LiveBlog: New Media Consortium

This is the unedited version of sitting in a conference with keynoter Larry Johnson of New Media Consortium. I hope to have an annotated version in the near future.

"The trick is not leading a horse to water, but to convince the horse that s/he's thirsty. They will find their own water." - Larry's dad.

I'm sitting in a conference and the keynote speaker, Larry Johnson, is talking about his work with the New Media Consortium. I'm trying a live blog just to see how it feels. Larry's upfront talking about using a machete to hack out the way early on so that others can come in behind him and build a road for the rest of us. In other words, he is in a position to search out new technology and then help others get to it and then create a way for all of us to use technology.

He's talking about how technology and that term, has changed over time. I remember seeing Larry at the CIT 2007 conference. He actually couldn't make it to the conference because of storms in Chicago or something, and so he came to us via Second Life. He had his avatar, looked a little like him give a keynote in SL with seats down in front of him where anybody could fly in to listen to his talk. Of course, it was open to everybody and so we'd see people fly in behind Larry instead of sitting down in front of him. We got to watch it on the big screen up in the front of the auditorium. Those in our audience who could catch a connection, would enter SL to talk with Larry directly while the rest of us watched the interaction.

I'm hearing much of what Larry's saying from his previous presentation. I'm guessing that many of the people in this room have also heard it. The only dif is that he's added a bit about being on/in Twitter and of course the little birdie sounds goes off while he's talking and we all laugh and smile and say isn't that cute. Not to sound jaded or anything but I could really use some new stuff. Not a talk on new stuff (I have a feeling I know what's out there or could find out), but a talk about how to apply all this stuff without losing any of the old stuff.

Maybe that's the wrong idea. Maybe we won't be able to hang on to the old stuff and still have the new stuff. Are we intellectually limited to only holding so much in our brains? In our minds?

Now Larry's talking about something I don't remember from the previous discussions. NMC has some new stuff out on the website. Using a community bookmark. One of their initiatives.

Initiatives

8 current initiatives

Emerging Technology

Dynamic Knowledge Community: trying to make it easy for people to share knowledge - find as many ways to share as possible

Each initiative is around 4 core competencies

Then each is linked to at least one project

Educational Gaming

New Scholarship Initiative - how you disseminate scholarly work, how do you even define it, how it affects the professional life of scholars, so many fields are moving so fast that things around scholarship are changing - peer review, how prestigious academic institutions handle things, etc.

"Call to Scholarship" - NMC asks universities to pose 3 questions. Try to narrow it down to a research agenda.

Look in del.icio.us for tags put out by the NMC, has to do with the Horizon Report. Horizon Project is looking for additional participants.

Ok, sort of losing my attention... watching my coworker check her email. We have a whacked out faculty member who insists that we fix things she's broken in her online course. This is rather frustrating.

Larry just talked about how there's a billion, a billion cell phones manufactured each year. Who is buying all these cell phones? What happens to the old ones? Repeat after me L-A-N-D-F-I-L-L. duh on us. we are pretty stupid. and we aren't teaching young folk to be much smarter!

The Hyper Cycle of Consumer Technologies (2007) or How Technology is adopted (Larry took this from Gartner research)

1. Trigger Technology
2. Peak of Inflated Expectations
3. Trough of Disillusionment
4. Slope of Enlightenment
5. Plateau of Productivity - until it gets to Walmart, we can only hope....

Here we go into SL. He gets a cabled connection, we are dealing with everybody trying to be on the wireless connection here in the hotel. Larry Pixel. According to his wife, sexy, he says.

So the NMC has a pavilion out on SL and each of the initiatives has a screen.

Project: Grassroots video by students, faculty, on YouTube, without any controls. Queensland U. no more streaming media servers needed any more. just go out and upload to YouTube. Encoded on the fly, Flash, stored on their servers.

Also on the new "Horizon" is Collaboration Webs. Good news for colleges. Good stuff, Google docs - NEVER BUY MICROSOFT products ever again!! Of course, my brother works for MS, so I won't say that too loud. He's working on business side apps, but still... I want to know he will be able to put my nieces and nephew through college when their time comes in 10-15 years.

Data MASHUPS - take two things that are very different and mash them up together. Take siesmic data from petro companies and put it together with something... don't know... lost where he went with that. But I think these mashups are that 3D thing databases were supposed to do. Only it sounds like it is in 4D - add an intellectual/critical thinking component.

Mobile Broadband - broadband networks are fueling an entirely new way of communicating - not just auditory 2 way communication over cell phones. In Japan, any cell phone must work with any network. the GSM networks are being built as we speak.

