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

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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

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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.

The Connectivist 18th Century

I have written a couple of postings discussing the idea that Connectivism isn't new (it is just highly relevant right now). There is an interesting note in USA Today by Elizabeth Weise on a project at Stanford called "The Republic of Letters" put together by Dan Edelstein and Paula Findlen that visually maps the networks of letter writers in the 18th century. The project graphically reveals the networks through dynamic animation. Oxford University supplied information on 50,000 letters (15,000 of them written by Voltaire). Today's social media is merely faster and cheaper.

Weise writes "The 18th century was alive with networks. Despite what some might think today, they weren’t invented when the first email was sent in 1971.

'In fact, going all the way back to the Renaissance, scholars have establish

ed themselves into networks in order to receive the latest news, find out the latest discoveries and circulate the ideas of others,' says Edelstein."

This project is a good example of cross discipline studies (History, French, and programming) helping us gain an understanding of where we are now and where we are going. Truly in the spirit of connective knowledge.

I Predict Things Will Remain the Same...

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...only very shiny.

I always brace myself at this time of year for all the predictions that are going to come out for the following decade. These "predictions" are often a way to express our hopes and fears and often have little to do with how technology and history play themselves out. Who would have predicted medical simulations in virtual worlds? Or that the next latest and greatest computer for the classroom would be the phone? What astounds me about predictions for the future is how much of the past world-views get projected forward. Predictions are often ways to repackage our best loved prejudices and preserve them for the future.

Larry Cuban's "An End of Year Prediction," for instance, gives us the same fears of online learning repackaged.

"Proponents talk about how this form of teaching and learning as a powerful innovation that will liberate learning from the confines of brick-and-mortar buildings. Estimates (and predictions) of online learning becoming the dominant form of teaching turn up repeatedly and, somehow, fade." This has not been the case at all. Online learning has been nothing but a growth industry. And it will continue to be, not just for colleges but for the k-12 as well. The economy is in such a state that online learning is pretty much here to stay. According to the Sloan Report, K-12 Online Learning: a 2008 Follow-Up Survey, the overall number of K-12 students engaged in online courses in 2007-2008 was estimated at 1,030,000. "This represents a 47% increase since 2005-2006" and this number is increasing for this year as well.

"Nonetheless, by 2020, well over 90 percent of public school students will be in places called schools going at least 180 days a year to self-contained classrooms where a teacher will be in charge." This will simply not be the case because no one can afford to build the schools in the traditional sense. This statement ignores what is happening in brick and mortar schools. They are turning more and more towards technology to solve their problems. Notice the concern with the teacher being in charge. I really hope those attitudes change.

Cuban goes on to say that "The error that online champions make decade after decade (recall that distance learning goes back to the 1960s) is that they forget that schools have multiple responsibilities beyond literacy. Both parents and voters want schools to socialize students into community values, prepare them for civic responsibilities, and yes, get them ready for college and career. Online courses from for-profit companies and non-profit agencies cannot hack those duties and responsibilities." This shows a real lack of understanding of what online education is and what is possible. The only way one could write such a statement is to have no real interest in the field of online learning or educational technology. There are many studies that show that it is a successful medium for interacting, learning and building community; all skills that are certainly needed in the 21st century workplace.

"Online instruction will continue to expand incrementally," writes Cuban, "but will still be peripheral to regular K-16 schooling. End of prediction." The joke here is that it is expanding exponentially. Just in my own workplace it has expanded 100% and nationally it is increasing steadily at

According to the USDLA, "Distance learning is used in all areas of education including Pre-K through grade 12, higher education, home school education, continuing education, corporate training, military and government training, and telemedicine.

Research studies have been quite consistent in finding that distance learning classrooms report similar effectiveness results as reported under traditional instruction methods. In addition, research studies often point out that student attitudes about distance learning are generally positive."

I predict that predictions will go on being made that ignore research, the facts, and reinforce the power dynamics of the medieval classroom. There are many articles and stories that discuss the expansion of online learning in the K-12. A good place to start is at eCampus which has a number of articles on this page that discuss the rapid expansion of e-learning.

Digital Writing, Digital Teaching - Integrating New Literacies into the Teaching of Writing

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I wanted to write a brief note recommending Troy Hick's excellent blog, Digital Writing, Digital Teaching. I live in a schizophrenic shadow world of being an instructional designer (lots of tech) and a former English teacher (where's the pencil sharpener?), and I really appreciate the natural merging of these fields that this blog represents. Recently I heard George Siemens define literacy as facility in the dominant media of the day; this blog is a great big step in that direction. This is generally rare in English departments. It is also a very useful blog because he links to his syllabus, teaching tips and assignment ideas.

When today's students go into the modern workplace, they will not be asked to write a 10 page paper on how new media can be used to promote collaborative work. They will be judged on their ability to actually do that. English departments can be the place where the traditional writing skills, rhetoric (in the good old classical sense), and critical thinking can be brought together with social networking and the new media.

Why Bloom's Taxonomy?

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I read a comment on an education blog about "Bloom's Taxonomy": "Why should we use that old thing?" was the basic tone. Bloom's Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain, simply put, classifies knowledge from lower to higher order of objectives from knowledge (memorization), comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. I wanted to put up a brief note on this because speaking as an instructional designer and erstwhile teacher, there is no better tool for organizing content for in-depth learning and reflection. Is it an accurate description of the "cognitive domain"? Is there really such a thing as the "cognitive domain"? Speaking as a Buddhist, maybe, but you can't get there from here. Seriously though, Bloom's taxonomy recognizes that there are different ways of knowing and understanding. If it is not an accurate description of the mind, it is because it never claimed to be the Master Key to All Human Cognition. NASA scientists know that Einstien's description of gravity and time are more accurate than Newton, but they still use Newtonian principles and math to orbit satellites or to send something to the moon. Bloom's Taxonomy is like this. It is not a Unified Field Theory, but a tool that does specific things. What Bloom's Taxonomy will do very well is fix a test or an assignment.

Every once in a while, I will get a faculty member who will ask me to look at a test. Sometimes the test is too difficult or too easy or the students seem not to be able to demonstrate what they have learned. Invariably, it is because the questions that they are asking rely too much on one particular section of Bloom's Taxonomy. In other words, the instructor will write a test that he or she thinks will demonstrate a student's ability to apply knowledge and what the test really relies on is memorization or comprehension. There is a whole list of verbs applied to each domain that can help in re-writing or creating tests. I can demonstrate quantitatively that this method works. I have seen it work in grades, retention, longitudinal studies, etc. I have not seen anything coming close to that coming from any other school of thought on education, constructivist, connectivist or what have you. There are a lot of new ideas about how Bloom's Taxonomy can work in social media and I think that these should definitely be tested, explored and used.

There are many great explorations of these ideas on the web and I want to encourage you to look at some of them. A summary of the work is at Bloom's Digital Taxonomy, but there is a lot of interesting things being done with these ideas elsewhere too.

Google Wave in Education

Image by Monica A. via Flickr

Google Wave is opening to the public soon. Even before it is out of the gate, there are pronouncements on what it is and is not good for. And since this is an education blog, I want to look a little at the teaching and learning side to this. One of the the great things about education technology is that the best educational technology never starts out as "educational;" the technology is always designed for some other use and a couple of educators figure things out like how to turn a spreadsheet into a writing rubric that inserts comments into student papers at the click of a button. Or that the AI routine in someone's R2-D2 in a virtual Star Wars world can be re-purposed in a medical simulation. That is why I think pronoucements about how Google Wave will be used are a little premature. There are a lot of tools in Google Wave and extensions and mash-ups yet to be created. Two things that are important to me as an instructional designer in all of his are the collaboration and play back feature. Collaboration is an essential to online learning. The level of interactivity in collaborative learning is unmatched by the typical "online textbook" model of online classes. We are already using Google Apps in classes. The collaborative functionality built into those, combined with email, and chat tools will make Google Wave a very powerful tool. The play back feature - the ability to play back the history of the the collaboration, will be useful for students for reviewing course content. Instructional designers can leverage this feature by scaffolding how a wave is constructed (or how information is brought into a wave) with this in mind. This is a new way of thinking about design. The play back feature will also give us new ways to research online interaction and collaboration. We will be able to measure in real time where things work and where they don't; when students run into trouble and when they "get it."

Collaborative tools are a great opportunity for giving back to control and responsibility for education back to the students. The collective intelligence of an entire class is pretty good at finding and sharing the information they need to be successful; especially if that class is facilitated by someone modeling critical networking skills. The combination of tools in Google Wave seems to enable that.

I will be more excited by the translation tools after seeing them in action. The rest of the tools have all been tested by us in other places, on other platforms - the brilliant thing is bringing them all together. The real genius comes in seeing how a network of teachers, students, and designers will use it in the end.

Flies with Bad Memories

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Victoria Gill, science reporter for BBC News, wrote in her article "Bad memories written with lasers" last Friday about researchers who "have devised a way to write memories onto the brains of flies, revealing which brain cells are involved in making bad memories." This reveals memory to be much more mechanistic than I have written about here in the past. Just last night I was in a conversation with someone that went something like "if memories and thoughts are chemical, why can't I make you drink something and see or hear a specific memory?" Miesonbock at Oxford has found 12 cells in the fly's brain that are responsible for "associative learning." The really important part of the story for me is where Miesenbock says "I have every expectation that the fundamental mechanisms that produce these error signals are the same in the brain of the fly as they are in the brain of the human." I think it is a huge leap from the fly to the complexity of the human brain but it is not so huge a leap as it was from the Friday before last. Twelve neurons that can be tricked into associated a smell with a predator is still quite a ways away from understanding the role communication and social interaction play in learning, but this is certainly an important step in understanding how neurons connect and create learning.

The Past is My Co-Pilot

McLuhan says that we travel blindly into the future looking at the past through the rear view mirror. There should be little tiny letters though that say "Objects in mirror are

closer than they appear." Today I talked to a dear friend from the past. I am sure she doesn't really know how dear of a friend she was, but if you recall Junior High and your freshman year in high school - anyone who treated you decently, talked to you, regarded you as a human being, shared a smoke, and didn't hit you more than was necessary was pretty damned decent. She had/has a genuinely delightful smile. I don't really remember a lot of people from those years but the few people I do remember were or are remarkable (for good or ill). You have to remember that I was just a little bit denser back then. I didn't enjoy much about those years, and I have no real way of being objective about them. Anyway, someone I have known since the 3rd grade friended me on Facebook sometime ago. I have added a few of his friends and low and behold, there was that smile; that refuge in a sea of Junior High horror. And I was really stunned because I knew that 20 years ago, I would probably never see that person again in my entire life. I grew up as ungracefully as possible and got the hell out of Dodge. I left a geographic location with the thought of never returning and all of those years would fade away. I was wrong, of course, on so many levels. I thought I would walk out creating more memories of greater or lesser value and I would just keep moving. Westward, ho! in a metaphorical sense. That is how it has been for my family since at least the Potato Famine. But that is not how it is going to work out.

We have a different relationship to the past now. We talk about how fast the future is coming, but the past is catching up. As more and more social networks go up and intermingle, as more and more records go online, the internet is the new small town you never moved away from. The person who stayed behind and lived for the glory days of soccer at El Camino Junior High thinks about life differently than the person who has followed job after job promotion across the continent. I am not making a value judgment both have their plusses and minuses, advantages and disadvantages. Someone who has remained in one place for a long time is more settled, more connected to their family, friends, and community and because of that they are more invested in what happens locally; they might vote more, buy locally, invest in local business, attend local colleges - these are all good things and values that are just being discovered in places like Silicon Valley. Someone who leaves might have a broader perspective on life and have a greater awareness of national and world issues. They might be exposed to a wider variety of viewpoints and a diverse population. These are just generalities. George Bush was from somewhere else, and despite everything managed to hold on to his simple beliefs.

If those lines are erased, if the networks carry our past with us where ever we go, what kind of person does that create? If I remember madelines and mint tea with my aunt through the lens of all my experiences, it is a different record than a picture or an online document. Memories are shaped and reshaped over time. And technology can change that. A high resolution photograph of Amadinejhad waving his passport revealed that one of the most vitriolic anti-Semites actually came from a Jewish family - a single moment captured by technology changed the past as it was presented forever and hopefully will help change his future.

We talk, as educators, about how the connected world is changing the way we think because of our increased connections with one another and with information. I will be interested to see how networks change the way we think as we connect to our past. Are our world views based on events as we knew them or from events as they were? Are the connections to the past in the online world somehow "more valid" than the events that I think I experienced? Is the memory of the network any more accurate than mine? Who will judge that? I think we are all about to find out.


"Every man's memory is his own literature." - Aldus Huxley

Networks in the Rear View Mirror

"The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future." - Marshall McLuhan

The real issue is not that networked thinking is new but the the networks have gotten significantly faster. But not faster than we think. The same technology that we use to build the networks is the same technology that we use to mediate the information. The information over networks is moving at such a pace that we have to adapt ourselves to keep up.

I loved the image that Jane Knight posted this month from Sean Carton. I linked it to the left. It is interesting to me because this is one of the few that acknowledges the inherent networked capacities in humans. The whole idea of writing arises from the desire to connect memory and ideas with other people, places, and the future. In a way, cuneiform libraries are networks because the information in them was meant to be copied, preserved, and sent to others. Carton's time line jumps from the 550 BC postal service in Persian straight to the telegraph in 1792. A nod should also be given to the East and the Silk Road as a network, especially since the Chinese found a 2000 year old letter in a post office adjoining the Silk Road. Again, I really appreciate the fact that he is giving us some idea of networks before the 1960s but I think an important addition to this timeline would be the monastic system of the Middle Ages. Not just for the "look-at-me-I-was-a-humanities-major" bit, but because those monasteries were so successful at transmitting, preserving, and passing on information that we are still struggling in the shadows of those institutions today. They were really good at finding, copying, and preserving books. That is where a lot of the traditions in colleges come from. Students are taking notes in classes today because in the 12th century university, the only way to get a copy of the book that the instructor was reading from was to copy it yourself. McLuhan calls schools the "custodians of print culture."

Some of the great epics of the West open with guards waiting to see the fire from the next tower over or with runners and messengers delivering news. A great deal of exposition is given in letters in Shakespeare and later we also have epistolary novels where the movement of information can sometimes shape the plot. What I am trying to point out is that there has always been this awareness of connectedness and information. What is happening now is that we are learning how to mediate that seemingly overwhelming speed of that change and that mediation is changing the way we think.

Notes Towards a Connectivist Instructional Design

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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.

Open Source Music Textbook

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Musopen is a free source of public domain music, both recordings and sheet music. They are also creating an open source music theory textbook. I would love to see an open source music appreciation course using these materials. This site combined with other free resources like the Wikipedia Sound List would provide a lot of material for such a course

"Musopen is an online music library of copyright free (public domain) music. We want to give the world access to music without the legal hassles so common today. There is a great deal of music that has expired copyrights, but almost no recordings of this music is in the public domain. We aim to record or obtain recordings that have no copyrights so that our visitors may listen, re-use, or in any way enjoy music. Put simply, our mission is to set music free."

The music is very well organized and down-loadable. Also you can embed the music in a web page so if one was to create a music history textbook in a wiki, one could easily use this. I love the example I chose below. "Entrance of the Gods into Valhalla" was the processional at my wedding and the Marine Band does some interesting things with it that really allow you to hear the textures and layers in this piece:

Don't Just Sit There; Learn Something!

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

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

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

Time for New Model for Online Learning

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I have been taking a closer look at Straighterline today. The Washington Monthly ran an article on the company called "College for $99 a Month." Their model is that students sign up to take classes for 99 dollars a month. The courses are accepted for credit at four colleges including Fort Hays State University. The courses are supported by a team of teachers, course ad visors, and 24/7 online tutoring. The courses use McGraw-Hill content (like many community colleges) and the courses are further vetted by the faculty and administrators of their partner colleges. The brilliant thing about this arrangement is that it allows students to take the courses at their own pace. One student discussed in the article was able to finish four classes in two months. For colleges with holes in the online schedule, it seems like a perfect fit. If you read the comments at the Washington Monthly you will see a lot of reasons not to do this - and they all basically center around the idea that either a) the purpose of the college is to provide jobs for teachers or b) a new model of education is wrong because education can only be defined by the old model. All of the reasons to not do this pale in comparison with the real issues facing students today.

According to a Michael Mandel in Sept. 12th's Business Week, since 2000, college costs are up by 23% since 2000 and pay for young college grads is down 11% over the same period. How can colleges and universities justify this? We have to come to grips with the fact that costs for the students are out of control - we need to look at alternative cost models like Straighterline; we need to adopt open source textbooks and technology. Straighterline is delivering the same outcomes and content at a significantly lower cost. In my experience, the same McGraw-Hill modules are being taught at many colleges with less interaction and support. Students should not be satisfied with courses with little interaction, little support, and where faculty do not provide timely feedback. What Straighterline can't do, and the colleges can, is adopt open education resources. Straighterline needs the quality assurance and expertise at McGraw-Hill. We should be taking the lead. We should be applying our expertise to free, open source texts and lowering costs for students.

I know that there are going to be a lot of people who are mistrustful or even upset at Straighterline's model. I like the fact that they will bring people to the table talking about things like cost, authentic assessment, and online course quality. It is long overdue.

Overly Connected?

That question came up recently in conversation and I really resent it because after I tweeted the question, which automatically sent it to Facebook, that had my Blackberry buzzing away from friends who had forwarded the question to Friendfeed and Plurk; I realized that I really didn't have enough time to answer the question adequately. Some responses went into my Google Reader which upped my unread items by another dozen. Other responses were from friends who made films or podcasts of their take on the question. I did some research through Wikipedia and some of my contacts in Delicious Bookmarks which led to a long conference call via Skype with researchers in India and Scandinavia. Our conclusion after running a survey in Google Docs and conferring with some friends in LiveJournal was that we are probably not overly connected but we are holding off a final judgment until the images of our jointly edited concept map of the question are shared on Flickr, Twitpic, and Picasa.

Clarence Fisher

These were recorded by Alec Courosa via UStream. Clarence Fisher is an inspirational teacher who is really on top of 21st century literacy. He says that his role is not to be the smartest man in the room but to help students learn to make connections to people and information.