Abject Learning (13)
Social learning, open education, and petty battles with rivals over power and money...
When MP3 blogs emerged a few years ago, I remember thinking "this can't possibly go on, the record companies will squash these people." Then again, the most popular musicbloggers more or less voluntarily adopted a fairly reasonable code of conduct. Note how Matthew from Fluxblog urges his readers to buy music on his sidebar, how he rotates files frequently, and provides links for purchasing the music he features (mostly positively). Given the homogeneous and stagnant cesspool that is contemporary rock radio, the emergence of this online genre was such an obviously good thing for the music industry that even the industry could see it. Not only did they not go to war with MP3 blogs, they quickly initiated clumsy and often highly successful efforts to co-opt them.
But we all know that the technology backdrop is not static. The sheer numbers of music bloggers doing their thing, and the emergence of aggregation and search services such as elbo.ws and especially skreemr.com makes it ridiculously easy to tap into vast stores of music posted here and there in small pieces scattered across the net. It's far faster and easier to find music via this open-web grey market than it is from any illegal file sharing service that I've seen. In fact, if I'm at home, and get the impulse to turn my son Harry on to The Beatles' "Hello, Goodbye", it's just seconds away, these services even have embeddable Flash players -- faster than it is to pull out and lay down the vinyl, far easier than hunting through the criminally mismanaged CD collection.
And if listening to The Beatles gets me thinking I need to educate Harry on The Rutles, well, not only can we be instantly listening to Cheese and Onions, there's a link to the Galaxie 500 cover as well -- a wonderful version I had totally forgotten about.
And of course there's always YouTube:
Combining Skreemr with DownThemAll is a powerful media cocktail. Say you just saw Dig! (and if you haven't, and you love rock, you really must) and you'd like some Brian Jonestown Massacre in your mix. Simply search for the band name, ask the plugin to download all the MP3s on the results page (it's not foolproof, but the DTA interface seems to avoid downloading redundant copies of tracks), and in a few short minutes you can gather 30 songs that have been selected by bloggy music fanatics. (As an aside, I single out BJM as an example in part because they already make all their vast back catalog freely downloadable on their own website.)
I find it hard to see how this can go on without the record companies engaging in one of their lash-out attacks -- either targeting the bloggers, or the aggregation services...
I have to admit, I've been following the ongoing and accelerating meltdown of the music industry with more than usual interest and Schadenfreude lately (I recommend the opinionated and profane Lefsetz Letter)... There really does seem to be panic in the palatial business suites, witness the hiring of Rick Rubin to head Columbia, or this astonishing admission by Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Warner Music Group Edgar Bronfman:
We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding. And of course we were wrong. How were we wrong? By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find and as a result of course, consumers won.
For sheer comic value (see and click on the image at the top of this post) though, it's hard to top Universal CEO Doug Morris:
"There's no one in the record industry that's a technologist," Morris explains. "That's a misconception writers make all the time, that the record industry missed this. They didn't. They just didn't know what to do. It's like if you were suddenly asked to operate on your dog to remove his kidney. What would you do?"Personally, I would hire a vet. But to Morris, even that wasn't an option. "We didn't know who to hire," he says, becoming more agitated. "I wouldn't be able to recognize a good technology person — anyone with a good bullshit story would have gotten past me."
As the Vulture notes with some shock: "We'd always assumed the labels had met with a team of technology experts in the late nineties and ignored their advice, but it turns out they never even got that far — they didn't even try! Understanding the Internet certainly isn't easy — especially for an industry run by a bunch of technology-averse sexagenarians — but it's definitely not impossible."
It's tempting to draw parallels between the music industry and my own racket, to wonder if ineffectually battling little-understood but evidently relentless technology trends might play out in a similar way in higher education. George Siemens is wondering that too. There are some obvious differences between the domains, but the contours of conflict sure do resemble one another. And I am certain that planning under the assumption things will always be as they are is the most foolish approach imaginable.
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I had always been bemused by the bold-type claim on Divshare's site that they would host unlimited amounts of my media online for free, forever.
