I have mixed feelings and thoughts about the PLN requirement. I am about halfway through the program. I have taken classes horribly out of sequence. So, my introduction to the PLN was through Owen Guthrie’s Online Pedagogy course. Accordingly, despite Owen’s efforts it still felt contextually weird, and somewhat artificial. Nonetheless, I also appreciated having a name for something that I had been developing organically for most of my life.
So, despite how old fashioned they are, libraries are still central in my PLN. As a small child, 4-5 we lived within walking distance, I was allowed to check out as many books, at a time, as I was years old. I gamed that rule by making several trips per day and exchanging books I was finished with for new ones. Once school started in earnest, the library became the place where I was in control of my learning in a way that I was not in school. Google was a couple of sets of encyclopedias. As well, San Diego has a rich set of museums in Balboa Park, and the Scripps Research Institute and Zoo are valuable aspects of my PLN. I recall a moment when I was ten years old reflecting on my book smarts but practical ignorance. Therefore, making, and tinkering became important to me. In this way, I also connected with my Grandfather, and so my PLN suddenly included the craft of the hand and eye and people (mainly old-timers but not, my school teachers). I hated school, elementary, middle and high school all. It is a wonder, actually because of a car accident putting me out of work that I went to college. College was great stuff and graduate school even better. Accordingly, I have taken classes almost continuously throughout my adult life. I have stayed in contact with professors for years following their classes. John Schumacher until his death is one example. Bob Whitcomb is another. We are fast friends and talk regularly working on each other’s’ challenges, work, life, whatever.
I share all of this because it feels like it is missing from the ONID PLN assignment (and here I am referring to the thematic reoccurring PLN assignment that occurs across ONID courses). The PLN is mostly focused on online tools and resources, and that almost seems to negate a lifetime of learning. I think the assignment would be better if it built on what we are already good at, and instructors helped us plug into online resources that amplified that.
I am not a huge fan of Twitter though over the last year and a half I have found ways to use it to good professional effect. Not so much in creating a web presence but in keeping informed of relevant online content. I had heard the librarians, at my previous job, talking about Diigo. One, in particular, I hold in high regard, used it and so I was willing to be patient with it. However, it was not until Skip’s presentation this semester that the penny dropped for me. That said, bookmarks, spreadsheets, bibliographies are all still good ways to manage web resources, though not necessarily “socially.”
All of that acknowledged I hate having a quota of retweets to make and all the required tags are annoying, and finally I just had to rebel. I see myself participating in the spirit of the assignment but the letter of the law – just felt to school for me.
I am visible and moderately active on LinkedIn, and that is a great source of work-related articles, videos, blogs, podcasts along with too much drek and rubbish. It is unclear to me why it is not a priority in the PLN assignment. G+ is an interesting tool used in the way this program does.
Unfortunately, I do not hear enough in the PLN assignment about attending workshops and trainings and networking. One door that may open at those events is an opportunity to get involved with professional organizations. I attended an EDUCAUSE leadership training and was roped into working on the NERCOMP conference selection committee for the library track at the annual event. That was a great bad experience, and I opted to leave it alone. However, I also have not thrown the baby out with the bathwater other opportunities like that will allow me to build quickly a reputation in Alaska. Moreover, I would urge an early or mid-career person to do it sooner than later. Conference presentations are a tremendous way to grow a network quickly, as well. The little I did immediately opened doors for additional presentations and consulting. My previous boss dragged me kicking and screaming into that, and he was right.
In the end, I would not encourage killing the PLN assignment. Rather, make more of it, and let learners, at least, sketch out the parameters of their network then add gasoline to their fire by suggesting online resources and tools that amplify the learners’ native activities. Right now it feels half-conceived, awkward, too much about a rubric and too much about the internet.
Writing about the process of creating “podcasts” is the work of this piece. In this program, this is the second time I have been required to something like this. My reflection on the first was deeply articulate, I said something to the effect, of “This is the illest homework I’ve had in forever.” Therefore, I was pleased to see this assignment. I remember as a kid listening to the local public radio station doing extended replays of radio shows from the 1930’s. Abbott and Costello’s landmark “Who’s on First,” Orson Wells, “War of the Worlds,” and on the lighter end “The Burns and Allen Show” for some examples. For me, these radio shows were magical, like books, but unlike TV. Yet, interestingly, I find YouTubers magical like books and radio and unlike TV, (though lately writing for TV is better than movies.) Writing, since browsers, has again become magical as well. The magic, I believe, is that creation of content is in everybody’s hands now.
I think making the spoken content is an interesting process. On one end of the continuum, for me, is a very writerly approach. The written revision comes from struggling with the transition to speech as I verbally stumble over words read easily but spoken with difficulty. On the other hand, some scripts originate with spoken words, improvisational, and only later are written down and polished. Beyond that, I suspect that the more I did this the more attention I would pay to rhythm and syllables, alliteration, cadence, and volume. For now, I was satisfied to come up with topically relevant content.
Audacity reminds me of Photoshop in that they are refined and deeply nuanced programs. They have several ways to do any particular chore and from several different user interfaces. While I am content that I produced these several audio clips on time and under budget, I am not content with their technical quality. Some of that discontent comes from cheap hardware, namely my microphone. Some discontent comes from simply needing more practice and a better understanding of the software. And, some comes from needing a better understanding of genre conventions.
Editing is an art of its own. At this point, my sources are Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel and Robert Rodriguez, 10 Minute Film School. Kundera speaks of his musical training as significantly important and informative of his composition in writing.
Rodrigues speaks of editing with the camera planning the shots ahead so less editing afterward is necessary.
Too, as I mentioned above I might take wisdom from rappers in thinking about rhythm and rhyme in my composition. Rapping Deconstructed is for me less about becoming a rapper and more about becoming self-conscious of the magic of rhetoric, again. The musicality, planful and mindful composition, all topped with the spiciness of improvisation that returns us to music as a metaphor, the pentatonic scale, and the chord progressions set the parameters, but within that is nearly an infinity of possibility.
I offer the following scripts from my audio recordings. They move from improvisational to scripted, though after the fact that is probably less obvious.
Today I want to talk about Moodle and from the perspective of an aspiring Instructional Designer.
