hyperventilating over learning

Here is a great story about the power of blended learning written in preparation for International Women's Day:

But how can you not hyperventilate? My students, many of them first-generation Americans and the first in their families to attend college, are doing real research. They are doing the research that was previously restricted to scholars who possessed letters of introduction, invitations, and appointments. My students and I have none of these things. We are in a public school during a recession. And yet, we are true researchers.

 In the morning, students knock on the library door, begging to be let in. “We open in five minutes!” I call. I savor the first five minutes of the day alone with my coffee cup and my own research. Currently, I am researching Berenice Abbott, the WPA photographer known for her “Changing New York” photographs of the city. Her work is among 700,000 archived materials in New York Public Library’s Digital Gallery.

You don’t have to live in New York or own a library card to access the Gallery. Like Google Books—which also digitizes historical books—the Gallery is available to anyone with an internet connection. All you need is five quiet minutes in the morning with your coffee cup—or four, depending on the day.

Today I will only have four minutes. Students are rapping on the door, pounding harder. They want in, and come barreling through.     

 “Morning, Miss!” “What new books do you have?” “Can I use a laptop?” “Can I borrow headphones?” “How do I embed video in PowerPoint?” “Where are the Shakespeare plays?”

update 2

As you know, Mubarek's speech yesterday was a huge disappointment to people who are fighting for democracy in Egypt. I guess it was one of those "trial balloons" politicians are so fond of :)

Today at about 6:30 p.m. in Cairo...

egypt update

Hosni Mubarak 'may step down' - Al Jazeera English (live stream here - Feb. 10 live blog here)

Egypt's Mubarak 'may stand down' - BBC (click on Live tab for updates)

revolution 2.0

from Three Weeks in Egypt with Alan Taylor (The Atlantic) - John Moore/Getty Images

On October 4, 2010 the New Yorker published this in a piece called Small Change - Why the revolution will not be tweeted by Malcolm Gladwell:

The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.

and

The evangelists of social media ... seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960. “Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,” Aaker and Smith write. But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires.

I think the recent use of social media to galvanize a group of web savvy internet users to sign an online petition against a CRTC ruling (that would allow large telecom companies to impose usage based billing on their competition) is an example of how the internet can be an efficient place for communities of interest to come together and advocate. I also think that participating in online referenda about irksome billing policies is qualitatively different than engaging in high-risk activism such as "sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960."

In the case of the anti-UBB petition, the petition signers saw a good result when Minister of Industry Tony Clement tweeted this:

As Gladwell says, the internet can foster a kind of activism but not the kind that requires the activists to develop a strong enough sense of commitment to the cause, and to each other, to support the risk-taking essential to creating deep social change.

On January 27, the day he was to be detained in Egypt, Wael Ghonim tweeted this:

And yesterday he tweeted this:

So what is all that about? Why is this participant in the January 25th uprising in Egypt, an uprising where hundreds of participants have been injured and detained and a number have been killed (there is controversy over the death toll numbers but most put the number at over 100), making this claim? Is it because he works for Google and sees the world through a 2.0 prism? Or is he experiencing a magnification of commitment that occurs when a revolution is tweeted?

I think there's an unmistakable effect that the Internet has had on dissident communities, that it has emboldened them. I recall when I was in the Islamist slums of Cairo, a friend of mine that I started to talk politics with silenced me immediately and said in Arabic (SPEAKING ARABIC) "The walls have ears."

There was a sense of fear in daily life in Egypt. And what I believe the Internet has given to dissidents is the -- the feeling that there are those in the West who care about them, an ability to talk with other people. So, it's a really -- a very empowering feeling that -- that nothing can take away.

David Keyes from CyberDissidents.org on NPR
(see video below - transcript here)

Gladwell might well argue that the ties between the Egyptian protesters and other Twitterverse participants are the weak ties of low-risk activism

but if those ties, however weak, strengthen the commitment and motivation of the people who have ties strong enough to support each other in high-risk activism, perhaps the revolution should be tweeted... and retweeted.

(anti?)social media

Here is a commentary on online personas from Ross Gardner:

more time to think

This is how Simon [a young student and son of the author Anne Trubek] describes why he hates to handwrite: "I have it all in my memory bank, and then I stop, and my memory bank gets wiped out."

As a great follow up to Letters Of Note, here is an article about the art and history of handwriting. In Handwriting Is History, Anne Trubek starts by discussing how we connect handwriting to "personal identity (handwriting signals something unique about each of us), intelligence (good handwriting reflects good thinking) and virtue (a civilized culture requires handwriting)." She traces the history of writing to try to understand how we got to the point where the technology of forming letters on paper with an ink-delivery device came to mean so much to us.

