Jared Stein – Education, Technology, Culture, and the Internet

I’ll be attending the WCET 2010 this Nov 11 – 13 in La Jolla, CA. I’ve been to WCET several times in the past decade, and sense that this year’s conference is moving in new and interesting directions for the better. For instance, there are a number of less formal, networked events during the conference, including the pecha kucha session (let’s just hope the presenters bring the funny) and the Tweet-up dinners (more…)

Many of you know I’m one of the people behind the Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange, commonly known as TTIX.

Registration for TTIX 2010 has just opened, so visit the site now and sign up for free. The conference runs June 10 & 11 in Salt Lake City, Utah, which is a great little city in a beautiful environment.

Hope to see you there!

This week I’ve decided to give SlideShare.net a go, and have now posted a half-dozen slide decks from different presentations over the past few years, all CC-licensed.

I must admit: now that I’ve shared, I have to worry if every image was properly credited, and the occasional borrowed slide attributed to the original lender. May the open web forgive us our sins of omission!

I traveled to Denver this week for WCET 2009, and though I was sunk with a cold on the second day, so far I’ve enjoyed participating in the conference, and, as always, have found the Twitter backchannel (#wcet09) a great way to connect with more ideas, and more people (more…)

The following is my comments and analysis on the first hour of dialogue between David Wiley and Stephen Downes re. openness and licensing. I want to precede this by recognizing that my point of view is both critical and challenging, though I do so with no desire to be divisive. Details on the conversation and a link(s) to recordings and live stream are available on the Open Ed 2009 wiki (more…)

I attended the 3-day eLearning DevCon 2009 in Salt Lake City this past week, and have compiled some brief notes based on the experience. I summarize the conference as having an enticing depth and knowledge of topics, good “presence” and information from most of the presenters, primarily for corporate e-learning developers (which was a refreshing change), not at all a bargain, and awkwardly spread out across Fort Douglas, though I must admit it was a joy to walk outside in late spring weather (more…)

Anyone who knows me knows about the Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange, aka TTIX, a small, free conference dedicated to the open exchange of ideas and best practices in distance learning and technology-enhanced education. If I’m not soliciting proposals, I’m soliciting keynotes, or I’m soliciting sponsors, or I’m soliciting participants–and really, the participants are the most important ingredient for a successful idea exchange! (more…)

Chris Lott captured most of my thoughts and feelings about the Personal Learning Environments All-Day Workshop that we conducted with Scott Leslie, however I wanted to reciprocate to my co-presenters and the participants by posting a few comments and observations (more…)

Now that Open Ed 2008 is over (I think I’ve written more PHP in two weeks than in the past two years to kick out the re-release of our open educational resources mod for Moodle … more on that next week), I am finally able to direct my energies toward the Next Project: an all-day pre-conference workshop for the 2008 WCET conference held this November in Phoenix, AZ. This workshop is titled Creating Personal Learning Environments with Web 2.0, and I’ll be collaborating with the inestimableChris Lott and Scott Leslie (more…)

George Siemens gave a great end-of-first-day keynote session at 2008′s Distance Teaching and Learning conference, in which he addressed connectivism. It was forward-thinking, heady, and deep, which I love in a keynote; unfortunately, I think a number of attendees were expecting it to be “keynote lite”.

George put his slides for this keynote online on SlideShare. Here are my fast-and-furious, almost-at-George’s-pace notes (which I hope to come back in and edit);

Task of education is to “combat” for lucidity

Knowledge is in the connections
more college students in china than in any other country
we are not in control of where education is going
we are not in control of these tbs of information

Complexity
putting together a puzzle
metaphor of a weather pattern – that’s why we can’t predict (Photo)
education is meant to be more like a puzzle
too much information
we end up with extra nuts and bolts
fragmentation
(I remember reading EVERYTHING in a book, in a newspaper, in a magazine, in a comic—hungry for knowledge. Now there’s too much)
“Fragmentation requires re-creation”
Fragmentation challegene coherance”
freedom of creation = abundance
(how do we filter)
There’s something else I need to read.
Need to filter out the noice, but that’s beyond the capability of our tools
fast-paced deep stuff. I feel like I’m a smooth stone George has skipped across a deep water
Brings up Kerr’s challenge
“Something is happening.
“But is it sufficient to warrant a reconsideration of learning theory?”

Web 2.0 is hype. “I never thought I’d hear myself say that blogs are hype.”

oh shiny object slide (George should use more of these—great response, great illustration)
Long timeline ofslwo change: Information (great slide showing transition upwards)
what do the tools allow us to do that they didn’t before
reminds me of the idea that technology returns us from individual thought (intraspersonal/intraspective) to collective though, or thought heavily influenced by the sometimes rash opinion of others (interpersonal/extraspective). Can we have a balance of these when everything is published open, for everyone.

Gutenberg press was one of those technologies that spilled blood

Let’s look at this; don’t look at the tools. It’s about those bigger factors of openness, access, creation, control.

Connectivism.
Tagged his critics on his del.icio.us account—great modeling of the true scholarly approach toward getting at truth.
How is this unique?
(pause. Man, he’s a bullet train barreling down the track)
a unity of learning and knowledge
not a significant difference between learning and knowledge
learning != process; knowledge != product
Abundance
I say overabundance. Scarcity of quality may remain proportional? Of course not exactly, but there will be a quantity of crap that may equal the proportional quantity of silence we had before the Internet. Now instead of not having enough I have too much information. Instead of being hungry and savoring the crumbs of information, I am overfed and nauseous at the sight of more platters of information.

Levelsof networked learning
Neural-biological
Conceptual
External-social

neural
connectionism and ai
what fires together wires together
biologically learning is creating a network

conceptual

when we make a concept map it makes explicit what we know

the occurrence of words reveals connectedness of concepts to create meaning

do network properties exist at a conceptual level?
We do have network attributes to knowledge seems intuitively right
PERSONAL BRAIN
novak on concept maps (see his delicious)
our concepts are understood by filtering through networks
simulations dont teach us steps, they teach us sequences of patterns
enable individuals to form patterns

external and social
we are connected to each other