Help! My kids outsmarted me!

The reading "Emerging Technologies for Learning" spoke to me in an intriguing way. A large part of the work I do for Columbia involves podcasting lectures for the Health Sciences campus. When I joined the university, podcasting was still the cool thing to do. Everyone, students first, was jumping on to the podcasting bandwagon. Faculty were obviously a little late to catch on and required some serious coaxing to join the party.

Today, podcasting is still a large part of my job, but the students have come to take it for granted and it is no longer the cool kid on the block. While I can only speculate about what kids are using as study aides (i.e. what else they may have moved on to), we know that not everybody is using the class audio.

For our part at CCNMTL, we are now trying to get faculty to move towards video and tablet PC based podcasting....with complete conversion by......perhaps the end of the decade! :)

I jest, but I must empathize with the faculty here. The idea suggested at the beginning of the article, of letting the teachers do their teaching thing the old fashioned way, while students do the tech part to improve their own learning seems a little "out there" for me....even though I brandish the title "Educational Technologist".

In recent months and years, the largest fear (I've noticed) that faculty have is that of becoming irrelevant in the educational process because of the fear of technology taking over completely. So yes, as the article later suggests, faculty need to include as much technology as possible (while being educationally justifiable).

With regards to working with students on implementing it, it sounds utopian, but a little unrealistic because of the issue of expectation on behalf of the students. They expect teachers to provide the content and teaching/learning aides and part of the classroom/education process, while primarily seeing themselves exclusively as learners.


While I am inclined to believe that technology alone cannot be a teacher to EVERYONE (for both learning-ability and economic reasons), I believe that as computers get more powerful and software simulators become more inclusive and pervasive, the role of the faculty member in the classroom as we know it today will progressively dwindle.

Pretty picture, ain't it?!

But bleak as I tend to paint it, I don't advocate less student face-time as being a bad thing. As a faculty member I know (aka, my supervisor) is currently testing (successfully), traditional seminar-based learning has given way to new team-based learning where class content is disseminated only outside the class in the form of PDFs and podcasts and in-class time is devoted to discussion and testing.

This article and my supervisor's class have put a fascinating spin on my subject of focus, which is "always on" learning and who drives it because of the combined use of cell phones, Wikis, podcasting, , etc.

If you finished reading this, award yourself $200 and move three places down the board.

What to do and what not to do??!!

Since I came to work for the Center for New Media Teaching and Learning, I have been enamored by the idea of "always on" learning. In many of the articles I have examined before, during and since the article presentations, as well as, in my experience as an educational technologist, I noticed a trend that this approach to learning is best adapted by the younger college-going population rather than the older, "continuing education" population.

The college-going population is used to being bombarded with different messages from different devices. For example, I specialize in providing content to students commonly via course management systems and podcasting. However, some technologies lend themselves to learning than others. Podcasting and wikis have been clear winners in this domain, while the jury still seems to be out on how effective Facebook can be.

I am considering the following:
- Exploring the value of Wikis in social learning
- Exploring how podcasts and RSS in general assist in social learning
- Exploring how Facebook has been used as a social learning tool to date
- Exploring suggestions you may have

My "epiphany in the shower" is due any day now!

Are you my public?

I enjoyed the discussion about what is public and the different types of publics in the article "Why Youth (Hear) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life".

If we talk about A public, it is possible to recognize that there are different collections of people depending on the particular situation. Talking about A public also implies that there must be multiple PUBLICS separated by social contexts.

Putting things in the context of Facebook, it would seem to me that everyone is part of the same public. It is surreal and mildly horrifying to me that my personal and professional lives would come together in ways I would not have thought of. I find myself being public to things that I wish I didn't.

A few days ago, I had to give a training session to new TAs on the CUMC campus, aka, a client. As it turns out, I also friends in that department. I was browsing through the profile page of one of these friends, and as I continued being click-happy through that and other pages, I suddenly stumbled on the page of one such TA. Now suddenly, I know her sun sign, her favorite flower and her favorite movie (which, it turns out, I can't stand).

I don't know what she might think if she's discovers that I visited her page, but I feel a little violated for having found her page to begin with.

The reason I bring up this incident is because of the line "Talking about a public also implies that there must be multiple publics separated by social contexts.", which is immediately followed by...

What then constitutes the boundaries of a given public?

In my opinion, the question should be rephrased to "What boundaries??!!" It would seem that Facebook and Orkut, my social-networking poisons of choice appear to have LARGELY done away with any differentiation between friends and acquaintances and "total stranger in the same network".

So what is the solution? I don't think there is one if you decide to stick to just one social-networking site. Since their inception, they appear to have show a bigger interest in setting everyone on the same playing field than categorizing them in any way. So I will continue sticking to what I have been doing all along...different networking sites for different types of people. Clean and effective.

I haven't quite figured out a place for this in my final, mostly because I still think that the notion of public in the context of education does not really leave room for differentiation, since such a site would assume that everyone affiliated with it has the same exact interest.

