Mid-June, Michael Wesch presented at University of Manitoba. The recording of his presentation is now available.
BC Campus and Common Wealth of Learning are offering a free download of their book Education for a digital world (the book can also be purchased).
The book covers significant topics, including: impact of instructional technology, implementing technology, preparing online courses, e-learning in action, and engagement and communication.
Alec Couros has posted a paper - Open, Connected, Social - Implications for Educational Design - for an upcoming conference based on his successful (and distributed) online course. He's onto something important (and as I acknowledge here, has served to inspire some of my thinking for our upcoming connectivism course). Alec explains his philosophy, methods of assessment, tools, acknowledges the challenges of managing the distributed conversation, and provides student reaction.
Writing in the Digital Age: "In the conversation over distributed learning environments, it is important to begin by recognizing that the question is not IF our learning environments can be or should be distributed but rather HOW...Students’ learning experiences are shaped by these distributed networks, and our pedagogies circulate through these networks. This may seem self-evident, but our discourse on emerging technologies in teaching regularly makes the error of situating the choice between a new “distributed” environment and an existing cohesive one (and in the case of face-to-face teaching, even an imagined “immediate” environment)."
The author makes a point I've been whining about for awhile: traditional classrooms "pre-make" too many of the connections for learners. Learners, in my own humble opinion, do not need their connections fully pre-formed. A bit of stress, a bit of ambiguity, and a bit of confusion are healthy contributors to learning. As long as we have a feedback loop where learners can contribute and faculty can respond and adapt, we have the basics in place.
Connections are the starting point of all learning. It's so obvious...and therefore so often overlooked. We really need to think about types of connections learners have with each other and content...and ways that we can extend the learning experience by critically analyzing and forming those initial connections.
Google announced a new mobile operating system and development platform called Android in late 2007. Wired provides a fairly coherent overview of Android, its development and its future potential. The mobile world is huge - far exceeding PC/Mac numbers worldwide. Apple's iPhone has raised the profile of smartphones significantly. Overall, innovation in this space has been lacking. Google has now opened innovation to "network effects", allowing others to assist in innovation, while simultaneously strengthening Google's position in mobiles (sounds a bit like Windows in the 90's). The biggest payoff for Google: if people are online, regardless of devices, they are searching. And if people search, Google sells ads.
Wired has an interesting online resource detailing massive changes in data - The Petabyte Age. A broad range of topics are reviewed that reflect how massive data abundance creates new challenges and opportunities. Included: data visualization, tracking airline fares, commodity prices, tension/conflict, etc. The articles are unfortunately placed under a grand theme titled: The end of theory which makes the bold Google-love-in proclamation based on correlations revealed in data exploration: "Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all. There's no reason to cling to our old ways. It's time to ask: What can science learn from Google?"
Um, yeah, ok. Google is all about science, innovation, and exploration. Simply being able to do different things with data does not eliminate the need for rigor, research, etc. Doing things with data - at any level - is founded in some type of theory. As stated here: "Correlations are a way of catching a scientist's attention, but the models and mechanisms that explain them are how we make the predictions that not only advance science, but generate practical applications."
Learning 2.008 in Shanghai is one of the more interesting conferences I'll be attending this year. Eight keynotes (if that's the right word) have been invited, but from the proposed layout of the conference, I think keynotes will take a back seat to conversations with attendees (which is exactly how it should be). I've been requested to present/attend a series of 8 presentations/workshops/conversations. The opening night will have all keynotes deliver a short (7-minute) TedTalks style presentation to get people motivated. Learning 2.008 breaks up conference routine and pushes conversation from the podium to the conference floor. If you're interested, a short podcast about the conference is here.
I suspect most educators have heard of brain-based learning (I read a particularly dismissive article on the subject recently where the author questioned what the alternatives are: Liver-based learning? Is that like butt-based sitting? Oops, off topic). Brain-based learning theories are often accepted without critical reflection. For some reason, however, perfectly normal, sane human beings accept all kinds of statements when prefaced by "neurospeak", as detailed in the Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations (.pdf). When we hear certain ideas expressed in non-neurospeak language, we are often quite good add evaluating bad information. When similar information is presented in neurospeak, our commonsense judgment seems to fade and we accept bad information. A short video (8 min) video on Brain based education: Fad or breakthrough.
