..and a dollar short

Final Reflection ...well, maybe not.

This blog is part of my developing online education with hypermedia class, but I may well maintain it - though perhaps more sporadically than thus far.

The assigned topic was to reflect on the value of blogging as an instructional tool. Good, bad, or another perfunctory task. The answer is, (like everything else in this field) it depends. .

Splindarella (http://splindarella05.blogspot.com/) wrote effectively on the need for investment in order to maintain a blog. I completely agree. I am completely invested and behind the worth of blogging -- when I feel like it. You see, a blog is a creative and a personal endeavour and, if you're doing it because you have to, well, that's all there will be to it. If a topic or incident inspires me, I'm ready to write reams on it. If not,.... Not. And that's the issue of blogging assignments. This was due a day ago. So there you go.

The good - they're informal. No grading for spelling or grammar (I don't make fixes unless something really stands out to me - which is why you may occasionally read 'fro' instead of 'for'.) You can write as much or as little as you wish. Just get something out there.

This is also the bad. The stucture and process of an essay serves to direct and - I feel - prop up the student's efforts. In a blog, you're in the situation (a Kurt Vonnegut anecdote, I think) of the writing students who were told to write an essay about anything and came up with nothing. When they were then told that they had to write about one brick in the classroom wall, the pens flew.

You have to contain your energy to some extent for it to be useful. A blog can allow too much freedom when a student needs some structure just to know which way to proceed. Assigned topics help, but the free-flow nature of the beast can ( for me) be problematical.

Put another way: Freedom can trap us and limits can be liberating.

..and there's a lie in believe, but that's a whole other thing (Sister Frances deSales - sixth grade).

Inspiration Came Late, or, The High Price of Tea in China

The current blog assignment was intended, if I understood correctly, to stretch our collaborative muscles and see how we in the hypermedia class might inspire one another. Of course, somebody had to go first, and it obviously wasn't me.

Al wrote on the disturbing trend of promoting the bad guy in video games - he was, however, clear that violence has always been part of entertainment, and I agree. Going back to Aristotle, drama requires conflict, and violence (physical or otherwise) is the easiest sort of conflict to imagine. Traditionally, shows and games had Good triumphing over evil, or at least the evildoer suffering as a result of his wrongdoing. But the developers of video games are steering the players toward situations where they play the bad guys, and for the player to win the bad guys must win. Not good. To quote Buzz Lightyear: "Good is better than Evil, that's why they call it Good."

I think this is a case of relatively young creatives thinking they are making the products fresh and different to appeal to a new audience. And/or desperate to make a name for themselves in an age of too-brief careers. Of course, Marketing may have simply taken over.

It reminds me of a version of Disney's Ducktales cartoon series a few years ago, in which Huey, Dewey and Louie were characterized as baggy-panted, backward-cap-wearing, rapping junior duckz in the hood. (A little research tells me it was called Quack Pack in this iteration. --aj) Now, there's nothing wrong with cartoons attempting to depict child-characters as having interests not unlike those of their audience, and this characterization is probably no more or less stereotypical than the original Huey, Dewey and Louie's Beaver Cleaver/Dennis the Menace hybrid - but to my mind: 1) it was painfully obvious pandering, and 2) it wasn't Huey, Dewey and Louie. I'd love to have heard Bill Cosby review that show.

Put another way, if you want to make a handicapped female James Bond who speaks French exclusively and is also a lesbian neurosurgeon, and you happen to own the rights to the character, nobody can stop you. You can call it James Bond, but it won't be James Bond. Even if your focus groups indicated that THAT is the tweak to the character that people today are interested in.

If you choose a demographic to which you hope to sell (or to which your advertisers have stated they hope to sell), and you then try to shoehorn your product into that demographic, are you making the same product you started out with?

In online education, in entertainment -- and I think the internet/TV convergence happened some time ago and we didn't really notice, by the way -- I think content creators, developers, producers, need to stick to a few basics in order to perform competently. Have a solid idea and execute it faithfully. Don't chase fads. I don't think you have to have a Message. I don't even think it's necessarily wrong to have an anti-hero or a villain as the protagonist (evil, maybe, but not wrong).

