From Collaboratories to Public Space:
Bringing the World to Students and Putting Classrooms in the Wild

Find out about opportunities for connecting digital and physical learning on the web, in the classroom, and in informal settings — at all educational levels, from science to social studies, from math to music. What are the implications for teaching and learning? How can students, teachers, faculty, and experts be engaged? How do Open Educational Resources (OER) impact the development of collaboratories?

Panelists:

• Sam Donovan, Assistant Professor of Science Education, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Pittsburgh; Associate Director of the BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium
  
• Ken Goldberg, Professor and Director, New Media Center, UC Berkeley
  
• Megan Simmons, Education Programs Manager, Coyote Point Museum For Environmental Education

• Lisa Petrides, President, Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME)
  

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My wife broke her wrist playing tennis this morning. Friends who drove her to the hospital called me to come to her side and to rescue her car from the parking garage. I decided to take the bus. It was my first local bus ride in years.

I went on line to check the bus schedule. The transit agency pointed me to a site called Google Transit that combined a local street map, bus routes, and a bus schedule. This was a mash-up: a consolidation of data from several sources.

Upon entering my home address and the name of the hospital, I received a personalized itinerary that suggested what bus to catch and when, where to transfer to another bus and how long the wait would be, a map of the route, and instructions for the 3-minute walk to the hospital emergency room.

Until recently, it would not have been possible to pull this information together on the fly. Now even non-programmers can assemble a mash-up because APIs, or Application Program Interfaces, enable the data sets to speak a common language.

My automated bus itinerary saved me time and hassle. It saved me an unnecessary taxi ride.

Whenever I see workers trying to coordinate information from different sources, I wonder how much wasted effort a mash-up might eliminate.

I’m the opening act at this event next month in Salzburg, Austria. Me and Dr. Dr. Was-ist-das. They have printed an article I wrote in „Selbstorganisiertes Lernen mit E-Learning. Einblick in die Landschaft der webbasierten Bildungsinnovation. Sammlung von ausgewählten Fach- und Praxisbeiträgen zu interaktiven Lehr- und Lernszenarien.“ Auf Englisch.

Most educators I run into are oblivious to the mind-blowing changes going on in the world.

Educators have traditionally focused on teaching students in a particular discipline. They sought to impart the wisdom in their curriculum. Their goal was to bring order out of chaos. Their program of instruction was determined in advance of its delivery.

In a connected world, disciplines are blinders. Unpredictability makes it futile to plan for every contingency in advance. Rigid rules and scientific laws are too brittle to flex with change.

From now on, the role of education is to provide, maintain, and improve a context that enables students to learn content among themselves. Helping students prepare to adapt to the future is more important than focusing on what has already happened. Students need to learn how to learn. In the words of this conference, they need to become effective self-directed learners.

Hints for Online Collaboration (Free white paper)

Related: Keeping up with the pace of change

Complete our three-minute survey of informal learning and web 2.0 practices. We’ll send you a report of the results.

Internet Time Group hosts in-house workshops for corporate teams. Contact us for further information.

Register for June 2008 sessions in Melbourne and Sydney. For more information, call Blended Learning Solutions at 1300 133 699 in Australia or +613 9857 3758 internationally. Or email us: info@blended.com.au

EVENT OUTCOMES
Participants who actively take part will:

• Understand informal learning concepts and opportunities.
• Know how to incorporate natural learning and the social web at various levels.
• Understand the life cycle of natural learning interventions; maximizing the impact.
• Learn how to make informal learning work
• Become aware of obstacles, measurement, governance and resource requirements.
• Know how to rally enthusiastic support for informal learning initiatives.
• Understand how networks evolve and how common ‘network effects’ change the way business is done.
• Re-invent learning as an active, collaborative, need-driven, social process of adaptation.
• Evaluate various Web 2.0 tools and understand how to make them work to fit with business needs.
• Prioritize informal learning projects, select one, and start it.

At the turn of the century, my vision of corporate learning put the learner at the center of resources that included the web, online learning activities, communities of practice, an intranet, and instructor-led training. My thinking has changed. Can you guess several ways I would re-draw the picture today?

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The Science of Thinking Smarter
an interview with John J. Medina
Harvard Business Review 2008

This mercifully short interview in HBR reinforced a few neural pathways in my noggin.

