Participating Online about Parenting

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? 

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

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.

Shirkey on Participation & Openness

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."

World is Open-- Macro Trends--2

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?

eXtension 2.0-- Interaction, Participation and Community

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.

Applying Crowdsourcing to Family Life Education

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.

CrowdSourcing Higher Education: The Sturgeon's Law Impasse

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%?

Blessed Unrest: An Interesting View of Social Change

In this video you get a glimpse at Paul Hawken's efforts to show us that an increasing number of people are working towards social justice and environmental stewardship. By cataloging all the small organizations created to address social change, he helps us discover that there may be a much larger shift in power and influence, but it is hard to see because our media and attention is focused on big government and large cultural and economic organizations.

In a longer version of this talk given in San Francisco for the Long Now Foundation Hawken uses the metaphor of the "body's immune system" to describe the way in which many small organizations networked together work to heal, restore and sustain the human body. He suggests many small community organizations are achieving similar goals for society and the environment.

So what does this have to do with our interests in family life, teaching and technology? Perhaps it gives us a window in how to engage in similar work in regards to teaching and learning around other important human and intellectual activities. It suggests ways to harness people working and learning together in open, connected systems.

Educators and Participatory Learning

"To me it’s one of the tragedies of the so-called information age," writes Cathy Davidson, in Academic Commons about educators limited willingness to embrace technology that allows for participatory learning. Continuing in this discussion she adds,

"Here we have this astonishing new way that people are making knowledge together. As educators we should all be vibrating with happiness at this moment! Here are millions of people, typically unpaid, with no ulterior motive, for profit or otherwise, who are validating what we do as a profession with what they do in the spare time as a passion. That seems to suggest that all of us overworked underpaid teachers have it right, that in fact there is something about humanity that likes to learn, and likes to share its learning, and likes to participate. That’s incredible! Every time I read some professor grousing about Wikipedia--that it’s not reliable, it’s not credentialed, etc.--I say sure, of course, so what reference work is perfect? What we may give up in some instances in expertise we more than make up for in scope. We have to have some skepticism about the products of participatory learning--skepticism is what we do as a profession. But, my God, you’re talking about billions of contributions that people are making for free to world knowledge in so many languages, from so many different traditions of knowledge-making, and on a scale that the world has never seen before."

Yes, this does seem like a good thing and it is clear that people are engaged in creating and sharing knowledge. So what is troubling to educators? Why haven't we embraced these tools and why aren't more of us building educational activities in this space?

Davidson despairs, writing,

"I guess part of me just doesn’t understand why this isn’t the most exciting time for all of us in our profession. Why aren’t we figuring out ways that we can use this exciting intellectual moment to bolster our mission in the world, our methods in the world, our reach in the world, our understanding of what we do and what we have to offer our students in the world? It just feels like we’re in an age where we educators should be the thought leaders and instead we’re futzing around the edges. Our profession’s lack of excitement and leadership in all the issues surrounding the information age baffles me."

Wiki University-- Maybe

Staley's interesting article in Educause on the future of the university as a "wiki-university" is based on an incomplete understanding of the history of the university and incomplete vision of the current state of higher education.

First, a bit of history. In a couple of places Staley suggests that in the 18th century, the university and science were based on amateurs who did teaching and research for the pure joy of discovery and teaching implying that we could return to this model as a basis for fostering higher education. Yes, there was some of this, but the fundamental impetuous of the founding of universities was the need by commercial interests and nation states to "educate" their citizens so that they could compete more effectively with other firms and nations states (See Ian McNeely, Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet for a good overview of the development of "knowledge systems" from libraries to universities to laboratories, and so forth). Although it is true that there were amateurs who engaged in research it is worth noting that these amateurs were often either independently wealthy (e.g., Benjamin Franklin) or they had rich patrons who financed their independent research.

