Open Access Research

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Open Research

In these days of budget cuts, free, open access to academic research is more important than ever. Cable Green put up a link to a video that I want to share here as well along with some resources and tips for accessing open research. College of the Redwoods had to cut some journal databases from their library budget. Publishers need to know that this is going to basically backfire on them. Technology is changing the way that we access information and there is no room in education for profiteers! Why aren't we boycotting? The students need to get involved in this: they are paying more and more for education and getting less and less.

Open Access 101, from SPARC from Karen Rustad on Vimeo.

Open Research Organizations

Right to Research
SPARC

Open Research Journals, Repostories, and Search Tools

• Journals
  • The Directory of Open Access Journals lists more than 2,800 journals that provide free access to the full text of their articles. You can search for a specific journal or browse by subject area.
  • The SPARC Publisher Partner Program features non-profit organizations that are pursuing innovative business models to provide affordable, if not open access, to peer-reviewed research.
• Subject repositories: These archives provide open access to articles by scholars in particular fields. Some only include articles with free, full-text access, while others also include articles with only an abstract. They may also include theses, conference presentations, working papers, or other types of scholarly content. This is a sample list.
  • openDOAR: an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories. As well as providing a simple repository list, OpenDOAR lets you search for repositories or search repository contents. http://www.opendoar.org/
  • arXiv: Physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology and statistics.http://arxiv.org/
  • CogPrints: Cognitive sciences, especially psychology, neuroscience, and linguistics.http://cogprints.org/
  • ERIC (Education Resources Information Center): Education. http://www.eric.ed.gov/
  • PubMed Central: Biomedical and life sciences. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/
  • SSRN (Social Science Research Network): Social sciences, especially law, political science, economics, and business. http://www.ssrn.com/
• Search tools
  • OAIster is a tool to search archives compliant with the Open Archives Initiative metadata standard. This can include open-access journals, institutional and subject repositories, as well as other digital archives, which may include educational or historical content in addition to scholarly journal articles.http://www.oaister.org/
  • The Directory of Open Access Journals also includes a tool to search the content of some journals listed. http://www.doaj.org/

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The Art of Describing

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There are often connections between my artistic life and my work in education that are surprising. I am reading a book called "The Art of Describing" by Svetlana Alpers. It is a book about Dutch art in the 17th century and it feels pretty far removed from my work in instructional design and distance education. It is not a new book but I am giving myself a crash course in art history and criticism to work out some ideas that are important to the current novel I am writing. Additionally, I am just interested in art in general. My current novel hinges on ideas of art, identity and authorship. In her book, Alpers talks about Dutch art as descriptive rather than being a narrative art like the Italians (she gives notable exceptions, of course) and in the second chapter, talks about how lenses and the camera obscura began to change how the Dutch defined art, seeing, and knowing. There are two important terms describing art for the 17th cent. Dutch - "naer het leven" (after life e.g. painting from a live subject) and "nyt den geest" (from the mind). Alpers writes "while naer het leven refers to everything visible in the world, nyt den geest refers to images of the world as they are stored mnemonically in the mind" (p.40). This is pretty exciting territory for me because there is an intersection here between this work I am doing for my art (fiction) and the work I am doing in instructional design, which involves visual pedagogy. The 17th century was an important turning point in science and art because the inventions of the lens and the camera obscura were changing how we understood optics and images. Kepler wrote about optics Alpers sums up Kepler's arguments when she writes "To understand our view of the sun, or moon, or world, we must understand the instrument with which we view it..." This is very radical. It implies that there is no concrete "actual" image out there - just a view of the world that is an interpretation by an instrument which could be a lens, a camera obscura, or the eye itself. I think this was a common view of all technology back then. It comes from a fundamental mistrust of the senses and an understanding that all tools for observation are really tools of interpretation and the tool you choose shapes that interpretation.

The lense we are looking through now is the series of connected databases, documents, images, texts and people that make up the internet. Understanding how the technology determines our interpretation of knowledge on the internet is critical. I believe that we are only going to be able to fully understand how we can do that by looking at how we processed technical innovations in the past.

Open Education Resources at College of the Redwoods

I sent this invitation out to our faculty:

Are you concerned about the high cost of education for your students?

Have you ever wished that there was something that you could do to bring down that cost?

One of the ways you can do that is to consider choosing an “open” textbook for your class. Open textbooks are free electronically or available to students for the printing cost. These textbooks have been written by instructors but have been released to other educators through public domain, Creative Commons, or other means of flexible copyright. In this presentation, we will look at collections of open source textbooks that have been created by instructors and subject matter experts and made available to schools right here in California and across the country. We will learn about organizations who vet these books for the state of California. We will look at new business models that provide free and low-cost textbooks to students and still manage to compensate instructors for their work.

I was delighted to find that two of our faculty, Dave Arnold and Bruce Wagner, are way ahead of the curve here and have written two Math textbooks (with contributions from other instructors).

Intermediate Algebra & Pre-Algebra

From what I understand, this was an individual as well as a dept. effort. I plan on interviewing them and putting that up here in the near future.

We have another faculty member interested in a music theory textbook and a couple who are interested in psychology. This is going to be a good year for the students!

Sven Birkerts in the Digital Age

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Sven Birkerts wrote an article in the American Scholar called "Reading in a Digital Age" where the tagline claims that his essay discusses "why the novel and the Internet are opposites and why the latter undermines the former and makes it more necessary." My meditation here begs to differ. The novel and the internet are not opposites; one informs the other and makes both necessary. There are things I like about Birkerts; he is a careful and thoughtful reader of books. I appreciate what he reads. I appreciate his reveries about books, binding, and paper. I like his reading lists. He reads authors that matter. That said, I would not turn to him to understand the internet, hypertext, or what is happening in social media and its connection to writing.

His arguments tend to be false dichotomies. It is not either/or. The internet is used for one thing and novels are used for another. How is one the opposite? Is a sailboat the opposite of a car? Information on the internet tends not to invite sustained meditation and reading on a linear level. It is organized as a series of connections, and this is how most people read. The mind links information, previous readings and experiences into a reading of the text. A lovely old leather bound book is still, in the end, a hypertext in the mind of the reader - even if that process is slow, thoughtful, and meditative. With that said, I can find the complete works of Dickens on the internet, download them and read them in a slow and thoughtful way.

Birkerts also indulges in the "digital natives" argument about technology - that young people get it (and are therefore cyber-addled cretins) and older people don't (and are therefore thoughtful and meditative). The problem with this argument is obvious to anyone not working in the Ivy Leagues - it is a class issue. I have many students in the community colleges who have had a limited exposure to technology. Their lack of critical thinking skills comes an education system that has seriously failed them and from the teachers who have forgot to keep up in their field who are supposed to teach them those skills. Students are stuck with teachers who think the only way to transmit information is through a two year old, $140 textbook. If a student can get though a class while surfing the internet, that curriculum needs to be revised.

I am currently using the internet to write a novel. It is not a book of postmodern fractured narrative (although I appreciate that approach) but a thoughtful examination of identity, projection and art. I am using Wikimedia to research examples of art that I am exploring, Google Docs as my word processor, and an online concept map program to outline the work. I don't do this because I am trying to use the latest technology (cool factor) but because I have a full-time job and have to be able to write and work anywhere on a moments notice; time spent at home, a break at work, a fleeting moment in a cafe, or an hour in the public library. Technology allows me to merge those moments fairly seamlessly. Yes, I would like a room of my own or an office somewhere, but that will have to wait for another lifetime. My room of my own exists virtually and asynchronously.

I know plenty of people who are proficient in the world of novels and the world of technology and the internet. I can show you hundreds of examples in Facebook - a community where hundreds of authors share information, announce readings, and despair of their vocation. A friend of mine who I consider highly proficient in technology (one of the first people in our little state college to work with researchers abroad via modem) is also a man who is in the middle of reading all of Balzac's novels. This represents nearly a hundred and twenty volumes of text.

What I find interesting about Birkerts' writing style is that all of the novels, magazine articles and movies that that he names feel like mere name dropping: they do not move his argument forward, support his argument, or at least, they do not tell us exactly why novels are the opposite of the internet. The article that he mentions on neuroscience is a single article and not a sustained argument based on even a casual review of the literature. I want to read those books and articles, but for now, they seem to be a distraction, like so many blips and beeps on the screen. In the end, he admits that he reads for entertainment - he doesn't say it that way - he uses words like "resonance."

So why is the novel the opposite of the internet? Is it because one is easier to read lying down?

The same human mind that came up with La Comédie humaine also came up with the internet. The connections between the novels and the internet are more important than the differences. Humans are connective thinkers. A direct example of this kind of thinking is in Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. Each sentence requires a knowledge of Medieval and Renaissance medical history, religious lore, literary history, and Latin - all in the same sentence! How can you read one paragraph of that book and not know that Wikipedia was inevitable?

Ning is Our Wake-Up Call

Ning just recently announced that they will no longer support free sites. I belong to a lot of Ning sites. Ironically, the Open Textbook Advocate Trainers website is a Ning site. That site is (was?) dedicated to open source textbooks. It really makes you rethink exactly what tools you use and why. I have a lot of materials in Google Docs that I think I am going to be backing up at home more often. I used to use Flickr a lot until I one day they emailed me to say that I was over the limit and they down-graded my account so I could not upload anymore or see pictures in full resolution until I sent them some money. This "premiumware" happens when something is free to drum up a customer base and then they "offer" you an "upgrade." Very effective when the company is holding your files and network hostage. Google does say they have a commitment to education but we will see what the economy dictates here. George Siemens warned about this too.

I use a lot of "free" online tools but I have some redundancy in there in case one fails - for instance, I use Slideshare and Slideboom for my online presentations. I use Google Docs and I use Scribd. I decided this early on in case someone's server was on the fritz and I was travelling. Now this redundancy is especially important when companies are looking to "monetize their assets." It is amazing how short-sited business people can be. How do you monetize a network? What do you charge for the learning and connections that happen? All of the great work that people did in these networks is swept away to "capture a big opportunity." Why not partner with education institutions, UNESCO, and other governments to harness those networks for everyone's benefit? That would be a far greater opportunity (and maybe even more lucrative) than any current business model could conceive.

In the meantime, we should be pushing more for open source tools, platforms, and public hosting of those open source tools.

Surviving Campus Politics

Here is something that they do not teach you in grad school. What do you do when you are at a campus that is in turmoil? I have not completely lived up to these verses, but they are certainly a goal and my better days are informed by them.

The Eight Verses of Thought Transformation
By His Holiness the Dalai Lama at Dharamsala, India 1981Published in 2005 in the LYWA publication Teachings From Tibet.
1. Determined to obtain the greatest possible benefit for all sentient beings, who are more precious than a wish-fulfilling jewel, I shall hold them most dear at all times.
The first thing we need to do is to remember our purpose. Think about why you got involved in education in the first place. There was some moment in your life when you got why all of this is important. Remember that and let it be the center of your day.

2. When in the company of others, I shall always consider myself the lowest of all, and from the depths of my heart hold others dear and supreme.

Graduate school does not teach humility. Remember that you are coming from a position of privilege. St. Luke wrote "and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more." Teaching is a vocation of service; you are here for others.

3. Vigilant, the moment a delusion appears in my mind, endangering myself and others, I shall confront and avert it without delay.

There are many delusions that arise on a college campus. Some might be: my program is the most important thing going; things will never change; if things do change, all change is bad; this president is the worse one (or the last one and certainly the one after), my feelings, dignity, salary, benefits (insert attachment here) matter more than teaching.

4. Whenever I see beings that are wicked in nature and overwhelmed by violent negative actions and suffering, I shall hold such rare ones dear, as if I had found a precious treasure.

No matter what someone says to you, no matter how personally hateful - they speak from a place of suffering; the same suffering you feel or have known.

5. When, out of envy, others mistreat me with abuse, insults or the like, I shall accept defeat and offer the victory to others.
I am still learning from this one. The turn the other cheek bit is hard and if you ever doubt the existence of your own ego wait for someone else to take credit for your work or to slander you behind your back. You will find out just how attached you are to your ego. I find myself returning to #4 an awful lot.

6. When somebody whom I have benefited and in whom I have great hopes gives me terrible harm, I shall regard that person as my holy guru.

Isn't that wonderful? You didn't know there were so many gurus around did you?

7. In short, both directly and indirectly, I offer every happiness and benefit to all my mothers. I shall secretly take upon myself all their harmful actions and suffering.

So if we are aware of the sufferings of others we can act from compassion and make a difference. It is one thing to be aware and another to act - if you are going to complain, ask yourself "how will complaining make a difference?" Maybe you feel like you need to raise other's awareness of a problem, but how will you ease the sufferings of others? As Ghandi said "be the change you want to see in the world."

8. Undefiled by the stains of the superstitions of the eight worldly concerns, may I, by perceiving all phenomena as illusory, be released from the bondage of attachment.

The important thing here is the "all phenomena as illusory" bit. Kissinger once said that "university politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small." Things do change - politics, budgets, and programs, and each day is an opportunity to participate in ways that will make a positive difference in the lives of others. Nothing in the college is more important than teaching and serving the students.

Open Education, Authority and Money

This is one of those blog postings that write themselves. The electronic version of this book on open education is $97.60.

Gad Fly

I understand why TEDx events are kept small. I don't blame them - there is a lot to be said for the depth of networking that can occur in small scale events. I just get annoyed at the corporate filtering and the implied exclusivity in a time when we should be opening education up. Also, despite creating "curated audiences" (yes, that is the language they use), the last one I attended still had the same dozen middle-aged white guys - there are more women and minorities involved in education. Even though I appreciate the advantages that being born male and white (that's Celtic-American to you boy-o), and being middle-aged, we can only move forward in education when we bring in a diversity of ideas, voices, and experience to the table. You can attend some of these events virtually but there is this whole application bit to attend that sticks in my craw. I came up with my own application process here.

In with the new...

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I don't think anyone, Republican or Democrat can be happy with the education system and the costs associated with it. I loved hearing Obama say "...what’s gotten overlooked amid all the hoopla, all the drama of last week, is what happened in education -- when a great battle pitting the interests of the banks and financial institutions against the interests of students finally came to an end." There are so many things that are in the way of education right now - student loans, the costs of textbooks, high unemployment, and the banking crisis - things that should not effect education as much as they do. We have an opportunity now to dismantle the old infrastructure that has long stood as a barrier to education for so many. If we are going to send manufacturing jobs over-seas, we owe it to the citizens to provide for an education. We are removing the barriers to health care and the same can happen for education. Why aren't Canadians or people from Scandinavia breaking down the doors to live in this country illegally? The strange thing is that I could take some classes from a Danish university online because they do not charge tuition for their classes. After we win the fight for health care in this country, I hope we continue on with the fight for education.

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Open Course Library Project

This great interview with Cable Green on OERs and the Open Course Library Project was on CreativeCommons.org. It was on their front page for a while and I wanted to post it here to keep it out a little longer because it makes some important points about open education resources and open texts. Washington From what I know of the grant (I used to work in WA and my wife, Jacqui Cain, is working on the online dev ed module), the developers of these open resources are not only authoring the modules but they have to teach with them as well. This is a very important part of the peer review process that is missing from even commercial textbooks. The real acid test of a textbook is not the credentials of the author, but whether or not it works in a real-life classroom setting: not all textbooks do. Sometimes it is just a matter of the author's teaching style (if, in fact, your author is a real teacher and not just an ivy league name with a bunch of TA's who do the teaching). In that case, one of the real values, as a teacher, in open texts and open education resources in general is that you are able to adapt the materials to your use and for the use of your students. You never have to ask students to pay for materials, chapters, and lessons that they are not going to use.

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Open Source University

Here is the other side of the napkin on what I mean by "Open Source University." Please add (or detract) to this in the comments. I might move this to a wiki as I get rolling:

There are no professors - there are advisers, facilitators, peer tutors, and mentors who all participate in networks.

Facilitators participate because they too benefit from the network itself.

There is a rubric for milestones in your field.

There is a connectivist rubric that evaluates your network.

You are not judged on how much information you took in and regurgitated at the end of the semester but on the integrity, quality, diversity, and utility of your networks over the course of your studies.

You are assessed on your ability to share, illuminate, and participate.

Each semester, your goal is to contribute to the "textbook" in some way - to make films, interview others.

You cannot get this degree by sitting in your chair and listening to someone speak.

You assessed via a portfolio of

• Participation
• Collaboration
• Creativity

You are not evaluated on the questions you answer but on the questions you ask.

Diversity in your network means that you have to have a few people in your network who think you are wrong or crazy and that you think are wrong or crazy.

The Future of Education

This is a first crack at thinking about the "Future of Education" question that George Siemens asked us. It is not a finished thesis but just little old me reading off the back of the napkin. I am pretty passionate about the future of education because the future is here now and passing a lot of community college students by. It is not from a lack of money but a lack of vision and will. As an instructional designer and educator, I see nothing "theoretical" about this discussion at all since the answers to the questions can mean real change for people - just look at what is happening in open education resources and open texts right now.

I threw in pictures that represented a history of futures and just basically played around with Garage Band.

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A Note on Learning Styles

I want it to be clear that I do not think that I have the all the answers about learning styles theory and pedagogy. I wrote about this earlier in the year here. Learning styles theory is an extremely complex subject that covers psychology, sociology, neuroscience, epistemology, and pedagogy. Notice all the soft sciences in this list. That said, in my own practice in special education in the k-12 realm, my work as a tutor and tutor trainer, and as an English teacher has benefitted tremendously from these tools. I have seen students who were tested as auditory learners begin to use recorders in the classroom and I have watched their lives turn around, but that is not research. The learning styles theories as they stand cover too much ground and are too broad to determine (at this point in time) solid empirical testing. Many of the theories are too simplistic to cover the complexity of the human mind. The research questions in some cases have to be narrowed. Researchers have to continue to define and test the theory, and explore - there is a lot to be done. There have been numerous attempts - many, to my way of thinking, have been successful. What happens though is that contra learning styles educators simply change the definition of learning styles to dismiss the conclusions of the research or weaken the argument by narrowly define what the theory should predict.

An example of that is a video by Daniel Willingham that has gained some traction on YouTube that declares that learning styles is bunk. It is filled with lots of unsupported phrases like "that is not how the brain works" as if we had a really clear picture of how the brain works (never mind how we learn). The only thing that can be said definitively is that more research needs to be done. Another really big problem with the video is that it ignores any research that has been done and there is a lot of it out there. To say that there has not been any research that supports the idea of learning styles means that Willingham has not done a thorough review of the literature.

Willingham says that "lots of people have performed that test" as if there was one way to test learning styles. He also talks about "meaning based" as if we are meant to take it for granted that "meaning based" learning is the final obvious word in epistemology and language. That is just not the case. Willingham narrowly defines learning styles and what it "ought to predict" and then takes the theory (as if there were one) to task.

The claim, for instance, that teachers have to change how they teach is just wrong - not everyone who supports learning styles makes that claim. The idea is that yes, we can teach to a broader spectrum of learning modalities. But learning styles theory is there to help the students understand why they may not be getting it. There are good, solid criticisms of learning styles theory and this ain't it.

Learning styles is still being defined as a theory. In this sense it is a lot like string theory - there is some decent math and models in there but a lot more work needs to be done and should be done. No one is going to through the theory out because it is accurately modeling what is happening in the real world. We don't even know how many strings there are! I consider the learning styles to more of a model like string theory rather than a full blown theory yet. But we cannot just discount research that supports the theory out of hand.

Some References That Go Beyond Personal Beliefsd (even mine)

1. Learning Styles and Pedagogy in Post-16 Learning by Frank Coffield, et al.

If you want to look at how complex this question is, check out this paper that is really critical of the theories and is in depth. (Notice that I don't just choose research that supports my world-view or research bias.)

2. Christy Tucker's blog has some excellent summary of the research.

3. Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesized: A New Model for Liberal Education By Robert J. Sternberg

4. Comparing Student Learning Styles in an Online Distance Learning Class and an Equivalent On-Campus Class by David P. Diaz and Ryan B. Cartnal, Cuesta Community College

5. One Size Does Not Fit All: Learning Style, Play, and On-line Interactives, David T. Schaller, et al.

6. Ability, Demography, Learning Style, and Personality Trait Correlates of Student Preference for Assessment Method
"More than 400 students from four universities in America and Britain completed measures of learning style preference, general knowledge (as a proxy for intelligence), and preference for examination method. Learning style was consistently associated with preferences..."

Curation Science: A note on Ted Talks

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Today I spent time listening to the TedxNyED Talks online. I really liked the event. There were a lot of great people gathered together and a lot of good ideas coming out. I recommend all of the people who presented, and I will link the videos here as soon as they are available. The people who put on the event did an outstanding job. I appreciated the fact that they streamed it live and that there was a large community of educators participating remotely.

I made discoveries today: I learned about Flexbooks which, given some of the projects I am currently working on, is very serendipitous; I heard people at the conference speak that I had never heard before, and I met new people in Twitter. I am very excited about the new connections with some very interesting people.

Because of all of the good work that went into this event, and the fact that I know that everyone came away from it with something positive (I know that I did), and that the conversations we had there were only the beginning, a planted seed - I feel free to be a pain in the ass about elitism. Some of the issues are argued here at D'arcy Norman's blog.

The event was based on the corporate Ted Talks format. I listen to the corporate Ted Talks too. These are really interesting videos and I have learned a lot from them. Like them, the New York local version "curated" the audience as well as the speakers. When they were asked why there were so few women or minorities it was "inadvertent" and because the white men said "yes" first and filled up the slots before they realized it. There was a application to be in the audience. You had to list your significant accomplishments. It seems funny that the audience was carefully curated and the speakers were "inadvertent." The irony about all this is that many at the event are promoters of open source and open education resources. One of the whole points of the corporate Ted Talks is that they need to control the audience in order to control the results of their conference. You want the right kind of people who have access to a lot of money (admission is $6000 to corporate Ted Talk). That is what curation means. It is the Disneyland approach to vacationing - god forbid you go to a real place and meet real people - who knows what could happen? This is not a great model for educators to adopt or to promote. This is like lecturing on collaborative learning or selling a book to Thompson & Wadsworth on open textbooks.

Many teach because they believe that education will make a difference in people's lives. And there are some huge problems in education and changes that need to be made. They won't be made by doing the same things over and over again. In education, there is still too much of the "sage on the stage" and everyone sitting in rows paying attention. And it is not working.

We need to hear, and act on, ideas from a broad spectrum of society and the world if we plan on making real and significant change. The world is now too small for us to be comfortable with not bringing in developing nations to the table, for instance. Someone pointed out that the majority of the teachers are women but the majority of presenters continues to be men. It is not that by having some token females on a stage that we will be magically transformed, but if we are serious about change as educators, we have to broaden our vision. We benefit and become stronger from hearing a diversity of voices. We are asking students to be more than they are - we can follow suit.

They are planning on doing a Ted Talks deal for kids. I am hoping that the audience is not curated for that event (they should at least let the parents in despite their education background right?) and that the speakers are representative of their community. As one of the speakers today put it: "How can you dare think you can transform a child if you are not willing to transform yourself?" And if you are not in education for transformation, what the hell are you doing?

There is a huge price to pay for not attending to diversity. Everything you do becomes irrelevant as the world around you changes and you are offering answers to questions that no one is asking. Again, as Lehman reminded us "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cant learn, unlearn, and relearn." - Alvin Toffler

Stephen Fry on Technology and Change

I have been checking out the BBC interviews on technology from the series called "The Virtual Revolution." Stephen Fry talks about how the driving force behind all the technological change isn't the technology but the inherent human will to connect. He backs this up with some interesting stories about how letter writing, the post box, and novels changed society. I have written some similar ideas here about Twitter - how the press and others miss how it works (it is not an information distribution platform but a network creation tool). Anyway, I highly recommend the series because it represents a wide variety of interesting view points on technology.

On the Greatly Exaggerated Death of Culture

I really thought Culture (I mean the exclusive education of privilege maintained by privilege) would have died years ago. Sven Birkerts and others have been predicting the death of The Book, Google is supposed be making us stupid, and instant messaging is supposed to turn us into twittering idiots, yet somehow things are not quite working out that way. Instead, books are more available than ever, social networking makes the authors and experts more accessible, and those same networks allow us to connect with others who are working along the same lines (or cause us to think differently). The same impenetrable silos of knowledge (The Ivy League) are now adopting an open courseware model because they are beginning to understand that information is not knowledge until someone applies, discusses, uses, and shares it. They really want an underprivileged high school student to be curious about New Media classes at MIT and to read their stuff.

Image of Ferlinghetti by Steve Rhodes via Flickr

Imagine my surprise when I open up the Chronicle of Higher Ed and read in an article called "The New Math of Poetry" by David Alpaugh that there is too much poetry in the world. That's right: because of technology, there is too much poetry in the world:

"Len Fulton, editor of Dustbooks, which publishes the International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses, estimates the total number of literary journals publishing poetry 50 years ago as 300 to 400. Today the online writers' resource Duotrope's Digest lists more than 2,000 'current markets that accept poetry,' with the number growing at a rate of more than one new journal per day in the past six months."

His complaint is that with all that poetry, we may miss the new Blake or Dickinson because the traditional filters of Culture (and please, do not reach for that revolver) are no longer in place. He says that no one can possibly read that much poetry and that

"professionals can ignore independent poets and reserve the goodies—premiere readings, publications, honors, financial support—for those fortunate enough to be housed inside the professional poetry bubble."

That is already the case. That has been the case for far too long. How many Blakes or Dickensons have we lost because they could not get into Yale or any college for that matter? Or didn't have the proper letters of recommendation to get through the doors of a publishing house? He does admit that Thoreau and Whitman were self-published. Yet he doesn't tell us how a volunteer army nurse and bum (Whitman) would get published in the academic poetry world before print-on-demand, lets say in the 1950s. Whitman would have died in obscurity if he waited to communicate. He continued to publish, not because he had the imprimatur and nihil obstat of Harvard, but because people read his poetry and bought his books. Emerson praised his work but the universities thought his work obscene and he had only one poem anthologized (a mummification process for poets) in his lifetime.

I also know some really great poets who only recently have made it into the anthologies because their poetry did not come out of the conservative academic tradition: they sinned by becoming popular before they were critically acclaimed. The first time I saw Ferlinghetti in a college anthology was in the early 90s for a single poem. There are a couple sides to poetry and one of them is the academic scene where the Status Quo gets to decide who is and who is not a poet. There is the MFA side where those who join the lodge publish fellow lodge members (secret handshake revealed upon final tuition payment). And then there is everyone else, who, despite themselves, can't help writing poetry, making videos, recording podcasts and producing art because that is what humans do and have been doing for 10,000 years. That is the frightening news flash: we are all poets. Ferlinghetti used to call for poetry to be recognized as a universal language, he opened his "Populist Manifesto" with

Poets, come out of your closets,
Open your windows, open your doors,
You have been holed up to long
in your closed worlds.

Technology is an opening of that window. More people can communicate and in a wider array of media than ever before. We should not be sitting on the ground telling sad tales of reading and the death of reading: people are reading and writing more than ever. They are just not reading and writing along the old model. People are creating videos, journals and blogs and listening to poetry in new ways that allow everyone to participate. And no, the professors will not have time to tell us who to include and who to exclude. It is up to us now.

Meditation on 21st Century Skills

One of the reasons why teachers should not feel threatened by technology or change is that in the next decade, the skills needed to be literate in the age of social media are still going to draw on traditional literacies and rhetoric. As a matter of fact, one of the weaknesses of "New Media" is the focus on technology at the expense of solid critical thinking skills. There is so much reposting of stories and not enough fact checking and analysis. Many education blogs will repost stories from sources that are not credible and pass them along as "fact." (Take, for instance, stories about teaching and learning in virtual worlds posted by those who have little experience in the topic.)

I believe that the three modalities of learning will center around critical thinking, networking, and new media. In other words, students will have to be able to analyze information, connect with others, and then use technology to publish their results or express themselves. This has been true since the invention of writing.

I am looking for more feedback on these 21st Century Literacies. There is a lot of talk about the need and not enough on what they are and why. Please feel free to contribute to this conversation using the comment feature of this blog.

What Can't We Do

According to Google Analytics, four visitors to this blog over the last three months have visited via dial-up modems. For their sake, I am typing this very slowly.

There are a lot of reasons not to use technology for teaching and learning. Especially in a place like Humboldt County. There are some places here that are inaccessible. There are some that do not have electricity. The technological infrastructure is weak. There are places where there is not a lot of high speed computers available to the general public. But this shouldn't mean that we shouldn't work on that infrastructure.

For some reason, some think that technological solutions have to have the same effect for all people in all circumstances or they are not solutions. That is like saying that we shouldn't teach reading because many of our students do not have access to books, books are expensive, and some students will require glasses in order to read them. So unless books are free and your reading program includes universal health care, we can't teach reading.

Online learning is not new. I understand the fear of technology, the stress when confronted with change, and the anxiety that a sense of a loss of control can cause. But we have a responsibility to our students to pass on the critical thinking skills necessary to use technology wisely and skillfully, not to pass on our fear, stress, and anxiety.

The digital divide will not be conquered by stopping in our tracks, and we can't go backwards. The same critical thinking skills we used in the old media are applicable in the new.

Frontline: Digital Nation

I watched Frontline's Digital Nation on television last night. I didn't watch it on the computer because I wanted to give it my full attention while I checked my email, sent notes to Twitter, updated my blog, Facebook, MySpace page and played Phosphor.Wait, what was I watching again?

In all I thought the program was fairly well balanced. Our culture is shifting. It has not evolved. If the digital world has caused us to evolve, why do I still have faculty who need to print out pages from an online learning management system? Why are we still using an LMS? Evolution is where humans begin to develop stouter, stronger, faster thumbs because those who master rapid texting will be the ones who reproduce, but I digress.

I love the scenes where kids who are "internet addicts" are sitting right there on the computer playing games while the mother complains (she is standing right next to him) that the kids grades are down, he is on the computer 12 hours a day, he doesn't eat right, and is becoming more and more antisocial and it us supposedly his problem. The real problem is that people do not know how to raise their children. My dad never negotiated or bargained with me. I can't tell you how many times I have seen mothers and fathers say "wouldn't you like to eat dinner now?" when what they should say is "Its time for dinner." That is the real cultural shift; parents as "pals." Teaching responsibility begins in the home. They can learn about democracy in civics class.

I feel the same way about Sherri Turkle and others when they say that "the kids do themselves a great disservice" by letting them be distracted from lectures. We are teaching children learning skills that are no longer relevant. There are so many ways to harness technology in the classroom that I find it incredible that teachers at MIT are still harnessed to the lecture method. What about using their cell phones as part of a student response system? Have the "google jockeys" in the class put notes and links up on a wiki (yes, MIT, I am available as a consultant for curriculum design). There were some good examples in the documentary of people using technology to turn poorly performing schools around. Not that the technology was the answer; it was the attention to the students that really made the difference. Technology was the medium.

The tests that show that multitaskers are poor performers only prove that tasks that merely require linear analysis are no longer the most effective use of a exo-networked brain.

Writing with Technology

Image by churl via Flickr

Usually my life as a writer and my life as an instructional designer do not intersect much. I did begin life as a tutor and English teacher though. There has always been an element of technology involved with writing (reed stylus anyone?). My latest foray back into the world of novel writing has me thinking and rethinking what I need in a word processor.

My past writing process was to write long-hand in notebooks, type up a draft on a typewriter, annotate and mark up that draft, type up another draft, maybe do some very literal cutting and pasting, and then type up a final draft. This would then be read, annotated and corrected by Jacqui who might even be tempted now and again to retype short pieces for me. I could not have gotten out of community college without her.

I got my BA in English at Sonoma State in 1991. They had Mac labs and I had a couple (only a couple) of instructors who insisted on getting their papers back to them on floppy disk. One of the instructors commented electronically on the papers. I wasn't sure about this technology but my uncle Ed (who also wrote) said to me that what the chain saw was to logging, the word processor was to words. I always started in notebooks. I still have boxes of them.

I still carry a notebook and pen but it is more to shock my brain out of ruts, brainstorming, concept maps, outlines and, of course, just to sit and process thoughts. The odd poem gets pulled out of there but it is mostly for notes and keeping my brain in order. It is more a part of my thinking process than my composing process now.

In November, I took on the insane task of the National Novel Writing Month "contest." The goal is 50,000 words in 30 days. I wrote the whole draft in Google Docs, Google Notes, and Delicious Bookmarks. It was insane because I am still settling into a new job at College of the Redwoods with a really hectic schedule, but of the many justifications, it was a good opportunity to give some online word processors a good shake-down cruise with a big project. I liked being able to write anywhere. I liked being able to share my draft with Jacqui. I will use Google Docs to share the first draft with a couple of volunteer readers and editors. I wish there were a way to join the docs, notes, and bookmarks though - maybe my next novel will be written in Google Wave.

I looked at Zoho Writer which is a great contender with Google Docs. Both of them allow the writer to build a table of contents and insert anchors into the document. This allows you to navigate quickly within the document. I found myself missing the navigation pane in MS Word or Open Office though. What Open Office (and MS Word) lacks though is the ability to edit or move sections of a document in that navigation pane. This is something that you will find in Jer's Novel Writer and in Scrivner (a Mac program I highly recommend).

I have been finding the act of organizing my discovery draft in Scrivener to be an invaluable aid in getting to the first draft. I am still in the 30 day free trial and I am about to shell out the $35 as an early birthday present. I don't usually buy software with a few exceptions but I am willing to pay for usefulness and innovation.

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12 Free Learning Networks for Students and Academics

Image via Wikipedia

The rise of new online technologies has reshaped the way people learn. Print reference sources, though still valuable, are no longer the primary gateway to information. Students and other academics have turned to social networks and collaborative learning communities to find research materials and increase their knowledge of various subjects.

There are many free learning networks that have been created specifically for students and academics. The following twelve sites are good examples. These online communities provide access to alternate forms of teaching and learning. They also offer a central place where like-minded people can easily meet and share information.

LearnCentral- LearnCentral combines social networking with live collaboration technology to provide a unique teaching and learning environment. Classrooms can connect with other classrooms, peers can connect with other peers, and groups can conduct online meetings and seminars.

LearnHub - This social learning network is home to a number of experts who can help with standardized tests, college admissions, and other academic pursuits. LearnHub also offers a community space for users who want to contribute educational information and learn from other members.

Sclipo - Sclipo is a social learning network that makes it easy for academics to teach and learn using the site's many built-in applications. Popular apps include a course manager, a document and video library, and a webcam-based classroom that can be used for live teaching and webinars

GCFLearnFree.org - Created and supported by the Goodwill Community Foundation, this global learning network provides free lessons on everything from math and money to careers and computers.

Academia.edu - This unique learning network can be used to find researchers with similar interests. The site's search feature also allows members track the latest developments in their research area and see what other people are researching.

Academici - Academici is a professional social network for academics and scientists. Site members include people from more than 200 countries.

GradeGuru - Designed specifically for college students, this knowledge sharing network makes it easy for students to share course notes and study together online. Members who share notes can earn gift cards, PayPal cash, and other rewards.

Pronetos - Pronetos is a social network for scholars, professors, and their institutions. The site encourages collaboration by allowing members to share papers, find research, post course materials, and share special announcements.

TheApple - TheApple is a learning community and social network for current and future educators. The site offers career resources, lesson plans, education-related quizzes, education news, teacher trivia, inspiring videos, and a community forum where members can chat and learn online.

Livemocha - Livemocha, the world's largest and most active online language learning community, provides a place for language learners to meet and communicate online. The site also offers free courses in 36 different languages and learning tips from native speakers.

LingQ - LingQ is a knowledge sharing network for language learners. Visitors who sign up for the site's free membership can meet other language learners online, take an unlimited number of free language lessons, and join live conversations for extra language practice.

VoxSwap - VoxSwap is another good place for people to learn new languages online. Members work together to teach each other new vocabulary words and language skills.

Guest post from education writer Karen Schweitzer. Karen is the About.com Guide to Business School. She also writes about online degrees for OnlineDegreePrograms.org.

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Why Learning Styles Matter

There was an article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed last month that after reading it, I decided to promptly ignore. But it has been resurrected in a few places and Stephen Downe's referenced it recently as an argument against learning styles. The article is "Matching Teaching Styles to Learning Styles" by David Glenn. There are articles that are written just to generate letters to the editor and I think this was one of them. The article begins with "almost certainly, you were told that your instruction should match your students' styles. " (I have never heard anything of the kind. What I do hear is that we should strive to make our information multimodal.) And then introduces the argument from Pashler's recent paper that "there is no strong scientific evidence to support the "matching" idea, they contend in a paper published this week in Psychological Science in the Public Interest. And there is absolutely no reason for professors to adopt it in the classroom." The article then goes on to quote Sternberg who has conducted a lot of research in this field who says that "while he holds Mr. Pashler and his colleagues in high esteem, he believes they did a poor job here. Several of the most-cited researchers on learning styles, Mr. Sternberg points out, do not appear in the paper's bibliography. "The authors draw negative conclusions about a field they fail adequately to review," Mr. Sternberg says." So in other words, the author of the article is giving us this "it may or may not be a valid position" kind of argument.

What this article points out is that more research needs to be done in this field. It is not "evidence" of any kind that learning styles are not an issue. One thing these articles do point out is how uselessly narrow research has become and how important cross-disipline work is in education. "Conclusions" for or against the idea of learning styles in the education field ignore the entire history of the study of visual intelligence in the cognitive sciences.

In one of my previous incarnations as a tutor, I used to listen very carefully to how students described problems. Phrases like "I can' t understand a word my instructor says" or "he hands out these charts and they are all Greek to me" gave me important clues on how to shape my tutorials and teach students how to study. Gathering information from them about how they take in information would shape how they studied. And sometimes learning how a teacher delivers information would help us find disconnnects between how a particular student learns and their performance in class. We made no hard and fast universal conclusions about our practices and called them "learning style preferences." We were not scientists, but educators in the trenches out to solve real and immediate problems. We used learning style inventories for purely practical, common sense reasons - it worked. That said, I will agree that more work needs to be done to verify the claims that some educators have made. We did not use them to say "teachers should now teach differently" - we used the information to show the students ways to leverage their learning style. Some teachers can be threatened by the idea that a picture might actually aid their students in understanding what the hell they are saying, and some aren't. I feel like a Civil War nurse, I don't really know why people who get operated on with boiled surgical instruments survive but I am going to keep doing it anyway and look forward to the day when the medical schools come out with a Universal Germ Theory.

If learning styles don't matter, why bother using pictures, graphs, concept maps, video, or audio recordings? Why provide transcripts to videos? The real question that needs to be worked out is how learning styles matter and how to measure that effectively.

If you are in a successful, ivy leaguish, academic environment (a well-monied university, for instance), you are in the worst place possible to do this kind of research. The kinds of students you will get there are students who are strong read/write oriented people. The system is designed to weed everyone else out! I want to see someone working in the K-12 system (preferably special education) and in developmental ed classes at the community college level before they attempt to draw conclusions on learning theories based on a study of 500 Stanford juniors.

If learning styles do not matter, then I can deliver all information in a single modality (blocks of text) and everyone will get it - no matter what their background, culture, or experience. This just does not happen. How does one explain "illiterate" students finally learning how to read using the Montessori method? (They use images and manipulatives.)

Learning styles matter because as an instructional designer, I can use the principle of making course materials multimodal which increases the engagement of the learners.

A very useful summary of the issues are on Christy Tucker's blog.

Every day the same dream

Everyday the same dream is a work of Flash art from Molleindustria. It was made in 6 days for the Experimental Gameplay Project. (They have an interesting article online "Videogame Rules as a Political Medium.") What fascinated me about "Everyday the same dream" is that using simple animation and interface, the artist guides us through some really complex ideas. There are minimal instructions. This is a fantastic lesson in education technology - it shows a greater understanding about how we learn than nearly any other piece of software I have seen in a long time. Each time the player guides the protagonist through the day (or the dream), he is provided with subtle clues to interact with the environment and make changes. It is our sense of play that causes us to do things in the environment, to try different things. To move the "story" forward, you have to disrupt the flow of the given narrative - don't get in the car, pet the cow, go to work with no clothes on - things that might happen in a dream. It is during these "disruptions" that more information is gained and things begin to change. It is as if the author was saying that learning is the sum total of the disruptions we throw against an accepted idea.