CCK08: Mini-workshop materials

Ailsa’s Wordle representation of her blog posts is so cool that I decided to try one myself.

Yesterday, I conducted a mini-workshop on Connectivism for my colleagues at Open School BC.Here are the  Powerpoint slides and a handout that I used for the session:

connectivism-workshop

connectivism-workshop-handout

I found Stephen Downes’ “Are the Basics of Instructional Design Changing?“, as well as George Siemens’ “Learning Ecology, Communities, and Networks: Extending the Classroom” and “Learning Development Cycle: Bridging Learning Design and Modern Knowledge Needs” especially useful resources for situating Connectivism in terms of ID.

Although the handout indicates “Is Connectivism a Learning Theory” as one of the guiding questions for the workshop, in fact I did not dwell on this item at all. I only had two hours, and felt that my time was better concentrated on speaking to the Connectivist framework in terms of its most compelling and convincing qualities, of which there are many! I think that two hours was enough to do justice to Connectivism’s grosser characteristics, and I think that the presentation was well received.

CCK08: Final Assignment: Connectivist Comix

Well, this assignment took far longer than you might imagine, which is why it is not as in-depth as it might have been. But I had a lot of fun working on it, and I think I am leaving CCK08 on a positive note. Thank you all for a wonderful course. I have learned even more than I can possibly realize, I’m sure…connectivist-comix4

CCK08: Concept Map

 

I enjoyed this one much more than the last one

CCK08: Assignment 3

Who are the real voices of resistance?

Ordinarily, we consider anti-establishment perspectives the voices of resistance. Who, however, are the voices that are resisting change most vehemently? They are largely the instititutions whose stakeholders desire that the mechanisms of accountability, order and control persist over time. The most powerful agent of social engineering is that of education.

I believe that there are systemically dysfunctional attributes in the education system, largely because those same dysfunctional attributes are core values that inform how we as individuals lead our lives. Speaking in general terms, we are molded at an early age in a world where desirable behaviours are praised, and undesirable behaviours are punished. Risk is discouraged, and making mistakes is frowned upon. We learn to feel good about ourselves on the basis of external valuations, and take this as the only de facto means by which self-satisfaction can to be realized. The tradition is reinforced in schools through coercion in the form of praise, stickers, useless dollar store trinkets, sweets, free time, field trips, movies and marks (Kohn, 1999).

Many, many students who are successful in school end up wishing to become teachers, often because their own teachers have been an inspiration to them. Some teachers were formerly bad apples in school, and somewhere along the line they had a teacher who allowed them to believe in themselves where they otherwise would not have. For the most part, however, I would speculate that most teachers understood how to play the educational game, and were justly rewarded in turn. In teacher education programs, the cycle of transmission teaching and the stranglehold of a marks-driven economy continue to perpetuate the cycle.  We must learn how to model a different kind of education for our children, which includes parents assuming greater responsibility and involvement in the education of their children, in collaboration withteachers.

Checks and balances that ensure a high level of accountability in institutions do not lend themselves to encouraging experimental teacher training programs. The risk of these programs is necessarily higher, since any such program would require tremendous unlearning on the part of students, and especially teachers! Self-discipline would replace extrinsic motivation; inquiry learning would replace required texts. Reading selections would no longer be dictated by the canon. Learning would occur by way of personal interests, in much the same way that individuals learn via—the Internet! Open courses and open software would be an option for educators and learners alike. Learners would seek out mentors in the areas within which their interests and passions lie, toward the end of engaging in specialized instruction, either individually or in small groups, rather than via introductory classes with hundreds of students and multiple choice exams to assess student “progress.”

Thankfully, mass consumption of new technologies in the marketplace is necessitating the introduction of these applications in educational settings. However, the fear from within educational institutions seems to be that if the means to adopt these technologies to an educational setting is not discovered, the relevance of education is placed in question.

In the abstract to Learning and Knowing in Networks: Changing roles for Educators and Designers, Siemens (2008) asks:

How do we design learning when learners may adopt multiple paths and approaches to content and curriculum? How can we achieve centralized learning aims in decentralized environments? (3)

In response, I would like to ask, Why must we continue to design learning? and Why must centralized learning aims continue to be achieved in decentralized environments? To ask these two questions is not to preclude that there are not good answers to these questions. In all likelihood, however, the answers will vary depending on the specific context of the training in question.

To the extent that private enterprise encourages innovation in the workplace, it can be a driving force behind change and innovation. The bureaucratic quagmire of at least some educational institutions can be avoided by visionary venture capitalists who are able to support extensive research and development initiatives with a minimum of red tape and funding restrictions. Consider the following:

As an interesting motivation technique (usually called Innovation Time Off), all Google engineers are encouraged to spend 20% of their work time (one day per week) on projects that interest them. Some of Google’s newer services, such as Gmail, Google News, Orkut, and AdSense originated from these independent endeavors (Wikipedia, 2008).

Depth of learning arises from providing learners with the time and resources to engage with material extensively. That means abandoning forty or seventy minute periods, and creating the space for learners at an early age to daydream without interruption. It means giving kids the tools to learn about themselves through false starts and unexpected diversions. And it means trusting that we do not have all the answers.

References

“Google: Innovation time off” Wikipedia. Retrieved Nov. 16, 2008 at:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google

Kohn, A (1999). Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 

Siemens, G. (2008a). Learning and Knowing in Networks: Changing Roles for Educators and Designers. University of Georgia IT Forum. PDF document. Available from http://it.coe.uga.edu/itforum/Paper105/Siemens.pdf

CCK08: Assignment 2

“Conducting” Instructional Design

The origins of the word educate hearken back to the Latin root of the word, educare, meaning “to bring forward.” Instructional design (ID) is typically defined along the lines of “the systematic process of developing effective instructional materials.” Web-based technologies are transforming the educational landscape in both formal and informal learning environments. If the courses that instructional designers build are to remain relevant to learners’ needs, then the instructional designer must assume the role of conductor, allowing for the bringing forth of knowledge and learning in addition to the dissemination of information. However, at least in the K-12 system, the realization of this goal remains next to impossible due to the practical constraints placed on distance education teachers. Mandated curricula and the absence of time and support for teachers to gain expertise with new technologies limit the ability of teachers to explore alternatives.

Siemens (2008a) has identified a variety of “networked roles” (1) that educators may assume in the course of instruction: among these “metaphors of educators” are teacher as master artist (15); teacher as network administrator (16); teacher as concierge (16); and teacher as curator (17). In addition, Siemens also suggests that in accordance with these new roles, instructional designers are best described as educators of educators (18), providing technological and pedagogical support and suggestions to teachers.

In the initial stages of the ID process, teachers and subject matter experts do need to be educated about the guiding principles used to inform instructional design. In course development, one may also work with writers, editors, multimedia and graphics coordinators, graphic artists, programmers, production technicians, IT support staff and network administrators, among others. Bringing the talents of all of these individuals together is a way of making pedagogical music.

Instructional design can offer tremendous flexibility (Cain, 2008). There is no reason that ID cannot accommodate “clusters” of course attributes or components that might constitute learning ecologies, as described by Siemens in his Instructional Design and Connectivism presentation (Siemens, 2008b, Slide 16).

Traditionally, assessment has focussed uniquely on assessment of learning (summative assessment and evaluation). Policy-makers (WNCP, 2006) acknowledge the importance of also conducting assessment for learning (differentiating instruction) and assessment as learning—“the process of developing and supporting metacognition for students (13). The task remaining for instructional designers and educators is to identify the means to implement these strategies. Slowly, policy-makers are also introducing metacognition into curriculum frameworks. However, measuring metacognition in instruction will remain a challenge.

The adoption of new social software technologies for collaborative learning, alternative lesson plans, suggested supplementary resources, assessment rubrics, and alternative assessment strategies can all be provided as part of the instructional design process.

For online course delivery, Open Source LMS’s such as Drupal and Moodle are proving to be economically viable alternatives to using proprietary LMS’s such as Blackboard/WebCT. Moodle’s design, however, makes it most useful to teachers who are using a social constructivist approach to explore thematically-based material. Tinkerers may enjoy the flexibility of Drupal and Moodle, with their extensive selection of custom plug-ins; the reality, however, is that at least in the K-12 system, many DE teachers are challenged enough just maintaining the everyday management of student workflow and course delivery, given that DE schools typically offer continuous enrolment to students. In addition, “the class size and class composition limits defined by legislation explicitly exclude distributed learning from those provisions.” (BCTF, 2006, 7)

There is little in the way of ongoing professional in-service offered to these teachers, and they are often teaching high numbers of students in many different courses at once. One advantage of proprietary LMS’s is that customer support staff are readily available for DE teachers, technicians and administrators in the event that they run into difficulties.

Open content initiatives such as Curriki and WikiEducator may provide alternatives to proprietary courseware, but information mining is required to find the instructional nuggets that may be included in any given course. If a course has been developed for a curriculum other than that which is locally mandated, then areas of overlap and divergence must be identified. When a course has been specifically designed to align to a local curriculum, teachers needn’t be concerned with these issues.

So long as the “industrial mindset” (Alger, 2003) remains the driving model behind K-12 education, little will change for instructional designers working to support teachers in the field.

 References

Alger, Brian (October 14, 2003). “Re: Is Instructional Design Becoming a Commodity?” Posted comment. Stephen’s Web. Available from http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=6100.

British Columbia Teachers’ Federation (2006). BCTF Research Report: Distributed Learning in British Columbia Schools 2006-07. PDF document. Available online at: http://www.bctf.ca/publications.aspx?id=5630

Cain, Geoffrey (2008). “Instructional Design in a Connected World.” Blog post. Brainstorm in Progress. Available at http://cain.blogspot.com/2008/10/instructional-design-in-connected-world.html

Siemens, G. (2008a). Learning and Knowing in Networks: Changing Roles for Educators and Designers. University of Georgia IT Forum. PDF document. Available from http://it.coe.uga.edu/itforum/Paper105/Siemens.pdf

Siemens, G. (2008b). Instructional Design and Connectivism. Articulate presentation. Available from http://elearnspace.org/media/InstructionalDesignConnectivism/player.html.

Western and Northern Canadian Protocol for Collaboration in Education (2006). Rethinking Classroom Assessment with Purpose in Mind. PDF document. Available from http://wncp.ca/media/40539/rethink.pdf

 

 

CCK08: Reflection Week 8: Part 3

Qallunology and the Hidden Costs of Technology

Note: footnotes originally included in the following excerpts have been removed for ease of formatting and readability.

Derek Rasmussen, a former Policy Advisor to Nunavit Tunngavik, wrote the article “Qallunology: A Pedagogy for the Oppressor” in the 2002 edition of Philosophy of Education. Since its initial publication, I have not been able to find a copy of the article available online. In the essay introduction, Rasmussen states,

Inuit observations are cited in this analysis to help shed light on Euro-Americans, those whom the Inuit call “Qallunaat.” This term “Qallunology” was coined by Zebedee Nungak to denote what we might colloquially call “the study of white folks.” Given that the property-based individualistic civilization that characterizes the Qallunaat emerged in nineteenth-century Europe, the words “white,” “Western,” or “European” denote its closest parentage and its place of birth, not the skin color of its current adherents or its current geographical limits. In his book, The White Arctic, sociologist Robert Paine said that his one “message” to whites was to drop the illusion that they were “in the Arctic to teach the Inuit,” and instead focus on “learning about white behavior.” Qallunology says that if Euro-Americans really want to study something they should study themselves; if Qallunaat really want to rescue indigenous peoples they should stop pushing them overboard to start with; and if Qallunaat educators really want to study something helpful to Inuit, they should study why Education was invented, and how it is a result of the ideology of scarcity (1).

Though many are now familiar with the roots of North American education being derivative of Prussian military training (in fact, this is finally being included in introductory history of education courses in universities), we are perhaps less familiar with Aboriginal perspective on education that existed and persisted over thousands of years prior to European colonization of the Americaas.

Rasmussen does not mince words when he describes European attitudes towards education indigenous peoples:

Qallunaat rush around the world proselytizing their alphanumeric fetishism, supposedly rescuing “primitive” civilizations from their richly integrated physical oral-mental cultures. Meanwhile they pat themselves on the back because they are out in the igloo or under the banyan tree teaching liberatory pedagogy to the suffering locals so that they can hang on to that twenty percent of the world’s resources that the Rescuers’ civilization has not gotten hold of yet (2).

Rasmussen contends that education is the means by which traditional community values, once uprooted, are replaced with a mentality of spiritual scarcity and depravity:

Education is the main compensatory mechanism invented to deal with uprootedness and the collapse of family and community relations, and to train converts to the new non-social economy. Education is a “designed process which is carried on in specially constructed places under various kinds of bribe and threat,” as John Holt defined it. It always denotes some kind of “treatment.” Education is an “odd, modern social phenomenon” that entrenches the belief “that competence in the world derives from being instructed about it, taught about it.” The word “education” itself does not show up in French until 1498, in English not until 1530, and in Spanish not until 1632. Europeans first began to conceptualize the “world as school” in 1759, and when, thirty-three years later, a Cambridge tutor introduced the idea of grading student papers “human thought succumbed to writing and writing had succumbed to numerical evaluation” These dates could be said to mark Europe’s surrender to the “ideology of literacy”: the beginning of the widespread belief that knowledge is a subset of writing and that “learning can be sliced up into pieces.” (4)

If this assertion is accurate, then how can a Connectivist model, within which learning ecologies are posited as the basis of a design for learning, be realized? To my reckoning, where context is as important as content, and where learning is being treated as part of a larger ecology within which the learner is embedded, how are the variable factors that influence the ecology in question parsed out?

There are limits to how much can be achieved in a classroom. Wisdom can only be gained by engaging with life, by honouring ones heritage and by mastering the skills necessary for independence. We used to have this when we lived on the land….Wisdom was essential for survival on the land, but it is not essential for survival in institutions…. What happens in most schools is that children and teachers are caught in a mechanical organization that has no interest in wisdom or independence. There is no preparation for life, just preparation for work in another controlling institution (7).

Rasmussen’s article provides examples of how citizens of the world would benefit from the Qallunaat first examining their own behaviour, before investing energy in the study and judgment of the behaviour of others. Compulsory schooling for Aboriginal peoples destroyed their traditional way of life. Meanwhile, factories continue to spew out deady chemicals, which in turn affect Inuit communities. For example,

…over sixty percent of the Inuit children under the age of fifteen and almost forty percent of Inuit women of childbearing age were found to have PCB body burdens exceeding “tolerable” guidelines.14 Mothers in Nunavut have twice the allowable levels of dioxins in their breast milk. Nunavut’s and America’s communities are tied together by America’s invisible exhalation of death. America breathes out, Inuit die (3).

Rasmussen asks, “Instead of exotic slide shows on the Arctic, why do not American schools take exotic field trips to Bethlehem Steel and US Steel’s iron sintering plants in Chesterton and Gary, Indiana (3)?”

E-Waste Dumping Ground

In turn, why is it that only last week, due to the efforts of investigative reporters in China, that the injustices being committed in China were brought to the attention of Canadians via The National in the report, “E-wast Dumping Ground“ ? Though the educational technology sector is by no means the only economic driver behind the regular upgrading of computer hardware, there is certainly a relationship to be drawn between the ability to use the most up-to-date hardware and software applications, and the drive to be at the cutting edge of technological development. Are we aware of what happens to our old computers? How many computers have you discarded in your lifetime? What can we do to turn the tide of companies that are illegally shipping old computers to China, where in turn they are dismantled in hazardous conditions?

I do not have simple answers to these questions. Nonetheless, especially in light of the discussions this week on the subject of power and authority, I believe that we are alll obligated to question our own involvement in what may very well be the hidden (or possibly overt) curriculum of educational technology: stay current. Buy now.

CCK08: Reflection for Week 8 Part 2

Unlearning Pedagogy

In  an earlier post, I made reference to George Siemens’ model of a Connectivist learning design as being based on “learning ecologies” as opposed to using a more traditionally regimented scope and sequence for course delivery. I stated,

Siemens contends that designing for Connectivism concerns creating a design for the space and ecology of learning. What is new about this idea?

Stephen responded in turn by asking about my background readings in this area, to which I replied that I do not have a strong familiarity with literature in the area of learning design. Yesterday, I realized that the greatest body of educational literature (paradoxical as this may sound) with which I am familiar concerns teaching and learning outside of the framework of compulsory schooling, teaching and learning. When I worked as a Learning Consultant for the SelfDesign Learning Community, the work that I did with individual families essentially constituted supporting unschooling or deschooling by being a liaison between families and providing assessment of learners that was aligned to the K-10 curricula of the Ministry of Education. Recall, if you have read my previous post on this subject, that the SDLC is affiliated with the Wondertree Foundation for Natural Learning.

The Master’s Thesis of Michael Maser, the current director of the SDLC, was an exploration of Virtual High. Virtual High transpired in a large house in which the originators of the Virtual High progam lived alongside their teenaged students, and which encouraged and supported those learners to pursue their passions. The thesis was called Virtual High Learning Community: Towards An Ecology of Being (Simon Fraser University, Faculty of Education, April 1997).

This morning, I recalled a discussion that I had in 2002 concerning the idea of writing a book called The Ecology of Education. Beyond the many educational books concerning all varieties of unschooling, deschooling, home-based education and emancipatory pedagogy that have informed my personal educational vision, I have also been influenced by ecopsychology, a term introduced by Theodore Roszak (formerly a mover and shaker in the education field in the 1970s) and Murray Bookchin’s work on social ecology.

Doubting myself, unsure about whether I was even clear on the meaning of the term “learning design” after Stephen’s asking me about my background reading in this area, I did a Google search on the term and settled on the first issue of the Queensland University of Technology Journal of Learning Design, whereupon I took great pleasure in reading the first article in the journal, “Unlearning Pedagogy” by Erica McWilliam.

McWilliam’s article summarizes what she identifies as the “Seven Deadly Habits of Pedagogical Thinking.” Below are excerpts from the article that resonated most strongly with me:

Seven Deadly Habits of Pedagogical Thinking

Deadly Habit No. 1: The more learning the better.

Bauman [2004] elaborates:

Just as long-term commitments threaten to mortgage the future, habits too tightly embraced burden the present; learning may in the long run disempower as it empowers in the short…. ‘Your skills and know-how are as good as their last application’. (p.22)

In this liquid social setting, forgetting (or what Bauman calls “de-learning”), becomes as important as learning. For Bauman, it is “the interplay of learning and de-learning” (p.22) that is crucial here.

Many contemporary learning theorists, I would suspect, want to express concerns about the limitations of Bauman’s definition of learning. If to de-learn is to forget, then learning is, by implication, remembering. Indeed, Bauman makes this explicit when he goes on to define ‘learning and de-learning’ as synonymous with “memory and forgetting” (p22). There is much more to learning than memory, we would want to insist, and we have known that for a long time.

Bauman’s thesis remains nevertheless an interesting one – that, in a “liquid-modern” social world, the work of assembling and structuring new social relations is no more important than the work of “keeping them eminently dismantlable” (p.22). His focus moves beyond the individual and the cognitive to incorporate the moral and the aesthetic, and the interplay among these various social elements. So Bauman’s ‘remembering’ and ‘forgetting’ have more profound significance than one individual’s mind or brain. They connote a cultural and ethical disposition to knowledge that is relational, unfinished and revocable, and an imperative to processing that serves the purpose of assembling and dissembling social relations.

Having opened up the space of pedagogy as an interplay between the cognitive, the moral-ethical and the aesthetic, Bauman is less clear about the principles for getting the right mix of learning and de-learning as interplay. For him, “…how to mix them in the right proportions is anyone’s guess” (p.22).

If we are to entertain Bauman’s thesis about the value of de-learning for the context of “liquid modernity”, we begin to de-stabilise what is the apparent Truth of our time-honoured pedagogical mantra – that learning is all that matters. Instead we have to come to grips with the idea that some learning is unhelpful, and thus that in certain circumstances ignorance might be better than knowledge.

Deadly Habit No. 2: Teachers should know more than students.

In The Weightless Society (2000), Leadbeater challenges the myth that lurks behind habitual thinking about the teacher as knower, ie, the myth that we are becoming a more and more knowledgeable society with each new generation. If knowing means being intimately familiar with the workings of the technologies we use in our daily lives, then, Leadbeater asserts, we have never been more ignorant. He reminds us that our great grandparents had an intimate knowledge of the technologies around them, and had no problem with getting the butter-churn to work or preventing the lamp from smoking. I expect that few readers of this paper would know what to do if their mobile phone stopped functioning and I certainly have no idea what is ‘underneath’ or ‘behind’ the keys on which I am typing. Nor, I confess, do I want to know. But that means that we are all very quickly reduced to the quill and the lamp if we lose our power sources or our machines break down. Thus we are much more vulnerable – as well as much more ignorant in relative terms – than our predecessors.

Deadly Habit No. 3: Teachers lead, students follow.

A corollary of the idea that teachers ought to know more than students is the idea that teachers should provide the starting point for learning activities, and that students should engage in the tasks set by the teacher – ie, that students should follow where teachers lead. There is some interesting work currently being done about the knowledge economy itself which can help us re- evaluate this potentially deadly thinking habit. I refer in particular to public policy analyst Gregory Hearn’s (2005) work on the shift to value ecology thinking [my bold and italics]. Hearn maps “an emerging fundamental shift in the way that value creation is thought about in business” (p.1), and the conceptual architecture he provides in his analysis is very helpful for re-thinking the idea of a teacher as the starting point and the student as ‘following’.

Rather than teachers delivering an information product to be consumed by the student, co-creating value would see the teacher and student mutually involved in assembling and dissembling cultural products. In colloquial terms, this would frame the teacher as neither sage on the stage nor guide on the side but meddler in the middle.

I am especially fond of the phrase “meddler in the middle”, because it reminds me of the “crazy wisdom” or “holy madness” approach used in Vajryana Buddhism and in Rinzai Zen (which uses koans) , where teachers educate their students by presenting them with situations that cannot be resolved logically. In those moments where students recognize the futility of trying to come to terms with the situations in question intellectually, they come to understand the world from a new perspective, one within which logic and absurdity mutually coexist.

The teacher is in there doing and failing alongside students, rather than moving like Florence Nightingale from desk to desk or chat room to chat room, watching over her flock, encouraging and monitoring.

Second, the new value ecology raises the possibility that the teacher who does not add value to a learning network can – and will – be by-passed. The rhizomatic [my bold and italics] capacity of networks to flow around a point in a chain means that teachers may be located in a linear supply chain of pedagogical services but excluded from their students’ learning networks. That would be an effect of being perceived to be delivering content but not adding value. Once again, this is not a matter of how much take-up of technology is evident in the pedagogical work, but whether or not pedagogical processes bring student and teacher together in their shared ignorance and mutual desire to make new sense of their world.

Deadly Habit No. 4: Teachers assess, students are assessed.

In the words of G.B. Shaw, “power is responsibility; that is why most men dread it”.

If the rethinking of pedagogy as co-creation of value re-positions teacher and student as project partners, as co-directors and co-editors of their social world, who then is the rightful assessor of the value of that cultural assemblage? The work is no longer clean of fingerprints, but is tainted by co-direction and co-editorship at every level. So what does it mean to make judgements to credential individuals on the basis of the quality of the co-creation? And what new dilemmas does this set up around ‘objectivity’ and assessment?

…But tension remains between the ‘democratic classroom’ as an ideological ideal, and the role formal educational institutions continue to play as credentialers and reporters to industry and the professions. Experiments that involve students deciding their ow curriculum and evaluating their own work have in general remained just that; Neill’s Summerhill was never likely to become every future employer’s dream.

But apart from the desire of external agencies to know what a particular set of credentials guarantee, there exists within pedagogical relationships a strong resistance to the idea of self or peer assessment. Students – especially high achievers – are very likely to resist any apparent move to ‘downgrade’ the quality assurance that ‘objective’ assessment purports to afford. Such students are likely to share with many in the community a belief that, in its purest form, ‘democratic assessment’ is oxymoronic

Whatever about the ideological struggles that persist in educational scholarship, the matter of assessing a co-edited and co-authored work remains an ethical challenge. While the rhetoric of team building is ubiquitous in universities as it is in other corporate organisations, assessment remains stubbornly individualistic. We assess and promote individuals and then we ask them to be effective members of teams.

Deadly Habit No. 5: Curriculum must be set in advance.

If pedagogy might be rethought as the co-creation of value, then curriculum cannot be ‘fully formed’ and set in place in advance of pedagogical activity… While this does not imply that teachers have a new licence to be unprepared for pedagogical activity, the nature and purposes of what counts as preparation must change. From fixed and immutable, curriculum needs to be conceptualised as content for meddling with. And this means a significant shift in what many teachers prioritise in their teaching. While the written text remains important, the remixable curriculum demands that the contribution of other ‘non-text’ media – visuals, animation, sound – be elevated from their currently marginal status in an overwhelmingly text-dependent curriculum. In Lawrence Lessig’s (2005) terms, we need to come to see “redaction” as central toeducation, not lesser than education.

Once the plan is written, care is usually taken not to stray too far from it or to be distracted by students with other agendas. This logic, in large measure, runs counter to the requirements of a remixable curriculum. The predictable or planned experience gives way to genuine experimentation, with outcomes neither known nor guaranteed. As a co-creator of value, the teacher shares with students experimental tasks in which failure is both likely and anticipated, where students and teachers fail without shame or disappointment. Bauman’s dictum that: “[y]our guess and know-how are as good as their last application” (p.22) applies equally to teachers and students. Put bluntly, where the stability of the plan is the hallmark of good pedagogy, then the experimental culture that is a corollary of the remixable curriculum is virtually impossible to achieve.

If our higher education institutions have a deadening effect on experimentation, the same cannot be said about the excitement of university managers around technology uptake. As Strathern (1997) points out, technology “comes with the friendliest of epithets” (p.317) in the university culture – the more of it used in ways that the university management approves, the better. Thus the self-managing academic demonstrates improved teaching performance by pointing to the use of more and newer ICTs… The problem here lies in the naïve hope that more and newer ICTs will mean a more exciting set of learning possibilities. Where curriculum remains fixed and immutable, however, these good intentions remain just that. There is no doubt that new information and communication technologies offer all sorts of new possibilities for remix – but, as Sassen reminds us, they cannot of themselves be relied on to change anything.

Deadly Habit No. 6: The more we know our students, the better.

I asked a group of Masters and Doctoral students in my faculty about the nature and purposes of education. ‘Raising self-esteem’ proved to be an almost universally agreed purpose, ranking alongside ‘helping people reach their full potential’. What flows from this logic is a heavy investment by these teachers in the development of a positive and friendly teacher-student relationship. And this is achieved in turn, by getting to know the students as individuals. Such determination is not to be thought of as prying but as seeking appropriately to teach the ‘whole person’.

They are usually…circumspect in their response to [the] question, [So what do I need to know about you?], less willing to give permission to pry. But the point is nevertheless made. The good teacher builds and maintains a close warm relationship with students and this means knowing ‘the whole person’, whether or not we want to be ‘known’ as a psychological subject. In this rationality, ‘openness’ is a marker of the good student and ‘interest in the person’ a marker of the good teacher. My point is not that we should be looking to return to a culture defined by the lofty arrogance and elitism of academics, but that one that respects students enough to challenge them by messing things up with and for them. The role, as Geoff Garrett, Head of Australia’s CSIRO put it at a recent senior management forum, is to become ‘chief disorganiser’.

Deadly habit No.7: Our disciplines can save the world.

It is my hope that I have demonstrated the problem with Deadly Habit Number Seven in my treatment of Deadly Habits One to Six. The approach I have taken to my own unlearning has been to range across academic disciplines and outside them in search of bright and shiny objects that can be used to generate different pedagogical thinking. Unfortunately, I have for some time now found relatively few compelling ideas about pedagogy coming out of mainstream education research, or professional development or leadership and management literature broadly defined…. Finally, I intend to save myself from another deadly habit of academic authorship – the deadly habit of summarising main points at the end of a paper. This will allow the reader to dispense with the deadly habit of needing to be reminded about them. In Bauman’s terms, the invitation is both to remember and to forget.

CCK08: Reflection for Week 8 Part 1

Power and Illusion

In the Oct 31 Daily, Stephen Downes commented:

From my perspective, the power I (Stephen) wielded this week in forcing a ’subscribe’ to the Moodle forums was actually an illusion of power. One student got it: “If Stephen hadn’t turned off the function as quickly as he did, I wonder if we would have taken power into our own hands, by simply not posting to the Moodle forums?” The power to do something else, to communicate using alternate means, to simply not use the Moodle forums, was always in the hands of the students – if they cooperated with each other.

I had been thinking exactly the same thing, but did not repond to Downes’ prompts to reply regarding the auto-subscription function in Moodle for precisely the reason suggested: because as an individual, not using the Moodle forum was how I chose to “communicate using alternate means.”

 In The Politics of Nonviolent Action: Volume 1: Power and Struggle (Extending Horizon Books, 1973) by Gene Sharp, the author remarks:

•  Obedience is essentially voluntary (26).
• It is not sanctions themselves which produce obedience, but the fear of them (28).

Being auto-subscribed to a Moodle forum is hardly an injustice in conventional terms. However, to the extent that Stephen was wielding his authority in a manner contrary to what students in CCK08 would expect, it begs the question: did an abuse of power occur? If we were to organize amongst ourselves as students to protest Stephen’s actions, first we would need to agree that a wrongdoing was committed. If it was agreed that an injustice had in fact occurred, then we would need to decide how we, individually and collectively, would choose to respond. Would we have agreed that collective mobilization was the course of action that ought to be taken? How would we have reached consensus about what was the best decision for us as a group? How would we implement our individual and collective responses? And finally, how would we move forward with the rest of CCK08 in a positive and constructive manner, shedding the abuses that have been conducted against us, if we chose to move forward with the course at all? Would we demand that Stephen resign from his role in the course? Would we demand an online apology?

The issues within which we find ourselves embroiled in the education system are so systemic that oftentimes it is impossible to identify how we ought to conduct ourselves when we know that injustices are being conducted against ourselves, our colleagues, and our students.

 John Taylor Gatto, voted both the New York City and the New York State teacher of the year, eventually chose to leave the teaching profession and is now a strong advocate of home-based education. He has reached the conclusion that working within the education system in order to try and transform students and/or the system itself cannot be realized. I believe that coercion plays a tremendous role in how we as teachers typically conduct ourselves in the classroom.

Especially if we are working with adolescents, for instance, classroom management is a reality that can require that students understand through no uncertain terms that unacceptable behaviours will have consequences. However, the affective and the cognitive domains must remain distinct in education, and therefore formal graded assessment is conducted not on the basis of a student’s behaviour or even engagement (for the most part) in class, but on a student’s ability to communicate knowledge and understanding back to a teacher through a variety of negotiated (some more forcefully negotiated than others) means. But the bottom line is that marks are the currency of the classroom. Even if students are promoted to the next grade whether on the books they have failed classes or not, formal assessment remains mandated by education authorities. Sure, we can be subversive about how we allocate marks; but we must allocate them all the same.

What options do students have? The vast majority realize that if they do not “play the game” at a minimum level their only option is to drop out of school, which their parents will not typically encourage.

But as educators, we all know this. Though I am no longer a teacher, I am still at a loss. 

CCK08: Reflection on Week 7: Do you Have Your ID?

George Siemens begins his Articulate presentation on Instructional Design and Connectivism by asking the following two questions:

• How we design for learning in a world that’s rapidly changing?
• How we design for learning in a world where the individual learner has far greater control over content and interaction than they ever had in the past? (Slide 1)

I would like to take a step back, and first ask the questions, “Who is we?” and “Why is it important that we identify how to design for learners in a rapidly changing world?”

One of Connectivism’s greatest strengths is that it “challenges the perceived linearity often found in learning design theory (Slide 11).”  By extension, the Connectivist framework seeks to “design for adaptability, not mechanistic views” through the use of patterning and wayfinding to refine sensemaking skills (Slide 12). The challenge then remains, how do we “achieve particular outcomes through distributed approaches (Slide 13) ?” Siemens expands on this question with three more:

• How do we deal with and design for learning that occurs in a complex, chaotic environment?
• How do we communicate a message that’s much more fragmented than it’s ever been in the past?
• How do we create learning to ensure that individual participants continue to stay current even when core knowledge within a particular field changes? (Slide 14)

To the extent that Connectivism situates itself as a framework for understanding informal learning, we ought to be looking at examples of both successful and unsuccessful informal learning to see what what they look like. There are a wealth of learners who have chosen not to learn in an institutional setting at all, and there are a wealth of learners learning in an institutional setting, also learning all sorts of material on their own outside of the formal teaching and learning environment. Siemens is correct that we must “pay attention to context, and pay attention to connections formed by learners (Slide 14). What I have found in my own teaching experience is that every learner is different, and by extension, every context is different.

I have a quotation written down somewhere, and I don’t know where or by whom, suggesting that the fact that schools have by and large not had the infrastructure or the financial means to stay up with technology in a widespread manner is a blessing in disguise. That way, teachers don’t have to make a mess of learners making sense of technology for themselves.

I have been a teacher in the past, and my current work as a project manager requires applying the principles of instructional design to the development of courses for distance education students. These courses serve a purpose, and have their place. For some learners, however, we know that the linearity of courses that have been developed with a lock-step linear scope and sequence are not desirable, with the exception of their being the means to accreditation or certification.

Autonomous learners have always found any number of ways to circumvent formal learning. Traditionally, this learning might have taken the form of reading, tinkering and troubleshooting, conversation and demonstration, hypothesizing and experimenting, and exploring without any notion of where those explorations might lead.

Many of our greatest minds have learned via these means, and up until now they have done fine without the Connectivist framework to support and explain their initiatives. Certainly, educators have always scrutinized the behaviour of learners and extrapolated theories on the basis of what they see, often with dire and far-reaching consequences in the form of hastily implemented educational reforms (where funding and political ideology have worked hand in hand with research initiatives.)

Yes, there are numerous points posited by Connectivism that I have no problem accepting as truisms, such as the following:

• learning is the forming of new connections
• ecologies are spaces within which networks occur
• as information changes, so to does the understanding of the individuals in the that field
• what we define as knowledge is represented in some manner of connectedness and the way that we perceive that knowledge is the way in which we’ve configured that particular network (Slide 5).
• learning is the ability to create and form…networks. So in a neural sense learning is the formation of new connections (Slide 6).

Siemens contends that designing for Connectivism concerns creating a design for the space and ecology of learning. What is new about this idea? I inherited a great collection of books from the early 1970s by a retired teacher who was involved in setting up some of the first alternative programs for high school students in Montreal. Among them was a book called “The Teacher as Learning Facilitator.” In Shambhala Buddhism, teachers discuss the ability to “create a container” within which the transmission of key teachings may transpire, if a learner is ready to receive those transmissions. How are these two analogies different?

Siemens:

Ecologies are the spaces in which  networks occur. As designers, our effort turns into designing an ecology that permits the broadest range of connections in order to achieve particular learning outcomes or particular learning tasks (Slide 7).

I cannot help but think that the most effective means by which we as designers for learners may permit the broadest range of connections is by expanding our own credentials as experts in education to also include mentors specific to the learning outcome or task that a learner wishes to realize—whether those individuals are familiar with the principles of instructional design or not. The necessitates a move away from an industrialized learning model, towards individualized instruction supported by a broad range of stakeholders.

In the second Elluminate discussion for Week 7 of CCK08. Siemens states, “Insructional design is an optional skill for a teacher to have.” I couldn’t agree more.

In a comment that was posted on Stephen’s Web in response to the Elearn magazine op-ed piece by Jerry Murphy, “Is Instructional Design Becoming a Commodity?” Brian Alger states:

Instructional designers will eventually become obsolete. 
The assumption that people need a kind of expert called an instructional designer in order to determine how they will “learn” is a retrieval of the industrialized mindset. The technology we refer to as “instructional design” is really a process that is used to impose a scope and sequence on information as well as the temporal assembly line we call the online classroom. What we are currently referring to as “e-Learning” really has very little to do with what learning is. It may be better to reduce the claims being made and refer to it as “e-Education” or e-Training.” Unfortunately many “e-Learning” companies and designers cannot see past their own assumptions and biases (October 14, 2003). 

 

 

 

 

CCK08: Reflection on Week 6: Part 2

1. Notes on “Complexity and Information Overload in Society: why increasing efficiency leads to decreasing control” by Francis Heylighen

The basic premiss of Heylighen’s paper concerns identifying the impact of ephemeralization on global systems.

Ephemeralization, the ongoing increase in efficiency or productivity of all processes involving matter, energy and information, is the most basic manifestation of technological and organizational advance (17).

Both of Heylighen’s papers are predisposed to an optimistic view of the future. It would appear that the author is a strong proponent of globalization, without, however, rigorously defending its criticisms.

People find it ever more difficult to cope with all the new information they receive, constant changes in the organizations and technologies they use, and increasingly complex and unpredictable side-effects of their actions. This leads to growing stress and anxiety, fuels various gloom and doom scenarios about the future of our planet, and may help explain the increasingly radical movements against globalization [my italics] (1).

Perhaps in theory, the reduction of international tariffs in the interests of encouraging trade makes sense; however, the legalities of these agreements are often ratified at the expense of the natural world, local sustainable economies, and indigenous cultures, none of which Heylighen has acknowledged.

…Both the area of land and amount of human effort needed to produce a given amount of food has been reduced to a mere fraction of what it was. As a result, the price of food in real terms has declined with 75% over the last half century (World Resources Institute, 1998). In the same period, the fuel consumption of cars has decreased just as spectacularly, while their speed, power and comfort have increased (3).

Ironically, Heylighen cites both advances in agriculture (leading to a decrease in food prices) and fuel consumption in the same breath. We know now that fuel consumption has increased in North America with an increase in the purchase of SUVs, and that the implementation of government policies that support increased production of biofuel has led to a decrease in the growth of grain products for food worldwide, especially rice. This had led to an increase in the price of those food staples, which in some countries, such as Haiti, has led to riots among the populace, which was suffering from high rates of poverty even prior to the spike in the price of grain.

There is also an unsettling irony that accompanies the increase in the GDP of developing countries, in particular China and India:

…In the developed countries, the problem with food is no longer scarcity but overabundance, as people need to limit their consumption of calories in order to avoid overweight. Even in the poorest countries, the percentage of people that are undernourished is constantly decreasing (Goklany, 2000; Simon, 1995). More generally, the trend is clearly visible in the spectacular growth in wealth, usually measured as GDP per capita, since the beginning of the 19th century (Goklany, 2000). The ever increasing productivity not only results in people earning more, but in them working less hours to achieve this wealth. Moreover, this economic development is typically accompanied by a general increase in the factors that underly overall quality of life: health, safety, education, democracy and freedom (Heylighen & Bernheim, 2000a; Simon, 1995; Goklany, 2000) (6).

Wage increases occurring in developing countries as a result of outsourcing by the West are in part what has contributed to the food crisis. For example, with the increase of the middle class in China, meat consumption has increased, which is also placing tremendous stress on grain production; grain is required to feed the livestock that are now in higher demand for human consumption. In India, the growing middle class is contributing to tremendous growth in the purchase of affordable automobiles. Granted, Heylighen is not making unsustainability a central focus of his paper, and he communicates as much:

Many things are still much less abundant than we would like them to be, and although increasing productivity leads to an ever more efficient use of natural resources (Heylighen & Bernheim, 2000a), ecologists have rightly pointed out that our present usage of many resources is unsustainable. The focus of this paper, though, is not on the remaining scarcities and wastages, which ephemeralization hopefully will sooner or later eradicate, but on a wholly new category of problems created by the emergence of “hyperefficient” processes. To get there, we first need to understand more fundamentally how ephemeralization affects the dynamics of society (6-7).

It remains nonetheless striking how much the world has changed, even since this paper was originally written. Heylighen’s own observations are applicable to the events that have transpired, including the recent downturn in the global economy:

The effect on society of this extension of causal networks is a greater interdependence of various subsystems and processes. Any action will have an increasing number of unanticipated or unintended consequences: side-effects. This entails a greater difficulty to predict, and therefore control, the overall effects of any particular event or process. The reduction of friction in causal chains merely increases the speed of the process, the number of subsequent effects in the chain, and the risk of snowballing. This reduces controllability but not necessarily predictability: as long as the cause-effect relationships are known, it is relatively easy to determine when and in how far a particular process will affect another one. The reduction of friction in causal networks, however, makes prediction ever more difficult, since the number of factors that need to be taken into account to determine any one outcome explodes, while the myriad interactions between those factors are likely to make the overall process ever more chaotic, i.e. sensitive to the smallest changes in initial conditions (11).

2. Notes on “Tackling Complexity and Information Overload: intelligence amplification, attention economy and the global brain” by Francis Heylighen

Heylighen’s description of what is required of 21st century education is entirely consistent with the treatment of subject matter in the Connectivism & Connective Knowledge course. The gravitation towards a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach to education may necessarily require that the term is largely deconstructed, unless Connectivism serves as the vehicle and the container within which the new paradigm emerges. In this regard, where Connectivism informs education and where education wishes to borrow from a Connectivist framework, it may, without the threat of the education domain being dismantled entirely:

An education for the 21st century will in particular need to teach us to better understand complex systems, and to avoid the typical errors of judgment that result from their counter-intuive behavior (e.g. Casti, 1994). This requires an in-depth reflection on the observations, concepts and principles developed in disciplines such as systems theory, cybernetics, self-organization, chaos, evolution and complex adaptive systems (Heylighen et al., 1999) (22).

Heylighen’s explanation of “economy” is similarly consistent with Downes’ characterization of the Seven Habits of Highly Connected People:

At the most basic level, “economy” means simply the careful management of resources, so that as little as possible is wasted. From this point of view, individuals should learn to optimally spend the limited amount of attention they have, by investing it only in the most worthwhile items (24).

The author proposes that “the only true solution…” that will allow humans to manage the phenomenon of ephemeralization “…must involve the synergetic use…of…three components, in the form of an emergent collective intelligence, or “global brain”.

First, practical intelligence requires extensive knowledge; yet it is extremely difficult to elicit this knowledge from human experts in a form sufficiently detailed and explicit to be programmed into a computer. This is the knowledge acquisition bottleneck. Second, true intelligence cannot be completely preprogrammed: it must be able to develop autonomously, to self-organize. Third, for an autonomously developing system to acquire knowledge about a realistically complex environment, it must be able to interact extensively with that environment, so that it can learn from its experiences (this requirement of interaction with a true environment is sometimes called “embodiment” or “situatedness”). (28).

Certainly the creation of common ontologies that allow databases to “talk” to one another has evolved significantly with the advent of the semantic web (28). I remain nonetheless skeptical of any uber-initiative, since it smacks of utopianism. That having been said, the formally rendered “collective mental map” is perhaps already being implemented in a beta format, to the extent that Open Source communities, the W3C, or research-based cohorts from around the globe are contributing to the resolution of complex problems (for example, the Genome Project):

The idea is that different individuals, agents or computer programs would contribute their specific knowledge, solve those partial problems or make those decisions for which they are most competent. The results of this cognitive effort would be shared with all other components in a coherent system that I have called a “collective mental map” (CMM). A CMM consists of cognitive resources (typically documents or database records, but this may also include computer programs, agents, and human experts), that are linked by a network of associations. This network would be organized in such a way as to minimize the effort in getting any resource to the place where it is is needed (30).

To what extent do such projects unfold using a centralized model for information dissemination, versus a more distributed model? I do not know enough about these initiatives to say. Heylighen’s observation that the success of a CMM depends on the extent to which it is self-organized and distributed seems accurate:

No system, human or technological, would be able to exert any form of centralized control over such a map so as to coordinate or allocate contributions. Any mechanism of coordination must be distributed over all contributing components. In other words, a CMM for global society must be self-organizing. Hints on how such a self-organizing mental map could function can be found both in the collective foraging behavior of ants, and in the organization of the brain (30).

There is a name for the synergetic use of individually intelligent components: collective intelligence (Lévy, 1997). The most famous examples are insect societies, such as ant nests, bee hives or termite colonies (Bonabeau et al., 1999), that consist of individually dumb components, but are capable of surprisingly smart behavior when working together (30).

One of the most accessible articles that I have encountered on swarm theory, and to which I have linked in a past blog, can be found here on the National Geographic website.