Brainstorm in Progress: constructivism

Showing posts with label constructivism. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

MOOCs, Group Work, and Instructional Design

English: Debate Chamber of the Oxford Union So...

Debate Chamber of the Oxford Union Society (Wikipedia)

Everything Old is New Again
In my last post I pointed out that all the arguments about MOOCs sound so much like the old arguments against online education in the 90s. One of the main arguments for authentic online learning in the 90s was the possibility of making online classes social environments. This fit well with the pedagogy of Constructivism. Constructivism says that knowledge is constructed when new information comes into contact with previous knowledge and evaluated against experience. Social Constructivism is an outgrowth of Constructivism that "extends constructivism into social settings, wherein groups construct knowledge for one another, collaboratively creating a small culture of shared artifacts with shared meanings" (Moodle). The instructors goal then was to facilitate these connections. In the 90s, this learning theory seemed to fit what was happening with effective teaching online. The goal of online assignments was to give students the opportunity to receive new information, hold it up to previous knowledge and experience, share that with a group, and then together, coming to new conclusions or new knowledge. Educators and researchers like Palloff and Pratt with their emphasis on learning communities, promoted group work and discussion forums as the solution to the badly performing classes that were basically online repositories of documents and maybe multimedia files. Over and over again, from the early days of online learning, the research shows that the greater the engagement in an online class, the higher the success and retention rates. Engagement does not mean clicking a link, widget or consuming media - it means actual interaction with students and instructors as well as content.

George Siemens

Everything New is Old Again
Today, we have learning theories that are evolving towards a more complete accounting of how we learn online. I am thinking here of George Siemens and Stephen Downes' theory of Connectivism. I am not ready to throw out the Constructivist baby with the pedagogical bath because Connectivism is still in the Copernicus vs. Relativity explanation for gravity stage - I believe logically and experientially that the theory is right, but I am not ready to use it to put a satellite in orbit. This doesn't make the theory wrong. We need to be doing more research; it is just a matter of time. For myself, I am satisfied that this new theory accounts for much of what is going on with Constructivism. I am going to let the Phd's battle out the details: instructional designers have courses to create, assignments to design, and faculty to work with. A good working theory is a good working theory. A lot of what we are doing with online classes and MOOCs is testing the viability of Connectivism.

What Then Should We Do?
So this preamble is really a way to point out that everything that makes authentic learning work in a brick-and-mortar classroom are the same things that make online learning work. And as a teacher and instructional designer, I have a really practical end in mind. To my way of thinking, there is no difference between an online discussion forum and the Debate Chamber of the Oxford Union Society except one is more expensive and acoustically louder than the other. They are just different platforms. A MOOC is just another platform. George Siemens wrote back in March that MOOC providers were going to have to rely more on group work to be successful. I find this sentence especially funny and pertinent here: "The 'new pedagogical models' (A Silicon Valley term meaning: we didn’t read the literature and still don’t realize that these findings are two, three, or more decades old)...." But what kind of group work should we use and how can we ensure that it is successful? Siemens points out that there is a high dropout rate in MOOCs that could make group work a problem, but I believe that group work is one of the engagement pieces that is missing from many of these MOOCs (especially those using content delivery model rather than the content creation model).

Ensuring the Success of Group Work
Faculty and students have often told me about problems with group work. What do you do about the alpha student who needs to be the leader and do all the work? How should instructors handle the student who has little motivation? I have a blog post coming about this but essentially there are eight things needed for a successful group work project:

Clear objectives
Students need to know the exact purpose of the assignment. Let the students know where they are going.
Detailed instructions
This is particularly important in a MOOC because students tend to have less contact with the instructor. A detailed instruction document accompanied with a video and some examples are very useful here.
Give each student a specific role
This prevents one person from taking over the process and helps with assessment too.
Communicate expectations in advance
Use collaborative tools
Model the means for useful collaboration. Give students instructions for setting up a wiki or a Google site for collaborating
Facilitate and model leadershipSometimes good leadership is not getting in the way of good work. Leadership in MOOCs means that you live the model: you are connected and engaged in your course. You cannot disappear for two weeks and expect this to work.
Encourage networks
Having the students using social media tools allows them to bring other subject matter experts into the project.
Provide assessment and closure
You would not want to participate in a MOOC with an endless series of unconnected assignments with no sense of closure. Assessment in group work gets interesting. I liked to use a blank form for the students to divide up participation points.

