Dave's Educational Blog

Slacker’s guide – week 4 TOOLS!

Feb 062011

There is nothing, i think, that leaves me feeling more frustrated than ‘tools’ that are supposed to be easy to use. I think in the rush to explain to people that a tool is useful, the teller often forgets that they struggled with inferior tools before they found this New Awesome Tool. They forget that they already understood exactly what it was they were looking for and then found this New Awesome Tool and figured out what it was for. I am not this person. I have come to learning analytics with a simple desire to be able to track what happens in an open course without having to shove people in a black box. I want to track people in the wilds of the internet. I’m not exactly sure how i want that done yet… and so we look at the tools.

Slacker’s run through content
Two tools this week… Gapminder. If there was any tool that you should spend five minutes downloading to your computer… this is it. This is the plug and play impress your coworkers with your amazing mooc learning kapow tool. It’s an adobe air application on your desktop… really, no excuse here. A slacker’s delight. How useful is it? well… if you study population dynamics… or social studies or something maybe. But who cares… i looks AWESOME!

and needlebase. This is a bit more of a serious tool. I’ve included the introductory video from the website here as its better than any tour i would do. You’ll be wanting to set aside 4 or 5 hours to take a serious run at this baby. It really will scrape content from a bunch of website and pull it into a database… i just didn’t find it ‘quite’ as slick as this video suggests. I didn’t get into trying to mix and match data… which is the real power in this application https://pub.needlebase.com/actions/visualizer/V2Visualizer.do?switch=true&domain=twitter-again&startPage=1&showCheckboxes=false&rerun=false but i did build this little database by scraping a pile of content off the http://search.tourismpei.com site. A person with more energy could do something very cool with this system. It also gives you great sympathy for people who complain about data that isn’t clean… grr…

Facilitated session – Why exactly would we want to do analytics in learning?
The recording of this week’s friday discussion will be hearty food for skeptics. We took a run at talking about what can be measured, why we would want to measure it and brainstormed some ideas about how one might use these new tools to change the way that we look at structuring education. I really enjoyed this chat…

On tools
There are some incredibly powerful data tools out there right now, and as long as you can scrape the data in an organized way, there are few limitations to what you could produce. The big question remains: what do i ask? I think moving forward in this field is going to require people to start asking new kinds of questions from the data. This was certainly one of the central themes from the Friday discussion and is likely going to be the challenge confronting many the first time they look at the tools. Yeah… it’s cool… but what do i do with it? Many of the people currently touting the tools are coming from years of struggle working with inferior technology… for most of us, its a bit more of a challenge. Good luck, and please post any results somewhere i can find them

Week 3 LAK11 – Slackers report

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Feb 012011

Ah… the semantic web. The saviour of the internet, and the evil empire enforcing its evil standardization upon my freedom. I’ve always been a little suspicious of this particular topic. Not that I’m opposed to any kind of stardardization, railroads and the lack of standardizations with bank cards at grocery stores come to mind (grrr…) But the semantic web and how data is ‘linked’ is pretty important to analytics. time to dive in.

Skim of the week
This might seem like an odd choice for a week three skim, but I don’t think we can really pass by the classic http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html Tim Berners Lee World Wide Web proposal. In it he suggested that ‘links’ and ‘hypertext’ could be a really awesome way to collect information. If you watch closely, you’ll notice that he doesn’t like things like ‘keywords’ because you can’t trust keywords to be put in the same way by two different people. As a possible replacement, he suggests that keywords are provided and have an existence of their own ‘nodes’ that could reflect what people mean by those words. When people say ‘they meant to have the semantic web in the beginning’ this is the kind of thing they were talking about. Skim it. Claim to have read it.

Other resources

The web 3.0 video… to which i will use ‘hypertext‘ to send you to another place on my blog where i talked about it. Thanks Tim!
Semantic Web: An Introduction: http://infomesh.net/2001/swintro a ‘real’ introduction to the Semantic Web. I simply CANNOT force myself to read this page. You might like it
Hilary Mason: Machine Learning. A really cool presentation… if you ‘play with computers’ ’cause that’s who she claimed was her audience. I really enjoyed this.

Presentations
Dragan’s presentation – Semantic Technologies in learning environments
I would call this a medium level presentation. If you don’t really understand how the web works and you’ve never considered how messy it currently is… you might find this challenging. If you are that person and you’re willing to put the time in searching out what people mean by things like RDF and ontologies this could be a nice introduction to why some people are so excited about the semantic web. Short version? Our systems don’t talk to each other. Facebook and moodle… no talkee. Semantic web is not opposite to social web. rules and structures vs. ecological approach.

Kimberly Arnold – Purdue Signals Project
How does learning analytics work in an institutional context? The first part of this session talks about who is doing analytics and why exactly educational institutions might want to do this in the first place. This is a lighter talk than Dragan’s… more of a narrative of what has been happening at purdue. Much more about how the inside of a university works and less about how the internet works. A nice balance really compared to the other presentation.

conclusion…
Sorry this came up a bit late… and is a bit short. see you in a couple of days.

OER as the new dictionary (OED) – a vision of a possible future

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Jan 212011

Yesterday I wrote a rapid fire reaction to news that the US government was going to be spending $2billion on Open Educational Resources. I talked about the end of the textbook industry as we know it. Since then, i had two chats, one with @marcparry and one with @sleslie. Marc asked me what i thought the most important thing about this was and Scott was taunting me for seeming to like OERs when I otherwise seem to not like them. You have them to blame for the following vision I had while putting Posey to bed.

The story of the OED (oxford english dictionary)
I’ve always loved dictionaries. I love all books for that matter… as much or more to look at as to read them. I love the promise of a book, the historicity of it. A few years back I read the Professor and the Madman a rollicking tale (if you… uh… like dictionaries) of the first massive scale live creation of a book. According to the author, the book was created one little slip of paper at a time. These slips were put into the mail by 10000 different authors, all of whom were tracking the first occurrence of a word in english usage in any book they could find. One man at Oxford (and lots of helpers) with a massive crowd sourced group of contributers hell bent on creating the entire word history of the English language.

Crazy quest.

But he did it. And, for all the good and bad of the standardization implied by that book, it was one of the most important books of the last five hundred years. It is standardization. It is the record of the words we use and what we know about them. If you’ve ever seen the 20 volume full version of the OED pull a copy out and be blown away by the awesomeness of the work involved in its creation. It was the dictionary of the last 150 years.

Hey! that’s wikipedia!
Umm… no. Wikipedia is also an awesome human achievement (not even really a crazy quest, as it wasn’t exactly planned) and is the result of a number of historical accidents (including, i should add, having it fall in the lap of some pretty clever people). But it is something that happened. It was not the result of a single minded effort to get a specific thing done, it is the result of the shaping of a million hands. Beautiful, but not something you could do on purpose.

What I would do with 2 billion dollars
You might think it a little presumptuous of me to offer advice on the spending of that much money and you’re right. It is. But I have this idea that I’d like to send into the ether. On the plane, on my way to Opened09 in Vancouver two years ago, I was trying to come to terms with the distinction I was making between OER (open educational resources) and what I was calling rhizomatic knowledge. One was something that could be brought back to first principles, something that comes close to being ‘objective’ and the other was something that was better thought of as a constant negotiation. I went digging through the video from the presentation to prove to @sleslie that I had nice things to say about OER on occasion. The exact quote

OER is the dictionary of our time

What i was trying to say was that open access to knowledge, and the resources that could be built to stand alone to “speak for themselves” as socrates would put it, could be the foundation upon which shared language was built. They could be the entry point, offer the foundation of information for any field, so that someone with enough time, effort, and access to wifi could make there way to becoming a ‘resident’ in a given field. To the point where they could have things to say about how the field could work, where they could challenge the status quo in a field.

What exactly would I do?
I think we could build it. And I would follow the exact model that was followed by the OED people. Make ONE person in charge of it. It’s a terrible amount of weight to put on one person, and they should have a great staff of people working with them… but make it one person. Someone with the authority to say yes and say no. To create a work plan that can be held to, who can put their nose down and hate every little piece that hasn’t been poked at, tidied, referenced and cleaned up.

The team would start with a list of the fields that needed the work done for it… pick the sections in any college campus calendar. (first year courses) Put that list up, request suggestions for addition and hammer the list out. Pick, say, five of them. Put the call out to those professions, get the material coming in, the stuff people have in their attics, and start to put it together. The trick is to make it comprehensive. It needn’t be a textbook when it is done, it is the master repository that textbooks are made from. It would need to be a group like archive.org… maybe the smithsonian… someone like that.

An dictionary of all the basic knowledge from every field. Free of copyright. Freely available.

OER as foundation
The dictionary is the foundation for many of the things we do. It underpins the book… and many of the ways in which we communicate on the web. This would be the next step after the dictionary. A massive catalogue of knowledge, open to all. It’s not all knowledge, and, in a sense, not complex knowledge that I’m talking about. That stuff lives in the network of ideas between us all and is in constant negotiation… but it’s the foundation of it.

