I’m in Rijeka, Croatia. It’s my first visit hear and it’s a beautiful country. The scenery is spectacular. Unfortunately, most of my time has been spent in a hotel room writing and getting caught up on email/work, etc. Wasn’t traveling fun *before* we could take our work with us?!
I’ve uploaded the slides from my presentation this morning:
Have a look at this video (a few static images kick off the video, but the fun stuff begins shortly after):
Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.
I’m always looking for metaphors, models, and analogies that can tease out learning and knowledge, and the social connective actions that give rise to both. This week, for example, in #change11, Dave Cormier is discussing rhizomes as a metaphor or way to think about learning. Similarly, starling murmurations provide a brilliant example of how systems, comprised of individual agents, can synchronize to produce fascinating activity.
EDUCAUSE publishes short papers on 7 things you should know about… that provide an overview of emerging topics and trends. Their most recent publication is on 7 things your should know about MOOCs (.pdf). From the paper: “But perhaps the most significant contribution is the MOOC’s potential to alter the relationship between learner and instructor and between academe and the wider community by potentially providing a very large and diverse forum and meeting place for ideas. Those enrolling in a MOOC are likely to discover learning at its most open on a platform that invites the world not only to see and hear but also to participate and collaborate.” Great stuff!!
I would have liked to see the inclusion of more open courses (those offered by Alec Couros, Ray Schroeder, David Wiley, mobiMOOC, Wendy Drexler, Chis Sessums, etc) as well as the growing amount of “mooc support resources” such as Dave Cormier’s What is a MOOC video (with almost 20k views).
Anytime individuals get together to reclaim social justice and fairness or to empower themselves in the light of gross inequalities, I’m heartened and encouraged.
I’ve been following the #Occupy movement with tremendous interest. The inequalities in society are increasing. The small % control the majority.
The movement is now 6 weeks old, and with that small amount of maturity, comes new models of organization and structure. News coverage of the #occupy has critiqued its lack of central leadership. That’s actually a positive, I think. Let ideas emerge, experiment with new models of democracy, and take advantage of self-organization and the passion of connected individuals.
However, the #occupy movement will fail unless it changes how it structures and scales its message to draw in the next wave of participants. Failure is a relative term, of course. #Occupy members could say “we’re successful because we’ve raised the profile of the injustices of the banking system and inequality of society”. And, of course, they have. They might even be responsible for getting Bank of America to drop it’s $5 monthly debit fee.
But, if the intent of #occupy is to reduce inequality – particularly at a systemic level – what it mosts needs is scale. By scale, I mean a critical mass of people. And that’s not happening. There are a few bright spots (Zuccotti park), but the movement has started to specialize too soon. At this point, I would expect to see numerous Zuccotti’s. It’s becoming a clique, an “in-club” with special language and symbols. I saw a few #occupy members on Colbert Report yesterday. They may not be representative, but I was left with a sense of “wow, I don’t speak their language…I have ZERO interest in being a part of what they are talking about”.
I’m concerned about economic inequality. #occupy has collected an eclectic mix of fragmented messages and specialized languages. As such, it is concerned with, well, everything: female-bodied persons, autonomous action and identity, empowered people, rights of all sorts, economics, racism, social injustice, and so on. Each draws from its parent discipline (often in academia) with special language and special processes of communicating. Unless #occupy is able to communicate 1) in a manner, 2) about topics, and 3) in a language that resonates with broader society their ideological fragmentation will be a liability.
I see this from a learning perspective: Learning is about coherence-forming…we connect concepts into some type of structure and coherent whole that enables action and guidance in our thinking. When language isn’t clear or when concepts can’t be cognitively apprehended because of too much specialization of language and protocol, coherence is simply not possible.
#Occupy can be leaderless and diverse and still succeed. It can be distributed and networked and still succeed. However, if its message doesn’t resonate with a significant portion of society, due to lack of coherence or limited capability of individuals to form personal coherence around numerous voices, it will fail. Over the last few days, for me at least, the message has stopped to resonate.
