Question 58 of 365: How are local and crowdsourced opposing forces?

The folks in my local network are amazing. They are the ones who will babysit for my children, or hang out after work with my family. They are the ones who seem to share a lot of the same values with me. After all, they moved close to where we live for a reason, right? They are really the ones that I should be turning to with my problems and with my questions.

But, they aren’t. In fact, there are so few local people that I turn to on a daily basis, that I am almost scared by it. Other than a few key people (my wife included), my local network is a wasteland of e-mail threads and empty projects. Whenever I have a new idea, I don’t put it out to the people that I work with on a daily basis. I send the idea out to anyone who cares to take a stab. And more often than not, the only people with that inclination are anything but local.

It is counterintuitive to think that people who do not share the same space and time with me (or even have a previous personal relationship with me) would be more likely to join in on a project than their local counterparts. In fact, it is almost unfathomable that my local network would be so silent on some of the issues that I seem to face all of the time.

My local network does not see the value in commenting back and forth. They do not see the value in Twitter or Buzz. They are not plugged into the conversation. They are not ready to avail themselves of crowdsourcing activities. And, I guess that is the difference.

The local is striving to stay local.

The crowd is striving to be a part of the crowd (or, at least, and individual in the crowd).

The only way to stay local is to be unplugged and uninformed. If you are engaging in conversations that are universal, you will become international, even cosmopolitan. If you are striving to connect, there is no choice but to connect with those outside of your local network.

While I would like to bring the local to meet the crowdsourced, the only way for that to happen would be for the people near me to adopt the methodology of the crowd. they must be more public with their work. They must strive to answer passionate questions. They must stop placing so much value on people that they can “have a beer with.”

Being a source for someone’s crowd is valuable because it means that they will be a source for you as well. There is a certain level of reciprocation that we can expect from the crowd, even if it is only a feeling about such things. Again, this is counterintuitive. It should be that the locality will produce more reciprocation because of proximity, but instead it breeds a lot more competition. If you are doing something of value, it will be noticed among the crowd and leveraged to everyone’s benefit.

If we are able to bring more people along from the local to the crowd, we may be able to change the very nature of what it means to be local. We may be able to change the expectations for how much participation is possible and what level of investment is guaranteed. We could change local to mean all kinds of connection, not just face to face.

While, I see a lot of drawbacks to crowdsourcing, when it comes to asking my own questions. I am directing them more toward people I don’t know than people I do. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that the most interesting opportunities and people have always come from outside the local, and not from within. Is that a function of the web, or is that just the way that it always has been?

LiC Podcast: Design with Forever in Mind Archive

Design with Forever in Mind [ 34:58 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (989)

Although I was thrown a whole bunch by not having wifi for the first 45 minutes, I think that the session was worthwhile. Here is the archive of all that we have done. I am also including my planning podcast from my drive up to copper mountain.

Presentation:

Drop Box:

Important Links:

Ben Wilkoff Links:

1. Learning is Change Blog and Podcast>
2. Twitter Page
3. Other Presentation on Thursday (The On Button: Instant and Always-on Collaboration)

Presentation Links:

1. Foreverism
2. Math Casts
3. Web 2.0 Game Over

Exit Plan for Vocaroo:

• Wav files backed up to a hard drive/server

Exit Plan for Drop.io:

• Everyone who downloads the podcast will have a copy.

Exit Plan for JamGlue:

• Mp3 files of mixes

Exit Plan for Screencastle:

• Download Direct Link to File and store on hard drive/server

Exit Plan for Screentoaster:

• Mov Downloads before uploading to screencastle site

Exit Plan for DimDim:

• Download and build own DimDim server and store recordings there.