My answer to Marc’s question about what was the most important thing about the government backing CC with so much money.

It’s a commitment to knowledge being free.

“If had two billion dollars, if I had two billion dollars… I’d be rich”

$2billion for OERs could end the textbook industry as we know it…

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Jan 212011

The quite excellent work that has been done by Cable Green and others at in washington seems like the pinky toe into the water of today’s announcement of 2 billion US dollars being funneled into OER for community colleges and ‘other qualified institutions of higher learning’. The difference, of course, being that Cable’s has a plan, (and i think an awesome plan) and this is just money to support plans… either way. There is now BIG money out there to encourage people to build stuff they have to give away. muhahaha etc…

So, uh, dave… what does this have to do with textbooks
Cable’s project, and one of my hoped for results from this project, is about the creation of free (or next to free) textbooks for introductory courses in education. One of the most maddening part of being in the edtechosphdere is that we all know that if someone could just pull it together, we could have really nice, compelling textbooks that could provide nice free education to people. Five years ago, we were asked by the Nord Family Foundation to look into the idea of creating wikitextbooks for schools and pretty much came up with the fact that we just weren’t ready. This kind of commitment from the government, money at that scale, that much commitment to the idea of creative commons… this tells me that we might be ready to rid ourselves of the $150 introductory textbook and move to open content.

My dislike here is for a specific kind of textbook
I am not speaking about the collections of copyrighted, existing texts containing articles written by experts in a field. While I’m not crazy about this kind of copyright, it’s an entirely different argument. The works contained in those ‘textbooks’ are sifted from existing work and you are paying for the work of collecting these texts, pulling them together, and paying the rights (ideally to the authors…) to those who own them. It’s unfortunate that things work that way… but they do.

The kind of textbook that i mean is the one that is created to introduce people to various standard tasks in a field. Some of them are works of art written by a dedicated author after a lifetime of experience teaching a subject… at least, I’ve heard people claim these exist. I’ve never seen one. More likely they are factory built collections of barely passable material recycled from the 30 previous years of the same kinds of textbooks assembled by people treated like drones, with ‘authors’ who are paid at the end of the process for the rights to use their names, and then a $150 price tag is slapped on top of them.

They are not all like this. But certainly enough of them are to make the bar for being able to afford them ludicrously high. This kind of money (used wisely etc…) could fuel the kind of open textbook movement that could actually get entire states/countries to move to an open standard for textbooks, thereby saving crazy amounts of money, and making me happy (which is, of course, the main goal of any country)

Why I think this could be the end

The US government support of Creative Commons removes the risk from trying it out. The biggest impediment to innovation, in my experience, is the inability for government educational professionals to shoulder the risk of innovation. We have long said “no one ever got fired for hiring IBM” and this has stayed fairly true in our industry. The open innovators have been outliers. And looking down the face of the public and answering the “but if it’s free doesn’t that mean it isn’t worth anything” question has always been a problem. No longer. Someone else bigger leaped first.
This is enough money. In LAK11 we just read the bigger is different article from the 70′s. When this kind of money steps out onto the playing field, innovators from around the sector (and certainly outside of it) will come running. With this on the table even the most suspicious administrator will be tempted. (there are a host of problems associated with this… but that’s for later in the post)
They aren’t alone. A host of funders have moved into the open game in the last few years (if not on a governmental scale) and there are a large number of people with skills to provide excellent advice. Just today I received an email from Doug McManaway (who admittedly works for a social media comms agency on behalf of the funder) pitching the http://nextgenlearning.org/ wave 2 funding. With Hewlett, Gates and a host of others putting money into things that people can’t sell… we have a chance to reach that tipping point (if you’ll forgive the expression.

Ideally… what does this look like?
These will, of course, vary from person to person and from circumstance to circumstance. There are some trades here in Canada, for instance, that have a rigidly standardized testing process. Let’s take welding as an example. The Red Seal in welding test is exactly the same across the country. The curriculum is created in almost every single school, updated 100 times over in 100 places. This is a super easy scenario for creating a standard curriculum saving everyone (except the publishing industry) a pile of money.

