Category Archives: Story

VRedhype (vee-ar-ed-hipe)

July 3, 2016communicationshape, Responding, Scholarship in the Act, Story, Tools, UncategorizedTerry Elliott

Introduction

What follows is the product of Kris Shaffer‘s Hypothes.is Aggregator. Find more info here on how it works and how to install on your WordPress blog. I annotated a recent Audrey Watters post about the history and hyperbole surrounding Virtual Reality hardware and software.

It’s a bit of a mess on my end at this stage, but what you are seeing is Shaffer’s plug-in gathering all of the annotations with “VRedhype” tags. If you are like me, when you are working in the margins you don’t take time to tag. Well…time to unlearn the old and learn the new. Advice to self: tag this stuff.

The next question is simply, “How do I curate this mess and, inevitably, why bother? Next, wouldn’t it be fine to get some playful response from the author? Fourth, how do I integrate (or should I even bother) this into the centrifuge of knowledge that seems to spin ever on and ever faster? In the spirit of infinite play I can dismiss all of these questions and party on, but as a teacher who wants to share the wealth with my fellow learners…I gotta curate and share.

Part One

Here is what you get when you run this through the Hypothes.is Aggregator plug-in on this site.

[hypothesis]

[hypothesis tags = ‘VRedhype’]

Part Two

There is another way to aggregate my tag, “VRedhype”. Run it through Jon Udell’s machine instead. It retains more here and looks a bit like the Diigo Outliner. He explains more in his happily lucid post for Hypothes.is.

That version is below this text. It is considerably more coherent, but unlike Shaffer’s, there is more manual handling to be done, more friction. Now, Udell and Shaffer need to join forces and add Udell’s machine to Shaffer’s plug-in.

(Marketing) Virtual Reality in Education: A History 5

tellio 7/3/2016 5:54:27 AM gsLSikEMEeaAy3cKCTdJZQ

seen record-setting levels of venture capital

VRedhype

Yes, a bubble. Wait for it. Wait for it. Just click your heels together and say to yourself, “Second Life, Second Life, Second Life.”

tellio 7/3/2016 5:49:53 AM 3_ShHkELEeaPWX_nqFThdw

Horizon Reports

VRedhype

Prima facie evidence of the foolish practice of futurology. As Jesus said in The Big Leboski, “Laughable.”

tellio 7/3/2016 5:49:47 AM 3GsfZEELEeajTiN02SC12w

we’re still two to three years out from widespread adoption of VR.

VRedhype

I agree with N. Taleb that black swans are only retroactively predictable. I always predict that it will always be something else. I am always right.

tellio 7/3/2016 5:43:34 AM _Z-hLkEKEeag0FsWi4JVsA

Virtual simulations promise that learning experiences can be undertaken more safely (and sometimes more cost-effectively).

VRedhype

I recall my most recent introduction to VR was one of the early NYT attempts. This one showed a food drop in Sudan. I really felt something new with that VR video. I felt empathy because I was surrounded (something I could see AND feel around me) by folks who were racing to get at the parachuting food palettes drifting down and landing. The point being that the experience was embodied. For some small percentage of people VR is incredibly embodied–they get very powerful motion sickness.

tellio 7/3/2016 5:25:12 AM bOz2iEEIEeaT0CegFcCGJQ

the erasure of embodiment

VRedhype

I have no idea what this means. I need more context, more examples, more ’embodiment’.

Student Data, Algorithms, Ideology, and Identity-less-ness 3

tellio 7/3/2016 5:36:54 AM D6IFokEKEeanWKd_nht8lQ

ideology, inequality, and higher education, with a specific focus on for-profit education through the lens of race, class, and gender

VRedhype

That’s a lot spinning plates.

tellio 7/3/2016 5:36:08 AM 7M3PmEEJEeaEgYvethb9zw

be posting the video-recording soon.)

VRedhype

tellio 7/3/2016 5:34:20 AM s4_5LEEJEeabu3e5jRRnYQ

More importantly, more urgently, is this “trick” being hard-coded, hard-wired into the infrastructure of our schools?

