After a very confusing vote on a local school bond, I’ve stepped down from my old project Blue Hampshire, to start a local information site, called Citizen Keene.

There were an number of other reasons for stepping down — as a newly promoted Director at a public college, I wanted to move away from being a prominent figure in partisan politics. Additionally, the workload of running Blue Hampshire was significant, and did not fit into my new job.

But those are more reasons for stepping down from Blue Hampshire.

The reason I started Citizen Keene is I felt the flow of local information was broken. Talking to people after the school bond failure, I found time and time again that the people who hadn’t voted, or had voted in a way that they later regretted once they learned the facts — these people were often good friends with people who had the facts.

But for whatever reason this information just was not transmitted.

And it was significant information. Almost no one understood what the rejection of the bond meant. The rejection of the bond didn’t save money — because a stay against enforcing certain code violations at the current middle school was predicated on the new school being built.

The upshot? The town will now spend $7 million dollars on band-aid fixes in the next two years, the school auditorium and industrial arts wing will close for at least three years, and current 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders will likely spend their middle school years in portable trailer.

The turnout was 16%. The bond failed by 24 votes. Now that the vote is over, there’s no end of people that didn’t vote or voted it down who believe they weren’t provided the information they needed to make the decision. No one would have voted this way had they had the facts.

It’s easy to look at that and say, well, you should have just done your homework.

But I’ve never seen that response solve anything. On the whole the amount of time that people are willing to put toward these things is constant. If you can get that information to them more efficiently you can change things. But you’re not going to shame them into spending more time to become informed. It just doesn’t work that way.

So Citizen Keene isn’t about technology, or Facebook coolness, or IPOs. It’s about the fact my 3rd grade daughter is likely to spend her middle school years in a trailer while they fix fire code issues in a school the town had been trying to move out of since 1968. And that’s going to happen because information flow is broken, and I want to fix that.

In coming days, I hope to explain why I chose the technoogy I did to build the site, and what the relation of this experiment is to academic technology and online communications. So please stay tuned, even is this doesn’t seem like it ties into the traditional subjects of this blog. It all ties in I promise, and will be useful to everybody from professors to college web editors.

But it does start with my daughter’s future, and it has a deep meaning to me. That’s step one.

It’s important sometimes to realize that while we are blazing new trails in mainstream education, we are really dealing with the dam of industrial culture finally breaking.

We’ve been paying attention enough to know why it’s breaking. We deserve credit for that.

In fact, we’ve been waiting for it to break.

But the ideas that fuel me (and I think possibly you) aren’t as new as most of my colleagues think. What we are looking at is the transference of a hacking culture to a mainstream population. That’s the revolution in a nutshell.

Educational institutions need to turn out more hackers. Because it’s the hackers, not the planners, that will save this planet.

So while the idea of the “hacker next door” might be novel to our co-workers, the culture is warmly familiar to us. It’s decentralized, it values recursion, iteration, intervention. It sees consumer/producer divisions as quaint. It sees five-year-plans as authoritarian and unproductive. It sees the Machine as an extension of Self.

In a way, it was all so predictable.

But I went back and reread Stewart Brand today and, well, if you haven’t read his early stuff recently, treat yourself to it. It will take your breath away. The wisdom of crowds, planner vs. hackers, machines as community builders, it’s all there.

From Stewart Brand’s brilliant 1972 article in Rolling Stone on the playing and creation of SPACEWAR:

Where a few brilliantly stupid computers can wreak havoc, a host of modest computers (and some brilliant ones) serving innumerable individual purposes can be healthful, can repair havoc, feed life. (Likewise, 20 crummy speakers at once will give better sound fidelity than one excellent speaker - try it.)

Spacewar serves Earthpeace. So does any funky playing with computers or any computer-pursuit of your own peculiar goals, and especially any use of computers to offset other computers. It won’t be so hard. The price of hardware is coming down fast, and with the new CMOS chips (Complimentary Metal Oxide Semiconductor integrated circuits) the energy-drain of major computing drops to Flashlight-battery level.

Part of the grotesqueness of American life in these latter days is a subservience to Plan that amounts to panic. What we don’t intend shouldn’t happen. What happens anyway is either blamed on our enemies or baldly ignored. In our arrogance we close our ears to voices not our rational own, we routinely reject the princely gifts of spontaneous generation.