There are any number of introductory courses that generally fall along standard lines. There are concepts in math, philosophy, biology, computing, english… that are pretty consistent across general lines. There are already likely way more OERs out there than we need to create first year textbooks for these, but, as i mentioned earlier, this kind of support gives the green light for more people to risk the innovation. These OERbooks might fall along general topics lines with a grab bag of options that separate instructors could choose from for each topic. Doing intro to Python? Use a little MIT syllabus, mixed with some OERs from connexions, one from Dr. Jimmy, one from Jane the python geek and two of your own. Doesn’t matter. And, I might ad, this is already happening… just not on a broad scale.

The third option is for different groups to create their own unique books and release them to the public. One of the biggest criticisms to the OER move is that it will remove the choice from instructors from choosing texts. This problem will start to fall by the wayside if 20 different groups create competing complete open textbooks. In the end, I think this is the model with the best likelyhood of success. One company steps up to host the site where we can all vote on our favourite first year philosophy open textbook (I’m looking at you Creative Commons!) and we’re done. Anyone can find a complete open textbook that is free to students.

And if the idea doesn’t happen?
The PROBLEM with throwing lots of money at a problem is that it attracts a number of people who aren’t otherwise interested in the problem you currently have. Two billion dollars is enough money to attract ‘professionals’ form other fields who are looking for a payday. I imagine there being sharks flying in from dimly shielded existing textbook companies claiming to provide “more scholarship” or “better rubrics”. I fear that this might sound appealing to the people giving out the money who are likely to have come from a system where this has always been the way of judging the ‘value’ of a given piece of content.

Broadly speaking, large amounts of money rarely solves any problem. The model that Cable is running out west sounds really great to me, all the more due to the collossal amount of money that already been spent on OER projects that didn’t really get very far. More money thrown on a bad plan doesn’t make that plan better. I hope they call Cable and few other smart folks out there and get good advice.

There is also the tricky problem about how we deliver these textbooks to students. If we are giving web based textbooks to people who don’t have computers… that doesn’t help very much. How are we going to deal with stale content? How is it going to be maintained over time? How are all those people out there who are worried that students will simply copy and paste out of textbooks into answer keys going to learn that that doesn’t qualify as instruction?

so…

I like the idea of free textbooks. Particularly for those topics at the entry level where we all pretty much agree on what needs to be taught. It gives us a chance to open specialties to people who might just want to peak inside or to those who might want to engage. I think the textbook industry (at this level) is an artifact of an earlier time when we needed to package knowledge in ways that could fit in a truck. I can’t believe i’m saying this… but Senator stevens was right… the internet is not a dumptruck. We don’t need them anymore. I imagine that this will cost good people jobs, and that they’ll have to move elsewhere… and that sucks. The emancipation of millions of people, however, I think is worth it.

We really need to do this, I think, and I applaud the government for taking a run at it. I just hope they engage the open community for help. Please. We’re all out here

MOOC newbie Voice – Week 2 Big Data… must be important… it’s big!

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Jan 202011

Response to my week 1 slackers guide was quite nice thank you very much so i thought i would take a run at doing week 2. I found the title of this week a touch intimidating but found the actual articles quite approachable. There is something going on with data out there, and we are increasingly at the mercy of the data that is out there and, if nothing else, knowing something about it makes us a little more paranoid.

Week 1 skimming
There’s a reason why people are addicted to the ‘top ten’ reasons style posts. They’re easy to skim. My pick for skimming this week is The Telegraph article on the 10 ways data is changing how we live. It gives you that 10,000 foot view of why you should care about big data… some of the other articles might drill you with ‘content’ and ‘research’ about his topic, but my selection will allow you to just kinda drift through the content and get a vague sense that you know what is going on. Which, of course, is how we like it.

Notes on some of the other resources

For those of you interested in getting started thinking about how to interpret data… I really like this blog post from the extra resources list. http://www.dataists.com/2010/09/the-data-science-venn-diagram/ A beginners guide to figuring out what the charts might mean and connected to a bunch of other resources.
If you’ve never read “more is different” it’s a classic. it says that… uh… more is different. Is short and approachable.
stephen wolfram’s TED talk. Interesting brain candy, and a nice introduction to his work, but not really the sort of thing that leaves you with a sense of what its going to do for you.
This one... a gonzo style interview with a dude who’s been in the industry and gives you an interesting background into how the web ACTUALLY works from a web perspective and how new data has changed that. You’ll need a bit of server understanding (and care about it) to get the full understanding, but it’s a really cool introduction. I liked it

This week’s activity
SNAPP is uh… kind of a snap. I haven’t poked too far into what I’ll be able to do with it but the video offers you the opportunity to look like you’ve done the test… which is what we are looking to provide here at ombuds central. Feel free to watch the vid, get a quick sense of what SNAPP is, and speak offhandedly about it at your next staff meeting.

http://research.uow.edu.au/learningnetworks/seeing/snapp/index.html

This week’s presentation – Ryan S.J.d Baker

This is a more content based presentation than the one we saw last week. It’s got that ‘what is it, give me an example of it, move to next sections’ kinda presentation. If you like your things ordered and your definitions where you can reach them, this is the presentation for you. This is the end of the business that i am very, very suspicious of. The speaker is talking about how students manage their work inside their specially structured educational software. Build software, create it so you can test things, and then draw conclusions from that. Suspicious of it… but still happy that i saw the presentation.

