OPEN2LEARN

Comments, teaching & HuffPo Divorce

2011-06-12T10:04:00.001-05:00

My most recent post on the Huffington Post has gotten the most comments to date. (about 290 in 3 days). Most of my other posts generally only got less than 50 comments.

The comments vary widely. On the one hand, you now get to hear what the students in the back of your class are whispering to each other during the lecture. For example, in response to the title of my post "Are the courts biased in favor of mothers, one commenter, wrote, "When someone tells you there are no dumb questions, refer them to this headline." Funny and snarky.

Overall, this post got some very thoughtful and interesting commenters. [These are probably like the students who sit in the front of the class.] For example, 715W posted the following,

The solution is to put divorce into an administrative system rather than the judicial system.
To each divorce case, assign an administrator trained in mediation/conflict resolution.

The commenter goes on the explain more about how this system of managing custody issues would work with this system.

There were also a number of commenter who cited specific research and/or other scholarship that enriched the discussion. Chris Sirhc writes,

"The court's ability to determine the best interest of the child is limited. See Robert Emery's review of custody evaluators. He is particularly daming: 'There is essentially no psychological science to support the measures and constructs designed specifically for the assessment of child custody arrangements for individual children.' "
http://psi.sagepub.com/content/6/1/1.full

In many cases these publications we new to me or added significant new perspectives to the discussion. This is the type of discussion that I would hope my work fosters.

The third type of postings are the personal stories. In many of the cases in this particular post the stories are by men who appear to have had particularly challenging, perhaps unfair treatment by the court system. Michael Morrison wrote,

"I'm one of those odd-ball men who was awarded custody of his daughters. A couple of years later, Mom landed in jail, and decided that she wanted custody of the kids...Remember, she was in jail.

Every few weeks, I'd be subpoenaed to appear in court. The experience was absolutely surreal: She would appear in her finest orange jail garb, and explain to the judge why she thought she should have custody. I would then have to explain why I thought custody shouldn't be awarded to an inmate.

This went on for months. It was absurd, and the court would never have countenanced this sort of lunacy had the genders been reversed."

Overall, I think this was a good discussion.

Huffington Post Social Media & Web Strategy-- Mix Education with Tabloid

2011-03-02T07:15:00.000-06:00

A central challenge in all teaching is to get the attention of the student. So how is this done on the web?

Bob Garfield, On the Media, asks this question of Farad Manjoo of Slate. Here is what he says about the strategy at the Huffington Post:

"One of the brilliant things about what Huffington Post does is it really understands this sort of mix of tabloid news and straight news and politically sensational news better than almost any publication on the Internet. And it has this mix down really well, so that it publishes stories about politics, about legitimate news stories and then it also publishes the kinds you just cited."

So what should this tell the rest of us about education? What is the combination of topics that we might be using to get the attention of our students? In parent education, should be include a place to share cute baby pictures and diaries of new parents? What is the "sensational news" we could include about parenting?

Of course, some will ask, is this appropriate? Again, what should we do here? What compromises our integrity and what is just savvy marketing?

There are a number of good articles at On the Media on web strategy and search engine optimization, strategies for the "most emailed stories" that are worth listening to or reading. Also, note the multiple delivery methods used by On the Media with its content. They did a very thoughtful discussion of the pros and cons of the impact of the internet on society.

Interesting Huff Post pattern

2011-02-24T16:35:00.000-06:00

The editors at Huffington Post are doing a nice job of mixing the various postings-- various practitioners (therapists, lawyers, authors of various types), a little research and lots of celebrity divorces. It would be interesting to see the pattern of page views on all these items, but there may be much to learn about how to get and keep people's attention.

One interesting little episode surrounds a recent study on conflict and divorce by researchers at the U of Michigan.

On December 8, 2011, I posted the following commentary on this study and today (Feb 24, 2011), the authors' did an interview with the Huff Post editors that headlined the page.

Linking News, research and outreach--An example

2011-02-19T08:26:00.002-06:00

One of the central themes in my work (See my proposal for linking science to practice) has been to champion the linking of research, news, and outreach activities in order to connect all these activities in a more synchronous manner.

This past week I found this example based on a research study conducted at the University of Michigan.

In this news release about a study regarding marital conflict there was a link to a website inviting readers to compare their own personal ways of resolving conflict with those of the participants in the study. If you click on this link you are taken to a brief survey that includes a series of questions that appear to be typical questions one would find in marital conflict instrument. After completing the questions, your responses are compared to the "average" responses by survey participants. In the final screen you are also given a variety of referral sources for counseling and other types of help.

The good part of this work is that the this is an interesting way to engage readers in exploring these ideas a little further and also linking them to potential types of help. But there are also substantial limits to this. First, the results that you are provided are not very easy to comprehend unless you are used to reading scientific tables. These results could be provided in a more comprehensible way that indicated in words or with other visual aides that explained the meaning of the results. I am sure that the scientists were reluctant to provide too much "explanation" because of genuine concerns about using a brief tool such as this for "diagnostic" purposes. This is an important consideration, but these results could still be presented in a more insightful way. The other problem is that the only "advice" that is offered by this quiz is counseling. Surely most couples who are seeking insight and/or help do not need this level of intervention. The "help" offered at this point in the quiz/activity could have included self-help books on marriage, links to appropriate websites and other material that addresses couple relationships, etc. In my "perfect" world of linking research and outreach, I would recommend that the authors of the study and/or their colleagues produce some useful activities and/or resources based on their research and professional experiences.

Overall, this is a good step in the right direction for taking more advantage of the distribution of scientific information to the public. This takes it beyond the mere "announcement" of a set of findings and invites the public to explore the ideas more deeply and in this case, apply it to their own personal lives.

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother-- Another opportunity to teach parenting

2011-01-16T13:25:00.008-06:00

The book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua is stirring an important discussion of the role of parents in their children's success. Some of the controversy over this book was stirred up by the Wall Street Journal that titled an article, "Why Chinese Mothers are Superior." But the topics discussed by Ms. Chua raise important questions about parent expectations, discipline, peers, practice, and so forth.

Here are some interesting discussions: Huffington Post:

Slate magazine is hosting a discussion of the book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua on January 27th.

Participating Online about Parenting

2011-01-16T13:13:00.000-06:00

This cartoon which shows a gun with the word "parenting" as the safety switch was a major topic of discussion in my house this week. It raised lots of questions.

1. Are parents to blame for gun violence?
2. Are parents "responsible for gun violence"?
3. What are our responsibilities about dealing with our adult children's positive or negative behaviors?
4. What are the challenges of finding resources/supports for our adult children with difficulties?
5. What are the limits of our ability as parents to influence our children?
6. If not parents, then how do we explain the troublesome behavior of young adults?

We didn't have any firm opinions on these matters. As family life educators and professionals who study parenting, child development and families, should we be talking about this issues. Should we respond to cartoons like this?

Autism: The Long Tail of Misinformation (Seth Mnookin)

2011-01-09T18:49:00.000-06:00

There has been a consensus among scientists for many years that there is little evidence that vaccines cause autism, but that has not stopped many in the general public to continue to believe this idea. In some parts of the US and UK there are still significant numbers of parents who are refusing to have their children vaccinated.

We are still learning how people of using the Internet to maintain ideas that have been discredited in various sources. There is much we need to learn here.

Here are three interesting commentaries that deserve careful consideration as we think about the long tail of misinformation.

Seth Mnookin: The Panic Virus (On the Media interview)-- book--The Panic Virus
Newsweek article-- Autism and the Affluent

Science Friday Paul Offit -interview

Citizen Scientists?

2011-01-01T01:00:00.001-06:00

The web is increasing the opportunities for more people to become involved in science and to participate in data collection, data analysis, etc. This New York Times article highlights a number of efforts to engage people in scientific work. In addition to the examples in the article there are additional links and examples in the comments section.

Almost all these examples are from physical sciences, where are the social and behavioral science examples? We are missing something here?

Half-Life of a Blog Post

2010-12-31T01:00:00.001-06:00

This is old news for veteran bloggers, but I was just curious about my contribution to the Huffington Post Divorce section on the Divorce Research of 2010 and the comments.

The article was posted at 3:23 am, Dec 28, 2010. By Noon that day there were seven comments.

Here are the number of comments between Noon - 8pm that day

Noon     14
1 pm      38
2 pm      52
3 pm      35
4 pm      22
5 pm      17
6 pm       8
7 pm      11
8 pm        5

Between 9 pm and and 10 pm there were five more comments and then between 11 pm and 1 am on Dec 29, 2010, there were 25 comments In the 48 following hours there were 4 additional comments.

This does not mean that this contribution is still not being viewed (I don't have access to these data.), but it does mean that at least in this particular case, the commenting on this post lasted about 12 hours. I am sure that the Huffington Post has more data about the pattern of comments, the demographics of the "commenters" themselves, but this does give you a feel for the brevity of the life of a discussion on the Huffington Post and probably many "news" sites.

Celebrity Divorce as a Teaching Tool

2010-12-30T02:51:00.001-06:00

The most frequent topics on the Huffington Post Divorce page is about celebrity divorces.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/divorce/

I haven't done a systematic analysis, but I would suspect that more than 90% of the postings are about celebrities.

This has made me wonder about whether there are ways to use people's interest in celebrities to teach or to interest people in useful information about divorce, relationships, family life, etc.

Here is an example by one of the editors of Us magazine: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mara-reinstein/what-tiger-woods-jesse-ja_b_801403.html. There are a couple of ideas that probably apply generally to non-celebrity couples such as spending time together and considering who you share information with about your marriage-- for most of us we have little worry about some meddlesome paparazzi or television reporter revealing our lives, but friends and family can be intrusive or harmful in some cases.

But much of what is in this article isn't very helpful to ordinary couples because we don't face the same challenges of high-profile celebrities... so I am not sure if this strategy makes any sense.

It is also possible that "celebrity names and events" can be used to get accidental page views by unsuspecting web surfers or to use as celebrity news events as a bridge to everyday lives. For example, parents fighting over custody as a basis for talking about the effects of custody battles on children and so forth.

I am going to look for opportunities to try out some approaches to incorporating celebrities into my postings.

Reactions to Divorce Research 2010 Blog Post

2010-12-29T09:04:00.000-06:00

About 36 hours ago, Huffington Post Divorce editor, Ashley Reich and I posted the results of ten research articles published in scientific journals in 2010. (see this post for more background.)

As of this morning there were also 300 comments, over 900 re-tweets, and 60+ shares on Facebook. Interesting. The postings are mostly the findings themselves without much embellishment. Six of these studies were in the news earlier in the year, but four of the studies have not had a news release prepared and/or released to the public. Readers also have the opportunity to rate the "most interesting" study and/or findings. Again as of today, the most interesting finding is from Gharzarian and Buehler study of the way in which marital conflict is linked to academic achievement. (complete study here) Again this is a study that I don't think has been in the news in general.

I have not done an extensive analysis of the comments, but they are interesting. Some indicate that there are some savvy readers such as this comment that shows the author is quite familiar with the research literature and methods:

"There is an entire academic industry based on exploring the impacts of divorce on children. Most use a cross-sectional design, examining differences between children from divorced & intact households. These designs lead to self-selection issues (despite attempts to control for confounding factors), as children are not randomly assigned to the divorced or intact group. Longitudinal studies, which circumvent these problems, are becoming more common and often corroborate cross-sectional findings, although the effect sizes are typically much smaller. With regards to the tuition finding, an earlier study of Albuquerque men found that men invested most in the college expenses of their biological children of their current spouse, then roughly equal in current step-children and biological children of previous spouses, and by far the least in former step-children from previous marriages. The fact that these effects were found from both the point of view of the child and the father suggests that the effect is real."

There are also comments like this one which indicates that some readers make it sound like they understand the statistics and scientific methods, but do not completely understand the source and substance of this work:

"I don't doubt at all that divorce has a negative effect on kids... I have made some comments to that idea regarding public education.

But, while there may be correlation—and maybe some causation—I doubt many of these studies are very statistically significant. Are we really supposed to believe that if our parents get divorced we are 100% more likely to have a stroke BECAUSE they decided to get divorced?

Spurious data and info ki//s me... the example we used was that divorce rate (coincidentally) doubled for each country club a man belonged to; therefore, 1 membership doubled the chances, 2 memberships tripled the rate... I doubt that golf is the leading cause of divorce."

Overall, many of the comments suggest that they are reading the findings and thinking about the issues that are presented. This makes me hopeful about the degree to which behavioral scientists can use new media methodologies to distribute their findings.

New York Times-- Teaching Family Life Education

2010-12-29T01:00:00.005-06:00

The New York Times creates an interesting feature in which they use the "news" as a basis for creating lesson plans for students. Here is there overall approach and strategy:
http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/about-the-learning-network/

Here is a sample lesson on children's experiences of living with with their fathers or mothers after divorce.
http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/10/moving-in-with-dad-comparing-two-teens-stories/

In general this work is designed for teachers, but there are opportunities for young people to also contribute or take part in this work. The overall design of this work is nicely done and would be helpful to teachers. In general, there don't seem to be many examples that use behavioral or social science materials, but this probably reflects the fact that these topics do not easily fit most school curricula.

This model might be adapted by teachers and/or curriculum developers themselves to develop lessons from a wider variety of news and information sources.

Here are some examples on the topics of marriage and divorce.

http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2004/08/09/into-custody-and-out-of-state/
http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/21/untying-the-knot/
http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2003/11/20/legally-wed/
http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/valentines-day-across-the-curriculum/
http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2005/05/19/for-richer-or-for-poorer/

2010 Year In Review of Divorce Research for Huffington Post

2010-12-28T08:17:00.001-06:00

Late on Thursday, Dec 22nd, I got an email from the editor at the Huffington Divorce page about helping to identify the "research findings" for the year 2010. Friday morning, Dec 23rd, I woke up early and did a quick review of my own collection of "interesting divorce articles" and a review of the major scientific databases and identified about 40 research studies that seemed to represent the important new findings that were shaping our understanding of divorce and also might be of interest to the general public. So I sent the following list of topical ideas to the editor:

military service and divorce
patterns of divorce in China
the genetic contributions to divorce
a better understanding of how marital conflict affects children
the risk of former partner violence around the time of pregnancy/birth
perceived household task sharing and marital happiness (or not)
Children with special needs including autism and likelihood of divorce
New online program for stepfamilies that looks promising
New evidence that indicates the effectiveness of mediation programs for divorcing couples

The editor replied that this was an interesting list and asked if I was willing to write short summaries of all of these except autism and the stepfamily program. She either indicated that they already had these or these were less interesting. (not sure of this).

So I began to re-read and summarize each of the articles I had selected on each of these topics. Although this seemed like it would be pretty easy, I suspect that I spent 4-5 hours on this. I spent a lot of time on two articles related to genetics and divorce and I realized I just did not have a sufficient grasp of this science to do a summary that I trusted. One my New Year's resolutions will be to learn more about this area of science so I can better understand developments in this area. Anyway I sent off my summaries which will be edited and become part of this year in review slide show for the Huffington Post. This coming year I am going to spend more time putting this review together and do a quick monthly review of new articles so that I have a better representation of the research at the end of the year.

The following article appeared at the Huffington Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/28/divorce-research-top-find_n_801776.html#s215777

Below you will see my original contribution (before editing) of my submission to the Huffington Post.

------------------------summary---------------------------------------

Interesting Research Studies Related to Divorce (2010).

Military service and divorce

Military service couples are more likely to get divorced, a recent prevention program offers help. Scott Stanley and his colleagues have designed a marital relationship program called, Strong Bonds, that is designed to teach military couples important communication and conflict management skills. Married U.S. Army couples recently participated in a test of whether this program would reduce divorce. One-half the group participated in the program and the other half did not. The results showed that about 2% of the couples who participated in the program were divorced one year later and 6% of the couples were divorced who did not participate in the program. These findings suggest that couple education can reduce the risk of divorce.

Stanley, S. M., Allen, E. S., Markman, H. J., Rhoades, G. K., & Prentice, D. L. (2010). Decreasing divorce in U.S. army couples: Results from a randomized controlled trial using PREP for strong bonds. Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy, 9(2), 149-160. doi:10.1080/15332691003694901 http://www.healthymarriageinfo.org/docs/MarriageDivorceNationalG.pdf

Patterns of divorce in China

China has been undergoing rapid changes in economic growth and relocation from rural to urban communities. A recent report on changes in the divorce rate suggest that China’s family life is also rapidly changing. Qingbin Wang and Qin Zhou recently reported in the Journal of Divorce and Remarriage that the divorce rate in China has increased over 200% since 1980. There is wide variation in the divorce rate across the various provinces in China which vary in terms of ethnicity, religion, and so forth. These results indicate that those regions with the greatest economic growth the largest number of college-educated people have the highest divorce rate. Xinjiang province had the highest divorce rate, followed by the northeast region of Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning. Changes in social and family life will be important to the future of China.

Wang, Q., & Zhou, Q. (2010). China's divorce and remarriage rates: Trends and regional disparities. Journal of Divorce & Remarriage, 51(4), 257-267. doi:10.1080/10502551003597949

http://www.uvm.edu/~rsingle/JournalClub/papers/Wang+Zhou-2010-JDivorceAndRemarriage.pdf

A better understanding of how marital conflict affects children

One of the most consistent findings is the link between divorce and marital conflict and children’s difficulties in school. Despite this finding scientists know relatively little about the mechanisms that cause these results and the factors that might prevent these outcomes. Sharon Ghazarian and Cheryl Buehler recently reported on a study that provides new insight into these issues. Based on a sample of over 2,000 sixth grade boys and girls, these researchers measured marital conflict, parent-child relationships, children’s academic achievement and children’s coping with their parents’ disagreements. Their findings indicated that that the way that parental conflict affects young people is through their children’s feelings of self-blame for the conflict. Youth interpret their parents’ conflicts as stressful and they are more likely to blame themselves by these experiences. These results were similar for girls and boys. These findings suggest the importance of helping children understand parental conflict and developing coping strategies that do not involve blaming oneself. Supportive parents and other caring adults also crucial to helping young people whose parents are in conflict.

Ghazarian, S. R., & Buehler, C. (2010). Interparental conflict and academic achievement: An examination of mediating and moderating factors. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 39(1), 23-35. doi:10.1007/s10964-008-9360-1 http://www.uncg.edu/hdf/facultystaff/Buehler/parenting/interparental%20academic%20achievement.pdf

The risk of former partner violence around the time of pregnancy/birth

Physical violence during pregnancy can be harmful to mothers and their children. It is estimated that between 4-9% of pregnant women experience violence from their partners. A recent study conducted by the CDC looked at intimate partner violence in more detail. Based on reports from about 135,000 women in 27 states, the researchers examined the extent of violence and the characteristics of the abusers and their living circumstances. The findings indicated that former partners (4.5%) were more likely to be violent than current partners (3.5%). Women who were recently separated or divorced were substantially more likely to experience violence during their pregnancy (12%) compared to women whose marriages had not broken up (less than 2%). These findings indicate the importance of screening pregnant women about violence from both former and current partners. It is also important to have programs and services available to women who are identified to prevent further violence.

Chu, S. Y., Goodwin, M. M., & D'Angelo, D. V. (2010). Physical violence against U.S. women around the time of pregnancy, 2004–2007. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 38(3), 317-322. doi:10.1016/j.amepre.2009.11.013 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20171534

Perceived household task sharing and marital happiness (or not)

Many recently married husbands and wives report conflicts over who does the household chores. Indeed this is often the source of issues related to divorce. However, even though wives usually do almost twice as much work in the home compared to their husbands, they usually report this division of labor as fair. This finding has long puzzled researchers who study couples. Recent data has begun to provide more insight into wives’ views of management of household chores. Sayaka Kawamura and Susan Brown at Bowling Green State University hypothesized that wives’ perceptions that they “matter” to their husbands is strongly related to their feelings of fairness about household chores. In short, they suggest that marital satisfaction has less to do with the equal exchange of resources and more to do with feelings of love and intimacy. They studied over 900 women who reported on the fairness of the division of household labor and the degree to which their husband’s made them feel important or that they mattered. They asked questions such as: “How often does your husband make you feel he is there for you when you need him?” and “How often does your husband make you feel he really cares about you?” The results indicated that wives who feeling respected and cared for substantially predicted being positive about the division of household chores. These findings held up across age, ethnic and economic groups. Kawamura and Brown write, “Mattering taps into an individual’s beliefs about the spouse’s supportiveness, as evidenced by respect, concern, appreciation and so forth…” This may be the source of marital satisfaction.

Kawamura, S., & Brown, S. L. (2010). Mattering and wives’ perceived fairness of the division of household labor. Social Science Research, 39(6), 976-986. doi:10.1016/j.ssresearch.2010.04.004

(no link to study)

New evidence that indicates the effectiveness of mediation programs for divorcing couples

There are numerous horror reports about divorcing couples and their court room battles. For the past 20 years courts and divorcing couples have been trying out alternative ways of reducing the conflict and animosity that is often associated with litigation. The primary alternative has been mediation which involves couples working with a professional who helps the couples find common ground. There have been several evaluation studies of these efforts that suggests this method reduces couple’s conflict and leads to more enduring resolutions of custody and parenting plans. A recent report in Conflict Resolution Quarterly by Lori Shaw provides the most promising evidence to date about the effectiveness of these programs. Shaw combined the results of the five most rigorous evaluation studies to compare multiple methods across diverse settings and circumstances. She reports that compared to litigation, divorcing couples using mediation are more satisfied with the process, the outcomes, their spousal relationship and their understanding of children’s needs. These results have important implications for court systems and divorcing couples.

Shaw, L. A. (2010). Divorce mediation outcome research: A meta-analysis. Conflict Resolution Quarterly, 27(4), 447-467. doi:10.1002/crq.20006

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/crq.20006/abstract

Outline of an Educational Blog Post on Divorce

2010-12-21T12:19:00.004-06:00

In writing for the Huffington Divorce page, I am trying to develop blog posts that have the following structure:

a) interesting/engaging/provocative opening sentence
b) a couple of interesting practical ideas that could be helpful to someone
c) links, directions, ideas about how learn more or do something to more.

This is one of my better posts in which I feel like I executed my approach well:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-hughes/are-children-of-divorce-d_b_799355.html

Additionally, I cite the research literature when appropriate and I use scientist's names to link to ideas or findings. I am also trying to take a hopeful, but realistic perspective on these issues. To do this I try to distinguish between what can be changed and what can't be changed in order to provide a broader perspective.

Blogging for Huffington Post on Divorce

2010-12-19T15:19:00.006-06:00

For the past month or so I have been writing for the Huffington Post Divorce page. This work gives a chance to return to my primary professional work which is as a educator regarding issues related to families.

For several years I have admonished and cajoled colleagues about the need for scientists and teachers to use the web as a platform for teaching. (See my comments about the importance of scientists and professionals blogging about the link between autism and vaccines.) When I was approached by the editors at the Huffington Post about being a blogger for their newly launching web page on divorce , I knew I had to do this. I have now posted four posts (about one per week). (See my Huffington Posts work here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-hughes )

My first post on the role of religion in shaping attitudes about divorce got the most (151) comments (both thoughtful and odd). My most recent post on the role of conflict in preventing divorce got the smallest number of comments (2). It is hard to know why one post gets more comments than others.

I will continue to try this medium. Here I will describe my various reactions to "teaching" in the Huffington Post.

Participation vs. Web 2.0

2010-05-27T06:57:00.004-05:00

I keep learning new ideas from Henry Jenkins. In a recent note about DIY (Do it yourself) Media, Jenkins makes two important points that are critical to how we think about models of learning on the web.

First, he critiques the use of the term "DIY" noting that the emphasis is not on "oneself," but on a group of people, he writes,

"what may be radical about the DIY ethos is that learning relies on these mutual support networks, creativity is understood as a trait of communities, and expression occurs through collaboration. Given these circumstances, phrases like "Do It Ourselves" or "Do It Together" better capture collective enterprises within networked publics."

I think his emphasis is right. I have the same difficulty with "personalized learning environments" that seem to emphasize the idea that each of us is some type of autonomous learner rather than emphasizing platforms and processes that engage people in the pursuit of a common understanding and learning.

Later in this article he comments on ideas from Gee (2007) saying,

"Unlike schools, where everyone is expected to do (and be good at) the same things, these participatory cultures allow each person to set their own goals, learn at their own pace, come and go as they please, and yet they are also motivated by the responses of others, often spending more time engaged with the activities because of a sense of responsibility to their guild or fandom. They enable a balance between self-expression and collaborative learning which may be the sweet spot for DIY learning."

Again this emphasizes the idea of learning communities rather than individual learning.

The last point in this article is his idea about differences between the Web 2.0 model and "participatory" culture. He writes,

"Despite a rhetoric of collaboration and community, they often still conceive of their users as autonomous individuals whose primary relationship is to the company that provides them services and not to each other. There is a real danger in mapping the Web 2.0 business model onto educational practices, thus seeing students as "consumers" rather than "participants" within the educational process."

I have often used terms like "Education 2.0," etc. but Jenkins makes an important distinction that may be missed as we talk about these ideas. He notes a big difference in these models is the extent to which mentoring and scaffolding is emphasized versus service to the business enterprise. Jenkins is reminding us of an important distinction that is critical to the structure of learning communities.

Talking about Science

2010-05-26T08:27:00.003-05:00

Scientists are failing in their efforts to communicate with the public. Dennis Meredith in a new book, Explaining Research and an accompanying blog has some good ideas about how scientists can communicate more effectively about science.

His blog includes examples of video, audio, blogs and more that illustrate effective way to talk about scientific ideas. In a recent commentary he writes,

"Many academic scientists might consider themselves expert explainers because a significant part of their job entails explaining research to undergraduates in their teaching. But even the most skillful scientist-teachers aren’t necessarily skilled science explainers. Speaking to “captive” student audiences is very different from communicating with any other lay audience, who often must be actively persuaded to be interested in a scientific topic."

Educating the public about science is critical to our ability to make effective decisions and to understand how to deal with the many complex problems of human society. We have learned much about the world, but until that knowledge is available and understandable to the public it won't make much difference.

If you want to understand the future of education-- consider this!

2010-05-16T18:49:00.004-05:00

James Fallows has written a fascinating article in the Atlantic How to Save the News that describes the ways in which Google has been working with news organizations and experimenting with ways to continue to have high quality news reporting.

As I read this, I keep substituting the word "education" or "university" for newspapers and keep asking myself how can be take advantage of these ideas.

Here is a quote about newspapers that has application to education and universities.

"Burdened as they are with these 'legacy' print costs, newspapers typically spend about 15 percent of their revenue on what, to the Internet world, are their only valuable assets: the people who report, analyze, and edit the news."

Fallows goes on to note that most of the cost of newspapers in for paper, printing and distribution, not the core aspect of reporting the news.

Now substitute these legacy costs for education-- classrooms, books and you begin to see where we are going.

Fallows describes the conceptual shift that newspapers are going to have to make. He says,

[in the past] "'publishing' meant printing information on sheets of paper; eventually, it will mean distributing information on a Web site or mobile device."

The conceptual shift is from viewing the work as "distributing information." In a similar way most educators have defined "education" as face-to-face lectures with some form of testing. We are going to need to begin to see our job "engaging people in learning activities" without reference to the form or location of those activities.

Education will also have to think about its business model in the online world. Fallows suggests that the the new business model for the news business is as follows:

"The three pillars of the new online business model, as I heard them invariably described, are distribution, engagement, and monetization. That is: getting news to more people, and more people to news-oriented sites; making the presentation of news more interesting, varied, and involving; and converting these larger and more strongly committed audiences into revenue, through both subscription fees and ads."

This may seem obvious, but Fallows goes on to describe tools that Google has been inventing such as "living stories," "fast flip" and "youtube direct" which seem to have interesting applications to teaching. More importantly, these innovations remind us that teachers need to be asking technologist for the tools that will help us with distribution, engagement and monetization. There are undoubtedly some betters ways to do instruction online that are currently available.

Survey of Parents who use the Internet

2010-05-11T08:36:00.005-05:00

Despite all the anecdotal evidence that parents are using the Internet as a part of their role in parenting there is very little solid scientific evidence that tells us much about what they are doing.

Colleagues from the University of Minnesota are trying to fill in this gap with a survey of parents.

The Parenting 2.0 research project, sponsored by the University of Minnesota, is looking for parents who use the Internet to participate in an online research study. The study involves filling out a 20-minute online survey about how and why you use the Internet. If you know parents or work with parents, we would appreciate your sending the message below to them. Attached, we have also included a message that can be posted on websites or Facebook. Please use the message that best meets your needs.

The purpose of the Parenting 2.0 research project is to learn more about the ways that and the reasons why parents use technology. Results from this study will be used to help develop parent education resources.

If you have any questions about the study, please visit our website at: http://www.cehd.umn.edu/fsos/parent20/

or contact Dr. Jodi Dworkin at jdworkin@unm.edu or Dr. Susan Walker at skwalker@umn.edu. If you are interested in getting information about the results, click here to sign up to be notified about the findings.

Integrating Ubiquitous Fragments of Knowledge

2010-04-21T07:20:00.005-05:00

The idea that learning can be embedded in many contexts, setting and experiences is among the most powerful ideas related to new media and education. Cope and Kalantzis in their chapter on an agenda for educational transformation, suggest that educational transformation needs to blur the boundaries between institutions, space and time in an effort to create learning opportunities that are embedded in many other parts of life.

At one level this seems exactly right. I don't want to have to attend a class every time I have a question or want to learn something. There are a lot of advantages to me learning it at the moment, in the setting I happen to be in. However, as we unpack learning from classrooms, curricula and face-to-face teaching, how to be retain the "structure" of instruction and guidance that were woven into these learning experiences? We still need structures and scaffolding for learning experiences in many cases. Each learner should not have to find their own path through the thicket of fragmented bits of of "ubiquitous" learning. Likewise, teachers (both formal and informal) should all have to build their own learning platforms in order to teach.

Ubiquitous Learning: An Exploration

2010-04-20T07:32:00.003-05:00

At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the College of Education has launched an initiative to explore "ubiquitous learning."

As a part of this initiative Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis edited a book that begins to explore the idea of ubiquitous learning.

Beginning today and over the next several weeks, I am going to read this book and comment about the ideas.

First, what is the definition of "ubiquitous learning?" Several definitions are offered by the authors of this book.

1. the definition of "ubiquitous" [learning] include[s] the idea that learners can engage with knowledge about "anything", and that this learning can be experienced by "anyone" (Kalantzis & Cope, 2009, p. x).

2. "the process of learning and the products of learning are rapidly merging into ubiquitous knowledge engagement" (Kalantzis & Cope, 2009, p. x).

3. "Ubiquitous learning is more than just the latest educational idea or method. At its core the term conveys a vision of learning that is connected across all stages on which we play out our lives. Learning occurs not just in classroom, but in the home, workplace, playground, library, museum, nature center, and in our daily interactions with others. Moreover, learning becomes part of doing; we do not learn in order to live more fully but rather learn as we live to the fullest. Learning happens through active engagement, and significantly, it is no longer identified with reading a text or listening to lectures but rather occurs through all the senses-- sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste" (Bruce, 2009, p. 21)

So do we need a new term for learning? There many other new terms-- elearning, mobile learning, "learning anytime, anywhere," etc. Bruce's definition above captures for me the central idea that term is trying to convey-- this idea that learning is not set apart from the other parts of living. And, of course, it never was except that as education was formalized and led by professionals, we have tended to ignore the vast amount of learning that was taking place outside of classrooms and formal institutions. Using today's technology tools we can begin to rebuild an integrated learning platform that bridges informal and formal learning opportunities in new and and interesting ways-- this is ubiquitous learning.

But as Cope and Kalantzis note, "Digital technologies arrive, and almost immediately, old pedagogical practices of didactic teaching, content delivery for student ingestion, and testing for the right answers are mapped onto them and called "learning management systems" (2009, p. 4). In short, despite the opportunity to create learning opportunities that are different from our current classroom-based, group instructional model, we use our new tools to create the old model. So how do we do something different, some better? This is the problem that this book is designed to explore.

Informal Science Education--Could this be the future?

2010-04-14T20:31:00.002-05:00

"The seemingly endless debate about how to improve US science education seems to make the tacit assumption that learning happens only in the classroom" (p. 813) So begins an interesting editorial in Nature, April 2010, titled, "Learning in the Wild" that suggests that we need to be paying much more attention to informal science learning. The authors go on to write,

"researchers who study learning are increasingly questioning this assumption. Their evidence strongly suggests that most of what the general public knows about science is picked up outside school, through things such as television programmes, websites, magazine articles, visits to zoos and museums — and even through hobbies such as gardening and birdwatching" (p. 813).

This goes right to the heart of the idea that we need to build alot of science microlearning opportunities that engage people's interests and lead them into deeper more complex learning activities. In the editorial the author's note,

"This process of 'informal science education' is patchy, ad hoc and at the mercy of individual whim, all of which makes it much more difficult to measure than formal instruction. But it is also pervasive, cumulative and often much more effective at getting people excited about science — and an individual's realization that he or she can work things out unaided promotes a profoundly motivating sense of empowerment" (p. 814).

I am in agreement with this statement:

"education authorities need to recognize the importance of informal science education and do more to promote it — if only as a way to motivate students in the classroom" (p. 814).

Rather than thinking of science education as either formal or informal, we need to build learning systems that move easily from the informal playful educational experiences to the deeper, richer experiences. This will both foster better learning, but it will be much more fun.

Games Can Change Behavior-- Jesse Schell

2010-02-28T09:58:00.004-06:00

Could we use games to teach important ideas and change behaviors. See an edited clip (about 7 minutes long) from Jesse Schell about the future of games. At the end he asks "who is going to lead us to this future?" Will the answer be some educators or will we let game designers invent the future of learning?

See the complete talk on the Future of Games (30 minutes).

Guest Post: Bootleg Education-- Myles Horton & Open Education

2010-02-26T11:05:00.005-06:00

With the burgeoning of free university courses offered on the internet, such as MIT’s OpenCourseWare, there has been much buzz in the media lately about how technology is “democratizing” formal learning, and how higher education is experiencing nothing short of a revolution.

While the Internet has certainly made higher education accessible to an astonishing number of people from all backgrounds, the idea that learning must reach beyond the traditional, university-educated elite is not new. In fact, the philosophical underpinnings of today’s open education movement can be seen in the life and work of southern activist Myles Horton.

Beyond academic circles, not many know of Myles Horton’s contribution to educational philosophy in the United States. In 1932, Horton founded the Highlander Folk School in an effort to educate poor Appalachian whites as well blacks. A solid two decades before desegregation was even discussed, Horton’s school accepted students from any background, regardless of race or class. Although the school was shut down during the McCarthy era because it supposedly propagated sedition, the school still runs to this day, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, as an educational research center.

In extensive interviews with Paulo Freire, a renowned South American educational theorist, Horton discusses his views on using education as a tool for social change. These interviews were eventually gathered in a book called We Make the Road by Walking.

In one interview, Horton explains,

“Here in the mountains we’ve had moonshiners and bootleggers, people who make illegal whiskey and sell it…so the phrase I’ve always used when I talk is, ‘You’ve got to bootleg education.’ You have to find a way to bootleg it. It’s illegal, really, because it’s not proper, but you do it anyway.”

Here, Horton was referring to his vision of changing the way we think about education. He felt what was wrong with traditional education is that it places limits on learners. He once wrote, “We have plenty of men and women who can teach what they know; we have very few who can teach their own capacity to learn.”

In many ways, the Internet itself is teaching the world this “capacity to learn,” simply because with open courseware technology, the emphasis is shifting from the material to the learner. Now, self-learning students, with the help of passionate educators, are directing their own studies, and in so doing, creating their own paths. Internet trends suggest that adults interested in continuing education--the people Horton was most wanting to help--are the ones who are benefiting exponentially from online learning.

The “Cape Town Open Education Declaration” , only one of the many such declarations drafted by important world organizations, including UNESCO, asserts,

"[Educators in the open education movement] are…planting the seeds of a new pedagogy where educators and learners create, shape and evolve knowledge together…”

This statement sounds similar to Horton’s writings.

Although Horton was pushing for education so that the disenfranchised could more actively participate in the American political system, open education through the Internet today strives for similar goals, only on a global scale.

This guest post was contributed by Katheryn Rivas, who writes on the topics of online universities accredited and can be reached at: katherynrivas87@gmail.com.

Digital Nation-- A Good Example of Web-based Instruction

2010-02-08T20:42:00.002-06:00

Digital Nation, a PBS documentary, developed this website which has many features that demonstrate how to create an effective educational website.

First, this is a 90 minute television program, but on the web the viewer is given a variety of options for viewing the program. First, you can see the 90 minute program in total just like the television program. However, the viewer also can view the program in various other ways. First, the program has been divided up topically such that you can see the themes of the program such as living faster, learning, etc. Within each of these thematic areas, you can view all or some of the various segments. These range from 1 t0 4 minutes in length.
In short, you can watch the program in any order you want to and you can focus on those segments that are of most interest.

Within each of these thematic areas there are places to share stories, comments and discussion by the persons interviewed in the video and other interactive features. Here the program creases to be merely a passive process, but becomes a place to discuss these issues, explore these ideas further and find additional resources on the topics.

This seems to be a good example of what a class lecture could become-- a series of short comments on various themes around a larger idea that invite discussion and interaction among students and the public.

Netflix Data--- What it tells us about culture.

2010-02-08T20:34:00.003-06:00

The New York Times has a very interesting set of interactive graphs that provide information about the top 100 movies rented from Netflix in 2009. The data are graphed on maps of the major cities in the United States so that you can see which movies were the most rented in various neighborhoods in these cities.

In some cases it shows how homogeneous our movie watching is-- see the pattern for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and in other cases the interesting regional variations-- see Last Chance Harvey.

It is also worth reading the comments as well--- everything from outrage that this data is public to curiosity and puzzlement.

Vaccine-Autism Link & Professionals

2010-02-05T12:37:00.005-06:00

The major study that ignited parent's fears that the MMR vaccine was linked to autism was retracted from the scientific literature this week. The 1998 study published in the Lancet by Wakefield and his colleagues was withdrawn from the journal.

This is a highly unusual step in the scientific publication process, but it reflects extensive review and investigation that revealed that both major ethical flaws in the data collection as well as scientific flaws in the methods.

Beford and Elliman wrote a very thoughtful editorial in the British Medical Journal on this issue highlighting the importance of educating the public. The note that health professionals were reluctant to engage in public debate on this topic. They write,

"If future debacles are to be prevented, professionalsmust enter the public arena, even though there can be unpleasantramifications (both the authors of this editorial have receivedhate mail and an American researcher has even received deaththreats). However uncomfortable this may be, we must be firmadvocates of what is best for children’s health, evenif this seems to run contrary to 'patient choice'."

They also suggest ways that professionals can talk with parents about controversial issues stating,

"For these parents, providing clear and accurate informationon the benefits and risks of the vaccine as well as the dangersof the diseases is only part of an effective approach. The natureof the communication with parents is crucial. They are morelikely to respond to a professional who listens carefully andrespectfully to their individual concerns, answers their questionshonestly and openly, and acknowledges when information is lackingabout a particular matter. With this approach, and repeatedopportunities to talk, parents who at first decline immunisationmay be willing to reconsider."

In short, it is not just the information that matters, but how we communicate the information. There are many important lessons to be learned from this controversy over the link between vaccines and autism. See other comments about the autism-vaccine issue.

Online Education the next public education

2010-01-16T13:59:00.003-06:00

"...the fact remains that digital educational enterprises are to the 21st century what public universities were in previous generations: accessible and more affordable means for people to better their minds and their lives"

John Meacham, Newsweek, January, 2010.

The World is Open-- Open Courseware is Just the Beginning--6

2010-01-11T15:01:00.003-06:00

Providing access to lectures, notes and other course materials means that lots of information is available to others interested in these materials, but Curt Bonk reminds us that this is really just the beginning. He says,

"We can all see that entry into the world of higher education, whether as an individual, department, organization, or community, just became easier. However, this content is typically not credentialed and often is simply lecture material or associated content to review. As such, it is what I call Level One Knowledge-- basic facts" (p.177-178).

His point is that for someone who is willing to teach him or herself or for an instructor who is seeking supplementary material this content is helpful, but in most cases it is not possible to have access to teachers and to get feedback or clarification about ideas in these open courses without enrolling in the course or the university.

Kevin Kelly on the Internet & Knowledge

2010-01-11T12:55:00.003-06:00

In this article,AN INTERMEDIA WITH 2 BILLION SCREENS PEERING INTO IT Kevin Kelly, describes the way in which the Internet has affected our "knowledge." I have highlighted sentences that capture the spirit of his thinking.

"But my knowledge is now more fragile. For every accepted piece of knowledge I find, there is within easy reach someone who challenges the fact. Every fact has its anti-fact. The Internet's extreme hyperlinking highlights those anti-facts as brightly as the facts. Some anti-facts are silly, some borderline, and some valid. You can't rely on experts to sort them out because for every expert there is an equal and countervailing anti-expert. Thus anything I learn is subject to erosion by these ubiquitous anti-factors.

My certainty about anything has decreased. Rather than importing authority, I am reduced to creating my own certainty — not just about things I care about — but about anything I touch, including areas about which I can't possibly have any direct knowledge . That means that in general I assume more and more that what I know is wrong. We might consider this state perfect for science but it also means that I am more likely to have my mind changed for incorrect reasons. Nonetheless, the embrace of uncertainty is one way my thinking has changed.

Uncertainty is a kind of liquidity. I think my thinking has become more liquid. It is less fixed, as text in a book might be, and more fluid, as say text in Wikipedia might be. My opinions shift more. My interests rise and fall more quickly. I am less interested in Truth, with a capital T, and more interested in truths, plural. I feel the subjective has an important role in assembling the objective from many data points. The incremental plodding progress of imperfect science seems the only way to know anything."

Shirkey on Participation & Openness

2010-01-11T12:24:00.003-06:00

In "The Shock of Inclusion," Clay Shirkey reminds us that our success in the age of the Internet will be determined by the ways we use this new tool or the ways we fail to use this new tool.

Using an analogy from the intervention of the printing press, Shirkey suggests that alchemists (who were working on turning lead into gold) failed and chemists succeeded in large part because of how they used the availability of printing to share their work. Shirkey writes,

"The problem with the alchemists had wasn't that they failed to turn lead into gold; the problem was that they failed uninformatively. Alchemists were obscurantists, recording their work by hand and rarely showing it to anyone but disciples. In contrast, members of the Invisible College shared their work, describing and disputing their methods and conclusions so that they all might benefit from both successes and failures, and build on each other's work."

In short, Shirkey suggests that developing a culture of "sharing" through print is why chemists and other scientists succeeded... not print itself, but a willingness to share using print.

Shirkey extends this thinking to the Internet writing,

"As we know from arXiv.org, the 20th century model of publishing is inadequate to the kind of sharing possible today. As we know from Wikipedia, post-hoc peer review can support astonishing creations of shared value. As we know from the search for Mersenne Primes, whole branches of mathematical exploration are now best taken on by groups. As we know from Open Source efforts like Linux, collaboration between loosely joined parties can work at scales and over timeframes previously unimagined. As we know from NASA clickworkers, groups of amateurs can sometimes replace single experts. As we know from Patients Like Me, patient involvement accelerates medical research."

He notes that although experts such as professor, physicians and others who have held a privileged position in regards to the ability to publish their ideas know longer have that position and that we will "will complain about the way the new abundance of public thought upends the old order, but those complaints are like keening at a wake; the change they fear is already in the past. The real action is elsewhere."

Shirkey suggests that we have the opportunity to use the Internet

"as an Invisible College, the communicative backbone of real intellectual and civic change, but to do this will require more than technology. It will require that we adopt norms of open sharing and participation, fit to a world where publishing has become the new literacy."

Using Research to Mis-inform

2010-01-07T16:31:00.003-06:00

Too often news accounts of scientific research fail to inform the public or fail to use research in useful or helpful ways. This is often frustrating to scientists and at times these failures can be dangerous or damaging. (I have written elsewhere about the debate about the link between vaccines and autism as an example.)

But I find it particularly troubling when a source of information about higher education fails to engage scientific research in a useful and thoughtful manner. In this article,Facebooking Won't Affect Your Grades, Study Finds. At Least Until Next Month's Study Tells You It Will,
Marc Parry provides the worst example of reporting on scientific information.

1. He presents two studies that on the face of it seem to come to different conclusions about the impact of "Facebook" on student grades without any consideration of the methods or approaches.

2. He then compounds this weak exploration of the issue with the citation of the relationship between the use of Facebook and divorce. In this case, he cites no research, but merely provide links to other news articles as if these were sources of evidence.

3. Finally, he concludes with a flip statement that next month's research findings will make counter claims and that all of this is just a matter of "he says, she says" and not really a matter of science.

Rather that provide any sort of thoughtful discussion of the evidence regarding the impact of social networking activities on personal relationships or educational outcomes the reader is left with the idea that scientists studying this issue have nothing really useful to say on this topic.

The World is Open-- Growing Content--5

2010-01-06T11:30:00.004-06:00

The first "opener" in The World is Open, is the growing availability of information on the web and the fact that much of this information is completely accessible without subscribing to the material, enrolling in a course, and so forth. In short, the content is available and accessible.

In this chapter Bonk highlights the increased availability of books noting the efforts by Google to scan in books and other projects such as the Open Content Alliance and Open Library that are working to make more books available to people on the Web.

He also highlights efforts to create free open-source textbooks such as those developed by the Global Text Project.

This is truly a revolutionary aspect of the Web as more content becomes available each day. This is a powerful foundation on which to create educational and learning opportunities.

World Is Open-- UCLA Summer Digs Blog is Closed--4

2010-01-05T12:10:00.005-06:00

Curt Bonk's, The World is Open, begins with an interesting and exciting story about the way in which web can bring science into the lives of many people outside of universities. The example is the UCLA Summer Digs program.

Bonk highlights a number of articles in the UCLA magazine about this project and writes,

"The Summer Digs Project is also a virtual apprenticeship for thousands or perhaps millions of online Web surfers....It is quite plausible that many people stumbling on their blog posts from Chile or Peru a few years, decades, or even centuries from now might become energized by them..." (p. 4)

Whoops.... if you click on the UCLA Summer digs, you get the message "this blog content is no longer available." This is a reminder that the Web content is fragile and that it isn't always reliable and engaging.

It is not clear what happened to this content or why it is no longer available. You can find a blog about a current UCLA archaeological dig in Egypt... but it seems less inspiring than Bonk's description. For one, there is no mechanism to comment or ask questions to the students or faculty. It looks like there are 5 posts over the course of the fall semester. Nice, interesting, but not exactly inspiring.

None of this means that Bonk is not correct that the Web creates the opportunity to bring the scientific discovery process into new places and engage new people. I have described Folding@Home" as an example of this type of work, but the disappearance of this blog and the limitations of its current Web presence reminds us that this type of learning is very much a work in progress and not well understood.

World is Open-- Informal Learning--3

2010-01-04T11:24:00.004-06:00

In my continuing reading of Curt Bonk's, The World is Open, he identifies what I think is the most important development within educational innovation-- the expansion of informal learning.

He writes,

"There are no credentials that this worker receives from going on the Web to learn what a wiki is, or to view a map of a country she intends to visit, or perhaps to buy [Jay] Cross's book [on informal learning]-- yet each of these information searches entails learning" (p. 40).

I continue to think that the most powerful transformation in learning is taking place in this invisible process of informal learning. Just as most of us have been learning a lot informally from television we are now learning a lot informally on the web. The unfortunate part of this is that just as most educational institutions have not actively participated in the creation of television material (other than through athletics!), our educational institutions are currently missing the opportunity to create great Web material.

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration challenges educators to actively participate in the creation and use of open educational resources, authors and publishers to release their resources openly, and higher education and other institutions to make open educational activities a priority.

These are the important challenges in the creation of informal learning.

World is Open-- Macro Trends--2

2010-01-04T11:02:00.003-06:00

In my continuing reading of Curt Bonk's, The World is Open here is an important perspective he has about the "macrotrends" related that will have an impact on learning and education:

These are:

1. the availability of tools and infrastructure for learning (the pipes);
2. The availability of free and open educational content and resources (the pages);
3. a movement toward a culture of open access to information, international collaboration, and global sharing (a participatory learning culture). (p. 52).

Bonk writes:

"The convergence of these three macro trends has put in motion opportunities for human learning and potential never before approached in recorded history" (p. 53).

There is a lot of evidence that these trends are moving in the direction that Bonk suggests, but it is far less clear that most of the educational institutions are contributing towards the development of open educational content and a participatory learning culture. Bonk correctly cites some of the important developments (Connexions, MIT Open Courseware, and a few others), but these are still limited efforts.

In fact, these are relatively old (2-3 years ago) developments and there have not been significant other developments in terms of institutions following their lead or in innovative new versions of open educational resources. Perhaps these developments are smaller and less visible, but there have not been any major developments.

What are the real trends in these areas? Are major educational institutions joining the open education trend? To what degree are online learning platforms fostering a participatory learning culture?

World is Open-- Not your parent's education--1

2009-12-30T16:39:00.002-06:00

Today I began reading Curt Bonk's, The World is Open. There is much to learn from this book, but it is important to take a thoughtful look at Bonk's characterization of the the promise of the web for learning.

"If we could travel back in time with him [his grandfather], we would see that the educational opportunities of a century ago were phenomenally different from what we have today" (p. 13).

Bonk then lists the things that were not available to his grandfather, they include:

1. podcasts made of his school lessons in case he missed class;
2. instructors who waxed eloquently in their blogs about how a particular class was going or supplemental course links.
3. email messages that linked him to wondrous electronic course resources.
4. no virtual worlds to explore for hours on end.

He sums up this paragraph with

"Grandpa George and his classmates could not move about to computer labs and media rooms in accordance with their interests and learning pursuits or think about entering and exiting a course at any time of the day" (p. 13).

Of course, most students today don't have this experience either. In fact, very few students at any level of learning routinely have the experience that Bonk is describing. There are certainly examples of teachers who are providing this type of experience, but few students regularly have this opportunity.

This doesn't mean that this experience should not exist or could not exist (and Bonk wants us to catch this possible future), but at present today's student is mostly having the same experience as his grandfather. One of the questions we should be asking is why are more students not having this experience?

Evaluating Digital Scholarship: New Resource

2009-12-04T17:38:00.002-06:00

The Modern Language Association continues to develop resources to assist faculty and others in evaluating the quality of digital materials for faculty. The newly produced Evaluation wiki is especially helpful because it allows many of us to contribute ideas and resources.

This short guide to the evaluation of digital works is an especially good resource to help faculty members think through their material.

Example of "Words as Video"

2009-12-02T01:00:00.002-06:00

Here is an interesting way to use only "printed words" as a way to do video/audio. Would this be better than our usual slides or is this just the usual slides done in a slightly more animated way?

Streams of Learning: Courses as Conversations

2009-12-01T17:18:00.007-06:00

I have borrowed the title of danah boyd's recent talk at the Web 2.0 Expo, "Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media" to express an idea that seems increasingly obvious to me which is that we can begin to build learning structures that are "streams of learning" rather than discrete chunks of learning. This past week I was busy trying to reorganize courses in our curriculum and this included a discussion of whether to organize the courses into two 8-week courses or one 16-week course.

There were persuasive arguments on both sides, but if you suddenly step back and think about this you realize that this structure is a function of how to organize a sequence of F2F courses over a four-year instructional time period... that has nothing to do with the content or learning itself. No particular body of knowledge fits neatly into 8 or 16-week segments. It is an artifact of our overall institutional design for learning.

We need to begin designing new institutional structures that allow us to create streams of learning, courses that are continuous conversations into which we can add new members over time. Although I am not a fan of most ideas about "personal learning environments" I do think that Stephen Downes has captured some important ideas in a recent talk titled, New Tools for Personal Learning." I particularly like the final part of the talk (slide 57-62) in which I think he captures the connectedness of learning. In this talk he also describes and demonstrates some tools that allow us to begin to understand how an institutional design for learning might be built that takes advantage of social and web-based media.

New Media P & T Changing Research Impact

2009-11-24T13:53:00.004-06:00

As research results move online, the measurement of scientific impact is beginning to look more like the ways in which we measure web-based material. The result is that issues surrounding promotion and tenure may be less troublesome for faculty whose work appears on the web for both teaching and outreach.

In short, all work whether research, teaching or outreach may be reflected in web-based impact assessments.

In a very interesting article, Neylon and Wu, discuss the multiple ways in which the impact of research articles may be measured in the future. They suggest the range of measures could include downloads, page views, citations in articles, blogs, etc., comments, ratings by other scientists/readers, bookmarks, blog coverage, trackbacks and so forth.

Many new media scholars have been concerned about how their work will be reviewed and how their impact will be measured. If Neylon and Wu are correct about the ways in which most research is headed, then there will be few differences between new media scholars and more traditional disciplines.

Nielsen On the Speed of Media Use on the Web

2009-11-24T13:17:00.004-06:00

One of the consistent messages from Jakob Nielsen has been the speed at which users spend on content on the web. (See How Little Do Users Read.)

His most recent contribution is to remind us how different TV is from the Web. He reminds us that web users have many choices and much control over what they view and how long they view it. Likewise, there are many additional features in addition to just passively viewing content. He suggests that web users make decisions every 10-120 seconds compared to 30-120 minutes on TV.

He suggests that web video viewers are in the 2-10 minute range.

Pediatricians Searching the Web for Diagnosis & Treatment Information

2009-11-22T08:33:00.004-06:00

In a recent issue of the Archives for Childhood Disease, there is a report, titled, "The information-seeking behaviour of paediatricins accessing web-based resources."

In this paper Prendiville, Saunders, and Fitzsimons asked practicing pediatricians how they found information in regards to questions from patients that they didn't know the answer to or about possible symptoms/diseases that they needed more information. They reported that "67% of paediatricians utilised the internet as their first "portof call" when looking to answer a medical question. 85% believethat web-based resources have improved medical practice, with88% reporting web-based resources are essential for medicalpractice today. 93.5% of paediatricians believe attempting toanswer clinical questions as they arise is an important componentin practising evidence-based medicine. 54% of all paediatricianshave recommended websites to parents or patients. 75.5% of paediatriciansreport finding it difficult to keep up-to-date with new informationrelevant to their practice."

So does the thought that your pediatrician is reading Wikipedia scary you? Should parents be concerned? Does this simply reflect the high-quality of information online? Are pediatricians skilled enough information seekers that they can separate trusted sources from quackery?

These findings should be a nudge to educational institutions, professional organizations and others that it is essential to be creating access to high-quality research findings on the web and to designing professional resources to help pediatricians and others find appropriate information. Too much research is still not accessible in general on the web-- this is a problem.

The article concludes with the following:

"Web-based paediatric resources are of increasing significancein day-to-day clinical practice. Many paediatricians now believethat the quality of patient care depends on it. Informationtechnology resources play a key role in helping physicians todeliver, in a time-efficient manner, solutions to clinical queriesat the point of care."

Effects of Divorce on Children

2009-11-21T10:29:00.006-06:00

One of the enduring questions in the last 30 years has been the question about the effects of divorce on children. Our scientific and clinical understanding of this issue continues to increase (see my summary of these findings.)

I am always interested in how scientific results get presented in the popular press so I was eager to listen the the American Radioworks documentary on "divorced kids" that was recently released. (Nov 20, 2009). The main challenge in presenting this topic is capturing the complexity of the findings which generally show that although divorce does have negative effects on children in general, the effects are small and most children are not much different than children who grow up in families in which there has never been a divorce.

Many popular media either emphasize the negative effects of divorce or the lack of differences. In short, they rarely tell the more complicated story. "Divorced Kid" generally emphasizes the negative effects. The produced only interviews social scientists who have generally found the negative effects of divorce on children (Judith Wallerstein and Nicholas Wolfinger). Other scientists who have provided an alterative perspective such as Paul Amato, Mavis Hetherington, Robert Emery, and Constance Ahrons are not included.

Despite the general emphasis on the negative effects, this report does not overwhelming emphasize the negative impacts. The produced does interview a variety of adults whose parents divorced and captures the various paths to healthy relationships and good marriages that were found (including the producer's own marriage). She also explores the development of parenting programs for divorcing couples and the creation of services for children that have been created in the past 30 years to help families deal with divorce. She describes some of the court reform efforts to introduce mediation as a solution to divorce that have contributed to less high conflict processes of handling issues of custody and child support. There is still much work to be done in this area, but we have developed better services and supports for families going through divorce.

We have also learned much about marriage in the past 30 years and we have tools that can help newly marriage partners develop better strategies for dealing with conflict and developing strong relationships. The most damaging outcome for children of divorce is for them to conclude that their future is doomed or pre-ordained by this one life event. This is completely wrong and there is no evidence to suggest that this is the case. The overwhelming evidence is in the other direction. Children from divorcing families can grow up to have healthy and satisfying lives. They may have to work harder, find extra supports from others and take advantage of educational or counseling services, but it is clearly possible.

Transforming Scholarly Communication -- the next step

2009-11-18T01:00:00.000-06:00

The distribution of scientific information is changing... everything from how data are collected, analyzed, reported and archived so says, Lee Dirk, in a fascinating talk about Transforming Scholarly Communication.

In this talk he describes new tools that allow scientists to discover and share data and scientific outcomes in ways that look more like social networking and Amazon book recommendations than scientific meetings and scholarly journals.

I am struck that the behavioral and social sciences would benefit the most from this level of transformation, yet our work seems the least influenced by these trends.

I also find myself asking questions about how educating students and the general public will change with these new methods of science communication. How do we build these science communication tools into our educational platforms?

The Answer Factory: Just what education is missing.

2009-11-16T21:06:00.002-06:00

In an article in Wired, Daniel Roth describes a company's efforts to automate content creation to address the questions/issues and searches of the day. Here is the formula:

"Demand Media has created a virtual factory that pumps out 4,000 videoclips and articles a day. It starts with an algorithm.
The algorithm is fed inputs from three sources: Search terms (popular terms from more than 100 sources comprising 2 billion searches a day), The ad market (a snapshot of which keywords are sought after and how much they are fetching), and The competition (what’s online already and where a term ranks in search results)"

That formula detects what people are looking for and then freelance authors and filmmakers get the chance to produce the results. Roth writes,

"Nearly every freelancer scrambles to load their assignment queue with titles they can produce quickly and with the least amount of effort — because pay for individual stories is so lousy, only a high-speed, high-volume approach will work. The average writer earns $15 per article for pieces that top out at a few hundred words, and the average filmmaker about $20 per clip, paid weekly via PayPal. Demand also offers revenue sharing on some articles, though it can take months to reach even $15 in such payments. Other freelancers sign up for the chance to copyedit ($2.50 an article), fact-check ($1 an article), approve the quality of a film (25 to 50 cents a video), transcribe ($1 to $2 per video), or offer up their expertise to be quoted or filmed (free)."

Now if you just pause and think about what it would cost to pay all this talent, you know that all kinds of institutions that produce content from newspapers, educators, etc. could not begin to compete with these low costs of employees.

There is much here to think about but my thoughts are about whether this model would work in education. What if rather than just looking at all the topics an educational institutions developed a focus on a narrow range of topics in which there were educators with a very specific kind of expertise that developed very specific content to meet a particular question. Although Demand Media's model is making money through volume, could you use the same model with lower volume, but pay for it with micropayments. What if in addition to producing content you sold "instruction" and/or "explanation" or feedback with such a system?

Health News Review-- A Model for Reviewing Health Claims in the Media and the Web

2009-11-16T16:53:00.006-06:00

Health News Review is a website devoted to rating the ways in which news organizations report on health news. They have developed 10 criteria including 1) raising unrealistic claims about effectiveness, 2) cost of the treatment, 3) how the benefits are portrayed, (4 limitations of the treatment and or risks associated with a treatment, etc.

The criteria and the overall service of the website seem very valuable and provide a good way to educate the public about what to pay attention to in regards to the way scientific and/or health information is provided to the general public.

These criteria could easily be adapted to many other scientific topics when presented to the public.

Their ratings of TV health news reporting are particularly troubling. Sadly, the publisher of the website, Gary Schwitzer, Professor in the Health Journalism program at the University of Minnesota, writes that he is abandoning rating TV programs as there seems to be little evidence that they can influence this media.

Educating Parents One Month at a Time

2009-11-05T13:47:00.003-06:00

The future of education is providing a way for individuals to get information in a timely way (just in time) in an easily accessible online/web/social network basis. Here is some good work by colleagues that are doing this work with parents on young children.

For information see, Just In Time Parenting.
The Effectiveness of E-mail Updates as an Educational Delivery Method

View more presentations from Aaron Ebata.

Openness in Higher Education-- Thoughtful Report

2009-11-04T01:00:00.000-06:00

The Committee on Economic Development made up of business executives and college administrators released a recent report (Sept. 9, 2009) on the ways in which "openness" as the result of the Internet has change or failed to education.

The committee's basic conclusion can be summed up in this way--

"Information is more open when there are fewer restrictions on access, use, accessibility, and responsiveness. The Internet... has vastly expanded openness.... Like many other service industries such as finance or entertainment, higher education is rooted in information....But finance and entertainment have been transformed by greater openness while higher education appears, at least in terms of openness, to have changed much less" (p. 1).

The report goes on to explore ways in which higher education activities in teaching and learning, research, outreach and administration would benefit from openness and makes a series of policy recommendations for government and colleges. The recommendations for colleges include:

Foster faculty dissemination of research via open access publications and open education resources.
Establish open-source digital repositories for scholarly work.
Examine technology transfer policies that include exclusive licensing agreements.
Establish e-portfolios for students.
Be a voice for greater openness in access to information and for a re-examination of intellectual property rules for a digital era.

Bridging the Research-Practice Divide

2009-11-03T01:00:00.000-06:00

A central problem in the growth of knowledge about human development and family life is providing effective ways to translate that knowledge into practice. There are many problems, but a central problem is how to provide a way for practitioners to help researchers understand more about their practical work.

There are so many outcomes of mental health, development and well-being and there are no easy ways to catalog this information. Nevertheless, NIH has been on the road trying to systematize outcomes for mental health treatment so that clinicians can provide similar outcome information across a wide range of clients and eventually across a wide range of treatment outcomes.

This is a massive undertaking already five years in development. Called, PROMIS, Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System, an assessment system has been developed that draws on the best measures of pain, fatigue, depression, anger, social relationships and more and provides a dynamic system to allow clinicians to create and report reliable outcome data that can be shared across a wide range of treatment situations.

There is much for others to learn from this work in regards to how to build a successful feedback system for the measurement of other social, behavioral and educational efforts.

Growth of Online Courses

2009-11-02T01:00:00.003-06:00

The Sloan Foundation has provided the most reliable trends about the growth on online higher education. It's most recent report suggests that more college students than ever are taking courses online. In 2007, about 20% of all college students took at least one course online.

The estimate is that now (2009), the percentage is about 25%.

Clayton Christensen in Disrupting Class has been following the trends among high school students and online classes and has predicted that around 2012, there will be accelerated growth in the percentage of students taking courses in high school. One would guess that higher education will not be far behind, but not every higher education institution will have the infrastructure to respond to providing education in this fashion.

Example of Helpful Structure for Teaching and Learning

2009-11-01T08:10:00.002-06:00

This example may seem obvious to some, but it doesn't seem that common.

One of the great solutions to "information overload" in scientific communication was the perfection of the "abstract" or a summary of a more extensive amount of information. The "text" abstract of a longer text-based communication is a good idea, but what do you do when the world is text, audio, video, etc. We have the "advertising" version of this solution which is to give us "teasers" of the material that is supposed to make us want more, but we still need the "abstract" version which supplies us with a good overall sense of the message so that we can decide if we want to see, hear or read more. This isn't a teaser. It isn't designed to give us almost enough. It is designed to give us a good dose of the more extensive version.

In this example on the ReadWriteWeb, the authors provide a good example of how to provide an abstract of an interview with Eric Schmidt of Google. We get a sampling of some major points in the video (six minutes of the 45 minutes), a bullet point summary of the major ideas in the six minutes, links to the longer versions and links to more contextual information on the general points discussed in this interview.

It seems to me that over the long run, this is a good model for how to create valuable instructional and learning situations for people.

Nifty Little Tool for YouTube Video Editing

2009-11-01T08:01:00.005-06:00

Tube Chop-- Here is a handy tool for editing YouTube video that could be especially helpful in putting together video for teaching. If you find a 10 minute video, but you only want about 2 minutes to illustrate your point, you just load it into Tube Chop and select the segment and chop it up into the pieces you need.

Here is an example

eXtension 2.0-- Interaction, Participation and Community

2009-10-29T01:00:00.000-05:00

eXtension Twopointzero

View more presentations from Robert Hughes, Jr..

A key part of our success in the online world is to take the lessons from our experiences as extension educators and create similar tools online. Extension work has never been solely about delivering research-based information to the public; it has always been about creating communities of people engaged in learning together and encouraging people to teach each other. This is the foundation of 4-H clubs, women's extension organizations, farmer groups, and so forth. The central processes of successful extension work have been creating active learning situations that engaged people, fostering participation in teaching and learning and creating community. This presentation explores the tools and methods for creating these processes online.

A Model for Successful Web Services

Fogg and Eckles (2007) outline a model that they identified as common for successful web services. They note that there are three phases—discovery, superficial involvement, and true commitment. Within each of these phases they note that web designers have created multiple processes that facilitate specific target behaviors. By engaging web visitors in these behaviors, they move people from discovery to commitment.

Active and Interactive Learning

Although the first level of interaction with material on a website may be to read the information, it is possible to do a lot more. To engage people in thinking about ideas and trying out new practices, it is often useful to create opportunities for them to interact with the material. For example, you can have people test their knowledge about a topic by taking a simple quiz. Newspapers and magazines are filled with quiz games that you have to flip to the back to find the answers. Surveys or polls are another easy way to get people to interact with information. This gives people an opportunity to see how others think about the same issue. With the use of audio and video it is possible to develop a wide range of interactive experiences including games, simulations, illustrations, demonstrations, analysis tools, stories, puzzles, explorations, and more. Mayo and Steinberg (2007) propose a bold scheme for the United Kingdom in which the government would develop a platform for using government-generated data about all types of activities (e.g., health data, economic data, crime information, etc.) so that citizens and companies can use the data to create their own new analyses, guides, and so forth. Translating this idea for land-grant universities would mean providing not just the results of research, but the data themselves.

Participation

"I think that participation is the saving of the human race. Participate in games, puzzles, fun, storytelling and when you're grown up participate in education….. It's the key to the future of the human race-- participation. " Pete Seeger, 2008.

eXtension should engage people to participate with others around the topics and issues. This could mean using blogs and wikis for forums in which to address current topics and controversial ideas. One way to address myths and misconceptions is to actively engage in thoughtful dialogue about these ideas. Our web presence should be a place in which the public can rely on thoughtful analysis and critical thinking about topics. We should invite the public into helping to develop ideas, thinking, and new solutions. This should not be a one-way broadcast.

Nielsen (2006) offered the following suggestions for increasing user participation: make it easy to contribute, make contributing a side activity, allow users to edit templates or material rather than create from scratch, highlight quality contributions and contributors.

Community

One of the hallmarks of successful extension work has been the creation of learning communities that persisted over time. Whether through 4-H clubs, women's organizations and farmer cooperatives, effective extension work has brought people together to learn. The most robust and effective learning has always taken place within groups of people who learned from one another. Success in the online world will require a similar attention to the creation of communities. Creating communities online requires that we attend to issues of community building. This is not a teaching or information process, it is a social process. Success in community building either F2F or online requires attention to issues of creating a welcoming environment where people are treated with respect and people are encouraged to share ideas and information. Studies of successful online communities indicate that people participate for social reasons-- to meet and get to know people, to have fun, to be appreciated for their ideas and contributions, and to gain visibility (Butler, et al., 2008). Long-term success in creating sustainable online communities will require much attention to community building.

In short, the development of eXtension should continue to develop richer interactive learning opportunities, more avenues of participation and more community building efforts.

References

Butler, B., Sproll, L., Kiesler, S., Kraut, R. (2008). Community effort in online groups: Who does the work and why. (pp. 171- 193). In S. Weisband (Ed.). Leadership at a distance: Research in technologically-supported work. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum. Available online: http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/butler.pdf

Fogg, B. J., & Eckles, D. (2007). The behavior chain for online participation: How successful web services structure persuasion. In Y. de Kort et al., (Eds.), Persuasive Technology (pp. 199-209). Heidelberg: Springer Berlin.

Mayo, E., & Steinberg, T. (2007). The Power of Information. Retrieved from http://www.commentonthis.com/powerofinformation/ on June 19, 2008.

Nielsen, J. (2006). Participation inequality: Encouraging more users to participate. Retrieved from http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html on June 19, 2008.

What will New Media Look like in the future?

2009-10-28T01:52:00.000-05:00

Get There Early: Sensing the Future to Compete in the Present

Bob Johansen, Institute for the Future

http://connect.extension.iastate.edu/p53095789/

Embracing the Chaos (& other scary tales from the social web)

Tara Hunt, Author, The Whuffie Factor Co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer, Citizen Agency

http://connect.extension.iastate.edu/p26037816/

New Media-- Promotion and Tenure Guidelines

2009-10-27T11:21:00.003-05:00

My presentation about New Media Promotion and Tenure Guidelines which was given at the National eXtension conference was recorded and is available to watch:

http://connect.extension.iastate.edu/p88595072/

I have compiled additional reference material, slides for the talk and keep track of various conversations via Delicious tags.

The Experience Economy

2009-10-25T04:00:00.002-05:00

Clark Quinn in a recent article in eLearn titled, Publish or Perish, presents some very interesting ideas that fit the "fun, interesting and delightful" theme that dominated the National eXtesnion conference presentations last week.

Quinn is discussing books and publishing and his term is "experience," but he seems to be again capturing this idea that people need more than information, more than content. He writes,

"The opportunity is clear. The old cliché "it's not about books, it's about content" doesn't go far enough. What's needed is to make a compelling online experience, based on the content, tapping into the additional capabilities of the digital environment while not abandoning the value add.
For educational publishers, there's an additional consideration, and a market-differentiating opportunity. Pine and Gilmore suggest that the level beyond the experience is the transformative experience, where you pay for experiences that change you in desired ways. This is the core of education, when done right, and the ability to turn expert knowledge into a meaningful learning experience is a captivating premise."

He goes on to define "experience design noting, this

"is a new area, involving information architecture and design, engagement, and diverse media skills. Critically, it's having someone own the ultimate vision of the experience, and coordinating the elements to create the necessary engagement.
For educational publishers, an extra layer is learning experience design. To truly execute against this vision of an engaging experience and an effective learning experience, you have to understand not only learning, but also the alignment with engagement.
Learning experience design capability needs to be placed as a core competency, and one that is not in most publishers today"

Transperancy as a Scientist/Teacher

2009-10-24T16:17:00.001-05:00

This week I was reminded again about the converging worlds of the personal and professional. One of the conference speakers, Tara Hunt, suggested that the personal and professional should all be one. (See didn't mention her own fame in which she lived out her personal relationship online and its demise in an article titled, So Open It Hurts.)

So even if we skip the idea of my telling you about my personal life. What should I tell you about my professional life beyond the usual stuff that shows up in my vita? What should students know?

What are my potential conflicts of interest that might bias my perspective on what I study and what I teach? If I teach martial relationships does my marital status matter? If I claim to have some expertise about divorce, do you you need to know if I am divorced? If I write about parenting, do you want to know if I am a parent?

What interests should I tell you about? How will this affect how you read my material?

The scientific journals I read? What books I read? My areas of interest beyond my science? The books and magazines I read for pleasure. (Of course, I read scientific journals for pleasure.)

The new cultural world invites us to be more transparent? How much is enough?

Free Online Higher Education Courses?

2009-10-24T14:49:00.004-05:00

Despite all the "opencourseware" activities in higher education, the business model for delivering these courses remain in question. In a review of this work in the Chronicle of Higher Education, many of these issues are summarized.

There are many problems with this article and the whole discussion, for example:

"A freshman at Podunk U. can study with the world's top professors on YouTube."

Sentences like this are misleading. The idea that simply viewing lectures or having the homework is the equivalent of "taking" a course is very troubling. One of the essential features of "taking" a course is getting feedback and clarification of your ideas and your understanding of the material. Watching the video is not "studying with" a professor it is merely "listening to a lecture." This may be informative and you may learn something, but you have not studied with anyone.

"Social life we'll just forget about because there's Facebook," Mr. [David] Wiley says. "Nobody believes that people have to go to university to have a social life anymore."

Wrong. Surely there is no one left who really thinks that "Facebook" replaces social experiences at college or anywhere else. Scholars who have studied this work have shown repeatedly that online and real life social life is completely intertwined and some online social activity is with people that one knows already.

There was at least one sensible note in this article that is a significant reminder of the limits of much of this talk about our current round of open courseware.

"There's a pretty significant fraction of the population that learns better with instructor-led kinds of activities than purely self-paced activities," says John R. Bourne, executive director of the Sloan Consortium, a group that supports online learning. "Can you have a group of students who know nothing about quantum mechanics and have them work in a group and discuss it and learn a lot? I think it's going to be difficult."

National Extension Conference 2009

2009-10-24T07:22:00.003-05:00

All the conference presentations at the National eXtension conference 2009 held in St. Louis, MO, Oct 21-23, 2009 are stored here: http://drop.io/next2009

Ten Leadership Skills-- Bob Johansen, Institute for the Future

2009-10-23T07:12:00.003-05:00

I am not a great fan of "leadership" and futurists, but Bob Johansen presented some interesting and compelling ideas at the eXtension National Conference. See Leaders Make the Future.

Here are some of his ten skills that I thought captured ideas that seem essential in my work:

1. Immersive Learning Ability-- Ability to dive into different-for-you physical and online worlds, to learn from them in a first-person way.

2. Quiet transparency-- Ability to be open and authentic about what matters to you-- without advertising yourself.

3. Rapid prototyping-- Ability to create early versions of new information, with the expectation that later success will require early failures.

4. Smart mob organizing-- Ability to bring together, engage with, and nurture purposeful business and social change networks through intelligent use of electronic and other media.

5. Commons creating-- Ability to stimulate, grow and nurture shared assets that can benefit other players-- and allow competition at a higher level.

Entertaining Education-- A good idea?

2009-10-23T06:49:00.003-05:00

"Stop being important and start being interesting."
Michael Hirshorn as quoted by Tara Hunt in Embracing the Chaos.

"Whatever you do, make it fun." Bob Johansen, Institute for the Future

"Focus on customer delight." Russ Roberts, Northwestern University

One of the major themes at the 2009 eXtension National Conference was the idea that our educational work needs to fun, interesting and delightful. At first glance this seems out of place and antithetical to education, but is it?

Aren't most of us today here because some teacher made some topic fun, interesting, compelling and engaging? Don't we all remember a favorite lecturer who managed to make the most boring topics exciting? Hasn't effective education always been fun, interesting, and delightful?

Tara Hunt-- -- the future of the social web

2009-10-23T06:33:00.003-05:00

Tara Hunt suggests a new of ideas about the future of the social web. From the perspective of an educator the most troubling, compelling idea is that "expertise" is less important or maybe not important at all. Is this true? Or is it that "expertise" is important, but the ways in which is is conferred has changed or is it that expertise is established in new ways? Slides 45-50 have a good set of bullet points that provide some important ideas.

Here are some quotes within her presentation that I found interesting:

"Stop being important and be interesting." Michael Hirshorn, The Atlantic

"you should be so lucky to have your work remixed. If it is not remixed you should worry about your relevance." Tara Hunt

"the more fun the mashup, the more likely you will get some press for it." Tara Hunt

"Put your audiences success at the core of every decision your make." Tara Hunt

Embrace the Chaos (and other scary tales of the social web)

View more documents from Tara Hunt.

New Media Promotion & Tenure--2009

2009-10-23T06:07:00.001-05:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

New Media Promotion & Tenure--2009

View more presentations from Robert Hughes.

Promotion & Tenure Presentation on Slideshare

2009-10-22T10:36:00.004-05:00

My presentation about a model of promotion and tenure using new media in outreach and engagement work within universities has been uploaded to Slide Share:

New Media Promotion & Tenure--2009

View more presentations from Robert Hughes.

Promotion and Tenure Metrics for New Media-- 2009

Abstract:

Despite the transformation in information technologies, few universities have revised performance expectations and promotion criteria. These changes have had a profound impact on outreach and extension staff. The purpose of this session is to outline expectations for extension professionals (county, regional and state) and to define the metrics to assess these activities.

The basic expectation is that personnel will create unique information technology-based instructional material that address issues confronting individuals, organizations and/or society using knowledge based on scientific research. Generally, staff will be expected to develop instructional material for both the general public and professionals. Two broad types of information technology instructional strategies are expected to be developed—a broadcast strategy (one to many) and an engagement strategy (many to many). Broadcast strategies are designed to reach a broad group of people and might include such tools as an email newsletter, instructional video, or podcast. Engagement strategies are designed to foster extended learning communities and might include technology tools such as blogs, games, online courses, etc.

A standard set of metrics will be used to assess the quantity and quality of the information technology- based broadcast and engagement activities. Three general types of outcomes will be assessed—levels of participation, client satisfaction and participant change. For example, to measure the quantity of participation, page views and unique visitors will be recorded. Measuring the quality of broadcast strategies would include links and citations. Metrics for assessing participation within engagement strategies would include the number of people involved, the length of time people are engaged, and/or participant contributions.

Standard tools and indices will be used to routinely assess satisfaction, although quantitative measures such as repeat users, depth and length of time on a website, blog, or game can serve as a proxy for “satisfaction.” Metrics and strategies for assessing outcomes will have to be tailored to the types of changes sought in regard to the programs, but general procedures will be outlined that can be incorporated into broadcast and engagement approaches.

other reference material: http://open2learn.blogspot.com/2009/10/references-notes-guidelines-for.html

Scholarly Publication-- Michael Jensen

2009-10-21T06:56:00.004-05:00

Jensen has been consistently at the forefront of thinking about how the publication of scientific information and scholarship can take advantage of new technologies. In a recent speech, he makes the following points:

"In a world of an ever-growing surfeit of content and distraction, when the clamor of voices for simplistic solutions to systemic problems, we must:

Promote our value to society, to justify our continued existence.

Further, we must:

Brand ourselves as becoming part of the CO2 solution, to our administrators and institutions, as part of *their* external messaging campaigns

Brand ourselves with the public as a key part of a civilized world trying to save itself

Brand ourselves as rethinking our relationship to scholarly communication

Brand ourselves as quality in a sea of content, by being openly accessible digitally

Brand ourselves as promoters of intellectual rigor and quality, online"

These last two points are worth repeating over and over. This is the difference that university faculty can make in regards to participating in the online world. It should also serve as a reminder that the point of new media is not to be "cool," but to produce high quality work.

Guidelines for New Media P & T

2009-10-14T15:24:00.013-05:00

(presented at the National Extension Conference, St. Louis, MO, Oct 22, 2009).

References & Other Materials-- this is a list of useful resources and materials related to this presentation. You can find other materials tagged in Delicious.

Other posts on this topic:

Should Faculty be required to Publish on the Web for Promotion?
Can Faculty Post Stuff on the Web and get Tenure?
Online Science, Teaching and Outreach with Tenure
Measuring Scientific Contributions on the Web

Evaluating Performance

Here are some sources for understanding and developing metrics for client participation, satisfaction and impact.

Google. (n.d.). Google analytics tour.

Many of the metrics that are essential to reporting on blogs, websites and other new media platforms are available by recording media activities using Google Analytics.

Hughes, Jr., R. (1995). Are a lot of satisfied participants enough? Human Development and Family Life Bulletin,1(3).

Hughes describes a brief example of how satisfaction can be used to monitor program processes.

Lambur, M. (n.d.). Communities of practice evaluation guide.

Lambur provides some useful advice, tools and metrics for evaluating eXtension materials and other new media.

Larsen, D. L., Attkisson, W. A., Hargreaves, W. A., & Nguyen, T. D. (1979). Assessment of client/patient satisfaction: Development of a general scale. Evaluation and Program Planning, 2, 197-207.

The 8-item general scale described in this article can easily be adapted to measure satisfaction of a variety of programs and services.

Criteria for Promotion and Tenure

Anderson, D. L. (2004). (Ed.), Digital scholarship in the tenure, promotion and review process.
Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.

This edited volume is one of the few examinations of digital scholarship and the ways in which it can be handled in promotion and tenure. Much of this work focuses on issues that are more central to the humanities, but there are still some useful insights about the overall issues. Anderson in the introductory chapter makes the following point: "it is not that they [scholars] use technology...but that they use technology so well that it transforms their field and the kind of work that is possible in it" (p. 9).

APA Style Guide. http://apastyle.apa.org/

When reporting the creation of information technology-based products it is useful to report these using a standardized format like APA for citing electronic contributions on your vita or annual report.

Extension Metrics Working Group. (Feb. 6, 2009). eXtension scholarship metrics.

Some good ideas of ways to capture contributions to eXtension efforts. These ideas could be applied to other new media activities.

Ippolito, J., Blais, J., Smith, O.F., Evans, S., & Stormer, N. (2009). New criteria for new media. Leonardo, 42, 71-75.

These authors provide one of the most complete descriptions of how new media can be handled in promotion and tenure. They write, "few new-media academics are going to bother with these innovations if their departments' criteria for promotion and tenure recognize only dead-tree journals" (p. 71).

Jensen, M. (2007). The new metrics of scholarly authority. The Chronicle Review, 53.

Should Faculty be required to Publish on the Web for Promotion?

2009-07-31T02:00:00.002-05:00

Most of the discussion regarding the web and issues of tenure and promotion have asked questions like:

Will web-based contributions count for promotion and tenure?
What are the equivalences between traditional scholarly work and web-based work?

But maybe we should be asking another question:

Why shouldn't faculty be required to distribute their work via the web? In an age in which a significant amount of information is available in various online venues, shouldn't scholars be expected to contribute to the intellectual discussions in their fields? Don't scholars also have an obligation to participate in the public discussion of scientific issues?

In addition to asking scholars about their production of journal articles and books, perhaps we should begin reviewing their web-based contributions.

What's wrong with this expectation?

Can Faculty Post Stuff on the Web and get Tenure?

2009-07-30T01:00:00.001-05:00

Most of the material that I have been able to find that discusses online faculty work and tenure has been related to the humanities. The Modern Language Association (2000) has posted these recommendations for faculty and committees making tenure decisions.

These general guidelines remind faculty to clarify their role at their institution, seek advice from administrators and senior faculty regarding types of work and to document their online work in a manner similar to other types of scholarly contributions.

The advice to committees reviewing promotion cases in regards to digital scholarship is to make sure that external evaluators are appropriate for this type of work, that the work is reviewed online rather than on paper (in order to fully understand the work) and to see advice from other disciplines that may be relevant to digital scholarship.

The MLA Committee on Information Technology has also established a wiki on the topic of digital scholarship that addresses a wide variety of issues and ideas about how faculty, administrators and faculty review committees can handle issues related to digital scholarship.

See all my delicious tags for p&t: http://delicious.com/hughesro/p%26T

Online Science, Teaching and Outreach with Tenure

2009-07-29T01:00:00.001-05:00

Some universities are beginning to think about how we deal with faculty contributions that are web-based, but there are much work that needs to be done. I am very interested in work by faculty and faculty committees regarding this issue. Please post comments about work at your institution or send me email at: hughesro@illinois.edu if you have ideas about how this work should develop.

Over the next several weeks I will post a series of discussions of the issues surrounding online science, teaching and outreach and how we can begin to think more carefully about these issues. You can find all the posts on this topic with the label: "PandT"

Measuring Scientific Contributions on the Web

2009-07-28T01:00:00.000-05:00

Michael Nielson (The Future of Science) has been writing some very interesting ideas about why scientists have been slow to adopt the use of information-technology as a means to distribute their work and to invite collaboration.

He cites the failures of significant efforts to foster online collaboration and communication. For example, the journal, Nature, launched an open commentary section on their website to foster discussion among scientists about papers published. Nature terminated the effort when the site failed to get many comments. The final report on the site stated, “…there is a marked reluctance among scientists to offer open comments.”

Neilson suggests that there are two major problems that prevent web-based scientific publishing and collaboration—a lack of software and cultural practices within the scientific community that prevent open sharing. He suggests that the second problem is the biggest problem.

He also notes that we don’t have good metrics for how to judge the value of online contributions:

1. What is the value of a blog post?
2. What is the value of a blog?
3. What is the value of a contribution to Wikipedia?
4. What is the meaning of having a webpage at the top of Google’s Page Rank?
5. What is the value of your lecture on YouTube?

These are tough questions to answer, but it seems to me that we have to begin to provide some best guesses and take this type of work into account in making judgments about the quality and quantity of scientific work. Failing to do this will only harm science and education because our best work will not be available in easily accessible ways.

Open Peer-Review of Scientific Work on the Web

2009-07-27T21:04:00.002-05:00

There is no particular reason that scientific articles cannot be openly reviewed on the web. If we are true to the scientific ideal that feedback from peers is valuable and advances both the scientific work and the presentation of the scientific work, then it would seem that the reviews of scientific papers should be available publicly. (Not just to scientists, but to all.)

Chris Anderson on Free

2009-07-22T21:42:00.002-05:00

Can this work for education? What is the "free" part of education and who pays for it?

Educational Gaming

2009-07-16T16:18:00.002-05:00

The nine tribes of the internet

2009-06-16T11:30:00.001-05:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

The nine tribes of the internet

View more OpenOffice presentations from lrainie.

Jeff Howe on Crowdsourcing

2009-05-14T06:11:00.004-05:00

There are numerous insights in Jeff Howe's book on crowdsourcing about how and why to engage people in building websites.

"Given the right set of conditions, the crowd will almost always outperform any number of employees-a fact that companies are becoming aware of and are increasingly attempting to exploit" (p. 11).

"Croudsourcing has the capacity to form the perfect meritocracy. Gone are pedigree, race, gender, age and qualification. What remains is the quality of the work itself" (13).

Howe relates a story by Linda Parker about the Cincinnati Enquirer in regards to their efforts to get the crowd involved in contributing stories. She said, "It used to read, 'Be a Citizen Journalist,' and no one ever clicked on it. Then we said, 'Tell us your story,' and still nothing. For some reason, 'Get Published' were the magic words." Howe notes, "There's a valuable lesson here: people want a voice, but that doesn't mean they'll use the vernacular of journalism" (106).

Howe, J. (2008). Crowdsourcing. New York: Crown Business.

Applying Crowdsourcing to Family Life Education

2009-05-13T06:06:00.003-05:00

Based on Jeff Howe's book on Crowdsourcing, here are some brief applications of his ideas to family life education.

1. Pick the right model of crowdsourcing. Crowds can help provide wisdom about family life, they can help create the content or educational process of family life education, they can rate family life educational material on matters of relevance, importance of helpfulness, they can contribute financially to the work or some combination of all of these strategies. (More about models of crowdsourcing applied to family life education.)

2. Pick the right crowd. Howe suggests that a good crowdsourced site has 5,000 active participants, but they need to be engaged in your work. Designers of family life education websites needs to design for specific audiences. Too often family life education web designs don't have a specific audience.

3. Offer the right incentives. Howe writes, "With few exceptions, the most important component to a successful crowdsourcing effort is a vibrant, committed community" (p. 282). Fostering and sustaining a community of interested partners means creating a process that rewards the community of users. What types of rewards do parents or family members want to receive for participating? A chance to help, a chance to share with others, what? (Other notes of community building. )

4. Crowdsourcing is not cheap or easy. One of the myths of crowdsourcing is that the web designers have less work to do or it takes less money to foster community-based web development. Not so says many who have done this work.

5. Crowdsourcing is a partnership between good management and the participants. Crowds don't self organize and manage. Good crowdsouring models are most effective when they have good leadership. That is, when there is a model that provides easy direction and opportunity for contributing.

6. Find the right level of contribution. Howe writes, "any task worth doing is worth dividing up into its smallest components" (285). Effective crowdsourcing is finding an appropriate-sized unit of contribution that is manageable for someone to do and provides a building block for the overall project. (See my comments on microlearning. units.)

7. The crowd is likely to produce a lot of junk. It is naive to think that crowds will only create wisdom and great products or that all members of the crowd will have the same talents. Effective crowdsource development means having a way of finding the best material and fostering the best talent for the specific jobs you need. (See more about the impasse of Sturgeon's Law.)

8. The crowd will also contribute some value. There are people who will help you build more effective and useful family life education websites.

9. If you are lucky enough to develop a strategy that involves a crowd... listen to them. Trust their guidance.

10. "Ask not what the crowd can do you for, but what you can do for the crowd" (p. 287). I am sure that Howe put this last so that the potential website developer would be left with this one thought. For crowdsourcing to work you have to find a project that you think is valuable and that the crowd thinks is valuable. The more the project serves the needs of the crowd and provides them with engaging, interesting, rewarding, and meaningful opportunities the better chance you have of success. Family life education is ideally suited to be built on a crowdsourced model-- there are long traditions of people gathering to share advice, stories, and troubles and a mutual help ethic of trying to assist one another in the complicated task of making families work.

Models of Crowdsourcing Applied to Family Life Education

2009-05-12T06:10:00.004-05:00

In his book, Crowdsourcing, Jeff Howe, identifies four general models of crowdsourcing-- crowd wisdom, crowd creation, crowd voting and crowd funding. Each of these models can be applied to the creation of family life education websites.

Crowding sourcing wisdom about family life.

Although we have significant information about human development and families, there are still many applications to particular challenges or particular children that reside in the daily experience of individual parents and family members that could be helpful to others. Most family life educators who work with groups (F2F or online) know the value of inviting the participants to share their strategies and ideas about questions and issues facing one another. In open social networking sites for parents you see a lot of this type of discussion. One parent poses a challenge and others suggest ways to deal with the situation. Sometimes bad advice is offered, but often times there are helpful suggestions. There are many ways to extend and encourage this crowd sourced wisdom from family members.

Crowd creation of family life educational experiences.

Family life education sites can move beyond simply capturing the wisdom of family members and involve families in designing and developing the educational experiences. Family members could be included in serving as a moderator of open forums of parent discussions. Participants might monitor topics of interest to particular families (for example, parents of children with autism) to identify hot, relevant, or new issues. Participants could be invited to write, record or video content that to illustrate a particular point. (Note: There are many developmental issues in the lives of children that can most easily be illustrated by video better than words. Family life education would be powerfully advanced by having easy access to short video clips of these developmental milestones. Asking parents to provide video examples of developmental milestones would dramatically increase the our ability to help parents understand human development and enrich the text descriptions of these topics.)

Crowd voting in family life education.

The simple version of "crowd voting" is to ask readers of family life education websites to rate articles, videos, etc. on usefulness or other qualities. Participants can also be asked to write reviews or reactions to topics. (this may be more crowd creation than voting.) Clearly, if a family life educational website were successful in gathering crowd created material, there would be many opportunities to include the participants in rating and commenting on the various creations.

Crowd funding of family life education.

At present the most common model of funding on the Internet has been an advertiser model. There are still relatively few examples in which people contribute to the funding of content delivery. One model that might work for family life education is the model used by ESPN and tried by several newspapers in which much of the content is available for free, but their is some "in-depth content" created by the most popular commentators that is only available by subscription. This might work in family life education settings. Another version of this would be to offer more individualized experiences for participants that would provide more in-depth support or help through a paid subscription process.

Summary.

There are numerous opportunities to engage parents and other family members in "crowd-based" strategies for interacting, developing and advancing family life education. This is an important area of further exploration.

CrowdSourcing Higher Education: The Sturgeon's Law Impasse

2009-05-10T12:27:00.005-05:00

One of the major reasons that educators are resistant to opening up education so that many people can participate in the creation of learning experiences is the worry that most of the material created will be badly done.

It is not that educators see their own work as perfect, but they remain skeptical that "committed amateur educators" would produce high quality learning experiences. This concern, sometimes called Sturgeon's Law or Revelation, holds that 90% of the material created by individuals is very low quality and at best 10% of the material will be useful and of high quality. Based on this idea, most educators are not willing to risk trying to find the 10% of valuable material in the face of the 90% of worthless material. They are also concerned that the worthless material will damage the the reputation of their good material.

In designing in open education system that allows for many people to develop content and learning experiences, this issue will have to be faced and a system designed to deal with this problem.

Is there a model that would change educators' views on this issue? Are their tools that would provide an easy way to sift through the material to find the 10%?

Early Learning Educational Platform-- Required Features

2009-05-08T06:51:00.004-05:00

Here is a working list of the features and tools that would be available in a robust early learning educational platform.

Need to create an educational and technical framework within which a variety of short and extended educational experiences can be incorporated.

Needs to have a sustainable development and maintenance system in which people can contribute for short periods and be replaced without major disruption to the enterprise.

Needs to be scalable so that the work can grow and yet still be managed.

Needs to take advantage of existing material and accommodate new material.

Needs to be able to handle text, audio and video formats…and any new formats.

Needs to be able to use a variety of levels of manpower in effective ways—interested amateurs, county level extension staff, non-extension professionals, state-level extension staff, university faculty without extension appointments, undergraduate and graduate students.

Includes convenient ways for people to contribute individually without much much efforts (e.g., Wikipedia model—in which when you encounter any page, you can register and contribute).

Includes a range of short (e.g., text FAQs, 1 minute video or audio clips, etc.) and extended educational experiences

Should include educational experiences that serve a range of types of learners from one-time, specific questions to in-depth experiences that would result in college credit. The platform would include all the levels in between.

Needs to have ways for contributors to get credit.

Needs to be designed in ways that foster credibility with the audiences. This might be different at different levels of the educational experiences.

For each type of “contribution” there needs to be easy tools to use to contribute. For example, there are just a few steps to follow to upload a video onto YouTube. Likewise, on Wikipedia, the text editor is right there to use.

There needs to be a variety of instructional tools—a text FAQ maker, a quiz maker, a tool to build an educational path that links a series of FAQs into a longer educational experience (from text FAQ to a factsheet that combines several FAQs to a series of factsheets that might be the equivalent of a “book chapter,” a series of chapters that might compose a book or course text.

Other instructional tools would be a quiz maker that might use the FAQs, a data collection tool such as survey maker for collecting information that may serve as a variety of feedback, educational and scientific purposes, data presentation tools or ways to easily display charts and graphs, presentation tools or ways to incorporate audio & slides, or text and slides, or video, and probably more.

Another instructional tool might be a “story-telling” tool that fosters the development of richer examples of understanding human development and family life concepts.

This platform should include a variety of opportunities for social networking and community-building.

What else?

Crowdsourcing Parent Education

2009-05-05T06:43:00.003-05:00

Most professionals who are engaged in teaching parent education and other family-related issues are generally reluctant to embrace the crowdsourcing idea of working with parents and family members.

First, although few people would claim to be experts on physics, chemistry, engineering, software development, etc., almost everyone thinks they are are an expert on raising children and managing families. Second, although many people would agree that there physics, chemistry, etc. are based on science, fewer would agree that behavioral or social science information is much better than commonsense.

So within this context, should behavioral and social scientists engage in developing crowdsourced educational activities in which ordinary people have a chance to create and exchange knowledge and insight about parenting and family matters? This leads to a whole series of questions and puzzles about how do you manage the potential of inaccurate information. What does this do to the credibility of our scientific knowledge about parenting and human development when "untrained" people are allowed to provide insights and advice about parenting, etc?

What risks do you run of being the source of damaging or very inappropriate ideas?

Despite the risks, I am on the side that professionals should invite the "crowd" into the creation of education for parents and families. Although there is potential for misinformation, I think there is much more promise of wise, thoughtful information. With the use of "moderators" and other techniques, misinformation can be a way of correcting parents ideas about various issues rather than treat this information as a problem.

At present we generally don't know the extent to which misinformation is common in forums, chatrooms and social network sites for parents. I know of no efforts to examine these sites to see the degree to which accurate or inaccurate information is being exchanged.

Before we abandon the idea of crowdsourcing parent education, let's see what is really happening.

Collaboration-- Stand By Me

2009-05-04T18:27:00.002-05:00

Here is an example of people working together.

Crowd Sourcing Higher Education

2009-05-03T13:13:00.002-05:00

Despite all the efforts to begin fashioning open higher education models (see MIT, OpenCourseWare, etc.), there is less discussion of "crowdsourcing" higher education. The basic idea of crowdsourcing is inviting your customers into the business and sharing their ideas and activities within the enterprise.

In higher education I think we are more reluctant to give up our positions as "experts" to our students. Even the various "guide on the side" ideas about teaching in higher education never allow the faculty member to be in any other place than the nominal head of the class.

Yet it seems to make sense to begin including students into the instructional process. There is a considerable body of educational scholarship that suggests that "peer tutoring" can be a powerful force for learning, both for the peer being tutored as well as the tutor. Any what about an even large pool of students, former students and other interested "amateurs" who are interested in both learning and thinking carefully about the content of higher education. Isn't this a great untapped resource? Rather than let them devote all their energy to creating thoughtful Wikipedia entries, shouldn't we invite into the process of developing instructional materials?

eLearning Infrastructure: A Model

2009-05-02T06:26:00.010-05:00

(Note: This continues the development of my ideas about an early learning educational platform.)

Building a learning community not only requires us to think about how we structure the interaction, we also have to think about how we structure the learning. In these figures I conceptualize a model for how learning might be structured in elearning settings.

The general idea in this model is that learning is structured from quick solutions or answers to more complex learning experiences that engage people in problem-solving and deeper explorations of ideas.

Next, I have tried to think about the continuum of learning experiences that would fit into this framework. In this second figure I have tried to identify the range of instructional methods that would fit into this learning infrastructure.

The most elemental forms of learning would seem to be questions and answers. Online this is often referred to as "frequently asked questions." (See previous discussion of "FAQS.") This format has been used a a variety of learning situations and seems like a good place to begin building a learning structure. FAQs do not have to always be text. There can be audio and video "answers" to questions just as easily as there can be "text" answers to questions. The next step in this structure would be increasing the length or depth of answers to questions in a sequence. A simple version of this idea would be a short article composed of a string of FAQs that would describe a more complex topic. Next, I use the term "microlearning" activities to refer to simple interactions with learners. Here I am thinking about quizzes, surveys, true-false tests, and so forth.

The next stage begins to put learners in each other's company so that they begin to learn together. The previous material is generally designed as individual learning. I have chosen the term "peer discussions" for this next phase. At this moment in time the discussions would probably take place in social networking sites in which participants would be invited to talk to each other (in a semi-guided fashion) on topics relevant to the educational activity or subject of study.

The final level in this model is a stage in which "feedback" is added to the learning process. Although it is possible for "peer discussions" about a topic to result in feedback to students, this stage explicitly adds the idea that learners are given tasks, activities and assignments in which they will get feedback about their ideas, understanding and mastery of a topic. I have chosen not to refer to this level as "graded and tested" but rather to emphasize "feedback." Although "grades" are often given in situations, the purpose is to provide a "summary" of the feedback.

Building an Online Early Learning Professional Development Community

2009-04-23T01:00:00.002-05:00

Designing online learning communities remains on the important challenges for educators. In other postings I have written about the roles for learners in communities and tried to describe general ideas for creating online communities.

In this post, I want to develop an outline for how to create a community focused on child care, parenting, and early learning to elaborate my ideas about online learning communities.

At the moment I mostly have questions rather than answers.

1. Can we create a community that includes for parents and professionals?

There are lots of overlap in terms of the types of issues and concerns faced by both parents and child care professionals. They are both interested in healthy development-- helping children grow, learn, eat nutritiously, be safe, etc. There are some differences especially between those professionals who care for children in centers with multiple children versus a parent with only one child. There are fewer differences between a family child care provider and a parent.

2. What advantages or disadvantages might there be to developing a parent-professional learning community?

The biggest advantage would be that parents and professionals could learn from each other and see the issues that they share in common. The disadvantage is that professionals may want to ask questions and raise issues that they would prefer be discussed within the professional community rather than in the presence of parents. Likewise, parents may be interested in hearing from other parents about issues rather than from professionals on some issues.

3. How would learning be organized?

I would create microlearning opportunities such as short audio, text, and video material that address a single issue, problem or idea such that these microlearning experiences could be assembled into larger learning activities such as lessons, courses, and so forth. My best example of microlearning is the FAQ (frequently asked questions) structure in which there are specific questions with short answers. Likewise, in many cases, these answers are also linked to related questions or additional information. I also think that short quizzes and surveys are other tools that can be easily used to create microlearning situations. Brief audio and video material can also be used to illustrate ideas, topics and experiences that can't be easily captured by words.

4. How would the learning community be organized?

In organizing the learning community, I would return to my ideas about "roles of learners." My idea is there are a range of roles that vary by level of knowledge or ability and level of engagement. I have hypothesized five levels from novice to partner. It is worth noting that I assume that expect for the novice level, in all the other roles I assume that the participants function as both teachers and learners. In short, each person is both responsible for teaching those members at the next role below themselves and learning from the members at the next level above them. Being both teacher and learner is one of the hallmarks of what it means to be in a learning community. (See a more extensive discussion of these roles.)

Here you begin to see one of the challenges of having both parents and professionals in the same learning community. How will people feel about both parents and professionals developing learning materials? Can parents (without other credentials) obtain the role of "expert" in the learning community?

What types of technology tools are needed to support this learning community?

There needs to be an easy way to create FAQs (short question and answers), quiz tools, survey tools, audio and video tools (perhaps just the capacity to upload audio and video rather than editing tools), forums for both synchronous and asynchronous discussions, and tools for assembling short microlearning content into longer and richer learning experiences (e.g., courses, how-to segments, etc.). At the most advanced end there may need to be research tools such as data collection, management and analysis.

FAQs as Microlearning Units of Education

2009-04-21T01:00:00.004-05:00

Despite significant advances in the use of online tools for teaching and learning, I still don't think we have conceptualized the right platform for learning online. Wikis, blogs, forums, repositories, social networks, and so on all have their place and usefulness in learning, but it is still difficult to assemble a powerful sequence of learning content and activities.

In the early stages there was much talk of "learning objects" as a basic building block of learning. Learning objects were conceptualized similar to software code objects that were designed to execute specific functions within a computer program (e.g., code for printing text) that could be used over and over again whenever that particular function was needed. A learning object was conceived as a similar unit of "learning" that could be used as needed in a teaching activity. Lots of puzzles and troubles emerged from this effort (see a summary of these problems), but gradually the idea of "learning objects" has been abandoned.

FAQs-- Frequently Asked Questions as a Learning Building Block

I think the problem is that we haven't developed the right building block for creating learning opportunities. In short, we haven't gotten the unit of production right. Yochai Benkler writes, "The number of people who can, in principle, participate in a project is therefore inversely related to the size of the smallest scale contribution necessary to produce a usable module" (The Wealth of Networks, Chapter 4, 2006, p. 101). I would suggest that whole courses, whole lectures, etc. are too big to include very many participants. Also, materials of this magnitude serve as useful resources if you are teaching similar material, but they are rarely designed in such a way that another teacher can easily incorporate the material into their own teaching/course, etc. This lowers the actual usage of such materials. The the brilliant aspects of the Wikipedia is that they developed a system that got the "unit of production" right.

FAQs as a solution to the "unit of production" problem for learning. If we start at the basic unit of learning, I think that most learning starts with a question. Whether we are thinking about the questions of a child (How did the stars get up there?) or the scientist (How did the stars get up there?), most learning begins with a question. So what if we began to create a platform in which teachers could write questions and answers (FAQs) and then there were tools for assembling sequences of FAQs into longer sequences of learning? Would this work?

A Limited Example

In a website, MissouriFamilies, I developed some limited models of this FAQ structure. For example, here is a simple FAQ, "What is the divorce rate in the United States?" Here is a longer article that is constructed from a series of FAQs about trends in marriage rates.

My own brief efforts in trying this strategy suggests that it is possible to create a series of FAQs that can be assembled into longer learning sequences.

What about Audio/Video/PowerPoint FAQs?

Although I have not tried to create audio or video FAQs it seems to me like they would be similar to text. That is, they would be short clips that answer a question or illustrate an idea. Again they might be put together in a sequence to teach a larger point.

I am less certain about how to create a easy set of PowerPoint slides for a lecture or other type of presentation from a series of FAQs. Clearly, you couldn't just string together the words or have a series of slides that had each of the FAQs. This is an interesting question to think more about.

Other Issues in Using FAQs to Building Learning Experiences

One of the biggest challenges in using FAQs is the developing an answer that is appropriate to the level of the learner. A child's question about the stars is not the same as a physicist question about the stars even if they use the same words. There is no easy solution to this problem. To build useful systems we will have to develop ways of tagging FAQs with metadata that capture the essential "learning attributes" that need to be considered with each FAQ. This will be challenging, but perhaps less challenging that to continue to create the same content for multiple efforts to teach the same content.

There are also all types of questions. One useful way to begin to think about these questions is to use the revised Bloom taxonomy of the cognitive domain of learning. (See Forehand presentation of this work.) Often this work is used to help teachers learn how to ask questions of students to encourage them to seek deeper levels of synthesis and analysis of an issue, but these same questions can be used to build a structured set of FAQs that move from basic information about a topic to a deeper understanding. Likewise, the Bloom conceptualization can be used to build learning sequences with FAQs.

Summary

I am not ready to give up on the idea of our creating learning materials that we can use and reuse in building learning activities.

Early Learning Educational Platform-- What's Missing?

2009-04-19T10:40:00.009-05:00

Over the last several years, Illinois has been building an educational and professional development infrastructure for child care (early learning) professionals. This project known as "Gateways to Opportunity" is designed to bring together all the resources for educating beginning and advanced professionals interested in early care and education. Additionally, there has been a long-term effort to integrate many of the resources for parents and professionals at the Illinois Early Learning Project.

