Evaluating a Flat Class as a Third Place—Access & Linkages

This is the fourth of four sets of questions evaluating our class this semester. Please be sure to respond to Sets 1, 2, and 3.

We are evaluating our class in terms of how well it functioned as a third place. The Project for Public Spaces says that a third place may be evaluated in terms of its access and linkages. In other words, a good public space is easy to get to and, in turn, links to other places well. We can evaluate our class, then, on how accessible it was and how well it linked us to other resources. How so?

First, our class, both real and virtual, should have been within continuous proximity to our other spaces. If you must go too far out of your way to reach a third place, then you won't likely go, so a fine third place is accessible from your first (home) and second (work) places, and it flows into other interesting and inviting places.

In addition to being accessible, a good class space must be readable. I take this to mean that the space must be interpretable; it must be intuitively obvious to the engaged visitor. When a student enters a third space, then its arrangements and structures and guideposts should make sense and should be easy to follow. A student should understand quickly how to get in and get out of a good class space and what to do while there.

Finally, a fine class space should be convenient. Traffic should flow easily into and out of the space, with no traffic jams.

In my experience, classrooms—especially the real classrooms—have been too isolated from everything else. They are bland, little boxes that do not connect well to whatever the class is actually about. If not obligated by money or grades to show up, then most of us would not willingly congregate in a classroom. They don't really connect to anything else in our lives, and I think that is sad. So, I'm wondering if a virtual classroom space or spaces could be that fine third place that invites us in, that connects us to other interesting places, and that entices us to linger awhile out of sheer interest and enjoyment. Why can't a classroom be that kind of place? What does it take to make a classroom a third place such as that?

So a final set of questions about how our real and virtual class functioned as a third place:

1. Was our real class space convenient to you, and did it link well to and from your other spaces? How could it have been better?
2. Were our virtual class spaces convenient to you, and did they link well to and from your other real and online spaces? How could access to these virtual class spaces have been improved for you?
3. Were the virtual class spaces readable, easily interpretable, intuitively obvious to you? Were you usually confident about what to do when you got there? How could they have been made more readable?
4. What traffic jams undermined our virtual class spaces, and what could we have done to help traffic and conversation flow into and out of our online spaces better?

Thanks so much for your honest and carefully considered responses to these four sets of questions. I am likely to use some of your comments in a presentation I am preparing for the Southern Humanities conference in February, 2008. If you don't want me to quote you by name, then please send me an email, and I will protect your anonymity. No problem.

Evaluating a Flat Class as a Third Place—Comfort & Image

This is the third in a series of four sets of questions evaluating our class this semester. Please be sure to answer Groups 1, 2, & 4 as well.

The Project for Public Spaces says that we can evaluate a third place on the basis of its comfort and image. So what does this mean for a class that intends to function as a third place?

Well, first it means that the space must be safe—students should feel secure to be in the class space and secure to express themselves in that space. They should not feel threatened by fellow students or their teacher or the class content. I think, however, they should feel challenged by their classmates, their teacher, and the class content, and sometimes a challenge can feel like a threat. It's a subtle difference, but an important one, I think.

Then, a class space should be clean, which means two different things for our real space and virtual spaces. For me clean means that there is no clutter to distract students from participating in the class. When the clutter distracts from the scholarship, then the space is not clean.

Green space is closely related to clean space, in more than just sound. It means the class space is not polluted with harmful social trash. The intellectual air is clear of the fog of war, fear, and propaganda.

Next, a class space should be walkable and sittable. Students should be able to get around in the space, both real and virtual, and once in that space they should find comfortable, resourceful places to engage the scholarly conversation of the class. The space should be charming and attractive enough to invite a student's presence even when they don't have to be in class.

Finally, a good class space should have a spiritual quality that speaks to the larger issues in a student's mind and heart, and inspires them to think, stretch, and communicate. It should challenge them to address the big issues beyond just how to score an A in this particular class. To my mind, this spiritual quality suggests a connection to history, to the long line of scholars who over the centuries have struggled to cast some light onto the darkness and to illuminate the mind of humankind. The class space should evoke that historic lineage.

In my experience, most class spaces fail miserably in this category, meeting at best only the first two qualifications: safe and clean. Most classrooms are hardly walkable and sittable, certainly not if you compare them to, say, a local coffee shop. Nor could you call most classrooms charming or attractive. I think you might have to go to the most venerable institutions to find any classrooms with a spiritual or historic air about them. Perhaps the classroom at Cambridge where Lord Byron sat his tests. Perhaps.

So let's evaluate how our class did in the comfort and image category. I expect lots of advice about how to improve in this category, so go for it.

1. Did our real and virtual class spaces make you feel safe enough to express yourself? What could we have done better?
2. Were our class spaces free of clutter and pollution? What could have been better?
3. Did you find the virtual class space walkable, or navigable, easy to get around in and then comfortable once you got there? How could we have improved our on-line spaces?
4. Did you find the real and virtual class spaces charming and attractive? Why or why not? What could have made them more so?
5. Did the class spaces connect you to any of the higher questions facing humankind? How could we have improved them to better inspire scholarship among the students?
   

Evaluating a Flat Class as a Third Place—Uses & Activities

This is the second part of four sections evaluating our class. Be sure to read and answer the other postings.

According to the Project for Public Spaces, the second major group of attributes for a third place involves the uses and activities of the third place. If a class is to function as a third place, it must be fun, active, and vital. I use fun here in its most elevated sense—not in the sense of some trivial diversion, but in the sense of an engaging and fascinating activity that can remove us for a time from the tensions of first and second places, home and work.

The third place class must also be active and vital. We know that people learn more by doing things that are important and interesting than by listening.

Then, the activities in a third place should be real and useful. They should connect in some way to the students so that they entice the students to engage them.

The activities in a third place class should be indigenous—that is, they should occur naturally. The activities should be what the class is about and should fit the content or objectives of the class.

Finally, the activities should be celebratory and sustainable. They should celebrate both the content of the class and the scholars exploring that content, and they should be sustainable throughout the entire time of the course of study.

In worst case scenarios, classes act as second places, or places of work. They are boring places where groups of people transcribe the recitations of people they don't know about things they don't understand. They sit quietly in rows and scribble, or daydream. The information they copy down seems to have little connection or relevance to them, and few can imagine why this information would ever be useful. The information also has little or no connection to the classroom where it is delivered. The lectures and notes do not celebrate either the course content or the students trying to master that content. Most students cannot sustain their attention in the face of the drone and hum of such boredom.

So how do we move classes from second places to third places? Did we move a little toward a third place? Those are the questions for this part.

1. Was the class fun (in the best sense), active, or vital for you, and did the technology aid or undermine this vitality? Why or why not?
   
2. Were the activities and uses of our class real and useful to you? Why or why not?
3. Did the technology make the class more or less real and useful to you? Why or why not?
4. Did the activities of the class fit naturally with the content and intentions of the class? Why or why not?
5. Did our class activities celebrate our work together as scholars, or did they dull and dampen that work? Why?
6. Did the class activities sustain well throughout the semester, or were you simply glad to have them over and done with? Could they have been better sustained?
7. Do you think you are likely to sustain the activities you started in this class beyond this class? Why or why not?
   

Evaluating a Flat Class as a Third Place—Sociability

This semester is drawing to a close, and so it's time for us to assess what we did well and what we didn't do so well. In the past, I've conducted these assessments in the last class meeting, but I thought this term we'd use the technologies that we've been exploring in class to assess the class.

But I'm not sure how to do that, so let me try several things. Maybe one of them will work.

I'll start with this blog. I'll ask some questions, and you'll respond. Some of you may be apprehensive about giving negative feedback, but I assure you: your comments will have no effect on your grade. However, failing to make any comment at all will likely affect your grade, so protect your A and post comments.

One concept that we did not explore well enough this semester, I think, was the flat class as a third place. If you'll recall from an earlier post to this blog, Canadian educator Konrad Glogowski defines a third place class as "an informal meeting place that can facilitate and support creative interaction." He points out that the third place is not just the classroom. "The idea here is to ensure that the students see the online environment as their own - not merely an extension of the classroom, but a place where they feel free to interact and write as individuals."

Glogowski then points his readers to Project for Public Spaces web site, where I found the following wonderful poster that describes the four features of a vibrant third place:

According to PPS, great third places have attributes in four large categories:

1. Sociability,
2. Uses & Activities,
3. Comfort & Image, and
4. Access & Linkages

Let me interpret these categories in terms of our class. For the class as third place to work it should have high sociability. It should be welcoming, interactive, and friendly. Committed students should feel as if they have a place in the class and that their presence and point of view are not just tolerated but respected enough to be engaged by others. In other words, they should feel like valued neighbors to the other students and the teacher, proud of what skills and knowledge they bring to the class, willing to share those skills and knowledge for the common good, and committed to maintaining a neighborly community, committed to stewardship that promotes the development of a rich learning environment where every interested, engaged student can learn.

