Dave’s Educational Blog

The Pad – Trends, drivers and a scenario from 1998

I’m still playing with the formats for this kind of post, but as my course starts next week, i thought i would get this started.

In 1998, Stephen Downes wrote a document looking into the future of technology and education. This is the first set piece that I’ve put together for the education futures course. It’s a neat document from Stephen Downes from a dozen years ago written to explain the reason for his work. It makes for compelling reading while reflecting on the last 12 years of our fields and offers us the benefit of seeing the work with the historical context. We also have the benefit of stephen having reflected on that earlier document in 2008. While it is certainly interesting reading, I’m hoping it will serve as a simple introduction to thinking about the future. It should also serve to start the process of establishing shared meanings for the words that we’ll be using.

This snippet and the audio discussion attached are meant to introduce us to the basic ideas of thinking about the future. Why should we look at trends? Why should we be thinking about the future? What is a trend? What are drivers? What’s the difference between scenario planning/futures thinking and a ‘prediction’ about the future?

To identify trends in education, perhaps the best methodology is to identify trends which work well today, whether technologically-based or not. In other words, identify the tools people actually use today, and examine how computers of the future will evolve these tools for use in the future.

And the tools most widely used in education today are remarkably simple, having remained unchanged for the last several centuries. They include books, notepads or paper, writing implements, blackboards, and teachers. Of these, obviously, the role of the teacher is the most complex and will have to be discussed in detail. The remaining tools, however, will be absorbed by the new technology in a very straightforward fashion: the PAD.

The PAD (Personal Access Device) will become the dominant tool for online education, combining the function of book, notebook, and pen. Think of the PAD as a lightweight notebook computer with touchscreen functions and high speed wireless internet access. The PAD will look like a contemporary clipboard and will weigh about as much. Its high-resolution screen will deliver easy-to-read text, video and multimedia. The PAD will accept voice commands, recognize your handwriting, or accept input via a touch-screen keyboard. From the future of online learning http://www.westga.edu/%7Edistance/downes13.html

I recorded this discussion with Stephen on March 17th, 2010. It starts out with a discussion of the context from which the paper was written… where he was working and why he felt the need to write the document. I’m hoping that this will help all of us to think about where we are in our own professional lives and to start asking ourselves about why we might want to think about the future of education.

Audio from The Pad Discussion with Stephen Downes

Discussion for this topic? Shared meanings of some of the initial language and to start thinking about why we as individuals may want to start thinking about the future.

Feel free to talk about the content, ways to improve the exercise or anything else that comes to mind.

The future of education – A course in futures thinking

Funny how these opportunities can present themselves sometimes. I had cleared my year to focus on some writing and, in the span of 3 days, had taken on the teaching of three courses (well… i’m teaching one of them twice). The course I’m going to be teaching twice, once f2f in Singapore next month and as an open course with George Siemens starting in mid-April, is about the future of education. It’s a strange path for me, in a sense, as I’ve always been a little wary of true prognosticating, and normally stick to my silly top ten list every year. The course description got me thinking though… and made me realize that I’ve been doing this all along, I just hadn’t called it by this name.

What is the next wave of technological change? What can educators do to prepare and anticipate trends? Using a method called “future thinking,” this course will look at a variety of trends and provide a series of potential scenarios and future directions. Participants will be actively involved in tracking critical trends, exploring their educational impact, and plan for ways to prepare for important changes. (written by George Siemens as part of emergent tech certificate at umanitoba)

I’ve been mulling over an approach for a while now, but have decided that its time to start firming things up for a course that starts its pre-amble in two weeks. I struggled with it, as it seemed to be a bit presumptuous to claim to be able to prepare people for the future. I started doing some reading… and started grounding the ideas into something a bit more practical… and now have an outline that I’d like some feedback on if you’ve a mind.

(This sketch is for the 5 day intensive course – heavily simplified for discussion purposes… there’s no way the days will be this discrete)
Introduction
The hope for this course is to bring some structure to strategic thinking around the next 10-15 years of higher education when seen through the lens of the impact of technology. It is not intended as a ‘prediction’ of the future, but rather as sharpening the skills for thinking about the future, finding ways to be prepared for possible futures, and making a best effort to avoid the pitfalls of biased thinking. We’ll take a look at a specific context (in this case the participants in Singapore) and get a sense of existing challenges, thoughts, hopes etc… We’ll move on to talking about decision making and trends. And then finish out the course by some exploratory and then normative forecasting.

Day 1 – Context building
Maybe the key to most learning, but certain essential to talking about the future is to establish a clear sense of the context in which we are discussing things. The difference between looking out over 5 years or 20 years, for instance, could change the focus entirely from a close attention to recent trends to casual blue sky thinking about future tech. I’m also very much hoping to get the participants considering where they work, how their institution fits into the marketplace, where there teaching is, where they hope it will go, what their students are like… Essentially create a picture of who and where they are. For this course, we’ll be doing this part online, starting a week or two before I head over. That’ll give us a chance to get to know each other, as well as allow me to do some last minute research to fill in specific context gaps in the materials we’ll be covering

I also hope that this will be a day of research as well. I’d like to see the participants pulling together info/data regarding their context. Everything from the number of students they may have, what their class size has looked like, access to technologies… whatever they consider important in terms of impact on their context. A good time, perhaps, to also list people’s resources (communities, experience, training opportunities) in order to get a better sense of what options may be available. We’re creating food to feast on over the upcoming days.

Day 2 – Decision Making
This is a day for reflecting on the process of decision making. Some of this will be premised on Gary Klein’s work… as well as things gathered from other locals. One of the frustrations for me in teaching a course that is this intensive, is that I’m wary of trying to get the students to find too much of the content. My preference is the ‘community as curriculum’ route, but given the timeframe, it’ll be tough for them to get the research in. Maybe a combination of both, it’ll depend on the make up of the students.

We’ll be talking about stories of decisions that people make, looking at article like http://news.noahraford.com/?p=175 this one by Noah Raford. He talks about a variety of ways in which bias affect group decision making which will be familiar to people who have… uh… been in groups. The ‘tyranny of the past’ ‘expectation bias’ ‘perils of too narrow thinking’ etc… all things that are useful to keep in mind when thinking about the impact of tech in education. Hopefully I’ll be able to draw examples of these out of the students as well, and get a discussion going on how people make these kinds of decisions in the education space.

I should also note that we’ll be covering technologies for communicating as a matter of course. These students are nearing the end of their work in the Emerging Technologies certificate at the university of manitoba, so they will already be familiar with a number of the technologies and have used them in practical ways before we begin.

Day 3 – Trends
We’re all familiar with the major trend publications that get released every year in our field (like, say, the horizon report). There are number of other trend watching websites, companies, and consultants who are willing to go on record on what they think we will be getting to in the future. The advantage of futures thinking and scenario planning for the kind of forcasting that we’re doing is that we don’t need to ‘agree’ or ‘decide’ to choose any of the trends that we find. We need the trends as more fuel for the scenario planning, to create relevant possibilities and think about how one would adapt to those.

If we, for instance, accept that the trend towards mobility in education is inevitable, there are a number of possibilities that can result from it. (decentralization of education, or the instructor, more collaboration) These might find their way into two or three different scenarios, but as we break down the trends into manageable pieces we might find that in each case having educators use a mobile device (maybe with a document management system supported by the university to support courses) gives the educators the literacies they need to adapt to any possible future examined as part of the process. Maybe not a very strong example, but i’m also not trying to seed the exploration process either. The point is that the trend need not be a simple “mobile good, must buy iphones” but rather a search for solutions to multiple possibilities.

Day 4 – exploratory scenarios
Given our context, decision making and trends we are ready to dive into the scenarios in earnest. The first of the two ‘kinds’ of scenarios will be the exploratory ones. These take a look at the possible futures for our context, not including what we’d like them to be, but rather what they might be. I don’t whole heartedly agree with this list, but it is a good example of the kind of thing that one might end up with. http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/4/3/38988449.pdf A series of six possible futures for education (in this case, not specifically mapped to tech) spanning the gamut from ‘business as usual’ to ’system meltdown’. Imagine each of six teams developing a scenario and then playing it out for the rest of the members of the class. The respondents would then draw on their own research, scenarios (and work from first three days) to refine the scenario, critique possible conclusions and explore ways to mitigate problems and encourage advantages.

Day 5 – normative scenarios
This is the opposite side of the coin. In this case you imagine the future you would like to see and talk about ways to reach it. What future of education would you want to live in… how would the technology get you there. What would get in the way. etc…

I’ve left a bunch out… but this is the basic sketch of what i’m going to do (i think) I’m still mulling over the decision about whether to use the jargon terms or not for instance. Anyway. your feedback muchly appreciated.

note: i should add that much of the better content in this post came from george siemens’ suggestions in our discussion around this topic, the original course description is his.

