How to cite tweets and keep them available...

Twitter is definitely taking off as a popular medium despite the brevity and 'media-poorness' of the messages. If you are going to train your students in correctly quoting the internet, how about tweets? In the article http://gunther-eysenbach.blogspot.com/2009/04/how-to-cite-twitter-how-to-cite-tweets.html the author links to some nice articles.

He also raises a far more challenging question. How to keep twitter messages retrievable. The author describes the 'Webcite' tool which will archive citations on the web for you.

To try it out I have just created a Webcitation of a tweet I sent out a few days ago. It is a little work, especially adding the metadata, but at least you are assured that the webpage will be retrievable. I do wonder how long the webcite service will be available.

Wiki in Blackboard - yet another manual

A well known drawback in most traditional VLE's is the lack of possibilities for structured input by students. One tool which can allow students room to add input in a structured fashion and collaborate on a collection of knowledge is the Wiki.
Sadly Blackboard does not offer this in the core code. Some teachers have requested a Wiki but in first instance it would be best to have a closed wiki for groups of students.
In order to gain some experience we have decided to try out the Teams LX building block offered by Learning Objects. I have ran it through and it seems to be very comprehensive. It allows for private group wikis which will automatically become accesible to the other students in the class after a predefined date. It also allows for commenting and exporting the final product to a public website.
I will be following a number of courses using this Wiki and am very intrigued how students and teachers will respond to this new tool.

The teachers manual (in Dutch) can be found here.
The students manual (in Dutch) can be found here.

Presentation Blackboard 9 - The next generation

Today Emmanuel Clemot, a Solutions Engineer from Blackboard came to Utrecht University to show off their plans for the Blackboard 9 - Next Generation product. We even got a prototype to look at, a short video will be available on the Blackboard website soon.
A few things that struck me:

Process
- First common APIs so both products can start using intermediate tools (community, content, portfolio and outcomes system).
- Then moving features into Blackboard 8 (is already out)
- And finally building a new shell to access either Vista, Learning system or one of the other tools mentioned above...
That really means as an institution you can choose to keep the old VLEs up and running and migrate gradually. I am not quite sure I would want to, but it is possible.

Look and Feel
Slightly more confusing than Blackboard, but not a lot. Teachers will be quite happy, they will recognise the system. The drag and drop looks good, the contextual menus are alright but they do hide options until teachers find them. Fortunately NO annoying Java Applets (they have learnt their lesson).
I had a big laugh about the WebCT view and the Blackboard classic view feature.

Features
What I like (some of its already in Bb 8) is social bookmarking (Scholar) continued, the facebook connection (though for Holland it is only a start), wikis and blog in the code, add a number of mashups, social learning space in community system, personisable pages, course homepage with more than only announcements (should Sakai or some other VLE sue them? ;-).
They claim Content System allows for student collaboration with versioning and comments. We do not use it at present and it made me rather curious.

All in all a good presentation and an interesting option for Utrecht University, certainly because it allows teachers a careful transition.

Podcasts, why bother?

In the final session here at Online Educa today I was surprised to see that in the three presentations universities are focussing on pod- and especially vodcasting rather than streaming video. The true benefit in my eyes lies in offering materials which can be listened to or watched on the move. On the other hand, it might be a better target to let students to create streaming material which can be shared.
Some of the speakers had taken this into account. Especially the example from the Geography department (impala)attracted my attention: giving students pod- and voldcasts to take with them on fieldwork seems a very suitable application.
An other advantage is that students can relatively easily contribute materials. This has been used to allow citizens to join in various debates in Europe. And now its time for a drink :-)

Andrew Keen's keynote: is Web2.0 the cult of the amateurs?

