I've just completed Week One of a new course I'm taking in E-moderating (kind of like teaching online, but with the differences that would come from all being online rather than in a physical classroom). The course is based on Gilly Salmon's 5 Stage Model for running an online course, as depicted in the diagram on the left, which demonstates the balance needed between teaching and technical skills in E-moderation.
The timing on this course is pretty tight. I began it from a hotel room in Sydney and will complete it during the first full week of the MA I'm about to start. Despite that, it's been a very positive first week and I'm looking forward to the next one. Every week is summarised by the participants in a reflection posted in the course forum. My reflections on Week One are below.
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Before I respond with my particular reflections, I'd just
like to mention that Reflective Learning Journals were a major feature of the
course I taught on prior to this new job. It was a one term course in core IT
skills to prepare non-native speakers of English for life at a British university.
Most of them seemed to find the activity to be very effective for consolidating
what they had learned and for gaining a useful perspective on their own
learning process. It’s good to be able to try such a feature out from the other
side (so to speak).
For me, I've found that having an active and experienced moderator
can make all the difference in terms of teaching the core principles of how to
run an online course plus the encouragement offered to keep going. Ken has been
doing a marvellous job here.
I'd come across Gilly Salmon's model before, as part of my
research for a qualification I completed last year. For the assignment, I looked
at blended learning and designed a course based around it. This model was a
vital part of the course design, so it has been really useful to put that
theory into practice by taking a course run on the same model.
Although I’ve spent a lot of my teaching life in
face-to-face learning contexts with people from many different countries, it’s
the first time that I’ve been in one where they are all still actually in those
countries. This means that issues such as time zone differences have to be
factored in to the momentum of the course, as do other participation
constraints (people doing a course such as this are likelyto have pretty busy full lives too). However,
it does make for a fascinating learning experience.
Major issues that arose from the first week include time
and timing. To get the most out of it, it is really worth putting aside the
time to give, take and interact with the other participants. Although we all
have those busy lives, taking that time is likely to mean getting the most out
of it. This can often be challenging, but if done means getting more out of it.
The second issue for me relates to levels of interaction.
I also run my own blog and have found that there is always much more activity
there when I engage with other people elsewhere on the Web (particularly on their
own sites) than when I simply put something of my own out there. The same
applies to this course – while it is necessary to post my own messages in the
forum, my participation comes alive more when I interact with other people.
This can be harder and take more time, but is ultimately more fruitful than
just using the forum as a ‘broadcast mechanism’.
I plan to apply the insights gained above by continuing
to pay close attention to the moderator’s techniques (including when he takes
off the stabilisers to step back from the coaxing), look forward to what I can
learn from the Week Two sections on managing timing, and try to continue both
posting and interacting with others on their postings.
(PS Managed to get the writing down a point on the Fog Index, but still on 13.45 – gonna have to work on getting that one down!)
I was recently introduced to Pummelvision - an online tool for making videos from photo collections - and used the service to make a video of some of my Flickr-held images of Tokyo. The service produces a snappy little clip with a choice of displaying the images 'fast' or 'very fast' (hold on to your hats, I chose 'very fast').
It's very simple to use, taking pictures from places like Facebook, Flickr or Instagram and putting them up at either YouTube or Vimeo. Once a collection of images has been chosen, Pummelvision throws them all together and syncs them with an audio clip that matches the speed of image navigation.
For a 30-second clip, it's quite nice. I'm sure that such a tool could have some effective classroom uses, such as producing a video to showcase steps of a project or something like that, but at the moment it's also fairly limited. There is only one choice of song, for example. Still, a bit of fun all the same with potentially wider uses.
As with so many millions of others around the world, the Internet has become a major feature of my life. Not only do I spend a lot of 'leisure' time on it, but I also use it and teach about it to my students every day. This has led to me finding myself more and more these days thinking and talking about what revolutionary times we as a species are living through, probably more so than at any other time in human history.
