Trees Communicate With One Another, Connected by Fungi (Video)

“trees in a forest ecosystem are interconnected with the largest, oldest ‘mother trees’ serving as hubs”

The Peeragogy Project – Self- Learning

“Learning is a social, active, and ongoing process.” Howard Rheingold

For more infomration The Peeragogy Handbook

Visual Notetaking on the iPad

Great tips on how to use various drawing programs to sketch on your iPads. This tutorial also includes how to record and add audio.

Jeff Pulver – Being Vulnerable In the Era of the Real-Time Web

Learning to draw again …..

I grew up drawing. I took art all though school including high school and college. But, I did not think I could make a living as an “artist” so I got a degree in psychology. That didn’t help me either.

Then one day while I was working as a pasteup artist (you may have to look this up) for a little advertising newspaper in California the first computers were brought in. They were macs.. but little screens and you could draw but only in black and white. Color printing was not yet cost efficient for this business, but at least with pasteup we could create some gray colors. We would draw a line…. and wait…… draw a line……. and wait…..it was not very fast. Then you had to save often, at least every 3-5 minutes. The programs did not automatically safe what you were doing for you. If you forgot to save.. the computer would lock up, and all your work would be gone. But I now could maybe be and artist and make a living at it.

The first years were fun.. we could be creative, we learned from one another and as programs and computers progressed so did we. But my last few jobs were like working in a factory… work as fast as you can… everything was placed were someone told you to place it, and be quiet. There was no creativity, the only new things I was learning was on my own – by now the internet had tutorials. I even tried teaching graphics. But few of my student had any traditional art knowledge or skills. Pushing buttons in Photoshop does not make you an artist. I was not creative anymore…

So I decided to get my Master in Education. Well that hasn’t work much either. Recently, from an online group I am involved in developed from Howard Rheingold’s Mindamp classes, I meet a artist from New York, Amanda. And what she was doing was amazing. This visual drawing is being done to explain things, such as RSA does. It is being done in meetings and classrooms to organize out thoughts. Amanda has create drawings for our classes at Rheingold U. . So thanks Amanda, for giving me back my creativity.

This is not me.. I am still just using a pencil and paper, and trying somethings on my iPad. But it gives me a great idea.

Some great sites:
http://www.commoncraft.com/
http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/
http://www.whatthegregg.com/
http://sunnibrown.com/doodlerevolution/
http://www.visualthinkingmagic.com/
http://blog.duarte.com/
http://www.urbansketchers.org/
http://mattiasa.blogspot.com/
http://digitalroam.typepad.com/digital_roam/

Why I Flipped My Classroom

http://www.fi.ncsu.edu/project/fizz/

From http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aGuLuipTwg&feature=related

Duke lets professors chose to ban laptops in classrooms

This week in the Duke Chronicle, the daily newspaper, there was an article that I was shocked to see. Band laptops… I could not believe that an article like this would even be considered today. I hope one of your most esteemed alumni have not read this – Tim Cook — the CEO of Apple.

I guess those professors do not remember their days of sitting listening to the “sage of the stage”. I do or rather, I don’t…… I do not remember most of my classes nor my professors. That is how much impact they had on my life. I tired to take notes (this was before computers) but mostly I doodled and had many things going though my head. But I am not alone. Research in neurology has proven, we or our brains cannot concentrate for very long. We may have some periods of “flow” in which we are so engaged that we loose track of time. But I can guaranteed this rarely happens in the classroom, most of us are looking at the clock and counting the minutes.

As students day are taking online classes and using iPads or smart phones in their K-12 education, I can only imagine that they will be even less engaged in a classroom like this. I am not saying that all Duke professors are saying this or believe in this. Cathy Davidson (founder of HASTAC), Tony O’Driscoll (leader in virtual worlds), Steven Craig (whose chemistry class in one of the first on iTunes U.,) the Duke School of Nursing using virtual worlds to learn. At least your medical school and new cancer center are moving into the 21st century. Every student should be required to learn the skills necessary for their future – content creation, communication, collaboration, critical thinking, creativity. How are you teaching your students these skills? One of the things that really struck me was when one of Duke’s students mentioned she could type much faster than writing notes.