Exit Plan for Twitter:

• Backup twitter with Tweettake

Exit Plan for Google Docs:

• Google Docs Download GreaseMonkey Script

Ustream Archive:




Twitter Archive:

CosmoCat: @bhwilkoff was great to learn about screencasting and audio recording! Hope you enjoy Audioboo! #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 09:46 PM GMT ·
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bhwilkoff: Thanks to everyone for adding value to my session #tie09 #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 09:40 PM GMT ·
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forevertie09: http://twitterforteachers.wetpaint.com/ #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 09:13 PM GMT ·
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toniobarton: Learning needs real purpose and real audience. #cotie09 #tie09 #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 09:08 PM GMT ·
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bhwilkoff: How do you capture learning? Add to the spreadsheet: http://tr.im/pvz2 #tie09 #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 09:05 PM GMT ·
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villagegreen: #forevertie09 http://screencastle.com/watch/b0c8a1b0ac6aa37d179f945721ee4400

Jun 23, 2009 08:40 PM GMT ·
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CosmoCat: I’m searching for #forevertie09 live on TweetGrid Search – http://bit.ly/4A1lo3 (expand)

Jun 23, 2009 08:19 PM GMT ·
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care507: I’m searching for #forevertie09 live on TweetGrid Search – http://bit.ly/4A1lo3 (expand)

Jun 23, 2009 08:13 PM GMT ·
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forevertie09: I’m searching for forevertie09 live on TweetGrid Search – http://bit.ly/MVxM0 (expand)
#forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 08:13 PM GMT ·
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forevertie09: #forevertie09 Devonee – Technology Integration Specialist from Mesa County

Jun 23, 2009 08:12 PM GMT ·
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forevertie09: I’m searching for #forevertie09 live on TweetGrid Search – http://bit.ly/4A1lo3 (expand)

Jun 23, 2009 08:11 PM GMT ·
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villagegreen: #forevertie09 to back channel: I’m Matthew Woolums, Integration Coordinator from DPS. My blog: http://villagegreen.edublogs.org

Jun 23, 2009 08:08 PM GMT ·
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matthewadennis: SpEd in middle school in NW Denver. #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 08:08 PM GMT ·
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jcope50: #forevertie09 Hi! Jill – Skyline HS Teacher Librarian- St. Vrain – just moved to CO on Saturday from CA!!!

Jun 23, 2009 08:08 PM GMT ·
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toniobarton: #forevertie09 first year HS Computer Teacher from Manitou Springs High School

Jun 23, 2009 08:08 PM GMT ·
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Sara24lynn: #forevertie09 Hello! I am a library media specialist in a K-5 school in Greeley, Colorado.

Jun 23, 2009 08:08 PM GMT ·
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lbreed: #forevertie09 Hi! Lisa from Evergreen Middle School! I am looking forward to learning about authentic assessments.

Jun 23, 2009 08:08 PM GMT ·
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matthewadennis: Name is Matthew (obvi). Work in DPS. #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 08:08 PM GMT ·
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Sara24lynn: #forevertie09 Audioboo.fm is an audio tool for iPhone My audioboos http://audioboo.fm/profile

Jun 23, 2009 08:07 PM GMT ·
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matthewadennis: @forevertie09 mind being blown; didn’t realize so many tools out there that I didn’t know about. Not in the know at 25?? #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 08:03 PM GMT ·
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bhwilkoff: How do you use audio to capture learning? Call 646-402-5701 x 25286 #tie09 #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 08:00 PM GMT ·
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McTeach: #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 07:54 PM GMT ·
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McTeach: I’m getting real-time search results at TweetGrid http://tweetgrid.com/ #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 07:54 PM GMT ·
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RickTanski: @jenwagner Slide 10 on http://tieconference.wikispaces.com/1117 #cotie09 #tie09 #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 07:51 PM GMT ·
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toniobarton: #forevertie09 I like http://www.vocaroo.com/ recording website, easy to use.

