We’ve talked a lot about privacy in this course as something to be preserved, or something that can be “invaded.” Almost like our personal space or personal property. Many bemoan a loss of privacy as we communicate more and more online and in a society which stores our actions in infinitely reproducible digital form. But I don’t think all privacy is the same. Here are a few different kinds of privacy: confidentiality, impermanence, and anonymity or pseudonymity. Living our lives online doesn’t affect all of these in the same way, and some might be more important than others.

CONFIDENTIALITY

Sometimes you want to share part of your life with friends, family, or colleagues in confidence. A picture I might share with my Mom might be one I wouldn’t want to share with an old high school friend (and vice-versa).

IMPERMANENCE

“What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” But that sure isn’t true online, or more and more offline. You used to be able to do dumb stuff and nobody would ever know. Or, maybe just your friends who were there would know. But, even then, memories grow hazy, photo negatives get lost when the basement floods. You didn’t really have a permanent record, but now you do. Memory loss was good for privacy. I think there are about a grand total of 3 photographs out there of me between the ages of 12 and 15–and a good thing too!

ANONYMITY/PSEUDONYMITY

A great way to keep your thoughts, words, or experiences private but still share them with the world is to put them out there anonymously (no name at all) or pseudonymously (associate them with one or more consistent false identities.) This is sort of the “nobody knows you’re a dog on the Internet” approach.

Each of these is important, and the Internet affects each of them differently.

BETRAYAL IS JUST A CLICK AWAY

Forget about it. It is all too easy for someone to forward those snarky, sweet, personal, or embarrassing emails to the world. Facebook? Forget about it. A friend recently added me to a “secret” Facebook group. Really? Come on! Take down a website or blogpost you wish you’d never put online? Not with the Internet Wayback Machine.

Anecdote: Myself and the program director at a former employer hadn’t been getting along with a colleague so well. Words were said. We knew he was having a hard time. I felt bad. We took him out for dinner and a few drinks after work. It had seemed like a good night, and hatchets had been, at least shallowly, buried. The next morning I saw an email from him in my box. He’d gone home and spent an hour or so picking up on a group email thread that had been going for weeks among a few teachers, which included various uncomplimentary nicknames, wishes for anatomically impossible acts, and general venom. Some combination of a few pints, Gmail autocomplete, or “would you also like to include…?” found me and the Director copied on this lengthy conversation. Never trusted that coworker again, but more importantly to the point of view of privacy, I never trusted the other guys on that thread who had been exposed through no direct fault of their own. If they’d had the same conversation at TGIF, I never would have known.

I pretty much gave up on online confidentiality a long time ago, as you can tell by my sharing the above. But like MJ says, it’s “too late to be paranoid“. And really, confidentiality as privacy had a pretty good, but short, run. Private post only began in the 1780s. Before industrialization, most people lived in small groups and everybody knew everybody else’s business inside and out. 200 years was a pretty good run, but say goodbye. The only thing to do is to try to act online in a way that is pretty consistent with your life offline.

IMPERMANENCE IS SO 1995

European regulators have been pushing a right to disappear, but running up against serious resistance from the usual suspects (Google, Facebook, etc.) but it does seem desirable. If a minor commits a crime, even a serious one, the record is expunged when they become an adult. But that YouTube video your friend posted of you playing “Fire In The Hole!” will be there forever.

Anecdote: A boozy, raucous, clothing-optional mass snowball fight during an epic blizzard in grad school among the dozen or so men and women who shared a triple-decker in Boston and their various boyfriends/girlfriends happened. These things sometimes do. The next morning, one neighbor went door-to-door confiscating film from the few people who had cameras. He was in law school and wanted to (eventually did) become a district attorney. No iPhones back in the day.

I feel more than a bit sorry for kids these days. My friend probably would not have become a DA if he was in law school 15 years later, or we might all not have had quite as much joy.

But the right to disappear is pretty hard to execute in practice. Martin Abrams in this Atlantic article says it is really “the right not to be observed in the first place…. We’ve been focused on symptoms rather than the underlying issues.”

WHO ARE YOU AGAIN?

Just as the shift from village to urban life brought more confidentiality, it also created a feeling of anonymity. Walking down the street in a big city pre- ubiquitous CCTV cameras and every other pedestrian carrying a small video studio in their pocket was liberating. You didn’t have to worry if you looked your best, or did your worst.

The Internet really expanded this. If you wanted to be anonymous, you could find public Internet access, sign up for webmail with a silly name, and pretty much go nuts online. Or, pour your heart out. Even better, you could take that silly name and build an an entire identity with friends who knew this other “you.” Pseudonymity meant nobody knew your name and address, but they knew the slice of you that you wanted to share privately. Your boss, wife, Dad, best friend would never know. Pseudonymity is much more powerful than anonymity because it creates a narrative unlike true anonymity.

Anecdote: I follow Ann O’Nymous on Twitter @TheSecretDoS and read her blog which features some pretty unfettered criticism. It’s great. But a post like “I’m afraid I have some bad news…” which describes a difficult teacher, grievances, etc. would cause me a lot of grief if I posted it under my own name. And no, I am not The Secret DOS.

