Listen to the Reverend! by cogdogblog
posted 22 Jan ’09, 3.29pm MST PST on flickr
Jim Groom gets the crowd rolicking at our ELI session on "Not your Grandpa’s Blog" eli2009.wordpress.com
This dog’s cog’s are wogged so the blogs are back logged.
The EDUCAUSE/ELI conference this week continues to demonstrate it as a prime gathering for the edtech crowd, and to be less about shiny gizmos and more about shiny ideas/practices. They do a great job of adding new features like the self tags, the interwoven “Where is Professor Bluth” ARG, and just a great atmosphere.
Among several highlights was co-presenting something “different” with colleagues Cole Camplese and Jim Groom. I joked that we “didn’t spend much time preparing” which is not quite true; all three of us have been prepping all these years; its just that we did not spend a lot of time (or any) prepping slides etc.
Our idea was to generate open discussion on the use of blog or blog-like software for something much larger than blogging, each of us with a slightly different perspective.
I liked Cole’s introduction of the Harvard Live Question Tool though we were mostly focused on the audience at hand.
An impromptu hand raise survey of the audience was in the ball park of the stats I showed from the 2008 NMC Organization survey — maybe 20& of organizations host their own blogging service or use of blog software to run campus web sites. One might say that has “crossed the chasm” yet I was noting the repeat of questions from the Live Question Tool about places where ther only option was “Blackboard” or “how do we innovate when that is all they offer”.
JIm, as usual rolled out the Reverend and advocated for the use and power of Free Open Source Social Software (namely WordPress). He was pretty sedate on Bbashing until the last question! It is always energizing to be around the Rev.
Cole too brought a powerful message of how a large organization like Penn State has implemented a blog platform service to a huge number of students, and has the numbers and data to show this is a big movement that is soundly supported. This is a giant success story.
Again, you can find all of our resources, images, etc on our…. blog powered site:
I have an audio recording as well captured from the session, so sit back, and put your hands on the radio:
Not Your Grandpa’s Audio Recording
For me, I was excited to find one more classic from Lynnetter’s Interesting Snippets collection:
But of course the best stuff at the conference was in between, some of it perhaps fogged by certain liquid substances, but Jim and I hoisted our flags to fight the tide of Blogger Death, and Keeping the Blogging Faith alive by… continuing to blog.
Twitter is fun, Facebook connective, but there is nothing more important to me than keeping the posts flowing.
I tweeted a protest yesterday when I saw most of the #Eli09 presentations are not cross-platform/browser and can only be viewed in proprietary software that has to be downloaded 🙁
Dr. Berger’s presentation mentions “multi-tasking” as a characteristic of a digital native. There has been a lot of conjecture in research circles that this term is applied inappropriately to these students and that they are, in fact, merely apt to engage in a range of separate and disjointed activities as opposed to focusing on just one task. I am a little confused as to the exact definition of this term as it applies to these students and I admit to having no opinion one way or the other. I would be thrilled to hear your opinion on this. I’ve been following your blog for quite some time and I have a ton of respect for you and your opinions. 🙂
Hi David,
I am not a brain scientist nor do I play one on the Internet, but I do find we all carry some personal assumptions about the value of thinking we do “one” or “many” tasks at once. I too have always questioned the concept that brains can truly multi-process like a modern CPU, but then again, do not really think it matters if brains can really do “2” things at once or switch back and forth.
I also think that some of us tend to carry our own images of study as quietly hunched over a book peering intently for hours as the “best” way to learn; I remember myself studying that way, but these days I work among multiple media inputs, and find the silence un-nerving. We ought to IMHO focus more in looking at what students are able to do, achieve, create, demonstrate than judging the way they prepare for it.
And in the “old” way of “focusing” on one task, didn’t students day dream? pass notes? doodle? I think it is a bit of a fairy tale of single task brains.
@Barbara: I understand the frustration; it is not the most friendly format for live video, but:
I know, Alan..there is not much you can do in that case and thanks for providing the extra footage, which I have already downloaded.
I had just come back from an inspiring presentation by Sir Tim Berners Lee at Campus Party Brasil and was very annoyed at being prompted to install silverlight to watch some of the #eli09 presentations and even angrier when warned that my system and browser were incompatible.
The battle to make the Web an open system should be fought on many fronts and let’s keep the river and the energy flowing!
I just want to say that I had a blast with you and Jim on this! Even our preconference iChat was great! Thanks so much for taking the time to help get it together and for capturing it.
Cole’s last blog post..Community Question: Lifestreaming
Winning the Web is one of my favourite blogs to read!