them for the one laser printer on campus, a hugely expensive monstrosity guarded carefully by the “nodies” who ran the “computer node” aka lab.
The whole conceptual shift from using applications to “being online” has been so fundamental and overpowering– coloring everything we do– that it’s hard to remember that crazy computing land before time, all of 15 years ago.
The official followup to Did You Know: Shift Happens, Did You Know 2.0 is worth the 8 minute viewing time for anyone involved in technology, culture and education.
Discussion, sources, and reactions can be found at the ShiftHappens wikispace.
I’ve seen great educational video of various kinds, but I’ve yet to see even a single example of a live distance learning event– teaching session, presentation, panel– where the video of the speaker(s) that was piped through alongside the web page activity, visuals, or even bulleted-list PowerPoint slides made an iota of positive contribution to the experience. I don’t care if it’s the Elluminate Video window, Adobe Connect, IM video, or a highly polished and produced second stream… it adds up to nothing. The potential benefits have yet– in any example I have ever witnessed– to outweigh the costs in bandwidth (and accessibility), setup hassles, and delivery issues. There are so many better ways to make use of that visual channel anyway!
I realize there’s a theoretical and logical argument for video as a means to allow for personal expressiveness, body language, facial cues, etc., but in the real world those benefits are lost because of video size, lighting, positioning, resolution, network congestion… all the non-theoretical, real-world technological issues that inevitable spring up when you don’t have the means to create the artful illusion that there is no production going on at all.
And if you work around those obstacles? Then you have to face the reality that effective non-verbal communication when you have only a monitor view of the audience (if that) and a (usually awkwardly placed) camera that you can’t look into while looking at your own materials or video feed (is there anything worse than being on the receiving end of the presenter who is constantly looking slightly away from you all the time) is a talent limited to the very, very few.
Creating an effective video presentation– regardless of the technology– demands skills not much different from those possessed by good actors. Good video presentation is a lot harder to do than it looks as a viewer and there aren’t very many who are good at it. The worst result isn’t just an ineffective presentation that could have been better, but potentially a negative association on the part of the viewer conflating this poor experience with distance learning in general. That is a bad taste in the mouth of participants that takes an inordinate amount of effort to overcome later.
I’m not picking on David Warlick here. He might be a master at stagecraft and makes the transition to video that so few seem able to do, or he might be optimistic that the video stream is doing something for his audience that it actually isn’t. I tend to assume the latter not because of David Warlick, who I have never seen in any medium, but because I’ve seen so many video presentations now– including some that have pretty extensive production and speakers who I know to be engaging face-to-face– where that turns out to be the case. The simple video feed is an illusory solution to the very real problems of being expressive and engaging while teaching at a distance. It’s a mirage borne of hopefulness (or desperation), leeching away energy that would be better spent transforming educational interactions than trying to replicate face-to-face experiences.
Erin McKean’s TED Talk on Redefining the Dictionary is pithy, insightful and interesting. Usually with web video you get to choose just two of those qualities. It’s also the first time since an early lit crit class that I can remember anyone using the word "synecdochical" in any sentence, much less one spoken out loud.
McKean’s talk is about how traditional the form of one of our most common references– the dictionary– is, having hardly changed in hundreds of years (it is essentially steam punk technology) and some pointers to how it might be transformed in the light of distributed, networked knowledge and read/write social webs. Some of this distribution is already happening with online dictionaries and dictionary like things of various kinds, integration of dictionary functions into search engines, Wiktionary, etc… but the importance of this talk is not about dictionaries per se as much as it is the concept of the dictionary as a metaphor for ways the social web can be produce levers for knowledge. And not just in the sense of members of that web contributing to a centralized resource, but participants’ own sites as sources themselves.
The exciting possibility is finding more ways to bring together individual small pieces of word wisdom, from magic words to the insight of irascible linguist bloggers, from one-letter words to the dictionary of grandiloquence, one that includes inveterate word-coiners and language observers alike.
This talk also has me thinking about the knowledge that we believe is passed down to us from our elders. In the talk, McKean refers to the story of the Ham Butt. My mother not only cuts the ends off the ham before she cooks them (which meant we got to fry that tasty piece up for an early treat) but told me this exact story by explanation, attributing it to my great-grandmother, who confirmed it not long before she died. I still do the same, despite knowing better. I have no doubt my great grandmother believed that she originated the story and my mother certainly believes it is a family anecdote. How much of what we think we know as educators, what we have learned can or can’t or should or shouldn’t be done is Ham Butt wisdom?
A bit Devo, a bit Hellogoodbye… it’s “Computer Camp Love”
I know it’s an easy target, but this video depicting a completely different kind of potential intersection between Second Life and Real Life made me chuckle:
[linktribution: Jim Groom]