Multitasking as a concept is being called into question (well, it has been called into question for several years, but the commentary is moving mainstream). The Myth of Multitasking is the most recent article on the subject. Research on this front - like with so-called millennial learners - is still in the early stages and we'll continue to see reports both validating and denying the concept. John Medina at BrainRules offers a short discussion on the error of multitasking. I personally, will continue to enjoy my high rate of distractedness and continuous partial attention as I email, blog, search, listen to podcasts, etc. Quite simply: most things I encounter on a daily basis aren't important enough to warrant full undivided attention. When these moments arise, however, I focus and discontinue multitasking (or task switching). I wonder if the criticism of multitasking isn't partly misplaced...i.e. perhaps we just have much more noise in our world today (video games, TV, podcasts, blogs, youtube) and the key task is one of knowing when to experience multiple information sources and when to focus.
I'm moving into the somewhat reflective stage of summer. My thoughts over the last few months have been focused on how I deliver presentations, how I use slides, and how audience members interact with ideas put forward. About 3-4 years ago, my slides were heavily text-based. Over the last year or so, I've tried to rely more on images. But I'm not satisfied with how the ideas I'm trying to present come across. Have you ever attended a presentation and the speaker, by her charisma/energy/passion/style, just "blew you away"? I've seen several examples recently of individuals who focus more on stories and less on explicitly defining ideas. Memorable presentations need to do more than just make us think. They need to make us want to do something/be something different. They need to draw us together with others, with "big ideas".
Anyway, as I'm trying to figure out ways to more effectively communicate, I came across this: Creating Powerful Presentations: "You gotta do what you gotta do to make the media you're using effective".
An interesting and lengthy presentation on how universities/colleges can connect with learners who are active in social technologies - Connecting with the Facebook Generation: Social Media Strategies for Web 2.0
Tony Karrer and Michele Martin have been throwing out lots of ideas on their new Work Literacy site ("Work Literacy is a network of individuals, companies and organizations who are interested in learning, defining, mentoring, teaching and consulting on the frameworks, skills, methods and tools of modern knowledge work."). A recent post - (Is scanning important: "Scanning is very important to me and occupies a fair amount of my time. I consider it essential to staying on the forefront. When I begin to work with a new client, I often set up various scanning activities for me to be in a continuous learning mode around their world."
Transforming the way to learn through dialogue and participation: "Overtime, I think universities have become more removed from society and gradually have been involved in a production of knowledge, which tends to objectify reality...I think teachers have to, almost, relearn the pedagogical approaches. Even if we think about dialogue as a conversation, we should not escape from the fact that there are many power relationships that influence the relationship between teachers and students. If teachers engage with students in conversation, unless both sides are aware of the expectations, and of the power relations experienced, it can be very difficult for that conversation to be based really on an equitable basis."
Issues of power and control are central to many changes in society and education. Wikipedia? It's about trust/authority/power. Classrooms? Power/control/authority are the defining elements. And yet, we are now at a point where no one person has the ability to see a field in its entirety. We are all seeing small fragments at best. Theoretically at least, more contributors=more diverse ways of seeing the field. The downside, of course, is that we get completely overwhelmed because we have not yet adjusted our tools and our methods for handling abundance.
In this age of personal production, it is interesting to see how different people manage their information and content. We often talk about how anyone can be a publisher - blogger, podcaster, webcaster, or whatever. But how do people manage their resources? How does a micropublisher find, filter, and share resources? One of the most prolific bloggers in the edtech domain - Stephen Downes - has put together a short presentation on how he manages OLDaily. I would like to see how other micropublishers and bloggers gather and make sense of materials they publish (such as Robin Good, Brian Lamb, D’Arcy Norman, Alec Couros, Dave Snowden, Jay Cross, Will Richardson, etc.). Bring on the sensemaking screencast series. Hey, can we have that as a meme?
A short study on social network users by age. Depending on the tool in question, significant drops occur at about 18 years for myspace and facebook users and 35ish for linkedin and flickr users. I wonder how those trends will hold up as people age...i.e. do facebook users continue to facebook as they get older? Do they switch to other platforms? Or do they stop all together?
Mark Nichols tackles a broad theme on change within education (and offers a short critique on connectivism...which is revisited in the discussion portion of the post): Solid thinking: A challengable position on learning 2.0 and the incumbent. In particular, Mark suggests we don`t need as broad a change model as some have suggested and that educational reform is best handled by including web 2.0 concepts and tools under the broad umbrella of social constructivism and some degree of centralized control and hierarchy.
Overcoming Bias is an interesting blog exploring an mix of philosophy, futurism, and obscure concepts/ideas (or is that an oxymoron when used in the same sentence as "philosophy"?). Recently, they posted on one of lawsuits around the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). LHC is a particle accelerator that a few individuals fear will cause the universe to unravel. Which would then in turn make global warming a largely moot concept. Interesting discussion follows in the Overcoming Bias post on probability theory (and when we are willing to gamble with "being wrong") as well as information validity.
I've posted slides from my presentation today to the Canadian Network for Innovation in Education. Topic: Socializing Teaching and Learning. I posted audio on my U of M blog (yes, I know, I can sync the slides on slideshare).
Anecdote has released a free whitepaper on Building a collaborative workplace: "Today we all need to be collaboration superstars. The trouble is, collaboration is a skill and set of practices we are rarely taught. It’s something we learn on the job in a hit-or-miss fashion. Some people are naturals at it, but most of us are clueless."
It's a good paper that will help get people thinking about the importance of thinking and working in collaborative modes. My only mild critique: the paper discusses three types of collaboration: team, community, network. This goes back a bit to Anderson and Dron's discussion of Collectives, Networks, and Groups (.pdf) or Stephen's discussion of groups vs. networks. I'm inclined to say that all forms of interaction are network based. Groups, collectives, teams, communities, etc. The underpinning structure is a network. As such, groups/collectives/teams are all certain types of networks. The key challenge is one of determining what type of network we require in a particular situation. How much autonomy is required? How are individual voices captured/projected/aggregated? Who has control and power?
David Wiley suggests that: "Educational reform is much like religious reform, and our openness movement and desires to innovate in higher education are much like the Reformation. When the Church was the prevailing power, it took Luther a significant amount of courage to stand up, nail a list of issues to the door, and say "Go ahead and excommunicate me. I’ve tried reforming from within with no success. You leave me no choice but to leave and try again on my own.""
I appreciate his analogy. I've found many parallels between the systemic reforms of the enlightenment, industrial era, and economics, with what we are confronted with in education. A small note of clarification, however: in most systems of reform, the first departure from the established norm is not radical. Luther, for example, was subsequently appalled at the direction the revolution took. His desire was to reform the church, not recreate it. Calvin and his followers took things in an entirely new direction. Similarly, the French revolution of the late 18th century sought to accommodate a monarchical presence. It was only subsequent thinkers and reformers that wanted to do away with the monarchy. I think this is an important consideration. First generation reformers still carry much of the ideology of the existing system into their reform activities. Subsequent thinkers, however, aren't tethered to the ideology of the system. It is here that true and significant change happens.
Stephen Downes and I will be offering an online course starting September through University of Manitoba on Connectivism and Connective Knowledge. The course is available for credit (enrollment is required) or for personal interest (no fee).
All discussions and learning resources will be freely available online. More information on how the course is run, weekly topics, etc., is available on the course wiki. If you are interested, you can sign up here in order to receive more information on participating or enrolling.
Quick update: for some reason, the above link to the wiki doesn't work for everyone. It is also available here: http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/wiki/Connectivism
I've posted this before, but was again reminded of the value of seeing the full process of content development with regard to news: The new news. Key point: while much of the initial process for gathering information (or, if you will, creating a course) is unchanged, what is most unique now is the iterative, corrective, and subsequent interaction and enhancement around the content after it has been created (again, think courses and programs if you're an educator). The quality of academic content is a function of how well it has been designed to accept feedback for improvement after initial creation. Opportunities for improvement need to be added during the initial stage of course development. Too many course/learning designers assume that a course is complete once it has been created. While that may have been the case twenty years ago, today a course is the starting point, not the end point of the design process.
Of related interest, Martin Weller has put together a short online presentation on the future of content.
Yesterday, Barry Dahl conducted a short interview with me in preparation for my upcoming presentation at Desire2Learn's conference in Memphis: Fusion 2008. The interview is available here. The conversation ranged from the social nature of learning to "connectives and collectives" for learning.
Ballmer on the future of media: "...there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form."
I enjoy broad sweeping proclamations of the future. But 10 years? Yes, the digitization of everything continues to plod forward. But the impact of those changes are hit and miss. Even now, countries in developing regions of the world are still grappling with consistent electricity access. Ballmer's prediction, while interesting, are not likely to be experienced outside of small pockets/regions.
This article - Is Google Making us Stupid - has been receiving a fair bit of attention. The author states: "My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages."
The concept of reduced attention span has drawn criticism. Mind Hacks states: "In terms of any new technology, it's obvious having tools to hand changes the strategies we use to solve problems, but so far, there is no strong evidence that Google, YouTube, Facebook or any other part of the web affects the fundamentals of how we think."
While the evidence supporting the idea that we think differently due to technology use may not exist, anecdotal seems to trump empirical for most people...
EdTechTalk provides an excellent weekly analysis of educational technology. In addition to providing discussion of various trends, they explore (and use) numerous tools educators might find valuable. This last week, they used ooVoo for video conferencing for up to six people. Looks like a useful tool.
