Category: Technology

Connected Futures (cp2tech01) Workshop Begins Today

I am really looking forward to attending the online Connected Futures (cp2tech01) Workshop that begins today.

Sponsored by CPSquare, the Community of Practice on Communities of Practice, John Smith and Bronwyn Stuckey have been doing all of the visible pre-work for the workshop. The workshop leaders include Beth Kanter(who I have spoken to numerous times online, but never in this context), Beverly Trayner, Bronwyn Stuckey (who I finally met a couple weeks back while she was visiting NYC), Etienne Wenger(who I read 2 graduate degrees ago as a former professor was fond of his work), John Smith (who laughs more heartily than his screen shot avatar indicates), Nancy White (who I also took an online class with and met and worshipped twice while at Northern Voice), Nick Noakes(who I have read but have never met), Shawn Callahan, Shirley Williams, and Susanne Nyrop.

I will be focused on this workshop for the next five weeks (while I am not working, finishing a most interesting class I am teaching, Project Management for Training, and preparing for a graduate Leadership course I am teaching). What is most interesting is that I have been increasingly looking forward to this class, even more than I thought I would be. Good sign.

We are having our opening teleconference call this afternoon, and one of the questions we were asked to consider is: “What brings you to this workshop?” Simple question to be sure, but one that I have the most trouble answering because there are many reasons. I want to learn from this group of experts. I want to increase my experiences because I find myself drawn to this area. I am looking to continue even more higher education, and think this may help me grok some additional distance possibilities than I previously considered. I want to consider ways to bring this into my teaching. I want to consider expanding some of my professional opportunities with consulting and my full-time work. I hope to get some new research ideas and perhaps additional research partners. I want to be exposed to the people pushing this field along. I want to be involved at this point where this is starting to become more of a field at all. These are just to name a few, and as a reflective practitioner, there will undoubtedly be additional ones as I further consider this today.

Now, we need to consider creating a logo for this workshop . . .

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Further Musing on Brian’s NMC Mashup Session

Brian Lamb shared an amazing blog post about his recent NMC Mashup session. Not quite sure why I did not get a trackback for Brian’s work as he mentioned me (and my comments) by name, so thankfully I got a Google blog post alert about it.

I spent a lot of time thinking about Brian’s post–his reflection, authenticity, model instructional strategies to discussing educational experiences, and the like–so finally posted my own musings on his blog this morning. I copied and pasted it verbatim (save for one spelling correction) here as a record of my own thinking.  

I have been reading and rereading this post for a few days, Brian, and appreciate your reflection and then sharing this for open discussion. I suppose this is becoming a metareflective opportunity, and I think I need to finally process my own thoughts enough to share them as well.

I saw Philip Glass’ opera Satyagraha this past Monday evening, and your presentation came to mind when I started to process that work. I was expecting an opera about the early life of Gandhi, yet with it sung in Sanskrit, intentionally without subtitles, the focus is forced to change. The hypnotic chorus, repetitive music, and postmodern set together made this a work that was not only unexpected, but boundary-pushing for the Metropolitan Opera (and me as well).

I see my role as an education professional to push my students to expand their boundaries (learning) while facilitating the process and maintaining some sense of safety for those who need to hold on while confronting the learning ahead of them. I felt that at the Met (the safety of being at the premier US opera stage with its desire to promote and expand culture in this art form), and have been considering why I have such a hunch there is some connection between it and your work during the Mashup.

I have heard you present and read your work for some time now, and that is the stable (safe) part of your presentation. I trust you not to take us someplace meaningless, and that is why I attended the entire session rather than leaving it mid-way when I was completely disoriented (to be honest, I don’t dance in the first world, either). Had it been somebody I did not know or was not known by those people I read, I would not have even bothered to comment at all, chalking it up to an unusual experience, period.

The fact you lose sleep over comments demonstrates (to me) that you take your work seriously and are in many ways helping to move education in an electronic age along. Pushing boundaries is never an easy business to be in, and having a hard skin seems to me to be a great asset when people are used to the status quo. So much for non-educators thinking education is a safe and easy profession to be in . . .

I am convinced that education challenges the status quo, and as educators sometimes we need to shake things up to help people see there are other ways to look at issues. Where else can growth come from?

With this said, I am really glad that this session has sparked discussion–the educator’s dream! Without it, we never know what we have done has worked if at all. As we often do not see the results of our work, these online discussions are testament that reflective practice and learning is happening. I am now beginning to wonder where it is going . . .

I think there has been such great discussion on this event, and wish more educational initiatives sparked the same sort of interest and reflective practice.

Thursday F2F with George

I had lunch Thursday with George Siemens, the networked learning and knowledge strcuctures guru from Canada, at my favorite Korean restaurant near my office in Manhattan. Having read George’s work for several years now, it was nice to put a face and voice to the writing. He and his wife are in New York for some conference work, and it was rather stimulating to speak with him about his areas of research interest and the locations where George travels to speak at conferences and other events.

One theme that kept surfacing that struck me is how technology changes so much and so quickly, with seemingly every week a newer social media killer app, that things will not change unless the underlying knowledge structures and our approach to them changes. I recall him speaking about this in his book Knowing Knowledge, though hearing a similar message through a different medium (F2F) and situation (while using chopsticks to eat goon mandoo) makes it so fresh.

Enjoy your time here in New York, George, May it stimulate you to consider how knowledge is larger and wider and louder and more culturally diverse than we have seen throughout history!

FriendFeed, So Now What?

friendfeed It seems social network aggregators are becoming all the rage, and why not? Who has the time to visit every site to see what friends / colleagues are doing? Enter–FriendFeed, a service that will track our activities on a variety of the social media sites where we enter information.

OK, I am game, so I signed up. Now, here is the problem as I see it–how do I find and then follow and then track my colleagues and friends? With email alerts? RSS feeds? Suddenly the good idea seems like a lot of work as I have to look for everybody (again). Sorry–don’t trust any of these services to search my contacts and then add them.

For those of you interested, my FriendFeed stream is http://friendfeed.com/jeffreykeefer.

I think I again need some help–has anybody discovered any best practices out there for using this type of service?

Whose Objectives Are They, Anyway?

I am an instructional designer. With quite a bit of education in the area of how adults learn, there is one thing that overshadows everything I do that involves education, human resource development, organizational communication, and the consulting work I do–What needs and expectations do learners have that education and communication try to meet? In other words, when I write learning objectives, they are just that–my objectives . . . and not the learner’s. I would set my classes up for failure if I did not acknowledge this very clear, but often overlooked, fact. The learners come with their own expectations and personal objectives, and for me to ignore them and insist on their fulfilling my objectives for them is just silly. Let’s face it, how can I realistically evaluate how well people meet objectives I am forcing them to accept and work toward?

Of course, that is what instructional design is all about–setting objectives to meet organizational needs.

No, we can not and should not get rid of objectives, because without them we lack some direction at all. I am only concerned when the unspoken, namely whose objectives are they, anyway? is ignored.

I have been thinking about this since I attended a session last night in the New Media Consortium’s (NMC) Symposium on Mashups. The presenter of the final session, Brian Lamb (a distant colleague whom I have met briefly twice at Northern Voice and who is a most dynamic presenter), facilitated an experience entitled “Confessions of a Mashup Un-Artist.” It was described as:

The creative side of mashups results in interesting and often popular-to-the-point-of-viral works, but at the same time, it raises questions about the nature of originality, authorship, and context. In this session, a mashup un-artist will discuss the process and products of his work, address some of the questions raised above, and discuss the relationship between remix culture and open education. Is originality overrated? Do we owe it to the intellectual environment to recycle our intellectual work? Is our existing concept of authorship still valid? Come along for the ride and contribute, collaborate, and mash up answers to these mashup questions. I attended this live in Second Life (where I am a newbie named Chartres Loire) and live in Adobe Connect (a great platform, BTW). There were video clips, music clips, avatar dancing, and various sounds. The session met the description, but nevertheless I was confused. Frustrated. Unclear as to the objectives. Grasping to “get it.” Looking for applicability. Struggling for meaning. I was that student who felt (s)he were the only one confused and not “getting it.”

I processed this a lot with some colleagues on Twitter last night, and it still seemed that I was the only one (of those who replied to me) who did not “get it.” Feeling completely isolated after this learning experience, I again started to think about learning objectives. Were Brian’s objectives the same as mine? More likely than not, the answer is no. How could they be–we did not discuss them (which is normal in most learning and presentation settings). I think I did not “get the session” for the simple reason that my objectives were not met. What were they? My objectives for the session were:

  1. understand what a mashup un-artist is
  2. apply this knowledge to my practice

After the session and after the Twitter discussion, I am still unclear as to what Brian was trying to demonstrate and I am still not able to figure out how to apply it. At least many of my colleagues seemed to respond positively and appreciate it.

While writing helps me to process my thinking (the entire purpose for my blog itself), I could only make sense of the experience when I finally realized my objectives were not met. This does not mean that other people had the same or different experiences, but I believe it does demonstrate how acknowledging individual (and thus different) learning objectives is so important in the learning process.

I think I still need to process this a little more, but want to share where I am right now.