Remaindered Links

• Elena: Nuclear Biker - A photographic tour of the “dead zone” around Chernobyl. Fascinating.
• Utopian schooling? - Touring the campus of a new school in an intentional community in Washington.
• Scream Gun - Our troops will be testing out a gun that concentrates a backmasked baby’s scream at the volume of a jumbo jet as a weapon. It can be non-lethal, only causing extreme pain or permanent deafness. I kind of liked the idea of nonleathal weapons when they were the sticky foam and stuff, but this is messed up. “Hello, I’m here to bring your nation peace and democracy. Now back-the-hell up or I will unleash the backwards screams of 10,000 lifeless babies upon you.”
• zefrank’s rant on social networking systems (via jill, via boyd—all caps must die). Funny stuff. “In my version of Friendster, you’d have to pick me up from the airport, or at least lend me money, before I’d let you in.”
• Pink is todays Red/Blue. It’s good when a school district is proactive, but moderation in all things. Seeing a rise in pink clothing (go to the local mall to see what they mean), the district decided to outlaw it before it got out of hand. (via NAWWAL.

Weblogs as "replacement" educational tech

[This is the second part of a draft of the chapter I’m writing for the International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments, forthcoming from Kluwer. The first part is here.]

Technologies provide a “valence” of potential uses, to borrow the terminology of Carolyn Marvin (1990), writing in the context of the early adoption of the telephone. What we think of as the telephone today is the result not only of the initial development of the technology, but a complex evolution of social practices over time. Examples of telephone systems used for news broadcasting, or Edison’s decades-long delay in accepting the use of the phonograph for music recordings, remind us that a technology does not choose its own use, though it may suggest some uses. In part, this is because new communication technologies are inevitably initially fit into existing ideas of how communication takes place. Depending on the metaphor with which blogging is approached, it may seem fairly obvious how such a technology is to be employed. Nonetheless, new communication technologies also have the capacity to violate our expectations, and usually do (Nord, 1986). Having our expectations disrupted need not be a bad thing; indeed, it is central to the process of learning. Nonetheless, the earliest applications of collaborative web publishing in educational contexts have aimed to replace existing analogues.

Despite the range of ways in which weblogs might be employed, the two general types of weblogs identified by Blood, above, suggest the most obvious potential uses. Diaries and journals are a longstanding fixture of writing and foreign language classes. Journals are also commonly employed in other subjects, including lab notebooks in the sciences, and sketch books and portfolios for teaching the arts. Teachers often encourage students to keep notes of their own, and sometimes use these notes as an additional indicator of their progress. The earliest uses of weblogs thus far have been as replacements for writing journals. Despite difficulties, there are several advantages to the use of weblogs in this setting, especially in that they provide a more immediate and social environment for writing (Kajder & Bull, 2003), which when combined with the improvements to student writing that seem to accrue simply by moving to a computerized form of journals (Goldberg, Russel, & Cook, 2004), represents an obvious area for experimentation.

There has been a move over the last decade toward using portfolios of student materials to improve evaluation and learning. Such portfolios not only provide a richer understanding of student abilities and progress than do narrower evaluative approaches, but also provide a way of allowing students to better monitor their own progress and become more active in the learning process (Frazier & Paulson, 1992; Lamme & Hysmith, 1991; Tierny, Carter, & Desai, 1991). The involvement of students in their own education, not surprisingly, often results in a better understanding of the material, when compared with traditional evaluation methods (Finlay, Maughan, & Webster, 1998). Portfolios can also be used to communicate progress to parents and others (Flood & Lapp, 1989), and to help teachers evaluate their own efficacy (Hiebert, 1992). There are a variety of ways in which portfolios may be organized. Some students assemble their best work, and provide an overarching narrative to frame that work in a “showcase” portfolio. Others use learning portfolios: records of progress and achievement in a field of study. Portfolios have gained ground in areas outside of education as well, and much of the work relating to school portfolios applies equally to professional and personal portfolios.

