1. Business. When Facebook crossed the 100 million member mark last year, I began to explore and experiment with its features (wall, notes, links, photos, tagging, videos, events, groups, pages, etc.) and numerous third-party apps, with the intention of teaching them during my Web 2.0 workshops at NTU’s Center for Continuing Education.
   
   As Mari Simith of WhyFacebook.com put it, it’s a great place for promoting business: “Meet your peers. Find business contacts. Instant gate opener. Build relationships. Raise visibility. Develop your personal brand. Target your niche. Get rapid top Google placement. Place targeted ads. No cost marketing.” (See also: Tom Lindstrom’s Myspace Marketing Tips.)
2. Ease of Use. Its interface is clean and uncluttered. If you know how to use Windows, you would know how to use Facebook. All you need is time (or a quick overview session) to discover its numerous features and third-party apps.
3. Usefulness. Facebook interfaces seamlessly with hundreds (or thousands?) of useful third-party apps. These include popular Web 2.0 apps such as Twitter, Slideshare, Digg, Delicious, and Skype. My current favorite is the Philosophers + Philosophy app developed by Dr John Abbate from the University of Melbourne. It’s a marvellous way to add my favorite quotes and to discover the ideas of a new philosopher everyday.
4. Lost Contacts. I found long-lost friends/colleagues (and they found me) through the “People You May Know” tool.
5. New Contacts. I’ve been connecting online with very interesting people from all over the world. For example, my new online friend today is a Spanish priest in Russia!
   

   Fr Otets Burgos with the Bishop of Moscow and two children.

6. Visibility & Transparency. What I say and do online are visible to my contacts. Likewise, what they say and do online are visible to me. What this means is I can easily introduce ideas/sites/other things to them and vice versa. This means we can co-discover (learn) about one another as well as many many ideas, sites and other things!
7. Social Mission. I can easily create a Group, Page or Cause to get support for ideas that I strongly believe in, e.g. “Faith without reason is blind. Reason without faith is lame.” (See the Faith & Reason (Fides et Ratio) cause.) I can also contribute to causes that others believe in, e.g. Beth’s Birthday cause.

FOR SOME TIME I’VE BEEN WONDERING: What’re the best ways to encourage comments on one’s blog? And not just any comments, but those that promote meaningful exchange of insights and experiences. I’ve found 10 techniques and 10 plugins through a Google search. Could you add a tip or two here please?

According to usability guru Jakob Nielsen, one needs to:

• Make it easier to contribute. The lower the overhead, the more people will jump through the hoop.
• Make participation a side effect. For example, Amazon’s “people who bought this book, bought these other books” recommendations are a side effect of people buying books.
• Edit, don’t create. Let users build their contributions by modifying existing templates rather than creating complete entities from scratch.
• Reward — but don’t over-reward — participants. Although money is always good, you can also give contributors preferential treatment (such as discounts or advance notice of new stuff), or even just put gold stars on their profiles.
• Promote quality contributors. …give extra prominence to good contributions and to contributions from people who’ve proven their value, as indicated by their reputation ranking.

According to problogger Darren Rowse, one could use these techniques:

• Invite Comments...new readers that are unfamiliar with blogging don’t always know about comments or how to use them.
• Ask Questions. I find that when I include questions in my headings… you set a question in their mind from the first moments of your post.
• Be Open Ended. While you don’t want to purposely leave too many things unsaid there is an art to writing open ended posts that leaves room for your readers to be experts also.
• Interact with comments left. If you’re not willing to use your own comments section why would your readers?
• Set Boundaries. I noticed that shortly after I set the rules for my comments section (with a comments policy) that my comment numbers jumped up a little… and that comment threads generally stay constructive as a result.
• Be humble. I find that readers respond very well to posts that show your own weaknesses, failings and the gaps in your own knowledge rather than those posts where you come across as knowing everything there is to know on a topic.
• Be gracious. There are times where you as the blogger will get something wrong in your posts… spelling or grammar… crux of your argument or some other aspect of your blogging… a graceful approach to comments where you admit where you are wrong and others is right can bring out the lurkers and make them feel a little safer in leaving comments.
• Be controversial? …it doesn’t always work (and I personally avoid it as much as I can these days) – but there’s nothing like controversy to get people commenting on your blog.
• ‘Reward’ Comments. There are many ways… that range from simply including a ‘good comment’ remark through to highlighting them in other posts that you write.
• Make it Easy to Comment. …there is one situation where I rarely leave a comment – even if the post deserves it – blogs that require me to login before making a comment. Keep your comments section as simple and as easy to use as possible.

According to Caroline Middlebrook, we could use some of these WordPress Plugins (comments in [] brackets are mine):

• DoFollow plugin: [I've stopped using this because this attracts visitors who drop in just to add some inane comments and a plug for their sites.]
• Top Commentator plugin: [I'm using this. Useful.]
• CommentLuv plugin: [I've installed and activated this. But it's not working on my blog. Probably incompatible with some existing plugins.]
• Most Commented Posts plugin: [Maybe I'll use this too.]
• Recent Comments plugin: [I'm using this. Useful.]
• Subscribe to Comments plugin: [I'm using this. Useful.]
• Threaded Comments plugin: [Hey! How many plugins does one need to use?]
• Gravatars plugin: [ditto]
• Custom Smileys plugin: [ditto]
• Edit Comments plugin: [ditto]

Today, I’m publishing online two wiki research proposals which I’d written for a Masters in Instructional Design program at the National Institute of Education, Singapore:

• “The UTAUT and Electronic Brainstorming in a Wiki”: This proposal was written in April 2005 for “Implications of Social Psychology Theories & Research for Educators”, a module taught by Dr Angeline Khoo and Dr Lim Kam Ming. Could have worked on this as a project if not for the circumstances (long story). So, imagine my surprise upon finding a very similar project (Global Warming Student Speakout) on the Google for Educators site last October! Not sure though what the specific research questions were.
• “Mediating PBL in a Wiki environment” (1): This proposal was written in April 2005 for “MID809: Designing, Conducting, and Reporting Investigations”, a module taught by Dr Chee Kit Looi and Dr Myint Swe Khine. A revised experiment was conducted in November among two classes in a polytechnic. The results were mixed. However, due to more pressing concerns at work, the writeup for the results of this project has been placed on the backburner till now.