I will be posting a short article on how these components work here on this blog.

Kinds of Assignments:
The ubiquity of internet access and the proliferation of collaborative tools and platforms makes collaborative learning more available than it has ever been. This allows us to design a wide variety of assignments that are ideal for MOOCs or standard online classes. These are just a few ideas here:

Group Research Project
Group research projects are opportunities for students to get together and literally construct knowledge. Having students work on a research project and publish their results together on a wiki or a group blog benefits the students and the class.
Group PresentationsStudents can work on presentations with one another remotely and create slide presentations with audio or even a film and work on the
Media Projects
Students learn a lot from content creation. Jim Groom's DS 106, a class that some would call a "task based MOOC" is an excellent example of students working together to create media. Students can create videos or podcasts. When they graduate from college, no one is going to ask them to write a 20 page paper; they will be asked to work in groups, use technology, and create media.
Debates
One of our instructional designers here at Humboldt State University is using online debates in discussion forums.The debates are carefully structured and each participant has a role. This kind of prior attention to details is essential to online group work.
Role Playing and Simulations Role playing and simulations have never been easier because there is so much data online now that can be used to build simulations (I am thinking here of epidemiological data, for instance).
Concept MapsTypically these are solitary projects but having a group negotiate what should be in a concept map and how concepts relate to one another are a good way to allow the students to clarify those concepts with and for one another rather than having the instructor spoon-feed "meaning" to them.
Infographics This is a good project for groups because the roles can cover a wide-variety of learning modalities and abilities: some students can gather data, others develop art work, and others can write interpretive materials.

Any of these assignments can be created in advance and given to small groups. The students benefit not just from following the steps of the projects, but through sharing the end results with other groups.

Saturday, December 03, 2011

On Learning Latin

Image via WikipediaI once walked into a beginning Latin class at U.C. Berkeley. I hadn't made up my mind whether I was going to take the class or not. Right off the bat, the teacher had us reciting "amo, amas, amat..." - all 40 of us in unison - in other words, it was going to be one of those classes where rote memorization was the key learning method. I raised my hand and asked why we were chanting verbs and declensions and the instructor said that if we didn't do that we would be forever tied to a dictionary. I sat listening to the students and wondered how long students have been attempting to learn Latin this way; probably a couple of centuries, but I have some ideas from my reading over the years that that method is fairly Victorian. The tables of verbs and noun declensions fit the mechanistic age of logarithm tables, early assembly lines, and the industrial mills. I figured out that the teacher thought that we had to know grammar in order for us to read Latin. This is ridiculous, of course, because I was talking and reading simple sentences long before I knew what a coordinating conjunction or a transitive verb was. I got up from the desk, walked out of the classroom, willing to resign myself to the possible fate of being shackled to a dictionary for eternity like some lost Jacob Marley.

Why do we still do "drill and kill"? Some of it is educational hazing: I imagine the instructor thinks "I had to go through this misery and now my students have to as well." To be fair, that is how the instructors actually learned it. In college, they are not trained in teaching, so they know no other way. Others make the argument that unless a student is thoroughly proficient in the rudiments, they can't master the subject. And that is my objection, what do we really want to teach? Do these teachers want Latin grammarians or readers of Latin literature and history? I had a teacher ask me once (in a blog posting) - "You wouldn't give students a Latin text and ask them to figure out the grammatical rules on their own?" Well, maybe I would.

Even what I consider to be the best texts make the mistake of thinking that students are going to find some kind of clarity around lists of verbs. Wheelock's Latin is a standard text and the thing that actually makes that textbook so useful is all of the examples from actual Latin texts. We used this at Sonoma State in my Latin classes, but the instructor also had us translating texts from day one. My textbook hero is Clyde Pharr - he wrote a textbook on Homeric Greek that has students reading right from Homer within a dozen chapters, and his Vergil's Aeneid has them reading from Vergil even earlier. Either of these texts could be used as primary textbooks. The sick thing is that Pharr did most of his work in the 1920s and many teachers have not figured all of this out yet. Pharr follows the assumption that children learn grammer by using language; they can learn the grammar in context just as they learn to speak grammatically in context. They are not going to use Latin if it is essentially a boring, tedious plow through inane paradigmatic sentences and tables of verbs. They are going to read if the work they are reading is interesting and engaging - Homer and Vergil are certainly that.

If rote memorization is the main teaching method, the teachers will only have students with a high tolerance for the tedious. If you teach students rote memorization, that is all they will be good at. I am sure we want more from our students than being good test-takers! Being able to jump through the hoops is not the same thing as critical thinking.

Notes 12/04/11:
Learning Latin in Context - This project shows the possibilities and importance of learning in context and in a community. (networked learning - or Connectivism).

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Wikis - More than Text and Context

Image via WikipediaPresenter(s):
Amber Evans (Virgina Tech)
M. Aaron Bond (Virginia Tech)
Karen Swenson (Virginia Tech)
Description: Dr. Karen Swenson, a 2010 Teaching With Sakai Innovation Award finalist, uses the Sakai wiki with her students to "think about important issues presented through works of speculative fiction," but has found there is even more to her students than the wiki reveals. Although the course goals include collaborative work to "reconsider traditional concepts of 'author' and 'self,' working together to build a better world, encourage a sense of community, and become aware of others contributions" her recent collected data provides insight as to "who" are these students in her Sakai Wiki community. Come to this session to see the paradigms that underlie the structure of the course, what the students do with the Wiki in class and after the semester ends, and who these students are (including demographics, previous wiki contributions, and perceptions of self, information technology, and active involvement in their learning process).

Presenter bios: Amber Evans: Currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Instructional Design and Technology. 15+ years experience in teaching, pedagogy, and technology. Professional and Faculty Development. Knowledgeable about (and doing research in) Diffusion of Innovations in Higher Education.

M. Aaron Bond: Aaron works as a member of the Instructional Design, Development & Support unit of the Institute for Distance and Distributed Learning (IDDL), as well as with other IDDL units to provide quality course development and support. He designs, develops, and delivers professional development activities for distance and distributed learning faculty. Aaron provides support to faculty, students, and staff engaged in distance and distributed eLearning at Virginia Tech and assists faculty with the design and development of instructional materials for online courses. He regularly meets with faculty and other members of the Virginia Tech community to assist in the planning and preparation for online courses. In each case, he works to assist in the effective integration of educational technologies into distance instruction.

+++++++++++++++++++

This presentation covered the design of the course - this was a collaborative site for a science fiction course. The wiki played a key component in the course. She covered basic instruction design principles around interaction.

Paradigms include behaviorism, cognitivism and constructivism. Chickering and Gamson (1987) and "Cultivating communities of practice" Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder (2002).

Her course was a fully online course, 80 students, 15 weeks long. Wide variety of backgrounds among her students. She wanted her students to be engaged contributers. Students share ideas in the Discussion Forums and a speculative fiction wiki. There are reading quizzes because the reading is essential to the course.

The created course goals and objectives that included collaboration and community.

She spent a little time describing wikis. They are collaborative webpages. They used the wiki in Sakai. A wiki is a web page that can be viewed and modified by anybody with a web browser and access to the internet.

She calls information on wikis "relative truths" because the information can change.

She continued to talk about the mechanics of wikis.

The best feature is that the wiki can be exported and shared with others.

Rob talked about an instructor who had to download and scan to pdf a wikipedia to "freeze" the information in time. Information now has a temporal dimension.

The instructor has a guide to editing and "netiquette" for those edits and settling disputes. she has had no problems teaching the course over two years.

Challenges to wikis:

They have to be monitored
May need authorization
Learning curve
Lack of some features
Content-focused - it is really ugly
No hierarchy - like a concept map - there are no "contents" pages
Collective group bias
Remembering to use it

"Student writing has meaning, power, and significance in this course."

"Wiki Aliveness"

1. design for evolution
2. open a dialogue between inside and outside perspectives
3. Invite different levels of participation
4. Public and private community spaces
5. Focus on value
6. Combine familiarity and excitement
7. Create a rhythm for the community

She created a handout for the students on what a wiki is all about, how to behave, how it works. The instructor has a very flexible grading philosophy, but there is a simple rubric for the wiki grading.

One feature suggestion would be to support "track user."

They collected student data on student demographics that coverted GPA, gender, major. 64% of their students had never used a wiki before. 14% use a wiki weekly. She went through survey data - one of the items was that 44% of the students do not like learning via websites, blogs, and wikis.

In general the students liked the course and the instructor. The students were participants in the course.

Their website is http://learn.vt.edu

Wednesday, March 02, 2011

OER Africa: Course Development Handbook

Image via WikipediaI am currently reading Santosh Panda's textbook Handbook on In-House Style for Course Development. This would be recommended reading for new course developers or distance education admins who are new to the field or need to develop a systematic course development program
with new staff. I am always on the look-out for possible training materials for new instructional designers or ways to enhance or streamline the course development process. This handbook contains a lot of useful materials and seems to be written with an awareness of what actually happens in online classes. It is light on theory and heavy on the practical. I have been in presentations on instructional design where the why was the focus instead of the what and the how. This inevitably leads to having a teacher stand up and say "Great. How does this actually supposed to work?" This not to say that Panda's book is theory-free somehow - the book models a lot of good theory through its use of concept maps and emphasis on course structure, and his discussion of constructivism. I would like to see more examples of student interaction in the example assignments but again, this is a practical handbook for getting things off the ground.

To think I had to travel all the way to Africa to find a book that was written in our own backyard :-) I am always looking for good instructional design materials. If you have a favorite online, please post a link to it in the comments.

Friday, October 15, 2010

Herzogian Pedagogy: A New Order in Education

I was meditating on the pedagogy of online learning and personal learning networks, and I could not get Werner Herzog's Rogue Film School out of my mind. I love the spirit of this, and I can't believe that I have not written on this before. Reading about his idea of the film school has the potential to totally transform ideas about professional development. The goal of our education workshops can be to push the participants to their utter-most physical and emotional limits so that they realize Ecstatic Truth (or they are eaten by a bear, which can also happen).
Seriously though, I have been skirting around the edges of this course on personal learning networks and the nature of learning in classrooms and online. There is a big difference between what happens in a learning management system and in a personal learning network. I like the idea of seminars over formal classes. I have learned a lot on my own and I think I have created some courses that allow for the participation of the odd autodidact (my learning style). In a Health Information Management course that I co-designed with the brilliant and plucky Char Gore, we took the 23 Things model which is like a Web 2.0 version of Abbey Hoffman's "Steal This Book." We utilized a learning management system only has a content repository of training materials for communication, connectivity tools, and collaboration. And whether you position yourself as a constructivist or connectivist, one still has to account for the solitary act of thinking critically and deeply.
The pedagogy implied by his film school creates a useful guide for any kind of creating and learning. I weeded out things that are only important to iconoclastic ego maniacs and when you take out the celebrity factor, one is left with a surprisingly lucid template. Here are 12 of the things I learned from Werner Herzog:

Seminars are held at infrequent intervals in varying locations. Learning has its own rhythm and the "typical" student may work or have other scheduling issues. Does learning really happen EVERY morning at 8:00 AM? Why can't courses be flexible with a multimodal delivery? One day a student should be able to participate online or go to a class.
The number of participants will be limited to a maximum of 65. This a an artificial restriction. I have been in courses where there were 300 students - massive open courses - where the teacher eventually became irrelevant. Teachers often suffer from the "sage-on-the-stage" syndrome. Even in open courses. But there comes a point where one has to ask as an instructional designer, what is the effective learning space for this class? For whatever arbitrary number is chosen, how does this course accommodate the engagement and interactivity needed for successful learning?
"Locations and dates will be announced on this website..." The seminar uses a central hub of communication. This is not a restriction, but an organizational issue. Classes, organizations, and seminars flounder when there are too many places to get information and no central space to retrieve it. It is a classic way to keep people in the dark if you are not interested in sharing power or information btw.
Do not teach anything technical. What this says to me is that the discussion of how your work reveals truth in the everyday world will be more important than discussions about the theories that led to a truth. An example might be critical thinking. There are a lot of technical and neurological discussions about what thinking might be but nothing replaces a demonstration of critical thinking using the day's news.
Learning is not about a subject but about a way of life; it is about creating a climate that makes learning possibleWe have to teach students how to learn. But it is more than that; there has to be some point to their learning. Kenneth Rexroth said this best in Classics Revisited: "He [Plato] defined education as we would: as training of personality to absorb the greatest possible scope and intensity of meaning and value from experience."
The focus of the seminars will be about a dialog in which the participants will have their voice in their projects, questions, and aspirations. This was where Herzog placed himself at the center of the seminars. What I find is that the students learn as much or more from their interactions with one another as they do from the information you provide as a teacher. Facilitating this interaction becomes vitally important.
Student work will be presented. Depending on the materials, the attention will revolve around essential questions:...How do you create illumination and an ecstasy of truth? The most important phrase here is "essential questions." What are the essential questions for work in your discipline? Are they already decided? What would happen if you and your students negotiated and argued for those essential questions? Maybe the work of education is to look for those questions.
Related, but more practical subjects, will be the art of lockpicking. Traveling on foot. The exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully. The athletic side of filmmaking. The creation of your own shooting permits. The neutralization of bureaucracy. Guerrilla tactics. Self reliance." This one needed to remain whole as a quote. In an atmosphere of open research and open textbooks, there has never been a better climate for rogue scholars. All of the great ideas started out on the fringe and the institutions of education are designed to keep them there for as long as possible.
"Censorship will be enforced. There will be no talk of shamans, of yoga classes, nutritional values, herbal teas, discovering your Boundaries, and Inner Growth." Again, I think classes have to decide what the focus of the class will be and what is appropriate or not. I find "censorship" a little fascistic but I have also been in classes that became therapy sessions instead of literature courses.
Related, but more reflective, will be a reading list. Required reading: Virgil’s “Georgics”...The Warren Commission Report...Bernal Diaz del Castillo “True History of the Conquest of New Spain." At first I thought this was a bit a a joke. And then I began to think about the works listed. Reading the books he requires take patience, reflection, attention, and focus. This is something we do not teach anymore - sustained attention.
"Required film viewing list.." One should always use a wide variety of media; this accounts for different learning modalities but also provides a fresh perspective on old problems. Again, this list should be negotiated but the seminar respects solitary focused learning and the social dimension of a shared experience which can provide a shared language and critical tools.
"Follow your vision. Form secretive Rogue Cells everywhere. At the same time, be not afraid of solitude." And this last one needs no comment.

Thursday, September 23, 2010

Connectivism and the Evolution of Pedagogy

Image via WikipediaIn some recent postings on connectivism and constructivism (see links below), educators and researchers write as if these models are oppositions; as if constructivism is early Bolshevist and connectivism is free market socialism. Pedagogy does not come from research and theorizing but from practice. The learning landscape changes over time and as the technology changes, we need new models to describe how people are learning. Connectivism is the next step in understanding how people learn in the digital age. Behaviorist and constructivist pedagogies describe a certain kind of learning that takes place in a particular milieu. Networks have changed a lot about the learning landscape, but on the other hand, much of how humans communicate and engage with one another has not. It happens faster, more often and over a wider population. I am talking to educators in India, China, and South America. I would not be talking to as many people around the world without the internet. There is a synergistic aspect to networks - we are smarter together than we are individually. There are network behaviors that are very different than purely social behaviors. Constructivist teaching is also occurring in networks. Connectivist learning is also happening. Will constructivist teaching fade away like feudal economies of old Europe?
An important point that should be made is that the social dimension of learning in constructivism isn't negated by connectivism. There is much that is complementary. To over-simplify, Connectivism accounts for the networks and learning in networks; constructivism accounts for what happens in them. Networks are only a means. Communication, interaction, and engagement all have to take place before anyone learns anything. Information itself is not knowledge. Forming a connection does not mean that any kind of engagement must or will take place.

In some of the online classes I have experienced with George Siemens (which I highly recommend), I see much of the constructivist pedagogies at work:

students are actively involved, rather than passively absorbing information;
the learning environment is democratic,the teacher is not seen as an authority figure as much as a learning guide;
the activities are interactive and student-centered instead of being lesson-centered;
a teacher facilitates activities in which students are responsible for their own learning and are autonomous from one another.

All of these are classic characteristics of the constructivist classroom (as opposed to the "sage on the stage" students-as-empty-vessel model). But I also learned as much or more from the connectivist aspects of his classes - the networks. My teaching, learning, and professional life have been immeasurably enriched by the people, communities, and networks I discovered through his classes.

All of the conversations about tools and personal learning networks presuppose an individual with some technical skills, facility with managing information and networks, the critical thinking skills to interpret that information, and a fairly high degree of motivation. All of these seem to be taken for granted - in the community college system (at least here in Humboldt Co.) and in less developed countries, one cannot make the assumption that networks in themselves will lead to learning. I am going to have to use all of the techniques of constructivist learning to show the value and purpose of these networks. I need to bring in the students prior knowledge and experience and guide them in applying that to new information and skills.

Monday, September 28, 2009

Notes Towards a Connectivist Instructional Design

Image via Wikipedia

Connectivism is a new theory of knowledge that reflects the new ways that people are currently communicating and learning in a networked world. As George Siemens puts it in his ground-breaking essay, "Over the last twenty years, technology has reorganized how we live, how we communicate, and how we learn. Learning needs and theories that describe learning principles and processes, should be reflective of underlying social environments." It is contrasted with Constructivism, which says that people construct meaning from relating knowledge to past experience and new information. I am still unclear why those two projects must necessarily be opposed or contrasted with one another, and I mean that sincerely. Often, Connectivism actually sounds like a means to construct meaning. Constructivism says that in order to teach, we must understand the mental models that students use to perceive the world and the assumptions they make to support those models. Why can't one of those "mental models" be a networked model? I like to think of the contrast between Connectivism and Constructivism like the one between the Theory of Relativity and the Copernican model. The theory of relativity is more accurate and complete, but engineers are still using the Copernican model to put satellites in orbit and to land spacecraft on the moon. Connectivism is able to account for the more complex relationships in the networked world

As an instructional designer, I see so many intersections between what a Connectivist classroom would look like and a Constructivist one. Constructivism calls for the elimination of a standardized curriculum. A Constructivist curriculum is customized to the students’ prior knowledge and provides opportunities for students to discuss new knowledge and frame it to their own experiences.

In the same way, I envision a Connectivist learning theory (actual content may vary from illustration on the box and contents may have settled during shipping), in Constructivist classrooms, instructors facilitate connections between information and ideas and foster new understanding in students. This is a student-centered environment where instructors shape their teaching strategies to student responses. Constructivist teaching encourages students to critically analyze, interpret, and predict information. Teachers also rely on open-ended questions, collaborative learning, problem-based learning, and promote student-student interaction. This is exactly what happens in the Connectivist classroom as I understand it.

Constructivism has little room for grades and "standardized" tests. In Constructivism, the learning process is the assessment. Students play a significant role in assessing their learning through reflective assignments, peer review, and self-evaluation. This is often through projects and portfolios which measure a student's progress over time. Projects can also measure, interestingly enough, a student's ability to build a smart network. Portfolios are seen as a greater measure of a student's skill and abilities than a single examination because portfolios tell us where a student has come from and where they are going. How long do students retain information from a test? (That is another post.)

So Connectivism does a little bit of all of this but the real jumping off point is in collaborative work. Students take control not only of their own learning but of the curriculum as well. As an instructional designer, I have to build assignments that encourage, facilitate, enable and empower students to work together and build connections. The students need the critical thinking skills not only to evaluate what they are seeing online, but to know what connections are worth making - they need critical network evaluation skills. Not all networks are created equal. Siemens and Downes are right when they say that there is learning in networks. There is a lot of stupidity too because the networks are made up of people. There is nothing inherently clever about a network. The students need new skills that ask:

who should I be connecting to?
what makes an "intelligent network"?
how do I make useful connections?
is this connection worth making?
is this network worth keeping?
how do I know when my networks are working for me?

This is different from Constructivism in that even more power is put into the hands of the learner, not by the teacher, but by the networks themselves. Students who are connected in the right way will often solve problems for teachers such as, learning how to broadcast a workshop into Second Life and pull in more people, or those moments when a student is able to introduce a source or expert in the field that the instructor has not met before. Connectivism takes the faith in the students' ability to learn to a whole new level and moves it to the networks' ability to teach as well. As an instructional designer, this is very exciting - curriculum becomes a handbook for cells and learning nodes - like Maoists or AA meetings.

An ironic note to all of this is that Constructivism is still seen in many places as a revolutionary act. Taking the sage off the stage and turning him/her into the guide on the side (as cliche as that is) has not happened in most classrooms. Student-centered learning is seen as a great threat to certain kinds of teachers. It is a shame because never before have we had a greater array of tools available to us to take advantage of the network-building skills that students are already using.

Friday, May 29, 2009

Twitter and Social Networks for Teaching

Image via Wikipedia

Sharon Gross wrote a great post on teaching with social networks called "Embracing the Twitter Classroom." The article is a good short argument for the connectivist classroom and the work we did here at Tacoma Community College in HIM 101. In that class, we used blogs, wikis, and twitter to create a community of learning.

There is nothing really new about using these tools for teaching and learning. Since the dawn of constructivism, educators have been talking about getting students to share their experiences as it relates to what they are learning and to communicate what they are learning in their own words. Constructivism is a recognition of the social dimension of learning. These technology tools are just other media that enable and facilitate that. Where the real change comes when these tools and networks become so ubiquitous that they begin to shape how we think and communicate (and no news there either since McLuhan).

Just as educators had a responsibility to teach the critical thinking skills needed for the traditional media, we have a responsibility to show students how to apply and use the new. Sharon Gross puts it well when she says "But the point of teaching students to use social media isn't just to embrace a novel trend: it's to help students become literate in our networking-based society."

Friday, October 24, 2008

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.

Sunday, September 28, 2008

Learning Networks: Theory into Practice

For readers of this blog who are not in the Connectivism class, I highly recommend this short but brilliant presentation. I listened to the audio and followed along with his slides.

I was going to wait until I had finished more of the readings before I wrote about this but I am pretty excited about this presentation and need to write about this and get some things out of my notes and into my network. Stephen Downes presented on Learning Networks: Theory and Practiceon March 8, 2005 to the International Conference on Methods and Technologies for Learning, in Palermo, Italy. Maybe I am so excited by this because it is more about practice than it is theory. This is a clear explication of how Connectivism works. There are still seeds of Constructivism in this presentation. In the beginning, he talks about how Connectivism gives people the "capacities" and allows them to create their own learning which is one of the central tenets of Constructivism. But Downes emphasis is on how technology shifts the view of learning from a controlled and managed deliverable to people creating their own learning. Learning is not something you get from the library "and put in people's heads." He says that "Learning is a conversation." And this has been missing from the discussions of Connectivism in the first couple weeks of our class, the social dimension of Connectivism. According to this presentation, meaning is not inherent in the signal - it must be "received and interpreted" by an entity. (This is why I think knowledge is more than a network.) From this perspective, there is a small but significant overlap in the Venn diagram between these learning theories. His description of a network is useful. It actually shows that some entity has to be in there somewhere for learning to occur.

Okay, here is the really useful part, this is brilliant - his Network Design Principles. As a teacher and instructional designer, I am always looking at the why behind how something works. If something works, we want to be able to reproduce it or to facilitate the conditions that allow learning to happen in that particular way for others. At Tacoma Community College, we are in the middle of teaching what we boldly call a "Connectivist class." Downes eight principles will allow us to build a Connectivist rubric that we will be able to apply to our assignments and materials just as we would apply a rubric that measures interactivity in our course development process in the eLearning Department. His principles are:

Decentralize
Distribute
Disintermediation
Disaggregating
Dis-integrating
Democratize
Dynamize
Desegregate

One of my goals for this class will be to take this list and put it into some kind of rubric that will allow us to ask of each assignment "to what degree does this assignment allow us to implement X principle?" I think I may rework some of the language: what is the positive action behind "disaggregating"?