First, I want to distance myself from the argument that we are better than this that the best online instruction only occurs in the open environment of the untamed internet. Most colleges and universities have selected one or a couple learning management systems that they support. Similarly, in the business world learning management systems are frequently standardized and selected for compatibility or interoperability with their HR department’s employee management system. Learning management systems are an important skill set for Instructional Designers.
I like Moodle because it is open source and being open source that means almost every internet service provider includes a one-click install of it as part of your service package when you buy domain and hosting. I cannot recommend taking advantage of this highly enough.
Once you set up your personal instance of Moodle, you have the opportunity to interact with the program as an administrator and teacher. Now it is also possible to install the Moodle app on your personal mobile device and test your content in that way, as well. Creating your own development domain lets you master both administrative and instructional functions.
Our tendency is immediately to explore the role of “Teacher” and to begin creating content. I would warn folks away from that and instead to explore the role of Administrator. Explore the various roles that an administrator can create and assign. As well, administrators have authority over authentication, account management, permissions, and enrolments. I am unsure about the effectiveness of it; I have used my own instance of Moodle in my recent job search. I created user accounts for my interviewers and invited them to review a couple of courses I have developed and achieved at my Moodle installation.
So, while I was disappointed with Moodle’s “big brother” competitor’s mobile app I am looking forward to experimenting with Moodle’s mobile app just to see how it works.
LMS have the same basic functions Moodle’s availability allows us to explore and master these basics hence preparing us for our Instructional Designer role.
I find the presence of a semicolon in a spoken piece laughable, to begin with. My process here started with my own use of Moodle. I then moved to reviewing their website for highlights to develop as content. Finally, I spoke to the microphone until I had most of the script. I forced myself to come in under three minutes and so the gap between my content and my outro required some spontaneity and some finessing. From this recording, I learned that I dropped my volume at the end of sentences fading rather than punching.
Internet service in Dillingham is quite expensive and slow. Therefore, I found myself researching NotSchool.net on my phone. I discovered Heppell’s website on my work desktop, but the heavy lifting was done from my phone. This script was further towards the written end of the continuum yet it to developed out of recording, writing and revising.
Today I want to talk about NotSchool.net. Professor Stephen Heppell at Anglia Polytechnic University started this as an outgrowth of his Ultralab project. Heppell offers his version of the inception of the project at his website, “history.notschool.net.” The initial conversations leading to the program occurred in 1998. One of the cool features of the program is that they developed a new vocabulary and rather than students, they had “researchers” I will respect that in the following. The project focused on researchers excluded from institutional education, school refusals, school phobic, school exclusions, children in long-term hospital care, and profoundly physically impaired. Beyond the goodness of the mission are two other striking elements Heppell was acutely aware of the compelling case that money makes for government officials, Heppell drops the number 25 billion pounds in reengagement savings. Second, Heppell’s list of “early heroes” is a striking list of leaders, non-profit, for profit, journalists, educators, and government officials. My first take away is entrepreneurship whether business, non-profit, or social has a similar recipe for success, networking, and storytelling are fundamental skills.
Heppell also offers the literal sketch on a bar napkin for the technology plan for delivery to researchers. In 1998, it was perhaps relatively radical, now it is a tried and true recipe. I like that Heppell talks about other versions being explored and the realization that that part of the project they got nearly right on the first draft. After inception comes a lot of hard work by many dedicated individuals and once relative success is achieved then continuity becomes important. Far too many projects like this end with their funding, Heppell offers academic, administrative, and social accomplishments for role modeling.
Simply the program worked and has stood the test of time; it has become a model for other similar programs. A British Non-profit called Inclusion Trust is currently operating it. I encourage folks, particularly folks looking for alternatives to the ranks and rows of our classrooms to explore and adapt Stephen Heppell’s work.
Because I had the Moodle script I had a feel for how much of a page would take three minutes to speak, so some of this composition was based on how big a text block I had achieved. Finally, I worked up the OCW script. This I did sitting at my keyboard with a Word document and my iPhone to search the internet.
Today, I want to talk about the euphemistically titled “Open Courseware.” Massachusetts Institute of Technology led the way in 2001 by starting a project to make virtually all their course content available online. In 2001, this was a completely unheard of approach. Most scholars in higher education considered course content to be proprietary and part of what made an institution competitive and unique. MIT lead in two important ways through this initiative. They anticipated “content creation” as a profoundly important marketing tool. As well, they anticipated and understood that online learning and online peer review were important future trends. In the intervening years, many other universities have joined with them and an amazing wealth of instructional content is available consequently.
On the marketing side, it is easy to understand that their leadership position in technology is nearly unquestionable because of this strategy. Content marketing is now an established new profession I believe, in part, because of this initiative. All organizations are facing questions about positioning themselves as thought leaders and contributors to the knowledge economy.
Sensibly, MIT has examined their website traffic as part of this initiative and the volume is impressive, certainly. MIT has observed three groups, educators, students and self-learners who traffic their site and resources. Of the self-learners, we find people already established in their professions who want to broaden their knowledge followed by people who need to brush up existing skills, or learn a new skill are frequent user of these resources.
I can think of another relatively new profession, Instructional Designers, who might use these types of resources as well. I can imagine using them to either audit or augment course content depending on the instructor I was working with. I can imagine using these resources for inspiration also.
Unfortunately, MIT’s OCW website is not optimized for mobile devices. However, they have a specialized search page focused on educators desiring to use MIT’s resources. Their search protocol is quite interesting it first offers a choice between instructional approach and teaching materials. Unfortunately, I was frustrated in using their searches since I continually received error messages from their website. However, given the many other universities around the world who have followed suit I am not worried that I could find a way to enrich any instructional project I work on. Perhaps this is old news for many folks but for some of us it represents a new class of resources to add to our toolkit.
In this case, I wrote the script entirely. I revised it based first on verbal stumbles. Second, I edited for concerns that are more standard, overstatement, and accuracy for example. By the end I was feeling quite peevish, perhaps cross even, with MIT of all places for having such a bad and broken website (in fairness the brokenness may well be blamed on Dillingham’s internet access, but I have no way to test that, so my pettiness is completely justified.)
