"Is our students learning?" (GWB)

The fact is, in higher education we really don't know. Unlike the standards of measure now being applied in K-12 through No Child Left Behind (draconian or controversial as they may be thought), no measures of success are demanded of higher education. Enrollment numbers, how smart students were before they arrived, how successful a football team...all are the current and inappropriate measures of value in today's colleges and universities.

So students continue to accrue previously unimaginable debt and nothing except the cost of an education seems to change in America. Many in HE have been waiting for a collapse similar to the shocking changes made to general medical care. We asked the medical industry to change, they didn't, and HMOs swept in and changed health care from the outside. One wonders who/what will have the authority to act as education's HMO? Private, for-profits like University of Phoenix with 225,000+ online students in 7 years? Community colleges asking for the ability to offer bachelor's degrees in a new 'communiversity' model? A public fed up with an institution that recognizes no customer and no obligation to serve? Higher education should step to the plate. It has a wealth of brain power that should be capable of a more thoughtful approach to solving its serious problems.

Kevin Carey asked some great questions recently about what it would take for HE to wake up and begin considering needed change. Seems everyone on the outside recognizes that HE is no longer offering the education the student and society wants or needs.
Seems if we put our heads together, those on the inside could come up with some ideas on how to drive down cost, improve access, increase desperately needed, new 21st century skills. Sadly, it also seems that we need to do it when our HE leaders (dressed in their finery/living the high life/increasing tuition AND lower division class size/jetting around the world)aren't looking.

At least Bill and Melinda Gates know a problem when they see it. And unlike our fat and happy HE leaders, the Gates Foundation wants to solve it. I think the thoughtful, working folk of HE should submit ideas to help them do just that.

Why we need a change in Washington

Recession. Health care. Women's rights to their body and their privacy. America's decreasing reputation, influence and place in the world. Our education system. The environment. Belief in the need for alternative energy sources. Thoughtful policies on changing the economic tailspin. We've all heard it, and we understand the very difficult choices ahead for the issues of our nation.
But the media is increasingly quiet about another nation many miles away. The death count continues to rise, the medical injuries are astronomic, and still John McCain claims our right to occupy Iraq for another hundred years.

Lest we forget, because the numbers and the caskets and carnage are being kept from us by an 'embedded' media:
American dead: +4,000
American wounded/damaged/maimed forever: +30,000
* data from globalsecurity.org as of Oct 2008

Our domestic problems are in the forefront of election news and ideas, but it would be a heartless cruelty not to remember, and track, and understand what we've done in Iraq and to Iraq. May God forgive us. May the citizens of Iraq forgive us, including the 50,000+ marching in the streets of Baghdad yesterday, demanding we leave now. May the world forgive us. And even if they don't, may we begin to take action to leave the oil and the grief and the occupation behind so that we can begin to forgive ourselves.

A Short Post on Palin and the Big Picture

This is a Blog on innovation technologies and use in higher education, but speaking on the Viet Nam war, MLK said "A time comes when silence is betrayal. " 

Now is one of those times. Invasion. Recession. Poverty. Homelessness. A government that protects the wealthy and allows New Orleans to disappear. A leadership that permits so many Americans to go without the simplest essentials while making enemies of the world. 

I watched the VP debate this evening and I am having trouble coming to terms with Sarah. She distracts me. Leaves me speechless. She's so sure and so grounded in the lack of need for knowledge. There is much of what she IS that I respect: funny, grounded, earthy, determined, energetic, charming, folksy, real. Pretty and rugged doesn't hurt. Ooh Alaska! 

What causes deep conflict is that she doesn't respect the things I hold inherent: intellect, study, discovery, knowledge, deep thought, ambiguity and wonder. She's read 'all' the newspapers but can't name one? Can't name one supreme court decision except Roe V Wade? Has no idea what the Bush Doctrine might be? Talks gibberish when asked direct questions? Doesn't suffer doubt or considerations of others' ideas? Doesn't worry about the big city people that now live in tents and lost everything while her family became comfy on Alaska bounty and oil revenue returns?

Sarah: this is not a game. America is hurting here!

MLK was right. Silence is betrayal when our country needs the voice of the people to speak up, speak out, be heard. I am an American and a woman and I admire Sarah Palin.  

But I do matter, and so do the homeless in tent cities and 'East coast' city dwellers SP dismisses with her crinkly grimace. 