Indications are they will come up a few trillion eons short of the goal.
In the ongoing debate concerning campus-hosted versus third-party applications and services, it's worth keeping episodes like these in mind. I have loved using this service, and recommended it to countless people here at UBC and beyond. I hope I remembered to add my cautionary disclaimers about back-ups and keeping options open...
BTW, I was alerted to this by two friends on my Twitter feed, for those of you scoring that wonderful and flaky discussion space on the "completely useless?" scale.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have some warning email to write.
I got some great comments on my apocalyptic Waves post (one from an experienced body surfer) -- and special thanks to Bob for pointing me to this zefrank video which does a lovely job of playing out the metaphor on the media side:
So there's been a definite negative tilt to my posts lately, but it hasn't been all bad. Last Friday I co-facilitated a workshop pushing social software on a group of students who are leading Student Directed Seminars next semester. This is a phenomenal program here at UBC in which students propose and coordinate for-credit undergraduate courses. (Here's a courseblog from a seminar held last year.)
This group has some tremendously cool courses on tap for next January, and it was a sincere honour to work with people who are so gifted and eager to learn. I've already had follow-up meetings with some of them... I tell ya, events like that keep me going.
And this morning's commute was greatly enhanced by listening in on a mind-bending conversation between two of my favorite working visionaries, Jon Udell and Gardner Campbell. The discussion starts with consideration of how new tools are prompting new questions of practice (on issues like archiving persistent student work and new media literacies) that I am wrestling with right now, and just goes deeper and deeper... I think I will need to give this one the Oook treatment and excerpt some bits for students in the Text Technologies course. Frankly, I need to listen again in part because my brain simply couldn't process quickly enough to keep up (at least not while I was elbowing competing bus-riders for space). But how's this for a succinct description of Dr. Campbell and what he brings to the table?
...here's a guy who teaches everything from Milton to rock and roll to Ted Nelson. He's creating a new kind of academic discipline that preaches but also practices information and media literacy. In this interview he explains clearly and passionately what that means, and why it matters.
I should say more, but yet another workshop that I'm co-leading (with the rather unappetizing title "The Web 2.0 All-You-Can-Eat Buffet") is about to begin...
It was more than four years ago that Stephen Downes whipped up a custom version of his edu_rss application for the Merlot conference being held here in Vancouver. It scanned the posts of what was then pretty much the entire education-technology blogosphere (granted, it was smaller then, but it had a ton of feeds), and anytime anyone mentioned "Merlot" in a post it was republished onto a custom page that Stephen had pirated repurposed from the official Merlot site. It worked beautifully, it was dead easy for the users, and I remember thinking it would only be a short while before this sort of functionality was available to everyone.
I'm still waiting. What I want is the ability to take any number of feeds, filter and re-organize them with minimal stress on user behavior, and republish them where I want.
There's no shortage of tools that promise this functionality. Most of them break down if you add more than a half dozen feeds. Few of them seem to like OPML. Other approaches require ordinary users to employ arcane techniques to facilitate the process, or an editor to manage even simple sorting and filtering. We never could get Stephen's edu_rss to run on our server. We developed our own system via a guerrilla in-house project that got tantalizingly close to fulfilling the EduGlu dream, but it feel victim to a lack of ongoing funding and student programmers' inexplicable desire to graduate and get on with their lives.
The past year has seen the introduction of a rash of mash-up editors from major players like Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, IBM among others, and the processing and filtering of feeds should be trivial to them, but all that my experiments with these tools has yielded to me is literally days of my life poured irretrievably down the sinkhole of wasted time.
And yet I blog merrily along, talking about the power of syndication to anyone who will listen... and I'm still trying to achieve what seemed to be just around the corner four years ago.