Composition and editing in making digital audio recordings has a second moment during recording. One may keep the tape rolling and simply re-speak a stumble knowing that they can snip away an offending “umm.” Finally, there is the actual editing phase though because of split functions and track movement one can still engage in composition even at this late stage.
At work, I am currently engaged in editing a professor’s Blackboard screencasts recorded from the Collaborate module. They will suffice. However, I am intrigued with constructing the audio separate from the video. Alternatively, is simply focusing on creating excellent audio in the first and last place. I recall my celebration of Bronet and Schumacher and their criticism of our cultures’ privileging visual knowledge, metaphor, and inquiry. I suspect that when we are not demanding and holding students attention by visual, auditory, and kinesthetic we experience ourselves as losing control. Students at a distance are not under the influence of the rooms’ ranks and rows. Students at a distance are, just like us, multi-tasking, watching YouTube listening to Spotify, typing a text, an email, and a writing assignment. Is there power in giving up control and instead developing excellence in our performance simplified and amplified through a single sense?
References
Bronet, F., & Schumacher, J. (1999). Design in Movement: The Prospects of Interdisciplinary Design. Journal Of Architectural Education, 53(2), 97-109. doi:10.1162/104648899564475
Kundera, M. (2003). The Art of the Novel. Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Reprint edition.
Paulo De Souza, M. (2008 July 5,). The Robert Rodriguez: 10 Minute Film School (The 1st & Original). [Video file] Retrieved from https://youtu.be/W-YpfievjSk
Vox. (2016, May 19). Rapping, deconstructed: The best rhymers of all time [Video file]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/QWveXdj6oZU
What is the role of the Instructional Designer in anticipating the learners need to un-learn and in supporting the teacher, in that perhaps most important task, facilitating un-learning?
I came to this assignment with a mild bias against Google Forms. A very long time ago, we made forms with HTML. Moreover, that offered a huge amount of customizability though at the steep price of building them from scratch. Six to eight years ago, my workplace transitioned to Google. Forms were among the tools available as a result. Looking back I am uncertain whether Forms has improved over time or if the functionality was there and we did not know how to use it. However, we soon switched to Survey Monkey (much more sophisticated was our participation in the MISO survey, a powerful tool, but mostly a black box) and more recently the Qualtrics product. It was with this in mind that I approached this assignment.
In this instance, un-learning was triggered by recognizing the feeling of misgiving that perhaps something was missing. In the workplace, I have gotten good at trusting that feeling when it comes to others’ presentations or projects. In my personal relationships, I recognized it when I rationalize or giving half-measure. This, for me, is first an aspect of listening intently, to others, and then to myself. However, in this case, my listening was dulled by my bias. Sometimes in life, we tell ourselves rich and complex stories based on just a few ambiguous facts and a bunch of emotional energy. These stories get in our way of relating with other people and of learning. In this instance, I was not telling myself a rich or emotional story. Rather, “Why is Skip having us work with Google Forms? I know there are better tools out there.” My simple story blocked my progress for a long time.
It was these misgivings in this case that slowly dragged me into realizing I needed to un-learn, in order to complete this assignment.
Because of previous work, I came to this project predisposed to create all of my content up front. In addition, this was an approach that actually delayed my insight into needing to un-learn. On many other occasions, I simply fire up a new program and see what it can do, learn it on the fly. Here I imagined that I knew what Forms could do. It also caused me to miss the nuance in Skip’s emphasis on “branching logic.” I sensed it was important to him and accordingly imagined I needed to write it into my content, up front. Yet, I was working on a real-world project, and real-world data (Google Analytics tells us a fair bit about folk’s use of our website) accordingly I needed to ask about what we do not know. Unfortunately, that did not fit well with “branched questions” hence Skip and I struggled to communicate here. If I was simply doing a simulation for the assignment then I probably would have been quicker to un-learn, but this project had real-world consequences for me, hence I was more stubborn then I might have been otherwise.
We were at an impasse as I approached Tuesday, evening’s synchronous session. The technical difficulty in my logging in meant that I heard Skip’s talking about the “description” and “question” text fields incompletely and out of context. However, it was a moment of niggling misgiving. My last attempt to use Forms had been stillborn on this functional ambiguity. Questions as spreadsheet headers, or not, made analyzing the data cumbersome and impractical (real world, I need this now and I do not have time or patience to figure it out). Therefore, this started my repeating my simple story above, “Why is Skip having us work with Google Forms? I know there are better tools out there.” The misgiving was inarticulate at that moment but it was simply my recognizing I did not know as much as I thought I did. Seeing Skip fumble around with the Forms interface was likewise an ambiguity. I started to repeat my story but pressed pause because Skip said, “They must have recently updated Forms. Things have moved around.” This simple fumble, I am sure, not intentional, but oh so real, caused me to watch the video that Skip posted. Why had I not bothered with the other video tutorials? First, I knew, already about Forms. In addition, internet access now is more challenging; hence, I am increasingly declining high data, and high bandwidth, options. I also have a vague recollection of Skip saying the Atomic Learning tutorials were “older.” My bias and my situation caused me not to engage with all the online learning objects.
Watching the new tutorial connected the dots for me. Skip is interested in branching logic because it is a feature of the Forms functionality. He wanted us to recognize the power. This was obscured for me in part because I tried to write my form completely and upfront in Google Docs.
Another important moment of realization that I needed to un-learn came from interacting with Valerie’s assignment. She has nicely broken her survey into sections. In fact, as a survey taker, this is something I dislike a lot. The only time I have patience for it is when the survey designer provides enough information to navigate the form and manage my impatience. This bias likewise stood in my way to discovering the branching logic functionality. Indeed, I discovered the section button on the toolbar and then immediately removed the section I accidently created when I was first messing about with moving my content into Forms. Seeing Valarie’s form was the moment of understanding regarding how sections and branching logic function in Forms. Skip said it in his tutorial, but to learn it I needed to interact with a peers’ form.
I still believe there is significant room to be critical of Google’s Forms. They are right-at-hand, powerful, richly featured, grossly under-explained, and not particularly intuitive. That said most of my struggle was due to my own internal monolog. So, how do I as a budding Instructional Designer design with a learners’ need to un-learn simultaneously along with their learning, in mind? How do I help teachers facilitate learners in un-learning? Treating myself as a case study I see the following elements that might have broader application.
