Stephen Asunka

I'm reviving this blog after a 3 year hiatus

2009-11-19T11:31:00.001-05:00

Revisiting the issue of social software

Issue Entrepreneurship … Still Going …

2005-12-19T15:55:00.000-05:00

For my Issue Entrepreneurship Project, I had this huge ambition of single-handedly creating an online community that will bring science teachers and other educators together to share ideas. My rationale for this was that most science educators in the developing world do not have access to the most relevant and up-to-date information especially pertaining to scientific facts, principles and discoveries. This forum was therefore to serve as a one stop shop for educators who are both seeking knowledge and also willing to share their knowledge, ideas and expertise.

So I started my ambitious (albeit empty) Science Demystified Wiki and sent out e-mail notices to persons I felt will be willing join the forum. I was however was quickly humbled after receiving a few responses, most of which were surprisingly discouraging. However, after reading some literature - especially Barabasi's book: Linked - and being enlightened on how sustainable networks are created and maintained, I realized why creating such a forum from scratch was going to be virtually an impossible task. The best option for me then was to join an already established network, participate actively and meaningfully so as to gain credibility, and possibly move towards carving a niche out of that network which will then ultimately grow to become a formidable resource as earlier envisaged.

So I joined MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching) http://www.merlot.org, and have been reviewing some articles submitted by other members, even though I am yet to submit one myself! In the meantime, I will be focusing more attention on my wiki (which is woefully incomplete) and hope that my interaction with other members of MERLOT will at some point make them feel that a visit to my forum will be worthwhile.

Lessons Learned

1. Creating an online community involves much more than simply having access to connectivity and social software. The issue to be addressed need not be only unique, it should also resonate with the potential participants' thinking and aspirations.

2. Communities formed by "bottom-up" processes - where individuals spontaneously congregate (in cyberspace) and prescribe lines of action - are more likely to be vibrant and sustainable than those formed by "top-down" approaches in which users' roles and activities are determined by an external person and rigidly conceived software mechanisms.

3. The affordances of social software - one-to-one communication (e.g., email and instant messaging), one-to-many communication (Web pages and blogs), and many-to-many communication (wikis) - ought to be used in combination if one hopes to build a community in cyberspace.

4. Still Learning...

Reflections on Social Software - Q&A

2005-12-18T18:58:00.000-05:00

1. What is 'social' about social software?
The affordances of the software can be harnessed to create communities of social interaction.

2. How is the notion of community being redefined by social software?
The traditional notion of communities being permanent (and oftentimes, closed) entities no longer hold as communities get created as and when the need arises - thanks to social software

3. What aspects of our humanity stand to gain or suffer as a result of our use of and reliance on social software?
Sharing of knowledge and ideas has become more feasible, but this is to the detriment of the over 3 billion people on this earth who have no access to computing resources.

4. How is social agency shared between humans and (computer) code in social software?
Humans use the affordances of social software to enhance their social activities, whilst computer code serves to minimize the constraints of social software to human interactivity.

5. What are the social repercussions of unequal access to social software?
With a social divide being created where only people who have access to social software will be responsible for decisions and actions that affect the larger society, people who feel left out of this social/technological movement are bound to react, probably in unpleasant ways, to ensure that their voices are also heard

6. What are the pedagogical implications of social software for education?
The Anytime, Anywhere learning afforded by the internet and World-Wide-Web is redefining pedagogy as teaching and learning activities are being migrated from traditional face-to-face settings to learner-centered online settings.

7. Can social software be an effective tool for individual and social change?
Certainly. Apart from broadening individual perspectives and as such leading to attitudinal and behavioral change, social software is also being extensively used to organize pressure groups whose collective voice often result in societal change.

World's Poorest Don't Need $100 Laptop?

2005-12-18T16:48:00.000-05:00

I bookmarked an article in del.icio.us/tag/ccte titled World's poorest don't want "$100 laptop" -Intel. In the said article, Reuters report that Intel chairman Craig Barrett is claiming that potential computer users in the developing world will not want a basic $100 hand-cranked laptop that is due to be rolled out to millions. The reasons being that "similar schemes in the past elsewhere in the world had failed, and users would not be satisfied with the new machine's limited range of programs."