Spacewar as a parable is almost too pat. It was the illegitimate child of the marrying of computers and graphic displays. It was part of no one’s grand scheme. It served no grand theory. It was the enthusiasm of irresponsible youngsters. It was disreputably competitive (”You killed me, Tovar!”). It was an administrative headache. It was merely delightful.

Yet Spacewar, if anyone cared to notice, was a flawless crystal ball of things to come in computer science and computer use:

1. It was intensely interactive in real time with the computer.
2. It encouraged new programming by the user.
3. It bonded human and machine through a responsive broadband interface of live graphics display.
4. It served primarily as a communication device between humans.
5. It was a game.
6. It functioned best on, stand-alone equipment (and diarupted multiple-user equipment).
7. It served human interest, not machine. (Spacewar is trivial to a computer.)
8. It was delightful.

In those days of batch processing and passive consumerism (data was something you sent to the manufacturer, like color film), Spaccwar was heresy, uninvited and unwelcome. The hackers made Spacewar, not the planners. When computers become available to everybody, the hackers take over. We are all Computer Bums, all more empowered as individuals and as co-operators. That might enhance things … like the richness and rigor of spontaneous creation and of human interaction … of sentient interaction.

Treat yourself, and go read the whole article now. It should be required reading for anybody going into learning technology.

Finally got around to listening to this. It’s good. It’s nascent, but maybe that’s why I love it so much:

http://learnonline.wordpress.com/2007/09/20/10-minute-lecture-george-siemens-curatorial-teaching/

It’s not a total solution to the sage-on-the-stage v. guide-on-the-side but it’s a great rethinking, and it’s very practical to implement.

It’s also refreshing that Siemens approach is not kick-against-the-pricks* (an approach I’m often guilty of) — his approach respects that there is not here a complete historical break with previous teaching, but an accenting of things that were always a part of good instruction, and now need to be accentuated because of the realities of a highly networked world.

*Note on the phrase “kick against the pricks”: Since it seems this phrase is less known than I thought….”Kick against the pricks” is a Biblical phrase meaning roughly “rebel against authority despite immense pain”. It comes from a metaphor involving oxen and sharp pointy sticks. Kicking against the pricks represents an ideological yet futile rebellion against authority for the sake of doing the right thing, rather than out of hope of possible success.

It comes to me not through the Bible, but through the awesomeness of Nick Cave.

Some day I’ll get tired of admitting how far ahead of the pack UMW is.

Today is not that day.

So to paraphrase that guy with the egg…

This is your Italian course:

And this is your Italian course on WordPress:

Click the above image to check out a module a UMW Italian professor put together on the Vespa scooter. In the module you watch some vintage Vespa commercials (in Italian, via YouTube), and answer a series of questions about the Vespa based on the commercials.

How can you not want to take that class?

Jim Groom has more details.

We are reaching the end of our evaluation process here on my eportfolio committee. So in a month of impassioned pleas, I hope y’all forgive me one more. This is the last push.

But I want to do it this time by telling a story.

I want us to pretend it is 1985, and we are considering two competing products for the library. Let’s say that the need is to teach students how to do research circa 1985, and we’ve decided to spend some money on a product to do that. The plan is to develop a “research curriculum” and to get a tool that helps us better understand students’ research ability.One product is called “Thingamajig” and is billed as a replacement for the NYT Index, ERIC, Dialog, and the card catalog. It replaces the Library of Congress system with its own “superior system”, and collates material from multiple subject indexes into its own aggregate database. It has maybe a tenth of the resources available in the library as a whole, but they are well arranged.

In order to do research students log into this tool and use the special Thingamajig™ search tool. Then they give the Thingamajig call numbers to the librarian, etc. And because all their work is logged in the Thingamajig system, we can very easily assess whether these students are starting to get the hang of “research thinking” – Thingamajig can log and score everything done inside of it.

The other product, which we’ll call ResearchRank, just gives some standard ways of assessing student work and pumping out reports. For the actual work, it lets students use the same things they would use outside of the institution: The NYT index, ERIC, Dialog, the card catalog, etc.

In fact, as new resources become available for doing research, ResearchRank doesn’t care – if the professor can understand how the student is using them, he can assess them.

