While this course has ostensibly been about “authoring” digital learning materials, in the end, I decided to concentrate on alternative c. from the final assignment.

c. communicate relevant information and ideas effectively to students, parents, and peers using a variety of digital-age media and formats.

After experimenting with a number of new (to me) and relatively unfamiliar digital authoring tools during the course, ultimately, this project needed to be  both practical and applicable to current objectives for the Main Library program.

At this time, we are concentrating on awareness of existing materials and services  with both students and teachers. In order to reach the widest possible audience of both, then, broader use of digital information presentation tools is called for. To this end, we are ramping up use of live media links of several types in our Main Library HS and MS Blogs which are set as the browser entry point for all students launching a browser in Main Library.

Using a blog as the library front-end has a number of advantages over using a homepage. To begin with, blogging platforms include the built-in theme and widget features which allow those with limited digital skills or time to assemble a reasonablly attractive page. Secondly, the blogging platform is easy to edit and to maintain a series of quick, relevant informational postings. Finally, the blogging platform has become relatively standardized, so that even users unfamiliar with this particular page can navigate relatively intuitively through it.

While exploration of digital authoring tools has been a worthwhile and engaging sidebar to the last six weeks, in the end, the important thing has been to select the most appropriate tools for the task at hand. Book trailers sponsored by media companies and made by professionals are effective at both promoting interest in new or underused titles in our collection and at presenting a model of effective promotion for students interested in trying it out themselves. the other tools used in our blogs have similar dual uses, and we will continue to try new options as we expand our exploration of this new digital landscape.

It may seem a no-brainer that the library environment lends itself naturally to using “how-to” videos. With the range of materials, databases, information systems and production services available through the library, simple “How-to” videos featuring  narrated screen capture of everything from the library catalog to setting up an RSS feed from a research database might seem to be logical uses of the technology.

The question is, “If we build it, will they come?”

The answer, I fear, is simply, without prevarication, “No. It’s just not that easy…”

The May 2009 OCLC report on library catalog usage suggested that students today want, to paraphrase, things to be Quick, to be Easy, and to be Relevant to their needs of the moment.

What single tool best meets this requirement today? Google, of course. Want a quick answer to who directed the 1968 Hollywood Romeo and Juliet? Google it. Need to know how to insert a complex formula into an Excel spreadsheet? Google it – and perhaps add “YouTube” if you want to see an instructional video on the exact topic.

The same question serves for every Helpfile, User tutorial and TechHelp access feature already built into each of the technology offerings in our library. As librarians, we seldom (never seems almost closer to the reality) see users (student OR teacher) navigating of their own volition to  Help features. How much easier it is, in our service-oriented system, for a student to simply ask the first person at hand, “How do I make a color copy?” or a teacher to just email the query “Do you have the Brannagh Hamlet?” (or perhaps a slightly more challenging, “Can you find critlit sources for the poetry of Michael Ondaatje?”)

Sounds pretty grim for the future of independent researching – but it’s not all bad. Screencasts seem to be a natural for promoting those  things users are already engaged with. Our student “front-end”, the page that automatically opens when a student launches a browser, is a blog, which should lend itself naturally to a screencast implementation.

We’ll start where the kids aleady are, or where they might conceivably go without the extrnal stimulus of classroom assignments or teacher-directed library use. Some possibilities include:

• Book Reviews by Students
• Book Reviews by teachers or professional reviewers
• Book Trailers from the industry (Scholastic,
• Movie Reviews of books

If you can’t beat ‘em…

Project Parameters: 20 minute team planning period (before lunch) and a 2 hour production period, followed by group presentations of results. With our disparate team makeup  and collaborative project topic,  our goal was also to complete the project (aside from individual reflections) in the f2f session.

Blog Assignment: Upload the completed project. Reflect on the process of creating the digital story. How could digital storytelling be used in your classroom/subject area.

During the 20-minute planning period we learned that the ESL department had handwritten notes in hand for a planned discussion of “Effective Discussion Behavior” and since each of us engage in some form of “storytelling” in our disciplines, we decided we could build a shared presentation/project using available digital tools.

We then used a FlipVideo camera to grab clips of discussions in progress. We downloaded the ensuing 21 clips and individually assessed them (MP4 files played directly in  Windows Media Player) to see which might illustrate elements of effective discussion identified in the ESL notes. 

