I’ve just got back from an interesting week at the SITE 2013 conference in New Orleans, run by the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education. It was the first time I’d been to a SITE conference, though they have been running for 24 years and I have more than a passing interest in teacher education, as that is my ongoing role as honorary faculty fellow at the University of Brighton and one of the reasons for setting up the Landing. It was an impressively organized and lively conference supporting a very rich community of people who sustain relationships between conferences and for whom SIGs are at least as important as the papers and roundtables of the conference itself. I was presenting a paper that I and Terry Anderson wrote about the value of the Landing in supporting a community of teachers. Not one of our best, though I think there is a bit of mileage in the notion of distributed transactional distance among networks and groups of people who are simultaneously learners and teachers.

A lot of the papers were about schooling of kids, which is a little outside my main areas of interest. I sat in on a fair number, however, out of curiosity and an interest in educational systems in general. Depressingly, a great deal of school education seems concerned with conforming to restrictive legislation and standards, meeting quotas, and controlling crowds of kids and their learning. The relatively small number of papers actually concerned with learning seemed to take these horrific premises as givens, though there were some innovative solutions to the problems.

While there was quite a bit on the usual learning technology suspects – mobile, social and blended learning, MOOCs, simulations, virtual worlds, Facebook, wikis, e-portfolios, etc – by far the most dominant theme was around uses of TPACK, Punya Mishra’s framework of technology, pedagogy and content knowledge, and their overlaps and contexts. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I am delighted that teachers are enthusiastically acknowledging that it is not just about content and pedagogy, but about other technologies too, and that technological competence is being treated with the respect it deserves. I am less happy that ‘technology’ almost ubiquitously means things with microchips inside them and/or the software that runs on them. This is a naive and simplistic view that suggests technology, pedagogy and content are separate and separable, and underplays many enormously significant technologies like course schedules, curricula, techniques, legislation, rules of behaviour, classrooms, corridors and school hierarchies (though oddly includes technologies related to content like lab equipment). I don’t think this is what Mishra actually means, but it appears to be the dominant interpretation, and it is depressing to see how wholeheartedly the education community has taken to the easily applied framework to assess the ‘different’ areas of knowledge without reflecting on what any of it actually means. The basic message, that everything should be orchestrated as effectively as possible and no part of the system and its context should be ignored, is a very good one. Unfortunately the artificial schisms that are introduced as as result of its application are not always helpful. 

It once again occurred to me, as I listened to relentlessly positive reports of the effectiveness (seldom ineffectiveness) of various interventions, that educational researchers, especially those reporting on their own interventions, are almost always the worst people to do educational research. Their passion and interest almost always trumps any tools, techniques and trickery they use. Our paper for the conference was no exception. Such stories are very good as long as that is all they are portrayed as being and there is no pretence of doing science. I’ve been talking about organizing the journal/conference of failed educational research for some time and really should get around to it soon. Just once in a while, it would be really good to hear someone say that they tried something that didn’t work at all, where everyone learned less, where they screwed up the pedagogy, made a hash of the research methodology, and where the tools they used or created were just pants. We’d all learn a lot more from that than from the countless pieces of meticulously engineered statistically valid nonsense that miss all the important factors and explain nothing. 

This was also my first visit to New Orleans. I didn’t have anything like enough time to explore it as much as I’d have liked, but I saw enough of it to fall in love with it. It is a city of magic, music and ghosts, filled with gentle, generous and utterly weird people. Wonderful.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.fupress.net/index.php/formare/article/view/12613

A fantastic article by Richard Nash ostensibly on how books and associated technologies have evolved and may continue to evolve, but really a meditation on the nature of culture, technology and society. The punchline is that the business of literature is blowing shit up, but here are a few quotes to give a flavour of this long and thought-provoking article…

“The book is not counter-technology, it is technology, it is the apotheosis of technology—just like the wheel or the chair.”

“Heuristics are great until they aren’t.” (a reference to the skewed view we all get of literature from what is published)

“What is published is published, and from that pool we choose to celebrate what we celebrate, and we say the system produced these celebrated works because, well, they’re available.”

Pre Gutenberg – “Writers were the machines through which the word of God was reproduced and disseminated.”

“the printing press essentially made science possible by allowing experiments to be replicated through the introduction of falsification, the ability to prove something wrong.”

“A variety of copyright-like regimes sprouted throughout Europe, the first purpose of which was censorship—to thwart the “greate enormities and abuses” of “dyvers contentyous and disorderlye persons professinge the arte or mystere of pryntinge or selling of books,” as England’s Star Chamber pronounced. The second purpose was to achieve the commercial equivalent of copyright for a cartel of businesses agreeing not to compete with one another, so as to increase their prices when it came to reproducing writing.”

“Pope’s view of himself was still as a transmitter of culture, not its originator. To originate, we invented genius. “

“the book is a technology so pervasive, so frequently iterated and innovated upon, so worn and polished by centuries of human contact, that it reaches the status of Nature.”