Barrett continues to say that "what people are looking for is something that has the full functionality of a PC, - reprogrammable to run all the applications of a grown-up PC ... not dependent on servers in the sky to deliver content and capability to them, not dependent for hand cranks for power."

Though I am inclined to believe that Barrett's campaign is motivated more by economics - as his profits will surely be eroded if the $100 laptop is accepted globally, I also feel that he might be right to some extent, especially if I consider Paul Dourish's notion of embodiment as it relates human-computer interaction. Dourish states in his book - Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction - that embodiment is not a property of systems, technologies or artifacts and disembodied cognition, but a property of engaged interaction (p.189). Embodiment involves tangible computing (i.e. creating smart environments and specialized devices that would enhance the work we do), and social computing (i.e. applying social underpinnings to the design and deployment of interactive computer systems). Embodied interaction should thus, in my opinion, be the guiding principle in the design and deployment of human-computer interactive systems.

The $100 laptop whose functionality is predetermined whilst content is developed somewhere else and then delivered to users via the internet will most probably defeat the concept of embodiment. Of what benefit is a computer if it cannot be made to do whatever we wish to do under the circumstances in which we operate?

Using Social Software for Fun and to Make History

2005-12-18T12:14:00.000-05:00

In an article titled "Ultimate Snowball Fight" that was bookmarked in del.icio.us/tag/ccte, an individual is trying to "rally as many folks as possible for an all out winter melee," not only for the fun of it, but also to make history by breaking the world record of the highest number of people ever involved in a snowball fight! This person is trying to use the power of the internet and social software to get the message across and also to whip up interest in as many people as possible, and eventually get them motivated enough to come out and participate in the event.

This is a very interesting and ambitious adventure, but I have no doubt that it will succeed considering the fact that not only is the idea itself quite interesting and challenging, but the ability of social software to disseminate information, motivate and mobilize people into action is very enormous.

Wikipedia vis-a-vis Ethics on the Internet

2005-12-06T14:57:00.000-05:00

Wikipedia has been compelled to tighten its rules for submission of articles following a complaint that an article falsely accusing someone was published in the online encyclopedia. See story. This is one of the downsides of anonymity and invisibility, as well as the low barriers to publishing in cyberspace.

In an article - "Ethics on the Internet: A comparative study of Japan, the US and Singapore" which appears in Feenberg and Barney's book: Community in the Digital Age - Yumiko Nara and Tetsuji Iseda outlined their findings when they investigated online behavior in the three countries. One interesting finding they made was that "the more the respondents are aware of the anonymity, invisibility and uncertainty of the internet, the more undesirably they tend to behave." Though they emphasize that this is just a statistical result, it should not be surprising as it is the nature of the human being - we tend to misbehave more only if we are sure that we may never be caught.

As it stands now the authors of Wikipedia have no idea whoever posted the article. But requesting that users should register before being allowed to submit articles is more or less a futile attempt control unethical behavior - as the mischievous people are the ones who will submit "authentic" registration particulars in the first place.

Folksonomies

2005-12-05T14:08:00.000-05:00

The article - Folksonomies: Power to the People bookmarked on del.cio.us/ccte, is quite an interesting piece. Simply put, Folksonomy is a user-generated flat classification of information as opposed to the traditional hierarchical classification. Tagging bookmarks with appropriate keywords as is done in delicious, flickr etc. is of great benefit to users as they can easily find information without having to drill through a hierarchy of keywords as we have in digital directories.

Having read Paul Dourish's book - Where the Action Is.. - I realize that the Folksonomies vrs. Hierarchical classification schemes are clearly related to what Paul classifies as Work Practice and Work Processes (p.62). He describes Work Processes as the "formalized and regularized procedures by which work is conducted … captured and codified in rulebooks, manuals, recipes etc." Work Practice on the other hand is the informal but nonetheless routine mechanisms by which these processes are put into practice and managed in the face of everyday contingencies. Paul continues to say that work practice "involves .. approximation, invention, improvisation and ad hoc-ery … reflecting a more fruitful adaptation of the process to specific circumstances in which the activity is carried out" (p.63).