Comparing notes, we agreed that eight of the 21 clips effectively illustrated one of the core elements of effective discussion behavior. These elements were;

1. Plan for Discussion (read: Topic of Discussion or problem to be resolved)
2. Putting plans into (immediate) action
3. Practicing Active Listening
4. Actively Participating
5. Attending Fully
6. Paraphrasing
7. Enunciating Clearly (my paraphrasing) with Appropriate Body Language
8. Offering a Solution

With the ESL plan in hand and the demonstration clips selected, the project needed only be assembled in a stand-alone presentation format. We decided to use Smart Recorder to capture screencasts of the relevant demonstration clips, interspersed with title frames of the core discussion elements done in Powerpoint, possibly backed up by an Audicity soundtrack. All three team members were quite comfortable with Powerpoint, somewhat familiar with Audacity, largely unfamiliar with Smart Recorder, and totally new to the FlipVideo Camera.

Result:
With the written plans in hand, the 8 relevant clips isolated and titling a simple task using Powerpoint, assembling the items seemed doable in the allotted time. We quickly found, however, that the tools we had chosen were limiting in several ways, at least for our novice production team:

• FlipVideo camera default appears to be 15 fps, resulting in herky-jerky pans rendering several clips unuseable. We did not have time to investigate 30 fps options and reshoot.
• Sound capture with the FlipVideo cameras included a high level of background noise on most clips. We had only our “one-take” footage to work with.
• Running Full-screen titling slides from Powerpoint hid the Smart Recorder controls, which meant that we had to capture Powerpoint titling in Slide Sorter mode, resulting in extraneous visual elements. (Windows Toolbars, Smart Recorder Controls, etc)
• Smart Recorder Controls are simple but slow. Our “quick & dirty” recording method was to play the WMP clip, then hit Record on Smart Recorder.
• Smart Recording from a playing WMP file appears to have been not very “smart”. The resulting Smart Recording of our project included the following features making it unuseable for instruction or presentation;
  o Transitions between title and subtitle frames and video are unacceptably choppy
  o Image quality of the captured WMP playout is unacceptable due to
          * Dropped video frames resulting in “Keystone-Kops”-like movement
          * Video frames have a “solarized” appearance suggesting incomplete capture
  o Audio frames are either dropped or chopped, resulting in illegible or no sound
  o Transitions between silent Powerpoint Headers and random-sound WMP playout is jarring

What did we learn (or relearn) from this exercise? We learned that;

• Digital production tools must be selected with the same care for desired outcomes that any teaching/learning tools must be chosen.
• Digital production tools, even of the “plug ‘n play” variety, demand expertise in their use in order to be used effectively.
• The time necessary to develop expertise in the use of any of the digital tools presented in this course is beyond the scope of the course.
• It is clearly not “best practice” to simply use digital tools because they are available, if a better tool is already available. In the case of this project, promoting effective discussion would probably be better done using realtime discussion on topics of interest to the target audience.

How could digital storytelling be used in my classroom/subject area?

Although this particular project would, by most standards, be judged a practical failure, as a HS librarian, I see digital storytelling as having major potential for;

• Appealing to students to get involved with the library, its programs and the selection of materials, resources and services it offers
• Creating awareness of ranges of services and materials available in the library
• Developing  awareness of alternative genres (students tend to stay within a reading “zone of comfort”) for independent reading
• Introducing new materials, systems or services in the library
• Promoting interest in and circulation of new titles (and old standards)
• Reviewing Research Skills in a novel and interesting way

Now – if we can just get our hands on a “Round Tuitt”…

I was lucky enough to have Kim Cofino mention “Presentation Zen” to me a year ago when I was working on a proposal for our regional teachers’ conference.   I wasn’t quite ready then to abandon all my work in the name of getting my message out in that dramatic, but Spartan, by my “old” standards, style.  Luckily, my presentation wasn’t selected for the conference, so no one was ever subjected to that last-gasp 20th-century blow-out.

But I’m learning. The message of that presentation was important to me, so I went back in the spring and took another look at it to see what could be salvaged. I found some heartening things through applying some of the principles of “Presentation Zen” as I now understand them.

1) I was able to improve it 100% by simply stripping out the background Theme. What a simple concept! As soon as I saw my images highlighted on that featureless black background, I was hooked. No more “wind over Paris spring” themes for me…

2) I had tried to open with a snapshot of a looming environmental train-wreck, to tie this to a personal life-story paralleling the evolution of the environmental one, and then to use the converging storylines to pitch my own speculative fiction novel, Mai Shangri-La. the result included WAY too many competing messages. Each deserved its own vehicle.

