Great Youtube video on web 2.0

I came across this video on UNM's nursing website. It's a great compilation of concepts on Web 2.0, produced by Kansas State University.

So while I'm sharing it with the world, via my blog, this is really a self-serving posting acting as a placeholder to keep the video until such time that I can actually sit down and play and replay it (for nuances).

http://hsc.unm.edu/consg/concast/video.shtml

Enjoy!

Communities and Networks

Question 1: In Gray's article about Communities of Practice, facilitators are needed to keep communities of practice together and strong. Kavanaugh's article focuses on the role of someone who is a bridge, who connects the groups together. Bridges are usually more social. So my question is, it seems as though facilitator and bridge have strong overlap in the Gray article, but with Kavanaugh's focus on the nature of the role, how would you best hold a Community of Practice together if the facilitator was not also a bridge?

Question 2: Communities of Practice work partially because of the overlap of common interest (interest keeps it together). If the social structure of the participants is identified and considered, is a COP with many bridgers able to be more diverse in their thinking (possibly offering more perspectives, thus more learning) than non-bridgers, or is subject matter the essential element, and if the information is to diverse, the COP falls apart?

Class Discussion questions March 2nd.

My questions for this week are idiosyncratic -- Johannes just defined the term. The questions don't really fit in context with the articles, but they are relevent to me, since I have been researching social networking, computing, and technlogies all week.

So here goes.

1. From the tagging, communities, vocabulary, and evolution article:
can tags go viral without a secondary, or cross referenced vehicle, like youtube or facebook?

and

2. from the College student Web use, perceptions of information credibility, and verification behavior article.

The article talks about how librarians are quite adept at research and reference, yet students struggle. why doesn't K-12 curriculum stress this necessary skill -- or is it necessary?

Week 6 Questions from Weekly Readings

Kajder 2004

"We’re only just getting started and are at a place where questions far outweigh answers. Emily’s list is long and reflective of our early stage: 'How often will my students blog? How am I going to assess my students’ blogs? What will the rubric look like?'"

How relevent are the above questions to teaching in terms of being new questions? For example, how many teachers say “ how often will my students pick up a pen and paper, or how often will my students type?

"How am I going to assess my students blogs?" Why is this different than pen and paper journaling, and couldn’t the rubric look the same as traditional forms of learning if you considered content over quantity?

Nardi 2004

"Why would so many people post their diaries—perhaps the most intimate form of personal musing—on the most public communication medium in human history, the Internet?"

Would more people use Blogs for knowledge or filters, if they were introduced as such in learning exercises – i.e. teachers are using them as diaries, therefore, they are seen as such.

Many people assume that technology is making the world a more impersonal place – given the above quote from Nardi (2004), how true is the statement, and can a case be made that technology (blogging) actually increases social interaction?

Opinion: Do bloggers who look to their postings for advice consider the advice from known bloggers or strangers to be more sound and credible?

"While bloggers do not always judge their audiences correctly, and may inadvertently write inappropriate or injurious posts, consciousness of audience is central to the blogging experience."

Toner (2004)

If teachers are using blogs as pseudo support groups and seeking advice from one another, is privacy an issue (administration liability, parent or student confidentiality, etc.) ?

Packer (2004)

"A curious thing about this rarefied world is that bloggers are almost unfailingly contemptuous toward everyone except one another. They are also nearly without exception men (this form of combat seems too naked for more than a very few women).”

Nardi mentions that bloggers are conscious of their audiences. Given the above statement by Packer (2004), is this contradictory, where is the distinction between readers and posters and “everyone else”? Or are readers who do not post, the “everyone else”?

Also, is it the instanteous nature of blogging that creates the appeal in political postings that Packer talks about, or is it the sniping comments that are often viewed as satire?

Week 5: Reading Questions re: collaboration

Week 5 Questions: Collaboration and Cooperation

1. Question: Is collaboration a totally different concept than cooperation (as in Curtis), or is cooperation an embedded social component of collaboration (as proposed by Soller et al.)? Also, how does Johnson & Johnson’s definition of cooperation “fit” with the other two articles?


2. In the research cited in Curtis (2001) email was used more extensively than discussion boards. Since 2001, text-messaging has become more widely used.

Question: can text messging be considered a hybrid between e-mail and discussion board activity, because of the ability to give near-synchronous response times, or is it a completely new medium of communication? If it is a hybrid, will it create a “quick response” discussion board type of communication, and therefore change the results of the tests from those researched in Curtis (2001)?

Week 4 Questions Re: Resnick/Young/SalomonPerkins readings

In Resnick, the role of schooling in economic preparation is discussed:

“Some critics of current practices hold that no formal training in the art and science of pedagogy is required, that everything necessary can be learned through on-thejob teaching practice by an individual with deep knowledge of the subject matter to be taught (emphasis added)”

QUESTION: Where might that deep knowledge be obtained, if not in the schools?”

I reflected on this question, and although my educational paradigm is through foundational learning in the schools, I was intrigued by a conversation with a colleague from India regarding Caste systems, formal and informal learning, and advancement.

The gist of the conversatlion was that people are born into one station in life – the doctors, the laborers, the lawyers, etc. When I asked about possiblities, I was told that for the most part, the doctors train the doctors, and all learning in that field is acquired on-the-job from others in the caste/field. To “break in” to medical work that required being a doctor, there needs to be someone in the caste/field who will befriend you and take you under their wing, and once they have acquired that stature, their families would follow, and therefore the next generation would belong to a different station in life.*

It was stated that this is not easy to do, because it is difficult to find someone willing to invest time in the lifelong learning process that would be required to obtain proficiency to the level of the mentor being willing to accept and represent you to the community as a competent professional in that field, therefore, most people stay put, where they are.

I likened this explanation to the early 20th century European immigrants who set up shoss and businesses on America’s East Coast and in Midwestern towns. The businesses became the backbone of the families, and the children were trained in the families’ livelihoods. Formal schooling came about at a later date.

So my initial question of “where would the subject matter expertise come from” goes full-circle to “the apprenticeship model”. So I think I might agree --- more thought needed.

*(This is definitely an oversimplification of a very complex system, but for sake of our question and answer session on India, my colleague agreed that my understanding was “a good enough overview of the Caste system for the level of depth in our conversation.”

Question 2:
In Young’s article on ecological learning and contexts, it was stated:

“an ecological presumption is that a sensitive exploring agent can pick up the affordance of an environment directly through exploration, discovery, and differentiation (Gibson & Spelk, 1983). So the learning environment and associated tool, activities, and instruction that are designed for instruction should serve to highlight important distinctions and focus the students’ attention on previously unnoticed uses for things in the world.”

Where does this leave us in regards to replicational studies? If nothing new is learned in a replicated experiment, does this mean that nothing has been learned? I would like to think, instead, that support of existing information can also be considered new learning.

Week 3: Introduction to Social Computing -- Assigned Reading Questions.....

1. In Chap 1 of the Watts article, the author questions which parts of behavior we need to pay attention to because we know little about how individual behavior aggregates. Further, O’Reilly in Web 2.0 discusses how internet/technology is changing at a rapid rate. So keeping this in mind, would technology use be used different (more on-topic discussion) if the lecturer came from a web 2.0 mindset and took on a persona of facilitator (where collaboration is an integral part of internet use), or would the teaching style be irrelevant to students’ style of internet use?

2. In Web 2.0, the author states:

“The successful companies all give up something expensive but considered critical to get something valuable for free that was once expensive. For example, Wikipedia gives up central editorial control in return for speed and breadth. Napster gave up on the idea of "the catalog" (all the songs the vendor
was selling) and got breadth. Amazon gave up on the idea of having a physical storefront but got to serve the entire world. Google gave up on the big customers (initially) and got the 80% whose needs weren't being met.” ?

Keeping this in mind, if products like Blackboard were universally available without cost to the end-users, would the teaching community be more inclined to adopt its use by collaborating with developers in making the product more user-friendly (e.g. developing add-ins and enhancements like integrated ID capability, seemless integration of third-party products, etc.)?

And if the product was better, would teachers be more inclined to incorporate additional technological tools into their day-to-day operations (i.e. if this is a teacher’s only exposure to technology, does frustration with existing software cause unnecessary barriers to adopting tech in the classroom?)

Making a short question long...... how much do inferior tools stymie the adoption of technology in schools?