Podzinger is a search engine for podcasts. Rather than allowing you to just search for a podcast based on the title, description, tags, or categories (as podcasting portal sites such as Odeo, The Education Podcast Network, PodcastAlley, and iPodder do), Podzinger lets you search the transcript of the podcast itself. Built upon speech-to-text technology developed by BBN, a searchable transcript is automatically generated whenever one of the indexed podcast feeds is updated. The context surrounding your search term(s) is displayed in the search results, so you have the option of listening (and subscribing) to the podcast in its entirety, or clicking on one of the words to jump directly to it.

While I’m on the subject of audio technology tools, I’ve installed Talkr functionality to to this blog. Talkr reads the RSS feed of this blog and then using text-to-speech technology creates an mp3 file of individual posts being read using fairly high-quality synthetic speech. You can either subscribe to the Talkr feed or listen or download individual posts by visiting the original post entry (the link to listen to the article is at the bottom).

Just as I brought up the notion that certain individuals may favor images and visualizations to words, there is also research to support the idea that some (or many, depending on who you talk to) learners’ reading comprehension skills are facilitated by computer-based text-to-speech functionality (e.g., Text-to-speech software for helping struggling readers, Applying Principles of Universal Design to Test Delivery, and Jumping off the page. Since I mentioned Marshall McLuhan earlier, it should be noted that this research, and more or less Talkr podcasts (my own included), do not really delve into or exhibit the power of the spoken word as a medium in and of itself. Instead, the transformation of printed text into spoken text is considered and represented. I hope to tackle these ideas later.

Just as a point of reference, someone who does a great job of taking advantage of podcasting as a medium in its own right, is Bob Sprankle and his students of Wells, Maine (US). In a professional development institute I co-lead last summer, entitled Shaking Up The Classroom, I introduced podcasting to the group of teachers through a clip from the Summer Literature Circle 02 podcast (kids and parents discussing books together? During the summer?).

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N.B., I’m realizing that this post on Podzinger and Talkr, as well as my earlier post on Retrievr is helping to put a focus on my talk for November Learning’s Building Learning Communities 2006 conference this summer. I’m listed on the Main Conference Sessions page along with all very impressive people, including one of my professors from graduate school. Not that there’s any pressure or anything. But some of posts in the near future may take this tact. At BLC ‘06, I’ll be talking about using social software to help build inclusive learning communities.

Retrievr is an interface which allows you to find Flickr photos by drawing a rough sketch (see the screenshot). It may not be as accurate as, say, a search on Google with words, but it’s also not bad. At one point, as I was attempting to elicit a red apple, a pumpkin was included in the results. I then tried to get the pumpkin back by sketching an orange blob with a short stem: I was unable to get a pumpkin included in the results, but I did get a bowl of spaghetti. It’s also important to keep in mind that it does not recognize sketches as iconic representations. For example, in the screenshot, Retrievr does not recognize my sketch of a rough green triangle with a short brown horizontal line as a “tree.” It recognizes my sketch in its entirety as a rough green triangle with a short brown horizontal line and a blue/green/white background (it took me a bit of experimentation to figure out the background piece of the equation: the background does matter when performing a Retrievr search). In addition, Retrievr currently only draws upon Flickr’s most interesting photos; Retrievr’s developers do invite submissions and a submission interface is in the works.

But enough about Retrievr’s limitations. I think that this method of search holds some promise for learners, as I said above, who may have trouble expressing themselves or processing information in words. It may also be a boon for those who simply prefer images and visualizations to words, especially if you combine Retrievr, Flickr, and, without trying to toot my own horn too much, my Greasemonkey script Trope for Flickr. Learners can start off a search by drawing a sketch in Retrievr and find the most appropriate Flickr photo(s). Because Flickr provides the ability and encourages photographers to assign tags to photos, a (albeit unvetted) descriptive vocabulary is provided for each photograph. With Trope for Flickr installed, icons are placed next to each tag allowing the learner to branch off to find information in other forms of media with the same tag, such as web pages (via del.icio.us), blog entries (via Technorati), podcasts (via Odeo), and academic references (via CiteULike).

Imagine the potential for access and power afforded by Retrievr to those learners who have been kept back from interacting with technology because the primary interaction mode of the World Wide Web is the written word.