Don’t tell George, but i found the middle part of the presentation where george was asking questions, to be the most valuable for getting a sense of what they actually do with the testing. (you can pick that out by checking out the blue progression lines at the bottom of the screen and pick the spot where there’s a big space between slides)

https://sas.elluminate.com/site/external/jwsdetect/playback.jnlp?psid=2011-01-18.1156.M.340DDA914E66190DED68B759DCF9C3.vcr&sid=2008104

MOOC newbie voice – a slackers entrance into lak11

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Jan 122011

As LAK11 starts to ramp up (for me at least, I”m a few days behind) I thought i would take a shot at being a useful helper/facilitator for the course. My hope during this six weeks is to give a tad more guidance than i normally would in an open course and provide a safe place for discussion from people who might not know much about learning analytics, who might be new to an open course, or who are just slackers like me.

A few words on being the ombudsman
While we were talking about the roles that each of the five facilitators could take up during this course, i suggested that a voice for newbies might be useful. A person who could respond to “uh… what the xxx are they all talking about” style questions, and who could feel frustrated and confused right along with you. The simple fact is that while i’ve dabbled with LA, I’m not exactly a luminary on the subject. I’m going to be learning along with everyone else… which is why i signed on.

So feel free to ping me on witter (@davecormier) or connect with me some other way if you’re wondering what you’re supposed to be doing in this course, what a ‘hunch’ is or to complain that you can’t quite figure out what George is talking about.

I’m thinking of providing a common list of cheater options for each week, an article to skim to get a vague idea of what’s going on, a description of what i did with one of the activities and maybe some other thoughts as the week goes on. we’ll see.

Week 1 – skimming
My skimming suggestion this week is the article by Tanya Elias http://learninganalytics.net/LearningAnalyticsDefinitionsProcessesPotential.pdf. It has awesome skim potential. It’s well layed out, with titles that identify whether or not you need to read that particular part of the article. It gives you a nice background of the bits and pieces that learning analytics has grown out of and also, the potential to skip right along to the page 4 section that describes analytics… culminating with this very nice quote by dawson (also computers page 11 and theory page 14)

Although it is now accepted that a student’s social network is central for facilitating the learning process, there has been limited investigation of how networks are developed, composed, maintained and abandoned. However, we are now better placed than our predecessors to use digital technologies for the purpose of making learner networking visible…. network- poor earlier in their candidature, it becomes possible for them to make timely and strategic interventions to address this issue. (p.738)

You might very well skim this article and then decide that it’s worth the full read. ’cause it is.

This week’s activity
Hunch is pretty painless. No excuse not to be a star this week and do the activity. It gives a little window into what analytics are all about and is kinda fun to boot. I recorded myself doing it. If you just want to hang back and cheat over someone’s shoulder… be my guest.

This week’s presentation – John Fritz
It is an introduction to learning analytics. The sound is nice and clear… which is always important. It’s a nice introduction to a part of the field. Something you could easily turn on and run on your desktop while you’re working on your assignments. http://www.learninganalytics.net/?page_id=71

I found it really helpful.
It’s focused on Learning(course) Management Systems
If you’re an analytics ninja, you might want to go back to doing your weird code stuff.
Includes a use case of ‘why learning analytics’

Bottom line? Wanna sound smart at your next meeting on this topic? Watch this presentation, take notes so you can refer to the articles he talks about.

Is this useful?
If I get some sense that this is useful, I’ll do one of these every week during the course. I’ll also take feedback collected from this blog post and bring it to the friday sessions if people like?

Need stuff added? Stuff here that isn’t useful? Let me know.

MOOCs, knowledge and the digital economy – a research project

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Dec 202010

Sometime in June Sandy McAuley, Bonnie Stewart, George Siemens and I decided to apply to SSHRC for funding for researching the place of MOOCs in the digital economy. We did a little work creating videos to allow people to understand what was going on in a MOOC and decide if it was something they might want to do.

