I haven’t checked these out yet, but the concept looks pretty interesting: an entire site devoted to screencasts, with the first set devoted to podcasting. I hope their bandwidth holds out. I also note with interest that you can subscribe to the feed via iTunes. Nifty.

Via Podcasting News.

Library Thing?

iTunes shared playlists for books, sort of. Or, given the tagging, a kind of bibliophile del.icio.us. Intriguing. Unfortunately, the world seems to agree: I get a raft of mySQL errors when I try to go past the blog and static pages to look at real user book catalogs, and I suspect bandwidth problems are also cropping up. I hope site developer Tim Spalding sorts the problem out soon so that he can keep moving toward his dream of reclining all day on a pile of gold.

Even with the system down, there’s a lot to learn here. For example, I didn’t know about the Library of Congress Z39.50 gateway. In the no-surprise department, at least one user reports a great deal of pleasure comes from simply entering the names and authors of books in your personal library. For some of us, that pleasure center is quite well-developed.

Thanks to audium for the link.

The mission statement:

The purpose of the Wikiversity project, which will ultimately reside at www.wikiversity.org, is to build an electronic institution of learning that will be used to test the limits of the wiki model both for developing electronic learning resources as well as for teaching and for conducting research and publishing results (within a policy framework developed by the community).

The goals can be described as follows:

* E-teaching materials. The development and cataloging of tests, teaching materials that go beyond the scope of Wikibooks such as slides and videos, complete courses, and more. All this information must be presented from a neutral point of view and represent the current state of scientific research. Wikibooks will be used as a partner project where appropriate.
* E-learning. A framework within members of the community can actually take courses online
* For more info on what Wikiversity is, please check its About page.

What can I say? “Interesting” seems far too weak a comment.

Good summary via Technology Review of rich web, map, podcast, and blog coverage of Hurricane Rita. Small pieces loosely joined means that resourceful hybrids can develop very quickly. Multiple transmit/receive nodes of information, routing around damaged parts, using redundancy for greater error tolerance … familiar design principles here.

Tom McHale’s article in Techlearning helpfully summarizes competing positions on Generation M (“media”), including recent work that suggests multitasking may not be an illusion after all. He also quotes one Generation M student on the usefulness of books: “I find that looking in a book first for research projects gives you more of a broad basis to start with,” says Liz Derr.

It’s refreshing that McHale avoids the typical all-or-nothing arguments about education and culture in which information technologies are either the answer or the devil. By the end, however, it’s clear that information technologies can be an answer, and a very powerful one at that. Meredith Fear, the “digital native” of the title, says of her Internet use for a research assignment that “[w]hat I make of it is entirely dependent on me and the effort I’m willing to put into it…. It’s a much, much more specialized and detailed level of thinking than I’ve been exposed to in any of the classes the school provides.”

Perhaps that specialized and detailed thinking could be done without information technologies. My own experience suggests it can be, and has been. The larger point, though, is that such thinking ought to be the rule in school and isn’t, and that information technologies allow digital natives access to the potential of real school no matter what obstacles the institution called “school” plants in their way.

Dan Karleen has received more information regarding the University of Michigan’s School of Dentistry and its private “podcasts.”

A U-M official confirmed to Dan that more such innovations are on the way, but she can’t tell us what they are. That announcement belongs to Apple. As does access to the innovations.

Think different, indeed.

Dan Karleen’s comment on the preceding blog entry is both intriguing and troubling. Mostly troubling. It appears that Apple is providing a private iTunes store to the University of Michigan dental school. Dan, who also has a dog in this fight, explains the basic setup in his blog entry: dental school lectures are recorded and made available for download by means of a “special iTunes Music Store interface from Apple Computer” (quoting from the Michigan press release). Access is therefore limited to users who can authenticate within the University of Michigan network. Plans for future collaboration between Apple and Michigan include even more types of downloadable content.

The arrangement is likely to expand beyond the School of Dentistry. The initial story in The Ann Arbor News reports that “James Hilton, associate provost for academic information technology, said this week two other U-M colleges have expressed interest in podcasting lectures.” I read that story yesterday with delight. Today, in the context of the press release Dan led me to, that delight has evaporated.

What do these developments mean?

1. More walled gardens, and a retrograde attitude toward intellectual property in higher education.

2. Apple is apparently getting into the course management / textbook business.

3. This distribution scheme apparently bypasses public RSS feeds. To get this content, students must use iTunes. Apple’s business plan is thus not to build the best directory, but to lock people into a proprietary system. This is not surprising, but it is disappointing, and antithetical to the spirit in which the podcasting movement began. I smell a hostile takeover–and the very openness of the community makes it peculiarly vulnerable.

4. Apple has simultaneously established a sweetheart deal with U-M for hardware purchases. From the press release:

The University of Michigan School of Dentistry’s partnership with Apple Computer extends beyond the classroom.