Just last week, I was talking to a class of my students - teenagers from a range of different countries - about how different my life was from theirs at the same age (there's about a 25-year gap between me and them). At their age, I was working six days a week to save up a measly £2 salary in order to buy bits of plastic with 2-12 songs cut into them. When I wanted to get in touch with someone I didn't see on a regular basis, I had to either sit down and write them a letter or wait until the time was right (either on their side or mine) to make a telephone call. If there was a film I wanted to see, I'd need to wait until it was on television or it was shown in a cinema within accessible distance. I got my news from the volumes of inky paper I put through people's letterboxes every morning before school or by catching one of the televised slots of an evening. To learn new things, I needed to ask other people, go to school, rifle through the books in the house, or wait until the weekend to be able to get a bus to the library in town - not that it could be guaranteed that what I wanted to find would actually be accessible. Every now and then, I'd help out the family by going to the supermarket and carrying home some of the weekly groceries.
25 years is really only a very short time, yet the internet has transformed every one of those activities, and much, much more. The actions playing out in North Africa and the Middle East, too early for commenters to have agreed on an appropriate label yet (revolutions, Arab Spring, pan-Arab uprisings, etc), demonstrate the latest examples of the Internet as a transformative social tool and not just as the facilitator of increased consumption in a dilettante West.
The Industrial Revolution, set in train largely in this country (and still playing out in some parts of the world), must have been a very challenging time to have lived through with the move from the land to the city changing much about people's lives. It would likely have been difficult to imagine where all those changes were heading and how the human landscape would look once the dust settled when in the eye of the storm. Likewise, it is the case with the Digital/Information Revolution (delete as appropriate). The changes that are sweeping through most societies on the planet undoubtedly have much, much more to show us, and in ways that we can't possible imagine at the moment.
I have my own ideas and theories on things as I try and keep my own head above the waters of the bit oceans, but it's definitely helpful to explore what other knowledgeable people are making of it all. This post then, is aimed at exploring some unformed ideas I have about the Network so see how they chime and if getting them down in bits helps them to take better shape. An early draft, if you will. As the Wikipedia page on it says, 'as the digital revolution progresses it remains unclear to what extent society has been impacted and will be altered in the future.'
During a recent evening's surfing, I came across a hefty piece of work that asked a few interesting folk the question 'How has the Internet changed how you think?' I pulled out some of the first quotes that struck a chord with my approach and flagged them up here.
Given what we have today, the Internet could easily become...a modicum of educational material in an ocean of narcissism and social obsessions. We could, however, also use it as...the communicative backbone of real intellectual and civic change, but to do this will require more than technology. It will require that we adopt norms of open sharing and participation, fit to a world where publishing has become the new literacy.
While acknowledging criticisms levelled at the Internet, Shirky recommends collective actions that users should take in order to shape the Internet's future direction, for it to fulfil a great potential that it has. This is one of the reasons that I advocate so strongly in favour of using Creative Commons licences for sharing content online - it's a way of establishing good practise, or 'netiquette'. However, I know that I don't participate enough to get more out of it yet. I still lurk more than I engage. I still treat the Internet in a lot of ways as a broadcast medium, throwing out content in the hope of 'building up an audience' without actually building much of a relationship with people (aside from within the walled garden of my Facebook network or in the odd tweet).
...there is not one massive central computer with lots of satellites...but a distributed network of computers of different sizes, speeds and manufacturers, a network that nobody, literally nobody, ever designed or put together, but which grew, haphazardly, organically, in a way that is not just biological but specifically ecological.
Interestingly, Dawkins looks at the Internet, particularly in how it has evolved, as an organic being - a fascinating perspective on an object that exists both physically (in cables, routers and servers) and virtually (in bits, digits and data packets). In the late 30s, H. G. Wells authored a series of works on a World Brain, being a global information resource and the best chance for world peace - potentially interpretable as a union of Google and Wikipedia. The biological perspective on looking at the Internet is a very alluring one. We could be in the early stages of the development of just what Wells foresaw, being the totality of human knowledge, an entity not only far greater than the sum of its parts but of man's creation and exceeding the marvel of the human brain in its capacity for storage and retrieval. The Internet is far bigger than any of us, but collectively we are the Internet.
Part of the reaction to the growth of this network and all that it allows is to bemoan the horrors of 'information overload' and the effects this is having on attention spans, or the destruction it is causing to traditional business models, or the 'publicisation' of the private sphere. These fears in many cases can be extremely valid, but need not be overwhelming providing we learn new ways of dealing with this new reality in our daily lives. When in deep water, we are faced with three choices - drown, tread water, or swim. So it is with the digital deluge - we let it overwhelm us, we manage and get by, or we learn how to make it work to our advantage (and I mean 'our' not 'my' advantage - the Internet is a reflection of our collective consciousness as a species rather than as a collection of individuals).
Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine had the following to say:
We are developing an intense, sustained conversation with this large thing. The fact that it is made up of a million loosely connected pieces is distracting us. The producers of Websites, and the hordes of commenters online, and the movie moguls reluctantly letting us stream their movies, don't believe they are mere pixels in a big global show, but they are. It is one thing now, an intermedia with 2 billion screens peering into it. The whole ball of connections — including all its books, all its pages, all its tweets, all its movies, all its games, all its posts, all its streams — is like one vast global book (or movie, etc.), and we are only beginning to learn how to read it.
These are a few of my unformed thoughts on the Internet and a few slightly more formed thoughts of a few others. How about you - how has the Internet changed how you think?
Call it going viral, call it protocol migration, call it global memes or whatever you will. Nowadays, it's not just corporations that spread across the planet at dizzying rates. There are also an increasingly large number of ideas, events and happenings that start somewhere and through a combination of 'being a good idea' + 'the existence of the Internet', spread across the world rapidly. This trend is becoming more and more interesting as it develops, both in terms of the emergence of a globalised yet decentralised world culture and with the blurring or even disappearance of barriers between the online and offline worlds.
One example is Pecha Kucha, which I wrote here about the last Brighton event. Another is TEDx, a larger scale and more formalised format of presentation event that blends sharing knowledge with franchising to grow the TED community and the reach of 'ideas worth spreading'. Yet another is BarCamp, the latest Brighton version of which I spent most of this weekend at.
an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants who are the main actors of the event.
Wikipedia describes it as 'an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants.' This also works to define an unconference, where participants all contribute to the agenda which is set at the beginning of the day and often changed during the course of the event.
I attended my first unconference in London last year, but never quite managed to get round to blogging about it (find the full public released book for the 'One Media Unconference' here). The first BarCamp was held in Palo Alto, California in 2005 - organised in less than a week, from concept to event, with 200 attendees. Since then, BarCamps have been held in over 350 cities around the world and six continents (anyone up for BarCamp Antarctica?).
BarCamp Brighton is now on its fourth event. While previous ones were held out on campus at the University Of Sussex (where the birth pangs of the modern internet were first unveiled by its midwives, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn), this year's event was switched to the Old Music Library in the centre of town.
The venue was very appropriately Brighton, looking like a squatted art gallery, with dusty floors, chunks of plasterboard missing from walls and ceilings, and crammed with exciting, esoteric or exotic street art and sculptures. Given that this town always tends to make effective use of abandoned space, particularly in times of recession, it was a most suitable place for a geek meetup. It also enhanced the informal nature of the event, rather than putting the happenings into a more sterilised environment.
The Beast tries to escape through the Old Music Library window
Given that from Monday to Friday these days, I deck myself out in a suit to go to work, it was good to don my geekware and slip into the crowd for a while, who were a motley crew of techies, creatives, Brighton geeks, amateurs, professionals and the self-taught, leftovers from the dConstruct conference and visiting BarCampers from out of town.
What is BarCamp Brighton? - a few words from a couple of the organisers
As with most conferences, the common complaint was that there was too much going on of interest to be able to take it all in. There was certainly plenty to take in. Given that it was my first BarCamp, I wanted to get a feel for the thing before diving in and playing a more active role. The first sessions that I sat in on were outside ones, while the sun was still shining. Steve Purkiss hosted a session on developing the building into a more permanent hub for Digital Media in Brighton (Google Group here), while Richard Vahrman took a nostalgia trip through analogue computing and his part in its downfall.
Heading back into the building, I caught a little of a talk from Melinda Seckington, who blogs as missgeeky and was offering up tips and tricks. I picked up a few interesting snippets, such as inviting guest posters being a good way to grow a blog, and the point that a large number of blogs serve particular niches but as readers tend to have a wide range of interests, it's not a bad idea to reflect that in the content provided. There was also a free wine-tasting event going on as part of the Brighton Food and Drink Festival, so I ducked out of the place for a while to join my wife in tasting samples. Sometimes, one is really spoiled for choice in what to do in Brighton!