Peer-to-peer
Down and dirty learning object(s) targeted at miscommunication
Sensitivity to miscommunication
Experience may provide a clue that a topic is likely to require unlearning
Collect and offer samples to interact with
A down and dirty search of Academic Search Premier, “unlearning” limited to education and psychology peer-reviewed article, shows that “un-learning” appears across many disciplines, medicine, social work, teaching, technology, organizational change, and leadership. The concept itself is contested (it would not be academia otherwise). It is not my intention to research this here, nor to argue for the concept. Rather, I want to use it as a a “variable” as I sort out my tentative re-invention of self as Instructional Designer.
In my case study, I mentioned the stories we tell ourselves. And this is a construct I learned from the Crucial Conversations training from Vital Smarts. They also offer a mnemonic, AMPP, which stands for Ask, Mirror, Paraphrase, and Prime when one is trying to stay on track in crucial conversation. It is also a useful tool for interrogating, and interrupting and rendering the stories folks are telling themselves as objects of self-reflection. This without being rude or causing defensiveness. I think of the story I was telling, “Why is Skip having us work with Google Forms? I know there are better tools out there.” I could have engaged in my own AMPP process and probably made quicker progress on this assignment. However, I need to get into the skin of an Instructional Designer and apply the mnemonic from that point of view. I see the need for AMPP as I work with Professors on a daily basis to interrupt the stories they tell themselves about students and about their subjects. But how do we anticipate as distance learners need to “unlearn”? How do we build that into a curriculum?
In which we uncover some taken-for-granted presumptions. In addition, in which, we discover some parallels between Western and Indigenous philosophies and hence some potential alliances for each in making their respective cases and even perhaps in working together. Finally, in which we play with some cheap-and-cheerful devices and technologies in both the classroom and the field and so further complicate the boundaries between the classroom, real life, roles, and relationships.
My introduction to course work at University of Alaska Fairbanks was Ray Barnhardt’s Culture, Curriculum and Community course. Ray is a fierce advocate for Alaska Native knowledge. One element of this knowledge is that it is specific to a particular place-time. I was surprised that this was not taken for granted. My assumptions arose from graduate studies in philosophy in the early 90’s. There we read about quantum mechanics, Boehm on the holomovement for one example. We also viewed computer-generated fractal art, read chaos theory, and closer to my heart and relative sophistication I read about bioregionalism. All of these sources contributed to a rationalization of local knowledge, perhaps out of proportion to its relative size, for example, we now speak of videos, tweets, or posts that go “viral.” Then we imagined the butterfly wing flap in Brazil that caused a hurricane in Tampa. Therefore, to be in Ray’s class 25 years later and to hear people struggling to articulate place-based knowledge and struggling to legitimize it, simply set me on my heels; I took it as assumed that these arguments were already made. That said there is some fun to be had in making those arguments again and with the slant, this assignment provides, that is aimed at mobile learning and mobile technology.
John A. Schumacher in this book Human Posture: The Nature of Inquiry unpacks the privileged monolog and position of Western metaphysics and epistemology. He argues that a God-like posture, all-seeing, is an artifice, that collapses as we move through theories of relativity to quantum mechanical descriptions. Rather, now we have to include our posture and our literal location as we define our inquiries; said differently, place-time (nor are they reducible to independent terms) does not cancel out as we work our equations. (This is an oversimplification. His book takes 259 pages to make his argument.) Therefore, acknowledging these arguments, we must sacrifice our schemes for a grand and unified theory. Yet, what do we gain?
Turning to a shorter work, Design in Movement: The Prospects of Interdisciplinary Design, Bronet and Schumacher collaborate, working interdisciplinarily between philosophy, architecture, and pedagogy.
Design in movement is a complement to traditional architectural design in space. Design in movement allows us to experience, through our bodies, in a way that challenges our deeply ingrained visual culture. If we design, in this visual culture without being able to call the culture into question, we do not take advantage of the full range of design’s liberative potential: it is one thing to design so as to refuse any single authoritative reading in space, but another to discover an alternative to reading itself. We are investigating how design in movement can motivate new ways of liberative building and inhabiting that challenge the hegemony of design in space (1999, 97).
From this, we begin to learn Bronet and Schumacher’s specialized vocabulary. A vocabulary that I think is important to develop before we delve into mobile learning. Space is no longer taken for granted but vexed by these two. Movement is celebrated, perhaps privileged, over reading. Reading signifies a negative return to a taken for granted type of inquiry, an inquiry that necessarily privileges our visual culture. Bronet and Schumacher offer the Hopi as exemplary of the kind of spatial participation they are seeking to understand and employee because of its disruptive value.
…”Distance includes what we call time in the sense of the temporal relations between events which have already happened. The Hopi conceive of time and motion in the objective realm in a purely operational sense — a matter of the complexity and magnitude of operations connecting events — so that the element of time is not separated from whatever element of space enters into the operations.” 5 Hopi descriptions, to use Warriner’s terms, organizes movements rather than presents a tableau. (1999, 97)
Hence, one element of our critical theory is to seek moments, tools, and disruptive practices that are about organizing movements rather than presenting a snapshot, a still life, a view. As a quick summary of the tension, they are trying to create, I offer an illustration from this article.
Therefore, this conceptual architecture served Bronet and Schumacher as they developed a pedagogical experiment in design and philosophy.
In our experiment with dance/design, therefore, we also tried to blur the distinction between the designers’ bodies and their movements, on the one hand, and the dancers’ bodies and their movements, on the other. In the main project, Dance Infusion, six seven-member teams of first-year architecture students were each asked to design an inhabitable installation that responded to the concept of movement determining space that is to space-in-the-making. The movements that determines the space was to be performed by dancers, who were themselves involved all along in the studio, as critics and as performers. And, finally, the students were led, through exercises, to blur the distinction between designing and building as well. (1999, 101)
My point here is not to fully summarize Bronet and Schumacher, but instead to aggressively borrow and develop a critical theory from them. For my purposes here, we will stipulate that these elements in the movement column are what I am seeking to develop in my own pedagogy of mobile learning. This is a self-conscious privileging for the sake of critical discourse. Bronet and Schumacher experimented with a first-year design course; here I will experiment with Chris Dede (and team’s) EcoMuve and EcoMobile projects.