3) In spite of my legacy bulleted style, I found that each slide had a core element that I could keep. By “unpacking” the multilayered images, I could expand one slide into several much simpler ones, all of which could impart their own unique message.

4) Without some of the excess wording, individual slides took on a new vibrancy that thrilled me. So a slide which had packed in a dozen cascading images and a series of expanding bullets became a series of individual slides with one or two words each.

I tried unsuccessfully to export a sample to PDF to display here, but uploads keep failing, so I’m bailing on this and moving on. Trust me, that the new, leaner Powerpoint was a dramatic improvement over the old. Now if I could just become so facile with a blogging platform… :0(

…but leaving it at that was really not very satisfying, so I finally ate crow and went to Dennis, my Divisional TRC (Technology Resource Coordinator), and learned a valuable lesson to buttress my learning about Presentation Zen – and basic Powerpoint use ;0) And the lesson is…USE the resources available to you, including the services of people who’s job it is to support you. It will save a LOT of time and frustration.  Thanks, Dennis.

Here’s a JPEG of just ONE of the original slides from the “Pre-Zen” Presentation (47 slides, all Packed out with words, cascading images, transitions (although I had already learned to pare these down to a single image and slide transition) and sound (thankfully, no typewriter clacks or machine-gun yammer, but still an overpowering background music dominating many of the slides)

And here’s the “kicker” slide from the new presentation (the new Presentation took that SINGLE original slide and “unpacked” it to present just one of the many messages in the original.)

"Fill" for a Future Housing Development on the outskirts of Bangkok. Normal?...

]]> http://edgingahead.edublogs.org/2009/09/28/suny3-presentation-zen/feed/ 0 http://edgingahead.edublogs.org/2009/09/16/stepping-back-on-the-merrygoround/ http://edgingahead.edublogs.org/2009/09/16/stepping-back-on-the-merrygoround/#comments Wed, 16 Sep 2009 09:08:15 +0000 rubisr http://edgingahead.edublogs.org/?p=124 SUNY EDC 604: Visual Literacy: Effective Communicators and Creators

“Write a reflective blog post on how the courses to date in this program have changed your teaching for the new year.

This blog has languished since the end of the last SUNY course at ISB in May, and now I have to conclude that frankly, the two SUNY courses we completed last year have NOT changed my teaching for this year.

I’ve been asking myself why – even before this question became a course assignment. It’s not that I’m not interested in helping kids “achieve their academic potential”.  It’s not that I’ve lost sight of ISB’s mission to foster “passionate, reflective learners”. It’s not that I’ve given up on our collective goal to help develop kids into “caring, global citizens”. And it’s not that the courses, in of themselves, weren’t  engaging, informative, and fruitful in terms of raising my awareness of new tools and technologies available to me and my students.

So what is it? In a nutshell, it’s a growing sense of impending doom; a feeling that we’re being overwhelmed; and not on the technological front, although certainly it’s become increasingly difficult to keep up with the weekly round of enhancements to online database interfaces, electronic book readers, all-in-one USB devices and “i-everything”.  Instead, this fall, I am overwhelmed by the following;

• I am concerned about the resignation to the inevitable I’m seeing in  my immediate “sphere of concern”.  At the beach that I could once keep reasonably clean by picking up two bags of trash each visit, I now find four to be the norm.  In my small off-campus housing development, rats have become new and unwelcome residents and I feel alone in fighting their encroachment.  I’ve given up trying to maintain on my own a small public park space at the entrance, and it has now become a rampant, weed-choked jungle.
• I am dismayed by the escalation of disregard I am seeing for the larger local environment. I live 20 minutes from this tiny western school enclave, and in my daily commute (by SUV!), I see streets becoming ever more congested and garbage-strewn, roadsides becoming defacto waste-dumps, and once pristine rice-paddies being paved over with first a meter of household garbage (pix to prove it), then a meter of fertile topsoil that should be growing a crop, and finally, two stories of glass and concrete that I fear will become Thailand’s Love Canal.
• I am staggered by the sheer global scale of irreparable damage to the environment I see perpetrated in support  of “business as usual” . We need to maintain “BAU” to support our insatiable demand for superfluous consumer products, unnecessary technology-laden “infomedia” capabilities  and an inappropriat global jet-setting lifestyle. A recent report by the BC Forest Service in Canada projects by within 10 years, the Pine-Beetle infestation will have destroyed 71% of all extant BC Pine Forests. That will bring about shocking changes in the appearance, climate and economic viability of Canada’s richest province.
• I am appalled at the scope of change sweeping the planet as a result of the above, from the speed of arctic sea-ice melt (a trend that’s, thankfully reversed slightly in 2009)  to the routine collapse of Antarctic ice-shelves, to the inexorable upward creep of atmospheric CO2.

