As always the more holistic elements such as literacies and the cultivation of a nurturing participatory learning culture amongst students and teacher are of equal if not greater importance – but considering how late it is tonight I’ll be hard pressed to do the tech justice.  So I’d best stick to that for now.

The post in question regards a communication model being used this session by David Silver for a Media Studies course at the University of San Francisco.  According to Silver, “this semester, twitter is the main mode of communication used by my students and me.”

Silver continues to say that Twitter in fact replaces “at least” three distinct technologies:

• the class listserv
• email announcements
• the assignment submission box

The end result: “these days, my students write blogs, design flickr sets, upload vidoe [sic], and post works-in-progress. when finished, they tweet about it so that i – and, more importantly, their peers – can check it out. ”

Expanding on this

In reading Silver’s post I was both intrigued and inspired by the possibilities of this sort of model, and yet on reflecting further there are additional elements I think should be present – or perhaps expanded upon.  Silver does make mention to other technologies, such as Flickr and video sites, however there are other elements I’d like to include as well, most notably:

Course Wiki or Blog to outline the  syllabus, course materials, reading lists and assignments.  Much of the interaction between instructor and students will take place in distributed, disparate spaces (particularly student blogs), and yet there is still likely to be a need for an centralised set of core materials and information concerning the fundamental structure and expectations of the course.

A course wiki to outline syllabus, course materials, reading list & assignments - in this example the Facilitating Online Communities course wiki at Wikieducator.

A course blog to outline syllabus, course materials, reading list & assignments - in this example the blogs, wikis and newmedia blog developed by David Wiley and made available on WordPress.com

Aggregation

One of the core considerations when adopting a distributed online model is how to gather, organise and repurpose the myriad of disparate sources of content.  Here the combination of tagging/folksonomy and RSS is absolutely crucial, as it enables you to make sense of the deluge of data.

Hashtags – In the case of Twitter, this would involve the implementation of a hashtag convention in which course-related discussions always feature the term preceeded by a # – such as #blogging.  Using  the native Twitter search tool you would then be able to view all discussions featuring the same hashtag.  Equally significant, you’d be able to grab the feed for the hashtag to use elsewhere.

Twitter Hashtags for Tweet aggregation - in this example all posts tagged with #cck08 are shown.

Once again, one of the key and most powerful opportunities in RSS is its capacity to facilitate the syndication of content.  In the same way that popular radio stations are broadcast under different call signs in different parts of the country, RSS enables you to take content from one site and reuse it in another.

Course Portal – When you are part of a classroom full of bloggers – each with their own space – RSS aggregation will enable you to set up a blog portal featuring the recent updates of all sites.  All that is required here is the creation of a free account on a site like Netvibes or Pageflakes and the population of a publicly visible tab with the RSS feeds of all the disparate content sources.  This can include any site, and any format – audio, text or video; blog, Twitter post, podcast or YouTube channel.  The only requirement is the presence of an RSS feed.

Pageflakes as blog portal - in this example a Pageflakes pagecast for the student blogs from Facilitating Online Communities

Other options

So at this point you’d have a communication system for announcements, discussion, and assignment submission; a central space for distributing course-related information and assignments; a legion of blogs to facilitate reflection, document progress and present assignments; a portal to present a quick view of all new blog posts, videos, podcasts, related articles or other information – and an underlying architecture of RSS to link everything together.

While this is indeed a powerful, flexible architecture it also facilitates only asynchronous communication.  Particularly if a course is fully online it would be advisable to also include opportunities for synchronous communication.  This could be achieved using a number of different technologies depending on the nature of the interaction the network wanted or needed to engage in, including:

• Webconferencing – Elluminate, Breeze/Connect or Dim Dim
• Video/Audio Chat – Skype/skypecasts, Instant Messaging
• Virtual Worlds – SecondLife

I’m of the view that the ideal framework would include a variety of formats (audio, video, text, images); be both synchronous and asynchronous; offer opportunities for both group work and individual reflection and synthesis; and above all be founded on a principles of openness and learner-empowerment that afford as much flexibility as possible to the individual, so they may explore the subject and build connections with others – both within the class and as importantly, outside of it.

It’s a fascinating look into the history of copyright law and why openness is so important.

Unfortunately embedded YouTube clips are currently breaking the entire page here for users of Internet Explorer, so rather than embed the playlist I’ll have to just refer you to YouTube for now. Click on the image below to go to the playlist.

UPDATE: A little while ago I watched all 4 clips in the series – one right afte the other – and in the wake of this felt compelled to do my part to ensure Lessig’s message is shared more widely.  Therefore after spending some time working out a process, I’ve managed to convert all 4 video clips into a single downloadable audio recording.

