cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

It was my honor and sheer fun joy to be invited by Mike Caulfield to KKeene State College today to bring a new interation of the Secret Revolution. In fact, Mike and his crew at the CELT had made it the theme of their Faculty Technology Showcase.

I pulled out the stops in this session, adding all new content to the version I had done last summer in Edmonton, and included the “gimmicks” of the computer voice, my “inner techno soul” who talked back to me using the command line generation tool. I added this time the “hacking” of my presentation also including some entity sending tweets out of my account, using the Keynote Tweet app/modification I wrote up that again makes this a viable option for Keynote and twitter.

Slides are posted

And I have an audio recording available as well:

I’d write something more prophetic but I am zonked.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Those verdant hills of New Hampshire may be shaking today, as the Secret Revolution unfolds at 9:00am for the Faculty Technology Showcase at Keene State College.

Stand by as our field agents again hack Alan Levine’s computer, and we transmit our progress on twitter via the #secretrev hash tag. We need your help there to respond to our leaked cables.

You won;t find them in government buildings or other marble column edifices… but we have gotten a cable that our field agents made an appearance at the EDUCAUSE ELI annual conference in Washington DC

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

What were they doing there? Might it be spreading the word through the oldest network around (the grapevine?). Were they infusing the Learning circles with some blood flow? There were some transmissions picked up on the radio waves.

Can you feel the revolution? It is right here.

Think about map tools for finding directions. You enter point “A” and “B” into Google Maps, a mobile app, your GPS, in search of the fastest (or least traffic prone) path. It’s all about getting to “B”.

An interesting new app takes a twist on that by suggesting there might be more to going from “A” to “B” in creating perhaps a less direct path, one that still gets you to “B”, but along the way introduces serendipity, discovery, a bit more of a game. It opens doors to exploring places in a way you might not have done in trying to get to the nearest coffee shop.

This is the idea of the Serendipitor

Serendipitor from mark shepard on Vimeo.

Serendipitor is an alternative navigation app for the iPhone that helps you find something by looking for something else. The app combines directions generated by a routing service (in this case, the Google Maps API) with instructions for action and movement inspired by Fluxus, Vito Acconci, and Yoko Ono, among others. Enter an origin and a destination, and the app maps a route between the two. You can increase or decrease the complexity of this route, depending how much time you have to play with. As you navigate your route, suggestions for possible actions to take at a given location appear within step-by-step directions designed to introduce small slippages and minor displacements within an otherwise optimized and efficient route. You can take photos along the way and, upon reaching your destination, send an email sharing with friends your route and the steps you took.

As described in Wired Magazine’s Gadget Lab, this idea gives maps a possible gaming layer, the sort of “gamification” of real life that is a new internet buzz term.

I can start to begin of all kinds of activities one could do with this (now I need to go to a major city where there is something to play with).

Thanks to our Australian agent, Leigh Blackall, for sharing this long scrolling link of essential readings, web sites related to our cause. It is ins support of a project we need to focus some attention to, the 2837 University, in which a San Diego neighborhood aims to explore how they can forma community educational institution, using existing locations and personnel.

The 2837 University is a project that re-imagines the Agitprop space and the surrounding neighborhood as the site of a micro-university, with the goal of opening a conversation about re-purposing the concept of University Education in the context of the ongoing critique of the corporatization of the University. We will begin by investigating the relation of the construction of a mass consumer class in the US after WWII and the formulation of a new concept of individuality that borrowed its notion of self-expression from the legacy of Romanticism, all the while yoking the seeming freedom of expression to the profit system of hyper-inflated production and infinite obsolescence. As the university system is increasingly dominated by corporate interest, the very notion of the student is replaced by that of the consumer, and the value of a university education is understood strictly in terms of the acquisition of readily available skills and knowledge bases that are immediately transferable to exchange value. We might begin from the question of what has been lost; what was the notion of the university student before it became the university consumer? And we might begin provisionally with the idea that education, the work of the student, is to come to terms with a freedom that, far from being the trap of infinite choice that masks itself as the freedom of a consumer class, is in fact the work that one does on oneself in order to free oneself from one’s limitations. The question remains, how to construct one’s own individuality without succumbing to the myopia that characterizes the absolute atomization of a self-interested consumer class, how to reclaim and reconstruct a social fabric that is not at all points grounded in the logic of the market, and how the structure of the University itself, which encourages the excessive borrowing, atomized suburban living arrangements and passive resistance strategies characteristic of the trap of the consumer class, can be retooled to encourage and make possible the work of the student, a work that continues despite all these hindrances, perhaps we could rethink the University as a space which is made by the work of the student however and wherever that may take place? The 2837 University will run from January to March of 2011; during this time the space will also play host to a series of installations, screenings, and performances that address and contribute to the conversation initiated by the project.

