Edupunk, multiliteracies, communities of practices, and online conferences
I’ve been thinking a lot about these topics lately and how I can converge them into an abstract I have to write today, a ppt I have to create for an important online conference presentation, and a talk I have to write up as if I were delivering a ‘paper’ at the TESOL conference in Denver this March (I’m on two symposium panels).
I was thinking up to now about WHICH to write for which event.
- One of the symposium topics is in fact on communities of practice.
- I’m teaching a multiliteracies course right now, one week to go.
- My online conference presentation is about struggling for ten years to get face to face conferences online, or nevermind f2f, purely online … even better?
- The abstract can be about all of the above (I just have to write it !!)
So, how do I fit the threads into warp and woof? The topic in our m/literacies course this week, which has hardly gone anywhere in fact :-( is Edupunk. To kick this off I had Robin Good come talk to us, online of course. There is a story there … I’m just freewriting now, getting stuff up there … but Robin is an edupunk sort of guy (like me ;-) and we were setting up in Elluminate the hour before Robin was due to start, and in this hour, pure edupunk. Robin had a presentation that was in PDF format so how to upload it to Elluminate. He decided to screen share but the refresh at my end was sooo slooooow. He decided he preferred Gotomeeting so he put me on to his acct. This was problematic, took time possibly because there was a dialog box buried underneath all the windows and we realized that was not going to work if we had people coming to meet us online in half an hour and somehow we had to herd them from Elluminate into Gotomeeting, where Robin only had an hour to spend with us anyway. Though we decided this was not for prime time, I did get in eventually and Robin was able to flip me through his slideshow. I said, hey Robin what if I screenshare what I see? So I did, people were starting to show up already, Robin was paging through his slides, and somehow screenshare out my end was working with a quick refresh. The only problem was that what Robin could see was not what I saw exactly and he had to get me to move my screenshare window down, now a little to the left, like trying to scratch someone’s back. Five minutes into his presentation we had it, we were ready to start, Robin using Gotomeeting to flip his slides, and all the presenters watching in synch with decent refresh through Elluminate screenshare.
That was the best part of the presentation, where we modeled the edupunk mashup. Downes has much to say about teaching being modeling. David Warlick said what ‘rocks his world’ these days (recent podcast) is the idea of teacher as master learner. I want to use that here.
So we’ve gone from multiliteracies to edupunk to teaching as modeling, and that’s the great affordance of online conferencing. If it’s ABOUT elearning, why isn’t it done THROUGH elearning? You don’t get much from a ppt preso at a F2F conference except nodding in agreement (some nodding with eyes half closed ;-). Online you actually DO it. And that’s how we learn.
Of course if you could BE online at a f2f conference and interact with the presenter and others in the audience and still more in the wider online audience … I’m thinking about all the Twittering that goes on AT f2f conferences, how in New York last year I was setting up my presentation and getting tweets from members of the audience (not all audience tweets are complimentary, another issue of etiquette ;-). Yesterday someone twittered Minxuan’s excellent slideshare presentation on How Twitter Changed My Life http://www.slideshare.net/minxuan/how-twitter-changed-my-life-presentation. I have many links of that ilk in my Delicious acct. Shouldn’t I be using Diigo? More features, better social networking.
I was at Dennis Newson’s conversation with Nick Peachey in SL last night. The SLURL didn’t actually drop us IN the preso room so people were arriving in a palm forest with buildings with roofs you couldn’t get into (this obscured navigation; NOT designed with Virtual Classroom Project precepts). One avatar said he’d follow me but I didn’t know where to go. I flew up. The roof of one geodesic dome was transparent and I could SEE people inside but couldn’t get there. I came down and walked around opaque walls. Eventually I ended in the wrong bldg. I found someone had offered me a teleport and I took it, but it turned out to be an old one so I arrived alone who knows where. Now I was really lost. So I got on my friends list. Nergiz was online and where I wanted to be and she teleported me there. I had offered friendship to another lost soul so when I found what we were looking for I teleported him as well.
Here is the distributed learning network at work in ways no one could anticipate when it was designed. This is how we now see CoPs, or how I do, how Stephen Downes does, how George Siemens does through his promotion of connectivism. So the thread is moving over to PLNs and CoPs now. But also in networks and how they pull us into online conferences and get us where we want to be. And how we learn from them. Twitter is one big 24/7 online conference, isn’t it? Does the learning ever stop?
Shouldn’t I be getting to work? You bet, more later ..