Community as Curriculum – a research project

I’ve been trying to figure out what I would do for the third of the rhizomatic education papers, I had hoped to pull together some of the things i’d learned since the original paper and pull it together with the second piece of writing around guilds and networks. This has lead me to thoughts about how some of the work was being interpreted and what there was to learn from looking out to the idea as it is connected to the network – the idea in its own own environment as it were.

The research project
I want to survey the way in which people have taken up the idea and how it has affected their practice. I want to interview them, and get a sense of why they tried it in the first place, what there expectations were, how well trying it reflected those expectations and what they ended up with in the real world. I have some expectation that the actual in class reality of turning the idea of curriculum into something else probably has a number of practical challenges in different fields, and I’m very interested in how people confronted those, how the learners confronted them, what their opinions were… I’m curious.

If the start align, i will be teaching ED366 again this year. Educational Technology and the Adult learner. I’d like to take the results from the first part of the research and apply it to the course as it stood 2 summers ago and see how it could be improved from the new interpretations.

Not too complicated really

Examples of uses
I’ve found a few very interesting examples of students either studying the rhizomatic education paper or running projects or courses using adapted versions of the content.

English 505 University of East Michigan
The paper appeared to be one of the challenges presented to the learners in the course. As you can see by the wiki, they made some very detailed analysis.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign- Dance Program
The dance program at Illinois appears to be arguing that the idea of ‘community as curriculum’ can allow them to consider their students as experts and allows them to guide what the word ‘curriculum’ means.

We are Media Project
By no means a ‘central’ idea to the great work done in the we are media project, but certainly an idea that was explored as a philosophical shift in thinking in terms of creating a curriculum.

What I’m hoping for
Well… I’m hoping for examples of people using the idea (and hopefully re/better-interpreting it) and having those people make contact with me so i can find out what they did.

I’m also hoping for advice on how to make the research project better. This is the first time I’ve set out on doing a research project without funding or formal structure… so ideas are most welcome.

I’m hoping, overall, to move the idea forward. It was, originally, the story that I put on the things that I have learned while working with all of you. It seems to have been a useful story for others as well, and now i’m kind of attached to it, so I’d like to see it grow.

Rhizomatic Translations 1 – Buying tech for learning

You might call it babble… you might call it context
After i posted an upcoming book chapter (article 2 of the rhizomatic education series) Nancy White asked me what the same article would sound like with a 16-year old audience. This isn’t going to be that… but her comments reminded me why i went on the journal writing odyssey in the first place. I was trying to get clear in my head about what I had seen on the internet, what my experiences meant and how I saw things moving. The intention was ALWAYS to be able to explain in plain language what I was trying to say. To be clear. This is my first try… how do you buy tech for rhizomatic learning.

Catch 22 – I’m buying but for what?
This is the trick. You either have the money… or you have the plan. People interested in education will probably smile at that line, and have probably been in that position many times. They have been approached by people with money (i have $500 i need to spend in the next week… I just got $150,000 to do research), or been approached with the money itself. This doesn’t happen all the time, but I’ve probably had the conversation 8-10 times. More often, you run into the need. Before things like Ning, we (at worldbridges) used to host these kinds of projects (personallearningspace.com (now defunct) youthvoices (still running under excellent new management)). Excellent learners, or educational practitioners, community members and idea havers just looking for the resources they need to do a specific thing.

If you have the money, you generally do not have a clear idea of how it is going to be used. You cannot line up hundreds (thousands/millions) or folks without any way to promise them that the technology will come through. You can have an extraordinarily detailed plan but if you do… that means that you’ve already pretty much decided what the needs are of the people that you are going to teach… and probably what they are going to learn. It is much, much easier to have a clear idea of the things you wish to purchase if what you are going to do is rigid, top-down – read: clear.

If you have a plan, this probably means that you have already gotten into a learning situation, you are a real learner amongst learners and you know what you need. Then comes the rub… it can take years to identify funding, apply for funding, wait for approval and actually get it in the bank. It can take 100s of hours to do the work, you need partners (who might not have been part of your initial vision) you need, usually, to make concessions to the needs of the funder (it is, after all, their money) and then you can only hope that the needs that you identified is still there and you haven’t lost the hours you spent on the project funding application.

Rhizomes to the rescue
We’ll need to set up a couple of premises

• In the rhizomatic model, experts do not create curriculum, it is co-created by the learners
• Educators prepare the context and the scaffold (maybe the syllabus, depending on the situation)
• There is a surplus of information (lets call them open educational resources) that can be used to provide the content of curriculum, there need not be A resource… any resource will do
• As we move passed a ‘knowledge economy’ towards one where being creative with that knowledge is more important (or put another way not knowing, but, knowing how to know) facilitating access to collaboration and collaborative skills is key (I might want to say community rather than collaborative)

If you take these things as given, all of a sudden buying the technology becomes a little more interesting. You can look at the affordances provided by each of the technologies and ask yourself if these are the kinds of things that fit with what you are trying to do.

ex 1
The IPad is at the middle of a number of debates right now, but the general consensus is, in its current release (sans camera for instance) it is primarily a consumption/ticking device. It will do an excellent job of allowing you to consume media. It will also do an excellent job allowing you to ‘tick’ things off a pad. I was thinking, for instance of my trainer who constantly has a paper pad he carries around with reps and weights and excercises which he then collates back in his office. Ipad is perfect. If you want a student to be able to write a professional paper, the lack of being able to hold a pdf, an email a website and an image open at the same time is going to be a real impediment. Impossible? no. But the affordances are mainly consumpion/ticking related.

ex2
A headset is one of the most useful tools anyone can have (when they already have a computer). It is critical for collaborative participation on the internet. In 5 years of running web based conference type events (webcasts/conferences) the “are you wearing a headset” question is still first and foremost. It allows you to participate in an online discussion without irritating the community that you are participating in and also allows for things like VOIP. It’s cheap and allows for that critical audio connection.

But but but what about training and what about…
Training and support is critical. Just in time technical support is critical. Clear models for how to succeed are critical. These things are also ephemeral. Training and support programs don’t really seem to last, good technical support (that can actually assess the needs of a learner and give them confidence) is tres hard to find, there is NO ONE CLEAR MODEL for success.

You need to be flexible, you need to plan projects with a strong focus on problem solving by the learners. You need to plan your systems for perfect simplicity… complexity is easily added if its necessary (and it rarely is). If the focus of any learning activity is centred directly on the leaners and those learners have technology that provides the affordances they need… you’re going to be able to find solutions on the fly that are far better than pre-planned responses for presumed problems.

A few more affordance examples
For instance…

technical
• opening documents (gmail will open anything – open office)
• voice (headsets… can you say headsets)
• video (a decent webcam takes pretty good video/mino HD provides the simplicity etc)

You could argue forever about what audio recording software to use, but, really… what do you NEED it to do. There are very few cases where someone needs to record awesome audio. Reasonable audio designed to share people’s thinking/learning is cheap and easy to use. Ease of use encourages use.

Closing
I’m not sure this has been a very strong start to my attempts at being clear… but, to put things simply, you need not buy (stuff) directly for the plan… but

buy(stuff) for the kind of learning you believe in. I believe in collaborative/community learning.(depending). I need/want to allow people to create, to participate and to understand that they can be part of what they are interested in.

Community as Curriculum – vol 2. The Guild/Distributed Continuum

“Community as Curriculum“, in: D. Araya & M.A. Peters, Education in the Creative Economy: Knowledge and Learning in the Age of Innovation, New York: Peter Lang, 2010.

This text is an extract of a forthcoming book ((Spring 2010) Education in the Creative Economy: Knowledge and Learning in the Age of Innovation, a book edited by Araya and Peters and Published by Peter Lang.

Chapter 23

Community as Curriculum

Dave Cormier

Mr. McGuire: I just want to say one word to you – just one word.

Ben: Yes sir.

Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?

Ben: Yes I am.

Mr. McGuire: ‘Plastics.’

Ben: Exactly how do you mean?

Mr. McGuire: There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?

Ben: Yes I will.

Mr. McGuire: Shh! Enough said. That’s a deal.

—The Graduate, 1967

This classic scene from the 1967 blockbuster The Graduate illustrates the assumptions and premises of the traditional twentieth-century ontology of work and knowledge. The scene paints a world where access to knowledge is privileged, access to mentors and inside information key, and getting in on the inside of the next big thing a one-time stroke of luck on which an entire successful—and linear—future could be built. The film reflects the prevailing understandings of its era, including that a future could be chosen at the start of one’s career.

In the scene, Benjamin Braddock, twenty-one years old, recent university graduate and star student, stands uncomfortably in his parents’ living room being grilled by their peers about what he’s going to do with the rest of his life. The enigmatic Mr. McGuire lures him aside in a semi-satirical performance that emphasizes both McGuire’s delight in his own power and the bewildering weight of the choice ahead of Benjamin. The magic word that McGuire dangles promises Benjamin entry into a cabal of people who know who hold the future. As viewers, we can apprehend Ben’s dilemma and the critique implied in McGuire’s over-the-top delivery because the roles and the beliefs they were built on still carry power in our culture and particularly in our educational systems, where knowledge as a commodity with structured, gate-kept access paths to success is still a powerful narrative.
Benjamin Braddock has the package he needs to succeed in McGuire’s world. He knows how to access the world of knowledge through the books and journals that live in the library at his university. He knows how to work with experts, receive the knowledge and expertise stored in their heads, and serve that back in a format that meets specific requirements. Ben has acquired an education, and now it can be put to use. He has a store of knowledge and the requisite skills to acquire more. Even as the final act of the film closes with Ben’s rejection of convention and the world offered by Mr. McGuire, viewers are left with the assumption that he will be just fine. Benjamin Braddock is positioned not to fail.

This idea of learning as something that can be bought, acquired, and then completed is deeply ingrained in popular culture. It is a comforting model. If we are to believe that learning is as simple as this, then at any given time, we can simply find the “way to do something,” pay the requisite fee to acquire the knowledge in question and then go about applying it to our lives. If we are in a field like, say, plastics, we need only be able to tell one plastics knowledge salesman from another. If we are clever or choose a reputable institution of plastic sales, we will have the item that we need and will be able to progress a little further down our chosen path. The model implies that there is a way to know what the answer might be, and that a person (our plastics expert) could have this knowledge, and that the knowledge can then be acquired by a learner. In addition, most importantly, once the knowledge is acquired, the learning is finished.

It is a simple model. Unfortunately, it is false. If it ever worked, it will not work anymore. The promise of the twentieth-century model of knowledge is an empty one today.

As the job descriptions of traditional professions change and diversify, people are realizing that the myth will no longer hold. There will be no more “plastics” salesmen. A manager might also now be a social media strategist, administrative assistants are becoming Web managers, and mechanics are plugging computers into cars. Where once universities and colleges would market to an established clientele and rely on word of mouth and prestige for attracting students, they now market to the globe and find themselves in need of types of literacy that were hitherto the province of embassies and multinational corporations.
In this climate of change and adaptability, where money is being spent on “making things digital” and “making people ready for the digital age,” how does one know how to guide one’s professional course? How can one choose learning opportunities that will contribute to success? How is the policy maker to choose between options, either of which are potentially equally likely to succeed, and both of which are being presented in terms that break current frameworks of judgment?

Often the answer to these questions has been, simply, “more.” More training, more work, more hours spent in the office. More research, more money spent on research consultants. The training is too often too short, too boring, and too old-fashioned. The consultants are expensive, difficult to find, and come with no way to accredit their advice. People turn to passing fads in an attempt to stay current without the necessary experience or context to be able to make informed, professional decisions about them.

This is the climate that is now demanding a new way of learning and a new sense of what it means to learn. The implicit lessons of our educational system are still twentieth-century lessons: being on time, attentiveness, focus on single tasks, completion of tasks outside of context, and, perhaps most importantly, completion of tasks without any sense for why they are being done. These are the preparations for effective labor in the Dearborn factories of Henry Ford in the 1910s and 1920s. These are the skills for the members of a workforce who were not to sit down, not to stray from their task and earn their time in front of the fire from a hard day’s work. They are preparations for the industrial revolution.

Most of us have, in spite of ourselves adjusted—at least incrementally—to this transmission-focused military model of education. There is a sense in many educators’ minds that learners need to explore their way through their learning, and have the experience of learning, of searching out ideas and discovering them for themselves. This process, though, is usually bounded by the learning objectives laid out at the beginning of the course of study by the designer/instructor. There is still, implicit in most widely held conceptions of learning that the instructor, designer, or at least the institution knows what a learner should get out of a given course.

The problem, then, only comes into play when we are not sure what “people should be learning.” What is the curriculum for innovation? How do we impart creativity? Where do students turn to be guaranteed that they are learning what is new and current? These are the questions that face us on a more or less regular basis now. As knowledge becomes a moving target and the canon starts becoming less reliable, we need a new—or in fact an old—model of education drawn out on a new canvas: community.
The answer is to stop trying so hard, to stop looking for a systemic solution, and to return to a human-based knowledge plan. We need to return to community as a valid repository for knowledge, and away from a packaged view of knowledge and expertise. Knowledge can be fluid; it can be in transition, and we can still use it. We need to tap into the strength provided by communities and see the various forms of community literacy as the skills we need to acquire in order to be effective members of those communities.

Community as curriculum is not meant as a simple alternative to the package version of learning. It is, rather, meant to point to the learning that takes place on top of that model and to point to the strategies for continuing learning throughout a career. There is a base amount of knowledge that is required to be able to enter a community, and there are methods for acquiring the specific kinds of literacy needed to learn within a specific community. A learner acquires basic forms of literacy and associates with different peer groups. Networks begin to form and, occasionally, communities develop. Knowledge is created and sometimes discarded as the community interacts. Knowledge does not develop and spread from and through concentric circles. There are no “plastics” to be learned and no canon to consult to ensure that a new skill has been acquired. Knowledge is a rhizome, a snapshot of interconnected ties in constant flux that is evaluated by its success in context.
We need a move toward a more practical, sustainable learning model that is less based on market-driven accreditation and more on the inevitable give and take that happens among people who engage in similar activities and share similar forms of literacy and worldviews.

Learning and Knowing
The rhizomatic view of learning reflects an organic, practical approach to thinking about learning and knowledge. It has a distinct connection to the traditional academic knowledge model, with its interlinking references and people. Each piece of information and knowledge is interlinked and supported by at least one other element, with no one place where knowledge about a matter begins or ends. The rhizomatic model, in contrast to the academic one, keeps the knowledge in the people and in the community rather than distilling it into a paper based product – be it the final publication of a journal, book or other ‘changeless medium.. The problem with the paper publishing cycle is the time it takes to proceed through the entire cycle, and the constraints on time and space that go along with the medium place severe restrictions on the flexibility and applicability of the academic tradition. It is not to say that it is not valuable, just that it does not always—and cannot always, today—respond in ways that meet the needs of learners in a world where what is known in many fields changes from month to month.
If we are working in a field where what is new or current is continually in flux, then we need to have a way of keeping our knowledge up to date. With the huge increase of academic publications, the simple process of choosing has become more difficult, and the sifting through what is out there a significant task for any professional. Our ideas of learning and knowledge need to become more flexible to allow for this mutability. “The term [rhizomatic learning] encapsulates a sort of fluid, transitory concept; the dense, multi-dimensional development and integration of several different sets of tools and approaches, appearing in diverse forms under separate settings, using all the multidimensional networking information technology tools, the social web, etc.” (Szucs, 2009, p. 4). rhizomatic learning distributes the channels of knowing outside traditional hierarchical models and into the social realm, allowing for help in sifting through the flow of information and knowledge. These “social learning practices are allowing for a more discursive rhizomatic approach to knowledge discovery” (Cormier, 2008, p. 3). rhizomatic knowers use a variety of approaches and tools to blend together bits of information and knowledge in order to form what they need. They especially need a learning community to help them test ideas, filter information and knowledge, and seek advice.

The skills that Benjamin Braddock—as a representative for his generation—learned for acquiring knowledge were listening, accepting hierarchy, and learning how to identify sanctioned bits of knowledge to apply to new situations. The traditional testing and identification model that Ben would have been accustomed to operated along principles of “here’s what you need to know and here’s how I’m going to know that you know it.” These notions of hierarchy, sanction, passivity, and external validity are all further victims of the social shift we are currently experiencing. As learning becomes about participation and knowing becomes a negotiation (Cormier, 2008), it is no longer as practical to approach learning with a pre-existing notion of what we are trying to find out. Instead, knowledge production becomes a participatory process based in communities, with members trying to solve problems, tap into existing trends or simply exploring by helping someone else. The problem of how we know what we are taking out of a community environment might be true or useful or might, in some sense, be seen as knowledge is at the heart of the change that is needed to cope with the accelerated speed of change.

The knowing, then, exists out in the networks and should be seen in this rhizomatic way. It should not be seen as a network in a digital sense but rather as a culmination of the connections between people. Knowledge becomes a snapshot in time of what is known in a community on a given issue. Publishing is done in order to crystallize and make knowledge about the community public—as in “public”-ation. Its value is in its ability to reach out from the community to others, not in its inherent knowledge.
In this rhizomatic model, the roles of the expert, authority, and reference in knowing all change considerably. A side benefit of this transition is the expulsion of the plastics salesmen, vendors of the “next best thing” that you simply must think about. Our plastics salesmen can no longer fall back on the old adage “research shows,” or simply show us a major corporation using a given product or method and expect us to want to incorporate it into our work.

This being said, expertise and experience are still critical to the success of any community. Whether one believes in the 10-year-rule of expert-making (Ericsson, K.A., Prietula ,M.J., Cokely, E.T., 2007), a healthy community will work faster and move toward goals quicker when the people living in that community immerse themselves in the specific goals of that community. Novices certainly can come together to learn without the presence of master-style members, but the progress is likely to be slower. Access to pre-existing work on a subject and trial and error experience can be of great value to novices trying things for the first time. The negotiation of knowledge is going to be more productive if the people involved have access to the basic literacies for that field.