There has been some promising progress on the 'RSS portal' approach, and I had begun to recommend this method to most people as the best available technique. A librarian here wanted to create a simple portal of relevant journal feeds for a course, but has found the technology buggy at best (tabs of feeds disappearing, funky rendering in some browsers) and is uncomfortable with depending on it for a course. Oh yes, it also doesn't seem possible to export OPML from Pageflakes, so if things go wrong it's laborious to reconstruct. I have had some success with sharing Netvibes tabs (like this -- 
), but that system requires viewers to set up a Netvibes account to do more than preview content. It's gotten to the point where our working plan is to handcode HTML tables and paste in Feed2JS javascript for each source... which just strikes me as an insanely laborious way to provide simple RSS rendering with a stable, public URL.
Add this into the mix -- I've had remarkably good luck the past few years with grant applications and conference proposals. But so far, each submission that mentions RSS or syndication in any way has been rejected -- come to think of it, these have been my only failures. I recently suggested a paper to some peers proposing to articulate "The State of Syndication" and that idea seemed to strike absolutely nobody as worth doing. It's as if I'm raving about professional wrestling as the future of online learning or something. I'm starting to wonder if my enthusiasm and interest in syndication is grievously misplaced.
That question is a huge issue at stake in the ongoing Writers Guild strike.
I am well short of the information threshold required to express a meaningful opinion. But it's clear the writers of the Daily Show haven't lost their knack for making a comedic point when the paychecks dried up:
If my recent post riffing on Waves seemed unduly alarmist (and I worried that it was, until I picked up my newspaper), you might want to check out someone who covers this ground with considerably more authority.
I listened to this podcast interview (23:24min) with Thomas Homer-Dixon almost immediately after I wrote that post, and was struck by how many of the same themes he hit -- except he enjoys the advantage of knowing what he's talking about...
As the title of his latest book, The Upside of Down, suggests, Homer-Dixon is not entirely pessimistic about the human capacity to get through the impending crises. I excerpt here a bit (1.3 MB MP3, 1:30min) from the interview, one that suggests I might not be in the wrong line of work after all:
Just came out a planning meeting for Northern Voice, and while we are behind schedule in terms of logistical planning (call it the Darren and Julie in Malta effect), we now have a date and location nailed down: February 22-23, at the main UBC campus's Forestry Science Centre (same place as last year).
An updated website and call for speakers is imminent, and we intend to have the schedule finalized before Christmas. When we relaunch the site, we intend not only to solicit presentation proposals but suggestions for topics and speakers as well... if you don't want to wait until then, feel free to add your feedback in the comments field below.
If half the people who've told me they intend to come show up next year, it's going to be another humdinger.
The tourist amenities and the beaches in San Juan are first-rate, so with the meetings complete, and my own workload in only a modest state of disrepair, I decided to take a day of rest along the island’s Atlantic coastline before returning home.
The water temperature was absolutely perfect. I’ve never swam in such powerful waves, and I spent hours bobbing and bodysurfing out in the churning maw, sometimes swimming, other times wading, following the irresistible rhythm of the waves. A glorious sensation.
Something I realized about myself that day… When I’m in a safe, comfortable solitary place I don’t achieve a state of blissful relaxation where I “get away from it all.” When I relax, I think. Which is a luxury in itself, given how the obligations of daily life seem to preclude thinking very much about anything.
So while I was bobbing out in the waves, I thought about that Canadian visionary Marshall McLuhan, and that early stage in his career when he transformed himself from literary scholar to media prophet, and how he cited Poe’s descent into the maelstrom as a metaphor for the human being sucked into the new media environment, how he wrote that when one enters the tumult it is foolish to resist, that the only chance for survival is to somehow connect with and ride out the pandemonium.
I imagined myself floating not in amniotic warm salty water, but in a digital ocean of zeros and ones, tossed this way and that, embraced one moment and thrown violently the next, riding waves wherever the prevailing energy happened to take me.
And though from my position I couldn’t see the waves coming, and I never came close to consciously determining a pattern between the mellow ripples and the big-time crashers, I came to develop a feel for the environment itself. Like how every now and then the water would get sucked away from me in every direction, and no matter how far out from shore I was I would find my feet on the sand below… that’s when I knew a really big wave was coming my way. The dumbest thing you can do at a moment like that is to plant your feet and try to resist the surge. No way… you have to be alert, get light, get loose, and when the boomer hits you have to jump straight up into it, and do your best to align with the energy and ride with it.
