Gina’s EME6635 Journal

I had this blog up for a class I took in the Summer of 2009. Leaving it up for the time being.

If you want to hear what I’ve been saying lately, visit my other blog: Adventures in Corporate Education.

This is the last post, for real! This week I:

• Reviewed the Produsage products
• Participated in the BlackBoard discussions
• Did the Bruns reading
• Posted to this blog
• Managed the FriendFeed blogs
• Felt lost when twitter went down (just kidding haha)

I really enjoyed this class. I am actually happy I disliked the Bruns book so much, it made it easier to write my journal posts. Keep in touch everyone!

This is the official reaction to our last reading in the Bruns book. The thing that drives me crazy about Bruns is he gets so close to getting it right….but then he just goes off the rails a bit.

Our last assigned chapter was titled “Educating Produsers, Produsing Education: Produsage and the Academy”.

Not everyone can be a produser in every learning situation

This is the first place where I think Bruns goes off the rails. I agree that we need to teach people how to find, read, engage, evaluate, and consume new media that is being produced. I want to explore this more in a minute.

But do learners really have time to become produsers in every learning situation? My audiences certainly don’t. They expect us to help them pinpoint the information that they need to do their jobs.

That is actually getting harder, because of the scope of information being created because of “produsage” activites. Anyone can blog about our products, anyone can create screencasts and demos. Our learners don’t have the time to even filter much of this information. Maybe our role as educators is helping learners learn how to set up their own Personal Learning Environment, so they are able to sort through the massive amounts of information available to them.

Maybe we need to act as a “Learning GPS”, pointing learners to the critical must-have information to learn what is needed to get the job done. Here’s how this GPS we design would work:

• Fastest Available Route:
  This would be the fastest path to getting the information you need to do your job. This would be the learning we design, with all the official learning objectives we have now. If you need to know what is supported, and what is required to do your job, get on the turnpike and go.
• Route Avoiding Highways:
  We should start providing alternative routes to that same goal that may take a little longer to navigate. These routes could meander through all the “produsage” things that are produced by everyone: podcasts, blogs, screencasts, discussion boards, communities, email distribution lists, etc. It will take you longer to get to the desired destination, but you will get lots more of the local flavor and have a better appreciation of the nuances of the topic.
• Avoid Road Construction:
  I develop technology courses, and there are always several ways to do the same thing. Sometimes, not all of the ways are supported by my company. This information is spelled out in the official training we have, but if you are taking the back roads you may not realize that some of the “prodused” information may take you down a path that is not supported. This gets into information literacy, which I’ll cover more in a minute.

Some colleagues and I actually entered this idea in EMC’s Innovation Conference. We didn’t get picked, and I think one of the reasons could be that people thought this already exists. You have FriendFeed and other aggregators, isn’t that the same thing? No, it isn’t. I’m talking about designing an area so people are able to create their own learnscapes, and part of that learnscape are the developed learning objectives that are directly tied to their job roles. That does not exist right now, especially not in an designed electronic format.

Information Literacy

Here is a place where I can agree with Bruns – I think there is a need to teach our learners how to consume information in a world where anyone can create content.

Think about that. If anyone can create content, and share it online, what does that mean for our learners?

• Information Overload
  There is too too much info out there. We need to teach folks how to scan and sort through this massive amount of information to get to the nuggets that will help them learn what they need to know to get work done.
• Relevancy
  This is tied to the idea of “Avoiding Road Construction” in the Learner GPS. How do you teach learners to evaluate if what they are reading or watching has been produced by someone that knows what they are talking about? How do you know the information is relevant and trustworthy?
• Information Production
  What if the learners benefit from producing their own version of the official learning objectives? I know I always have learn more from explaining what I know to others, that is  probably why I am in education. I also believe blogging is a important tool for reflection and deeper learning. Maybe its time for us to provide areas that our learners feel comfortable creating their own learning objects.

This is where corporate L&D is heading in my opinion. Its up to us as learning professionals to help people situate themselves in this sea of information so that they can learn what they need to learn to get their job done.

I think Bruns needs to work in a corporate L&D setting before he writes another book. Come see how people really learn, come see what its like to work on a quarter-by-quarter basis. See what its like to support people who have no time to get their work done, let alone become content creators. I also think he needs a better editor, the run-on sentence horror should not be repeated!!

So what do we do next?