Read James Howard Kunstler’s “The Long Emergency” (this link to the Rolling Stone article, but we have two copies of the book in ML) and consider how prescient he seems now to have been so far. Read his new novel “World Made by Hand” and consider what’s going to be important if his vision of America in 20 years turns out to be even partly true.

Then ask yourself, “How can I best help students achieve to their academic potential, become passionate learners, and prepare them to be caring, global citizens in a world which might not have functioning electricity or adequate freshwater – even at their soci0-economic level?”

Should I continue to obsess about flavor-of-the-week technological wizardry, or should I concentrate on rubber-meets-road learning skills that will transcend “the long emergency”,  when being able to learn, from a technology not dependent on electricity, how to purify unsafe drinking water, will be a skill more prized than knowing how to assemble a cloud-based mashup of irrelevant extrivianza?

I haven’t changed much about how I’m teaching this fall – except the time-frame within which I’m placing it.  I’m trying to keep my finger on the pulse of new technologies for information seeking and learning, but I’m concentrating on personal connections, practical learnings and transferrable skills that I can impart regarding the already rich array of tools available to our students.

This places me squarely in the left-hand column of Greg Craven’s Magic Grid Machine if you were to exchange his “Significant action now” and “Little or No action”  to combat climate change with “Hedge your bets with traditional vs. technological learning tools” and “Put all your eggs in the technology basket”.

Whether global warming is going to lead to uncontrolled and irreversible climate change is still, unfortunately, a matter of debate (albeit mostly from “outlier” opinion-leaders).  But using Craven’s irrefutable logic, I’ll fight to preserve the best of the past while critically examining, and implementing where it proves really useful,  technology’s promise for the future.  We’ve already made huge changes in the way we do business in our Main Library from 5 years ago.  This year we’ll concentrate on fine-tuning those rather than introducing a host of yet newer experiments in learning.

During the current SUNY Technology class, at least three groups are wrestling with ISB’s Acceptable Use Policy. Two groups are redrafting existing divisional Acceptable Use Policies to bring improved currency and relevance to documents several years old.  This project is to attempt to forge a link between the somewhat subjective wording of the AUP’s as currently in development and the very objective requirements of applying principles of “acceptable use” in a real-world environment; in this case, ISB’s Main Library.

For the purposes of this reflection, I will concentrate on the work of the HS AUP and Main LIbrary
“Technology Use Agreement” teams, since the most significant disparities between policy and behavior appear at this level. By the time they reach high school, students are better equipped to both assess their own personal actions and to rationalize this behavior.

A surprising revelation as I have considered this project is that none of the related documents (from ISB) are currently (at least prominently) available on ISB’s website or 1st-generation linked pages. A Google search for “ISB Bangkok” along with “AUP” or “Acceptable Use Policy” does not turn up a working link to a current AUP at any division level. This fact alone suggests that ISB’s core relationship to an AUP needs to be rethought. The quickest way to ISB’s existing AUP’s is through the SUNY Technology Course currently in action, where the current AUP’s are offered as attachments (scroll to the bottom).

Neither is the laptop-loan-agreement we have used for the four years since we adopted wireless laptops in our Main LIbrary available online. In my search I came across Acceptable Use Policies, Laptop Loan Agreements, and Technology Use Agreements, but none from ISB.

Once again, kudos to our very own ISB SUNY instructors Jeff Utecht and Chad Bates, for finding some of the best summarties of current thinking on AUPs, posted as resources for this course from AUP (Acceptable Use Policy) For New Web Tools by Dr. Howie DeBlasi (His keynote address from the AzTEA Conference, January 31, 2009 is worth a view)

Meanwhile, while I believe in a review of the overarching guiding principles of acceptable technology use at ISB, in our Main LIbrary, we still need a tangible, quickly reviewable but relatively comprehensive set of guidelines which we will ask student patrons to sign off on. As we review our school webpages, whatever emerges as a full-blown new AUP will  be placed at the library pages. For now, here is the proposed  “isb-technology-use-agreement-final-090509” which will likely continue to be used as the “rubber-meets-road” working document to hold students accountable for acceptable technology use in Main LIbrary.