We also did a huge write up that you might find interesting

First paragraph – The MOOC Model for Digital Practice responds to the “Building Digital Skills for Tomorrow” section of the consultation paper Improving Canada’s Digital Advantage: Strategies for Sustainable Prosperity by synthesizing the current state of knowledge about Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs). It argues that building and sustaining prosperity through Canada’s current digital strengths depends on a digital ecosystem that embraces both infrastructure and the collaborative social networks enabled by that infrastructure. Prosperity in this context requires a citizenry with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to turn these factors towards creating wealth. By exploring the relationship of MOOCs to the digital economy in general and their potential roles to prepare citizens for participation in that digital economy in particular, it illustrates one particularly Canadian model of how these needs may be addressed.

MOOC Final Draft

Top 10 Edu News events of 2010

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Dec 202010

This is year SIX of the fantastic awesomeness of random end of yearishness that is the Top Ten Edu News events of the year. First… a Quick review of the five years that have passed…

# Top 10 of 2009. I like the winner. the Zephoria incident. “will you knock down the tower”?

# Best of 2008… the end of ‘the killer app’. and the ‘end’ of blogging.

# best of 2007? well… tough to ignore twitter going crazy. But i love the Tom Wood story.

# Top ten of 2006? oh Ted Stevens. We’ll always wonder if that dumptruck of internets arrived to your office.

# My top ten edublog news events of 2005. Winner? browser based app. fav? 100 laptop doesn’t exist.

And now, what I’ve been waiting for, the top 10 of two thousand 10

Number 10
Free is dead
We rang in the early part of the year to news that Ning was going to force people to pay for the fine work they were doing and then the year was going out with delicious maybe going into a ‘sunset’. We’re all coming to terms with the fact that people need to be payed for the work that they do.

Number 9
Wikileaks
Leaks that were a flood to a website that wasn’t really a wiki. An international manhunt and
a new flag to fly up the ‘internet is dangerous’ flagpole. If there was a story this year that threatens open access to education, this is the one. All that and not for many surprises, rich people in the Caucasus throw big parties and some people in government are kind of annoying. Open still good… but probably going to get harder.

Number 8
Pads
Ipads, blackpads and android oh my! (android understanding table) I know i’m a convert, and any of the rest of you caught with any so retro as a ‘laptop’, had better be making a fashion statement.

Number 7
Angry birds bringing the tetris
Angry birds got the mobile devices into the hands of the people this year. All those people claiming to be working when they flipped their iphones over in the meeting room you were in? They were smashing blocks and trying to get their eggs back. But it brought the mobile device, and the obsessive use of it needed to get it into the mainstream out to people. Like tetris and the home computer, angry birds may be the secret weapon that made the mobile computer mainstream.

Number 6
switching to google
The university of Alberta wants you to know that lots of people love the switch to googledocs. (i do too)
As we all move inexorably towards our google overlords its our email that is now moving under its inevitable sway.

Number 5
Old Spice
A marketing campaign that targets the guy who runs the moodle installation in your university. (yup, they responded to a tweet from @kvillard who work at my uni) How does this change the way that kids need to be prepared…? Now there’s a 21st century skill. (How it was done)

Number 4
Pearson to get accreditation and private online schools
So, it seems that all kinds of people are talking about giving out degrees nowdays. I wonder if they’ll get a cut on their book prices?

Number 3
The end of research
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/17/books/17words.html?_r=1
It seems that we have lost interest in the word ‘fly’ since we starting being able to do it. It also seems that the words ‘love’ and ‘art’ dip in their use during the first and second world wars. In their ongoing attempt to take EVERYONE’s job, the job of the fearless data researcher is quickly going out the door… slackers like me can now wax philosophical over ideas that we came up with over a pint and ‘researched’ in 10 seconds. Haha.

Number 2
Cable Green, director of elearning and open education for the State Board of Community and Technical Colleges rocks.
A real, honest to goodness, open textbook model

Number 1
Netflix. Yes. Netflix.
We’ve seen piles of amazing video this year, and the Ted talks have taken over many a discussion table, and not just those deemed cool enough to be able to attend. In netflix we have a potentially sustainable model for learning video, that could easily replace all those rabid intellectuals who believe that CONTENT is what they’re selling. If learning is about content, then video is the way to put it together, and netflix is the way to sell it. It’s not the education system i want. But at least it would work.

