Conflicted: Faculty and Online Education, 2012 | Inside Higher Ed

I find this a little depressing, though full of interesting figures.

It is interesting and astonishing that there is still such notable resistance to online learning among conventional faculty, even though there are positive signs that many recognise potential and actual value in extending the media and methods they are attached to. The notion that blended learning (in this report meaning a mix of online and face to face) done right could conceivably be worse than face to face is particularly bizarre, as it carries no learning implications one way or the other about dropping what people already do. If what they already do is OK, then it is hard to see how (assuming mindful design and a recognition of systemic interdependencies) it could be made worse by adding new capacities and possibilities.

I think that this all springs from asking the wrong questions in the first place.  Asking whether online learning is better for learning than face to face learning makes no more sense than asking whether people using paint brushes produce better art than designers using Photoshop. It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.

Despite the stupidity of many of the assumptions and questions in this report, it provides a very interesting snapshot of attitudes, prejudices and beliefs held by college professors in the US, as well as a good overview of how institutions are thinking about the use of various tools and methods. In spite of its blindspots, this is good information, and fuel for the struggle to get over some of the hurdles that stand in the way of common sense and good teaching practice.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/survey/conflicted-faculty-and-online-education-2012

BlueGriffon, The next-generation Web Editor based on the rendering engine of Firefox

An interesting and quite slick free WYSIWYG HTML editor that, on cursory examination, seems pretty good. It is easy to use and the code it produces seems clean and standards-compliant from what I have seen so far.

It operates on an interesting variant of the freemium model – there are plenty of extensions available to make it more Dreamweaver-like in its range of functionality that you can pick and choose from, all as Mozilla-style xpi files. One or two are free but most start at about five euros, including its manual. If you want things like CSS editors, they add another 10 euros to the price. Because of that, I think that I still prefer Kompozer as the free WYSIWYG editor of choice, but this is not bad and has less obvious glitches.

Address of the bookmark: http://bluegriffon.org/

Dunno for Mac and iOS will change the way that you take notes forever – The Next Web

I’ve been playing with this app on Mac, iPhone and iPad for a few days and am finding it quite useful, if so far lacking in some quite important features. The general idea is that you use it to record thoughts and notes, and that it asynchronously seeks relevant information in the background from a few sources (Bing, Wikipedia, News, YouTube, iTunes) so that, when you get back to it, there’s a whole load of detail that you can follow up on.

It cries out for better means to move results from one place to another: even a bit more copy and paste would help, but the ability to send to EverNote or ReadItLater would be really useful. It could also do with a few more sources: for me, Google Scholar would be a must, and Google Search is generally superior to Bing for me.  I’d also like to see options for refining and filtering searches: a typical search is a real-time conversation whereas this is more like sending a letter and waiting for a reply, and the lack of export and filtering makes that feel quite clunky. For many notes, there is just a bit too much serendipity in the returned results. However, I like the way that you can jot down ideas and questions then come back another time to find that the app has done a bit of preliminary research on your behalf, and that searches are replicated across different devices so you can (say) jot a note on the iPhone while sitting on a bus then explore related things later on a Mac.

Address of the bookmark: http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/06/15/dunno-for-mac-and-ios-will-change-the-way-that-you-take-notes-forever/

$25 million investment backs startup aiming to create elite university | Inside Higher Ed

An interesting model intended to create a cut-price for-profit top-class university. It could work. The combination of online learning with a novel approach to kindling a traditional face-to-face academic community, mixed in with a focus on high quality teaching, no national barriers to entry and, above all, a rigorous selection process that focuses entirely on ability to succeed rather than money or sporting skills, seems to be a good one. Not in itself a particularly disruptive or tradition-defying model, but part of a trend towards eroding traditional university battlements that, despite the profit motive, seems to be a good one. So much of current university thinking, even in a modern and open university like AU, is mired in path dependencies, dated funding models and historical happenstance that maintains a mediaevally archaic status quo. All the arcane paraphenalia of ancient and absurd forms of religion and redundant technologies of learning have no place in learning and yet they drive us still. This kind of minor re-thinking of what it is all about, especially because it retains much of the implicit values and constructs that made universities worth having in the first place, stands a fair chance of success.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/04/04/25-million-investment-backs-startup-aiming-create-elite-university#ixzz1r6Vy2Sy2

On Bubbles, Facebook, and Playing for Keeps: Ten Questions With Clay Shirky | Wired Business | Wired.com

I’ve loved Clay Shirky’s writings for well over a decade. In this interview he presents some characteristically fine insights. I particularly like what he has to say about universities:

“Plainly universities are the kind of institutions that are ripe for pretty radical reconsideration. Probably because the founding story of many institutions and particularly the ones that we think of as the kind of original avatars of American higher education was “notable gentlemen X donated their library.” Right? So literally just access to written material became an important enough gesture that you would organize a university around it. And whatever [laughs] — whatever it is people need more of today, it ain’t access to written material.”

Address of the bookmark: http://www.wired.com/business/2012/06/on-bubbles-facebook-and-playing-for-keeps-ten-questions-with-clay-shirky/

Dr Jon Dron, ‘Baby Bear’s Bed: open learning through social media’ on Vimeo

A recording of my presentation at the Follow the Sun 2012 conference on finding the pedagogical spot that is not too hard, not too soft, but just right. The context was open learning and my take on this was that open access is only part of the story. For learning to be truly open, learners need to be in control of their learning and, in particular, this implies the power to choose whether and when to delegate control to another. I examine the generations of distance learning pedagogies with a view to modelling their distinctive freedoms, noting that all have some weaknesses and that a holist solution, combining all and aggregating them via emergent collectives, seems to be the most promising approach.

Address of the bookmark:

Dead Romanian mayoral candidate likely to win election by a landslide: wtf?

Perhaps the strangest thing about this story is that it is not the first time it has happened. In 2008, residents of another Romanian town elected a dead man as mayor: “I know he died, but I don’t want change,” a pro-Ivascu resident told Romanian television (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/17/1). 

This is an interesting example of a problem caused by a hard technology that could simply be averted with common sense. The situation is apparently possible because of the rigid rules of Romanian elections, which require that the candidate name cannot be removed from the ballot paper. It is just a rule, made by people, and people could choose to ignore it if it leads to absurd outcomes. And yet they don’t. I find this very weird. Though this is very bizarre indeed it is not as weird at North Carolina dealing with the problem of global warming by legislating against it (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jun/01/north-carolina-sea-level-rises) but it is part of the same family of collective insanity.

Why do apparently rational people place such enormous credence in legislation to the point that they take precedence over the laws of physics and what any sane person would recognise as common sense? These kinds of legislation are classic examples of hard technologies but, unlike a manufacturing process or restrictive computer program, they are enacted by human beings who could very easily behave differently.

While these examples make such craziness plain to see, we constantly do the same kind of things in our institutions and businesses. I wish I’d kept a track of the number of times someone has objected to a sensible course of action in a committee meeting because it is not in accordance with the regulations. I’ve seen students fail courses despite clearly demonstrating their competence because work was submitted one minute later than allowed or because the rubrics are too inflexible to accommodate what they have done. I’ve been told that I cannot use a particular form of assessment because the system cannot record it. I’ve watched rooms full of very intelligent people make ridiculous decisions because they are hamstrung by some earlier decision they or someone else made. The legal profession has become an industry for those who can operate the machinery to make it do stupid and evil things. I’m far from immune to it myself: I recently failed a student (in both senses of the word) because of my unwarranted adherence to a set of marking criteria that I had actually devised myself. Because of such craziness I recently had to take a basic English Language competency exam despite being not only a native English speaker but actually having taught English, having won awards for my skills, being an experienced reviewer and editor, and having scores of English publications to my name.  

If rules and regulations are too inflexible to accommodate logic and common sense then a) the rules should change and, in the interim, b) we should ignore them and do what we know to be right. OK, I know, that way a different form of madness lies, but at least we should be aware of when we are bending to the machine and try to remember to act mindfully as human beings, not just as cogs in a machine.

Address of the bookmark: http://austriantimes.at/news/Around_the_World/2012-06-07/42178/Dead_Heat

EdgeRank

A neat site set up to explain how Facebook’s powerful and profitable EdgeRank algorithm works. Very straightforward and easily understood explanation if a little lacking in detail (probably because the precise details are a moving target and likely secret in places).

Address of the bookmark: http://edgerank.net/

Collective values

Terry Anderson and I have written a fair bit about the different social forms that apply in (at least) an educational context. We reckon that they fall fairly neatly into physically overlapping but conceptually distinct categories of groups, nets and sets. In the past, we used the term ‘collectives’ instead of ‘sets’ but we have come to realise that collectives are something else entirely.This post starts with an overview of the distinctions and then drifts into vaguer territory in an attempt to uncover what it might be like for something to have meaning for a social entity. That’s a rather bizarre concept at first glance: is there any sense at all in which a collection of people, not the people within that collection but the collection itself, can feel or think anything and, if not, how can anything be said to have meaning to it? And yet, oddly, we do ascribe human attributes to collections of people all the time in our everyday speech – ‘Apple is a creative company’, ‘Canada got another gold medal’, ‘We came top of the league’, ‘the crowd is angry’, ‘this is the most enthusiastic class I’ve ever taught’, ‘Google beat Oracle in the court case’, ‘Athabasca University is committed to open learning’ and so on. While this is often just a shorthand notation for something else or a poetic metaphor, the ubiquity of such language makes it worth examining further.

Groups, nets, sets and collectives 

Groups are the stuff of conventional teaching and learning: they are distinct and intentional entities that people join and know that they are members. You are in a group or out of it: you might be more or less engaged, but there is no real in-between state. Groups are generally characterised by things like purposes, collaboration, hierarchies, roles, exclusion. We know a lot about groups and their effects on learning, and the whole field of social constructivist models of teaching and learning is based on them.

Networks are more tenuous entities. To join a network you connect with one or more of its nodes. You might intentionally wish to make connections with particular people or kinds of people, but a network has no formal constitution, no innate roles and hierarchies, no innate exclusion: it’s about individuals and their connections with one another. It is composed of nothing but connections and ties and has no formal boundaries. Networks are traversable and offer ways of linking and connecting to others and their knowledge. Learning in networks tends to be informal, connected and undirected by any individual. Networks are great for on-demand and serendipitous learning, combining social ties with unbounded knowledge.

Sets are about categories and topics. Set-based learning is about finding people and knowledge based on shared characteristics, typically a topic about one wishes to learn. Wikipedia, YouTube, and Google Search epitomise the nature and value of sets in learning, with ascending social interest sites like Pinterest or Quora beginning to enter the fray. However, libraries and bookshops are also primarily set-oriented, so this is nothing new. Unlike networks, there may be no direct connection with others and certainly no expectation of sustained interaction (though it may occur and develop into other social forms). Unlike groups, there is no formal constitution of a collection of individuals. It is just a bunch of people joined (in a set-theory sense) by a shared interest.

When social forms act together as a single entity, they become collectives – not a social form, as such, but the result of social forms and the interactions of individuals within them. A collective may be the result of direct or indirect interactions of individual autonomous agents, such as may be found in natural social forms like ant or termite nests, herds, flocks or shoals or, in human systems, in the operations of money markets, mobs, stock exchanges, group-think and forest path formation. The ‘invisible hand’ is a collective in action, the result of myriad local interactions rather than a deliberate global plan. The environment plays a strong role in this: things like the availability of resources, sight-lines, weather patterns, topology and more play a role in determining how such dynamics play out.

In computer-based systems, the combination that leads to a collective is not just a result of the emergent results of individual agents but may be effected and consequently notably affected by a machine: Amazon recommendations, Google Search, PayPal reputations and so on are all combining intelligent and independent actions of humans using algorithms in a machine in order to affect human action. The computer system extends what is possible through direct/indirect interaction alone, but it is still powered by individual intelligent beings making intelligent choices. It leads to a cyborg entity where collective emergence is part-human, part-machine. This makes such systems very powerful and flexible as a means to create collective intelligence that is directed to some end, rather than being simply an emergent feature of a complex system that happens to have value. Not only does the environment itself play a role in shaping behaviour, as in ‘natural’ systems, but it actually creates some of the rules of interaction. In effect, it bends and sometimes creates the rules of social physics.

Values in collections of people

In some sense, groups, sets, nets are all identifiable entities in the world that achieve some kind of action or purpose that is distinct from the individual actions or purposes of the people of which they are comprised. Clay Shirky talked of them as first class objects – things in themselves. But are these entities, these first class objects, anything like people? Are there values we can ascribe to them? Do they have intentions and purposes that are analogous to those of individuals? Do they have attitudes that are separable or different from the attitudes of those that comprise them? This is a problem that my student Eric Von Stackelberg has been exploring in his masters thesis and he has made some very interesting progress on this by using categories, that are used in psychology to describe individual values, as a means of describing group values (‘group’ used here in the generic sense of a collection of people of some identifiable sort). I’ve been challenging him to clarify what it would mean for that to be true. Can a bunch of people (not the individuals, the bunch itself) be kind, or hedonistic, or happy, or avaricious, or whatever in a manner that is meaningfully different from saying that the individuals themselves, or even a majority of them, have those attitudes? It seems that a corollary of that implies we might ascribe to them something akin to emotion. Could a bunch of people (the bunch, not the people in the bunch) feel happiness, amusement, tiredness, anger, pain, hate or love? I find this a difficult concept to get my head around. And yet…

It seems intuitively obvious that there is something organism-like in a social cluster. It is certainly normal to speak of organizational values, national values, group beliefs, group norms and so on. Athabasca University, for example treats itself as a unified entity in its mission statement that talks of values, purposes and intentions as though it were (almost) a human being. Corporations are treated in the law of some countries almost exactly like people (albeit odd ones, given that all would be diagnosed as having, on analysis, serious psychopathic disorders). Nations are very similar – we can talk of America invading Afghanistan without batting an eyelid, even though it is very clearly not something that is literally or physically the case in the way it would be were, say, a bully to pick on someone in a playground. A similar but far more worrisome phrase like ‘the French have always despised the English’ sounds like it plays on a similar notion but suggests something rather different. When we say that a country has invaded another we are talking about a group activity, something organized and intentional, whereas when we suggest that a whole population of people thinks in a certain way we are talking about a set: people with the shared attribute of nationality (the same applies to race, or gender, or physical attribute, etc – that way bigotry lies). There are interesting hybrids: it is normal to say ‘we won’ when a hockey team wins even though ‘we’ had negligible input or nothing to do with it at all. We identify at a set level (we, the supporters of the team) in a manner that encompasses the team (a distinct group). It is harder to find examples of networks being treated in quite the same way, though the flow of memes that is so easily facilitated through social networking sites may be an example of values of a sort being a feature of networks. However, the innately diffuse nature of a network means it is significantly less likely to have values of its own. It may be predicated on individuals’ values (e.g a network of religious believers) but a network itself does not seem to have any, at least at first glance. Networks are primarily about individuals and their connections to other individuals, each seeing their part of the network from their own unique perspective. This is not promising territory to find anything apart from emergent patterns of value.

There are natural parallels though, that suggest an alternative view. It makes no sense to think of an ant colony as just a load of autonomous ants – the colony itself is undoubtedly a super-organism and an ant from such a colony is, on its own, not a meaningful entity: it is constituted only in its relation to others, as part of a single network. We can use telological language about the colony, and even ascribe to it wants, desires and intentions. It is also absolutely reasonable to think of an organism like a human being as a group/network/set of tightly coupled cells that are behaving, together, as a single unified entity that is not dissimilar to an ant colony in its complexity and interdependence. An individual cell may live on its own, but its meaning only becomes apparent in the presence of others. Even at a cellular level, our cells are a community of different symbiotic organisms. The vast majority of the cells in our bodies don’t even have human DNA (that still staggers me – what are we?) but we still cannot think of ourselves as anything other than individuals that have values, intentions, meaning and – well – an autonomous life of their own. Are social forms so very different? It seems that at least one contained network that constitutes an entity may well have values because, well, we have values and we can be viewed as networks. In fact, we can also be thought of as sets and, in some senses, as groups.

While chatting about this kind of thing, a friend recently remarked that perhaps the most crucial value that we can ascribe to an individual is the value of survival: the will to survive. An arbitrary collection of entities does not have this. If we are thinking in terms of organisms, then I guess we might more properly think of it in evolutionary terms as a bunch of genes seeking to survive, but that’s a layer of abstraction higher than needed here.

At the individual organism level it is the organism that tries to survive. This is one obvious reason that it is logical to think of an ant, termite or bee colony as a single organism: individuals will readily sacrifice themselves for the colony exactly as the cells in our own bodies continuously sacrifice themselves in order to protect and sustain the entity that we recognise as a person. We can easily see this survival imperative in intentionally created groups, from small departments to sewing circles, from gangs and teams to companies to countries (groups). If a group exists, it will typically try to preserve itself, and individual members may often be seen as expendable in meeting that need: thing of countries at war, political parties, hockey teams and so on. We can also see it in less rigidly defined entities such as cultures (sets/nets) and institutions (sets/groups). Even though individuals may have no formal connections with one another with, at most, tenuous networks and no unifying constitution, the simple fact of observable similarities and shared features leads to a self-reinforcing crowd effect that leads to survival. Often, intentional groups will be formed to support these but the interesting thing is that they are not groups defending their own ‘lives’ but a kind of collective antibody formed to protect the broader, sometimes barely tangible, set. People who form organizations to defend society against some challenge to what they see as being its central cultural, aesthetic, ethical or social values are doing just that. The set of which they feel a part is somehow greater than the group that they form to protect it.

It is harder to see this in human networks. Although there do appear to be emergent and dynamically stable features in many networks, that’s just it: they are emergent features like a solonic wave in a river, the rhythmic dripping of a tap, or a whorl of clouds in a storm. It makes far less sense to talk of a cloud formation as trying to survive than it does of an ant colony. We do, however, see moods and trends spread through networks – if you know people who are getting fatter then you are far more likely to become fat yourself, for instance, and depression is contagious. It is reasonable to surmise that values spread in much the same way: indeed, if we look at extremes such as the spread of Naziism or the growth of fundamental religions, there is a very strong sense in which networks act as conduits for value. But I think that’s it: they are conduits, not containers of value. Whatever has values may consist of networks that facilitate the spread or even the formation of those values, but it is the thing, not the network, that is what we care about here.

All of this leads me to suspect that the social forms that Terry and I identified as different in their pedagogical uses and affordances have some fundamental characteristics that go quite a way beyond that and relate to and intersect with one another in quite distinctively different ways. When we picture them as a Venn diagram it homogenizes these differences and makes it seem as though there are simply overlaps between vaguely similar entities, but there is more to it. Networks provide conduits for the spread of value between and within sets and groups. They are not the only conduits by any means: for example, if the human race were attacked by an alien civilization then I think it unlikely that a network would be needed to spread a range of values that would surface fairly ubiquitously (as a set characteristic), though it might help spread attitudes to how we should respond to such a threat. The same is true of many things in the more mundane realms of broadcast media, city planning and publication, not to mention the effects of natural features of the environment. Part of the reason for the distinctive culture and values in Canada, for example, is surely related to its dangerously cold climate that makes assistance to and from others a very strong necessity, plus a million other things like the opportunities afforded by its abundant natural resources and its proximity to other places. Prairie people are not quite the same as mountain people for reasons that go beyond historical happenstance and path dependencies. This is all about sets: shared characteristics and features. Sets can help to generate values: the fact that shorter-than-average people have to interact differently with the environment than taller-than-average people in many different ways leads to (at least) greater tendencies to share some values. The fact that people are collocated in a region, quite apart from network and group facets that emerge, means they are likely to share some attitudes and tendencies. It’s simple evolutionary theory. It’s why the finches in the Galapagos Islands have evolved differently: they have to interact with their different environments, and those environments have varied constraints and affordances. Other factors like path dependencies play an enormous role. Networks have a crucial part here too as co-evolution occurs not only in response to the environment but in response to the interconnections between agents in the system. In human systems, groups are both containers of networks and are themselves nodes in networks, so there are layers of scale that make this quite a complex thing.

The complexity becomes much more manageable if, instead of focusing on the social forms of aggregation, we think of values as being attached not to the aggregations themselves but to the collectives that emerge from them. Collectives are, by definition, behaviours that emerge from multiple interactions and are different from those interactions. A human can be viewed as a net, a set or even a group (there are hierarchies of organisation in which the brain might be seen as a controller) but it is the collective, the emergent entity that arises out of sets, nets and groups that is recognisably an individual, that has values. In the development of nationalist or religious values, it is the operation of algorithms that makes the set, net or group of which it is comprised into something distinct and potentially able to embody values, typically resulting from a mix of interactions combined with intentional categorisation by individuals – a collective.

I don’t see any of this as suggesting even a glimmer of consciousness but it does seem at least possible that collectives can, at least sometimes, be described as having tropisms and to talk, perhaps loosely, in terms of intentionality. Whether this is enough to ascribe values to them is another matter, but it is not entirely absurd. We sometimes talk of plants as ‘liking the sun’ or ‘liking the shade’ in ways that probably have more to do with metaphor than beliefs about plant feelings, but there is a sense that it is true. It is even more obviously true in animals: even single-celled organisms are slightly more than just billiard balls bouncing round in reaction to their surroundings. They have purposes, aversions, likes and dislikes. Some exhibit fascinatingly complex behaviours – slime moulds, for example. It is not a great stretch from there to talking about human collectives in similar terms. Financial markets, for instance, are archetypal examples of human collectives that in principle need little or no machine mediation, yet move in complex ways that are not simply the sum of their parts. And, interestingly, we talk blithely of bull and bear markets as though they were in some way alive and, in some sense, imbued with feelings and even emotions. And maybe, in some sense, they are. 

ePortfolios – Overview (Helen Barrett)

A great post by Helen Barrett that very clearly describes, in detail, the two distinct facets of e-portfolios, as process and as product. The rest of the site contains great examples, explanations and ways of using Google Docs (and many other tools) for both facets.

I particularly like https://sites.google.com/site/eportfolioapps/overview/blog-entry-eportfolios-and-googleapps which nicely captures the inevitable confusions that occur when institutions try to harden the many processes and kinds of product in the e-portfolio field by selecting tools to support them. 

Address of the bookmark: https://sites.google.com/site/eportfolioapps/overview