Streams of Learning: Courses as Conversations

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.

What will New Media Look like in the future?

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/

Transperancy as a Scientist/Teacher

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?

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

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.

Parents and Facebook

There were at least 14 books written in 2007-2008 about protecting children in regards to social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

In reviewing these books, Zheng Yan writes,

"public concern is enormous, the entire scientific community, including governmental and private funding agencies, theoretical and applied researchers, and journal editors and reviewers, appear to have fallen behind rather than lead the communities of parents, publishers, and policy makers in responding to the growing use of SNSs among adolescents and the accompanying concerns about their safety on these sites" (J. of Applied Developmental Psychology, 2008, 29, 473).

In the same journal Subrahmanyam and Greenfield (2008) write,

"For researchers who study young people's use of the Internet, one of the biggest challenges is the constantly changing virtual world. Online communication forms are in a state of flux, and many operate like a fad. By the time researchers become aware of a popular online application or site, identify the research issues, design a well thought-out study, and get IRB approval, the population of interest has moved on to the next new application" (p. 417).

As information and communication technologies continue to change the social environment we will increasingly be pressed to move more rapidly in understanding and adapting to these changes.

Howard Rheingold continues to develop his ideas for building community through the creation of a social media classroom platform. This 8 minute video provides an overview of his ideas.