Emotions suck. I have made one of the most difficult decisions of my life.
And the result is a milieu of emotions: bitter-sweet, happy-sad, hopeful-depressing.
After almost a decade at Red River College (as an instructor), I have accepted a position working with Peter Tittenberger at The University of Manitoba – as a Research Associate in the Learning Technologies Center (LTC). I am excited about the prospect of contributing to the research in the learning technologies field as a whole. So many opportunities exist to a) conduct research and b) implement the research results into organizational functioning (our current academic habit of implementing research results fifty years after theory formation isn’t acceptable (we are only recently seeing the impact of work done by cognitive theorists in the 60’s and 70’s (or earlier)…Piaget, Bruner, Vygotsky, Knowles. I will post more on my LTC activity in the near future (and to shake down corporations and academics to engage in research). My goal is to engage as diverse a group of partners as possible to contribute substantially to the research activities (and associated understandings) of our field.
I am a firm believer that theorizing is a valid contribution to a knowledge space. And I’ve spent most of my time over the last five years (with elearnspace, more recently connectivsim, and in the next few weeks knowingknowledge, sites) drawing theories from my practical experience and observation. However…most people trust research more than someone sitting in a corner thinking. As a result, I think my contributions to the field will be more significant in a formal research and publication position.
On the same side, I am reluctant to leave the institution that has provided me with so much opportunity. My interest in learning technologies was fostered within Red River College. I have had the opportunity to work on many exciting projects – streaming video,intelligent agents, mobile devices and learning, sitting on committees to rant against LMS’s, babbling incessantly about how pedagogy and vision should drive our tool selection (not vice versa) etc. Mostly, I will miss the colleagues within my department. Changing projects and activities is easy. Parting with friends and colleagues is hard.
Familiarity Breeds Mindlessness - "mindlessness for familiar things" is a challenge for any leader, learning designer, or educator. We build many of our beliefs without direct awareness of what we are doing (without sounding like I'm getting too old, consider the beliefs of many young people - directed and influenced by media which presents a certain type of look and attitude). Layer and layer of beliefs eventually result in "who we are". Learning that occurs below our conscious understanding is interesting...sometimes we hear ourselves saying (at least I hear myself) things that we don't really mean. We have acquired these views because of our environment and familiarity placates. Reflecting on this now, there are many things that I read on a daily basis (news, theories, global events) that should outrage me. Instead, I have been mindlessly lulled into tolerance.
Architecture of Control: "To what extent is the illusion of control, rather than real control, what most people really want in their products?"
Clark Quinn, Stephen Downes, and others have been exploring What you should learn...some provocative ideas about what we need to learn in order to function in society today and more importantly, how to live with meaning. Neil Postman has had a big impact on my thinking about the role of education. We are currenlty consumed with the "what and how" of learning. We have forgotten the why. I love Stephen's take: "Living meaningfully is actually a combination of several things. It is, in one sense, your dedication to some purpose or goal. But it is also your sense of appreciation and dedication to the here and now. And finally, it is the realization that your place in the world, your meaningfulness, is something you must create for yourself."
Six Eyes of Seeing Knowledge: "I explored the hidden assumption that intellectual knowledge is the only lens for creating and sharing knowledge. Other eyes for seeing and sense-making have the potential to uncover new knowledge. The very brief overview of these six eyes of knowledge are:
Intellect
Instinct
Imagination
Intuition
Insight
Ignorance"
I like the concept of "six ways of seeing". Too often, what we define as knowledge is limited to a fairly static or structured view. It's important to understand that knowledge is often more about shades and continuums than clear demarcations.
An interesting exploration of media - suggesting that what we typically describe as media (newspaper, TV)... isn't media, but rather a vehicle within media (and suggest only three types of media exist: interpersonal, mass, and new). What is 'New Media'?: "There is a saying about Einstein's Theory of Relativity: that what makes it difficult for some people to comprehend is its simplicity. That you don't need to acquire more information to understand it, but that you must instead discard preconceived notions that block your understand. There is a similar saying about Quantum Theory.
Understanding the New Medium is like that, too.
