Martin Weller continues to remind us of the immense impact of the super-abundance of searchable information on the web is having on learning and teaching. Martin calls this the pedagogy of abundance (see the latest Slideshare slidecast) and the characteristics, taken from one of Martin’s slides, are summarised as:

These changes are now with to a greater or lesser extent and we should be expecting our educational technology and tools to be keeping pace.

Sadly this is not the case with the rapidly aging learning management systems (LMS) that are in widespread use. Another strong adherent of the new pedagogy is George Siemens and in a recent post on his Connectivism blog he asks a very relevant question ‘Future of learning: LMS or SNS?’. The second argument that George puts forward really resonated with me:

The wild card in education today is abundance. We simply have too much information and we can’t make sense of it all. It changes too quickly. Many universities rely on a “design today, use for three years” course design model. It worked great in 1950. 2009 – not so much. Greater adaptivity of content is required. Learning resources should be tagged with a “best before date” so we’re not teaching information that is no longer accurate. LMS’ perpetuate the course model. And that is their greatest flaw.

I only have to look at my subject sites from last year on my institution’s LMS (ilearn.bond.edu.au) to see that these ideas are very close to the mark. I am strongly in favour of taking social network systems (SNS) and moulding them into the new online systems to support learning and teaching.

Occasional mentions of downloadable books for electronic readers from my public libraries (GCCC Libraries) have passed in my tweet stream from one of my Twitter friends, librarian Kate Davis (@katiedavis). It was not until I received the email newsletter this week from the libraries that I realised how far the Overdrive service for ebooks (and audiobooks) had come (past services were limited in media types and range of devices). Effectively it heralds the start of a 24/7 library service for time-limited, electronic borrowings – the way of the future.

From the virtual library page we are told the range of media is the impressive:

• Adobe® EPUB eBooks
• Adobe® PDF eBooks
• Mobipocket® eBooks
• OverDrive WMA Audiobooks
• OverDrive MP3 Audiobooks
• OverDrive Music

I immediately searched the epub/PDF catalogue which is understandably limited as it to be expected. Neverthe less I discovered quickly that Qualman’s Socialnomics title was available in epub format. Only a week previously I had tweeted my thanks to the library for ordering this same title for me in print. [Eric Qualman also tweeted me back.] What a coincidence! Another less significant coincidence is I already had Adobe Digital Editions installed on my PC, the recommended reader for the epub format of the ebook. For many months the free Digital Editions software has been my reader of choice for all my PDF documents, reports, papers, manuals and so on. This meant the download of the Socialnomics ebook was seamless and within less than a minute the book was on my PC screen – really great.

In a first for me I now have both the print and epub versions of the same book available while I am reading it. I can directly compare the two reading processes to see which I prefer. Since I don’t yet have a dedicated ebook reader capable of displaying epub format the comparison is between reading on my PC and the print form.

On the PC the usual huge advantages of ebooks become quickly apparent:

• the links in the table of contents (always visible on the left in Digital Editions) take you straight to the major book sections
• search takes you immediately to information you require (the index is no longer needed)
• change the page and font size to suit you reading comfort
• links in the text, footnotes, endnotes and so on all work
• limited text copy allows for note taking

I quickly set up my netbooks and laptops to share the same ebook using the Adobe authorisation mechanism to its allowed limit of 5 devices. Netbooks extend the range of contexts for reading ebooks but of course are still not as convenient as dedicated ebook readers (and the printed book) in bed for example.

In the 48 hours of my print/ebook reading duality the ebook is winning. Both have to go back in 14 days when this first experiment will end and I will be able to report again.

I must give a big shoutout to Kate who I suspect had a really big part in bringing the beginnings of our local virtual 24/7 library to fruition. It will revolutionise reading habits.

Being at a social time, 11 am on a Saturday, I joined the latest online social media seminar from George Siemens and Dave Cormier who talked about the theme of nowism, which is essentially various forms of the realtime web. A paper on the nowism trend contains this exercise scenario that took my fancy:

The seminar audience topped out at about 85 from all over the world in many different time zones. The seminar series Ning site gives more details and links to the recordings of these seminars. Detailed notes are also available for this particular seminar via a public Google Docs link.