Folksonomy is clearly a "work practice." With information now produced and consumed by the masses through blogs, wikis, webpages etc., Folksonomy has emerged naturally as individuals have now resorted to lose and ambiguous classification of information devoid of all the rigid, conservative and centralized method of classification that is typical of the hierarchical classification akin to a work process.

So, in our search for information, we are beginning to drift away from the traditional "drill-through" procedures and resorting to the this flat, ambiguous and oftentimes misleading system. The important thing however is the get the work done within the circumstances in which one finds him or herself, and not following a particular procedure to get the work done. Folksonomy, I guess, is here to stay.

$100 Laptop for Every Kid?

2005-11-21T18:29:00.000-05:00

I bookmarked an article in delicious titled "Can $100 Laptops Save the World?" and will like to follow up with a short comment. The article reports that Nick Negroponte's idea of helping to bridge the digital divide is to give $100 laptops to poor kids around the globe. I see this as a great idea, especially as these laptops will not ran on electricity (which is unavailable in most parts of the world).

The only problem I have with interventions of this nature is that we often think that the issue of the digital divide is only about access to digital resources. There are a lot more deep seated socio-economic factors that all culminate in making and keeping this divide, and not until all these issues are addressed, adhoc measures will only probably widen the divide further. I can bet that currently, there are some schools in some parts of Sub-Saharan Africa now that have well-equipped computer labs and internet connections, but are not being patronized by the kids. Why? Over 80% of the kids are out in the streets and markets working to earn a living as well as support their families. What such kids will do with a laptop is anybody's guess.

So whilst we wish that Negroponte realizes his ambition, it is my prayer that this venture does not go exacerbate the divide by making the few comfortable kids benefit whilst the majority are left behind.

Still on Issue Entrepreneurship

2005-11-19T16:34:00.000-05:00

For my Issue Entrepreneurship, I had this huge ambition of creating an online community that will bring science teachers and other educators together to share ideas, but having realized that it will not be very feasible, I opted for joining an appropriate community which is already in existence. One community I found interesting is MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching) http://www.merlot.org.

MERLOT is as a collaborative effort of a consortium of higher education institutions and its strategic goal is to improve the effectiveness of teaching and learning by increasing the quantity and quality of peer reviewed online learning materials that can be easily incorporated into faculty designed courses. Disciplines covered include The Arts, Business, Education, Humanities, Mathematics and Statistics, Science and Technology and the Social Sciences.

Membership of MERLOT allows one to:
- Contribute learning materials.
- Make comments about a learning resource you've used.
- Add an assignment to a learning material.
- Develop a personal profile to help others in your community know more about you.
- Create your own personal collection of learning resources.
- Become a peer reviewer of the learning materials in your discipline
- Get access to great ideas to help you in both online and classroom teaching

I have since become a member of MERLOT. In the meantime I am starting a wiki in which I will catalogue all my activities within this online community. I hope to contact as many science educators as possible and urge them to let us form a community within (and ultimately outside) MERLOT. I just want to see how far I can go with this.

Harnessing the Power of Social Networks

2005-10-31T19:30:00.000-05:00

Having read Barabasi's Linked, I now have a clear understanding of why some social networks continue to flourish whilst others flounder along or grow steadily only to collapse dramatically. Though I was aware of the presence of some influential persons or groups (hubs) in social networks, I was generally of the opinion that networks are made of nodes and random links between them (with six degrees of separation). As I understand networks now, most are basically scale-free and self-organizing, and are governed by power laws, and so are flexible and very tolerant to internal failures and external interventions.

Thus whereas communist networks have all but collapsed, other networks such as the illicit drug cartels, the mafias and terrorist networks have stood the test of time despite all the interventions so far put in place to uproot them. Communism was being held by a major hub - the Soviet Union - a phenomenon which Barabasi describes as the Achilles' heel of networks. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 (akin to removal of a major hub in a network), triggered a "cascading failure" which virtually engulfed the whole of Eastern Europe. On the other hand Al-Qaeda is a typical self-organizing scale-free network, and so even in the absence or otherwise of their leaders, the network still operates.

