Growing concerns about how safe our children are online are increasingly reflected in discussion, policies, and politics. Last week, during a parent-teacher meeting, we received a booklet on "safety online" for young children, signs that the conversation has moved from hype/panic, to some more practical steps and directions. I don't view online safety to be any different than safety in any other aspect of life. All things are potentially dangerous - a trampoline, a pool, a baseball bat. The key challenge we face is in teaching children how to participate safely in any activity. I was skimming a report - Safer Children in a Digital World (.pdf) and came across this practical statement: "Children and young people need to be empowered to keep themselves safe – this isn’t just about a top-down approach. Children will be children – pushing boundaries and taking risks. At a public swimming pool we have gates, put up signs, have lifeguards and shallow ends, but we also teach children how to swim."
A few months ago, after seeing his Disruptive Mobile Learning presentation on slideshare, I asked Mike Sharples if he would be willing to deliver a similar presentation online. He agreed, so I'm pleased to announce that University of Manitoba's Learning Technology Centre has organized his presentation for April 2, 9:00 am CST (GMT-6). If you would like to attend, please send me an email: gsiemens AT elearnspace DOT org.
Failure is a valuable experience. We learn more when things don't go right than we learn when everything goes as planned. Unfortunately, the concept of failure has negative connotations. We find it less than desirable and strive to avoid it, sometimes to the point of paralysis. And thereby miss the opportunities to learn. What has been your most valuable recent failure?
Jim McGee has an interesting post on the designing with failure in mind: "Human systems are interesting and effective because they are resilient. Good designers allow for the reality of human strengths and weaknesses and factor both into their designs. Too many poor or lazy designers ignore or gloss over failure modes. How many project plans have you seen, for example, that assume no one on the project team will ever be out sick?"
I delivered a presentation today to the Canadian Defense Academy titled "When information and interaction change". Slides are here...audio of the session is available here. My main emphasis in the presentation was to explore how the different manner in which we access/use/create information, and the different manner in which we interact with others, defines and shapes our institutions and approaches to learning. As such, changes in information and interaction should impact design of learning and teaching.
Why Everything in Medicine Is Connected: "But social networking is about more than just friends reunited; it's a framework for understanding even the most basic of biological processes...In its simplest form, network analysis can map ties between entities (whether elephants, humans, or genes). The same principles that allowed researchers to characterize the role of matriarchs in the social organization of the endangered African elephant species also illuminated the collective dynamics fueling individual donations to the 2004 tsunami relief fund, and provided the techniques to model the gene network that controls T cell activation in humans."
The term network is no longer broad enough to encompass its multiple uses. The article listed above describes networks within medicine according to structural patterns of organization. It works well in that instance. But in discussion of networked learning, things become a bit less certain. Does learning in networks refer to the web? Social ties? The neural activity going on in our neocortex? Obviously it refers to all of these concepts...and that is exactly the problem. When a field first emerges, one word describes it all. As the field specializes, more nuanced terms need to arise to provide more descriptive views of concepts. In the end, it'll still all be about networks, but our language of networks needs to be more precise.
What a lovely day. We have (yet) another 2.0 term: Conference 2.0. When we were working on our conference article for EDUCAUSE, I had one driving desire (well, I had several, primary of which was to actually finish the article): under no circumstances would we pick low-hanging fruit to title the article - such as conference 2.0. Fortunately, Teddy (editor) equally suffered from "2.0 fatigue".
From the article: ""People now have a voice, enabled by technology, to participate and be heard, and they're going to use it," Heuer said. "This has only just begun. It's only the first inkling of how people are going to seize the power from institutions. People in power need to find ways to get the audience to participate.""
Just read an article on The Authentic Enterprise (.pdf). Ignoring for a moment that the term "authentic" is no longer very authentic and is therefore largely meaningless, the report presents an interesting perspective on how participatory web tools have shifted the role of corporate communications. The ability for a PR department to craft, control, and segment messages is now minimal due to web. While it's not a revolutionary statement, the report makes the admission of the current state of information flow: "We are not in control". Like any individual in need of help/therapy, accurately appraising one's predicament is important to healing :). I wonder how many educational institutions have a similar understanding - i.e. that we no longer control information creation, flow, dissemination, validation, etc.
