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Posts Tagged ‘sxsw’
Stories from SXSWi 2008 - Textbooks of the Future: Free & Collaborative
I have been talking to SJ Klein regularly via email and phone for my work on the wiki pages and kid’s user manual for the XO laptop for One Laptop Per Child, so I was excited to hear him speak and meet him in person. Also, directly afterwards I planned to go to lunch with SJ and with Robert Nagle, the technical writer (and self-named idiot programmer) in Houston who originated the idea of XO user groups across the states after the Give 1 Get 1 program completed.
I had tried my best to promote an XO meetup as a lunch after the Textbooks talk, even getting it listed on the entirely awesome sched.org, but when the four of us arrived at Las Manitas at about 10 after 1, we were the only ones with the “little computers,” as my son calls them. So we just waited our turn for seating, and got to know SJ and Melissa Hagemann, a program manager with the Open Society Initiative who was moderator for the panel. As it turned out, she and Robert had been in some of the same cities in south eastern Europe in the 90s. While speaking of books, Robert described hand-carrying two fifty-pound bags of books along dirt roads as a Peace Corp volunteer and for me it really brought home the fact that books - they are heavy. Much heavier than the two 3-pound XO laptops I had been “lugging” around the Austin Convention Center all day. The 3-pound OLPC library on the XO laptop probably contains hundreds of pounds of books, and you could add several hundred more pounds of books by putting in a small USB stick or SD card. Quite a revelation for me.
Here are my rough notes from the Textbooks of the Future: Free & Collaborative talk at SXSW Interactive 2008. I’ll link to the podcast of it when it’s available. (Updated to add the link, since now it is.)
For open source textbooks, take a look at cnx.org.
Yes, wikibooks are now possible. Pedia press had been doing high quality book output for a while, now partnering with Wikimedia Foundation.
OLPC’s interest in open education materials is that it gives students and teachers ability to share and collaborate on materials. They’re in a unique position in some ways, though, because they’d like to target 15 languages for their materials.
Why are open textbooks possible now?
- Convergence of technology and community
- Also XML - lets you build lego blogs of reconfigurable, recombinable objects (sounds like DITA topics, doesn’t it?)
- Online lets you go past books
- Intellectual property now has new licensing - creative commons license
- Development of quality control mechanisms, repository of content
- Lens - gives you a filter, lets you see things through a lens, filtering which items which you think are valuable
- National Instruments, Texas Instruments, checking the books, offering lenses
Print on demand options - if you can’t produce shiny books, you aren’t taken seriously in many parts of the world, and in some age groups, print is important. With just-in-time printing, books are assembled automatically, index generated automatically, print on demand only costs students $20 instead of $120.
The same thing will happen everywhere that knowledge is valuable.
Is there a role for publishers in the new learning environment? There can be conflicts even in branches of publishing. All major publishers he’s talked to know that a change has to happen. They’re investing/investigating.
What strategies are useful? “The Budapest Open Access Initiative: an international effort to make research articles in all academic fields freely available on the internet.” from http://www.soros.org/openaccess/index.shtml
Three dimensions -
people (blurring the lines of roles, in today’s society we have rigid lines of roles of teacher, or author)
networking, transmitters, guides
Q: Robert’s question as a representative from Teleread.org - people searching for tutorials or text books want “the best” - what’s the finished state?
A: People looking for most efficient and effective way to learn things. Those sites will rise to the top.
Q: Can you use a lens that is another company’s lens?
A: Next version, yes you can.
Q: What about “controversial” areas or areas that evolve year over year?
A: For CXN.org, they decided not to develop with a wiki model, allowing for a multiple entry model, such as causes for the civil war has multiple articles with author attribution. Lenses can then point towards most used, or most heavily peer reviewed, your choice.
Q: From instructional designer in corp. environment - she sees missing things such as visual representations or animations, what’s happening or needs to happen to bring in those valuable designers.
A: Inkscape - open source vector drawing application, access to others’ illustrations (svg, vector graphics standards) Also mentioned the payment for illustration contribution based on Phillip Greenspun’s donation to Wikimedia Foundation.
SXSW and Twitter - lost digital camera, found!
I finally have an exciting handful of stories from South By Southwest based on the really neat people I met. Yesterday I wrote about the awesome attendees. Here’s a story about Twitter used in a way I hadn’t heard of before.
At Tom Parish’s social media metrics panel, I sat next to Summer Huggins, who works in Austin for Hammock, a media company based out of Nashville. We chatted about Austin, how I feel like a tourist in my own town when I come downtown, and laughed about the Compass Bank building when she said it looks like a giant nosehair trimmer. (Yes, it does.)
When she left the talk, she accidentally left her digital camera on her seat. I noticed it and asked both the guys in front of me if they caught her last name so that I could try to find an email address for her in the SXSWi attendee directory. None of us could remember her last name, though.
So, I took the camera in its cute case to the SXSW information desk to be placed in Lost & Found, telling them that someone named Summer from Austin would hopefully pick it up. They said they’d be open until 8:00 and it would be kept in a safe place overnight.