One of my biggest gripes about most classes is the profound lack of sociability. It seems to me that most of my classes—especially those classes where a professor stands in front of a large lecture hall and drones for an hour while all the students scribble notes, or check their email and Facebook—those classes did not promote any sense of sociability, no sense of neighborhood, no sense of connection to a group of scholars exploring a common topic.

So, I have questions for you about the sociability of our class this term:

1. What did the class do, both in-class and on-line, to build a sense of scholarly community, or neighborhood, among the students and teacher?
2. What did the class do to undermine your sense of belonging to a scholarly community?
   
3. What could the class have done better or differently to build a sense of scholarly community?
4. Did you connect to anyone else in this class, in-class or on-line, and why or why not?
5. If you connected, did you connect better in-class or on-line, and why?
6. Did you develop any sense of pride in and responsibility for the content and progress of the class, or did you just assume that was the teacher's job? Why or why not?
7. Did the other scholars in the class, both students and teacher, bring enough resources to the class to make it a rich, rewarding environment for you?
8. Did you bring enough to the class to make it a rich, rewarding community for yourself and for the others? What could the class have done to encourage you to bring more?
9. Did the technology add to the sociability of the class or detract? Why?
   

Undermining the Lower Hierarchy

Every so often, I read a blog that either changes what I've been thinking or solidifies my thinking on a given topic. A recent post by Mark Pesce, a consultant, writer, blogger, and lecturer from Sydney, Australia, called Mob Rules (The Law of Fives) clarifies for me lots of the discussions we've had in class this semester about how the emerging network structures are undermining hierarchical structures in society.

He begins by insisting that we are in the midst of a profound and fundamental shift: "The world has changed. The world is changing. The world will change a whole lot more. We … bear witness to the most comprehensive transformation in human communication since the advent of language. We are embedded in the midst of this transition; we make it happen with every script we write and every page we publish and every blog we post and every video we upload."

This may strike many as hyperbole, but I'm not sure . I believe that language is the fundamental technology from which humankind has developed all other technologies, including the Web; so calling the Web "the most comprehensive transformation in human communication since the advent of language" is a bit of a statement, but Pesce could be right. If he is, I won't be surprised, and I hope I get to see it happen.

But even if the advent of the Net is not as big an item as the advent of language, it's still a very big item—much bigger than anything else any of us have witnessed and much bigger than most of us realize. Why? Because it reworks the fundamental structures upon which we build our social, governmental, religious, economic, and intellectual lives. It shifts us from hierarchies to webs. This changes how we view, understand, and engage reality. Big.

Okay, but isn't society always changing, even if slowly? So what makes this so important? Pesce points out that one of the reasons this is a revolution and not an evolution is the rapidity of the change. He says, for instance, of cell phones, just one element in the new Web: "In just a decade’s time, we’ll have gone from half the world never having made a telephone call to half the world owning a phone." This is an amazing transformation. It's an explosion, and it changes everything.

But the old hierarchies will not give up without a fight, Pesce notes, especially the telcos, the telecommunications companies that actually made the new Web possible. That still want to own it, to control it, to command it in true hierarchical fashion. Pesce doesn't think they can, though they can certainly be a nuisance. Pesce thinks the mob (that's his term for all us users of the Web) will steam-roll the telcos and everything else that stands in our way, as the Chinese government recently learned. Pesce quotes John Gilmore in saying, "The net regards censorship as a failure, and routes around it." The Net, the Mob, the Web, or whatever you want to call it will simply flow around any attempt to control it and force it back into the hierarchy bottle. The genie is out, and she's bigger, badder, and hungrier than any government or transnational business.

Anyway, your assignment for the Thanksgiving break (remember, online learning is 24/7/365) is to read Pesce's post and then comment on his blog. You may certainly comment here as well, but it's time you guys branch out and let your voices be heard on the wider Web. You've learned a lot in this class. Now share it. Step into your third places and speak up.

How Google Works

Okay, we've been using all this wonderful technology from Google, all of it funded by that wonderful search engine they have, but do you know how the search engine works? No, I didn't either, but the people at Portfolio.com seem to have an idea. Give a look at their short slide show that explains how you get all those millions of web pages in response to your search for "all that glitters."

Thanks to Susan Sedro's blog Adventures in Educational Blogging for the link.

