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.

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.

Presentation prep/notes for -> Open Educational Resources – A potential foundation for the future.

Thursday November 5th, 4pm Eastern NA. GLOBAL TIMES

In May i had the wonderful opportunity to try a live slide build as part of the WIAOC (webheads in action online convergence). They were a great crowd, and the build was awesome. It was the first success that I’ve had with that kind of live interactive slide building, and, well, I’m going to try it again this afternoon. Here’s how it works… I put together a dozen or so slides that are mostly blank with a single question on each slide… we import that slideshow into eluminate (or some other program that will allow for whiteboarding over slides). Each member of the audience is responsible for answering the questions, and I, your confused moderator, will present from the slides as they are being built by the audience.

I don’t know the folks who invited me to speak at this conference (although i think i recognize a name or two). I don’t know if anyone is going to show up… which is a bit nerve wracking for a live presentation created by the audience. So… if your interested in libraries, OER, the future, learning or apple pie, please come along, share your ideas and have some fun.

Please come play. SUPER IMPORTANT PRESENTATION LINK

This is the presentation description as it appears on the your school library website and below are my empty slides.
As more people turn towards opening their work to the world we are confronted with a remarkable challenge. We could change our approach to stewarding content, to encouraging learning and to teaching. We could look at this ever changing landscape of work that others have made and find new and interesting ways of working with these resources. We could decentralize the school and the teacher and connect learners directly with some of the content they are interested in. We could empower teachers to the point where they feel comfortable reusing and remixing these resources to promoted collaboration and life long learning in their students. We might also take these new resources and fit them in with existing objectives, use them to leverage our current curriculum and teaching plans. We could promote the centralization and standardization of these resources into national/provincial/state curricula. These are the decisions that stand before us… how to deal with the change from knowledge being scarce, to it being abundant.

If OERs have the potential of being the dictionary of our era. If it will be the common language, the new knowledge base upon which we work, what effect will this have on the traditional stewards of that
knowledge. Wither the librarians? What literacies will be necessary and what are the potential effects of the decisions that we make about how we deal with the new knowledge. This presentation will be a
facilitated conversation around the continuum between openness and standardization, between collaborative learning and content focused study in the context of this amazing new OER landscape. What’s that going to look like? Here is an example of a previous online presentation of this kind http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/1555002 that I did on community learning. Come and join the fun but be ready to participate and the audience will be the most important part of this
presentation.

And this is what the last one looked like when we were finished

PEI site tech conference – overcoming obstacles

I had a really nice time with the site techs on wednesday. I got a chance to speak to them in the morning and then participated in a few short presentations and did a few small group discussions in the afternoon. I found an energetic group of people, very open to ideas, receptive to mine (for whatever reason) and pretty passionate about learning.

Here’s a link to the synopsis i recorded today of the presentation. http://www.archive.org/details/OvercomingObstacles-PracticalProjectManagementInWebBasedEducation

Blogging
There were several blogging projects running. Most on edublogs.org. That was a big surprise to me, as i hadn’t heard of very much of it happening on the island. I also heard of one other teacher who was using blogger. I had several people ask about what I would do for a ‘blogging project’ and my answer was the same. Don’t do a blogging project, if you have a writing project that blogging makes sense for… then go ahead and use a blog. Don’t focus your project on a technology.

Wikis vs. Blogging
Lots of wiki work going on as well. The department has a pro-level pbworks (once pbwiki) account and are using it for art projects to create an eportfolio. I’m not a big fan of using the word portfolio for this, as a portfolio does suggest portability and I”m not sure how these kids will ‘port’ the folios around… but still… nice wiki work. Here’s a link https://peistudentartloft.pbworks.com/. Had four conversations explaining to people that i think that blogging is far preferable to wikis… Blogging makes it easier for people to feel ownership over their work, and it doesn’t get crazy messy like a wiki. Wikis are good when the project implicitly involves stucture (like a cookbook)

Koha Implementation
I saw an impressive presentation about their new library system. They’ve done a nice job integrating Koha into their existing infrastructure and getting rid of their 1980’s era library system. Best conversation i had around this is that parents could, very soon, browse through their schools library at home with their kids looking for books. How cool is that. http://koha.org/

Other fun stuff
They are supporting a number of different tech projects (modules) but with a real focus on how they translate practically. They have some pretty serious podcasting gear that they are sending out to schools and setting them up using audacity (might even be overly complex for some, might be nice to offer two levels, a blue mic and the mini-soundboard they have) They have video planned for use with movie maker. They are using Alice for 3D and some lego robotics (planned for after the Alice) for some fun robotics stuff.

