Flexknowlogy

This article is an attempt to objectively define the phrase “creepy treehouse” as coined by Chris Lott, and in current usage by ed tech folks such as Scott Leslie, Marc Hugentobler, John Krutsch, and others. I plan to follow up with a post on my perspective on CTH in the field of educational technology.

creepy treehouse

see also creepy treehouse effect

n. A place, physical or virtual (e.g. online), built by adults with the intention of luring in kids.

Example: “Kids … can see a [creepy treehouse] a mile away and generally do a good job in avoiding them.” John Krutsch in Are You Building a Creepy Treehouse?”

n. Any institutionally-created, operated, or controlled environment in which participants are lured in either by mimicking pre-existing open or naturally formed environments, or by force, through a system of punishments or rewards.

Such institutional environments are often seen as more artificial in their construction and usage, and typically compete with pre-existing systems, environments, or applications. creepy treehouses also have an aspect of closed-ness, where activity within is hidden from the outside world, and may not be easily transferred from the environment by the participants.

n. Any system or environment that repulses a target user due to it’s closeness to or representation of an oppressive or overbearing institution.

n. A situation in which an authority figure or an institutional power forces those below him/her into social or quasi-social situations.

With respect to education, Utah Valley University student Tyrel Kelsey describes, “creepy treehouse is what a professor can create by requiring his students to interact with him on a medium other than the class room tools. [E.g.] requiring students to follow him/her on peer networking sites such as Twitter or Facebook.”

adj. Repulsiveness arising from institutional mimicry or emulation of pre-existing community-driven environments or systems.

Example: “Blackboard Sync is soooo creepy treehouse.” Marc Hugentobler

In the field of educational technology a creepy treehouse is an institutionally controlled technology/tool that emulates or mimics pre-existing technologies or tools that may already be in use by the learners, or by learners’ peer groups. Though such systems may be seen as innovative or problem-solving to the institution, they may repulse some users who see them as infringement on the sanctity of their peer groups, or as having the potential for institutional violations of their privacy, liberty, ownership, or creativity. Some users may simply object to the influence of the institution.

I’ve been observing this phenomena increasingly, as instructors push down hot Web 2.0 technologies, while students push back with vocal objections or passive resistance. I call this the creepy treehouse effect.

More directly, any move to integrate or aggregate new institutional tools or systems with pre-existing tools or systems already embraced by the community may be seen as creepy treehouse, in as much as it may be construed as institutional infringement upon the social or professional community of it’s participants.

For example, the Blackboard family of learning management system products are often seen as creepy treehouses, as they provide e-learning tools in a very rigid, closed environment that is institutionally controlled in an attempt to “engage” students through technological novelty or mimicry of existing Web-based tools for social engagement. Increasingly, learning management systems are incorporating what educators assess as being potentially valuable learning tools such as blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, instant messaging, etc., not recognizing that these tools may be seen as artificial, meaningless, tiresome, temporary, or simply another aspect of The Man by the institution’s target participant group: the students.

At the same time, other LMS tools that are more exclusively related to the traditional activity of teaching (e.g. gradebooks, online quizzing, material posting, etc) are not viewed as inherently creepy treehouse. Tyrel Kelsey suggests:

Students reject creepy treehouses for one reason: they are creepy. I think a better approach to education is the idea of a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) … which [students] can invite the professor into when they feel comfortable doing so.

In Students should build their own tree house

Creepy treehouses are not limited to the realm of education or educational technology. In the computer software environment, for instance, Microsoft Office Live is likely to be judged as creepy treehouse relative to Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Zoho, not due entirely to it’s competitiveness or the relative similarities of the products, but more to the origination of the software: Microsoft is often seen as a controlling, soulless, self-centered institution, whereas Zoho and Google are seen as not only preceding Microsoft Live, but also open, user-centered, community-driven, or alternative.

Opinions in the community as to the creepy treehouse-ness of a given system or environment may vary greatly due to the subjectiveness of individual experiences. I expect that newly introduced tools, systems, or environments are more likely to be suspect and labeled “creepy treehouse”, though over time such systems may prove to have more salient long-term value to the community than anticipated.

I’m always on the look-out for new conference ideas that can be implemented to make Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange (TTIX) more and more useful. While most of the “un-conference” ideas mentioned here require a large crowd (larger than we can expect at TTIX 2008) this article does illustrate the growing tedium with the conference-as-usual approach, and highlights key problems that TTIX can seek to avoid or inhibit in the future.

My first attempt at drafting a map of my personal learning environment came out better than I expected. I didn’t utilize any of the physical space metaphors I’d planned to use, instead opting for a fast mapping solution through Excel that showed strong relationships (matched edges) as well as weaker relationships (arrows).

PLE Mapping, Draft 1
Originally uploaded by Mr_Stein

You’ll note that I did not limit myself to technologies, let alone Web-based tools as some have been inclined to do. I’ve used all tools, utilities, and resources that make up my actual environment for teaching, learning and professional/creative production.

I know much of the discussion of PLE’s centered on the idea of using technology as an all-containing hub, and while I see significant usefulness in hubs (my own primary hubs are Google Reader, Twitter, and my own blogs) I am beginning to believe that a single hub is not the answer, and PLEs should not be encompassed by a single product or service. For instance, Ron Lubensky defines the primary goal for a PLE as follows:

The primary goal of a PLE for an individual is to bring all the disparate artefacts of interest for learning under a single operating roof. … PLEs are meant to simplify managing these artefacts…

I have two problems with this goal as stated:

1. It is akin to the goals of monolithic learning management systems, and seems to vie for a “one-size-fits-all” approach. Scott Wilson with the Personal Learning Environment blog says, “It’s an unfortunate tendency especially in our sector to take a concept (PLE, e-Portfolio) and attempt to reify it as a product.”
2. Because individuals with several generally distinct interests likely have multiple origination/entry points for learning, one all-encompassing, multitudinous hub may not be optimum for effectiveness (it may in fact be distracting; I’ve found this to be the case with a fully-loaded iGoogle home page)

Speaking of my several generally distinct interests, I was initially inclined to separate my teaching and creation activities from this map. Arguably not “learning” by some strict definitions, but certainly from a “learning by doing” perspective. At any rate, teaching, creating, and learning seem to me to be inextricably intertwined.

This shirt is based on a workshop title suggestion Scott Leslie made (half?) jokingly over a Skype meeting.

I’m considering ordering up a batch of these from UberPrints.com for my crew at DE. PLE is People! That’s all you need to know.

One of the things I’m most proud of in my professional life is our annual Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange, which is now nearing it’s 4th year. While we’ve held it as a pretty traditional (small) ed tech conference during the first three years, John Krutsch and I began TTIX in 2004 with two key objectives:

1. TTIX will always be free - no registration fee (and therefore no conference tote bag, low-capacity usb drive, pen, keychain, etc.)
2. TTIX will emphasize 2-part sessions: part 1 is information, part 2 is hands-on application

We’ve added a few other facets, like
presenters are encouraged to make their materials available under a Creative Commons license, videos of presentations should be available for download after the event,
organized social events can help folks make professional connections
And, this year, conference proposals can be rated by the public almost immediately after submission. Admittedly the 5-star rating system is overly simplistic, but we see this as a great way to (1) advertise the possible sessions, (2) give prospective presenters some preliminary feedback, and (3) give the community a chance to make their interests heard to the proposal review committee. Ultimately we hope to go to a fully community-driven conference proposal review system.