Later that night, I started searching on twitter for someone named Summer from Austin who maybe just maybe had talked about attending the social media metrics panel. Sure enough, SummerH posted a tweet marked with #SXSW saying she had lost her digital camera! I immediately sent her a direct tweet, clicked through to her blog, found her email address, and sent her an email telling her she could pick up her camera at SXSW Lost & Found. Problem solved!
Summer was very excited and also noted the power of the Twitter and SXSW attendees! The power of SXSWi attendees was certainly not lost during the metrics panel, but this story has a feel-good ending to it.
Amazing conversations and meeting amazing people at SXSW Interactive
South by Southwest Interactive is a big web design/blogging conference in downtown Austin. There are thousands of people here for it in 2008. It’s crazy busy.
The latest excitement was in a friend’s panel where people tried to stage an uprising on both Twitter and in the meebo room at meebo.com/sxsw, set up specifically for this talk. Tom Parish has a great picture and is quoted in this Wired blog story. The very next day, the Zuckerburg interview had a similar uprising on a much grander scale. Jeff Jarvis has the best analyses I’ve read so far about it, and Scoble’s view from the Twitter gallery is also a good read.
I’m of two minds about the things that have happened here this week - on one hand, I think the conference is only as high quality as its presenters. If all the attendees think they’re smarter than and better than the panelists, then why bother coming at all when you can view the video online or listen to the podcast later? I guess that hypothetical question is answered with - we come because we can interact with the panelists.
I even witnessed a panelist admit that he “wasn’t paying attention” to another panelist’s answer to a question during their panel. It came across as immature, arrogant, and unprofessional to me. Much like the sweater-tossing antics I observed based on the meebo room conversation in the social media metrics talk, I internally rolled my eyes and thought, how many people are just trying to get attention, drawing it away from the panelists disrespectfully? Is this online behavior and real-life behavior only as mature as the junior high lunch room?
On the other hand, if all the panelists preach about user-centered content, then when the choir stages an uprising, the preacher should be able to adjust his message to fit the audience. Right? I really admired Tom’s quick thinking. I was admiring the way that Tom handled the panel, ensuring that the podcast recording turns out well also, by having each speaker introduce themselves so that listeners later can identify voices while listening.
But enough about the conflicts and struggles going on between panelists, interviewers, and SXSWi attendees. This year, my interaction with other attendees has been the most exciting and fun for me.
Before and after the social media metrics talk, I befriended two guys from Washington, DC, and Summer from Austin who were all sitting around me.
I ended up giving a ride up Sixth Street to David, one of the guys from DC, and he and I had the nicest conversation on the way to BarCamp. I had asked about the conversations that occur on wikis and how interesting it was that the WoWiki panelist George Pribel said they never want to answer how to or troubleshooting questions on their wiki, that they only wanted articles and discussion around strategy. I said that as a tech writer, I was looking for the best use of wikis for content, but since we usually live nearest to and offer the most value to the customer support department, our wikis would be shaped more towards howto and troubleshooting information. However, best practices and strategy wikis might be more easily shaped for conversational articles, so, which was the better approach? His answer was spot on and an excellent example that will stick with me. He said, it’s just like the real world conversations you have in a crowd. If you and I are talking about movies, and someone comes up and starts talking about their favorite restaurant, we would politely inform them that we’re talking about movies, and could you take your food conversation elsewhere, maybe to the person sitting next to me? It’s a matter of staying on topic. With wiki design, I would conclude, you might want to prepare for two audiences (and two types of conversations), just like Lisa Dyer has done at Lombardi Software.
After attending David’s talk, WhiteHouse 2.0 at Barcamp, I learned that he’s former White House Internet and Communications Director David Almacy! He started RSS feeds and podcasts on iTunes and Tivo for the president’s white house. He wrote a Barney Cam script that got posted on Youtube and had over 25,000 views that season. As it turns out, he has two daughters nearly exactly the same age as my two sons. Our youngest kids were born within three days of each other. He was so nice and professional, a knowledgeable expert who is also willing to share his experiences. Prior to the social media metrics talk, I babbled about how I was a blogger for Ynema and Tom on talk.bmc. Little did I know of my fellow attendees level of experience with social media, but I was so pleased that David didn’t try to prove just how much more knowledgeable (and famous) he is than I. Instead he just answered my questions and truly listened to me.
I’m still amazed at the serendipitous meetings and conversations. Yes, the attendees make the conference interesting, and the panelists are bravely facing those attendees.
SXSW Interactive starts today - pack your XO
So many sessions that I want to attend, but at least sched.org lets me select more than one session at a time. Such an awesomely simple interface and login is so quick, just an email address and a password and you’re scheduling in no time.
I’ve also put an invite out on upcoming.org to anyone who wants to meet with other XO users to come to Las Manitas for a late Sunday lunch. Thanks tantek for the photo.
