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Everything is Miscellaneous Summary Podcast

The use of Wikis in the Classroom

The Use of Educational Blogging

Instructors are beginning to use blogs to replace the standard class Web page. Instructors post class times and rules, assignment notifications, suggested readings, and exercises within the blog.

Within the blog, instructors can link to Internet items that relate to their course and short essays directed specifically toward his\her students not mere annotations of interesting links.


Blogs are also being used to organize in-class discussions. This method allows students to get acquainted with each other better by visiting and reading blogs from other students. It is less threatening as they read the blog to discover their similarities and differences.


EDUCAUSE REVIEW, vol. 9, no. 5, September/October 2004, pp. 14-16, 18,
20-22, 24, 26

Facebook and Education: the Pros and Cons

Facebook, the popular social networking website, was the topic of discussion at the first Teaching and Learning with Technology Speaker Series session of 2009. Originally launched in 2004, by a Harvard student, Facebook began as a social networking website created exclusively for post-secondary students. Currently, Facebook has over 150 million active users worldwide, and has expanded to allow anyone with a valid email address to sign up. As it has gained in popularity, Facebook has become one of the main communication tools used by university students to stay in touch with friends, organize events, and connect with classmates.

Pro: Students and Educators use Innovative Strategies on Facebook

Social software tools such as weblogs and wikis are already being used for educational purposes at UBC, but can Facebook be used in an academic setting? Philip Jeffrey, an Interdisciplinary Studies graduate student, brought forth a few examples of how Facebook has been used by students and educators to quickly inform and communicate with others in the larger community. Philip found out about the potential closure of the UBC Aquatic Centre weight room through a friend on Facebook. Partly due to awareness-raising on Facebook, a grassroots movement formed that eventually over-turned the administration’s decision to close the gym. Recently, a York University anti-strike group has formed and, with over 4,500 members, the Facebook page has become a place where people go to get the latest information about the strike. Some universities are even using Facebook to recruit students.

Cyprien Lomas, Director of the Learning Centre in Land and Food Systems, added another example of how the Faculty’s student advising office is using Facebook to connect with and inform students. According to Cyprien, “the interesting difference with using Facebook is that often students will take pieces of information and then repeat it back to their own constituent groups…students [are] mentoring and advising other students on affairs that matter to them and also matter to us.”

Cyprien also discovered that some students are using the site to facilitate online discussion groups. Even though students have access to WebCT Vista, and can use its discussion forum to interact with other students, some are choosing to use Facebook because it is their preferred place to communicate online. Students themselves say “well, why don’t we put it in a place where we know it’s going to work…and move it into Facebook?” Cyprien notes that “whether or not we like it…we may see more and more examples of this,” which is of concern because many Facebook users are not aware of the privacy issues related to the popular social networking tool.


Con: Privacy Concerns - Is Facebook Right for the Classroom?

Questions were raised from the audience about whether Facebook can be used in the classroom for academic purposes. The third member of the panel, Humanities and Social Sciences Librarian Sheryl Adam, raised concerns over the disclosure of personal information on the site. “Can we require that students be involved in something that requires them to put personal information on a server in the United States? I don’t think so,” asserts Sheryl. A larger discussion broke out amongst the audience, and the room came to a general understanding that if you expect students to interact with you or your Facebook group for a course, then you are requiring them to be involved in something that they may or may not know a whole lot about. For instance, users might not know that when using an application in Facebook, they are allowing the application to collect data from their Facebook profile. Philip notes that there is a “higher level of trust” amongst friends on Facebook, which may lead many to overlook the fact that if they are not careful with their privacy settings and use of applications, they might be disclosing personal information to complete strangers.

