More on Shirky's Here Comes Everybody

Having just returned from the NECC where there were buttons any direction you looked, I feel that the book cover of the UK version of Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations is so much more interesting and apt.

Talking about the idea of the "WE over I" - the name iPhone seems rather inappropriate, especially when you see people constantly conversing, communicating, collaborating over those sleek devices... wePhone would be so much more apt - or maybe wiiPhone! Not having one myself made me feel quite the outcast at NECC - a fact underscored by a remark Will Richardson made in jest - "Oh! You're SO 2007!"

Shirky's book was also at the center of an interesting session at EduBloggerCon 08 (see previous '@ NECC' posts); and here's an interesting post on the book on Jeff Atwood's blog Coding Horror.

Finally, here's a 42+ minute video of Shirky talking about his book at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School in Feb this year.



(My own distant connection with Shirky - if it can be termed "connection"...I wrote a letter of recommendation for a design student in Bangalore when he was applying for the Graduate Program at the ITP at NYU in 2005...he did get admission, and went on to take Shirky's course(s?) at ITP :))

To F2F, or not to F2F,..or how much (or less)... that is the question...

As an educational technologist, my livelihood depends on spreading the gospel of the advantages of leveraging technology for better teaching and learning. "Technology as a means to an end...and not an end in itself" is of course, the mantra that I impress on teachers and schools, but I have spent a large part of the last couple of years touting the advantages of web 2.0 tools for communication, collaboration, and community experiences.

Every now and then, however, one is faced with a viewpoint that counters or questions the usefulness of the pervasive trends of 24X7 online interactions, and raises concerns of where things may be headed if they continue in the current vein, and cites the dangers of interaction that is only restricted to typing on a keyboard as opposed to talking - face to face (F2F) or over the phone.

One such viewpoint was offered by Greg Philo in the Guardian article titled "Let's take the digit out of digital" who writes "Facebook is not the same as face to face and, as our virtual skills increase, I wonder if our ability to communicate using speech is on the decline". The article unfortunately digresses into a condemnation of excessive use of Powerpoint and OHPs in conferences and inside classrooms, to support his assertion that "The ability to communicate face to face and hold the attention of others is a vital human skill. Beware of a technology in which the speed of our fingers is more important than the quality of our voices."

I found this observation particularly fascinating -

"The great tragedy, of course, is that the phone was invented before the computer. If it had been the other way around, internet forums would now be buzzing with the exciting news: "Have you heard (type, type, type)? There is this amazing new gadget (type, type). Now you can talk directly with people (type, type, type). And they can, like, hear your voice. Without all this flipping typing."

Relentless marketing would do the rest and colleges would be rushing to develop new courses in telephone skills."

"

Science 2.0

Yet another space that admits to a web 2.0 avatar is Science!

Here's an amazing Scientific American article I came across this morning - Science teachers, please take note! It's called 'Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk?' which is not just an article but a web 2.0 "experiment" in "networked journalism", since the article itself will be re-written with views of all those who comment on it. Probing the role of open, collaborative technologies such as blogs and wikis within an inherently "secretive" research communtiy, the issues that the article is urging readers and contributors to look at (in the context of scientific journalism) --

• What do you think of the article itself? Are there errors? Oversimplifications? Gaps?
  
  
• What do you think of the notion of "Science 2.0?" Will Web 2.0 tools really make science much more productive? Will wikis, blogs and the like be transformative, or will they be just a minor convenience?
  
  
• Science 2.0 is one aspect of a broader Open Science movement, which also includes Open-Access scientific publishing and Open Data practices. How do you think this bigger movement will evolve?
  
  
• Looking at your own scientific field, how real is the suspicion and mistrust mentioned in the article? How much do you and your colleagues worry about getting “scooped”? Do you have first-hand knowledge of a case in which that has actually happened?
  
  
• When young scientists speak out on an open blog or wiki, do they risk hurting their careers?
  
  
• Is "open notebook" science always a good idea? Are there certain aspects of a project that researchers should keep quite, at least until the paper is published?

Creative Web 2.0 Learning

[I posted this on educatorslog.in and hence the rather long drawn-out intro to Web 2.0]


Web 2.0 is a buzzword that many of you may have come across in your wanderings around the Internet. In fact educatorslog.in, too, is using Web 2.0 technologies like blogging and tagging, to facilitate bringing people together to discuss issues, share and organize (through tags and categories) resources, and participate in a common space.

Among the common Web 2.0 technologies are blogs, wikis, RSS, tag-sharing (folksonomies) tools like del.icio.us, mashups (bringing together information from various sites to create a more "unified" or "integrated" experience, like in Google Maps). Social networking sites like Facebook & Orkut, and video/photo sharing sites like Flickr & YouTube which bring together elements of the aforementioned technologies are all part of the "Web 2.0" revolution.

Probably the most important "affordances" of Web 2.0 are sharing, collaboration and the ease with which anyone can create/publish content (text, audio, video, or a combination of these) on the internet. This new generation Web is a great leveler, in some sense, where one does not have to be a web developer or geeky programmer to publish his/her thoughts, stories, artwork, stories, photos, video clips, on the Internet.