I am at first seduced by the EcoMuve module. However, the power of strangeness that Bronet and Schumacher’s vocabulary invoke inspires me to critical reflection. The opening scene is a standard computer classroom organized in ranks and rows, each student at once isolated and visible. The classroom organized for the teacher’s convenience. The classroom is a ready-made-space, with ready-made-status. We turn to the lesson on the computer and it gives primacy to the eye, and to space (a simulated world, hence one that is read). As the student moves the mouse we have a tiny bit of vertigo, a tiny throwback to eyes-moving-with-the head, alas, a pop-up text box interrupts our wonder in the virtual world and we slip back to reading. Soon, the linear plot introduces a minor villain who inadvertently is causing eutrophication in the pond and we see political authority and ready-made-justice. Yet all the while the nerdy gamer in me is loving what Harvard has done with this program. Better game developers could raise the level making it open-ended, letting one switch roles, better graphics, and UI. Yet, I think the criticism still stands.
I suspect our program developers at Harvard felt misgivings, too, and chaffed a bit at the implicit map-territory error. Once we get past the talking head, and the classroom scene, we see a group of youngsters walking in the woods. The trip is augmented with cheap-and-cheerful smartphones keeping the hardware within the budgets of most schools. The FreshAir augmented reality software is likewise accessible, cheap-and-cheerful, costing $20.00 per month for 30 users, but also easy to use for curricula designers; finally, they have low-cost Texas Instruments NSpires with Vernier probes collection devices. Being cheap we have to imagine things not always running smoothly with the interface, and indeed the narrator tells about peer-to-peer learning. But wait, let me invoke our critical vocabulary: recall that in the virtual pond one could walk into the pond and on its bottom, the political boundaries, the artifice of a kind omnipotence, whereas in the real world, you get muddy and wet if you trespass the natural shore-water boundary. We see the young people moving their eyes with their heads, even as they insert the phone and its additional information between themselves and the world. It is easy to see the enthusiasm the learners experience as they do real science, in the real world. Certainly, the teachers have constrained the scope, but the associations the learners are making about other applications, other uses are evident. My absolute favorite moment in the video is at 3:43. This young person, lacking the vocabulary of movement is attempting to celebrate the day’s learning and to criticize previous classroom time. Spontaneously, this youngster starts to articulate the difference.
Augmented reality is frequently demonstrated in an urban landscape, showing us places to eat, or telling us about historical landmarks, and sometimes creative or subversive uses connect graffiti with interpretive and polemic.
So, yes, what possible use could this distracting, consumerist toy offer serious learners? Both Alaska’s struggles with remembering place-names and the EcoMobile team inspired me to imagine my smartphone on the tundra. Where mountains and trees, salmon and bears, become hotspots, and language, culture, and science swirled together as seductively as Spiderman beating the Hulk….
I have held the tension long enough and here it truly becomes important to define some terms. First, “place-based education” in Wikipedia, offers us this:
Place-based education seeks to help communities through employing students and school staff in solving community problems. Place-based education differs from conventional text and classroom-based education in that it understands students’ local community as one of the primary resources for learning. Thus, place-based education promotes learning that is rooted in what is local—the unique history, environment, culture, economy, literature, and art of a particular place[2]—that is, in students’ own “place” or immediate schoolyard, neighborhood, town or community.
Certainly, ethnicity and culture bear strongly on an Alaska Native understanding of this notion and practice.
The second term I have employed without definition is “augmented reality.” So that we are comparing apples-to-apples, Wikipedia offers this definition of “augmented reality:”
Augmented reality (AR) is a live direct or indirect view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented (or supplemented) by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data. It is related to a more general concept called mediated reality , in which a view of reality is modified (possibly even diminished rather than augmented) by a computer. As a result, the technology functions by enhancing one’s current perception of reality.
Interestingly, implicit in each definition is an alignment with our chart above. “Place-based education” resonates with elements in the “movement” column. “Augmented reality” seems more closely aligned with elements in the “space” column. Perhaps, then our way forward is like the Buddha, a third way, the “tensive play of eye and movement” that Bronet and Schumacher summarize. Perhaps instead we employ place-based education and augmented reality in ways that each keeps the other honest. Perhaps we can avoid slipping into the excesses of either by navigating both.
In my opening, I mention reading bio-regionalist thought back in the 90’s and hence part of why I assumed the argument for place-based pedagogy was made. An excellent summary of bioregional thought is displayed in this quiz (Charles et al., 1981):
Trace the water you drink from precipitation to tap.
How many days til the moon is full? (Slack of2 days allowed.)
What soil series are you standing on?
What was the total rainfall in your area last year (July-June)? (Slack: 1 inch for every 20 inches.)
When was the last time a fire burned in your area?
What were the primary subsistence techniques of the culture that lived in your area before you?
Name 5 edible plants in your region and their season(s) of availability.
From what direction do winter storms generally, come in your region?
Where does your garbage go?
How long is the growing season where you live?
On what day of the year are the shadows the shortest where you live?
When do the deer rut in your region, and when are the young born?
Name five grasses in your area. Are any of them native?
Name five resident and five migratory birds in your area.
What is the land use history of where you live?
What primary ecological event/process influenced the landform where you live? (Bonus special: what’s the evidence?)
What species have become extinct in your area?
What are the major plant associations in your region?
From where you’re reading this, point north.
What spring wildflower is consistently among the first to bloom where you live?
Before I accept this at face value, I want to think about it in light of the vocabulary that Bronet and Schumacher provide us. I worry that this quiz could easily slip into “knowledge as a tableau.” I could Google the answers to all of these questions. We inhabit a data-rich era. However, what if instead of “trace” our water, which smacks of a pencil and paper exercise, we must literally follow our water. We begin standing in the rain. We follow the run-off, to a stream, to a lake, and because we know the answer to question three, we know how that water enters our aquifer. Because we hand-dug, or at least watched curiously while our well was drilled, and because we know how the submersible pump works, and our homes’ pressure system, we can say we followed our drinking water to its origin. To my mind, this paragraph answers the letter of the law and the activity of “following my water” fulfills the spirit of the quiz. Moreover, I think that demonstrates how this quiz operates in the tensive moment between “space” and “movement” as Bronet and Schumacher define them.
