Daily Bookmarks 05/10/2008

• FactCheckED: Monty Python and the Quest for the Perfect Fallacy

  Lesson plan for teaching logical fallacies using political and commercial advertising, plus Monty Python. Aligned to National Social Studies standards and NETS info literacy.

  tags: logic, lessonplans, politics, k-12, informationliteracy

• Let Your Online Learning Community Grow (pdf)

  3 Design Principles for Growing Successful Email Listservs and Online Forums in Educational Settings. Even though the technology discussed is a little dated (the paper was written in 1998), the principles for online learning communities are still relevant.

  tags: learningcommunity, e-learning, leadership, discussion

• Working with online learning communities

  Best practices for working with online learning communities, including how to work with lurkers who may still be learning even if they aren’t actively participating.

  tags: learningcommunity, e-learning, teaching, leadership, discussion

  • • online learning communities are grown, not built
    • online learning communities need leaders
    • personal narrative is vital to online learning communities.

  • He gives a set of mantras for teacher/leaders in any online community:

    • all you need is love
    • control the environment, not the group
    • lead by example
    • let lurkers lurk
    • short leading questions get conversations going
    • be personally congratulatory and inquisitive
    • route information in all directions
    • care about the people in the community; this cannot be faked
    • understand consensus and how to build it, and sense when it’s been built and just not recognised, and when you have to make a decision despite all the talking.

• The Connected Classroom: A Lesson on Reflection: MORE Copyright Confusion…

  A teacher’s reflections on using images from Flickr. Although she encouraged the use of Creative Commons images, the nature of the student work clearly fell under fair use. Even so, she got complaints from photographers about the fair use of their work. She wrote a really thoughtful response to the Flickr users and had a great discussion with her students about copyright.

  tags: copyright, flickr, education, k-12, creativecommons

• Flickr: “pc40sf06″

  Student projects showing trigonometry concepts through annotated Flickr images. The pink sweater is my favorite.

  tags: flickr, math, k-12, education, visualization

• What to do with a visually noisy blog » VisualsSpeak Blog

  Christine Martell explains blog visuals with some usability and color theory. First in a series where she will help a blogger work on making his content easier to find.

  tags: graphicdesign, usability, blog, color

Comment Challenge Days 2 through 8

I’m catching up a bit on the Comment Challenge. I don’t plan to write a post every day; I’m aiming for a reflection about once a week.

Day 2: Comment on a Blog You’ve Never Commented on Before

Since the challenge started, I’ve commented on a number of blogs outside my usual circle. I don’t read that many blogs from practicing K-12 educators, so these were all new to me.

• Kevin’s Meandering Mind
• Learning Mosaics
• BLK
• Miss W. and her Smartboard

Day 3: Sign up for a Comment Tracking Service

I’ve been using co.mments since last August; it works great. Here’s all my conversations, if you’re interested.

Day 4: Ask a Question in a Blog Comment

Well, I’m the one who came up with the idea for this task, so I probably should do it. My comment on Wendy’s blog had a lot of my own thoughts about the purpose Facebook, but I did turn it back around as a question to her. That discussion has prompted a second post on the topic, with more great comments.

Day 5: Comment on a Blog Post You Don’t Agree With
Day 6: Engage another Commenter in Discussion

Nothing has come across my reader in the last week that prompted me to disagree, so I postponed this task. I’m bending the rules a bit and combining tasks 5 & 6. Someone linked to a post by Kristin Hokanson about copyright confusion from a Diigo conversation. I replied to a comment where someone argued that students should be taught to ask permission to use any material, even if it’s under a Creative Commons license. That defeats much of the purpose of Creative Commons in my mind.

I also responded to two other commenters on Wendy’s second Facebook post, so I guess I did #6 twice.

Day 7: Reflect on What You’ve Learned so Far

What have I learned?

• I comment to agree or ask questions much more often than I comment to disagree.
• I have a hard time limiting myself to really short comments because I don’t usually take the time to edit them down after I write.
• Rambling comments can still be beneficial though, if they let me mentally process something. That’s what happened with my Facebook comment on Wendy’s blog; I used her space to “think out loud” and reflect.

Day 8: Comment on a blog outside of your niche

I knew this one was coming, so when I saw this meme on Musical Perceptions, I jumped in with the few songs I could identify off the top of my head. This is one of the blogs I read that is totally unrelated to my current professional life. This is for the band nerd in me, not the instructional designer.

Technorati Tags: comment08, Michele+Martin, Wendy+Wickham, conversation, Comment+Challenge

Daily Bookmarks 05/09/2008

• Will at Work Learning: FREE Research Report on Feedback

  21 points from research on feedback summarized, plus a downloadable free report with all the details. Feedback is generally good for learners and should tell them the right answers, plus maybe why it’s right. Lots of insight about what kinds of feedback to use or how to use feedback depending on the results you’re aiming for.

  tags: research, learning, feedback, e-learning, training

  • • Immediate feedback prevents subsequent confusion and limits the likelihood for continued inappropriate retrieval practice.
    • Delayed feedback creates a beneficial spacing effect.
    • When in doubt about the timing of feedback, you can (a) give immediate feedback and then a subsequent delayed retrieval opportunity, (b) delay feedback slightly, and/or (c) just be sure to give some kind of feedback.
    • Feedback should usually be provided before learners get another chance to retrieve incorrectly again.

Daily Bookmarks 05/08/2008

• A Difference: Things They Should Have Taught Me

  Humor as a tool for teaching, with math examples.

  tags: education, k-12, highered, humor, math

Daily Bookmarks 05/07/2008

• Career Advice ‘08 » SlideShare

  Garr Reynolds (Presentation Zen) slideshow summarizing the 6 career tips from Daniel Pink’s book, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko. Reynolds also gives his own ideas on each of the points. I love the point about doing things that are you believe are intrinsically valuable even if they don’t lead you on an obvious career path; we should learn what we’re passionate about.

  tags: career, change, presentation

• 100 Killer Web Accessibility Resources: Blogs, Forums and Tutorials | WHDb

  Annotated list of accessibility resources, including tools, tutorials, validation, and information about needs based on disability.

  tags: accessibility, webdesign

  • If you already lean toward the idea that accessible sites are good for humanity as well as for business, then this list will provide plenty of reference materials for you. If you don’t have a clue about the issues that surround Web site accessibility, then this list will help you to become well acquainted with the issues involved in this movement.

Daily Bookmarks 05/06/2008

• Education Week: Online Education Cast as ‘Disruptive Innovation’

  Book review describing online education as a disruptive technology for K-12 education. The educational system as it exists right now, the authors argue, can’t adapt to new technologies and provide the individualized, student-centered approaches possible with online learning. Compares models of change in business to education.

  tags: change, k-12, education, e-learning, studentcentered

  • Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns predicts that the growth in computer-based delivery of education will accelerate swiftly until, by 2019, half of all high school classes will be taught over the Internet.

• A List Apart: Articles: Community: From Little Things, Big Things Grow

  One of the founders of Flickr writes about building online community. One of his big points is that if you create too many hard and fast rules, people are less creative and open to conversation. It’s better to build community by providing spaces for people to negotiate the guidelines for themselves as much as possible.

  tags: community, flickr, conversation, learnercontrol, creativity, quoteable

  • The sculpture demonstrated a fascinating idea: given fewer rules, people actually behaved in more creative, co-operative, and collaborative (or competitive, as the case may be) ways.
  • Any time you construct specific rules of engagement, they are instantly open to interpretation and circumvention, and we want our members to negotiate their place with each other, not with The Authority.
  • Any community—online or off—must start slowly, and be nurtured. You cannot “just add community.” It simply must happen gradually. It must be cared for, and hosted; it takes time and people with great communication skills to set the tone and tend the conversation.
  • We also tried to create an egalitarian playing field. At a glance, visitors can’t differentiate a professional photographer with an enormous lens from an enthusiast just getting started in photography. There is no indication of “quality” apart from the content itself.
  • Participate in the community you’re trying to build. Add content, make contact, show yourself as a person and have fun.

