Flexknowlogy

Overview

There’s been a bit of buzz recently on more ed tech blogs than I think I can refer to about using blogs as a delivery host for opencourseware as PLE-inspired learning content. This branches off of that thought by demonstrating a very quick-and-dirty method of targetting chunks of content from various sources in order to remix a customized online “lesson”.

In short, this is a tutorial-in-lieu-of-a-lousy-conference-presentation for those who are unfamiliar with the tools or need orientation to an approach.

Preparation

You’ll need:

1. A Google account set up for Google Notebook and Google Docs & Spreadsheets
2. Mozilla Firefox Web browser with the Google Notebook add-on
3. A collection of topic-related Web pages or documents from which to remix
4. A basic outline of the lesson to be composed/remixed (pref. with objectives)

I expect that this process can also be done with Zoho using the Zoho Notebook Helper add-on for Firefox, however I’ve not worked through this process myself.

The importance of having the last element, an outline of the lesson, should not be underestimated. The hardest part of this task is staying focused and organized. I tend to take a kitchen-sink approach, throwing everything together and sorting it out later, but having a clear outline of what you want your lesson to include from the beginning sets up a checklist of sorts from which you can search and order information.

As for information sources themselves, there are an increasing number of Creative Commons-licensed or public domain materials available on the Web that can be remixed into an online lesson. Some of these are materials specifically authored for education (e.g. MIT OpenCourseWare, Open Yale Courses, UK Open University’s OpenLearn), others are collaboratively authored repositories (e.g. Wikipedia), and some are already in the publich domain (e.g. Project Gutenberg. Of course, copyrighted materials can be quoted and cited within reason, and Google Notebook helps you preserve source information for citations.

Quick Tutorial

Disclaimer: the sources and excerpts used in this example are merely for demonstration purposes and should not be reflective of a well-remixed or structurally complete lesson!

1. First, create a new Google Notebook for the lesson with title.
2. Using your lesson outline, seek out your information sources on the Web. Select a passage and right-click to activate the Firefox Google Notebook Add-on. Choose Note this (Google Notebook). This passage is now an excerpt copied into your Notebook. You’ll notice that the Google Notebook Add-on opens a preview window in the lower-right-hand corner of your screen. You can type your own commentary or notes here to include with the quoted passage.
3. Repeat this for all your information sources on the Web, selecting passages you wish to use as an excerpt in the lesson, right-clicking, and choosing Note this (Google Notebook).
4. Do the same for sources that you may wish to condense, rewrite, summarize, or paraphrase information from. You’ll be able to edit your Notebook in a minute. Because there’s so much information out there, it’s fine to collect more than you need. At the same time, using a lesson outline from the beginning will help you stay focused and not stray from your teaching objectives.
5. Don’t worry about noting sources out-of-order; Google Notebook will let you re-arrange your sources.
6. When you’ve completed your grab of sources, simply click Open Full Page from the Google Notebook add-on. This will open up your Google Notebook with all quotations. Each excerpts is preceded by the title of the Web page from which it came, and a hyperlink to the Web site for citation purposes.
7. You can type directly in the notebook to draft introductions, conclusions, additional information, or segways from one piece of information to another. Again, having a solid lesson outline here is very useful.
8. By mousing-over the left-side of source excerpts, you’ll find that you can left-click and drag excerpts above or below other excerpts or text sections that you’ve written. This makes it easy to rearrange the excerpts to match your lesson outline.
9. Once you’ve finished your rough edit of your lesson, you’ll need to send the saved Notebook to Google Docs for finish editing and publishing to your blog. Under Tools on the top-right, choose Export to Google Docs.
10. While Google Notebook is the best place to perform basic structural edits to your document because of the drag-n-drop feature, Google Docs have slightly more sophisticated formatting features to choose from for your finish edits. After you’ve completed editing and formatting your lesson in Google Docs, click the Publish tab to send this to your blog.
11. In the Publish tab you’ll need to click change your blog site settings and work through the few form fields to point to your own blog for publishing (e.g. blog hosting server, username, password, blog title). Click Test before finishing by clicking OK.
12. An alert will ask you to confirm publishing. Note that after you’ve published, you can in fact make edits to your Google Doc and republish to your blog, overwriting the original blog post using nearly the same process we just did.
13. After publishing, go to your blog and review your re-mixed lesson! Remember, you can edit your Google Doc and republish at any time, however if you want to add to your lesson starting from Google Notebook you are better off deleting the original blog post and Google Doc and re-exporting from step 9. Using the Firefox add in for this process preserves text, images, and hyperlinks from the source all the way to the published blog, however I’ve not had any luck preserving embedded video files.