Unfortunately, this pseudonymity is also on the verge of disappearing in the name of “security”. For a while now, Google has been offering two-step authentication. I tried it recently for my work Gmail. (I have several Gmail addresses.) And now I am stuck with it. It works like this. I login with my ID and password and if it is the first time I have logged in from that machine, Google calls or texts me and give me six random digits to enter as well. No more phishing! Even if someone gets my password, they have to have my phone too to log in. Seems great.

What happens when Google stops offering this and starts requiring it? Add that to their real name policy and pseudonymity goes away. I can only have an account if I link it to my phone, and thus my “real life,” and our Overlords from Mountain View will know. And, it isn’t just Google. Other companies will do the same or legislation may eventually require it.

I’ve had a few pseudonymous identities online (like the one in the Wayback Machine link above which I lost just by failing to renew the domain). Still use a few, not for any especially nefarious reasons, but it can be fun. And, it is a great way to protect your privacy. Like Aja, it is a way to keep work and personal life separate.

As long as it is around.

So, time to walk the talk. According to Titlow at ReadWrite, “the social networking site most used by companies for recruiting is LinkedIn (78%) , followed by Facebook (55%).” I can personally attest to the site’s usefulness. I manage a large group for the Japan Association for Language Teaching with almost 900 members. I’ve also been approached by a prospective employer after they read my profile on the site. Used well, LinkedIn is much less spammy than many social networking sites and is a pretty efficient use of my time.

CC BY andertoons on flickr

So, since I couldn’t find one, I went ahead and created a group for COETAIL. I used a CC BY 2.0 licensed image for the group logo, since I guessed I couldn’t use the official logo without permission. (Maybe something to ask for later?) In fact, I hope I’m not stepping on of SUNY’s intellectual property just by using the name. If so, I’ll be happy to delete the group. But, I put a little disclaimer in the group description: “This group is not officially recognized by COETAIL or SUNY Buffalo.“

The initial settings, which can be changed, are:

• People must apply to become members. It should be easy to verify who is really a COETAILer.
• Only members can post to the group. That makes it less spammy and by default more professional.
• Only members can comment or discuss. As above.
• Discussions are public. Otherwise we’re not creating many footprints, are we?

Why this group when there is already the community site? It serves a different purpose. This is a way to demonstrate your activity to a wider audience, and in particular an audience that may be looking to hire you.

Anybody with me? Just click, join LinkedIn if you haven’t already, and request membership. It’s that easy.

In a famous (on the Interwebs) case a few years ago, Andy Baio paid Jay Maisel $32,500 to settle a DMCA copyright case that he was sure he could have won on the merits but couldn’t afford to litigate. We’ll never know if Baio would have won, be we can be quite sure that massive lawsuits with requested damages of $150,000 per download will have a chilling effect.

The whole affair gets into the nitty-gritty of copyright and fair use. Some good round ups can be found at:

Waxy: Kind of Screwed
Copyright Infringement and the Culture of Suing Artists Into Submission
How Much Pixelation is Needed Before a Photo Becomes ‘Transformed’?

I think this could be a great starter with some students. The “remixer” made a good faith effort to clear permissions. The copyright holder went for huge penalties far beyond any actual damages (if any)? And the image below forces each viewer to make a judgement. Which image is sufficiently changed to be a transformed work commenting on the iconic original? It’s a nice little thought experiment.

Image credit: Photograph by Jay Maisel. Isn’t just a little ironic that I can do this, but Baio couldn’t?

You can see the full program here, but here’s my abstract, a few thoughts on this process, and a preview to give you an idea of what I will present.

Title: Putting Massive Open Online Courses in Context for Educators.

Abstract: Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) started in 2008 as a connectivist experiment in education with a participatory focus. Extremely large MOOCs were convened 2011, and the term took off in popular media reports in 2012. They have been hailed as “revolutionary” and disruptive to the status quo in higher education. However, the ideas behind MOOCs are not new. Moreover, as the practice has become fragmented, there is not a clear consensus on a coherent description of MOOCs. Still, these courses are part of our educational landscape and may benefit many learners. Educators need to understand the potential uses and abuses of MOOCs.

This presentation will review the current state of MOOCs, including a critical view of the hype and hopes that accompany this trend. This will help educators evaluate MOOCs and make informed choices about selecting courses, using them to augment their own teaching, participating in them directly, or even starting one. Participants will gain perspective and critical understanding of MOOCs and indicators for how they may change education in their contexts.

A few thoughts on process

I’ve been going through many versions of this talk for two reasons: personal and external. Getting a chance to be a featured speaker at a significant conference is a real privilege and a challenge. I wanted to do something great. In an early version, I tried working out doing the talk with just index cards and a single sheet of A4 for the attendees. Everyone is sick to death of PowerPoint, right? I’ve seen a few talks, Paul Nation as a JALT plenary a few years ago was a tour de force, where the speaker has just spoken. No slides, no graphics, no multimedia. Just the ideas. Done well, this can be very effective. Done poorly, it can be death-on-a-stick. So, back to the slide drawing board.

