The Open Author

Live in Utah? Got a kid going into the 9th grade? Want that kid to be part of an online, completely open High School? Want use of a free laptop for the duration of their studies?

Then the Open High School of Utah is the place for you. Applications are now being accepted.

If anybody reading this is an online educator, or any educator for that matter, you need to stop reading this, go to Wal-Mart, buy World of Warcraft, and play it for 2 months. It’s homework.

I can not believe how engaging this game is. There has to be some way to figure out how a game can take boring, meaningless tasks, and make them fun, engaging, and dare I say, educational.

Blizzard, the company that makes World of Warcraft, just came out with a patch. They updated the game, and now there is something called ‘achievements’. Basically when you do something (usually something boring), you get a virtual ‘star’ for it. Usually you get 10 points (you can’t turn those points in for anything), and a message goes out to your guild saying, ‘Herman just did X’. And that’s it. That is all there is to the achievements. It’s nothing more than a way to record what you did.

The crazy thing is that everybody is doing them. Like mad. One achievement is to discover every area in the game. I think there are close to a thousand areas. So you hop on your little mount, and ride around the country. You just run around, trying to find all of the zones. It’s mind-numbingly boring, and takes hours, but it seems like everybody in my guild is doing it. Every 10 minutes I get a message that says something like, “Magicatak just discovered Western Plaguelands!”

Many of these achievements will take weeks, if not months to do.

Maybe this whole ‘student confidentiality’ thing is wrong. Maybe instead of giving grades, we should give students levels, and make it public. You’re at level 7 math, level 9 reading, and level 15 writing. You could have achievements like knowing your 7 times table in 8 seconds or less. We’d keep track of it on some social network, and you could proudly display all of your achievements to your guild…er, class.

Sound like a crazy idea? That is because you’re still reading this, and not playing World of Warcraft, like I told you to. Go. Go and see if you can figure out how Blizzard seemed to pull off the impossible. They have got me baffled.

I’m a big fan of mashups. A mashup is where you take one tool, combine or mash it up with another tool, and you’re left with an altogether brand new toy to play with. I like mashups because they bring together experts in different content areas. A good example is Flickr‘s geotagging tool. You have people who take pictures, and you have people who love fiddling around with GPS devices. You mash these two people together, and the next thing we know we’re all geotagging our photos.

It’s been over a year since a post I wrote hit slashdot on the subject of linking content to location. I’ve been thinking about the topic for probably over 3 years. It occurred to me that a good way to visualize the system I’m proposing, is by understanding how a content management system (CMS) works.

The basic idea behind a CMS is that is solves the problem of too much data. Let’s assume you have a lot of stuff, like electronic text, images, links, video, and more. You have all this stuff that you want to share with others. You could just put it all on one really big massive html page, but what if you have 10,000 items? People would have a hard time sifting through all the content to find the one thing they want to view.

Enter a CMS to save the day. With a CMS you can upload all your stuff to the system, and then choose how you want to display it. You can display information hierarchically, where content is stored in categories and sub categories. Or you could do it linearly, where people first see one topic, then move on to a more complex topic. Or you could sort it by date created, file type, keyword, etc. The beauty of a CMS is that you can have thousands of pieces of content, and then sort it by one or even all of these methods. One person can view the content by date uploaded, while another person could browse the same content from the same repository, but do it by topic.

A good example of a CMS is the site I work on, USU’s OpenCourseWare site. We have thousands of pieces of content, but it’s sorted by topic and by lesson, and is easily navigated.

So, how does this pertain to the geo-content idea? We just mentioned that a CMS allows you to sort information based on several methods. Now imagine that the earth itself becomes a CMS, with users access the information via their GPS enabled smart phone. This Global CMS would display information based on your location. Instead of sorting by date or file type, it sorts by where you are on the planet. If you’re driving on a freeway it might display information found on wikipedia’s site regarding the freeway system. It might also display information about the city/state/country you are currently in. It might display information about the flora, fauna, and wildlife in the area. It could tell you about the history of the region, or famous people who were born, or passed through this part of the world. This information would be useful and relevant because of your location, not based on something you searched for. You would find ‘hidden knowledge’ that you were not aware existed.

You can go out and buy a CMS. Or there are a lot of really good ones that are open-source (USU uses educommons, which is open-source). What we don’t have is a system that would allow us to create and access this global CMS. We have WordPress for blogs, we have Plone for a web based CMS, but I think it’s time we get ourselves a CMS capable of building a Global CMS.

Last night I was working on a little outdoor project. I was trying to get them to help me, but of course, none of them would.

A neighbor girl came over in her roller blades. She’s only 7 or so, and she scares me to death, because she can barely stand up in these things. She asked me what I was doing, and I told her. She proceeded to help me for about 45 minutes. Working harder than all of my boys put together.