Outside of taking courses in XML, programming logic, and Python, I am not a programmer. I understand the importance of being able to program. I can get by with HTML and CSS. There are few things more irritating, however, than having ideas that one is not capable of activating in a meaningful way. It’s like having a desire to communicate but lacking the ability to speak. This isn’t a huge liability – as long as you have access to people who can translate your ideas into code. Or apps. Or something digital. You need to be part of a team that covers your weaknesses. I don’t have access to a team like this, so I’ll whine here instead.
Here are a few tools that I would like someone, somewhere to build (startups, research labs, competent coders):
1. Geoloqi for curriculum. I love this idea and I’ve been talking about a similar concept for years. Basically, it combines your location with information layers. For example, if you activate the Wikipedia layer, you’ll receive updates when you are in a vicinity of a site based on a wikipedia article. One of the challenges with traditional classroom learners is the extreme disconnect between courses and concepts. Efforts to connect across subject silos are minimal. However, connections between ideas and concepts amplifies the value of individual elements. If I’m taking a course in political history, receiving in-context links and texts when I’m near an important historical site would be helpful in my learning. Mobile devices are critical in blurring boundaries: virtual/physical worlds, formal/informal learning.
2. Visualization and data collision tools. I need tools to help me make sense of complexity. I want to be able to activate an open data set (UNESCO, OECD, local university) and perform visualizations based on questions that I ask the system – i.e. computation meets visualization, sort of like what would happen if WolframAlpha meets Gapminder. I want to be able to manipulate random data collisions, combining (or, at least, position in relation to each other) stats and open data with qualitative data. One of the reasons many people are not very data-based in their thinking and argumentation is that the tools to interact with data are difficult to use and inaccessible. Want to debate the economic impact of the #occupy movement? Sure, let’s fire up SPSS load some economic data, compare that with sentiment analysis in both traditional and social media, and then output a visualization on our blogs. It’s much easier to say #occupy is Awesome/Sucks.
3. gRSShopper. I’ve known Stephen Downes for over a decade. What he’s doing today will be prominent in edtech in a few years (if his early work with OLE (LMS), blogging, RSS, learning 2.0 are any indication). We’ve used gRRShopper, a tool that he developed, for our open courses over the past few years. It aggregates blogs and feeds the ones with a particular course tag into a daily email. Basically, it weaves together distributed conversations (blogs, twitter, moodle). However, it’s a system built for the mind of Stephen. Which means that it will likely not receive broad adoption unless fairly tech-competent educators deploy it. And that’s the problem: many educators do not have a significant programming/technical background. And many programmers do not have a solid educational or learning sciences disposition. In order for gRSShopper and the Daily (email newsletter used in open online courses) to receive broad adoption, they must become push-button easy so any teacher can start an open course as easily as she can start a blog. edufeedr is another tool that offers similar blog aggregation in courses, but I don’t think it’s tied to an email service like the Daily.
I don’t know how my writing comes across to others. When I was a teenager, I had a few general issues with the world (I know, likely the first teenager in history with this affliction) and very specific issues with authority. This attitude produced a number of difficult situations for me. At one point, as I was engaged in paying the consequences of a particular act in the form of a solid tongue lashing from a judge, I remember this odd feeling of “I’m not like that…I’m a pretty good person”. But, in reality, people can’t evaluate us by our thoughts. Our actions, words, and artifacts determine how others interpret us.
With most of my writing on this blog and with open online courses, I’m not trying to tell others what I know. Generally, I’m trying to make my process of coming to know as transparent as possible. When we learn transparently, we teach others.
This preamble is a lead up to something that I’m hoping doesn’t come across the wrong way (i.e. self-promotional and such). I was in Madrid yesterday where I received a very generous award: the Fundación Telefónica/OEI Award for an individual who demonstrated “educational innovation through the use of ICT, thus substantially contributing to improving the quality of education” at the 6th annual International EducaRed conference. A huge, very humble, thank you to the conference organizers, the foundation, and to my hosts. I had hoped to spend more time in Madrid, but unfortunately, my daughter is ill and I had to cut the trip short.
