Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech

“An uniformed opinion expressed entertainingly trumps an informed opinion expressed boringly every time.” Linwood Barclay

So I think information and ideas can fall inside this quadrant I created.

Obviously we should be aiming for the top left but I’m guessing the bottom left has more influence that the top right. (Think Fox News, or most of what you find on Youtube and the internet in general, and also see Andrew Keen). It once again falls into the long line of topics relegated to the “it is what it is” category.

I think being entertaining often gets a bad rap. We often see it a less academic or somehow a dumbing down of important and serious thought. Entertainment does not have to be synonymous with fluff. On one hand we try and make learning more engaging for our students and at the same time guard against the pointless drivel of the much of today’s content. Surely this will be an ongoing struggle.

I’m advocating for entertaining, or at least interesting (I haven’t decided yet if these are the same). I heard Gar Reynolds once say that 90% of Presentation slides are boring but surely 90% of people aren’t. And yet I sometimes get the same feeling as I read blogs. It has nothing to do with length either. Tell me stories, be funny, be clever, surprise me, anger me, or challenge me. I don’t have a recipe for how to do this but certainly if you’re a boring person in real life, I’m not sure you can pull off being entertaining online. I don’t know that many truly boring people. Mostly because I likely tend to consciously or subconsciously avoid them. Don’t we all?

In Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind he advocates for people to be watching/listening to comedy everyday. I remember as a young child staying up late, hoping my parents didn’t noticed me so could watch the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. My two favourite parts were Johnny’s monologue and whenever he had a stand up comedian. I’ve always been intrigued with how comedians are able to craft language and physical gestures to make people laugh. I won’t even tell you how many Seinfeld episodes I’ve seen. My wife says I can relate everything to Seinfeld and I have several friends who know exactly what I mean when I say, “the vault”. If you’re interested in the meta cognition involved in crafting a joke, rent the DVD Comedian. It chronicles Jerry Seinfeld’s return to stand up comedy and more interestingly how difficult it is to be funny or entertaining. It’s hard work to be entertaining. I think it aligns nicely with the value of crafting a compelling slide deck for your presentations. Often skipped over because its seen as decorative, it really becomes the avenue for which compelling ideas are expressed.

So spend some time on youtube watching storytellers and comedians. So is content more important than engagement? Maybe not but most of the world would say it is.

In case you haven’t laughed today, watch this.

That’s how Andrew Keen sees the culture of the web and new media. I have not read his book but have watched several interviews and lectures. The Truth According to Wikipedia is a great video that debates the merits of wikipedia with Keen and Jimmy Wales key players.

Without rehashing previous arguments, two main ideas override the specifics of the debate for me:

1. Truth has always be personalized. As much as Keen argues how this will have adverse effects on society, it really is simply the amplification of what has always been. Individuals have always determined this. Yes, in the past gatekeepers have been our filters and we’ve trusted them for the most part but there were always gaps that were revealed, sometimes years or centuries later but truth in many cases emerged. The process is simply more transparent now. The Cult of the Amateur does have merits. The idea that being able to publish somehow makes you important or have something people need to hear is a dangerous concept that we are going to continue to deal with. I have a bit of difficult time understanding his arguments that this is somehow less democratic. We still need gatekeepers but now we have more say in who those gatekeepers are.
2. It is what it is. If Keen’s argument is to make people aware of these trends, fine. But the lament of he and others to the “good old days” (whenever that was) is a moot point. We’ve always had to make decisions around trust and experts. Good teachers have been helping students critical navigate their world for years. It’s just that now it’s more important.

It’s never been a matter of good or bad for me. This is our world and why not embrace what is good, leverage it, pay attention to what is bad, and discourage it.

The concept of using your network to filter content (I don’t mean content filtering I mean filtering content…never mind, just keep reading) is a burgeoning idea. The fact that I spend a huge amount of time online need not be beneficial only to me. Like the spies going into Egypt and reporting of the abundance, I can come back with reports of goodness of all that I see, read and hear. Here are  3 simple ways to filter content for your network:

1. Use your the “Share Feature” in Google Reader.  By simply clicking the Share button at the bottom of key posts, I filter out on average about 1 out of every 400 posts I read. If more people did this, you’d quickly create an easier entry point for newcomers.
2. Delicious link Roll. While many have added their del.icio.us links on their blogs, I just added a “mustread” tag. I’ll likely add this tag to about 1 in 10 items I tag. The difference here is that I totally control all my bookmarks but with my Reader, I only control my feeds, not every post. While I subscribe to many folks bookmarks, I think adding a mustread tag would be helpful to those with only a passing interest.
3. Videos I watch. I just recently noticed VodPod on Susan Carter Morgan’s blog which allows you in the same way you add bookmarks in del.icio.us, you can have a bookmarklet to save videos. I do have a favorites list in youtube but this allows me to gather video from a variety of sources. I’ll likely label about 1 in 5 must see. Video is certainly more of a time investment in most cases so it’s likely more I see will be worthwhile.

One argument that continues to surface is that since we live in a publish then filter world, students quickly get the impression that simply posting content online is good enough. I think Sturgeon’s law is fairly accurate: “90% of everything is crap.” Finding the 10% that is really good takes a lot of time. But again, using the same power that allows us to easily publish crap, we can also easily label quality. Sure, it’s still arbitrary, but overall, it’s a pretty good system.

This is all about the power of tagging. As you can see if you’re reading this on my blog, that I’ve added all three of these to my sidebar. I’m trying my best to filter out what I think the best of the best is for me. I realize their are a number of other ways to filter content for your network.

What did I miss? Do you have some other ideas for filtering content?

Image: Seive by James UK

Technorati Tags: googlereader, delicious, vodpod, sturgeon, susancartermorgan, filter

This podcast is a bit odd in that I take 3 episodes of TWIT and mix them up to highlight the discussions around twitter. I think it’s the best I’ve heard in helping form some understanding of this stupid, yet powerful thing. If you know nothing about twitter, I think this might help. If you use it, it should help clarify some things as well.

Here are the links to the full episodes in case you want more:

TWIT 134
TWIT 135
TWIT 136

Just doing a little filtering for ya.

Also I wasn’t happy with my audio, it sounds tinny. I used Audacity and really didn’t do much with the settings. I used a ClearChat Logitech USB microphone but it doesn’t sound great. Any advice?

 

 What is Twitter?: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I’ve been thinking for a long while about some of the angst people feel about content and keeping up. We definitely are suffering from an old school belief and/or understanding that in order to be current we have to have a handle on the very latest research or content in our field. Obviously 20 years ago, actually you probably only have to back about 5, it was quite easy for educators or anyone for that matter to feel like they were aware of the latest greatest. Subscribe to a few key journals, read a book or two and year and you were done. The good old days?

So now we add to the mix every blog, social network, new tool, changing media, easy publish, youtube, rss reader and the list goes on. We hear about information overload. We hope these tools will help us manage. They won’t.

Is this a generational thing? We need to get comfortable with the messiness as a virtue. Most of us don’t like messiness. My kids don’t seem to have a problem with it. Although I razz Will at times for his struggles with managing it all, I heard him say recently that doesn’t worry about missing things because his network is his filter and that the cream of content will eventually rise to the top. Good advice.

While there seems to be a desire for first posts, I’m also grateful for the revisiting of old links. Today I was reacquainting myself with the lectures of Randy Pausch. Although I posted on this back in the fall, I noticed Wes Fryer just recently discovered him and posted on him today as well after someone posted this on twitter. I think this is great. Ideas, people and stories worth telling are worth telling about more than once and they will. So if you missed Randy Pausch in the fall, you got to hear about him again. (if you’d like a great lecture on time management, watch this one)

I missed the whole color war thing, don’t really get diigo, still don’t really know all the my new Macbook can do. I don’t care. I’m not sure if I was Alec who said it, or where I heard it, but understanding that learning and content today is not a reservoir but a river, is a great metaphor.

Don’t panic if you don’t get twitter. If you don’t check your facebook account for 3 weeks, who cares? So I’m urging you to mark this post as read in your reader. Don’t worry if you don’t read it. Okay, that may be stupid to say since if you’re reading this it’s already too late. But the fact that you’re around, sipping in the river leads me to believe you’ll be fine. If you don’t read this post or the next, it’s no big deal

Update #1: Stephen Downes may have said it first
Update #2: Rob Wall posted a similar idea a month ago. See good ideas resurface.

Technorati Tags: willrichardson, wesfryer, randypausch, aleccouros,

Our first live podcast featured D’arcy Norman. Here are the show notes. Have a listen. It’s raw and it’s real.

 

 EdTech Posse 4.1: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download