You also cannot require a student to use Facebook, as not all of them will want to share their personal information with their classmates and instructor. If there is any UBC-sanctioned involvement using a tool that stores data in the United States, there has to be an option for the students to preserve their anonymity. The fact that this is not possible with Facebook (which has its servers located in the United States) raises a bigger issue: users should be concerned with how secure the service is, where the data sits, who owns the content, and how it is being used. Cyprien notes that this is not just a Facebook issue, but a general IT issue. “If you ask me how secure Facebook is, I would say not secure enough if you are worried about it,” remarks Cyprien.

Even though many students are using Facebook to communicate with their peers, it does not necessarily mean that they will want to use Facebook in an educational setting. Sheryl originally joined Facebook to communicate with her students in a space that is comfortable for them. However, she has discovered that students have not communicated with her on Facebook, but are instead using other forms of communications such as email, telephone, and MSN Messenger. For Sheryl, Facebook “seems like the wrong place for a professional-student relationship. It seems to be more [for] peer-to-peer relationships.”

Another drawback of using Facebook in the classroom is that students will have to go to another location (other than WebCT Vista) to access their course information. Sheryl points out that this fragmentation of course information is “a big disservice no matter how convenient the communication piece.” She points to the advantages of WebCT Vista, which centralizes information and allows students to access course materials “all in one house.”

So What Now?

Some attendees said that they would like to see more centralized resources and guidance to inform students, faculty, and staff about social networking tools (like Facebook) in order to build awareness of privacy concerns and the pros and cons of their use. Attendees also thought that members of the UBC community need to be educated about these tools. Infoation resources, such as the Digital Tattoo Project (which Sheryl is a part of), have been created to educate students, faculty, and staff about online usage, but still more needs to be done.

Cyprien suggested that we could start leveraging connections at other schools to come to a solution for a broader community. If UBC is struggling with this issue, other educational institutions must be too. It was here that Sheryl offered up the example of RefWorks, which used to be hosted on an American server. To address privacy concerns, a consortium of Canadian libraries banded together to move RefWorks data onto a Canadian server. Such a consortium could be beneficial when addressing the use of social networking tools in an educational setting, eventually helping UBC solidify a strategy for addressing issues that arise with the increased popularity of these tools.

Using Twitter to Teach Collaborative Learning

50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Education

Using Podcasting to Enhance Collaborative Learning in the Classroom

Pod Casting for Students

Pod casting facilitates instruction in many K-12 (and collegiate level) settings. Dlott (2007) demonstrated pod casting's efficacy in teaching geography, history and poetry writing. Pod casting allowed for the inclusion of music and sound effects in teaching descriptive language, writing styles and oral expression. Pod casting also facilitated students' efforts to test the sound of their voices in a non-threatening way, causing Dlott (2007) to consider it an appropriate tool to develop effective communicators. Dlott's efforts combined pod casting with other digital technology tied to the internet.

Social Knowing

In the chapter entitled "Social Knowing," we see that today students behave differently. Students are more socially involved in the sense that they are emailing each other, instant messaging (IM’ing) each other, studying together, etc... Knowing this makes me wonder if tests will be given to groups rather than to individuals. I agree with Weinberger’s statement, “increased emphasis on testing measurement is anti-social learning.” Students get turned off to so much testing. They are left feeling anxious, aggravated, and bored. All the testing leaves them with an “I don’t care” attitude, which is where we see a decline in grades. This should tell us that we need to get back to “Social Learning.”
Today kids IM each other and discuss their homework, but turn it in and get graded individually. If we know that they participate in these type activities, why don’t we work with them? Home schooling in theory permits this, though the social aspect may be difficult. Our jobs as educators and parents are to want to make children curious about the world. Taking core classes, even in good schools turns high school students off as the exams testing large classes chases away the appeal of interesting subjects. The web is more interesting than traditional media.
On behalf of disciplines: nobody thinks the world divides into categories and that's that, but there are distinctions that should be made. If you are studying science, you need to know that it differs from economics. It's not that everything is chaotic, but that we are able to find what the ways of organizing and clustering are that make sense without being stuck with decisions made by experts for us that are meant to apply in all cases.