Handwriting slowly became a form of self-expression when it ceased to be the primary mode of written communication. When a new writing technology develops, we tend to romanticize the older one. The supplanted technology is vaunted as more authentic because it is no longer ubiquitous or official. Thus for monks, print was capricious and script reliable. So too today: Conventional wisdom holds that computers are devoid of emotion and personality, and handwriting is the province of intimacy, originality and authenticity.

Our romanticism of handwriting has led to the "handwriting effect" where assessors rank elegantly scripted prose much higher than the same prose written in chicken scrawl.

"...[T]yping in school has a democratizing effect, as did the typewriter. It levels the look of prose to allow expression of ideas, not the rendering of letters, to take center stage."

But more than that, using a keyboard rather than handscripting allows us "cognitive automaticity, the ability to think as fast as possible, freed as much as can be from the strictures of whichever technology we must use to record our thoughts. ... This is what typing does for millions. It allows us to go faster, not because we want everything faster in our hyped-up age, but for the opposite reason: We want more time to think."

deep in my heart

It has been incredibly harrowing following the news from Iran. We are learning lessons about bravery, commitment and justice.

Joan Baez sings "We Shall Overcome" (with some lyrics in Farsi) for the Iranian people.

We are also learning more about how to navigate the so-called new media. One thing I like about the new media is that it is all critical literacy all the time. As I read along on Twitter, 140 characters or less at a time, it was interesting to watch how some sources came to be trusted(ish) and some were rejected.

Vietnam was the first "television war," the first "living-room war." What did it mean to the war and what did it mean to the people watching?

"The conventional wisdom has generally been that for better or for worse it was an anti-war influence. It brought the "horror of war" night after night into people's living rooms and eventually inspired revulsion and exhaustion. The argument has often been made that any war reported in an unrestricted way by television would eventually lose public support. Researchers, however, have quite consistently told another story... Only during the 1968 Tet and 1972 Spring offensives, when the war came into urban areas, did its suffering and destruction appear with any regularity on TV. For the first few years of the living room war most of the coverage was upbeat. ... By the fall of 1967, polls were already showing a majority of Americans expressing the opinion that it had been a "mistake" to get involved in Vietnam ... television was probably more a follower than a leader in the nation's [United States of America] change of course in Vietnam." -- from the Museum of Broadcast Communications.

Television told its story from September 1959 to April 1975. The Winter Soldiers told theirs in February 1971:

"We who have come here to Washington have come here because we feel we have to be winter soldiers now. We could come back to this country; we could be quiet; we could hold our silence; we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, the fact that the crimes threaten it, not reds, and not redcoats but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out." -- John Kerry at the Winter Soldier hearings :: transcript.

The Winter Soldier Investigation received little media coverage at the time but did prompt the April and May 1973 Fulbright Hearings.

But a revolution was tweeted and You Tubed. We turned our profile pictures green. We navigated amateur and professional news reporters and we tried to find a truth. As reporting gets more and more immediate and we hear more and more perspectives, we work on our media literacy skills so that we can understand our world better and see it more clearly and deeply. I am not happy about the violence and injustice in Iran but I am happy that everybody seems to be questioning everything again.

faithful

The reading and research I have done this week has left me feeling a little out of sorts. I just wrote a post about how everything is changing and nothing is changing but I now do not want to publish it. Maybe some other time.

So instead I am going to re-publish something I wrote for the The National Institute for Literacy (NIFL - US) Technology List discussion about integrating technology. (You can sign up here.)

I do not feel like this today but I did on Thursday and I will again soon I am sure. I face the weekend with hope.

Some people have talked about how integrating technology changes the role of the teacher.

In some ways, I think that integrating technology allows teachers to do some of the things they have long wanted to do but found challenging.

One thing I have been thinking about lately is the role of the canon — that “dead white guys canon” we deride but that still gives us currency we use daily.

We used to talk a lot about how to bring the canon to literacy – how to balance giving literacy learners access to the canon that lets us be part of the Western Judeo-Christian discourse with creating an alternative canon that includes a more diverse range of contributors. We valued the alternative canon and wanted to promote a more democratic, post-colonial canon but we knew this canon is not valued in some of the places literacy learners want to go.

Literacy students come to programs to change the access they have. I remember an occasion when we read Robert Frost’s Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening and the next day, Pierre Trudeau’s (former prime minister of Canada) son paraphrased the poem at his father’s funeral. The students knew the reference which made the quote more meaningful to them and also made them feel they were part of a conversation – not onlookers or outsiders. I think that is an important role for literacy education.

