Later today I’ll be giving a talk at the AU Learning Services conference, so here are my slides.

Softening the machine (note – only available to logged in users) BIG DOWNLOAD ALERT! May slow down the server if many people do this at once. UPDATE: Scribd version of the slides for viewing in a Web browser, no big download needed, at http://tinyurl.com/37hpr37

For those who want the condensed version, here is a stream of consciousness brain dump on the message I am trying to get acroos:

Like all educational systems, Athabasca University is a machine, composed of many technologies. Some of these are directly about teaching, some with processes around it, some with helping people to work together and more. Because Athabasca developed as a distance institution in the industrial age of distance learning, based primarily on the postal service and telephones, both its institutional and teaching processes became brittle: essentially, Michael Moore’s theory of transactional distance that treats distance as a continuum between structure and dialogue puts us in a tricky situation: limits on dialogue inevitably mean an increase in structure. Technologies developed from the Web 1.0 era that enable richer and more inclusive communication are changing that but they are based on a model of closed groups, focused and task-centric. And that tends to be the nature of dialogue, both in teaching and in the daily workings of the university. The real social connection stuff is still largely left to happen in more or less occasional face to face meetings. Web 2.0 technologies open that out and level the playing field, enabling serendipity, creative engagement, filling those spaces between the islands – that’s what the Landing is about, in both teaching and in ‘learning organization’ terms. However, the Landing is a soft technology: it offers enormous potential to increase the ‘adjacent possible’ but that comes at a price in terms of difficulty of use. The harder technologies from which most of Athabasca’s processes are built have the big benefit of making it easier, but at a cost of constraint. So, we are evolving the Landing so that it can make hard things softer, but also hard things softer. And it’s worth putting in the effort because the payoff can be large.

Nice article from Discover Magazine, 2005, on how Web 2.0 is different in the ways information and ideas spread when compared with simple hypertext.

Address of the bookmark: http://discovermagazine.com/2005/oct/emerging-technology

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.