In case you were not aware, I will provide you with an important insight: there is a lot of information out there. And it's growing. Faster. It is difficult to get a clear grasp of the amount of information currently in existence. Previous reports (such as How Much Information? - 2003) are rather outdated. IDC offered a report in 2007 on information growth, and now provides 2008 edition (.pdf): "In this companion to last year's EMC-sponsored white paper, IDC again calibrates the size (bigger than first thought) and the growth (faster than expected) of the digital universe through 2011". The main website also allows people to calculate their digital footprint.
The field of informatics (i.e. study of information) is not very developed. We are all impacted by information growth and development - in fact this is one of the areas that most impacts us - and yet we have at best a rudimentary understanding of the nature of information. Sure, we have people telling us information is exploding...that it's overwhelming...and so on. But that's a bit like saying the patient has a fever. I'd like to know more. I'm surprised at how little we actually understand of information itself, especially when considering the tremendous impact on our lives.
Elliot Masie interviews CEOs from numerous learning systems corporation (the term "management" appears to be missing). The interviews provide insight into how corporate leaders see learning unfolding. I was surprised at how much of the dialogue was related to conversations we've had online for years: changing content, increased participation of learners, skill sets of younger learners, aging workforce, etc.
Terry Anderson has posted information on a Pan Canadian Research Agenda. It's an important document in order to reclaim the ground Canada has lost to other countries in elearning. We're trying to arrange a focus group to discuss options. We/I had hoped Canadian Council on Learning would be interested in being involved but have been unable to make a connection. If anyone has insight into the workings of CCL, let us know :).
I didn't understand Twitter at first. It seemed, at best, to be a colossal waste of time. I already had several blogs, social networking profiles, flickr account, etc. What more did I need? And, why in the world do I need to tell people "what I'm doing now" in 140 characters? Since I created my account, I would periodically post "I'm in the airport", or "going for lunch". All very trivial. And I saw no point to it. But...then I started experiencing Twitter less as a broadcast tool with intermittent interaction (the way I largely see blogs), and more as a living network. For example, I'm in San Antonio, and I post on Twitter that my presentation - Rethinking Curriculum, Knowledge, and Learning - is available on Slideshare. Within five minutes, over 50 people had started viewing the slides. Hmm. The speed of information sharing, and the growing awareness of what key learning nodes in my network are up to (thinking, doing, feeling), changed my perspective. Last week, I posted a request with regard to Second Life. Within about two minutes, Jennifer Jones put me in touch with the very helpful Fleep, and...problem is solved. I had to overcome my blog perspective in order to see the affordances of Twitter. Twitter is a conversation, not a monologue.
So, I'm suddenly a Twitter fan (you can find me here).
A few Twitter resources to explore:
How Twitter makes it real: "I feel that I have a foretaste of what tomorrow's network world will bring, when the boundaries have dissolved completely and we can experience the network directly"
More Twitter Types...and Twitter etiquette.
So it only costs about 6K to register for the TED conference. But the event gives much back for free - like the oft cited TED Talks. Well, here's a new approach to conference summaries: visualization of the presentations in TED 2008 BigViz (.pdf). See also the support page with video, etc. An innovative approach to summarizing conference proceedings in, what they call, "idea maps".
Some neat videos/images/discussion on the history of learning technologies and the internet:
Scanned images of a 1962 text on how technology might influence learning
Newsweek in 1995: The Internet? Bah!: "Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.
Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works."
Early videos on the internet - wow, 35-40 million people online? 14.4 baud modem? Awesome!
It's interesting to look back even a decade and see what has developed. And to note that naysayers have long existed.
Memory is fallible. We all know that. Conversations with friends/family often yield dramatically different results. And yet, somehow, we still manage to communicate. PsyBlog has compiled a list of memory related sins. A great overview of memory-related concerns for educators (though a part of me questions if memory still has the critical role in information sharing that it once did, due largely to the rise of the web, search engines, and social networks). Articles discuss long-term memory, deep processing, misattributions of source and context, bias, and persistence.