The challenge in finding the balance was always access to resources and the ways in which resources were organized. We used libraries and indexes that were developed by experts. They were useful but we had no ownership and no way to contribute. Most of what students saw was stuff we brought. Most of what students thought was valuable was the stuff we brought. They trusted us to know the index and to choose wisely.

I think that the internet and publishing tools help us find a better balance – or a better way of creating balance. It allows us (compels us?), teachers and students alike, to create our own resource lists and index them in ways that are useful to us. It allows us to index items from the revered canon with items from our own personal canons side-by-side. It allows us to publish our own work and see it beside, linked to, and with reference to any other work we choose. It allows us to join a discourse and create a discourse. And it means that each teacher and each student can create their own balance.

And the great thing for those of us working in literacy, those lists and canons and conversations can be less print-based and people who are not primarily reader-learners can participate in them more easily.

getting ready for web 3.0

This post will probably take even longer to load than usual because of the audio/visual content.

Just as most of feel we are finally getting our heads around Web 2.0, here comes Web 3.0.

There are parts of Web 3.0 that sound like a giant leap forward in terms of organizing data so that the internet is less of a great library where all the books are lying on the floor. It should make the routes to the information you are looking for more transparent and easier to follow.

There are parts of the "semantic" web that sound a little Big Brother to me.

If you use Gmail, Facebook, or Google, you will have seen the beginnings of the personalization that is part of Web 3.0. Gmail and Facebook use "behavioral advertising" -- those little sidebar ads based on keywords in your emails or your Facebook profile (try changing the information in your profile and see how the ads change). Google is starting to introduce "intelligent search" where the items that get top ranking are based less on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies implemented by companies and more on what you have searched for before, what you have clicked on and what you have ranked yourself.

Digital Inspiration has collected a series of slideshows of Web 3.0 Concepts Explained in Plain English. I have embedded my favourite two below. The first one explains the concept clearly and simply IMHO. The second part is the "behind the scenes" look at how the semantic web is built. It is a bit techy but it explains the alphabet soup that is Web 3.0 so we will be less baffled by acronyms.

I have included Michael Wesch's InformationR/evolution video which is another look at indexing in the semantic web.

Unfortunately, you have to read all these presentations. And the Wesch video has that anxiety-producing music that seems to accompany all videos about technological change.

Web 3.0 explained with a stamp (pt I: the basics)

View more OpenOffice presentations from Freek Bijl.

Web 3.0 explained with a stamp (pt II: techniques)

View more OpenOffice presentations from Freek Bijl.

the literacy avengers

faster than a speeding social capitalist,
more powerful than a knowledge manager,
and able to leap the zone of proximal development in a single bound.




















Let everyone see your inner superhero at the Hero Factory.

You build your heroine/hero and the Factory folk name her/him. I think it is pretty apropos that the café hero is called the Thoughtful Philanthropist.

Send us your comic book cover or a link to it so we can see the Literacy Avengers Community of Practice.

frankly, my tweet

Not sure what Dave would think about this, but if you are still feeling twittery and need a little more help on hump day -- check out Frankenstory. It is kinda like those collaborative story games where one person starts a story and then passes it to the next person who adds the next bit. The group continues to pass the story from person to person, each one reading only the last entry and adding something new.

In the Frankenstory version you only get 40 words (that is the Twitter part). You write the first part of a story. You send it on to your friend but they can only see the last few words you wrote. They write the next part in 40 words, send it back to you and you are done.

rethinking twitter

I really enjoy Twitter. So does the Alpha blogger. Plus it is great for learning. But ever since I found out that it is radioactive I have been having second thoughts...

Happy Hump Day.

tweet tweet

21 interesting ways to use twitter in the classroom

By the time this goes to air, it may be Twitter will be yesterday's thing, but it happens to be hot at the moment because things reach a tipping point, and Twitter has reached its critical mass.

Enough people are now on it to talk about it so that people go "What is this Twitter?"

...Suddenly there's wit, charm, self-deprecation, self-knowledge, understanding - all kinds of qualities. ...

As I talk to you now, and as one talks, especially to strangers, all the terrible problems of class, differences in education, race and gender all have their part to play in the embarrassment of real life conversation, but the moment one's let loose with a keyboard or a pen you can express yourself properly.

Stephen Fry: The internet and Me

r u talking 2 me?

