Around the Corner-MGuhlin.edublogs.org

• Michael Nielsen » Is scientific publishing about to be disrupted?

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  • There are two common explanations for the disruption of industries like minicomputers, music, and newspapers. The first explanation is essentially that the people in charge of the failing industries are stupid.
  • The second common explanation for the failure of an entire industry is that the people in charge are malevolent.
  • even smart and good organizations can fail in the face of disruptive change, and that there are common underlying structural reasons why that’s the case. That’s a much scarier story. If you think the newspapers and record companies are stupid or malevolent, then you can reassure yourself that provided you’re smart and good, you don’t have anything to worry about. But if disruption can destroy even the smart and the good, then it can destroy anybody.
  • Some people explain the slow death of newspapers by saying that blogs and other online sources [1] are news parasites, feeding off the original reporting done by the newspapers. That’s false. While it’s true that many blogs don’t do original reporting, it’s equally true that many of the top blogs do excellent original reporting.
  • The problem is that your newspaper has an organizational architecture which is, to use the physicists’ phrase, a local optimum. Relatively small changes to that architecture - like firing your photographers - don’t make your situation better, they make it worse.
  • The result is that the newspapers are locked into producing a product that’s of comparable quality (from an advertisers point of view) to the top blogs, but at far greater cost.
  • The only way to get from one organizational architecture to the other is to make drastic, painful changes. The money and power that come from commitment to an existing organizational architecture actually place incumbents at a disadvantage, locking them in. It’s easier and more effective to start over, from scratch.
  • The reason is that those organizations are large, complex structures, and to survive and prosper they must contain a sort of organizational immune system dedicated to preserving that structure.
  • The result is that the people who add the most value to information are no longer the people who do production and distribution. Instead, it’s the technology people, the programmers.
  • When new technologies are being developed, the organizations that win are those that aggressively take risks, put visionary technologists in key decision-making positions, attain a deep organizational mastery of the relevant technologies, and, in most cases, make a lot of mistakes. Being wrong is a feature, not a bug, if it helps you evolve a model that works: you start out with an idea that’s just plain wrong, but that contains the seed of a better idea. You improve it, and you’re only somewhat wrong. You improve it again, and you end up the only game in town.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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I was a bit disappointed to receive this email from iNACOL organizers regarding my presentation/workshop submission, which I discuss in this April, 2009 blog entry:

On behalf of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL), I’d like to personally thank you for your VSS 2009 proposal. We received 210 submissions for the November conference. Members of the Program Committee worked very hard in reviewing the proposals and making decisions that will best fit the symposium theme Creating New Solutions through Online Learning and meet the dynamic participant needs.

We appreciate your submission of Moodle Habitudes - Constructing Online Learning Environments. However, this proposal was not selected as a presentation for this year’s symposium.

Every effort was made to balance the program in the areas of content, topic, grade level, focus, and audience. Due to space limitations, many excellent proposals could not be accepted. We appreciate the time and effort involved in preparing a proposal, and thank you for offering to share your expertise with other educators.

We still hope you plan to attend the conference and that you will join us for robust networking opportunities; to learn about the latest trends, challenges and opportunities in e-learning; to interact in session presentations; and to gain access to the latest research and best practices reports. And if you register now, you can still take advantage of Early Bird pricing: http://www.virtualschoolsymposium.org/registration.php.

For information on how to take advantage of the VSS group housing rate at the Hilton Austin, visit the Travel & Hotel page: http://www.virtualschoolsymposium.org/travelhotel.php.

We look forward to seeing you at VSS 2009 in Austin, Texas, and we hope that you will consider submitting again. The Call for Participation for VSS 2010 will open in February 2010 at www.virtualschoolsymposium.org.

Best regards,

Dr. Fred Sagester, Chairman
Program Committee
International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL)

Since Virtual Schooling is still important to consider, and it’s important to learn as much as possible, I’m still planning to attend iNACOL in Austin, Texas. Unfortunately, it won’t be as a presenter.

Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

Playing around with XtraNormal.com, I took a piece of dialogue from The Heresies of an Ostrich Leader and put it in…here are the results:

Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

Click to view at larger size or use the Bubbl.us graphic organizer below….

Ken Task approached me the other day at the SOSCON09 and shared something about Moodle Collaborations. I’m still not sure I understand this fascinating concept, but here it is in his own words:

What is it?
Where users of Moodle Server A can access/enroll in selected courses (from a selected category) in Moodle Server B.

Moodler Servers setup for networking can be on the same server, another server within an internet domain (ex: tcea.org), or the servers can be on different domains (ex: tcea.org and sosoftexas.org). Both servers can use their own authentication services (Moodle A could be using MS LDAP while Moodle B could be using FirstClass) yet all users of both A and B have access to courses offered on the other server.

Users of A and B would have single sign on … ie, user X logging onto Sever B doesn’t
have to login again to access the categories/courses to which they have access.

One can also network Mahara (E-Portfolio) servers with Moodle servers (and vice versa).

Possibilities/implications are numerous, but a few that could apply:
Every ISD may NOT have to “re-invent the wheel”. Collaboration across ISD’s within Moodles - could be students/teachers/administrators.

