Techfoot

Link to: Inside Higher Ed :: Serious Bloggers

This piece by Wayne State assistant professor Jeff Rice, who blogs as Yellow Dog, highlights the chilling effect that articles like the Chronicle’s Bloggers Need Not Apply and the Business Week cover story Attack of the Blogs have had on academic bloggers. Even academics who are attracted to this new medium generally respond by either writing anonymously or by adopting a super-serious tone that robs the writing of the very energy that should be fueling it.

Writing a blog under a pseudonym is usually an argument that the only safe way for an academic to write publicly is to write anonymously. Our thoughts about students, grades, internal policy and even our private lives and interests can never be revealed to our colleagues or future colleagues or we risk losing all we have worked so hard for!

Students and colleagues lose out when we block this exchange. Our positions on issues of grading and curriculum and our feelings about our students are as central to our teaching as issues of what content to teach or what grants to apply for. Our community is enhanced when on-line tools can be used to give us additional insights about and access to the authentic understandings of those that meet with in classes, studios, labs or faculty meetings. Blogging offers an extremely rich set of tools help share those understandings..

Lost in this seriousness are a number of quite amazing things blogging has provided writers: ability to create discourse in widely accessed, public venues, ease of online publishing, ability to write daily to a networked space, ability to archive one’s writing, ability to interlink writing spaces, ability to respond to other writers quickly, etc.

One more voice to the chorus of those calling for those of us in higher education to use these new tools to connect, communicate and unfreeze our practice.

Link To: Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Wikipedia and open source

As the debate on the accuracy of the Wikipedia goes on, I am reminded about the wiki:wabi sabi world view ( the appreciation of the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete).

Nicholas Carr, of IT should become boring, fame, continues to stir things up in the blogosphere. In this post he takes on the article from Nature that has requently been cited as vindicating the claim that the Wikipedia is [almost] as accurate a resource as Britannica. Carr’s careful reading of the supplemental materials raises some issues about the reliability the study and the validity of the conclusions. He has a number of specific problems:

1. Many stories in blogs and in the more mainstream press have overemphasized the findings of the study and have glossed over the fact that the story in nature was a news story, not peer reviewed scientific article.
2. He uses the supplemental materials (which are available on his site as a Word document) to examine how the Nature reporters filtered out some of the criticisms offered by the experts. They adjusted some of the expert findings to adjust for the expectations of the “typical encyclopedia user”.
3. He cites some additional evidence that the inaccuracies in Wikipedia tended to somewhat more substantial than those in Britannica.

Ross Mayfield, who was at the open source conference where Mitch Kapur gave the speech that triggered the Carr post, responds pretty persuasively to the criticism on his blog. I like the Wikipedia as a personal resource, and I’d found myself referring to the nature article several times in the last week without really haven’t read it carefully. I’m a little more cautious now. As Mayfield’s post indicates, having folks like Nicholas Carr in the blogosphere is a huge advantage to sharpen our thinking, and it’s good to be reminded every now and again of the frailty of all of our knowledge systems.

Which is part of the point. No editing system, closed editorial process or open, is perfect. Instead focus on media literacy and a little wabi sabi.

Link to: CogDogBlog » Blog Archive » The Dissonance of “Blogs in Education”

There’s lots to chew on in this post from the CogDogBlog. Seems like the whole crew at the Northern Voices conference got their juices flowing and there are more provocative ideas floating around than I can absorb. I think Alan’s discomfort with the term “Blogs in Education” hits on a fundamental problem that will constantly plague us as tools for individualized learning proliferate. The key distinction to me is between “education” and “learning”.

Back when I was doing career counseling, I spent a lot of time trying to help students understand the difference between a job and an industry. Jobs are things that you do, like writing process, creating images, or counting beans; industries are the environments that you do those jobs in. (That’s the simplified version; the longer version requires the use of props like paper plates, but I digress.)

Education in the US is an industry, much like advertising, investment banking or luggage manufacturing, though bigger, and, some would say, with more noble goals. As an industry we have certain expectations that differentiate us from other industries. The higher education industry is defined–for better or worse–by the fact that we offer courses, evaluate what happens in those courses, and grant credit for those courses that other industries judge as being valuable. As an industry, we see most everything–including blogs and other social software–through the lense of courses or the support organizations that allow us to offer courses. (The research enterprise is an industry with its own rules of engagement.)

Learning is a job or an activity that can take place in multiple environments. Adult educators, led by Allen Tough, have tried to help the education industry understand that learning is centered with the individual–not with the industry, but with little success. Social software tools are empowering learners to be at the center of their own learning universe to an extent we could only imagine a few years ago. There’s going to be an amazing amount of dissonance and discomfort within the higher education industry as we try to break free of our conception of the course as the primary organizational tool of what should be our primary organizational activity (job)–learning by indviduals.