Reflection for March 12 class - virtual reality

For this class, we covered a lot of ground and I opened up to some new possibilities, having seen Second World and World of Warcraft for the 1st time. I can imagine the excitement of NetGenners at these fantasy/reality worlds. I'm a fairly imaginative person and having been into SciFi for a long time I can attest to the attraction I have for some of these applications. Tron was a watershed moment for me, but kinda from a graphics level as well as a fantasy level.

I remain disturbed that war and conflict seem to be keystone trends in manjy of these virtual worlds and I'd like to know if anyone else here feels the same way. I'm not sure this a healthy outlet. March 11th saw a teenager in Germany kill 16 people including himself - "a classic case of a conflicted young man who wreaked havoc in real life after savoring imaginary violence in the digital world" [New York Times, March 13]. Of course, there is no way to regulate this information and the genie is out of the bottle already.

We also made a podcast file together, which was very enjoyable, based as it was on Dr. Ellen Wagner's excellent, professional and academic talk of the previous week. That had a feeling of cameradery which we do enjoy as a cohort group in this class.

I do firmly believe that now, more than ever, people need real connections with other people, and deep and personal connections, especially in learning situations . . . I think that technology should be viewed as only an enhancement and not the main subject; though it is, for us of course, a subject in itself worthy of study. I'm just not sure how much serious growth is possible, though, without real experience through human connection, unless we want to be part chip ! (I think some imagine they would enjoy that).

I'd rather not smell things through my monitor; real smells abound all around and that's e-nuff for me.

Ellen Wagner podcast script

Ellen Wagner points out the following question - that as educators,

How do we move beyond the fascination with the latest and greatest and focus on sustainable innovation?

At a minimum, by applying the Gartner Higher Education Hype Cycle model to this question, the slope of enlightenment as portrayed in the model would need to be elongated and extended as much as possible before plateauing.

Any technology that thus has legs and real application to learning could answer this question on its own by being viable, durable, and widely used - though it would need to meet multiple criteria to be successful; being widely used alone does not necessarily make it a good learning tool.

Dr. Wagner's question must be not only answered, but indeed be identified and faced by a greater segment of the population of the learning community if we are to realize true sustained innovation, not once, but as a paradigm.

Dr. Ellen Wagner reflection week 6

Dr. Wagner's talk was very informative as all of our speakers' talks have ben; I enjoyed hers more than Kurt Bonk's as it seemed more grounded in the realities of social networking and web 1-2-3-4. Since Wagner, Bonk, and are all interrelated, there is a lot of breadth to the developing discussion and that in itself is very illuminating to the process of e-learning. Transparency is a big issue here and a very unsettling one indeed. I believe the people "farther up the food chain" need to be more transparent by far in their dealings with everyone else, I.e. more honesty and inclusiveness are needed desperately for institutions in academics and for corporate entities to survive in this brave new world. It is reaching critical mass now and the technology world is no exception. Ellen brought up the fact that we have to leave a trail of tech for others to follow, and I agree with this. She responded favorably to my point about e-waste (the hardware kind) being a big issue in a world "going green". We cannot give short shrift to this problem. People burning computer waste in India to get the copper causes serious pollutants to leach into the air you and I breathe, and it is going to get worse. Gotta clean the dishes before we get dessert, though most won't want to do this, of course.

The Gartner hype cycle presents a good plain-language way to make sense of new technology developments in our lifetimes. I think of it often already when I read about twitter, etc.

Interesting thought that "web 3.0" is 3-d in nature. I like the data visualization and threat simulation angles here - these seem like strong ways to use this technology.

I was encouraged to study "today's learning metaverse" and find that classroom instruction as a modality is on the increase while instant messaging and games are decreasing.

All in all, a standout presentation among the several we've had.

Bravo !