To understand the New Medium, discard the colloquial meanings of medium and media. Don't confuse a Medium for its Vehicles. What most people today think are media are actually vehicles within a medium."
Well, it appears that I have written a book. It's titled Knowing Knowledge, and will be available in mid-September. I posted a request for reviews on my connectivism site, and received over fifty reviewers. I'm working through the balance of comments over the next week, and will then turn over to an editor for a final review, and then on to type setting. I will make the book available in physical form, .pdfs for download, and a wiki for readers to correct my errors and faulty thinking (and assist me in writing book version 2).
I have set up a website (www.knowingknowledge.com)...so if you would like to be kept informed on progress, feel free to subscribe to the blog there...or enter your email address on the site for updates.
Words of Wisdom vs. Words From Our Sponsor: "Textbooks used in the classroom are, like the instructors themselves, extensions of a university’s autonomy and no more likely to be considered an appropriate place for corporate ads than the classroom lectern (or the instructor’s forehead)."
In-school advertising is not new. We see it in the soft drink machines in the hallway, the sports score boards, and the external school signs. Corporations know that schools are a lucrative market for creating a life of brand loyalty. Ads in textbooks (or more specifically, e-texts) are a fairly natural extension (one that doesn't sit well with me, I might add). Personally, I think tecnology is at the point where educators can form according to disciplines, create a wiki, write it with other colleagues, publish in a physical text with lulu.com, and gain control over their own content (and in the process, earn a few extra dollars :)). Visioin, not technology is our limiting factor.
Our realities are blurring - online is physical is online. Even new media turns to old media. MySpace may be bound for the newsstands
Common sense, as many have noted, is defined by actually not being too common. No Suit Required : "To all appearances, Nettwerk is just a midsize music management company with an indie record label on the side. Many of the artists on its client roster – which includes Avril Lavigne, Dido, Sarah McLachlan, and Stereophonics – are mainstream acts. But McBride, the company's cofounder and creative force, is quietly carrying out a plan to reinvent the music industry, including legalizing file-sharing and giving artists control over their own intellectual property."
The music industry and mainstream media have been dealing with the new climate end-user control for over five years. Some are starting to wake up to a new reality - and if you can't defeat the "enemy" (in this case, the customer)...partner with them. I still maintain that this is a reality that education will be facing shortly - we need to learn from the lessons of other fields with much more experience in dealing with distributed, decentralized, end-user-in-control models.
Wow - just what I've always wanted. I can now make a shirt of a "tag cloud" of elearnspace, weblogg-ed, OLDaily, connectivism, etc. What fun. Perhaps I should get my children one for the start of the new school season (hi, my dad is a loser).
Much like Stephen's Guide to Logical Fallacies, Fallacies in Computational Neuroscience attempts to explore fallacies focused on (surprise) computational nueroscience :).
It's been a while since I've posted on Web 2.0...and the medication has helped to reduce my rash whenever I say and hear that word. So, here goes: A Web 2.0 Tour for the Enterprise - this is a good article that stays away from the plethora of tech terms, and presents a useful, commonsense overview of what web 2.0 means to organizations...
Jay Cross on language: How about an order of slimehead?: "Slimehead is more palatable if you call it orange roughie, Chinese gooseberries better if you say kiwifruit. Same fish, same fruit, new labels.
It’s time for us to come up with a vocabulary that’s not an obstacle to installing learning technology."
A critical concept (we haven't structured ourselves to be most effective with knowledge and knowledge tools) Tool-and-Die Makers in a Knowledge Economy: "In knowledge-work organizations, technology and tools have proliferated, seeking similar gains in productivity for knowledge work. What those organizations don't yet have is the knowledge-work equivalent of tool-and-die makers. They have not made the necessary organizational innovations to realize the productivity potential of new technology and tools."
A great chart for how things are changing in our use of information, how we communicate, get news, intellectual freedom, etc. Meme: “You’d better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone, For the times they are a changin’”
Assumptions have a sell by date: "We can't expect to innovate new products, services, techniques, etc. without challenging our assumptions. Have some of your assumptions "gone off"? How frequently are you checking?"