Community
Community is a kind of network. A learning community is a specialized version that inverts the normal pattern of responsibility from being responsible to oneself to being responsible for the learning of the people with whom one is involved. More specifically, one is connected to these people in a variety of ways, be it professional lives, social networks, or other settings. There is a sense, however, that work goes better when people are working together. They are sharing information, working together to learn new things or sharing experiences. In a professional network, “taking care of oneself” is what is considered appropriate; in a community, lending a hand and helping to make sure that others in the same community are learning is the highest order. This idea of learning, that it happens between people on a relatively flat hierarchy, is the antithesis of the world that our Benjamin came from. In his education, having the right connection and having acquired the right information from the existing canon was critical. In the learning community view knowledge is rhizomatic, and learning transactional.

Joining any kind of community can involve a fair amount of research and time. Communities are about commitment. They are about responsibility rather than goals described by others. There are many interpretations of the word, many of which attempt to call on a possible past full of barnstorming, communal sharing, and mutual survival. There is another version of the word community that calls more to mind the inequality of high school group work, the inefficiencies of the communist farms and the tedium of the weekly meeting. There is no guarantee that a given community is going to work in a way that will satisfy every prospective member. The definition of community used here differs from both of those archetypes in the sense that it is about choice. A choice to be responsible to a group of people and a choice to join in with a group of people who, while they might not share similar distinct goals share equivalent mores, skills, or worldviews. They are, on some axis, on the same part of the long tail.

Conventional instruction is based on a hierarchical model in which those who know teach those who do not know. As Cross notes, “Institutions of higher learning were set up with the express intent of attracting people who know and the tools of knowing into regional settings in order to allow for the building of centres of knowledge. Students would come from outlying towns to come to the locus of this knowledge in order to get access to ‘those who know’” (Cross, 2005, p. 5). Communities, then, become this same kind of regional settings, allowing different kinds of members, some centrally invested and others peripherally so, to interact in centres of knowledge. The difference is, of course, that knowledge is negotiated in time. As this knowledge is negotiated, it is spontaneous rather than reified in books or articles. “Learning together depends on the quality of relationships of trust and mutual engagement that members develop with each other, a productive management of community boundaries, and the ability of some to take leadership and to play various roles in moving the inquiry forward” (Wenger, White, & Smith, 2009, p. 8).
The creation of a community in and of itself is not sufficient to guarantee the kind of life- long learning that promotes creativity in a professional context. Indeed, the creation of a community is often the easiest part of the process. It is important to understand, from each learner’s point of view, the goals he or she is to achieve as well as the available to obtain them.

The two types of learning communities presented here reflect two differing directions for learning. They should not be seen as mutually exclusive but rather as different in control. The first, the guild model of community, offers more control and better options for accreditation and verifiability and is also the easier one of the two options. If a guild style community can be established, then it gives a single locus of learning. The other, the distributed model of community, i.e., multiple membership roles in multiple communities, offers far greater flexibility , though less control. It would be difficult for an employer to track learning in this kind of environment, or for learners to take guidance on what they should learn. A combination of these two is certainly possible, or the path might lead from one end to the other.

Community as Guild
Creating communities for learning is the first path that many people take begin to believe that the Benjamin Braddock model is failing them. They are looking for a connection between the organized world of learning and the new connected world of the Web. Indeed, there is a sense that a classroom can be this way. The community versions of these kinds of classrooms emerge around a particular topic or perspective and grow and adapt along non-institutional lines. We also see the same in different social communities that occur around different topics and fields online.

They do offer a number of very significant advantages—perhaps the most important being quality control. A look at traditional guild models and how they deal with issues of quality control offers an interesting perspective to the current open classrooms and social networks.

It is clear from the records left by guilds that they [guild] were vitally interested in matters of “quality control” and quality assurance. The exclusive right of the guilds to sell certain goods in certain markets, coupled with quality standards written into the guild regulations, assured buyers that all goods under the guild’s jurisdiction would be of a certain quality. The guild “imprimatur,” in other words, took the place of the reputation of individual craftsman as a quality assurance device. (Merges, 2004, p. 7)

The members of the guild, be they a representative organization or a classroom, are constrained by a charter, social contract, or syllabus that defines the things that are done and known inside that community. It both allows for observers of a community member to know what that member is likely to know and allows new members a better sense of how they can get involved. There are observable dos and don’ts that a person can follow in order to be more successful. People need to know who they are in their community. They need to know how to succeed. They need to understand the roles that are available and what it means to participate. Guilds can work, particularly when they are open and people think of them as part of the whole knowledge building structure.

In the Classroom
“ The community is not the path to understanding or accessing the curriculum; rather, the community is the curriculum” (Cormier, 2008)

The ED366H Educational Technology and the Adult Learner classroom, a course I taught at the University of Prince Edward Island in the summer of 2008 was an attempt at putting the guild model community learning into practice. The goal was to create a sense of reliance and a sense of responsibility in each student toward the learning of their fellow students. The goal was not, however, to create some kind of community that would last past the time allowed for the course but rather to instill some of the literacies and demonstrate some of the advantages of community learning in the hope of fostering the desire to join or support community learning in their respective teaching environments.

The course is a accredited by the university and designed to span 35 hours in a two-week period. The constraints of such a shallow time span had a considerable impact on the decision not to create a standing community. The course began with a day-byday syllabus that suggested broad topics of research for week one and broad topics for student lead demonstrations for week two. It took a people centred and, as far as possible within the required structure, a technologically neutral approach to introducing the idea of technology to the classroom.

One of the interesting features of teaching this kind, of course, is that any specific information, terminology, technology, or even approach is likely to be partially or totally outdated by the time the opportunity for the learner to actually use it in the classroom has happened. The focus of the syllabus was entirely on the students learning to rely on each other to find paths through the tasks that were set out. Competency for the course was simple, the students needed to teach something to the rest of the class in the second week that they had never heard of in the first. During this process, they were required to create a textbook, together, of the things that they learned and reflect on the process throughout.

The difficulty with the course scenario, however, is that the forced community tends to fall apart after the course. Many more formal attempts have been made to create this kind of community, but they face significant challenges. A case study made of the Education Network of Ontario illustrates many of the pitfalls of trying to sustain long-term interest and participation in an online community of practice. It was a 12-year project that began in the days of dial-up and, due to the inevitable challenges implicit in sustaining a long-term community, eventually ended in 2005.

Despite the obvious benefits of online networks, the complexities of forming and supporting online communities will need to be addressed if they are to be sustained. Designers will have to balance the needs of the community and the needs of individual members. The success of future online communities will be heavily dependent on: the level of information overload, the tone of the environment (including all of the community building practices needed for a healthy community), and outreach and marketing. (Riverin &Stacey, 2008, p. 55)
The guild style community, however, need not be an end in and of itself. It can be seen as a gateway to a more distributed, more flexible view of learning communities. It can be a safe place from which to set on our own or simply a trusted node in a widening network of trust from which communities tend to form. What the leaders of these guild style communities need to teach people, then, has little to do with content and more to do with actually using communities to learn. The community is, in effect, the whole of the curriculum. Its members need to experience what it can be like to learn in a community mediated environment and take that away with them so that they can continue to be contributing members to their knowledge rhizomes.

Distributed Community
Seeing communities more broadly and taking multiple community and network membership online/offline might be a sustainable community learning model. In a sense, this is what academia has been, as opposed to a simple guild model. The guilds learned and worked mostly with people from their villages or the rare traveler; academics had the written word on books, and they traded with them. They developed methods by which, at a distance, the community could judge the applicability of a given bit of knowledge to the overall field. The methods of quality control by peer review and citation are the distributed community in paper form; adding the Internet, matters start to move faster at a fantastic rate.

The learner and the knowledge producer now can tap into a broad base of professionals in any field at the click of a button. There are professionals sharing their work at the time that it is happening, presentations being streamed online and data coming out from research long before papers are published. With connections through social networks it is possible to query the writers of professional works in order to get clarity, suggestions or confirmation about certain ideas or theories.

We are also able to find other people who have the same degree of interest in a given subject as we ourselves possess. This concept makes Chris Anderson’s idea of the long tail so attractive. If we connect the whole world through social networks, then the people with very specific, very passionate interests will be able to collaborate. In Braddock’s world they would have accomplished their goals—had they been able to find each other, but now even simple searches will reveal people with whom specialists can form strong connections.

The multiple memberships that make up online community participation can be overwhelming. Online participation can, from a technical perspective, include micro-blogging, bookmarking, blogging, Web cast memberships, and a host of other technical formats that require some degree of competency to participate. The key, however, is the varying layers of connection that they allow with the people who are actually present. Simply “using” the technology offers no particular benefit. Being able to participate in live knowledge building on a daily basis with a group of peers, on the other hand, is a privilege of the so-called digital age.

Having members of a community involved daily in activities of the digital age l means teaching them to network first, to assess ways in which their networking can grow into relationships of trust that allow them to rely on people to care about their learning and about their success and where they learn how to judge people’s opinion. They will, in a sense, have to become sensitive to the ways in which knowledge can be acquired, created and validated along the rhizomatic view.

Edtechtalk As a Model for Community Curriculum—A Piece of the Puzzle

Edtechtalk comprises a community of educators who come together in various ways on a regular basis to share their expertise and experience with each other. It is “a community of educators interested in discussing and learning about the uses of educational technology” (Edtechtalk, 2009).

My community learning experience started with Edtechtalk. My relationship to it and membership in it has changed and morphed over the last four years, but it has consistently occupied a very important place in my learning world. It is both a locus for the guild model of learning in the structured weekly programming and the inner core of producers of shows that works together and is also a distributed model of learning in the way that it becomes a locus for less central members to come together, meet others, and move on to other projects.

The problem, however, is that these are emergent communities. They are communities with no direct goal and have not been created by an entity with the specific goal of “learning.” It is a learning community that was created out of an event are sometimes created out of an existing event, as the Web heads were in 2002 and continue to be a strong supportive community. However, they are difficult to create on purpose to solve a particular problem.

The focus of this kind of community learning needs to be on the people and on the specific context of those people. There may be circumstances where much of this kind of learning would be face to face, where it might go in waves, or where it might be entirely online. This need not have a profound impact on the success of the learning experience. Each venue or platform, be it a Multi User Virtual Environment or a coffee shop offers different advantages and disadvantages. In either case an eventedness is offered to the student who can take them out of their context (Cormier, 2009, p. 545). Certain matters may be resolved easily in one situation, whereas in another situation, the same matter may prove to be a lot more complicated. More specifically, each matter needs to be seen in its individual context.

There are problems, necessarily, with this kind of approach. For example, if a number of practitioners, who are still in need of experience, attempt to band together without access to the “trails” of more experienced practitioners, they could be in for a very difficult and time consuming learning process.

Strengths and Weaknesses

This kind of approach is in no way going to appeal to all people and be ideal to all situations. There are some buttons that are blue that need to be pushed after the yellow one. While there are any number of potentially important community lessons to be learned around this concept (how to sit when doing so, what to do if the yellow button is missing), there are times when the training path is simply a question of acquiring certain simple facts. More broadly, there are objections that affect this kind of learning… as Mr. Szucs noted “We should notice that the strength and the weakness of this approach is at the same time, that the content and the competence are legitimated by the collaboration in the networked system” (Szucs, 2009, p. 4).

The content, in this case information and knowledge on how to accomplish tasks, e.g., grow professionally, choose a new course, whatever the case may be, is legitimated by collaboration and by its applicability to the context of the user. If that user does not return to the community with the results, is not able to assess those results, or is not honest about them, the system begins to get weaker. There is also the significant risk of groupthink. The more a community insulates itself from outside influences (a distinct risk in the guild model), the more it is likely to fall into established patterns and allow knowledge to become defined as “what we happen to be thinking right now.”

Another place where online communities can get into trouble is the over-focus on the digital element. Much ink has been spilled in discussions of digital literacies and how they are critical to the survival of the twenty-first-century professional. Indeed, these literacies are important and are comparable to the effective use of the pen, train, or conference hall in the twentieth century. The digital landscape is yet to be painted, not necessarily in terms of contents but in terms of the medium that is used to “paint” digitally. The medium has a huge effect on what can be done and a more subtle influence on what does get done.

Conclusion
The world that rhizomatic learning commits itself to is a far less secure world than the one presented to Benjamin by Mr. Macguire. He would have us believe that the future is a novel, can be seen, learned about, acquired, and put in the bank against an uncertain future. What we are acknowledging here is that the future is uncertain that we do not know what we will need to know, or who will know it. We are committing ourselves to people, not to specific bits of knowledge or information and hoping that our commitment to those people will keep what we know relevant, and keep us above water.

We can create communities, out there in the online space. By far the easiest way of creating this kind of community is to use find a Web based community that already exists. As the decision of “what” to learn, that is, the problem facing most professionals in the workplace today, it is probably easier to start one’s learning inside a guild community model, where the literacies for community are easier to learn, and while the idea of “knowing you know” is a bit easier to manage.

References
Cormier, D. (2008). Rhizomatic education: Community as curriculum. Innovate, 4 (5). Retrieved from http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=550

Cormier, D. (2009). MUVE Eventedness—An experience like any other. British Journal of Educational Technology, 40(3), 543–546. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8535.2009.00956.x

Cross, K. P. (2005). What do we know about students’ learning and how do we know it? Research & Occasional Paper Series, 7(5). Retrieved from http://repositories.cdlib.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1041&context=cshe

Edtechtalk. (2009). About Edtechtalk. Retrieved from http://edtechtalk.com/About_EdTechTalk

Ericsson, K. A., Prietula, M. J., & Cokely, E. T. (2007). The making of an expert. Harvard Business Review, (July-August), 5. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonbaseballinstruction.com/themakingofanexpert.pdf

Merges, R. P. (2004). From medieval guilds to open source software: Informal norms, appropriability institutions, and innovation. Conference on the Legal History of Intellectual Property. Retrieved from http://www.law.berkeley.edu/institutes/bclt/pubs/merges/From_Medieval_Guilds_to_Open_Source_Software.pdf

OJR: The Online Journalism Review. (2006, August 31). Five rules for building a successful online community [Web Log message]. Retrieved from http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/060831miller/

Riverin, S., & Stacey, E., (2008). Sustaining an online community of practice: A case study. Journal of Distance Education, 22(2). Retrieved from http://www.jofde.ca/index.php/jde/article/download/3/533

Szucs, A. (2009). New horizons for higher education through e-learning. e-Learning Papers, 14. Retrieved from http://www.elearningpapers.eu/index.php?page=doc&doc_id=14317&doclng=6

Wenger, E., White, N., & Smith, D. (2009). Digital habitats: Stewarding technology for communities. Portland, OR: CPsquare.

Too much dave, episode 19

Well… i’ve made it to episode 19 of 365/2010 too much dave. A daily video blog experiment to see what happens over time, given the chance, to my public voice. I an already feel changes… thoughts about spreading the scope of what i’m talking about… of different kinds of synergies. I’d originally thought i would go with 1 min pieces, and apparently i’m too mouthy for that.

Last time i tried this i got to number 50 (2007). Almost half way there now. we’ll see. it’s here… i tweet out the live broadcast, wait 2 min and then get started. Not a great format maybe, but there it is… http://www.ustream.tv/channel/2010-365—too-much-dave

Top 10 Edtech stories of 2009

10 – YAWN
Our “haven’t you heard abouts” got rusty this year. We woke up with a cat stretch after new years hangovers, looking forward to the next great thing that would force us to remember just one new password. Just one more “is this the new twitter”? And what did we get? Nothing. No super tool shared. No chance to smile knowingly over other people who found out about it 2 weeks later. It seems we are expected to be able to do something useful with our technology now… no sir. I don’t like it.

9 – GOOGLEWAVE
And please… don’t give me the ‘what about googlewave. It has teh awesome.’ It doesn’t qualify for this list because it doesn’t do anything. “it’s the new email” “people just don’t understand how cool it is yet”. It’s a platform… I get it. There’s one thing it can’t do for me… and that’s make my day any longer. It can’t carve out an extra hour to live collaborate on the next great american novel with fifty of my bestest chums and 20 people who walked in barely invited. Do that for me. Then i’ll be impressed.

8 – SPEAKING OF GOOGLE – THEY HATE YOU
Google hates your job. If it’s not near perfect translations, it’s automatic captioning, and I’ve heard rumour that ‘they’ the actual ‘omnipotent they’ have just stopped hosting their own email and have said that “google docs is just a nice bonus”. If you are in the business of doing anything, ever, forget it. Google is just about to do it better. Barak Obama, they say, is already switching over his blog to googlesites… the UN can’t be far behind.