There have been various efforts to move portfolios online and create electronic portfolios, or e-portfolios. This has been particularly popular at the tertiary level, with a number of universities promoting e-portfolios for their students. E-portfolios provide the advantages of traditional portfolios, but in many cases also provide a way of moving beyond the student-teacher dyad. When a portfolio is placed online, it provides an opportunity for parents, friends, and others to view the work of the individual. Making the portfolio electronic has the further advantage of allowing for a variety of multi-media and interactive content, depending on the skills of the student both in creating such material and, not insignificantly, making it available via the Web. While there is much excitement over e-portfolios at the moment, and a number of incipient projects, it seems that effective supporting software remains a stumbling block (Young, 2002). Moreover, the approach is much more akin to traditional publishing models: portfolios may be updated, but rarely incrementally.

Weblogs are a natural extension of online portfolios. As noted above, weblog software is little more than a simple content management system, a way of placing work online with little effort. Such software can provide a easy way of managing online portfolios, and often the term “e-portfolios” is now used in the same breath as “weblogs” (or as “blogfolios”; Levine, 2003). While it does, at some level, provide some of the same functions as an online journal or portfolio, generally, an implementation using weblog software will bring with it certain expectations in terms of the length and permanence of the materials, the connection to the audience and other online content, and the motivation to publish.

Before examining some of those differences in more detail, we might turn briefly to the other form of blogging: those websites that focus on selecting and annotating links to information found on the Web. In 1945, Vannevar Bush described what many have suggested is one of the earliest visions of hypertext, and suggested that mapping information space would be a primary way of transmitting knowledge in the future. He writes that the associative process of research through the literature of the world could be recorded as a “trail” of a researcher’s linkages and annotations, “and his trails do not fade.” The processes of discovery, as well as the records that make up that discovery, are easily recalled in this “enlarged supplement to his memory.”

Students at all levels often turn first to the Web when called upon to do research, only later reverting to the library, if at all. Given the increasing availability of authoritative information available on the Web, using this information effectively is a worthwhile skill. The process of annotating their search, using a weblog or wiki, provides a window on research, an opportunity for teachers to intercede in the process, and for the student to be more reflective about their own efforts. Students can use this process to learn to manage information effectively. Also, linking to their sources helps to avoid problems of plagiarism and provide a venue for understanding copyright, as students come to a greater appreciation of the originality of their own work (see Oravec, 2002).

Finally, especially at the college level, teachers have experimented with using weblogs for course management. Because of the flexibility of many weblogging systems, they may be customized to this end relatively easily. Readings, handouts, and assignments may be distributed through a weblog, but weblogs are even better suited to providing a central location for news and discussion related to the course. Many of the large, commercial course management systems have been experimenting with collaborative web publishing systems of various sorts. It remains to be seen whether such systems will retain the cultural practices that have led to the success of weblogs and wikis.

To draw on a metaphor already applied elsewhere in the context of blogging (Frauenfelder, 2000), the automobile began as a replacement for the horse-drawn carriage, and was for some time the “horseless carriage” before it was clear that it not only provided for new kinds of uses, but shaped social interaction, the built environment, and a national culture. Weblogs can certainly serve as replacements for existing educational technologies, but their potential reaches far beyond this. Weblogs provide an environment amenable to decentered, distributed, experiential learning. One of the greatest differences between collaborative web publishing and other computer-mediated forms of educational interaction is that weblogs, wikis, and similar technologies encourage public engagement, interaction with a broad community, experiential learning, and an extension of the learning process beyond the physical and temporal boundaries of the classroom.

Etienne Wenger describes what he calls a “learning architecture,” based upon certain needs:

“1) places of engagement
2) materials and experiences with which to build an image of the world and themselves
3) ways of having an effect on the world and making their actions matter.”
(1998, p.271)

The following sections suggest that collaborative web publishing can help to provide for these three needs. By creating virtual places of engagement, and in combination with directed self-discovery, students can use weblogs, wikis, and related technologies to engage in an active, communal learning process.

Cited

Bush, V. (1945). As we may think. Atlantic Monthly, 176(1), 101-8.