UPDATE Number 1a
Student fees
Two years ago i first heard someone tell me higher ed student fees would triple on a fifteen year horizon. Two years later, the kids are in the streets in the UK. Is it a right? Is it a privilege? Even Churchill thought it was crazy to shut down the liberal arts schools during WWII. If anything is going to break the stranglehold of the ‘degree’ over society, it’s making it impossible to pay for (if it isn’t already). (via doug belshaw snarking me about US centrism in the comments)

Voice – digital storytelling 106

Uncategorized 4 Responses »

Dec 092010

The reverend – Jim Groom, is going to take his excellent digital storytelling course open and online. It’s a bit of a strange thing to announce, as I know a great deal about his course… due to his openness and onlineness… but he’s going to run another version of the open online ‘experiment’, following in some of the same footsteps that I’ve been dogging for the last few years. This is cool. For those of you wanting more info… http://bavatuesdays.com/ds106-as-an-open-and-online-experiment/

The open online thingy
I note that he calls it an experiment, and not a course, but I’m going to hope that the same rules that I’ve worked on in my own work applies. The path that I have pointed to in some of my own work is orient, declare, network, cluster and focus.

The orient part is covered by me getting my blog posted over at Jim’s site… and getting my blog hooked in. I’ll need to pay a bit more attention when the experiment starts to how it’s going to be coordinated, but time enough for this later. This post, in a sense, is me declaring myself. But the part that’s really important, that is only hinted at in the video above, is that it helps to know what you are taking the course for. The advantage of an open course, is that you don’t necessarily need to take the course for the same reason that it is given.

Why I’m going to join ds106OPEN
Storytelling is the thing that brought me to blogging the first time, in 2003 or 2004. I had started a blog with the intention of writing… not about education, but about life. Of telling stories. I always thought that I would be a writer, I wrote short stories as a young kid, poems when you’re supposed to in your teens, wrote a terribly ‘introspective’ novella while travelling in my early twenties… and then stopped.

I don’t really know why I stopped. I started sharing my ideas in other ways… in ways I suppose that are also important to me… but not in the same sense that I had hoped to do when i was 8 and 15 and 21. I tried again in my late twenties, two more chapters of a different book that I can’t seem to find right now, but most of my type type typing has gone into education over the last 5 or 6 years.

So I’m hoping that this course will be a path back to a different feeling under my fingers when I’m typing. Less about trying to make an idea work, or exploring my practice, and more about trying to work my way through the story. These things aren’t terribly different, I think, but they’re not really the same either. Maybe I’ll figure out how they are different during the event.

My goals for ds106

Write. for storytelling
Remember why i liked to tell stories
Find a home for my stories online
Develop my storytelling
Find a community of writers to write with
Focus on a project

My PLE model is the internet – no more system for me

PLENK2010 29 Responses »

Oct 212010

I had hoped to get this post out last week, but the dissaggregation 2 post came out instead and here I am in the middle of week six trying to combine a post that addresses both evaluation and success… and then i realized… that kinda makes sense. The problem with creating an evaluation model for a PLE is that it will inevitably have a strong impact on the success of the PLE. If the PLE is essentially about emancipation (which Scott Leslie tells me everyone believes in the comments of the previous blog post) then the scaffolding applied to allow for evaluation seems like the other end of the counterbalance.

This post is as much a simple reflection on my own practice… I hope you find it useful.

Presenting The Challenge
In the passed several blog posts we’ve talked about how the PLE can contribute to people committing to learning in a different way. To learning as practice… as a side effect of the work that they do everyday. In a PLE modelled course all the work that you do can contribute to the overall work that you produce, it can interact with work that you’ve done before and, most importantly, it can connect with other people doing great work out there as well. Those connections between your work and the work of others is where the real magic, where the network in the uh… network… really starts to pay dividends.

But wither the facilitator… It’s all fine for people to go out and do ‘real’ work on the internet, but how am I supposed to know that they’ve done it. Sure they can tag it… but what about comments? Sure they can repost in their blog… but that takes it out of its normal context. How do you evaluate work done in a PLE? How do you make sure that you are out there connecting and helping students make connections? How do you provide enough scaffolding to ensure that ‘nervous’ or ‘resistant’ students are coming along? How do I help provide comments? How do i find everything? I mean… in my Moodle course I just press on someone’s name and i find all their work.

