In his latest post, Guy discusses the ARSE: Asshole Rating Self Exam .The ARSE ‘index’ is a tongue in cheek (OK very bad pictures generated with that unfortunate phrase) self evaluation of a person’s rating on the asshole scale. If you skim through the questions you can see exactly what the whole thing is about.

Meandering through the questionaire, it struck me how easy it is to fall into the asshole type behaviour. How easy it is to rest on the certainty of the knowledge that we have and to make assumptions about the people who don’t have that knowledge or (worse) disagree with us. I thought about the whole 2.0 bandwagon that the interweb world is on – did you know that some people are looking at our capital city becoming Wellington 2.0, or that Seth Godin is looking forward to Web 3 and, horrors, Web 4?

The start of the New Zealand school year also signals the countdown to our first ICT PD conference. Every year I look forward to these gatherings for the networking and for the new ideas that are generated. Every year I am saddened by the number of people who have garnered some jargon, some cool tricks and present these in the name of learning.

I have some predictions for Learning@School 07:

1. Web 2.0 will be the most overused phrase
2. There will be some talk of School 2.0
3. There will be a lot of back-patting and self-congratulating
4. The best stuff will happen away from the conference centre

And then we will all go back to real life where interweb connections are flakey, where BOTs can’t quite see the point of sending money on all of this technology anyway and where Remuera politicians can use kids as news-bait.

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Neowin:

One might still ask, what is Web 2.0? It is something better described by marketing than by reality. Somebody (O’Reilly Media actually) decided that as of 2004, the internet had entered the second revolution where Google and other online mainstays replaced the original tools of the first generation internet. The kids in the virtual trenches are probably aware that the internet is actually an ever-evolving beast rather than something that is neatly packaged every few years into a new edition (like traditional software). Still, services like YouTube and MySpace have come to define Web 2.0

I italisied the bits that I liked. This whole business of Web 2.0 and all the other 2.0 bandwagons ignores one fundamentally important point: the people who are driving it are not talking about it, they are just getting on and doing what they need to do.

Most of the people uploading photos to Flickr are not talking about how they are now Web 2.0-ing it. When they send email via Gmail or message via Windows Live / AIM / Meebo they don’t consciously think that they are striking another blow for this wild Web 2.0.

It’s the rest of us who are creating lots of noise about what the tools are that are creating all of the static that disguises the signal.

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One thing that has been brought to my attention about these mapping services is the potential for incorrect information. For example, one North Shore school principal told me that his school was incorrectly labelled on Wises online map but correctly labelled on the hard copy. I looked on Wises for myself and sure enough, the schools name is incorrect. The same incorrect information is repeated in the Smaps map but not on Zoomin where users can add tags.
I checked the AAMaps site and the school is correctly (if rather oddly) labelled / tagged?. The school hasn’t been tagged yet on Google Maps, but you can identify the site easily.

This is of interest because of the continuing discussion about the new web applications that rely on users inputting data (wikipedia, etc) and their veracity. Wises is an established company and you make the assumption that the data that they have will be checked, re-checked and then checked again.
I emailed both Wises and Projectx and I’ll be interested to see the responses.

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For blogging links, podcasting, video, wikis, file-sharing …

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1. Short Bits

ajaxWrite works inside the Firefox browser (on versions 1.5 up). It has a range of features and allows users to save their work back to their computer. The software is platform independent, which means that any internet connected computer with the correct browser can use the wordprocessor.

The developer says that this is only the first of many programmes that will be launched. In fact he says there will be a new idea released every week.

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Read/Write web tools promise a lot, but why aren’t people adopting them? If problem-based learning is so great, and information literacy and problem-solving approaches (like Big6), are so powerful…so obvious…why aren’t more using them? We continue to see pockets of innovation but no wide-spread success. Blogs enable us to stay in touch, to keep the flame alive, but why aren’t such smart people making more progress?

He quotes Michael Fullan and says that people are waiting forthe Silver Bullet solution, the one piece of magic that will make it all happen.

Go and read his post. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a Whitney Houston quote next to a Fullan quote before!

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This is an interesting subject and one that I’ve been considering from the educational angle. While the techie-boys (and unfortunately they are mainly young males) go on and one about the imminent bursting of the Web 2.0 bubble, those of us back with at least one foot on the ground are considering exactly how ordinary web users are getting their ideas.

Hang on. Is there such a thing as an ordinary web user? Can you classify according to age and gender? Are all ten year old boys doing Neopets and chatting on MSN? Or is that the domain of sixteen to twenty year old girls? Who is busy on TradeMe? A wide swathe of ages and certainly both genders if my family and friends are “average”. There may be trends emerging – younger people prefer instant messaging, ie texting and MSN Chat over slower email – but the internet on the whole is a great leveler. Flickr, deli.ici.ous, Google everything …

Back to gatekeeping. In his critique, Stowe Boyd asks “who are the gatekeepers?” He says we should all be our own, but then adds, “The reality is that we are unequipped — we do not have the time or resources.”

Then he goes on to discuss the four methods of getting ideas and knowledge and how authorities emerge – by dint of good writing, which is then picked up and worked over by others (much like I have picked up his post).

My issue is that there are a lot of self-proclaimed experts out there and people who have been able to work out systems and ways to get themselves to the “top of the charts” so as to speak. After all, get on Digg, Memeorandum, Slashdot orBoing Boing and, hey, you’ve made it. Right?

Back to what I consider to be my job with teachers. I think we have to look at evaluation and assessment in a new light. We need to look at systems of evaluating and assessing ideas and opinions as well as knowledge and facts as they are presented to us as adults. Back when I was in the MMP programme at Waikato University, the late (and great) Nola Campbell drummed into us the basics for evaluating a website. Is it dated? Is it acknowledged? Are there references? Simple stuff (and there is more) but powerful if we apply them to the other “stuff” that is thrust in front of us. A newspaper columnist, a talkback opinion, a website about monarch butterflies, the Wikipedia …

It’s not about the popularity of a topic (or the inverse popularity as in the case of Web2.0) it’s about carefully crafted authority. It’s about not accepting (or the Luddites dismissing) the internet as the only source of good information. It’s about accepting that books can only be as good as the editors who worked on them and the authority that published them. It’s about assessment and evaluation.

After all, it was Aristotle that said,

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

Links: here and the earlier discussion can be found here.

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