• Wikipedia has published statistics indicating that in October 2007 they maxed out at 175,000 contributors who have edited (in English) at least 10 times since joining.
• In March 2009, Second Life reports that the number of Residents with repeat logins users hit 732,526.
  
• In April 2008, statistics published in http://www.mmogchart.com/ showed World of WarCraft topping the MMORPG charts at 10,000,000 users, 5.5 Million of which are in Asia.

Are we preparing students for a world of Mass Collaboration? Not very effectively. We still generally;

• require written (and usualy harccopy) assignments as indicators of learning or understanding. More often than not, these assignments are assigned to and assessed by, individuals (the student expected to develop the assignment on his/her own, and the teacher “marking” it personally).
• dismiss alternative media or assessment tasks as being unmanageable or “unassessable”.
• discourage  (or prohibit) kids from playing MMORPG’s in school and virtually never enlist them in the service of learning or assessment
• read about (and perhaps tinker with individually) virtual worlds like Second Life,  but have no official presence there.
• offer kids “penpal-type” experiences with students in remote areas using the new tools, occasionally Skype in a speaker from another part of the world, and sometimes set up “global classroom” projects involving a handful of classes geographically remote from each other,  but in reality, these projects still account for single-digit percentage of the average student’s day

Do we get kids involved in truly “Mass Collaboration” activities? Not very often, if ever, at this writing? How many of our kids have edited a Wikipedia article under our guidance? How many are members of Teen Second Life with school sponsorship or support? How many are MMORPG gamers with school acknowledgement? (I sponsor a “Game” division of my library club, which has a dozen active members in a school population of 700)

How do we prepare students for a world of Mass Collaboration? Perhaps the question should be “How would we prepare students for a world of Mass Collaboration (if we were truly doing so)?”

How would we prepare students for such a world? We would;

• Rewrite Acceptable Use Policies and “device use policies” to acknowledge a vastly enhanced range of acceptable activity with both bandwith and with access devices.
• Encourage student to share with teachers their online experiences and expertises rather than to hide them because they are “against the rules”.
• Recognize and mentor student Pathfinders who would search out, pilot and evaluate emerging technologies for accessing, managing and sharing insights and for creating new learning. This would logically and functionally enhance our commitment to helping students;
  • Reach their academic, recognizable potential
  • Become experts in understanding and guiding their own learning
  • Acquire an international education that inspires understanding and enthusiasmfor world citizenship and service to others:
• Massively increase our bandwidth so that we could support whatever (appropriate) online activities kids might like to engage in. This would include;
  • Online Gaming, both of the strategy-based MMORGS, but also traditional games like Chess. Chess ladders are common on the web, and players could join ongoing tournaments at their level of expertise and learn from both experts and simply from an exponentially larger pool of players than is available in their “real” world, whereever it might be
  • a presence in Teen Second Life where our students could collaborate both literally with their classmates and virtually with global visitors
  • Exploration of other Virtual Worlds like “Teen Second Life”. Virtual worlds can eliminate national and cultural barriers, remove physical limitations (everybody can fly in Second Life) and level the playing fied regarding age, sex or experience.

How could we improve how we prepare students for Mass Collaboration?

We need to embrace the wave of change and evolution in the same way our kids do – and embrace our kids as the agents of that change as well as the beneficiaries of it.

Then Again – maybe it’s a moot point, 2012 upcoming an’ all:)…

]]> http://edgingahead.edublogs.org/2009/04/24/course-reflection-mass-collaboration/feed/ 0 http://edgingahead.edublogs.org/2009/04/18/course-reflection-living-out-the-soapbox-speech/ http://edgingahead.edublogs.org/2009/04/18/course-reflection-living-out-the-soapbox-speech/#comments Sun, 19 Apr 2009 03:21:19 +0000 rubisr http://edgingahead.edublogs.org/?p=113 Essential Question: “What makes the web so powerful?” The one-word answer? Quality.

I’ll get to why this it. But first – In view of the “digital reality” of (our) students today, I’ve been seriously considering retiring one of the “soapbox speeches” I sometimes trot out when talking with a class that has that particular glazed-look attitude to actually looking in a book for information on their current assignment

“HEY! Check this out!” I tell them, once I’ve got their attention by jumping up on a chair, a table, or whatever is available that can give me a bit of a vantage (I’m only 5′8″ and shrinking…) and using my traveling evangelist voice.

