Morgan's Log

garden envy

This note on Gardening the wiki, order in chaos from Brian Lamb prompted me to pay a long-overdue return visit to the UBC Wiki. Lamb and colleagues have been developing their wiki like mad. Envy. Particularly interesting is using a Gardening the Wiki blog to support and evangelize the space, with regular news and meta-commentary on the State of the Wiki from their wiki admin Will Engle. Double envy. UBC is making the hard move into open learning, and that’s to be envied.

Wish BSU had the interest and the energy to develop this kind of major project. Our faculty energy goes into developing (closed) courses using D2L. Hardly garden-fresh. More like frozen peas from Wal-Mart.

But the gardener’s role, as exemplified by UBC, will make an appearance when I re-fit the Weblogs and Wikis course next year. Kudos to UBC.

More on gardens at Understanding Nothing, c2.com, Meatball Wiki (zen gardens, walled gardens, gated communities). Then there are FormalGardens, KnotGardens, EnglishGardens, and Follies.

bookmarks for August 31st, 2010 through September 1st, 2010

• Practical Advice for Teaching with Twitter – ProfHacker – Covering organization, access, frequency, substance, archiving, and assessment – (twitter twwt social_learning socialpractices socialmedia teaching tips )
• 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error – (none)

bookmarks for August 30th, 2010 through August 31st, 2010

• Gardening the wiki, order in chaos – Brian Lamb's latest report on recent gardening efforts at ubc wiki. – (wiki gardening en3177 )
• iPad: Traveling Cold turkey – Add his one to the constraints of writing on an iPad w/o multitasking. – (iPad travel )

bookmarks for August 26th, 2010 through August 29th, 2010

• NSFW: A Modest Proposal For Authors Who Abandon Their Publishers — Give Me A Break – makes a good case for working with print publishers – (none)
• Step-by-Step: Creating Your Blogging System – Advice for EN3177. Get a plan. Get a market. Get a purpose. – (en3177 blogging )

semiosis & open learning course pedagogy: my spurious connection?

Reading Kress, Multimodiality, I was struck by how his model of semiosis lines up with Downs’s and Siemens’s open course pedagogy of connectivism as it appeared in the critical literacies course earlier this summer.

Here’s Kress’s sketch of the sequence by which semiosis moves:

the recipient’s existing
interest shapes
attention, which produces
engagement leading to
selection of elements from the message, leading to a
framing of these elements, which leads to their
transformation and transduction, which produces a
new (‘inner’) sign.

Or, from the perspective of the interpreter:

interest produces attention;
attention shapes the form of the engagement;
this leads to selections being made;
the selections are framed;
there is the subsequent transformation and transductions of the elements in the frame;
and, in that, the (‘inwardly made’) sign is produced.

The sequence reshapes (aspects) of the initial message, the ‘ground’, into a prompt. Interest is the motive force: it is the basis for attention to the ‘ground’ constituted by the exhibition, for engagement with that ‘ground’; it shapes selection, transformation and transduction; and interest becomes evident in the new sign, the map.

And here’s Stephen Downes’s explanation of how the Critical LIteracies Online Course is designed:

1. Aggregate
We will give you access to a wide variety of things to read, watch or play with…. , what you should do is PICK AND CHOOSE content that looks interesting to you and is appropriate for you. If it looks too complicated, don’t read it. If it looks boring, move on to the next item.

2. Remix
Once you’ve read or watched or listened to some content, your next step is to keep track of that somewhere. How you do this will be up to you.

3. Repurpose
We don’t want you simply to repeat what other people have said. We want you to create something of your own. This is probably the hardest part of the process.

Remember that you are not starting from scratch. Nobody every creates something from nothing. That’s why we call this section ‘repurpose’ instead of ‘create’. We want to emphasize that you are working with materials, that you are not starting from scratch.

4. Feed Forward
We want you to share your work with other people in the course, and with the world at large.

Now to be clear: you don’t have to share. You can work completely in private, not showing anything to anybody. Sharing is and will always be YOUR CHOICE.

I wasn’t going to map Kress’s sequence to the course sequence, but I will: The instruction to aggregate let’s the learner draw on interest to shape her attention, to produce engagement which leads to selection, which slides into remix. Remix and repurpose put the focus on framing the elements of aggregation, to produce a new inner sign – which can then be shared, or not.

This connection between theory of communication and pedagogy – I’m not sure if it’s spurious or not yet –  also gives the vernacular activities aggregate, remix, repurpose, feed forward a pedagogical strength that I hadn’t recognized before.

That’s my morning started.

bookmarks for August 23rd, 2010 through August 24th, 2010

• Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive « alex.moskalyuk – Love ‘em or ‘ate ‘em. – (rhetoric )

time to update blogging software

I’ve been using ecto for blogging, and happily, for the last couple of years. I looked at MarsEdit the few times I heard it mentioned, but only now am I ready to move. What won me over was the multi-pane, single-widow design. Flickr integration is a plus. I like the way it handles tags and categories.

So many little niceties. Maybe I’m getting spoiled: I want the niceties.

update on blogging with an iPad: big cat in a small bed

I have tried and tried, and for many things, an iPad was enough – reading and annotating books and pdfs, reading and annotating rss feeds, taking notes, drafting and revising single- and multi-page print documents, some management and editing of photos, keeping up with email, twittering, even keeping a local wiki. But for blogging when drawing on multiple sources, it falls flat.

yet another promise to post

Paul Carr at TechCrunch makes some sharp observations on the appeal of immediacy over the hard grind of reflection in Thnks Fr Th Mmrs: The Rise Of Microblogging, The Death Of Posterity.

A decade or so ago, a new generation who would previously have kept diaries instead started to set up blogs. Sure those blogs may have been twee or self-absorbed or clumsily written or emo or just plain boring – isn’t that the joy of a diary? – but they at least required the writer to take the time to process the events of their life, and the attendant emotions they generated – before putting finger to keyboard. The result, in many cases, was a detailed archive of events and memories that they can look back on now and say “that was how I was then”.

And then along came micro-blogging – and, with a finite amount of time and effort available, the blog generation turned into the Twitter (or Facebook) generation. A million blogs withered and died as their authors stopped taking the time to process their thoughts and switched instead to simply copying and pasting them into the world, 140 meaningless characters at a time. The result: a whole lot of sound and mundanity, signifying nothing.

I haven’t been an enthusiastic microblogger, so I don’t need to back away from Twitter much, I’ve already let my Tumblr account go dormant, and I just don’t find Facebook rewarding and so rarely visit But the piece is a reminder to get something extended and thoughtful – or even trite – posted regularly. And, I’d add, posted to one place. Along with the brevity, the scatteredness of the sites to post to makes creating a record difficult.

bookmarks for August 21st, 2010

• Never Mind the Edupunks; or, The Great Web 2.0 Swindle – Here's a chord. Here's another. Now go form a band. Brian Lamb and Jim Groom critique open ed, sneaky commodification, Vivienne Westwood, and the coming New Romantics. This is where we are, again. Like old home week. "It may not surprise readers that the two of us—a couple of embittered Gen-X'ers who've been associated with the "edupunk" aesthetic—look at the commodification of online educational environments with distaste. At the risk of indulging our stereotypical knee-jerk anti-corporatism, we note here several concerns." – (bollocks openeducation edupunk openaccess opensource sex_pistols SCORM )
• EDUCAUSE Review Magazine, Volume 45, Number 4, July/August 2010 | EDUCAUSE – Open Ed Special Edition – (de opensource openeducation ple )