Technology Review provides its list of emerging technologies. Many are outside of my scope of interest - i.e. hard to define use for in academic roles. A few do stick out, however:
modeling surprise - anything seeking to make sense of massive quantities of data through the integration of principles of psychology is potentially valuable educationally.
Connectomics
- the attempt to model our neural networks
- Reality mining - collecting data from mobile phones in order to observe human behaviour.
I'm a bit behind in listening to Stephen Downes' presentations - here are a few recent sessions:
Learning 2050 (audio) - good discussion of the importance of everyone contributing to the creative act...and how learning is the aggregation of the creative activities of others. Jeff Utecht also emphasizes the importance of not just consuming content but actively producing it.
...and Personal Learning
I've posted before on the unfortunately narrow view some (Latin for "most") educators have of peer review (and the accompanying angst of non-traditional peer review). While expert, blind peer review will obviously continue to be a primary mode of assessing ideas and research, informal and developmental review can be achieved through social web tools. The Wired Campus has a short article on a professor experimenting with blogs as a formative peer review process.
Great resource, providing a sampling of how much learning material is available for informal and formal learning: More than 100 Free Places to Learn Online - and Counting
Techchrunch linked to this interesting innovation on speaking without voice. My first reaction - that can't be real. But, it comes from a fairly reputable source, we're a few weeks away from April 1, so I conclude it must be true. Basically, we don't need to audibly speak to broadcast our voice. Our thoughts being vocalized without vocal cords - it's thought controlled (watch the short video to see how it works). Given the nature of some of my thoughts during meetings, I don't think it's an innovation I'd like to adopt :).
Conferences are changing rapidly...a few years ago I was struggling to get wireless access at a conference, and now Twitter, Second Life, blogs, wikis, and podcasts abound. The keynote is not king. Royalty is found - as seen by cult-like conferences such as Northern Voice - in the connections formed with colleagues and friends. Peter Tittenberger, Terry Anderson, and I recently published an article with EDUCAUSE on the theme of changing conferences: Conference Connections: Rewiring the Circuit
I'm somewhat torn on this: The year the audience keynoted. Background: while interviewing Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Sarah Lacey didn't ask the questions audience members found interesting. As such, they essentially took over the interview. Much of the criticism is directed at Sarah, which I think is unfair. It takes effort (courage??) to get in front of a large group of people and conduct an interview. To chastise her for "not doing a good job" seems unfair. It's easy to have off days - I have many presentations I would like to go back and do again. The real issue here is that conference organizers failed to acknowledge the talent and interest of the audience. The problem resides with organizers, not the interviewer. Unfortunately this is being cast as a "mob rule" situation, which is only partly true. It's really about failed expectations.
Great resource - 19.20.21 - on how society has changed and will continue to change in urbanization. And note where the majority of the big cities will be located...
Nothing too new in this article - Learning Long Distance. But I link to it not because of what it says (i.e. distance and online education are growing), but rather due to who is saying it. Considering the source (University Affairs), it represents a growing understanding of the value of online learning by traditional institutions. Of personal interest, the concluding quote in the article - "Distance education is leading the way...in the transformation of how people teach and how people learn at the university level in advanced economies” - is the key concept as far as I'm concerned. A first generation view of learning technology is often focused on how it helps the student/employee gain access to learning opportunities. The second generation view needs to be focused on how learning technology changes the institution itself.
(via Downes)
Times of transition create mixed messages: User-generated? Expert-reviewed? Open source? Proprietary? While we have been partly taught to think of developments and innovations in light of VHS/Beta-Max or presidential campaigns (i.e. clear winner, clear loser), in the development of wikipedia or open source software, I think this is a false conflict. But the winner/loser thinking still prevails, as exhibited by a recent article, Revenge of the Experts : "In short, the expert is back. The revival comes amid mounting demand for a more reliable, bankable Web. "People are beginning to recognize that the world is too dangerous a place for faulty information"".