Jun 23, 2009 07:50 PM GMT ·
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dlevesque: vocarro does not work on a eeepc #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 07:47 PM GMT ·
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erhubbell: @bhwilkoff Hi everyone! Looking forward to great conversations today. #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 07:39 PM GMT ·
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matthewadennis: Will the iPhone be forever, Ben? #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 07:31 PM GMT ·
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McTeach: @bhwilkoff was giving it rave reviews! RT @courosa: @zemote I see Edmodo on the screen at #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 07:29 PM GMT ·
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sroseman: #forevertie09 how do i get rid of the echo

Jun 23, 2009 07:29 PM GMT ·
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zemote: @courosa awesome!!!! thanks for letting me know #forevertie09 , if anyone has questions, forward them on

Jun 23, 2009 07:28 PM GMT ·
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courosa: @zemote I see Edmodo on the screen at #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 07:27 PM GMT ·
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courosa: #forevertie09 re: learning that lasts 4ever,think about boyd’s media attributes” persistence,replicability,searchability,invisible audience

Jun 23, 2009 07:25 PM GMT ·
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dlevesque: #forevertie09 why last forever?

Jun 23, 2009 07:23 PM GMT ·
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RickTanski: @bhwilkoff Hello from an office in Colorado Springs #cotie09 #tie09 #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 07:22 PM GMT ·
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McTeach: @bhwilkoff Hello from Sunny Northern California! #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 07:22 PM GMT ·
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ericolsen: Will the computers ever work?#forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 07:20 PM GMT ·
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courosa: #forevertie09 Hey Ben, hi from the St. Louis airport, soon to get back to Canada.

Jun 23, 2009 07:20 PM GMT ·
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villagegreen: Sitting in on design with forever in mind at tie #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 07:20 PM GMT ·
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bhwilkoff: Say hello to all of the folks at #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 07:19 PM GMT ·
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RickTanski: @bhwilkoff 3 hour session! I’m going to kill some bandwidth bits for sure. #cotie09 #tie09 #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 07:10 PM GMT ·
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mjmontagne: tuning in to a bit of @bhwilkoff ‘s workshop #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 07:09 PM GMT ·
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debh2u: RT @bhwilkoff: Session wiki page http://tieconference.wikispaces.com/1117 #tie09 #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 10:53 AM GMT ·
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bhwilkoff: Session wiki page http://tieconference.wikispaces.com/1117 #tie09 #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 05:55 AM GMT ·
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bhwilkoff: Creating a hashtag for my session tomorrow at #tie09. Come and Join in the session with #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 05:54 AM GMT ·
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I won’t buy anything that only does one thing

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

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

The cost of not doing anything…

I was in a great meeting this week where we were considering whether
or not to go ahead with a full scale implimentation of the Moodle LMS
for assessment purposes in our district. It was a great meeting not
because of the topic but the way it was being handled.
 
We were talking about the absolute costs of an open source LMS and of
staying with a custom-built assmessment solution. We were really
looking for a venn diagram moment when one of the curriculum and
instruction representatives said something really smart: “There is a
cost to not doing anything as well. It may not be a dollar cost, but
it will cost the teachers the ability to know more about their kids’
knowledge and it will cost the kids some learning opportunities.”
(Paraphrased by me.)
 
Too often we do not think about the cost of doing nothing or of doing
things too slowly. Does appathy in the face of huge choices cost our
kids the best learning years of their lives?
 
So, it got me thinking: What are the costs of doing nothing (or doing
very little) to change school?
 
Share an idea if this makes you think as much as it has made me.

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

New Responsibility

I was thinking about waiting until I got a little further into the
project to start blogging about it, but since I made the choice to
start blogging daily, I have really found that this forum let’s me
think through all of the things that I need to.
 
So the new responsibility is this: I have been put in charge of
administrating multiple moodle installations in our district. The
reason why this new charge I have been given is so strange to me is
that up until 2 months ago, the only “official” moodle installation in
our district was at a high school in parker, which I had little to do
with.
 