Apple is offering students, faculty, staff, and alumni discounted prices on its desktop and laptop computers, iPods, and other products. To take advantage of the discounted prices on Apple products, individuals will have to visit the School’s Web site, www.dent.umich.edu. At this site, they will click a special link that will take them to Apple’s Web site where they can then place an order using a valid credit card.

Apple will gift two percent of the proceeds of the sales to the U-M School of Dentistry Learning Technologies Fund that will be used to develop educational technology at the School.

Aside from the teeth-grinding use of “gift” as a verb, this part of the release makes the larger plan clear: Apple seeks to be a sole-source software, hardware, and content provider for the dentistry school (at least). Apple gets a captive market. The school gets a nice little “gift” in return for leasing part of its core mission to Apple by allowing Apple to control access to content.

Worst of all, from a soul’s point of view, is that the entire press release describes the process in terms near and dear to all of us who work in academic IT: bottom-up, user-driven innovation, 24/7 access to content anywhere, collaborative project management and development, and a hook into a major new communications phenomenon, in this case podcasting. The whole enterprise reads like a textbook example of doing things right.

So what’s the problem?

Something to do with being closed and commerce-driven instead of open and community-driven. Something to do with profits instead of principles. And to be fair, something to do with public schools desperate for revenue in an age in which cutting appropriations for higher education is Job One in many states.

The new “Courses and Lectures” category in the iTunes podcast directory (blogged on here by Amy Bellinger) looks a bit sinister in this light.

More to chew on (apologies–just trying to keep my spirits up):

This “dentistry to go” podcast features a chat “on Apple computers in dentistry,” specifically an OS X dental management application. This podcast, of course, is freely available.

EDIT: (almost typed EDIOT, which would be apt!): I fixed the link below. Apologies to all.

Hey folks, I’ll be here all week.

Dental students at the University of Michigan are listening to podcasts of their professors’ lectures. The initiative was led by a second-year student. The lectures are available through the iTunes music store.

Amazing. What students won’t do in their quest for knowledge.

That’s really only semi-facetious. Perhaps not facetious at all. Think about this quote: “I do walk (to class) often, and I will listen to the lectures 20 minutes there and 20 minutes back.” That’s Jared Van Ittersum, the student who started the project. His words demonstrate the false dichotomy between the “sage on the stage” and the “guide at the side.” The time-and-place constraints of the classroom (beautiful, necessary, misleading constraints) distort our understanding of learning. The classroom is one node of attention and focus, with ramifications we could imagine more creatively.

I think of Bernstein’s monologue in Citizen Kane about the girl on the ferry.

Thanks to eSchoolNews for the tip.

Distributed conversations, augmented intellects, networks of inquiry: though I’ve been blogging for over a year, it’s still a thrill to make contact and find new sources of wonder and wisdom.

Today’s case in point: “Blog of Proximal Development” author Konrad Glogowski responds to my response to his blog, thus teaching me and sharpening my thinking. Konrad then links to Joan Vinall-Cox’s lovely and deeply thoughtful College Quarterly piece on “Teaching Writing in the Age of Online Computers,” which also bowls me over. New horizons for thinking and conversation open up as a result.

I could get used to this.

Pull quote from Konrad’s blog:

This reminds me of what Prensky calls “legacy content” – students need to learn about great minds and the ideas they produced and not just what’s online. They also need good teachers, people who are experienced “connectors” – people who will help students discover that Copernicus, for example, connects to the geocentrism of Plato, Aristotle, and Ptolemy but also to the heliocentric view of the universe and to the notion of immanence, subjectivism, intellectual freedom, the Renaissance, and religion in general.

As the kids say in Peanuts, THAT’S IT!

Pull quote from Vinall-Cox’s article:

Now, in this new digital world, students are more comfortable producing writing and their prose is less constrained and constricted. Some may still have spelling errors or use the wrong words, some may research shallowly and show little evidence of critical thinking, and some may fail to structure their material for the reader, but they all can produce a flow of words. This is new, and, I believe, a direct result of their use of the online computer as a social tool.

Does it improve them as writers? In terms of the amount of their text output, it does. Does it make them good writers of academic papers? Yes and no. They still have to learn how to think critically, how to structure material, how to cite authorities, and how to use the capacities of the new writing tool, the online computer. Some will learn those skills, and some will have trouble learning them. All, however, now start out with the ability to link to their “inner speech” (Vygotsky, 1962, p 148) and that is a major difference.

Ditto the above.

I am grateful to both of these writers. I’m also grateful that the content was on the Web, not in a walled garden. I want to get used to this.

Interesting stuff, as always, from George Siemens and Konrad Glogowski. George’s discussion of meaning making merits a post all its own. Konrad’s blog today also inspires a few thoughts on my end. I hope he would agree, or at least find them useful or provocative extensions of his thinking:

Way leads on to way. Viva la link.