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Question 36 of 365: How does distribution change the message?

Published on February 6, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.


There are new devices popping up all over that are shifting the ways in which we get our content. Blu-Ray players no longer just play the discs that the film studios produce; they connect to the internet, play music and let us rent movies from Netflix. The Boxee box creates hundreds of channels that were previously only available on your computer and serves them up on your TV, all nearly for free. For all of its hype, the iPad will circumvent the process of buying books, reading newspapers and watching videos. In effect, these devices and their like-minded brethren push the rigid forms of distribution into being pliable, even usable in this century. They offer content wherever we are. They are the reincarnation of the evening post, the movie reels filled with news, or the light bulb tickers across old buildings. The new distribution channels are making our content personal and letting us connect to it in ways that we never have before. We can be social without even leaving our couch. We can see the world (so long as it doesn’t require flash) from the palms of our hand.

While this kind of thinking is almost Utopian in scope, my question is whether we are not just shifting the ways that we consume, but rather if we are shifting what we consume as well. Is watching a movie on an iPad the same as watching it on a TV? Does streaming music onto your Boxee box change the song itself? Is the news, when read through a smart phone, the same news?

I would like to make the case that the very content we consume is changed by the distribution channels that it takes. In a conversation I had with @raventech last night, we discussed whether or not a hashtag on twitter could be the nexus of a movement. Could a single technology be the organizing force which pushes all conversations to be about changing the ways that schools and learning organizations operate? The distribution channel of 140 characters forces us to be on topic. It forces us to hyperlink and pivot fast between topics. There is no room for drawn out back-room deals to be made. Twitter is searchable and open. A hashtag can be archived and sorted for any information of value. This means that the message is fundamentally changed by the stream of tweets that it inhabits.

It is the same with more mainstream content. A song really does change when you can see the lyrics on screen. A movie really is different when you can speak directly with the director in a live chat (as some BD-live content has done). A book really is different when annotations can be searched and done collaboratively. These are not small shifts.

As many people in the media industries have bemoaned over the last few years, the old distribution methods are dying. If video didn’t kill the radio star, certainly Last.fm will (or at least the disc jockey). When distribution is actually distributed, no one person or company can actually own it. While the world may think Apple is making lucrative distribution deals with Marvel comics, textbook companies, and major publishing firms; they are really changing what a book is. They are changing the message of all books to be: read me… but also collaborate with me.

They, and nearly all new distribution forms, are causing us to question the very nature of the formats that we have held dear for so long. While the experts and the artists will always be the ones that we look to for their work, the ways in which we consume content are dictating to us to become more involved in the process of creation. We are not only creating well-informed (and advertising-saturated) customers. We are also creating customers that expect to have a voice, that expect to be social, and that expect to co-create.

This is what will save the dying industries. Not micropayments, not ad-support or blending video into newspaper layouts. The thing that will save newspaper, music, and film are engaging the audience in the means of distribution itself. When we feel like we own the content as a part of ourselves, we will buy as much as we can. And when the distribution channels truly become two-way, that is when their value will be irrevocable. We will just simply need the content because the content is us.

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Question 29 of 365: Why is location pretending to be content?

Published on January 30, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.


Location is the new content.

Or, so would nearly every viral iPhone and web app I have seen recently have you believe. From becoming mayor of Café Macchiato, to allowing everyone to know where you are in Google Latitude, or even just checking in at any of the different locations found on Gowalla; Location has become so important to the fabric of the mobile web that it has found a way to become content. It has started showing up in status messages and blog posts. It has created its own platforms for sharing. Location has become so content heavy that pictures and live streaming of your location is easy for anyone who cares to share the information. It has become an automatic part of every day life for thousands if not hundreds of thousands of users.

So, why do I say “pretending” if so many people find this information engaging enough to want to “check in” multiple times an hour as they bar hop? I believe that location in and of itself is useful, even playful, but it is not a substitute for discussion, creation or collaboration. Location is now being used as a means to simultaneously advertise to you and through your own posts about places you go, advertise through you. Every time you check in at a Starbucks, you are advertising that you are there, and every time that you are near a Starbucks, you can become a target for an online coupon. This cycle doesn’t exactly sound like you are able to ask the right questions.