7 – GOING MOBILE – ANNUAL SHOT AT OLPC
It wouldn’t be a top ten list if i didn’t make some reference to the OLPC project. Here is the tablet of the future… 2012. It’s only going to cost $100 and will save the world… oh wait, sorry. Flashback. All this year, we’ve been droided, and iphoned and i can’t stop saying it itableted to death. The future of learning is MOBILE… or so I’m told. Um… my brain is mobile. I’ve been moving around with it for years. Someday, someday we’re going to get post-digital and stop thinking about the technology as the locus for learning. Just not today. I’m the future!
http://mashable.com/2009/12/23/olpc-tablet/

6 – INTERNET GROWS UP – PEOPLE DIED THIS YEAR
The internet is growing up, it helped win an election… and reality is seeping in. This year we started to notice that things like people dying is going to create a few issues for our favourite social networking sites. If the population of facebook is 8 cagillion, and the fastest growing segment is middle aged… well… what are we going to do about people’s identity when they aren’t able to sustain it themselves? One more thing to worry about. Come on google… solve our problem. http://davecormier.com/edblog/2009/09/18/identity-memory-death-and-the-internet/

5 – UNFRIEND
Don’t leave enough comments on my blog? Don’t RT me enough? Don’t return my tweets? No more friend for you. The venerated oxford university press has chosen ‘unfriend’ as it’s word of the year. It’s hard to imagine a more depressing commentary on our times. Maybe we’re just looking at this wrong… maybe we should be seeing unfriend like unconference. Kind of a post-friendship worldview. Yeah… that’s it.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_friend_mom_dad_and_the.php
http://blog.oup.com/2009/11/unfriend/

4 – THE LIVE CONFERENCE
“There are really just too many live events.” This is my favourite complaint of 2009. The poor educationalist forced to not be able to claim to have shown up to every single presentation. But but what if i missed the CDAFGDSAG conference? Or the social media in learning in future in what about the children seminar. Oh the huge manatee. http://www.flickr.com/photos/ulrichp/1362599/
Imagine, the pain of too much choice.

3 – OK. MAYBE ONE NEW TOOL
http://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton/ Here’s my shot in the dark for this year. A an open source webconferencing system… 15 min install. Asterix. Red5. Flex/flash. I’ve been hoping for it for years, and these dudes might just have the moxie to do it. I really, really, like the look of this project. They claim they are working on recording… which is kinda necessary, and are looking for feedback. Follow along, get involved. Open source matters.

2 – OPEN ME
Alan Levine, who both killed and unkilled blogs last year, curmudgeon of awards , requester of snark, barker, and storyteller extraordinaire gives us a reason to believe in the ‘open’. And, as a result, wins the award. One biscuit to you. “What do you mean by open?” has become the theme of the open movement, sign of maturity or impending senility. Or, as my son would say, maybe both. Cast all thoughts of definition from your mind, openness is a state of mind… a state of YOUR mind. Be open. ’nuff said.

1 – THE ZEPHORIA INCIDENT
Harbinger of the end of civilization or righteous crowd demanding its due from someone who should know better… interpretations on this one span the gamut from moral to epistemic. A web 2.0 speaker trashed on a live twitter stream during her presentation. Should she? should they? Nevermind. In it is distilled the most important conversation of this year and probably the next five. What rights does the entertainer have before the crowd? Do we want to restrict knowledge in a presentation to that that can be ’shared’ by a presenter (or teacher)? Should presenters (or teachers) be accorded any more respect than a comedian (who would have gotten the same treatment or worse in the same spot?) What are our classrooms going to look like with live twitter streams flipping through them? My friends, we have the tower of babel a million times over… We have 20 students in a classroom, 200 in a conference or 20,000 in a field all building their tower of knowledge… growing, maybe, passed the teacher, the presenter or the expert. Will you knock the tower down? The people are going to be heard… speakers corner has come to the back of the room… are we ready? I doubt it. http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/11/24/spectacle_at_we.html

Eyes shaded, we walk out of the factory – there is no more button to push

I’ve had any number of discussions with some of my good peeps this week talking about the factory. This is, as any long suffering reader of this blog will realize, one of my ‘first draft thinking’ posts, so stay with me if you can, and comment deeply if you can afford the time.

kindof introduction
I’m currently in the process of trying to pull together a paper with someone about what literacies we need in order to deal with the current influx of control we have over the means of production. We are not, most of us, in control of the means of production around our food, or, for many of us, for our jobs, but we are able to participate. Far more. As many of the jobs in our factories disappear, and the jobs that we have get more complicated, new realities (or, really, old realities) emerge. We are more and more tasked with trying to figure out how to maintain larger stores of knowledge, computers allow us to compute more data, to process more products. Many of our jobs are in the process of breaking under the strain of scale creep.

Our schools and teaching for the factory
The traditional idea of schooling hangs on the idea that we can get a really long way on calling things TRUE. or FALSE. That we can offer a task with a single correct solution that can be achieved based on the general agreement of the people who are creating the curriculum. We all (or i certainly hope all) know that we are kinda simplifying the world by doing this, we know deep down in ourselves that the world really isn’t a place where things are completely right or completely wrong, but a place where these things are often or usually so. But its hard to measure those things and sure easier to design things around people ‘needing’ to know ‘this thing’. The other side of this is that this was exactly what some people had in mind when the designed ‘public’ education. We needed to have kids who showed up to work on time when they grew up and could live with pushing the button with their right hand. In a factory.

Hello, my name is joe, i work for a button factory
I have a wife and a job and a family
One day, my boss came up to me
He said “push this button with your right hand”
Hello, my name is joe, i work for a button factory
(half remember song from my childhood)

Walking out of the factory
Much to the chagrin of places like where i grew up, these jobs are fading fast. They are being exported to other countries where they can be done far cheaper and they are being done by machines. Any operation, whether it be winding a string of wool around a spool, or pouring lead into a kettle (a job i’ve had), or pushing buttons… if these jobs can be automated they will be. soon. 20 years from now there will be no need for people who can boldly ‘remember’ or who can staunchly ‘repeat’. Whether that be at the coal face or the book shelf. That’s not to say the remembering and repeating wont be useful… just that people wont be making money because of it. We are all of us walking out of the factories and moving back into the light, and it is a bright light that we are not used to seeing. There will be no more button pushing for joe.

Why this is a problem
Well… this sounds like good metaphor… hell, we’re moving towards the light. The only problem is, we’re very, very accustomed to the factory. We are accustomed, as a culture, to having a button that can be pushed. A truth that can be true, and fully true. A task that can be approached, tackled and accomplished and then… be finished. These are the ways of the factory… a factory has a superstructure a falsified context wherein things need to get done in a linear, straightforward way. It’s a place where science gets rarified down to its purest. Lead melts 318 degrees, it also sheds impurities just above that, so keep it between 325 and 319 and you’ll be able to clear it out. Wash hands. repeat. Each person has a very specialized task, and that task has predetermined parts… a way to win… judged by the fact that you are still being payed.

We’ve seen this light before
The funny thing about this brightness, is that we’ve seen it before. There was a time where many people did control the means of production. They did have control of the work that they did. Certainly not everyone, not everywhere, and not in every culture… but many many people. They watched the weather, and accepted that sometimes it was good for crops or not. They built tables and chairs, and horseshoes and made dishes and utensils. And each making was slightly different than the one before it, and they were each judge in a variety of different ways. A person who makes things makes a bunch of different decisions in the making that sets them apart from someone who doesn’t. It’s the difference between cooking your own food from scratch and cooking a frozen pizza. Bunches of decisions, small ones, but they matter.

Why are we shading our eyes
Our decider is a bit rusty. This is why we are shading our eyes. We aren’t able to make decisions for ourselves about things that are important. We’ve lost our ability to see through the vast amount of garbage we are being fed (see vaccination debate) and just deciding what is right for us. Our school system is often designed to train obedient button pushers, not strong deciders. I mean, lets face it, deciders can be a pain in the butt. They don’t do what they are told…

But we need to… and i don’t just mean the kids. We are entering a time that might be very shortlived. We have a chance, right now, to start to take control of the messages that are out there. To have a real pluralistic society where people are allowed to have different opinions about things and that could be something that makes us strong. But we need to be thinking about talking to people and teaching students what it means to be responsible to the work that you do. What it means to decide that my work is done because it is done right to the best of my ability to do it… not because i have managed to satisfy some obsessive rubric.

epilogue
This is my rant against digital literacies. The literacies that we need are not digital. THEY ARE HUMAN. We need to be responsible to the products of hands… even if they are typed through a keyboard. The digital may have given us an opportunity to band together, but the banding is not about technology, it’s about us raising a very old standard.

Open Educational Resources: The implications for educational development (SEDA)

This article will be published in the December 2009 issue of Educational Developments, SEDA’s Magazine (see http://www.seda.ac.uk). Many thanks to James Wisdom and Co. for their help, patience and excellent suggestions.

Introduction
I am not, in any sense, an opponent of openness. I think that an open sharing of ideas is healthy for the thinker and, perhaps more importantly, for the idea itself. In a world where what is known as new or current is increasingly difficult to pin down, a collaborative approach to learning, and particularly learning around technology, is critical to the survival of any practitioner (Cormier, 2008). I see open education as a method of confronting the challenges that face us as people working in the business of education. As open education and open educational resources are moving into their second decade we are moving past the time for evangelism and towards – hopefully – something a bit more pragmatic.

The field of education is being confronted with the need to teach new ideas, new tools and new theories on a seemingly daily basis. The challenge is not, as it has been in the past, the finding of ways to teach these things. The challenge, rather, is in choosing what to teach and which information and content to rely upon in order to make that choice. And even when we do make the leap to understanding these new ideas, the work that we produce is increasingly not solely our own. As our thoughts, our ideas and our content – if it ever really made sense to think of ideas as ‘ours’ – move more and more to the web they will inevitably be seen, used and reused by people far beyond the reach of reprimand or law.

There seem to be two alternative paths to follow when confronted with this mixture of the new and our own loss of control. We can give in to the openness or we can lock down on what we have and what we know. If we can’t protect our work, we can embrace the change and decide to march along with our peers. We can open our work and share it with the world. Or, alternatively, we can take our work underground, hide it behind passwords and hope to protect our investment of time and effort. In the first, we can share in the learning of others, but not benefit directly from the content we produce. In the second, we might benefit from our content, but we lose the opportunity to work together.

Truth be told, we have sharing our work for years, just on a different scale. We’ve been giving away our work for free at teaching conferences, workshops and water coolers from long before the internet revolution. The difference now is the reach that our work can have, the syndication with which good resources can spread around, the lack of control over the distribution. We are not sharing it with one person at the water cooler, 25 at a workshop or 200 at a conference. We can be, as in the case of Dr. Michael Wesch of Kansas State University, sharing it with 10 million (mwesch, 2007). There is a sense, in some peoples’ minds, that this reach is proof of the value of the content, and, because of this, the content should be monetized.

This latter alternative, protecting what is ‘ours’, pursuing legal cause with people who steal our ‘copyright’, is the alternative that has been chosen by many. Regulatory agencies are banding together to hunt down thieves as part of a multinational legal effort (as we are seeing in the music industry (Buskirk, 2009)) to preserve intellectual property. The critical difference between ourselves as teachers and some people in the music industry is that we are still, most of us, being paid the same for designing or teaching courses as we were before the revolution. Most of us were not receiving huge royalties on our ideas. There is no industry at risk. And we are still in demand.

Openness, and particularly in the form of Open Educational Resources (OER), seems to be the way many people are dealing with the new realities. But openness, and the way that people speak about OERs in particular, is a much more complicated matter than a simple confrontation with the realities of our era. OER can be, by turns, a branding operation by an educational institution, a path to grant funding, a hardening of that link to the past of objects and known knowledge and, in the extreme, a potential new thread of nationalism. This article will try to step through some of these ideas in order to separate the value of openness for educational development from the ways in which openness is being used to support other agendas. It focuses on the difference between thinking of openness as either project or practice.

What is openness?
Openness is not a panacea. It will not suddenly teach students or spread ‘good’ education, nor is it free of cultural baggage. There is a vast amount of money currently being spent on open education and some kind of return is expected, even if it is not to be the direct return of actual clients purchasing the content. Many of these projects also seem to exhibit a potentially different kind of openness, and suggest that there are different degrees and ways in which a given piece of content or educational experience can be considered as open. With the language of educational openness now reaching the national level with major OER projects in the UK and Canada the field appears to be moving into the mainstream.

The moniker of openness – like its much maligned cousin ‘free’ – comes in many guises. With the word free, as in free software, we might call it free because the user (as in the case of gmail) does not need to spend any money to use the product. The software is free from inherent monetary charge, but it does have hidden costs in the permission given to Google to search your email data and the subliminal viewing of advertising – an activity that most corporations would have to pay money for. Free, in the sense that The Free Software Foundations uses the word, means that it is not owned by anyone and it is not bound by any licensing that restricts what someone would like to do with it. It is also, usually, free of charge. In common usage both are “free”, but in practice they are very different things.

Openness suffers from the same confusion. A thing can be open in the sense that you may use or interact with the product of a process created by a university. This might be called OER as ‘project’. This is the sense in which Open Educational Resources like the ones at OpenLearn and MIT’s Open Course Ware OCW are open. Rebecca Attwood’s article in the Times Higher (September 2009) mentions that the tuition at MIT costs $36000 a year and claims that this is the worth of the OCW project to its users. Elsewhere in the article she reports that MIT found “it would be impossible to transfer the kind of education it provided on campus to an online environment.” This kind of openness bears a striking resemblance to the kind of software that you can get free of charge. You get access to the cold hard facts of the course, not the heart and soul.

Another kind of openness, OER as ‘practice’, opens up the learning process to the scrutiny of the watcher. It is transparent rather than free of charge. The work done by Alec Couros at the University of Regina (Couros, 2009), and the MOOCs that are being taught at the University of Manitoba, are excellent examples of these (Cormier, 2008b). In these cases, the classes are open for people not only to read the content and the syllabus, but these visitors can be part of the learning process. The role of the institution becomes one of accreditation.

It is a story of two contrasting visions of what openness can do for education. On the one side we see large ‘knowledge infrastructure’ projects, dominated by discussions of standards, intellectual property and massive amounts of cash. These are great projects for bringing money into institutions, for raising the bar for professors who maybe have not been putting the amount of work into their courses that they should have, or for raising the profile of an institution. On the other hand we have individual educators working to open their own classrooms, sharing their work with their colleagues and sharing their colleagues with their students. This is a great open method for learning, but using the internet can lead to disruptions of scale and frustrations from students and administrators with more traditional conceptions of learning.

What is an Open Educational Resource? 

By “open educational resources” the OECD’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) – Open Educational Resources project means more just “content”. Their definition embraces:

Learning Content (full courses, courseware, content modules, learning objects, collections and journals)
Tools (software to support the development, use, re-use and delivery of learning content including searching and organization of content, content and learning management systems, content development tools, and on-line learning communities)
Implementation Resources (intellectual property licenses to promote open publishing of materials, design principles of best practice, and localization of content) (OECD, 2007)

So our formal definition includes the content of individual items you may have produced, the best practices developed for a classroom and the software that might have been created to store and distribute these items.

The idea of resources of this quality and lineage being available to the general public represent a cultural shift, a massive move from the inherent protection of content and the ‘sale’ of knowledge to one where the content itself has no longer has enough intrinsic value to be for sale. The simplicity of the technological part of the creation process, the avoidance of the associated costs of paper make the creation of the resources a practical option whether one is inside or outside of academia. The value of the university as a place of experience and accreditation must necessarily take priority over content, as it seems that this can now be given away.

There is also a difference, one might say, between providing ‘the’ resource and providing ‘a’ resource. If you are creating a basket weaving video with the primary intent of conforming to a branding plan from your university that forces you to contribute in a certain way with certain things to a central repository, then you are probably part of an OER plan that intends for people to find your particular resource. An educator or a group of educators who make their weaving work public or, indeed, work in public for the reason that it makes their work better to have it interact with their peers or even to have their students interact with their peers, is providing ‘a’ resource.

This lack of ‘monetary’ value has often led to one of the primary criticisms of OERs: “if the things that they were giving away were worth something, they wouldn’t give them away”. There is some sense in this. If the universities had a viable, sustainable market for this content, they might not, indeed, be offering it for free. A university may be offering up its courseware to the world, but they are not (unless committed to it through government/NGO funding) offering up the IP behind things like pharmaceuticals. Nor are they offering accreditation exams for free. The defenders of openness will see this as a redress for the way that the world should be, and say that the universities are releasing something that always should have been free. The actual connection of quality and cost, however, have long since been disproven by open source, free projects such as the Apache server software – http://apache.org/

So what does this mean for Educational Development?
We are, I think, constantly running the gauntlet between project and practice. There are times when the project serves us more often than we serve it. As we approach new projects and consider approaches to them, the distinction between project and practice can be helpful to keep scale under control. There are some things that simply live on the scale where they should/need to be projects but others, I would argue most, are simply a matter of changing practice. A cautious educator or creator of resources might be well served keeping things as simple as possible and keeping a clear focus on curricular goals.

Overhead – Creating an OER 
The first thing that strikes me about the OER movement is the massive amount of overhead that seems to be implied in an “OER Project.” The consensus view seems to be that in order to be open, you need to be organized and you need to have the investment of your institution. The list of existing OER projects often hail from well heeled and well established universities, with an organizational staff and ‘professional’ archival systems.

Being open need not be complicated, it doesn’t need to be organized, nor does it even need to be funded. It has to respond to a need that exists. Simple solutions may require a 10% concession from the educator, but a small concession to sustainability can be important. Perhaps they need to give up the idea of the content being interconnected, or only available to some people or, again, having professional quality video.

Creating High Quality Resources – The video 
Then again, what is ‘professional’ quality video in an era where the incredible staying power of the common craft videos (http://www.commoncraft.com/) and the introductions produced by people like Michael Wesch have contributed to the belief that video is something that people can just ‘do’. When this inferred simplicity is combined with the desire for ‘high quality’ resources the consultant (be they technical or educational or both) is called upon to easily and efficiently create a video that compares to the one in a million that has filtered its way through the morass of YouTube.

If you’ve not seen the genius that is the common craft videos, they take very simple shapes and, with a clear delivery on an organized script they explain complex technical concepts in transparent understandable ways. The genius, here, however, is in the script. The ‘quality’ of the video is not very high, as it was being produced to be seen through the blurry windows of YouTube.