Which is the better product? Which serves the student better?

All of these eportfolio template products we’ve looked at exist in a Thingamajig mindset. Rather than let students use tools that have a broad application outside the boundaries of our college

, they push the student to think of eportfolios as dependent on

institution-specific technology. They keep the student in an unempowered mindset. They force the student to see technology in the wrong way.

To return to our example, imagine it’s 1987 and you’re a professor hiring for an assistantship. You have to chose between two students.

The first student comes in. And when talking about research they tell you how great they are at research – they are, after all, proficient in Thingamajig. They tell you how they used the specialized undergraduate templates to do research in Thingamajig. Are you familiar, for example, with the “Essay Research Template for Political Themes #5”? They did an excellent project using that.

The next student comes in and tells you about subject indexes, the problems of restricted vocabulary, how much they hate the quirks of ERIC, and how low they’ll get a result set on Dialog before they print the list. They tell you a neat system they devised using colored post-its to keep track of where quotes came from. And they tell you about the time it failed and they ended up citing Richard DREYFUSS on particle physics.

You’d choose the second student in a heartbeat. Sure, maybe Dialog rolls out a new version in 6 months, and those skills are irrelevant – but the second student has demonstrated an ability to solve real world problems with real world tools. They understand how to interact with technology – technology extends their will rather than limiting or defining it. And because they have to construct their own environment, they don’t confuse the process of research with the parameters of some school-bought tool.

You’d choose the second student. So would I. And we’d be absolutely right to do so.

The real world tools of reflection today are numerous, but they are not in TaskStream, or ePortaro. They are wikis, blogs, video-sharing sites, Flickr, del.icio.us, etc. We can show students how to use these tools to better understand and represent their experience.

Or we can buy them a Thingamajig.

I really think that’s the choice we’re looking at here.

Heard of Pecha-Kucha? It’s poetry slam for the design crowd. Haiku for the business world.

It’s the solution to Death by Powerpoint. Here’s the rules:

• Each pecha-kucha participant delivers a PowerPoint presentation
• Each presentation must comprise of 20 slides, no more, no less
• Each slide must be displayed for exactly 20 seconds
• Consequently, each presentation is exactly 6 minutes and 40 seconds long

(h/t Downes) 

Now what I would propose is this — anyone reading this post

• Make a Pecha Kucha entry about some aspect of Learning 2.0
• Post it on slideshare or youtube or whatever…
• Tag it on del.icio.us, etc. as PK_Learning2.0

 And let the games begin. I know it would be a lot cooler to get in a room with some gin and tonics and do this, but baby steps, right?

What would happen if instead of encouraging students to build yet another fake bookstore project we had encouraged them to write wikiscanner?

They’d have changed the world, that’s what.

What if instead of having statistics students take multiple choice tests on data analysis we had them examine earmarks or deficit spending using ManyEyes?

They’d change the world, that’s what.

What would happen if our Modern Language students translated popular foreign blogs into English, or our film production students organized to film every presidential candidate’s appearance within 20 miles and post the video on YouTube or Blip.tv? What would happen if our chemistry students went to the Salvation Army Store and bought historical toys to test them for lead, then posted the results?

We do a lot of real world projects at  the college I’m at – in fact, it’s one of the most admirable facets of the college. We’re truly a leader in this regard.

But my belief is we can (and will) will go much further along this road in the coming years.

Why? Because in the old world there was a real cost to real world projects. Very often you were putting students at the helm of something expensive — equipment, time, something. Putting inexperienced students in charge of those resources was at best a risk, and at worst a danger.

And we built our educational system around those parameters. In the manufacturing economy, you had to run students through simulations of work, because failure was EXPENSIVE and publication RARE. Products required expensive investment, equipment, resources. And even more purely intellectual products had physical limits on them:  in the non-networked economy, publication was the privilege of the few, and outlets for one’s findings were hard to come by. There wasn’t really much of a publication tier for undergraduates.

So, in many cases we waited until people were in graduate school or in industry to encourage them to do things with real impact. And we spent our time in college with them preparing them so they wouldn’t fail when they eventually did engage with the world-at-large.