On Twitter, you are able to ping specific people about what is going on and where they are, but more importantly, you are able to contextualize the content in any way at all. You can be devoid of location and still have something to say. While your location matters, it isn’t who you are or what value you have. In a blog post, you can make sweeping accusations or link to an enormous amount of information and do high-minded research (or, low-brow comedy). The ability to create your own set of rules for your own content is stunted when everything becomes about where you happen to be standing when you check in.

I get why location is so attractive. It is so easy to produce a feed from. It is easy to follow someone (virtually) and then somewhat voyeuristically, meet up with them. The “content” that comes from location-based services is going to become a massive amount of our daily diet of information. Yet, how is that going to change the way that we fundamentally ask questions or interact with other human beings. Knowing that you exist somewhere in a given time and space may make me feel a bit more connected, especially if I have existed in that exact time and space previously. However, if that is the only connection I am making, if there is no probing deeper, the way you might with a blog post or collaborating in an EtherPad, then I’m not sure that it qualifies at content worthy of our time.

That is not to say that Location can’t be a part of the equation. And, perhaps I give blogs a little too much credit for being about thinking and belief, but I just don’t want to see our rich connected world become a series of tweets about having a great sandwich in a local restaurant. If that is where we are headed, everyone who told us we were crazy to join up in the first place will have been right.

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SpeedGeek Learning Version .1

Published on November 9, 2009, by in Uncategorized.
I am pleased to announce the following features within the first prototype at http://speedgeeklearning.com:
I would love it if you would test out all of them and see what there is to see. I would also love any feedback that you can provide this prototype, either by simply e-mailing it to me or by leaving comments on the Planning site (if you don’t have access to that yet, let me know).

The other two things you can do to help the project at this point are as follows:
  1. Think of any way that you could use the SpeedGeek Learning platform within your own work. If there are any videos that you use and would like to collaborate upon, let’s set you up with an instance of your own. If there are certain big questions you would like to answer, let’s answer them with video and collaborative documents. Start to think about pushing the platform to be what you would like it to be. I am up any ideas you have. Just let me know.

  2. Spread the word that the prototype is available. I would love to get as many people answering these questions in the collaborative document and passing the link around as possible. If you feel the need to blog about it, do so. If you feel the urge to tweet, please do so. I pushed out the initial idea, but this is the first version that I can actually show off.

Thank you so much for your continued interest. I can’t wait to get to phase two, which will include:
  1. Recording your own videos within the interface.
  2. Analytics about individual video views
  3. Greater collaboration with the presenters of the sessions
  4. More ways to organize the sessions
  5. Further design work to flesh out the platform
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I won’t buy anything that only does one thing

Published on May 3, 2009, by in Uncategorized.

I have been thinking a lot about this recently: I don’t want anything to do with a device that only does what it was advertised to do. It is something that I have slowly realized as over he last few years as I went through the experience of using a Smart Board, CPS clicker system, an iPod touch and an Apple TV. The two former products are meant to do one thing well. They are advertised specifically for educational purposes, and they work. But the two latter products are meant to do anything that the community makes them do, and they are not specifically marketed as educational components.
 
The latter products I keep on coming back to because they can do more and more as the community supports future development, and I guess that this is the difference between products I want to use and ones I don’t. The ones I care to use for education, are the ones with built in communities. They are the ones that get pushed to their full potential.
 
So I guess what I am saying is that if I am ever put in change of large purchasing decisions for a district or school, I will be choosing to purchase and support products that connect together and have a community surrouning them.
 
For example: I am right now using my iPod touch with an open source program called boxee (remote on the touch and the full program on the Apple TV) that is a full fledged media center in order to watch powerful TED talks in high definition on my TV using WiFi to stream the content. It is all connected.
 
Shouldn’t it always be this way?
 
(As an aside, I realize that this example is filled with apple products. I don’t believe that apple has a monopoly on connectedness or hackability, it happens that this is the community that I associate with most easily. I would actually love to hear about other devices that you keep on coming back to because they increase in value over time.)
 
Sent from my iPod

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Making moving easy…

Published on March 18, 2009, by in Uncategorized.