Chris Lott takes issue with those who dismiss netgen learners: "I suspect that we will see, in retrospect, that there are biological and neurological changes occurring due to technological changes, but it’s not really important. The remonstrations about the evidence remind me of scientists concluding that bumblebees can’t fly and philosophers concluding that there is no physical reality. Like Berkeley, I refute you thus, with the students I teach every term…"
He then adds an additional (and quite interesting) metaphor of eating to support his case: "People eat very differently in times of abundance than scarcity. Their biology doesn’t significantly change (though it does some), but it would be foolish to look around and argue that people aren’t really eating differently, it’s just a change in their food context. It would be wiser to recognize that the socioeconomic context is an important factor to consider when it comes to nutrition and try to teach proper eating habits in an environment that is not just no longer one of hunting and gathering, but one that is very different for most of us from even 50 years ago."
Case Western Reserve University recently held a panel on learning 2.0. The recording is now available. I appreciated Susan Metros opening points on how technology as a tool looks past the impact - i.e. when faculty use an ipod, is the issue about "the tool" or is it about mobility? Gibson's notion of affordances of tools (.pdf) is particularly apt here.
Jim McGee, in a short post on useful models of systems change, introduces the Satir change model. I've been somewhat focused lately on trying to define the nature of systemic change. Why do some ideas resonate with people? Why are certain technologies adopted and others ignored? Why does one department readily embrace the spiral of idea generation, while another is antagonistic to different approaches? The challenge of differentiated adoption seems to rest in at least two elements: the nature of change at a systems level (as addressed with the Satir model) and the attributes/attitudes of the people who are key elements of the larger system. Understanding change involves, at minimum, understanding these two elements.
Advertisers gravitate to large populations. As more eyeballs shift online, advertising not only follows but also changes. The utopia of 30 second television and full page newspaper ads, where the advertiser controls the message and directs it to several million people, is a thing of the past. Online, as with our conversations and content, advertising becomes much more distributed, end-user controlled, and relational. The Five Essential Elements of Effective Social Media Marketing explores some of these challenges: "Social media is a big deal, and it’s revealing a giant shift in media, marketing, politics, relationships and culture. Seasoned online marketers understand that while you won’t change human nature, there’s no doubt that business as usual is not going to cut it in this environment."
It's great to see innovative approaches to what has long been the desktop suite of applications: Word, Powerpoint, spreadsheets, etc. Google Docs is one of the early leaders. As is Zoho. Microsoft now offers Office Live for online storage and collaborating. Now Adobe has entered the space with Acrobat - online word processor, file sharing, and most importantly, virtual live meeting space with Connect (up to three participants).
What is easy to create and duplicate has limited economic value. Digital content suffers this fate. ebooks, video, music, and other content doesn't have the same value they did when they were scarce. The entire value cycle of content has shifted. Instead of paying for content, we pay for peripheral elements (I mentioned this in October). The value point in a climate of abundance is no longer the content element itself. Instead, the value point shifts to our related experiences around the content. Or, as expressed in Bits, Bands and Books: "the ease with which digital content can be copied and disseminated would eventually force businesses to sell the results of creative activity cheaply, or even give it away. Whatever the product — software, books, music, movies — the cost of creation would have to be recouped indirectly: businesses would have to “distribute intellectual property free in order to sell services and relationships.”"
While at CNIE in May, I had the pleasure of hearing Mark Bullen present on the (or lack of) empirical evidence to support the notion of netgen, digital natives, or millennial learners. Any idea is not complete until we consider its opposite. So, he has since set up a blog devoted to debunking the concept of netgen's: Net Gen Nonsense. Mark also contributes to Teaching and Learning at BCIT blog.
I'm quite comfortable saying that our education systems needs to change, but as Mark notes, the reason for that change is likely not to be found in "changing learners". Instead, in my eyes, we need to change education for two primary reasons: 1) the changed ways in which we can access, interact with, and create information, and 2) the changed ways in which we can access, interact with, and connect to each other.
About 50% of the world's population has a mobile phone. Pew Internet's research suggests that not only are more people using mobile phones, but they are starting to use them as the primary phone (instead of landlines). My use of mobile phones (Blackberry) is limited due to some rather expensive data plans with Rogers. In the late 90's, internet use was a similar issue - online fees were charged by the hour. Once these fees were dropped for unlimited monthly plans, internet use exploded. I find myself currently limiting mobile use due to data fees. Once we get past those...
Last year in June, the Learning Technologies Centre at University of Manitoba hosted a humbly titled conference: Future of Education. Following the conference, I was asked by James Morrison to edit a special issue of Innovate. The journal edition is now available online (free sign up required). Articles include: changing pedagogy, rhizomatic knowledge, copyright, technology adoption, YouTube, and more.