Yesterday, during Brian Lamb’s excellent session on mashups, I had a little epiphany. Brian made a throwaway comment about learning object repositories and my mind wandered for a moment, and suddenly a shaft of light pierced the dusty fog in my brain and I realized this truth: reuse isn’t the point.

Back in the mists of time (technologically speaking) I wrote about learning objects, and one of the things I wrote is that learning objects should be designed to make it easy for the creator and others to reuse or repurpose them. This was the conventional wisdom of the day, but I don’t think it holds true any more.

The important thing now is not reusability. The important thing now is customization. It needs to be easy — really, really, ridiculously easy — to create something new. To reverse engineer. To change your mind, customize your message, substitute a different flavor, get the sauce on the side.

Back when I preached reusability, it was hard to make learning objects, and the amount of effort that had to be put into one justified the claim that reusability was desirable. But it needs to not be hard. We need ways that people — and not just geeky people — can decide one afternoon that they want to make a learning object (or call it what you will) and have it ready by dinnertime. It needs to be point-click-drag-click-clickclickclick easy. The tech isn’t there yet, at least not for everyone, but it’s getting very close.

Like Brian’s mashups, these things will have little existing pieces of other things pulled into them. This means the barrier we face isn’t just technological. We need to rethink ideas of ownership, permissions, fair use, and copyright. We need a model that works, so people can grab stuff, make stuff, and share stuff, and assemble it into a learning-object-of-the-moment. These things don’t have to last forever. I want something that responds to my instant need to communicate information by letting me pull words and sounds and clips and pictures and stuff together instantly. Let’s call it the Teachable Moment Authoring System.

is this video of Robbie Dingo creating a guitar for Suzanne Vega for her upcoming performance in Second Life. Wow.

The talk by Hans Rosling I mentioned in an earlier post is available online! TEDTalks is a new feature on the TED website where selected talks from the TED2006 conference, TED Global, and others are made available — the way it should be, free — so that you can view them in the page, or subscribe to them as a podcast. I love the web. An excerpt from the announcement:

“…today, for the first time ever, we’re releasing some of the best TED talks to the public, and I would like to request your help in letting people know just how a special a treat they have in store.

“The talks are available as a podcast series, TEDTalks, at http://www.ted.com/tedtalks and http://tedblog.typepad.com. We’ve launched with six remarkable talks – in audio and video – and will add more each week. Thanks to a partnership with BMW, all the talks will be entirely FREE.

“It’s a big moment: Until now, the TED experience has been limited to 1,000 people each year. But we’ve always known these talks deserve a much wider audience. Indeed, the whole vision of my foundation which owns TED, is to leverage the power of ideas to make a difference in the world. Now thanks to the maturation of online video and podcasting, and the visionary sponsorship of BMW we can share some of the best of TED widely for the first time. We’re excited about this and trust that you share our enthusiasm.

“I hope you’ll make the time to rediscover some of the most moving presentations from TED2006: Al Gore’s sage advice on living a carbon-neutral life; Hans Rosling’s inspired interpretation of global statistics; Ken Robinson’s vision for an education system that values creativity; Majora Carter’s commitment to environmental justice; Tony Robbins’ roadmap for reaching our potential; and David Pogue’s software-inspired show tunes. We’ve launched with these six, and will add more weekly, pulling primarily from TED2006 and TEDGlobal, but also dipping into previous years.”

I’m over the moon. Go listen to Hans Rosling’s talk. Then listen to the others. Then do it again. Then tell a friend…

[Edited to add categories, which for some reason I keep forgetting to do]

I’m sitting in a lovely auditorium at the University of Mary Washington, reveling in being at a conference where I am not a host (and reveling no less in the power outlet right here in the arm of my seat and the no-fuss wireless access… cool… if I had a tropical drink it would be just like a vacation!). Cyprien’s showing us stuff I had no idea Flickr could do, and explaining stuff that I knew it could do but couldn’t work out how.

I’ve also seen the neat stuff faculty here are doing with their courses. Wikis, blogs, digital storytelling, moviemaking — it’s all here. The faculty are sharing the process, the ups and downs, what worked and what didn’t, all with frankness and humor. There’s a fantastic atmosphere of support and a willingness to learn from each other that’s wonderful to see. I’m thrilled and honored to be a guest here.

Take a look at the conference blog — we’re writing it as we go!

You might not think that playing an MMO (massively multiplayer online [game]) is a creative activity. Given that the world is heavily designed, and animations are scripted, and players can’t really customize much in-game, there is a lot of truth to that. Choices for in-game creativity are limited. But many games have a vibrant fan community where creativity abounds; players write fan fiction, create fan art (drawings of their characters and equipment, or artist’s renderings of favorite in-game locations), write game-related comics, and even make movies. I ran across a particularly nice one: Big Blue Dress.

Fair warning: the rest of this post contains spoilers about the movie, so go watch it first if you prefer. (Now would be a good time. Go on, I’ll wait.) It’s worth the time it takes to download. Use headphones if you share an office.

There are some remarkable qualities of this piece that you might not notice if you don’t play MMOs. The movie was made by capturing what was going on on the screen while playing the game, so everything you see is happening within the constraints of the game world.

The significance of the dress. Each piece of armor in the game has a certain “look” that players can’t change. Mages (the main character in the movie is a mage) can only wear cloth armor. At high levels, if you want a piece of cloth armor that gives good protection and also, say, gives you a bonus when you use fire spells, you pick the Robe of Flaming Might or something (I made that one up). It looks a particular way and that’s that. Most high-level cloth armor looks like robes, so you’re pretty much stuck wearing one. The point is underscored in the movie by letting the amount of damage this guy is doing show (i.e., the yellow numbers that appear over the heads of the characters he hits) — 1300+ per hit is a healthy amount of damage, so this is a pretty powerful character. The other on-screen information is turned off, so the numbers stand out more to someone who is used to playing the game.

The music-video quality. All animations are pre-scripted in-game, and players can’t change them. The dancing gnomes, for instance, are animated by typing a dance command, at which point the gnome starts dancing. All gnomes dance alike and you can’t change that. To get the synchronized dancing, those three players all started the command at the same time, after carefully lining up their characters in the right spots. The way the characters seem to sing happens because of another command that animates the mouth, so they had to throw that one in at the right time, too. Some care went into this, in terms of timing and getting the best command to make the gestures look appropriate for the song. Oh yeah, and the guy’s actually singing, and he edited the footage and the soundtrack to make a coherent video. I’m impressed.

The camera angles. You can zoom in and out, set the position of the camera, and so forth, but it requires some preplanning and mousework. The angles are used in the video to great effect, framing the tight shots and panning past the character while he’s walking or riding.

Like all fan art, the movies you might find will vary widely in artistic merit and taste. My point is that the game world can make people want to be creative, to bring some part of it out of the game and into the rest of their world. We make art about stuff that inspires us, among other things. I think that’s pretty cool.

The NMC’s island in Second Life, NMC Campus, is nearly finished. It’s being built by Electric Sheep, who do absolutely fantastic work, and it’s as pleasant and inspiring a space as you could want. One of the buildings in particular would be amazing to actually walk through in the physical world. But the really neat thing, the thing that I’m most excited about, is not the space itself. What I’m really interested in is figuring out what kinds of activities we can offer in the space, and planning them, and participating in them.

It’s important to me that for the activities that we choose, it actually makes a difference to have them in SL versus, say, having them on the phone, or using Writely, or Learning Times. I realize that at first we will spend a lot of time getting people used to the space, but we do that with every online tool that we use, so that doesn’t bug me. I’m puzzling about what happens next, and whether there are advantages to having an avatar, and what those advantages might be.

One of the things that I do at face-to-face meetings is graphic facilitation. Maybe you’ve seen this; there’s a giant sheet of paper, 4′ high by 8 or 14 or 16 feet long, mounted on a whiteboard or a wall or foamcore boards or whatever, and while the meeting goes on, someone (me in many cases) records the discussion visually using colored markers on the large paper. It’s really impressive to watch — I can say this because I’ve seen other people do it — and it’s also fun to do. I want to be able to do this in Second Life.