Google Earth Lit Trips

Dr. Susan Walraven is showing me how to create a lit trip in Google Earth. She tracked the trip of HMS Bark Endeavour in 1768, based on the novel Stowaway, for high school grades. Great stuff. This would be most effective on an Activboard. Co-presenter Dale von Kohr did a lit trip of the Trail of Tears for middle grades.

Seems that educators can get a free copy of Google Earth Pro by emailing geec@google.com and begging. I think I'll try that.

Podcasts & Wikis & Blogs, Oh My!

32 million Chinese are now blogging & 57 million Chinese are reading them. 50 thousand new blogs each day. It's exploding.

Visit Andy Carvin's vBlog Waste of Bandwidth. Cool. So why didn't someone in class do a vBlog? Why didn't I do more of it?

Web 2.0 is not only participatory, but also multimedia. Web 2.0 gives us different ways of learning and storing information, multiple pathways of learning.

check out Glenn Reynolds at instapundit. or Stephen Downes' OLDaily.

Not a bad overview of Web 2.0 for those who don't know what it is, but aside from a few new sites to visit, I didn't pick up much. I was the wrong audience.

A Vision of Students Today

The fine folk at Kansas State University's Digital Ethnography labs have created a new video for us that, I think, captures the predicament of wiki-students trying to learn in a hierarchical world. Give a good look, and let's talk about it:



Obviously, there is a disconnect between the education industry and its consumers (that's you students). Think on the lessons to be learned from our book (the lessons were summarized in the last chapter, if you need a hint ;->), and then consider the following questions:

1. How does GCSU take cues from its lead users in designing new services or revising existing ones?
2. How do GCSU students build a critical mass of wiki-students to change the entire process for GCSU?
3. What does GCSU do both technically and organizationally to supply an infrastructure for collaboration?
4. How does GCSU guarantee value for all collaborators?
5. What does GCSU have to change to fit the collaborative community norms?
6. Finally, what does GCSU keep proprietary in its services?
   

Chapter 10: Collaborative Minds

In this, the last chapter in the book, Tapscott & Williams sum up their insights into wikinomics:

The number-one lesson is that the monolithic, self-contained, inwardly focused corporation is dying. … Winning companies today have open and porous boundaries and compete by reaching outside their walls to harness external knowledge, resources, and capabilities. They're like a hub for innovation and a magnet for uniquely qualified minds. They focus their internal staff on value integration and orchestration and treat the world as their R&D department. All of this adds up to a new kind of collaborative enterprise–an ecosystem of peers that is contantly shaping and reshaping clusters of knowledge and capability to compete on a global basis (290).

And they end their book with a pointed question: "Is your mind wired for wikinomics?" Well, is it?

1. If someone were to ask you, "So what is wikinomics, anyway," how would you answer?
2. What one point in the book have you found the most insightful, or helpful, or illuminating?
3. What one point in the book do you most agree with?
4. What one point in the book do you most disagree with?
5. What is the biggest error that the book makes?
   

New Net Tools

I mentioned in class last night (Wednesday, 31 Oct) that Google has released some new social network tools that it hopes will challenge Facebook. As you know, Facebook is a popular social network, but unlike most Web 2.0 applications, it is rather closed. If you want to do Facebook, then you have to be in Facebook. Outside won't work.

Well, these new social network APIs from Google, called OpenSocial, allow people to interact with any or all social networks that agree to use those APIs. That list is pretty long: MySpace, Ning, Bebo, NewsGator, Orkut, LinkedIn, Hi5, and growing.

But here's the cool thing: you will be able to add these social network hooks to your own blog. Or as uber-twitter Scobleizer tweeted today to a fellow twitter: @PatrickRuffin: you are missing the point. You don't need to use MySpace or Bebo. YOU could put your own social network on your blog. now developers can build apps for both YOUR SITE as well as MySpace/Bebo et al without doing any additional work. blogs … soon will have Open Social apps and networks on them.

So now, all that info from MySpace and others, and eventually Facebook I suspect, will flow seamlessly into your own blog or wiki. You will be the master of your own on-line universe. You rule!

BTW, Scobleizer was tweeting all this stuff while he was interviewing the CEOs of Google and MySpace! That is way cool, very instant. He even invited the Twitter community to submit questions to ask Google and MySpace. Yeah! I'm keeping Twitter.

UPDATE: Scoble did a phone video of his interview with the CEOs and posted it to his blog. Here it is: