Not at all, I fear. A primitive bit of technology but a sophisticated business model that might well work if the technology offered more. The crossover between open and closed approaches is potentially very powerful. But, as far as I can tell from a fairly cursory exploration, sadly this potential innovation seems to reinforce the wrong values and pedagogies like all the rest and seems sub-moodle in functionality. Sigh.

Address of the bookmark: http://nixty.com/course/Structure-and-Interpretation-of-Computer-Programs-MIT-Eric-Grimson

Very nice article from one of my favourite bloggers on education, Donald Clark, covering a multitude of issues including a scary story of a positively evil self-serving, exam-result-drive school, the benefits of mobile technologies, outsourcing, home tutoring and more. I was particularly struck by his comments applying to the Learndirect call centre in Leicester, UK, that could (or should) equally apply to Athabasca University:

The learners are pleased not to be attending a class, college or school, as that, for them, is associated with past failure in their own lives. They are learning in the comfort and safe environment of their own home, free from the tyranny of time and location. 

The association between institutional learning and past failure is one that we at Athabasca should be doing everything we can to break. In the the admissions process, our distance-learning approach, and, to an extent, many of our pedagogies and other processes we are successful in doing this. However, there are a few areas where we could do more, most notable of which is in how we assess.

First to go should be written exams at exam centres. It astonishes me that we choose to bow to ignorance and prejudice in still allowing, let alone promoting or condoning, sit-down written examinations. I have particular loathing for those taken unseen, especially when the rest of our course may be entirely online. Aside from being anti-pedagogic, de-motivational, inauthentic and guilty of many other atrocities and crimes against learners, there is nothing more certain to be associated with past failure in a student’s mind than a sit-down exam when coming to an open university such as ours. If anyone feels that a written exam is necessary they should be forced to make a case to a jury of peers and get special approval, explaining how it shows ability in an authentic setting. If the subject being learned typically requires a person to sit down in a strange place, with a pen and paper, and produce (typically reproduce) knowledge under enormous pressure, in silence, without the assistance of other people or machines, then I am fine with it. If not, it should be scrapped.

I think we also have a tendency to over-assess, often for the best of reasons: assessment can be a very powerful formative tool, helping to correct misapprehensions, offer guidance, subject-knowledge support, motivational support and more but, maybe more importantly, in our unpaced courses it enforces a process of dialogue and communication between learner and tutor. However, when linked with marks and turned into something summative, it can become a major source of stress, not to mention a recipe for the worst kind of externally regulated extrinsic motivation and consequent destruction of intrinsic motivation. I don’t see the point of giving a summative assessment of a course until very near to its end apart from to make a tutor’s life easier. Formative assessment is wonderful, and there is no harm in loosely enforcing a process. Structure and scaffolding can help to maintain motivation, and ability to work to deadlines within a formal or semi-formal structure is a valid and authentic learning outcome in many cases (though, if that is the skill to be learned, should not be assessed till students have had a chance to learn it in the context of the subject being taught). It is also perfectly acceptable to use the outputs and process artefacts of the formative process as evidence in a summative assessment. However, in assigning final grades directly to outputs, we transfer the target of that motivation from mastery of the subject being learned to the passing of the assessment. Formative assessment should allow students to improve and fill in the gaps so that they can pass the summative assessment more easily and, only when they are ready, should they submit something to us in our role as judge and jury.

If we assume that our job is to teach, if we do our jobs well (enthusing, motivating, providing subject knowledge, supporting and managing the process of learning) then there should never be any students with less than 100% on the final summative assessment. Period. I realise that is, in our current system, unrealistic, especially as we play the dual role of educators and sorters of abilities. It is also, for some few students, too hard: whether through wilful efforts to avoid work, lack of interest in the subject and/or a rare innate lack of ability, the effort involved in bringing some students to a level of mastery is not economically viable for them or us to achieve. It’s not that it couldn’t be done: there is no human-created subject that cannot, with enough assistance, time, effort and patience, be learned by any able-minded human being. It’s just that, sometimes, that time can be very long indeed, and the care, effort and patience might be better spent on other things. Be that as it may, I think 100% pass-rates with 100% achievement is a worthwhile goal to aim for and maybe, if we see every lost percentage mark as a failure on our part, we might try a little harder to teach and spend a little less time trying to pick holes and seek out weaknesses.

Address of the bookmark: http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com/2010/10/faceless-schools.html

Mark Zuckerberg on the new Facebook groups feature. Nice to see Facebook starting to catch up with the rest of the world on this, looks like a good feature (also some very interesting announcements re exportable profiles and greater dashboard control today), very clearly recognising differentiation in social roles and interests beyond the ludicrously one-dimensional graph formed by ‘friends’. 

Address of the bookmark: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=434691727130

An article stating the obvious (if you build it then, unless you are Wayne, it’s pretty unlikely they will come) but it’s always worth re-stating. What makes social systems work is people, supported by tools that work in ways that help them, not hinder them.

I like the notion of ‘tribe-leader’ one of the interviewees mentions: so much of getting the impetus to sustain a social system is about champions and enthusiasts doing things and using tools for their intrinsic worth and benefits.

It seems to me that, given a very large, diverse and multi-faceted population of potential users of a system like this, where some needs are known but most are unknowable in advance, especially in detail, that we should start with a range of very soft technologies, ones that can be adapted to different needs and purposes with great flexibility. However, they should not all be so soft that they are an empty vessel: there should be sufficient hardness that different tools can be adapted to different purposes with a bit of precision: blogs, wikis, discussion fora, instant messaging, bookmarking, file sharing, for instance. As needs start to become more fixed and clear, it should be possible to build on those technologies and add new functions and constraints to harden them to fit people’s needs more precisely. However, that has to be seen as a dynamic and shifting process so it should be equally easy to soften the hard things again when needs change. Hardening soft technologies is pretty easy: it’s a well-known problem for which we have many solutions. Softening hard things is way harder.

The softer a tool is, the harder it is to use and the more prone it is to error and confusion, because we have to add extra layers of process to make it work as we wish. email, for instance, is a very soft technology indeed and we bend it to purposes as diverse as arranging meetings, file storage and backup, newsletters, informal dialogues, chats, group meetings, coursework submission, formal feedback and much much more. Each different use requires a different set of norms, rules and conventions to which all participants must adhere. This becomes obvious when people do the ‘wrong thing’ such as when emailing the wrong type of message to the wrong people. Harder, more specialised technologies like file servers for file storage, calendar servers for arranging meetings, instant messaging clients for sending instant messages, assignment submission systems for submitting coursework and so on can reduce the errors and make the processes they enable easier to perform, but they do so at the cost of flexibility. Before long, we reach a point where it becomes possible to say, with a straight face and no hint of irony, ‘the computer says no’.

Soft technologies are hard, but flexible. Hard technologies are easy, but rigid. We have to design systems, or ecologies of systems, that let us shift effortlessly from soft to hard and back again. 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/enterprise/not-every-blog-has-its-day-20100913-159bf.html

This is a flawed and biased report that seems driven by ideology as much as the figures, especially in the (generally good but unusually appreciative) qualitative part of the report but also in the choice of questions and the curiously constructed Internet well-being index (which oddly seems to include a load of mobile technologies to help boost the positive results). For all that, the figures are interesting and suggest that, at least for a segment of the populace, toys with connections really might make people happier. Particularly interesting that it reinforces the observation that women on the whole like the social stuff, men on the whole like the flashing lights and buttons. Also interesting comparisons of different countries’ usage and the differences between new and seasoned users. It’s also a good antidote to the anti-net journalism that still exists in some sectors (curiously, especially those that thrive on sales of dead trees) that at least makes its data collection methods very clear so we can draw our own conclusions.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/info-dividend-full-report.pdf

The word ‘cyborg’ was born the same year as me. Kevin Kelly celebrates with this thought provoking piece on how we have always been cyborgs. Technology defines us in a very real sense as we have co-evolved with it. Good stuff.

Address of the bookmark: http://quietbabylon.com/2010/domesticated-cyborgs-kevin-kelly/

Very interesting approach to teaching that sounds surprisingly sound in concept and execution. Students learn skills through playing Starcraft and reflect, discuss, explain etc. Great idea!

Address of the bookmark: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/25626/

I’ll start with the simple conclusion: no. Oh alright. Yes. Yes and no.

Somewhat fancifully, language is sometimes described as a tool, but that’s not right either. It’s more like a toolset, a massive and interlocking collection of tools that can be disassembled, reassembled, aggregated and combined to create many things, including more tools and more toolsets. The word ‘and’ might be a tool, but it has no meaning until combined with others into assemblies that perform tasks and it is those assemblies that are the technologies, not the language per se. In extreme cases, language does real work in changing the world directly: by making a performative utterance like “I do” the tool has become the technology that performs the action itself. In most cases, however, it is to do with communication and, I think more significantly, sense-making. Words can be used in an indefinitely large, almost certainly infinite number of ways to achieve a probably infinite range of results and effects. Language thus leads to an infinite range of technologies. More than the computer even, language is the universal technology. We can use language to manipulate ideas, create and transform concepts, design, explore, analyse and more in order to achieve some goal or goals. We can use language to manipulate language, and we often do. We can construct things in language and use those constructions to make other constructions. In language, a single word can express the abstraction of a billion ideas. Add a second word and we change that abstraction utterly. This is a mighty powerful toolset.

Like any technology and more than possibly any other, it takes a great deal of time to learn how to use a language at all, let alone well. It is in many ways the fundamental human invention, hugely more important and fundamental than fire, the wheel or the Internet. We can be human without fire, but to be human without language is barely conceivable, at least when viewed in the general sense, There are a few individual humans without language (babies for instance) but, were lack of language to become widespread, we would no longer be human.

Languages don’t have to be verbal, of course: the advantages of verbal (and similarly sign) languages bring are also there to a greater or lesser extent in visual languages, musical languages, architectural languages and more. Words are not the only fruit by any means. However, the language of words is perhaps our oldest, most highly evolved and most flexible technological toolset and the richness of grammar and syntax it has evolved give it some large advantages over other languages we have invented. 

Language provides a toolset that, first and foremost, is not so much about communication as it is about thinking: it is an incredibly powerful, highly evolved technology to amplify and enhance thought. As we put thoughts into language symbols and connections we condense them and formalise them, allowing us to chain thoughts, hold more of them in our minds at once, build them into richer edifices. Just as writing is a thinking tool that lets us offload some of our cognition, allowing us to create longer and more elaborate chains of ideas that feed back and let us create new and enhanced ideas, language itself takes ideas, lets us abstract them and feed those abstractions back so that we can construct more thoughts, richer thoughts, more elaborate ideas. Learning a language might seem to be to do with communication but really, in learning to talk, we are learning to use a set of technologies that enable us to think. And from that ability we derive almost all other technologies. 

But, of course, the more obvious face of language is that of communication and here, too, that ability the technologies it enables give us, to symbolise, abstract and construct, also enables us to amplify and enhance the thinking of others: to act as a kind of hive mind in which the exchange of symbols enables the hive to build richer, deeper, more creative, more diverse thoughts, individually and collectively. Each new language act that we engage in with others is an opportunity to spread technologies, build ideas, learn, create, discover, enhance. It’s a wonderful virtuous circle that leads to an ever expanding explosion of knowledge in our species as a whole even though we, as individuals, are likely getting dumber and are very likely dumber than some of our distant extinct cousins. It is not intelligence that makes us so ‘successful’ as a species: it is how we use technologies to amplify that intelligence.

Benjamin Franklin famously defined our species as man the toolmaker – homo faber as distinct from homo sapiens. It seems to me that our sapience is at least as determined by our toolmaking, most notably in the form of language, as our toolmaking is determined by our sapience. Probably more so. 

I’ve been spending a lot of time over the past couple of years thinking about what we mean when we talk about ‘learning technologies’. Here’s a thought or two to conjure with…

Is an abacus a technology? I’d say no. It’s a tool. It is only when we use it for a purpose, utilising the principles that it embodies that it becomes a technology. We could use it to hit someone on the head and it would not be the same technology as when we use it to perform addition or subtraction, even though it would be the same tool. What makes it the technology we call an abacus is that we can use the tool to exploit ways that numbers work to perform operations on them.

What if we imagine an abacus in our heads? There is no physical tool, just a representation of that tool in our minds. I think I can do that. I can certainly perform mental arithmetic by imagining and remembering the various rows and beads of a simple abacus. I think that means that it is still a technology even though there is no actual tool present. In fact, I can do that without telling anyone that I have done so, so there doesn’t need to be any actual manifestation of the technology in any form save what goes on in my brain, and it actually works, just like a physical abacus. It is a lot harder than using an actual abacus though.

Taking that further, the ways that we are taught to add, subtract, multiple and divide are using pretty much the same underlying abstract principle as that of the abacus. Those methods are therefore technologies and, if I do them in my head, they remain so. Again, using paper is easier, but they remain technologies even if no writing is involved. So, a thinking process can be a technology. Interesting. Especially as it is possible to think of a computer as a glorified abacus in some senses.

Is this a universally applicable rule to all technologies? No.

If I imagine a four-wheeled, petrol-driven road vehicle in my head, is that a technology? Absolutely not. If it were, I would just be able to imagine driving from A to B and I would magically find myself transported to B, along a road, by the power of thought alone. The difference between the cases is in the phenomena I am exploiting in using the technology. For all that I wish it would, my brain is not able to directly exploit internal combustion, friction, momentum and so on. It might handle the rules of the road and driving skills on its own but much of the technological assembly that defines a car is beyond the power of thought to create. It needs metal, rubber, glass, manufacturing machinery, asphalt, amongst other things. The abacus is a technology for improving thinking and it therefore occupies a special position in the world of possible technologies inasmuch as the phenomena that it utilises and the uses to which we put it are all to do with thought and cognition. Which is, of course, quite a bit of what is involved in learning.

There are things that we call learning technologies that are all about thought, but there are also other things that are more car-like inasmuch as they cannot live entirely inside our heads. Foremost among those are technologies of communication (one sense in which a computer is absolutely not just a glorified abacus). If I get some time I’ll be writing more about that soon.

1. When did you begin blogging. What were your reasons?
   It depends what you mean by ‘blog’. I have shared my thoughts via the Web since around mid-1993 (around the time the Cello and Mosaic browsers were released) but until the mid-late 90s only on static web pages. I did it for the same complex of reasons that underpin most sharing I do with the world. I want to make a difference, gain social capital, give something back rather than simply consuming, archive my thoughts, share ideas on an open stage, it reminds me I am part of a bigger community, establishes a social identity (of a sort) etc. My first blog of that name was probably around 2000 – by that time I was using blogs in teaching as they are a great way to create an idea-centric dialogue, share easily, connect disconnected learners and are wonderfully motivating (until the spammers hit) so it seemed churlish not to do the same as my students. Before that I had created and used my own collaborative bookmark system (CoFIND) that was very blog-like in many ways, including comments, RSS feeds, tags etc, and that continued to feed into my blog until a couple of years ago. Part of the motivation for doing that was to use the system to see how it behaved and performed, and to encourage others to use it. I also really like to play with toys and technologies. It’s a curiosity thing.
2. Has your blogging changed over this time? How? (topics, focus, frequency, etc.)
   Very up and down indeed at multiple timescales. My blogspot (formerly blogger) blog has 9 whole posts starting from 2001, an average of one a year. I would post to my various CoFIND systems many times a week in the early 2000s, and have had flurries of activity, latterly on this site and formerly on my old Elgg site at the University of Brighton since around 2006. I still have phases of rabid activity, punctuated by pauses of a month or more. Sometimes the ideas flow and I have the time and/or motivation, sometimes they don’t and/or I don’t. The vast majority of my blogging activities relate to my research and/or teaching, and they nearly always have. 
3. How has blogging helped you with learning?
   Any writing that involves creating, analysing, constructing ideas and knowledge offloads the cognitive process and extends one’s capability to think: we don’t have to hold it all in our heads at the same time and can connect and organise many more ideas than we could without it. I often don’t know what I think until I write it and writing it encourages further thoughts. In that sense, because a blog helps to motivate the writing process without the same strictures of an academic conference or journal paper, it definitely helps me to learn on an ongoing basis.
   Blogs are a long way from being unconstrained in form and content – the simple fact that they are mostly public ensures that – but they offer liberties that more traditional academic forms exclude. They let me think and behave more like a journalist, which is fun as I can explore ideas that I might exclude from an academic paper because of justified fears they would be shot down in flames. The fact that it is for public consumption forces me to be a bit more careful about what I write and to reflect more, analyse more, correct more. That’s a learning process.
   The dialogues that sometimes ensue also help me to co-construct a shifting view of reality with others. Being able to get different perspectives, being encouraged to re-formulate and adapt ideas to explain them better, to argue, to clarify, all helps me to learn. It’s a bit like teaching which, as we all know, is the best way to learn.
   I also like the ability to easily flick through old ideas, comments, sites I have found that easily get forgotten and link them to new thoughts and ideas: it’s a variation on the same theme of cognitive offloading, and of course is an explicitly reflective process that helps both cement ideas and inform metacognitive introspection.
   Blogs also give me permission to sit back and think: it’s a bit like the value of going to a class or a conference, a large part of which relates to the simple fact that you have explicitly put time aside to think about something and engage with it. If we don’t have such formalised ways of making space to learn then we tend not to do it so much.
   And, naturally, I have also learned unbelievably large amounts from other people’s blogs – a major source of inspiration and a good source of information.  
4. What are the main reasons you have persisted in blogging?
   I research social computing systems for learning and use them in my teaching – it’s a recursive motivation amplifier for me with positive feedback loops all the way down the line.
5. How do you think your blogging activity will change in future?
   Greater connection and greater contextualisation. Here on the Landing I often bookmark things that I find interesting in a blog-like way as well as blogging. I also Tweet things that catch my eye pretty regularly, post things to the Wire, update things (rarely) at acadmia.edu, blog at Brighton and much more. Pulling it all together is a challenge, not because it is technically hard, but because of my increasing awareness of the need and want to provide different things for different audiences or the same audiences in different contexts. One of the major tools being developed for the Landing is based on this idea – that we have many different social, academic, work and personal contexts that we need to switch between very regularly and constantly. We already have the ability to choose who sees what: the next step is to allow people to select what is seen, how it is seen, according to context.
6. How has the Landing influenced your blogging?
   I am strongly aware when blogging here that I know some of the people who will read it very well, some quite well, some a little, some not at all. I am more aware than usual of the effects it will have on those I do know. Not that this always makes me sensitive or diplomatic! In some cases it actually gives me wicked pleasure to know that I will irritate some people and stir up hornets’ nests. In fact, I’m sometimes a bit disappointed when people I expect to have a contrary opinion don’t take up the bait. Contrariwise, I am also very aware of how supportive this community can be and both give help and receive it in many ways, academically, practically and emotionally. In both the stirring and the soothing there is an underlying dynamic that makes this very different from other social sites I participate in, and it is down to implicit trust, I think, brought on by explicit membership in this community. This is a shifting community of groups and networks with some shared goals, ideals and purposes and a shared sense of belonging and support, even amongst those we barely know, which binds in a way most social networks of a more general kind fail to manage. It is partly because other social networks are more commonly based on affinity and connection – we choose who we connect with in a very explicit way. That can be true here as well of course, but selected from a subset of the world that is that AU community. We have deliberately set default permissions for posts on this site (logged-in users) that mean we are mostly also connecting with others who we have *not* chosen to connect with but who are part of this closed and trustworthy community. This gives two big gains: the first is that we get diversity of beliefs, opinions, interests and so on that would not happen if we were only deliberately connecting with individuals via a personal network of friends. We would get more diversity if things were entirely public but what we would gain in diversity we would lose in trust (on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog). The second big gain is therefore that we know we are sharing with those we can trust and, in sharing, helping to further increase the trust and connection between people: to build trust we need to expose ourselves and our vulnerabilities, foibles, quirks and weaknesses. I think I have displayed quite a few of those aspects of myself on this site!
   I have found it fascinating and delightful to engage in dialogue with people from the AU community that I only slightly know or only know online. It’s tangibly binding and connecting. I feel more a part of a rich academic community than I did before, even though we only have a little over a thousand inhabitants so far. If I didn’t contribute something to that, I don’t think I would feel the same way. Contribution builds connection. And that’s another motivation to blog.