Every night this week and last I have been packing. I have been
packing up my family to move us to someplace better, with more room
and more possibilities (and more than one bathroom). This move has
gotten me thinking a lot about what to keep and what to let go of.
Without extending a metaphor too far out, it has also gotten me
thinking about how to move an entire school or even a district from
digital learning systems that they currently use, to ones that have
more possibility and room to grow.
 
And, what can we leave behind in this move. When you move from an
email based system of communication to a feed and “friend” based
system of communication (twitter, facebook, or even project wikis),
what is no longer neccessary?
 
 
When you move from a server based architecture for storing learning
objects to a cloud based repository, what is gained and what is lost?
 
The specifics are becoming more and more clear to me as I pack things
up. As I pack up our assessments for the online school, getting them
ready to move again, we can leave behind proprietary formats. We need
to be able to plug them in anywhere and reuse them for many purposes.
 
As I pack up all of our content, I realize that we can leave all html
pages without an edit button on them.
 
And, as I try to put all of our tools and resources for collaborative
and connected learningn into their box to be ported over to a new LMS
or to new PD spaces, I am realizing that there is no box big enough to
hold all of them.
 
Every tool must be allowed to connect to others, just like every
person must be able to connect. If there are tools that do not
connect, they will be packed away permanantly and placed under the
stairs.
 
Well, I am off to pack some more, but I will continue to think about
what can and can’t be thrown out when we make big shifts in education.
I hope to return to this theme soon when I figure more out.

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The Collaborative Instinct

Published on February 15, 2009, by in Uncategorized.
PC hard disk drive capacity (in GB). The verti...
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It is so strange how links seem to be related to one another when you have a single idea in your head. The tweets seem to come together in a way that makes you think that “the network” pushes you into a certain direction, just so that you can take the time to synthesize what you know. Well, that has definitely happened to me over the past few days.

To get right to the point, for some time I have been thinking about the stages through which an adult learner becomes a connected learner, someone who knows just how to find the resources and people that will support them in thir own learning. Well, I don’t think that I have it all figured out, but I will say that one of the stages that has struck me the hardest is The Collaborative Instinct.

When I say Collaborative Instinct, I mean the compulsion that exists whenever a learner creates something (a word document, powerpoint, well worded e-mail, etc) to share it with others. The simple act of sharing your resources openly, as an instinct, is something that changes the way in which you learn. By saying that your ideas and contributions are valuable enough to be available to others–that others might see their value–can transform your expectations about receiving feedback on your work, the process of revision, and the long tail of learning from others. A Collaborative Instinct is one of the easiest ways to create a community of learning around yourself. Others will want to create around your content, comment on it and remix it. They will use their own collaborative instinct to publish their own works that are related to yours. However, even if you never see these things, even if your Collaborative Instinct stops at sharing your own words, the community is being created. It will wait for you until you are interested in further connecting your learning.

Now, why did I start off with a paragraph about the links that have informed this post (and what will likely be quite a few others)? From Will Richardson’s blog, I was introduced to this study that finds those who contribute online are the ones who have the power to influence others, they control the debate about education, finance, science, and nearly any other field that values contributions from a community. I would go further to say that those who have A Collaborative Instinct are the ones who can make their own decisions. If you are not adding to the world’s knowledge, if you are not sharing what you have to offer, you are letting others make learning decisions for you. Influence and pursuasion only come from action, and yet it can be the simple action of putting up a word document on a wiki.

The next link is just a beautiful blog post. Steve Hargadon has simply hit it so clearly on the head, that I’m not sure how much commentary it requires. In this post, he recounts a story of heaven and hell which is a perfect parable for The Collaborative Instinct. Hell is where there is ample content to go around (the stuff that is saved on hard drives, carried around on flash drives, and hoarded in email attachements), but no one can feed themselves because they only have very long spoons tied to their hands. In heaven, there is the same amount of content, but no one goes hungry for resources because they are feeding each other.

The Collaborative Instinct is about knowing what nourishes us. It isn’t the heavy collaboration that lasts weeks and requires tons of planning. It is in the simple handing off of a resource that we have created which is valued by another learner. We are nourished by the long spoon of the teacher who blogs about a better way to do classroom mangement or who has an activity that explains how you can use voicethread in math.