Social Learning

As an Educator, wouldn't you know that I would pick up on the part of "Everything is Miscellaneous" that speaks of anything educational.

Weinberger discusses “Social Knowers,” and he describes the typical Massachusetts classroom at the end of the year where students are taking standardized tests. The following paragraphs are an exerpt from "Everything is Miscellaneous."

The implicit lesson is unmistakable: Knowing is something done by individuals. It is something that happens inside of your brain. The mark of knowing is being able to fill in a paper with the right answers. Knowledge could not get any less social. In fact, in those circumstances when knowledge is social we call it cheating.

Nor could the disconnect get much wider between the official state view of education and how our children are learning. In most American households, the computer on which students do their homework is likely to be connected to the Net. Even if their teachers let them use only approved sources on the Web, chances are good that any particular student, including your son or daughter, has four or five instant messaging sessions open as he or she does homework. They have their friends with them as they learn…

One thing is for sure: When our kids become teachers, they’re not going to be administering tests to students sitting in a neat grid of separated desks with the shades down.

The last paragraph really moved me. I thouhgt, "FINALLY, someone is thinking exactly what I'm thinking....and not only that, they're actually writing it down for others to see." It frustrates me to no end with all the testing and assessing that is going on inside our classrooms these days. It brings me comfort in knowing that when my nieces and nephews become professionals, they will not be required to give all this testing and progress monitor. That makes me really happy.

How to Add a Podcast Badge to Your Blogger Blog Post | eHow.com

How to Add a Podcast Badge to Your Blogger Blog Post | eHow.com

How to Publish Your Podcast on Blogger

How to Publish Your Podcast on Blogger.com

A Fun Read

What a fun book. The main idea of the book is that digital information can be organized in fundamentally different ways than previous information formats. Basically, before, with what Weinberger calls 1st and 2nd order organization, everything in an organizational structure can only exist in one place, a book can only have one Dewey Decimal Number, an animal can have only one place in a taxonomy. This is a limitation of physical media. A book could perhaps be about five different things, but you can only put it on the shelf in one particular place. With the digital medium, however, information can be categorized more comprehensively. Tagging is the best example of this: you can "categorize" something an indefinite number of times just by affixing tags to it that others can search for. The searching process calls up everything within a category without it having to be stored in a particular category order.

This book said a lot of the things I've been wanting to hear. There is a lot of potential in this type of thinking that has not really been explored. Moreover, it was a fun read- very entertainingly written, with examples made from most of the interesting websites I could think of. A fun an interesting look at digital organization, or, if you want to look at it that way, and interesting tour through the more innovative corners of the internet.

I'm Impressed with "Everything is Miscellaneous!"

I am very impressed with the thinking of David Weinberger. I love his new book, "Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder." David really helped me to think and the book left my head reeling.

David mentions something I’ve heard in several presentations lately. He mentions that the more “mess” you have the more valuable the data becomes. For example, if you have a tool like Flickr that stores information from every picture we upload, results can be clustered in ways that are impossible in the first order world (the physical world).

Throughout the book, Weinberger uses Wikipedia as an example of how the third order of order has been successful. On page 208 he makes a great point:

The Britannica includes references at the end of articles to remind us that topics are related to other topics, literally afterthoughts. Wikipedia, on the other hand, is besotted with links…These links are not even bread crumbs, for with two clicks we well may be going down a path no one has trod before and that no one anticipated…In the miscellaneous order, a topic is anything someone somewhere is interested in. Anyone an pull a topic together by contributing to Wikipedia, writing a blog post, creating a playlist, or starting a discussion thread.

While researchers question the accuracy of Wikipedia (and rightly so) it cannot be dismissed as a powerful research tool. I enjoy researching on Wikipedia and following the links to find additional information. As an educator, I have introduced this tool to my students. They are very familiar with Wikipedia. However, I have taught them to research the topic further using additional tools to confirm accuracy – but if I hadn’t used Wikipedia in the first place I may not have ended up down the path I did.