While my time was short (20 hours from landing to take off), I did have an opportunity to meet numerous educators from Spain, Peru, Argentina, Brazil, and Columbia. A few years ago, I was chatting with Stephen Downes about the high level of interest from educators in Latin American countries in connectivism, social networked learning, and ICT use in education. I’m not sure why this is the case. Nonetheless, I had a great time meeting teachers and leaders, the fine folks at EducaRED, and representatives from Fundación Telefónica. Thanks. I’m honoured. And humbled.
Data, big data, analytics, and visualization are significant trends in education. We need to pay attention. There is much to be alarmed about with analytics, including the mechanization of teaching, learning, and assessment. Additionally, the data and analytics that are easy to collect and conduct risk becoming a simple veneer over the complexities of learning and cognition. Or, as Gardner Campbell states: “Current NGLC/NCLB paradigms create great risk of analytics-generated edu-hell.”
Analytics also hold promise for providing increased quality of learning for individuals. We experience benefits of analytics in many areas of our lives, including music, books, and social network friend recommendations. My interest in learning analytics, however, doesn’t blind me to potential risks. We should be concerned and alert as analytics discussions turn to education. Learners are not widgets to be optimized and shifted around in assembly lines. By the same account, analytics can yield value in improving learner success in the current education system, and, more critically, providing perspectives on how we should improve the system itself. The slides below are from a presentation I delivered at EDUCAUSE 2011:
At the EDUCAUSE 2011 conference today, I had the pleasure of attending a lecture by Hal Abelson – founding director of Free Software Foundation and Creative Commons. He presented on the state of openness in education. While on the surface openness is gaining traction through scholarship and publication, content providers and journal publishers are starting to push back.
During the talk, he used the image below (from this article – .pdf) to argue that journal publishers have a monopoly. The surface progress of openness belies a deeper, more dramatic period of conflict around openness that is only now beginning.
Across the full spectrum of education – primary, secondary, and higher – we are witnessing a race to develop platforms for content, learning, teaching, and evaluation. As liberating as the web is, tremendous centralization of control is occurring in numerous spaces: Google in search/advertising/Android, Amazon in books/cloud computing, Facebook in social networks, etc. I use a smaller range of tools today than I did five years ago. And the reason is simple: companies are in a landrush to create platforms that will tie together previously disconnected activities and tools. Numerous companies are eager to platform the educational sector, with Pearson being the lead runner to date. More on that in a bit.
This post/rant on life at Amazon and Google, from the perspective of an employee (programmer?) with experiences in both systems, is worth a read. It is not, however, an exercise in logic. The rant is a bit confusing as it starts off criticizing Amazon as doing everything wrong and Google as doing everything right. Then the author shifts to a discussion of how Amazon got platform and accessibility right (which he acknowledges as being the most important elements). So that kind of doesn’t add up. But a critical concept is expressed about mid-way through the post:
Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that’s not why they are successful. Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work. So Facebook is different for everyone. Some people spend all their time on Mafia Wars. Some spend all their time on Farmville. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of different high-quality time sinks available, so there’s something there for everyone.
In education, we don’t yet have that platform that enables/allows “other people to do the work”. Learning management systems, authoring tools, and personal learning environments don’t quite get the “it’s the platform, stupid” aspect of the internet. Most of the tools we have available today in education allow us to create content within a system. What a platform enables is very different; it enables the extension of a system. Amazon is brilliant at this – they’ve essentially vanquished main components in the book space. They’re basically a monopoly, one that will only increase with the Amazon Fire. For an author, all roads lead to Amazon. Facebook has mastered this in the social network space as well. Facebook is now well past being a social network. Billboards and magazine/newspaper ads for companies list “facebook.com/whatever” instead of an actual open web URL. I guess that’s why Facebook is now bigger than the web was in 2004.