OK, this creates an admittedly rough looking “lesson”, but it’s a fast method of remixing open content, especially if one has a good outline and is familiar with what’s available.

One idea that I haven’t played with is using Google Desktop with Notebook to grab pieces from files on my local computer. I’ve actually never used Desktop, but it’s been suggested that this would be possible.

Writing is fun. Writing is fundamental. If you don’t write, you don’t know what you think. Jeffrey Zeldman on Twitter

In the spirit of knowing what I think as Zeldman so aptly puts it, and adequately preparing myself at what is essentially the starting line of this blog: My intention for this ‘blog is to lay out, as frequently as time allows, commentary on (and hopefully arguments for or against) new and emerging theories and practices related to the field of educational technology. I am keenly interested in how humans learn best, and how technology can improve that learning by increasing efficiency and enhancing pleasure.

My intention is to challenge assumptions–both yours and mine, to force myself towards objectivity as much as is possible, and to entertain as many sides of an issue as possible. This does not mean my explorations will attend to all sides of an issue, only that, through my own thinking and our engagement in dialogue, many sides of an issue can be explored or examined. That’s the point of the Internet, no?

Having said that, though it may not enhance my reputation, it certainly can’t hurt to be above-board and describe some of the philosophical nodes from which I tend to operate. I do this more for my own benefit than for the benefit of any of my readers; following a discussion with a pair of much-respected colleagues that ended up getting close to the heat, I asked myself, “What are the beliefs that underpin your approach to analyzing and implementing teaching practices?”

I believe in scientific realism, and tend to favor arguments that are backed up by empirical evidence.

I believe in the powerful utility of logic, and have little respect for arguments that don’t at least try to adhere to the fundamentals of logic, that is, valid arguments consisting of sound premises that lead us to conclusions, though those conclusions may not always be tidy.

These are the tools which I employ (though perhaps crudely at times) to evaluate teaching theories and practices.

I am not afraid to state that I try to live my life guided by a philosophy of moral objectivism. I have no use for any sort of dogmatic relativism which allows serious dialogue to discombobulate into a failure to attach meaning to language. Which leads us to the fact that I am generally conservative in my mindset–a concept which I find frustrates or confuses some of my colleagues who may unfortunately think that conservatism = closed-minded-ness, resistance to progress, or religious fanaticism. In their true form I abhor all of these. On the contrary, while at its core conservatism means favoring gradual change over radical change, recognizing the value of “how we’ve done things” for the measurable fruits we currently enjoy, my orientation towards scientific realism provides me with ample reason to continually reassess my beliefs and correct my practices based on new evidence.

So in a nutshell, I believe that there is objective truth, and I believe we can get at it through analytical, science-based approaches. This relates to teaching because every time we teach we are practicing a skill that is guided by our theories and shaped by our philosophies, whether we know it or not. Many of us do not know what directs our teaching, but that does not make it directionless.

When I think about my students, I put myself in their shoes. I think of the time I as a student am investing. I think of the money I am investing. I critically assess the value of the teaching and the learning. To horribly mangle in paraphrase Harold Bloom I’ve concluded, “Life is Too Short for Bad Classes.” (Which must be allowed to explain, in part, my habitual absenteeism in high school and college!)

And so I scrutinize new “engaging” approaches to teaching and learning as much as I scrutinize the old “boring” approaches. I scrutinize the time wasted on technology usage as much as I scrutinize the time wasted on flat lecture. I see no point in discarding the old if the new hasn’t proven itself better.

There you have it. Now that that exposition’s off my chest I feel much more comfortable tackling some of the hot ed tech topics that make my mind swirl. Every day I walk into the office and find myself echoing Dave Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey who finally enters the mysterious black monolith and gasps, “…Oh my God, it’s full of stars!”