But the slides are the very last thing this time. I worked a little bit differently than I have on past presentations. This time, I really worked in an iterative way, wrote down much more of my talk, and spent a lot of time listening.

1. Read everything I could for the past 6 months.
2. Made a map of post-its on my office wall facing my desk. I had to look at the damn thing everyday and fiddle with it.
3. Index cards and the failed attempt to go slideless.
4. Write out the talk in outline form.
5. Give the talk in the privacy of my home or office and record it. 
6. Listen to the recording on my way to or from work.
7. Transcribe it back into the outline and edit.
8. Re-record the talk. Listen. Edit again.
9. Repeat Steps 5-9 four times.
10. Make the slides.

Phew! Damn, I’m sick of listening to myself. But, I feel like I know the material much better and was able to edit my talk down from 46 minutes to a relatively speedy 35 minutes. Assuming a few live stumbles that should still allow at least 5-8 minutes for questions at the end of my 45 minute time slot.

The other problem

I really chose a horrible topic. It is almost impossible to estimate what experience or knowledge the attendees will bring to the talk. Luckily, I am last, so I have a chance to listen to everyone else and ask a few people about what they think about MOOCs before I speak, so I can adjust a bit.

I think the topic is interesting, relevant to the conference theme, and timely. But that last one has been killing me. It’s too timely. Every time I thought I had something nailed down,  a new development popped up. Antioch College went with MOOCs, but then Amherst said no thank you. xMOOCs had an openness problem, but then EdX finally started offering a course under Creative Commons. Then, just a couple of weeks before my talk, there was the EDUCAUSE ELI Online Spring Focus Session 2013, “Learning and the Massive Open Online Course. Talk about a shifting landscape! Let’s hope nothing else goes through a transformation in the next five days.

So, my talk will be a snapshot. I’ll try to digest all of the reading I’m filing away in a Diigo group. (Please do check that out if you want to learn more about MOOCs.) I’ll bring in my own experience participating to one extent or another in four MOOCs. But, in the end, it is just too soon to to have all, or even many, of the answers. So, I’ll be presenting as a kind of live FAQ. Perhaps I should have called my talk…

29 Things You Wanted to Know About MOOCs, Dut Didn’t Even Know to Ask

1. What does MOOC mean?
2. How can we define MOOCs?
3. How large is Massive?
4. In what senses are MOOCs open?
5. What do we really mean by Online?
6. What goes in a Course
7. Where did MOOCs come from? And, why now?
8. What is a cMOOC?
9. What is an xMOOC?
10. What are some of the problems with MOOCs?
11. What’s wrong with cMOOCs rooted in connectivism?
12. What problems do both c and xMOOCs share?
13. What about xMOOCs in particular?
14. What about assessment?
15. But really, who cares about assessment?
16. Who are MOOcs good for?
17. Who are MOOCs bad for?
18. Will MOOCs reduce the cost of higher education?
19. What about psMOOCs?
20. How should we think about MOOCs?
21. Has this happened before?
22. Are there any success stories?
23. What do these have in common?
24. What should you do if (when) your institution asks you to run a MOOC?
25. What if you want to organize a MOOC?
26. What developments should we look for?
27. Should you try it?
28. Where can I find out more?
29. How can we continue this discussion?

What if you know nothing and want to learn a little about MOOCs before the talk?

This would be a fine place to start.

Looking ahead at this Saturday’s first session at COETAIL, I went through the agenda and found something completely new to me and thought I’d do as suggested:

Explore the Common Sense Media Scope & Sequence (choose your age range, focus on copyright, creative commons, fair use sections) – Does this help us address the concerns of copyright and fair use?

Since I mainly teach first year university students, I had a look through the Grades 9-12 section and was quite impressed with much of what I saw there at first. The site is very clear and the media production values are-as one might expect-very slick.

I first looked at “Lesson: Who Are You Online? (9-12)” expecting to see something along the lines of the digital footprints we’ve discussed previously. It was much more interesting with slideshow and video prompts to discuss how people bend, morph, and perform identities online. In the avatar slideshow, it’s all up for grabs: age, appearance, race, gender, species–you name it. But the discussion questions shy away from the deeper issues. For example, when discussing the first slide, CSM suggests:

Slide 1: Choi Seang Rak might represent himself as a girl because he’ll do better in the game he’s playing.
Or maybe he wants to explore how others might treat a girl online.

Um, I guess it is for Grades 9-12, but seriously? It is pretty hard to ignore the sexualized content and possible gender exploration stuff going on in avatars, Second Life, or other online interactions. Maybe Choi actually fantasizes about being an armor-plated, mini-skirted school girl?

Slide 4: Ailin Graef might want an avatar that looks like her, wearing her favorite dress and with her best qualities exaggerated.

I thought there was something familiar and a little web searching (We are teaching students to search, right?) quickly leads to Anshe Chung’s early careers. Anshe: “I started … as a private entertainer, somebody people who are bored or lonely could seek out for company.” And according to The Age: she “got her start as an exotic masseuse, who used to run classes in virtual lovemaking.” They’ve got it completely backwards. Graef/Chung created the stereotypical sexy, Asian dragonlady in SL, then dressed up as her avatar in real life.

Personally, I don’t think there is anything wrong with gender play and sexual behavior on Second Life or other appropriate places. But, what does bringing this up and then treating it in a superficial way do to build trust from students? If you don’t want to go there, don’t go there. If you feed students a cleaned up sanitized version of online behavior that they will recognize as false  in one unit, what will they think in the next unit?

On the other hand, Ramon’s Story – Being Real Online, seemed much more, well, realistic. This is another view of the kind of stories we saw in the MacArthur Digital Youth Report. It seems like a pretty unvarnished version of what Ramon sees. He struck me as more authentic, but maybe hard for my students to connect to. But maybe I have to give my students more credit? He describes people projecting themselves online as “thugs” if they live in a community where being a thug is a significant thing. I wish they’d actually included some examples of the MySpace profiles or whatever. Not sure the cleanup accomplishes much in the face of what students can see online. Again, it doesn’t seem to trust students. If you want to talk about intellectual property and copyright, trust would seem to be a prerequisite.

But, “Does this help us address the concerns of copyright and fair use?” Let’s look at Lesson: Copyrights and Wrongs (9-12) and see.

The two minute video is lively and may get students’ attention. It goes through and visually depicts online behavior like uploading, downloading, searching, copying and pasting. It then turns to how easy it is to “download & share cool things on the Internet.” We get to the meat of the matter with these admonitions (all caps from the original):

“But it’s important to be careful how YOU use other people’s work”

“When an idea is created the creator owns the copyright”

if YOU don’t
check who owns it
get permission to use it
give credit to the creator
buy it (if necessary)
and use it responsibly
then that’s STEALING

Um, that is not teaching. That is simply giving teenagers a list of rules and some misinformation.

If I’ve already told my students I don’t really trust them by sanitizing the Internet and skirting some issues related to the existence of sex and fantasy, then drop some rules on them with an accusation or wrongdoing, what kind of response should I expect? I know what kind of response the 14-17 year old me would have given. “Yes, teacher. I understand. Let me take the quiz on IP now.” Then scurry off to do what I wanted.

Common Sense Media states that respecting copyright is important, but never explains why. That would “help us address the concerns of copyright and fair use?” The concerns should be the values, competing interests, and effects. Not a list of prohibitions.

Perhaps the Mad Men handout gave a more nuanced view, but I could not read it. The only way to access it is to join Common Sense Media, which doesn’t seem in keeping with the spirit and perhaps even the letter their stated Creative Commons policy on their Terms of Service page.

After the ToS, the next place I looked was About Us. They say personnel is policy. OK, this group sure looks a front for the copyright maximalist industry to me.

James Steyer, CEO and Founder
“Prior to founding Common Sense, Jim was Chairman and CEO of JP Kids, a respected family media company.” –Selling ads to kids.

Amy Guggenheim Shenkan, President/COO
“Amy joined Common Sense from McKinsey & Company, where she was a leader of the firm’s global digital marketing and sales practice. At McKinsey, Amy consulted to multibillion-dollar corporations around the globe to help them drive their eCommerce growth.” –Speaks for itself

Linda Burch, Chief Education and Strategy Officer
She was Senior Vice President of Business Development and Corporate Planning at SyStemix, a biotechnology company that she helped build and then sold to Novartis. –Drug companies are no friend to any Intellectual Property liberalization.

Liz Perle, Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief
Liz was a 20-year publishing veteran where she held many executive positions. She was vice president and publisher of several of the nation’s most prestigious publishing houses, including William Morrow/Avon Books, Addison-Wesley, and Prentice Hall Press (Simon & Schuster), as well as associate publisher of Bantam Books. –Old media

The Boards of Directors and Advisors is heavy with media industry people, venture capitalists, and a smattering of academics for cover.  It’s just common sense to me that Common Sense Media is promoting an agenda that protects their financial and corporate interests.

So, where to next? I really don’t want to constantly complain.

It’s not so slick. It’s mostly just text. It doesn’t provide ready-made content for all grade levels, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation provides plenty to support educators at Teaching Copyright. which is where I rediscovered the lovely “A Fair(y) Use Tale”. Enjoy!

There are several good things about this MOOC compared to my previous experience on #edcmooc that give me some confidence: the size is more manageable (about 700-750 enrolled); the conveners and participants are already actively engaged and committed to the use of technology for education, and they are moving with agility to fix early problems based on input like this from Stephen Downes; they are using WordPress instead of Coursera’s lame not-invented-here-syndrome version of course management software.

Enrollment is still open if any of my #COETAIL buddies want to jump in with me. Give it a try! I think you’ll find that the content and approaches are complementary to what we are doing at YIS this year. Week One content prompts include these options, some of which will look familiar:

• How Eric Mazur brought peer instruction into the lecture theatre using simple ‘clicker’ technology in his lectures
• How Sugata Mitra designed a physical and social environment around computers so that young children would self-organise and teach themselves new skills through peer interaction and ‘emergent learning’
• How Stephen Downes and George Siemens pioneered the development of massive open online courses
• How Margaret Cox and colleagues developed technology that could simulate the tactile and visual experience of drilling a tooth
• How Helen Keegan devised a full Augmented Reality Game (ARG)

The organizers do a really nice job of selecting short excerpts from the longer videos, linking to exact start times and specifying how long to match minimum. Saves time and keeps the discussion tighter.