Here are just a few items for consideration when thinking about the use of social software (such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, photo-sharing services, social bookmarking and annotation services) that I’ve come across or thought about:

What new challenges and barriers does the use of social software create, or what challenges and barriers does the use of social software reinforce?

I’ve written about this topic in terms of Zeno’s Paradox; social interaction, collaborative work, and the community-based emergent categorization practice of tagging are all important and useful literacies to develop, and may allow for greater access and participation. With tagging there are even quite a few interesting articles about the more cognitive aspects of the practice (e.g., Tagwebs, Flickr, and the Human Brain and A cognitive analysis of tagging). But there is the potential in collaborative environments for individuals’ weaknesses to be reinforced; as Drs. Eide write in Commenting on Commentary: Interdisciplinary People vs. Teams?,

Many of the most successful innovative personalities are quite lopsided in their cognitive and social abilities. In fact, sometimes very smart people can make big mistakes by diluting their native talents by brooding and working too hard on their weaknesses rather than devoting themselves to their strengths.

In a collaborative environment, there is the danger that the failure of an individual to effectively participate will go unnoticed as those around him or her essentially pick up the slack. This can reinforce this individual’s feelings of low self-worth, breeding more failure. Members of the social network and an educator/moderator should be on the lookout for such scenarios and encourage every individual to contribute so that their strengths are accentuated and to value each and every contribution. It’s not an easy thing to do.

On a slightly more technical note, many of the social software and services utilize a technology called Ajax; while it is very useful for most people, it should be noted that when implemented incorrectly, Ajax poses an access problem for those learners who are blind or have reduced vision and use screen readers.

Again, I am certainly not advocating that we should disregard social software and the affordances such technology brings to the learning table; I am just posing questions to think about when planning and utilizing social software for learning.

Does the use of social software connect back to the learners’ experiences and “real-world” environment (and yours)?

Largely through this blog, I am hoping to encourage educators to think about the implications of the educational process — a concept that is often left out of the discussion of schooling, learning, and pedagogy. More often than not, the discussion ends at “Learners need to know things” or “Learners need to know how to do things” without taking the next step of asking why. What social, political, and cultural implications are triggered by schooling and learning for both the learner and for society as a whole?

Ulises Mejias asks many of these questions and responds with his idea of a pedagogy of nearness. Drawing on the work of Paulo Freire, he posits that social software is a way to foster praxis. He describes praxis as an emerging and evolving “prescription for action,” formed by the confluence of reflection, interaction, and action. Interaction by itself, or even interaction and reflection, falls short in this framework. Furthermore, praxis keeps with the idea of nearness, that is, the relevant and imminent; activities within this framework include the idea that there can be communications about and communications with (ideas, causes, concepts) on a variety of levels: the personal, local, and global.

As Ulises writes in A Nomad’s Guide to Learning and Social Software,

…The challenge for social software users is to contribute to a social cause in a way that enhances and aligns with—not disrupts or fragmentizes—other forms of activism.

Ensuring that the benefits of social software reach all circles of society will require that we focus not on the virtuality of social interactions, but on their reality. For a long time we have lived with the misconception that what we do online is virtual, and that since virtuality is a lesser form of reality (or a higher form, depending on who you ask), the consequences of our actions there have little to do with the ‘real’ world…. Nearness, in the sense I am using it, does not refer to spatial and temporal distance, but to immanence: the desire for connection and understanding, the nomad’s learning as becoming.

Does the use of social software the encourage the development of depth of thinking, knowing, and becoming in addition to breadth?

Avant-garde theater director Richard Foreman laments in The Pancake People, Or, The Gods Are Pounding My Head,

But today, I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available”. A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance—as we all become “pancake people”—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.

As young, impressionable, and forgetful as I am, a member of Generation X who remembers a world without the Internet and instant access and communications as well as a participant in and product of the “Information Age,” straddling nostalgia and prospection, these sentences strike a chord.

Connectivism is a theory which has spread far and wide across the educational blogosphere. The basis of connectivism, in short, is that learning can occur across people and networks and is the process of drawing connections between nodes. Far be it from me to deny that such skills and literacies are important, and the emerging nature of technology is making such practices ever more vital.

