The theme of community was discussed at length on many occasions this semester. Drawing on the readings I have developed my sense of community. I view a community as a group of people with something in common who interact with each other. There is an infinite number of communities in the world, several to which I belong and many more to which I do not. I wrote about belonging to many communities here, describing formal and informal membership. In a community, people come together for a purpose. For
this course, the class members formed a small community, a community of
practice. We met ever Thursday to
discuss disruptive technologies and the assigned readings. We blogged on a weekly basis and used many of the new (to us) technologies to interact both inside and outside the classroom. Participation in the community was mandatory at some levels, but optional at others. The extent to which one participated determined how much the person benefited from membership in the community. The mandatory blog entries were one level of participation. Twitter use was optional, but strengthened the bonds between community members due to increased interaction of a more personal type. Facebook games also served to bring members of the community together even more. Wenger wrote about the claims processors community of practice. The employees became members when they started their jobs. Their community, just like others, featured boundary objects. Such boundaries are reduced by brokering objects that can form links from one community to another or one person to another community. In the community, the claims processors’ level of involvement increased as their experience increased. Their status evolved with time and titles and roles changed with promotions. The different statuses of members of the community are highlighted very well by Brandon. He compares Cole to Paul Revere, an influential member of the community whose actions and opinions will sway those of other members. Their support is critical to speed up the diffusion of information, which I blogged here.
Identity
The class has been split over the issue of identity. Does a person have one identity or many identities? Who defines one’s identity? I think that there are absolute and relative identities. I am a unique individual with my own DNA. No one else on earth is exactly the same as me. The total picture is my absolute identity. The people that I encounter and those who read or hear about me form identities of me that I would consider relative identities which are perceptions of my absolute identity based on the lens through which they viewed it. As I wrote earlier I am many things at once. As Wenger writes, “In practice, we know who we are by what is familiar, understandable, usable, negotiable; we know who we are not by what is foreign, opaque, unwieldy, unproductive.” Though I used the word absolute earlier, it is subject to additions and revisions because it constantly evolves as I grow older and gain life experiences. It is the nexus of all the individual trajectories on which we are. All of the individual trajectories influence one another for better or worse. This Army poster shows the same people in side by side pictures. On the left
everyone is wearing civilian clothes while on the right they are wearing
military uniforms. The photos are captioned citizen and soldier. Each
person in the picture is both, but not all people view them that way. To people in the Middle East they would be seen as a military
presence. While walking in street clothes domestically, they would
likely be seen as just other citizens.We choose to align ourselves with other people, groups, parties, and communities. Identification with one community
does not necessarily have a bearing on one’s identification with other
communities, though it could. As I blogged here, we are people who think in different ways, viewing some things microscopically and others macroscopically. Wenger states that alignment involves directing and controlling of energy. Our identities are socially organized and
dynamic, allowing us to invest energy to work to improve them.
Design
Design is the theme that received
the least attention in class, but it was what drove the class and interests me greatly. It
was the blueprint for this grand experiment of a course. Scott
and Cole designed the course and wrote the syllabus with certain plans
in mind. This design served as a reification of their ideas and foresight. Design provides a framework. The course drew upon previously existing Penn State infrastructure and internet applications plus ones that were newly set up for the course. The instructors chose to utilize the Blogs at Penn State as the mode of submitting assignments. They introduced the class to social ratings site, Pligg, they had set up for rating and commenting. They introduced us to Twitter, a microblogging tool that allows users to update their status for followers to see. They designed the course to have the students learn, explore, and present new technologies. A conscious decision was made to design the course with student presentations for the last several weeks of the semester instead of instructor presentations. for all teaching design plays a major role. Considerable effort is put into designing courses and the lesson plans throughout the course. Designing curriculum material is no trivial matter as I have learned in a project I have been working on throughout the semester.Each of the technologies presented features its own design. The designs reify the ideas of their creators. The blogs were designed to allow users to publish content on the web without having to learn any of the code. Penn State chose to use Movable Type as the platform for its blogs. The tabs and subtabs at the top of the page are arranged and worded in such a way to help users work with the technology as efficiently as possible. Create, manage, design, and preferences are word choices. A house icon, circular arrows icon, and a web page icon represent home, refresh, and view site. The designer decided to use icons instead of words for those tabs. Each member of the class personalized a blog, choosing a theme and arranging content in a specific way. The blogger had the option to enable comments or keep them disabled. Such ability was another part of the design of the blogs.The Pligg site’s design facilitated discussion and comments. All blog entries were aggregated on the site and one could vote for the posts of interest. The highest vote-getting posts moved to the top of the list, becoming published news after a specific number of votes, chosen by the designers of the site to be 3, had been received. Below each post was space for commenting. Replies accumulated in order with the first ones appearing closest to the initial post and the most recent ones at the bottom. There was an option to reply to a reply that led to comments accumulating in the same order. The design did not enable one to reply to a reply of a reply. The design also used PSU access accounts for author names instead of the author’s actual names. This led to a degree of anonymity of authorship to members of the class in the beginning of the semester and to outsiders throughout.Twitter is designed as microblogging platform that is akin to AIM away messages. Users create id’s and can create small profiles about themselves. They are limited to 140 characters for their status updates. They can make their updates public or limited to approved followers. These options are components of its design. It was designed to be very simple, but open enough to permit new applications to be created to enhance the twitter experience. As the semester winds down I am able to look at design with hindsight and see design elements in a new light. I learned the importance of tagging, a
design of web 2.0, because I had not done much tagging throughout the
semester. With tags, it would have been much easier to pull up my relevant old posts, like this one, which addressed the design of multi user domains in the early stages of the internet that have influenced the design of subsequent sites and MUD’s such as fantasy sports. Good design provides convenience and allows for improvement; poor design just creates plenty of problems. I feel the design of the course helped me learn a lot of new technologies which I will certainly continue to utilize for personal use and for teaching where I see fit.
id+
Wenger’s discussion of identity used several examples that I would have used, making it more understandable. Identification with one community does not necessarily have a bearing on one’s identification with other communities, though it could. In the New York area, people are typically fans of the Yankees and Giants or the Mets and the Jets, however they can have all different religious affiliations.The issue of imagination is one that comes up in several contexts. In the story of the stonecutters, one of them sees his work as part of something greater while the other sees his work as something great. Contextualization provides insight into one’s perspective. There are plenty of unsuspected possibilities looming on the horizon, That is both comforting and disconcerting. We have dreams and visions of what our lives will be. It is nice to know that such dreams can be exceeded, but we have to accept the possibility that things could go horribly awry.
In a classroom context, teachers seek to engage students, but can
benefit from some disengagement of their own by imagining themselves in
the position of their students from time to time.Concerning alignment, we do what it takes to play our parts. Wenger states that there is directing and controlling of energy. When he writes about alignment creating communities and cites circumstances that create strange bedfellows, I immediately thought of something I often say, “there is no greater uniting force than a common enemy.” This is an approach some teachers dare to take in an effort to get their classes to come together. Our identities are socially organized and dynamic, allowing us to invest energy to work to improve them. Web 2.0 technologies permit us to “create wider, more complex, and more diversified economies of meaning and communities” and expand our identities. Hopefully such a spread can help dispel stereotypes, which when combined with imagination can prevent a great deal of progress from being made.