I matter and I have a voice. I will soon be "Reduced in Force" (laid off) by a University I served for 17 years. My city has 20,000 empty homes in foreclosure and an anticipated 26,000 more to come in the next few months. We are a big city and we matter. We live in the desert and we matter. 

I am voting for Barack Obama and Joe Biden in November.

I Still Love/Adore/Worship Google: Spreadsheet LookUps

Despite a few stumbles in the recent past (especially the offensive Knol, for which I won't even provide link), the Google kids astound me on a regular basis. There is so much, coming so quickly, I don't even have time to explore a new, disruptive/transformative tool or service before they provide another. And yet, getting under the hood, finding the deep features or integration gems within these tools, is where the real beauty of Google resides.

Here's my latest, which I'm quickly discovering that most of my high-tech friends are equally in the dark over. We should have intuited the possibilities, given that it's GOOGLE providing the service, and realized that search logic would be embedded, but we're not as smart as Google so we never imagined how...or how beautifully.

So,Google Spreadsheets provides the creator (you) with the ability to do a Google Search (Lookup function) on another cell. If I put "George Washington" in cell A1, I can do a dynamic look up of his birthday in A2 with a function =GoogleLookup(A1,"place of birth") . Here's Google's explanation of the function GoogleLookup. After it does the lookup, it also stores the sites where the information was found and verified. Rest your cursor on the response to see them.

Tell me, how cool is that? Wait! It gets better. I can then populate cells for that column with like information. When I click on the cell holding "George Washington", a small blue box appears in the lower right corner. Just as with Excel, you could pull down from that box and populate the column with many, many cells filled with our beloved first president. BUT, unlike Excel, when you hold down the CTRL key as you pull down through the column, Google will populate with other instances/objects/things that are 'like George Washington'.
Give it a try, and depending on how deep down into the column you pull your cursor, you'll see our other beloved (and not so beloved) presidents appear. Hand-enter a number of cells to better narrow the data. (eg: Enter Los Angeles and Phoenix if you want large cities; entering just Phoenix will return cities in AZ. Google chooses its own definition of 'like' and it may not be as same as yours if it doesn't have enough data).

Here's the thing...Google is NOT as smart as you. So you'll have to check the data returned, even if you're specific. I needed to erase "Benjamin Franklin" from the data on U.S. presidents. He's 'like George Washington", but not a president. I knew that, Google didn't.

Same with cities and populations. I created a list of American cities 'like Los Angeles" (SF, NY, Chicago, etc) and then did a LookUp on population. Google nailed it, but instead of population for Philly, it gave me "10,882 sq/miles"). Huh?

It also gave me the correct population for San Antonio, but doing a LookUp on state in another column, it gave me Puerto Rico. Huh? Not like, unlike, except in Google's flat world.

Thus, a thing of beauty but only as smart as the metatags. A great case for the need to infuse information literacy into the expected outcomes of 21st century education. And a great example of why we love Google in emergent learning, but desperately need a digital literacy curriculum that focuses on critical thinking, evaluation, meaning and the notion of ownership over mere acceptance. Teach them to use the information at their fingertips, and then to evaluate the returns.

Here's the demo sheet, if you want to see results in action: Google Spreadsheet w/Lookups and populated columns. You must try it yourself to actually get in there and wander around in the data and functions, though. Publishing takes away the dynamic aspects of seeing the functions, markers, references, etc. And owning and creating your data is much more fun. For those of you watchin the stock market tumble, check out how you can use Google's related GoogleFinance function to look up stocks, current prices, track the tumbles, etc.

Hey, not until I published my spreadsheet did I see that Google adds citation mark and all the referenced LookUps at the bottom of the document on publishing. It justs gets better and better. Now, let's start worrying about a world where Google owns the information channels, tools and data services of the digital age. Somebody start creating applications and services as beautiful as Google's. Please.

Meta-Reflection in a time of jest politics

Can't help dwelling on David Foster Wallace and how much he contributed to my understanding of how seldom we experience deep reflection. Hit and run thought is the currency of the constant, tuned in & digital moment. Reflection was DFW's way of being in the world, brought on perhaps by sadness and worry, making meaning through thought rethought annotation and explanation.



He could make me crazy, wishing for an easier read. And he could make me revel in the wonder and humor and depth and 'smartness' and dogged pursuit of theme. And I am so much the less for our loss of him.