 The reason for the shift is nothing short of an economic and
pedagogical perfect storm. Our district had slowly been building the
capacity for more and more teachers to start asking for a way of
teaching and engaging with their students online, and with the failure
of our bond election, the only choice for an LMS was to have someone
who was already working in open source to implement and support a
solution like moodle.
 
The best part is, however, that no one I have talked to thinks that we
are settling for something. From all of the initial conversations, all
stakeholders believe that professional development, online learning,
and blended learning fit well within a vision of moodle that includes
outside assessments and google apps for communication.
 
I guess the only reason for this post is to ask for advice. If you
were asked to design and implement learning environments for an online
school, a professional development program, and a blended model
(online and in centers/schools) using moodle, what would you make sure
to do (or not do)?
 
While I have a definite vision for the way forward, I am not the
smartest person in the room (considering that I have no idea how big
this room is). I want to know more… Always more.

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

Condensation

I was at a restaurant this morning with my family and my wife’s
fingers were getting stickier and stickier from the leaky maple syrup
container. After a while she started looking for some water to wash
them off with. Her water cup was empty but the condensation on the
outside was still there so she used it to clean her hands.
 
I’m not sure why this sparked something in me, but the act of her
using only the water that was on the outside of the glass made me
think of what is happening in many school districts that I see around
me.
 
We can see the water, the life giving liquid inside, but we have to
settle for the small beads collecting around the outer edge.
 
We know that the bandwidth that is needed to fully share with one
another the media, ideas and resources of our district is available.
It exists for businesses and other entities out there, but in
education we are stuck with the runoff from those large high speed
pipes.
 
We need a straw, but we are stuck licking at the glass.
 
(The preceding metaphor is stretched pretty thin, but I did want to
get it out there just in case someone else found it useful.)

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

15 questions…

I was given the task recently of coming up with 15 questions to ask a
information technology director candidate during an interview. While I
missed the window during which this information would have been useful
to the person who solicited my help (moving is really hard), I would
like to provide it here. It may not be useful as a list in itself, but
I had a lot of fun coming up with it, and it may lead to more good
thinking if I ever care to answer these questions.
 
1. What do you see as the purpose of technology in education?
2. What is the one change that you would make to our institution that
would help students to learn in a more connected way?
3. What do you believe is the purpose for acceptable use policies?
What is your ideal AUP?
4. What should professional development look like?
5. Who is in your personal learning network?
6. What does your learning workflow look like, or how do you learn?
7. How should our institution archive, tag, and share information and
learning objects?
8. How do you plan on bringing all stakeholders to the table to make
technological decisions?
9. What role should open source software play in our institution?
10. What is your vision for mobile devices accessing our institution?
11. What does online learning mean to you?
12. What kind of technology infrastructure is essential in our institution?
13. How will you connect our institution to others in the state,
country and world?
14. How will you let our students take their learning identity with
them after they graduate?
15. What will we find if we google you?
 
Anyone think of any others?
 
Anyone want to answer these ones?

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

Making moving easy…

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.

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

A question

This is a really interesting question.

First, if you are looking for engaging videos to show for professional development, I would look here:
http://www.speedofcreativity.org/resources/videos-for-pd/

As for introducing the subject of engaging students with technology, I think that you would really have to find a good itch that you think all of the teachers want to scratch. What is the one thing that they can do with technology and students that they couldn't do before? Why should they care about technology?

Places like http://classroom20.com, or http://supportblogging.com, or even something as specific as http://voicethread4education.wikispaces.com/ would work well to figure out just how deep the topic goes with your teachers.

As for an article, I like http://blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/?p=94, many of the posts from http://weblogg-ed.com, or any of the presentations at slideshare about educational technology.

If you are really interested in starting this conversation, I would recommend that you start up a discussion group over at Google Groups or set up a wiki for this purpose. Or, simply get an e-mail group going if that is where your teachers are at. Creating an avenue for this kind of conversation is the only way to make it last. Let me know where you want to go from here. Creating change is not an easy business.

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

A list of tags…

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?