Strange New Year

Looking again at Web 3.0 brought back memories of H806, New Year 2005/6, & a big debate I had with a colleague & fellow student about standards & metadata. I was convinced back then that structured blogging had no more chance of surviving than the proverbial snowball in hell, & indeed it quickly melted away. As did 'learning objects', those tasty nuggets which we spent a whole nine months digesting & regurgitating.

Laughed out loud at a 2001 paper by Cory Doctorow, dismissing the whole business as 'metacrap' . If only I'd seen this at the time. 

Web 3.0 continues to make me angry. For all its endorsement by Tim Berners-Lee, the concept seems entirely contrary to the spirit of the web (Webs 1.0 & 2.0) as we, the users, have adopted & made it:  messy, creative, unpredictable, free. Predictions that 'the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines' (Berners-Lee & Fischetti, 1999) may well have come true, but is that really what learning is about?

It's good to tie up these loose ends & still feel that 'It's fresh and new and happening''.

La donna e mobile

Spent much of this week alternately gritting my teeth & feeling Deeply Inadequate. Nothing new there......

We were doing 'mobile learning'. Activity 1 was a big quiz about how we use our handheld mobile devices for teaching, work, learning, social interaction & entertainment. My handheld mobile device ownership extends to one phone, decidedly un-smart, vintage c.2005 (at least that's the date of the oldest saved text message). I use it for occasional voice calls & to text my family & friends. After considerable thought I remembered that I also use it to tell the time in tutorials, since I don't wear a watch & the local venue hired by the OU doesn't have clocks in the rooms. Not working ones, anyway. But I had a sneaking suspicion that this wasn't quite what was expected of educators in the brave new world of Mobile 2.0.

Then I read an article by Sharples et al. from 2005 (the same age as my phone!) Towards a Theory of Mobile Learning & that started me thinking. The authors confidently state their objective:

to offer an initial framework for theorising about mobile learning, to complement theories of infant, classroom, workplace and informal learning

Where, I wondered, was 'traditional' distance learning, of the sort offered by the OU for over 40 years now, in their list? Could it be that in the excitement about mobile learning, this had been overlooked? It certainly looks that way. Here's one of the major findings:

The control and management of learning can be distributed: In a classroom the locus of control over learning remains firmly with the teacher, but for mobile learning it may be distributed across learners, guides, teachers, technologies and resources in the world such as books, buildings, plants and animals

Replace 'mobile' with 'distance' & we've been doing that since the 1970s!

Here's another example of over-inflated claims. Sharples et al. appear shocked by the way mobile technology conflicts with traditional ways of learning:

children can subvert the carefully managed interactions of a school classroom by sending text messages hidden from the teacher

How dreadful! But wait... Did the authors never pass notes in class, or sneakily read a comic, or get on with their homework for another lesson?

So maybe much of the rhetoric about 'mobile learning' can be filed under 'true, but not new', along with other bits of myth & moral panic, & I don't need to be scared of it at all.

I know, I should stop being such a diva. Here's Pavarotti to put it all in perspective.

Stop pushing!

This week has seen a flurry of activity with social networking tools. On the whole, it's been fun playing around as a break from reading earnest scholarly articles, but at the same time I've found myself going round in increasingly self-referential circles.

Blogger X writes a new post & announces it on Twitter, where his followers re-tweet it. He also posts about it on Facebook, where it is shared by his many friends. Subscribers to his RSS feed are notified about the new post via their feed reader. If I was active on Google+ I would no doubt find it there too, & mutual acquaintances may well have added it to their social bookmarking site, which in turn would be notified to me......

By the time I've read about this post in half a dozen locations, the one thing I haven't done is actually read what he has written. The proliferation of tools can be counter-productive:  I find myself becoming hostile, muttering 'Yeah, yeah - you already said'.

I suppose the solution is to be more selective about how I use the tools. Perhaps I should only follow/subscribe to/befriend people in one place, to avoid duplication. I've already turned off most email notifications.

There was a lot of talk in the early days of the web about 'information overload'. Perhaps this is the web 2.0 equivalent. I'm starting to feel more sympathetic to my opting-out students!

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