Clayton Christensen is well known for his work on disruption. His discussion of disruption at a systems level - i.e. how a new technology is able to develop on the edges of an industry and eventually reshape an entire field - is simple and intuitive. But last year, he co-authored wrote an aggravating little book called disrupting class (a lovely text of how great education could be if we could just get rid of the human element). Since then, my general fondness for Christensen has plummeted. I’ve been looking for critiques of his theory since, but haven’t found anything particularly useful. I’ll keep looking.
Micheal Nielsen applies Christensen’s work to a variety of fields: construction, news, and scientific publishing. It’s a thought provoking piece, but I don’t share the author’s vision for journals in the future (i.e. technology innovation organizations). Scientific (or more broadly, academic) publishing is a surprising industry: it takes work generally paid for by the public (through government research initiatives), relies on peers within the field to review research and articles (done without fee), and then sells it back to the government (through university access to journals). If ever there was a field built on sand, this is it. Changing scientific publishing is only partially about technological disruption. It’s mainly about common sense. If it comes from the public purse, it belongs to the public.

This report will get a fair bit of attention: Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning (.pdf). It joins a long list of meta-analysis by researchers like Abrami, Bernard et al. (.pdf), Tallent-Runnells et al., Zhao et al., and of course the original “no significant difference” site. The current report - by US Department of Education - is focused on the K-12 market and states that some online learning (blended) is actually superior to only face-to-face learning. Conclusions of this type likely won’t convince anyone who is antagonistic to technology use in classrooms. At minimum, the report provides a sweeping overview of how various researchers have tackled the effectiveness of technology in schools over the last decade. The questions we ask in research are sometimes more interesting than the findings…

I encourage you to read this report from the MacArthur foundation, published by MIT Press The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age (.pdf). If you’ve followed this blog - and many others with a similar educational technology focus over the last seven years - you won’t find much new in it. And that’s the problem. I like the report. It offers many insightful statements that I hope will be considered by leaders who don’t follow edublogs. Statements such as:

• “We contend that the future of learning institutions demands a deep, epistemological appreciation of the profundity of what the Internet offers humanity as a model of a learning institution”…and
• “participatory learning is about a process and not always a final product”…and
• “We advocate institutional change because we believe our current formal educational institutions are not taking enough advantage of the modes of digital and participatory learning available to students today”…and
• “Networked learning, however, goes beyond these conversational rules to include correcting others, being open to being corrected oneself, and working together to fashion workarounds when straightforward solutions to problems or learning challenges are not forthcoming”

I could offer many other similar statements. All of which have been discussed at great length on many sites and by many authors that I frequently reference. One of the first steps in publishing on a subject is to do a literature review. Type in “networked learning” into Google or Google scholar and you’ll see many individuals that have written at length on the subject: Chris Jones, Stephen Downes, Leigh Blackall, Martin de Laat…as well as entire conferences devoted to the theme. Or, when considering educational change and OERs, where is David Wiley? The list goes on.

The report irritates me because I’ve seen this happen several times: an existing field, and major thinkers within the field, is completely ignored as open, online conversations are squeezed into existing publication processes. This “reframing” of research builds on the intellectual work of others but fails to provide appropriate recognition as the message is shaped for a traditional audience.

There are many reasons to love emerging technologies - ease of use, features, ability to connect with family/friends. But for most people “free” is a prominent reason. Unfortunately, it’s not the right kind of free. The idealism of early 2000 around open source and free software has given way (within education) to “wow, cool tool” syndrome of today. Mark Pilgrim posted on this in 2005 in Freedom 0 where he discusses the dangers of “free enough”. I don’t mind paying for software, even content, when I actually own it, rather than rent it under the terms provided by a software user’s license.

This short article raises the important concerns about control again: Why free web services aren’t really free: “Trading one closed-source app for another gets us nowhere, even if the new app happens to come from Google”.

Educators and trainers face competition for attention from mobile devices and social networking services. Of course, prior to the development of these technologies, we faced a similar challenge of attention - but day dreaming is far hard to detect than someone posting comments on Facebook or Twitter.
Designing Choreographies for the “New Economy of Attention” is an interesting discussion of attention and distraction. You may not agree with their core argument - that we need to choreograph technologies that are under the control of learners (such as back channels) in a manner similar to how we organize more traditional classroom components - but the approach of blocking software and banning mobiles/laptops in classrooms is simply not sustainable. Today’s reality of connectedness is dramatically different from what existed even ten years ago. Banning is at best a short term solution that will isolate and agitate the very group education is expected to serve. The battle for control of information and interaction has already been won by “the individual”. Organizations, governments, and universities that have not yet recognized this may continue to limp along for a while…but their current stance is not tenable.

Laptops and wireless devices are increasingly present in academic settings. Rather than assuming that their presence “takes away” from an established order of attention, we are seeking to understand how they reconfigure that order in ways that might allow for new methods of engagement. In practice, with the introduction of networked technologies into the traditional academic setting, the attention of individual audience members is redirected from a single stream of speech to the presence of other audience members interacting with a global network of ideas.