Accidental Pedagogy

Librarians and metadata are toast

Via Stephen Downes, a link to a Dave Pollard post on 12 Tools That Will Soon Go the Way of Faxes and CDs. The list is fairly ho hum and obviously a bit tongue in cheek, but technology number 7 caught my eye.

Corporate Libraries and Purchased Content: The only people who really care about taxonomy and boolean search are librarians, and unfortunately they usually don't know enough about their employer's business to know what to do with the esoterica that requires such tools anyway. With luck, they'll learn the employer's business and morph into subject matter specialists, producing real research and analysis and adding meaning and value to information. But they won't need a proprietary library for that. Nor will they have to pay for the content they add value to much longer. "Information is always trying to be free", as Marshall McLuhan said a half-century ago. And they won't sell their research and analysis either: They'll give it to colleagues to use first, and later they'll give it away to clients to show how smart they (and their employers) are.

So, IANAL (a librarian in this case, though I am rather fond of some of them) but it does occur to me:
a. I dont care about taxonomy and Boolean searches but I do care that they help me find what I need and want to find much more quickly and effectively and
b. Most of the librarians I know (and I know some rather well) actually do do a lot of research, really good research and by so doing "add meaning and value to information."
c. Librarians were fighting about access to information long before many johnny-come-lately It and journalist types were. And they'll probably continue fighting longer.

I could go on......

Critique of Marc Prensky and digital nativism

My friend Alan Wolf sent me a link to an article by Jaime McKenzie in From Now On that makes a pretty searing critique of Marc Prensky and the way that his concept of digital nativism has been picked up by many of those writing about the differences between young and old in how they respond to and use technology.

Critiques of Prensky are way overdue. At a conference I attended Marc Prensky was introduced to a friend of mine who is a wonderfully insightful, productive (and I might add technologically hip) professor of instructional design. On being introduced the first comment out of his mouth was that she was "one of the fun suckers." Arguably his comment was teasing and intended as a joke but it always struck me that a lot of what he writes about is produced in the same sort of way. A shoot from the hip stereotyping based on a very superficial understanding.

Jaime McKenzie's article starts to demonstrate exactly how that is the case. His critique focuses on the thinly supported claims made by Prensky (that what we're seeing is a radical discontinuity) and the poor quality of the citations that Prensky does use to support his assertions. Mckenzie also shows how actual empirical evidence out there contradicts much of what Prensky is arguing.

But go read the article.

My one criticism of the piece is that it starts off strong and ends weakly and Mckenzie allows himself to engage in a little bit of techno-bashing that starts to sound a little like the somewhat hysterical critiques of technology use by the young that we read in convention media eg "Those who substitute FaceBook for face-to-face communities suffer many of the consequences....

We should not substitute one form of stereotyping for another.

On a side note Prensky's misuse of cites is clearly not that uncommon also among real academics.  In today's Inside Higher Education there is an article about some research done that shows that roughly 30% of citations are incorrectly cited or misrepresent the findings.

Nice Connotea collection on teaching and learning

My friend Alan Wolf sent me this link to a great collection in the academically focussed social bookmarking site Connotea on threshold concepts. It is a pretty handy source for anyone interested in pedagogy, teaching and learning.

Is the iPod Doomed?

A short and interesting post based on a report from the Diffusion group on how the iPod and similar devices are likely soon to be replaced by all in one phones which offer music, phone, email and web-browsing capability a la the iPhone. This makes sense to me. Apparently it also makes sense to the ABC who says she'll even buy me one if it makes it more likely that I will a. carry a phone, b. keep it charged and on and c. answer the bloody thing

Even at Oxford, you aren't safe on Facebook

One of the things I have been thinking about for a while is how we can educate students better about privacy and how best to manage their participation in social software sites like MySpace and Facebook such that what they post there they doesn't cause them long term harm eg losing them a place at graduate school or a potential job. A lot of sororities etc are starting to offer seminars on this but it would be cool to get a larger conversation going, a conversation that might include broader discussion of what sorts of expectations of privacy we should have and how technology constantly blurs those lines.

Anyhow, from Graham Attwell's Wales Wide Web a link to a newspaper article about how students at Oxford are getting busted by university authorities for indiscretions (eg being drunk and partying) the only evidence for which seems to be on Facebook.

And talking of Facebook. They are being sued by another company who claims that the founder (who used to work for them) stole the basic code and business model. Should be interesting. If the case is successful, or even a bit successful, it should have a pretty big impact on Facebooks market value.

Privacy in personalized Google searches

Via John Battelle's Searchblog a really interesting post about how Google's personalized search and how it can really compromise one's privacy.

Harvard Business Review new ideas for 2007

From Tony Karrer's eLearning Technology blog, Harvard Business Review on Breakthrough Ideas for 2007.

There are a number of interesting ideas there, and I like the focus on ideas rather than technologies (a la the Horizon and other reports). I found the first especially thought provoking. Duncan J. Watts concept of the accidental influentials (naturally I like that name ;-) here he argues against the two-stage theory of communication used by Gladwell and others where ideas and innovation spreads first to a few key individuals (connectors, or mavens or brokers as they are sometimes called. Instead Watts argues that its just regular folks who spread things through a community.

This has some real implications for how we work with faculty in technology in higher education. We have relied quite a bit on the two-stage models - use the impact of the early-adopters and the key influential faculty to get others to go along with new technologies and pedagogies. Perhaps we need to rethink this approach.

2.

AAP hires Jeffrey Skilling's former publicist to persuade us to pay more for scientific journals

BoingBoing this morning points to an article in Nature that quotes several emails between members of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and a PR guy that they have contracted with to help them dissuade people from being in favor of open access to open access.

The PR guy they hired was recently employed by for Enron CEO Jeff Skilling to help clean up the image the public had of him before he was convicted of fraud.

Read the article.

I found the following quote  particularly telling:

"We're like any firm under siege," says Barbara Meredith, a vice-president at the organization. "It's common to hire a PR firm when you're under siege." She says the AAP needs to counter messages from groups such as the Public Library of Science (PLoS), an open-access publisher and prominent advocate of free access to information.

UN Report and Case Studies on FOSS in the Developing World

Theres an interesting new report out from the UNDP (and, filed under irony, Elsevier) looking at the use of free and open source software in the developing world. As someone who did some time there I am naturally especially interested in the South African case studies, of which there are a few.

Online Shaming

An interesting article in the Wall Street Journal about online shaming for loud cell phone talkers, bad drivers and parkers and doggy doo louts. The sites they mention dont quite deliver on effective shaming -- I dont think there is enough going on. But it does seem to be a growing phenomenon. I wonder if we will see more of it.