So, I'm driven to stop the course of my day and think about thinking about thought on a topic of meta-reflection. Here's where it leads me:
- I'm out of step and a woman not of this time. Evidence: I took one of those inane work-smart personality tests recently. What did I learn? I should work on assertiveness, participation in social activities, and less waffling and subjectivity in my decision making. Bleccchhhh. If I had wanted to be Caribou Barbie, I'd maneuver a place on some rigid, assertive, only-our-way platform. My quiet, perhaps obsessive reflections and desire to get it right - even if it looks like waffling/revising/annotating/allowing multiple views has served me well in technology and so I guess this is here (somewhere) that I'll stay. If I had DFW's talent, I'd be writing 1000+ page tomes on the nature of it all explored in small moments and large themes, but instead...I'll think about designing perfect online courses where every voice is heard and every mind constructs their own understanding at their own pace in their own way. I think DFW would approve.

And I'll ignore workplace profiling that suggests women like Sarah Palin are the new role model: uncompromising, non-collaborative, "won't blink" (don't her eyes hurt??), no time or interest in her children (I know, none of my business...consequences be damned), mean-spirited, take-no-prisoners, & small. Not small-town for I've been there and done that...prefer it to city life...just small & small-minded. And I don't care how successful it makes one, man or woman, I want a quieter, more reflective mind and a kinder, bigger, more doubtful life.

I want to take the time to read writers like DFW, but sadly, (and here's my point IF I have one) there is no other writer like DFW and there is now no DFW. And as interesting as this current election is turning out to be in examination of presence over ideas, it hurts to think about it. We need tools to do it. Here's one from the Bamboo Project Blog: Debriefing Yourself.

A gift to all the hard, fast, mean-spirited folk that didn't have time or interest in the meta-thought and ideas of David Foster Wallace. Be careful when reading. You may wind up changing your mind. But, the good news is that, unlike your present state, you may also change the minds and lives of others.

Wings of the Butterfly

Aug 31, Phoenix: I stare desolate into the water of my pool today, safe water, set deep in a dry dry desert, while the people of New Orleans once again head for safety. My thoughts are with them and I'm hoping, this time, the energy and resources of our government are with them as well.

Too infrequently, I step away from the information overload of this news, of my work, of my little life and step into the quiet overload of my digital connections. First, Google Reader and my feeds. I am smarter for my connections and the smart people I follow. Then, I scan Twitter for things I should know about friends, colleagues, and again, people I admire. Where are they? What are they doing? What's new? Last, I look at what's happening with my peeps on FaceBook, LinkedIn, Epsilen. Only when I have the time (like a Labor Day weekend) and usually late at night if I can't sleep. I'm not a digital junkie, nor am I the quotidian type who builds hobby into the daily flow. Zen practice/being of the moment doesn't quite seem to align with surfing for random data that crosses my screen. So I make my moments there when longing for connection, news, new ideas, something...else.

This week, it brought me right back to my practice. Dave Pollard tweeted a just do it call for people to read "Life is a Verb" and the language was so passionate I thought "Why not?"
A bit Artist's Way, bit self-help, bit art, bit judgmental. And worth the effort, IF you make the effort. Patti Digh offers story and exercises that help us connect with living intentionally, joyously, loudly. You shouldn't just read it, you should do it. I'm going to try. To be more aware, more mindful, more in touch with life in the moment. And do the homework. For 37 days. Patti has inspired me to carry my camera and capture the moments fleeting by. I'll post one, every day, for 37 days. Funny that a Buddhist would need to find her practice out in a tweet, but wherever we go...there we are.
Life is a Verb.
Yes, it is. Buy it, and buy one for a friend that needs it.

Tag clouds

We talk often about the idea of a 'disruptive technology'. The fascinating part for me is the notion that we don't often see it coming when it happens. So often, the technology began with a different intention, focus or goal from the way it's used when it radically changes a process. I assure you, no one in higher education IT saw the CMS coming: enterprise-level support, hardware, online courses, resources flying out the door. Overnight.

I'm wondering if our understanding of qualitative research is about the experience the same transformational change. Social network analysis. Thread and trend software. And my favorite: tag clouds. I used them in my dissertation so that the participants could better SEE consensus as it emerged.
I used ManyEyes, but have recently discovered Wordle, which is easier, quicker and prettier for the narrow application of tag clouds of text. Here's my dissertation, summed up in one cloud. Is THAT what it was about? Who knew?

For the technology to be truly disruptive, we're going to need some early adopters demonstrating affordance. Hop in. Show us your tags.

Colleen's dissertation made visual

Closing Pandora's Box

And they say it couldn't be done. But it can, when Draconian legislation aimed at curbing Internet access is allowed to succeed. Pandora Web radio is thinking about shutting its doors. Here's the story from ReadWriteWeb. Perhaps the music giants, clueless as to the value of Pandora in promoting music, wouldn't be able to manipulate our distinctly integrity-challenged men in Washington if we weren't a virtual community. Hard enough to get us out of our pajamas, let alone into the streets. If Iraq didn't do it, how can the loss of Pandora?

Sometimes I feel really alone here, hovering over the glow of a technology fire while politicians (and the people who buy politicians) are doing bad, bad things out there in the physical world. Internet petitions aren't working. Ironic that we might need physical bodies in action to save an Internet radio station...but what else would work? If I can save the world - starting with Pandora - from my couch, let me know how.

Feeling flu-ish

Fun experiment I'm passing on from Patti Anklam, tracing the diffusion of ideas. It's the Happy Flu app, and you too can watch distributed knowledge move around the grid. If you have a Blog, click 'spread it', copy the code, move the trace along. Here's Patti, me and maybe you. (Move scroll bar down to capture image if too distant)

Seeqpod and Everything

Thanks to a simple Scott Leslie tweet, I wandered over to Seeqpod and my head blew off.

How is it possible that every day every day every day there's another site or tool or blog that I can't imagine life without? Yesterday, I was loyal to pandora.com and my customized, intensely personal and private radio stations. 

Still love Pandora, but seeqpod allows me to listen to any artist I want for as long as I want, while Pandora offers variety (within the channel constraints) that often annoys me. Depends on the mood, but let's skip over my whims and wants and address the technology. 

Everything is at my finger tips all the time. Ideas, images, music, facts, figures, and more. 

I'm never lonely and more often, never alone. I start to 'jones' if removed for long from life on the digital stream. 

& I can't help but wonder, if this is my life today, what will it look like next year? In five years? In ten years? My professional life depends on understanding emerging technologies and I will openly admit that I'm hitting my limits. Incredible, exciting, overwhelming and how do we keep up, sort, make meaning, categorize, and shed what's not of value?

Seeqpod? Too cool for school. Add it to the list. 

Think less, be more

Odd post title from me, known for dismissively claiming that "the mind should transcend the body" as I make my way through the plastic noses, breasts, lips and even (yes, it's true) buttocks now, here in the kingdom of surgical vanity procedures. The Phoenix/Scottsdale/Tempe triangle is an odd place for a natural, food-loving soul like myself to land, but I stay aligned to sanity by holding tight to the values of university life.

cognition uber alas!

And here, this becomes the coin of the realm and the smarty-pants are the vanity crowd. But everywhere, everywhere everywhere it's becoming not how well we think but how busy we stay in managing the task of thinking itself. Thinking as demonstrated in emails, v-mails, text, calendar meetings, and rushing from place to place.

Not good. Turns out, not even smart. (Gasp)

Read the BBC News Magazine article "No time to think?" and rethink your silly, busy, exhausting ways.
Loved the idea. So here, now, at 9:15pm local time, I'll yank myself away from the laptop and pay a bit of attention to the physical life around me.

What a wonderful world!

I see babies cry, I watch them grow
They'll know so much more than we'll ever know
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.

I have great hope that, with time and tenderness, higher education will do right and put its bright, lazy mind to the task of reformation and relevancy. For too long, we've been failing to educate so many of our citizens and a recently released report by the National Commission on Adult Literacy made me shudder. OK, the rich and lucky babies still get the best education in the world...even though even the privileged aren't majoring in the science or math fields. We can continue to claim we're a great nation, but it's not evidenced in the data on American literacy and competitiveness. Nationally, we're crawling in a hole and HE is playing peek-a-boo with the problem. ("I can't seeeeee you!!")

Access. affordance, engagement, relevancy. These are all topics that cry for attention as an aged and out-of-touch industrial age institution batons down the hatches. I love my ivory tower but oh YouTube. I was bemoaning this thorny problem to a friend of mine last week and noticed that the discomfort we're feeling is similar to the one we get when sipping milk just before it goes sour. You can tell it's just this side of turning, still...good enough, but use it fast because in no time you'll be at that reflux stage if you sip it.

Here's what WICHE wrote about the report in a policy alert email they sent out:
"It presents evidence that our failure to address America’s adult education and workforce skills needs is putting our country in great jeopardy and threatening our nation’s standard of living and economic vitality. The Commission makes several recommendations for immediate action to reverse the course we are on."

TinyURL just got better

Custom TinyURLs? Yes. Yes Yes.
An idea whose time has come and a practice we've all been anticipating.

Appendage to last blog post: sometimes, the value of the tool is intuitive and needn't be explained, explored or analyzed. I now can customize my tinyURLs. I'm a happy camper.
Here's pretty URL for last blog post: http://tinyurl.com/carmeangkflow
Nice, crisp, to the point, easy to remember in context. (It's all about the context)

Wonder whether creating short and meaningful URLs will become an art? Or a critical skill for the digital age? I could be the first to offer a workshop on the practice!

In Search of Meaning and Flow

I haven't been blogging. Mea culpa. Working on dissertation, family illness, job demands, etc and there just didn't seem enough time to make meaning out of all that I was reading and learning from other bloggers. Then, life changed (dissertation done!) and Lilia Efimova shamed me into thinking about blogging as healthy routine again.

Granted my life is still chaos, but in the right context, it is beautiful chaos ripe for sharing. I'm in Chicago at the School of the Art Institute (TICA & more on that later), and one of the participants said that my work is like "being a kid in a candy shop." Too true, but even kids want vegetables/macaroni and cheese/protein now and then and lately, I'm feeling urpy (technical term) by the tools, information, ideas flowing past. George Siemens recommends we learn to accept that we miss out on the flow when we "eat, sleep or whatever". Hard to do when your job is to find application, meaning, value amidst the rubble. No sleeping! So - hoping it lasts - I'm focused on returning to making meaning while here, awake and on the grid.

My friend Patricia McGee and I have been attempting to think through a model with focus on meaning & value by not talking anymore about the tools, but about narrowing description of use. We're expecting push back from those who are in it for the wild ride, but for us, it's about the value the deep learning the return the outcomes.
Patricia believe one avenue (perhaps the only, certainly the best) approach is through story. Case study is story. Best practices is story. What didn't work is great story. More on that when she finishes her latest oeuvre.

Meanwhile, the Havas Media Lab have put up a very compelling white paper describing the framework of meaning as "user generated context". What HML has done for rethinking the business model, (yes, following on the work of so many great bloggers; see my list gathered via SNA at Shared Knowledge Project) those in higher education should be doing to make sense of the flood of tools, technologies, places and spaces we're exploring daily.

We know the tools. (FYI: Jane Hart did a great job of compiling consensus on tools relevant to learning) but I don't think we're doing a very good job of making sense and meaning/demonstrating value of all this technology, chaos, beauty. Those who work in this realm (hey, I resemble that!) should move forward and take responsibility in getting the social, distributed, shared nature of digital knowledge incorporated into the fabric of higher education. I'm suggesting we stop promoting the tools and address the value. User generated context. Meaning. Value. Integration into the flow of the course and the desired outcomes of the discipline.

OK. Enough blogging. Chicago is calling my name. So is the pizza, italian beef with two peppers/dry, hot dogs with everything (neon relish, tomato, pickle, onion, mustard and NO ketchup), sudsy Leinenkugels, and muggy walks in verdant greenery. I'll defend desert life till my throat hurts but Chicago is a great place to visit after a rockin' workshop on Web 2.0.

My Night with David Gurteen

Bet that got your attention. Those who know of David's work with Knowledge Cafes in whatever international spot he lands will know already of what I'm speaking. As David travels the world, he offers to facilitate a free, open to community, informal exchange and sharing of ideas on whatever burning question that locale might wish to consider. Informal but not unstructured. David uses a specific, distributed, what I would call "emergence" format where 'the whole is greater than the sum of the parts' for encouraging knowledge transfer amongst participants. No leaders, no report outs, no death by PowerPoint. Everyone matters, every voice counts.

The closing moments of a Knowledge Cafe reminded me of a Quaker meeting. You don't speak unless you're compelled to share an important thought, realization, or theme that emerged from your multiple small group discussions. Some participants violate the framework and just need to be heard, but like the Quakers, everyone listens respectfully and reflects on the thought without the need for comment or debate. I think the format works because David seems to be one of the nicest people on the planet. Not sure what would happen if a less gentle soul asked the same behavior of a crowd. I'd love to hear more out there from those who've tried his Cafe format on their own.

