My prize for best returning presentation

The first presentation:

I started by defining a personal learning environment, very much the same way as I did in this post here, as “everything around you that helps you to learn”. I went on to talk about how you can change your environment in order to change your learning. I then went on to spend a little under half the talk dedicated to different tools that one can add to their learning environment to make it more effective.

The second presentation:

This one was titled “Use your leadership skills to create a personal learning network”.  The idea was that leadership skills are great and all for leading people, but they can also be put to work for enhancing your learning. This time I spent far more time focusing on the network and personal aspects of learning, a good representation of my own learning and growth that has been going on in the last 6 months. The idea was that you can only learn better through hard, personal change, drawing the analogy between what it takes to be a good learner and a good Ice Hockey player (these Canadians are converting me pretty quickly eh?) The second thread was that we are able to be much more effective if we use other people, yet the only way to use people is to not use them. In order to gather an effective network you need to be selfless and compassionate, only then will people offer their help.

I also promised the participants a list of resources which I will publish below.

Resources:

Improving study skills:

Reading speed/comprehension/retention:

Breakthrough Rapid Reading

Memory:
The Memory Book: The Classic Guide to Improving Your Memory at Work, at School, and at Play

General Study Skills

How to Become a Straight-A Student: The Unconventional Strategies Real College Students Use to Score High While Studying Less

Time Management/Productivity:

Getting Things Done

The Power Of Less

The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich

Peace of mind:

The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

Relationships:

Tribes

That’s just a few, if there is anything anybody would like to know more about, or any other resources someone things may be handy let me know in the comments below.

Why:

Ironically, the catalyst for this change of heart was my blog post on CCK09.Jeff Fong left a comment on that post pointing me to Scott Young’s post on studying. Reading that post (and subsequent posts) sparked something in my mind. It was the created a connection between several recent things that I had learned and not connected before. I decided to do something that was new and exciting for myself, figuring that the concepts and connections in CCK will still be there in a year.

Basically, the ideas boiled down to the feasibility of personal development. Although I have seen enough crazy “self-help” ideas, money making schemes and development training programs to make me very skeptical of any personal development literature, while reading Scott’s post something clicked. An idea that I can indeed (despite the fact that 22 years of new-years resolutions have proven otherwise) change the things that I do not like about my life. The idea was that finding a way to enact constant improvement would allow me to be far more prepared for school when it starts in January as well as for helping me get my head around the crazy world of ed-tech.

Of course, I am not silly enough to believe that a few months of concentrated effort can “fix” my life, but I thought that maybe I could start to structure things in a way that kick starts a continuous “self-repair mechanism” and enables lifelong learning and improvement. Now of course, to make things work, I came up with a system (seeing as coming up with systems is one of the things I seem to do best). Part of it is explained below:

Planning:

I sat down and brainstormed areas of my life that I wanted to improve. I then categorized those into three categories:

• Quick fixes
• Habits
• Lifelong learning goals

For example, quick fixes included rearranging my Google Reader to make it work better. Habits included keeping my room tidy (the nemesis habit of many university students). Lifelong learning goals included things like learning to read quicker.

Although I did not do it originally, I have since added end points to every learning goal, some way of saying “I’m done”. I know that learning is never over, but there has to be some point where you can switch your main focus to something else and keep whatever you are doing on the periphery.

Preparation:

Now that I had lists of things I wanted to change, I needed to integrate them into my life somehow. To do that, I used the one thing that I check every day, my iGoogle homepage. I deleted everything else off of my homepage. I added a sticky note widget, a Google Calendar widget and then a bunch of Google Tasks widgets (I use Google Tasks because of how quick it is to add emails to tasks and tasks to my calendar). I set each widget to contain a different list (GTD style) and included the lists of the three areas that I outlined above.

In the sticky note I highlight things that I want to concentrate on / accomplish for that work.

Here is what it looks like (quick fixes became merged into projects):

Implementation:

Now that I have my lists, what is the implementation?

Firstly (and this is the first habit I had to learn) is to take 2 minutes to look over the iGoogle page every morning. I look at the weekly goals in my sticky note to make sure that I am still on track to accomplish them.

Every week I take 10 minutes to review my progress and set new goals for the next week.

On a monthly basis, I choose one habit that I want to work on. In that month I move mountains to make sure that I stick to that habit. I add a date to it to say when it should end. If I slip up, I move the date back to 30 days from the slip up.

I choose one lifelong learning goal that I want to concentrate on. I set the goal for when I have acquired that skill/knowledge. Once one goal is completed, I move on to the next one.

Results:

Now, of course I have only been using this system for just over 2 months so I can not say it works completely just yet. What I can say, is that I have definitely had a lot of progress.

The two habits that I have focused on so far (keeping my room tidy and going to the gym regularly) are now firmly ingrained in my life. My current learning goal is also coming along, my reading speed has tripled since I started. I will probably blog my current successes pretty soon.

I also feel like I have so much more control over my environment than I ever had before. When school starts again in January I will be able to tackle the term with far more confidence than ever before and I will also (hopefully) be able to use much of the improvements that I make to myself as a way to develop my ability to learn (both in school and in my goal of helping to fix education).

So what is Connectivism anyway? After reading and watching much of the first week’s content here is my interpretation:

Connectivism is a new learning theory that was developed by Stephen Downes and George Siemens. It basically states that knowledge “is” connections. It rejects the notion of knowledge as a physical entity (that can be passed from one person to another), but more as something that grows as we create more connections.

According to Siemens and Downes, this type of knowing exists on three (and perhaps more) levels:

1. The brain: our brains store memories and “knowledge” as a set of distributed pathways and connections.
2. Concepts: We can only know concepts by drawing connections between different nodes.
3. Society: The knowledge that a society has exists in the links between different nodes (people, databases, books, etc).

Now, of course, this is my gross oversimplification. For more thorough insights into the topic here are some links to read:

What connectivism is

The unique idea of connectivism

So here are my questions concerns and thoughts after 1 week:

1. I understand and accept the neurological principle (modern neuroscience has accepted that what we know is stored in the connections between neurons). The question then is: Can we abstract that one level up for our learning in higher level concepts, or should this thinking stay at a neurological level?
2. Even if we can represent learning in the same way our brain stores things, is that the best way to do it? Our brain is a result of evolution and we know, as fundamental as evolution is, it tends to follow the principle of “just good enough”. If our brain’s method of storing information is “just good enough” could we not have developed better ways of doing things? I would argue that even the fact that society is “connectivist” in its knowledge is a result of “just good enough” as the system is too large for a more efficient method to have evolved. Are we smart enough to come up with something better?
3. Assuming I get to the point where I believe fully in connectivism as a learning theory, what technology needs to be created to support it? 3D networking maps? A personal learning framework that allows you to visualise the framework of your connections? How can I apply the principles of connectivism to come up with brilliant pedagogy and the tools needed to support that?

Some related links:

• Learning Leaders Fieldbook (downes.ca)
• Connectivism and Connective Knowledge 2009 (downes.ca)

But we need to build more lasting channels of communication soon, lest we miss some important connections

So here is my attempt to provide those connections:

WPMU For Education blog

The basic idea is an aggregation blog for “WPMU for education” developers. Jim Groom provided a blog from his WPMUEd domain so that a new channel, dev.wpmued could be created. I used the Add Link Widget with FeedWordPress to turn this blog into an aggregation of content from developers who are working on developing WPMU in education using the method that Jim and I came up with. I seeded it with a few of my often read WordPress MU in education blogs (myself, Jim, D’Arcy, Boone, OLT and CUNY Dev).

But we need more, much more. If you know of any other blogs that write on this subject, please add their feed to the site.  Here is the current master list of institutions that are using WordPress MU. If you have any connections to any of them help the community out by contacting them and asking them to share what they are doing. Also, before you add your feed remember to turn the number of posts up (if you have more than 10 feeds to contribute). If you use WordPress you can include a mutli-tag feed by going “your-url/tag/tag1,tag2,tag3/feed”.

This can be a powerful way to boost our combined development prowess as well as a fantastic demonstration of the power of WordPress to support a community.

the actual conversation happening (photo credit Michelle Lamberson)

Adding your feed is as simple as dropping the URL into the text box on the left sidebar. Add the password (wpmued) and you are done. I’ll be checking for new feeds periodically but you can give me a shout and I’ll activate it ASAP.

Future plans:

I plan to use Wiki Append to pull important content from the wordcamped wiki into pages (it would be done already but wiki-append is having some problems). I think the wiki can act as  a second channel of communication. I will post again as soon as all of that is set up. In the mean time, edit the wiki, give it some much needed love!

I’ve also been playing with a branding idea. A year ago I came up with the idea for the UBC BlogSquad of having badges for contributors. It has worked really well as it reminds everyone of the existence of the aggregated blog (including the blogger themselves). It also immediately identifies you as part of the community. Of course, these were all first and second year students and I am not sure if seasoned bloggers want to pollute their blog with badges. If you do, feel free to grab one below. If you don’t like the design feel free to take your own shot at it (icon design is definitely not my strong suit). If you think the idea is stupid and that something else would work better, let me know in the comments below.