Second, a bit of realism about the state of higher education. Staley is certainly correct that Web 2.0 technologies offer new and interesting ways of fostering "participation" and for sharing information beyond the campus classroom, but he builds his notions of a "wiki-university" on premises that are not real. Implicit in his discussion of "participation" in knowledge creation and the sharing of knowledge is an idea that current faculty and students in higher education do not do these things. Indeed, there is the suggestion that until Web 2.0 technologies that students did not engage in developing knowledge and information independent of what they copied down in lectures. Clearly, this is wrong. Students have been sent to the library (indeed the library is open to almost anyone who has an interest in their own independent pursuit of knowledge) to engage in independent assignments, invited to lectures of visiting scholars, to participate in faculty research projects or to pursue their own guided research projects. Staley and others who write about Web 2.0 are correct that these technologies expand the range and reach of participation and provide a platform for more engaged feedback and wider distribution, but they are wrong to suggest that this future participation is not based on a history and practice of intellectual participation that has been in existence throughout the development of higher education.

Web 2.0 and wikis offer us many new opportunities, but we will only create effective new teaching and learning platforms by having a good sense of our history and a complete view of the current state of higher education. Good use of Web 2.0 "participation" will be built on our successful models of current models of participation.

Becoming "Tearners" -- Linking Teaching & Learning

"Tearners" is a term that Wayne Hodgins coined to capture the transformative idea that learning environments, models, tools and so forth need to be created to foster our ability to effectively engage in both teaching and learning.

In his blogpost, Hodgins asserts that we are more in need of teachers than ever before because of the continued growth of knowledge. He also notes,

"In the past 20 years, we’ve certainly seen an increase in our focus on learning. Yet if we really look at our learning effectiveness (the speed with which we can acquire new skills, knowledge, and abilities), we don’t seem to have achieved an appreciable increase, despite the addition of new tools and new technologies throughout the entire e-learning and technology-enhanced learning era."

His solution is that we all need to be both teachers and learners. In other articles I have made similar suggestions and also described models for participation in teaching and learning and suggested that learning communities can be structured to foster roles in both teaching and learning.

Hodgins contribution to this discussion is the suggestion that we need to think about how to learn how to be effective teachers and we need tools that help us find the "right" teacher at the "right" moment. For example, he asks,

"Could we have more metadata about us individually? Could we get better at itemizing what each of us knows: our skills, knowledge, abilities, experience, expertise, to enable us to find people who are just right for us at just the right time and in just the right context?"

He also suggests that we don't just need to find content related to a question when we search, but we need to find content designed at the "right" level to match our interest, knowledge and understanding. This ability is definitely needed, but will be very complex to develop.

There is much work to do here.

Encouraging Participation in Online Communities

Understanding participation in online communities is one of the important areas that will help educators and others who are interested in developing and maintaining effective learning communities.

Brian Butler has contributed some important theoretical and empirical findings to our understanding of online community participation (See my summary of Butler et al Building Community Online.) His recent article with several colleagues in the Communications of the ACM (2007, 50(2), 69-73) is another useful contribution.

In main findings is this article are:

1. Offline interactions are the strongest contributor to posting activity.
2. Users perceptions of "usefulness of the website" are the strongest predictor of viewing community website material.
3. Larger communities produce more posts and more views. Small online communities may have great difficulty in surviving.
4. Efforts by the community leader did not affect online posting or viewing.
   

In the concluding remarks about these findings, Butler and his colleagues suggest that the importance of "offline interactions" may be less important in high quality information technology (broadband and good conferencing technologies) infrastructures than lower quality structures. They suggest that in this study offline meetings may overcome the problems associated with more cumbersome technology.

Perhaps the most surprising finding is that efforts by the community leader did not affect participation. They suggest that leadership may be a foundation building block for establishing the community rather than a factor that affects participation.

These findings provide more clues about creating effective online participation, but we still have much to learn. It is particularly important for us to understand more about the relationship between online relationships and online community building.

What motivates Wikipedians?

The short answer seems to be "to have fun."

Oded Nov at the Polytechnic University, New York recently surveyed Wikipedians about their values and the extent of the time they spent contributing to find out what motivates them. Nov asked contributors to Wikipedia about how much they endorsed various value statements about the degree to which contributing to Wikipedia was a labor of ideology, helpfulness, overcoming negative personal feelings, career enhancing, a chance to learn, or in response to others encouragement and/or just fun.