I could give you a list of videos and article on the web that would show you how wrong you are, but you need a computer to read them. Howard Rhiengold, Sebastian Thrun, Khan Academy, Sir Ken Robinson, and Sugata Mitra, would be a real good start. In my opinion, professors should not be given this option. It should be a mandate by administration that computers need to be used by students in the classrooms, and it is up to the professors to keep your students engaged. I used to teach where all my students sat in front of computers in the classroom and online…. it is not that hard but you will have to change the way you think of yourself…. and your teaching ability. Students should be in the center and not the professors.

Howard Rheingold at UC Berkeley Regent’s Lecture

http://vimeo.com/35685124

Howard Rheingold offers a glimpse of the future of high-end online learning in which motivated self-learners collaborate via a variety of social media to create, deliver, and learn an agreed curriculum: a mutant variety of pedagogy that more closely resembles a peer-agogy. This lecture was presented at UC Berkeley on January 23, 2012.

Letter to “The Chronicle of Higher Education”

The Chronicle of Higher Education just ask a question to their readers — “Who Are the Top Technology Innovators in Higher Education? And this is my response.

It is not just one person or one great teacher I am learning from nowadays. It is many. Through the Internet I have created my own personal learning network, I am creating, curating and collaborating with many though out the world. These skills should be taught to all students from middle school on. It should be a requirement in the first month of any university.

Learning to search properly is one of the most important things I have learned. Curation though following using RSS and even Yahoo Pipes others blogs and having their titles dumped into Netvibes so I can quickly find articles that interest me. I find so many interesting people and links to articles (some in scientific journals) though Twitter. But went use an article in my own blog, I also know who to cite it properly and give that person create for their works. It takes time to learn who to follow and who to believe. Howard Rheingold calls this “crap detection“.

I have been to conferences and watched them streamed live. Last week it was a SWSX like technology conference in France and another conference on Virtual Worlds. I have also watch live streaming of Occupy Wall Street. I have taking several MOOCs – Massive Open Online Courses with thousands from all over the world lead by George Seimens and Stephen Downes. I just tried to take Artificial Intelligences course from Stanford with 120,00 others. I did not study as much math on Khan Academy YouTube videos that I need to and got lost. But I can take this again in the future or go back to YouTube and watch the lectures.

In Second Life, I have heard Clay Shirkey and Sir Ken Robinson talk. I have meet with libraries and other educators connected to real world organizations such as American Library Association and ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education). I have see how IBM and Cisco uses Virtual Worlds and to train their employees and get them to collaborate with each other. Tony O’Driscoll (from Duke) has a great book on this “Learning in 3D”.

I belong to an Alumi group of past Howard Rheingold’s students that is growing with people all over the world. We are co-learners — teaching each other. We reading books such Cathy Davidson’s “Now You See It” (from Duke) and Douglas Rushkoff’s “Program or Be Programmed” — together and comment in a forum our thoughts and opinions. My co-learner and I meet twice weekly in either Adobe Connect or Google+ — not only learning from each other but also talking with a high school class, their teacher along with Roy Christopher about how they feel about classrooms and learning today. We even got Douglas Rushkoff to speak to our little group and Cathy Davidson is on our list.

And every Saturday afternoon I spend with TED, not a person, but short talks from some of the most inspirational and interesting people around the world. Just last week, I learned about the Knowmad’s movement. I am learning more than I have ever learned in my life. Learning is not just restricted to the classroom anymore. Anyone can create, curate and collaborate.

(Several Weeks later)
The Chronicle of Higher Education has picked their nominations, but at least did mention my post. I still think we need to find many people to learn from, whether on the web or in person. This is old fashions. We need to learn collaboration, we need to learn how to communicate with other in this new world, and to curate the web.

Cathy Davidson and Howard Rheingold