Today I was lucky enough to stumble upon Alan Levine (aka CogDog)’s reflections on the EDUCAUSE ELI conference, “On Conferencing”. In this he examined the big questions I always ask myself when I go to conferences: Why do we go? and, Is it worth it? Mr. Levine lays out several complaints and ideas for conferences in general, and this inspired me to think about how we might push TTIX to the next level of meaningfulness and value for our participants. Let me highlight and springboard off of some of Mr Levine’s thoughts (and some of my own) here with respect to TTIX:

1. Online session evaluations. Addition: with immediate results viewable to everyone. With kiosks at the back of the room. Or with “clickers” (as much as I hate ‘em)
2. Learning Circle. Like Cracker Barrels at DT&L in Madison, Wisconsin. I like these a lot, actually, because you get to meet people and talk about related interests, and share experiences. The way I see this working best is someone deemed as expert moderates at small tables, others attend. On cue we all switch tables. I love Mr. Levine’s note that at ELI they used wikis and Google Docs for note-taking; TTIX will have to have this set up in advance for it to work.
3. Post session archives in 24 hours (a/v). We post video archives, but haven’t been able to do it in 24 hours. We probably could if we cut the quality. Addition: make presenter information uploadable during the conference, so presenters can upload their latest slides or materials. On the presentation video and materials download page make participant commentary open, a la a blog. This could be attached to or on the same page as the conference evals for each session! Ooh, but then we couldn’t use a presentation sharing service like Slideshare…
4. Twitter used throughout. ELI had a Twitter account just for the conference, which I definitely want to follow suit with, and many of its participants used Twitter voraciously–I know, I read ‘em! What if we started the first day of TTIX with a Twitter primer/workshop for participants? How to use Twitter, is it good for professional development, is it good for education? I mean, if participants are glued to their laptops for half the conference any way, can’t we encourage them to participate through their laptops? (What other sandboxes can we set up for them?)
5. Do something with the backchannel. No real new ideas here. Chris Lott has suggested “some lamps or orbs which change color and/or intensity according to the back-channel assessment”. Maybe blog up a “best IRC or Twitter quote” per session?
6. Conference blogging. It’s really nice when participants blog up the sessions or even just the conference in general. What if TTIX had it’s own blog that the TTIX committee updated during the conference, or a wiki that everyone could edit on the fly to summarize sessions with. Or, if we aim for something more reflective as Mr. Levine suggests, what if we set up a blog and invited participants to volunteer to author a reflective blog post on one session that they attend? We could have someone in charge of providing those volunteers with an author account on our TTIX blog, and then give them a reward if they post before the conference officially ends.
7. A conference with just keynotes. Last year we ran 4, even 5 sessiosn at a time. Bad move. The sessions were too poorly attended, and we knew some of the sessions were not cream of the crop in the first place. We took notice for 2008 and are trying to limit ourselves to just 3 at a time. But John attended one conference last year that was only keynotes. He loved it. I personally like the variety of being able to choose. But we need to emphasize differentness next year. We need to continue to pushe for, focus on, and applaud the second-day sessions, which is our twist of lime on ed tech conferences. What if we ask 2-day presenters to create an assignment day 1?
8. More hands-on. This is my own suggestion/complaint. Perhaps instead of a conference entirely of keynotes we composed a conference entirely of mini-workshops. That’s the idea behind the 2-part session, after all, but taken to the extreme. Or maybe the regular sessions are all workshops framed in by keynotes (2 per day)? Or a keynote and a learning circle/cracker barrel?
9. More Something Else. At DT&L and many other conferences you have the choice of going to an info session, a panel session, a poster session, etc–all of which are running at the same time. Now I cling to the idea of variety (I’m a session-jumper, remember?), but what if we did 3 sessions at a time, but had an info session hour, a panel session hour, a poster session hour, a workshop hour, etc to force the variety into the day?

These ideas have revved me up. I’m convinced we need to “stir up the stew” as Mr. Levine puts it. The next question is: If TTIX were to implement any 2 of these, which two would you find most valuable? Which would make the conference-going experience more important, more memorable, more applicable to your professional life when you return home?