flaneuse.org

I ended up having a migraine yesterday — perhaps thanks to the fluorescent lights and staring at my screen too much. Today is much better — we’re working on specific projects with people to implement into their classes. The more concrete we can make new technologies, especially by creating exact ones, the better I think. It’s hard to really conceptualize a wiki or a blog when you’re not sure why or how an educator would use one.

I think I need to spend a week off the grid, out in the mountains or desert. My eyes are crossing from looking at a screen too long. And let me tell you how much I don’t want to go to the grocery store on the way home, but the animals (us included) are out of food.

I probably don’t need to eat, really.

The conference is over, I am working in a summer hybrid tech camp for faculty, and things are slowing down, bit by bit. So I turn my thoughts to something else — traveling and taking pictures, which are two of my favorite things.

Recently, with some leftover grant money, I was able to buy a Nikon D40 SLR with two lenses. In many ways, this is my dream camera. Four or five years ago, I found that I love to take pictures when I saved up birthday and Christmas money and bought a higher-end consumer camera — not an SLR but a nice enough camera where I was able to get some good pics (which are on my flickr whose password I have forgotten and need to resuscitate). My father gave me his 1977 Nikon SLR — a real camera, with two lenses, this past year and I have loved using it.

But digital photography has just gone past film in so many ways — it’s cheaper and easier, I can edit the photos and post and send them online all over the world. Tools like the Nikon digital let me play without assuming a high knowledge of shutter speeds and aperature and, when I want to, I can go completely manual and play with those settings.

By the weekend I should have some time to get out and shoot some film, and in a couple of weeks I go home to the West and can shoot my head off, in a manner of speaking. I am SO looking forward to it.

As a special treat, in thinking about travel, here’s a neat little site I found on Unclutterer — One Bag: The Art and Science of Traveling Light.

This morning, as I trawl the web for nuggets of interest, I find on Higher Ed a great article about professors online.

The article points back to another on in the NYTimes this weekend about professors’ online presence — about how and what having a blog or a MySpace or Facebook page means in the relationships we have with students. Disclaimer here — I have a very active Facebook page and my students often add me as a friend. I also use it to keep in touch with friends from different schools, alumni from my program, and join new groups in my area of interest. I am very careful, however, about the information I put on it — no phone numbers or addresses, no comments about school or students. There’s really no need.

But then there’s ratemyprofessor.com

That site allows students to enter comments about us and our teaching, and without our knowledge necessarily. So yes, I look it up just to see what people have said and then I become really conflicted. I am a young professor, in her third year, and very much trying to find my way. I also teach specific freshmen classes about thinking, reading and learning on the college level, as well as graduate hybrid courses. And so far, across my ratings (and under two names, since my name changed), most of my students like me as a person and don’t find the class hard. In fact, they even call it easy — and I have to say that worries me.

I want to challenge them more, and push harder for all of us on our thinking. Other colleagues in my department get rave reviews for doing just that — teaching challenging, deep courses that make a real mark on our students. Am I going too easy because I am worried about the reviews and any impact they might have? I know that teaching more challenging courses won’t keep me from tenure — in fact, that’s probably  just what I need to do.

I think I have been too easy, especially on the undergraduates, because I am learning and thinking about what it means for them to be academically literate. I know too, that the ways in which I teach don’t come across as hard — I’m not a lecturer and we do lots of group and paired work along with whole class discussion. But I need to push myself and my students harder. They can do it — I don’t worry about that. I just need to stop pussy-footing around and give back to them what my very best teachers gave to me: the desire and ability to keep learning and stretching my understanding throughout my life.

Ready or not, here I come.

We use the term “deep learning” quite a bit — or at least I know I do. I want my students to reach a deeper level of learning in which they reflect on what they think, in how they ask questions, in how they even interact with the world at large. No small goal, right? And I often want them to use technology to do these things — but I want them to want to do it. I get so frustrated having to tell students to read the news online, or surf for something interesting and then write about it — but that’s how they’ve been trained. What the hell does it mean when I tell them to follow their own minds? Why would they do that - how can I assess them? How can I guarantee that these kinds of skills and practices will pay off any better than what they already know how to do –or that they will pay off at all?

So that just keeping up, tagging and commenting, watching the right videos and sending information around becomes the tangible way of learning through a social relationship with learning and each other. This is happening both online and offline — in children’s Pokemon card games and studies like Rebecca Black’s work with fanfiction and her subject who wrote stories in order to better learn English but that garnered more than 6,000 responses from fans who wanted to give her feedback and encourage her to keep writing.

I love this — “two-ness as a paradigm.” Yes and yes and yes — “a different way of going about doing life” — going online, joining affinity spaces, attempting new tasks with the support of other novices instead of going straight to expert sources and manuals. Choosing and adapting tools that are useful within the definitions of our life but not because it was mandated — choosing blogging because it fits within my life as a writer and a thinker, and trying to break out of the blog rut, or even decide against it if it no longer makes sense. Understanding when to have everyone try something, myself included, even in the face of probable failure and then understanding when to get out.

So here’s the time I think I am most excited about, when I get to moblog the keynote that Colin and Michele are giving. I should disclose that I was one of the lucky ones and got an early copy of their paper and so I know some of the fascinating ideas they’re working with and trying on. I know they’ve been at this longer than I have, but I am so consistently impressed with the depth of their thinking and their willingness to question sacred cows from interesting perspectives.