The Collaborative Instinct isn’t hard or a very big idea, but it does require a shift in the way that we create things. If we are creating documents in Word and then saving them to the hard drive, we need to be able to submit them via e-mail to a sharing space. If we are creating things in Google Docs, we need to be clicking the share button immediately after we have finished a first draft and either publishing them as a webpage or sharing them with the people in our built-in networks (schools, organizations, other face to face collegues). Or, better yet, we should be adding them to a collaborative space and building value on top of them like this.

The preceding wiki is a new place for people at Hope Online (an Online Charter School) to share their work. I introduced the topic of The Collaborative Instinct using these simple questions:

1. How do you share with others?
2. What is your first instinct when you create a learning resource?
3. What is your tool of choice?
4. How do you leverage the learning that exists on the web?
5. How do you organize what you create?
6. What are your next steps.

Through these questions we are getting at the Collaborative instincts of all Hope teachers. We are questioning just how people share resources and whether or not there is a better way to do so. It is my greatest hope that every one of them starts to think about “the next step” after they create something. That they won’t simply be sharing the resource with the one person that needs it now, but with everyone, so that they will inform the discussion of that topic and nourish those around them.

The next post in this series will be The Reflective Pattern, but I don’t think that I will be able to do that one today as well, so stay tuned.

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A list of tags…

Published on January 5, 2009, by in Uncategorized.

The EdTechTalk delicious site has a wealth of relevent tags. It has so many in fact, that it may be THE resource for tags about Educational Technology and learning in general. I love being able to select different tags and find out what other people are categorizing within this rather large community. However, what if you wanted to use those tags somewhere else? What if you wanted to add those tags to the choices in your own blog or search according to those terms?

What if you wanted to categorize all of your ideas according to what the community has deemed worthy of their time? Well, I did want to do that. I wanted to use the common tags of our community, so I have made all of the tags in EdTechTalk (at least up until today) into a comma separated file for easy import into anything I would like to use them for.

Here is the file: edtechtalk-tags

Pedagogical implication: I think that it really makes sense for us to start using the same words to talk about learning. Coming together on a group of tags that we would like to use for aggregation purposes is something that we have neglected too long. The community is far enough along to put get into a discussion about just where we want our folksonomies to go. We need to take ownership of terms like elearning and make them more specific. We also should be teaching our students to come together on terms to use so that all of their work can not only be found later, but also grouped according to topic, theme, or even skill level.

Think about if we had a way to group student work according to a self-reflected score (of effort, of achievement, etc.). What if we could use exemplars and organize them according to the tags that they have self-selected.

Where else should we go with our community of tags?

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Everything as a feed.

Published on January 3, 2009, by in Uncategorized.

I am now coming to understand feeds and rss as the muscles that move the web. They are the tissue that seems to push and pull all of the information that I care about. Unfortunately, many sites still do not open up their content to rss feeds.
 
Well, instead of waiting for them to open it up, I can take matters into my own hands and construct my own rss feeds using http://www.dapper.net. Much like greasemonkey, Dapper allows you to choose which ares of a webpage are important and then select them for inclusion in the rss feed (or exclusion on your browser in the case of greasemonkey). So, what does this have to do with learning?
 
Well, if I can make anything into a feed, then I can make anything on demand for others. I can make any webpage that was created before “web 2.0″ into something that can be fed into an email subscription, an aggregator, or a portal. This opens up all content to redistribution in a format of your own choosing. So, put everything at students’ fingertips. Aggregate everything. Seriously.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

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Strategic vs. Slow

Published on December 16, 2008, by in Uncategorized.

Am I just imagining things, or are more and more educators using the term “strategic” when they want to move slowly? Since when does having a strategy mean that there is no hope for reason to feel urgency.
 
I believe in research and I believe in planning, but these things do not seem to have anything to do with how quickly you can get things done.
 
I have had major conversations about making sure that everyone is on the same page before we move ahead with an initiative or roll out a new tool. While I seem to agree in principle, I think it is much more about our wish for everyone to be great, rather than it is based in reality. In reality, you will never have everyone on the same page. In reality, you wouldn’t want all teachers to be doing the same things in their classroom, only reaching the same kids. Why shouldn’t we let the truly exceptional work and ideas be what they can be? Why shouldn’t we run with a great, well thought out proposal, even if it doesn’t fit in with a strategy of standing still.
 
Now, I am not interested in only my ideas. I am not so egotistical to believe that I have a monopoly on change. However, it is my contention that the glacial pace of educational reform is not in place because of a lack of good ideas, but rather, it exists because of a lack of urgency.
 
How do we show the immediacy of how powerful connected learning is? How do we make sure that all of what we say has an overwhelming sense of need? I love the direction that our schools are headed, but I worry that we are going to strategize ourselves out of options for saving public education and reaching our kids. Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

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Create your own MobileMe (Sync Everything, at all times).

Published on November 12, 2008, by in Uncategorized.

An aside: it is too bad that every post I write seems like an attempt to get back into the habit of posting, but I suppose until I start blogging consistently again, that is just how it is going to have to be. I have missed way too many things that I have been thinking about to ever fully catch up, but perhaps I can start anew. Anyway, here are my latest thoughts.

Before I go into the details of how to sync yourself completely, I want to tell you why I even undertook this idea. Well, our school system uses an extremely proprietary e-mail and calendaring system called firstclass. Every person that uses firstclass in our schools is locked in to using the firstclass calendar for appointments and things of that nature. But, because I have seen the light of using Google Calendar (open API, shared calendars, embedding, etc), I refuse. In fact, I was so obsessed with the idea of converging the two that I speant an entire weekend (when I wasn’t having fun with my family) on getting Firstclass to sync with Google Calendar, and then eventually my new blackberry that the school district provided for me.

So, this is how you sync everything:

Calendars:


Contacts:

Now, for the details…

(Update: I didn’t put this in the initial post, but I think it is worth mentioning that Firstclass does have a way to sync with both Palm Desktop Software and SyncML directly, but since my district hasn’t set either of these up, I thought it was important to try and find a better way of doing things… there are also third party services that do some of this, but I want a FREE workflow)

In order to get your first class calendar to talk to anything else, you will need to export it as a iCal file:

Now, you may look at this picture and ask, why I wouldn’t just export it as a blackberry file and skip all of the steps in the middle. Well, there are a few reasons. One, if I did this, all of the events would be duplicated every time I exported and imported. Two, because I am on a Mac I do not have any blackberry desktop software to make this sync work.

So, onward we go to iCal. First, you will need to set up your Google Calendar to sync with iCal, using this handy dandy tutorial from Life Hacker.

Now that you have your Google Calendar set up to sync, simply import into iCal your latest and greatest export from Firstclass:

Now, if this isn’t your first time doing this, you will end up with a lot of duplicates. If that is the case, just use the iCal Dupe Deleter. This is also a good tool for deleting duplicates from Google Calendar if you have ever found yourself with too many of one item.

Now, you have synced completely to your Google Calendar and you are ready to sync to your blackberry. Simply point your device to this address and download your over-the-air sync application.

You can now enter an event in Firstclass, iCal, Google Calendar, or on your blackberry and they will sync with one another. Pretty cool, right. But, we are not done. If you would like to have your calendar in an even more universal Format, you can put it on a SyncML server, like Funambol.

All you have to do is download their blackberry application and you can sync to your heart’s content there.

For Contacts:

If you are also looking to sync your contacts, you can simply use your Blackberry or iPod touch to talk to Funambol using their built in programs (search for funambol in the App store, or use the above link to download the blackberry funambol application).

Then you can sync your contacts with the funambol server.

As for your Mac, you can use the Preference Pane sync.

This will let you put your contacts on your mac, on the funambol server, or on your blackberry and they will all sync.

I understand that MobileMe does a lot more than this, but I believe that if we can create a FREE workflow for each one of our teachers, students, and administrators that syncs information to the place that they need it, we will be able to have the conversations that truly matter. We will no longer be stuck trying to find information, it will always be ours. Although you may not geek out at all that I am proposing, I think there are some pretty heavy implications for continuity in the systems that we are creating. If you have figured out any more syncing tricks, please leave a comment and add to the value of our collective research.

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