But is the idea that “the pipe is more important than the content within the pipe,” or that there are joys in shallow thinking the only way to conceptualize learning in the information age? Could there exist both breadth and depth? I am of the opinion that the two are not mutually exclusive, nor is it a “friend or foe” situation. As educators, we need to develop the skills to be able to recognize the affordances and drawbacks of both and to develop activities which encourage the development of both ways of thinking. We need both the cathedral and the bazaar.

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And that — after three days of on-again, off-again writing, punctuated by the necessities of real life with family — are my two cents. I hope that I’ve presented some questions to think about and to foster discussion, dialogue, and practice.

How much respect can you have for something you refuse to criticize?

Often in the blogosphere it seems that new ideas and practices are touted, celebrated, embraced, and sometimes even followed with a very short — or even non-existent — period of reflection and criticism. Peter Ford refers to this phenomenon as the “edu-blogging echo chamber.” To critique something, when done without malicious intent, is a call for an extended dialogue; it seems like that can only help bring about that open exchange of ideas in order to better the world at large.

Apparently, I’m not. I found this wonderful podcast, The Myth of Multi-Tasking. Merlin Mann of 43Folders posits that when one says they are multitasking, they are really just slicing their attention into smaller and smaller chunks. It is well worth listening to the podcast (it is on the short side), he talks about the self-perceived ability to multitask:

We’ve really been habituated over the years to thinking of ourselves, we should basically be these parallel processing computers and our conscience mind should be able to be in ten places at once….

There is alot of pressure to “multitask.” I’ve even been described by a former supervisor as a good multitasker. But I still feel quite overwhelmed, so Merlin’s podcast really speaks to me.

So is there any scientific basis behind Merlin’s astute observations? As a matter of fact, there is. I did a little digging and found the report Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Provides New Constraints on Theories of the Psychological Refractory Period associated with an American Psychological Society’s press release entitled We Weren’t Made to Multitask. It turns out that Merlin’s observations are actually validated by fMRI studies; as a person moves back-and-forth between tasks in a “multitasking” environment, they are “passive-queuing” the unfocused tasks rather than “active-monitoring.” The authors further discovered,

…no increase in the sort of activity that would be involved in keeping two thought processes separate when subjects had to switch faster. This suggests that there are no complicated mechanisms that allow people to perform two tasks at once. Instead, we have to perform the next task only after the last one is finished.

Could it be that even slicing our attention into tiny little slices could be detrimental to the task at hand? Likely, as the more we switch, the more we passively queue — rather than actively — engage with the task. This, I believe, has an impact as to how we approach learning and teaching, as we look for ways to encourage active learning.

But for us as people, Merlin gently reminds us,

…once you realize you can only ever do one thing at a time, an amazing thing happens. You discover that all this anxiety that has been acting as a spackle in your brain to turn all of your tasks into one ginormous task, the anxiety goes away. Suddenly, the tasks break down back into the single activities that they really are. And your brain spends more time on creative efforts instead of generating more anxiety for that monster in your head. And that can be really powerful.

We can play at learning, without retaining much save the temporary pleasure of the play, and we can act the teacher, strutting expectable stuff in front of blackboards. Real learning and real teaching require more. Successful learning gives us that rush of confidence which comes from competence. We cannot fake it. Often it comes from a struggle, from hard reflecting, from trial and error, from considering the previously unconsidered. Sometimes it jumps out serendipitously, like the meant word in a crossword puzzle. Sometimes it is forced out by apprehension, by the fear that if we do not master this sequence of ideas, we will suffer a reduced respect from ourselves, our teachers, or our peers. Whether our learning comes from orderly revelation or serendipity or hard attention fueled with apprehension, we know that the process we went through to reach understanding is complex, subtle, often mysterious, and sometimes not much fun at all.

I think this paragraph really jumped out for me because it is very successful at describing the complexity of the relationship between learning and teaching. One approach, one philosophy, one outcome, or one measurement of this relationship seems too reductionistic and short-sighted. Here’s looking forward to having the time and motivation to explore learning and teaching in depth.

Off to Los Angeles, unfortunately unexpectedly.

George Siemens of the Connectivismtivism blog — almost always thought provoking — just posted an item entitled “The Joys of Shallow Thinking….” The idea behind this post is to move the skills of, as one commenter puts it, “scanning and gisting” into a primary position in the learning sphere. Will Richardson, who seems to have an overall positive view of “shallow thinking,” writes,

I’ve started to feel guilty about the way I read these days. My wife gives me grief because I don’t spend as much time with books as I used to. And in some ways I miss that.

