Archive for May, 2008

Learning In A Flat World » Thirty-one Days Of May

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Wow! With full disclosure (something this month raised for better or worse), I will first admit to shamelessly borrowing the stacked Comment Challenge logo from Ken Allan, as it perfectly denotes how stacked up I got this last week. During the month of May, we at the Center for Teaching Excellence do one Institute early in the month focused on Teaching and Leaning, and starting in two days, we do a second Institute focused on Teaching and Learning with Technology. That is two weeks with 18-20 different faculty in a five week period! So, I have not been real focused on this Challenge, and yet it has certainly enriched me through participation in the process. So, summarizing the last six days of the Challenge in one post:

Day 26: Exploring Other Ways to Comment

Even with the problems Twitter was experiencing this past week, I found it to be an effective tool that supplemented blog comments. Whether it was bloggers announcing their posts (an effective use of Twitter IMHO) or discussion about comments (which the Stephen Downes issue certainly created), Twitter helped jump-start me into specific discussions.

Day 27: What Do You Communicate About Your Personal Brand Through Comments

At the gym, I wear a t-shirt that simply says WYSIWYG. Those who have been around computers for awhile will recognize that as “What You See Is What You Get.” Given that I am a 58-year old, greying, overweight geek, the t-shirt certainly fits! I am not sure I have a “brand” the way CogDog does, but I try never to fake my way in a comment. What you see in my comments is me….pure and simple. If I remain authentic and true to myself, that is brand enough for me. But part of my authentic self is a healthy sense of humor, and I see nothing wrong with that either! -)

Day 28: What’s Your Blog Commenting Strategy?

This one is a little tough. I have worked for years helping institutions develop strategic plans, and I have always suggested that thinking strategically involves setting some stakes in the ground to guide your journey. Yet, I have done little strategic planning for my own blogging and commenting. I have, however, seen some excellent models by others in this challenge, and so have set some commenting stakes in the ground for my future journey. These include continuing to routinely blog myself (most bloggers do not last beyond 6 months…and I am 5 and 1/2 months into mine!), using RSS feed to follow the bloggers in education, science, technology and business - as each of these fields have value to share, and finally, commenting routinely to posts in these blogs and providing summary comments in my own blogs to those who comment to me. And as the pirate noted in Pirates of the Caribbean, “these be more guidelines than rules!”

Day 29: Write a Commenting Guide for Students

This one is one I want to spend some more time on after our Institute. I will be teaching a graduate course next Fall and Spring where the “students” are all K-12 teachers. So I see value in having a blog as part of the course. Yet, a commenting guide for students may suggest that students are required to comment, and I am still not sure I want to “mandate” either blogging or commenting for students. After all, I see blogging as an intensely personal endeavor, and I am not sure you will get much if and when it becomes tied to a grade (and I would be interested in others’ views about this). Ken Allan laid out some excellent points in his blog post for this day. My thoughts might be to allow commenting in my blog as an alternative to discussion board - or to alternate weeks between discussion boards and blogging. I just do not feel ready to have 25 teachers all start blogging as part of a course. I could sure use some useful comments from all of you on this!!!

Day 30: How Can You Use What You Have Learned About Commenting to Change Your Teaching?

As I noted above, this is one I need to think on for a while. What I have learned is that I have become a better commenter - more reflective and more willing to scratch below the surface level. Yet, I feel that it has taken me over 20 weeks of blogging and 31 days of commenting to reach that level, and this is not something you command students to do in 15 weeks. Having seen the power, it suggests that one can begin to build the process within a class and model a process within a class. Ken Allan talked about non-participants. I asked my Spring graduate students if any of them routinely read my blog (since I never saw comments from them). It was not a part of the course and they were not graded on reading it or not..but out of 12, only 2 had. The rest said that they thought it was cool that I was blogging but they really did not have time to waste on that. Ouch! The intrinsic values are just not evident to our fellow educators (yet)…so I want to think through ways to help my Fall and Spring students next year appreciate the value of blogging and commenting. This month has impacted me…but as Barbara Sawhill noted last week on Twitter, “impacted” also applies to teeth and is painful! I have not figured out the details yet - and would love your creative ideas!

Day 31: Your Top Five Lessons

It has been a wonderful month in which I have learned more about myself as a blogger/educator and more about the blogosphere.