I thought about other stuff too.
I don’t pretend to be a McLuhanesque visionary, I’m just one of millions of nodes bobbing out in the digital wonderland, riding waves of information, with socially filtered antennae-bots probing out in innumerable directions and sending back data that I have no expertise to analyse. Lately I’m receiving increasingly strong and troubling transmissions… About a deepening financial crisis with the global megamoney players just staring at each other, waiting for someone else to blink. Energy prices are at record highs and the forecasts of the most hysterical peak oil pessimists are looking more and more prescient. The latest climate change reports suggest a truth not so much inconvenient as apocalyptic and irreversible. An emerging worldwide water shortage doesn’t seem to be on anyone’s agenda. War is being driven by kleptocrats and theocrats intent on doubling down on their disastrously wrong bets, and there is the near-certain prospect of escalating conflict ahead. Nuclear weapons are proliferating, tracking mechanisms of existing weapons are breaking down from neglect, and we’re seeing the criminally irresponsible dismantling of multinational treaties, the weaponization of space, and evidently serious talk of tactical use of “strategic mini-nukes.” Centuries-old and unresponsive governmental structures are thoroughly corrupt and utterly unprepared to deal with the challenges they’re facing, a mood of resigned and depraved apathy prevails amongst the citizenry. New media is eating old media and spitting it back out so fast that the venerable old media institutions (including higher education -- especially higher education) don’t even know that it’s happened. And one after another, inspirational heroes, peers and friends tell me in private moments how tired, isolated, burned-out and disillusioned they are… Believe me, I could go on and on…
I really hope I’m wrong about this… but I sense a damn powerful sucking sensation everywhere around me. I feel a wave coming. And it’s going to be a motherfucker.
Get ready to jump.
At night, sections of old San Juan are transformed into something like a giant open air nightclubopolis… with every form of party music imaginable, salsa to rock to electronica (Pete Tong will mix there soon) throbbing out of bars all along the streets and cobblestone walkways that are so peaceful and quaint during the day. It’s one hell of a fun place to party.
At around 2 AM last Friday night, a shiny new black Humvee with the bass-heavy hip-hop cranking plowed down Calle Fortaleza as part of the never-ending procession of vehicles cruising slowly down the impossibly narrow 19th century streets. The Hummer was so big that it hung over the road onto the sidewalk, forcing people to press tightly against buildings or duck into doorways as it passed.
Quite the statement, don’t ya think? What with oil inexorably moving toward a hundred dollars a barrel and beyond, and the cataclysmic endgame of global warming clearly in sight. The driver was not dragged out of the Hummer and beaten by an angry mob. He was not met with stony shaming looks. The prevalent vibe on the street was evident admiration, a sense that the owner of this obscenity would have his pick of the nubile girls who were shaking what they had on the street and in the clubs. It was the ultimate bling.
And at that moment that same scene was being played out in countless playgrounds of the idle rich all around the world. It’s probably being played out somewhere right now.
I recognize I’m in no position to get moralistic… I mean, there I was, a tourist from a wealthy country having a grand old time in the nightclub district of San Juan at 2 AM. And I’m typing this self-righteous little blurb on a jet airplane with a carbon footprint I’d rather not think too hard about right now.
I don’t know quite what to make of it – I don’t need to make sense of a moment of Zen, do I? It was an instant in time that I suspect will play in my mind for some time, a moment when the relationships between money, power, technology, and sex came together, pounded into my brain with dazzling visuals and a kicking Latin beat.
I really have no idea what San Juan's cable TV providers are doing with these monitors-of-monitors showing oscilloscopes doing whatever it is that oscilloscopes do on my hotel TV menu, but if they're trying to seriously trip me out, then misión cumplida!
In all sincerity, I prefer this to the cable TV on offer at hotels closer to home.
It's my immense good fortune to be in San Juan right now, at the conclusion of three days of meetings between a wide variety of Latin American institutions, one from Spain/Catalonia, and one mostly confused visiting Canadian. I'm realizing that I never did share my impressions of an event I attended in Barcelona a couple weeks back, and I will have to go back and do that, because that was also very rich in a lot of ways. But I thought I would quickly capture a few thoughts prompted here in Puerto Rico.
* The world is not flat. That notion is yet another thing that Tom Friedman is horribly, dangerously wrong about. And we shouldn't want it to be flat. Sure, clearly superior technology can be adopted cross-culturally (think how quickly native Americans grasped the potential of guns and horses, or the global pervasiveness of books, telephones, automobiles, etc...), and it may help cultures to communicate and learn with one another. And there may well be an implicit logic inherent with the adoption of a new technology. But persistent and essential characteristics of distinct cultures exist, even within an increasingly integrated whole, and thank whatever deity or humanist icon you care to thank for that.
* When you only understand half of what's going on, you'd be surprised how much you learn. The gaps in comprehension leave more space for thinking. I realize that cognitive space is something I miss very much from my time in Mexico.
* I can't say enough for the spirit and the energy of the people here. I can't think of any other conference I've attended where the dinners were such explosions of singing, dancing and laughter, ones in which everyone is participating -- hard to imagine fifty Canadians letting loose like this. All I can say about the people here is "wow". Huge kudos to everyone, especially the organizers from the Open University of Catalonia and Interamericana University here in Puerto Rico.
I'll try to share more later.
I came here as an invited guest speaker, but according to the documents composed during the meetings and all of the rhetoric I, and both of the institutions I was representing (COSL and UBC) are now part of the "network". It's quite possible the inclusion is just characteristic courtesy, but I can only hope this is the beginning of a beautiful partnership.
This week the Text Technologies course I co-teach is about to begin Rip, Mix, Feed - Reloaded (feedback welcome), and it occurred to me I got some linktribution and love karma to give out.
Among the things I didn't blog the past few weeks was a virtual keynote I did with Alan and D'Arcy for the K12 online conference. Due to our schedules, we more or less composed our sections in isolation, which was a real drag as the main reason I agreed to do the thing was to work with my amigos. I think I let that disappointment colour my reaction to the result, which is uneven but not too bad -- due mostly to some heroic editing by D'Arcy.
Rip, Mix, Feed Reloaded also draws critically on some absolutely essential work Alan did for his Australian sojourn: Web 2.0 Gems, and 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story. These collections are a staple in everything I do these days, it seems. I feel like we in the edublog community should give Alan a medal or something.
Also figuring heavily in Rip, Mix, Feed - Reloaded is Bryan Alexander. I'll take this opportunity to play a short clip from the aforementioned K12 keynote. While I was procrastinating about preparing my section, I put out an open call on Twitter asking if anyone wanted to engage in some audio hijinks. To my delight, Bryan volunteered. Obviously, this was improvised, and a first take to boot. But I think this is a fine example Dr. Alexander's comic gifts:
Original .mov here.
I find myself tonight in San Juan, Puerto Rico, late at night, horribly sleep-deprived, hoping that the humidity that is fogging up every surface in the hotel room won't somehow screw up my laptop. Tomorrow, I'm scheduled to speak on the subject of "open educational resources" for an innovation network of 20 Latin American universities partnering with the Open University of Catalonia. Besides getting a sponsored trip to Puerto Rico (first time in the Caribbean), this event has some resonance for me on a personal level. I got my start in this field as a teacher with the ITESM Campus Sonora Norte, in Hermosillo, Mexico so for sentimental reasons I don't fully understand I want to do well here.
I am planning a somewhat stripped-down version of the talk I gave in Barcelona a couple weeks back (oh yeah, I never blogged that, but Ismael did), which itself was a stripped-down version of the talk I gave at the Open Education Conference (audio for that debacle is now public).
One challenge I feel like I need to deal with is the language thing... The meeting is being held in Spanish, and I've been advised that the English skills of attendees will vary quite widely. I speak Spanish like an illiterate Diazepam addict (no offense to illiterates, or to addicts), so while I can order in restaurants and talk politics with cab drivers I certainly don't feel up to giving a presentation en Espanol.
So as an attempt to meet the participants half-way I have tried to translate my visual materials. I also interviewed a couple of people I often cite as examples in my presentations, so I will have a couple short clips in decent Spanish to play live, with more clips people can check out later. Jon Beasley-Murray discusses blog-based teaching and scholarly discourse (and the importance of students developing a public voice) in the Detectable section, and Pedro Pernias discourses on his work with distributed publishing and OCWinMotion in the RemixableFormatos section. I can't express how grateful I am that I could tap such awesome contributions on very short notice.
If anyone with Spanish skills cares to correct the more egregious errors that are undoubtedly there in my materials, it is a wiki, and I would certainly appreciate it.
Now, I bow to physiological reality and try to get some sleep.
...of intercontinental jetlag, backlogged tasks, torrents of email, mangled limbs, and trying to Do the Right Thing.
I do have a few posts percolating, and hope to bring at least some of them to fruition shortly. Irregularly scheduled blogging, standing by.
In the meantime, some Bob and Ray, spanning the earlier and later parts of their amazing career:
This clip, via Listening Post qualifies as "not safe for work," at least for me, as I couldn't stop laughing very loudly while watching it. I had to pause anytime I saw someone nearby who didn't already know what a goofy 'nuck I am.
Context here. I just bought my first electric guitar and amp last week (after pining for one for literally 25 years), so maybe I'm especially susceptible to this sort of humour.
On the other hand, I thought I was pretty much immune to "guys with acoustic guitars being wacky." But I enjoyed this (mature content):
I discovered Flight of the Conchords via Northern Voice hero Beth, who is rapidly becoming my favorite hockey blogger.
Oh, and on the subject of musical humour, it really doesn't get smarter than this clip ("aggressiveness need not be hostile") from Mike Nichols and Elaine May -- played on Charlie's last ever WFMU show (sniff).
So I didn’t feel great about how my talk at Open Education went, but my friends have kind of turned me around… Jim has convinced me that my extensive rant on rats was not a psychotic episode, as I had feared, but actually a symbolic working out of complex relationships concerning work, society and self. Honestly, this may be one of those cases where the critic pulls out something the author didn’t know was there, but is nonetheless on the money. It certainly gratifies my ego to suppose so, authorial intention be damned. And D’Arcy is such a fantastic photographer that he managed some shots of my session that don’t embarrass me.
Then again, it seems my session is the only one for which the conference organizers are withholding the audio. Can’t say I blame them. There may well be legal liability issues, I don’t intend to push the issue.
Two upcoming sessions I’ve been shamed into promoting here:
- Tomorrow, October 4th at 12 noon PST I am doing a virtual session on mash-ups for the Wimba desktop speaker series. My boss gave me a gentle chiding this morning for not plugging this… To be frank, I plan something pretty close to my portion of the Open, Connected and Social event done with my amigos a few months back, with a few new wrinkles.
- Slideshare has made the teaser for More Than Cool Tools its featured slidecast of the day. This may end up bearing some small resemblance to a session with Alan and D’Arcy for next month’s K12 Online Conference. BTW, the audio is not the Tijuana Brass, but this knock-off from the 365 Days Project.
I’m in the Salt Lake City airport as I write this, and positively knackered. So I’ll apologise upfront for a post that is incomplete and probably incoherent. I’m sure I’ll miss lots of stuff.
Some highlights this week:
- getting an early start to the week at quieter than normal COSL office, getting the chance to hang out and talk more than usual with Justin, as he pushed the promising conference application 51 Weeks out the door.
- Ramita Shrestha’s keynote was her first talk ever (she was awesome), and this was her first trip out of Nepal. Listening to how she approached her work running a community-access library with a handful of computers and a shared dialup connection, and what she was up against (even to be allowed to come to the event) was a truly humbling experience. Frankly, I felt like a spoiled punk — which in the global sense I am, of course. She was really gracious in conversation as well. I hope she had a worthwhile experience coming here.
- It’s been my immense good fortune to share an apartment with Pedro Pernias when I’ve been in Logan on COSL business the past couple months. He’s simply a fantastic dude, great fun to be around. And the kicker is that in Alicante he’s been implementing the kind of whacked-out syndicated distributed content framework I’ve been dreaming of, and on a massive scale. His OCW in Motion project — which among other things uses RSS as a content import method into a wiki-based CMS. He presented this amazing system with great style — what wonderful PowerPoint slides (never thought I’d write those words). He says he wants to work with us (I wish he could meet my own whacked out RSS-buddy at UBC, Novak Rogic) and I can only hope it happens.
- D’Arcy and Jim kicked out the WordPress jams, and made a clear and compelling case how free tools can support a dynamic and rigorous network for the creation, remixing and redistribution of educational resources. Honestly, when I reflect on how higher education tends to spend technology money, and refract it against the simple but irrefutable points these guys made (in the expected entertaining fashion), I get kind of pissed off.
- I got to meet the dudes who did the Rick Noblenski video! I am not worthy.
- Scott Leslie’s screencast on client-side extensions and educational resources is freaking amazing. Go watch it now. Prepare your mind for a blowing.
- David Wiley’s talk on the proposed license was immensely clarifying and provocative. I’m still a bit uneasy about a license attached to “education”, but I see the overall logic. His “Four R’s” framework is something I will be revisiting.
- I had my mind blown by this talk on location-based metadata. This is huge in terms of mashups, authentic learning experiences, and learning activities that create useful public resources. I need to integrate this subject into my learning, and they gave me a great start.
- My own talk was something of a comedy of errors, but thankfully people seemed to focus on the comedy part and were very kind with me. I might blog more about it (I learned a lot), then again I might not.
It’s a good thing I need to go catch my flight, as I could get intensely goopy about what this week meant to me in terms of friendship. David Wiley describes COSL as a family, and they make me feel very much part of it, and I can’t express how grateful I am for how I am treated by that wonderful and gifted group of people. And any chance to spend time with D’Arcy, Scott and Jim is something to treasure. They are talented, ethical, thoughtful, and funny as hell. And damned good people to have as friends. David made a bit of fun about how we tended to be seen together, but I just wanted to soak up every bit of those fantastic dudes, it was an opportunity not to be missed.
— Apologies for the calibre of blogging here. No time for the usual proofread. (Yes, I usually proofread and revise — hard to believe, huh?)
opened2007 - hope that works, I’m hallucinating from fatigue right now.
Preparing for my Friday talk at this week's Open Education Conference I have been mulling over something that one of last year's keynoters, Erik Duval, said in conversation. If I understood him correctly -- and Erik is one of those scary-smart people I never presume to fully comprehend -- one of the primary challenges of the emerging media environment is dealing with an overwhelming abundance of resources.
On a basic day-to-day information overload level I think this is something we can all understand. (Cole wrote a post on that theme today.) But every now and then something comes along that really brings the problem home to me.
Case in point, last year's Media in Transition conference at MIT, on creativity, ownership and collaboration in the digital age. The site is chock full of fantastic resources on numerous subjects that have been very much on my mind the past few years. The site is something of a model on how to document a conference, with links to papers, podcasts of the plenary sessions, and well written summaries of the sessions that are ideal for skimming and scanning. Everything I've sampled so far has been first rate.
The conference was last April, so how am I only coming across this site now? I like to think of myself as fairly plugged in, I'm online a lot, and read a lot of amazing people who work in this field -- some of them must have linked to this. I subscribe to MIT's Emerging Technologies newsletter. I'm an admirer of Henry Jenkins. So how is it that I didn't see MIT5 until Dean Giustini linked to it? (BTW, Dean's always-fine blog has really kicked it up a couple notches of late, I highly recommend you add it to your newsreader.)
This post might simply be an admission of my own cluelessness. But I can't help but think this oversight is symptomatic of a broader condition of information abundance. Now, with my talk only a few days away, and with those days packed with work and sociality, the new challenge posed by abundance is taking in all this relevant and exciting stuff and somehow managing to process and account for it. (Those text summaries are tremendously helpful in that respect.)
And I gotta keep an eye out for next year's 6th Media in Transition event. I would love to see what next year has in store.
I've already acknowledged my fuzziness around the implications of the various clauses of a Creative Commons license. In my hyper-simplistic way I have come to be convinced by the likes of David Wiley and others I respect in the open culture movement that in too many instances the Non-Commercial (NC) clause created an unnecessary barrier to reuse.
For instance, I know some people (disclosure: one of them is mother to my son) who are passionate about teaching the principles of permaculture, to promote techniques that will decrease energy consumption and promote sustainable food production. Among their activities are workshops in which practitioners share their knowledge with an informal, generally hands-on approach. The instructors get a small honorarium for their time, and there are overhead costs, so a nominal fee (usually $25) is charged to participants. I can assure you that nobody is making money out of this arrangement, it's just an attempt not to lose money. When I talk with open education types, I often ask how online educational resources could be shared in a way that is relevant and useful to this type of use case. A common theme that emerges in these discussions is that NC-licensed resources are effectively copyrighted against this type of use. Sure, the permaculture people could ask permission. But they could ask permission to use a copyrighted item too. Creative Commons is supposed to promote frictionless adaptability.
On the other hand, you have the position of Stephen Downes and others, who essentially argue that allowing commercial use will inevitably be exploited by corporate creeps in ways that will be contrary to the spirit of Creative Commons. Perhaps the process will even be a lever to move open content into the proprietary domain. (I'm radically simplifying here, but hopefully got the spirit right. I really don't have time to write this post, I've got spam to suck.)
Well, add a point to Stephen's column.
Via Twitter, I read Vicki Davis's post which describes how a Virgin Mobile ad swiped a picture of a girl (check out the comments) at a car wash, and apparently used the CC-attribution license as justification to use the kid as an unpaid model. Apparently a lawsuit is pending. More swiped images and discussion here.
There may well be more to this, so in the absence of further research I'll hold my vitriol. But on the surface it seems like a fairly straightforward case of a corporation using an open artifact for aggressive marketing... I'm fairly sure Virgin had lawyers consider whether or not they needed to get permission from the subject of the photo. They did provide attribution in the bottom corner, and there may well be nothing anyone can do (unless the CC license is found not to carry any weight, which could get ugly for a lot of people).
I suppose I could boycott Virgin, but I've been avoiding them for years anyway. Richard Branson and his self-obsessed hipster billionaire act put him high on my hatelist long ago. He manages to combine what I despise most about Bono and Donald Trump into one smarmy package.
...as every spare moment I've had this week has been engaged in a futile battle against an automated spambot that is gradually but relentlessly overgrowing the work of thousands of UBC citizens on a wiki service we support. My usual tech support network here is mostly occupied with a higher stakes project (and NOBODY wants me messing with a server), and my energy is spent reverting vital pages, researching response strategies and cajoling anyone I can find to implement them, and offering endless apologies to increasingly frustrated users.
We briefly froze the creation of new accounts only to be bombarded by requests from concerned students who were unable to complete course assignments (ten emails to me during one ninety minute period away from my desk). It is gratifying to know the system is being used much more extensively than I thought, but less exciting to ponder what all these users are thinking about their work being replaced by obscene linkage every time they look away.
Missing in action: my presence in an online course I'm co-teaching; my sense of humour; my attention to every other thing I'm supposed to be doing; my ability to interact pleasantly with family, co-workers and friends. On its deathbed: my professional sense of purpose; my will to live.
I had hoped to spend some time this week preparing for my keynote (YIKES! Don't look down!) at next week's Open Education Conference. At this point, all I'm prepared to offer up are demented ravings about Texas Hold 'Em, Viagra, and terrible things to do to animals.