elearnspace

Round 2: Connectivism and Connective Knowledge

gsiemens — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 20:42:12 +0000

This should be fun (again): Stephen Downes and I will be offering Connectivism and Connective Knowledge 2009. I’ve posted a short introductory post on CCK09 on the course blog. We start on September 14, 2009.

You can sign up for The Daily here. Even if you were signed up last year, you’ll need to sign up again. It’s a new course, after all :).

Web Squared

gsiemens — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 22:38:26 +0000

I prefer to stay away from pop-culture resources as a source of guidance for where we are heading in terms of technology, and more broadly, society. I listened to a podcast (TWiT, episode #197) and was inundated with buzzwords (apparently it’s still cool to say “Google Juice”) and random nonsense. I was surprised by the seriousness of the topic (future of university) and the shallowness of the approach (at one point Don Tapscott offered the nonsensical statement we often hear at conferences: universities haven’t changed in 100 years!). With this mindset, I approached Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle’s article Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On rather skeptically. I was pleasantly surprised. It’s an important article that captures a small glimpse of the future. Yes, there is a bit of silliness in the article (the web as a baby, slowly growing up with each innovation) and the conclusion is completely unsatisfactory (the web is now the world and the world needs our help - an interesting hypothesis, but one that requires an entire article, not a throw away piece at the end of this article).
Nevertheless, it’s a strong article. It captures trends, extrapolates to implications, and offers insight into where we are heading. Lots of great examples…

Social and Networked Learning

gsiemens — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 21:31:03 +0000

In June, through LearnTrends, we hosted an event on Social and Networked Learning. The recordings are now available (thanks to Scott Skibell of SkillCasting). Topics include: What is social networked learning? ROI, Organizational Challenges, and Moving Beyond Networks.

Does anyone still use Second Life?

gsiemens — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 20:15:02 +0000

Does anyone still use Second Life? The answer, according to a recent report (which is a bit of a pain to get, but free), is a strong yes. Not only is Second Life thriving, its citizens spend more hours each week in world than those in other multi-player online games. The hype around SL has been more subdued in educational conferences this year. Of course, with all new technology, it first needs to go through an insane hype cycle, be declared dead by a prominent theorist/writer, fade into obscurity (i.e. acknowledged by those who hyped it in the first place), and then quietly emerge as a viable tool.

Disruption and scientific publishing

gsiemens — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:10:14 +0000

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.

The Edgeless University

gsiemens — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 06:33:58 +0000

The Edgeless University (.pdf) argues, that while university enrollment continues to increase, universities are in an increasingly “fragile state”. Growing competition, heavy reliance on public funding (which is made even more insecure in today’s economy), technology growth, open content, and social media/networks are forcing universities to adapt. The author states that technology is the core of the change (p. 8). This isn’t entirely accurate. Technology is one of many change pressures. The real change pressure is found on points along the longer time lime of change: how we interact with information and with each other. Today’s technology is only one point on the timeline. Language, Gutenberg, and the scientific method all occupy a role in increasing the ability for individuals and society to create/access/validate information.

This report, while focused on UK, provides a good overview of technological and policy concerns universities face. To increase relevance, universities need to become “edgeless”, extending current roles to include informal, collaborative, and participatory learning.

Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning

gsiemens — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 03:20:29 +0000

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…

Beyond Management: Personal Learning Environments

gsiemens — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 22:14:13 +0000

Stephen Downes’ presentation at ED-MEDIA 2009 is available: Beyond Management: Personal Learning Environments. The talk is an advancement (integration) of Stephen’s ideas over the last several years and looks like a precursor to his large PLE research project at NRC. During the talk, he makes a distinction between complicated and complex that resonates with my own work around learning theory (and Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework, Ronald Barnett’s work on super complexity). In this distinction we find the driving motivation for reform of education. Web 2.0 is an instantiation of change. It is not the core change. The shift from settled and stable information (complicated - like a jigsaw puzzle where every piece has a place in our curriculum) to adaptive and emerging (complex - like a weather system where numerous combinations of factors will produce outcomes that cannot be fully predicted) is the core change. New education models must be built on this change. Any system that is out of synch with the market it intends to serve risks irrelevance.

The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age

gsiemens — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 00:33:10 +0000

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.

Learning Leaders Fieldbook

gsiemens — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 00:18:10 +0000

Masie Center’s Learning Leaders Fieldbook offers a diverse-perspective overview of leading learning in an organization. Topics include talent management, role of CLO (including lifecycle, basics of success, team structure), and role of technology. In all, it’s a good handbook. But, its strength is also a weakness: each chapter is only a few pages. After a few chapters you get the impression that you’re reading a series of blog posts.

This reflects a trend I’ve noticed over the last several years: when did leading thinkers in corporate learning conclude that their audience can not handle complex subjects? Why this push for shallowness? I presented at a large corporate learning event about five months ago. After the presentation, a VP (in charge of training and development) approached me and stated that simple messages are preferable. I assumed this to mean that I had delivered a presentation that was too complex (I was talking about restructuring training departments to take advantage of existing organizational connections between people and using decentralized methods to achieve adaptive corporate strategies - yes, the topic was a bit complex, but because it was complex, it required a complex treatment). I responded that a good presentation, in my eyes, should do two things: clarify simple issues and present a complex constellation of important issues.
The organization then faces the challenge of working through complex issues in a manner that reflects organizational and external contexts. If it were simple, we could just write a blog post about it or deliver a one-slide powerpoint presentation. Corporate learners aren’t dumb. We don’t need to reduce significant training to pablum-like consistency.