I appreciated how Weinberger commented on the future of the ebook. He mentions how we could collect data from how people read books, the passages they highlight, where people read books and so much more using wireless enabled ebook readers (p.222) – and while it sounds like science fiction – we’re almost there. Kindle has the power of wireless technology – meaning that in theory, Amazon could connect to our readers and collect data. W hile this sounds scary and like a huge invasion of privacy – imagine the power that this data could provide. Some examples Weinberger has is that you could create a list of books that people most often read at the beach or a list of books people stopped reading halfway through – how cool would that be?

So, like I said at the beginning – my head is reeling with information and I’ll probably have to read this book again to get a real hold on some of the theory involved, but I loved the book! I think it’s a great read for anyone interested in learning more about the new digital order.

How Does the New Digital Order Work?

So how do things work in the third order? People organize things the way they personally and individually think about them. They put them into folders or classify them as ‘alike.’ They can put the same things (e.g. documents) into several places. They can tag things. They can search on their own tags — as well as other people’s tags. Tools such as del.icio.us, YouTube and Flickr do this today without imposing ways of organizing things on the user/participant/community.

Everything is Miscellaneous - A Must Read Book

David states, "In the first order we organized things — putting similar things together (Alleyne, 2007)." David gives many examples, one of which is emptying the dishwasher — when we do this, we put similar utensils (e.g. plates and bowls) together. In the same way, the original libraries stored books alphabetically and therefore relied on a librarian to locate materials upon request. But then along came Melvil Dewey and, with the creation of the Dewey Decimal system, libraries moved to the second order. Now we could have card catalogs and organize books by subject as well as by author. The library could be opened up to visitors and we could find things without relying on a librarian who needed to have intimate knowledge of the entire collection. But books, in the second order, are reduced to 3×5 cards in a catalog and we have a few ways of organizing them — and therein lies the limitations of second order frameworks.

In the digital age, David claims, everything is miscellaneous. Welcome to the third order. He supports his thesis using a number of examples, most of them with strong web-based business models. Along came Amazon leveraging the vast capabilities of computers and techniques of collaborative filtering (’people who bought this book also bought…’) to allow us to traverse collections of books. Think about it: we are no longer told how to organize books, the community contributes to our understanding of the relationship between various books, and the organization is not static but dynamic and grows over time. With every search the collection is rearranged to match our point of reference/view.


Alleyne, J. (2007, October 27). Everything is Miscellaneous-A Must Read Book. Retrieved from http://www.slaw.ca/2007/10/27/everything-is-miscellaneous-%E2%80%93-a-must-read-book/ on November 9, 2009.

The Central Argument for "Everything is Miscellaneous"

The central argument for the book is that a new order in organizing ‘things’ that he calls ‘the third order’ is emerging and that we need to rethink the frameworks we put in place inside and between our organizations.

Read more

Background on David Weinberger

David Weinberger got a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Toronto
in 1978. He then taught philosophy for six years. Because there was no
tenure track where he taught, he left academics and became a marketing
writer for Interleaf in the mid-1980s; Interleaf made early electronic
document software, with special capabilities with structured documents
and SGML. He left in 1994 as VP of Strategic Marketing and became a
marketing consultant. In the mid-1990s, he was VP of Strategic Marketing
for Open Text, a search engine company becoming a pioneer in intranet
collaborative software. Since then he has been a consultant, writer and
speaker.

Throughout his career, he has been a writer, published in a wide range of
journals, from Wired to Harvard Business Review to TV Guide. For almost ten
years, he's been a commentator on "All Things Considered." He is a co-author
of The Cluetrain Manifesto, the author of Small Pieces Loosely joined, and
an early and avid blogger. His new book, Everything Is Miscellaneous, was
published on May 1.

For the past three years, he has been a fellow at Harvard Law's Berkman
Center for Internet & Society. Next year he'll be co-teaching a course at
Harvard Law on whether the Web is different or just more of the same.

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