“Abundance, it turns out, is a much bigger problem to solve than scarcity”

“The economics of the analog reproduction of culture lead inexorably to the exhibitionist….The most profitable print-publishing business of all would be in a society where everyone reads the same book.”

“The non-mainstream was abetted by the growth of the superstore model of bookstores. The traditional independent bookstore stocked 5,000–10,000 titles, and so could only handle the new and backlist output of a limited number of publishers. But a Barnes & Noble or Borders superstore could have 50,000 or 60,000 or even 70,000 titles! Indeed, it needed those non-mainstream offerings to fill its shelves. Ironically, while indie, alternative, and literary presses frequently decried the predations of the superstores, the superstores were critical to their existence. “

“Copyright, though nominally instituted to encourage the creation of a work, has as its only logical purpose the encouragement of the reproduction of the work.”

“[the business of literature is] not about making art; it is about making culture, which is a conversation about what is art, what is true, what is good.”

“… relying on the notion that one deserves to get paid will fail every time. Imagine that as a dating strategy: I deserve to be desired by you.”

“Selling a book, print or digital, turns out to be far from the only way to generate revenue from all the remarkable cultural activity that goes into the creation and dissemination of literature and ideas.”

“Book culture is not print fetishism; it is the swirl and gurgle of idea and style in the expression of stories and concepts—the conversation, polemic, narrative force that goes on within and between texts, within and between people as they write, revise, discover, and respond to those texts.”

“The publisher is an orchestrator in the world of book culture, not a machine for sorting manuscripts and supplying a small number of those manuscripts in improved and bound form to a large number of people via a retailer-based supply chain best suited for the distribution of cornflakes, not ideas. “

“A business born out of the invention of mechanical reproduction transforms and transcends the very circumstances of its inception, and again has the potential to continue to transform and transcend itself—to disrupt industries like education, to drive the movie industry, to empower the gaming industry.”

“The business of literature is blowing shit up. “

Marvellous. 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2013/spring/nash-business-literature/

A list of reasons that a social networking system like the Landing can be more effective than email for managing knowledge and communication in an organization.

It’s a brief opinion piece so it’s little simplistic in some places, and it clearly has a very particular toolset in mind (that includes task and project management, apparently), but it covers the basics of why tools like the Landing are a good idea pretty well. As with all technologies, it’s not what you do but the way that you do it that makes the biggest difference, but systems like the Landing have some propensities and strengths that are harder to duplicate with other tools.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.business2community.com/social-media/why-social-networks-are-better-than-emails-for-enterprise-collaboration-0437685

One of the better of many recent articles covering the popular breed of xMOOCs like Coursera, edX and Udacity, with some superficial discussion of the pedagogies, business models, technologies and motivations behind them.

One of the things that worries me most in this article is the cherry-picking of relevant research to back up claims and models. I recognize the value of appreciative enquiry, but this is not the place for it. Lectures are dismissed with a nod to an article from the 1970s which is actually concerned with short and long term memory models – barely relevant, not reflecting recent findings and far from the best article on the maninfold weaknesses of lecture-based approaches. But it fits with the cherry-picked model of providing short lectures to fit what are presumed to be average attention spans, ignoring the fact that it depends not just on length but on content. I could watch a great talker like Sir Ken Robinson for an hour without boredom but will turn off in an instant if the speaker is not engaging. It’s not just about the technology, it’s about skill and artistry, and the interest of the learner. Other references are similarly thin and also make the classic mistake of generalizing from the particular that is so prevalent in educational research, especially when called upon by those who are not educational researchers. For instance, the fact that peer grading can under some circumstances be closely correlated with teacher grading does not mean that it is always so. It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it, and it varies according to the context you are in, the subject you are teaching, the nature of the students, the resources that are available and the pedagogies you are using. 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=massive-open-online-courses-transform-higher-education-and-science

Well, it’s not that thorough, and does raise the question of why this information is not made available by purveyors of MOOCs, but there are data here, and that’s a start. One of the reasons for non-completion is answered in the text – that a focus on completion assumes this was among the goals of the learners who participate. In many cases, perhaps the majority, it is clear that this is very much not the case.

This highlights a fundamental difference between open courses (massive or not) and closed courses and one of the reasons that MOOCs are disruptive innovations, not just a big and free version of mediocre examples of what we already have. Traditional courses are focused on accreditation, for which it should be fairly vital to complete everything in the course, so people tend to do so a little more often than when left to their own devices. For those participating in MOOCs, the goal is typically quite different: it is to learn something. There is no reason on earth that a whole course is always needed for that, any more than that we should have to read an entire edited book to learn something useful from it. Nor is there any reason to finish a book we have started once we find that it doesn’t interest us or is too difficult for us right now. Or we might find a different book, or article, or blog, or Wikipedia page that does it sufficiently or better. This is not news.

Give learners control, and they can choose when, how and what they learn. It is not up to us, the teachers. This is why I suspect that the future lies less with the xMOOC or even with the cMOOC (though that is far more interesting), but with the kMOOC – with the kind of things provided by the Khan Academy and a million how-to videos, help forums, Q&A sites and wikis, where learning comes in chunks appropriate to the needs of the content, not to filling a number of weeks or credit hours: where learning is on demand, not on command. Some things take five minutes to learn, some take five years, some are a never-ending process.

But, let’s assume that completion rates actually do mean something. It seems to me that what this most likely shows is not that MOOCs are problematic as a matter of principle (if they were, no one would reach the end), but that those created so far are insufficiently compelling to be of value to more than a few. If they really offered value, neither hell nor high water would stop people from finishing them (OK – both might be a strong disincentive, but completion rates would be a great deal higher). This means that the content is perceived as insufficiently compelling and/or they are boringly or confusingly enacted. If we look at what people learn in appropriately sized chunks, there are things that people look at and gain value from, and things that they don’t. The bigger you make the chunks, the more likely it is that there will be things within them that are of lesser value. So people lose interest. That’s not much of a story though. We love to generalize from the particular to the general and we like news that simplifies complexity, especially if it demonizes something strange to us.

Address of the bookmark: http://mfeldstein.com/the-most-thorough-summary-to-date-of-mooc-completion-rates/

Well this is cool.

Predicted by Ian Pearson more than 10 years ago, along with many other interesting things – http://www.futurizon.com/future/skin3.htm

Always a bit of a surprise when the future arrives. The adjacent possible just expanded a whole lot more.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2013/mar/13/electronic-tattoo-monitor-patient-symptoms

Nicely written article. It’s not really about binge learning though – it works just as well if you take the opposite approach too and eke out your learning a little at a time. It’s really about control.

The tricky thing is always achieving a balance between too much and too little choice – to be in control is to have the power to choose intelligently when you engage with the course, how you engage, and how much help and interaction with others you get when you need it. Really big MOOCs have an advantage here because there are likely to be more opportunities to engage with people as and when you need to do so. Smaller MOOCs are disadvantageous to self-paced learners who may not so easily find the help, support or simple presence of others when they need it.

Address of the bookmark: http://theumlaut.com/2013/03/06/binge-learning-is-online-educations-killer-app/

This should be an interesting workshop on social technologies, in an interesting place.

The deadline for submissions has been extended to March 20th.

Details:

The 2013 International Workshop on Social Computing, Network, and Services (SocialComNet 2013)

September 4-6, 2013, Gwangju, Korea    http://www.ftrai.org/socialcomnet2013  

Call for papers available at: http://www.ftrai.org/socialcomnet2013/cfp.htm

Damned lies and statistics…

But it does seem that Google+ is gaining ground and network effects are amazing things, as MySpace found to its cost when Facebook shot past it. I find it interesting, however, that there is a lot of chalk and cheese in this list and this is an ecosystem in which many different systems can thrive.  And I still don’t believe that Google is trying to compete directly with Facebook in a big way, even though Facebook might think it is competing directly with Google. Google+ is not a direct competitor to Facebook on most counts, even though many functions are superficially similar and industry watchers would love them to be head-to-head. They are not quite like chalk and cheese, but nor are they like two brands of car competing on features, style and price.

One thing in this article really caught my eye…

“The continued growth of Facebook, Google+ and Twitter also has a secondary side effect, the survey found. Local social networks in various countries are seeing a dip in usage, up to 57 percent in some cases, particularly in China. This is apparently due to a saturation of the market and shift towards more informal social media including blogs and forums, where privacy is easier to maintain from growing government clampdowns”

I know of thousands of Elgg, WordPress and possibly millions of other social sites out there that are quietly populating an increasingly long tail. While many of these are largely independent, this long tail is feeding on the big providers in many cases, even while the big providers attempt to feed on them. On an increasing number of social sites I use, from Pinterest to AcademicExperts.org, the big three (Twitter, Facebook and Google+) are simply a means of authentication to get to somewhere else. Speaking for myself, if the choice is between Facebook and pretty much any other alternative, I choose the other alternative, and an increasing number of sites provide good alternatives. I suspect that use for authentication might count as ‘active use’, in which case the figures are hiding some big changes in behaviour that are going unreported, but it’s hard to tell for sure. If so, the respective business models of Google and Facebook put Facebook at quite a disadvantage: Google just needs to know more about you so that it can improve its search (which is why Google+ exists – social networking is just a fringe benefit that sometimes adds a bit more information for it to use), whereas Facebook needs you to actively engage in its toolset before it can make a profit from you. But, if all it is doing is getting you in to a smaller competitor’s site, then it becomes increasingly irrelevant (still dangerous, still nasty, but no longer the site where the game is held). If this turns into an endgame, the winner will not necessarily be the one with the most identities to its name, but the one that can make most effective use of them. And, in a distributed universe of decentralized systems, that looks like it might be Google. 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2026521/google-outranks-twitter-as-no-2-social-network-after-facebook.html