Daily Bookmarks 05/04/2008

• Impress Your Friends and Co-Workers: Obscure Firefox Keyword Search » CogDogBlog

  Set up a keyword search in Firefox for any site that has a search box. Handy little trick, with directions and a useful example.

  tags: firefox, search, howto

• How To Effectively Manage Your Comments on Other People’s Blogs | Mobile Technology in TAFE

  Directions for setting up and using co.mments. Anyone who is having trouble with coComment should check this out as an alternative comment tracker.

  tags: blog, conversation, tools

Community Size & Connection Strength

Britt Watwood asked a thought-provoking question in a comment, and he graciously agreed to let me promote his comment to a post.

A question I think for all of us - which ties in with Shirky’s latest book - is at what point does a “communuity” grow to the point where you can no longer connect with everyone. I have 40 some blogs that I track with RSS…which to me can be managed. Any thoughts or suggestions?

I haven’t read Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody yet, so I can’t respond to that part of the question. However, the idea of community size and an upper limit for size is intriguing.

Some of this certainly depends on the individual; where Britt can manage 40, others might only really be able to manage 15. I have many more than 40 RSS subscriptions, but I don’t really interact with everyone in my reader.

Perhaps in my network, I see different degrees of connection intensity. Don’t look at this as definite layers with clear starting and stopping points; there’s a lot of blurring between them. It’s more of a gradual change.

• Strong: I have a handful of people I interact with pretty regularly, like Michele Martin. Those are stronger connections.
• Medium: I have a bigger group of people I’ve interacted with several times, but maybe it’s less regular.
  • These medium connections might be people I interacted with several times over the course of a few weeks but haven’t talked to in months since then.
  • They might also be people I interact with sporadically: a comment or two every so often.
• Weak: I have a large group of weak connections.
  • Some of these are blogs I read but haven’t ever directly talked to. I read Stephen Downes for months before I commented on his site or emailed him; ditto for Jane Hart, David Warlick, and many others. I have had direct contact with all 3 of those people now, but they started out as very weak, one-way connections.
  • I consider blogs I read but have only commented on once to be weak connections.
  • Sometimes I might comment on a blog once but not subscribe. That happens now when I get trackbacks here. I try to go out and read any posts where someone links to me, and I often comment. Sometimes I do subscribe, but I admit that I have too many subscriptions already to add everyone to my list. So I might have a weak connection to someone who reads my blog, but I don’t read theirs.

Then again, even in face-to-face communities, you don’t have the same relationship with everyone. Do you have the level of connection with everyone in your department or team at work? What about in religious or volunteer organizations? Heck, do you have the same relationship with every member of your own extended family?

Perhaps when I think of “community” online, I don’t see it as something with hard and fast borders. The edges are much fuzzier than that; it sort of gradually fades from strong to weak. Face-to-face communities seem to have harder edges; you either are employed by a company or not, you are a member of an organization or not. It’s easier to identify who’s “in” and who’s “out” offline. There’s a clear line between people who have an online presence and those who aren’t online at all, of course. But once you have a blog, I don’t see bright line distinctions anymore, just different intensity in the connections. There’s affinity, but not a clear boundary.

Obviously, not everyone sees the online community that way. The recent conversations about whether the edublogosphere is a closed, elite cocktail party certainly demonstrate that some people do feel like they are outside looking in. I guess I’ve never really felt that way online though; I’ve always known I could express my thoughts and join the conversations anywhere I wanted to. (As a side note, I just have to point out that I find it very ironic to look at Stephen Downes and think he’s elitist. Elitist != socialist. I’m just sayin’…)

Getting back to Britt’s original question, I think there might be a soft upper limit on how many strong connections any single person can manage—with the caveat that the “limit” varies widely between individuals and can change over time. I think the technology allows us to have many more medium and weak connections and to manage those effectively.

That raises some other questions:

• Do the medium and weak connections constitute a “community,” or are they something else?
• Does a community have to have a distinct boundary, or can it be something more fluid and dynamic?

Technorati Tags: Britt+Watwood, community, Clay+Shirky, Stephen+Downes, Jane+Hart, David+Warlick, connections

Daily Bookmarks 05/03/2008

• Dave’s Whiteboard » Blog Archive » Think and do?