Looking forward to your comments, suggestions, queries, etc.

Healthbolt has done some nice analysis of the layouts of top 10 blogs at Technorati and comes up with the following Composite Map. It gives a unique insight at how a small group of top blogs arrange themselves.

See it at full size and with a key to interpret the colors here  but before you go and look at it, see if you can predict what each color signifies in the following categories:

• Advertising
• Search
• Email/RSS Subscription
• Header/Site ID/Branding/Logo
• Content
• Internal Links/Navigation

Afternote 05-04-2007: Shortly after posting this, I found out that the above list was actually taken from a 2005 article by Tim O’Reilly. Here’s just a note to clarify this.

According to Mr O’Reilly, characteristics of Web 2.0 include:

1. Web as Platform
2. Harnessing Collective Intelligence
3. Data is the Next Intel Inside
4. End of the Software Release Cycle
5. Lightweight Programming Models
6. Software Above the Level of a Single Device
7. Rich User Experiences

And here’s a compact definition from Wikipedia:

“Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O’Reilly Media in 2004, refers to a perceived second-generation of Web-based services—such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies—that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users. O’Reilly Media used the phrase as a title for a series of conferences, and it has since become widely adopted.”

Was a little amused to read this post by founder James Farmer:

As for blogs on May 23rd the 10,000th edublogs.org blog was created. Which was great. But as of this moment today (August 14th) there are 17,869 blogs. Yikes.

Splogs… the plague of our times! :-p Still, looking forward to seeing the new site (already integrated with wikispaces) — expected to incorporate Flickr, YouTube, and other widgets.

• Clinfowiki: The Clinical Informatics Wiki
• RHIO Wiki: The Only Online, Real-time Forum on RHIOs and Health Information Exchanges
• Child and Youth Mental Health Wiki: A Pilot Project Wiki Sante mentale des enfants et des ados: un projet pilote
• Health Information Technology: Community of Practice Project Home Page
• Katrina Help Info: Health and Safety
• Health Informatics & elearning

According to Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Consumer-Generated Media (CGM) encompasses the millions of consumer-generated comments, opinions and personal experiences posted in publicly available online sources (such as blogs, message boards, forums, Usenet newsgroups, discussions and forums on large email portals, online opinion/review sites and online feedback/complaint sites) on a wide range of issues, topics, products and brands, using media such as photos, images, videos, even podcasts and webcasts… and who knows what’s next? In other words, “CGM is also referred to as Online Consumer Word-of-Mouth or Online Consumer Buzz.”

Why is CGM important?

First, consumers place far more trust in their fellow consumers than they do in traditional marketers and advertisers, according to research… Secondly, CGM is prolific and increasingly easy and inexpensive to create… [Finally,] because CGM data is easy to find on search engines, marketers and advertisers no longer “control” the message or the medium.

Skype has been a great tool to do small Web Conferences of 5-10 people. Recently it got better with the introduction of a new moderated Skypecast Web Conferencing service. Any Skype user can now do a free live Web conferences with up to 100 persons through their client software.

All you have to do is login into the Skypecast service with your Skype ID, describe what the event is about and schedule it on the site. You can also send out invitations or announce the event on another website or a forum. Members of the community then register and participate in the live Web Conference. As a Web Conference moderator, you can pass “virtual microphone” to participants, mute, eject or encourage conversations.

CHECKED OUT Skypecasting this afternoon and learnt a few new things today.

Skypecasting is still basically text and audio conferencing, with rudimentary moderation features (as described above). However, to obtain an almost full-fledged webconferencing solution, we can easily use it with free or low-cost tools such as:

• Pamela (thanks, Gordon) or Skylook for quick voice recording: In addition, Skylook enables the user to “make Skype calls and start Skype text chats directly from Outlook 2000/XP/2003 (not Express!) contacts and emails. It shows contacts who are online in the Outlook toolbar and provides options to review contact details and review previous communications with the contact. It also records all voice calls and text chats to a special Outlook folder, allowing them to be organized and managed like email. Voice calls are recorded to MP3 attachments to these items.”
• Glance or GoToMeeting for easy screensharing — to show PowerPoint slides, use a website to share conference papers, run a poll, etc.: In Robin Good’s words, “[With Glance,] activating a new conference in which you can show whatever is going on in your screen to as many people as you like takes only two clicks… GoToMeeting is a simple tool focused on doing screen sharing and remote control in an extremely effective way. Its screen-sharing abilities are compounded by a high quality screen-sharing engine capable of adjusting automatically to different bandwidth connections while always delivering a 24-bit full color image of the screen being broadcast (many screen sharing solutions default to 256-colors).”

(See also more details on other webconferencing tools in Kollabora.)

The SMS Reference Service, the latest initiative from NLB [was] launched during the FIND IT campaign. Customers can SMS their reference queries to the National Library by dialing 9178 7792 on their mobile phones. The SMS Reference Service is targeted at educators, designers, entreprenuers, researchers, consultants, academics and tertiary students who need to find the sources to answer their information, reference and research needs. This service adds to the suite of email, fax, phone and onsite reference services currently provided by reference librarians and gives customers the option to pose their queries from virtually anywhere and on the move.

Sample SMS queries:

• Info on history of Hoover Park Estate in Singapore (related to the Heritage Collection)
• Info about the beauty industry in Middle East. Where can I find the info and resources? (related to the Business collection)
• I want information on early childhood education, including journal articles. (related to the Education collection)
• What is the role of design in Adidas? What are some of their famous products and what is their design significance? (related to the Design collection)

The operating hours of this service are as follows:

Monday to Friday 9am to 9pm
Saturday 9am to 5pm
Sunday 1pm to 5pm
Closed on Public Holidays

Each SMS is limited to 160 characters. If more than 160 characters are sent, the message will be broken up into 2 or more SMS. Users of this service will receive an auto-generated SMS reply after sending out the enquiry. The turnaround time for an actual response to an enquiry will be up to one working day. SMS enquiries received after 9pm on weekdays, after 5pm on Saturdays and Sundays and on public holidays will be attended to the next working day. An automatic acknowledgement SMS will be sent to users, informing them of the above. This service is free of charge and users need only pay their mobile phone service provider the usual SMS charges.