This is a basic problem with not just assumptions, but knowledge (I guess it could be argued that these concepts are tightly related anyway). We need to know when knowledge "updates". We have built our approaches based on a relationship with knowledge sources that ends once we have acquired needed knowledge. We don't "tie-back" to original sources very well...largely becasue we haven't had to in the past.
A valuable lesson of the importance of thinking about our thinking (and beliefs) - Bad Assumptions: "The importance of identifying and testing the assumptions that determine how organizations and technologies are designed sounds so obvious – yet we’ve learned that, when we don’t press managers, consultants, and researchers (including ourselves) to take a hard look at their deeply held beliefs about what they are doing and why, they will unwittingly do horrible – or at least very expensive – things over and over."
Networks are the structure of tomorrow. Schools, businesses, and non-profits need to be thinking about ways to make their organization "network-reflective". How work gets done, how decisions are made, how we recruit, how we compete...these are all more effective in a network model that traditional top-down command/control. Robert Cross expresses this view: "In an era of globalization, proliferating technology, and the specialization of knowledge-based work, accomplishments of any substance require more than streamlined processes; they require people to work together in ways that aren't fully captured on formal organizational charts or standardized processes and procedures. Important outcomes - revenues, patent approvals, cycle time reduction, client retention - are associated with certain network characteristics."
David Weinberger suggests that one of the factors leading to credibility for wikipedia is its explicit claim (in the form of warning tags at the start of articles) that an article may not be neutral, authoritative, or even accurate: "There's one more sign of credibility of a Wikipedia page: If it contains a warning about the reliability of the page, we'll trust it more. This is only superficially contradictory."
I'm not completely convinced that the warning label is as valuable as David states (if you approach me and say, "George, what are your views about quantum mechanics" and I prefaced my lecture with, "I don't know anything, but here goes", I can't see that contributing substantially to the knowledge space). To a degree, we should approach everything we encounter online/textbook/newscast with a critical eye. Wikipedia is essentially encouraging "critical thinking". To have someone do our critical thinking for us (i.e. "this article may not be neutral"), doesn't allow learners to build those skills themselves. I must admit, however, that the first several times I encountered the tag on a wikipedia article, it was arresting...but not as a means of assigning credibility...more of a novelty.
On a related note, I found much humor in Dave Snowden's experience with wikipedia: "Minutes later my changes were amended and Clint informed me that I was wrong about Snowden and had obviously either not read his work, or had failed to understand it."
Microsoft just released a new tool: Live Writer.: " Blogging has turned the web into a two-way communications medium. Our goal in creating Writer is to help make blogging more powerful, intuitive, and fun for everyone." (they even include a "digg this" link at the bottom of the page).
I've played with it a bit - it enables individuals to publish to a variety of blogging platforms without having to login and use their interface. The spell check is nice (though it doesn't recognize the word "blogging" - explain that for a blogging tool?!?). I haven't tried the image feature yet...Overall, not a bad first attempt (I'll continue playing with it for a while), though not everyone is impressed.
Dave Pollard provides a quick overview of social network tools (listing eight broad areas of functionality...and exploring various successful tools): Social Networking: Still Not Meeting its Critical Promise. Most of what we call "social network tools" will eventually just be features of existing tools. In very limited ways, this is starting with MS Outlook (and other email/communication tools) - the notification that someone is online, the link to names in address books, etc. are first run attempts at making social networking a part of work...not an activity separate from work.
Michael Feldstein will not be winning an "educator of the year" award from Blackboard. He has been one of the most constant sources of information in Blackboard's patent for all-things-LMS. He recently posts on Desire2Learn's altruistic behaviour in fighting the patent: Why Desire2Learn CEO John Baker is Our Hero. Personally, I'm not convinced D2L is doing it out of altruistic reasons...but it does appear to be a side effect of their willingness to challenge Blackboard's boorish behaviour (that is officially my first use of "boorish" in five years fo blogging :)).
Denham sent me a link to this wonderful resource: Complex Problem Solving. It's quite possible that I lack a life, but I could spend several hours exploring links and connections.
Reexamining Hebbian Learning: "One of the fundamental ways that neurons compute is thought to be a form of learning called Hebbian learning, in which cells that "fire together, wire together." Other learning mechanisms, such as back-propagation, have proven useful in neural network simulations, but are often considered less biologically-plausible (although the evidence for some form of error-driven learning is accumulating)."
I have great respect for Ben Werdmuller and David Tosh. They are doing with Elgg what many of us are talking about in theory...giving a "proof of concept" to my work with connectivism and Stephen's work with connective knowledge. In my view, the future of learning looks much more like elgg than it does like Blackboard (though they have taken the safe (intelligent) approach and sought integration with tools like webct)
Two recent announcements of their activities: elgg spaces ("you get your own social networking system for learning with blogs, podcasting, fine-grained access controls, and everything you've come to expect from one of the world's fastest growing open source e-learning products - instantly") and Ben's book project: The internet is people. Great stuff.
Moving Student Blogging Beyond the Classroom: Another Look: "Unlike George Siemens who wearies of the same old conversation in spite of understanding why it must be so, I quite enjoy both conversations, and find them equally important--the long-view-changing-educational-spaces talk he embraces, and the local-work-where-people-are-at-with-these-tools-to help-them-along talk of others. Both are crucial, and not everyone need do both. "
I appreciate this perspective from Barbara. The practical work of social, technologies in classrooms will require saying the same things over and over and over again. I certainly value the work that many others are doing in developing the conversation to a sufficient crescendo to be acknowledge by policy and decision makers.
Lovaglia’s Law: "The more important the outcome of a decision, the more people will resist using evidence to make it."
This article is late to the conversation...and for regular readers here, will not really present anything new: How Web technologies are shaping education : "Teachers are starting to explore the potential of blogs, media-sharing services and other social software - which, although not designed specifically for e-learning, can be used to empower students and create exciting new learning opportunities."
...but I imagine articles of this nature - that reach beyond our edublogger community - are important for mainstreaming these ideas. In an arrogant, self-serving way, I must say that after a few years of reading/writing about these ideas, I've lost some of the magic and power inherent in these new tools. I know many educators are just now beginning to experience blogs, RSS, wikis, flickr, etc. I am finding that my interest is far less in the tools themselves...and much more in how we need to change the spaces and structures of education (even society) to permit knowledge to flow. We can only add new tools for so long...before something in the system must change. I hope we get there soon.
Learning Styles Instructional-Design Challenge: "I will give $1000 (US dollars) to the first person or group who can prove that taking learning styles into account in designing instruction can produce meaningful learning benefits."
I had a fairly long (and enjoyable, I might add) discussion/interview with Stephen Downes...partly related to his article on connective knowledge, and partly all over the place (as my conversations with Stephen tend to be). I've uploaded the audio file from our conversation (68 mb - it may take a while to download). We started by discussing the need for a new epistemology...explored artificial intelligence, democracy, wikipedia, new models of societal organization, knowledge as a product/process, the nature of learning today, neuroscientific view of cognition, and other light breezy subjects :).
Knowledge and knowing: "Knowledge as possession and knowledge as being, is one of those fundamental polarities in KM"
I love this statemetn: "Strong opinions, weakly held". A must for how quickly knowledge flows today.
No one knows what they're doing: "You can stop pretending you know what you're doing. I know you're making everything up as you go (hoping nobody notices). It's OK though - that's not where your problems are coming from. Rather, your problems are coming from the fact that you think other people know what they're doing...Relax into your ignorance. Open up. Experiment."
Stephen has been busy with presentations and postings. Here are a few:
Why the need for new tools - broad exploration of new tools for learning, as well as the changes in views of learning that accompany (drive) these tools.
ICT in Education in Columbia (I was surprised at the low number of organizations that have an ICT policy...though I imagine in North America, we have about the same number that don't have a teaching/learning policy regarding technology).
Learning Objects: Their Use, Their Potential, and Why They Are Not Dead Yet - I haven't thought about learning objects at length for quite a while (as a concept, it has fallen of a cliff in educational discussions). So much of our learning emphasis is now on dialogue and socialization. The critical role of context and our inability to fully define (or if we could define, we couldn't actually use or find it because the context is so limited - as noted in the presentation "the learning is not in the object, but in the use of the object") a resource makes learning objects appear challenging to store and reuse.