Of course Google Wave figured prominently but many in the audience had not yet experienced it. A good example given by George on how invaluable Wave might be is the development of a new curriculum for a course over, say, 3 months with a small team of 5 or so. Imagine how many emails would be needed over that timescale, probably over a hundred. Instead a single, shared Wave document would exist, no doubt highly threaded. Using the Play button the actual development of the document through time would be visible showing exactly how each part of the curriculum was derived. Wave is so much better provided we all learn to use it sensibly.

Other examples of realtime web and synchronised collaboration were discussed briefly. Google Social Search (see notes) also rated a mention. Mercifully mention of Second Life was short, with the consensus being that current virtual-worlds-without-a-purpose had been tried and found wanting in large part because of the huge up-front preparation time and effort that is needed.

All in all it was a most enjoyable hour with lots of electronic resources to follow up which are of use in the general education 2.0 space.

I have been meaning to report on the outcomes of a question I set in the final theory exam of our CORE subject Information Technology 1 in our May 2009 semester. This subject is taken by virtually all students enrolled in my university at some stage in their degrees. The short answer question was:

There appears to be a trend for printed text books to be replaced by electronic books that must be read on digital devices. Indicate whether or not you are in favour of this trend. Give several reasons for your choice.

I was about 150 scripts into marking the total of 372 scripts and I happened to tweet my impression of the answers to that point:

This sparked a positive response from Peta who discussed it with her fellow librarians. Because of this interest a proper count of the students’ answers was in order to confirm if my first impressions were accurate. I decided to put each answer into 5 categories:

• For: answer and reasons given were wholly in favour of ebooks replacing printed books
• For-but: in favour overall but recognised some disadvantages that were described in the answer
• Neutral: neither for or against with reasons given on each side
• Against-but: not in favour but recognised some advantages to ebooks
• Against: answer and reasons given were wholly against the use of ebooks

In the end, my first impressions proved incorrect although the result was close. Combining both ‘for’ categories and both ‘against’ categories the numbers are 50% in favour and 44% against with 6% in the neutral category.

The more detailed results show that 17% of students recognised that the choice was not entirely clear cut and there were both advantages and disadvantages with ebooks.

So as far as this particular class of students is concerned ebooks are favoured by a small majority. Hopefully our librarians can take something useful from this result. For the record I place myself in the ‘For but’ category.

Postscript: I tried to use Twitter search on this day (27 October 2009) to find my original tweet to no avail – it turns out that 19 August 2009 is too far in the past for Twitter! Fortunately our institutional Yammer service was quickly able to find my tweet text (use of the #yam hashtag), but did not provide the unique link to the Twitter tweet. Using Google search with a phrase from the tweet returned a single result from dipity.com (maybe the recently heralded Google Social Search would have helped me). This dipity service keeps a timeline of chosen social network activity. I had all but forgotten about them except they emailed me about updated features this week. Going back to 19 August in my dipity timeline shows the tweet in all it glory together with the Twitter status link. Well done dipity.

PPS Update: Google just announced general availability of experimental Social Search

I was taken by a slide in Sean Parker’s presentation to the Web 2.0 Summit where he predicts that network services will take over from information services. The two service types are:

This is a bold prediction, and although unique access trends are currently running in favour of social networks and network services my feeling is the thought is premature. I don’t think the trend has gone unnoticed at Google and Bing, and we are already seeing new social networking services being built on to the offerings of the information services providers. A good battle is in the offing.

Via a MG Siegler post at TechCrunch

I mentioned in my Barcamp Brisbane IV report that we were privileged to have our photos taken by DJ Paine of Studio Promise. DJ has now sent us the high definition versions for free use in any context. In return I am happy to give him a big shoutout.

The barcamp photo collection is available on Flickr at http://bit.ly/barcamp09.

Had I known in advance that DJ would do such a great job in taking these portrati photos I would have worn something more tidy than my Twitter t-shirt!

In a previous post I mentioned me need to have a home page of important links to the cloud apps I use heavily on a regular basis. Managing this home page of bookmarks needs to be as efficient and convenient as possible. I decided to use the simple but effective techniques of Delicious bookmark caches for my main home page.