I think this insight is important because this coursework, this assignment is aimed at training me to be an instructional designer focused on the online environment. We are already predisposed to visual tropes, to the artifice of an all-seeing, all-knowing epistemology. Our information technology with its graphical user interface seduces us further in this direction. How can we design our curriculum and our learning modules to interrupt, self-reflexively, to make learners aware of themselves and their devices moving in the real world? How can we write lessons that scale learners into the roles they are seeking to take on – scientist to Scientist, perhaps? Since this was exactly the work that Bronet and Schumacher were involved in, though not online, it seems worthwhile to circle back to their article and see how the first-year design students fared with this challenge. We recall that they divided the class into six seven-member teams. Each team was charged with designing an “inhabitable installation that responded to the concept of movement determining space.” The test, as it were, (actually a feedback cycle, with opportunities for revision) was that groups of contact improvisation dancers then inhabited the installations. Wikipedia defines “Contact improvisation” in this way:
Contact improvisationis a dance technique in which points of physical contact provide the starting point for exploration through movement improvisation.[1]Contact Improvisation is a form of dance improvisationand is one of the best-known and most characteristic forms of postmodern dance.[2]
Therefore, in this case, the mobile technology is this form of dance improvisation; the reality is augmented or designed by our aspiring design students (the boundary violation is reversed bringing the outside inside). At the end of the article Bronet and Schumacher review and evaluate each group’s (or perhaps report on these) relative success with the assignment. For our purposes here I am most interested in the groups that struggled in the middle, not those that failed or succeeded. Here we will review one of those projects called the Dichotomy Project.
The Dichotomy Project, which was most impressive visually in terms of form, lighting, and so on, could be read all at once. It consisted of two amorphously shaped, stretched-fabric-over-wood forms seated on electronically triggered ramps that responded to pressure by lighting up specific quadrants of the set…. The location of the audience and the stage like configuration of the elements immediately set up a scenario of viewing all-at-once. This scenario was consistent with the dancers’ interpretation of the space and the difficulty they had developing sequences that were not spatially predictable; we could anticipate how they would use the forms. (1999)
As a lifelong student, I recognize the damning death-knell of grading in the phrase “a scenario of viewing all-at-once.” I know that we failed. However, it seems these learners failed-forward. So, as an aspiring designer of online learning, what can I learn from them? They did not vex the roles of audience-participant sufficiently but rather, at a glance, I can recognize the performance space. That error forces roles and predictability on and within the performance. Perhaps, they did not test their installation sufficiently with the dancers and audience, both in practice and in mind. We see this in the phrase, “dancers’ … the difficulty they had developing sequences that were not spatially predictable.” However, it is the “electronically triggered ramps… {and} lighting…” that salvages this installation for the learners and the dancers and ultimately for the audience.
The person-bodies were quite independent of the architectural bodies. The minimal manipulation of elements on site during layout, construction, and test-inhabitation may have contributed to the predictability of movement…. For example, when the performers figured out the triggers for the lights they began to use those, and found rhythms with one another between their feet on the ramps and the lights going on and off. The props and the bodies referred to one another, with an in-the-making quality that began to establish them as aspects of an order of movement rather than as aspects of a ready-made space. (1999)
The praise is evident when Bronet and Schumacher say that: “the bodies referred to one another, with an in-the-making quality…”(1999). Therefore, as a designer, I want my mobile technology and augmented reality to rupture the boundaries between class and community. However, imagine an EcoMobile learner at the pond and a passer-by asks her what she is doing and as a result together they engage in learning. The roles are negotiated, as the youngster explains the smartphone and augmented reality assignment and some facts about the pond. Imagine the passer-by asking a question that the youngster cannot answer, but through logic and troubleshooting they together work out the answer. Our EcoMobile narrator seems unflustered and poised yet we know that on a field-trip with technology that we, as the “teachers,” are going to have to “wing-it.” If we are open to a permeable boundary (we are comfortable with our own role as learners) then exchanging roles with the younger folks as we-together-step in the co-making of mobile learning will become a contact improvisation.
As a designer, I am also looking for the unpredictability of movement. For example, learners using the TI probes to sample other water sources, adjacent puddles, or a home water source. I need to ask questions about the smartphone and the software used out of context. Will the AR recognize a bear, for example outside the linear narrative I have imagined? If I am viewing a landscape, 2 miles to the west, will the AR still recognize the shape of the mountain and offer the correct indigenous place-name? What happens when I imagine an AR that is modifiable perhaps like Wikipedia, where the content grows out of the users’ interactions? How can the functions and features of the hardware/software create opportunities for online interactions? How does the onboard GPS help us to refine and develop both content and potential interactivity? What happens to our content when mobile devices are in proximity and “recognize” each other?
I am merely touching the surface of these topics however, I am unconvinced that simply using mobile technology will inspire a radical learning experience. Rather, the assumptions which we approach a course design and instruction have to be called into question, perhaps even mugged and left in history’s back alley. I think Bronet and Schumacher provide us a vocabulary and they have piloted a fruitful route. However, the work is not all done. In 1999 they did not imagine the ubiquity of mobile devices, nor the pressures on higher education to move towards online education. So, it remains for us to move this critical theory into our practice as designers and architects of learning.
Bohm, D., (December 1971) Quantum theory as an indication of a new order in physics. Part A. The development of new orders as shown through the history of physics. Foundations of Physics , Volume 1, Issue 4, pp 359–381.
Bohm, D., (June 1973) Quantum theory as an indication of a new order in physics. B. Implicate and explicate order in physical law. Foundations of Physics , Volume 3, Issue 2, pp 139–168.
Bronet, F., & Schumacher, J. (1999). Design in Movement: The Prospects of Interdisciplinary Design. Journal Of Architectural Education, 53(2), 97-109. doi:10.1162/104648899564475
Charles, L., Dodge, J, Milliman, L., and Stockley, V., (Winter 1981) Where You At? A Bioregional Quiz. Coevolution Quarterly 32: 1.
In which, a doddering old guy takes insight from a couple of young men. And, in which we explore dualisms and speculate on more fruitful x-y-z coordinates.
Rather than seek out pre-existing definitions I would like to struggle a bit in order to formulate, abductively, my own definitions. In order to establish a point of reference, first I want to develop a couple of case examples. Perhaps these represent fully developed web presences. Accordingly, I offer Jon B., at Fishing the Midwest on YouTube and Brennan (several YouTube channels actually) at GoldGloveTV and on Twitch. These two are not alone, nor are they the most successful; however, they offer good cases. We are broadly familiar with YouTube. Twitch, however, is more of a niche social media, and bears some additional introduction. Twitch is a platform that allows computer gamers to broadcast live and real-time their game-play. Frequently there is a social component to the game-play, either through the game being a massive-multiplayer-online (MMO) or through a co-op element to otherwise single player games. Twitch facilitates the creation of online communities and potentially a revenue stream for successful “hosts.” Content creators can monetize their accounts by permitting advertising, and promoting subscriptions.
The two young men I have chosen to review as case examples here are self-employed, full-time, by and through their content creation. They have created recognizable personal brands, defined business models, and are executing on their plans. Their participation in social media also intentionally blurs boundaries of identities – this blurring is seen clearly in “vlogging” content offered by both. “Vlogging” is a “journalistic documentation of a person’s life, thoughts, opinions, and interests” (ZMD, 2005).
Jon B. is in his early 20’s. He recently dropped out of college in order to work full-time on his YouTube content. He has been creating YouTube content since 2009; he was 12-13 years old at that time. He participates in several additional social media, such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. Jon B. is attentive to the details of his camera, audio work, and editing and he seems as passionate about them as his fishing. Recently Jon B. has traveled, fished, and created content with a cohort of YouTube channel hosts. These people might be seen as competitors; however, they are working as collaborators driving traffic to each others’ sites and appearing in each others’ videos.
Brennan O’Neill is 25 and has likewise been on YouTube since 2009. Among gamers, he is well known and widely subscribed as well. He and his personal information are more indiscriminately available online. In addition, he is well known for his drunken live streaming and for his unfiltered, sometimes inappropriate, game commentary. His social media includes Twitter, Facebook, Twitch, and a number of game related sites. Brennan employs a Video Editor to assist with the creation of videos. He likewise has a cohort of friends with whom he games and creates content.
In the language of this assignment, we encounter several classic binaries. For example, public: private, personal: professional, and active: passive. The “passive” and “active” aspects of online activity reinforce the definition (Christenson, 2014) stipulated in this assignment “the intentional and unintentional traces left when participating online.” Of the active and passive traces, we tend to fear the passive, the notion of big data, and the Orwellian or Kafkaesque paranoia that comes with it, haunts us. Wikipedia (Digital footprint, 2016) offers examples of privacy issues that do raise serious concerns. Interestingly, I served on a jury that examined a child pornography case. The evidence showed a huge library of video and imagery. However, what trapped the defendant was not the collection of the images (abhorrent but a relatively passive set of traces was left by that activity) rather it was setting up a file sharing system and making some of the collection available for download. The transition to “content creation” or “distribution” was a movement towards an “active” digital footprint, as it were, that tripped up the defendant. A tiny bit of “passive” evidence was used in court; however, the telling evidence was the “active” footprint.
That distinction brings us back around to the case examples above. These two young men really vex a traditional notion of these categories — public: private, personal: professional, and active: passive. Brennan, for example, clearly drinks on the job. Moreover, both Jon B. and Brennan appear to be role models since their primary market segment is 13-17-year-olds. Both employ vlogging sometimes discretely and sometimes woven into their specific content. It is a challenge to speculate on their concerns about the passive elements of their digital footprint; however, their active content creation is plainly visible. Jon B. challenges the boundaries include the virtual: real boundary. He maintains a post office box and takes fan mail there and then videos the unboxing as channel content. Going the other direction he takes fans fishing or attends real world “meet ups.”
I have really only ever worked with post-secondary young people. Our two case examples fit this demographic as well, perhaps revealing my affinity for them and selection of them as case examples. Nonetheless, it seems that many Millennials are self-conscious of both their web presence and their digital footprint (Eddy, 2015). I have heard colleagues in higher education speak poorly of these young people’s judgment and attitudes, broadly, but also specifically regarding their online sophistication. Given the two case examples, I suspect this reflects a superficiality in my colleagues thinking. One frequently touted truism is that Millennials learn first from each other. Given the case examples participation in a cohort of channel hosts and their apparent status as role models, we see some evidence for this truism. I also suspect these two case examples are acutely aware of both their active and passive footprints. Hence, I wonder precisely what I might “teach” their cohort about this topic. Brennan and Jon B. are living it in full color and at top speed and certainly, have more credibility than I. Instead, I might offer examples, open a discussion, and facilitate the conversation along the lines of the tensions we are exploring here — risk: reward, personal: professional, public: private and active: passive.
It is precisely through the introduction of the risk: reward binary that my thinking became more complicated and richer. This sparked my recollection of White, & Le Cornu, (2011) who offer a criticism of the binary digital native: digital immigrant. However, they do not stop there but rather they develop a theory of visitor: resident as a continuum of participation in their article Visitors and Residents: A new typology for online engagement.
In this video, White complicates our thinking in several key ways; first, he calls into question the importance of “generation” in our thinking about web presence. In this essay, I persist in using the demographics of “Millennial” and “Gen X” and this is predominately a contrivance of convenience – but it is not without self-consciousness. White’s video further complicates our thinking by introducing the model of continua in contrast to binaries. White also introduces the importance of motivation in propelling a persons’ relative residency or visitor status. Taking these notions together allows me to sketch a framework to review our case examples and to reflect on my own web presence.
There is a lot of money to be made by enterprising content creators. Obviously, in the cases here revenue comes directly from online enterprises. However, I have observed young people working to develop their LinkedIn personas, for example, in order to facilitate their more traditional job search, hence to generate revenue just as real as our two content creators make. So, can we say that the reward, or potential reward, outweighs the risk? Conversely, perhaps not participating, not creating, and not managing a web presence is a greater risk? Therefore, if the simple binaries do not adequately open the conversation, what other possible models do we have at hand? Perhaps instead if we imagine the binaries as the ends of ranges and we imagine a node at which these several spectrum intersect, then we can plot our “location” or comfort in the online environment — a multidimensional map. White indeed has mapping one’s participation as a goal of his method. I mention above risk: reward, and White talks about motivation in relative participation as a key element. Yet “participation” calls into question “presence” too. “Presence” suggests a product, perhaps, whereas “participation” suggests a process.
It seems that our content creators actually create drama around these boundaries and along these continua in order to increase traffic. Interestingly, both of these content creators have crossed the boundaries of public versus private. We followed Brennan’s relationship with a young woman, also a content creator. First, as they became housemates, and then later when they broke up. Jon B. has engaged his critical commenters directly calling out boundary violations, almost as though he was taking on the role of an etiquette coach. These two seem to set public: private on a continuum rather than a dualism and they slide back and forth on that continuum to manage their traffic and personas. They are gauging this based on some risk: reward calculation that they instinctively or consciously invoke. It seems that they navigate these issues — risk: reward, personal: professional, public: private and active: passive — self-consciously and with a keen eye toward maximizing their profits.
Copyright and intellectual property are intensely important issues to these two YouTube entrepreneurs. They are acutely aware of copyright as their channels and hence livelihoods can be shut down due to copyright claims. This and the fact that most serious YouTubers routinely mention this threat in their commentary starts to put the lie to the claim that “kids these days” are pirates. Moreover, as these two make their living from their content creation, their understanding of intellectual property is key to the enterprise. I am inclined to think that some young people are more sophisticated regarding these matters than some of us older folks.
Certainly, in the case of our young men, they are their employer, at least for now, and their web presence is their business. Jon B. has moved back and forth between his full-time content creation and working for Mystery Tackle Box.
I interpret that to mean he is mindful that he may not always be self-employed. His web presence, while youthful and exuberant, reflects a more conservative approach. Brennan, on the other hand, seems fully committed to his enterprise and his style. In addition, his style does blur the boundaries. The traces he is leaving may well influence his future employability if he chooses to seek work that is more traditional.
So, based on that, it is time for me to become self-reflective and to consider my own engagement with risk: reward, personal: professional, public: private and active: passive online activity. I need to address the questions from our assignment:
Can you effectively manage your web presence? Can you maintain both a private and a public web presence? Is it necessary to separate your public and private web presence? How might your employer’s interests or policies affect your personal web presence?
I am personally less comfortable on the private-public continuum and more comfortable on the professional-personal continuum, hence, my choices in social media. I am moderately active on LinkedIn but not Facebook. Moreover, this reflects my choices around content creation. I am inclined to be more deeply cautious about what content I actively create. This caution is reflected in my participation in LinkedIn, or Twitter. I am content to share, like and retweet. I tightly manage my rendering of opinion in these venues. This caution slices the definition in a different direction. It is increasingly challenging to make sense of “public” and “private” in the online environment. Rather, I make more sense of the “personal” and “professional” distinction. For myself, I am and have been acutely aware of not violating these kinds of boundaries. In part, this is a personal value, but it also derives from the fact that my employers have always been intensely brand-conscious and protective. Trashing them either directly or indirectly through inappropriate boundaries seemed too risky for my taste.
I have maintained a blog logging my exercise for many years, though using a pseudonym. I have not promoted it and, as such, it has no traffic. Rather it served me as a journal and a way to be accountable. However, my thinking about it and my relationship to the hundreds of workouts logged there is more in line with notions of an open web. My thinking was indifferent and vaguely generous regarding the content. This indifference towards “property” and “copyright” differentiates me (and probably many) from the two case examples. I lacked the vision that personal branding and content creation could open a door to the fitness industry for me. In contrast, these young men clearly grasped their opportunities.
I have observed of late a blurring of my boundaries and a willingness to own my authorship. This in part inspired by these two young men who are passionate about both the form and content of their online creations. I find Jon B.’s excitement split equally between photography, video editing, and fishing to be rejuvenating and motivational. There is much for me to learn.
Therefore, yes I do think it is possible to manage my web presence but the calculations need to be more complex than simple binaries. I find the notions of “visitor” and “resident” valuable constructs for thinking about web presence (White, & Le Cornu, 2011) and yet I felt discomforted by these concepts, too. I am not certain that I ever will be a resident, and at home in the same way that Brennan and Jon B. appear to be. Though I wonder if that has anything to do with the internet at all, perhaps that reflects myself in any social situation, introverted, and intently observing from the margins. Nevertheless, such calculations do include a risk: reward calculation. At this time, for me, the reward is less about revenue and more about audience; in truth I suspect many content creators start with that goal.
Curriculum and Community course. Ray is a fierce advocate for Alaska Native knowledge. One element of this knowledge is that it is specific to a particular place-time. I was surprised that this was not taken for granted. My assumptions arose from graduate studies in philosophy in the early 
90’s. There we read about quantum mechanics, Boehm on the holomovement for one example. We also viewed computer-generated fractal art, read chaos theory, and closer to my heart and relative sophistication I read about bioregionalism. All of these sources contributed to a rationalization of local knowledge, perhaps out of proportion to its relative size, for example, we now speak of videos, tweets, or posts that go “viral.” Then we imagined the butterfly wing flap in Brazil that caused a hurricane in Tampa. Therefore, to be in Ray’s class 25 years later and to hear people struggling to articulate place-based knowledge and struggling to legitimize it, simply set me on my heels; I took it as assumed that these arguments were already made. That said there is some fun to be had in making those arguments again and with the slant, this assignment provides, that is aimed at mobile learning and mobile technology.
mechanical descriptions. Rather, now we have to include our posture and our literal location as we define our inquiries; said differently, place-time (nor are they reducible to independent terms) does not cancel out as we work our equations. (This is an oversimplification. His book takes 259 pages to make his argument.) Therefore, acknowledging these arguments, we must sacrifice our schemes for a grand and unified theory. Yet, what do we gain?