The first lesson is that it is a wonderful world in which the creative minds of Kim Cofino, Michele Martin, Silvia Tolisano and Sue Waters can unleash at no cost (other than our time and efforts) a Challenge that draws educators worldwide together. This truly shows both the power of the web and the interconnectiveness of us all.

My second lesson is one of time. I jumped in to this challenge without weighing the costs of participation versus the real job commitments with the aforementioned two institutes. It caused stress early on, but once I came to terms with the balance required, I actually looked forward to seeing the array of comments that flowed into my Google Reader.

The third lesson is one of companionship. I was already following 40 bloggers before the Challenge. I am now following 52 and really like the additions. I might have found these bloggers on my own but I doubt it! So the Challenge helped me connect to more colleagues.

The fourth lesson is that I might be an island but that I am in an archipelago. We each flower in different ways, and yet we have more in common than we do in differences.

The final lesson is that the human bonds are as important as the virtual ones. Part of what made this Challenge work for me was the offline conversations I had with Jeff Nugent or Bud Deihl in our various offices or in Starbucks as we talked over what we were seeing and how we were reacting. As connected as I feel to a fairly large number of fellow bloggers and twitterers, it is still amazing to see the body language associated with the engagement we were feeling.

To all who read this blog and to all who commented to me, my deep thanks! It has been a fun month and I look for the relationships to continue long after May has faded in time.

[Photo Credit: K R Reinsch]


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Not About Tech » Mediadefender’s Attack On Revision3, Engaging Our P2p “desires,” And Metallica Poster Boys

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As I'm a huge fan of Revision3, this post in my RSS yesterday caught my attention immediately:

"MediaDefender Behind the Attack on Revision3" [from ReadWriteWeb by Sarah Perez]. According to Sarah,

MediaDefender is a company that acts on behalf of other media companies to muck up P2P and file sharing networks. A post on the Rev3 blog today reveals that the company responsible for this weekend's DoS attack on their servers was none other than MediaDefender. Revision3 uses Bittorrent to help distribute their shows across the web by running their own tracker which coordinates the sharing and downloading of their content. Despite this perfectly legal and legitimate practice, MediaDefender set their sights on Revision3's servers and flooded them with SYN packets, effectively shutting them down.

The fact that they're banging on the servers of my beloved Revision3 is upsetting enough. But then my mind went off, as it usually does. What came of this is below.

Note that I am in no way defending the sharing and distribution of illegal content, in whatever form. I am only writing to the principle of the matter based on my belief that, regardless of how people choose to use or abuse it, P2P is here to stay, and people benefit from it. And lest we think that fighting about P2P is new, remember that we have a long and sordid history of various industries over the decades crying foul whenever a new technology came along that threatened their business model. In MediaDefender's case, they're simply a new handle on an old axe. A very sharp, heavy axe.

Examples of this longstanding fighting include the Photocopier, VHS player/recorder, MP3 player, and even the hyperlink has been challenged. (For more on hyperlinks, I wrote a paper about British Telecom v. Prodigy Communications, in which the hyperlink itself almost was sued out of existence. Let me know if you'd like a copy). For discussions about copyright and our culture of ownership, see Lawrence Lessig's works, including Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, as well as this article, which rebuffs the MPAA's 2003 "Copying is Theft" campaign during the so-called "Golden Age of Free Music" (see article here , and a bit more on the 2-handedness here ). While you're at it, check out Carolyn Marvin's excellent book, When Old Technologies Were New .

So, back to the story.

Just for fun, I strolled on over to MediaDefender's um, website. So, at the same time they are trying to beat peer-to-peer into the ground as a vector of evil with one hand, a closer look on their site suggests that the other hand (see here, here, and here) is busy "leveraging" P2P and enabling ways for the "Consumer/Fan" to have "...the special experience of 'discovering' the new content" and to provide the "Sponsors/Advertiser" with the ability to, as they say,"Engage millions of targeted customers with desires." So we're getting music video and audio teasers. Really? That's all they can think of to use P2P for?

First, I have a visceral reaction to the "Consumer/Fan" label. This is about the same degree of Maalox-inducing discomfort I experience whenever I hear an IT staffer refer to someone as a "user." As if the act of appreciating music (or any art for that matter) can be reduced to the level of buying a burger and fries at the local fast food joint.