VRedhype

Of course, schools have ever been tools and it all depends on who has grabbed the handle. Well…who? Wanna get used? Go to school and be a tool.

Conclusion

So what do we do with these tools that improve upon how we seek, make sense of, and share the world around us?

That would be an ideal question to pursue in the comments and the margins.

Writing Project Tech Pedagogy: Episode 14 (6/30/2016)

June 30, 2016Holy Multimodal Roundings, Responding, Scholarship in the Act, Story, Tools, WKUWPTerry Elliott

Often when you read tech pedagogy articles you get listicles. For example, you get “Top 10 Education Tech Blogs” or “The Best Ways to Use Padlet” or “7 Tools for Creating Classroom Blogs”. All good stuff. Not complaining. But I want to share how I am using tech not only in the classroom but professionally and personally. What follows is one of those stories without lists. And if you are open to it, you can annotate in the margins by going to this link which allows you to use Hypothes.is to comment on the sides. I hope that conversation will be one part “director’s commentary” and reader’s zoo.

One of my favorite partners in creating is Kevin Hodgson. In a recent post, “Resonation Points: Practicing Noticing and Connecting”, Kevin leapfrogged across a lily pad of ideas and spaces, distinctly non-listicle:

CLMOOC–>noticing–>Mary Ann Reilly’s post “Love is a Story in Five Parts“–>using the app SUPER–>using the app Legend to pull out a notable quote from Wendy’s postcard project–>back to SUPER with a response to Anna via Melissa–>my shell game post–> a conclusion.

My name for these is ‘feldgangs’, field walks. Imagine you personal learning network as a series of meadows with fervid hedgerow margins full of life and pastures, an ecosystem of nearly infinite complexity. In a feldgang we pull out what we notice. And what do we notice? We don’t know until we go field walking. Or as Kevin says and I steal for a Pablo poster:

I responded in Kevin’s comments:

Then I translated it into a poem

Tech pedagogy has more to do with how you use your repertoire to make sense and create and share and reciprocate than it does with dazzling others with your technical capacity. All of these tools are simple and derive from engaging with others online at the most basic level–text. It all ripples out from there, from the comment and conversation and noticing what is happening on your feldgangs to the sharing and showing of the path.

Another way of thinking about it is what Nick Sousanis calls “unflattening” or what the writer James Scott refers to as “making legible” or what James Gray names “liminal thinking” or what Mike Caulfield offers us with Wikity and federated wikification or what Venkatesh Rao deems is ‘breaking smart’.

In other words all tech pedagogy and tech are about is helping us connect so that we can make and share meaning. Pedagogy is learning turned inside out. Tech pedagogy is just another way to turn ourselves inside out. The reason we make a big deal about it is that it is a new way of doing and being that we pretty much suck at. We are all just making one feldgang after another and coming back with a aptly round stone, a feather, a Solomon’s Seal dug up from the hedgerow and dirt under our fingernails. If tech isn’t connected to life it is an inert idea, not even usefully dead like a possum that feeds a vulture or a blade of orchard grass hay from the pasture. I think it is more like setting a luna moth free.

Writing Project Tech Pedagogy: Episode Thirteen (6/24/2016)

June 24, 2016Holy Multimodal Roundings, Responding, Story, WKUWPTerry Elliott

Today’s post strays into a briar patch where only rabbits feel comfortable: the sense that the noise of the net is drowning the inner signal that is trying to get out of ourselves, our voice.

Here are five short screencasts that don’t even begin to scratch the high pressure stream of data that is my Internet life.

Tweetdeck

Chrome Address Bars

Happy Friends

Vellum

Inoreader

And what about mobile apps and YouTube channels and Roku and Chromecast and…my question to you dear readers, “Is there any controlling this giant game of “Crack the Whip” or the feeling of being a wee child tethered on the end and losing his grip?