It shouldn’t be that hard, right? Imagine I’m sitting at my desk, logged in to SL, and I’ve got a graphics tablet with a pen. I’ve got my headset on and I’m connected via Skype or phone bridge or whatever audio technology, so I can hear what people are saying. My avatar is standing in front of a whiteboard in SL, and when I move my pen on my tablet, the marks appear on the whiteboard. (My avatar doesn’t have to look like she’s drawing; I’m not asking for the moon here.) The other avatars in the room can see what I’m writing as I write it, just as if we were doing it face to face. Then when I’m done, I can save the contents of the whiteboard as a jpg (or whatever, I’m not picky) so we have a record of the visuals.

I’d need to be able to switch “pens” — choose a different color — quickly and easily, maybe by tapping a square on a palette. The pens all have the same tip, so I don’t need a huge variety of Photoshoplike brushes. It would be nice to have a softer tip to emulate the chalks I use for emphasis, but I can wait for that.

So, who’s bored? Someone want to write me one of these? I’ll help with the requirements and testing.

I’m editing this post. My husband, who does not yet keep a blog but who actively reads them, came home yesterday and said “Your post on Campus Impact might be a little vague, dahling.” (Okay, he didn’t say “dahling,” but the rest is more or less true.) His English upbringing results in a certain delicacy of expression; translated to modern-day conversational American English, what he meant was, “I’m pretty sure that people who haven’t heard you talk about this particular project day in and day out for the past I-don’t-know-how-many-weeks won’t have a clue what it’s about from the little bit you chose to say about it.” So I’m editing this post, which he assures me is a perfectly acceptable thing to do in the world of blogging, so long as I’m up front about it.

Yesterday’s vagueness had a lot to do with late-stage writer’s block. I was in the push-on-through-till-dawn phase of writing and wasn’t sure what else to say. There wasn’t really a single coherent question I could ask. The post, which ran as follows, was basically a cry for help:

The NMC is working on a paper that discusses what it means to have an impact on campus (for a new media center or similar organization). It’s sort of a how-to guide for directors of such centers, with suggestions about ways to make a difference on campus. We affectionately call it “Campus Impact.”

The material for the paper has come from several discussions with the directors of centers that belong to the NMC, so the suggestions are good, solid ones that people have actually employed, illustrated with examples. The paper covers seven strategies that can be used together to increase a center’s impact on campus:

• be focused
• be adaptable
• be productive
• make allies
• set expectations
• make your boss’s goals your goals
• be needed

Obviously the paper goes into a little more detail. It’s in a late draft stage at this point, but if you have ideas, I would love to hear them.

That said, the suggestions I did get were actually quite helpful. Thanks to Bryan’s example (The Studio at Colby College), I emphasized the role of students in making an impact. Nick’s point about leveraging campus networks is an excellent one, and found its way into the paper as well. Just the fact that someone out there expressed an interest in reading the thing gave me new energy as I tackled it (thanks Steve!). Of course, I also took a direct line of attack and walloped that writer’s block with some really good tea and top-of-the-line chocolate — desperate times call for desperate measures. All of this together got me past the hurdle.

I realize I still haven’t put in the “more information,” so here it is. The idea for the paper came out of several conversations among NMC directors (that is, people who run new media centers or similar organizations on various campuses). The directors were sharing stories about things they had done that had made a noticeable impact on their campuses, and asking each other questions about their stories. Victor Edmonds from UC Berkeley gave a presentation at the 2005 NMC Director’s Meeting based on his experiences running ETS; he’s the one that came up with the seven strategies, and the other directors really resonated with those ideas. In that session and in a similar one at the 2005 NMC Summer Conference, the directors explored those ideas some more, and swapped stories, concerns, and suggestions. Craftily, we took notes. (We told them we were going to, so it was crafty in the clever sense, not in the sneaky sense. In fact, I took notes on giant 4′x8′ sheets of paper, so it would have been really hard to be sneaky about it.)

We’ll share a draft of the paper at this year’s Director’s Meeting, which is next week (back to Texas for me — more travel stories for you), and use it as a springboard for further discussion of the topic. When the paper is finished it’ll likely be posted on NMC’s website, so I’ll include a link here for those who are interested.

As a proof-of-concept, though, yesterday’s post worked really well. You can be sure that the next time I’m stuck, I’ll be writing about it here. Thanks y’all!