Second, the only activity I can think of that engages customers with their "desires" isn't safe to blog / read about at work.

I've believed this for some time that, for all of the legal battles the MPAA, RIAA, and the like have been waging against P2P, they have been quietly figuring out how to use P2P to their advantage. So, once the bad stuff is gone and all the "Consumer/Fans" are sued into submission, what will be left is the content chosen for us to have access to. And we better like it. When it comes to distributing and publicizing content, rather than pay an expensive marketing firm, it's far easier and cheaper to use P2P, under the guise that we, as customers, are still getting exactly what we are looking for, "...free content," or if we'll super duper lucky, we'll be "presented with unique and compelling offerings that fit [our] tastes." Woohoo. Sign me up.

Further, rather than a marketing campaign ending when the budget runs out, P2P runs 24/7 off of "Consumer/Fans' " systems. So, Media Defender's clients have the added benefit that their "Files continue to live and spread virally, even after the campaigns is ended." Um, yeah. As if this were a feature specially-created by MediaDefender. That's how P2P works. So, while P2P networks are being shut down, the remaining bandwidth is filled with what amounts to simply more advertising, except for now the distribution is on the "Consumer's / Fan's" dime. Unfortunately, P2P, by its design, provides an amazingly targeted audience that no marketing firm could ever claim to provide on its own. So it should be no surprise that MediaDefender has discovered a way to sell P2P back to its clients packaged as a marketing platform.

Suspiciously, all the legal battles over the past years have seemed to be less about actual theft, and more about the fact that these industries were caught completely off-guard because they were resting on their old ways of business. So, suing everyone and their mother (literally), bides time for the industries to figure out (if ever) how to make money off the new technology, to use it as yet another advertising platform rather than realize its (in this case, P2P's) true potential. It's as if horse breeders would have sued Henry Ford for introducing the mass-produced automobile to the world, and all the while trying to figure out how to put wheels and a steering wheel on a horse. It just doesn't work.

It's funny that we as "Consumers/Fans" are seen as little more than open wallets, especially when the poster boy for the early days of the Anti-Napster and P2P crackdown was none other than Lars Ulrich of Metallica. In a 2000 Wired article about Metallica's involvement in the first volley of lawsuits against Naptster, Ulrich was quoted as saying, "We take our craft -- whether it be the music, the lyrics, or the photos and artwork -- very seriously, as do most artists. It is therefore sickening to know that our art is being traded like a commodity rather than the art that it is."

Regardless of the legality, I don't think people who trade art, whether exchanged via mixed tapes, bootlegs, or P2P networks, view the art necessarily as a commodity; in fact, the heaviest traders are likely to be also the biggest fans. So, the only people treating art like a commodity are those who stand to profit the most from controlling not only the means of production and the means of access, but also what gets called "art" and how much it is to be valued. That being said, it's those who create the art in the first place, as well as those who love the art, who have the most to lose.

Again, I'm not condoning the sharing and distribution of illegal content. I'm simply arguing for the principle of the matter that I don't think it's right to call somebody a criminal on one hand based on the tools they are using to exchange content, and then expect them to be your captive marketing audience on the other using the same exact tool! And calling the act of hijacking links to redirect to targeted advertising "interactive," this content is claimed to be, (and, by interactive, we're talking merely redirection to where you want us to go), as described below on Media Defender's website.

Peer-to-Peer networks are similar to ‘Google’ - both take search requests and deliver content; but peer-2-peer networks are more ‘fun’ than ‘Google’ because instead of taking you to a webpage they deliver: movies, music, videogames, TV shows, etc. This makes our Redirection service like running an interactive television (video) commercial that is only viewed by your targeted audience and given the ability to interact and make immediate purchasing decisions. [From MediaDefender - Peer-2-Peer Marketing Solutions]

Don't even get me started on what's wrong with the rest of the passage's descriptions, other than the Internets must really be like a series of tubes. Who knew?

Techfoot » The Importance Of Responsible Computing

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Like many academics, I think that many security policies and procedures are a tad draconian and based on superstition rather than evidence. One of my pets that I often rail about is the requirement that individuals change passwords on some fixed schedule; I’m still looking for any evidence that these requirements actually make our institutions more secure. In my own case, I’m much more likely to try skimp on password complexity or write the new one down in those cases where I’m forced to change.