Collective Intelligence - is about datamining, search. Also about explicit kind of intelligence through tagging. WE ARE GOING TO HAVE TO RETHINK OUR DEFINITION OF WHAT AN EXPERT IS!

Social Operating Systems - google, facebook, fundamental change in the way we see... I wish I could rewind Larry, I lost what he said. Something about XONDI. Social network (your matrix I guess), having to reenter your social network everywhere you go. Social graphing. Now this sounds very new to me. I'll have to check it out. Make your "graph" visible or invisible to others. I guess it is a way to look up info about somebody.

What is really cool, the whole dynamic about how technology is not about isolation, it is about social networking. Going global.

Questions from the audience: the issue about security/privacy and putting your face out on facebook. Old school - email. Zombie - new school. How to get past the fear that faculty have about security.

When Bullying is More Than Name Calling

In my online graduate course at University at Albany, we had a discussion about "digital bullying" among grade schoolers. It seems that bullying just went online along with just about everything else young people do.

My thinking, which I shared with my classmates, was that sometimes young people just have to work things out for themselves. They have to figure out how to best handle a bully. Why not ask the child/young person who is being bullied how they wanted to handle it.

That seemed like a way to handle things, let the person in the position of victim take control and find their own internal control and power. It seemed fine that is, until I watched CNN and learned of the death of a young gay boy in Oxnard, California.

On February 12th, Lawrence King, 15, was shot to death by another boy, in the middle of the day in the middle of a class. Lawrence King was, by the sounds of it, in the process of coming out at school. A brave and scary thing for an adult, let alone someone in high school. According to the LA Times, King and the murderer and a group of boys had a verbal confrontation the day before the shooting.

To those of us living as lesbians, gay men, and transgendered folk, it is not a big surprise that gay teens are harassed. LGBT youth face verbal harassment and physical violence on a regular basis at home, at school, in the streets.

Neil Guiliano, president of the Gay Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) said of the crime, “This senseless act of violence is deeply disturbing and a reminder of the climate of harassment, bullying and violence that so many gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students face across the country.” said Giuliano. “It is imperative that the media shine a spotlight on bullying, violence and hate crimes based on real or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity. Calling attention to such issues is critical if we are to address the hostile and sometimes dangerous environment that LGBT students face all too often.”

It is too easy for me to forget what LGBT youth go through in high schools and colleges across the nation. Standing guard, being vigilant, remaining in a state of hyper-awareness because those who want to do you harm will wait, will lay traps. Who could focus on learning in such a state? What is academic freedom, if not the freedom from the threat of violence?

I was glad to see that the DA prosecuting the King case did not hesitate to say that what had happened was a hate crime. It is only too bad that the penalty is an extra 1-3 years. And some may say that is better than nothing at all.

We get what we settle for. It is time to stop settling for less than what we deserve.

Freedom from violence, harassment and threat of violence should be at the top of the academic rights agenda. It should not be something we have to fight for, but it is. Along with the rights of LGBT people not to be discriminated against in employment, housing, insurance, or any other right or privilege given to others.

If you are a resident of New York State, I hope that you will join with other LGBT people as we take a day to speak to our legislators about the rights of LGBT people. Included on the agenda is the protection of young people in our schools. It is the right of all young people to an academic environment free of violence simply because of who they are beginning to become. The date is April 29, 2008.

If you would like more information about going to Albany and meeting with representatives of ALL people, visit New York Pride Agenda about Equality and Justice Day.

One last thought - since this is an election year and the unprecedented is taking shape - picture if you will a young person, free of the threat of violence and harassment, free to discover who they are, growing up to become our first transgender or lesbian or gay president of the United States.

That can only happen if we start act now to make sure our youth grow up with both their intellect and concept of self fully intact.

Stumbled Upon

So you found your way here. Is that good or bad? Good and bad of course being twins and not opposites. You should read some more. More of this blog and also more Thich Nat Hahn. I'm tellin' ya, the guy is Mr. Insight. That is strictly meant as a compliment (or is it complement? There's that twin thing again). There are more connections than meets the dendron!

Welcome to Synaptic Leap where I will try to be inspired enough to write something that you would actually like to read.

The purpose of this blog is to leap the gap in thinking and learning. Mostly though, to record my progress as I learn about learning and about learning about me learning to learn. About learning. Is there such a thing as meta-metacognition? Or would that be meta (raised to the power of 2) cognition? Fascinating, simply fascinating.

The name Synaptic Leap came about as I contemplated some of the new cognitive neuroscience ("new"-roscience) research and how we deal in a practical way with learning, especially in holding pens, er, I mean schools.