His talk ends with the observation that there is no one person that knows how to build an aircraft - that it is a network of people with diverse skills that are all working within a network that creates the aircraft. This is one of my problems about traditional English classes (I also teach English): what are we teaching the students when we look at the ten page paper as an end to itself? What context do this papers exist in? I have never been asked in my entire working life to write a ten page paper. I have been asked to contribute to the learning of a group and that has sometimes involved writing but there was some connection to the collective intelligence of others.

Monday, September 15, 2008

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

Saturday, September 13, 2008

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.

Monday, August 11, 2008

Everything Old is New Again

Something about these old books from the 60s makes me sneeze. They really don't make paper like they used to. Some salient quotes from R. Buckminster Fuller's Education Automation (1962):

"I would say, then, that you are faced with a future in which education is going to be a number one amongst the great world industries, within which will flourish an educational machine technology that will provide tools such as the individually selected and articulated two-way TV and an intercontinentally net-worked, documentaries call-up system, operative over any home two-way TV set."

This sounds like YouTube. I am sure though he was not thinking it also hosting re-runs of "Hogan's Heroes." There are some great pieces of film that are winding up on YouTube that you just can't find anywhere else (like "Why Man Creates").

"We would also find that generally speaking the geographically larger the physical task to be dome, the duller the conceptual brain that is brought to bear upon the integration of the scientific discoveries and their technically reaqlized applications."

The above is an early argument for open source. There is no way that one person, one company or even a handful of governments is going to bring education to those that need it most. The message that fuller has is that we need to give people access to the information and the networks (two-way TV set). Today's education is still a system of one-way delivery. The interaction that is inherent in the network is everything.

"I would counsel you in your deliberation regarding getting campuses ready now to get general comprehensive environmental controls that are suitable to all-purposes like a circus. A circus is a transformable environment."

This is why I like what Howard Rhiengold is doing with his "Co-Lab." It is an extremely flexible collection of tools. It can be added on to a commercial learning management system (the "duller conceptual brain" that Fuller was writing about) or be used as a stand-alone LMS itself. I like being able to chose what tools I use rather than having them chosen for me out of the box.

"You don't need a detailed drawing; we do not make that kind of communication to craftsman anymore; but all of the schools go on teaching that we do. The data no longer goes to the craftsman; it goes to the tools...What we want is the man who gets the fundamental concept, the information significance, and can do some comprehensive thinking regarding that information. He will put the data into the information machines, and it will be processed by automation into physical realization of his effective thinking. We don't need many of the myriad of 'things' we have had in schools."

A side note about Connectivism: So whenever I am faced with a new theory of learning, the first question I ask is "So what?" How does this theory describe what we do? How can this theory tell me about how people learn, and therefore, how I should teach? I want any new theory to be like an information machine; I can give it my data and get out of it a realization of effective thinking. Knowing that some information is more significant than other information is currently one of the top critical skills. I know how constructivism approaches this problem: we apply information to our experiences and the experiences of others and we create new knowlege. The goal of education is to create places in space and time where this can happen. Teaching is to facilitate this interaction. This fits my experience in the classroom and online. My questions about constructivism (and they are questions because they are unanswered - there is nothing rhetorical about this) ask if the creation of a network isn't just the future of constructivism? Is it focusing on the network rather than the people and experiences? The connection rather than the connected?

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Connectivism is Nothing New

To quote Wikipedia "A hyperlink is a reference or navigation element in a document to another section of the same document or to another document that may be on or part of a (different) domain." The act of linking two things together is a critical act. The connection is first created (connectivism?) in our mind based on other connected thoughts that are in turn linked to our personal experience, social, and historical milieu (constructivism). Creating references between two "documents" is as old as recorded history. And what is a document? According to Wikipedia, "Anything serving as a representation of a person's thinking by means of symbolic marks." There are many instances of documents through out human history of containing "hyperlinks" to other documents. In the east, many of the sutras are actually written references or guides to mandalas and other art. One of my favorite chapters of the Illiad is the shield chapter (18:478) where I have long felt that the description of the shield is obviously a reference to another work of art, a sculpture perhaps, and in turn, the arrangement of images in the shield is a critique of the society and world that created it. So the Illiad was an oral tradition, referred to by a written document which also refers to a work of art (the Shield of Achilles). The shield itself was a graphical representation of the complex relationships of humanity and the cosmos. Now if that is not a hyperlinked text what is?