So here it is, 17 August 2009, the Wordle for all my content is:

my Wordle

I treat unread email as to do items. When I check my email I respond to the things I have time to respond to and the rest I mark as unread so that I can respond to them later. This is a very hassle free system. Except, there is one big problem. Gmail does not have a default “show all unread mail” button. This means that it is hard for me to compare my unread mail (to do items) and prioritize this means that some big tasks end up being buried under pages and pages of emails. Of course, with Gmail’s new addons this is very easy to do. Here is how:

1. Go to “settings” then “labs” on the top right menu bar.
2. Scroll down and enable the quick links addon.
   

   enable the add links in settings

3. in the search box type in the following: in:inbox in:unread. Click search mail
   

   search box

4. In the quick links box (middle left of your screen) click “add quick link”.
   

   add quick link

And there we have it, now your Gmail is set up to list all of your unread mail without the interference of stuff that you have already dealt with.

I am currently working at a software company as an intern, writing a program. Now of course, as anybody who has taken Software Engineering knows (don’t worry readers who are not in Computer Science, I promise I will not lose you), when you make software you have to provide different types of documentation about it. Things like, why you made it, how it works, how to use it, who is going to use it… all these things and many more have to be written down formally and saved somewhere in order for your software to live a long and happy life.

Now, Software engineering (CPSC 310) is a class that in part teaches you how to write all of this essential documentation. I took this course with Meghan Allen, one of my favorite professors simply for the fact that she teaches like a human being and not an automaton. This is post is no reflection on her, just on the system that she is pushed into using by those above her . Anyway, in the course she would explain why this documentation was needed and how to do it. She would then provide us with careful examples of what it should look like. We were asked to use her examples as reference when creating our own documentation for our class project.

So far so good, pretty normal learning experience. But, we skip ahead to right now. My little program that I am writing for this big software company needs documentation. I remember why, but am very fuzzy on how. What to do? Of course, I can just go back to the example from class an… but wait. The examples were posted in Blackboard. I can’t see them anymore. They were a great resource… utterly useless as I have no way of applying it to a real life situation.

Ok, Well, not utterly useless. I still have the assignment that I handed in (thanks Google Docs for keeping it safe for me). I could still google the type of documentation and find other examples online, which works, although it takes time (less time of course than writing this post). The thing is, I know that the document is a fantastic resource, why should I have to go and search for others? Shouldn’t the university-provided example be better than most things I can find online anyway? Isn’t that the point of somone spending time writing it up in the first place? Money was used to create that example (mine and the government’s) so why should it be a one-time deal used only to help me complete an assignment? Can anybody come up with a sane reason why it should not be available to me always? I feel ripped off, because I had a resource and it was snatched away from me. If it had been given to me in good old-fashioned paper handouts, I would still have it.

This is just one example amongst a sea of them that I am sure most students experience often. I guess most don’t even realize that they are getting a raw deal for the time effort and money they put into the classroom. In three years of university I have taken well over 10 courses with Blackboard components. What do I have to show for it? See for yourself. Below is my list of blackboard courses. Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside doesn’t it?

My blackboard welcome screen

Related articles on other sites:

• The LMS is So Web 1.5 (ezrasf.com)
• Shall we call it Blackangel? Or Angelboard? (castingoutnines.wordpress.com)

The short explanation (for those who have difficulty reading more than a paragraph):

What is it?

1. Basically, you lend someone in a poor country $25 so that they can use it as capital to grow their business.
2. In a few months you get all of your money back and the borrower has grown their business and are now better able to provide for their family and help revitalize their country’s economy.

It’s that simple.

Why do it?

1. It costs you nothing.
2. You change someone’s life for the better and contribute to the economy of some of the world’s poorest countries.
3. It is a lot of fun! Reading all the descriptions, finding your borrower and tracking your repayments is really enjoyable.
4. For every person who reads this and lends through Kiva (let me know by comments on Facebook, Twitter or preferably this blog) I will contribute $25 dollars myself (so you get to make me eat my words). If you are in UBC, join the UBC group first.

So come on, go to Kiva and just try it, I promise you that you will not be disappointed.

Now the long explanation (for those of you who want some in-depth explanation).

When it comes to aid of any kind, I am a very big skeptic. Too often have I witnessed well meaning money being squandered on useless development projects. My favorite dumb project is one that I learned about one night in Ghana when I was at a bar with some friends. We met some volunteers and after a while they started to describe their project. Basically, they had been sent from Britain to teach computer literacy to people in Ghana. However, they had been assigned to a village that had no electricity, so they had to charge the laptops with car batteries (this was before the days of one laptop per child which can be charged by batteries). The project was laughably unsustainable.

Not only are there dumb projects out there, but there are so many competing theories about development aid. Some say we should donate no-strings attached money, some say we should just leave the poor to develop on their own because it provides the right incentive. There is also the consideration (the one that stops me from giving most) of “where will my money be most effective?” I would like to maximize the impact of my (very limited) funds and doing so is very hard. I am currently reading different development economic works (currently on the End of Poverty by Jeffery Sachs) and will keep on reading until I have a thorough understanding of what I can actually do to maximize my ability to relieve my home continent of the poverty and despair that it faces.

Kiva sidesteps all of these considerations. Who cares if it is not the most efficient way to end poverty?  It costs me nothing. The money is not aid, it is simply a capital loan. I have the capacity to give unlimited funds and if I decide one day that micro-lending does more harm than good (unlikely) then I simply have to wait a few months and I will not have wasted any money as I will have it all back again. From all the famous developmental economists that I have read or listened to: Dambisa Moyo, Paul Collier, Jeffery Sachs and Stephen Lewis (many of whom as a group contradict each other on most points) none of them say that micro-finance is a bad idea. some argue as to how effective it can be, but none say that it has negative impacts. Until I figure things out I am going to continue to lend on Kiva… it is simply the safest way to go if you want to make a difference.

Finally, for anyone who made their Twitter profile pictures green in support of the Iranians (and do not currently contribute in any other way to those less privileged than themselves), this is one big step up into doing something that can make an actual measurable difference (still at no cost to yourself). Seeing as the action of making your profile green has shown a will to help others, not doing as little as lending money to someone who really needs it shows that you lack any real moral capacity to put that will into action and validates every single sarcastic remark that I and some others have made about the “People’s Twitter Front”.

As for who to loan to, I prefer to loan to Women in Africa, more specifically Women in Ghana. I also like loaning to groups as there is more security. But the nice thing about Kiva is that you have choice. Find someone who’s region/plight/plans strikes a chord in you and help them out. It becomes very personal.

So go ahead, make me, yourself and most importantly a desperately struggling businessperson happy by signing up to Kiva and giving just one loan. As I said above, let me know and I will loan $25 in response.

Related articles By Zemanta

• The Inevitable Anti-U.S. Backlash Has Started On Kiva (techcrunch.com)
• Micro Loans with Kiva (semanticmetadata.net)
• Schneidman: Helping Africa Save Itself (one.org)
• International aid: Help or handout? (guardian.co.uk)

Scott Leslie set up an installation of Social Media Classroom the other day and offered for others to take it for a spin. I gave it a try and here is what I think.

The Social Media Classroom does exactly what it says that it will do. The user interface is quite impressive, making thing really easy to jump into.  Sarah Perez on ReadWriteWeb said that “its ease-of-use and educational slant make its introduction an impressive and potentially game-changing move for the educational system as we know it”. I think she would be right, if it were not for some big obstacles that the platform faces. These are:

1. It seems to be closed off and private by default (although this may have just been the system I used). If outsiders can participate (as has been shown by Jon Beasley-Murray, Jim Groom and D’Arcy Norman) magic can happen. We need to let the world see what students are doing in university.
2. The “Social Media Classroom” is missing one little word in the title. A game changer would rather be a “Social Network Media Classroom”. Although students can edit their own profiles in the Social Media Classroom, there is no way to form groups or to add people to their network. The network is often the most powerful part of any social media applications and it is a terrible oversight to not include it.
3. The training wheels don’t come off. This application is great for students who do not know of, or use social media tools. However, it sucks for those that do. They are not able to use their current networks or applications. Most people who have blogs would want to use their own blogs for a class. Or use their own social bookmarking service. These people (the ones who would be very useful in this environment as they could guide their peers and instructors in the use of social media) will feel alienated and resent having to use the Social Media Classroom. If an education-based social media application is ever to be successful it has to provide an easy way for experienced students to show others the tricks of the trade and for novice students to take the wheels off of the bicycle and use real tools when they are ready for it.

The bright side is that these are relatively easy things for the social media classroom to fix. Jim Groom is already taking care of the training wheel problem at UMW blogs with his BuddyPress, FeedWordPress, WordPress and mediaWiki experiments.  UBC’s OLT also has some of this in the works. I’m sure that Drupal is powerful enough to do the same for the Social Media Classroom. The network part simply takes adding some features and making it open… well that should be just flicking a switch.

The Social Media Classroom is a good service and I really wish that more people had taken Scott Leslie up on his offer of trying it out on his hosted server. If you are in education, check out Social Media Classroom. Despite all of my complaints above, I would still far rather use it than any course website that I have ever used (Blackboard or otherwise).  With a few simple, yet fundamental changes, it could just be a game changer yet.

