The Vertical and the Horizontal

I will be presenting a quick 15-20 minute session at the Council of Independent Colleges conference focusing on History and Information Fluency. I was pretty inspired by James Grossman’s talk tonight about how information can be understood in terms of engaging the new medium of the web on its own terms—rather than remediating it though the lens of what we already know and are comfortable with. He touched on 3 major points: 1) how we can have students think more about how resources are created and discovered online (I interpreted this as them building resource sites and understanding how they are discovered through Google a la UMW Blogs); 2) the power of Wikipedia as a teaching tool (thank you Jon Beasley-Murray for your awesome example in Murder, Madness, Mayhem); and 3) allowing students to help build the syllabus (or crowdsourcing the course as we are bearing witness to in ds106).

So, I basically reproduced some examples of all his talking points, and will offer a quick explanation of how it is rather fast, cheap, and out of control, but demands an investment in people and the willingness to let go of some notions of control we often hold dear and which kill innovation. I’ll also then talk about how we now own the vertical and horizontal with .

All this in 15 minutes, and if the internet gods align I will be broadcasting it live at 9:15 am (central time).

Update: Presentation has been transmitted, and below is the ds106 radio archive 🙂

We Can Control Transmission

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3 Responses to The Vertical and the Horizontal

  1. Sami says:

    High time you guys got together and wrote your own book. I think you guys have enough experiences to reflect upon and enough ideas that you can put in there to actually go out and write a book about these trends, their ideals, and implications. That would add some coherence and point of reference to both reach towards and attempt to criticize… rather than the passive aggressiveness or cynicism of standing against rather than for… I find much of the conflict these days on various fronts is because there is cynicism in the economic environment and stress that comes from that; an unclear understanding of the ideals with everyone having a different picture of both the world and their own ideals and values… and so on. If a single text were written to attempt to find a common ideal, it would go a long way to finding a direction or at least charting some course for people to build on top of… rather than project of the day and how it changes education.

  2. Bravo for using the Outer Limits!

  3. Chris Lott says:

    I wish I’d heard of this conference before… information fluency kind of being “my thing” and I’m intensely interested in how other people are seeing this move, particularly w/r/t the humanities. Time to dig around and see what all there is in terms of artifacts from the conference.

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