My bookmark collection on Delicious is public in order to leverage the full social sharing capabilities. For my home page I mark my bookmarks as private so as not to pollute my other bookmarks and because some personal cache bookmarks need authentication. This choice is entirely optional. I then chose to structure my bookmarks at two levels, the main list linking to a series of secondary lists. I use the tag mjr (my initials) for the top level list of bookmarks and I set my browser home page to delicious.com/mrees/mjr which currently looks like:

I chose a unique tag to act as as the key for bookmarks at the secondary level. For historical reasons I use mjrkeya but any meaningful tag will do. Each secondary bookmark uses this tag plus one other tag to signify the category such as cloudtool for my Cloud Tool List category. Thus delicious.com/mrees/mjrkeya+cloudtool is the URL for my list of cloud tools. I can use the Delicious browser tool to add a new bookmark into my caches very easily:

1. Acquire the link by positioning the browser at the page or using the right-click context menu item Bookmark this link in Delicious
2. In the Edit Bookmark dialog mark the link as Private
3. Enter the tags mjrkeya and the secondary category

Once the secondary level bookmarks are entered then the top level list can be created. For example the Cloud Tools List bookmark is:

An example of the Cloud Tool List at the secondary level is:

After some experimentation to keep the vertical spacing of these bookmarks to a minimum I add several formatting options for my Delicious Home Page in my browser. My current URL reduces each bookmark to 1 line, paginates 25 bookmarks at a time, and sorts them in alpha order:

    http://delicious.com/mrees/mjr?sort=alpha&order=asc&detail=1&setcount=25

This is difficult to remember when setting up a new browser so it is stored in a private bookmark delicious.com/mrees/mjrstart.

Only one problem remains. When viewing a second level list how do you quickly return to the top level? Answer, create a tag bundle and add the necessary bookmark for the top level delicious.com/mrees/mjr. One click on the mjr tag takes me back home. Tag bundles appear on the right of Delicious pages:

Note that every Delicious bookmark in the various lists has an Edit and Delete button which allows very quick, in-context editing to change title, URL and tags. Managing these two levels of caching is very, very easy.

I have been using these techniques for about a year and am extremely happy. Very minor gripes include the somewhat slow response for Delicious pages in Australia and the need to re-login to my account every 10 days or so. I recommend this approach to everyone.

As as strong adherent of working in the cloud (10 cloud apps and list of cloud apps) I need my browser home page to give me instant access to my preferred cloud apps. Over the last year or two I have experimented with some of my own web apps. I started with my own DotWikIEWeb tool which is an ultra lightweight wiki allowing quick in-place editing of parts of a page called i-grains. The screen fragment to the left shows the links in part of the my home page. Hovering over an i-grain such as WebTwoOServices reveals an edit menu to allow the i-grain contents including the links to be switched to editing mode as seen on the right. The Close menu saves the changes in memory and the Save All menu on the left saves the wiki page.

This worked well but could only be used with IE since DotWikIEWeb uses the built-in IE HTML editing component not available in other browsers. As I became a Firefox user another solution was needed.

Teaching an ASP.NET class at the time I then knocked up a DotLinx site to hold a simple list of key links in alpha order. ASP.NET is browser neutral so works automatically with Firefox and IE. Each link is preceded by an ‘@’ link which when clicked allows editing of the link, deletion and insertion of new links. Again it is normal use on the left and editing on the right. DotLinx uses an XML file as a simple database.

For a dead set simple layout (not my best UI design ever) and trivial implementation this worked well for a while until I started using Delicious social bookmarking heavily. In a previous post I extolled the virtues of bookmark caches as just one of the many useful features of the Delicious social bookmark service. Ease of use was well in advance of my own DotLinx web app so it seemed sensible to put Delicious to work as my home page of links. This is described in another post.

Like many others I have been an enthusiastic user of the Delicious social bookmarking service for several years. At the time of writing I have 1085 bookmarks, but at my bookmark cleaning at the start of this year I cleared out over 400 bookmarks. Thus it would seem I accumulate about 500 bookmarks each year.

I divide my Delicious bookmark collection using individual tags or tag bundles into smaller bookmark caches. In my case each cache is used for a research project, working group, publication (paper, presentation, report) or student class. Others will create caches for consultancies, company and client communication and so on. Each bookmark cache has its own, unchanging URL that can be shared with others such as colleagues, clients, customers, students – hence social bookmarking. A bookmark cache also evolves over time, growing or shrinking as bookmarks come and go.

Efficient use of Delicious is made possible by a Firefox add-on and an IE extension, both produced by the Delicious team. These bolt on browser tools capture the URL and the page title but most importantly make it easy to add a descriptive note and the vital cache tags to each bookmark. Notes and tags with a bookmark make the whole bookmark collection reusable, shareable and valuable.