What you can expect from the service :

Reference librarians from the Lee Kong Chian Reference Library at the new National Library will recommend materials from our library collections as well as electronic and web resources to help you with your information needs. For simple fact-seeking questions, we will also be able to SMS you quick answers. The turnaround time for recommendation of resources would be about one day while quick answers could be provided as soon as we can!

What a great idea! When will such sms services be available industry-wide? For example, sms support services for advice/help, sms sports/beauty centres to book or cancel sessions, sms restaurants to order meals, sms taxi companies to book a cab, sms a corporate mobile line to apply for urgent leave and to inform colleagues…

• What is it?
• Who is doing it?
• How does it work?
• Why is it significant?
• What are the downsides?
• Where is it going?
• What are the implications for teaching and learning?

Screencasting. A screencast is a video recording of the actions on a user’s computer screen, typically with accompanying audio, distributed through RSS. Screencasts can be thought of as video podcasts. They provide a simple means to extend rich course content to anyone who might benefit from the material but cannot attend a presentation. More>>

Virtual Meetings. Virtual meetings are real-time interactions that take place over the Internet using integrated audio and video, chat tools, and application sharing. They offer a way to engage students in fully interactive, online learning experiences such as lectures, discussions, and tutoring. Many virtual meeting applications integrate with course management systems, providing students and faculty with a unified learning system including access to online meetings. More>>

Grid Computing. Grid computing uses middleware to coordinate disparate IT resources across a network, allowing them to function as a virtual whole. The goal of a computing grid, like that of the electrical grid, is to provide users with access to the resources they need, when they need them. Grids address two distinct but related needs: providing remote access to IT assets, and aggregating processing power. More>>

Collaborative Editing. Collaborative editing tools allow a group of individuals to simultaneously edit a document, see who else is working on it, and watch in real time as others make changes. As a functional hybrid of wikis and instant messaging, collaborative editing creates a new dynamic for group work and multitasking, two hallmarks of today’s learners. More>>

Instant Messaging. Instant messaging (IM) is a form of online communication that allows real-time interaction through computers or mobile devices. Although typed text remains the primary convention for IM, the technology now allows users to send images, audio and video files, and other attachments. Hundreds of millions of people use IM to stay connected. In many ways, it epitomizes the notion of the always-connected, multitasking student, sending and receiving messages at all hours, from a wide spectrum of devices, while doing several other things at the same time. IM has become such an integral part of students’ lives that many colleges and universities are working to move it beyond the social sphere into teaching and learning. More>>

Augmented Reality. Augmented reality adds information and meaning to a real object or place. Unlike virtual reality, augmented reality does not create a simulated reality. Instead, it takes a real object or space and uses technologies to add contextual data to deepen students’ understanding of it. To the extent that instructors can furnish students with a broad context for understanding the real world, students are more likely to comprehend and remember what they are learning. Through exposing students to an experiential, explorative, and authentic model of learning early in their higher education careers, augmented reality may help shift students from passive to active learning modes and thus become more successful learners. More>>

Blogs. A blog—shorthand for “Web log”—is an online collection of personal commentary and links. Blogs can be viewed as online journals to which others can respond that are as simple to use as e-mail. The simplicity of creating and maintaining blogs means they can rapidly lead to open discussions. Faculty are using blogs to express their opinions, promote dialogue in their disciplines, and support teaching and learning; students increasingly use blogs for personal expression and as course requirements. By carefully evaluating blogs’ strengths and weaknesses, educators are learning to set guidelines and expectations to maximize blogs’ instructional benefits. Structured exercises and clear goals are further enhancing the educational value of blogs. Put into practice with an understanding of their benefits and limitations, blogs are an increasingly accepted instructional technology tool. More>>

Video Blogging. A videoblog, or vlog, is a Web log (blog) that primarily utilizes video rather than text or audio. Videoblogging offers a richer experience than text blogging by combining movies, sound, still images, and text. New technologies make images and video easy to produce, so anyone with a digital camera or camera-equipped cell phone and Internet access can create a vlog. Based on the popularity of blogs and podcasts, and growing access to video tools, videoblogging is likely to increase in popularity among faculty and students. The ability to easily create video segments and quickly post them online makes videoblogs a potential tool for recording lectures, special events, and so forth. Videoblogs can also be used for personal expression and reflection. As a result, they are being incorporated into e-portfolios and presentations. The use of videoblogs for digital storytelling may be one way to encourage strong student participation in e-portfolio projects. More>>

Wikis. Wikis are Web pages that can be viewed and modified by anyone with a Web browser and Internet access. Described as a composition system, a discussion medium, and a repository, wikis support asynchronous communication and group collaboration online. Their inherent simplicity gives students direct access to their content, which is crucial in group editing or other collaborative activities. Their versioning capability allows them to illustrate the evolution of thought processes as students interact with a site and its contents. Wikis are also being used as e-portfolios, highlighting their utility as a tool for collection and reflection. They may be the easiest, most effective Web-based collaboration tool in any instructional portfolio. More>>

Podcasting. “Podcasting” refers to any software and hardware combination that permits automatic downloading of audio files to an MP3 player for listening at the user’s convenience. Part of the appeal of podcasting is the ease with which audio content can be created, distributed, and downloaded from the Web. Barriers to adoption and costs are minimal, and the tools to implement podcasts are simple and affordable. Podcasting allows education to become more portable than ever before, giving educators another way to meet today’s students where they live and learn—on the Internet and on audio players. More>>

Clickers. Interaction and engagement are often limited by class size and human dynamics (a few students may dominate the conversation while most avoid interaction). Interaction and engagement, both important learning principles, can be facilitated with clickers. Clickers can also facilitate discipline-specific discussions, small work-group cooperation, and student-student interactions. Clickers-plus well—designed questions-provide an easy-to-implement mechanism for enhancing interaction. Clicker technology enables more effective, more efficient, and more engaging education. More>>