Finlay, I.G., Maughan, T.S., & Webster, D.J. (1998). A randomized controlled study of portfolio learning in undergraduate cancer education. Medical Education, 32(2), 172-176.

Flood, J., & Lapp, D. (1989). Reporting reading progress: A comparison portfolio for parents. The Reading Teacher, 42, 508-514.

Frauenfelder, M. (2000). Blogging. The Whole Earth. Winter.

Frazier, D.M. & Paulson, F.L. (1992). How portfolios motivate reluctant writers. Educational Leadership, 49(8), 62-65.

Goldberg, A., Russell, M., & Cook, A. (2003). The effect of computers on student writing: A meta-analysis of studies from 1992 to 2002. The Journal of Technology, Learning, and Assessment, 2(1). (pdf)

Hiebert, E.A. (1992). Portfolios invite reflection - from students and staff. Educational Leadership, 49(8), 58-61.

Kajder, S. and Bull, G. (2003) Scaffolding for struggling students: Reading and writing with weblogs. Learning and Leading with Technology, 31(2), 32-35. (pdf)

Lamme, L.L., and Hysmith, C. (1991). One school’s adventure into portfolio assessment. Language Arts, 68, 629-640.

Levine, A. (2003). An idea: Blogfolios. Blogshop. June 4.

Marvin, C. (1990). When old technologies were new: Thinking about electronic communication in the late nineteenth century. New York: Oxford University Press.

Nord, D.P. (1986). The ironies of communication technology. Clio, April.

Oravec, J.A. (2002). Bookmarking the world: Weblog applications in education. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy. April.

Tierney, R.J., Carter, M.A., and Desai, L.E. (1991). Portfolio assessment in the reading-writing classroom. Norwood, Mass.: Christopher-Gordon Publishers.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Young, J. (2002). Creating online portfolios can help students see “big picture,” colleges say. The Chronicle of Higher Education. February 21.

Language police

OK. I get as fed up as anyone with people who want to regulate what words should and shouldn’t be used. Nonetheless, can we just agree to stop calling the War On Terror™ and related military actions “crusades.” Listening to Powell’s prepared remarks today before the 9/11 commission, and he actually refers to a “crusade” in Afghanistan.

No, we aren’t battling Islam, just terrorists. Really. We mean crusades in an entirely metaphorical sense. God bless America.

Social Mind-Extensions

Many have suggested that what makes humans different from other animals is our use of tools. Our most important tool is language. It is through language that we are able to coordinate our work and form civilizations. We build our conceptions of the world through conversation, but we also build our physical and social world through conversation. The idea that we could build a shed, let alone tunnel under the English Channel, or a large corporation, or a hospital, without communication between individuals is absurd. It is not unreasonable then to assume that studying and improving the way we communicate as a society might be an especially effective way to improve the world we live in. This is what drew me to the field of communication, and continues to guide my research in this area.

My interest is in how social structure and social change are related to conversation, especially conversation at a large scale. The internet and the World Wide Web change the way in which we communicate with one another, and I suspect that this will have far-reaching effects on how our society functions over the long term. I have a feeling that we are already seeing many of these changes, and simply not recognizing their significance. Therefore, I try to seek out venues in which collaboration and social change are most pronounced and attempt to understand what makes these interactions work so well. At present, I think online communication yields some of the most interesting cases to work with.

My dissertation examined Slashdot, a weblog that has gathered a large and vocal participatory “audience” (or, arguably, “community”). Slashdot appealed to me as an example because they represented a field study in using technology to help to enable effective communication within a very large group. The social and technical attempts to mediate this conversation have been largely effective, depending on your measure of success. That they continue to attract a participating audience of hundreds of thousands is one such measure. But that they have a significant effect on what an audience of that size is interested in and focusing on is even more exciting. The idea that one site can focus the attention of hundreds of thousands of people on a given obscure site, even for just a few hours (the “Slashdot Effect”) is a kind of power worth studying.