Overall?
From the stuff i took in and saw, i was pretty impressed with the direction being taken. Technology… yes, but with a focus on what we are going to do with it. I left them with a suggestion of trying to create a community of practice user Yammer (or skype or something) to allow them to support each other. I saw two people sign up while i was there… i hope they do. It was a good group, and a good day.

Open Course preparation 2 – introduction au technologie émergentes

We have a tag – ite09

Well… things are firming up, we have a start date and confirmed courses. I’m going to be teaching a twelve week course as the leader of the french cohort of professors and administrators from universities in different parts of West Africa.(will include countries when i get them) It is going to be an open course (yay!) with all curriculum created and published on wikiversity. http://fr.wikiversity.org/wiki/Introduction_au_technologie_%C3%A9mergentes I’m still a little fuzzy about the zones of interaction for the course (as per openness) stay tuned for this. I’ve got alot to learn between now and then, but i must say i’m pretty excited about the adventure of it all.

Learning in a new language
The most obvious stretch here is that I’ll be teaching in French. I’m a good acadian boy from the north shore of new brunswick… I went to french school, have french relatives, but have never done academic work in French. More importantly, i didn’t (three weeks ago) have a french learning community to speak of. I’ve been working on that and have had a really positive response from the french educational community. I’ve probably posted it before, but i’m quite please to be participating in http://apprendre2point0.ning.com which is also helping get me into shape for the course.

Openness
We are going to be able to share this course with anyone who wants to join in. I’m am wary of forcing my new (and unknown) students to share openly however. It is one thing to believe in openness for yourself, it is quite something different to impose it on someone without giving them a chance to make an informed decision. So, I’m thinking now, that we’ll end up with one sponsored group location and a private location that allows for students to get accustomed to the idea and make their own choices. No decisions here yet, would need to talk to Mr. Siemens about what he wants to do, but we’ve agreed on this in the past.

I used the term ‘zones of interaction’ earlier and the term ’sponsored’ here more recently. I’m thinking that with a course that might have 15 or 50 (or who knows) people in it, it’s important to make the lanes of communication obvious. If people wish to take the course in their own direction, copy the curriculum and cut it into fridge magnets for a local teachers party… that’s fine. They don’t need my direction anyway. For those who are looking for a little more guidance, i hope to provide some (unsupervised) locales for that to happen. People are going to like to be open in different ways.

Creating the syllabus
I settled on wikiversity for two reasons. Leigh Blackall suggested it and I’d like the course to not be ‘mine’. While the folks at the University of Manitoba have in no way infringed upon my creativity or openness in the past, i thought the suggestion of ownership by a university might be too strong. This is a rare opportunity to have an international course created, with differing viewpoints included during the creation process. While the course will, initially, be based on the course that george and i designed and taught last year, it will hopefully grow beyond that and take on a scope beyond what a couple of people could manage. So i hope this will happen.

My french will get better as i remember how to write in french, but feel free to fix the grammar, the spelling and the thoughts. We will, as always, play

Add don’t take away – for all content

Can’t wait to see the changes start to happen.

Will keep you all updated. Have not yet decided if i’m going to blog in french from this blog or not. Probably will. a little later.

Is thinking for remixing the new best?

This is me thinking outloud. It’s spoken from a fairly certain tone… but that’s only because that is the only one my fingers seem to be able to type. My bad. But I’ve been mulling this around in the car driving back home today and was going to just mail it off to a few folks but chickened out and posted it. Butcher as you like… but think about it if you can.

Where I’ve been
I suppose it’s always been positive membership karma for people to lay waste to the popularisers of ideas. I remember my own lambasting of James Redfield’s rediculous remixing (uncredited of course) and popularisation of the works of Shakti Gawain in the Celestine Prophecy. It was tacky, it was short sighted it overlooked the ‘important parts’… you name it. And, in truth, it’s really badly written. And it… uh… sold 20 million copies.

And so we of the no-million copies but very high philosophical standards maintain our memberships in our communities and our adhrence to a traditional view of rigour, research, citation and ‘best’ and shake our heads knowingly. We have a new crop, I’ve heard nothing but sly remarks and frustrated mutterings (and I’m one of the worst ones) regarding Malcolm Gladwell and his butchering of everything from neuroscience to postmodernism. I was sitting amongst friends and colleagues a few weeks ago and his name came up and a practiced ‘meh’ shuddered through the group.

