eduSWAN

[CC Licensed image by everythingnewisdangerous] 

As my disillusionment with the profession of education (and technology in education) deepens, my interest in very particular, sometimes tangentially related topics, is growing quickly. One of the topics bubbling to the top is the way our language is changing through our engagement with technology.

I think both of the most obvious “sides” in this discussion are correct. Language changes for many reasons, including the insinuation of communication technologies and their features, and that evolution isn’t coherently characterized as a net “loss” except through some particular personalized view. But that’s the rub… language is one of those cultural resources that is both shared and intensely personal at the same time. So the loss is incurred by these changes can be, at a personal level, very real for any one of us as individuals, as well as for any group that is defined with enough clarity to identify shared language characteristics.

Naturally, writers of various kinds make up many of the groups that feel the effects of evolutionary change most keenly and, by nature of their (pre)occupations, perhaps have an outsized voice when it comes to writing (and griping) about them. So Clive Thompson’s recent review of three books that—in whole or in part—speak to the area of technology and language was a pleasant surprise, providing a balanced view of the topic and three books I now need to read.

It may come as a shock to anyone who reads my writing here, but when it comes to “creative writing” I generally prefer brevity to expansiveness. I prefer poems that are under a page, right down to Haiku, as broken as the traditional American view of them is, and American Sentences. I love prose poetry and flash fiction. The speed with which technology lets us communicate (making it easier to and less time-consuming to communicate multiply rather than collectively) combined with technologically based limiting factors (from the UIs in composition spaces to literal limitations and their derivations as seen in SMS text messaging and Twitter) has facilitated a compression of language that I find equal parts maddening and fascinating.

It helps that Thompson writes with a clear prose and is very clever… many will know him ideas like his analogy between Twitter as a part of our social sense analogous to our physical sense of proprioception. For example, in the review Thompson makes this point about Twitter:

“…Twitter is training millions in the compressive skill of newspaper-headline writing—ironically enough, at precisely the moment when actual newspaper-headline writing seems at the point of vanishing. And consider the odd literary function of the link: a tool that lets you compose a status update that’s suggestive and intriguing but incomprehensible unless you follow the link itself, at which point the sentence’s meaning is revealed.”

There’s a lot to think about in this area… not just in terms of compression, brevity, and references/referents, but also how these can be (and are being) considered collectively– whether deliberately or haphazardly, and whether as part of authorial intention or audience invention.

Our good friend Cathy Casserly, former Director of the Open Educational Resources Initiative of the Hewlett Foundation, as just been elected to the Creative Commons Board of Directors. While there were already people on the CC board who cared about OER, the addition of Cathy means that the Board now has one of the most articulate OER champions around in their ranks. This is great news! Congrats to Cathy, CC, and anyone who cares about OER!

Coverage at:

• Welcoming Cathy Casserly to the Creative Commons board of directors
• Open Education Resources Get a Big Boost: Cathy Casserly Joins Creative Commons Board

Image credit: bionicteaching’s “Edupunking your CMS”

Maybe it’s just cause I live in a particular bubble on the internet, but over the past six months or a year there has been what seems to me like some serious momentum towards thinking through WordPress (and/or WPMu) as a serious alternative to Learning Management Systems. And posts like this interview with Kyle Jones as well as Joe Ugoretz’s tour-de-force two part series on how he is putting the idea of WordPress as a LMS into action are pretty badass. This is some amazing stuff, and I really think Kyle Jones nails what the appeal of WP as an LMS is for many with this quote from his interview at wpmu.org:

But [offering faculty and students a hands-on approach to designing their learning] is what makes using WordPress MU wonderful as a LMS: We’ve modified and tweaked it at the students’ request, making their learning space what they need it to be – not what some company says it should be.

And, on top of that, Kyle captures the engine that is driving this emerging cooperation amongst and between a distributed group of faculty, students, and technologist all over the world:

We learn from each other, we steal from each other, in the end we try to give back to those who have helped us.

That really sums up what this vision of openness is as we work through our issues, tinker with the tools, think through the implications, and share back what we’ve learned. I might be crazy, but I still have faith that through this kind of process we can take back the means of imagining our own spaces for teaching and learning from the expedients of institutional efficiency, cause it’s exactly the imagination of these spaces that is a necessary and integral part of the teaching and learning process as Joe Ugoretz’s posts make all too clear. I may be biased, but I can;t help but think what we are seeing in the educational community working with WordPress, is just one part of a larger momentum of people using a variety of tools to escape the prison house of learning that is the LMS. And that brings me to a bigger point, I really don’t think we are simply using WordPress to ape the LMS, but rather to re-imagine the ideas that under gird this design: give students ownership of their work, control over the design, and the ability to seamlessly integrate a wide variety of other tools they already use to network online. More than that, the bigger push is to put students in a pace they own and share back what they choose, an expectation that they take ownership of their work and identities online.

Paternity leave is over, and the bava is back!!!

[CC licensed image by KraetzschePhotography] 

Brad Ovenell-Carter (aka @Braddo) was kind enough to bring his 2010 Prediction for K-12 Education to my attention. While they’re labeled "K-12" they are also relevant, in different ways, to higher education, and each stimulated some thinking on my part.

Prediction #1: "School administrators will enter the conversation."

This is precisely apt for higher education: administrators are having a conversation… but it’s not the conversation they need to be involved in. The current conversation administrators are taking part in is instead happening mostly in parallel with that of the practitioners and innovators within the space(s) they administer. Of course I worry about the effect administrative realities have on innovative activities– Christensen’s work on disruptive innovation is frighteningly relevant– but at some point what is learned and practiced on the edge needs to make its way into the fabric of the institution. Or maybe it doesn’t have to, but I’d like it to since I plan to remain working within one of those institutions.

Bringing ReadWriteWeb.com’s Top 5 Web Trends: 2009 into play (Structured Data, Real-Time Web, Personalization, Mobile Web / Augmented Reality, Internet of Things) as part of this prediction interests me. How many educators would list ReadWriteWeb’s five as the most important web trends of 2009 w/r/t their work? If we’re talking about a top 5 in terms of importance to education, then I propose:

• real-time web – setting aside subtleties and arguments about these roles, this is more important for educators and their professional communities than their students’ educational world(s)

• "cloud computing" – I use the term haphazardly to include both educational institutions increasing move toward enterprise-level cloud computing services as well as the march of end-user applications and activities from specific desktop to Internet applications such as Google Office

• distributed, synchronous conferences – perhaps organizers for events in other areas can afford to attempt to corner their audience into over-priced and under-valued face-to-face offerings, but education isn’t one of them

• personalization – this will be important, but mostly in its effects on privacy and identity…it will be two or three years before we seem integration of scattered, siloed information to a point that the grander ideas of personalized learning is possible (if it happens at all)

• tablets, netbooks and iPhones (oh my) – most of the activity in this area will continue to focus on simplistic content provision and access to "materials," but I suspect the Apple tablet will result in a tectonic shift in the fundamental landscape just as the iPod and iPhone have. Netbooks will be the next Trapper Keeper.

If I’m not limited to explicit technologies, then I add:

• open education/openness – this is fundamental to the visions of many innovative educators, sometimes without those same educators knowing it. The traditional models of content-centric OER creation and provision will continue to die-off and become less relevant. But there’s significant danger here if we aren’t successful in refocusing and reshaping the energy of open teaching and learning as a fundamental way of working.

• new literacies and information fluency – yes, there’s more information and means of expression, but digital literacy just doesn’t cut it. I may be early on predicting serious, practical movement in this area, but it will be a top-flight concern nonetheless.

• intellectual property and copyright – alternative licensing will continue to grow in importance, but media convergence and mobile growth is going to act as a serious counterbalance. I expect significant legislation and wrangling in this area… and net neutrality!

Prediction #2: "Everyone will wake up to the idea that students are not digital natives."

I’ll quibble with the absolute nature of this prediction. I’ve shifted a bit on my position regarding use of the phrase "digital natives" but not at all on the reality that the label (as typically used) refers to characteristics accurately representing an important– if small– set of learners that I encounter in every class I teach.

Who are myriad prognosticators thinking about when they roll out their predictions about personalized, individual education, if not those who are outside the fat belly of the bell curve? “Digital natives" are, to me, similar to what other gifted groups are: a small set of students with outstanding skills and experience that are not being served by middle-of-the-road educational experiences.

We can dispense with the phrase, but those students exist, just as do many other "outliers" in any community of learners, and I, for one, am really tired of the immense leveling effect that comes as a byproduct of terminology crusades.

Prediction #3: "We’ll put philosophy back on the table."

I sure hope so! The "participation and presentation" circle of my information fluency Venn diagram is predicated on the idea that we are recognizing and teaching the practical ethics and evolving morality and mores of the webby, netty world.

With no experience in K-12 education beyond experiences with my own children, I can’t speak to the needs there, but in higher education this means taking into account creeping relativism (and I am, by most standards, a relativist– or more specifically an ironist) and at least being aware of the constant conflation of ideology and philosophy.

The recent "openness debates" provides a stark illustration of the difficulty of 1) engaging the philosophical in an edtech world heavily biased towards traditionally pragmatic concerns, and 2) finding productive means of doing so.

[1/27/10 - edited for grammar]

And to build on my last post about Moving from Multi-DB to SharDB on WPMu, here is a rundown on some of the work done to further optimize the multiple-databases for our WPMu at UMW Blogs.

First off, we have a plugin install called WordPress MU Sitewide Tag Pages that basically republishes every public post from around UMW Blogs into one blog, the tags blog, which is located at http://tags.umwblogs.org. This plugin has a ton of uses for us, not least of which is sitewide tags and categories, as well as feeds off those sitewide tags and categories for syndication and republishing into course sites. Another function of this blog could be a searchable archive of all the public work done. So, needless to say, this blog is important enough that we have let it run now for almost two years without pruning. And when I checked the wp_posts table of this blog in the database there was what seemed to be 99,066 posts.

And that one table was weighing in at a hefty 425 MBs, which mean it was out-of-control, and I imagine some of our recent performance and down time issues might be related, so I decided to cull this table. So after backing it up, I tweeted looking for advice on how I might delete all posts from the tags blog before a certain day, say August 15, 2009—the week before the Fall semester started this year.

And in no time at all, Michigan’s finest, Gowtham (and sgowtham on Twitter) sent me the following bit of code:

DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_date < "2009-08-15";

Along with the note, “please be sure to replace the right table name in place of wp_posts though.” Which would like like this for the tags blog with the ID 1291:

DELETE FROM wp_1291_posts WHERE post_date < "2009-08-15";

So I just copy that bit of SQL code into the PHPMyAdmin editor that lets you run SQL queries for a specific database like so…

And within a minute 66,000 posts were removed, and the table was now 142 MBs.

Now, let’s stop here for a second. How sick is that? Within minutes I got a solution to my issue and deleted 66,000 posts and potentially saved UMW Blogs a couple of more crashes this coming week, from a friend on twitter who just knew what to do. How much richer am I because of this relationship? How much richer is all of UMW? It’s kinda wild to think about that. And more than that, it doesn’t stop there….

When I removed those 66,000 posts the size of the table was still showing 425 MBs, but there was now a value in overhead column of the table that had a value of 140 MBs. I had o idea how to get rd of this, so asked again in Twitter, and D’Arcy Norman tweeted me back this:

He was right, optimizing the table brought the 425 Mbs down to a slender 140 MBs, and the overhead value was flushed clean. So this got me thinking, hmmmm, what if I could run a script and optimize every table in every database? I mean this site has been running non-stop for almost three years, and has been a work horse. How about giving UMW Blogs an “oil change”—to use Gowtham’s analogy which works beautifully. So, when I tweeted about that optimization question, Gowtham once again sent me a message, and after I gave him the naming conventions of my 18 databases on UWM Blogs, wham, I had a PHP script to optimize every table in UMW Blogs.

People, are you getting the point here? Gowtham is an Engineering Physics grad, a hell of a photographer too, but he knows his shit. And he was willing to share that will me in all of about a few minutes the first time. But for the optimization script, he actually wrote it up and sent it to me via email. I don;t know how long that took him, but it would have taken me hours and hours of research and learning to figure out I could do it. And hours more to beg someone who knew at UMW to write it for me (if that person existed). Well, this process was a matter of minutes.

And, Gowtham not only sent me the SQL Optimization script, but was more than cool with me sharing it, so here is the code to the script as a txt file.

And here it is copied below sans opening and closing PHP calls.

# PHP script to optimize each table in a given set
# of MySQL databases and improve the overall performance.
# First written: Gowtham, Mon Feb 27 09:33:01 EST 2006
# Last modified: Gowtham, Sun, 24 Jan 2010 13:01:58 -0500

# Close the connection
mysql_close($connect);

I put in the drop database sign-in information, uploaded it to UMW Blogs via FTP, and went to the script at http://umwblogs.org/mysql_optimize.php, and a few minutes later all of the tables in all 18 of the databases were optimized.

Is this not awesome, UMW Blogs has gotten the oil change it has been in desparate need of—and I don’t recommend waiting every 4,000 users and blogs, every 2,000 may be wiser. So, thanks to Gowtham, UMW Blogs is purring like a cat, and I really hope it stays that way.

And just to show you I have no shame, something else I saw when the databases were optimizing is that random blogs still have the Spam Karma tables in them, I would think about 500 or 600 blog tables filled with old spam. The tables are labeled wp_blogid#_sk2_logs and wp_blogid#_sk2_spams. For example: wp_21_sk2_logs and wp_21_sk2_spams. So riddle be this Batman of Gowtham, how would you find and drop all tables with _sk2_ in them across 18 databases?

I love the internet, and I can’t thank you enough Gowtham for your selfless support, people like you make this space both fun and wonder-filled.