Bona fide recorded memory is a very rare thing on this planet. The reason is that the brain isn’t interested in reality; it’s interested in survival. So it will change the perception of reality to stay in the survival mode. Unfortunately, many people still believe that the brain is a lot like a recording device—that learning something is like pushing the “record” button and remembering is simply pushing “playback.” In the real world of the brain, however, that metaphor is an anachronism. The fact is that the actual moment of learning—the moment of fixing a memory—is so complex that we have little understanding of what happens in our brains in those first fleeting seconds. Long-term memory is even worse. That’s because, much like cement, memory takes a long time to settle into its permanent form. While it’s busy hardening, human memory can very easily be modified, as traces of earlier memories leave their imprint upon it. All of which is to say that our understanding of reality is approximate at best.

Witch doctors who claim to understand the brain and prove it with parlor tricks need to read this article.

Eric Kandel won the Nobel Prize for showing that when people learn something it’s because the wiring of their brains changes. You can test sea slugs or human beings, and you will come up with the same results—any creature that ends up learning something does so because of physical changes in its neural architecture. This is astonishing. We used to think that we were born with all the neurons we were ever going to get and that it would be hard, if not impossible, to change them beyond a certain age. But it’s been quite clear for a while now that the physical changes neurons undergo when learning something happen to anybody’s brain at any age. The brain remains quite plastic until we die. We are lifelong learners. That’s excellent news indeed.

In short, neurons that fire together, wire together.

I wish the laymen who talk about the amigdyla, the corpus collosum, or the frontal lobes would just stop. As if they think labeling a dozen pieces of the most complex organ is the universe is meaningful. Science is still in the dark about brain basics.

I’ve heard people claim that tests such as Myers-Briggs are based on “sound neurological principles”—that brain science proves their validity, or even that these tests were designed with brain science in mind. The fact is that most of these tests—including IQ tests—were developed long before we knew very much about how the brain processes anything.

My fellow facilitator put me on the spot in yesterday’s session. Didn’t I find the Myers-Briggs instrument useful? Hmmm… Anything that gets you reflect on the nature of others is probably useful. But saying you can never change your type is wrong-headed. The the terminology is a direct takeaway from Jung. And how about learning styles, certainly they can help us improve learning? Well, no again. This brain stuff is tricky.

Saul Wurman recounts the story that “I used to think my brain was the most important organ in the body. Then I paused to ask ‘Wait a minute. Who’s telling me that?’”

At Web 2.0 Expo, a fellow turned me on to a service called WOT (web of trust) that warns you away from virus and malware sites, among others. I installed it and forgot it was there…until I was on an innocuous looking shareware site and received this alert:

Enough said.

IBM, Oracle, Yahoo!, and Microsoft (ominously close to Yahoo!) had big booths. I It’s ironic to see traditional bloatware providers claim to be loose, flexible, and fleet of foot. Uh huh. Remember Steve Martin in the early days of Saturday Night Live? “Let’s get small.” Scores of tiny companies, most of them with odd-ball names, were doing the booth thing. It’s hard to tell some of them apart. By the end of the year, half of these guys will no longer exist.

In the “Long Tail Pavillion” for small companies I found a some technologies that fit well with the concept of impromtu learning. OpenaCircle is a lightweight collaboration platform which has just what our Cafe group has been looking for: simultaneous video conferencing. CamWii is a very slick screen-sharing app. No client software required. Blazingly fast. Apps like this can support over-the-shoulder learning: live screenshow. I hope I get into CamWii’s beta program before leading workshops on natural learning to Australia in June.

WOT is short for Web of Trust. WOT offers an internet reputation scorecard that pops up when you’re visiting sites. “wOT is a free browser security tool that warns the user about risky websites that try to scam visitors, deliver malware, or send spam. The company, Against Intuition, was founded by a couple of Finnish grad student a couple of years ago. I’m going to test drive this one.

I picked up a couple of interesting O’Reilly books that didn’t feature the usual menagerie on the cover: Adaptive Path’s Subject to Change and Amy Shuen’s Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide. I love most O’Reilly pubs but wonder how long they can continue proliferating new series without watering down the brand. Knowing Your Ass from a Hole in the Ground: The Missing Manual. Some of the O’Reilly digital photography books are spectacular.

