Don't Just Sit There; Learn Something!

Participatory learning has always been one of my top learning modalities. I love this video. It speaks to the frustration I think a lot of students and instructors have with education as a one way channel. To go from a culture where sitting up straight and being quiet is a core foundational skill to one where learning to create, connect, and share are the skills is really exciting. There is so much sense in what George has to say about how teaching and learning works. Connectivism has informed a lot of what I do as an instructional designer. Research has shown that the more interactive an online course is, the higher the retention rate. When I look at curricula, I like to ask a few questions:

• Why is the student here?
  
• What is this student doing?
• How is what the teacher is asking the student to going to help the student connect with other ideas in the course and from his or her fellow students?

Here is the video from Robin Good's YouTube channel:

Concept Maps: from pencil to virtual worlds

I presented at an online conference recently ("Connecting Online 2009") on concept maps. I not only want to present on concept maps and the technology around them, but I think I can show how the change in the media used to create the maps can change the way we think about the ideas and information. This is not really very new - the seeds of this argument were planted in readings from McLuhan to George Siemens. I felt that CO '09 was a good preliminary attempt at defining that and I will expand that work for a live presentation in Wanatchee later this year. One of the things I have discovered about concept maps is that, for myself, there is no "right" technology: pencils, Inspiration, Freemind, Personal Brain, and Spidergram Planner in Second Life all do different things and those differences can allow us to see information and problems in new ways. I don't like how some of the software forces you to label each connection but that labeling process can be helpful in seeing ideas differently. A lot of the discussion of the differences between "mind maps" and "concept maps" range from the nearly logical to the arbitrary; what you decide ultimately reveals what kind of thinker you are rather than which definition or tool is the "correct" one to use. I find myself using different tools in different situations. I used to teach in k-12 and that system has a long history of using concept maps. K-12 was on the cutting-edge with rubrics and portfolios long before they showed up in colleges. But it is no accident that concept maps are a popular teaching tool in k-12 schools because that is where students are just learning how to form their ideas and how ideas and thoughts are connected to one another.

Concept Maps Cain

View more presentations from Geoff Cain. (tags: conceptmaps mindmaps)

Instructional Design in a Connected World

In reading discussions and listening to George Siemens and Stephen Downes speak in our class, Connectivism and Connected Knowledge, I have heard and read a lot of narrow and overly simplistic definitions of instructional design. Much of what has been said characterizes instructional design as mechanistic, linear, and formulaic. To an extent, there is some truth to this because instructional design has many problems to solve - one of them, for instance, might be that factory workers may need to know how to operate a specific piece of equipment or billing coders in hospitals may need to know some legal procedures. In cases like these, the important thing is that the information is being given clearly, in sequence, and in a way that will ensure that everyone is on the same page. An added bonus would be if you had a good instructional designer who could also include in that training:

• problem-solving skills,
• practice sessions that helped users remember the sequence of procudures,
• interactivity with other learners,
• attention to multi-modal learning (e.g. visual or aural learners)
  
• and a community of professionals where learning would continue

But I am ahead of myself and the above list is not typical of a lot of instructional design.

The other problem that instructional designers have to solve is the unifority of curriculum. I know that the "throw the kids in a bucket of clay and watch them sculpt the Pieta" crowd flinches when they hear this. But the problem goes something like this: if English 101 is a requirement to succeed in Philosophy 110, how do ensure that students are getting the same level of education in all English 101 classes? Now lets say you have a teacher who follows her instincts, doesn't believe in standards and thinks that the students will learn more about writing if they keep a journal, read "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence" and just "be here now." In an ideal world, a teacher like that would get on fine, even without tenure, but we do not live in that world yet. Creating that world is not the work of instructional designers. For me to say, "I do not agree with the current standards so everything I design is fundamentally flawed" means that I should be doing something else. It would be as if someone were to hire an engineer to build a bridge and that engineer said "we really should be flying over this river, not driving." I do not particularly like multiple choice tests, for instance, but my job as an instructional designer is to help instructors design the most effective multiple choice tests. I have found that by scaffolding the questions using Bloom's Taxonomy to be a demonstrably effective way to create those tests. Not every theorist likes Bloom, but not every theorist out there is tasked with making a multiple choice test work! And I can't wait around for the Rousseauist utopia to come before I work on the test.

Good instructional designers keep up on the latest learning theories, teaching methods, and instructional technology. We do this not to tell a teacher how to teach, but to help instructors solve problems. Most teachers do some things really well. There are other things that teachers may not like to do, like deliver the same lecture in their history course semester after semester. This teacher would benefit by having someone who could show him how to record lectures and put them online, reserving the classroom for the discussions that he enjoys moderating and participating in. Or an institution wants their employees to be more productive at their work and have the fore-sight to see that it might be a training issue. People often do not do the work you want them to do if you have not told them (or don't know) what that work really is! An instructional designer can look at a job, interview the management and workers, and by bringing everyone together, discover what they need to know and how to build training for that.

Teachers and administrator often do not have the time to keep up on the latest developments in instructional design and technology. Why should they? They have enough cut out for themselves in teaching and staying current in their field, they cannot be expected to wade through all of the commercial hype and rapid changes in technology from day-to-day. An instructional designer is a contact person into the meta-disciplines around instruction. This is not telling anyone how to teach but being a resource of information, tools, and techniques that can increase the interactivity, communication (both in breadth and depth), and community of a course.

In my own day to day work, I wear many hats: counselor, teacher, researcher, education historian, data analyst, administrator, artist, etc. I use a wide variety of methods and tools that are carefully matched to the problems being solved. There are times when I have to think like a Cognitivist ("What would be the most efficient way for students to memorize this information?"), or a Constructivist ("Where in this course can we increase opportunities for students to communicate and share with one another?") or a Connectivist ("How can we create a network that will allow the students to learn now and continue their professional growth?"). Teachers do a lot of things really well, but they don't always know why some of the things they do in the classroom work. An instructional designer can map out the successes to help instructors reproduce it in other areas of their teaching. That mapping out process can then be turned around to help create an institutional course development process: one that does not tell someone how to teach, but how to manage all of the processes that can (or even should) go into a face-to-face or online course.

Instructional designers also create networks: they can connect with other instructional designers, bring new teachers together with experienced teachers, they link instructors to learning opportunities, and help connect students with more experienced students or graduates who are working their professions. Each one of the problems above require communication skills and network building. The work of the instructional designer will always be relevant because ultimately their job is making connections and managing change.

Learning Modality vs Learning Theory

I have used learning theory, Constructivism, to create course materials and assignments. I have used the theory to produce particular results. As quoted in Mergal's paper:

What is a theory?
* A theory provides a general explanation for observations made over time.
* A theory explains and predicts behavior.
* A theory can never be established beyond all doubt.
* A theory may be modified.
* Theories seldom have to be thrown out completely if thoroughly tested but sometimes a theory may be widely accepted for a long time and later disproved.
(Dorin, Demmin & Gabel, 1990)

I have seen all of this at work in one way or another with Constructivism and I haven't yet with Connectivism. This class is one experiment and what Char Gore and I are doing in HIM101 is another. It is to new of a theory to say it has been adequately tested - one can't reject an untested theory, one has to test it!

This is not a defense of Constructivism or a Constructivism vs. Connectivism aaproach. I just think it is important to talk about what people do as teachers and instructional designers and put Connectivism into that framework. In a simple form, Constructivist teaching is teaching that provides students the opportunity to put the information being taught in their own words and apply it to their lives. How is that not "connecting"?

I think the same thing is happening in a way with Connectivism, but it does not help that the vocabulary around it all has not really been nailed down. What do George and Stephen mean by "knowledge"? Berkeley? Hume? Kant? Buddha? Never mind how knowledge can exist in inanimate objects; how can you have knowledge without a knower? How can inanimate objects contain "learning"? There are some phenomenal changes happening in technology and culture and those changes are changing how I teach in some dramatic ways, but it is not clear yet if we are looking at technology, a new learning modality, or a theory. If students have visual resources available to them in an unprecedented way (movies, overhead projectors, photography) do we need a new learning theory to account for that learning modality (visual learning vs, traditional read/write) or do we adapt theories for the new media?

Any "scientific" picture of the mind has wound up not being how the mind actually works but being a model or metaphor that accounts for our current understanding of how we think it works. Connectivism will have to be able to account for the changes in that metaphor if it is going to keep the claim that it is a learning theory that reflects how the mind actually works.

A book doesn't even contain learning. Learning is what someone can do with information. Someone can read a book and not learn anything. There are no people in my telephone either, I have to actually call them.

Mergel, Brenda.(1998) Instructional Design & Learning Theory. University of Saskatchewan. http://www.usask.ca/education/coursework/802papers/mergel/brenda.htm

Critiques of Connectivism

Constructivism represented a revolution in online learning. It changed the online classroom model from "sage on the stage" to "guide on the side" or course facilitator. What happened to online education was that the focus went from point and click online textbooks to people focusing on creating community (e.g. Paloff and Pratt). Despite that, there are people out there who call themselves "Constructivist" teachers who still use punishment and reward based learning. I think there will be a period like that with Connectivism. I do think that Connectivism will be better defined in the future and supported by research, an historical perspective, and a fully-realized pedagogy. You don't go from a single essay to fully realized idea overnight - Connectivism will have its version of "Being and Time." I think we are seeing the birth of a system of thought that will account for our new relationship to technology. Connectivism will have its different schools of thought just as Constructivism does.

The claim that Constructivism is some how vague is a little simplistic - that is like saying Existentialism is vague. There are a handful of principles one may take from Connectivism and transform a department or school -- people have.

Bill Kerr makes some good points about what Connectivism means to learning theory: There are other theories that account for Connectivism. Distributed cognition theories are over ten years old. There is a lot of re-inventing the philosophical wheel in Connectivism. Connectivism does not adequately account for social/psychological dimensions of learning (or YET account for). I think our HIM 101 class is an opportunity to create a Connectivist laboratory for working out for Constructivist curriculum and pedagogy.

There is a more philosophical account of Connectivism in one of Downes essays. The link to the version of the essay with citations is actually working so I will give a review of that article here later.

The Library in the New Age by Robert Darnton

This article makes some important points about our relationship to information and technology that are particularly relevant to Connectivism and what is happening at Tacoma Community College 's news site -, the Tacoma Challenge. In the article, Robert Darnton argues that every age was an "Information Age" and that information has always been unstable. Each generation, whether from print, telegraph, radio, TV, computers, deals with its own "future shock." This is one of the challenges to Connectivism: is it a learning theory (with a complete epistemology)? or does it merely describe our relationship to networks and information? Does Connectivism give us a theory or explain a learning modality? As media became more pervasive, it became important for educators to understand how people learn via the modalities of sound, vision, etc. As networks and information become more pervasive, it becomes more important to explore how the mind uses networks for learning.

The second part of the article deals with the nature of the news; he says that news has always been an artifact and never corresponded exactly to what has actually happened. One of the criticisms I hear about the Challenge is that it is not run by AP trained professionals as if this is some kind of assurance of integrity. I appreciate the journalistic ideal of the truth but I have read enough news to appreciate it as an ideal and not reality. Traditional reporting in my view has as much integrity as the collective wisdom of the community captured over time as a single report hurriedly scratched out on a deadline and then repackaged by an editor. The Challenge has moved from traditional newspaper to student run news site. The goal is to create a network of information that will have some of the traditional journalistic ideals but not dependent upon them. There will be no single story but people reporting on events, sending in pictures, and responding to postings: a collective story created by the community, not handed down by an authority.

2008 Pacific Northwest Higher Education Teaching and Learning Conference

I had the pleasure of attending and presenting at the 2008 PNHETL Conference in Spokane. George Seimens was the plenary speaker. It was really good to hear him speak. It cleared up a lot of questions I had about his book. He had a section that talked about objects containing knowledge. And now I think he means the information in context of the objects use. Our philosophy instructor who came with us was politely quiet on the subject. I think Seimens is one of the most important writers in education right now because the field has gotten pretty calcified. He is a revolutionary and a catalyst. He eschews the typical layers of research references (although I consider him widely and well-read in the field) and actually gets down to describing what is happening in people's lives in our relation to information and what is happening in education.

Like his fellow Canadian, Stephen Downes, Seimens seems uncomfortable with virtual worlds. In his opening plenary, he made comments about how SL was "empty"; there is no one there. Downes also makes this comment. If you come to a brick and mortar college at 8:30 P.M. on a Friday night, it too will be empty, but we don't get rid of the school. Second Life is only really useful when there are people there. That is the whole point: it is actually a suite of communication tools that allow people to interact with one another and their environment in some very significant ways. His closing plenary included the statement "We do not need Second Life to provide games in the classroom" misses the point of using SL entirely. Educators in SL, and yes, there are thousands, do not see it as a game, but as a way to increase the interaction between the instructor and students, students with one another, and the students with the content of the course. Seimens did call it one of the more innovative uses of technology at the conference. He also called for administrators to support the innovators on campus and to reward their failures (that is authentic attempts to move technology and info management forward that do not always have buy-in).