Social Bookmarking. “7 Things You Should Know About… Social Bookmarking” addresses a community-or social-approach to identifying and organizing information on the Web. Social bookmarking involves saving bookmarks one would normally make in a Web browser to a public Web site and “tagging” them with keywords. The community-driven, keyword-based classifications, known as “folksonomies,” may change how we store and find information online. More>>

Useful, informative and great for meeting people. Also had a great physical workout — climbing flights of stairs to LT1A (at NTU) for the 9am and 1.30pm keynotes, striding quickly every one or two hours from LT to LT (lecture theatre) at one end of the NIE cluster of buildings to the other, lugging along (among other things) a notebook PC, an iPod (with iTalk), a small digital camera and brochures from the exhibitors. By the second day, I’d left the hardcopy 985-page proceedings at home and started referring to the softcopy CDs instead.

One great pity though — 10 concurrent tracks full of interesting information and there’s only one me. If only I could easily switch channels… if only the conference organizer had made use of 10 virtual rooms in addition to the 10 physical rooms for the speakers to present their papers!

THEN PARTICIPANTS can choose to listen to and interact with speakers either virtually or physically. Those who prefer face-to-face (f2f) contact can still move from room to room. But those who prefer switching channels (I know many people walk out of many presentations halfway to go into others) can stay in one room and use their PCs to listen to and to interact with the speakers. When necessary, they can walk over to the room where the speaker is.

All participants can easily meet one another f2f during breaks and meal times. In addition, remote speakers and participants can join in the conference too. And recordings can be easily done and made available for further review, comments, etc.

Why isn’t anyone doing this in Singapore? OR why don’t someone appoint me as conference organizer and give me some free rein? Maybe it’s time for me to take some initiative? That is, after I’ve finished my thesis…

1. No Author Biographies (trust: add a descriptive ‘About’ page)
2. No Author Photo (credibility, recognition)
3. Nondescript Posting Titles (time: create microcontent)
4. Links Don’t Say Where They Go (anticipation: use link titles)
5. Classic Hits are Buried (time: add highlights)
6. The Calendar is the Only Navigation (time: use categories)
7. Irregular Publishing Frequency (anticipation)
8. Mixing Topics (recognition: carve niche)
9. Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss (future value)
10. Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service (future value: readership, links, search engine ranking)

Looks like i’d better do something about points 1., 2. and 5.

…it’s easy-to-use and practically free wikis that proponents say offer the promise of collaboration beyond e-mail, even though big editing kinks remain and other quirks and security flaws are sure to surface. Internet research firm Gartner Group predicts that wikis will become mainstream collaboration tools in at least 50% of companies by 2009. At Ann Arbor (Mich.)-based Soar Technology Inc., an artificial-intelligence company that works on projects for the Office of Naval Research, wikis enable the company to slash in half the time it takes to complete projects. Soar engineer Jacob Crossman says that’s because the wikis eliminate the usual flurry of back-and-forth attachments and resulting document-version confusion that’s rife in e-mail. At Dresdner, Rangaswami says that among the earliest and most aggressive adopters, e-mail volume on related projects is down 75%; meeting times have been whacked in half.

GREAT NEWS TO ME, given that my Masters thesis is on wikis. At the same time, since Dresdner is a Socialtext customer, the BusinessWeek report also sounds like a follow-up on one of the corporate wiki’s customer webpages:

1UP.com, the gaming division of Ziff Davis Media, one of the largest technology magazine publishers in the United States, has been a Socialtext customer for one year. 1UP.com was created to consolidate the online activities of several leading magazines. New General Manager Tom Jessiman sought an efficient and effective alternative to email and attachments as a way of working together.

This customer case study shows how use rapidly evolved from strategic planning to day-to-day coordination and communications, supported the brainstorming and launch of a new product and has led to promising experiments in group writing. Using Socialtext Workspace for group communications has reduced email volume dramatically to result in soft cost savings in excess of $1 million per year for a 50 person team. Project communication accelerated the project cycle of a four-month project by a month.

The initial reason for adopting Socialtext was as a substitute for group communication by email and attachments. When General Manager Tom Jessiman started the job he noticed, “a lot of confusion using email, well over 100 group emails a day, which was unwieldy, even nightmarish. Nobody knew what was the latest version of an attachment, everything was lost in inboxes and you had to data-mine your emails to find anything.”

Dear Learning & Training Colleague,

You have watched me, as reader of Learning TRENDS, experiment my way through the design of a very different event, Learning 2005, over the past 12 months. (Me: “It has been truly interesting to watch.”)

In just 3 days, I’ll have the incredible honor of welcoming 1,500 learning colleagues from two dozen countries around the world to the start of a very different type of “conference”. We changed a lot of assumptions during the design process and I wanted to share those with you, as a personal reflection:

• Focus on conversations and dialogues rather than presentation. People want to have focused and meaningful conversations with peers.
• Take away the overhead projectors in most sessions and limit facilitators to one slide. As slides go up and lights go down, interaction and engagement go down.
• Don’t solicit a RFP for presentations, rather reach out to colleagues and ask them to lead a conversation or kick off a case study. Inviting gets a much different and richer level of participation vs. the same people presenting the same stuff at all events in our field.
• Drop the trade show. Put supplier materials in a backpack and create some one hour face to face case study sessions. Paid participants don’t want to be forced into the trade show. Exhibitors are frustrated with that format. And, over 78 top suppliers signed on as sponsors and are coming as learners, as well.
• Ask people to do something rather than just listen. So, we are creating 24 communities and 12 task forces.
• Shift from keynote presentations to interactive interviews with 15 thought leaders, like Malcolm Gladwell and Marshall Goldsmith. Speakers love being able to interact with a host, the audience and each other. I will bring Steve Johnson back on the stage to mull the future with Malcolm.
• Use technology for an Extreme Learning Experience:

• RSS Feeds of all content.
• PodCasts for three months before and three months afterwards.
• Social Networking System to make new colleagues.
• Put all content into an open wiki and allow participants to evolve the session focus.
• Give everyone a radio interactive device to carry around.
• Leverage SMS Text Messaging.
• Have a dozen bloggers throughout the event, documenting it all live.
• Create a Jam Band with two dozen music oriented colleagues.
• Place all content in the public domain, using the Creative Commons License.
• Build a virtual world called LearnLand to experiment withe 3D Learning.
• Honor the need to revitalize the classroom rather than replace it. Invite Bob Pike and others to dream about the future of the classroom.
• Create the entire event as a Sandbox, with a spirit that says let’s experiment and most will succeed, some will change and some might fail. Learning innovations requires that risk.

I have learned so much during this past year. I am moved that 1,500 of you will be in Orlando starting on Sunday. I know that dozens more will decide at the last minute to join us at Learning 2005 and we will welcome you at the door. And, I appreciate that the 60,000 readers of Learning TRENDS can be a part of this experiment with us, by accessing all of the content on-line after the event and perhaps planning to come to Learning 2006 (Nov 4 – 8 in Orlando).

Thank you and I look forward to continuing to learn with you, my learning colleagues.

Elliott

Yes, perhaps not all will be the kind of conference wikis that I’m thinking of. But a quick sampling yields the names of many conferences:

• X-Tech 2005 – May
• Canadian Library Association (CLA) Calgary 2005 – June
• ALA Chicago 2005 – ALA Chicago Wiki – June
• “What The Hack 2005″ conference – July
• OpenEducation2005 – OpenContentWIki – September
• Web 2.0 Conference – October
• WikiSym 2005 – October

AND THE LATEST conference wiki is — Learning 2005. Eliot Masie’s latest newsletter announced:

“A Program as a Wiki: We have placed our entire Conference Program in an interactive wiki. This means that every session is open for comments, extensions and even revisions by our attendees. Quite a difference from a printed traditional program. In the last few days, we have had hundreds of people start to extend the program, volunteer to co-facilitate and add their perspectives. This is evolving the program from an agenda
publication to a dynamic needs assessment and content evolution tool.”

Sure wonder which one was the first conference wiki of them all.

Personally, while attending the eAgenda 2005 conference organized by NTU last August, the thought of using wikis for conferences first crossed my mind. I was supposed to be a scribe for the two-day conference. Ended up bringing my own notebook PC and started entering personal notes on the conference into my wiki. And I couldn’t help thinking, “How wonderful it’d be if all attendees enter their comments/notes into a common wiki.”

And it is happening now — all over the world!

“Computer conferencing, first introduced in distance higher-education settings over 20-years ago, is increasingly presented as a forum for knowledge co-construction, informal argumentation, group problem solving, emancipatory dialogue, dialogue journaling, or relational communication (respectively, (Gunawardena, Lowe, & Anderson, 1997; Marttunen, 1998; Jonassen, 1996; Boyd, 1987; Fisher, 1996; Rovai, 2001).

“So far, many students and instructors have reported that conferencing enhances their learning or teaching, and that they enjoyed the experiences and look forward to participating in more conferences. However, two decades of research observation indicate that students rarely engage in the communicative processes that comprise critical discourse. More troubling, some reports suggest that in the rare cases when they do, they do not achieve the purported outcomes (Veerman, Andriessen, Kanselaar, 2000)….

“CRITICAL DISCOURSE is an enduring feature of higher education… As Weedman (1999) has shown, few scholars, artists, or professionals can produce their work in solitude; they need the give and take (thrust and parry?) of debate and critical discussion with their peers in order to develop their ideas. Theoretically, a wide range of scholars offer accounts of the role of argumentation in a diverse set of educational outcomes including cognitive development (Perret-Clairmont, Perret & Bell, 1989), higher order thinking (Vygotsky, 1972), conceptual change (Chi, Bassok, Lewis, Reimann & Glaser, 1989), emancipation (Mezirow, 1990), practical competence (Orr, 1996), epistemic development (Belenky, Tarule & Goldberger, 1997), and understanding (Gadamer, 1989)…

“In 2000, Garrison, Anderson and Archer presented an influential model of computer conferencing’s role in higher, distance education. At the core of their complex model was the process of critical discourse. For a computer conference to serve as an educational environment, they argued (Garrison et al., 2001, p. 15):

it must be more than undirected, unreflective, random exchanges and dumps of opinions. Higher-order learning requires sustained critical discourse where dissonance and problems are resolved through exploration, integration and testing.

“An operational definition of critical discourse emerges in the rubric they developed to assess students’ participation in conferences. At the upper end of their hierarchical rubric are conversational actions such as challenging others’ interpretations, supporting conclusions with evidence, and developing evidentiary hypotheses. Contributing to the definition are the responsibilities they assign to instructors: identifying areas of disagreement, seeking to reach a consensus, focusing the discussion, and diagnosing misconceptions.

“This model is just one among many in which critical discourse plays a central role. Despite the warm feelings that these phrases evoke among distance educators (like us), Laurillard pointed out in 1993 that, “One of the greatest untested assumptions of current educational practice is that students learn from discussion” (p. 171). Since that time, several researchers have responded to her challenge. Using labor-intensive data collection and analysis techniques, which typically involve classifying each locution produced by each student through the duration of a course, researchers often find results similar to Marttunen’s:

…results reveal that the interaction between students turns out to be mainly non-argumentative in nature: only a small percentage of students’ references to each others’ texts express opinions opposed to those of fellow students, and only a smaller fraction indicate grounded disagreement. The results suggest that the pedagogical aim of our studies, to engage students in argumentative interaction, is not realized very well. (1998, p. 397)

“In this study, we spoke with five students (from a group of 12) and their instructor while they participated in a computer conference as part of their graduate-level humanities course. They provided several insights into our observation that the forums contained little critical discourse: 1) They did not orient to the conference as a forum for critical discourse, and worse, they had competing orientations; 2) they perceived critiques as personal attacks; and 3) they realized early on that critical discourse was a bothersome means to obtain their participation marks.

“We suggest certain elements may ease some of these difficulties, including 1) well-structured learning activities with clearly defined roles for teachers and students, 2) a method of assessing students’ participation in the conferences that reflects the time and effort required to engage in critical discourse, and 3) an understanding of the technology’s function that attends to the students’ experiences.”

“US policy-makers, war-fighters, and law-enforcers now operate in a real-time worldwide decision and implementation environment. The rapidly changing circumstances in which they operate take on lives of their own, which are difficult or impossible to anticipate or predict. The only way to meet the continuously unpredictable challenges ahead of us is to match them with continuously unpredictable changes of our own. We must transform the Intelligence Community into a community that dynamically reinvents itself by continuously learning and adapting as the national security environment changes.

“RECENT THEORETICAL developments in the philosophy of science that matured in the 1990’s, collectively known as Complexity Theory, suggest changes the community should make to meet this challenge. These changes include allowing our officers more autonomy in the context of improved tradecraft and information sharing. In addition, several new technologies will facilitate this transformation. Two examples are self-organizing knowledge websites, known as Wikis, and information sharing websites known as Blogs. Allowing Intelligence Officers and our nonintelligence National Security colleagues access to these technologies on SIPRNet, will provide a critical mass to begin the transformation…

“The Wiki and the Blog are complementary companion technologies that together form the core workspace that will allow intelligence officers to share, innovate, adapt, respond, and be—on occasion—brilliant. Blogs will cite Wiki entries. The occasional brilliant blog comment will shape the Wiki. The Blog will be vibrant, and make many sea [of] changes in real-time. The Wiki, as it matures, will serve as corporate knowledge and will not be as fickle as the Blog. The Wiki will be authoritative in nature, while the Blog will be highly agile. The Blog is personal and opinionated. The Wiki is agreed-upon and corporate.

“The Wiki and Blog, however, while standing together, cannot stand by themselves. Intelligence officers need a wellspring of intelligence from which to build the Wiki and about which to comment in the Blog. Such a wellspring would be a community-wide intelligence repository patterned after DIA’s SAFE or CIA’s CIRAS. These repositories are largely disordered, out-ofcontext piles of cables. That is okay. The intelligence repository is like unrefined ore. (The repository could actually be many federated databases.) The Blog and the Wiki serve as successive refining processes for the unrefined ore in the intelligence repository. The Blog would vet, comment, and establish context for the intelligence. This extracted intelligence knowledge from the intelligence repository would be placed in the well-organized Wiki. Both the Wiki and the Blog would link back to authoritative source documents in the repository.

“While an intelligence repository is required “under” the Wiki and the Blog, two more technologies are required “above” them. One is a search technology and the other is a feedback technology. Part of the agility required in today’s high-speed national security environment is to be able to quickly find information. One needs the ability to search for specific knowledge within or across the Wiki, or the Blog, or the Intelligence Repository in a Google-like (www.google.com) fashion.

“While most intelligence officers are quite familiar with search technology, we are less acquainted with feedback technologies. These technologies are often in and of themselves self-organizing. For example, we might want to know which cables in the repository were most cited by the Blog over the last 24 hours. This feedback lets the visitor quickly know what the community thinks is important. It also lets the originator of the cable understand its impact. Feedback technologies let visitors know what areas of the Wiki are changing most rapidly as an indicator of newly vetted knowledge. Feedback technologies can utilize subscription techniques such as “send me an alert when more than 10 people have read my blog.”

“Wikipedia.org makes extensive use of these feedback technologies on its homepage. Another feedback Internet site (www.daypop.com) has dozens of real-time lists–from the top words to the top blog postings to and the top sources cited. Its Top 40 list not only gives the current ranking but whether the ranking is going up or down.

“Feedback technologies are an integral part of the solution suggested by Complexity Theory. As important as information sharing is to the success of the solution, it is even more important to know who is sharing what information. This allows intelligence officers to accurately understand where they are in the intellectual space of the intelligence community. It also allows intelligence officers to see what gaps exist and where changes need to be made. The feedback technologies allow an agile reading of the current state of play across the wide expanse of the Repository, the Wiki, and the Blog.

“Together, these five technologies (Repository, Wiki, Blog, Search, Feedback), would allow the community to start down the path of implementing the five mission recommendations (self organization, tradecraft, information sharing, feedback, and strategic communication) suggested by Complexity Theory.”

Y’all know the relativist argument: Other people have views they hold as strongly as you hold yours. Those views are incompatible with yours. Thus, a sense of certainty is insufficient to guarantee truth. Therefore, we can’t trust certainty. Therefore, we have no way to decide whose views are right.

Good things come from this relativism, including a willingness to listen to others and maybe even a little humility. (That was, at least, until the Bush Doctrine declared humility to be unpatriotic.) But relativism contradicts a tenet of knowledge: To believe something is to believe that it’s true. Relativism wants to keep sneaking in a qualifier — “Of course, I might be dead wrong” — that seems to destroy the possibility of knowledge.

Worse, relativism can sap action: Since all sincerely held beliefs are equally valid, why go to any pains to defend yours?

THERE’S JUST something wrong with relativism…. it literally goes against everything we believe by telling us that we have no right to believe any of it. There’s something wrong with the setup.

I think the Internet is showing us what’s wrong with relativism.

Relativism works by pointing to the most extreme differences… There is an assumption — not a logical part of the argument but part of its appeal — that cultures live apart from one another, developing wildly different ideas and values… Neither has privileged access to the truth, or at least neither can reliably know that they have privileged access. So we’re all stuck in our silos of knowledge.

That picture explains why relativism is not just frustrating but depressing. It’s an isolationist’s view of the world.

But now we have a world that’s snapping itself together through talk and writing and conversation. In this world, relativism is much less important and appealing. You don’t have to sit alone and try to undercut your every belief in the name of a humble relativism. Instead, you can put your knowledge out into the world where it can talk with others who hold contrary views. Rather than being silos, we are conversations that — as conversations do — continuously and eternally negotiate agreement while iterating on difference.

…Relativism simplifies the world. It renders all views equal. The Internet complicates the world. All the world’s beliefs are in play as conversation engages us in the mutual quest of trying to find what’s right and wrong, what’s better and worse, what we can agree about and what we’d better leave alone.

In a connected world, relativism is just a way of giving up.

As an emerging tool, blogging uses have still not been completely explored. Some current uses:
- Communication, Self-expression, Self-marketing
- Campaigning/social reform – see Tara Grubb
- Community building
- Customer service – see Blogging Goes Corporate
- Experience tracking – A K-log Pilot Recap
- Interactive journalism – see Instapundit
- Knowledge sharing and knowledge management – see Bottoms Up KM Development
- Learning – see SchoolBlogs
- Storytelling – see Grassroots KM Through Blogging

BESIDES THOSE listed above in “Uses for Blogging”, benefits of blogging include:
- Democratization of information. In classic models, knowledge flow was ’stopped’ and administered by news sources (paper, magazines, TV). Ideas in keeping with current zeitgeist or political agendas received top billing, while unpopular (though necessary for innovation and social transformation) ideas were ignored.
- Barrier elimination. Society is about barriers – actual or unspoken. For example, I don’t run in the same circle as Bill Gates – a socio-economic barrier (at the absolute minimum!). In society, this generally means that I do not have the benefit of Mr. Gates’ wisdom…blogging, however changes that. Opportunities now exist to hear regular thoughts from people like Ray Ozzie, Mitch Kapor, and Larry Lesig.
- Free flow. Any idea can be expressed…and accessed by any one. The process of blogging separates good ideas from poor ideas. The process itself has built in quality control – try that in traditional media!
- Fostering the fringe. Ideas are evaluated based on merit – not on source of origin.
- Filtering. Ideas with merit are filtered through various blogs. Significant thoughts or posts receive multiple-links and spread viral-like across the blogosphere.
- Multiple perspectives. One-sided perspectives of newspapers are replaced by passionate debates exploring virtually every facet of an idea or concept.
- Real time. Discussions and interactions happen right NOW. Waiting for tomorrow’s newspaper or radio program seems like an eternity compared to real time blogging.
- Links and connections. The complexity of an information heavy society requires specialization. Yet specialization is futile if a process is not created to link specialties. Blogging serves this purpose extremely well. Disparate fields of interest and thought are brought together (and dissected) in the machinations of bloggers.

“A BLOG, OR WEB LOG, is like a paper diary except that you compose your entries on a computer and send them up to a website. You can make a blog completely private or limit access to friends. But if you really don’t mind having your innermost thoughts read by utter strangers, then you can write a public blog that anyone can go to by typing in the correct Web addresses.

“What suprises me is that lots of bloggers (or bloggettes?) actually relish opening a window to their lives this way…. Even more unexpected is that these bloggers really let things hang out when recording their personal dramas for general consumption… So, if you know a blogger — or a journalist — be careful of what you say or do to him. Otherwise one day you may find your dirty linen washed in public without you realising it, until it is too late. Then you will know what the view is like from the other side of the window.”

READ THE ABOVE COLUMN incidentally while scouring the local papers for interesting infographic snippets. Having attended a lunchtime talk by Maish Nichani on the same subject only yesterday, i couldn’t help but be struck by the immense gulf (a chasm!) that separates those who “know and do technology” from those who don’t.

If i had known nothing about blogs and read this column, i would have remained in my small world, brushing off new technologies as mere gimmicky avenues for baser instincts.

Fortunately, i have experimented with blogs and do know a little about what blogs can do. So, was quite surprised by the simplistic argument. To consider blogs as mere “personal dramas” flicks or “show-and-tell” gossip just because there are such blogs is as good as panning the usefulness of all publications just because there are gossipy printed material, writing off all TV programmes just because there are sensational shows, or scoffing at all websites just because there are porn sites.

Am reminded of people who don’t quite understand something, wouldn’t do the serious work needed for real understanding, and yet want to pronounce a negative judgement. Perhaps i’m guilty of this sometimes. Nevertheless, it’s attitudes like this that could block the rollout and adoption of useful initiatives in elearning (or other important field) today.

As Maish pointed out, according to Wikipedia, “A weblog, or simply a blog, is a website which contains periodic, reverse chronologically ordered posts on a common webpage. Such a web site would typically be accessible to any Internet user…. Individual posts (which taken together are the blog or weblog) either share a particular theme, or a single or small group of authors.”

There are many types of blogs: personal, collaborative, political, and so on. As Maish had explained and demonstrated during the talk, the ubiquity and uses of blogs today are mind-boggling. They have been used with great success worldwide in various fields: to enable reflective learning or teaching, to enable collaborative work and project management, to enable capture and sharing of tacit knowledge, as e-portfolios….

Listening to Maish, i see a world of possibilities and how i’ve been using my blog in quite a limited way. Baring my soul in a public website had never been my intention. Just thought that weekly blogging is a neat way of compiling assorted essays on my reflections on faith, work, learning, and etcetera. Was quite thankful recently to receive a compliment via email from a priest, “I enjoyed (… and am enriched) reading your reflections!”.

Still, how about summarizing what i learn through a daily News section? How about analyzing and synthesizing what i’ve learnt through a weekly or monthly Features section? How about learning from the experts in my field on a regular basis through an RSS aggregator that pulls insights from their blogs? How about adding an interaction box to maintain persistent and relevant conversations? How about encouraging my students to express themselves and collaborate with one another through blogs? …

The usefulness of blogs is limited only by our openness and imagination. The question is: How many of us would actually choose to “cross the road”?

This is getting clearer and clearer, especially after the video conferencing session that we had with G., S., et al, on one side (in Australia) and with our in-house Instructional Design (ID) program participants on our side (in Singapore) yesterday morning.

THERE WAS a certain unexpressed angst in the air. The Australian team knew that they have put together a great ID program, but somehow participation level in the online program was quite low, especially in the online forum. We the Singaporean team knew that we have made available to our academic staff one of the best programs (if not the best) in Australia and we have tried our best to be good co-facilitators — but the question remained.