Related from around the web:

http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2008/08/20/social-media-classroom/

http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=45674

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_social_media_classroom_a_new_platform_for_education.php

Screenshot of old theme

Some features to note are:

• Snazzy JavaScript slider. Why? Lets me show pictures without taking up too much space. One of my goals for this year is to learn to actually draw well in Illustrator and as is obvious, I have a long way to go and need a place/reason to practice.
• Proper archives page using the awesome wp_archives plugin. I can’t think of a better way to browse archives (aside from tags maybe). The default WordPress way of dates is stupid… they just have no context. One way in which I might change this page in future is modify the plugin so that I can annotate dates around important events in my life.
• Social Networks page. This has snippets from other places around the web that I haunt. I’m considering changing it in the future to be a bit of a life-stream, but am holding out for someone to come up with an exceptional plugin to make that happen.
• Better fonts.
• More pictures!

Again, let me know what you think in the comments below, any feedback is always welcome.

From sonson on Flickr... click on image to go to source

At CELC 2009 I was part of a panel of students that tried to answer the question: Personal Learning Environments. What do students think? The other students on the panel were Angeli and Zack. Cindy Underhill was the mastermind that brought us all together and did a superb job of directing things.

So what did us, the students have to say about Personal Learning Environments (PLEs)? I don’t know how much I can speak for Zack and Angeli (although we did agree on the majority of things), but here are my (heavily supplemented) answers to the core questions that Cindy asked:

1) What do we know about how students define personal learning environments?

For this question I avoided the (arguably defunct) definition of PLEs as an environment that educational technologists create for students to learn in (nobody even brought it up in the session). Instead, I defined it as “the environment in which I learn” (I think a lot of people are starting to agree with this definition as well). This includes a bunch of distributed technologies (a topic that I regularly blog about), but it also includes other things, like my classmates, my roommates and very big pieces of paper. This is important, so everybody in ed-tech listen up: you cannot create an entire PERSONAL learning environment for students! It is impossible. Every student has their own way of learning, every student evolves their environment continuously (look at how my tools have changed) and any one tool will be obsolete as quickly as any other piece of technology. Don’t despair though… there is still plenty of work for you to do. What students really need are small, lightweight tools to help them learn. The process should be as follows:

1. Find out where the gaps are in the student’s learning
2. Fill the gap with an easy to use tool.
3. Let them know it exists and show them how to use it (the part, in my opinion, that professors and educational technologists are worst at).

I didn’t get a chance in the session to really flesh that out… but there you have it. Give me the tools and let me use them to build my own environment.

2) How do PLEs contribute to the development of learning competencies?

With my definition above, this question doesn’t make too much sense. The reality is, that a PLE only really contributes to the development of a student’s “learning competencies” when they know what the hell that means. Or when they care. Students don’t often take the time to think about how their current study techniques are actually helping them to learn. They just study and pray that they pass the exams… which brings me to the next question…

3) Are PLEs effective without educational reform?

The answer is… only a tiny bit. My PLE is helping me to get good grades… not to learn. In fact, because of how education works, most students don’t have PLEs… they have “PGGEs” (Personal Grade Getting Environments)! At the end of the day, that is what most students really care about. Why shouldn’t they? As Cindy said in her follow-up post “We’ve structured the education system this way, it’s not their fault”. I am often way too busy memorizing things to actually learn them.  Learning takes time and effort… it also takes practice and conversation, it is much more efficient to get good grades by memorizing the textbook. This is not only a curriculum problem, it also has to do with the whole way degrees are structured. A Small anecdote for a recent event in my life:

After speaking to someone in Science advising I realized that I will not graduate from University if I do not take the second introductory (1st year) Physics course. I took the honours version of the first course and scored 87%.  I would dearly love to take a 4th year Psychology course on human behaviour instead… but if I do take it, I won’t graduate. The irony is that for me, the Physics course will be a breeze, I will ace it easily.  I find it so easy that it doesn’t interest me at all. If I took the Psychology course I would enjoy it a lot more. It would also be a lot more difficult and I would actually learn something new. It would contribute far more to my plans for the future than the Physics course.

Seems wrong doesn’t it? That same story is being told by countless times hundreds of thousands of students all around the world.  Then professors complain that the students are not interested in the stuff they teach. If you give students the freedom to choose what they will learn and emphasize through proper assessment that they are there to learn and not just there to get good grades, then students will be interested. I would bet my life on it.

Conclusion to that long-winded rant: Without educational reform students don’t care about learning, therefore their “learning environment” is severely neglected, making it ineffective.

4) What’s your role in supporting the development of personal learning environments?

This was kind of a double-edged question… one for us to throw back at the audience. My comment that I threw back out to the audience was this:

You cannot expect students to think about and improve on their learning if you are not modeling the behavior and seeing what works and what does not.

They may all have finished formal education, but in this information age we all have to continually learn and the better we are at it, the more successful we will be. My challenge then, to anyone who reads this post is:

Think about your own personal learning environment. Really dig deep and figure out what contributes most to how you learn. What distracts from that learning? Now, patch, build and experiment with your own environment to try and improve it. You will find yourself much better off for doing it.

If you are involved in education at any level and you cannot do what I have asked above… then you are really incapable of helping students do it as well.

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While attending the 2009 Canadian e-Learning Conference I was suddenly struck by the fact that there were two very different ways that people were trying to better education. There are simply two things that need to be accomplished before education is fixed. These are:

1. Access
2. Reform

Access is an obvious challenge, there are too many people in the world that do not have access to a good education.  Reform on the other hand is less obvious, but also necessary, even the best education that is given to the wealthiest of people is deeply flawed and missing something essential, that education has to be fixed.

Now, here is the problem, where do we devote the most of out attention in order to have the maximum impact possible? On the one hand, giving the uneducated even the most basic education seems to be the most important, but again, do we want to be giving them a deeply flawed education? However, we can’t ignore those that suffer while we slowly chip away at the entrenched problems that education currently faces.

Since both are necessary, the only real course of action is a two-pronged approach. Whenever dealing with one problem we need to constantly be mindful of the other. This can be done as they often go hand in hand. The best example of this has to be the open education movement. By creating open and free educational resources (as well as encouraging their re-use) we not only provide access (by lowering the cost of providing/consuming education) but also help with reform, as we allow (and encourage) educators to build on and refine what others have done… creating something much better, instead of continually reinventing the wheel.

Of course, open education is not the only way that we can marry these two goals. The one laptop per child initiative, efforts to utilize technology in the classroom, project-based learning and a whole host of other movements and projects are capable or bridging the gap between these two fundamental educational goals. All that it takes is some thought, creativity and awareness. I challenge anybody who is working to try and improve education to really think about which one of the problems they are currently addressing and to look for ways to augment their effectiveness by addressing the other problem.

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I was introduced to the phenomenon that is Seth Godin by my friends Rob Winson and Matt Corker. Seth Godin is one of the most revered marketing gurus of our time.

In this TED talk he talks about the importance of creating movements or “tribes”. He says that every now and then “someone stands up and says: this one is important”. This is a cause that I am passionate about and I want to organize people around me to help get something done. He ends with “go out and create a movement”.

Image via Wikipedia

My movement is simple. Let us help to fix education. Education is broken. There has to be a better way to teach human beings to contribute to society than what we are currently doing. Studying textbooks and tests are an incredibly inefficient way of learning. Humans have evolved to rely on education. We have stopped adapting physically and are using education to drive our adaptation. In order to continue to evolve and create the best society that we can, our education system has to evolve. The fact that things are being done the same way that they were done 100 years ago is crazy. Education has to be fixed.

Now of course I don’t know what the solution is. I don’t know how to fix education, nobody. I have some ideas, but they are not guaranteed to work. What is needed is for students, educators, parents and anybody else involved in education to experiment openly and to document their successes and failures. For people to realize that things are not working and for them to work to improve them. With critical mass, we can change things.

So, wanna join my tribe?

Related articles (on different sites)

• Seth Godin Talks Tribes (enquiringmimes.com)
• http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/12/expertise-and-p.html

photo credit: gwydionwilliams

So, it is that time of year again. Exams will rule my life as no thing ever should. Posting will resume on the 28th!

photo credit: Alex France

While studying for my recent test in Artificial Intelligence, I used Quizlet (still an awesome service) to create a deck of flashcards in order to help memorize all of the terms. As I was about to post the link on the class discussion board so that others could use it, I hesitated. The reason for my hesitation? I asked myself, “if the grade for this test gets curved? Would others using this possibly lower my grade?”

The answer to the question is of course yes. If the grade had been curved my helping the rest of the class would have hurt me. I posted the link in the end but am still disgusted by the fact that I even considered not sharing with others just to improve my own grade. I am even more disgusted by the fact that I have to make that choice. What if I was really into getting good grades (although we all know what I really think of grades)? Could I mislead people on discussion boards or during study groups in the hopes of bringing down their grades and increasing my own? How many students do this at the moment? Yuck!

So, the model of curving grades is broken. If it fosters malicious competition then it is not a model that should be used. The model cannot just be thrown out though, as it is very useful.It protects students from professors who have lost touch with just how difficult their material is. It helps to make sure the course grades from year to year are consistent. So how to fix the model?