Slashdot benefits from having a small number of people who influence how individual messages are exchanged. The Web at large has a relatively large number of people who are collectively trying to affect how messages are seen. One of the most influential technologies for controlling the flow of messages on the Web is the hyperlink. The importance of the hyperlink has been even further extended by Google’s reliance on collective hyperlinking to help filter results. Sometimes, those who are shaping these hyperlinks are unaware of the communication structures they are creating. When Maria Garrido and I looked at the structures surrounding the Zapatista movement, we found that the impact of the revolt was not only global, but that it had affected the connections and relationships of hundreds of organizations on the World Wide Web.

More recently, I have been looking at personal weblogs and their effects on existing institutions: research, education, law, medicine, and other areas. The “blogosphere”—the totality of interconnected weblogs—is represents a way of organizing a social information space. Can weblogs be used to measure or otherwise gage this social group? Or are they a force for change, affecting the agenda, making connections, and focusing effort? How do the new networks of information flow on the internet relate to traditional mass and personal communication networks?

Finally, I am also interested in “the last 3 feet” : the interface between the human and the machine that mediates communicative action. What kinds of visual and interactive representations allow for more effective communication? What happens when these devices move into the living room or into the street with mobile devices? What happens when they disappear entirely and melt into other everyday objects? How does interacting with and through a machine change the way we think and act?

Collaborative web publishing as a technology and a practice

[This is the first part of a draft of the chapter I’m writing for the International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments, forthcoming from Kluwer.]

It seems clear that weblogs existed well before they were named. These days, there are nearly as many definitions of weblogs as there are weblogs. Most of these relate to the formal presentational structure of a genre of web pages. Jill Walker’s (2003) definition, for example, notes that:

A weblog, or blog, is a frequently updated website consisting of dated entries arranged in reverse chronological order so the most recent post appears first (see temporal ordering). Typically, weblogs are published by individuals and their style is personal and informal.

While Walker goes on to suggest some of the behaviors and motivations that lead to this formal presentation, as with most weblog definitions, the focus is on the web page itself. Such definitions certainly capture many of the features that are frequently found on weblogs, but by no means are these observable attributes always present or clear.

Rebecca Blood’s (2000) history of weblogs describes what sort of material is usually placed on such pages. The original weblogs, according to Blood, were websites created to keep track of and publicize other pages found on the web. In some ways they resembled public, annotated “bookmark files,” cataloging and identifying websites that the author thought were particularly interesting in one way or another. At least one of these sites also linked to other sites with a similar aim, and this cross-linkage is what would later evolve to become a “blogosphere” of interlinked blogs.

A second type of blogger then emerged, growing rapidly in numbers by 1999, according to Blood. Rather than the outward focus of the public linkers, these weblogs were composed of short diary entries in which authors would make note of their thoughts and experiences, sometimes several times throughout the day. In order to support these new bloggers (and helping to drive the development of blogging) a number of content management systems were developed that aimed to make updating a weblog easier. Naturally, there is no clean line between these two types of blogging; those who primarily provide links often provide reviews of the sites to which they link, and those who publish essays or their short observations often accompany them with linked materials. Rather, these two pure types of blogging help define a spectrum of approaches.

These two ways of identifying weblogs—by their formal organization and by the kinds of content that they contain—may have been adequate during the earliest days of blogging, but as blogging has grown as a phenomenon, it has become clear that part of what makes a weblog is whether and in what ways it is linked to other weblogs. What drove the rise of weblogging was not just a desire to increase the frequency with which personal web pages were updated. When weblogs began to link to one another, bloggers were increasingly able to self-identify as a group, and—potentially, at least—as a community. Weblogs exist chiefly as a part of a larger “blogosphere,” a term that has been employed in various ways (cf. Hiler, 2002) to describe this collective hyperlinked subweb. That is, one of the most important ways of discovering whether a page on the Web is a weblog is whether it links to other weblogs and whether other weblogs link to it. Unlike the earliest examples of weblogs, more recent examples engage in an exchange with some subset of the millions of other weblogs being published.