The Way Forward

I know that title is a Bushism, but I couldn't resist it.

I have been dabbling with a few ideas and researching them:
- The sense of belonging to cultural or nation-based communities only
- The use of social software by teachers to impart education and its success
- The use of social software by students to band together for a common cause (e.g. common class) and related outcomes
- Exploring notions of legal responsibilities for end-users and mediators/medium owners in social software (this is the least flushed out idea I have so far)

I have not been able to narrow it down yet to a favorite child. But, I expect to extensive search the Columbia library databases that relate to new media rather than education because it appears that social software is yet to find ready acceptance in education.

At a minimum, I hope to find a gap in research that is worth exploring. Its all very ambiguous right now, but Monday is another day.......to blog.

Thinking back

I had mentioned this in our introductions on the first day of class, and this week's readings about Trinis and Koreans brought things full-circle for me. I wanted to explore why I spend so much time in social networks like Facebook, and to some degree, Orkut. The word "belonging" stuck out like a....excuse the cliche....sore thumb.

However, I am not entirely convinced that the sense of belonging is entirely cultural. Part of it, is simply my comfort with technology and everything it has to offer, rather than easy access to anyone not in a 2-mile radius of me. Instant messaging was my solution for a long time (mostly because it was cheaper than phone calls), but social networking offers the possibility of conversing in the context and company of other friends, something that IM does not offer itself to.

I seriously doubt I am the only one.....but, I SOOOOO TOOTALLYYY have this figured out, dude!

CMC and Identity

I have spent the last two weeks largely not being able to relate to the many issues brought up in class. Though oddly enough, both sessions have now rolled up into a single ball of paper clips in my head.

Firstly, it is somewhat hard for me to my real self and virtual self as part of the same entity. (Disclaimer: This may have something to do with the number of times I have died while playing first-person-shooter games since the days of Wolfenstein 3D in the early 90s.)) The notion of being emotionally vested in my online persona has never come up, because it is more a factor of what I do rather than who I am.

On the same lines, with the exception of playing online multiplayer games where I am made to assume a certain "avatar" (oh, I hate using that word as much as "Web 2.0"), my virtual self is not different from my real self. I have never pretended to behave or react differently from how I normally would, so the notion of being someone else online is a bit of a stretch. I expect that if I ever tried, I would be rather stretched in trying to maintain the personality and traits of someone who I'm not.

Obviously, I don't make for a very good Gemini (we're supposed to be two-faced, you see).

The other idea is that of distancing the real self from the virtual self and viewing them as different individuals. I think that everything I do (at least while I'm awake) is a part of who I am. This includes trying to be someone else (because it is perhaps a manifestation of who I'd like to be). In my online explorations, I would enjoy projecting a BETTER (e.g. leaner) version of my self rather than a DIFFERENT (e.g. Beckham) version of myself. The line between these two may be fine in some places, but it is an important distinction to make. The IMVU experiment we did in class last week proved that for me, when I discovered that I did not want to be or have any of the .....here we go again.....avatars that were offered.

A large number of people I hang out with online are people who I know in real life, rather than complete strangers. Indeed, that probably shapes who I am online, because others expect me to behave in the ways I do in real life. Many of the people I talk to online are fellow countrymen, which then leads into communal expectations of online behavior, which mirror real-life behavior. This also includes people who I am not met since middle-school and have absolutely no idea of what my personality is like today.

I ramble so well, I should add it to my resume!

The Information Society

I was particularly drawn to the "Cyberspace and the American Dream" article for this week. The time of publication for this (and the other) article is interesting because some of the issues brought up here were tackled by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The article obviously predates this law.

I was fascinated by the use of the phrase "technological sense". Did anyone (including the FCC) ever foresee the possibilities that technology can offer (things like over-the-air HDTV, 3G cell-phone networks/content)? It would seem that most content providers have gone above and beyond what their licenses allowed them to do.

The FCC is about to auction another portion of the spectrum next January. Is the agency or the larger population still able to define it in any particular way that will hold for, say, the next decade? We talked about socio-economic conditions being right for the adoption of technologies. How can we as a society (or the government) plan for technology adoption with such major variables that need to be considered? And how accurate have we been in our predictions thusfar?

Yesterday, I spent 10 minutes in the office without internet access. The break would not have been such a bad thing, if I wasn't bouncing off the walls about not being able to finish my tasks within the stipulated deadline. For all its benefits, how safe is it to incorporate technology as a standard part of the curriculum and without redundancies or backups, especially if we can't live without our "fix" for so much as 10 minutes? Firstly, that could mean canceling the day's class (in itself a great educational and monetary loss).

In purely technological terms, I grew up in the stone ages and can still remember and perhaps relearn to live without computers if the day came. But the paranoid side of me wonders if we're setting up future generations for failure based on how much technology they're served with. Not to mention, this sets up a digital divide across international boundaries, not conducive to a global economy and society.

Enough ranting for now.