“There’s a new technology you should know about for this assignment It’s the most amazing device ever invented for gathering, storing and providing quick answers to just about any question you might have. It’s compact, reasonably lightweight, instantly accessible, and infinitely retrievable. The information is logically organized in a way that’s easy to follow and convenient to reproduce for your own use. Setup is a snap, and there’s no tangle of cables and plugs drive you buggy. Best of all, it doesn’t even need electricity. Just grab it and GO!

I hold up a book, usually one measuring more than the 1 cm thick that I’ve noted as the limit of most teens’ interest (”if the answers aren’t in 64 pages, I’ll just Google it…”)

“This is it,” I tell them. It’s called a BOOK. And it’s a timeless example of “QUALITY“...

***

I spent the Songkran vacation upcountry (well, it’s looks like “downcountry” on a map, but it’s distinctly UPCountry).  This trip I decided to just go Cold Turkey. I packed a briefcase, the backpack I usually haul all my laptops bits around in, and, for good measure, the conference bag picked up at Learning 2.0 – with printed BOOKS, and every day I treated myself to a couple new titles.

It’s been a while since I spent any amount of real quality time reading for pleasure, and so many of the titles I had on this trip were fiction, and there area some great reads here. Check out my thoughts on these at “Reading for the Future“. Heading into this break, I figured I also would have some time on my hands (like during the 13 1/2 hour drive down) when I wouldn’t be able to read, but I could listen, so I downloaded several new titles to my phone (I don’t have an iphone, so need to list on my O2). I recently listened to “One Second After” and decided I wanted something along that line, so I had 12 hours of ”Apocalypse 2012″ by Lawrence E. Joseph to chew over. Joseph’s take on the many and varied ways in which events seem to be converging toward an inevitable collapse of society (and the technologies that underpin it) as we have come to expect them, is, in my view, a “must-read” for anyone in education, in the tech world, or just in the business of “getting on with life”.  While a true “apocalypse” may be not be inevitable, I believe that a rethink of our expectations for the future IS – and enduring quality figures prominently in whatever that future holds.

Because both “One Second After” and “Apocalypes 2012″ are pretty dark visions of the future, and to provide a bit of timeless food for thought, I also decided on this trip to try out one of our new MP3 CD audiobooks. This gave me another 9 hours of “Zen and Now” a recently published followup to the classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”. For anyone who has ever read and mulled over Robert Pirsig’s reflections on “Quality“, n “Zen and Now”, Mark Richardson offers up his own road-trip along with unique insights into Pirsig’s philosophy, and details of the Pirsig’s personal journey that, as a rider myself (with several motorcycling incidents detailed in my own book), I found absolutlely riveting. A “must-read” (or listen. Actually, this is one of those titles that I find huge pleasure in going back to again and again to listen while the miles spool by). Don’t miss it!

Of course, I didn’t ignore the non-fiction side either. To start out, I reviewed, skimmed, or otherwise perused a collection of new titles recently arrived for our library on environment/climate topics. All of these, now available in our Main Library, are worth checking out. If you aren’t yet convinced of the gravity of the situation facing the world today, or if you’re convinced, but uncertain of how you, as a single individual, can be “part of the solution rather than part of the problem”, check these out;

• Climate Chaos. Your Health at Risk. Cindy L. Parker & Stephen Shapiro. Praeger, 2008
Energy Supply and Renewable Resources. Regina Anne Kelly. Checkmark Books, 2008
• Going Global. Key Quest for the 21s Century. Michael Moynagh & Richard Worsley. A&C Black, 2008.
• Harnessing the Sun’s Energy. Why Science Matters. Heinemann, 2009.
• Plan C. Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate Change. Pat Murphy. New Society Publishers, 2008
• Seven Years to Save the Planet. Questions and Answers.  Bill McGuire. Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2008

Better yet, I brought with me the print copy of “Born Digital. Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives“, by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser (Basic Books, 2008).

I picked it up and glanced at the introduction, intending to skim it and summarize what I figured I already had a pretty good handle on. But then I found myself actually reading it fully, nodding at the examples that struck a chord, reflecting on the discussions we’ve already had on topics covered, and turning over in my head the things we haven’t discussed yet. I found myself going back to chapters that seemed particularly relevant and mulling over the salient points. The chapter on Quality was particularly of interest in view of my concurrent listening to “Zen and Now” and thinking back to Robert Pirsig’s theses on quality from 40 years ago. I even bookmarked several of the key points, and the book is beginning to develop a thumbed-through look even though I’m the first reader. If you’re one of the shrinking number of people who still love to read real books, get the book and spend some quality time with it.  For starters, chew on this (I’ve blogged about this on several occasions)

• p. 14 par.3 ”One of the most worrying things about all digital culture is the huge divide it’s opening up between the havs and have nots.”, and
• p. 14 par.4 “The vast majority of young people born in the world today are not growing up as Digital Natives.”

And don’t stint on Chapter 7. In the digital age, these points are more relevant than ever.  

• p. 161 – “Information quality goes directly to the heart of what it means to have a freer society. Unfortunately not all Digital Natives see it this way… In conversations with Digital Natives about information quality, questions like “So what?” and “Who Cares” are common refrains.”
• p. 163 – “It’s essential that all of us be able to differentiate good information from bad. By virtue of their age and education level Digital Natives are more susceptible  than adults to the threats posed by inaccurate information.”
• p. 165 – “When speaking about information quality, we always need to ask: “Quality” viewed from what perspective and in what context?”
• p. 166 – “…young people who access the Web, for instance, through computers in the library need to get the information very quickly and thus don’t have the time to evaluate their sources carefully.”
• p. 167 – “The ability to make quality judgements about information on the internet is not an innate skill.”

There’s more, much more. Get the hard copy and do yourself a favor. Spend some Quality time with “Born Digital” and in particular, with Chapter 7.

Back to the shop, to reality, tomorrow. I’ll be continuing to think, though, about quality – and I’m thinking that Robert Pirsig, Mark Richardson, and others, who worked, and still exist, almost exclusively in the world of print, may really have the answers (and the questions) that those “Born Digital” may never experience.

Perhaps, in the end, I consider myself lucky to be a “Digital Settler” (”Born Digital, p. 3). I like this designation better than the more commonly used “Digital Immigrant”. I’ve been there from the beginning. I worked on my first Commodore Vic20 program  (4 K of memory delivered straight to a tv monitor) for a travelling set of the new devices in Abbotsford School District in BC, Canada, in 1980. I have a collection of personal computers including one of those Vic20s, a Commodore PET, a Radio Shack TRS80, and each of the Macintosh models from the original Mac128 to the last of the all-in-one models (the Color Classic, in 1995). I appreciate quality – and I’ll keep striving for it as I move into the future – whatever it holds.

Reduced to a few basic concepts as I’ve wrapped my head around them, and with apologies to John if I’ve misunderstood or misinterpreted his message, he has convinced me to seriously consider that;

• In addition to initiatives on carbon conservation and reduction and efforts to replace fossil fuels with renewables, we need to add a “third leg” to the global environmental recovery strategy, and that is to restore every degraded environment on the planet to its natural balance.
• This is not an insurmountable challenge. John’s documentation of the changes to 35,000 square kilometers of the Loess Plateau in China over just 10 years is an amazing affirmation of what can be done when political will is turned to practical implementation of real-world projects.
• The 21st century preoccupation with atmospheric CO2 reduction is a misplaced and overly complex approach to simple systemic global problem. The overarching problem is rooted in human activity planetwide which replaces natural ecosystems with subsistence agriculture.
• Replacing natural ecosystems with subsistence agriculture has one logical natural conclusion, which is the ultimate degradation of the environment resulting in barren, unproductive deserts.

Furthermore, John proposes, and makes a strong case that;

• ALL of the environmental issues we’ve been bombarded with over the past ten years can be addressed at some level with a simple fix involving rebuilding the land’s ability to retain available rainfall and so to recover its natural propensity toward biological diversity and equilibrium.
• Physical reclamation of biodiversity on a local level can have  global climatic impacts – and virutally all of these impacts are positive.
• integrated poverty eradication and large-scale ecosystem rehabilitation go together. Local biodiversity recovery projects lead to the reduction of poverty and overal raising of the standard of living, which in turn can lead to the reduction of negative ecological behaviors, which reinforces ecological recovery, which leads to regional weather modification, which ultimately can have global impact.

Further, in order to become globally effective;

• the movement has to be “organic” – “grass-roots”, if you will. It has to be furthered by the actions of committed individuals involved in local action with regional or global consequences.