My one proposal is to give students who work towards increasing the understanding of their fellow students some form of bonus grades. If a student can provide proof of the fact that they helped to increase the understanding of their peers then they should be rewarded in some way. Sharing is a good thing… not a punishable offense!

Update: The actual test that I took was not curved in the end. In fact it was a really well written test with all the questions relating directly to the learning goals of the course and most students in the class did really well. I still have many other courses where grade curving and scaling will be applied this year, but Artificial Intelligence isn’t one of them. 

Having clear learning goals in a course has been a great step forward for education.  In courses where this practise is used (and used well) students know exactly what they will be able to do if they successfully learn the material in the course. There is also a clearer view of what the practical requirements are for what they have to do to prove that they have learnt what they are supposed to learn.

The problem comes when you don’t really agree with the learning outcomes of a course. Now, I know that any course contains core material, but at the same time students should have the freedom to decide what they concentrate on. For example:

I am currently taking a course called “Numerical Approximation and Discretization”. The learning goals boil down to “understanding, selecting, utilizing, assessing and creating” different Numerical Approximation techniques.

Now, I will never have a career in numerical approximation. However, I might find it useful to understand and select techniques of numerical approximation in some future research that I do. I will probably never have to create my own technique so why should I learn how to do it? Or even more importantly, why should I be assessed on my ability to do that? Would it not be possible for us to be provided with a range of possible learning outcomes for a course and let us choose the ones that we want to pursue? Those can then be tested more rigorously. We would still be exposed to the other things, but will be allowed to concentrate on that which we are passionate about. I don’t think that this is that far fetched, for instance I already get to choose the courses in the program that interest me, why not have a choice over the goals within those courses?

I know that any form of granularity makes a professor or curriculum committee’s job much harder. However, in courses where assessment is already based around certain outcomes I feel it would not be too difficult to weight assessments based on the student’s preference in outcomes.

It all really boils down to this: Should students have some kind of input on their goals learning goals for a specific subject, or is that something that should only be decided by a curriculum committee?

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Although, with all the recent layoffs at Microsoft maybe 2019 might be a stretch.

Maybe it’s time to start backing Aubrey de Grey on his quest to help us all live to be 1ooo years old just so that we can all live the the cool future that is sure to come…

photo credit: carboila

While the new theme does still break a whole bunch of rules when it comes to accessibility and usability, I will be fixing those as soon as I can. The theme is chosen for its style and how I identify with it more than anything else. One of the key fixes is going to be a nice (really complex to code) JavaScript navigation. However, due to the fact that school is in crunch mode and due to my impending trip to Mexico, I will not be able to fix things up as early as I would like.

So there it is, new theme with many changes and improvements still to come. Comments, suggestions and all that jazz are welcome (especially as I am still on the fence about some of my ideas).

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It highlights what I hate most about the way the world conducts education.

They don’t show my last slide, but in it is a big shout out to a few people like Brian Lamb, Jon Beasley-Murray, Jim Groom, Scott Leslie, Gardner Campbell, Alan Levine and D’Arcy Norman, all of who’s presentations, tweets, blog posts, comments and plain old conversations have helped to shape so many of my ideas and beliefs. I think that this stuff really matters and it was your collective influences that helped me to see that.

Here is my talk embedded below:

To see more of the talks you can visit the Terry Talks Website.

I don’t understand how there can even be any validity to the “heuristic multi-touch” patent that Apple was just granted. Why? Here are the facts as I see it:

1. In order to obtain a patent you need to prove that you are the original inventor. To quote Wikipedia:

   Section 101 of Title 35 U.S.C. sets out the subject matter that can be patented:

   Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.

   This means that someone has to prove that they are the person who invented the technology. So for instance someone delivering a presentation on that technology to thousands of people means that there is no way that someone else can apply for the patent afterward.

    

    

2. The Apple patent states the following:
   

   A computer-implemented method for use in conjunction with a computing device with a touch screen display comprises: detecting one or more finger contacts with the touch screen display, applying one or more heuristics to the one or more finger contacts to determine a command for the device, and processing the command. The one or more heuristics comprise: a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a one-dimensional vertical screen scrolling command, a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a two-dimensional screen translation command, and a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a command to transition from displaying a respective item in a set of items to displaying a next item in the set of items.

    

    

3. The Apple patent was filed on April 11th 2008
4. Jeff Han gave this presentation (in front of thousands) at the TED Conference in February 2006:
     

    

    

5. Jeff Han’s presentation clearly shows all the things listed in Apple’s patent and was produced before the patent application. Therefore the patent is clearly invalid.
   
6. Patents have to be non-obvious.
7. Multi-touch heuristics are obvious. Here is a list posted by Craig Musselman on this post. As you can see multi-touch heuristics are very obvious and have been for a long time (well at least to Hollywood anyway):

   1. gene roddenberry Star trek

   http://www.trekcon.de/fedcon/2006/Intro/console.jpg

   2. Independence day docking tracking screen

   3. jetsons menu system

   4. AI (artificial intelligence) movie

   5. minority report

   6. children of men

   7. Predator

    

    

Am I wrong? This seems to be so patently obvious to me. Have I missed something? If I am not wrong, then I hope that Microsoft, Palm and even maybe Jeff’s lawyers are able to prove this and get the patent taken away.

Watching Jeff’s video about a year ago was a turning point in my life. It opened my eyes to the world of possibility that research into human-computer interaction can provide. My life’s goal is now to be a part of that, to be someone who helps to discovers new and intuitive ways to interact with computers. It is such a shame to see his inventions stolen by Apple. I agree that patents are necessary, but   really only for non-obvious things and only when you really, truly invented something yourself. Advances in any field are hampered if people and corporations do not play fair and I really feel that Apple is playing this one really dirty.

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photo credit: psd

Last week I attended a talk given at the Vancouver User Experience Group (VanUE). The speaker was Greg Bell and he was talking about how in order for really good software to be developed, everyone in the development process needs to have a good understanding of usability. It was a decent talk, although the 3rd year UBC human-computer interaction course had already taught me most of what Greg was trying to get across.

photo credit: impresa.mccabe

This lecture coincided with me installing Windows 7 on both of my computers and really loving it. Now, Windows 7 is not much different to Vista, except that it is faster and addresses quite a few usability problems. I enjoy it so much in fact, that I will not go back to using the current release of Ubuntu.  Of course, this realization has upsets as it hits home the realization that as Apple and Microsoft (and indeed any big tech company) are starting to see the great importance of usability and putting it at the forefront of their design process, open source solutions (which have just started to catch up to the big boys) might be left in the dust once again. This Article from the University of  Waikato highlights a few of the challenges faced by open source projects when it comes to usability, including (and in my opinion the most important) “Design for usability really ought to take place in advance of any coding”. This leads us back to Greg’s talk at VanUE. I feel that if usability and the importance of design is pushed more heavily in the introductory parts of Computer Science then open source projects can benefit from that usability knowledge being pooled. Until then though, I think that many open source projects are going to start falling even further behind their proprietary counterparts.

This however, does not apply to all open source projects. Those with enough corporate backing (like WordPress with Automattic and Ubuntu with Canonical) are able to forcibly steer their developers towards more usable interfaces. This kind of work has already payed off for WordPress, however, we will have to await another Ubuntu release or two to see whether their efforts to change the way that a much larger (and more traditionally minded) community of open source programmers will actually pay off.

photo credit: 4_EveR_YounG

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This term things are much better. I know people in every one of my classes and it has truly made a huge difference to the way I feel about school. I want to be in every class, not just because of what I will be learning, but also because of the great social interactions that I will be having. I am so excited for an academic term filled with social-academic connections that will do wonders for my grades as well as for my overall happiness!

My team from CPSC 344

photo credit: bionicteaching

At OLT we have decided to make our steps to develop the WordPress Multi-user platform into a university content publishing platform more prominent, so as to encourage sharing and collaboration. Before this we were all writing about our development on different blogs dispursed around the internet, but now we will all be putting our thoughts, ideas and code in one place. OLT WordPress Development  now lives on the UBC Blogs site at blogs.ubc.ca/development. It is sparse at the moment, but once all of the developers are contributing their work it should fill out quite quickly.

Now if only WordPress.com would get back to us on allowing us to put our plugins in the WordPress repository so they will all be on the main WordPress plugins page…

So what is the problem?

Swurl doesn’t give you a way to take things out of Swurl. Yes there is an RSS feed… but any lifestreaming app has that. What makes Swurl brilliant is not its ability  to aggregate your life… it is Swurl’s ability to make it visually stunning. Swurl provides no mechanism for taking that great visual feast and putting it in your own space. I guess their intension is for you to turn your Swurl into your primary web presence… but for those with established blogs (which is something that is highly likely for their primary audience of early adopters) the idea is laughable. 

I think that in order for Swurl to not get lost in the infinity that is the Internet it needs to provide a way for users to bring their beautful Swurl content into their own spaces, through embed code, or badges… or anything that works really.

Until that day comes though I guess I will have to be happy with links and being the only person who ever really sees my Swurl.

My Swurl: http://andremalan.swurl.com/timeline

1)  OneNote has failed me. It worked so well in my previous classes, but I am finding it useless at the moment. Why? Well the lectures are carried out differently. In my previous classes the PDFs required a lot of diagrams and annotations… OneNote handled that perfectly. However, at the moment all the PDFs that I get are pretty self-contained, the only thing I need to do is summarize and organize the material in them.

2) So in order to replace OneNote, I am using FreeMind  again. I think the reason that I didn’t enjoy FreeMind when I used it last year was that I didn’t have a system for icons and decoration. Now that I have a system (and another mindmap to remind me what my system is)! I am really enjoying taking notes on FreeMind. Below are some pictures of the start of my maps:

Here is my “cheatsheet” map telling what all the icons mean (as I come accross a new type of content I just choose and icon and add it to this sheet so that  don’t forget the mapping).

3)I’m probably not going to use the map on my wall, just due to the fact that I have the FreeMInd maps now. I might start printing them though and stick them up!

Fickle… I know. But hey, in order to succeed we need to try new things!

Microsoft Office OneNote:

I cannot find any note-taking software that comes even close to OneNote’s ability to keep notes for school. The three levels of navigation and ease of printing PDFs straight to OneNote (seeing as almost all professors insist on delivering their notes in PDF and note HTML) puts OneNote ahead of everything else. I would desperately like to use EverNote (because I can use it from more places than my personal computers with OneNote installed), but it doesn’t let me scribble all over course PDFs like OneNote does.

Mind Mapping:

 

Last year I tried out FreeMind as a means of organizing notes after they were taken. It was great software and worked pretty well, but I just didn’t enjoy using it. I think that the limits of current screen sizes is what makes virtual mind maps so difficult. I just felt like I could never see the full picture and the detail at the same time (which, I believe is something mind maps should let you do). So instead I went lo-tech and have taped a giant white piece of paper to my wall that I will use to map and connect all of my courses on. It is a new experiment, let’s see if it works! I might also resort to using FreeMind again especially for the guest lecturers that are going to be coming in to my Software Engineering Course as there won’t be any predefined lecture notes that I can annotate in OneNote.

To-do lists:

I tried Remember the Milk a few months ago and for some reason it just didn’t stick. I revisited it about three weeks ago and now find it invaluable. The big change I think is that you can embed your to-do lists everywhere! I have my list in my gMail, my iGoogle, my Google Calendar my iPhone and on my desktop. I can send tasks to it using Jott. I find that if my to-do lists are not in my face I forget to look at them. With Remember the Milk I can have a constant reminder.

Remember the milk lets you categorize items, add recurring items (a great one is “pay bills”) and lets you know when things are overdue. Remembering to hand in an assignment, or study for a midterm will be a whole lot easier with Remember the Milk.

Flashcards:

Most courses require some degree of memorization. Quizlet is so much better than any other online flashcard app that I have tried. It gained me plenty of marks last year and everyone that I know who uses Quizlet swears by it. It is easy and fun to use. It is collaborative. It has tests. It will soon have an iPhone app. Enough said.

Time Management:

Google Calendar is possibly the greatest tool ever. My life would be incomplete without it. I actually have over 15 calendars in there that I use to organize my life and keep track of the people around me.

Collaborative Projects:

I’m already using Google Apps for my work on the Student Leadership Conference, so I will probably use that (if my team agrees that is) in my Software Engineering and Human-Computer Interfacing projects. I’m still looking for a good collaborative way to do UML diagrams, seeing as how expensive Gliffy has become.

Pen and Paper:

For my Math courses I’m going the old fashioned notebook route. I really don’t see any other way (seeing as I don’t have a tablet PC). Hopefully the big mind map will compliment it nicely though and maybe help to make some connections between the three Math courses that I am taking.

I will monitor the effectiveness of all of these tools and update depending on what works and what doesn’t (or if I find something around the internet that blows one of these out of the water).

photo credit: drustar

One of the things that is starting to happen at OLT is that we are creating an increasing number of WordPress based websites. Using WordPress as a content management system is not a new idea at all, there are a ton of examples out there of WordPress blogs out there that have been turned into sites. There is however, a dearth of information out there on how to do it (there are some out there… including some in amazing detail from Alan Levine).

One of the things that I couldn’t find was a stable way to create a second level navigation that stays constant for every top level section. The problem with most of the solutions on the forums and sites around is that as soon as you drill down to the third level of navigation the second level disappears. As you can see at aboriginal.ubc.ca I was able to come up with a way to keep the navigation constant. Here is the loop that I had to create:

<?php
$secondAncestor = count($post->ancestors) -1; //figure out what level of navigation we are on, subtract one because we don't want to consider the top-level
if($post->post_parent!=0) //if the page is not a top-level category
{
echo '<h2 class="widgettitle">In this section:</h2><li class="sidebarlist">';
//the following lists children of second level ancestor of the current page.
wp_list_pages("title_li=&child_of=".$post->ancestors[$secondAncestor]."&    sort_column=menu_order&echo=1");
echo '</li>';
}
else //if the page is a top-level category
{
//listing only the child pages of the current section
$children= wp_list_pages("title_li=&child_of=".$post->ID."&  sort_column=menu_order&echo=0");
if($children) //this will stop it from displaying a section heading if there are   no elements in the section (for example on the home page)
{
echo '<h2 class="widgettitle">In this section:</h2><li>';
echo $children;

echo '</li>';

}
}
?>

This is the first time I’ve blogged code, I’m not even sure if it is readable… but here’s hoping. Basically I figure out what level of navigation the user is on and then list the pages of the current page’s ancestor… that many levels up (subtracting one for the top level navigation.

I am currently doing a lot of work on using WordPress as a content management system including coming up with plugins and modifications for using WordPress MU as a multi-site manager used purely for websites and not for blogs. Will blog it all once everything is stable and working.

Image via Wikipedia

Yesterday I was invited to attend a ceremony to celebrate Don Wehrung’s contribution to the International Student Initiative at UBC. It was an incredible ceremony and all the speakers did a fantastic job of highlighting what a great man Don truly is.

Don is the person who was asked to head the International Student Initiative when it started back in 1996. The goals of the program was to increase the number of international students at UBC. Don has been incredibly successful, around 10 percent of UBC students at the moment being international. One of the most important contributions that Don made (at least as it applies to me) is starting the International Leader of Tomorrow (ILOT) Award . He lobbied the university for money to provide what has become the most generous international scholarship program in Canada. At the ceremony Karen McKellin the Associate Director of the International Student Initiative told the Audience that Don risked his job to provide international scholarships at UBC. Some of the most important people at UBC including the Dean of Arts and VP Academic both told stories of how Don personally fought for funding on a case by case basis for ILOT winners. The dedication, care and selflessness that he has shown concerning less privileged international students is remarkable.

Don’s actions and initiatives have shaped almost every aspect of my life. The staff that he hired and the recruitment program that he developed have directly influenced how I see the university and what I have experienced. Damara Klaassen who came to my school in Ghana and showed me all the pretty pictures that sold me on UBC. Badre Hassani, who on my first day at UBC made me feel so completely at home, taking me into his office, serving me tea and even giving me an international calling card so that I could contact my parents. Karen McKellin who on my third day alone in this strange country/city/campus helped me to transport all of my possessions from one side of campus to the other. All these people, Don’s staff, their kindness and caring created a love and awe for UBC that lingers with me still.

The ILOT award that I was lucky enough to receive has allowed me to come here, to form this great life that I have. At UBC I have found new passions, friends and interests, all of which are incredibly dear to me. Everything that I own, everything that I do, all the relationships that I have made would not have been possible without Don, his staff and their never-ending commitment to my success. I lack the  necessary eloquence to truly describe just how grateful I  am to them for all that I have. That gratitude is there though, in overwhelming amounts for not only me, but also for the many other students that he has helped.

Thank you Don.

The first new development of my Summer was moving out of traditional dormitory style residence into Suite style residence… aka… an apartment. I now have a kitchen to cook in (an activity that I really need a lot more practice with), a lounge and bathrooms all to myself and my two roommates instead of an entire floor of 22 people. I also get to share this apartment with the lovely Miss Amy Tipton, one of my favorite people in the whole wide world.

The other great part about summer is that you just get to do more of the stuff that you should be doing during the year. I’ve got to spend a lot of time with so many friends that I never had time to hang out with while advising in Place Vanier.

I’ve been rock climbing and reading and watching movies (MacKenzie left me a great list of must watch movies that I am slowly making my way through). Being able to read for pleasure again is something that I am particularly happy about. I went to the second hand bookstore and bought an armful of books that I will soon add to my LibraryThing.

My Summer work term at OLT is also kicking into gear. All the students for this term have been hired and we are in the process of finalizing what everyone will be working on. I think my main focus will be on using WordPress Mu as a content management system… so expect some cool hacks and plugins to be written as a result. It is so exciting to think that when I start school again in the summer that there will be a number of UBC web services out there that I have helped to create.

A few weeks ago, I was asked by Julie Mitchel if I would be able to speak at the opening of the Irving K. Barber Learning Center. She wanted me to give a student’s perspective of what the Learning Center means to the students of UBC. I accepted, not really understanding what I was getting myself into. As the weeks went by subsequent meetings with Julie made me see that the ceremony was a lot more important than I ever could have imagined. For a great description of what the ceremony was actually about, Phillip Jeffrey wrote an excellent post here. I am still unable to express just how terrifying it was to speak after people like Professor Stephen Toope and Gordon Campbell. It went off pretty well though and I think my speech was well received. Pictures of the event (courtesy of Philip Jeffrey) can be found here. A video of it can also be found here (I talk right at the end).

It was an amazing experience and I feel so honored to have been a part of it.

Interests:

Running

Swimming

Hiking

Hockey

Ciara even adds breaks using dashes. I did the same and now my profile is no longer a jumbled mess… yay!

In fact it looks so good I’ll just include it on my about page on this site.

Most content will be stored in a wiki. Our wiki will be extended so that we can lock more sensetive pages for certain users.
In order to make our content semantic and to allow it to be remixed in ways that make sense we would use the SemanticMediaWiki plugin for our MediaWiki. A working example of this kind of wiki can be found here.This plugin allows users to define relationships between the article and its content. This data is then Collected and can be navigated in a semantic way. Lists are then also generated and dynamically maintained. For instance in Chemistry someone could define the property “has boiling point” for a certain element. The page for “is metal” will then contain all the elements that have a boiling point (like this example).

Once we have the Semantic MediaWiki the next step is to republish content from the wiki into other contexts. We are still working on exactly how to do this (what tools to use etc) but the basic concept is simple: Use some kind of feed to publish the content in another context (we will probably use WordPress as the new context for most of our services). Then periodically check the feed to see if it has been updated. If it has been updated, then update the republished content. This ensures that not only is content dynamic (like it should be) but it also means that it is searchable and that the server-breaking parsing of hundreds of feeds doesn’t happen all the time. Another step would be to build in a system whereby people who take feeds from the wiki are notified when the content changes (I know the watch page function does that already, but one time users that just wanted to quickly grab and republish some content would need to be informed of major changes to their content). This would create communities of watchdogs around more used content to ensure that vandalism is quickly curbed.

So that is the start. Content is dynamic and open on the wiki. It will be easy to grab content and republish it in other places. It will also have meta data that can used in the immediate term to navigate data and in the long term to drive applications like those created by the MIT simile project.

FriendFeed: Allows me to publish my life stream on my Facebook profile

Boost: Boost is a Firefox add on that allows you to change the look and feel of Facebook. Adds a bunch of cool functionality like “download whole album” and showing full size images when you mouse over them.

Nexus: Creates a graph of your network. Really interesting to see how you are connected to other people and how connected they are to your friends.

FBcal: Generates an iCal file of your upcoming Facebook events and/or upcoming birthdays. Seeing as my Google Calendar plans my life, I don’t know how I’ve lived without this application for so long!

from digitalbazaar

Still have no idea how. We will figure it out though.

So here’s how:

Now for where!

1) Content changes, therefore the content stored in repositories has to change and be updated when the source is updated. This is overcome by using a wiki (this has been Novak’s vision of content management for a while) that produces RSS feeds along with an aggregator like Feed WordPress that updates the repository when a feed gets updated (that feature is still buggy at the moment, but I will get to fixing that ASAP).

2) The second obstacle is the fact that RSS and JavaScript are not easily searchable (a must for a content repository or even an end user site). Republishing is a must until we find an easy way to index and search RSS and JSON.

So here is what it looks like (click on it for larger view):

This plugin eliminates the question that I’ve been asked plenty of times “what if a student who is not in the class adds themselves to a course blog?”. I think the answer is simple (and I think Jim and Brian would agree with me)… just delete and/or ban the user. However, in order to eliminate this barrier on implementing course blogs I modified the plugin to allow professors to enter a list of student emails. If the student’s email is in the list they can then add themselves to the list. This means that in conjunction with my Add to BDP RSS widget that Professors or institutions can decide whether anyone can add themselves, subscribers to the WordPress Mu system or only users that are in a specific list. This will now work for all three of the course blog types that I created.

Final, final update:

WordPress. org has started to show OLT some love and we are now rapidly publishing all of our plugins there. The new direct link to download sidebar add user widget is here and the plugin page is here.

Final Update:

Now that OLT has a place to house its plugins I will no longer be maintaining add user widget on this site. Instead it will live on blogs.ubc.ca. The direct link is here.

Update: V1.2.4

Fixed the problem with the plugin not reloading user’s status when they first add themselves.

Update: V1.2

Changed the way restricting users works. Now the admin can simply set a password in the widget control menu and users who know the password can add themselves to the blog.

Download V1.2.4

Download V1.2.1

Download V1.0

Installation:

Just drop into the mu-plugins folder.

Any problems/suggestions just leave a comment

Here is the Jist of it:

I have spoken to so many people who tell me that “Facebook is creepy”. One of the biggest taboos here is to say “oh, I saw it on your mini-feed”. People get all weirded out as if they didn’t know that one of the key reasons of Facebook’s success is the fact that it is so good at distributing your information to those who know you.

Jocelyn and Ciara (my resident Facebook experts) were lamenting that fact with me and we came up with the idea that maybe the problem is just the language that has evolved around Facebook. We put information on Facebook for people to see. We have complete control over who can see that information. It’s like creating a poster about yourself. It isn’t creepy looking at someone’s poster. Jocelyn and Ciara came up with some alternative names. They suggested something like “exploring” or “learning”. I think of it as “researching your personal social network”. Someone reading your profile is a good thing… it helps them to know you better. Someone reading your wall-to-wall with someone else is also a good thing. It’s flattering. Someone cares enough to read about you. If there is something that you don’t want people to read about you… you shouldn’t publish it and if you have to tell somebody something private… that’s what private messages are for.

So here goes, my attempt at a bit of helping out:

I’ve noticed that many of you haven’t changed your blogroll yet (although I see that Genevieve has added a bunch of things to her one). Your blogroll can really complement your blog, by telling people at a glance what you are interested in. It shows people what you are reading and gives background for your own writing. It also doesn’t have to simply be one long list. If you go to the “blogroll” tab in WordPress you will see that you can add categories.
You can then add specific blogs to each category. Here is a quick example of what this would look like:

There is also a link at the bottom of the “add to blogroll” section that you can drag into your browser so that when you see a site that you really like you can add it to your blogroll very quickly.

P.S. My actual blogroll is a terrible example. Seeing as I am not using WordPress at the moment changing it is a lot harder for me to do than for all of you!

Ghost Course Blog

This blog uses BDPRSS to output the content of an aggregated feed of the class. I created a widget to add to the list in BDPRSS so students can auto-populate themselves into the course. The other feature that I developed for this blog is an auto-populating class list (with the heading our class). The class list is the reason that I took so long to get these examples up and running. I spent a good chunk of this week working on an “add to blogroll” widget so that students could add links to their blogs in the sidebar. I tried many methods, but just couldn’t get the plugin to work. Gardner Campbell was paying a visit to UBC and while he was showing me some of the successes and issues that he has been having with his course blog Rock soul Progressive I saw that he was using the BDP RSS widget to display comments. A light bulb went on and I realized that I could simply tweak the widget to show a list of blogs in the course. Here is what you have to do:

1. Create and output format in BDP RSS that contains the same blogs as the one that is being used to display entries in the course.
2. In the “output format types” section select the radio button that says “list by sites alphabetically”
3. In “about the items” set “maximum items per site” to 1, check “print site names” and “only display item’s title”. Uncheck “print the item’s age”

in the “XHTML formatting” section, add list tags around “title for each site” and comment tags around “each item’s title”. (see picture )

If you add the BDP RSS widget for the output to the sidebar then you create a class list.

Spam Course Blog

This blog uses a spamblogger (I’m using feedWordPress because it actually updates posts if they are changed in the original feed) combined with BDP RSS to quickly create the course. Basically what happens is a feed aggregated by BDP RSS is fed into the spamblogger and feedWordPress republishes it. I have three reasons why I run the feeds through BDP RSS before I feed them to the feedWordPress:

1. I’ve already created my Add to BDPRSS widget to add feeds to BDPRSS. If I wanted students to add their own feeds to the spamblogger I would have to create another widget (and the widget would have to be specific to the spamblogger).
2. BDP works really well with a large range of feeds as well as with a large number of feeds. It acts as a kind of normalizing process, ensuring that each entry is parsed in the same way.
3. It allows for the auto-generation of a class list as described for the ghost course blog.

Communal Course Blog

This Blog is the simplest to set up and is probably closer to what most faculty members will imagine when they think of a course blog. I simply use the sidebar add user widget to add authors and the Wp-Authors widget to display the class list. Quick and simple. My example isn’t as good as the others simply because all of the content had to be written from scratch (or copy pasted from Wikipedia). K1, one of the work study students at OLT was kind enough to post a few items under different authors to show how this kind of course blog would look.

If there is anything that I am missing in my thinking here, please let me know.

Some notes on policy and where I’m going from here: As I have been making these ways for students to self-populate a course, the question keeps on coming up “what if people who don’t belong to the course add themselves”? At the moment the sidebar add to BDP widget gives three levels of permission, global (anyone), system (on the same MU system) and blog (subscribers to the blog). I will be working on changing the “add user” plugin to accept a list of people (I’m thinking student numbers or emails?) and check those against people who are trying to add themselves to a blog. This would mean that a professor could just paste a list in the control of the widget and not have to worry about people who are not in the class adding themselves. Then to close off the spam and ghost course blogs one would set the sidebar add to bdp widget permissions to “blog” and display the add user widget forcing students to add themselves as subscribers to the blog first so that they can be checked off against the class list before adding their feed.