The old best
Our best, to speak broadly, is about either practical applied experience (good points there) or about specially researched and confirmed study (also good but ’specially’ changes drastically depending on who’s speaking). Popular success, like in many communities on or offline, is seen as a failure of the creed. As a betrayal of the covenant. So we have our best teacher practitioners out there who are allowed to be cool. And we have our senior officianadoes who have done the work and speak with authority and, as long as they don’t get too popular, make too many concessions to the man or, ‘popularize’ can be best of best.

Change of perspective?
But I’m having misgivings. When i think of all the work that we are doing around trying to remix things and make our work open and make it accessible (think broadly about accessible here) I’m wondering if we ourselves shouldn’t be seeing ourselves as horses in front of the plow on this. Our best may be pulling said plow… but the harvest is elsewhere and the farmers are those

Who can speak in ways that can be remixed.

The amazing thing about the James Redfields and the Malcolm Gladwell’s of the world (Dan Brown comes to mind as well) is that they can get first time readers to contemplate ideas that have taken traditional experts years to get their minds around. They get people to try and blend these ideas into their lives. The repulsed response is usually “yes, but they’re doing it the wrong way” and “putting the work in is important” and even “they’re only getting a surface reading”.

Are we not being a little silly, maybe, may I say it, traditional by taking the names of the popularizers in vain? Are they not the actual arms of change out there in the wilderness? Are they our politicians? Our capitalists? Because one way or the other, they are the ones that are capitalizing on change, if by capital we mean money. Or broad recognition. Or broad status.

We can easily say that these are not the things that we want. And this may be true. But one of the things that most of us are interested in is change… and the popularizers are, more often then not, the ones at the table of change.

So. I’m going to stop taunting our new overlords and thank them for making my job easier. (that really hurts)

The new equation
So… if a vague understanding of philosophy, science and society combined with a keen sense of language and marketing is the new best and the ‘experts’ that they are lifting from are the new cart horse, then what is this equation that we are using to measure? and why is it happening? How can we measure this kind of expertise and how do we recognize it when we see it?

Does it really matter if someone completely understands network theory before they write a book about it? Need someone actually know anything about cave paintings before they use them as a balance point for an entire argument?

Our pre-knowledge abundance views of accuracy were founded on the potential spread of non-canonical ideas. On the idea of the scarcity of paper. of the pain of the publishing cycle. of polluting the knowledge stream. Here we stand polluted. Everyone can publish.

Is it the ideas themselves that matter or is it the social change that they bring about?

Thinking for remixing
So if toning down on an idea and speaking simply about it allows for people who are not specialists to get a handle on things… why is that wrong? And we think it’s dirty business, are we just being exclusive and inaccessible? The market for an academic paper has not gotten wider (and i still quite value the academic paper for getting my thoughts clear and deep thinking… cart horse) but the market for thought is huge. How do we think for remixing other than just talking in soundbites. (something that i find myself doing more and more and not admitting to… before now)

Is there some kind of assessment of this new best that we can do to make our own work more palatable and more effective for the social change (whatever that might be) we are looking for?

Is thinking for remixing the new best?

How I approach teaching a new course – the state of my art.

People have heard alot about it… but Open Ed 09 was a transformative experience for alot of people. The four months i spent thinking about the presentation that i did there, the responses to it, and the wicked discussions i had there did much to focus my feelings about learning and how one goes about trying to ensure that that kind of thing might happen in ones ‘classroom’.

The course and the challenge.
So i had this quick conversation with George. This kind of thing is never good.

[30/07/09 6:23:10 PM] George Siemens: dave
[30/07/09 6:23:20 PM] George Siemens: you’re generally bored without a lot of free time, right?
[30/07/09 6:23:32 PM] George Siemens: wait, I mean, with a lot of free time
[30/07/09 6:23:34 PM] dave cormier: yes. that’s me

It seems that George wanted me to teach something similar (and I’m still not sure how similar) to the Introduction to Emerging technology course we taught last winter. The only catch, and this is the tricky part, is that he wants me to teach it IN FRENCH. And, while my last name is Cormier, and I spent my first five years of school in a little French acadian school in Norther New Brunswick, I have not done a terribly huge amount of professional work in French.

