Class Acts

This week, I will be teaching a Master’s level course in “Human Rights and Information Technology” at the University of Siena.  The first challenge is of course determining the level of technical understanding of the students.  Given the number of internet cafes that dot Florence, largely populated by student-aged population, and reflecting the increasingly multi-cultural nature of the city, I am optimistic.  My experience in traveling back and forth to Italy is that the rate of diffusion of technology from the US to Italy has been steadily increasing over the last ten years.  The extent to which they use and are fluent in social networking tech–ubiquitious in the form of LinkedIn, Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook, will be the most critical item.

The last post covers most of my thoughts on the blog issue, but I think that it is important to use the blog example as an illustration of a broader point.  Educational technology–like technology in most any venue–can really be defined as either a sustaining or disruptive innovation.  These are buzzwords that I tend to use quite frequently, but the distinction is quite important. 

Simply put, sustaining innovations are those uses of technology that simply digitize (and perhaps slightly modify) an old paradigm and make that traditional practice “modern.”  Using closed blogs for students to provide responses to readings and class discussion is an example of such an innovation.  Internet technology is used to enhance the traditional practice of student discussion, reading, and response; when such technology is applied, more active dialogue between student and instructor (and other students) is encouraged through blogging features such as commenting, tagging, and rating.

A disruptive innovation, by contrast, presents an entirely new paradigm and opens the users to new experiences that would not be possible without the technology’s use.  Students writing in public blogs is an example of such a paradigm change.  The Internet has, among other things, provided a ready outlet for cheap public distribution of information.  For the first time, the creative voices of individual students can be published for the world to see, and meaningful interaction with readers from all over the world can potentially take place.

So why does this matter?  The Internet is a great thing, so we all agree, and it has made many aspects of our daily life and work much more efficient (teachers taking student responses electronically in blog format), but its greatest potential to make a substantive difference is not in its ability to sustain old norms but instead to promote new ones.  Instructors and students have interacted for years without blogs, but students have not had the types opportunities to write for a broader audience until very recently.  Whereas the Internet acts as an enhancement in one case, it acts as the crucial ingredient in another.  “Innovating,” be it in a classroom or an office suite, requires participants to blend new solutions to old problems with completely new opportunities.  A true innovator is one who is able to seize these new opportunities while also understanding reality enough to know that the sustaining innovations are immediately helpful.  When given a choice, take both.

Three cheers to internal and external blogging!

(For a quick discussion of sustaining and disruptive innovations in a business setting, read the introduction of Clayton Christensen’s Seeing What’s Next)

technorati tags:Blog, Innovation

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One of the cardinal elements of modern on-line communications is, since 2003, the use of blogs.  The tricky question is whether to have students do them within a closed community, in our case a wiki structure, or to have them be public.  When I taught a version of this course last year, I left the option open to the students, and most of them understood the distinction–if you are essentially doing an internal journal of your thoughts on the readings, then internal makes most sense.  If you want engagement with the world, then post on blogger, WordPress, etc. 

This year I am going to ask students to do two different blogs

1.) an internal one in which they respond to questions in preparation for class, and reflect on the readings and issues that emerge in class.

2.) An external one,  using the Zimbio social news site, as a home base.  This is a site which allows for collaboration, and enables users to put up links to many different types of news feeds, blogs, tagging, and anything that you can link to with an RSS feed.   By surrounding students with news they can choose, the idea is to facilitate their engagement with the web as a news environment. 

In a revealing article in the London Times, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”, Charles Leadbetter advertises his book, “We-Think” which seems to be a popular(ized) effort to think out the implications of distributed intellience.  The “bare-bones” (his words) portrait in the Times does not reveal anything new, but what is striking that he practices what he preaches.

As I was researching and writing We-Think, it became evident that I could not write a book about collaborative creativity in a traditional way — which is why, with the support of my publishers at Profile, I am releasing the book in draft form before its physical publication, which is planned for summer 2007. Most of the first draft was made available online this week, with the final three or four chapters following over the next few weeks. I hope that by opening up the book to readers’ comments before it hits the bookshops, we can make it a better book. But the real point is to provoke a conversation about the emerging opportunities for us to organise ourselves in more collaborative, creative ways.

If anyone drops in, let me know.  I will get there, eventually…

Julia here. By way of introduction, computer appreciator, identity explorer, sometime activist, and Government major.

One theme I hope to focus on is how technology, particularly the internet, allows for new kinds of communities and bonds to form. What are the characteristics of some of these new networks? How do they compare to and interact with older forms of community, including countries?

Before I get to that, though, a quick look at something else from class on September 5th.

Friedman identifies three historical “flattenings” of the world, or revolutions in global interaction. The first involved a geographical expansion and deepening of how countries related to each other. The second was when businesses expanded into global trade relations. The third, which we are witnessing now, is fueled by the ability of individuals to readily interact on a global level.

When trying to determine whether Friedman or Mogler (the dot Communist Manifesto) had a more pertinent view of the process and results of the information revolution, this thought came to mind: If the new mode of production is between individuals, businesses and countries must change to accommodate and deal with individuals. So, you get (not necessarily respectively) both increased IP freedom (Mogler’s unregulated access to free information) and a level playing field (Friedman’s call centers in India and from the home) for all.

As a Class Acts collaborator, I’ll take a moment to introduce myself.  The name is Andrew Welch, the location is Williamsburg, VA, and the background is all-things Internet.  I’ve pulled cables through walls, sat in class, managed Internet departments, and run an Internet company, but I have a specific interest in how we teach and learn online.

Ted, Julia, and I begin writing at the same time I am reorganizing myself online.  I am the token Internet utopian in the group, so expect me to write often about the Internet as a positive force in society, about how our online identity is becoming an extension of our traditional identity, and about how students and educators will be most successful when they incorporate disruptive technology with their daily lives.

To that end, I am seizing this opportunity to reinvigorate my dormant personal blog.  We’ll reincarnate “the Welch blog” after a 6-month hiatus.  Most of what I post here–as well as on other blogs to which I contribute–will be aggregated to andrewdwelch.blogspot.com.

As for Class Acts… we’ll try to keep you informed and entertained.  Tell your friends, tell the world, and tell us exactly what you think.  The connected world is only as good as we allow it to become.

Track me down: andrewdwelch@gmail.com.  I’ll be there.

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