I thought to myself, my boys must just not know how to work.

Then, today, one of my sons goes over to another neighbor’s house. He spent an hour raking their leaves into a big pile. It’s not that they don’t know how to work, it must be something about doing something different.

So, I need a social network site that allows you to swap kids. I’ll send my kids over to your place, and you send yours to mine. They will all work happily, and we’ll get a lot done.

So, there you go. Somebody code that puppy. I’ll see if ‘childlabor.com’ is available.

A friend of mine posted a request to her blog, looking for music for their ward DVD. I wrote in her comments, but it started to get a little too link heavy, so for a cleaner version, I’m posting my suggestions here.

For a ward DVD, you can never go wrong with Camper Van Beethoven’s “Take the Skinhead bowling“. Bowling and skinheads were never given such a snappy rhythm and catchy tune.

And don’t get hung up on his funny name, Gogol Bordello does a great job with “Start Wearing Purple“. Although this shouldn’t be confused with any of the Prop 8 stuff going on in California. Ward DVDs should be apolitical.

And then of course, no ward DVD is complete without Johnny Cash’s ‘Ring of Fire‘, just to remind everybody of hellfire and damnation. I prefer Wall of Voodoo’s version.

And if you have any ward Christmas pics, and need a good Christmas song, then make sure to include “Get behind me, Santa.” by the very talented Sufjan Stevens.

And finally, if you had any ward activities surrounding the Bronze Age, and really, what good ward doesn’t have a ward activity surrounding the Bronze Age, then don’t pass up They Might Be Giants “Mesopotamians“.

Of course, using this selection depends a lot on whether or not you want to be asked to do the ward DVD again next year…

Those interested in OpenCourseWare will find Tom’s post interesting. Coursefeed has hooked up Facebook and Blackboard together to provide students a way to collaborate even after the course is finished. Not surprisingly, the folks at Coursefeed are running into all sorts of privacy and proprietary issues. However, to me this is interesting for several reasons.

OpenCourseWare has none of these issues. We could set up learning environments around courses, and people could join if they wished, and leave when they want. We’ve wanted a social aspect to OCW for years, and this could be it.

The other interesting aspect to all of this is what happens when faculty realize they can put their content in OCW, and have all their learning tools in Facebook. Who needs an LMS when you have this setup? The natural next step seems to be to ditch the fee heavy, tech support heavy LMS, and move to what students are already using…

My problem is that I’m an idea man. I come up with ideas, but am completely powerless to do anything with my ideas. I’ve been pining for years about how the publishing industry is behind the times, runs on a very closed model that is harmful to everybody but themselves, and that writing can be, and in many cases, should be, a collaborative effort.

“Why doesn’t somebody create a web site where people can write collaboratively, share their books, and then vote on the best book to be published? Why can’t royalties be shared among authors, editors, and those who give feedback?”

Well, enter Webook. Get it? Webook? Isn’t that clever? It’s like We-book (we write a book), and web-book (a book on the web), all at the same time. Ha ha, zany!

Anyway, if I had sat down and designed a site that met all of the things I’ve been whining about, Webook would be it. You can start a project, collaborate in an open or closed environment, work on other projects, or just give feedback. Projects are voted on, and Webook already has their first published book out. And their terms of service looks pretty decent.

I can understand that many authors, especially those who have already been published, might be a little bit leery. But let me take the risk for you. I’ve already signed up, and posted chapter one of a book I’m working on. If you’d like to give it a try, please feel free to drop in. Or maybe you have a book that is out of print, and not doing anything? Post it!

Now, let me say up front, you may go there and find a lot wrong with the site. There is a lot of content that is very rough. It’s the first draft attempted by somebody who probably has no experience with writing. But what better way to learn than through a community of similarly struggling writers. Person A may know nothing about hooks, but can write a good scene description. Person B is a hook master, but struggles with descriptions. Put the two together and they start to learn and grow. Those familiar with fanfiction.net, know this is a healthy process, and one that should be encouraged.

So, if I’ve piqued your interest, sign up. And if you do, make sure to let me know, and add me as a friend.

And finally, let me leave you with a quote from the founder of Webook. One that I could not possibly agree with more.

“[Webook’s] biggest challenge is to contribute to the evolution of the traditional publishing business, which is still dominated by a few large publishers who wield enormous control over the titles that reach the bookstores. While in the past decade the music, software, travel, financial, and other major sectors have shifted the power from the few to the many, publishing continues to function as an exclusive, traditional business.”

I, for one, wish them good luck.

Dad is opening his hand-drawn birthday cards.

Dad: “Very nice! Is that a birthday cake?”

Boy # 4: “No, that is a monster eating a kids arm off. But it doesn’t go down to his stomach, it goes up to his brain, ha ha!”

Dad: “Oh yeah…now I see it.”