Scolaris

A great idea – modelled broadly on crowd-funding sites like Kickstarter, this provides an opportunity to connect students with funders for scholarships, tuition fees, courses, etc. For funders (‘philanthropis’), this is a great way to pay it forward for individuals who can fund as little or as much as they like, including the option to create scholarships as well as to choose who they fund, and a nice opportunity for businesses to support potential or actual employees. For students, especially those who fall between the cracks for traditional grants, scholarships and funding schemes, a great way to get an opportunity for education. 

A Canadian site, so none of the worries about privacy etc found on US sites.

Address of the bookmark: http://scolaris.ca/

The Monkey’s Paw effect in higher education

The story of the monkey’s paw by W.W. Jacobs tells of a talisman (the monkey’s paw) that can grant three wishes but, when the wishes are granted, they result in horrific side-effects. Technologies are like that. We build systems for one purpose and other things happen that we did not foretell and did not wish for. From the large scale environmental and human catastrophes wrought by industrialization, mass ownership of cars or large-scale use of artificial fertilizers to the smaller things in life like the self-locking door that locks us out or the delights of autocorrect on iPhones, technologies are monkeys paws that grant our wishes while destroying other things we value. This creates a demand for new technologies to correct the problems of the ones that came before. Whole clusters of industries and intricate social structures, laws and institutions develop as a result of this. Amongst the many factors that determine their development and uptake, technologies feed from and are spawned by other technologies. We come to rely on technologies to deal with problems caused by the technologies we already have.

Education is massively technologized. You simply cannot do education without technologies, including language, pedagogies, and other infrastructure that surrounds the process. It’s a fertile space for mischievous monkey-paw demons lurking in the technologies we use. 

Before the 12th Century, people used to visit scholars in order to learn stuff. They sat round while the great masters (always men) spouted their wisdom, wherever they happened to be located. These students were, of course, quite rich – going to spend a few years at the feet of scholars is not something the average peasant would have ever dreamt of and grants were few and far between. At around the same time, city burghers in Bologna and Paris saw the benefit of having many rich students populating their streets for years at a time and helped to establish Europe’s first universities. It all went downhill from there. At first, there were two distinct models of university – the university of masters, of which Paris provided the prototype, which set teachers up as arbiters of all things, and the university of students, stemming from the processes used in Bologna, in which students determined what was taught and who taught it. We all know which model won! A concentration of self-moderating scholars soon led to things like (non-exhaustively):

  • a concentration of books in libraries;
  • buildings to house and teach students and faculty;
  • administrative procedures to manage ever more complex processes;
  • formal awards and testing methods to validate both institutions and their learners,
  • ‘efficient’ methods of teaching like lectures (and the infrastructure to match);
  • restrictive subject ranges born of economic and physical necessity (communities of scholars needed critical mass);
  • large complex bureaucratic infrastructures to maintain and organize the educational machine, to handle timetabling, student registration, award-giving, hiring and firing;
  • overseeing bodies (often governmental) to ensure quality, consistency etc;
  • and so on.  

A few centuries later, some time in the late 18th Century, the written exam was born (the Cambridge mathematical Tripos), an innovation that spread fairly slowly over the next century, driven largely by economic benefits. That was about it. Apart from minor technological innovations such as slates, blackboards, quills and so on, the occasional restructuring (e.g. Humboldtian universities) and the incorporation of subjects other than theology, law and philosophy, things pretty much stayed as they were. The teaching methods and organizational structures used today would be instantly recognizable to Abelard, one of the early pioneers. Almost every technological innovation in education since mediaeval times has largely been an attempt to overcome some of the unwanted consequences of the basic technologies that remain unchanged.

It is a little bizarre that distance institutions like Athabasca University and the Open University UK have managed to replicate structures that were designed to fit the exigences of scholastic life in mediaeval Europe, barely considering whether they made any sense once one removes the physical context that resulted from the needs of scholars of the middle ages. And so we have courses, semesters (though AU at least gets rid of these for undergraduate students), libraries, deans, faculties, convocation ceremonies, mediaeval gowns, classes, grades, exams, scholarly covens, doctors and masters. At least we don’t have as much physical infrastructure based on mediaeval assumptions as most universities.

Higher Education has spawned a wealth of industries: copy houses, essay mills, textbook publishers, gown makers, schools that ‘prepare’ students for university, companies that filter based on qualifications, government departments dedicated to grant awards, professional societies to defend their disciplines, tourist industries to cater for the mass exodus of students every summer, student unions, faculty associations, institutional furniture suppliers, whiteboard manufacturers, and so on and so on. It is very well integrated in our social and economic lives.

But, sometimes, technologies can do more than repair the damage done by others. Sometimes they open up new adjacent possibles that allow us to replace the whole rotten caboodle, because the paths they clear ahead of them lead somewhere better. Christensen would call them disruptive. The Internet is one of those technologies. Right now, we in academia are mostly using it to shore up the old technologies and entrench them deeper with tools that automate mediaeval ways, like Moodle and other LMSs. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Imagine a world in which we throw away the old monkey’s paw. Amongst other things:

  • No fixed-size courses that are simply the result of a need to herd cats and whose length is determined primarily by the need for students to help with the harvest or observe religious holidays at certain times of the year, not by any academic reasoning.
  • No exams that are designed to make the lives of scholars marking pieces of paper easier.
  • Accreditation that shows what you can actually do, not whether you can pass a test on those fixed-length courses; accreditation that is transferable to wherever you need to go next, that is precise, that does not bind you to one institution that holds you by the contractual short and curlies.
  • Resources that are distributed rationally and electronically, not bound to physical libraries that mimic a million physical libraries elsewhere for no good reason.
  • Institutional structures that are flat, distributed and agile, adaptable to changing needs and interests.
  • The end of academic disciplines that punish those that cross their borders (perish the thought that we might like arts, sciences, social sciences and humanities and might see fruitful ways to combine them).
  • Payment of teachers for teaching well, not jumping hoops and shuffling more bones on the research circuit.
  • Methods of learning that are fitted to the subject and people learning them, not the needs and capabilities of institutions teaching them. 

It’s all possible, if a little disruptive, given the interdependence of so many things. Some people are already doing it.

Of course, technologies being what they are, if we made these kinds of change across the board then the monkey’s paw would no doubt work its usual mischief. But this particular set of wishes has held sway for too long and it doesn’t even make any sense. 

 

WiFi woes

I have a small house. A very small house. It basically has four rooms and it is made of wood. To the best of my knowledge it was not designed as a Faraday Cage.

And yet – it seems impossible to get wifi in every corner of the house.

I teach networking so I have a reasonable idea of how to set up such things. I’ve tried putting the WiFi access point everywhere. I added a big antenna. I added a high-power wireless repeater. I added a second network with its own access point, using a different wireless spectrum, and placed it at the other end of the house with a big antenna, wired via the mains. I added a third repeater. I added reflectors to direct the signal better. I got rid of anything I could that might be broadcasting on the same frequency.

There are 30 visible wireless networks around me and every time someone opens a garage door, answers a phone or switches on a microwave oven it makes things worse. Basically, there’s too much noise in the ether and everyone is shouting louder to get heard. I think I might go back to wires.

 

 

E-Learn 2012, Montreal: another earth-shaking conference.

I’ve just returned from an enjoyable week in Montreal attending the E-Learn conference. There was, of course, an earthquake, albeit so minor (3-4 on the Richter Scale) that I didn’t even notice it. Not as earth-shaking as E-Learn 2006 where a much large earthquake took out the power in Waikiki for a day, nor ICALT 2007 where an earthquake left me stranded in Tokyo and steam escaping from a nearby nuclear power station. 

E-Learn is usually a great opportunity to catch up with many leaders and friends in the online learning field, but numbers were down this year (about two-thirds as many as at the conference’s peak) and there were not as many familiar faces as I would have liked to see. It was good to catch up with folk like Theo Bastiens, Gale Parchoma, Norm vaughan and our own Andrew Chiarella & Linda Chmiliar, who had a fine short paper on the use of CoRead, a stigmergic annotation tool. Sarah Duke Benson did a brilliant job of coordinating the cats, if not exactly herding them. Also it was good to meet Myk Garn, Punya Mishra, Dale Stephens, Saul Carliner and many others who provided stimulating conversation and some fine presentations.  However, whereas I usually expect to see at least 50 people that I know fairly well, this year they probably numbered less than a dozen. It’s not just that I’m an old fogey and the new generation was coming in: though there were a good many students and younger researchers (as usual), many attendees were (amazingly) older than me and had been doing this for years. We talked a lot about this at the exec committee meeting and agreed that the pattern repeated across the board for most conferences thanks to the economic pressures most academics are under. I suspect that this is far from the only reason though: the information about the latest research that I used to get from conferences (and hardly ever got from journals) is now available in a far more timely fashion on the Web. It is notable that, apart from a few of us talking about them in keynotes etc, MOOCs were hardly mentioned at all, despite being perhaps the hottest topic in educational technology right now. I still like to get to talk with and connect with people at conferences as it is more likely to lead to lasting connections and friendships, but that’s pretty much it: if I want to be inspired by the latest and greatest things in the field, I get it in my newsfeeds. AACE has made a good job of putting together an online social framework around the conference and its proceedings and it has some online presentations, but I think the only way such conferences will survive is by innovatively capitalizing on the connections people make in person. Tricky stuff.

Unexpectedly, I wound up participating in a keynote panel thanks to some unexpected schedule clashes (three keynotes only able to speak on one day, unfortunately the same day) in which we debated the future of online and distance learning, covering issues such as the future of formal education, the rise of MOOCs, the relationship between pedagogy and technology and a whole lot more. I may be biased, but I reckon that it was maybe more generally stimulating than the usual single speaker, especially as we made a point of taking views and questions from the audience.

All the usual suspects turned up in the themes of the papers – blended learning, higher education, teaching, learning environments, social media, a bit of mobile, and a good dose of technologies in general. E-books and iPads were a popular topic but oh so uninspiring (most of the time). This is a rough and ready tagcloud (produced via tagcrowd.com) of the titles, which gives a pretty good clue about the themes:

E-Learn 2012 paper-title tag cloud

Although I did make a point of seeing a few selected presentations, I was trying a new conference technique of deliberately attending some presentations that were in subject areas of little interest to me. This was on the grounds that most of the ones in areas I knew about would just confirm what I already know while those in different fields might inspire me. It worked a bit – I did get one or two new ideas – but I think I might go back to my old approach in future as the hit rate was not that high. Among the highlights for me were:

  • Punya Mishra’s keynote: so much common sense and a really enjoyable presentation style. I’ve come across his TPACK framework before and found it to be a useful reflective scaffold but lacking in coherence. Chatting with him, I think his ideas about learning technologies are much closer to mine than I’d originally thought.
  • Saul Carliner’s keynote: less that I agreed with than Punya’s keynote, but a wealth of wisdom and sound thinking, wrapped up in a friendly and delightfully approachable presentation style.
  • Yuhei Yamauchi et als paper on using Facebook to connect students and working adults – wonderful idea, great research, impossible to implement in Canada or Europe thanks to privacy legislation.
  • Joséphine Rémon’s paper on risk-taking in language learning: some great use of signals to identify risk-takers vs grade-seekers.

My own refereed paper went down OK. I was talking about one of my courses, describing the ways I have tried to make it both self-paced and social. My slides are available here on the Landing.

At the airport I bumped into Stephen Downes chilling out in the VIP lounge, on his way back from Germany.  Small world.

Open Access Week :: Athabasca University

The theme for the 2012 Open Access Week is “Set the Default to Open Access”.  

Athabasca University is proud to participate in its fourth international Open Access Week, between October 22-28, 2012 to broaden awareness and understanding of open access. 
This event will be sponsored by the UNESCO/Commonwealth of Learning Chair in Open Educational Resources (OER), Dr. Rory McGreal. 
Athabasca University will present a series of noon hour webcasts exploring major issues and opportunities of Open Access and Open Educational Resources.  Each session will feature an internationally known promoter and developer of open educational resources, research, or ideas.

Personal plug: see http://openaccess.athabascau.ca/events.php#3 for details of the session being given by Terry Anderson, George Siemens and myself on issues of personal control, ownership and disclosure.

Address of the bookmark: http://openaccess.athabascau.ca/index.php

The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan

I love this. McLuhan at both his most lucidly brilliant and most loquasciously bonkers. Packed with quotable wonderfulness and perspective-shifting visionary genius, it is worth consuming again and again, even if it means choking from time to time on some of his wilder ideas and prophecies.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.nextnature.net/2009/12/the-playboy-interview-marshall-mcluhan/

Skeuomorphism and the online presenter

 

horse pulling car

I’ve been preparing slides for a virtual talk I’m giving next Wednesday on how learning technologies work (all are welcome). I’ve done virtual presentations using webmeeting software countless times before. Until now I had never thought to change the aspect ratio of the slideshow from that of the default, which is of course designed for lecture theatres and standard projector screen ratios.

How weird is that? 

I can’t count the number of times I’ve tried to squeeze a chat box, a video, some online presence indicators and sometimes more into the tiny space left on the webmeeting screen once the usual 4-by-3 slides are showing. Makes no sense at all because the constraints of the virtual space are entirely different from those of a lecture hall. It’s a classic example of skeuomorphism, in which a design element replicates something that was essential to the original technology but no longer has any functional value. In this case it actually introduces a harmful and entirely unnecessary constraint, making it much harder to sustain and follow the interesting dialogue that typically occurs in such sessions.

The particular irony here is that the talk I’m preparing is largely about how to use technologies and how they can, if we let them, use us. I feel used.

 

 

Slip Sliding Away: The Open in MOOC | iterating toward openness

This is a compelling critique of Rory McGreal and George Siemens’s Openness in Education MOOC that makes a point I’ve seldom heard as clearly expressed: is a course really open (by which the author seems to mean free in both beer and speech senses of the word) if you have to sign up for it to receive any content? Very interesting point.

I think the problem with this point of view is the assumption that a course is content, ignoring the people and the process that are what really make it happen, at least for this kind of course. If I’m right then it matters who you are and that others know who you are: freedom to interact comes with responsibility to be who you say you are and be recognisable to others. Signing up is not intended as a means of taking something from you (as it might be on a commercial site) but simply as a means of making communication possible.

If it were a face-to-face course then you could turn up, interact, and leave, without ever having to say who you are were: your presence would be sufficient to assure people that you were a person, accountable for your deeds and words. Unfortunately, persistent identity in cyberspace is defined by usernames and profiles. They are a crude, coarse and ugly caricature of a human’s identity, but it’s currently as good as it gets in asynchronous systems. For real-time webmeetings and the like, it is seldom such a problem: in this kind of learning context it is often sufficient to enter a name, any name, and be present with others much as you might in meatspace. If you want to be identified, great. If not, great. The moderator can always boot you out if you start doing unpleasant things, just as they might ask or require you to leave in a physical-world meeting. More easily, in fact. But it’s different in an asynchronous setting where discontinuous continuity is needed. If you are going to engage in a sustained dialogue over a period of time then there has to be a means to sustain a cyber-identity otherwise it just doesn’t work, and that has to involve trust on both sides of the persistent connection.

I’ve been sporadically puzzling about this problem for a few years and coming up with ideas like context switching and faceted profiles in an attempt to regain a little of the richness of identity as experienced in real-world encounters but have yet to reach an ideal solution.

I have an idea though.  

The problem of giving your contact information away is only a worry when, as a result, the person or organization (let’s call it a ‘body’) is taking something from you as a result – your privacy and control, in particular. At that point, when you are giving something of value to be used by some body, ‘open’ is no longer free as in beer. 

In my personal communications in networks with people or organizations I don’t fully trust, I usually use an email address that identifies the sender – at Amazon, say, I am amazon@jondron.org. This gives me the power to easily identify misuse of the identity (or facet) I choose to reveal, to present different facets of myself to different people, and to very easily filter out any body that I do not like. It also reduces the risk of some kinds of hacking attacks though, as a victim of domain theft, I can attest to the problems that occur when your domain gets lost. It would be cool if these faceted identities were linked to network profiles that could be adapted to different bodies. Better still, in my dealings with them (especially bodies like Facebook that use literally hundreds and sometimes thousands of tracking cookies and related technologies to spy on me) it would be useful to present their personalised facet to them while not letting them see anything else that I do under a different facet. It’s possible now, but the process is awfully manual and typically involves lots of different browsers open at once. Wouldn’t it be cool to, say, allocate an identity to only one tab in your browser window and disallow access to the rest of your online browsing? The interface would take a bit of work and you would probably have to be quite mindful about the process but, with a bit of care and effort, you would be able to engage on fair and equal terms with any body, revealing only what you want to reveal to whoever you want to reveal it to. 

 

Address of the bookmark: http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/2509