These videos were created, distributed and made the career of their creator without the benefit of massive underwriting or a university repository. The Wesch videos are the output of a brainwave of an educator pushed to YouTube. They are not, however, likely to be replicated by every person creating a learning object. One in a million successes of this kind encourages the desire to create ‘the’ resource, a dangerous goal for any project. The creation of ‘a’ video that achieves a particular curricular goal is a far more practical goal, and, preferably, the discovery of an existing creation that fits the need.

Legal Issues 
The copyright implications of an open approach cut in both directions. Many educators have materials that they have ‘acquired’ in their repertoire that are not, strictly, theirs. This leads to an understandable reluctance from many educators to make their work open. The reverse legal issue ‘what about my intellectual property’ is manageable in two ways. In the creation of any object, the creator owns a copyright, but it is a copyright in name only. The cost of pursuing a copyright case is huge and not practical for most. This leaves you with two viable options – the use of creative commons or staying away from the internet.

OER projects as new nationalism 
The OER projects, and the potential of significant uptake of programs like MIT open courseware offers another issue for consideration. How are local professors, debating the relative value of their curriculum against the standardizing power of a major university, going to be able to forward their own ideas?

“Imagine a course in ethics or social justice. You could argue, and some do, that this is the reason more people need to open their curriculum. I ask you… how will the majority of people be able to choose between the curriculum of a small town Nova Scotia university and Berkeley. Easy. They’ll either choose the most famous or the one that they were already in agreement with.” (Cormier, 2009)

Take that idea a step further, and imagine this kind of control as part of a national dialogue. There was a time when a national educational policy was about educating people within a nation. It had its benefit for the country in the way in which it was able to live, work and compete given the degree to which it had educated its people. The internet and OERs are opening a whole new venue for the “national education policy.” The recent policy document (Cook, 2009) talks about the English educational system as something that can be exported, indeed, something that should be exported (BIS press statement, June 2009). It seems the call to OER is the call to arms of the 21st century, with knowledge as the new battlefield. Sadly, the knowledge that people will be fighting over will be of the shockingly 20th century variety.

Conclusion

Not all openness is created equal. There is a presumption in traditional learning design that a given trainer is somehow going to be able to divine the needs of a given group of learners before a course is started. Alongside this belief is the idea that there is some kind of ‘best practice’ or ‘one way’ of doing things that can be created, sliced up and dropped into place alongside others just like it and these will serve as the core of what will be needed for learning. These are the assumptions that underlie the idea of a resource repository. All the trainer needs is access to the knowledge, the trick, the video and they will be that much further down the road to success.

The kind of openness presented in our second response to the inevitability of the sharing of our work, the openness of the process, produces no such easily transferable objects. It is, often, a clumsy and dirty process of people coming to know things, of people sharing information, of collaboration. It is remarkably human.

(Cormier references edited)

Attwood, R (2009). Get it out in the open. Times Higher. http://tinyurl.com/ybgsrtg

BIS press statement, June 2009. Universities set to go online for millions http://tinyurl.com/yfzfpke

Buskirk (2009) Forrester to Music Industry: It’s the Consumer, Stupid http://tinyurl.com/yd4jt6o

Cooke, R (2009) World leader in e-learning http://tinyurl.com/ye2xkhm

Cormier, D. 2008. Rhizomatic education : Community as curriculum. Innovate 4 (5). http://tinyurl.com/ydp397z

Cormier, D. (2008b), “The CCK08 MOOC-Connectivism course, 1/4 way”, http://tinyurl.com/y9cabmb

Cormier, D. (2009), “OERs shining light, new textbook model, or harbinger of a new imperialism”, http://tinyurl.com/dkaud6

Couros, A. (2009). Open, connected, social – implications for educational design. Campus-Wide Information Systems, 26 (3), http://tinyurl.com/yal5pxe

Downes, S: http://www.downes.ca/

Grant 14/08: HEFCE/Academy/JISC Open Educational Resources Programme: Call for Projects http://tinyurl.com/7scnzo

mwesch (2007) http://tinyurl.com/cqau66

Netcraft Survey (2009) http://tinyurl.com/kq9l

OECD (2007) Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) – Open Educational Resources, http://tinyurl.com/yk37rc6

Does the PLE make sense in the connectivist context?

So I posted a little tweet tonight that got a few raised eyebrows from my esteemed colleagues. I sent it out because i’d been thinking it for a while… I’m preparing for a “where we are two years later” paper on my rhizomy stuff (not for any journal in particular, just think its time to write one, and i feel the need to pull strands together) and am trying to think a little deeper about how i feel about knowledge and learning.

This is definitely first draft thinking. I’m more than willing to have someone explain to me what i’m missing… (I’ll accept whole hearted agreement as well) Lets start with a couple of quotes from George’s 2005 paper. These are both ‘first sentence’ quotes from summary sections of the paper.

Connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories. Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual.

Connectivism presents a model of learning that acknowledges the tectonic shifts in society where learning is no longer an internal, individualistic activity.

My problem with the combination of the PLE and connectivism is that they seem to come from two different epistemic background. I guess that’s not necessarily a bad thing (to someone like me) but most people I’ve met like to live by one theory of knowledge at a time. Leaving aside the unrelenting desire to acronymize everything that has led us to the term PLE and its historicity as an opposite, learner empowered version of the VLE (virtual learning environment), it is also the current candidate as the child of the enlightenment. It is the location where the one, the individual (personal) stands their ground for learning, where they store ‘their knowledge’ where they represent their learning. We often hear of people talking about PLE’s as portfolios, this is the sense in which i mean it.

The PLN and the PLE, at any one time, are instantaneous reifications of the set of (as yet, unknown) rules which govern the complex interactions between resources, individuals and their own knowledge. Pat Parslow http://brains.parslow.net/node/1558

The key bit here (of an excellent post) is the part about knowledge ownership. The PLE (and the PLN) are a reification (interesting choice of words here as it, to me, means that it becomes a thing, something potentially real, a far stronger term say, then snapshot) and govern the interactions between a person’s different stuffs. It is MY place to keep MY things. To represent, further, how I am connected to the world and where i sit on the knowledge spectrum.

There is a distinct difference, I’m thinking, between this view of knowledge as something that can be possessed and something like connectivism where “Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements” and “learning is no longer an internal, individualistic activity”.There is a desire, it seems, to return to what “I” have and what “I” know pulling things out of their connective space. It makes sense to make the attempt, certainly. The vast majority of what we call education is premised on the idea of knowledge being something that can be owned, that you can give and receive. What, I wonder, does knowledge co-created look like when it is taken back and possessed by an individual? This seems like a critical context shift that removes knowledge (and learning) from its connective state and returns it to something countable.(as opposed to knowledge and the learning thereof being non-counting nouns)

I’ve since received a few more definitions of PLE from the twittersphere (doubt, now, that this is first draft thinking?)

Share what you discover as “best”-I’ve never come up with a general def short enough to be of use; I define by processes @fncll

The essence of our characterisation of the PLE highlights its change in the locus of control of technology from institution to learner. (http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/Ple/Report#Introduction via @scottbw)

In the former case, Chris seems (i’ve got a tweet which he claims doesn’t probably cover it, so i’m winging it) that it is the place from which he shares the best of what he thinks and comes across. And he does this very well. By this argument my blog would be my PLE, and if we’re using this as a definition, then i don’t really have much of a problem. But this is only talking about a publication medium. A means by which we are communicating. It is not the communication itself.

The second quote from the JISC/Cetis study is a more profound claim, I think. It’s about control and power. In it we see the student controlled classroom where they get to decide how they handle knowledge and learning… Student centred learning… there are certainly reasons to like that… but it’s not connectivism. Connectivism is networked learning, a student is not ‘controlling’ anything really, unless its the networks that they try to blend in with.

Things I understand i’ve glossed over
I understand that a cleaner treatment of the separation of knowledge and learning is necessary here. I’m not sure how I want to do it yet (that’ll be in the paper) pick the way that sounds best.
It’s PLE as “thing we should pay for and get designed and write scads about” that referring to… not the kind that is a major broadcast platform for an individual.

So what am I saying?
I’m saying that in a connectivist model, as i understand it, the learning (and i would argue knowledge) lives in the network, it lives in the connections that are part of each thought and idea. In the print world, we have an amazing maze of interconnections in references and works cited pages that go back (in some way or other) thousands of years, one cannot speak of ‘knowledge’ as being separate from that historicity nor of ‘learning’ any part of it without it being part of the whole. One of the prime affordances we have at our fingertips with the web is the ability to create these connections very quickly, and very complexly, we can also see far larger chunks of the network at any one time.

The Personal Learning Environment may simply be a misnomer. If it is, as (i think)Chris suggests, a fancy way of talking about a medium of publication, then it is more like a “Snapshot of my personal thinking platform” (SOMPTP) if it is, however, as Pat suggests, a place where my personal knowledge lives or, say, a place where my personal learning happens, then I’m thinking that it might disagree with the ‘non-individualistic’ nature of connectivism.