Alberta Distributed Education and Technology Association

The website for Northern Voice 2009 just went live, so the date for WordCamp Education Vancouver 2009 is set. Thursday, February 19, 2009 in Vancouver - the day before Northern Voice (which runs February 20-21 in Vancouver - BE THERE!).

The venue for WordCamp Education hasn’t been set yet, but we’ll find a place either on the main UBC campus or downtown. Or at a pub somewhere… hmm…

More details will be posted as soon as they’re known. But if you want to come play with a bunch of education-minded Wordpress folk, be sure to reserve the day.

I’m dropping offline soon for a couple of weeks on a family vacation. I’m bringing a book or two, but want to stuff some blog posts and articles that I’ve probably neglected onto my iPod for more in-depth reading. I’m planning on using Instapaper to bring offline copies of stuff so I can read it anywhere.

What should I bring? What is the most important article or post that you’d recommend for offline reading? Doesn’t have to be related to education, or technology, or anything in particular.

What would you bring?

Education is being enlarged. More choices, more options. F2F, augmented, blended, online learning, etc are enlarging options for learners and educators to deal with individual, personal needs and contexts. Much like content is fragemented from large holding structures (newspapers, books, courses), the entire education system itself is breaking into muliple specialized choices. For example - homeschooling goes mainstream: “Home education is now being done by so many different kinds of people for so many different reasons that it no longer makes much sense to speak of it as a political movement.”

I’ve been suffering connection issues (see my post here). Earlier this year, I was in Accra for Elearning Africa. The connection issues were significant there as well. Participants at the conference knew the importance of connectivity in advancing African economies. Yet the problem was/is huge. Many areas don’t have electricity, never mind internet connectivity. Still, news like this - High-Speed Internet Coming to Africa - is encouraging. While foreign aid and development work are critical for Africa, the long term challenge is one of providing individuals with the tools and opportunities to shape their own future.

The hype around open educational resources (OERs) is growing to the level that web 2.0 inhabited several years ago (I recently posted a short overview of openness in education). The problem with OERs is that they are too often focused on content. More recently, a few educators have been pushing the concept of openness through open teaching and open accreditation. But, as Brian Lamb notes, “if we live in an era of information abundance, why is the primary drive around OERs the publication of more content? And what other activities around the open education movement might be an effective use of our energies? What other needs have to be met?”

Learning happens constantly. The formal education component receives more respect than informal learning. As content and conversations fragment, I doubt existing systems of education will retain their shape. The real opportunity lies in how institutions think about “tying together” the multiple learnings across our daily lives. Canadian Council on Learning introduces the multiple learning domains as “limitless dimensions of learning”. Two approaches are possible to serve as the glue to pull learning together in a manner that can be accredited or evaluated by traditional educational models: eportfolios and personal learning environments. Eportfolios have great potential, but little uptake. Personal learning environments have similar potential, but the concept is a bit difficult for educators to grasp. I would have loved to sit in on a recent session by three individuals who know what they’re talking about…here’s their commentary on the workshop: Jared Stein, Chris Lott, and Scott Leslie. This PLE thing will yet take root :).

With the financial world in turmoil, it’s logical for people to turn attention to other fields that are in need of change. Nothing like a crisis to force introspection that should likely be ongoing. Higher Education is often criticized for its bureaucracy. Now that governments and businesses are in “belt tightening” mode, we’ll see pressure on higher ed as well: Higher Ed: Next Bloated Industry to Go?: “Like so many of our great industries and social sectors, higher education has grown huge, bureaucratic, and in many cases bloated (think 24-hour coffee shops in dorms). The ongoing trends of globalization, technology, and innovation continue to pressure societies and economies and America’s world leading system of higher education is going to have to respond just like other great institutions.”

While it is unsettling to be staring into an uncertain future, times of change offer opportunities for transformation. I’m optimistic that the catalyst needed to foster innovation in education can be found in the current crisis.

Following a thread through some blog posts this morning - I started at The Reverend’s post about Martha’s documentation of her hacking on WPMU, including a description of a WordPress plugin I hadn’t heard of before - Flutter.

Damn. The Rev’s gonna love this.

One of the things I LOVE about Drupal is the fantastic CCK plugin that lets me create compound structured content types without hacking the database or writing code. Things like Events. Profiles. Pretty much anything that can be stored as database records.

Flutter appears to do most of what I use CCK for. It’s a bit of a hack on top of WordPress’s custom fields design, but whatever. I really don’t care how it works under the hood. It works. And it’s really nice. You can create any number of custom content types, groups that can contain any number of fields - and the fields can be simple text strings, long text chunks, images, audio, dates… Very cool.

So far, the only thing I’ve found really missing from what I use in CCK is the idea of linking nodes (or posts or pages - I haven’t seen a way to select a page or post as a field in another - but that’s not fatal - tags and categories can make up for some of that).

I’ll be playing with Flutter over the next few weeks. I think this might go a LONG way to implementing some of the things I’ve been thinking about wrt WordPress as a course blogging and publishing platform - WITHOUT HAVING TO WRITE CODE.

I love that. Thanks to Martha and Jim for the heads up on Flutter!

Update: doh. Looks like Flutter does some unpleasant things to the main Write Post interface as well - it was wrapping this post to a set width, making it look ickyier than usual. hrm…

yeah. definitely not quite ready for prime time. but still, something worth keeping a close eye on. this could really make some interesting things possible with wordpress…

I don’t follow the Annoyed Librarian, and I didn’t pay much attention when it was announced that Library Journal was paying him/her to move his/her blog over there.  But holy cow, now the AL has shown up as the author of every article in a “special issue” of the Journal of Access Services! (volume 5, issue 4).  I’m on the  editorial board for this journal and this was news to me; it just showed up in my mail Friday afternoon.  I’ll skim through the articles to see how funny they are, but even if we’re having trouble scaring up contributors, I’m pretty sure this isn’t the path we want to go down with our peer-reviewed journals!