Daily Archives: January 24, 2009

Looking Back to Look Forward

I spent Saturday writing a draft of a journal article titled, “CloudSocial: Changing Teaching and Learning by Changing Perspective”. After a round of review from my co-authors I will blog the introduction to the paper.
Here is a cool quote I got from Wikipedia that I wanted to use in the paper so badly – but could not find a way to fit it in: “”Perspective in theory of cognition is the choice of a context or a reference (or the result of this choice) from which to sense, categorize, measure or codify experience, cohesively forming a coherent belief, typically for comparing with another. To choose a perspective is to choose a value system and, unavoidably, an associated belief system. “ I like it – it sounds like talking to the Architect in Matrix 3.
Writing the journal article made me spend a whole day stretching my brain and got me looking beyond the current important issues and tasks of the next 6-12 months and instead wondering about the “future”.
Somehow as I got farther and farther into the future, my mind wandered back to an NSF grant I had written over 10 years ago where I laid out my view of where we needed to go back then. Of course I was never funded – the comments felt that the proposal was “too obvious” and not really “research”. I can’t disagree with the comments – I knew that everything I proposed in the grant was doable and feasible.
I had a sneaking suspicion that I might get some good design ideas about where to go next from my 1998 NSF grant application. It was interesting to jump back in time a decade and see which of my dreams had come true and which of my dreams still needed to be delivered.
You can read the grant application Using Asynchronous, Web-based, Video to Humanize Distance Education. Much of the proposal talks about my lecture capture system which I developed in 1996 called Sync-O-Matic.
Of course web lectures are pretty much a solved problem these days so I was more interested in the software I proposed to build around the lectures. I still do kind of like the lecture-centered UI of the LMS for certain distance education contexts. In a way Google follows the pattern by trying to put some video “above the fold” on every page they want to be a sticky/welcome page. It brings humans to the front and center rather than just text and icons.
Some of my favorite excerpts form my 1998 NSF grant proposal are below.

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