"You never hear 20-year-olds talking about information overload because they understand the filters they’re given. You only hear, you know, forty- and fifty-year-olds talking about it, sixty-year-olds talking about because we grew up in the world of card catalogs and TV Guide. And now, all the filters we’re used to are broken and we’d like to blame it on the environment instead of admitting that we’re just, you know, we just don’t understand what’s going on." Clay Shirky via Scott Heiferman's Notes

History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

History of the Internet is an animated documentary explaining the inventions from time-sharing to filesharing, from Arpanet to Internet. You can see the credits for this movie on lonja.de/motion/mo_history_internet.html Other works done by Melih Bilgil can be seen on lonja.de or lonja.de/diploma

The history is told using the PICOL icons on picol.org , which will be available for download soon. On blog.picol.org you can get news about this project.

revolutionary habits

Scott Heiferman "It's now awkward and loserish being around strangers (such as being on an elevator) without interacting with a screen. In fact, I'm typing this now, amongst strangers, to avoid contact and perhaps appear as if I have friends or responsibilities in the world. I wouldn't mind conversation or a quiet, contemplative, and/or work/social-free screenless moment. Scott Heiferman's Notes

The Revolution in the Hello "... we’re sluggish now from our deep sleep – we will go to the neighbor that we daily padded by with our iPod, go up to that person and slow down. Taking in that so ordinary and so fantastic neighbor – the revolution is here... If we walk in our streets again we re-magicalize them. Touching each other for a moment, “Hello!” - in that moment the architecture around us seems to change... Say hello to a neighbor and trade names and a new economy begins. Can we sense the release from debt and the launch into real wealth when we find a stranger who was always nearby but was lost in our consuming?" Reverend Billy: the church of stop shopping via Scott Heiferman's Notes

(Know Other People poster by Open downloaded from ReadyMade: Instructions for Everyday Life projects page 2)

help 4 those trying to keep up

Butterscotch.com is "a portal into the world of technology." Like the CommonCraft Plain English Series (a big favourite here at the café), Butterscotch can help you do more with the technology you know about and learn about new developments. Butterscotch's tutorials offer demos, tours, tips and tricks and a step-by-step guides for the software, Windows, Mac and online services in plain English, without the jargon.

Butterscotch also hosts a number of shows:

The A-List Show at Butterscotch "does the leg work, trolling hours of YouTube footage, email forwards and silly sites to find the best soon-to-be viral videos, Internet memes and bizarre online trends. ... We're wasting time online so you don't have to."

The Lab Rats Show "demystifies technology;" the hosts "discuss everything from practical ways to combat identity theft to keeping kids safe online, from wall mounting a flat panel TV to fixing a broken iPod."

The Miss Download Show "gives the scoop on ... fresh, powerful, fun and useful software that's worth the download."

And the The Noob Show "offers tech 101 for newbies and interesting info for seasoned veterans... important tech questions are answered in friendly, approachable and easily understood language."

cartoon by Hugh MacLeod,
retrieved from gaping void on December 10, 2008.

keeping up

Overheard: Facebook is so 2004.

Please note: I joined facebook in 2007.
And only then because my 20something relative invited me.
Sigh.

cartoon by Hugh MacLeod retrieved from his site: gaping void.
(sorry - i have lost the url for the exact post.)

bringing pomo to life

Inspired by MFlavin and the haiku writing students, I made a movie at xtranormal. It is pretty cool, reasonably straight forward and, for now, free.

I wanted to practice so I used a cartoon that Tracy Westell and I did in 2004 for the Literacy Enquirer called PoMo (PostModern) Cloze.

The result is below or you can go to xtranormal and see it here: http://www.xtranormal.com/watch?e=20081112192610609

wordsmith

Judi showed me wordle last night -- she is going to use it with a group of students in the St. Christopher House Adult Literacy Program -- and I made this word cloud of the café.

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

Here is where you can find this wordle in the gallery. I saved the image above as a screen grab (command + shift + 3 or 4 on a mac, and this or this on windows) and then saved it again as a jpeg. They give you code for a thumbnail version but it is very small.

Have a great weekend. Do not stay inside playing on your computer the WHOLE weekend :-)

gifts

Today some of our American friends are celebrating ... happy birthday to you!

An American ESL teacher is creating a series of gifts for all of us in adult education, especially those of us interested in incorporating online, Web 2.0, and computer resources into our work. Larry Ferlazzo makes “The Best…” lists where he highlights what he thinks are the best educational websites each year. He updates each list in an ongoing way. I have not explored every link but have found some pretty interesting stuff there that I am anxious to try out. You can find the lists on Larry's blog.

Have fun exploring these lists on Monday. Take the weekend off and spend with your bike and your books and your friends and your family in the sunshine.