When I was at the Strata conference in February, I was surprised at who wasn’t there in any substantial way – Yahoo, Google, Microsoft (they did present on Azure, but their presence was minimal). Who ruled? Amazon. AWS. Every single session. Because Amazon gets the platform concept – as they did with book selling: entrepreneurs need a platform. They have ideas, but they don’t have huge dollars for technical infrastructure. So, AWS. Plug and play. An entrepreneur doesn’t want to think about the platform. For entrepreneurs in need of big, scalable computing, all roads lead to Amazon.
Similarly, educators don’t want to think about the platform. They want something easy to use – simple, effective, and extensible – so they can get on with teaching and research.
Knewton gets this with their platform, hence their massive $33 million funding round. (note Pearson as a partner).
Pearson and Google appear to be making in-roads in this space with Open Class:
Today Pearson, the publishing and learning technology group, has joined the software giant Google to launch OpenClass, a free LMS that combines standard course-management tools with advanced social networking and community-building, and an open architecture that allows instructors to import whatever material they want, from e-books to YouTube videos.
I posted on this last year after Blackboard acquired Elluminate and Wimba:
To be effective in the long term, large LMS companies will need to pull more and more of the education experience under their umbrella. Why? Well, technology is getting complex. Very complex. Which means that decisions makers are motivated (partly out of fear of appearing ill-informed, partly out of not wanting to take risks) to adopt approaches that integrate fairly seamlessly across the education spectrum. Why buy an LMS when you can buy the educational process?
I would not be surprised, if in the next several years, educational institutions – especially those who are cash strapped – end up using a content/delivery platform the same way we use Facebook today “Visit us at Pearson.com”. Blackboard’s acquisition binge was about building an integrated infrastructure to offer one-point value for universities (and now, schools with the Edline affiliation). Pearson has been aggressively moving in this direction for over a decade. Startups like Knewton want to be your testing/adaptive content platform (either they get big fast or they will be acquired by Pearson or similar platform-aspirational company). Sure, we’ll still have edupunks and other deviant educators playing at the corners or outer edges of these platforms and systems. Whoever has the platform sets the rules and controls the game. Diversity will be pushed to the margins and Ellul’s fears will be realized in education as they have been realized in much of society.
I did an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education on Why Universities Should Experiment With ‘Massive Open Courses’. Thanks to Jeff and Warren for the opportunity to share some of the work that Stephen Downes, Dave Cormier, Alec Couros, and a growing number of educators have engaged in over the last four years. The interview ran over 30 minutes, but was edited down to 12 minutes, so some of my discussion about the history of open courses (Wiley, Couros) was not included in the final version.
I was surprised (disappointed) to read some of the comments.There is a chasm between those who are actively experimenting with educational models and those who are focused on preserving it. This chasm is complicated by different language use and different visions. These two camps are talking past each other.
For example, in the comments I/we (those who run open courses) are presented as being corporate shills:
Not surprising that online learning is being pushed by corporate entities who smell the bottom line figures. Faculty should resist this movement at every turn. It will undermine and dilute higher education as we know it, mass producing degrees that mean nothing. This is why the liberal arts are necessary. Critical thinking skills, writing, and close reading cannot be taught in cyberspace. The movement toward degrees in “Business” and other faux disciplines was the beginning.
Huh? Corporate entities? I haven’t made money on open courses. I haven’t tried.
and in terms of engagement:
For all intents and purposes I am sitting in the middle of a massive coffee-shop or bar and in the middle of hundreds of half-baked, uninformed conversations that while they may be interesting are nevertheless, not grounded in scholarship and since the tendency is for the bloggers and tweaters to flit from conversation to conversation I have no sense of any substantial engagement with any group about any topic.
I have no illusions about open online courses being THE key to education’s problems. To even make a statement of that nature is to misunderstand the interconnectedness of complex problems. As I stated in the interview, researchers need to start experimenting with the system of education. We’re not going to think our way to educational change and reform. Meaningful reform will only come through experimentation – many models, many different approaches. When researchers don’t have answers to a problem, they start hypothesizing and running experiments. Educators and administrators need to recognize that we do not understand what an efficient education systems look like in a complex, networked, and digital world. We’re muddling through.