(You can find tons of information on "web 2.0" on the Internet, including videos on youtube. I found this slideshow and this one interesting, although someone completely unaware of the concept may find it hard to get it without any accompanying commentary or notes, but they may be worth a viewing, anyway).

After that rather long drawn-out introduction, I guess I should come to what I really wanted to share - an interesting slideshow titled "Creative Web 2.0 Learning" which focuses on the idea of "Library 2.0" but also describes in several interesting slides the meaning of web 2.0 technologies in education.

Slide #8 is referring to this impressive youtube video - The Machine is Us/ing Us which provides a definitive look at the web 2.0 interaction paradigm. I think slide #16 is a good description of web 2.0, and slide #24 provides a wonderful look at where education is, or should be, headed in this century, especially when we have at our disposal these great technologies of the "read-write" web (another way of describing "web 2.0") --

* Formal Learning Spaces --> Informal Learning Spaces
* Mass Learning --> Personalized Learning
* Competitive (or I would call this "Individual") --> Collaborative learning & assessment
* Restricted & Constructed --> Creative & Extended
* Instruction --> Personal Author & Innovator
* Content --> Knowledge & Understanding

Social Bookmarking Within A School Community

This workshop was a long time coming...It had been cooking in my head ever since I posted the article - "On the Social Side of Bookmarking" - on this blog well over a year ago. [That article serves as a good guideline for anyone who'd like to set up something along similar lines for their school (or department or any other group or community, for that matter)].

40 teachers of Aditi participated in what was a good intro to the idea of tagging and bookmarking for easy storage, retrieval, organization and sharing. Discussion around common del.icio.us accounts for the school to share bookmarks among teachers and between teachers and students, and finally developing a common vocabulary, and shared rules for tagging - by grade and subject especially, made for a useful, productive session that will hopefully mark the beginning of efficient internet searching and sharing of ideas among teachers and students.

The idea of folksonomies demonstrated by clicking on users who had bookmarked the same website, and then going through their bookmarks -and finding some useful sites in the process - was truly a 'wow' moment during the workshop.

Browser del.icio.us buttons for tagging and viewing have now been installed on every machine in the school. 20 new bookmarks have been added to the school del.icio.us account in the 1 day since the workshop.

It's working :) Go del.icio.us!

Sharing with Teachers New Technology Tools for Collaboration

The 3-day conference titled "Teaching and Learning in the 21st Century" organized by The Association of International Schools of India (TAISI), just concluded in Bangalore today. This was the second conference organized by this newly instituted body, the 1st conference was held in September 2006 in Hyderabad.

I was once again invited to speak in a break-out session, and conducted a workshop on "New Technology Tools for Collaboration", and shared with the audience some of the fascinating web 2.0 tools that the new "read/write" web offers teachers, students and learning environments today.

The session started with a brief discussion on what collaboration in the classroom entails and means, and how a "tool" may help. I started with the popular group tools of the "old web" (listservs/discussion boards, yahoo and google groups), (that still have a place today, I guess), and then fast forwarded to talk about wikis, blogs, social bookmarking and googledocs and spreadsheets. The focus on what students and groups hope to achieve in a collaborative project, and how each of the tools discussed helped the process, resonated with teachers. Information on specific tools such as blogger, edublogs, David Warlick's Classblogmeister, wikispaces, del.icio.us and googledocs & spreadsheets was shared, and also exemplary blogs (that discuss web2.0 in the classroom) such as Will Richardson's weblogg-ed, and projects such as the Flat Classroom Project. That all the tools are free and easy-to-use also caused much relief and excitement.

I touched briefly on communities of practice/learning that could be formed and fostered among educators using blogging and tagging features in an appropriately designed platform, and showcased educatorslog.in as a case in point.

I now look forward to sharing educatorslog.in with an international audience in Boston in July 07 at the November Learning conference on Building Learning Communities.

Wikinomics

(Also posted on educatorslog.in)

"The art and science of harnessing mass collaboration for innovation and growth" is (roughly) how Don Tapscott describes the term Wikinomics.

For many of us (especially educators interested and involved in issues of technology in education) Don Tapscott's 1987 work Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation was mandatory reading in our professional studies. Tapscott's new book Wikinomics:How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (co-authored with Anthony D. Williams) may well become required reading for students of economics, business management, commerce and for just about anyone wanting to engage actively the ideas of openness and collaboration that this new web is fostering.

"In its latest incarnation, the World Wide Web has become a communal experience—collaborators from anywhere and any walk of life now have the ability to solve problems and produce results through the use of collective wisdom. Although some business leaders may find the prospect of this kind of openness rather frightening, Tapscott believes that leveraging the new wave of community is the way of the future." [Source: Harvard Business Review]

All of us here on this forum for educators too are a part of this new culture of collaboration and dialogue, and "community", that these new authoring and publishing tools of the web have afforded us.

Our teens and youth are a part of it already - through their social networks on orkut, hi5 and others. For those of us teachers with access to the Internet in our schools, how we teach must change as well to use the opportunities that the new web affords for student collaboration, as well as publishing and sharing student work - to prepare our next generation for a world that will be governed to a large extent by Wikinomics.