...and in a slightly related vein:
The Battle for Wikipedia's Soul: "But Wikipedia is facing an identity crisis as it is torn between two alternative futures. It can either strive to encompass every aspect of human knowledge, no matter how trivial; or it can adopt a more stringent editorial policy and ban articles on trivial subjects, in the hope that this will enhance its reputation as a trustworthy and credible reference source. These two conflicting visions are at the heart of a bitter struggle inside Wikipedia between “inclusionists”, who believe that applying strict editorial criteria will dampen contributors' enthusiasm for the project, and “deletionists” who argue that Wikipedia should be more cautious and selective about its entries."
Alec Couros has been modeling a method of instructing online that others should consider. Visit his site for the course - Computers in Classrooms. He has a list of sessions by invited speakers (a useful archive for future courses and profs from other institutions), tech/learning/education videos, tutorials, etc. He has been streaming the elluminate presentations in ustream, so non-class members can attend the lectures. My only suggestion: record the elluminate sessions with camtasia (for higher quality archives) and export to audio files for people who prefer to listen to podcasts instead of watching a screen. A great example of how to use technology to increase the effectiveness of student learning and to knock a few holes in the rigid concept of "a classroom".
Hmm...some interesting thoughts on expertise...it's not just time, but deliberateness of practice that creates experts. The science of experience: "Experts tend to be good at their particular talent, but when something unpredictable happens — something that changes the rules of the game they usually play — they're little better than the rest of us...Ericsson's primary finding is that rather than mere experience or even raw talent, it is dedicated, slogging, generally solitary exertion — repeatedly practicing the most difficult physical tasks for an athlete, repeatedly performing new and highly intricate computations for a mathematician — that leads to first-rate performance. And it should never get easier; if it does, you are coasting, not improving. Ericsson calls this exertion "deliberate practice," by which he means the kind of practice we hate, the kind that leads to failure and hair-pulling and fist-pounding."
I've been having an ongoing discussion with a colleague on "what has really changed". so much of what we do today has its roots in what was done "yesterday". For example, how are links on the web different from citations in journal articles? Or how is our manner of collaboration today different from collaboration in guilds in Europe? My argument against "it's just the same" is somewhat anemic still, but generally centers on: technology has enabled new affordances of interaction with others, the pace of information growth and flow, and the scope/scale of conversations. While we today may be learning in a similar manner to what was done even a generation ago, the point of departure will become greater as time goes on. The impact of Descartes and Luther, for example, was not felt in their own generation. They marked a departure, but the full implications still ripple today. Similarly, social technologies for creating and sharing information, making sense of our world, and creating small-scale global networks don't seem to be a significant departure from 20 years ago. But talk to me in a few decades :). Anyway, this post (via John Connell) provides an indication of the similarity of previous methods, but the point of departure already reveals a different tomorrow: Social media in the 90's
I started playing around with Microsoft Live Workspace yesterday. It has the typical clunky feel of a Microsoft offering, but has promise. A detailed review comparing Google Docs and Microsoft Live Workspace is available here. In a recent presentation, I was talking about using RSS to manage content flow...and setting up Google Reader. I received blank stares. So I asked, "who has Outlook 2007". Many hands go up. Well, there is the audience that will find value in getting RSS feeds directly into Microsoft Outlook. With growing sense of information weariness that I encounter with faculty, any tool that has additional functionality, but doesn't require developing new habits (such as checking Google Reader), is immediately more desirable.
Do we still need courses? I mean, we have the tools and processes available to learn in alternative (distributed) means. And yet, we still push new learning opportunities through the course model. I've been reflecting on this recently, and put together a short presentation on A World without Courses. The function of education - in serving its stakeholders and in how it creates value - can be duplicated in a distributed manner. We're still missing the final piece of accreditation (though we're making progress on that) and we're missing the piece on how we will tie these pieces together. But, I imagine that will be on the horizon shortly. (with tying together, I don't mean tying content together - we can do that with RSS, PageFlakes, etc. I mean a conceptual tying together so we can say, "yes, Susan has achieved those learning targets"). Treat it as a conversation starter, not a declaration of belief. Appreciate any thoughts/feedback.
Words are a pain. Especially when they obscure underlying concepts of value. Take Personal Learning Environments (PLE) or Networks as an example. When PLEs were first advocated by a group of edubloggers, the concept was largely in reaction to learning management systems (LMS). A concept, after all, is defined by the context in which it originates and how it is related to other terms. PLEs in this case, were a push against the structure and lack of learner control evident with an LMS. That has changed. Many people now have personal experience with blogs, podcasts, Facebook, wikis, etec. The concept of a PLE is less abstract; and as a result, more critical discourse occurs. Chris Lott expresses his frustration with the tools, concepts, and misunderstanding of PLEs (can we apply the notion of nominalism to PLEs?)
Tired of PLE Flak: "The majority of educators have no idea what resources are available to them and never leave their email client or their default MSN page. Thus, I have found it useful to sit people down and model for them the tools and techniques for networking. This often includes holding them by the hand while they sign up to follow and participate in particular groups and networks. Many people have absolutely no idea that their network can extend beyond their email box and their passive browsing."
I'm not interested in the PLE: "All a PLE is, to my way of understanding, is a particular, personal selection of tools, contacts, and methods. Many of us are still at a stage in our evolution that we can learn much from knowing what tools others use, how they use them, and who they make contact with."
A few weeks ago, I posted on second-tier information (information that we create indirectly through our actions, such as clicking a link. First tier information would consist of more intentional activities such as writing a blog post or creating a podcast). Second tier information has significant value, especially when we have access to what our friends and peers are doing. Consider Amazon's referral system: "people who bought this also...". Facebook has raised the awareness of the value of information in personal networks, such as the addition of a new application or new friend. By making second tier information explicit, we are able to benefit from it as we make our own choices, or perhaps more critically, as we try and make sense of a rather overwhelming abundance of information. Applying second tier information to how we manage and make sense of our world (and thereby cope with abundance, stay current, filter information, etc.) results in a network-model of learning. The concept is discussed here - People who read this article also read... - from the perspective of reading news online. In an educational sense, it would be useful to have a referral system that allowed similar evaluation, i.e. people who watched this video on chemistry also liked this article or blog.
I spend a fair bit of time talking to educators about how to use technology for learning. Courses, workshops, consultations, etc. In the end, impact is uncertain. Did they use the tool? Was it successful? Did it help students learn? Ah, the internal angst of determining the value of ones contribution to others. With a mild sense of simmering dissatisfaction of how educators adopt and use technology, I found this concept worthwhile to explore: Viral professional development here and here..."I call my strategy, “Viral Professional Development,” or “VPD,” because it is based on the popular definition of “viral,” that refers to a technology, tool, or teaching strategy that is quickly spread from one person to another."
Networks seem intuitive (as Dave Cormier indicates in his opening of rhizomatic knowledge). When we say suitably vague and ambiguous things like "personal learning networks" or "networks of influence" the terms seem to make sense. For many people, however, the discourse on networks is not a key consideration. Instead, they want the outcome - the benefits - of networks. They have limited interest in power laws, hubs, small worlds, etc. Optimally structured networks, in the eyes of more practically minded people, are ones that yield personal results. To that end, I found this article - Building a web of influence - useful in providing the practical overview of networks. Implementation rather than theoretical.
I've spent a bit of time looking at a new service (in beta, I'm guessing) offered by the Boys of Elgg. It combines the profile/social networking opportunities of Facebook, with the channels option of Jaiku, and the intent of Twitter: ElggVoices. While the site has a few bugs (periodic log outs, took me a while to figure out how to post a "shout out", etc.) I like the clean interface and ability to create networks (once the channel feature is available), which would be ideal for keeping in touch with students in a particular class. The mobile phone integration looks useful as well. While I suspect a few people may be a bit reticent at first in relying on the service due to how the EduSpaces shutdown (i.e. lack of communication with members) was handled, I can see it becoming a useful educational tool.