I’ve started my own very short list of ocTEL tweeps, and just following the #ocTEL hashtag won’t cause you to drown in Tweets, but will link you to some interesting people and resources.  Come on and login. You decide your level of participation. Even if you just find one  cool, new video or idea, then you’ve gotten something out of this MOOC from the Association for Learning Technology.

For my first UbD planner in Course 1 of COETAIL, I took a bit of a departure and addressed teachers not students. Many thanks to Trent Citrano who was writing his UbD for parents and pointed me to some useful resources.

Background

The Japan Association for Language Teaching is a national organization of about 2,600 members. The organization’s motto is “Teaching to learn-Learning to teach” which sums up what members do and how JALT aims to help them. JALT is an NPO and must comply with Tokyo Metropolitan Government regulations. We have a lengthy constitution, longer bylaws, and many other rules we have to abide by. This can be a challenge for a large organization with many groups under its umbrella.

There are two kinds of semi-autonomous groups within JALT: chapters, organized geographically; and SIGs, or special interest groups. Representatives of these groups (70+ people) meet three times a year as an Executive Board to manage JALT and make sure we are doing things as we should. One of those things is making sure that all groups are in compliance with the rules, or else they may have to be dissolved. This is relatively easy to check if the rule in question is simple such as having enough members. However, it is quite difficult in other cases. One difficult rule is that to be in good standing, SIGs must send several (it varies by status) publications to their members each year. If a SIG does not do this, their status may be reduced or they may even be dissolved. The Executive Board votes on status changes and as a pretty friendly group, we’re usually pretty reluctant to dissolve a group, but we do have to follow our rules. This has become a bit of a problem because it is hard to agree what exactly constitutes a publication to satisfy the rules. That makes voting on SIG status very subjective. Voting by feeling may mean feelings get hurt. Not a good situation for a professional organization and just not fair to all concerned.

October last year I joined the Board of Directors and it is now my responsibility to help sort this out.

Previously

This issue came up about a year and a half ago. It is not clear exactly who was responsible for reaching a conclusion at that time. There were several lengthy email threads on an existing discussion list for JALT Executive Board members and two face-to-face discussions among many people over a weekend meeting. No conclusion was reached for several reasons. One, any decision would effect the status of SIGs, so the stakes were high. Two, it is unclear if everyone on the mailing list read the relevant messages. Three, even if they did, email threads are not an especially good way of managing information on a couple of dozen publications. Four, we didn’t have the data from email handy for the in-person discussions. So, plenty to improve the next time around, and thus, my UbD.

Application of technology

Google Groups and Google Docs

All participants already use email regularly, but the other technologies people use vary. The next step up from our current barebones, messages only Mailman email list would be a Google Group that allowed attachments and shared documents. This should be accessible even to members who have not used Google Groups.

Managing editors of JALT group publications (about 35 people) will evaluate online publications from other groups but even better, will be encouraged to communicate directly with peer editors in other organizations by email or as they like. Some editors are comfortable using Survey Monkey or have colleagues who have used it who can help them. Particpants will be encouraged to differentiate on this task. They will share the results and the methods on this stage via the Google Group.

Next, two shared Google Spreadsheets will be used to gather information: one, on JALT group publications; the other on similar publications from peer organizations such as IATEFL, TESOL, and national TESOL organizations such as Korea TESOL, Thai TESOL, MELTA, and others. These will allow participants to list data (e.g. frequency, pages, number of editors, number of articles, language, etc.) about their own publications and ones they study. They will include an open field for various descriptors (e.g. peer-reviewed, in color, Open Access, content notes, style, etc.)

As much as possible, depending upon copyright, participants will place copies of relevant publications in a shared repository. These will mainly be PDFs so Diigo is not useful. A shared folder on the Google Group or Google Drive will be used for this. This seems a reasonable extension from email, but will be new to some participants.

These tasks will take place over several months leading up to an in-person weekend workshop sponsored by JALT in either February of July 2014. There may be chances to do local hands-on preparation with small groups in late 2013. These will also be chances to share new techniques and applications.

Participants will move from a simple email list and progress to creating shared documents online. Some will use survey tools of their own choosing. They will also use a shared repository of files.

Meeting and technology

At the meeting, participants will discuss the compiled findings. Not all participants will be able to attend, so people who are busy will be invited to Skype in. Many participants already use Skype, but it is unclear how many have used it to attend a meeting. There are JALT officers experienced at Skype meetings who do not have to participate in the discussion who can assist with this.

JALT has a designated Director of Records who will take notes on the meeting. This will be immediately shared as a Google text document to be annotated. Participants will be shown how to annotate the document and will add initial comments to demonstrate that they are all able to comment. A period of comment will be open for participants to make notes and additions online from home after the meeting. Discussion will move from synchronous in person, to asynchronous and virtual.