Most of us are moving on to the fall semester. I’m taking Intro to Program Evaluation and Performance Systems Analysis.

At least that is what I am taking for credit at Florida State. I’m also going to attempt to keep up with the Connectivism and Connected Knowledge course. I participated last year until I got too busy with “real” school work. The course is taught by George Siemens and Stephen Downes. The course is about the idea that really learning happens in the networks we create for ourselves, not in a classroom or a curriculum.

If this is true, what does that mean for instructional design? How can we design learning spaces so people are able to connect to the network that will best serve them no matter what the learning objective may be?

If you liked the course this semester, I would encourage you to sign up for CCK09, and see if you can keep up. We’ve already started a few learning spaces, including a FriendFeed group.

I’d love to be in the course with people from my program at FSU!

Here’s a video of George Siemens talking about last year’s course:

For the last week of class, being that we have all been together for the last six weeks (or as some would say, 42 days) it seems appropriate to pay homage – if only in style – to the author we were all required to read for the majority of this summer semester; taking time to reflect on the amazing writing style of a non-technical author who wrote about the technical concepts of produsage and indeed the social topic of collaborative creation.

That’s all I got.

Official Prompt for Week 6:

Reflect on what you have learned in the class and how you will use it professionally as both a lifelong learner and an instructional systems professional (or whatever field you’re in).

I came to this class with quite a bit of experience with using and building Web 2.0 tools.  I was happy I had an excuse to sit down and read Shirky’s book (Here Comes Everybody). I wasn’t so happy about reading the Bruns book, but looking back the readings gave me the greatest opportunity to learn because Bruns is so non-technical and tries to explain a very technical world.

It was also interesting to watch the conversations from my classmates. Most of them had never used these tools either, and it was interesting to watch the same patterns from old ways of doing things be applied to this new Learning 2.0 world. This may have been the biggest thing I’ve learned: we are the ones who are going to have to come up with new patterns, new ways of measuring, new ways of doing things. The world really is changing, and we have an opportunity to bring that change to everyone. We just have to figure out how to do it.

Easy right?

Here’s what I did in Week 5:

• Wrote blog posts (on this journal and on my main blog)
• Worked on Produsage 2 with Amanada
• Read the bulletin board
• Posted on the bulletin board
• Read blog posts, and commented on several
• Saved links to Delicious
• Started a new FriendFeed group for #cck09
• Read the Bruns reading (almost forgot!)

I worked with Amanda to get for Project 2.  We decided to create a giant firehose of Information Systems information. We created a Friend Feed group for all of the online IS resources we could find. The group name is FSU Instructional Systems.

FriendFeed is meant to be a stream. What this means is that anytime someone posts anything to new to any of the sites we’ve assembled in that group, the new post will show up in the stream. To partake of the stream, you can either come to FriendFeed, have it go to your email, have it sent to your IM, or just have it pop-up on your desktop.

If you see something interesting in the stream you can either go straight to the original post or you can comment on it in Friend Feed.

So if you are an IS student, faculty member, or alum, please come join the group. If you have sites you would like to add just email Amanda or myself and we’ll make you an admin.

Just be prepared for an onslaught of information. This is the idea of a stream. You can try and keep up with it, or you can come back at a later date and peruse the postings. You are in charge of how you use the stream and the information nuggets you may find.

Official prompt for week 5:

How do issues such as authorship, copyright and open access impact your desire, ability and willingness to engage in produsage, both personally and professionally?

Personally

I have a couple of things that I have created – I refuse to say “prodused” – that I share with the world. The first is my blog. My blog is syndicated, and people quote and point to it all the time. So far no one has started copying it outright. I would be pretty annoyed if someone started copying my posts, and posting them as their own without any acknowledgment that I had authored the post.

I also wrote a couple of Twitter cheat sheets. These have been downloaded many, many times. I originally made the cheat sheets for a group at work that I was helping come up to speed on social media. I attached a Creative Commons license to the cheat sheets, mainly because I didn’t want someone to take the work I had done and start selling it.

Professionally

Engaging in “produsage” in a professional setting is an interesting topic. First of all, I develop training for a company that sells products. So, while there is a part of me that loves to connect and share and engage, my company has to stay profitable for me to have a job. So there is a limit to the types of things that can be shared with the outside world.

I can even take the limits a step further. We can’t even share all of the training we develop with all of our internal audiences. For instance, training on a product that is in development typically is not shared with many people in the field. If we share everything with them, they are bound to share things with the customer before those things are ready. And in the spirit of sharing, that info will get to competitors.

The other danger in crowdsourcing technical training is the issue of correctness. Our products support data center operations. If we were to host user instructions that didn’t work, or that our company didn’t support, we could be liable if another company lost data. So there has to be a way to verify ideas, and to be able to point out when something may work but its still not supported.

Having said that, I wish we did more to encourage people to post their methods of learning the different products for which we develop training. Our industry moves so fast that having different ways of explaining complex technologies can only help learning. Additionally, if someone takes the time to blog or screencast about a particular topic it serves as a form of self-training.

I don’t ever think we’ll get to the point in corporate settings where you can create a product in a “shopwork” space. I do believe we could design a space where people could share the way they learned a certian technical topic. It would have to be a bit less open than what Bruns described. But I think a “commodity space .. of an extrodinary source of energy” could be designed so that people could help each other stay on top of technical education needs.

I posted on our Blackboard discussion group about Joel Tenenbaum’s fight against the ridiuculous fine the RIAA has levied against him for downloading ten songs without paying for him years ago (he was 16). One of my classmates believes this is a black and white issue of theft. He even said that as educational professionals we should be educationing people about ethical behavior, because if we promote theft of this kind people will start stealing the educational content we develop.

Where to start?

My classmate’s father is a music artist. One thing he mentioned was that his dad has to travel promoting his work, and can’t get in the studio to record new stuff because he is always on the road. Maybe his dad needs to take a cue from other artists like Radiohead and Trent Reznor. They realize that the music industry is what was keeping their fans from accessing their music. They have made their music free, and have seen increases in older catalog sales, concert attendance, and interest in general.

The music industry promotes what they think the majority of the market will purchase. And by purchase, I mean a CD for 16 bucks. A CD I am not supposed to copy to any of my other electronic devices, let alone make a backup copy of. And I’m probably not going to want to buy what is marketed to me.

I will however buy CDs from artists that I hear on Sirius Outlaw Country. I want the ability to download the source of inspiration for the artists played on that channel.

THIS is the true longtail. I listen to an interview with a band I like. They say they were inspired by the music of an older artist because their mom always played it in the car. The music reminds me of something, I want to hear it. But the catalog is out of print, so how do I get to it?

Hopefully the artist has a website, or even better a MySpace page. If I can’t download the CD, maybe they are playing nearby and I can visit the merch table. I can connect with others who like the music, becoming part of that community. The artist is popular in this small community that I was able to find on my own, making my own connections, avoiding the bs marketing machine of the music industry. Janis Ian wrote a fantastic post about her experiences with the music industry back in 2001, you can find the article here.

The Bruns reading even refers to this. He said this about the new power of artists:

The new players, then, are embedded into the networks of community and cultural exchange, and participate in such networks where traditional industry only utilized them to capture new prodct of the media industries once it had become sufficiently visible; the new operators instead connect directly into the grassroots of fandom and creative practices to cultivate new ideas and new participants, they work with, for, and as part of communities, and share in their tacit knowledge and informal practices

In other words, record companies filter access to artists. The artist must be very visible for the record company to allow massive connections to that artist. But artists who open up their networks by making their work freely available become part of the community of folks who appreciate (and buy!) their work. These artists who connect to the communities have a better chance of selling records, especially if they don’t have alot of exposure.

Maybe this is what my classmate’s father needs – embrace this new way of connecting. The old ways of distribution are dying. Right now the artists have a golden opportunity to drive their own destinies, they just have to let go of the paradigm that the music industry has created for all of us. If they don’t they are destined to become like the scribes in the Shirkey readings.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the world is changing right in front of our eyes. As far as education professionals go, we have to give up this idea that we own the content we develop. Its a losing proposition. There are other ways to monetize what we do, so that we have the resources to do more. Acting as the experts, or the expert finders, is one way. Becoming the human GPS that helps people learn to navigate the firehose of information is another.

But wasting energy, time, and money to lock information up is going to keep us firmly planted in the old way of doing things. Those old ways may be familiar, and they may be the only pattern we know to get things done. But we have to start creating the new patterns that work in the new world we live in. We have to be willing to open some ports so that network connections can be made, or we’ll find ourselves on the outside of the connected world.