Please let me know what you think.

Installation:

Just download, unzip, then drop the plugin into your plugins->BDPRSS folder and activate in the plugins menu.

Update: For some reason the control is not saving the options properly. I’ll fix it on Saturday morning.

Update: Version 1.2 released.

Changed the way that permissions work.

• Simplified things by only allowing registers users of the community to add their feeds.
• Gave admin the option of password protecting a blog so that only users who know the password can add feeds

Download V1.2

As always, let me know what you think of the changed.

Update: Version 1.1 released.

• Fixed subtitle bug
• Added control over what type of user can add feeds.
  • Global: Anyone can add a feed
  • System: Anyone on the Mu System can add a feed.
  • Blog: Only a subscriber to the specific blog that the widget is on can add a feed.
• Made it so that if a user cannot add a feed, they don’t even see the text box.

Download V1.1

That is the rub, when you open up a system like this, there are a number of ways of going at it, and having the ability to meet as many of them easily makes your life simpler.

I agree whole-heartedly with Jim. My judgment has been clouded lately by the Wp-o-matic’s ability lack of to update posts on the fly and the lack of a “delete all” button on any of WordPress’ pages. Today though, I saw the light. I now have a clear vision of three simple, definable, student driven course blog structures.

1. The ghost blog:

This blog is for the professor who doesn’t want to be confused by hundreds of student posts knocking around his/her blog. The blog simply uses BDPRSS and my add-to-BDPRSS widget (source code coming soon I promise) to populate a WordPress page with aggregated student entries. When another year of students comes, the old posts will still be there (or not, or in another blog that that the new blog links to), but as newer posts come in, the old posts will fall off of the bottom of the feed and the blog will have just new fresh content. No having to delete anything!

2. The Communal blog:

This blog is for the professor who wants to get stuck into the blogging experience with the students. This also probably the easiest (although I used to think it was the hardest) to implement. Jim reminded me of the “Add Sidebar Users” widget, which I will tweak slightly to make setting up this kind of blog super easy. Our new blogging service will allow students to sign up as just subscribers if they want to and with Campus Wide Login they won’t even have to remember their username. Zero work for the professor!

3. The spam blog:

Jim did great things with WP-o-matic. I found a tool that works even better for what we want to do (in fact, it is the one thing that I can now do better than the current incarnation of eduglu). FeedWordPress by Charles Johnson is another spamblogger that updates entries if they change in the feed. The biggest problem that I had with other versions of spam blogging tools was that they took dynamic content, republished it and then made it static. This might work for blog posts (which don’t generally change very much after they have been written)… but for something like a course syllabus or wiki feed (I’ll save that discussion for a later day) the content in the repository has to be continually updated. Otherwise we just have old junk entries lying around. FeedWordPress fixes that. FeedWordPress also has a nice “delete all” button that will get rid of feed entries that are marked for deletion. Best of all, the author has provided an excellent API and a bunch of hooks so that I can massage this plugin into doing my complete bidding.

I will be finalizing and testing these methods tomorrow and over the weekend and will hopefully have some concrete examples by early next week.

One last thing. These structures do not have to be independent. the communal blog can be combined with the spam blog (giving students the option). A ghost page can then be created in a different tab, feeding in content from other sources as examples and even points of discussion for future posts by the students. A ghost blog can be archived by simply feeding it into a spam blog and so on.

A year ago I didn’t care about education and technology at all. I really didn’t. One day I realized that UBC was missing some kind of events calendar. so many great things happen on campus that are under-attended because people simply don’t know about them. I contacted Tlell Elviss (one of the most awesome people I know) and she told me that she had just been contacted by a student who was also interested in the same thing. We got together and talked about it (along the way she taught me about this obscure piece of technology called RSS). Things evolved and now the University is in the midst of creating a usable tool.

In the second term of my first year I became immensely annoyed with the fact that WebCT locked away all the examples from CPSC 111 that I had used in the first term. Those examples could have helped me immensely in CPSC 211. I felt so utterly cheated, nobody told me when I came here that all the resources that I am given at University are equivalent to trial software… you can use them for a few months and then suddenly it gets taken away from you. I was angry.

Shortly after that I decided that UBC was missing something else. A simple way to plan your degree. Thousands of students do it every year using sheets and sheets of paper, crossing things out becoming really confused ending up spending an extra semester or year in university. I decided to build something in Java (the only programming language I knew back then) and after obtaining a quasi-working model I realized that the job was too big for just me. Instead, I created a simple template in excel that provided a clear way for students to map out their future.

That was what got the ball rolling. Over the Summer I work at UBC Student Development on LEAP and there learned the I am truly interested in educational technology. I can see so much potential for them to make student’s lives better. I started Get Teched Up as a result.

I spent my last term at school using as many learning technologies as I could get my hands on and following the exploits of many of the edubloggers. That is why I am really not deserving at all of Jim’s praise… I’m not new to this, I don’t understand eduglue because of some innate ability, I understand it because I’ve been thinking about it for almost half a year now.

On a more fun note, if anybody wants to play with my latest plugin, go here and add your feed into the box. Give BDP a few seconds to poll your feed(don’t worry about any error messages… it’s still in production) refresh and then look for your posts in the featured blogs list.
Enjoy…

Cheers

So here is the deal:

I wrote that we would allow professors who so wished to republish all of the student’s blogs into a class blog using wp-o-matic. I’m not sure if we should do that anymore. My reservations come from that fact that if it is republished in the Professor’s blog then I feel that the students loose ownership and that rings strange to my sense of morality.

Let’s consider a few hypothetical situations where a student writes for a class and his blog entries are republished in a class blog :

• A year down the road the student realized that what he wrote does not represent him and he wants to get rid of it. He can delete the entries in his blog, but they will still be saved in the class blog. He could of course ask the professor to take his posts off, but what if it is 10 years down the line? What if there were a lot of other students who feel the same way?
• The student decides to delete his blog. If the professor decides to publish the class posts (without attribution), the student has no way of claiming authorship over the post.

There are also hangups for the professor:

• If the professor accidentally resets wp-o-matic It will recreate all of the entries. WordPress doesn’t have automatic mass deleting of entries (I mean we could write a plugin for it… but plugins take time).
• If the student updates their blog then those updates are not automatically reflected on the class blog.
• If a student adds a strange feed (one with say 150 items regarding unsavoury topics) then if those are republished, it is a nightmare to get rid of them. If we just use BDP RSS, all it takes to undo the damage is delete the feed in the BDP RSS options menu

There are probably many more reasons why actually republishing would not be a good idea.

So it comes down to figuring out why we wanted to republish the posts and finding alternatives.

• Creating a repository: I don’t think at this point we are wanting to create a repository, this isn’t eduglu (as I may have wrongly alluded to in my previous post), it is a blog based course platform where student input is used. A repository of teacher resources should be done in an entirely a slightly different way.
• Keeping examples of what students did previously: Why not just leave the blog active and create a new blog for every year that links back to previous years. Not only would this give the students an opportunity of pulling out if they don’t want their work published anymore, but it would also allow them to continually update what they have and allows the course to have a history. Using templates and import/export It would be much easier to create a new blog than to get rid of everything from the old blog.

I’m wondering does this make sense? Or are we missing something? We will probably change our minds a hundred times between now and October, but for now I think this model is the most sustainable and easy to implement approach, for us and for the professors.

I’ve just come back from Northern Voice 2008, an absolutely phenomenal experience that I learned a ton of great things from (and will blog about it as soon as I have got the important stuff off of my chest…).

Probably the most important thing that I learned is that the work that Vince and I are doing for UBC Blogs matters to others outside of UBC. From reading posts on Brian Lamb Jim Groom and D’Arcy Norman’s blogs I knew that a lot of people were struggling with the implementation of a free, easy to use “course management system” based on blogs, but for some reason it just didn’t click that I could (and should) be helping everyone out by describing what we are doing. It was only when Jim Groom and Lloyd Budd both on seperate occasions excitedly asked the question “where are you blogging this stuff” that I realized that I have been neglecting my duty to the community by not outlining our solutions to the problems of implementing a university-wide blogging platform.

So here it is, my plan for using WordPress as a University wide blogging platform:

To start off, I’ve been mentally breaking the problem down into two parts. We are in a sense providing two completely different services. One part is that we are providing a platform and community for student bloggers. The other part is that we are providing a course management system for professors. Although both services are interlinked, they each have their own fundamental challenges.