The source material for the notes above are available in more detail at a post somewhat down the homepage on the Earth’s Hope blog but the very essence of what John presented can be seen in the before and after images at the Earth’s Hope website. If you find these images striking, be sure to download the “Lessons from the Loess Plateau” video and watch the entire amazing story unfold.

I’ve spent several hours with John over the past three days, listening to his vision, revelling in the imagry he has presented, and mulling over where to go from here. Although John argues vociferously against adopting a “ready, fire, aim” approach, cautioning that the first step is to seek to understand how the current state has been reached, and then to adopt sound ecological interventions around water retention and biodiversity reestablishment, at the simplest level, it seems to me, I need to do something…and so do you... You can start by reading John’s story, viewing some of the footage posted at the Earth’s Hope website, and then reviewing (and perhaps contributing to) the issues raised on the Earth’s Hope blog.

My personal memmonic for the second half of Buddhism’s Eight-Fold Path (Right “Livelihood” through Right “Effort, Mindfullness and Concentration”) is -”Live Every Moment Carefully”

“Earth’s Hope” is that each of us will do exactly that. It’s never too late to start.

The simple answer? No. The very nature of the web, in which information is broken in to discrete packets and virtually broadcast to the four winds of the web ensures that any information released in this environment will be basically available to anyone who is intent on tracking it down.

A quick perusal of these articles basically bemoans the fact that people tend to be naive about the security of information posted online, and in the first, Husna Najand suggests that “A line must be drawn between what is acceptable and what is not”.  Rephrasing this as a question, the issue perhaps then is;

“Can a line be drawn between what is acceptable and what is not online?”

Again, the simple answer, for the same reason noted above, is “No.” Since the web, by its nature, has no centralized editorial control, and, to a large degree, literally no actual human evaluation of the contents, drawing such a line would require an algorithm to automatically analyze every web posting and to determine if it has crossed this line.  The possibility of designing such an algorithm seems wildly improbable. Thus, there can be no effective line drawn online between what is acceptable and what is not. The web, like life itself, is self-perpetuating but shaped by whatever becomes an integral part of the whole.

This week’s assignment for our Technology course is to blog on our experience and learnings at the EARCOS Teachers’ Conference (ETC) in Kota Kinabalu this week. Assumedly, we should look for linkages between our course reflections and the week’s topic of discussion.

On the face of it, there has been little in the sessions I’ve attended this week which I can link back directly to online privacy. The three keynote speakers this year have all been environmentalists at one level or another, their messages uniformly messages of hope and potentiality.

The conference began with Alan AtKisson, who presented the concept of “exponential growth” (driven home with an interactive ditty in which the audience sang, on cue, the refrain “exponential growth”) – and the idea that countering the exponential growth of events such as atmospheric carbon loading, habitat destruction and species extinction, there are positive incidences of exponential growth in areas such as renewable energy. If we can manage a confluence of these positive and negative trends, AtKisson proposes, we can reach a balance and avoid the many crises facing us.

The second day’s keynoter was William Lishman, a philosopher, inventor and innovator who’s address was titled “If we are not part of the solution, we’re part of the problem.” Lishman went on with a second session to show examples of his research and experience in the areas of alternative energy architecture including an overview of the design and development of his unique underground home in Ontario, Canada. As a sidebar, he showed the audience the most amazing video sequence of a calving iceberg I have ever seen

Tomorrow’s Keynoter will be John D. Liu, an American film-maker and ecologist, who has worked in China and abroad for years “on ecological film making and has written, produced and directed films on Grasslands, Deserts, Wetlands, Oceans, Rivers, Urban Development, Atmosphere, Forests, Endangered Animals, Poverty Reduction primarily for EARTH REPORT and LIFE series on the BBC World.

As I think more about this, though, it seems to me that perhaps there is a link between the concept of privacy and the issues that these three men raise. The link is in their very public presence on the web. A specific Google search of any of these three turns up 3-digit lists of hits. With this kind of online presence, even where there is duplication of some of the key stories involving or featuring them, how can personal privacy be even an issue. A little digging turns up everything from a trickle to a stream of personal data, professional accomplishments and public adulation.

Why is this relevant? It’s relevant because in the future we are facing, we need all the positive, future-oriented thinkers and do’ers that we can dig up – and it’s inevitable that the power of the web is going to be indiscriminate in the presentation and dissemination of a mix of the above. These people are doing important work – and by their very actions, they have demonstrated that the issue of personal privacy is, for them subordinate to the issues of the public good.

Thank you Alan AtKisson, William Lisham and John Liu, for showing the way!