Viva the Revolution! Agent Blackall has earned his stripes, and is not a foot soldier in the Secret Revolution.

Do you want your stripes? Just share us an example of a small or large practice that is quietly innovating or just tag the revolution.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Our advance troops are on schedule to arrive at the next rally point in less than 10 days. We got a transmission from Agent 32 via the scrambled channel that the caravan was on track, having just stopped for pie in Blanchester, Ohio. Headquarters has cleared us to let you know we are headed for one of those tiny little slivers of a state in New England.

Once we arrive, new recruits will be granted the privilege to wear one of the coveted badges show above. Anone really wishing to be part of this is only eligible if thy provide us their un-covert ops info via
http://bit.ly/secretrevolution

If that is too much of a challenge, then just tag some things on the web that meet our mission- examples of things that help people be creative within the limits of a particular system or the ways people creatively innovate outside the lines of what is official.

The delicious tag is no secret or even coded- secretrevolution

And if you are not able enough to do the lowest rank action, well then you can just fall in line with the lemmings

cc licensed flickr photo shared by starstreak007

The Revolution’s command center has been mobilized, gassed up, and was last reported heading east on I-70 leaving Green River, Utah. Headquarters has put us on standby, but is being vague about the destination, behind it beeing a keen mission for us in the north east.

Having been a few months since our last Canadion mobilization, we need to replenish our supplies. So we put out our request again to teachers, both in school and out, who are using the tools of the web creatively. What we seek are stories of people who are cleverly subverting the limits of technologies forced upon them (we shall refrain from using two letter alliterative acronyms that vary in case), or people who have been able to step just outside of the lines to utilize a technology in a novel way.

Share your stories http://bit.ly/secretrevolution

Tag the revolution.

And who knows, next may be a beach invasion

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Reellady

Anil points out its easy to bash things, which leads to a lack of understanding and empathy.

We have things we know are indefensibly wrong and our instinct is to try and fix them and correct them. There are things that we hate that we don’t necessarily have to hate, from Paris Hilton to Tea Partiers to Powerpoint. Anil teaches us some principles to put into play when we think someone is wrong and indefensible, so we can learn to have empathy for the people we think are indefensible.

heck, he even defends PowerPoint. Now that is revolutionary.

Today the revolution came into the spotlight with a keynote session for the 2010 Canadian eLearning Conference. The call has been made, and now it is all of your turn to join up!

Presentation slides have been uploaded to Slideshare (if you view there, you can see the slide notes). And the revolution is now recorded and is synced in the Slideshare below:

Well we hope so. Sometimes tagging can be a lonely game. It’s more fun when you play along.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Laurie | Liquid Paper

For tomorrow’s presentation at the CeLC conference, I;’ve been tagging all the web resources listed (and more) in delicious using the bluntly obvious tag of secretrevolution, with the most recent ones embedded via RSS on the sidebar of this site (hey, look right, there they are).

But play along. Tag anything you might think relevant, articles, blog posts, videos, flickr images, anything that gets to the heart of this not so secret revolution, all the ways we are finding to play the game differently, inside ort outside of the tools our institution provides.

Ahhh, but there is more.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by bookgrl

There is a SECRET tag. How can it be secret if I am putting it on this blog? Do you get the total irony of fake secrecy?)

Add an extra tag if what you are bookmarking is a bonafide education example of this in action– use the tag of s3cr3trev.

C’mon and play tag, its lonely doing this by myself!