Building the perfect system
So… off I went to try and build the perfect system. I started years ago using html, moved to moodle, elgg and drupal (all content management systems of one kind or another).

phase 1. I taught my first online classes on invisionboard, a discussion board software. I had 200+ writing students all working collaboratively in a discussion forum, editing writing, talking shop… it worked pretty well. But I wanted more! I had tried to cobble invisionboard together with a variety of other pieces of software, you know, calendar, assignment tracking… and then I found Moodle.

phase 2. Oh wow, I thought, here’s a system with all of the things I want in the same place. They had forums, and wikis and assignments and a gradebook. Piles and piles of toys. Except all those things were in the same place, and I started finding things constrictive… Where were my students going to put their content when the course ended… I had students coming up to me wanting to continue the conversation. Did i just delete these courses where people were feeling like they were connecting with each other when they were done?

phase 3. And then I found ELGG. It lets people have their own identity. They could blog, they could… uh… manage files. Lots of cool stuff. You, yourself, can live in your own location, you can write to whom you would like, be open or not. Seemed kind of ideal really. But it was kinda hard to use, and people got lost in trying to make connections, they kept expecting the connections to be there… and they weren’t. At the time (elgg has changed a bit since then) there was NO real way to start in ELGG. You couldn’t easily just ‘go to the home page’ and this made people crazy.

phase 4. By the summer of 2008 I thought i had it all sorted out. I would build a system out of drupal, loosely modeled after the interesting work that Funnymonkey had done for/with us for the http://livingarchives.ca project. It had a blog, that could be public or private. It had a very simple organization, by date, of the people in your group who had written reflections on their blog, reverse sorted to allow you to comment on those people who hadn’t been commented on yet. It was all in one place, I had feeds coming out of it in a dozen ways. The other main piece of functionality is that I had an ‘almost-wiki’ where students collaboratively built a textbook from the course. http://edugrids.org. It’s still there. No really… I still do the updates on it. I still have it.

so…
There are others I haven’t mentioned, I made some detours down the wikis paths, and down some other ways. Suffice it to say that I’ve tried a few things on my way to trying to set one of these things up. Here’s what I’ve learned.

Building from scratch – writing your own html is annoying
Using a VLE – moodle (blackboard etc…) a blackbox, no matter how you open it up, its still designed to be top down, it’s not for empowerment, it’s designed to keep work tidy.
Using ‘social software’ – While some of the projects we ran with ELGG (youthvoices comes to mind, now transferred to drupal) were successful, it was difficult for people to get started in it. It was committing to a new country without knowing if you wanted to be there… tough to make that ‘yours’
Building your own – You have to own it. and when you own it… it doesn’t belong to your students.
Overall – These things are about the teacher. Not the students. I don’t know of a way to design a system that changes this.

Why I gave up trying to build a system
So then this summer I looked back at the 2008 course site i was still managing and said NO! I’m NOT doing it again. Everytime i throw away a system, a webpage, a moodle course or something like that I’m breaking up a community (even though the students have likely long left) that I tried to make my students believe was important to build. I’m breaking connections that others may have to my students work… The whole thing works against my philosophy. So i don’t do it anymore.

The internet is my PLE
In the course I taught this summer, I had the students go out into the wild with their work. I asked them to set up a blog on wordpress.com. I asked them to get a twitter account. I told them that they would need to keep track of each and everything that they wanted me to evaluate and put it in a googledoc. I said “I”m not going to look for it, I want you to interact with people, keep track of it, and tell me why it was important.” You can see the full plan here… http://wikieducator.org/User:Davecormier/Books/Educational_Technology_and_the_Adult_Learner I wont belabour the point… those interested in such things can wander over there and take a look at it. I stopped building systems, and I’m happy about it.

So… what can this mean for evaluation
There’s no way of knowing whether my summer course will replicate itself, but i had the most satisfying evaluation experience of my professional career. My students each handed me in VERY different pieces to evaluate, each reflecting their own style and their needs after the course. They all did 10 or so blog reflections, which fit to a format. They each sent me in a ‘reflection and collaboration report’ which included a grade for them posting in comments they had made and explaining how those comments for formative in that context. They also handed in a “learning network plan” which included things like links they hadn’t followed, things they found challenging they might go back to, interesting people they could follow… things like that. I really enjoyed going through them.

So what can this mean for whatever success might mean
My goal for their PLEs was that they should be as individual and as focused on their own context as possible. I also wanted to make sure that the content was in a format that they would be able to use after the course as easily as possible. Their blog posts are still out there (though some people may argue that this isn’t necessarily great) but in collecting and choosing how to organize all their work, they each seemed to create something that was personalized enough that they could see it as a valuable go forward reference if nothing else. Maybe, for some of them, it was the start of getting networked enough to be able to carry on with the work on line in as professional way as possible.

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