The lesson one can lesson from this book is that, in an attempt to create or foster a social network of any kind, one should not create a situation where the entire network overly depends one person or resource. Also to get the network growing and self-sustaining, then the network should be increasing the desire for people to be part of it by focusing on issues that people are very passionate about, either by virtue of their beliefs, perspectives or aspirations. Offering freebies (as in the case of hotmail at its inception) is another option, but in the educational sector, this will be hardly feasible.

At the time I came up with my Issue Entrepreneurship proposal, I had not yet read Linked. So my proposal was about creating a blog or wiki that will serve as a knowledge forum for high school and college science teachers, especially those in the developing countries. I thought that by putting a blog or wiki out there and announcing it to people I felt were interested in the issue, I will get some responses and hopefully, create a network of learners and resource persons. Now I am very much aware that such line of action is not the best. Even in the unlikely event that a sizeable number of individuals agree to join in the project, we will not create a robust and scale-free network, since removal of the wiki (hub) will most probably collapse such a network.

So what is the way forward?

Instead of trying to "start" a network, I should rather join some existing networks (as Ulises proposed), and then work towards becoming one of the hubs within the bigger network. Also instead of targeting and addressing only hard core science issues, my blog/wiki will occasionally venture into other science related social issues just to get people interested and willing to participate. Hopefully, as this community grows, it will eventually get to the point that I envisaged at the beginning.

Issue Entrepreneurship Project

2005-10-11T18:03:00.000-04:00

Developing a Learning Community of Science Teachers on the Internet

There is no doubt that the ever-pervasive "digital divide" is a reality and several initiatives and interventions have been (and are still being) put in place to address this issue both within and between countries. Apart from merely increasing accessibility to technology, effectively integrating ICTs in all levels of education is one such intervention that, it is hoped, will help ensure effective and productive ICT use, and eventually assist in bridging the divide. To this end, training programs have been embarked upon to get teachers predisposed to using technology in their classrooms.

However, as someone who has been involved in science teaching both at the secondary and higher education levels in a third world country, I am fully aware that most science teachers (especially those in less endowed communities), identify a lack of knowledge about the internet as one reason why they have not used it more often as a teaching tool. Questions they often ask include: what types of educational resources are on the internet and how do I find the useful ones? How do I adapt these resources to suit my particular situation? Some of the websites I used to visit have been taken off, where do I go next? etc. All these questions would not have come up if there were to be cooperation and collaboration within the science teacher community throughout the world. With most educational institutions now getting internet access, it should be possible for science teachers to cooperate and share their knowledge and skills online. This will help spread the use of technology in science teaching across borders and cultures, especially as scientific facts and principles are the same everywhere.

As a starting point in this direction, I am proposing the establishment of a weblog that will serve as an interactive medium that can connect high school science teachers across institutions and continents. This blog will contain pre-screened resource listings and instructional pieces that will help the teachers find and use websites and educational software, and also a discussion board for interactivity between teachers. Users can also blog-post their questions and concerns and get appropriate responses from credible personalities as well as from other users. Science teachers from third world countries will be targeted and encouraged to join in (I don't know how I will do that for now).

Whilst moderating the blog I will research the internet for potential resource persons whom I hope to encourage to join in providing useful content for other users. It is hoped that as this online community grows, a lot more science teachers, especially those who are still hesitant to integrate technology into their classroom activities, will gain the necessary technical knowledge and ideas from their more experienced and resourceful counterparts. Those teachers who are really committed to using the technology that is available to them in their classroom activities should therefore be able to do so eventually.

Becker: Findings from the Teaching, Learning and Computing Survey.

2005-09-27T15:30:00.000-04:00

I find this article quite interesting as it discusses findings in a survey that was seeking to answer questions raised by Larry Cuban when he proclaimed that "computers are largely incompatible with the requirements and conditions of teaching."

Becker states that Cuban could have been perfectly right at the time (mid-1980's), considering the fact that the capabilities and functionalities of computers at the time were severely limited, and their use was very tedious and frustrating. However, in 1998 (when computers had become fairly sophisticated and email and the WWW etc. were available), a national survey of Teachers, Teaching, Learning and Computing (TLC) revealed that Cuban's argument was still quite relevant. An in-depth analysis of the survey results however pointed to the fact that, given the right conditions, computers can become valuable and well-functioning instructional tools.