Imagine “A” ISD’s “best” 8th grade Social Studies teacher, “teamed up” with “B” ISD’s “best” 8th grade Social Studies teacher in a MNET “team taught” course. “A” ISD might be in El Paso and “B” ISD might be in East Texas!

As best I can understand it, regardless of affiliation, users can authenticate from wherever they might be and access a common list of Moodle courses.

This makes it possible for multiple school districts–handling user management/authentication in whatever way they prefer–to partake of courses offered by a central repository that might be hosted by an Education Service Center, organization Moodle course site, etc.

It’s a pretty exciting idea because it eliminates course maintenance for member districts and enables the “Moodle Central” organization to develop courses without having to manage users from disparate systems.

Ken sent the following update:

How 2:
http://sos.tcea.org/kensmoodle/
Registration required.
Now implemented (for TCEA consideration) on Ken’s Moodle to/with TCEA’s Moodle at
http://moodle.tcea.org/mhub/ (some, but not all courses).

Conceptual issues in setting up … especially IF you are admin of both Moodles.
The the end user, once configured and working, transparent and all they have to do is
“click”!

Am sure there are some “catch 22’s”, but I’ve not found any I would object to.
Also, am not alone … but may have been the first to explore this in Texas! :\
(that’s sad to say, given the number of ISD’s, size of State, and everyone’s situation
[large/medium/small schools] in “re-invention of wheel”).

Moodle 2.0 +
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Community_hub

Looks even better!

Someone in Texas wrote…

Did you ever receive any input from the forum on updating your AUP? I have been given the job of updating ours to reflect the “newer issues” and am having problems finding any examples. Please share if you have anything. Thanks.

To which I responded…

You can find something here:
http://mguhlin.net/aup

Love to hear suggestions and improvement ideas!

and then…

Thanks so much for the info. Looks like this covers what I was looking for. The only other issue we had addressed was the use of technology for cheating. Some students were caught this year with answers stored on their cell phones. Any thoughts on this?

To which I wrote back….

Yes, actually. On that page, you’ll find a link to Liz Kolb (author of a new book on the subject of mobile devices) to collection of AUP info…I’ve also added some here, as have other visitors:
http://mguhlin.net/aupCellPhoneUse

How would YOU have responded?

Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

Thanks to Steve Dembo’s NECC presentation for sharing his Prezi.com presentation…

I am laughing my head off at the videos available at XtraNormal.com. It’s hilarious and I can imagine creating something here, especially if it just involves typing dialogue (satire) in for characters provided by XtraNormal.

Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

How neat it was to listen to Scott Floyd (White Oak ISD) online via ISTE Connects! His talk focused on Wordpress, including the mention of email subscription as THE add-on to include for WP. He also mentioned a few others, such as Twitterbadge and Flickr….

Let’s hope Scott follows up with a blog post listing his favorite WP plug-ins.

Also catching Scott and Mike Gras chatting regarding WordPress.

Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

A colleague told me, “School districts don’t know what to do exactly…Texas will, like Pennsylvania, run afoul of federal expectations for use of stimulus funding. Districts are having to prepare 2 budgets in anticipation of what will happen.”

This perspective is supported by a new article in the Austin American-Statesman which shares:

…as more information has trickled out of the U.S. Department of Education in recent weeks, it appears that Texas might also have some notable strikes against it:

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan warned that states could harm their chances in the grant competition by using stimulus money to “backfill budget holes” while protecting state dollars.

Texas left untouched $9.1 billion in its rainy day fund while using $3.2 billion in stimulus money to pay for textbooks and increase school funding. State officials argue that the use of money was in compliance with the law and say there was a lack of federal guidance on spending the money.
Source: How Will Texas Compete in the Race to the Top

Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

“Open source,” shares Jon Orech via a tweet today, “is free like a puppy.” This tweet reminded me of a short blog entry I wrote about PuppyLinux…

One of my favorite distributions of GNU/Linux is PuppyLinux. In fact, I carry one around with me wherever I go, and I’m sure to have it whenever I visit some place with computer access but I don’t want to use their Windows machine, burdened with who knows what keyloggers, etc. For fun, I even run PuppyLinux on my Macbook, although I also have UbuntuLinux loaded to do the real work. PuppyLinux is just fun to use and fast.

A nice article appears introducing folks to PuppyLinux:

Fast, small, lightweight—and still a full-featured GNU/Linux: Puppy Linux combines a complete set of applications with great flexibility, yet it requires minimal hardware. This article introduces this increasingly popular GNU/Linux distribution.Puppy Linux offers a full-featured, high performance system that doesn’t require state of the art hardware.

When you read it, be sure to check out the comments section to read the success stories. Get PuppyLinux online at PuppyLinux.com…

Give it a spin! It’s gotten even easier to install PuppyLinux and other GNU/Linux distros. Instead of burning a CD (gee, who does that anymore?), make a USB Flash drive…these are inexpensive, and boot up fast! These instructions help you do that (it’s really a short 3-4 step process, not very technical).

Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

How fun to listen to Julie and Vicki in this interview recorded and shared via YouTube! Watch it below:

Video Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoLBmZlrc1c

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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure