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

A member of the ITForum mailing list asked about the legality of using Audacity to create MP3 files for an educational project, because patents on the MP3 technology are claimed by various different companies and organizations (more…)

Mark Crane pointed my attention to the following video recording of Richard Miller addressing academics in the humanities re. new media/technology and the alteration of the acts of authoring and publishing (more…)

At 11 o’clock this morning I decided to sit in on David Wiley‘s Intro to Open Ed course, so after a trudging drive to the heart of Provo I parked my car at the public library and walked three blocks and up a delightful hillside path to the BYU campus. (more…)

Darren Draper stirred up another conversation on his blog yesterday (Hacking the Curriculum) which intersects a number of my interests: independent study, reusable course content, and open education, and reiterates the question, what is not replaceable in teaching? In the live classroom? In individual instructor-developed curriculum? And how far can we stretch the re-usability of online educational materials? (more…)

George Siemens posts frequently and with clarity on his blog elearnspace, and often I find myself nodding my head as I read or questioning my assumptions or bouncing around to other web sites as I hunt down reinforcing or contradicting information. Today I challenged a couple claims made in his posting, Explaining leads to information (more…)

The Chronicle’s Wired Campus column published a short commentary on the creepy tree house effect, quoting Alec Couros and myself. I then stumbled upon a couple really great blog posts on the subject that simply popped in response–definitely worth the read, as each offers an in-depth reaction to the concept and term:

• LilaTov Cocktail: “Creepy Treehouse” effect: Twitter & Facebook suck when they’re required by your professor
• Marie-Jose Klaver Met je professor in een boomhut (In a Treehouse with Your Professor) (Dutch — does “kippenvel” mean “goosebumps”?)
• AnneC Trouver l’équilibre (French — relates personal experiences with student resistance to instructor-implemented social media)
• History-ing: Creepy Treehouse

The persistence of this discussion should be encouraging for John Krutsch and Marc Hugentobler, who will be presenting at this year’s WCET Annual Conference specifically on the creepy tree house effect in a session titled “Taking the ‘Creepy’ Out of ‘Creepy Tree House’”. I look forward to seeing educators and administrators engage in discussion and debate on the meaningful/meaningless-ness of the term, any deleterious effects it might have on teaching and learning, and how we can leverage technology without wasting our time.

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

As several other bloggers have pointed out (Michael B. Horn & Clayton Christensen, Guide to Online Schools), there is a clear and surprising disparity between the two US presidential candidates volubility on the matter of online education. While Barack Obama has been “mum” on the subject of online education or virtual schools, John McCain has explicitly stated his support for online education and virtual schools for k-12, and has even gone as far as promising federal funding for online learning programs.

My take on this is fairly mundane. First, I think that the online learning thing was not Mr. McCain’s idea; rather, he likely had a savvy adviser who laid out the potential benefits of online K-12 education, and online learning’s growing attraction to students and parents alike. Nonetheless, he has taken a position that may rankle those who favor the traditional means of obtaining that coveted piece of paper, whereas Mr. Obama has not.

Secondly, as has been suggested by at least two Obama supporters on their my.barackobama.com-hosted blogs, Mr. Obama would probably prefer to focus on investing federal funds in existing “real” schools. This is akin to a comment purportedly made by our current university President, who said, “I don’t want online learning to flourish because it takes revenue away from the brick-and-mortar.” Someone needs to let these folks that online learning is more cost-effective than brick-and-mortar, especially if built right. At the same time, I will disclaim the disparity by suggesting that Mr. Obama, once fully informed, is likely to counterprove some of his supporters by coming out in support of online learning and virtual schools when challenged on the issue. In the big game of presidential election politics, this is not a campaign-breaking issue.

But since Mr. McCain has beaten Mr. Obama to the punch, let my proffer my opinion on his suggestions:

1. “…$500 million in current federal funds to build new virtual schools and support the development of online course offerings for students.”
2. “…$250 million through a competitive grant program to support states that commit to expanding Online education opportunities.”
3. “…$250 million for digital passport scholarships to help students pay for Online tutors or enroll in virtual schools. Low-income students will be eligible to receive up to $4,000 to enroll in an online course, SAT/ACT prep course, credit recovery or tutoring services offered by a virtual provider.”

Total: $1 billion. For a fiscal conservative who is adamant about reducing government spending, that’s a lot of money, right? As they say, a million here, a million there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money. I had to put this in perspective: While the US annual spending on K-12 education is around $536 billion, only about $43 billion comes from federal funding. Adding in Mr. McCain’s proposed $1 billion would become just under 3% of the current annual federal expenditures for K-12. Because the US Constitution leaves education funding primarily in state hands, I think Mr. McCain is right to offer 25% of that billion as grants to states, and another 25% directly to students. This reminds me of Clayton Christensen’s Disrupting Class, which suggests that the monolithic nature of K-12 public education will make the sort of necessary disruptive innovations difficult at first, and that the first stage of the disruption will likely happen through outside server providers. In fact, Mr. Christensen uses nearly identical key language that Mr. McCain uses: “tutoring services offered by a virtual provider”.

I’ve been itching to write a post on “edupunk” since Jim Groom first added the term to our edtech lexicon. The term “edupunk” is both provocative and deeper than it seems, and so it deserves the benefit of a close analysis. My problems with “edupunk” have been:

1. I have a hard enough time converting faculty to use edtech as it is; a label like “edupunk” will only further alienate those faculty. And as john Krutsch suggested, “cliques suck, especially when you are on the outside”.
2. “edupunk” presumes a politik that Mr. Downes has already claimed as “progressive”, but that is too exclusive for me. (I am not “a progressive” [but it's amusing how vilifying that statement sounds--"liberal" was far more neutral, though admittedly it had gained some negative connotations in the last several decades. Ergh, I digress.]), and implies a knee-jerk or overgeneralized anti-establishment/anti-corporate mentality that I am not willing to fully accept.

There might be other reasons for my distaste. I may be taking the term in an altogether too personal context, for as a youth I was pretty active in the punk music scene, but I wasn’t ever on the inside of punk. You see, my friends who were into the cookie-cutter punk politico dug a lot of my libertarian ideals, but didn’t understand my capitalism, and my Brave New World “elitist” interpretation that conservative/traditionalism is served by (if not necessitates) punk-type counter-culture just as punk-type counter-culture is served by conservative/traditionalism. Even if we had a utopia (by anybody’s definition), we would always need an other, and some other’s are more harmless than others. Also, punk itself is not so punk as it would like to think it is–as I suggested, it’s often cookie-cutter, it’s often whiny or anti-corporate, and not because of strong ideals as much as it is because of failure or missed opportunities to exploit the corporate system for it’s own benefit. Most “punk” bands will “sell-out” if they get the chance. Sell-outs are sell-outs, and “true punk” treats them as such, maintaining a superficial fraternity with the black-white-black-sheep punk bands through artificial sub-labels like “pop punk”.

It may be that some edtech’ers feel the same way about educators who toe the corporate line, and thus find “edupunk” a great metaphor for their societal angst. While I have plenty of of my own societal angst, it rarely fits under any the de facto “edupunk” political posturing. At the same time, I’ve found that I can sit down with edtech’ers on the other side of the political fence and agree a lot on issues of educational strategies and philosophies for technological adoption, which makes Ken Carroll’s suggestion the more useful and bridge-building: “I would not recommend that we politicize learning 2.0″. Let politics stump us when it can; I’m here to make teaching and learning better and easier.

But at the same time, the DIY, question-authority aspect of edupunk is not only attractive to me, it resonates with my daily activities–to an extent. Martin Weller nailed the middle path (my emphasis):

it’s not about being an edupunk, but rather preserving some area of what you do where you can do edupunk kinda stuff … universities and educators need to have edupunk time – a period when you can explore stuff away from the mass of concerns that arise.

Martin suggests 10% of your day for edupunk time, i.e. innovation, experimentation, DIY, whatever. I wouldn’t do it for less than 33.33333%.

Unexpectedly, I began reading a lot of blogs this evening when I was supposed to be going home thanks to Darren Draper’s summative review highlighting criticisms of and ideas to improve Steve Hargadon‘s trailblazing Edubloggercon 2008. Just as with Educause ELI 2008, I learned a lot about ed tech conferencing (or unconferencing) from a conference I didn’t even attend thanks to blogs and Twitter. I read these reviews greedily, as I am anxious to continue to morph the Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange into one of the most engaging ed tech conferences for presenters and participants.

So I’ve collected here a bunch of quotes that speak to the good and the bad of Edubloggercon in it’s first two years that I personally am going to think about as we begin planning TTIX 09. As I said, I wasn’t at Edugbloggercon so I can’t speak to the accuracy, yet I do think they communicate something about ed tech conferencing in general.

Content

Didn’t we talk about this stuff last year? And the year before? Not to mention in many places online in the interim?

Tim Stahmer

[Get] outside the echo chamber… I look at the title of the session above and think: Yeah…we know that.

Jeff Utecht

[This year's conference was] more about tools and vendors than about the real work of getting our brains around how learning and networks and the very essence of how teaching and schools are being pushed by the shifts that are occurring.

Will Richardson

Structure

Start … with a set of questions, and then ask attendees … to collaborate in answering those questions from what they’ve learned from the conversations

David Warlick

Set up a space with two (or more) mini-presentation areas (not unlike the bloggers cafe actually), many “round tables” for people to retreat to for further conversation (this is key!), and plenty of power and wi-fi. … [Impromptu facilitators] sign up for [5-15 minute] time slots at the presentation areas

Mark Wagner

Engagement & Participation

…the breakout groups were too large which turned what should have been conversations into something more like panel discussions

Tim Stahmer

[In the informal area of the Blogger's Cafe] multiple conversations could occur and overlap – and we were able to ‘play’ in a serendipitous fashion

Mark Wagner

[At Blogger's Cafe] I would engage in a conversation to my right, over hear something on my left and turn and join that conversation.

Jeff Utecht

…the scanty fortunate [engaged in the impromptu 'edupunk-esque' sessions at Blogger's Cafe] … represent less than 1% of the people that actually attended EduBloggerCon. Moreover, as others gradually attempted to join in on this cocktail party of learning, when the party became too large, those that were truly invited quickly dispersed…

Darren Draper

[Last year] the focus was on having conversations with people without the intrusion of [technologically mediated] methods of communication. … The back channel … got in the way.

Vinnie Vrotny

It felt more like Monday than Saturday…

Will Richardson

That last quote is my favorite–I think ed tech conferences should be more fun and relaxed than a Saturday, yet be more productive and enlightening than a Monday.

John K. read these quotes and mused, “Where do we take these ideas?” I’ll think that through myself over the next little while, and let any readers post their comments to assist.