Al's point - that there is glut of video games promoting evil characters and evil goals, and that this is not a positive thing - is right. I think this came about because one company did it, and it was different, and so people bought it. So other companies did the same thing. Now everybody's doing it and it isn't different any more. Trying to pander to your audience instead of making the best product you can is a danger in any creative endeavor.

On Online Collaboration (da doo run run, da doo run run)

Impressions and how much the experience is valued vary depending on both the type of collaboration (I much prefer the asynchronous flavor) and the point of view (student, team-member or instructor).

As a student: It can be frustrating and counterproductive to spend time and effort trying to synchronize schedules, often with the result of "well, I guess we should meet again after everyone posts something". Just because we can meet in Centra (or conference call, for that matter), doesn't mean we should. It's like the endless meeetings called at work for no real purpose other than "we're supposed to have these meetings".

The ability to post work or communications in a shared, secure space is the online advantage in my (student) point of view. As a team-member (work POV), I collaborate online with others to copyedit articles, plan courses of action, etc. The online advantage is that we don't have to synchronize schedules to call a meeting. This is a mostly informal interaction and seems to carry more actual value as a result. Formally organized collaborations (for example: working with a Word document, with everyone's notes in a different color, and every post shrilly criticized if it is perceived as not being directly involved with the task at hand) have - in my experience - more energy devoted to serving the process rather than to serving the goal. And I personally like tangents (which informal online collaboration seems to encourage). A light shone from the side can illuminate details hidden by a straight-on flood.

This is the advantage I see from an instructor point of view, as well. Without the constraints of time or of classroom formality (to a degree - this varies, but we need some rules for the class to function),students can work around an issue, scaffolding one another more fully and possibly reaching new insights that would have been missed in a traditional (or synchronous) setting. The lifting of inhibitions that occurs in the online environment also add to effective collaboration, synchronous or not. Being fairly shy myself, I can say that there is an actual feeling of pressure pushing against you when you are debating whether to contribute to a conversation. There is less pressure to be shy or self-conscious when you are as invisible as you want to be. And then, like Claude Rains, you find yourself being still unseen but very visible indeed.


Well, that was quite a rambler, wasn't it?

A Tree Falls in the Classroom

I've been thinking about the last class, in which there was much discussion over a new definition of learning - which (as I understood it) says that modern learning isn't the absorption and personal possession of knowledge - rather, learning is the skill to find what you need to know on a just-in-time basis (FedEx University, perhaps).

In the text chat we went off on a small tangent (as text chats will do), which led to my suggestion that if a computer were programmed to behave as if it were self aware, programmed so well that a person couldn't tell the difference, would there be any difference at all?

Linda suggested, tongue-in -cheek, that this was a 21st century koan.

Which eventually led to the old "if a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it , does it make a sound" routine. My response was to quote Reverend Jim from Taxi - the bigger the tree, the bigger the sound.

The question turns on your definition of sound - do you view sound as an event (the movement of molecules of air) or as the perception of an event? We wouldn't suggest that a light turned on in a closet is in fact not emitting light until someone is there to see it, would we? So do we think about sound differently - or does our view of sound have different taxonomic rules?

So with learning -- is it something you have, or something you have a pointer to? It depends.

Maybe the text chat tangent wasn't tangential after all.

Uniqueness Diminished

After a quick search, let me say that I'm simply shocked at the huge number of "Adam's Blogs" out there. Like Pooh's pal Tigger, I'm the only one (or should be). The dilution of impact I noted in the video blogging post rears its ugly head -- when everyone can be heard everywhere I wonder if we've gotten to more of a global village or if we've simply entered a new frontier of noise pollution. Extending the 'village' thought -- I find I prefer the private anonymity of a big-city crowd (or train, or elevator) to the chatter of a smalltown streetcorner (or crosscountry flight). And here I am, adding my bit of fluff to the collective static.

Blog pollution? Damn kids.