Assuming you are positioned on a newly discovered page to be added to one of your caches then in matter of seconds you can:

1. Select a sentence of two from the page to become the bookmark note
2. Click the Tag button provided by the Delicious browser tool
3. From the tag list generated from your tags and popular tags click on the tags that define your cache
4. Click the Save button to store the bookmark on Delicious

Here is how this process appears on an example found today:

This process works only if a page/site summary appears on the page. I shout out to all page authors:

Always have a line or two of text summary for your site or page near the top of the home page to make it ultra-convenient for the Delicious browser tools.

The key here is selectable text – so many sites have their summaries as graphic images which is fatal.

Bookmark cache creation and evolution is thus exceedingly simple, but making use of the caches contents is where the benefit lies. Here the tools come to the rescue again by providing a sidebar to access the caches quickly and return to pages in question. The actions are:

1. Click the Bookmarks button to show the sidebar
2. Scroll to the cache, expanding the cache subset (extra tag) if necessary to bring up the bookmarks
3. Click on the required bookmark to retrieve the page

Delicious bookmark caches make the management of bookmarks extremely convenient and I have yet to come across a superior social media tool for this. I know Delicious is in the top 5 of tools I couldn’t live without.

Peta shared a post by iLibrarian which commented on the Wired Campus article by long-time elearning commentator Jeff Young about the possibility of Google Wave taking over the role of learning management systems (LMS):

by blending instant messaging, wikis, and image and document sharing into one seamless communication interface

Having used Wave for a few weeks this functionality and more is there to be exploited for some roles of an LMS. However these thoughts reignited similar dormant ideas of my own from a few years ago about the hidden gem of SharePoint taking over from LMS of the day reported in a chapter with Charles Herring entitled ‘Building an LMS with Ubiquitous Software’. From this chapter I highlighted that being a generic, powerful content management system SharePoint supported all LMS features save one of the most important – the assessment/grade management module.

The same comments hold true for Wave, although one can hope that the ease of development of Wave extensions and gadgets may lead to suitable assessment modules being added in the future. However, SharePoint is still a dark horse and a look at the SharePoint in Education blog by Mike Herrity will show the extensive efforts of the education community to embrace SharePoint for learning and teaching.

I look forward to experimenting with Wave for educational and many other purposes, but expect Wave to be only a valuable adjunct to an LMS for quick and immediate information sharing and class feedback.

I was alerted by Jane Hart to word mosaics from Imagechef which take Wordle at step further for simple words and phrases.

With a rotating attendance of 40-50 at any one time I spent the day at Barcamp Brisbane IV at the East Brisbane Bowls Club yesterday. It was a leisurely start of 10 am to allow extra time for people to arrive. The organisers and early attendees soon had the open space of the club partitioned into 4 meeting spaces, 2 with projectors. The Twitter hashtag was #barcampbne but the tweeting activity was down on last time.

See the CoverItLive Replay for the full tweet capture and the mesmerising VisibleTweets for the animated version.

The main organisers Paul O’Keeffe and Steve Dalton did a great job as usual, and timekeeper/wrangler did excellent duty with his cowbell. The event attracted an impressive list of sponsors, all of which gave talks during the day. It was good to see a wide variety of sponsor products and services. Like many others I took advantage of the free portraits being shot by DJ Paine of Studio Promise and look forward to seeing the outcome. Had I known this was to be available I would have dressed more formally than in my Twitter t-shirt!

There were varied talks on SEO, Google Wave in which I was a live participant, legal structures for companies, startup incubation and advice, developments in image panoramas, driving CMS with XSLT (innovative but hard), real-world agile development, Linux install from USB drive, and a run through Amazon Web Services.

A big problem was what I dubbed the hacker’s corner where a group sat at their laptops all day. They rarely mixed with others, and chatted and guffawed non-stop during the event often drowning out the speaker giving the main talk, despite suggestions they desist. This stereotypical, antisocial nerd behaviour was sad to see even though it was a tiny minority.

I enjoyed the barcamp and made some useful contacts. Thanks again to Paul and Steve for their major efforts in staging another successful event. However significant changes at the bowls club or a different venue will be needed to entice me back.

This is just a quick demo of two new WordPress.com features. Publicize allows WordPress to send a customisable tweet about every blog post. When creating a post on WordPress a new Publicize edit box is available so the tweet contents can be edited. As usual I am creating this post in Windows Live Writer so I will be interested to see if the tweet will still be generated. Like many people I have been using Twitterfeed to monitor my blog and generate a suitable tweet. This method leads to delays of up to 30 minutes.