Wikipedians reported that the main reason they contributed was that it was fun and when Nov correlated this value with the time spent contributing there was a strong positive correlation. Interestingly, the other strongest correlation with the level of contribution was overcoming efforts to overcome personal problems.

Nov doesn't ask any deeper questions, but we are left with a puzzling finding. Is Wikipedia an effective way for people struggling with personal problems to have fun? Are there two different groups of people-- those motivated to have fun and another that is motivated to overcome difficulties. And what does this suggest about encouraging participation in the Web 2.0 world? Should fun be the primary goal?

Note: This report was published in the Communications of the ACM, 2007, 50 (11), 60-64.

Can Universities Become Networked Publics?

Writing about youth and new media, Ito and colleagues use the term "networked publics" to
"describe participation in public culture that is supported by online networks" (Ito et al., Living and Learning with New Media, 2008, p. 10). The authors note,

Rather than conceptualize everyday media engagement as “consumption” by “audiences,” the term “networked publics” places the active participation of a distributed social network in producing and circulating culture and knowledge in the foreground. The growing salience of networked publics in young people’s everyday lives is an important change in what constitutes the social groups and publics that structure young people’s learning and identity" (p.10)

So I find myself asking, "are universities places in which young people (those not attending the university) can "participate in producing and circulating culture and knowledge?" There are some examples of individual faculty who are engaged with young people and with the public in culture and knowledge. Henry Jenkins immediately comes to mind with his work on fan culture and various media analyses. However, his scholarly interests coincide with popular culture so that seems too obvious. I am particularly interested in natural and social scientists. Are there chemists, biologists, psychologists, family scientists, adolescent developmental scientists who are developing ways to engage young people?

I haven't done an in-depth search, but I don't see this work. Am I missing this? Are we missing ways to engage young people in developing their thinking about math and science by not presenting this world in ways that allow their active participation?

OpenLearn: The Philosophy Behind UK's Open University

In this short, 4 minute video, you learn about the basic components of how the British Open University is designing a platform to share free educational resources.

Virtual Worlds Educational Nonsense

There are some valuable ways in which virtual worlds can be powerful learning environments, but there is a lot of nonsense being presented about this work as well. Robbins-Bell in a recent article in Educause Review makes a variety of assertions about virtual worlds in regards to higher education that don't make a lot of sense.

Here are a few of her assertions and my replies.

Participatory Culture Engages Students in New Ways

"The participatory culture offers exciting new opportunities to pull learners into conversations and turn passive, knowledge-receiving students into active, knowledge-making student."

There is a huge leap in this sentence between the notion that "participatory culture" has anything to do with "education." Most of the "participatory culture" involves entertainment and playful activities. This is fun and interesting, but there is no evidence to suggest that my ability to make and watch YouTube videos has anything to do with my learning math, science or literature.

Virtual Learning is more Life-Like Than Classroom Learning

"The false separation between classroom learning and life learning is falling away with each new form of social media that becomes part of our everyday life."

"The genuine conversation and participation that virtual worlds encourage is a step toward more authentic learning for all students."

Although much of today's education takes place in classrooms and laboratories, it is false to assume that these learning experiences have nothing to do with life learning. Although some of us learned to read at home with our families, most of us learned to read in classrooms and most of the rest of our life learning is dependent on that skill. Isn't this the case that learning to read in a classroom is strongly related to life learning? Likewise, doing a science experiment in a physical laboratory seems much more like the real life learning I might do some day working in a job doing biological or chemical analysis than doing this in a virtual reality.

Virtual Learning is Deeper, Richer or More Extended than other types of teaching.

Robbins-Bell makes the case for why virtual worlds can be powerful for teaching and learning, but most of these activities are not unique to virtual worlds or assume that other forms of online or F2F instruction do not use the same strategies. For example, she suggests that since students cannot get into classrooms 24/7 that classroom learning only occurs during the classroom time period. The reason that higher education campuses have students on campus is so that they can go to the library, get together in dorms and student centers to study and and visit the offices of professors is so that learning can take place outside of the specific classroom time period. Learning on college campuses has never been limited to just what happens in the classroom.
Likewise, many other web-based tools are also available 24/7, not just virtual worlds.