The Knowledging across life’s curriculum blog refers to a techno-determinism aspect of connectivism. I would agree with this analysis; posts proclaiming the joys of shallowness of thought would seem to support this. To remind us all that the Internet may not be ushering an age of new ways of interacting, communicating, and doing things, “…only about 10 percent connectivisme on the planet are familiar with the Internet and what it can do,” according to Taking the Internet to the People by Tony Salvador and John Sherry, two ethnographers for Intel. These two scientists describe stories people in developing countries when introduced the Internet solving immediate and necessary problems, often for their personal and economic well-being. They do not have the luxury — or the need — of scanning and gisting. They are not participating in shallow thinking; they are deeply, fully immersed, learning and doing for their own benefit, the benefit of their family, or of their community.

Then the animal pack/comes scurrying back,/saying, Hey! Come join the lot of us!
And she just doesn’t know–/should she stay? Should she go?
But YES the hippopotamus!
But not the armadillo.

What about that armadillo? As my job entails much thinking about learners “with special needs” or “with disabilities,” I can’t help but keep first the hippo and then the armadillo at the forefront of my mind when reading this book. Technology, beyond the basic accessibility affordances computers and other technology devices provide, has great potential for expanding inclusion. Online communities, producing for an audience, authentic learning tasks, folksonomies, multiple modes of media, all have potential for allowing learners previously unable to reach their full potential to do so. However, a paradox exists: whenever you increase the potential for an individual to succeed, you create barriers for others to do so. We have reached a condition in which Zeno’s paradox takes hold.

Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise states that the fast runner Achilles will never be able to catch up with the tortoise in a race — when the tortoise is given a head start — because when Achilles reaches where the tortoise was, the tortoise will have moved already. Such, it seems, is the way with technology. The technology catches up and helps to support certain cohorts of learners; other cohorts are still not supported, or an entirely new class of learners all of a sudden are left out because the new technology puts them at a disadvantage.

I’m not, of course, saying that we should throw out all new technologies. The web2.0 set actually speaks very well to my own style of learning. Instead, I think we should be open the idea that we need to recognize the possibility of new possibilities in learners even if it lies in old technologies.

Instead of designing instruction (which we assume will lead to learning), we should be focusing on designing ecologies in which learners can forage for knowledge, information, and derive meaning. [...] An ecology is dynamic, rich, and continually evolving. The entire system reacts to changes – internal or external. An ecology gives the learner control – allowing her to acquire and explore areas based on self-selected objectives. The designer of the ecology may still include learning objectives, but they will be implicit rather than explicit.

Once again, I find it hard to disagree in theory with the sentiment. I wonder if “designing” a learning ecology, however, is the proper term. John Seely Brown, who I would give credit for coming up with the term and concept in a learning context, similarly discusses ecologies in terms of design.

It seems that ecologies, learning or otherwise, exist whether or not educators design them. The idea of “designing” an ecology, to me, seems like it still imbues educators with power — not necessarily the same kind of obviously explicit power inherent in a didactic classroom setting (at least to astute obsevers), yet magistral nonetheless. In some ways, the very subtle and nuanced power structure in a “designed” ecology may be more dangerous.

If, as educators, we are to start thinking about learning ecologies, it seems that the role we assume should be to recognize and participate in these ecologies and act as attractors, borrowing from dynamic systems lingo. Rather than “design,” educators should be up to the task of fostering and encouraging connections and especially recognizing the possibility of new possibilities as the process unfolds.

Another potential pitfalls of a “designed” ecology, and this is a perspective I have adopted just after reading Education and Event: Thinking Radical Pedagogy in the Era of Standardization by Daniel Cho and Tyson Lewis, is that there is a danger of expecting “truth” (whatever that means) to be contained within the system. They argue, successfully in my mind, that educators and learners should agree to together seek out “truth” in the world, thereby transforming it. A “designed” learning ecology could be seen as a “Practice Field” while a fully participatory learning ecology with educators as attractors could be seen as a “Community of Practice” (the Practice Field/Community of Practice distincition I hope to discuss in a future post).

Perhaps this whole semantic and wholly academic argument is based on the fact that as an American I’m touchy about the intersection of “design” and “ecologies” because of our national intelligent design debate….