Lunchtime sandwich breakout
A difference with the London One Media event was that hosts seemed a little more surprised when participants left their talk to wander off into another one. One Media was notable for participants behaving just like they would in online chatrooms, by dropping in and out of conversations, contributing nothing, something or plenty to a discussion. In Brighton, it seemed that there was a bit more of the feeling that it was not so much 'the done thing' to disappear when someone else had got going on their presentation. There must be all manner of other varieties of social behaviour at other BarCamps that reflect the local area more.
The afternoon included a session on Web Typography from digitalblonde, Visualising Home Energy Use with Laurence and a tour of The Skiff, one of several coworking spaces in Brighton and Hove. The first session went through a brief history of type families from the fifteenth century to today and covered general rules on font usage, which was rather handy.
The second one had plenty of useful information on how much energy is used in the home and different ways to monitor it. Items like air conditioning, fridge freezers and plasma screen TVs consume a lot of power, and desktop computers suck up more than laptops. There are, however, items such as smart meters that can be used to monitor one's home energy use directly, meaning that it's a lot easier to see when you're using too much or have left something on that doesn't need to be.
Costing around £50, they can be clamped on to existing mains supplies to monitor the data, which is then fed into a PC and then some sort of visualisation software. This means that surges are easier to spot and users can get to know how much energy they use (rather than just waiting for a utility bill that will likely charge them for using energy that they have to waste). Useful resources to find out more include Google PowerMeter and Current Cost for monitoring, and Pachube or Sensorpedia for visualising.
In The Skiff's basement, with extra large cushions
The Skiff was very near to the main venue, so the tour was a short trot away. Described as 'like BarCamp every day', it is modelled on San Francisco's Citizen Space, one of the many initiatives that bubble out of the US East Coast's prime location for the blending of the tech/creative worlds. Taking the best elements of a coffee shop and of a workplace, these are combined to provide a sociable, productive and affordable space for independent workers to do their thing without having to stay at home stuck in front of a screen all day. They also have a webcam that shows live whether a desk is available or not. People drop by to network, participate in activities like robot building or join in with some of the events the space has been able to host.
Ambling back after the tour, I got down to a bit of networking and mingling, given that the main workshops seemed to be winding down by then. I had a very interesting chat with the organiser of a UK version of BarCamp Africa (and was surprised to later find out that there are several BarCamps all over the continent), before heading upstairs to find out what all the noise was about - discovered myself amidst a geek singalong of Foreigner's 'I Want To Know What Love Is' (see video here).
Pizza frenzy begins
By then, all that remained was to hang out and eat pizza, drink beer and wait for the musical entertainment to start. An intriguing feature at this stage was the way that information was delivered. Pizza, beer and band times got juggled around a little, and given the informality of the event, it wasn't necessary to go around making big announcements about time changes. As all participants were permanently clamped to some sort of mobile web-enabled device, all that was needed was to tweet the information using the '#bcb4' hashtag. That way, anyone could follow a live information stream about the event and contribute to it themselves by tagging their own tweets in the same way. Twitter Search became a powerful tool for real-time information dissemination.
Described by cminion as 'Brighton's geekiest band', an accolade later wistfully refuted to me by drummer toastkid, 100 Robots took the floor as house band when all work-related stuff was over. An electrorock trio reduced to a duo for this performance, they let go in the subterranean basement to the gathered crowd, who dug them very much. The material was fast-paced, it rocked and included songs about subjects like the recent financial meltdown, the election in Iran and a gene therapy cure for AIDS.
'Deep Underground' by 100 Robots, live at BarCamp Brighton 4
With the day clearly done I made my way home, not having the desire to sleep on a dusty floor in an abandoned building when I had a bed to go back to. The next day, I was due to pop my BarCamp cherry and hold my own session. After all, everyone's expected to make some sort of contribution at these things.
Day Two
The agenda for the day
The second day was shorter yet (for me) deeper, as I dared to get a little more hands-on. The first session I ended up in, almost by accident but actually being one of the most fun, was titled 'Using Agile to Build a BarCamp Theme Park' and was hosted by Jez Nicholson. Agile is something that I'd heard of before but didn't really know a great deal about. Essentially, it is a software development methodology (see original Manifesto for founding principles), but seems to be a way of working that is very suited to the connected post-Web world we are all building these days.
Working with physical tools (plasticine, pipe cleaners and string) to meet a client brief rather that virtual ones, it made it easy to follow the operating methodology. The team that I was part of were tasked with producing 'something to do with Google' as part of the 'theme park' and came up with the 'Google Search Bar', as seen below. Although the picture may not convey the entire project that fully, it was fun and an effective exercise in collaborative teamwork to a timescale.