#tltsymposium2008
Saturday’s Symposium was a great learning experience. Lessig’s keynote address drew very interesting parallels to the past, with the one about Latin standing out for me. When the masses did not speak the same language as the elite, each group became irrelevant to the other. As educators, we need to recognize where the students are coming from and work with them rather than ignoring their backgrounds and forcing our material upon them. I think I felt personally challenged because I felt like the giant Uncle Sam finger was pointing directly at me. The sessions that I attended were very informative and taught me about new technologies that I am already telling others about (zotero). The conference was designed to make people aware of what is already happening at Penn State. Drawing speakers from the branch campuses highlighted the university-wide prevalence of emerging technologies. Building in time for questions and leaving plenty of time to walk down the hallway facilitated face to face conversations that let me walk away with most of my questions answered. The designation of a hashtag for the symposium allowed the community members to share their updates with each other. This helped for all the tweets people were authoring throughout the day. I had heard about a conference at which people tweeted and had a lot of activity, but I grossly underestimated the volume of tweets that would take place over the span of eight hours. I felt that I got more out of sessions when I was able to read the realtime thoughts of others in the room. The backchannel communication also permitted me to find out what was occurring in the other rooms and provided me with laughs on several occasions. Many people made twitter contributions, but a lot of people did not – was there another backchannel or were they trying to avoid possibly being considered “rude”? The tradeoff to audience members (micro)blogging during presentations is a lack of eye contact and uncertainty for presenters. The community came together throughout the day. People were having face-to-face conversations and technology facilitated conversations. On some occasions I would speak to the person next to me, on others I would electronically send my thoughts through a tweet or a google doc. I found myself reading updates from people I have never met and vice versa. What mattered was that each person was at the symposium and communicating about the symposium. The community seemed to be largely faculty, which makes sense because they are the ones using the technology at Penn State, but I think a larger student presence would be nice. I think undergraduate education majors and minors should be encouraged to attend to provide an additional viewpoint for the benefit of all and to make them aware of new technologies for potential use in their future classrooms. Thank you to those who put the symposium together and those who presented. Thanks to Cole and Scott for having us attend.
The Professor as Open Book – New York Times
This article talks about professors expressing themselves online and letting the students know more about them as people.
Geek Love – New York Times
obituary for one of the creators of dungeons and dragons – worth reading
Who am I?
Sorry for the delay – my whole response got deleted yesterday so here is an abridged version today.I am a son, brother, friend, student, teacher, and many more things because of my roles within various communities of practice. There are plenty of things that I am not because I do not belong to certain communities of practice.Wenger writes:”In practice, we know who we are by what is familiar, understandable, usable, negotiable;we know who we are not by what is foreign, opaque, unwieldy, unproductive.”It is what we do and what we do not do that shape who we are; our participation and non-participation determine our identities. The notion of identity as a nexus is the one with which I am most comfortable. All the identities and trajectories we have in different settings all influence one another because they all affect us an individuals. There is mutual exclusivity or pure fractioning possible. Our identities as teachers are influenced by our identities as students because we can identify with what the students are experiencing. Our identities as younger or older teachers are influenced by older or younger teachers through inter-generational interactions. The conversations provide history and new insight. In this course, our community of practice, all sorts of interactions between members help guide individual trajectories in different ways.
flickr
My photo album is a collection of pictures that represent various uses for the noble gases. This would be shown during a lesson about groups of elements in a high school chemistry class. Similar albums could be created for any group of elements, or even individual elements. This allows teachers to provide pictures when the textbook might be lacking or not up to date. http://www.flickr.com/photos/24009338@N07/sets/72157603994198613/
put on your airline wings pins
We are part of a pilot program, which has been referred to numerous times as a grand experiment. Adoption of technology on a large scale should not be done without first evaluating it. Such an approach applies throughout marketing. How many times have you been given a free sample to eat, drink, or use? After trying the sample, you make a decision about whether to buy some. Right now, we a trying numerous types of technology and seeing how they benefit or detract from learning in a real class example. People at other institutions (from what I’ve been told) are following the progress of this class and awaiting (anxiously?) the results. Our local example will serve the global community.When it comes to the K-12 environment, fear of possible negative outcomes should not preclude all possible positive outcomes. The debate over the use of YoutTube sounds a lot like that over genetic engineering in the 1970’s. Pilot studies ought to be launched to learn what actually happens given the possibilities. Externalities can be observed and reported. Limitations can be set, but the human element should be added to assist the computers so that students can do research on breast cancer and engage in other legitimate academic pursuits. To continue the use of cliches – I think “to each his own” and “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” are quite applicable in determining which metaphor one uses for technology. People will select a metaphor for a specific example based on their personal understanding and perceptions. When they feel in control, technology can be considered a tool. When they don’t know how something works, but just that it works, they can view it as a system. I think different members of the class probably have different thoughts of some of the different technologies we have explored thus far this semester. As one of my professors had in his email footer, “Change is inevitable – except from a vending machine.”