Participants will designate a sub-committee of several members to extract a list of descriptors from the annotated minutes of the meeting. These will go on a shared document for final comment. Then, the resulting list of descriptors will be posted publicly on the JALT website. All JALT members will be able to see which descriptors apply to which JALT publications. Publications which meet a consensus number of required descriptors will be designated as publications satisfying the NPO rules of JALT.

Expected results

I hope that by doing this, partipants will gain skills at editing shared documents and managing a depository of shared files. These skills should be valuable to any editor who does not yet apply them to producing a publication. In addition, I hope that they will gain several of the facets outlined in the UbD planner-particularly Empathizing and Self-knowledge. I consider these be crucial to a good outcome.

So, the planner.

(Apologies to my my fellow COETAILers for not embedding the properly formatted GDoc. I created a bit of a technical problem for myself by only bringing my iPad with me as I travel for work.)

Update: I formatted the GDoc and embedded it, but like many of you, the fonts all changed and it is not readable. I’ve left the iframe here for now (maybe that is the culprit. iframes? Really?) but I’d just skip down below for more readable text.

Project Title: Publications Chairs and Editors Development Workshop

Standards Met: Adapted from selected NETs for Administrators Self­ Reflection Template See: http://www.iste.org/docs/pdfs/nets-a-standards.pdf?sfvrsn=2
Educational Administrators create, promote, and sustain a dynamic, digital­-age organizational culture that provides a rigorous, relevant, and engaging professional development for all members.

From website sub­standards
a. Ensure instructional innovation focused on continuous improvement of digital­age learning
b. Model and promote the frequent and effective use of technology for professional development
c. Promote and participate in local, national, and global learning communities that stimulate innovation, creativity, and digital age collaboration

Enduring Understanding:
Academic NPO publications serve several purposes: they support the development of their readers, members, the organization, and the field as a whole.

Essential Questions:
What defines the publications of teaching professional development organizations? What are their purposes and how do they fulfill them?

Goal: Participants will understand good characteristics of academic and professional publications.

Role: Managing editor(s) of a JALT Special Interest Group (SIG) publication.

Audience: Several

Peers: editors of publications from other special interest groups
Members: each special interest group has dues-paying members who support the publications financially.
Readers: non-members may also read the publications

Situation: Members and officers have to certify which special interest groups are in good standing according to NPO rules and organization bylaws. One key criteria is the number of publications a SIG publishes each. This creates a seriously difficulty because JALT has no guidelines or definition of what is or is not a publication. Are any or all of the following “a publication”: a book, a postcard, a blog, a 12 page printed newsletter, a CD-rom, an email message, Facebook update, 80 page peer-reviewed journal available in print and online PDF. It is very difficult to compare these.

Product: Participants will document specific of descriptors that will help to define JALT SIG publications. This document will be shared in editable form on the current Officer’s Resource website in a Drupal handbook (wiki-type document). Updated read-only versions will be published online in PDF format for all JALT members, readers of SIG publications, and other teaching organizations to refer to.

Six facets of understanding
Explain: Participants will we be able to describe how different types of teaching professional organizations create their publications. These explanations may include but will not be limited to: editorial teams, style handbooks, schedules, authorial voices, ethics policies, frequency of publication, budgets, mission statements, readership, advertising, etc.

Interpret: Participants will make connections between discoveries in the Explain facet and the value of the publications to readers, members, their respecive organizations, and the teaching profession.

Apply: As members of JALT’s Executive Board, SIG officers must vote on the status of new, continuing, or failing SIGs according to JALT’s bylaws. One bylaw specifies the number of publications required. Participants will be able to make a transparent, supportable judgement of whether the activities of a SIG meet the definition of “a publication” and thus meet the requirements of JALT under NPO law.

Have perspective: After evaluations of other publications and dialogue with a peer in a similar organization, participants will understand how others make choices and accomplish similar tasks.

Empathize: Participants will have have a better understanding of how other SIGs in JALT meet their sometimes very different goals.
Have self-knowledge: Participants will clearly know the nature and characteristics of their own publications and how they may or may not meet their organization’s goals.

End of planner

Initial self-assessment

Some of this probably read like inside baseball for anyone outside JALT, but there’s lots of history and personal investment in a group of 2,600 plus with 50+ semi-autonomous groups. I think many JALT people will see how this might work. I hope I have explained it adequately (if not briefly) for others.

Personally, I chickened out on this assignment in some ways. While this is a real task with real applications for technology to help a group of people who rarely all meet at the same to try to be more consistently productive, it is for teachers, not students.

I was really struggling to come to grips with this UbD thing with the emphasis on Understandings when I come from a context where almost everything is described as Skills. My students are adults and their understanding of themselves and their surroundings is often (usually?) far more advanced than the language they need to learn. Next time, I´ll plan for my students.

Time dissipation warning: Evolution does not take place without mode of selection and replication. Teachers can help create that. Skip to the end.

Not the immigration debate again!

No, I am not talking about the D’s and the R’s and Amnesty and the Dream Act. I sometimes think that if I hear Digital Native one more time I am going to scream. OK. That was a bit of an overstatement, but seriously. Still with the born digital? Jenkins, among others, did a good job of critiquing this ages ago. Prensky’s Shaping Tech for the Classroom raises some excellent points about institutional obstacles and the need for one-to-one technology access, but when I hit this, I just had to take a break.

“These “digital natives” are born into digital technology. Conversely, their teachers (and all older adults [At 46, I now, unfortunately, count myself as an older adult.]) are “digital immigrants.” Having learned about digital technology later in life, digital immigrants retain their predigital “accents” — such as, thinking that virtual relationships (those that exist only online) are somehow less real or important than face-to-face ones. Such outmoded perspectives are serious barriers to our students’ 21st-century progress.”

This is just rife with the broadest of broad overgeneralizations. “All older adults…think that virtual relationships are less real”? Really? This is confusing all sorts of different issues. Anyone remember Ham Radio, CB radio, penpals, indie underground zines? All of these are virtual relationships. Digital technology may have changed their speed, range, content type, and connectivity, but the underlying basic relationship is the same–connecting with another or others only through media. Each individual is presenting and performing themselves in some way, and they are not directly present to the other. People have been having virtual interactions in deep ways for a very long time.

The 18-20 year old students I see in university classrooms may have been born into a world full of digital media and technology, but that in no way makes them digital natives by default. Many were educated in a profoundly non-digital, non-technical educational landscape where handwritten homework, elaborate paper-based notes, and chalkboards continue to be the default to this day. I’ve had plenty of students deride Twitter and FB as “just a waste of time.” To enter the university where I teach now, many of them had to master a very conservative non-digital system and are very comfortable there. Paper is still king. Where is the handout? Everything they produce on a PC is stored (precariously) on a USB drive. I recently glimpsed a student email inbox with 1450 unread of 1700 messages. No wonder he is in danger of failing and I have to sit him down to walk through locating important messages so he can complete make up assignments for other professors.

My immediate thought was that the old William Gibson quote, “The future is here–it’s just not evenly distributed yet” applies to individual people as least as well as to places, communities, or schools. Fortunately, that same quote popped up immediately in the NMC Horizon Report 2012 K-12 edition [PDF].

Trends to watch? No! trends to ride

Two trends in the NMC report have been very important to me and I hope they are about to become more important. This is where I contradict almost everything I just wrote, but remember “not evenly distributed yet”.

According to the NMC:
As the cost of technology drops and school
districts revise and open up their access policies,
it is becoming increasingly common for students to
bring their own mobile devices.

My experience follows a very different path, but winds up in the same place. I have seen schools that have not opened access–sometimes going backwards and actually reducing access. I’ve seen university-wide adoptions of Moodle LMS that go unused or very lightly used. In one case, a department had made an excellent start on supporting blended learning with content-filled, customizable templates and tutorials for common compulsory courses. But, these remained optional and could not be assigned to students or assessed because it would disadvantage students with limited connectivity. This was as recently as 2011.

People expect to be able to work, learn, and
study whenever and wherever they want. (NMC Report)

All of this is changing and reaching a tipping point with each new class of first-year university students. They tend to get new phones and providers are offering/bundling cheap pocket wifi access points with student discounts. More and more of my students are wandering around with these. They prefer them over the university network because they are faster and don’t log them out/force them to log back in on a regular basis. Many students don’t even know how to login to the university wifi anymore because they just don’t need it.

BYOD N-P

In my current situation, we have a Bring Your Own Device Non-Program. Nobody in IT is organizing it. There are no departmental or university guidelines.  No documentation, no measures or goals are in place. It is just happening. The students bring their devices and use them however they can. This does pose a few problems when they get whiplashed by different professors having different ideas about autonomous use of technology, but in general this will work. Some students are bypassing the IT department and Blackboard (which they universally hate) and figuring it out for themselves. But, always remember, some are not.

Some examples I’ve seen (with the good and the bad):

• One medical student takes copious notes in a science lecture. Her friend sleeps in and skips 1st period. She borrows the notebook and snaps high-rez pics of each page of notes on her phone between periods (and into the beginning of my class). She may share these notes with others. (I wonder how many exam papers are getting snapped this way too…)
• I often take photos of the chalkboard with my phone during class for my own reference. Students seemed oddly hesitant to do it too until I really explicitly encouraged them. (Idea of teachers as the owners of knowledge?)
• Nursing students seem to be especially tuned in to social media. I had a discussion class about social networking services last June and was surprised to find that FB and Twitter were used lightly, but Line had 100% adoption in one class of nurses. They described it as “compulsory.” But, this was not set up by any faculty. They had created their own nursing department social media network that nobody (professors) really knew about. They said you just couldn’t do well in the program without being on Line. I think it may be interesting that the 98% female nursing department is better at social than the overwhelmingly male, hyper-competitive, medical department.
• I usually regulate use of phones a bit in speaking class because of the potential distraction (designating phone OK/Not OK times) but it’s speaking test day and T-kun is late (again). He’ll fail the course if he misses this class. I ask who has his contact info and ask them to wake him up and get over from the dorm immediately.
• Preparing for small group presentations in the autumn, one group of students recorded video of their practice sessions, but five other groups did not. I thought this was especially interesting because I had required recording of many speaking tasks in the spring semester, but once the workflow was set, I stopped assigning it. Curious how some students kept it going, but others did not even though almost all students had recognized the value of doing it. Small group dynamics make a difference. Did I do the other students a disservice by not requiring recording? (The recorders did very well.)
• I had a writing course, but had lost access to a computer room. (We used to have two, but now we only have one–reduced access.) So, I had to ask students to bring their laptops. (All first-year medical students must have laptops.) This is a big pain for them, especially if they have a long commute and they only use them in my class. After a while, some students started bringing lighter iPads instead or trying to write on their phones. This did make completing their work more difficult for them, but I let them make the choice. The results showed up in the task assessment, rather than checking their device compliance. Some did just fine, but many did not and eventually realized an iPhone or iPad was no substitute for a full-sized keyboard and laptop in a timed essay writing task.
• There are sometimes very odd gaps in students’ abilities. One second year dental student was clearly a whiz on his old-style gara-kei flip phone and worked just fine on his friend’s iPad. Couldn’t for the life of him figure out how to use a mouse and Windows PC. He had completely bypassed that stage. I’m finding more and more students who cannot use a mouse comfortably because all they have known are phones or touchpads. When will the vestigial mouse disappear?

OK, What do all of these things mean?

I’ll paraphrase Prensky (italics mine) “First, consult the students. They are far more varied than their educators in terms of taking advantage of digital technology and using it to their advantage and disadvantage. One way to move forward effectively is to combine what they know about technology with what we know and require about education. And, help them create situations to share our combined discoveries.”

Introduction of technology to education almost always brings up the r/evolution words. But for evolution to take place we need:

• Variation (Check–Students have this down.)
• Selection (Maybe–Do they realize when their tech choices effect their results on tasks? Sometimes. Can we help focus on this? Yes.)
• Replication (Much needed. It isn’t clear to me that the community of students I teach have a good way of sharing the good DNA of their individual discoveries. 

And that’s how I’m trying to zero in on my UbD project.

• SOPA and PIPA become the Theft of Intellectual Property Act.
• The ubiquitous surveillance state, ASBOs, and moral panic about the depraved youth of Britain remain the ubiquitous surveillance state, ASBOs, and moral panic about the depraved youth of Britain.
• The MacArthur Digital Youth Project (MADYP) takes life as an ensemble of teens in the city hanging out on the Confusing Peach discussion boards, setting up a squat to share, making art, figuring out what to do with their lives, getting in plenty of trouble along the way, and ultimately taking on Parliament.

Meet…

• Trent McCauley AKA Cecil B DeVil, a YouTube remixer par excellence who is obsessed with repurposing clips of a typical Hollywood leading man into horror, comedy, and finally propaganda films. Cecil is straight out of Geeking Out.
• The woman of his dreams, 26 (her friends can call her “Twenty”), a bright, driven, organizer of the Pirate Cinema underground parties of the title.
• Aziz is a scrounger who has got all of the best gear for adaptation and re-use. If Doctorow didn’t pattern him directly from Mac Man, I’ll eat a deprecated video card. And the way Aziz teaches Cecil to hack comes straight from Derrick on page 44 of MADYP.

Actually, Doctorow is very upfront about his admiration for Mimi Ito and MADYP. Aside from science fiction and YA lit, He has worked for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and was Canada–U.S. Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Public Diplomacy at USC Annenberg. He knows Ito, her colleagues, and their work.

Doctorow is a bit of a copyfight maximalist, and the book can get preachy in places, but it’s a good read all-in-all. It’s a fun page-turner and dystopian coming-of-age story leavened with plenty of joy and hope. And, Cory puts his money where his mouth is. You can download the novel for free, or go out and buy a copy.

Anyone in our COETAIL cohort read Pirate Cinema already? I’m a little out of the loop, but would it make a good read for international school students? I think it could. Some of my university first-years might get a lot out of it, but few are ready to read enjoyably at this level, so I can’t do much with it right now. Warning: The novel recognizes the existence of teen sex, drinking, and drugs, but not (I think) in a sensational way. YMMV. If anything, Doctorow can be criticized for wrapping up some of the messiness of life too neatly in characters that are a little too perfect sometimes.

Doctorow has a few other similar YA books as well. I really enjoyed Little Brother when it came out and a coworker’s 14-year-old nephew loved it. I haven’t had time to read the sequel Homeland yet, but it sounds good. Though none of his books are explicitly about education, Cory clearly benefited from the creative and liberating education he experienced growing up. You can see the effects in his work.

Any other Doctorow fans out there in our group?

• We discussed Google+ last night and I’m trying to find my way around using it well. This is one post in a large community. Others might want to see how it worked out.
• The subject video and the G+ post are about education in some ways.
• The vid presents one image of technology in daily life
• It lets me get my rant on !    

Watch “A Day Made of Glass 2″

My notes on Google+