Every once in a while, though, I get a graphic reminder of why folks with more daily responsibility for security are more paranoid (which may not be too strong a word) than I am. Several of those reminders have been delivered this week as faculty and staff have been hit with a barrage of phishing schemes. At least seven members of the community, including at least a faculty member or two, have succumbed and provided their userids and passwords. Almost immediately their accounts their accounts were attacked by zombie armies, hundreds of sessions were opened and hundreds of thousands of spam messages were generated.

A Botnet (also known as a zombie army) is a number of Internet computers that, although their owners are unaware of it, have been set up to forward transmissions (including spam or viruses) to other computers on the Internet. Any such computer is referred to as a zombie - in effect, a computer “robot” or “bot” that serves the wishes of some master spam or virus originator. Most computers compromised in this way are home-based.

In these seven instances, millions of messages were generated. Cleaning up the resulting mess takes lots of engineering time–though unfortunately with practice we’re cutting it from days to hours. Mail response for local users slows dramatically and huge internet service providers like AOL and Comcast blacklist the college domain as part of their spam management process. Reopening delivery may take a couple of days and untold amounts of mail from college addresses may be dumped to the bit bucket.

If you care about your colleagues and being a good citizen of the community and don’t provide your id and password by using a link in an email message.

Learning In A Flat World » The Trust Factor

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Events this week have had me thinking about “trust” as it applies to our craft. My last post was a bit of a knee jerk reaction to Stephen Downes knee jerk reaction, when he said “I can’t trust anything Sue Waters and Steve Dembo write - and that’s an unhappy state to be in.” What transpired over the last couple of days around the edublogosphere was some interesting commentary about trust. Sue Waters blogged about transparency and maintaining trust, and in the comments there, Darren Draper made the point that he could sign in AS Stephen Downes and leave a comment and potentially get away with it. Darren then went on to confess to what he had done in his own blog and point out how easily one can forge another’s identity.

The word “trust” is too easily tossed about. Wikipedia noted that trust is a belief in the honesty, benevolence, and competence of another party. We are increasingly dependent on our virtual connections, yet yesterday I could not email my wife at her Comcast account because two punks (my term) hacked in and hijacked Comcast’s DNS for over five hours. All week long, many have joked about how untrustworthy Twitter has become. In fact, Hugh MacLeod had several hilarious cartoons lampooning Twitter. As Wikipedia noted, one is apt to forgive trust issues in competence areas such as these much more readily than in honesty or benevolence, and I guess I took Stephen’s questioning of trust as a deeper and more personal level.

Many have pointed out the Dark Side of trust and how easily one can be duped, but it leads me to question if this is the world I wish to live in or not. One can be cynical and assume the worst of everyone, or one can model trust and be trusting. As educators, we impact the world daily. If our actions (and our syllabi) reflects distrust, we will find it returned in multiple levels.

Yesterday, Cathy Mosca posted an interesting note on Tom Peters blog about a Trust Assessment. This is a self-diagnostic test to measure one’s Trust Quotient, developed by Charles Green. I asked myself the same question Sue did and view my integrity as one of my strengths. So I was a little shocked at how “poorly” I scored on the Trust Quotient.

My score is in the normal mid-range of the2119 who have taken the instrument so far, though at the lower end of that range. I got a 4.7 out a a range that runs from 0.6 (low) to 15 (high). According to this instrument, my strength is my credibility, and I need to work on showing others that I care about them more than me. In other words, stop trying to control others and start trying to help others.

Maybe this instrument knows me and my role as a faculty developer better than I like!

But to return to my theme, much of my value system on trust comes from my work in the quality field. I was deeply influenced by Dr. W. Edwards Deming, who said that once one understands about quality, one will:

“…apply its principles in every kind of relationship with other people. He will have a basis for judgment of his own decisions and for transformation of the organizations that he belongs to. The individual, once transformed, will:

  • Set an example;
  • Be a good listener, but will not compromise;
  • Continually teach other people; and
  • Help people to pull away from their current practices and beliefs and move into the new philosophy without a feeling of guilt about the past.”