1. Challenges in providing blogs for students:

   We want to provide students with a way to easily tell their story and with a way to find other students who are interested in their story. The second part is a little easier to do (seeing as umwblogs has already successfully done it), using plugins like muTags, List All widget and BDP RSS we are hopefully going to be able to provide enough ways for students to connect with each other when blogging and help them to easily form that community that so many bloggers crave. for a sneak peek here is the link to one of our many dev sites (warning., it is a dev site, so don’t expect it to look the same every time you stop by).

   the “easy” storytelling part is the true challenge. Despite what many professors might think, many students are scared of technology and the thought of having to learn an HTML tag or two sends many students running away screaming. Students are also scared of registering for too many services online, I know that we all have that fear… but many students find it crippling. Solving the “no HTML” problem was easy… we used WordPress. Solving the “signup” problem was a bit more difficult. We (and when I say “we” I mean Enej and John and Vince, with me shouting out ideas and debugging from the sidelines) created a plugin that integrates UBC’s Campus Wide Login (CWL) with the WordPress login. The process is a bit intricate so I will dedicate a full entry to it tomorrow.

   

2. Challenges in providing course blogs:

   .

   How to use WordPress to create a versatile, easy to use eduGlue blog? At Northern Voice, Vince, Jim, Brian and I met to try and figure it out. Here is what we came up with:

   The first step is to create a widget plugin that can be embedded in the sidebar of the course blog. That widget would have fields for students to paste their name, RSS feed and blog URL. The name and blog URL would be added to the course blogroll and the RSS feed would be added to the BDP RSS aggregator. BDP allows one to aggregate blog posts and display them in a fully customizable way (and touch wood… we haven’t been able to break it yet). A professor who wants a ghost blog (one that doesn’t keep the student’s entries when they leave) would simply output the BDP feed into the course blog and everything would work well. If the professor wants to keep a repository of all the posts written for the class by students, the BDP aggregated feed could just be fed into wp-o-matic the spamblogger that Jim has been experimenting with. Professors want this kind of flexibility and this solution provides it quite elegantly, only requiring a few simple plugins.

   This solution allows students to post in whatever medium they feel comfortable with, it allows students to keep their content and it stops professors from having to do anything technical when setting up a blog, aside from applying the course theme that we create that lets professors choose whether or not they want to keep their student’s content.

Whew… so that is what we are doing… in a very general nutshell.I will be elaborating in weeks to come, but for now if there are any questions, comments, suggestions, pieces that I can elaborate on etc let me have them and I will be sure to act on it.

I guess I should provide some background on why WordPress and I have any relationship at all. At the moment I am developing a blogging platform for UBC to replace weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca. This project will hopefully allow bloggers at UBC to connect with each other and inspire the creation of some rich academic and personal content. We are trying to do this all with WordPress.

At this year’s Northern Voice Conference Jim Groom (a true expert on WordPress who’s blog and creation have helped me solve so many problems with my own blogs) is thinking of hosting a WordPress anonymous session that welcomes all Wordpress lovers as well as “haterz”. I am neither, but I have started dreaming about WordPress so I guess I should really attend.

I do have one big complaint about WordPress that I need to get off of my chest now (and will probably continue to rant about at NorthernVoice):

I’m bitterly upset over the fact that WordPress trusts nobody! Without heavy plugins and hacking you just can’t do anything fun… no matter who you are. Admin has no ability to upload theme files and page templates. I know that security is an issue (especially in WPMU) but I just wish there was a simple way for an admin to say: “Ok, WordPress… I trust this user and his blog, why don’t you go ahead and let him use a tiny little embed tag…?”I know that there are probably plugins or hacks to do that… but they are not easy to find. Assigning “superuser” roles that don’t strip you of any advanced coding or limit you to pre-installed themes and templates would be such a great addition to wordpress… and would probably convert many of the “haterz” out there. I mean think about it… with that kind of functionality… who needs Movable Type?

My current project is recreating weblogs@ubc. It’s going to be based on Wordpress, with a lot of cool features, including CWL login. Soon I will also be working on UBC wikis so look out for posts about this in the future. I might even need some help from some UBC students in order to get some of the community based initiatives off of the ground.

My grades say no. According to my grades, I’m almost exactly in the same place that I was a before I got involved in LEAP and experimenting with learning technologies. However, I don’t think my grades tell the whole story. One has to remember that in addition to the fact that my courses were a lot harder this term, I am also a Residence Advisor, which seriously reduced the amount of time I that have to study. In fact, my grades staying the same speaks volumes about the tools that I have been using. I have used different technologies and techniques to make my learning more efficient and organized… and me keeping my A average is proof of that.

As for what was the most useful… here is a small synopsis of some of the things that I felt helped me most:

• Google Calendar:

  Due to all of my involvement outside of school, I would never have been able to survive without this. Google Calendar is super easy to use and maintain. I can plan my days and weeks, look back at what I have done and coordinate with other people in my team. Google Calendar takes paper agendas, chews them up and spits them out… it really, really does.

• Quizlet

  I raved about quizlet earlier… but using quizlet for exams blew my mind. There were literally pages on some of my exams which I just flew through… all the time saying to myself “Thank God for quizlet!” Quizlet is easy to use, collaborative… and above all… just a little bit fun. Of course flashcards can’t be used for all subjects, but for those in which it can be used… you would be a fool to not use quizlet.

• Microsoft Office OneNote:

  This was indispensable this year. It does such a good job of keeping all your notes in one place and eliminating the need to print out pages and pages of course notes. It would make your life almost paperless if you have a tablet pc, but even if you don’t have one… there is no better way to organize you school life.

Those were the “super useful” technologies. I used others like electronic mindmapping, but I feel like those still need a lot of work before the concept can revolutionize the way one studies. As far as mind mapping goes… next year I plan to just put up massive sheets of poster paper around my room and map in my courses as they go. Electronic mindmaps just don’t have the dynamic interface yet that would make them revolutionary.

So there we go, experiment over for now. School is done so I have eight months to find a whole new set of tools to help me get through it all again in September. I am on coop now at the Office of Learning Technology, so even though I can’t really test them… I can still write about the great technologies that I will be finding/building in my work.

The first change that may have been noticed is the different look of the site. No, it’s not permanent, it is just to replaced the mangled disaster that was my attempt to modify the “blue crush” theme in Movable Type. The current three column layout has to go… and probably the new theme too… but I will wait until December when I have time to breath and just play around with the CSS.

The second change I’m going to make is to actually start blogging regularly again and reenter the “blogosphere”. How could I not, seeing as my job now entails creating a UBC blog platform. I’m also working with Brian Lamb at the moment and if you take a look at his blog, you will see that one can’t really work with Brian and not blog. I’m also working with the UBC blog squad (as a mentor), yet have been completely shamed by the likes of Mackenzie, Lillienne and Genevieve who are all phenomenal bloggers.

I am also going to be broadening the scope of my blog, writing a bit more about residence life and life at UBC as well. I know it will look strange at the moment under the heading of “Learning and Technology”, but once I have the new UBC blogs up and running, I will be moving my whole site over to wordpress and with then do an even more massive overhaul. For now though, enjoy the new visuals and also the new content!

I find all that is said true… but how to fix it? It also makes no mention of random irrelevant assignments, one of which stops me from fully reflecting on this video. Hopefully I will have some time soon to actually delve deeper into what it means…

The answer has to be that I am not studying at home. The problem with me and studying at home is not that home has too many distractions (although it does have a lot), it’s more like I have found ways to use those distractions. Here at the coffee lounge the only distraction that my mind (aching to think of something other than statistics and chemistry) can find is to order more coffee or go and draw some money from the bank. However, if I had to do this regularly my mind would probably find many more ways to distract itself. I’m sure if I came here another 5 times, by the 5th time I would probably get very little work done. The moral of the story for me is… change it up! Having a selection of different study environments and using them is critical. Of course this is difficult for me, a person who is being paid to be in my room 4/7 evenings of the week. For those of you at UBC who do have more freedom, here is great list of places to go study! For those living on campus, remember the study caf is open every Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday (with AMS tutoring being available on Tuesdays and Thursdays).

For any students at UBC (living in Totem or Vanier) that are interested in getting a leg up before the exam season starts, Rebecca and I will be giving a presentation on how to use LEAP this upcoming Wednesday at 7pm in the Vanier commons block. We will also be handing out some great study packages. All are welcome to attend.

Will post later on how it goes.

Finally, here is the doodling of a kid who types all his notes out (me) and has no paper to draw on. I will probably bring ut a whole series once I get my graphic table that I will use to write down equations into oneNote.

Cheers,
Andre

1. Study what you’re interested in and if you don’t have a choice about what you study… become interested in what you are doing. At the moment I am doing fantastically in all of my hard subjects, but poorly in all the easy ones. Why? Because I am interested in the hard ones and don’t care about the others. I spend time thinking about algorithm efficiency and the way CPUs translate code… I don’t spend time thinking about redox reactions. One of the hardest things for me this term is going to be to forge an interest in Chemistry and Statistics.
2. Your tools are only as good as the way you work with them. I’ve been using things like mindmapping software and OneNote and they have really helped me assimilate information. Only however, when I worked at it. Just making a mindmap on statistics is not going to help you learn it. You have to interact with that mindmap (something the software lets you do) move things around, create new links etc. Without this extra effort you are never going to learn anything.
3. Go to class. I can’t tell you how much I have lost by just not being in the class (or not paying attention when in class). The amount of information that one learns in class is honestly a lot more than you would ever imagine.

Ok, agreed, that was not the most interesting post of all times, as soon as I get out of this midterm storm I will be able to write more riveting stuff.

Cheer,

Andre

P.S. More XKCD for your enjoyment: