I was sure I had mentioned this project before - Web 2.0 and Emerging Learning Technologies. However, I can't find record of it. So, rather than ignore this valuable resource (put together by Curt Bonk and a global group), I'll risk linking more than once :). The last year has brought about a tremendous surge in interest in emerging technologies. I don't fully understand why. What's different this year than in the previous 8? Oh well, whatever it is, resources like the one listed above will become increasingly valuable as more educators discover the opportunities of extending interaction and content creation to the network.
Pew Internet has released an interesting study on how people blend online and traditional media. I rarely read a physical newspaper or watch a news program. Apparently that's not the norm. While traditional media has declined (newspaper readers has dropped from "40% to 34% in the last two years alone"), it certainly hasn't been abandoned. In the report we're introduced to new terms: integrators, net-newsers (ugh), traditionalists (largest group), and disengaged. We're still at that interesting crossroads of serving the the function of the old with new media and beginning to recognize new opportunities.
I'm almost done posting links to the course on this blog...I'll continue the posting on the course blog. A short presentation introducing massive open online courses (MOOCs) is now available here.
The Connectivism and Connective Knowledge online (open) course starts on Monday. If you're interested, you can still sign up. The course outline is also available if you'd like to get a sense of what's coming next...
TED Talks are extremely popular. Excellent speakers and provocative subjects. Universities are aware of the value of short informative videos and are launching similar initiatives. I see no reason why all universities and colleges shouldn't have a similar feature to attract learners, students, and donors. Why not showcase your best?
I've read a series of books/articles recently that are quite negative on technology. A particular emphasis seems to be that technology is somehow making us dumber - distancing people from what really matters. We search Google and think we have acquired knowledge. We blog and think we have subjected our ideas to peer review. Or, we publish an article on our website and think that qualifies as a publication. I partially understand the negatives being expressed by these authors. Times of transition are unsettling. We don't know if we're giving up too much. I struggle with this with my children - how much screen time a day is too much? This past week, I found myself informing my daughter that she should search for information beyond Wikipedia and rely on other sources as well. But that's just good information management. We should always be seeking multiple sources. We should always be striving for a deeper understanding of subjects through the type of information and dialogue we engage in. Critics are valuable in that they give us moment to pause and consider where we are really going.
One area of concern that I just can't fathom is the assumption that technology disconnects us from others. I'm more in touch with more family members, friends, and colleagues than I have ever been. Through skype, twitter, facebook, mobile phones, (and yes, email) I have a continual connection to people I wish to be connected with. A recent report supports this feeling: "Almost all (97 per cent) of the respondents stated they felt more connected to people and networks now than they did 5, 10 and 20 years ago."
So, I’m tired. In the last 21 days I’ve traveled about 8,000 miles, near as I can figure, and given 11 presentations, four of them on “opening days” in front of a total of about 3,000 teachers in about a half dozen states and provinces. It’s a fun time when people are rested and ready to get back to school and for the most part engaged in thinking about teaching, learning and schooling. And it’s a good time to get a temperature check as to what’s changing, if anything, in classrooms and in schools. In a few words, my impression continues to be: not much.
That’s not to say that there aren’t more silos or islands or whatever metaphor works of teachers and classrooms with teachers who are letting students do real work for real purposes and real audiences. There are, and in general, it’s feeling like more and more teachers are taking seriously the idea that we need to start some wide-ranging reflection and conversation about just what it is we’re doing with our students. (How far those conversations ever get is another story, however.) I’m sure there will be those that read this blog and others who will disagree, who will trumpet serious efforts and rethinking things either on a personal or system wide level. And that’s all good, but not surprising. They’re reading and participating already. On some level, they get it.
But, I’ll say it again, what these condensed travels remind me is just how small the scope of all of this talk continues to be. The vast majority of those who I’ve been in rooms with the last three weeks have little idea of what is happening in the world and have given nary a thought to what this means for teaching and learning. How do I know that? By the “omg” comments that I hear as they are filing out. By the “Ugh…we’ve got a lot of work to do” responses. By the teacher/mother of a teenager who asked me what Facebook was. By the consistently less than 10% of people in the room who own a MySpace or a Facebook site. Not that the Read/Write Web conversation is the only one that matters in the context of changing schools, mind you. But it is the one that consumes my time, obviously.
Recently, after one of my presentations, the superintendent of the district and I were standing shoulder to shoulder as his teachers were filing out of the room. He’d given an extremely thought provoking introduction, articulating his desire that they enter into a district wide conversation about change, that they all had a stake and a voice in that conversation if they wanted it. But at the end of my talk, the few questions went pretty much right to the “yeah, buts” and the reasons why these ideas would be difficult to make work. “The problem,” the superintendent said to me, “is that they don’t think they have a voice. They’ve been conditioned to wait for us to lead, to tell them what they can or can’t do. Somehow, we need to change that.”
For most educators, “back to school” means “back to teaching.” And that can be good work, but it remains obvious to me that very few see it as “back to learning.” For themselves, that is, along with their students. I’m not seeing much change since I wrote this two years ago.
I hate to generalize, but the thing that seems to be missing from most of my conversations with classroom teachers and administrators is a willingness to even try to re-envision their own learning, not just their students.
I still feel that way, for the most part. Things may have moved a tic or two on the scale, but until we do that en masse, not much is going to change.
(Photo “Knives Out” by Charlyn W.)
I link to this largely because it's a rare point of focusing on innovation that arises in Canada (and, after all, the world needs a bit more Canada :)): Backbone Magazine Top 20 (via Academica). Many of the sites listed were new to me...
I'm trying to understand why Google is releasing a browser. I'm sure there's a very good reason. When Apple announced it's Safari browser for Windows, it didn't make much sense - why enter the battle ground of browsers? Well, as was evident once Apple released the iPhone, Safari is a browser that helps to bridge the transition from Microsoft to Apple computing devices. Safari for Windows was more about introducing a new audience to Apple than about trying to create a better browser. Google is expected to release its new browser - Chrome - today. A short comic book overview of Chrome is available. While the official marketing message is about creating a more stable, safe, functional, and user-friendly online experience, the message I think is more inline with Apple's move. Google offers significant support for Mozilla, so in theory, they don't need a browser. But, Google also recognizes that if the web is the "new" operating system, then a browser is the key battle ground for control.
Google asks us to make a simple sacrifice: they'll make the online experience much simpler in exchange for our ongoing reliance on their products. Tying together our gmail, search, and other online activities will be a valuable addition. Focused advertising based on our online habits is the logical next step (it already happens in gmail, google groups). But Google does more. Google also promises to filter sites. In theory this is good. In actuality, this moves Google away from being a neutral provider to assigning a value statement of content. Obviously, given the amount of junk online, this is important. I just don't want the same company that provides the access to also provide a value statement. How much longer can Google innovate the web before it crosses over to controlling it (a strong argument could be made that this has already happened)? Out of Microsoft and into Google...
Moments like the Sarah Palin for VP pick are moments to sit back and take measure of what a complex landscape we’re living under when it comes to what to believe, Googleability, and the whole concept of “citizen journalism.” The stupidity from both sides has been amazing (the “she has foreign policy experience because she’s right next door to Russia” remark on the right and the “it really wasn’t her baby” watch on the left), and the breadth and speed with which all of the details of her and her family’s life have been coming out have been astounding to watch. In fact, we’re no doubt witnessing it in spades right now simply because it was such an out of the box pick and the MSM just wasn’t ready for it.
Good thing we’re all here to fill in.
If you listen to C-SPAN in the mornings like I do, you can’t help but agree with Bill Maher when he says the country is getting stupider and stupider. If you watch FOX or MSNBC, listen to Rush or Hannity or Ed Schultz, read the red and blue blogs, you quickly find yourself in a huge virtual, asynchronous shouting match that regardless of your political leanings will make you both tired and frustrated and longing for the one page briefing memo with just the “facts” if there still are such beasts. (By the way, does anyone want to argue that the Wikipedia article on Sarah Palin may be the most extensive, neutral point of view collection of “facts” that exist about her right now?) Yeah, everyone having a printing press is a good thing on balance. But sheesh, it sure complicates things.
And it’s been a real treat watching a good chunk of this develop with my kids, pausing the TIVO like every 30 seconds to ask them what they heard, what they think it means, and then explain why it doesn’t necessarily mean what is sounds like it means. (Don’t worry, we don’t torture them too much with this, and we do it across party lines. We can only take so much of it ourselves.) All in an effort to plant some seeds of skepticism for media in their brains. (The best quote was from Tucker, btw, who while watching Palin’s introductory speech to the nation said “Why does McCain look so nervous?”)
There must be about 3 million ways we can make all of this a “teachable moment” for our kids, from having them blog the convention goings on to creating their own campaign commercials to building their own policy wikis. (I’m sure there are many others much better than those ideas, btw.) That is, of course, assuming we have the editing skills (and we’re not just talking punctuation, here) to sift through all of it and come to some informed conclusions ourselves, that we have the ability or at least the awareness of our ability to participate in meaningful ways.
I love presidential politics, but while it usually points out what is best about this country, it also serves to remind us how really, really dumbed down the whole process has become. And unless we get some folks around here who can sift through this morass of “truth” with a little more skill, it ain’t gonna get any better any time soon.
Elgg was one of the first services to focus on a broader application of social networking services. While many of the tools at the time - Friendster, MySpace - were focusing on simply connecting people to each other, Elgg took a learning centric focus in the creation of their tool. Elgg straddles the content creation, social interaction, and eportfolio worlds. Congrats are in order on the announcement of the recent release of v1.0 and on receiving Infoworld's award for best open source social networking application. While I haven't played with Elgg for almost a year, I used previous versions for teaching, corporate networking, eportfolio management, and so on. Great tool.
Only a few years ago, user-filtering sites such as Digg were seen as more of a fad than a legitimate way of organizing people and information. That has changed. In 2004, James Surowiecki published The Wisdom of the Crowds. In 2006 Time gave a formal nod to the masses in declaring "you" the person of the year. Now we have traditional academic institutions - such as Oxford in this case - contributing to a research base on the dynamics of distributed networks for information creation and sharing. I'm surprised by how antiquated the findings seem. We need "serious academic research" to tell us what we've known for years (that distributed networks are used for "sharing, contributing and collaborating")?
Last year, we hosted a highly successful event: Corporate Learning: Trends and Innovation.
This year, Jay Cross, Tony Karrer, and I are again organizing as week-long online conference: Corporate Learning: Trends and Innovations 2008. The conference runs November 17-2008. It's online. And it's free. If you've been involved in conferences we've organized before, you know the routine: if you want to be kept informed on developments, sign up. Or follow our conference blog: LearnTrends.
I'll take a brief respite from my usual dismissal of all things 2.0 to highlight a nice article by Thomas Vander Wal: Tale of Two Tunnels: "the difference between Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 is like the difference building a tunnel through rock and tunnel under water...The Enterprise 2.0 tunnel is built under water. This takes more engineering understanding, but it also requires more fault testing and assurances. A crack or crumbling of a tool inside an organization is not seen kindly and raises doubts around the viability of the tool...Web 2.0 does not work well in enterprise, but the approaches and understandings of Web 2.0 modified for enterprise work really well."
There is value in this for educators. I frequently hear reasons about why we can't implement blogs, wikis, Second Life, and social networking services in education...security, we can't control it, they're just playing (instead of learning), and so on. I've been emphasizing a shift similar to Vander Wal's: don't focus on the tools and the direct application of the tools. Focus on what the tools allow us to do better and then find a way to implement that functionality in an organization. Should all grade 3 students have a blog on blogspot? Or videos on youtube? No. But all students in grade 3 should be communicating with others (preferably from around the world), expressing themselves in creative ways, co-creating with peers, and interacting with media and technology. Don't let the tools be used as a scapegoat for inertia.
The best place to be an author or consultant these days has to be the field of personal productivity. Who isn't overwhelmed these days? Information Overload: Time for a data diet? looks at the problem: "The river of content is turning into a flood, and my instinct is to get to higher ground." Two main solutions are presented: turn to technology (relying on RSS/web feeds to bring info together)...and stepping away from the internet. The first solution makes sense. The second...I don't know...it seems like we are getting more tethered to the internet through smart phones. The solution to overload is twofold: 1) new tools and techniques for managing what we want to track, 2) a new mindset - one that accepts always being behind, always learning, always missing something. And that's the way everyone else is. And that's ok.
Sure, China gets all the attention for having the largest internet population. But don't overlook the internet population in Europe, with countries like Russia, France, Spain, and Denmark reporting double digit growth. Netherlands has 82% of the population connected to the internet. In spite of significant growth of internet access, online learning is still poorly utilized. In several recent discussions, the aversion to the internet as a teaching/learning tool have been highlighted. The question for me is no longer "is online learning as effective as classroom learning". Rather, I'm asking "what better option do we have to meet current learning needs at a reasonable expense (of time and money)?"
Open educational resources (OER) continue to gain significant popularity. It's an exciting space. Lots happening: pen text book publishers, OER wikis, handbooks and tutorials, etc. Just came across this: OER Handbook. It is a useful starter resource for academics that are new to the space. It was an interesting experience reading the book. Perhaps because I read it online, I didn't see any mention of authors (until the end). I assumed that the book was written via a wiki. And I found it distracting. I like reading the work of individuals, not organizations. I wonder why...
The book widely references many of the key developments (Downes is reference about a dozen times, which is good to see). I was disappointed to not encounter any reference to mine and Downes' work on open education from about five or six years ago. While the project fizzled, I think it was one of the first attempts to pull together numerous projects, educators, and set some type of path forward collaboratively (rather than the current top-down direction from foundations and governments). At least give us a footnote :).
Most often, I don't finalize a presentation until just before the conference. The world has a habit of changing frequently. For an upcoming conference in Portugal, however, I was asked to submit a paper in advance. If you're interested: New spaces and structures of learning: the systemic impact of connective knowledge, connectivism, and networked learning (MS Word file). In this article, I suggest that the developments of technology and social learning theory are creating a sequence of change pressures that will alter traditional education. In particular, I try and answer: what will education look like in the future?
If you're reading this in an RSS aggregator like Google Reader, this post will be redundant. But, if you're reading this on the site or newsletter, take a look at this one minute presentation on Google Reader. It's a great overview to RSS (or web feeds) in general.
This page covers the voices of participants at the 2006 Milken Institute Global Conference
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