As with the other participants, I got rather caught up in the exercise, to the extent that I almost missed my own session. Titled 'Shall I Give My Stuff Away For Free?...or The Creative Commons Dilemma', I decided that I wasn't going to use my slot to present my expertise in one area or another (my skills are widely but thinly spread), but instead try to crowdsource a solution to a quandry I've set myself (in other words, ask some other people what they would do in a similar situation).
Full slideshow of my pictures from BarCamp Brighton 4
I have almost 2,500 pictures hosted on my Flickr site. I tend to get a good amount of views most days and have occasionally had people ask me to use them in their blogs or websites. However, I'd like it if this resource were put to greater use and get a wider audience, perhaps with the possibility of even covering the costs of a Flickr Pro account or at least driving more traffic back to my other sites. Therefore, I've been debating with myself whether to issue them all under a Creative Commons licence.
'A Shared Culture - Saving the world from failed sharing'
What is Creative Commons? It's a form of licencing that offers an alternative to full copyright and which enables increases sharing and improved collaboration. Essentially, while a content creator retains the copyright to their work, they also allow other people to use, share or remix that work, thus giving a bigger audience for the original piece. It's all very well creating great work, but if no-one knows about it (increasingly more difficult with the vast volumes of material available on the Net) an artist doesn't get anywhere with their work. As Tim O'Reilly said:
Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.
There are six kinds of licence. These are Attribution, Attribution Share Alike, Attribution No Derivatives, Attribution Non-Commercial, Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike, Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives (further information about each licence can be viewed here). The discussion went well, with contributors giving me good advice based on their own experiences of using these licences. I was even thanked at the end for 'one of the more interesting sessions' at BarCamp, which I was pretty pleased with. After giving it much thought and throwing the debate open to the crowd, I decided to go ahead with freeing all my photos. One thing that I still have to decide is which licence to use, but that's an issue for another post!
The remaining sessions that I ended up in - all very enjoyable - were on haiku and other forms of Japanese poetry, fetishism (the emotional value we attach to our possessions rather than sexual preferences - thanks Ellen!) and differences between Western and Eastern styles of animation.
At session end
How was it for you?
General consensus garnered from conversations and the tweetstream seemed to be that it was a very enjoyable event, with a range of great sessions, an amazing venue and a lot of appreciation for the hard work put it by the organisers plus the back up support from the sponsors (Paypal, Yahoo! Developer Network, The Guardian Open Platform, Metranet, Madgex and Vodafone My Web) for enabling it to happen.
It was also fascinating to be a part of a localised version of a global movement, and will be most intriguing to see where this BarCamp thing goes in the future. I'll certainly be signing up for BarCamp Brighton 5. It goes to show that if you're in need of an answer, geek and ye shall find!
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Appendix
Obviously, at such an event it's impossible to see everything. I've put a small handful of some of the content from sessions I missed but which have since gone online below. If you have something that was presented at BarCamp Brighton 4 and would like it included here, please drop me a line through this blog and I'll update the post.
A mention here to other attendees that haven't been covered above. Again, if you were at the event and would like your name, Twitter page or blog link included here, drop me a line through this blog and I'll update the post. Likewise, if you are linked to on here and would like the link removed, get in touch. Apologies to anyone missed out - I think everyone appreciated everyone's contributions!
Comments on this post also highly appreciated...:)
Bit by bit, slowly but surely, I'm about to start moving with more online activity after the recent hiatus. Following at least a month away from being permanently online, I'm now connected again.
Although it feels good to be back and I'm looking forward to reconnecting with some of the things I've been missing out on, being offline has also been positive in other ways. I've noticed the birds singing more, I've got a little sunburnt and have been having more face-to-face-conversations with actual people rather than through an internet-enabled device.
I think that it'll have to be a bit more selective and productive this time around, with less time spent just jumping from place to place. Easier said than done once temptation is laid out, but I'll give it a go.
Before I begin getting busy again with what's up in Brighton and the shape of my new life, here's a video I recently came across with some beautiful time-lapse photography of Tokyo. Can't beat those sunsets and cityscapes in my book. Thanks to Jamaipanese for pointing the way and to Samuel Cockedey for putting in the graft.