Andrew starts off his keynote that there is nothing wrong with technology as such. He argues that the ideas behind the Web2.0 however are a danger to the distribution of wisdom. The wisdom produced in Web2.0 is the wisdom of the crowds. He claims that Google lets users decide what wisdom is. I do certainly not agree on this point: What is shown in Google is certainly not neccessarily wisdom.
He goes on by complaining that Wikipedia entries are just as long on irrelevant subjects as on subjects he finds interesting. This makes me wonder whether I would interested in whatever he finds interesting.
The challenge is how to select which information is correct. Students must be trained in medialiteracy, knowing what is correct in the media. This is not a new call, in fact there are teachers training first year students in this skill.

He argues Harvard professors should be busy publishing on the internet. On the other hand this is already possible, so what is his point...
In his retoric internet is a place with its own dynamics, although technology did not receive this dubious honouw. Though the content on the internet is nothing more than contribution by individuals. Would it not be better to focus on the indivivuals and the social processes between individuals when constructing knowledge?

The SMS wall actually did work!

It took some effort and some perseverence on the part of Pierre, but in the end the SMS wall did work and was put to good use in the debate Wilfred gave on the more ethical questions regarding the use of blogs and wiki's in education. I heard he will be posting about that soon.

Getting the SMS wall to work
Originally uploaded by kgrussell2

Teemu Arina's session on slow pedagogy, an alternative in this age of speed

In his session Teemu argues for room for serendipity adaptability in learning. Teaching should provide students which adapt and adjust their processes. He offers various snippets of information and theories, but does not connect these, but as he explained later: 'Leaves this up to his audience to select the theories they find relevant.'

His session followed a philosophical approach analysing words and their meanings.
'How to cope in this age of information overload?' Marshall MacLuhan claims we can solve this challenge by pattern recognition.
Another point he argues is that in learning we should give room for serendipity: planning everything leaves no room for unintended outcomes. There should be more attention for slow pedagogy, we should concentrate on the learning process rather than the outcome of learning. By focussing on the outcomes we leave too little room for serendipity.

Blogs in education, success stories

Shame it's quiet in this session at the end of the first day of the Onderwijsdagen. In this session Rene Jansen from the UvA describes plenty of examples of application of web2.0 tools in higher ed. Blogs have been used for reflection on learning. This does spurn a discussion on whether you can use a blog for reflection, and can you do this on a public blog?
A nice conclusion from a research by Martin Kloos is that social software individual tools do not offer sufficient features to accomodate a community of practice, though a combination will work.
Two of Rene's students also explain their experiences. They have set up a knowledgecafe to share and grow together by setting up a groupsblog. Blogging was an important tool in developing skills in collecting and aggregating and reflecting on knowledge. 'Publicating-light' as they called it.

Which other Twitters want to be my friend?

A thank you to Wilfred for being my friend ;-)
But seriously, I thought I would try the Twitter badge which shows my friends on Twitter. It really does work and certainly is a lot more interesting than just my own mucking about. The one thing I did notice was that it was a pain to find out just who is on Twitter. Of course I can start inviting everybody, but I just want to find those already on twitter...

Google map on my blog

With thanks to a posting by Pierre, I gave MyMaps a try. It is extreeeeemely simple. It took me about 10 minutes to build a map and to squeeze it onto this blog!
So here it is: a few places of work I am cycling between regularly...

Creative Commons finally on this blog

It took a while bit I have finally got round to reading the fine print and selecting the most suitable licensing for this blog. You will now find a small logo in the column on the right.



The background is that all the information on this blog can be shared and used as long as you correctly attribute this to the author. This is an open expression of the more inherent underlying idea regarding social software: it is valuable to share information, in sharing you can set up communities and networks in which everybody can profit. It is no longer the information itself which is important, but rather the skill in building up a network, assessing the value of information and reflecting on information.

Twitter badge

In case you are wondering what I am doing at every possible moment of the day, you can always watch my Twitter badge, now added in the column on the right....
PS: I don't promise I will keep it up all that regularly, I am just not techy enough for that sort of stuff ;-)
If anybody wants to sign up as my friend I can try out the badge with friends too :-)