Out of courtesy I’ve also devoted some time to looking for any signs (explicit or inferred) that this presentation may carry restrictions on reuse or remixing – not surprisingly the licenses I have found are Creative Commons ones that support reuse.

Lessig’s website features a long list of audio and video recordings – including a text-to-MP3 translation of the transcript for the same keynote – all of which are shared under a Creative Commons (Attribution: 3.0) License (US). Therefore I feel fairly secure in the idea that there are no problems re-distributing this recording under the same license.

“Remember the Refrain”

Throughout the keynote Lessig refers back to the refrain he introduces during the first minute of the talk.  In the YouTube clips the refrain is visually displayed each time it’s referenced, however it’s not always stated out loud.  So for reference, I’m including the four concepts below:

1. Creativity and innovation always builds on the past
2. The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it
3. Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past
4. Ours is less and less a free society

Formats:

I’ve exported the recording as both MP3 and OGG Vorbis formats, each of which are available below.

• MP3 version (29 MB) [podcast]http://techticker.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/free-culture-full.mp3[/podcast]

• OGG version (20 MB): Free Culture – Lawrence Lessig
• Transcript: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/policy/2002/08/15/lessig.html

Workflow

Finally, in the interests of transparency and respect for open source purists, I wanted to include the work flow process I used to ultimately produce the OGG version.  I relied upon as much open source software as I could (as always), however there are two notable exceptions that I’d like to menition. Namely, the process was conducted on Windows XP and included the MP4 codec during the initial rip from YouTube.

1. Download videos as MP4′s from YouTube (http://au.youtube.com/user/DavidRGilson) via Greasemonkey plugin for Firefox and “Download YouTube Videos as MP4″ script
2. Rip and convert audio from MP4 to OGG Vorbis via VLC media player
3. Merge OGG files into a single file via Audacity
4. Export as OGG Vorbis; Export as MP3

I’ve just joined the Social Media Classroom, a project initiated by Howard Rheingold and funded through a HASTAC award, provided by the MacArthur Foundation. This project seeks to empower and support learners and educators via new means of communicating, interacting and collaborating, and which emphasises the importance of “participatory pedagogy.”

From the website:

“The Social Media Classroom…includes a free and open-source (Drupal-based) web service that provides teachers and learners with an integrated set of social media that each course can use for its own purposes—integrated forum, blog, comment, wiki, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets , and video commenting are the first set of tools. The Classroom also includes curricular material: syllabi, lesson plans, resource repositories, screencasts and videos. The Collaboratory (or Colab), is what we call just the web service part of it. Educators are encouraged to use the Colab and SMC materials freely, and we host your Colab communities if you don’t want to install your own.”

Having only just gained access to the community area, there is much I still have to explore; and yet I cannot help but be inspired and empowered by the opportunities and mission this project seeks to promote.

“…we’re launching an instance of the Colab as a community of practice for learners and teachers, educators, administrators, funders, students of pedagogy and technology design, engaged students who share a common interest in using social media to afford a more student-centric, constructivist, collaborative, inquiry-oriented learning. “

If you are interested in the educational possibilities afforded by recent innovation in social media, I strongly encourage you to take a look at the Social Media Classroom. Near as I can tell the project only just recently launched and is looking to bring more forward-thinking educators together for the purposes of exploring and discussing the learning opportunities in this brave new world.

In keeping with the opensource sensibilities share-alike idealism that underpin the pedagogical aspects of the Social Media Classroom, the technical framework supporting the community has been made available for download as well. The embedded video clip above provides an overview of the current functionality.

I’m in two minds regarding whether it’s appropriate to post this presentation here (and may opt to remove the post if I change my mind, or am asked to do so), however given the fact several of my fellow students of CCK08 and FOC08 have indicated they are researching – or interested in researching – the educational uses of virtual worlds, I thought it worthwhile to share this.

This presentation outlines my preliminary thoughts on the SecondLife project I’m currently working on. Much of the content has been covered here previously, but the project workflow has not.

Given the extent of expertise in this area across my PLN I’m hoping to inspire or acquire some discussion, feedback, experiences or suggestions on this subject.

If you have thoughts on the matter, I’m all ears.

Given a number of my online colleagues, friends and other contacts have begun to discuss similar questions I would suspect – or at least hope – that this video may prove useful to others as well. I’m also quite interested in exploring more widely the questions I pose in the presentation, so if you have thoughts or experiences in this area please leave a comment or trackback with your thoughts.

Also I haven’t historically had the opportunity to do many presentations so any feedback on how I could improve things would be welcome as well. Roll film…

A colleague of mine has indicated I speak way too fast during parts of the presentation. So in the interests of making sense I’ve uploaded a transcript of the talk to Scribd. This file is available below: