Posted by Danny on Monday, November 23, 2009 at 2:10 pm
This post is written defiantly on paper, in green fountain pen ink, amidst the high-pitched whine of computer monitors and the low-pitched rumble of the subway beneath the building. My computer is dead. It won’t reach the BIOS so I can’t jiggle its software guts from the command prompt or safe mode, and I don’t have time to qualify myself to noodle around with the hardware where the real problem probably resides. My laptop is useless for accessing my online class, so I’m in the computer lab at OISE, contacting the people who need to be contacted, downloading my readings for the week, and gradually pushing through the shock of being without my personal computer into a state of giddy, Luddish novelty that will in turn give way to the awareness that my paper-crunch and correspondence and peripheral device-charging are going to take place in this room, probably for the next two weeks.
It’s a good room! The lights and noises are ugly, but I’ve got space to work, it’s clean, it’s got broadband, and it’s free. I could be so much more unplugged than I am, and the disrepair of my computer could be so much more devastating to me, my family, my education, and my prospects than it is. When my big paper for Student Experience in Higher Education is finished, I’ll have time to try and resurrect Caligula, and if my data is really gone, I’ll be able to panic and writhe then, responsibly. This is such a petty catastrophe.
The potential for online education to obviate barriers of finance and geography continues to drive my research interest, but it remains that for most of the people who stand to benefit from it, online distance education won’t be delivered to personal computers with big, bright screens in private rooms with lovingly-tailored sound systems and a clean bathroom and ready food only seconds away. It probably won’t even be delivered to computer labs as nice as this. I feel like that expectation could probably be planned for, pedagogically. When I’ve got time, I want to look into the design of public computer terminals and quantify the tradeoffs between (say) the savings on fluorescent lighting costs vs. incandescent on the one hand, and student comfort, tenacity, and health on the other. Is the present arrangement of computers and monitors in a sort of wall-less cubicle system ideal for students working in parallel, with screens blocking face-to-face interaction, or could other configurations benefit learning by fostering local collaboration that could subsequently enhance or transfer to work online? I’m not asking this rhetorically–it may be that face-to-face obstructions prevent more disruption than collaboration of a sort we’d deem valuable, or that instant-messaging interfaces will frustrate this kind of thinking entirely as they become more transparent to the way we communicate.
I wish I could make better use of my time and actually explore some of this stuff.
Posted by Danny on Sunday, November 1, 2009 at 5:33 pm
I recently attended my first research meeting hosted by Clare Brett, which concluded with a discussion about the problem of sustaining online communities that form around distance education classes after they’ve ended. It was mentioned that students often request the spaces and accounts remain open so that shared resources, links, and discussion transcripts continue to be accessible (and long-distance friendships continue to be facilitated), but inevitably and usually quickly, attendance dies away and the community effectively dissolves.
This might not be such a tragedy—these environments came into being to serve a particular purpose, as did the communities that formed within those virtual spaces, and upon completion the students who took part supposedly (hopefully) achieved the growth of skills, experience, and knowledge they came for. Nonetheless, even if everyone was given a complete transcript of all posts, chats, documents, and perhaps even the contact information of the other students, there would be a sense of loss when the doors finally closed. Without the physical infrastructure and associated costs necessary to maintain these virtual spaces, those doors probably could be kept open. So why, ultimately, isn’t this successful?
Read more »
Posted by Danny on Monday, July 20, 2009 at 11:06 am
If anyone’s still out there, you’ve probably had enough Blueberry music. I’m going to be posting a longer article shortly, but I wanted to bring your attention to some handy resources for ebooks, as I’ve just found them. First, there’s MobileRead, which I haven’t just found, but which contains this directory of free ebook lists and author websites. It’s geared mainly to non-academic reading in multiple formats (PDF, Mobipocket, EPub).
They seem to have a small selection of individually-published open ebooks, though I’ve added links to Lawrence Lessig’s author page and Matt Mason’s The Pirate’s Dilemma, so it’s possible that there are other open books to be had which have yet to be catalogued here. It’s a wiki—if you know of something tasty, you should add it to the directory.
In other news, I’m gearing up for thesis research and adding resources to my daunting pile of “oughtta-read-this-before-you-go-talking-to-other-people-dammit” books. It turns out that MIT Press includes a lot of CC books and article series, among them the following that are of interest to me and maybe you:
Iiyoshi, T & M. S. Vijay Kumar (Ed.). (2008). Opening up education: The collective advancement of education through open technology, open content, and open knowledge. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. (Link) I’ve been using articles from this collection since my first project in 2008; it’s full of tasty goodness.
Willinsky, J (2006). The access principle: The case for open access to research and scholarship. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. (Link) I haven’t read this yet but it looks pretty good, if you’re into the OA thang. Leslie Chan gets a mention.
Also, The MacArthur Series on Digital Media and Learning is available as well from the MIT Press. I’m particularly excited to look at Davidson and Goldberg’s The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, not surprisingly.
If anyone’s still out there, you’ve probably had enough Blueberry music. I’m going to be posting a longer article shortly, but I wanted to bring your attention to some handy resources for ebooks, as I’ve just found them. First, there’s MobileRead, which I haven’t just found, but which contains this directory of free ebook lists and author websites. It’s geared mainly to non-academic reading in multiple formats (PDF, Mobipocket, EPub).
They seem to have a small selection of individually-published open ebooks, though I’ve added links to Lawrence Lessig’s author page and Matt Mason’s The Pirate’s Dilemma, so it’s possible that there are other open books to be had which have yet to be catalogued here. It’s a wiki—if you know of something tasty, you should add it to the directory.
In other news, I’m gearing up for thesis research and adding resources to my daunting pile of “oughtta-read-this-before-you-go-talking-to-other-people-dammit” books. It turns out that MIT Press includes a lot of CC books and article series, among them the following that are of interest to me and maybe you:
Iiyoshi, T & M. S. Vijay Kumar (Ed.). (2008). Opening up education: The collective advancement of education through open technology, open content, and open knowledge. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. (Link) I’ve been using articles from this collection since my first project in 2008; it’s full of tasty goodness.
Willinsky, J (2006). The access principle: The case for open access to research and scholarship. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. (Link) I haven’t read this yet but it looks pretty good, if you’re into the OA thang. Leslie Chan gets a mention.
Also, The MacArthur Series on Digital Media and Learning is available as well from the MIT Press, but start here for information and links. I’m particularly excited to look at Davidson and Goldberg’s The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, not surprisingly.
Posted by Danny on Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 11:13 pm
Dad was a devotee of computers probably minutes after discovering them as an undergraduate at Waterloo in the 70s. He repeatedly tried to instil the same wonder and excitement in me, groping for ways to connect the nature of computing machines to my own interests and probably disappointingly artsy foci—anything, at least, to extend their significance beyond the video games I was playing. One of the early uses, I learned, was for academics studying literature to compute word frequencies in texts, which was for me at once a completely novel idea, and seemed spectacularly boring and pointless.[1]
I hadn’t thought much about it until “tag clouds” started popping up on popular sites and the possibilities of this kind of data visualisation started revealing themselves despite my benightment. Recently, Geoff brought Wordle to my attention. Read more »
Posted by Danny on Tuesday, May 26, 2009 at 6:56 pm
I’m grateful to Gideon Weisman for a lot of things: I met him in high school and formed a very tight friendship with him in our OAC year, though both of us lived only tangentially within each other’s dominant social circles. We fell in and out of contact through university, but as is the case with a few of my really good friends, we revert to our easy bonhomie almost immediately regardless of the time spent apart. I was privileged to attend his wedding to Marissa last summer, and my friendship with both of them has blossomed.
As I designed Philomathy.org and wrote my bio-blurb, it occurred to me that for many of the interests by which I define myself—my love of pens, tea, and audio equipment—I have Gideon to thank. The pattern seems to be that I will stumble upon one of the refinements with which he seamlessly surrounds himself, have a conversation with him about it, incubate the topic for six months to a year (or four, for my audiophilia), then suddenly be seized with an urge to learn everything I can about it, study it online for a few months, expend relatively immoderate funds on it, and then catch up with Gideon to report on my findings and share the interest with him intelligently, rather than as a gawking neophyte. Usually at that point Gideon brings my attention to something else amazing that I hadn’t noticed before, and the process repeats. The friendship is unspeakably rewarding.
One thing Gideon and Marissa shared with me that incubated very swiftly was an interest in actively learning about natural history (or, that province of biology that focuses on fuzzy, or leafy, or chitinogenous things and their interactions with each other—to wit, the stuff I’d been dying to learn about since I was four but was scared away from by (deeply important but much less approachable) organic chemistry diagrams and all the stuff that happens to ATP). At Carleton, Gideon took Natural History with Michael Runtz, a course also transmitted to distance students by mailed VHS and broadcast freely on iTunes as a podcast. It was at Gideon and Marissa’s direction that I sought these videos out and discovered the availability of nearly 72 hours with what amounts to the best possible synthesis of Charles Darwin and Robin Williams.
Dr. Runtz is a world-renowned wildlife photographer and naturalist who works primarily in Algonquin Park. He is excited by nature and “natural drama” in a way that reveals Discovery Channel offerings for the hyper-processed Sunny-D sludge of edutainment they are; he is Steve Irwin without sensationalism or self-conscious branding. In one lecture, he brings in a stuffed porcupine for demonstration and then pricks his fingers as he loses himself in a sudden (characteristic) digression, jolts painfully back to the present, forgets where he was, suddenly remembers something neat, and then pricks himself again. This goes on for at least five minutes. Like Poliakoff, he is impossible not to like; he shares the chemist’s warm, self-deprecating sense of humour, but has an infectious eagerness and wonder that makes for much better pedagogy. I’ve delighted myself (and kept sane) by consuming lectures and lessons outside my chosen fields of study, but only viewing these lectures have I felt genuine envy and regret not to have devoted myself thither. I will never get to be Michael Runtz, and I think I could have been.
Resources! The best thing you can do is watch the lectures and breathe deeply the heady Algonquin essence—to do that, search for “Michael Runtz” in the iTunes Store and subscribe to his 1902 and 1903 podcasts. However, if 350 megs per lecture is a bit steep for you to jump right into, a series of educational films he hosted called Wild by Nature are available for streaming in their entirety at FactualTV.com, and can give you a sense of the fellow. Please, please, please be aware that he’s nowhere as cool in these videos as he is in front of a room of students. Try this stuff, and see if you aren’t thankful for Gideon and Marissa too.
Danny Fekete is studying education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appropriately. 