This focus on the aggregate nature of weblogs begins to indicate that blogs are more than simply a genre of web content, they represent a social practice. Restricting the definition to purely a description of the web sites generated is difficult because it misses so much. The only seemingly vital element of weblogging is a public forum (the World Wide Web) in which bloggers are able to associate and self-assemble into groups. The attraction to weblogging has less to do with the software involved and more to do with the kinds of social groups that emerge from interactions among weblogs and their authors. These practices provide for serendipitous, unstructured learning, as differing perspectives and discourses come into contact with one another.

In our discussion we should include tools that perform similar functions, and provide for similar venues for social interactions. Wikis, for example, are web pages that are easily updated by (usually) any person who encounters them on the Web. While not as familiar as weblogs, the success of projects like Wikipedia—an online collaborative encyclopedia project with nearly a quarter million articles in English alone—has brought collaborative hypertexts like wikis wider recognition. Related systems that allow for the sharing of personal information among networks and friends, often referred to as “social networking systems,” as well as machine-readable forms of weblogs, wikis, and social network information, form a larger information ecology that allows for the traffic of ideas within a community.

While several alternative labels for these technologies have been suggested, all represent some form of collaborative web publishing; that is, all support the addition and editing of relatively short pieces of text, and sometimes other images, audio, and other forms of media, in a way that invites multiple authors to link their ideas together. Of course, while these changes may be small (resulting in what is sometimes referred to as “microcontent”) the impact is often anything but. As the example of Wikipedia above demonstrates, in the aggregate, such efforts can yield a substantial collaborative text. Nonetheless, because the text can be addressed and constructed in very small pieces, it allows for the kinds of communicative give and take that are more often associated with synchronous environments.

It would be a mistake to assume that there is a single culture that pervades the blogosphere to the exclusion of all others. Indeed, the variety of bloggers allows for niche communities of interest that would be far more difficult to maintain without the openness of the blogosphere. Bloggers have inherited a core set of values, common to the early computer hackers, and passed on through earlier virtual environments. Pekka Himanen notes in The Hacker Ethic that hackers’ (and here he means computer enthusiasts) relations to the idea of networking, though present in the 1960s, “received a more conscious formulation in recent years” (2001, p. 86). He traces some of the virtues cultivated by hackers, including passionate engagement in their work, autonomy from government and others, pursuit of social position (sometimes to the exclusion of financial gain), and perhaps most importantly, an active and caring approach to communication on the Net (pp. 139-141; Levy, 2001, lists similar attributes).

These virtues are not difficult to identify within the blogosphere. Mutual aide and open exchange of information are encouraged as norms. Although the commercialization of blogging recently has begun in earnest, many tools remain freely available. The Creative Commons project, an effort to provide a more flexible intellectual property regime to encourage the sharing of information, has enjoyed a warm welcome from many in the blogosphere. Many of those who engage in blogging become interested in extending and changing the tools they use, and this kind of amateur tinkering is at the heart of the hacker ethic. Respect from one’s peers is highly valued. In many ways, the practices of the blogosphere resemble nothing so much as the scholarly exchanges common in academic settings, and the number of professors and students that choose to take up blogging is therefore not particularly surprising.

Given the nature of collaborative web publishing, it is sometimes difficult for non-participants to understand. Of course, all technologies have considerable social components, but a television, for example, has a fairly limited and easily described range of uses. Weblogging is essentially an evolving collective and social practice, and therefore easier lived than described. In what follows, we will examine ways in which the social technologies that drive collaborative web publishing may be effectively leveraged in educational settings.

Citations
Blood, R. (2000). Weblogs: History and perspective. Rebecca’s Pocket. September 7.

Hiler, J. (2002). Blogosphere: The emerging media ecosystem. Microcontent News.

Himanen, P. (2001). The hacker ethic and the spirit of the information age. New York: Random House.

Levy, Levy, S. (2001). Hackers: Heroes of the computer revolution. New York: Penguin.

Walker, J. (2003). Weblog, to appear in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (in press).