That has guided me for a quarter-century, and has guided my craft as a teacher. I start my classes with a discussion of what does quality mean in that class. If students see themselves as active deliverers of quality instead of passive students, then they typically will rise to meet the high expectations I set. In the same light, if they internalize that they are responsible for the quality of the learning and are working with me to achieve that learning, then high levels of trust can exist between the teacher and the students. I attempt to model honesty, benevolence and competence and seek the same from my students and colleagues. I may be disappointed from time to time, but those are the minorities. Most of my students and most of my colleagues rise to my expectations, and so I am a trusting individual and hope to stay that way.

[Photo Credit: Thorinside, doctor paradox]


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And He Blogs » Celebrating Innovation And Creativity - More Ken Robinson

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I just got done re-watching Sir Ken Robinson’s terrific TED Talk on creativity in education. Here is an update that expands upon creativity by talking about the power of innovation, and how we systematically suppress it in our classrooms. There IS an education revolution taking place and it is what makes my job one that gets me excited to go to work on Monday mornings. I’ll have more on these ideas of creativity and innovation soon (with thoughts of the neonatal EDUPUNK movement), but I wanted this video to make the rounds as soon as possible.

Not About Tech » I Was Going To Write A Great Post Today…

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...but I somehow lost it in the process of pasting and testing a hyperlink I wanted to use in the post. Yeah, the whole post got hosed.

What little mental energy I had for blogging today disappeared along with the post. I'll try again tomorrow.

Learning In A Flat World » Wis-dumb Of The Crowds

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I subscribe to Stephen Downes’ email newsletter “OLDaily” because I find interesting and relevant items there that complement the other blogs I read. However, I feel he stepped way over bounds yesterday. One of his items was as follows:

Quick Quiz: What New Web Tool Can You Use and Get an ASUS? How about a little disclosure here? Are Steve Dembo and Sue Waters getting paid to promote a commercial product (I assume Alan Levine’s rah rah post is unpaid, though you’d never know from the tenor)? Was Dembo being paid when he started plugging it on his site back in early April? I don’t care if people want to make a little money, but let’s keep the advertising content in the edublogosphere clearly labeled as such, OK? Because, as it stands now, I can’t trust anything Sue Waters and Steve Dembo write - and that’s an unhappy state to be in. Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, May 27, 2008.

In fairly quick fashion, Al Levine, Steve Dembo and Sue Waters all stated in the “Comment” area of Stephen’s newsletter that none of them were being paid. Several others joined in the discussion as well, and Sue added a response in her blog.

It is worth reading the string of responses, and as Alan Levine noted, it is good to have pot stirrers shake things up from time to time. But I would suggest that there is a difference between stirring pots and making personal attacks, and attacking the trust of fellow educators is just a low blow. In a Web 2.0 world, one’s validity is about all the currency one has, so a very public attack on someone’s credibility online is extremely damning.

Trust is a slippery fellow, hard to gain and easy to lose. I have been honored to have Sue help me in my blogging - as she has helped many others, and I see the trust that other “trusted” educators have in her. When someone with the street cred of a Stephen Downes slams a fellow educator, a lot of people will take notice. I checked the Technorati stats and Stephen has an authority of 708, WAY above my 33. (I am happy to finally rank in the 6-digits instead of 7!!!) So a ton of people check out Stephen’s blog and listen to what he has to say - many more than me. Unfortunately, given the skimming practice of many on the web, a lot of people may see Stephen’s slam but not go in to the comments and see the responses from those individuals he incorrectly slammed.

The wisdom of the crowds is normally fairly good, but vocal minorities can unduly influence it. I would hope that Stephen Downes does the right thing and apologizes so the the crowd can learn from his error. We have enough people worldwide who try to build themselves up by putting others down. Darren Draper recently did a blog series on blogging etiquette. After watching this personal attack, I would agree that we in the edublog world need to step up to a code of ethics that rises above what transpired here.

[Photo Credit: Alexandralee]


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Not About Tech » Darth Vader + Blackboard 8 Enterprise = A Great Mashup Waiting To Happen

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Following Jim Groom's most recent post after his well-deserved time off the grid, I'm really inspired to make a mashup that includes Darth Vader and some Stormtroopers, underscored by The Imperial March subtly playing in the background, and all wrapped-in with media bits from Blackboard 8 Empire Enterprise Academic Suite announcements. 

Thematically, I think the plot points in Stars Wars: New Hope (as well as scatterings from other episodes) will have some interesting parallels with the the dominating forces of LMS's like Blackboard against the rebellious academic spirit of open source and Web 2.0 tools. In the end, no matter the technological might brought to bear by the Empire, the Rebellion (dare I say...faculty??) nevertheless thwarts Vader and his merry band of Stormtroopers at every turn. It may take some creative heroics and a bit of the ol' Force, but my bets are with the Rebels. 
For background thoughts go check Jim's post, and keep your eyes open for an upcoming premiere. 

Jim - wanna help me out with this?

I was going to include a couple episode clips that I have in mind, but I can't find them online. However, I did find this one, which is absolutely hilarious. 



Bavatuesdays » Fa08 » Faculty Academy Videos, Or The Beauty Of Our New Media Specialist

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Faculty Academy posts will be streaming in irregularly as I grok this year’s amazing event. So much to say, but for the time being I’ll be relatively brief. This year’s conference was about many things, pushing the boundaries, going boldly, and refusing fear as an alternative. One thing from this year’s Faculty Academy that I think embodies all of these themes beautifully was Andy Rush’s video work this year. He took the webcasting and video presentation/archiving of this event to the next level (and a special shout out to David Dean who was the audio Godhead throughout the two days).


We all bust his chops about his new position as a New Media Specialist and joke him about the nature of his work, but that’s only because we don’t understand just how far he is pushing the web envelope to make video an integral, sharp, and professional part of the academic environment at UMW. There is no better New Media Specialist, and the very fact that we now have that unique position occupied by Andy Rush is a measure of the genius behind the imagined future of DTLT.

This genius is no surprise to all of you who caught the event via UStream, for you got a taste of Andy’s beautifully produced streaming videos of the plenary sessions and Keynote firsthand. It was awesome, and he even built it into a self-reflexive moment within his unbelievable talk about New Media during the “UMW Blogs Begins” plenary (I will blog this when that video is published, it is a gem!).

Not only was the Ustreaming top notch, but Andy has archived all the videos and is now republishing them over at the Faculty Academy blog here. (Keep in mind he is using the high-powered h.264 codec he explains here for extremely high resolution–another element of how new media was the star this year —Andy notes in the comments below that he is not using this codec for the Faculty Academy videos, but you should still read his post about h.264).

So far he has published the following videos:

The Deck Wars competition, which was an event that Jerry Slezak did a phenomenal job re-imagining and organizing. This fun-filled event was inspired by a similar event at SXSW called Battledecks that we found out about thanks to Tom Woodward’s web surfing savvy. Our’s was harder than SXSW’s though because our four bold contestants (Jeff McClurken, Jennifer Pollock-Wahl, David Rettinger, and Barabra Sawhill) presented on a deck of slides they had never seen before (not like the SXSW prima donnas who got a full two minutes ) ). The amazing slides Cathy Derecki created for the four players made this process far harder than you might think. Jeff came away with the title of “First Annual Deck Wars Champion,” for this will surely be the first of many Deck Wars.

Dr. Janet Murray’s Keynote address: “Inventing the Medium: Learning and Symbolic Expression from Knucklebones and Senet to Second Life and Spore.”
This talk was amazing, and while Dr Murray may seem to start off a bit slow (this excludes a classic Gardner Campbell introduction), this talk may have opened up the most conceptual possibilities for thinking about gaming, humanity, and the shared future of symbolic spaces. Murray talks to the arts, social sciences, and hard sciences at once, offering an amazing framework for conceptualizing games and the development of human communication. It is a truly thoughtful and provoking talk, and I will definitely be re-watching this soon before I blog it, for it is definitely one of major importance that I haven’t fully wrapped my head around.

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Not About Tech » Oops: Ignore The “title Unknown” Post

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Ignore the "Title Unknown" post. It's an incomplete version of the more recent post entitled "I Challenge Thee..." I clicked Submit rather than Save as Draft, but apparently Google was too quick-a-draw for me to keep it from showing up on the Internets (at least in Google Reader). Grrr...