I hope you don’t listen and watch all of the vids above. Just scrub through them and let us think about what our tech hath wrought and what we might do about it if anything.

When I get confused I write poems. They help settle the silt in the muddy glass of water. Here is one. It helped me find the signal.

Dragonfly in a Bucket

A dragonfly

drowned

in the sheep’s

water bucket.

No,

wait…

It’s not dead.

I lift it

from the water

and hold it

to the sun.

I see.

Writing Project Tech Pedagogy: Episode Eight (6/18/2016) Analog Meets Digital: the Fountain Pen as Strange Attractor

June 18, 2016CLMOOC, Holy Multimodal Roundings, poetry, Story, Tools, WKUWPTerry Elliott

I love fountain pens. I love what you can do with a decent one. But I love cheap, too. That is why I am a denizen of bargain pen sites like Jetpens and Goulet Pens. (They also sell very expensive, boutique pens, too.)

My wife accuses me of being a pen porn video addict. OK. My name is tellio. I am addicted to cheap fountain pens. Below is a video of a recent purchase reviewed by Matt Armstrong from “The Pen Habit”.

I also love new ideas like refillable marker pens. I have always hated throwing away the plastic parts of pens and now I don’t have to. I use the Platinum Preppy Refillable Marker Pen. (You can also get refillable highlighter pens that use fountain pen ink and replaceable tips.)

It is a simple task to crossover from the analog to the digital. Just use MyScriptFont to create a font from your handwriting. In this case I took my new best pen friend, my Jinhao 450, and marked up the font template that MyScriptFont provides.

Scan it after you have used your fav fountain pen to mark in the squares where the letters go. Unfortunately, my scanner only goes up to 600dpi and I think you need twice that resolution. I also tried to take a picture with my phone but that was an interesting failure. So I will update you as soon as I can find a scanner with better rez. My point here is that the joy of analog and the joy of digital need not be mutually exclusive.

A “making of” video by KQED about the layered ‘hybrid films” of Manu Mukherje…

December 24, 2015Holy Multimodal Roundings, Responding, Scholarship in the Act, Story, ToolsTerry Elliott

In the latest episode of Art School, Mukherjee unpacks the narrative and details behind her newest piece, Home and the World, which examines cultural hybridity, the aftermath of colonialism, and feminist questions.

Only wish she could have gotten down to some of the nuts and bolts of her layering process. The video is worth watching on many levels including her chaordic studio. I love looking at all of her tools, how she has them at the ready, how idiosyncratic it all is, yet managing to work through to done.

You can also contribute to the conversation here if you wish with Vialogues. I am finding myself more and more using video annotation as a way to integrate image/sound/meaning in the unique medium that film and video are. I have taken my notes and put them here if anyone else wants a go at analyzing and curating what I have already done: https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/Collapsing-Colonialism-w-Manu-Mukherjee-NFCRTLY4aUUvlJajxwjxv

Source: A “making of” video by KQED about the layered ‘hybrid films” of Manu Mukherje…

Candy Blox Versus Pallet Liquidators

October 11, 2015Holy Multimodal Roundings, Responding, rhizomatics, Story, ToolsTerry Elliott

I was waiting in line at the Sav-A-Lot yesterday to purchase some bananas and milk. In the ‘impulse’ section next to $1 pregnancy tests was CandyBlox. Charming. Candy you can play with then eat. $2.50 a box. The frugal dude in me said, “Not a good deal. Don’t even think about it,” while part of me screamed like a six year old boy, “Please, please, please!” My frugal self won. The little guy will win another day. Still…such a concept.

Walking out to the car with my groceries, I noted a new store had opened where the Family Dollar had been. There is a continual churn of these stores which consist entirely of the contents of container ships from China and points east. There are no small clothing, hardware, or appliance stores in small town Kentucky anymore. Only these outposts for slave labor goods from around the world. Only this one was obviously an outlier in that group. They called themselves “The Pallet Liquidator Store”. I walked over to view dozens of tall, pallet-sized cardboard boxes filled with the leftover stuff from the contents of container ships from China and points east.

The phenomenon of salvage groceries has become entrenched since the Amish moved into our community over twenty years ago and started them locally. It is a national trend now. This is the natural extension from groceries to big box store leftovers. Commerce has devolved to the point where rural communities are the very tail end of the cloaca of 21st century consumer culture. Below you will find a twisted pair of videos that bespeak this low truth. Useless stuff re-packaged, but still useless. Similar to the Japanese idea of chindogu.

Feel free. Is this what crazy Yeats meant when he ended his apocalyptic poem “The Second Coming” with a question:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Sometimes the best view of the apocalypse ain’t in some future urban blightscape. No, it is right where the beast hunkers down for the long haul in some small town strip in Kentucky with the nail salons, the tattoo joints, the adult GED centers and the great Sargasso Sea of plastic that is the pallet liquidation biz.

VS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuRys_ruS8Y

#Twistedpair : Epictetus | Mojo Nixon.

October 5, 2015CLMOOC, connectedcourses, Holy Multimodal Roundings, poetry, rhizomatics, Story, Tools, youshow15Terry Elliott

In the spirit of infinite play I am following a recent prompt from Steve Wheeler:

Choose a strange pairing from above (or make up one of your own, the weirder the better). Let your imagination run wild, go very slightly unhinged and dig deep into your knowledge of those characters. Some of the connections may be tenuous. That’s part of the fun. Come up with an inspirational, satirical or thought provoking blog post about teaching and learning. Share it and include the tag #twistedpair. Don’t forget to also challenge at least three other people. If we get enough responses, I will create a page that links them all together.

My twisted pair are Mojo Nixon and Epictetus, the profane rocker and the profound Stoic.

OK, I am feeling resistance here. I have had my fill of writing prompts over the years. They often feel false. Other times I recognize them for what they are–pump priming fuel that gets burned up in order to start the engine. In this case we are asked to play. I like play, but generating inspired, satirical or thought provoking stuff about teaching and learning? This feels like managing chaos and a little forced. Isn’t the nature of the imagination that you don’t so much as give it permission as it seizes it?

It is true that both of these figures taught me something. I learned from both of them. It is also true that I could draw many other connections.

So I get to have cake and eat it and save some for later.

Here’s some Mojo to listen to, his only big hit, “Elvis Is Everywhere”

Here’s some Epictetus to listen to, his biggest hit, “The Enchiridon”

I recommend that you play both at the same time. Twisted, dude, twisted.

A Date with October: A WIP (Work in Progress)

October 4, 2015Holy Multimodal Roundings, poetry, Responding, rhizomatics, Story, ToolsTerry Elliott

I get a daily poem in my email from Poetryfoundation.org. Today’s is by a younger Robert Frost before he became the scary old man of American arts and letters. No, really. If you thought that “The Road Not Taken” was truly suitable for commencement addresses, then you need to dig down into its cruft. Not that nice. I know he must have laughed at the thought that others considered it an ‘optimistic’ poem. In truth it is a devastating one about death and despair. But not this poem, not “October”–I don’ think.

I was struck by the heartbeat of the iambics in it-lubDUB, lubDUB, ad heart-finitum. I wanted to read more and connect more with the poem and I wanted to connect the poem to the world it describes, my world on the farm here in Kentucky in October.

I want to have a date with October today starting with Frost’s poem.

So many approaches, many of them redundant, but in the good way that the walnut tree makes more nuts than the squirrels can ever remember to eat.

This post will be a work in progress as I have lots of little micro dates with October the poem, October the month, October the place. I will return as I add links to this post. Consider them as reports from along the edges, the hedgerows, the bramble tangles, the fallen leaves, the wool and warp and weft of October’s loom and shuttle.

For example, I could go the annotation way:

Diigo
Hypothesis
Genius
NowComment

Or invite others to go the Hackpad route? This is a collaborative path that converges or diverges as much as anyone could wish. Create your own adventure, mild or wild.