A second notable feature allows the insertion of pictures from PicApp which incorporates advertising into the otherwise freely embeddable images like these social media cushions:

Once again WordPress uses its proprietary embed code and has simply persuaded PicApp to generate the WordPress code for each image.

I posted earlier in the year about the main Horizon Report from the New Media Consortium and its predictions about technology in education. Now we have the Horizon Report – 2009 Australia and New Zealand edition. Its 36 pages are worth a read. As usual in this report series 6 technologies predicted to have a significant impact on education over varying timeframes are identified. They are:

1. Mobile Internet Devices that include phones, netbooks, personal wireless hubs and e-book readers: one year or less
2. Private Cloud Services: one year or less
3. Open Content – reusing and sharing course materials: 2 to 3 years
4. Virtual, Augmented, and Alternate Realities: 2 to 3 years
5. Location-Based Learning: 4 to 5 years
6. Smart Objects and Devices: 4 to 5 years

I am glad to see netbooks included in technology 1 since mobile phones seem to hold sway in this space. In my experience to date the content quality of the message content sent from mobile phones is not worth the screen real estate it is displayed upon. Mistakes abound primarily because editing and proof reading is so difficult.

Private clouds in this context just refer to general cloud services where the data centres guarantee the data stays within the institution or the country from where the cloud services are accessed. This reduces legal concerns about data jurisdiction. I hearedly concur with this selection as I am a great believer in the benefits of cloud services. However my experience to date suggests private clouds are often far too restrictive in terms of access and prevent the use of a host of useful sharing and analysis tools on the general Internet which of course rely on public access.

Again I fully agree with the move to open content described in the report.

The rising costs of education and the chronic shortage of time felt by most teachers are beginning to open the door to a broader acceptance of open content. Open content for education includes any freely available course materials — everything from worksheets to lectures to study aids to entire courses — offered online for teachers or learners to access, download, use, and in many cases, modify.

My only other comment here is that the 2 to 3 year timeframe is somewhat optimistic judged on the reactions of most of my teaching colleagues.

As things stand with the primitive, processor and bandwidth intensive virtual world clients available like Second Life I can’t see significant educational benefit. The huge cost to produce simulations of use in education will still remain for years to come. I personally completely discount this technology for the next 5 year timeframe.

Location-based learning sounds really appealing but even over the longer timeframe predicted I fail to see the allure. Set against this idea is the current thinking that physical learning spaces, even redesigned for the age of hyper connectedness, are diminishing. Instead various forms of virtual learning spaces (definitely not virtual worlds) will come to the fore. Location-based content is another matter:

There is a considerable amount of work that must be done in this area before it becomes mainstream for teaching and learning, but the potential advantages are great: from basic uses such as guided historical tours to more complex applications for mapping, fieldwork, and immersive activities, location-based learning holds promise for just in-time learning tied to a student’s physical location.

I have some sympathy with the smart objects and sensor technology also referred to as the Internet of Things. RFID chips and QR codes are useful identification technologies. All we need is an educational software infrastructure to build on these technologies – a big ask.

So I would rate this report a 4.5 out of 6 but welcome it wholeheartedly as a vehicle for productive debate about educational technologies.

A  blog post and an email (from Des Walsh) alerted me to the imminent arrival of IBM LotusLive iNotes as a possible competitor to Google Apps Premier. After a quick look at the iNotes web site it looks like very pale imitation. I have yet to meet a satisfied Lotus Notes user but I know many in the opposite camp. Even the scope of iNotes services, online email, calendaring and security with the usual administrator options, trails Google Apps which also includes document creation and management and simple content management via wikis (Sites). iNotes offers 1 GB per user where Google Apps Premier sits at 25 GB per user (it is even 7 GB per user for the free version of Google Apps).

So I say there is no competition here. Mary Jo Foley agrees with this view in her post which compares iNotes to the more closely aligned Microsoft offerings such as Deskless Worker Suite. For the same price per user Microsoft includes Exchange Online (same as iNotes) and SharePoint Online which brings sophisticated high-end content management, blogs and wikis. Each of these services can be bought separately at much lower cost.

At a recent Microsoft conference, TechEd2009, we were each issued with an HP Mini netbook with Windows 7 and preloaded with Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) clients which offer considerably more functionality and put iNotes out of sight.

Even with the recent Gmail downtime scare I think IBM has a great deal of catching up to do.