However, what it does present me is a wonderful opportunity to assess the way that I put a course together, the assumptions that I make and the things that i take for granted. I’m going to do my best to record that process and incorporate the new clarity that i think i have about the practical applications

OER (Open Educational Resources) is the dictionary of our time
I designed all my slides for opened on the plane ride from PEI to Vancouver. I had the images on my netbook, gimp loaded and open office ready to go. (thanks for images @cribchronicles). I knew that i didn’t like the idea of people/communities being seen/used as resources, but i wasn’t able to figure out what i thought the role of these resources were. If a person believes that discourse and collaboration are the best ways to acquire/create knowledge wither the content? On the flight one of the images that bonnie had found on flickr of an old dictionary combined with a Dale Spender quote (Print made the Dictionary) made it clear to me. OER is the dictionary of our time. It is the foundational knowledge base that will provide the common semantic that the dictionary has provided for the last 300 years. This means (among other things)

• That definitions will be about tracking use in multiple locations (meaning is use – Wittgenstein)
• Knowledge building will be an overt mashup rather than the implicit one we’ve had before
• Content will live outside of the curriculum
• Teaching will slide on the towards the ‘leader’ side of the ‘leader’/'teller’ continuum

Web 2 vs. Open education (george again.)
In a recent blog post addressing concerns about flatworld knowledge… George included this little tidbit

This is a central conflict in web 2.0 vs. open source. Web 2.0 has few of the ideals of the open source movement. For many users, this is fine – free is the desirable trait. Monetarily free is not without cost.

I’m taking his quote out of context… but what popped into my head was that this was one of the other big things that cleared up for me at OpenEd. Openness matters a great deal to me, and, while it’s sometimes harder or even counter-intuitive to someone brought up and trained in our society, it works. I’ve always had problems with the idea of trading ‘no-money’ for ads. I still use gmail and can’t seem to break the habit… but it bothers me. But the difference between the two is the same difference that i feel between a simple network and a community. In an Open context i see there being a responsibility to the discussion you are contributing to. The people… and the knowledge matters.

Applying this to my teaching
One of the core precepts of my teaching around emerging tech has been that what i currently know, in the specific sense, about tools or approaches, is probably not what my students need to know. The experience that i have using different kinds of tools, thinking about how I have failed with things before, and the idea of integrating them into my practice without really worrying too much about them, however, i think might be more useful to them. I’ve always agreed with the people who consider ‘teaching education’ a bit odd, and like to stay in subject matter discussions, context analysis and people own context as much as possible.

The last course was designed to do a number of things. Hopefully give some people a sense of using things in context, covering some theory existent in the field and getting people ready for the rest of the certificate program. I felt during and have since that while we tried to include a couple of overarching assignments designed to give ongoing context to the sections that it didn’t really work the way i had hoped. This time (when i was still going to be teaching it in English) I was going to include six running discussions that would be the locus of discussion for all the assignments. Essentially one moodle topic called ‘discussions’ which would include 6 discussions spaces addressing themes. Yes. moodle. it’s what they use. and will work fine for this.

But now. Now i have the theory clear in my mind. The OER stuff is the stuff of weekly work and the discussion spaces are the knowledge contextualizing places (i wish i could say co-creating just to irritate @fncll but i think he may be right about that word). The OER provide the ground floor, the common language of the discussion and the discussion is where the learning happens. The trick, then, is going to be the creation of those 6 main themes, and how much is co-created with the students and how much I want to influence that. I could go with themes from the field (maybe IP, openness etc.) or go with goals from the students in terms of what they are trying to get out of this course, or speaking about it in terms of their own context and how things will apply to specific contextual issues. I don’t know yet… but at least now i have a way of thinking about it.

So it’s in french – How do i start?
The first thing i did was go out and join a community. I am now a proud member of http://apprendre2point0.ning.com (learning 2.0) and am using that community as a jumping off point to finding resources as well as a place to start the discussion in french. I have specific literacies to acquire(where is that stupid french question mark) there are a lot just broad language issues to establish but, more importantly, the subtlety of the language. In what ways does the french word réseau = network and how is it different. It’s forcing me to assess every story that i’ve ever used as a default example for something and wonder what kind of philosophy it is supporting. The community has been great, people have started helping already, I just have to get comfortable enough to start giving back… something i’ve not done yet in the 6 or 7 days i’ve been in it. Better get comfortable with that before classes start

I’m am looking for acorns. I have a little tree over at the ltc.manitoba wiki where i am gathering those acorns for use during the course. Little bits of OER that might come in useful, that discusses some of the stuff that I think might come up. If you look at the course that goerge and I taught, you’ll see many of these acorns strewn about the course. But i’ve got my mind, now, around what i’m doing with them and where they fit in my hierarchy of importance.

Maybe this is obvious to everyone else… but it’s been huge for me. I’m not sure I’m even doing anything different… but i have a much better idea of WHY i’m doing it.

• I’m favouring open source because openness matters because its responsibility based and encourages the right kind of responsibility for learning
• I’m looking for OERs because they are the foundation of establishing a common semantic for discussion much like the dictionary was for the 18th century
• I’m using discussion forums to bridge my course because it contextualizes the OERs and gives a locus for knowledge building and ends up being where the learning happens.

Open Ed 09 – My debutants ball.

Bonnie has an expression that she used to use talking about a zone that I used to get into more than I do now. ‘public dave’. Public dave is a bit of a machine I’m afraid. There is no conversation that he does not want to be involved in, no thing is beyond his desire to know or hear about it and no situation exists for which he does not want to tell a story. This is what happened at Open Ed. I arrived in full twitch and managed to control my enthusiasm only slightly. It was a silly amount of fun… I learned a great deal, had some great discussions with folks, and had a chance to meet new and confirm new/old friendships. For those forced to sit next to me, I admire your patience.

A bit about how I navigated the conference.
I must confess, I did not make many presentations. I probably saw 6 or 7 presentations over 3 days. I took the executive decision early on that as things were going to be recorded and posted, I could spend more of my time getting to know people and pick up the stuff that I missed on ustream when I get home. The first thing that struck me was just how much I liked the people there. It is not surprising that when you are at an ‘open’ conference with people who are committed to openness, that they will be welcoming. And they were. The first night was like watching my twitter account talk. The taunting started almost immediately, and while I think @sleslie (who is a gem of a human being) took more than his share, there was enough to go around for everyone… big fun.

Ideas –

Copyright
I had the great pleasure of having a bunch of debates with David Wiley at the conference. One of the more lengthy and interesting was our discussion of my concern about copyright. The problem that I have with Creative Commons is that in ‘giving away’ content I am first calling myself the creator under the Burne copyright guidelines. I wont replicate David’s excellent recap of this on his site, but his ideas of declaring a personal exemption from burne is very compelling.

The bureaucratization of openness.
An underground thread through the conference was the problems of having piles of money of having to put rigid guidelines on things that are open. I have a very clear image of Jim looking at me just as I was leaving and saying ‘we can just put that stuff somewhere else, there’s just too much overhead’. I have a very strong sympathy for this position. Giant amounts of money are nice and everything, but they are rarely elegant. I have great hopes for athabasca’s new funding but I prefer things like the find an oer Africa project. No money. No investment. Hoping to have more time to talk to Jim and company about this. As ‘open’ goes mainstream, stewardship becomes more important than ever.

Scale
Had a fun discussion with Brandon Muramatsu from MIT. He has a remarkable position at the university and in charge to finding ways to scale or work on the permanence of projects that are being done in the university. I’ve always been interested by how well an individual project can be generalized and what the processes are that would support this. Brandon intimated that a broad approach to this is probably unlikely and comes down to people looking at individual situations and going step by step with every context. He’s six months into his job, will be checking in with him to see if they discover any secrets to this.

Talis
An educational/library company from England has decided to donate it’s marketing budget to opened projects. How cool is that? They are going to be taking in applications (due dec. 31) and offering people money to do specific projects that are going to be of benefit to the open community. The guidelines are pretty broad, and there’s not a crazy amount of money (maybe 100K) total, but it’s a real chance to get that 1500 that someone wanted for a small project. According to Chris something like 25K is possible, but it would mean not funding a bunch of other projects, so it would have to justify that.

Meaning is in Use – OER as dictionary of our time
I think I could talk to Chris Lott (check out his awesome photo jigger from the conference) for a month. One of the things we talked about was a mutual passion of ours, Wittgenstein. I quoted him in the middle of my presentation claiming that as we could do a lot with live tags and quotes and such (similar to my presentation last may for the webheads) that you could actually show ‘use’ and therefore ‘meaning’ of words by crowdsourcing and live streaming usages. It’s an appealing move as it allows us to replace the tired conversations about static definitions and allows us dynamic definitions that would better approximate what we really mean by words. It’s dirty. But I like dirty.

Flash mob conferencing
Another dude I met for the first time this weekend is Cole Camplese. What a dude. We had a bit of a time at the railway bar and over some restorative beverages, we discussed, amongst other things, the possibility of getting a half dozen canadians on the road to come and do ‘things’ at a given university. His point was that it cost as much for him to bring 5 of his people to vancouver as it would cost to bring 6 of us to his university. Sounds like fun… I hope they have enough maple syrop.

Speaking of dudes
I met quite a few legends of the community this weekend, none more ‘dude’ than the reverend Jimbo Groom. Funny thing about Jim, he and Brian Lamb had some discussions about the word ‘edupunk’ a couple of years ago and as the fastcompany article came out just before the conference, I got an email from my boss indicating that I might want to look into this while within eyesight of both of them and Wiley, also mentioned in the article. I confirmed with her that finding this out might not be too hard Another of the people that I could spend piles of time talking with.

Credentialing
The preconference day saw the 6 hour marathon discussion between Stephen Downes and David Wiley. Of the several interesting things that came out of what was essentially a public viewing of a private conversation, was the idea that people could directly appeal for a degree to someone who could judge their competency (Stephen’s idea… what else could we do for $189,000 it costs for an MIT undergrad). Think of it as ‘uber-plar’. You’re not challenging for a course, your challenging for a degree. It’s a fun thought experiment that forces us to think about what those 3-4 years are really about. If they are just about ‘knowing stuff’ and not also about stuff like ‘learning how to focus and work towards a goal over four years’ then why not? Interesting.

Edtechtalk PD
Was talking to George Siemens and Peter Tittenberger (and Konrad) about the possibility of giving recognition to people at edtechtalk for PD for participating in the community. I keep coming back to this as an idea that would be very interesting to try. I know that people feel like they are learning, and they are getting the chance for a long term support community by using ETT… seems like it should make sense.

Thanks to
Everyone who put on the conference. D’arcy Norman for giving me ideas for my server (and making me laugh). Catherine Ngugi for being so trusting. All the great questions in my session. The good people at the indian restaurant. Everyone who kept finding my water bottle for me. Alec for the great ideas in the airport. Doug for making it out to say hi. David for being so open and interesting. Giota for telling me about the cool stuff she’s doing for OU. The grandville island beverage company. All the people I’m forgetting to thank and include here… I know i’ll remember as soon as I hit ‘post’.

Name dropping
Is not what I’m doing with this… even though it might look that way. Open education is not about content, as I suggested in my presentation the OER part of open education is the foundation that we are standing on, its the common language that we are working from but THE PEOPLE are what make this community. Going to this conference and thinking with these people is a privilege I wish on everyone. As @injenuity intimated in many ways, having people who are doing what you’re doing, and who you can trust with your ideas, is a very grounding, peaceful thing.

My dream of an open course – Bob Dylan MOOC

As people have become fond of mentioning, i have alot going on right now… and don’t have the time to take on another project. But I have a project in my head that i’d really, really like to try. I want to do a bob dylan open course.

My feelings about how knowledge gets created are strewn all around this blog, so i wont torture you with it. Suffice it to say that i think curriculum can come from membership in a network.

What i’d like to do is have an open course that ran for a period of time (in order to get people places, i think ‘eventedness’ is an important part of learning) lets say 12 weeks. Each week would have a theme, maybe we would wander through the different incarnations of dylan following along with the I’m not there film. Maybe through different concepts that keep recurring.

But imagine what this means about learning. It means that people with common interests come together to ‘learn’ stuff, consciously. You’d have some people who were new to dylan, looking for a way into understanding what all the fuss is about. Other folks who maybe have heard the canon and think maybe they’d like a little more. And then some other folks who might be a bit more engaged with the lyrics, the style… whatever.

A learning ‘community’ (i use this word lightly in this instance) with no other purpose but to come together and learn about something. No financial attachment, no credit, no asessment.

So.

Yes… so. The so is about scale. Think about this as 2000 people who came together to learn about dylan. Think about how these things get routed, how subsets get formed, how people splinter, other communities form that then go on existing passed the actual event.

I think the idea is really exciting… and I want to try it sometime. Just as a landscape to discuss how learning can happen if nothing else… not to mention all the great tunes.