Or I could go with a Storify slideshow?

Or maybe Z33ga?

Or Pocket? (The mobile version will read it back to you.)

Or Soundcloud? (Perhaps you would like to read the poem to us and I could put it here or on Hackpad or make a playlist there.)

Many stances. Some analytic. Some juxtaposing. Some emotional. Some analogical. So many stances to choose from, but all arising from the passion that arises from getting to know someone or something more closely.

Perhaps a Youtube feldgang and a Vialogue annotation?

What am I hoping for, what do I expect on this date with October? What is my null hypothesis? Where will this take me?

I know not.

&

that is OK.

Graphics as Public Space

July 23, 2015CLMOOC, Responding, rhizomatics, Scholarship in the Act, Story, ToolsTerry Elliott

I have been digging into Daniel Bassill’s work with the Tutor/Mentor Institute as a way to question, rethink, adapt and pirate his ideas about systems in organizations. I am essentially using the public spaces he has mapped graphically about his organization. My annotations are an occupation of his public space, a happy pirating for happy purposes.

For example, I used this graphic to ask questions and push our conversation forward, upward, downward, backward, and otherward. Part of the beauty of this work is its public nature, a commons for those who will have it or need it. It is the ultimate ‘potlatch’ and part of the gift culture that is pure Internet to the core.

I used the Commons that Daniel created here as a happy pyracy (pyracy with two “Y”s is self-defined as white hat skullduggery). Every time I post I assume that it is the creation of a public commons to be shared by as common pasture by all the “flocks” and “herds”. I took Daniel’s image above as just that, a commons to use but not abuse.

One moment I am a lamb gamboling in fresh white clover and another a serious old ewe stamping the ground in protective warning. (I am a sheep farmer and you have to allow a certain amount of latitude here in my extending the pasture metaphor.) I make a point that I am playing in the public commons of Daniel’s graphic as well as its margins, its metes and bounds, its interstices, its fence rows.

Here is a another commons, public and intended to be used by others, an organizational map that sums up the systemic work of Daniel’s organization, the Tutor/Mentor Institute.

I used this commons space to close read with a filter on it–facilitation. In other words I am interested in creating a large system/organization with facilitation at its core much like what Daniel has done with putting tutor/mentoring at its core. I pyrated his work by messing about with it in SnagIt–close reading it in SnagIt. This kind of commons work forces one to be quite a bit more deliberate in considering. I could have gone slower but I wanted to publish this new public space for him to get his reaction. And I wanted my peers in #CLMOOC to see what I understand public digital space to mean.

I have moved beyond comprehending Daniel’s work to apprehending it and finally toward appreciating it. You come, too.

Community Is What We Do

July 13, 2015CLMOOC, StoryTerry Elliott

I was thinking about my own community engagement on #CLMOOC when I annotated this post. I am not picking on Susan and Janis. The questions I ask here are ones I ask of the whole community. I will ask them here and on G+ and Twitter and Facebook. I will continue to ask them as what I perceive is my changing role as facilitator on #CLMOOC. I need to be looking at how we work together there, how we do good and how we do ‘not so good’, and how we can do better for each other and the tribe as we connect and learn.

I am beginning to think of myself as an “Angry Walter lite” looking to protect Donnie from the nihilists in The Big Lebowski only sometimes I am hapless Donnie and sometimes the stupid nihilists and other times Walter asking “Has the whole world gone crazy? Am I the only one around here who gives a shit about the rules? Mark it zero!” My goal is to ask some hard questions of myself first and then of us all. If I am not harder on myself than you, then you need to channel the Dude and say, “You’re not wrong, Walter. You’re just an asshole.” And if you aren’t getting all the Lebowski references then that just proves you need to watch The Big Lebowski.

Okay then.

Here is a Hackpad if you prefer to discuss there instead of the comments below (I am beginning to prefer this funky hacked up form of commenting, more flexible and fun and freewheeling–the three F’s of community sharing):

RhetCompNow

Nowhere but here.