Our academic staff participants knew that they wanted to learn. But somehow they couldn’t bring themselves to plough through the excellent papers and then post their insights or comments in the forum. They cannot yet see how the theory or insights gleened from the papers would help them design good online learning courses in practice. And they cannot understand why they were not taught ID in a jiffy.

This evening, after a virtual chat with B. and M., it gets even clearer. It’s a problem of ‘Industry’ vs. ‘Academia’ — ‘practice’ vs. ‘theory’. It’s through no conscious fault of any party. Yes, good ‘practice’ flows from sound ‘theory’. However, like the proverbial East and West, ‘practice’ and ‘theory’ are still having difficulties trying to ‘meet’ — even with much vaunted constructivist approaches.

More about this later. Gotta run for Bible study group now.

(imported from Blogger.com, see also ‘Industry’ vs. ‘Academia’ II)

“1. Prior Commitment.
I have work-related matters and eh, a week-long holiday to attend to. [Then, it was SARS-related quarrantine for almost 2 weeks. Later, a week for spiritual renewal.]

2. A ‘Push’ Factor. I feel a certain revulsion, or to put more mildly, plain inertia. Just one week away from the DF and “My Goodness! How the messages have multipled!” The thought of having to plough through all these messages (now seen as “readings”, as Iris called them during last wed’s virtual chat) is enough to put me off. In other words, the volume and the textual nature of the discussion makes learning rather unattractive.

3. Weak ‘Pull’ Factors (especially ‘emotionally’). Sure, my motivation is high – i take up this course to gain knowledge and to get a qualification. i also think discussion with my tutors and peers is necessary to gain deeper insight. However, if i compare my rate of participation in this learning forum with that in another forum (which is not related to work or study) which i feel emotionally tuned in, reasons (1) and (2) are not enough to stop me from making time to take part in the latter forum. In a way, members of a community need to ‘buy in’ emotionally to the idea of belonging to this community before they will become active and contributing partipants.”

After the post, E. very sensibly pointed out the flipside to relying on emotional commitment as motivation, “…if someone is very emotionally involved in something else that is happening in their life (or, more generally, in the world), it is difficult to stay as focused on one’s work or study. There are some periods in my life when some major concern I have seems to use up all my emotional energy and ‘drains’ me so that I can’t focus as well on other things that are also important. No amount of telling oneself to ‘pull yourself together’ seems to help sometimes.”

i think in a very true sense, this probably sums up another key reason why my usual drive to study flew out of the window these few months. i had been emotionally distracted by a relationship issue, and E. said it all. So, this is how some (or is it many?) of our students feel like! And the heavy textual nature and the required rigor of authoritative references in an academic program like this one doesn’t help.

(imported from Blogger.com)

1. Personal Interest. When i first started on the course in early March, i was highly motivated and raring to go. i’ve paid for the Teaching Online course fees out of my own pocket. Had been teaching a tertiary subject part-time for a year. And due to an on-going project on a knowledge portal for instructional designers, i’ve also been researching on the subject on my own for almost two years.

2. Professional Need. At work, a second run of the School ID program has also started. Will be helping to moderate some of the online discussions. So, skills acquired from the Teaching Online course will come in just handy. i also wanted the qualification: a Masters’ degree in educational technology will help open doors to better job opportunities, i hope.

3. Prior Experience. i was one of the 20-odd staff on a 4-month customized School ID program last year, put together by an Australian u. to help teaching staff handle design, facilitation and evaluation issues of Flexible Learning in our polytechnic. Enjoyed the online discussion with the students and tutors, especially Dr G. So noted with pleasure that he is the key facilitator for the course.

3. Class Dynamics. Initial rounds of self-introductions by course participants on the forum was most promising. There’s Mila from Argentina and Jo C. from Japan — so exceptionally warm and friendly! Ah, there’s Andrew B. from Bangkok and LKM from Hongkong. i would like to meet them when i get there in a few weeks’ time. Then, there’s David S. from Jerusalem who travels to Prague thrice a year. How exciting! And many many others from all over the world — Australia, Canada, USA, Saudi Arabia, Spain, UK, Netherlands…. so mind-boggling — such an international group of students with such impressive experiences and credentials!

Thirteen weeks into the program, almost all the above factors still apply. Another plus was the responsiveness of tutors like G. and B. Got a week’s extension for Assignment 1 and then a two-week extension for Assignment 2 quite readily. Now, this IS Flexible Learning.

So, how did i let myself be side-tracked?

(imported from Blogger.com)

In a twist of fate, yours truly (normally highly motivated and studious) is now behaving like a proverbial unmotivated lazy student in our institution.

First, went on a long-awaited six-day holiday (this is for family bonding) in Hongkong and Bangkok in mid March. Came back in the midst of a Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) scare. Was confined to work at 56kbps at home (and up to 10 hours per month) instead of 100Mbps at office (unlimited!) for six days in Week 4 (bcos i just returned from a SARS-inffected country) and Week 5 (bcos a student was down with SARS).

LOST SOME momentum there, but managed to squeeze out Assignment 1 with a one-week extension after the official deadline. Then, went on a long-overdue four-day retreat (this is for spiritual renewal) at the local Ignatian centre in Week 12. Felt wonderful upon my return, but for a week or two was most reluctant to get into study mode.

Quite an experience! i’m beginning to understand how an unmotivated lazy student might feel as untouched learning material accumulates with the rapid passage of time while other activities beckon so enticingly. Almost wanted to give up! :-p

And quite an irony! Just a few months ago, i had put the finishing touches to a Blackboard course entitled Top e-Learners’ Study Strategies — specifically designed for students in our polytechnic. Got great reviews from boss, colleagues and varsity tutors earlier. Now, i can’t even apply them myself — these strategies have become Strategies That Don’t Work.

But wait! i chose to take this course, i wanted to learn to set effective online teaching strategies and tactics, and this skill is useful in my work. So, okay, grit my teeth and hang on!

And inspired by blogs shared by an online classmate Adam L. and ex-classmate A.O., i hereby start mine….

(imported from Blogger.com)