Virtual Worlds Create a more robust "presence" than other forms of online learning.

Robbins-Bell suggest that in virtual worlds one has a "presence" that is different than one's experience in a chatroom or discussion board. This is true, but as yet there is no evidence that this presence leads to better learning.

Virtual worlds allow people to explore identity which improves and or expands learning.

The most troublesome idea is that the ability to create avatars and deal with issues of identify, roles, etc. is advantageous in learning. Much of what we have to learn has nothing to do with issues of identity, roles, etc. There are clearly some topics that could use these tools to explore these issues, but this would be very limited. In most cases, how you look and what you wear makes no difference to the learning. Robbins-Bell also demonstrates little understanding of the experience of people with exceptionalities when she writes,

"a non-handicapped student can take on a handicapped avatar to see how it feels."

I would suggest that putting on a blindfold and walking around the house will give you a much better idea about dealing with blindness that pretending to be blind in a virtual world.

Wide-area Network Advantages of Virtual Worlds

Robbins-Bell asserts that "the wide area network of virtual worlds implies that the space is public to join and participate in, meaning that students can interact with and learn from a larger community than can be offered by their local campus." Again this assertion assumes that students in higher education are limited to campus for learning or that other web-based tools (discussion boards, learning communities, etc.) do not offer similar opportunities. This just isn't the case, students have always taken field trips & studied abroad, done internships and so forth. Likewise, communities members and other experts have always been invited to campuses to enrich and extend the learning opportunities. Clearly, any web-based tools can create opportunities for participation in a broader range of learning experiences, this is not only available in a virtual world. With videoconferencing, I don't just have the opportunity to interact with visual representations of people, I can actually see and participate with the actual representations of these people.

There are some valuable ways in which virtual learning environments can be used to create learning experiences, but the examples provided in this article don't offer those examples. To advance the development of learning within virtual worlds, we have to develop learning opportunities that can enrich or extend what can be done F2F or in other online environments.

Solo Professors as the Future of Higher Education?

In an article titled, "When Professors Print Their Own Diplomas, Who Needs Universities," Jeffrey Young at the Chronicle of Higher Education explores some interesting developments in open education.

He notes that there have been several recent examples of faculty opening courses to students beyond those who are enrolled in the university. The most radical example might by David Wiley's agreement to allow students to not only take his course without enrolling, but agreeing to provide feedback through grading to these individuals and then offering them a self-made "certificate of completion." In general, it seems unlikely that this scenario will be widely adopted as it too time consuming and too personally costly for faculty to give away their time in teaching large numbers of students (paying or not paying) to create sustainable models that merely open-up classrooms online. However, it is possible create learning communities that provide access to a wider group of participants at various levels of engagement. Creating learning communities requires us to shift on thinking from having only two types of roles (teacher or student) to a model in which everyone in the learning community has expectations for being both a teacher and a student. In this model it is assumed that a great deal of how I will learn will be dependent on my efforts to creating opportunities for others to learn-- in short, "teaching" will a platform for learning or for being a student. In other posts, I have described some general ideas for the possible roles in this type of learning environment.

Rather than assume that professors are individually going to offer courses to increasing numbers of people it seems more likely that they are going to manage complex learning communities with students at many different levels of participation and engagement. This can result in more "open education" for people interested in the topic who want to obtain some insights into the current thinking and development on a topic, but it would also create an environment in which more advanced learning can take place that is not completely dependent on "one" instructor doing all the teaching.

Learning Community 2.0 Instructional Design

Instructional design in learning communities has some different features than traditional courses. In learning community instructional design there are different levels of participating and varying opportunities for learning. A nice example of this model is provided by WorkLiteracy that is hosting a Free Web2.0 seminar.

In this program they have identified three levels of participation--spectator, joiner/collector and creator and have prepared learning materials for each group. As you might guess from the names, each of these represents more depth of participation. The three "learning types" are based on participation types that have been identified by Forrester in their book called Groundswell based on data they have analyzed in terms of their own analysis of participation on the web. These different types are somewhat similar to my own "theoretical" categories of possible participants in learning communities.