Becker mentioned these conditions as:
1. Where teachers are personally comfortable and moderately skilled in using computers
2. Where the school's class schedules permit allocating time for students to use computers
3. Where enough equipment is available and convenient to permit computer activities
4. Where the teacher's learning philosophies support student-oriented constructivist pedagogy.

Looking at these conditions, I have now come to understand why in my country (Ghana), the use of computers as tools for instruction has been very difficult if not impossible to implement. This is because, the fourth condition - teacher's learning philosophy should support student-oriented constructivist pedagogy - is very often overlooked. Policy makers and school administrators are of the view that providing all the necessary equipment and training teachers to use computers is enough to ensure that computers are effectively used in the classrooms. Thus so-called model schools were established and supplied with state-of-the-art computing resources. Teachers were also "trained" (by computer programmers) to use these computers.

The results of all these efforts…? A casual visit to any of these schools reveals that all the computers are placed in a special room and locked. This room is only opened to each class for a period of about 45 minutes, and once the students get in, all they do is to send personal emails, engage in online chats etc. The teachers on their part mostly use the computers for record keeping purposes, after all they still practice the age-old philosophy of rigidly covering the required content and conducting exams at the end. Given this situation, it can be clearly seen that the technology is not serving its intended purpose, but is rather distracting the students from their normal academic activities.

With all the other conditions in place, Becker's survey results provide a strong platform for one to argue for the adoption of constructivist learning philosophies by teachers if we hope to get them use technology effectively in the classrooms. The ICT revolution is here and if we all hope to benefit from it, then we better make sure all children come out of school ready to take up the challenges and opportunities that ICTs offer. We can only realize this if we get our teachers to use these technologies effectively and efficiently in the classrooms, and one way of achieving this is by inculcating in them (teachers) a technology-compatible learning philosophy i.e. constructivism.

My (Techno-)Biography

2005-09-19T12:14:00.000-04:00

I first came into contact with digital technologies during my undergraduate student days in Ghana (in the early 1990s) when my department first acquired an electronic typewriter/word processor. I was fascinated by the fact that one could type text, see it appear on a screen (one line at a time), and have the opportunity to correct any mistakes before printing it out. Hitherto we were using manual typewriters, and any errors made had to be corrected with white correction fluid. At worst one had to discard what had been typed already and start all over again. I therefore saw the electronic typewriter as a great relief (even though the text could not be saved for future use), and spent several hours trying to learn its features. Since then I have not looked back.

I came to the United States in 1992 for an MS course in Chemistry at UCLA, and by the time I was returning to Ghana (1993), I made sure that I had acquired a word processor that had the extra feature of saving on a floppy diskette!

Back in Ghana, I was involved in teaching chemistry at the college level, and whilst most of my colleagues were writing their reports etc. either by hand or with manual typewriters, mine was always neatly processed (justified lines, bold, italics, underline etc), to the amazement of all. It was therefore not surprising that when my department first acquired an IBM computer, I was seen as the person who could make effective use of it; hence I was appointed a technology coordinator. By this time however, I had very little knowledge of how computers work, but I was not honest enough to let my colleagues know this. To save myself from any embarrassment, I took some crash courses in computing (on the quite), and within a short time I was fairly conversant with creating databases, generating reports etc.

With the coming of the internet and WWW, I was deeply involved in getting my university online (www.ug.edu.gh), but there was still a lot of work to be done, especially in the area of applying these technologies in education. As I was assuming a leadership role in all these technological activities, I decided upgrade my knowledge by coming to TC in the fall of 2001 for the MA degree in Instructional Technology and Media. My experience at TC was highly rewarding and upon returning to Ghana in 2003, I contributed to the setting up of an ICT center to train all categories of persons in the use of technology to enhance their activities.

I am now back to the Ed.D program in Instructional Technology at TC. Being interested in distance learning, I am quite knowledgeable in web design and programming but blogs, wikis, RSS feeds etc. are fairly new to me. I therefore hope that by the end of this course in Social Software Affordances, I would have developed competency in the use of social software in addressing diverse social issues.

Now Serious About Blogging

2005-09-17T18:09:00.000-04:00

It appears I am now in a position to do better blogging so I have revised my blog. Now we can go on from here.