There are (and were) exceptions, and many of them. There are stunningly good programs at my college that put students in Art and Architecture and Safety Studies in positions where they do great work, real work, in service to the greater community. And when I see such things, I’m just inspired and proud.

But I’m saying in our net-enabled world, we can make such learning the norm, and not the exception.

The reason why is simple economics. In a networked information economy, failure is cheap. Production is cheap. And if you produce something worthwhile, distribution is free.

Film students don’t have to tie up the professional grade camera (at least not for everything) — they can film events on a $100 USB device. Statistics students don’t have to pay for database access or tools — there’s a wealth of public data out there, all waiting for someone to sift through it. Translation of a foreign blog takes only a student and a computer.

The other day I wrote an application that posts to twitter every time a bill or resolution is passed in the House of Representatives. It took me two hours. It didn’t cost a dime.

There are literally thousands of worthwhile projects out there, just waiting for a student to take them on. But students aren’t familiar enough with the landscape of real-world needs to know where these opportunities are.

If we want real academic engagement, we have to treat undergraduate education the way we treat our most successful graduate programs. We have to see a major part of our role as pairing interested students with interesting problems. We have to be a bit of a matchmaking service. Because that’s how we are best going to help our students change the world.

So Leigh Blackall is my new favorite edublogger (Sorry Jim!).

If you want to know why, you can listen to this podcast.

Favorite thinker? Not sure. Thinker? It’s odd, but I feel these observations are just so obvious. I’m not sure I ever had to think them up, or that Leigh had to think them up, or that Jim had to think them up, or that Jon had to think them up or that even Roger had to think them up.

So it’s really unfair, but I don’t think of this stuff as shockingly brilliant. What I’m shocked by most often is why it’s not just obvious.

I mean, I put all this Web 2.0-speak on top of my explanations, but what I want to say most often to people is — so have you ever tried to accomplish a real world goal? Yeah? Well, it’s like that.

All the same, when ideas become so obvious that you can’t remember when you first got them, it’s very often because history is hurtling towards an inevitable change. So a historical frame is useful. Leigh does a nice job with that. If you haven’t check out his stuff, I highly recommend it.

You can start with this if you want:

Here’s the thing – it’s 2000 all over. Eportfolio is the new LMS.

Watching a recent vendor presentation I thought – I can’t believe this is happening again. That single phrase. In a loop. In my head.

Because remember — this happened once before. The LMS vendors came in with an assessment and management tool, and told us it was an elearning solution. At the time, I was on the other side of the equation, with a company trying to sell award-winning goal-based scenario software to colleges who were saying — but we already HAVE an elearning solution. It’s called Blackboard. Or WebCT. Or whatever.

And so Blackboard, an assessment and management tool, determined the pedagogy of colleges for eight or so years. Because teachers wanted to import rosters, we put students in a closed box and told them it was elearning.

When it wasn’t. The truth is the kids were doing more elearning on MySpace than in Blackboard.

How do we avoid it again? How do we avoid imposing something that is just pedagogically WRONG on a new set of students because we need to meet some institutional assessment needs?

There’s only one way — loosely coupled assessment.

If we are going to talk assessment, we are going to have to segregate it. Your assessment tool should ONLY assess.

We don’t need to talk more about student needs wth vendors that supply assessment tools. We need to talk to them less about student needs. It’s not their business.

Literally: it is not their business.

In fact, we should remove student needs entirely from the equation.

The students know they can get far bettter solutions to their problems for free elsewhere. They don’t need a eportfolio system to post thier resumes on.

So enough of letting assessment vendors tell us what facilities we will be forced to use in their walled garden, and expecting us to be excited about it. Enough with assessment vendors selling us “environments”. What we should be doing is describing the the enviroment that might exist – students using Wordpress, Blogger, S3, GDrive, email, messaging, etc. And then we should ask if they have a tool that can evaluate that. How will their tool interface with the learning environment we’ve constructed?

Anything else is insanity.

Via bavatuesdays, I learn of CommentPress.

Obviously there are other non-WP group annotation tools. What’s really striking to me here, however, is how powerful the fit is between the CommentPress approach to text and the best bits of traditional literary exegesis.

So great is the fit, as a matter of fact, that I half wonder if CommentPress could become the first step toward faculty blogging — rather than the other way around…