David

Emerging Technologies in E-Learning - good information, refreshingly amusing

I read and thoroughly enjoyed this essay. It really is cool to have some hard, simple definitions in one place for reference . . . it's the objectivity I appreciate here, that and the good real-life examples offered. I didn't know what a mashup was, Top City Books sounds good, really in my interest arena, but will not come up in any browser and I'm not interested in spending anything beyond a few minutes trying to get in. I'll give it one more shot. Social Computing was a good mini-essay here, but here is where the utopian ideals start to color the essay - "people will be able to A) find great treasuries of information on almost any imaginable topic and B) contribute their knowledge to it". We can already do that. It's called A) a good library, and as for B) contributing to it, let the buyer beware of the information subsequently found. Know your sources! As for institutions abandoning top-down management and employees and partners "becoming part of a living fabric of brand loyalists", that's admirable thinking, but alas, flawed in that it sounds col, antiseptic and corporate in the same way that top-down management in corporations now demands the same thing under pain of termination. Try drinking coke if you work for pepsi - a friend of mine works for one of them and believe me, they don't joke about it. I am all for employee-ownership of their company, with equal participation and success, and everybody wins. Go visit the Cheese Board Collective in Berkeley for a whopping success of a real-life example. Their credo:

We are a collective of about 30 members. Everyone who works at the Cheese Board is a member of the collective with equal decision making power. There is no boss, manager, or non-owner worker. Everyone makes the same hourly wage.

Easily the best cheese and especially bread you can find, and the best service anywhere. If you had to base an electronic social network on a community ideal, this would be the one to do it on.

Mobile learning - "the logical next step for e-learning". I don't think so. A small segment, maybe.

Augmented reality - where you separate the toys from the real deal, i.e. guided surgery.

Smart mobs - Stop, you're killing me. Enough already, let me up! " salvos of text messages" from a "million Filipinos" apparently "toppled President Estrada". Too many sci-fi shoot 'em ups and bad coffee for the quoted Rheingold, I'm afraid. I physically winced when I read this.

MMOGS - the going gets a little sloppy here; "will use" is a tad hasty for me. Kinda, well, kinda goofy if you ask me.

WIKIS - excellent, tight mini-essay that keeps it simple and reminds us it's not authoritative.
information.

One of my deep concerns is addressed with the statement on page 16 - "the challenge will be for learners (all of us) to manage information overload". So true for so long now (decades) and it's getting more so every day. But to state in this paper that "Google and other search engines will evolve to provide tools for people to manage it all" is a royal naieve blunder and insulting to the intelligence; it sounds like a punch line to a Bizarro comic.

I like the glossary and overall, digging for usable nuggets in this article was successful, and some of the idealism made me chuckle.

Reflection for February 19 class - goals for learners

I enjoyed last week's class a lot. Just visited Academhack and joined in the discussion on tenure. Checked out pbwiki; I'll construct one. The short stories were effective and fun; I like the side by side revision feature a lot. I do think twitter is a phenomenon that may or may not be truly useful to learners, but the excellent group presentation allayed some of my doubts. Using it as a conferee at a conference among other conferees is a good idea, for example. I think the key for me in social networking as an effective learning tool is compaction, making it have impact (like Kim does, a style I really try to emulate). I can and do write long rants, commentaries, letters, e-mails and all manner of correspondence but continue to strive for saying more with less - there is a lot of information out there to wade through and I'm cautious about devoting too much time to opinions offered on a whim.

Educational Wikis

http://shannongoodwin.wikispaces.com/ high school

http://mysideofthemountain.wikispaces.com/ 4th grade

http://coe.sdsu.edu/eet/Articles/wikis/index.htm SDSU

Stars and their boring tweets

Had the opportunity to read local newspaper column
inches devoted to boring, pointless drivel from some
tweeters. A "treat". Not. They range from a post about
how someone is accusing someone else of tweeting too much
(that's three layers of pointless, people) to the kind of personal
"details" you avoid by putting your headphones on when
someone tries to bore your ear off on an airplane flight.

In a world desperate for real experience for the past three
decades at least, this is scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Apparently new "celebs" are being "created" by twitter, just
'cause they tweet. Hmmm.

Staying tuned; but with online privacy an issue, I'm just
tweeting out loud in the real world so far, to the birds wintering
in the garden . . .