I love the opening of this video where he says that we can finally get technology to do what we want, now the real question is what do we want to do."
I like that this video used archival footage and vj clips - both of which are freely available and can be found online at places like www.archive.org. A video of this quality is not beyond the reach of anyone at Tacoma Community College. This week (5/15/09), I will be presenting a workshop on the Flip video camera. A little camera that puts film making and editing into the hands of teachers and students at a very low cost. It comes with editing software built into the camera (it installs it on the computer). It also will create a direct link to your YouTube account and upload the finished film. I will post a link to the presentation the and its resources here.
Angel sold out to Blackboard. Or Blackboard acquired Angel. Either way it is a real shame. Angel had a lot going for it as a company. It was practically revolutionary in the way it handled customer service. While Bb had service tickets that were years old, angel would send a team of people out to each campus to meet with people. All of the reasons Blackboard claims to have acquired Angel were all of the reasons we left Blackboard - innovation and customer service. I really hope Bb doesn't figure out too soon how to lock down, monetize and password protect all of the great features of Angel. The next year will probably be the greatest argument for open source software since Micro$loth. I seriously think this aquisition should be looked into especially in light of all the litigation around Desire2Learn and Blackboard's attempts to sue them out of existence. Angel's market share was expanding and if they just waited they would certainly have become a dominant force in another year. We really need to take education out of the hands of the corporations. I am not anti-Blackboard - I am anti-big money, bad service, and stifling of innovation. I was pretty angry when I first heard this news because of all of the time, training, energy, and money the State of WA has put into this. We still really don't know what it all means. I will be brushing up on my Moodle skills. One of the more measured responses to this Paradise Lost was from Marc Lentini who said via email:
"We got word about the Blackborg buyout less than an hour before starting our very first Angel Transition Orientation.
Our plan is to continue transitioning to Angel. It's still a better product, it's still going to be maintained as its own entity, it's going to be here for three years (which is all we figure you get out of any system these days), and it'll still allow cross-campus collaboration.
Then I'm going to ram my head into a concrete wall."
Here is a presentation I am giving in Wanatchee, WA on concept maps and problem solving using visual methods. I appreciate any feedback and suggestions:
Some random notes I made while I was catching up on my reading last week with my non-swine related illness:
There is an article in the latest New York Review of Books on Anthony Grafton and his latest book "Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West" reviewed by G. W. Bowersock. Towards the end of the article there are some amusing notes on Grafton's suspicion of Google and online texts. What I miss about the communities of scholarship in the online world vs. the face-to-face is that if one challenged someone's thinking real-time they came back the next week with research, essays, or evidence and called you on to the carpet. Today they just drop you from Twitter! We read the work of a professional scholar like Grafton's born in full armor like Athena from the forehead of Zeus. This is lovely of course, but I would also like to read Grafton's letters and notes as well. I would have also liked to have participated in the broader understanding of that work as it evolved. I can't do that yet with him, but I can with writers like George Seimens or Stephen Downes because their work is being created in the new "Respublica Litterarum" of the internet. I will call this the "Respublica Digitarum" or the "Respublica Digitara." The internet and the blogosphere is the new coffee house of the 18th century, the "penny university."
Bowersock waxes nostalgiac about the old libraries and books. I don't see it that way. He sees a beutiful old library; I see knowledge siloed away in an inaccessible ivory tower of privilege. I too love old books and value the feel of original sources. But that world is only for the select few and knowledge dribbles out of that silo very slowly. I am glad classical literature is moving online in places like the Perseus Digital Library. Not only do I not have access to these documents elsewhere but neither does the collective intelligence of the internet, or that highly gifted young person with original ideas and fresh enthusiasm (but little money or connections for education at Harvard).
George Seimens asks in Teaching as Transparent Learning about the connection between community, learning and teaching and how interrelated the activities might be. It is in direct contrast to the spirit of Grafton's work. The "Republic of Letters" is the same cacophonous bazaar of ideas that is the "Digital Republic" but much slower. Ideas like this that connect the various traditions are an important context to our intellectual history because they provide a vital context that shows that these ideas are part of a long tradition of research, study, and communication. It is unfair of scholars like Bowsock or Grafton to compare the on-going seminar of the blogs to a closed and finished traditional journal article. Blog entries are always seen as questions, open statements, works in progress, not ends in themselves. Blogs are important because they are somewhat more durable than email or discussion board postings. Electronic books (where some of this wisdom is collected) are going to
be even more important. A good example of that is Seimen's book "Knowing Knowledge."
In another posting from George Seimens on New Criteria for a New Media the idea of blogging as part of a scholar's academic publishing is brought up. I think if someone gets academic credit for a 225 word note on the use of the passive paraphrastic in the poems of Callimachus in an issue of Modern Philology then scholars and teachers who are constantly engaging and challenging others in their field in new ways via social media should also get some recognition. "As the reports from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Modern Language Association, and the University of Maine recommend, promotion and tenure guidelines must be revised to encourage the creative and innovative use of technology if universities are to remain competitive in the 21st century." I read all of this together in the same afternoon and it is amazing how it all works together. On one hand you have a traditional scholar who isn't quite sure about all this "new" technology and on the other you have the new scholars trying to make sense of where there work fits into that stream.
I have a couple emails from the James Burke web asking me why all of a sudden there has been this increase in traffic to his YouTube page. I am not sure why they are asking me. But I did recently subscribe and put him on my favorites list. The answer was that recently a couple of educators mentioned on Twitter that his videos were on YouTube and it is a real testament to the power of Twitter that enough people went and subscribed or downloaded the videos enough for someone to notice. James Burke is the journalist/historian that did the BBC show "Connections" and "The Day the Universe Changed." I was pleasantly surprised to see how his shows from the late 70s and early 80s held up. The shows were popular and I found them very interesting, informative, and fun. The fact that he could hold the interest of a late teen with a mixture of history and science is a real credit to his work. The principles behind his work still holds up today. His latest project is something he calls the "K-Web" or "Knowledge Web." The K-Web, so far, is a collection of over 200,000 thousand entries in a database of people and technology. All of them are interconnected in time, events and other people and objects. It is like a large encyclopedia of connected information. He is talking to the people who created "TheBrain" mindmapping and presentation software which I think is a terrific piece of programming and a great presentation tool. I have embeded a film below of his description of the project. There are some comments at his YouTube page from a few people who are wondering if this project is still active and I have a few ideas about why it might not be or at least why it might be going slowly. You have a great teacher and communicator (James Burke), a lot of information, and some great tools. The problem is going to come in with the creation of yet another closed information system. My impression of the project (and I hope I am wrong) is that they are creating a dynamic, interconnected encyclopedia. And that is the problem - we don't need another encyclopedia. We don't need another database of information (we have Wikipedia). We don't need another closed commercial project that will separate users and knowledge creators from sharing information. What is really special about the idea of the K-Web is that it implies a set of semantic rules that can show us how information, technology and people are interconnected. And that is exciting. I would be interested in an XML/RDF schema that authors could apply to information (metadata) that databases could then gather and assemble according to programed rules. This is essentially the idea of the semantic web. There is an information entropy in closed systems such as MERLOT (of which I am, nevertheless, a participant and believer) because it needs an easier way for people to connect information with people besides memberships and subscriptions. Projects like the K-Web can be a lens through which we really see and make sense of all of the information. I just hope it doesn't get locked up in commercial software. He says here that he sees it as open to education but I mean open as far as people being able to contribute and edit. I like his criticism of concept mapping as too hierarchical to really represent information.
Note: Occasionally I read criticisms of Burke saying that at times the connections he discusses between ideas, technology, information, and people are superficial. But his philosophy is that we are all interconnected and so we are participating, even in small ways, in all of this knowledge building, creating, and inventing. In the past, some of the smallest interconnections have led to the biggest changes. This is especially true in this age of collaboration and communication.
A number of us here at Tacoma Community College are using Twitter. Recently one of our faculty who is new to it said "I doing this but I don't know why yet" which is a fair thing to say. On the surface, it looks (and can be) fairly superficial. As a matter of fact, the Common Craft video on Twitter is pretty ridiculous. If I saw that video first, I would not have created an account. I thought I really didn't care what you were having for lunch; it turns out I am wrong about that, but the video is an overly simplistic view of Twitter that does not do the power of the simple or the network creation capabilities justice. It is quite possible that when the video was made no one really knew how this tool would really be used.
1. It's Simple Twitter is one of those tools that nearly does nothing. It is extremely simple. I do not need to hold a two hour seminar to teach students or educators how to use it. It is a microblog. You can follow people and people can follow you. You can tell people what you are doing in 140 characters or less. Brevity is the soul of wit. Twitter forces you to be concise. I can easily create accounts and I can place a twitter feed on my blog or website very quickly. It is low bandwidth. 2. Communication Twitter is a great way to link people back to your blog, business, or other website. It is also a way to be alerted when something is happening in your network of interest to you. And you also get a lot of mundane details about people's lives and vice-versa, but here is why that can be important too. Let's say I am trying to form a team and I need to talk to someone, I may know that John eats lunch at his desk every Thurs. because he tweets that now and again. I may not remember why I know that information, but it is Thursday and somehow, I know he will be at his desk. This mundane information gives me an idea of when students are studying, when people are going to work and puts me in the ebb and flow of their day no matter what time zone they may be in.
3. Connections Twitter doesn't just allow you to create networks but as you add people to your following/follwers list, you begin to see messages to and from people you may not have thought of following or meeting before. Instructors can leverage this in some very powerful ways. If a new student opens a teachers followers list and follows everyone on that list, those new students are then following a list of professionals, students from the previous classes, and those who have graduated and are working in the field. I have an example from a Health Information Management's social networking map. This is an easy way to increase the interactivity of a course.
A in the "60 Seconds Science" column in Scientific American there is an interesting note about Jest and Meeks' attempt to map "wisdom." They have looked at 10 scientific papers that have attempted to define wisdom and believe that they have found its seat in certain areas in the brain.
"Jeste and Meeks concede that some might call their conclusions reductionistic because they based their 'map' not on the idea that wisdom is a single trait, but a collection of attributes. But Jeste said that similarities between how wisdom was portrayed thousands of years ago in the Bhagavad Gita (a Hindu scripture) and in the West today — as well as the tale of Phineas Gage, a railway worker whose allegedly wise attributes such as amiability and good judgment were said to vanish after a spike penetrated his left frontal lobe — 'makes you think it's not a cultural phenomenon but biologically consistent.'"
First off, I have to say that my amiability might suddenly vanish if I had a railroad spike through my head. What makes me a little less cranky but cranky none-the-less is the illusive definitions of "wisdom," "knowledge," "memory," "ideas," and "information." I do like that they refer it to a collection of attributes. When we talk about learning and our relationship to knowledge and information, I think we are looking at a similar problem. When we use taking notes to learn, I think it is important to remember that that action includes the movement of the hand and the feel of the pencil. In other words, thinking and cognition may not reside in a single organ. Until we understand how all of the parts work together, I am not really sure if we have a working definition of knowledge epistemologically.
One of the weaknesses of the cognitive approach to pedagogy is that there is a false correlation between how the brain functions and how we learn. This cognitive approach is found in many theories of learning whenever the researcher wishes to put the stamp of legitimacy on a project with Real Science. Thinking, memory and learning are a little messier than the fMRI's would lead us to believe. Neuroscience is going to tell us how we sense the world around us and how currently measurable systems function in the brain but that is as far away from knowing how we learn as the Hubble is from answering cosmological questions about the origin of time. We are learning valuable things but we do not know enough about all the interrelated complex systems that go into creating a single thought to make any conclusions about how we learn.
I hope we read more about an accounting of Eastern systems of epistemology and ontology as they relate to learning. The current thinking about education is decidedly Cartesian. Ironically, Leibniz read a Latin translation of the I Ching which if it did not influence his exploration and invention of binary numbers, it certainly led him to strongly consider the the archetypal significance of a numbering system (as seen in his writings) which led to the modern computer.
I found the original video exhilarating. I knew people who interpreted the video as a negative thing. I did not understand that. I thought people would see that video and say “it is time to change how we teach.” I really thought that it was about time. Instead, they would say “those poor kids” and talk about how we should be banning computers in the classroom. I celebrated the video because I knew that those changes in our culture were already happening. Students today do not read paper; they do not read journals, and they don’t subscribe to newspapers. The current culture of teaching prepares students for a world that is already gone. No one is going to ask them in the work place to solve a problem by writing a ten-page research paper.
The original video was one of the inspirations for our class (Health Information Management 101). This class utilizes social networks, new media, and is portfolio assessed. I felt that it was important to create a class that taught students how to build knowledge networks of peers, advanced students, and professionals. We also have classes where students are creating videos and podcasts in place of traditional papers. Since the students are utilizing the internet and networks for their main source of information, it is extremely important that we facilitate critical thinking about new media and social networks. Isn't that why we were doing this in the first place? When did papers and tests become more important than critical thinking?
Yesterday I had Monica Monk in my office. She is an ESL teacher here at Tacoma Community College. She was looking for some way for her students to record what kind of errors they make in their writing and how often. She also wants them to record what they are doing right. Monica is pretty fearless when it comes to technology, so I suggested that we try the forms in Google Docs. We logged into Google Docs and created a form that asks for the student's name, assignment, and then asks the frequency of certain kinds of errors that she wishes to track (e.g., how many errors, adjective clauses, adverb clauses, etc.). When you create a form in Google Docs, it automatically builds a spreadsheet based on the form. Monica will be able to sort this data by student or assignment and track the success (or weakness) of an assignment over time. I think there are a lot of untapped possibilities here and I am thinking that we can't be the only ones who have thought of using this tool in this way. I would love to find others who are doing this. Google Docs is secure - no one will be able to see the data except for Monica or those she chooses to share it with. The spreadsheet creates charts and graphs and is exportable into Excel. Getting an IT dept. anywhere to build a tool like this for the school would take years and cost a lot of money, and forget about trying to get institutional data on individual assignments or even an individual class.
As the economy weakens, more projects like this will surface as people seek solutions to assessment problems. Projects that use free or open source tools in creative ways, If you are doing something similar, know of someone who is, would like to do this, leave us a comment here.
I can't recommend enough George Seimens and Peter Tittenberger's "Handbook of Emerging Technologies." I had been working on (and co-teaching) a "Student Success 2.0" class that has a wiki associated with the syllabus that links to tools. Seimens and Tittenberger will save me a lot of time in the future with keeping this up to date, especially their tools page. As an instructional designer, I need resources like these to help faculty solve problems and keep their courses interactive. I have one faculty member who just calls now and again and says "what really cool tools are out that that I don't know about?" (She is any instructional designer's dream teacher!) I will be directing a lot of people to this book. But here is the real point, it would be ridiculous to try to make this a print textbook. The tools change too rapidly for a print edition with the minimum two-year turn around time to make any sense. Also, for maximum usefulness, there has to be live links to the internet and these have to be kept up. I was thinking about this after reading a review in the New York Times about Leher's book on how we make decisions. It is essentially a popular look at the neuroscience behind decision making. His book discusses research that involve fMRI and I thought "wouldn't it be cool if this book could link to the research that is on the web?" And many books do, some have webpages associated with the book that serves as an online bibliography. But lets take all this further - the bulk of the relevant research in nearly every discipline is at least being managed on the web. When all of the information was in print, it makes sense to design textbooks that way - but since so much of it is accessible on the web now, why not create textbooks that utilize the media? There are cognitive science textbooks on the web and I think there are enough resources out there and combined with RSS feeds, one can imagine a textbook that essentially updates itself. And this could work for the humanities too. I was in an online workshop that was moderated by Steve Hargadon called "Remixing Shakespeare" that presented ways to get students involved in Shakespeare using new media tools. This workshop was presented by PBS Teachers and Classroom 2.0 and featured people from the Folger Library and of particular interest to me Amy Ulen, an English teacher at Tumwater High School in Tumwater, WA. who is the founder of Shakespeare High. There were enough resources in this one workshop for someone to turn around and create a living, dynamic "textbook" of interactive texts, tools for recording, videos of plays, and an online community dedicated to the subject matter. It didn't cost anyone a dime. Why wouldn't you want that? I want to make sure that when we are discussing OER textbooks that we are not just talking about doing this because of the financial crisis. This is an opportunity to not only solve a problem, but to redefine textbooks in such a way that they include up to the minute research, instant corrections and updates, and community.
Studies like Brain lives at "edge of chaos" are particularly interesting to me because of the tendency of those engaged in education research to interpret the brain's ability to organize information as somehow a description of how the brain works or how we learn. This study applies a phenomenon they call "self-organized criticality" to brain science — where systems spontaneously organize themselves to operate at the borderline between order and chaos. This phenomena is present in many different physical systems, including "avalanches, forest fires, earth quakes, and heart rhythms." We can learn using concept maps, for instance, not because that is how the brain works, but because one of the functions of the brain is to organize information. Networks exist in the brain but rather than a flowchart model typical of cognitivist pedagogy, this study is interested in the synchronization of activity between different regions of the functional networks in the brain. Pictures of the brain merely as a network are far too mechanistic to explain what is happening. I don't think there is anything mystical about how the brain works, but it is an incredibly complex system that cannot be described by a flowchart. Scientists will one day look back on those models just as we now (or at least should be) look at those models of atoms with orbiting electrons. It is easier to imagine them as orbiting electrons and it would be difficult to represent an electron probability cloud in k-12 science textbooks, but the model tells us more about our limitations than the world.
It is interesting to me that education is one of those fields where everyone has a tenaciously held opinion about what it is, how it works, or why it doesn't despite not having any training or background in the field beyond having been educated. For myself, that is like saying "Of course I can sew my own jacket, I have been wearing one for years" or "I can fix your car; I have been driving since I was a kid." Pronouncements on the credibility or the veracity of learning theories or tools come fast and furious from people who do not engage in education as a discipline in itself or its research. This is why we still get teachers that tell us "they don't let" their students use Wikipedia, quote from blogs, or will ever consider using Second Life, etc. I mean, insert whatever-it-is-they-do-not-quite-understand here. These are the same students, when sent to the library to research geology or anthropology do not come back with citations from "Chariots of the Gods," hollow earth literature, or other non-academically viable sources. The students have the critical thinking skills required to go into a library, and despite the library containing books on astrology or conspiracy theories, that sort of thing tends not to be cited by students. Why can't instructors have the same faith in students on the internet? Who said it was our job to "let" or not let the students do anything? I won't harp on Wikipedia further because there is already enough actual research from journals like Nature that say that Wikipedia articles were shown to be just as accurate as anything in peer reviewed articles. The problem with things like Wikipedia or learning online in any form is that it is new. Books and traditional journals safely fit into the framework of traditional teaching. The increasing amount of available information, the users ability to participate in the creation of that information, and the myriad ways of accessing and aggregating that information are all shaking that traditional framework to its 1200 year-old foundation. All of a sudden it is very difficult for traditional teachers to evaluate online sources, information and tools because their sources of peer-reviewed information are always printed one to two years late with sources that are three to four years old - an eternity on the internet. And here we introduce fear. The last thing you do when you are afraid is ask questions: you certainly aren't going to bother with research, create an hypothesis, test it, and analyze data. You are going to run straight to drawing your conclusions and broadcasting your "results" because you feel threatened. This has never been about whether something is a good teaching tool or not but about our ability to adapt to change. Good teachers are often good communicators and when good communicators connect with tools that facilitate communication and interaction, good teaching happens whether that tool is a clay tablet and a stylus or a virtual world.
The above video is funny. There is nothing wrong with that. What it points out though is how difficult it can be to understand new technology. There is nothing interesting about Twitter. It is a very simple tool. It allows users to post 140 character messages and follow others. It doesn't always even do that very well. The real power in Twitter is not the technology but the network, and that is everything. The networks that can emerge in Twitter can be very powerful. They can also be inane - a lot depends on the intention and critical thinking skills of the user. If you want to use it to socialize with your friends, there is nothing wrong with that. But Twitter can be used to build professional and learning networks of great power. It can be a living encyclopedia, job board, emergency network, political action coordinator, or problem-solving tool. There is nothing superficial or mundane about that! If you are interested, look at the HIM101 materials on this blog (Health Information Management) to see what I think are some effective uses of Twitter. Even users of technology are not always clear on why a piece of technology is successful or useful. I know instructors who use Second Life very effectively who still think that the novelty or "fun" is the primary reason it works so well as a teaching and learning platform. That is the shiny surface - it is really the connections that people are able to make - the community building that makes all the difference.
I have attempted in a few postings here to talk about art and science. I have been asked more than once about the connection between instructional design and art (other kinds of design) or how I find the time to create when I am writing and working so much for others. There are a couple of answers to those kinds of questions and I think the real trick is to understand that there is no difference between the art we create and the work that we do (another answer is "I never have enough time!"). It is all fine and good to be a poet and an artist, but the real genius is to see the poetry and art in all that we do; to give ourselves to our work in such a way that our creativity or playfulness is found even in the most serious of things. I am only sometimes successful in doing this. This is why I love people like Da Vinci, Chaucer, Dante, and Cheng Man-Ch'ing - the polymathic autodidacts of the world. It is a stunning thing to find out that a favorite poet worked in a bank or was a family physician. Or to read the complete works of Chaucer and run across "A Treatise on the Astrolabe." This would not be too far off from reading a GPS handbook by Umberto Eco. The astrolabe is really an early astronomical computer. It has programmed data (the star positions on the rete) and an input (the alidade or rule). With that, you can find our information about where you are, what time it is, how fast you are going; vital information for both navigating or practicing Islam. Writing something like this was all in a day's work for Chaucer because he was interested and enthusiastic about so many things and was interested in bringing those ideas to others. His "Treatise on the Astrolabe" is a fine example of early technical writing. It is written in very clear, direct prose. The economy of style would fit right in with standard guidelines at NASA. This treatise was written by Chaucer for his son, Louis: "Lyte Lowys my sone, I aperceyve wel by certeyne evydences thyn abilite to lerne sciences touching nombres and proporciouns; and as wel considre I thy besy praier in special to lerne the tretys of the Astrelabie." What is interesting here is that he is writing the treatise for someone he knows to already have a gift for science and math. In other words, he is shaping the document for his audience. He also had the astrolabe calibrated for Oxford because unlike a sextant, an astrolabe is only accurate for one line of latitude. The treatise is unfinished (at least according the latest textual evidence) but it looks finished enough to actually get a working knowledge of the astrolabe. My point here is that this text was used for teaching. It was the second most published of Chaucer's text apart from the "Canterbury Tales" and it is not just a manual for a scientific insturment but a record of an early form of technical writing, teaching, and translation (from Latin sources) from a major poet. Note: Yes, my father was an English teacher and named me for Chaucer.
In another example of the Chronicle of Higher Ed's misunderstanding and misapprehension of education, technology, and online learning, they have published an article called "Professors Regard Online Instruction as Less Effective Than Classroom Learning" By David Sheih. There is nothing wrong with reporting the results of a survey. That is what they should be doing: reporting. But what I don't understand is why they find that so significant when other stories should be taking precedence. If they are going to have a tech section, they should be writing more about web 2.0, new trends in learning theory (Connectivism perhaps?), the open source movement in the changing economy, and a hundred other topics besides something that has been pretty much settled since the early 90s.
I am not sure that I see any relevance in a survey of what faculty and administrators "feel" about online learning. There is already enough research to show that there is No Significant Difference in the learning between online and face-to-face students. I have taught online and off and also work as an instructional designer. In my experience, face-to-face and online take the same amount of time. What I find is that instructors who say that it takes more time have not been properly trained in how to teach online. They are often not taking advantage of the full range of tools available to them and have unreasonable expectations of themselves and their students (24/7 faculty availability; 24 hour turn around on all postings, emails, and assignments; futzing around with email attachments instead of using the LMS, etc.) It is not the same as teaching face-to-face and when instructors try to replicate the face-to-face experience online they run into trouble.
The print version of the Chronicle is worse. They have headlines in the tech section like "MIT Lab Gets New Wall Sockets and Plugs" with pictures of administrators at ribbon cutting ceremonies wondering what the new holes in the wall are for and why they were so expensive. The real news about the faculty and administrators who think that online learning is less effective is how little they know about online learning and the possibilities of online teaching.
I presented at an online conference recently ("Connecting Online 2009") on concept maps. I not only want to present on concept maps and the technology around them, but I think I can show how the change in the media used to create the maps can change the way we think about the ideas and information. This is not really very new - the seeds of this argument were planted in readings from McLuhan to George Siemens. I felt that CO '09 was a good preliminary attempt at defining that and I will expand that work for a live presentation in Wanatchee later this year. One of the things I have discovered about concept maps is that, for myself, there is no "right" technology: pencils, Inspiration, Freemind, Personal Brain, and Spidergram Planner in Second Life all do different things and those differences can allow us to see information and problems in new ways. I don't like how some of the software forces you to label each connection but that labeling process can be helpful in seeing ideas differently. A lot of the discussion of the differences between "mind maps" and "concept maps" range from the nearly logical to the arbitrary; what you decide ultimately reveals what kind of thinker you are rather than which definition or tool is the "correct" one to use. I find myself using different tools in different situations. I used to teach in k-12 and that system has a long history of using concept maps. K-12 was on the cutting-edge with rubrics and portfolios long before they showed up in colleges. But it is no accident that concept maps are a popular teaching tool in k-12 schools because that is where students are just learning how to form their ideas and how ideas and thoughts are connected to one another.
Necessity may be the mother of invention, but budget crisis will always be the mother of innovation (e.g. how did my mother manage to feed six kids on one pound of hamburger?). I created a brief presentation on open source software for our faculty here at Tacoma Community College. It is not the most complete picture - it is a toe in the water for an institution that is pretty deeply entrenched in corporate solutions. I will expand this later with audio, so if there are horrifically glaring omissions or links that should be included, feel free to leave a comment here.
We are rapidly approaching that wondrous time of year when pundits congratulate themselves for being right on technology. I used to make pronouncements about technology quite frequently because I was an avid reader of Popular Science and a couple of other magazines that would now and again publish stories about domed cities on the moon which either looked like Marin County or a five mile in diameter dentist office waiting room (depending on whether you were reading Whole Earth Review or Popular Science). If I had another life, I would love to take up the project of analyzing our vision of the future to see what it tells us about ourselves today. It has only been in the last couple of hundred years that the western mind has been able to wrap its self around the idea that the earth might be a bit older than 10,000 years. It astounds me that people think they know enough about humanity, social systems and technology itself to make predictions 20 years out.
I had a lot of questions about the future as a child. I wanted conveyer belt sidewalks. I could tie a rope to a tree and skate board all day long. But then, do they run all night? Will they eventually squeak? Why would we need them if we are all living in elevated pods connected by monorails? We will all have personal rockets and vacation domes on the moon which brings us to the space helmets. From what I could tell there were two kinds of space helmets, the fishbowl with the vacuum cleaner hose and the one with fins which were far cooler but led to the further question: Do you really want to be in a situation where your helmet requires fins? The fishbowl always seemed fragile or at least unwieldy.
My brother went to an alternative high school that was run by an electrical engineer and his hippie sons. I was hanging out at the local community college playing with their computers (the TRS 80). He came home one day with a floppy disk and was really excited. I told him that it was a ridiculous technology and why would someone use a proprietary disk when you could walk into any Radio Shack and by a cassette tape for the computer tape drive. I also thought that we would still be using BBSs (bulletin board systems) and that the whole http and internet thing was a fad. Why would you do that when you could upload and download hypercard stacks from a BBS?
If you really want to know how NOT to predict the future, read "The Omni Future Almanac" by the editors of the now extinct "Omni Magazine." The book was published in 1981. The writers for the magazine would take existing technology such as the laser disc, and try to extrapolate out how the technology will be used 10, 20 and 30 years out to hilarious effect. It not only makes ridiculous predictions about the future but it even makes the claim for "The Only Current Major Athletic Record That May Never Be Broken" - Beaman's 29' 2.5" long jump in the '68 Olympics. And guess what? It was broken by Mike Powell in the Tokyo World Championships in 1991 by two inches. But notice the qualifier "That May." That is an important futurist tool. Among my favorite claims are:
Moving Sidewalks will not gain widespread acceptance...until the Variflex Moving Sidewalk is developed from practical use in the early 1990s. (p.48)
AIDs and cancer cured in the early 1990s and a vaccine for tooth decay soon following. (p.56-57)
We will have nuclear power plants orbiting the earth by the early 90s. (p.133)
Health care costs will drop 20% (no date given!). (p. 157).
Their economic predictions throughout the book are a scream.
There will be armies of low-cost robots performing all of our menial labor by 2000. (p.177)
All of the above predictions are variations of the techno-fantasies from the 50s. Of real interest to myself, and those legions that read this blog, is the vision of the future of education. In the cocaine addled 80s it was seen by the writers of Omni to be just another biological function. Educators will track students biological cycles for their optimum learning times (yes, this would be BIORHYTHMS for those having a flashback right now). We will also create better smart drugs to increase their learning. There is a nice Dr. Strangelove statement on p. 213 where it claims that the popularity of adult education will increase as schools become the meeting place for single adults. The book is filled with people learning by watching videos, video disks, and teletexts, etc. then taking tests and "learning." In other words, the predictions about learning do not go beyond the correspondence school vision of learning. It is important to look at these kinds of predictions because they tell us where the bumps in the road are going to be in innovation. Knowing what expectations are hampering the general public can tell us a lot about where we are not going to go.
Despite my past record of being "wrong," I have high hopes that my MS in Education will allow me future moments of tele-punditry on the 3-D ElectroTeletron.
The cardinal rules of being a Futurist include:
Keep it vague and broad ("I see an exponential increase in computer memory storage..."
Make numerous contradictory predictions, trot out the winners at the end of the year
Predict "forces of change" that will cover the tracks of predictions gone awry ("Given current conditions and rates of progress, a new vaccine will...")
I have been reading about Matt Mullican since Dorothy Spear's New York Times article "Mapping an Imagined Order, Page by Page" from Nov. 16th. He traffics in symbols, signs, and links them together in ways quite familiar to those who use concept or mind maps. He "performs" his art by taking to the stage under hypnosis and drawing on large canvases. Of the many questions that Spears says his art posits include "how can thoughts and emotions be communicated visually?" This is a question we ask as instructional designers and artists. Mullican works in everything from notebooks to large, commissioned public works. If the work is familiar it is because there is something of his in every modern museum, and his work reveals something about how we use visual patterns to communicate. The Times piece discussed the influence of Oceanic and tribal art on Mullican but what is curious to me is that Oceanic and tribal art were also engaged in an attempt to communicate complex ideas and systems (cosmography, religious ideas, rituals, etc.). We engaged in the same activity in the work place that people have been engaged in for millennia now.
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