CCK08 – Challenge, Importance, and Learning Design

I was wandering through classmates’ delicious bookmarks and found this document from Nick Shackleton-Jones of the BBC. He starts with describing formal v. informal learning, but the interesting bit comes later.

Shackleton-Jones suggests that the keys to learning are challenge and importance.  He writes :

..with formal learning there is often no immediate challenge and the imminent importance to learners is low (although senior people may feel differently). This may sound like common sense, but the answer to the question ‘what is important?’ is not as obvious as one might imagine.

This statement resonated with me because of a conversation I had with a colleague yesterday about encouraging instructors to use new technology.  They pointed out that adoption will happen when there is perceived benefit.  The example they gave was that teachers adopt elearning models because it gives them schedule flexibility.

Shackleton-Jones proposes an awareness-resource model, where the primary purpose of formal instruction/training is to raise learner awareness of when to go out into a PLE and seek information. The actual providing of the information moves out of the formal instructional setting and into a combination of  trainer/instructor designed resources and learners trolling their own networks for the needed information.

I wonder if this is a hard sell in an education environment full of those who expect the traditional model of the instructor/trainer providing the information directly.

Also, what do you do when the benefit to the tutor/instructor is a less tangible one related to improved student learning?  We’ve all at one time or another spent many hours preparing a 45 minute training or conference presentation, so such things do happen.  How do those of us who provide instructional support lower the cost (including instructor time and energy spent learning new tools and redesigning)/ benefit (improved student outcomes and warm feelings, but these don’t give you more money in the bank or more time w/ your kids) ratio so more of this happens?

CCK08 – Musings on Instructional Design

I’m much more excited about CCK08 this week since things are finally moving toward application.

Gina writes about social objects.  I’m not sure I like the term, because I think people will understand the object as being the enabling technology, which it isn’t.  Instead it’s more the point of common focus for members of the network. I was talking to Blanche Maynard about this earlier this week. During the course, the course itself (or perhaps the desire for a grade/academic credit) holds the network together, but what happens after the course is over? In order for the network to continue to contribute to learning , it needs to persist. Maybe that persistence is mostly a matter of how much value the network generates for the member nodes, combined with a dash of “Do I like the nodes in the network, and do I want to hang out with them after the course is over?”

Lisa mentioned Rousseau and put together a very nice chart comparing his and Locke’s approach to education.  The bit I found most intriguing was this from Locke:

Do you wish to get an idea of public education? Read Plato’s Republic. Those who merely judge books by their titles take this for a treatise on politics, but it is the finest treatise on education ever written.

I am now adding The Republic to my to-read list, as soon as I finish Phillip Pullman.

Lisa then goes on to write…

There are good ideas here whose implementation has been interrupted by the advent of industrialized education, which I consider to be the real culprit in poor instructional design. The perceived necessity of educating the multitudes, and the rise of mandatory education in the West, has created our current system…(my emphasis)

It’s easy to blame the “industrialization” of education for the system’s present woes.  I’ve done it myself from time to time.  After all, if we all had just a handful of students, everything would be better, wouldn’t it?

It’s important to remember that when the kind of education Locke and Rousseau describe was the norm, the proportion of the population receiving it was much smaller than the proportion of the population in modern “industrial” education, at least at the higher levels.  The outcomes maye have been better two hundred years ago because the student body was much more select. The institutions at which both Lisa and I teach didn’t exist 50 years ago. They attract students, who, a generation ago, would have been considered “not college material.”, so I was surprised to see her refer to a “perceived need to educate the masses.” Why is the need only a perceived one?

Even if high level skills aren’t strictly necessary for a particular job, it’s generally accepted (perhaps without enough questioning) that critical thinking/reasoning/etc. skills are good to have.  Lisa makes a good point that much of the way we do education these days may not actually help foster the high level skills we claim are the impetus for educating people in the first place.

She then answers the question, “In many ways the theories of connectivist learning are designed as a tutorial system without a tutor. “  This sentence jumped out at me the first time I read it as hitting thr nail on the head. Now as I think about it, I wonder if rather than their being no tutor, there’s a multitude of tutors as big as your network, each guiding you through the bits they know more about than you do.  It’s kind of a “professoriate of all learners” to paraphrase Martin Luther.

Big networks may be important to this model.  As your network grows, the likelihood that everyone in it is as ignorant ( I don’t mean the term pejoratively- perhaps unaware would be better) of a given topic diminishes.

Now, how do we design learning resources to make that happen?

CCK08 – New Wineskins for New Wine

I haven’t read the week 7 material through as carefully as I ought yet, but one thing from the Gráinne Conole article stood out

if information is abundantly available, surely assessment processes which focus primarily on knowledge recall are inappropriate?

Initially I would have said I agree with this, but I suppose I have contradicted myself. In titling the post, I was reminded of a Biblical parable.  If you had to look it up, that kind of association wouldn’t likely happen.  Maybe having knowledge in one’s head isn’t now  so much about being able to recall it (you can Google it) but instead about the kind of associations you can make because it’s all up there bubbling around, not needing to be looked up.

Which Technologies Shall We Evangelize (response to injenuity)

This started as a comment to this post from injenuity, but started to spiral out of control.

Thanks for this. It’s helped me clarify muddle my own thoughts on this issue.  I certainly have seen enough educational technology used badly to agree that it, including web 2.0 tools, isn’t for everyone.  So far, so good.

I can’t shake the sense, however, that the decentralized, learner-influenced environment of Web 2.0 is what we ought to be doing. Isn’t the real point of education to teach our students to learn and think for themselves?  Downes has a post somewhere here about telling the teacher you no longer need them.  But… how do you get students there? On Saturday, I had a student comment about a test they just took in my class that it was much harder to recall the information (fill in the blank)  than just recognize it (multiple choice).  I had the sense that recall wasn’t something they’d been asked to do very often.

My experience is that students are often so used to being told exactly what to do and doing exactly what they’re told that when one opens it up, the assignment falls flat.

You mention finding out how a teacher teaches before pitching technology to them.  The problem is, if they’re lecturing all day every day and then giving multiple choice tests which emphasize factual recall as  the lion’s share of their assessment strategy, I don’t think they’re teaching in a way which serves students well.  I’d go further and argue that this approach is so ubiquitous that students come to expect it and that the choices of those lecturing instructors (in aggregate) make it much harder on those who wish to try any other approach.  Remember that the predominance of the lecture in “modern” education owes much to the fact that in the medieval university, there was usually one copy of the book, and the professor had it.

I think we might be moving away from this faster but for two things, both which have to do more with assessing learning than enabling it.

1) Lecture creates an economy of scale (see William Farish) which supports the lecture model.

2) In an environment where accountability is key, those paying the bills want to see a quantification of progress (test scores, etc.) whch encourages the multiple guess test, which is easier to grade than more open ended responses (see point 1)

Can we really do better as long as educating people is considered an industrial process?

CCK08 – Three Degrees of Tony Dovolani, or “Are we all unknowingly Downesheads?”

CCK08 has given me a reason to sign up for a number of “web 2.0″ tools (slideshare, utterli, voicethread, seesmic, and I’m probably forgetting a couple)  Whenever one signs up, one looks for the people one already knows, and then at their followers to find common acquaintances, etc.  I signed up for a service the other day, and as I was doing this, I stumbled across a profile for Tony Dovolani.  Yes it really is him, as the site lists him in their official blog as a “featured community member”.

This of course got me thinking about Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon and small world experiments.  Web 2.0 tools have confused things quite a bit because asymmetrical connections are now possible.  That is to say, “How close to you in your network is someone who follows you on Twitter but whom you don’t follow”? (or vice versa)  Perhaps that distinction doesn’t make a difference.

Maybe the ability to follow unilaterally makes for groups within networks.  If person A and person B don’t follow each other, but both follow person C, who doesn’t follow them, are they more like a fan group? ( Maybe we’re all Downesheads and just don’t know it)

CCK08 – Group and Network Norms

This was going to be a comment to Gina’s post, but got so long that I decided to post separately.

I wanted to thank you for your reminiscences about Schoolhouse Rock and comic books.  It’s too easy to forget sometimes how many different ways people can learn.  As an educator it’s a bit daunting, though.  How, apart from moving to a UK style system of tutors, do we meet all the different needs of our students?

I’m sorry your interactions haven’t always been positive, but I think there’s something important to remember .  I think of George and Stephen as, at most, primi inter pares.  I can do that since I’m not being graded. I don’t necessarily grant them the right to define terms.  Also, I try not to read anything they write differently because they are the leaders/instructors.  So what if they don’t like your questions or your answers. Now that they’ve started the ball rolling, they could both be abducted by aliens tomorrow and lots of learning about connectivism would continue. (Let me hasten to add that I’m not rooting for an alien abduction, not even of Stephen)

On the other hand, whenever you have interaction inside a culture, there are norms which govern that interaction.   What those norms should be and who should set them are topics for discussion and debate, if the course is really decentralized.

CCK08 – Assessment/Marking and Networks OR Do you Trust Your Grade to the Cloud?

I’m still sorting through the complexity theory readings for this week, but one of them made me think of something else.  It’s now time for one of my $64,000 questions.  How does/should assessment work in a decentralized/networked learning environment?

When I read Developing Online From Simplicity toward Complexity: Going with the Flow of Non-Linear Learning , I liked the openness of the course structure, but immediately wondered student learning was assessed.  Lisa Lane also writes about being graded/marked in CCK08.

The problem is this. Educators don’t just enable learning, they also serve as gatekeepers.  Whether or not they like it, or think they ought to, much of the rest of the world uses the marks/grades and degrees that educators generate as a measure of a given person’s skills. It seems to me that one undermines networked learning to some degree if, after allowing the learning to be decentralized and learner directed, the assessment of that learning is still centralized and instructor directed.

So how would one do networked assessment?  There’s always peer review, but many are wary of it because

• Only some students can be counted on to be dispassionate and fair in their peer assessments (how do we ensure Alice and Bob don’t grade each other poorly because they had a personal spat the weekend before peer evaluations are due?)
• Particularly early in a learning process, students may not understand the evaluation criteria or the course material well enough to peer assess effectively.

Is there some other way to do networked assessment, or does the nature of grading make it inherently an authoritarian exercise?

CCK08 – Computer Enabled v. Non Computer Enabled Networks

Jenny Mackness writes about her mother’s networks, pointing out that her mom doesn’t use computers. Jenny makes a good point.  There were networks before we all had computers.  I do think that the availability of computers, TCP/IP, etc. has changed our networks permanently.  Looking at Jenny’s mom, it seems to me that the strong ties and week ties are defined mostly by geographical distance.  Those in her church whom she sees regularly as opposed to those she sees once a year at a golf event in England.   Thanks to telephones, which I imagine Jenny’s mom uses, it’s not quite that neat and clean, of course.

Contrast that to the present day.  I’ll look at two subsets of my network, people I know through this course, and people I spend time with in Second Life.  None of the people who I’d characterize as  my moderate-strong ties (say those I communicate with more often than once a fortnight)  from these subgroups is physically within 250 miles of me.  In a pre-computer world, these people would have been weak ties (Christmas card list) at best.  Technology allows me to have regular “conversations”with them.

Particularly for specialized networks of interest (something like Tolkienien linguistics) for example, the members are geographically dispersed and there are likely not enough of them in one geographic area to foster regular connections.  Computers, etc. allow the coalescence of this set of persons in a way that probably wouldn’t have happened 50 years ago.

CCK08 – We Need More Than Two Labels

Thank you, Terry Anderson.  In Terry’s presentation Wednesday, he added the term collective to the current group/network discussion. He gave Google and Amazon recommendations as examples, but said that the collective is defined by whoever is doing the research (I think his example was Canadian bloggers except those who live in Alberta).  I think Terry’s collective is a way to deal with what Frances called categories in a comment to my last post, that is, aggregations into which a person fits without specifically intending to do so (I wrote about males, and wearers of eyeglasses) I grant that a person may choose to wear eyeglasses, or to speak a certain language, but I would argue that they don’t do so to become an eyeglass wearer. Thus maybe Deadheads would be a collective.

Another interesting thing was when (I believe Stephen) labeled ITFORUM (the electronic mailing list) a network rather than a group.  I am troubled by that, as Stephen admitted to not knowing all the ITFORUM members with whom he’s communicating.  Can someone truly be in your network if you don’t know who they are?  The idea that one can narrowcast only to a specific set of persons who choose to receive the message , as can anyone it that set of willing recipients, is a new one, born of packet switching. It certainly complicates things.

I am still inclined to see networks as unique to the individual.  For example, Stephen knows (or perhaps doesn’t) who is in his network.  If networks are defined by connections, the only way I could determine Stephen’s network would be to analyze all of his posts, tweets, email messages, telephone records, etc. and follow him around Moncton, in order to see with whom he was connecting.  On the other hand, I can query the listserv and get a complete list of all email addresses which receive ITFORUM. A third party, running the same query at the same time, would get the same list. As opposed to a network, membership in a group or collective is independently verifiable.

CCK08 – More Networks and Groups or Why Stephen May be Right

When I perused the readings yesterday, I liked George’s continuum rather than Stephen’s dichotomy. But now that I think more about it…

I can, with some clarity define what groups I’m in.  (Male, English speaker, glasses wearer, etc.) Defining the edge of my network is more difficult.Even if you define strictly (my network is those with whom I have a bilateral following relationship on Twitter), your network is defined in terms of your relationships rather than a common shared state (those whom you follow may or may not be following one another)

I do think groups can be open. Take for example an open enrollment SL group.  You choose to be a part of it, but then are clearly a member of that group. Something like Deadheads is  trickier.  Since members of the group self select and identify (nobody defines deadhead until social scientists start researching them), finding the boundary of the group is difficult.  Nevertheless, my instinct wants to call Deadheads a group.