Thanks to David's Twitter post, I discovered on Tuesday that there would be a Cafe here in my home town on Wednesday eve. He was here in Phoenix to present at BSEC 2008, and stayed an extra day to help KM leaders in the Valley think through "How could the Valley become a vibrant knowledge capital? What role would our business community play and what would be the benefits?"

The topic was briefly introduced by Jay Chatzkel, author of numerous pieces on the topic, and a small group (~50?) spent the evening in shifting clusters of 4-5 people imagining the Phoenix area as a thriving knowledge hub. A wonderful evening of deep, thoughtful, diverse ideas.

The group will gather again in September (without David) to see where each of us have taken the ideas and where we might go with them from there. A great evening, great meeting one of my KM heroes in person, great example of Twitter as pipeline for information immediacy.

Giving the Devil His Due

OK, trying to teach 'mashups' to my students: what, how and more importantly, why this may be a key new media literacy. They're not enthused. Deep thinking required to create meaningful new content. So I'm looking for ah-hah moments.

And here's where you have to nod to MicroSoft. They're cranking out SilverLight applications without much fanfare, keeping low key, very beta and some have potential.
I'm not going to desert the Google search engines easily (scholar is getting me thru my dissertation research), but take a look at tafiti meta-search engine, powered by SilverLight and Live Search. Newest version is a bit scarey in interface (Halo 3? looking for a market that's not me) but the earlier release had a 'tree view' which was a lovely little mashup.
Visual media. Visual literacy. Visual integration of data across sites and services.
The students get it when it works. We all do, without needing to ponder.

So then the students go over to PopFly and create their own silly, sweet and sometimes compelling mashups. User site and rankings is a mess, but the interface certainly beats the dead Yahoo Pipes project.

So, MS approach is unclear. No promotion or noise. Must be a method to the madness somewhere. (PopFly is often slow, perhaps they're tuning before selling), but if anyone has better idea on how to get learners into mashups, let me know.

Meanwhile, does ANYONE understand why or what is with their clunky OfficeLive site?
Google Docs did it as well as we could ask. I'm all for competition on freeware, but...huh?
But that's a whole nuther post.

Masie Fellowship?

Looked everywhere and don't find this on their messy, crazy site but here's announcement that's posted in my PhD community site (instructional design for online learning) at Capella regarding Fellowship at Masie Center.
Can't help thinking that this would be very, very fun and rewarding. What a great combo for the right person:
-------------
We are pleased to announce a new program that will support learning
professionals pursuing an advanced degree (Master or Doctorate
Level) or interested in a Research Sabbatical.

Starting in Summer 2008, for a period of one semester (2 to 4
months), we will select and host a series of Learning Fellowships at The MASIE
Center in Saratoga Springs, NY.

The candidates will be provided housing, a stipend for living
expenses, full access to the Center and our Learning CONSORTIUM. They will have an
opportunity to:

* Spend 50% of their time on a Research Project in the Learning Arena.
* Spend 50% of their time working with MASIE Center staff on key Learning Projects.
* Work with our Learning CONSORTIUM members to create and deploy their research.
* Place the results of their research in the public domain.
* Shadow Elliott Masie or other CLO's in our Learning CONSORTIUM.
* Write at least one article for Learning TRENDS.
* Present their research at Learning 2008.

Candidates will be selected by an Advisory Panel of colleagues,
academics and learning executives. The Fellowships can begin at the start of
the Fall, Winter or Summer semester/season.

Rather than complete a long application, we would like you to start by
sending a personal note to us, outlining your interest in the Learning
Fellowship. We will follow-up with more details and requests for additional information.

Send your note to: fellowship@masie.com

We are very excited about this program and hope that it will support
more research and advanced degrees in the learning field.

Regards,

Elliott Masie
The MASIE Center & Learning CONSORTIUM
trends@masie.com

Popfly toy for (big) girls and boys

Attended a Cengage workshop in Mesa AZ this week. Interesting speaker, Mark Frydenberg of Bentley College, introduced audience to Popfly.

I'd tried Yahoo Tubes awhile back. Frustrating, non-intuitive, perhaps buggy interface. Quit after a few hours. Mark claims MS got it right with Popfly. I'll give it a try. Site shows a lot of 'highly ranked' but untagged and some non-functional mashups on the home page, so I have my doubts. But there's the quirk in new tools.

Meanwhile, Mark is using Popfly to teach new media literacy to his Tech 101 courses. Mashup as required literacy skill? Sure maybe.