An important aspect of the WorkLiteracy example is that the instructional design provides explicit ways to participate that require more or less interest and investment by the learner. Importantly, if this work was designed to persist over time, the design would include ways to transition from being a spectator to being a joiner/collector, etc. (We still know little about this process, but theoretically this would occur.)

Another aspect about the WorkLiteracy course is that there are numerous tools to use to engage with the course and bridge across other activities so participants are immediately offered the opportunity upload images or videos, to join a forum, to invite other to participate or to create an interest group within the community. Each of these activities may appeal to various participants. Even within the general categories of learners there are ways to make various contributions.

Overall, this is a very nice model.

Higher Education as Transformation

"For transformative education to take place there really needs to be a much more experiential form of learning, for people to actually engage in processes of change, to try things out from themselves, to address real world problems, and to realize that not all solutions can be found easily. And it’s when you start to ask the hard questions and grapple with some intractable problems that you begin, perhaps, to open up opportunities to learn in a different way."

This quote comes from a report by edited by Paul Taylor for the Global University Network for Innovation.

Although the focus of this is not particularly about technology in education, it still emphasizes conversation, dialogue and participation in talking about how education can be transformative. We should continue to think about how all educational experiences can be engaging.

Links & References to eXtension 2.0 talk

Links, References & Further Reading
from
Hughes, Jr., R. eXtension 2.0: Interaction, Participation & Community. Paper presented at the National eXtension Community of Practice Conference, June 24, 2008, Louisville, KY.

eXtension.org http://www.extension.org/

For further discussion with the Presenter:
Open2Learn: http://open2learn.blogspot.com/

Introduction to Web 2.0 and eXtension 2.0
Web 2.0 definition: http://www.downes.ca/post/31741

Successful web services

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.

Interaction

Active Learning
Bransford, J. D., Brown, Ann L., Cocking, R. R. (2000). How people learn. Washington, DC: National Academy Press

Example FAQ: http://www.extension.org/faq/36399

Example of Quiz: http://horsemanagement.msu.edu/e-Tips/Question03-2008.htm

Cosmo Polls: http://www.cosmopolitan.com/you/viral/poll-052907

Examples of analysis tools for learning:

Financial Calculator: http://www.extension.org/category/finance+calculators

Cotton Production Management Calculator: http://www.extension.org/pages/Cotton_Production_Budgets

eNewsletters & Feeds
Just In Time Parenting http://www.extension.org/pages/You_and_Your_Baby_are_Learning_Together

eTips My Horse University:
http://horsemanagement.msu.edu/e-news/03-2008e-Tips.html

eXtension feeds: http://www.extension.org/feeds

Example of pictures, audio & video:

How Stuff Works http://www.howstuffworks.com/
Knot Tying http://www.extension.org/pages/Knot_Tying:_Introduction

Participation

Basic User participation: See comments and ratings on this page: http://www.extension.org/pages/Draft_Horse_Percheron

User-Generated Content websites:

Blogger http://www.blogger.com/home
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/

Science & Society: Blogs, media and other discussions

Google Trends: http://www.google.com/trends

Interacting and paradoxical forces in neuroscience and society
Jennifer Singh, Joachim Hallmayer, and Judy Illes
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=17237806

Keelan, J., Pavri-Garcia, V., Tomlinson, G., & Wilson, K. (2007). YouTube as a source of information on immunization: A content analysis. Journal of the American Medical Association, 298(21), 2482-2484.

Hughes, Jr., R. (2008). Blogs and science: The autism-vaccine debate. http://open2learn.blogspot.com/2008/05/blogs-and-science-autism-vaccine-debate.html

Science 2.0: Platform for Participatory Science (some examples)

Folding@home http://folding.stanford.edu/
US Geological Survey; Did you feel it? http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2005/3016/
Illinois Early Childhood Asset map http://iecam.crc.uiuc.edu/
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.

Community

Brown, J. S., & Adler, R. P. (2008). Minds on fire: Open education, the long tail, and learning 2.0. Educause Review, 43(1), 17-32. Available online: http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Review/MindsonFireOpenEducationt/45823?time=1214188614

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