Also very good today was the point/counterpoint discussion with Erik Jacobson and Rich Wolfson. I absolutely loved how Erik had a powerpoint that somehow went from Learning 2.0 to Learning 9.0 and still made absolute sense. People may not know a lot about Montclair State outside the state of New Jersey but we have incredible scholars and teachers where who every day give me a whole new education.

OK, they’re off after a goofy intro I did and best of all, they’re building on the ideas that Rich and Erik talked about at lunch time. See, we named this conference Learning 2.0, but I can attest to the fact that the name came around much more quickly than any sort of definition. If Web 2.0 is about being more collaborative, user-driven and shaped, then what is Learning 2.0? Learning 1.0 might be though of as the traditional ways of learning in families and then moved into classrooms that objectified learning, “cutting it off from the meaning embedded in it.” It’s a good point — that learning is often remote from the kinds of places the learning needs to be situated in.

I love this as Colin says it — “the twoness” of Learning 2.0 that makes it different from Learning 1.0 and in doing so, come to understand them both. He gives the history of Tim O’reilly and his ideas of Web 2.0 — those companies that survived the end of the dot com bubble, possibly because these companies offered something different — namely the possibility of the user to create, contain, shape, interact, participate, purchase, organize and more. We taught the computer as the programming allowed that to happen — just as Amazon saves information and presents it back to you just in time, making recommendations and connecting up lists you might find useful. For many of us, this was a bit insidious but for others, perhaps those of a younger age, the computer was designed to collect information *from* you, not just work *for* you. That’s a huge shift — as Colin describes to be a different sort of entity.

Participation and collaboration — Wikipedia

Distributed expertise and cognition — the World Wide Web is not only all of us, but perhaps the only collected place that locates what we all know. If the Library of Congress was once the location of all that we knew, isn’t the Web so much more so? And what does that do to the nature of expertise, the need to print paper-based books that are closely monitored and sold?

And speaking of selling — much of what Web 2.0 is isn’t about selling, per se: flickr, wikipedia, — but what does that mean for learning 2.0 versus learning 1.0?

Michele’s point about truth is important too — the fear that Wikipedia may not be true, but things like Encyclopedia Britannica is written from a particular perspective woven through with notions of truth, sovereignity, and power. Ratings, rankings, and tagging systems too attempt to categorize users in a hierarchical way — but this moved into folksonomies, which are much more collaborative, horizontal, and rhizomatic — with no clear ending or beginning. On the other hand, systems like Digg do give the top ratings for each day and, within a few minutes, each user can see what places are more highly rated. The same thing can happen for comments on the initial links and this gets ever more tightly wound until we end up in some sort of never-ending spiral that *does* mean something, in thinking specifically about how we would hierarchize what we find to be important.

Chris has been videotaping throughout the conference, and Will and I have both shot some still images so sometime in the next few days, look for those to appear here. I’ve also heard some good things about the video games presentation, where novices got onto the Wii and experienced Sims and Civilization. It seems like a lot, I know, to do so much in a single day and it is a long day — the ending keynote goes from 4:15 to 5 and given that it is Colin and Michele, I know it will be brilliant. In fact, their paper will be available on their website, and we would like to put up presentations and ideas on to the conference website when they become available (i.e. presenters send us their powerpoints and other materials).

Because the more we share, the deeper I think we think about new technologies, new ways of making meaning in the world, of using language.

Right now, four of my freshmen from last summer are presenting on facebook, from the perspective of being immersed in this technology. facebook is so different than anything I knew when I was in school, when connections were much smaller, more local, and contained few links across groups. There were always those people who seemed to know everyone, but it was a talent they had, not a tool that anyone could use.  This is such a huge shift in terms of immediacy and connection — you can always look someone up, at any time of the day or night, and make that connection. You can also stalk a crush, find social groups, and more. How do we conceptualize this? What does it mean to connect and flatten and connect again?

I am sitting at the conference sign in desk, in the lull when people are in sessions. The morning dawned beautiful and for once, I didn’t oversleep my alarm. Sheer panic will do that for you. We got here in plenty of time and with enough coffee in me to get things started, and then….. of course….. no, wait for it…. the tech wouldn’t work. My laptop would not show up on the projector. Another faculty member and I tried everything we could think of, and the laconic AV guy wandered in and out. We were almost 20 minutes behind when it was discovered that the podium had become unplugged.

Yes, it was that simple. The main cord was unplugged. Deep breath, look at the screen, and dive in.

It was not the most auspicious of beginnings and I had scripted my speech. Usually I speak off the cuff but this needed to be tight. (I’ve posted it under the papers tab on this blog, if you’re interested in reading it). I made it through, that’s the important part.

Really, the important part is the sessions that are going on right now — faculty presenting on using Second Life in their teaching to help students visually analyze Flannery O’Connor, or the learning theories behind video games. Sessions on Digital Backpacks in schools (getting computers and equipment to teachers in schools in easier ways), using other kinds of technology including children’s engineering and video production by and for teens.

We’re all playing around with the idea of Learning 2.0 — how learning can become more flexible, more “unpedagogy” as Colin and Michele say and if that doesn’t make much sense, I’ll try to explain what little I know.