  Dave Ferguson explains at the end of this post his “three links out” idea. You read a post on one of your regular blogs, then click a link (1). From there, click another link (2). From that place, click a third link (3). This brings you outside your regular circle of reading so you’re explosed to new people and ideas. Seems like a good lifelong learning technique.

  tags: blog, conversation, connection, lifelonglearning

• The Heart of Innovation: The Top 100 Lamest Excuses for Not Innovating

  Common excuses for not innovating or changing, plus a technique for addressing these excuses.

  tags: change, orgculture

  • Current reality, however, is only one form of reality. And just because it’s current doesn’t mean it’s the way it will always be. Or should be.

    Real innovators challenge excuses. Real innovators challenge the status quo. They do not concede to current reality.

• Top News - Blogging helps encourage teen writing

  Survey results about teens and writing, showing that students who blog write more for personal reasons and are more likely to think writing skills are essential. Most students think their writing would improve if they could use more technology to practice writing for school.

  tags: blog, writing, education, k-12

  • Forty-seven percent of teen bloggers write outside of school for personal reasons several times a week or more, compared with 33 percent of teens without blogs. Sixty-five percent of teen bloggers believe that writing is essential to later success in life; 53 percent of non-bloggers say the same thing.
  • Most students (82 percent) believe that additional instruction and focus on writing in school would help improve their writing even further–and more than three-quarters of those surveyed (78 percent) think it would help their writing if their teachers used computer-based writing tools such as games, multimedia, or writing software programs or web sites during class.

• Take Your Résumé and Shove It - US News and World Report

  Interview with someone who did a successful search for employees using only social networking tools–no resume, no email allowed.

  tags: career, transparency, socialnetworking

  • Is transparency one of the key benefits to this sort of job search?
    Absolutely. I wanted the transparency. The problem with traditional résumé interviewing is it’s so one-dimensional and it’s so easy to paint yourself as something. If I can look at your social network, I can see much more. This took a level of trust for the people who were reaching out to me. But I did say that I’m a big enough boy, that I’m OK if you talked about partying or things that you do in your personal life. I want to know who you are. I’m a human being as well, and I don’t care that you do things, because I expect that human beings would do these things.

Commenting Self-Audit

Like many others, I’m participating in the 31-Day Comment Challenge. The first task is a commenting self-audit.

How often do you comment on other blogs during a typical week?

Looking at my tracked comments & conversations, I’ve tracked 147 comments since I started using co.mments last August. That works out to about 4 comment conversations per week, or a little more than 1 every other day. That number doesn’t include conversations where I comment more than once though, so it’s probably a little higher than that.

Do you track your blog comments? How? What do you do with your tracking?

Obviously, yes, I track my comments. There’s no way I’d comment as much as I do if I wasn’t tracking them. Before I knew there were such tools, I really didn’t comment much because I never remembered to go back to the sites and see the responses. With tracking and an RSS feed, I can keep track of it all much more easily.

Do you tend to comment at the same blogs or do you try to comment on at least one new blog per week?

I do tend to comment on a lot of the same blogs over time. That commenting helps build and maintain relationships with other bloggers, so I do see value in that. I don’t have a set goal about commenting on new blogs, but I do try to check out new blogs, especially when they link to me. If someone links to me, I try to go at least thank them for the link, even if I don’t leave a substantive comment.

The second part of this task is looking at the suggestions in Gina Trapani’s guide to comments. I’ve broken all of those at one point or another, but I think I actually do pretty well usually. I can certainly work on being more succinct in both my comments and posts though. For example, this comment I left on our team blog for work was absurdly long. Normally I’d move something that long into a post instead of a comment, but we have a set posting schedule and topics for that blog.

As a whole, I think I’m about average for my commenting. I comment pretty regularly. I gravitate towards certain blogs where I comment more regularly, but I try to branch out. I consider myself a decent online citizen, and I think I’ve been able to disagree with people without being too disagreeable. I can do more to reach out to new blogs and to really make sure I’m adding value to the conversation when I do. I’ve been trying to do more to interact with other commenters and not just the blog author, but I’m sure I can do better in that area too.

More than anything else, what I’m hoping to get out of this challenge is just becoming more aware of my commenting. Much of it just happens out of habit for me, so I hope that a bit of self-examination will help me be more deliberate and thoughtful of what I’m doing.

Technorati Tags: comment08, conversation, blogging, comments