Kelly Tenkely mentioned “…all an I-pad will let you do that laptop won’t (for same price)” and then clarified that she was thinking about software when she wrote “…not as many free software options on laptops.” That one made me do a double take, and I’m sure somewhere Richard Stallman’s ears are burning. Jon Becker then mentioned Linux laptop projects. Before Kelly mentioned software, I was guessing that she was making the argument, which I’ve seen before, that iPads are more useful than laptops because their UI makes it easier to actually get work done since you don’t have to spend as much time learning how to do things.

Michelle Baldwin made the quite valid point that different tools meet different needs. I think, however, that the 1:1 model implies that one tool will be a focal point of technology use. I would argue that if you are going to put a single tool at the “center of the show”, that tool should be as flexible and open a tool as you can find.

I hope Anastasis Academy’s iPad approach works for them. I also hope they’ll consider adding a Raspberry Pi, or something like it, to the supply list for older students once the device ships later this year. I’d love to see what the creative students they are cultivating could do if given a device they could program.

The Good

• Badges recognize that meaningful learning can happen in units smaller than a 750 minute credit hour.
• The backpack concept makes it easier for learners to aggregate credentials (I am under no illusion that badges are not credentials written small).
• The replacement of A-B-C-D-F with badge or no badge (now everything is pass-fail, in essence) may reduce relentless sorting pressure.

The Meh

• Badges still rely on external validation.  Validation already exists outside of the formal higher ed system.  Ask anyone who’s ever taken an MCSE or DELF exam. Therefore badges still signal.  Some badges will be perceived as more valuable ( a .NET badge validated by Microsoft) than others (a .NET badge validated by your brother-in-law, unless he happens to be Steve Ballmer).
• Badges are touted as a way for learners to have more control over their learning. Can that really happen given that , with external validation, controlling your learning is about  choosing which badges from which validators you will pursue?
• Almost anything a badge documents could be documented by an e-portfolio.  Badges become another shortcut HR offices and Admissions committees can use to avoid actually examining a person’s work in making screening decisions.

The Ugly

• How will one ensure that the badges a person claims truly belong to them?  Since badges are digital, anyone planning to validate them is going to have to make significant investments in security and redundancy.  If your badge is hacked or the validator is no longer able to document it’s validity, the badge is worthless.
• Will a badge system require you to have a single verifiable identity to which your badges are attached? (Thanks to Bud Hunt for spurring this thought). This is a dream for Facebook and Google, and a nightmare for the EFF.
• The current system of degrees ensures that it’s not just about employable skills.  Even students doing a career-focused AAS are required to take classes in English, math, history, and arts/literature.  To the extent that badges succeed , we may well end up in a world where employers will hire based solely on skill-related badges, removing much of the incentive  that remains for students to learn history, arts, scientific thinking (outside of those in science careers) and other things which contribute to their becoming critical thinkers, conscientious citizens, and well rounded human beings.

https://www.eff.org/

This isn’t to say that there’s no need for something like circles. I can think of at least a couple of valid use cases for them. I put very little about my children onto social networks.  When they’re older, they should decide how public they want their online lives to be, and I don’t want to burden them with a massive online footprint of childhood photos.  Circles let me share this selectively with relatives and other people who actually know my children.

Another sensible use for circles is managing languages.  I speak/write several languages with varying degrees of competence and fluency.  By segregating speakers of different languages into circles, things are seen only by people who are likely to be able to read them.

However, with these couple of exceptions, I think Google is missing the boat with outbound filtering. I may not know that someone in my Educational Technology circle is also interested in Medieval and Renaissance music, and thanks to the circle model, never the twain shall meet. The crux of it is that people should decide for themselves what’s interesting rather than trying to predict the audience for a specific artifact.  Rather than wonder if I’m in Jon Becker’s Dead Cat circle, I should filter Jon’s streams that I follow to exclude (sorry, Jon) dead animal references using hashtags, keywords, etc.  TweetDeck has a decent global filter, but why not something more granular, so I can avoid Jon’s dead cats while still seeing posts from the horse stable where my kids will attend camp this summer?  Better filtering also can help address social platform overload.  As soon as Google+ launched, the technopundits began to ponder which platforms (facebook, Twitter,etc.) would lose the attention that Google+ gained. If you can filter your streams so as to raise the signal to noise ratio in each channel, this becomes less of an issue.

Caulfield makes some interesting points about the effect on co-curricular emphasis, but there’s an effect that I think all the posters have missed.  The difference between the “sticker price” and the real price affects who goes to college, not just how much they pay.   The elegant term for this gap is “tuition discounting”.  The Lumina foundation examined the practice in detail .  They noted that discounting caused the amount of grant aid given to students from the wealthiest families to grow six times faster than the amount of aid given to students from the lowest income group.  Matthew Quirk wrote in “The Best Class Money Can Buy“  of how tuition discounting  and enrollment management “…changed financial aid—from a tool to help low-income students into a strategic weapon to entice wealthy and high-scoring students.”

If Quirk is right, are we seeing a shift in our collective understanding of what college is for?  Louis Menand recently considered this question in the New Yorker. (Go read Menand’s piece now. My post can wait).  Particularly, is enrollment management a shift back towards what Menand called Theory One (college as intellectual sorting mechanism) and Theory Three (college as vocational training) and away from what he termed Theory Two? (college as preparation mechanism of an informed and thoughtful citizenry)

Given the scale and emphasis of tuition discounting, what bubble there is isn’t round.  The tuition coat gap is growing fastest for those least able to pay.  How we as a nation intend to greatly increase the number of college graduates while making our investments in higher education in such a way that they benefit most those already at the top of the socioeconomic ladder is a question I haven’t been able to figure out the answer to.  I’m concerned that if I figure the answer out, I won’t like it.

As I poked around Wikipedia, I found the Center for Digital Storytelling, from which the term seems to have sprung. In the beginning, digital storytelling seems to have had a narrower definition than it does today. Essentially it was

Recorded narration + musical background + slideshow with Ken Burns effect.

The Wikipedia article also pointed to a digital storytelling site put together by BBC Wales, which stuck to the early definition of the form. Many of the stories had transcripts of the narration, and this led to a discovery.

Rather than wait for videos to load, I tended to read the transcript and then decide if the story was interesting enough to bother watching the full version. After sitting through several videos, I realized that the digital part of the storytelling often didn’t add that much to the experience. You saw some nice pictures and heard the author’s voice, but they were just reading their story, not telling it.

For illustration, compare Seamus Heaney reading the opening of his Beowulf translation with Benjamin Bagby telling the story in the original West Saxon. I’ve read the Heaney translation aloud, and it is, IMHO an excellent rendering of Beowulf into modern English. One can read it aloud and feel like you’re telling a story rather than reading a translation, which is no mean feat. Nevertheless, Bagby claims your attention in a way that Heaney just doesn’t.  So what does this comparison of Beowulf readings have to do with digital storytelling?

When we transcend text, we are making stronger claims on our audience’s attention.  If we’re going to tell stories digitally, we need to back up those claims with something that holds that attention. Just as much as how to use the tools, it’s important for us to help would be digital storytellers that they are, well, storytelling , with all the performance aspects that that entails.

At least I think it’s an interest in m-learning.  I worry that I may fall into the trap that this post tells you to avoid. My smartphone is so smart that it is really a pocket computer running a touchscreen optimized OS that happens to have a cell phone radio in it. That combined with the fact that I work in elearning at a traditional higher ed institution, means that I see mlearning through a traditional lens of course objectives and credit hours, even though I don’t learn with my mobile device that way.  Having a smartphone has moved the gigantic information repositiory of the global Internet from my desktop to my pocket (at least until the battery dies).  The just in timeness of it all is amazing, but I question whether it would work for learning that isn’t snippet sized, and I do believe that much of the most important learning we do happens in bigger-than-snippet sized portions.

The other way in which having a smartphone has changed how I learn is by making my Personal Learning Network more accessible.  I tend to use twitter rather than facebook for keeping up with my informal professional peer network. Surprisingly (or maybe not), the learning that happens here is serendipitous.  Rather than posting a question and waiting for a response, I’ll see something of interest posted by someone I follow and use that as a jumping off point.

The iPad is actually opening up technology to more people. None of this crap about it being closed is accurate. By giving people freedom to explore the app store without having to worry about anything (except their wallets), Apple has possibly made the best move they could make by locking down the iPad’s installation sources…..The iPad only does less than a regular computer to us geeks. To everyone else, it does more. This is what Motorola and Google and Samsung and BlackBerry and everyone else, with the sole exception of Apple, do not get about “open” computing. It’s powerful, but for ordinary people, it’s too powerful.

To geeks like us, open means something very specific.  It has to do with things like Stallman’s four freedoms.  I think the author means something different here.  He talks about “freedom to explore the app store” and makes the quite valid point that many people do more with an iP*d than they do with a “computer” because the ease of use and integrated application management system make non-technical users more willing to try things.

This has value and is for some a reason to buy an iOS device, but call it ease of use or flexibility or shallow learning curve.  Don’t call it opennness. Given the connotations that “open” has in the technical community, if you must use the term in a different way, you should make it very clear how and why you have chosen to do so.

The author,as an open source developer, knows that Stallman’s freedoms matter. His FLOSS project won’t run on an iOS machine. It almost seems as if he envisions a bifurcation into a large group of users with locked down devices and a small group of programmers with general purpose computers who create everything.  Even though that may how things are de facto at the moment, the huge installed base of programmable machines means that the user who decides he wants/needs to program has the tools available. Someone who owns an iOS device and makes that decision needs to get access to another machine. Is that what Mr. Teti wants?

Listen here (Source Material)

It occurs to me that I maybe should explain how this came to be.  I’m in the midst of reading Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings to my oldest child, and we got to Book V, Chapter 3 last night, which contains examples of Tolkien’s modern English alliterative verse.  This morning ,in the madly creative spirit of DS106, I got it into my head to do something in this form, but what?

My first thought was some sort of technical tutorial, and I even tweeted seeking suitable material.  I worried that trying to poetically render things like “mouse click” and “command line option” might be nearly impossible and create something forced.

Then I considered some iconic quotation.  Donald Rumsfeld’s “Known knowns…..” seemed too short.  I then considered the Gettysburg Address.  It was too iconic, and the Lincoln was from an era when rhetorical alliteration was part and parcel.

Whose words would work?  At last it was obvious — Jim Groom.

Looking at the Audio Assignment instructions, I made the decision right away that I’d post audio rather than text, since I was working within an oral tradition, even though I wrote it out.

The trickiest part was the hard data.  I decided it wasn’t really a challenge if  one was allowed to transform the instructions into something unrecognizable.  I laid down another ground rule. Whatever I ended up with still had to be usable as instructions.

With this constraint, there were two tricky spots.  One was handling dates and times.  Although one could say five o’ clock or March 11, it didn’t seem to fit the style. Dates ended up being trickier than times. I considered using ancient Roman convention and putting dates in terms of days before the Ides, but it seemed to not mesh with the Germanic origins of the form.

I actually settled on two different solutions. One was to return to the church calendar. Today is, fortunately, St. Mathias’s Day. Unfortunately, it couldn’t find a church feast for the final deadline on March 11.  I thought briefly about making it “six days before the feast of St. Patrick”, since the date is well known.

Then I thought of something else.  Lunar cycles.  Tolkien used this timekeeping mechanism in the chapter I was reading last night. So it was off to search for full moon dates for Fredericksburg. Add that to things I never imagined I’d be looking up.  That led to ….”the full moon filleth the land with light”.

The other thing I worried about was the specific instructions for filenames.  Thankfully the inclusion of the group names in the filename led to epithets.  It’s very much within the style to refer to a person by several names given to them (terror of enemies, gift giver, etc.) sometimes consecutively.  So of course epithets had to be found for Jim and Martha.

Usually the epithet was given by someone else rather than being self claimed. So it was off to Jim and Martha’s blog to research.  Jim has handy testimonials on his front page. so he became “Internet Midas” as well as his usual Reverend.

I don’t know Martha nearly as well, but her blog mentioned her kids (Martha the Mother) and her VW van (Moby’s great Mistress).  Finding the epithets was probably the most fun.

I need to make one correction.  I said “from Richmond a day’s march distant”. The sixty miles from Richmond to Fredericksburg is probably at the absolute limit of what someone could march,so it should have been “a day’s ride distant.”