The Storyboard Story

Storyboarding for instructional design is a bit different from storyboarding a video. It's more like the 'paper edit' you do when planning to edit a video or film (well - when editing film you've got all those symbols you write on the print indicating fades and dissolves for the guys at the processing lab, something like the symbols in a circuit diagram. I loved those, leaning over the old Moviola with spinning disks everywhere. But now I've moved away from the comparison of an ISD storyboard to a paper edit, haven't I? I would not be surprised, however, as the field of hypermedia-based ISD matures, to see a new crop of arcane symbols develop for the designer to pass to the programmers -- perhaps indicating an intended segue from a rich media offering to a group interaction).

The article, http://www.ion.uillinois.edu/resources/pointersclickers/2004_09/index.asp, was brief, clear, and (I think) helpful -- like the effective storyboards the author discusses. I was particularly impressed with the web-based powerpoint presentation (I bookmarked it). Worked well in Firefox/Mac, despite its sniffer message about being designed for "more recent versions of Internet Explorer."

So, in light of the prior post on rights, is a storyboard (and other client/preproduction deliverables) a copyrighted asset? Granted, it has a very specific application, but it's not inconceivable that a different designer building a similar class might use significant elements of, say, my storyboard for winetasting 101. Would this be actionable? Would it be viewed as an hommage? Or is this a non-issue for all but the extremely touchy?

Rights, Lefts, and Open Source Issues

All Open Source Code is Free, But Some Code is More Free Than Others

At first blush, the thing that struck me about the educause article on copyleft and open source issues ("Of Birkenstocks and Wingtips", http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm05/erm0517.asp) was that there are as many flavors of "free" when it comes to software rights as there are of the software that the open source folks are trying to manage. That isn't exactly true, but there is a bit of head-spinning involved when considering the many kinds of "free".

Software in this usage can also refer to content, and the same issues (open/open - that is, you can change it even to the point of making it proprietary -- or copyleft - like GNU, no proprietary rights ever) touch the use and modification of content. Content developers will want to know what they can and can't do to "free" content, and to what extent new products made with this "free" content are affected by the licensing choices made by the originators. Can I copyright a module that contains a public domain video clip from the Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org)? I've rubbed my eyes with legalese, but I'm still not sure.

This poses an interesting complication, which I will revisit after more research.

Stay Tuned

Small Pieces Loosely Joined

The author does a good job illustrating the issue we face in many areas (not just education) of combining many small discrete elements into "what we know". I found the comment posts (apart from the repeated "I'm with ya, Godfrey!) to be generally useful as well.

In the context of conducting a class, I think the real question is: "which small pieces?"

Most of us have had the experience of doing internet research, finding a broad array of information (usually in small chunks) and then discovering that some of what you've found contradicts other elements, and much is often of questionable validity. Some small pieces are more valuable than others. This applies to data (is there evidence to support a childhood vaccine link to autism?) as well as to opinion (which LMS is the best for a given situation?).

At least, with opinions, we know we are dealing with one person's view, feeling, or axe to grind. When opinion is presented as fact, that's when the danger arises.

Presenting non-facts as fact is not always done with malice or with an agenda. As a news editor, I follow wire reports. The first reports are almost always wrong. We watch and wait for confirmation, and for a confluence of opinion from different sources. To be honest, the reporter on the scene can only offer an opinion on what he has witnessed. Educated, hopefully, but an opinion all the same. And we build the news out of these small pieces. "Better to get it right, than to get it first," as my old executive editor used to say. And the tightness of the join is always the subject of debate.

Students gathering information may not have the background to critically examine the information they find in their research. I recall Marc's blog post mentioned the issue of wikis. In this environment, where there is no editor, publisher, or gatekeeper other than the person posting, caution and guidance is called for. Of course, an effective lesson - -pulling together a different set of "small pieces" -- might well involve letting students learn the hard way about using dodgy sources.

On the old "Cosmos" program, Carl Sagan once made the point that even the most diligent reader could only hope to read a fraction of the books available. The trick, he said, is to read the right books. I'd say his view applies to much more than books.