Blackboard has received a patent for, well...everything to do with LMS'.
Scott Leslie comments
Stephen Downes posts extensively...including his own work which pre-dates Blackboard
Others have also commented here and slashdot.
Dave Cromier announces a weekend edtechtalk on the subject.
Technorati is a great place to follow the running conversation.
In related news, Jay Cross is threatening to patent learning.
I think it's a break with end-user confidence. Knowledge as an entity has changed. Some organizations don't seem to understand that, and continue to function as if they can bully competitors and end users (even Microsoft has seen the light and made changes). On the one hand we have 25 provosts supporting open access...on the other, Blackboard attempting to lay claim to a concept as diverse as a learning management system. (why do patents always arise once a concept is deeply ingrained in the actions of many?). I'm not against the notion of patents. I personally would like to hear from Blackboard on why they took the approach they did (beyond "we invested heavily, so we want to protect ourselves). I've been critical of LMS' in the past...but I can't imagine that Blackboard took this step without being aware of the consequences. In the end, my question is - has Bb decided that those who use their tools will be okay with the patents, and those who advocate for open source or other tools don't matter (i.e. their not our customers now, so let those who feel entitled to open spaces whine)? The internet has given us community. Blackboard is part of our educational technology community. Their actions do cause ripples for all of us. Our industry is too young for infighting...we have much growing to do. I don't want to jump on the Bb is evil bandwagon - I would love to hear their rationale.
What's the impact? I can't say I'm really worried. I have moved away from LMS' to a certain degree. In a perfect world, I would get a chunk of funding and create a tool that is much less like an LMS...and much more like a social network/portfolio/blog/wiki /tagging/user-generated/search tool (some call them personal learning environments). What we really need are new tools that do new things. Not tools that duplicate the classroom experience. Blackboard is, before this patent was awarded, not the future (at least based on its current tool-offerings). Bb (well, any LMS that structures content in "courses") sees knowledge as a product, not process. We need tools that enable us to navigate a river of knowledge...not a reservoir.
Defining the Knowledge Economy: “In broad terms, we know that the knowledge economy is what you get when organisations bring together powerful computers and well-educated minds to create wealth. And we also know that this combination is a new thing in the history of the world: firms in the knowledge economy compete on their ability to exploit scientific, technical and creative knowledge bases and networks.
“The difficulty is coming up with a measurable definition that allows the hype to be tested against hard facts. Around the world, governments talk about the future belonging to ‘knowledge-based industries’ and ‘knowledge workers’ without bothering to question which firms and individuals are in and which are out of these categories...If, as virtually every serious economic commentator believes, the productivity of knowledge-based work is critically important to our future, then it is essential to try and measure knowledge accurately and logically. The slovenly thinking about what constitutes ‘knowledge work’ needs to be challenged.”
The article links to a 31 page .pdf report covering the state of the knowledge economy. I have some concerns with ongoing attempts to define things. Definitions are valuable in that they provide a shared understanding of elements. They are difficult when applied to fast moving targets. By the time we've agreed on a definition, the entity has changed. This notion is particularly challenging (as the report does acknowledge in the conclusion) in subject areas as broad as "knowledge". It's difficult (if not impossible) to define knowledge. We can define a certain type of knowledge at a certain level...by exploring the context. The more broadly we attempt to define knowledge, the less valuable clear/concise definitions will apply. In the end, it becomes a context-game (sorry to Wittgenstein). Our real challenge today is not to define knowledge specifically, but to spend our efforts in context-games as we seek to explore and identify key elements of the context that impact a particular knowledge interaction. We can know context (though we may not always know the nature of knowledge until we consider it in the form of history).
Good article exploring expertise as innate or acquired...and the heavy emphasis on accessing long-term memory in to meet current challenges (i.e. pattern recognition, or replacing current problems with known/solved problems in the past - "thinking the term memory", which is typically viewed only as a storage location, not an area of cognition. ): The Expert Mind: "Thus, motivation appears to be a more important factor than innate ability in the development of expertise."