These efforts have advanced the resources for parents and professionals interested in young children and have developed a wide array of useful tools-- newsletters for early learning professionals, a listserv for professionals interested in early care, descriptions of early learning standards and video examples of classrooms, teaching and work with parents, parent materials in Spanish, English and Polish, and much more. There are also many useful links to other resources on the web.

Despite all this useful material, I still feel like something is missing and there is something about the design of these websites that is lacking.

Review of the Illinois Early Learning Project Website

One difficulty is the conceptual structure of this website-- it is organized by structural features of the material rather than by the content. For example, there is a section on "videos" and "tip sheets" (which is actually a reference to the fact that these are designed as print materials). Organizing material by delivery mode is a structural characteristic of the delivery system, but not a characteristic that would be particularly important to a parent or professional who is more likely to be interested in a particular topic, issue or question. This points to another problem with these materials which is that parent and professional material is intertwined. The Illinois Early Learning Project website could easily be organized by the type of learner/client/audience so that parents could find the materials designed for them and professionals could find materials addressed to them.

Review of the Gateways to Opportunity Website

This website is better organized to address the needs of particular types of potential audiences (parents, students, current professionals, etc.) and there is a lot of useful resources located in each section, but I still have the feeling that the organizational structure reflects the resources rather than the interests or questions of the audience. For example, in the section designed for higher education faculty there are many useful links to appropriate resources, but they could be organized around the tasks or needs that higher education might be interested in such as: resources for getting approval as an entitled program, resources for professional development, resources for your students, new teaching resources, and so forth. In short, the website could be organized around the questions or concerns of the audience.

This organizational structure may result in people overlooking valuable resources. For example, the website has an extensive list of research reports listed under the section titled, Resources, but there is no link to this directly from the higher education pages. This list of research studies is likely to include a number of items that would be of interest to higher education faculty either for their own professional development or for their instruction to students.

Adding Interaction, Participation and Community

Increasing websites are incorporating opportunities for online users to interact on the website, participate in the creation of knowledge and building community. (See my general description of these topics and links to other resources about these issues.) In order to build an effective platform to education and professional development in early learning, we will have to build a platform in which there are opportunities for parents and professionals to engage with each other and with the creation of content in these online settings. This means moving beyond websites as places to find information or to tell people about the issues. This calls for a different type of design and a more open online platform.

This is the big challenge for those interested in building an effective learning platform for early learning.

Falling for Social Science: People in Mind?

2009-04-12T06:52:00.003-05:00

In a fascinating book on the role of physical objects and children's developing love of science, Sherry Turkle in Falling for Science, has collected essays from over 25 years of students at MIT in which she asks them to write an essay on the question:

"Was there an object you met during childhood or adolescence that had an influence on your path into science?"

In this book, she shares the essays that students have written over the years that capture the excitement, passion and curiosity that objects often played in these students' growth as young scientists. This is wonderful reading and Turkle uses these reflections to craft new insights into how we foster science education.

The question I was left thinking was how young people's interest in social science emerges. I have often thought that most young people come to social science (family studies, psychology, sociology, anthropology) by the back door. They come into the fields because of an interest in helping people, concern about injustice, puzzled by the difficulties that have witnessed in the lives of their families, communities and so forth. I am not sure many of our entering students would view themselves as entering college in a "science field" or even see themselves as "scientists."

Often it is only after beginning to study that that they discover that there are systematic ways of studying these issues and understanding these problems and fall into love with social scientific work. One of the significant challenges of teaching social science is that students often assume that their own "theories" about how social relationships work and how people grow and change are "right" and have not done very careful thinking about how to test these theories or how to marshal evidence in support or against a particular view of the world. In short, we are often teaching them about how to think critically and scientifically about people and the social world-- in short to think more scientifically about these ideas.

But this is just a hypothesis and I have never explored these questions in the way that Turkle has asked this of her students. So what would the question be to ask young social scientists?

"Was there an event, circumstance, or problem in childhood or adolescence that had an influence on your choice of this major in social science?"

And if it is the case that our students discover that they not only have an interest in making the world better or helping people, it would be interesting to ask them when they began to think of themselves as "scientists." And what pushed these interests and passions forward?

Updated Information on the Integration of Teaching, Content and Technology

2009-04-01T16:35:00.006-05:00

In a very polite comment, Punya Mishra, corrected my earlier post on his work and noted that there was an updated description of his work regarding the integration of content, teaching and technology. Here is the updated image of the conceptual model. Mishra and Koehler continue to explore pre-service teacher's reports on these different areas of knowledge and have developed a good tool for measuring these domains.

(For more about their work, see this website.)

Although their focus is on these interior domains and the intersection of the domains of knowledge, I think it is also important to explore how the outer circle (labelled "context") intersects these domains. The contexts for instruction are also changing. At a simple level, the "Internet" is always a contextual backdrop to F2F instruction. Also, how these areas of knowledge work when a teacher is teaching in an entirely online environment is quite different than teaching in a traditional classroom.

This adds complexity, but we need to understand how this is handled by instructors as well.

Adding "The Public Mind" to Teaching and Learning

2009-03-30T01:00:00.002-05:00

In order to engage in teaching it is always important to understand student's knowledge and understanding of an issue. Indeed a fundamental aspect of excellent teaching is the ability of the instructor to bridge the student's understanding and new information.

As teaching and learning has moved online I think this process has become more complicated and also more important, especially in the case of topics that are in the public discussion. Here is an example of what I mean:

There is much discussion about the role that vaccines may play in the cause of autism. (See some my other comments on this discussion.) This is an topic that is a major issue for health educators, the medical community and for parents of young children. There is some evidence that an increasing number of parents are choosing not to have their children vaccinated as a result of the information available on this topic. (Note: See Google Trends on this topic.)

My simple insight is that in order to effectively "teach" about this topic on the web, it is important to understand the way this debate is framed online, the participants in the debate, the passions in this discussion and the challenges faced by bridging parent's views of this situation and the scientific evidence. This is what I have been referring to as "Knowing the Public Mind." I don't know if this is a good term or if others have a better term for this idea. At one level this is the same issue faced by all instructors who are trying to teach, but the web is a more complex instructional environment in the sense that at a minimum there are more voices and in particular unlike the enclosed classroom in which the teacher's voice is often respected, teachers on the web have more difficulty in establishing credibility, web credibility is often quite different that classroom credibility.

In an earlier post, I reviewed the ideas of Mishra and Koehler regarding their model of integrating content, teaching and technology. I would suggest that successful online teaching must also include this fourth dimension of "understanding the public mind."

Trend in Searches Related to Autism-Vaccine

2009-03-29T13:05:00.006-05:00

Here is a summary of the trends related to searches on the web for the term "autism-vaccine." Note that beginning and 2007 there has been increased searching on this topic and there are major peaks as there are articles in the press, especially surrounding various court cases.

Integrating Content, Teaching, and Technology

2009-03-29T12:01:00.007-05:00

There is much discussion of why teachers do not quickly adopt technology tools in their classrooms. Punya Mishra and Matthew Koehler at Michigan State wrote a very thoughtful article in the Teacher College Record in 2006 that provides a good way of understanding why teachers have such difficulty and providing a framework and strategies for addressing these issues.

Their ideas of most easily captured by this figure in which they note that teaching with technology requires that the instructor integrate knowledge about content, teaching (pedagogy) and technology.

The authors write,

"our framework (Figure 4) emphasizes the connections, interactions, affordances, and constraints between and among content, pedagogy, and technology" (p. 1025).

Later in their discussion they also write,

"The addition of a new technology is not the same as adding another module to a course. It often raises fundamental questions about content and pedagogy that can overwhelm even experienced instructors" (emphasis mine) (p. 1030).

Too often in discussions about the failure of teachers to adopt new technologies, we are failing to acknowledge the complexity of the task we are asking them to take on. This is not say that educators are excused from trying new forms of instruction and new technologies, but there is much to learn and we also need more help in learning these new tools. For more work by Mishra see his blog and other writings.

What Do Newspapers have to do with Education?

2009-03-25T01:00:00.001-05:00

As newspapers begin to close a number of edubloggers have been contemplating what this might mean for educational institutions. Newspaper publishers and journalists should have seen this coming for the past 10 years say many. So why are we so caught off guard as they close?

Some ask are schools and universities next? Well, certainly there are things about learning that are changing as the result of the web, but newspapers are failing because advertising has moved from paper to the web. Schools and universities are not based on advertising revenue so there are lots of differences here.

But one place in which schools and universities might be challenged is in the development of niche educational markets.

What Would Google Do?

2009-03-21T08:15:00.009-05:00

This is the title of a new book by Jeff Jarvis that provides a good overview of how the web has changed the ways in which companies and organizations operate. If you have ignored all the hype about the Web 2.0 and are just curious about how people are thinking about developments in search, social networking, sharing free content, engaging with the public and so forth, this would be a good book to get a thoughtful summary of this thinking.

Here are Jarvis' basic themes that define the ways in which Google and other web savvy companies and institutions will succeed in the years to come:

Customers are now in charge. He suggests that organizations will need to organize the delivery of products and information in ways that meet customer needs. Obviously, this basic idea has always been true, Jarvis asserts that the we are going to have to be even more quick to be responsive to customer demands.

People can find each other anywhere and coalesce around you-- or against you. Organizations that are good at engaging the public around their ideas, products and people are going to be more successful than those who fail at this. He provides important examples of how customers also can organize against companies that fail to respond to problems. It is no longer an idle threat to say, "I am going to tell a few million of my closest friends about how horrible your product or service is?"

The mass market is dead, replaced by the market of mass niches. Alot of commentators have made this point in the last several years (see Chris Anderson, The Long Tail). Some good examples of this idea are Amazon (lots of small book sellers and lots of obscure books) and the Huffington Post (lots of excellent writers/commentators in one place.)

Markets are conversations. This idea was first offered in The Cluetrain Manifesto and extended in Naked Conversations. There are good examples of this idea in this book, but this is still a fuzzy idea. Ok, so I get the idea of talking to customers. What do I really need to talk about? What are the important conversations? And who is really the "customer?" There are lots of customers and lots of topics. How do you find the right conversation? This is much easier said than done.

We have shifted from an economy based on scarcity to one based on abundance. This idea has a variety of implications. How do you manage too much information? How do help people manage and organize lots of ideas and options? Another question related to this situation is what value do you add when everyone can find any product, service or idea a click away?

Enabling customers to collaborate with you-- in creating, distributing, marketing and supporting products-- is what is creates a premium in today's market. This idea is an elaboration of the marketing as conversation and customers are now in charge.

The most successful enterprises today are networks and the platforms on which those networks are built. Today this means Facebook.... tomorrow this means....?

Owning pipelines, people, products, or even intellectual property is no longer the key to success. Openness is. This may be both the most important idea and the most troublesome. Note that Jarvis does not say that pipelines, products or people are "valueless," only that "openness" is the key to success. He notes however that Google does not practice this value in much of its operation. This is a complicated idea. What needs to be open? In what ways is it valuable to be open?

This book provides a good basis for an extended discussion of many important ideas that will shape business, education, media, government and much more. We are only at the beginning of understanding how to think, work and act in this world.

Is Psychology a Science?

2009-03-18T21:08:00.002-05:00

To follow-up my previous post about the public's perception of science, this week the American Psychological Association (I am a member) posted some brief results about a survey done regarding the public's perceptions of psychology. In regards to whether psychology is a science and what type of science they wrote,

"To learn how the public perceives psychology, the consultants first tried to establish people's understanding of scientific disciplines. "What we found was most people think of biology, chemistry and physics as 'hard science,'" says Steven Breckler, PhD, APA's executive director for science. "They also view medicine as a hard science. Interestingly, they see the term 'behavioral science' as harder than the term 'psychology,' and they don't precisely equate the two."

This serves as a reminder that when we ask the public about their perceptions of scientists and science (see notes on perceptions of professions) , they may not all be thinking about the same groups of people and there may be important differences about people's trust of physicists and psychologists.

Here is an example of how people responded to a question about the relationship between science and psychology--

Q. How much do you associate the practice of psychology with scientific techniques and practices?

A great deal—22 percent
Somewhat—49 percent
Not very much—23 percent
Not at all—7 percent

It is worth noting that 71% of public in this survey thought that psychological practice was based on science. This suggests that in general people assume that psychology is more than just good common sense.

Do People Trust Scientists?

2009-03-17T20:57:00.002-05:00

As a result of thinking about the criticism of scientists and science in regards to the autism-vaccine debate, I began to wonder how much do people trust scientists and professors.

There are a couple of recent polls that suggest despite the criticism that we often hear about scientists and science, people still trust them alot. The most recent poll I could find was conducted in 2008 in England. In these results, teachers are the 2nd most trusted profession, professors are 4th and scientists are 6th out of 16 categories of professions. In 2008, 87% of the population agreed that they would "generally trust them to tell the truth." 79% of people trusted professors and 72% of people trusted scientists.

In 2006 the Harris poll conducted a similar survey of Americans. In this case 22 professions were rated on trustworthiness. Teachers were rated 2nd with 83% saying they were trusted, scientists were rated 3rd with 77% trusting them, and professors were rated 5th with 75% trusting them. It is worth noting that between 1998 and 2006 all three groups lost a small amount of people trust-- about 2-3%.

These findings suggest that the public in England and the United States put a lot of trust in these professions. Despite the criticism that were sometimes here there appears to be considerable respect for the professionals. Those of us who practice these professions should treat this trust with care.

Autism-Vaccines: Developing Scientific Thinking

2009-03-02T20:59:00.006-06:00

I periodically review the debate over the discussion about whether vaccines cause autism. This past week there was a major report in Newsweek on the scientific evidence that was titled, Anatomy of a Scare. Likewise, there were new full-page ad in many major newspapers that were sponsored by Generation Rescue that continues to assert that vaccines are connected to neurological disorders.

My interest is in what we can learn as scientists about communicating science to the public. Especially now that news and ideas can be spread via the web it is critical to understand how to information is spread and how to effectively communicate complicated scientific stories. Clearly, there will always be some people who will prefer to believe in conspiracies and fail to examine any reasons, but there are still others who will engage in thoughtful examination of the evidence. So how can scientists present that evidence most effectively and how do we encourage deeper scientific thinking about such issues.

First, it is important to hear what ordinary people are thinking about these issues. Some of the comments and thinking is confused, but some of it is also thoughtful. Here are posts in response to an NBC report that was generally unfavorable in regards to link between vaccines and autism.

The CDC has taken a lot of criticism by those who believe that the government is trying to cover up scientific facts. I continue to watch how they are using the web to present the evidence regarding these studies. There is a very interesting section about an ongoing Study to Explore Early Development (SEED) that provides information for the public about an investigation of early development and efforts to explore a variety of links to developmental problems such as autism. These FAQs about the study seem like a good way to engage people in understanding how the scientific study is being conducted and the likely outcomes of this study.

One positive consequence of the media attention to the autism-vaccine connection is that there may be more efforts to provide more detailed information about the research rather than just the findings. This seems like one good way of engaging people in a more effective way of thinking about science. Likewise, the CDC website includes a lot of links to new studies that are exploring issues surrounding the autism-vaccine issue so that the public can easily find the latest research. This too seems useful and important.

A missing part would seem to me to be a moderated discussion of these issues that would seek to answer questions. There are some challenges in doing this because it is likely to be overtaken by those with strong opinions, but this type of engagement with the public may be important to undertake.