As the day was coming to an end, Chris Heuer motioned for me to join him in front of the cameras for a live videochat on UstreamTV. His questions punched my mental hot spots, and we had a rollicking good time. (Check back tomorrow for the full rant. How are people going to cope with mind-blowing change? Unlearning. Visualization. Mindful flexibility. What did I think of this conference? This is not a conference; it’s a ten-ring circus. Normal people (i.e., not us) would have a hard time figuring out whether the activities in the Blogtropolus room were real or science fiction.

The message from the stage at the Web 2.0 Expo: We are at an inflection point in human history. Doug Engelbart’s vision of harnessing our collective intelligence is unfolding. We’ve only just begun. The turning tide is frightening or wonderful; that’s a matter of perspective.

Tim O’Reilly told us Web 2.0 is becoming the platform for everything. It’s an amazing tool for harnessing collective intelligence. It is turning the enterprise inside out. It is the platform beneath a new way of living. We are at a turning point — a huge change in the way the world works.

Tim retold a great story from Clay Shirky. IBM’s Thomas Watson predicted the world would need about five computers. Clay points out Watson was wrong. Not in the direction you think. Watson overstated the number of computers by four. It’s all one cloud. Web 2.0 is evolving into cloud computing and the internet operating system. Ambient computing is on the way but it rides on mobile phones and sensors, not computers. It converging into one platform for the world.

Participatory is too uninspiring a word to describe what’s going on. Since the middle of the last century, we’ve received a gift: discretionary time. Confused, we didn’t make good use of it. When we weren’t taking instructions (at what we call “work”), we became accustomed to doing nothing: sitting back and letting the world go by. Watching the idiot box. From now on, we have to make better use of this gift of time. We must build and share; we must co-create the world we live in. This is a mind-blower on the order of the Industrial Revolution.

In that revolution, abandoning country life to live in cities and working in factories instead of farms put people into a state of perpetual disorientation. One thing enabled them to cope with the crisis: gin. People escaped mental chaos by becoming blotto. Gin pushcarts rolled down the streets. Swilling gin by the tankard blocks out everything.

Clay Shirky told us about one about a four-year old girl searching for something around and behind the family television. Her father asked what she was doing. She asked, “Where is the mouse?” To a four-year old, a television without a mouse is broken. If something doesn’t include you, it may not be worth sitting still for.

What are we doing collectively? Instead of drinking gin. We’re looking for the mouse.

The Blogopolis room here accommodates about a hundred people. As I write this, three or four huddles of them are recording interviews. I am sitting on the floor, beside a large screen. Three people in front of me are waving their arms in the air; they are air-bowling with Wii handhelds; the screen is their virtual bowling alley.

This is the blogging room, a freebie for people who self-identify as bloggers. You want to do something besides sit in a chair listening? This is the place. To the right, several 1′ high robotic dinosaurs are shmoozing. To my left, two people are slumped over the backs of chairs, receiving massages. Scoble’s here. Stowe Boyd is here. Dan Farber sits on the other side of the screen writing a story. A Finnish guy tells me about a web service that warns you of dangerous websites while you are on the net. I mention that for most corporate leaders, this room looks like an outtake from a science fiction flick.

As the keynotes conclude, the Blogopolis is shoulder to shoulder. Soon, people will be fanning out to continue the Expo 2.0 Expo conversation in bars and restaurants. A mash-up of Twitter, Upcoming, and an interactive map will enable them to locate friends via cell phone. They can also get a map — and a report on how big a crowd is at the bar. That’s part of the message: the formal event closes down for the day but the conversation continues on. Care for a pint of gin?

Dorothy Parker:

I like to have a martini
Two at the very most
After three I’m under the table
After four I’m under the host.

Gin is not my drink of choice. I wandered through the one-time wasteland that is now Yerba Buena Gardens reflecting on the day. Serendipity kicked in. Two guys were walking along Mission Street, next to Yerba Buena. Clay and Tim. I re-introduced myself and told them their presentations were awesome. I wasn’t buttering them up: jointly, they had delivered a wake-up call.

Today I’ll be heading across the Bay to attend Web 2.0 Expo. I don’t have a ticket. I don’t attend to buy one. It’s not that I’m cheap (although I generally am) so much as I don’t have three days for this. My plan is to suck as much knowledge from the event as I can in six hours.
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