Extension or Public Engagement 2.0-- Building Community

Just as there are new discussions about the impact of the Web 2.0 on education (Education 2.0) and Science 2.0, there is another important change that needs attention in regards to opening up the relationship between scientists in universities with interests in real world issues and the public who seeks answers (or at least our best thinking) on important issues.

This third phase of the opening of universities is in regards to re-thinking the extension or public engagement mission of the university.

One of the traditional features of land-grant universities (for example, Illinois, Ohio State, there is at least one land-grant university in every state) is the Extension Service. Established by federal legislation in 1914, the Extension part of these universities was created to take scientific research about agriculture and family life to the rural parts of the United States. Over the past almost 100 years the focus has been expanded and broadened, but the same basic mission has remained the same. Today in most counties across the US there is still an extension office linked to a land-grant university. Even large cities such as Chicago and New York City have extension offices that serve these urban communities.

One of the fundamental ideas the Extension Service was the idea that these county offices that had regular contact with everyday citizens would be place where science and societal problems would meet. And that at this nexus research at universities would identify real issues confronting the public and the public would find practical solutions to their concerns. In this beginning and for many years, this person to person exchange of needs and solutions was met by people meeting face to face. Over time this exchange evolved to include the use of mass media (radio, television) and in the most recent times the use of the Internet.

However, the general model of exchange between the university and the public has generally been based on an expert model that assumed that the university faculty had the answers and the public had the questions. Today this remains the general model of operation.

Recently, the Extension service as unveiled a new communication platform, titled eXtension (pronounced e-Extension) that is based on the Web 2.0 tools that allow the creation of learning communities and invite more mutual exchange of information.... except.....

that many of the protocols are still based on a very limited ability for ordinary people to contribute in very meaningful ways to the information. Rather than create collaborative communication spaces that are typical of the Web 2.o world, we have retained a closed, hierarchical presence that assumes that the public has little voice in these discussions.

Blogs, wikis, feeds, social networking and all the other tools that have been created to facilitate communication and collaboration are available to open up the communication between scientists with interests in societal issues and the public with insights and ideas about these problems.

If universities are going to fulfill their public engagement and extension dimension, they will need to embrace these Web 2.0 tools and open up a rich and varied dialogue with the public about today's issues. Faculty will need to open blogs with a wide variety of citizens and engage in thoughtful conversations about the ways in which science can make a difference with today's pressing issues whether this is climate change, ethnic relations, school reform, and so forth.

From the perspective of the university we have never had a better opportunity to communicate with the public and engage them in thinking about these complicated issues.

Pete Seeger's View on "Web 2.0"

Pete Seeger, folksinger, was interviewed recently by Bob Edwards for his weekend radio show.

Seeger, who is approaching 90 years old, always encouraged his audiences to sing along with him in concert. In the course of this interview, Seeger made the following comments that remind us that "participation" may not just be a blog thing or a Web 2.0 phenomenon, but something that is more deeply embedded in society. In response to Bob Edward's question about Seeger's encouraging his audiences to sing along, Seeger says,

"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. Learn to ask questions, the most important thing you can learn in the world is to ask questions. Next important thing is to learn how to give a report. You read a book and you don't just read it, you learn how to give a report in two minutes telling roughly what the book is about and you learn to work with other people, participate in politics, participate in work, all sorts of things. It's the key to the future of the human race-- participation. "

You probably couldn't write a clearer formula for Web 2.0. Hearing this from Seeger makes you think that if Seeger were in his youth today he would be a major contributor to the blogosphere, YouTube and the most popular guy on social networking sites.

Applying the OpenWetWare approach to behavioral research

OpenWetWare is a good example of how to begin creating a shared interactive space to begin exchanging information and ideas about science.

The focus of this work is on biology, but the principles and structure that have been created are applicable to other science areas.

In OpenWetWare they have three main sections related to the research: materials (things that get used in biological research), protocols (procedures for different research activities) and resources (everything from biological material to journals).

For behavioral scientists, these sections would translate as follows:

1. Materials (research instruments, questionnaires, databases, etc.)
2. Protocols (procedures for collecting and analyzing data)
3. Resources (data sources, funding sources, journals, etc.)

Another dimension of the website includes: Labs, Groups, courses, blogs. In short, scientists and use this platform to manage their laboratory group or to create a new group of scientists to work on a common project. The courses section seems to be a wiki-based course platform. The blogs section provides a platform to create blogs related to biology. Again all of these would have easy parallels in the behavioral sciences.

Some useful ideas about Science or Discovery 2.0

Scientific American has begun a discussion of Science 2.0 (I have referred to this as "Discovery 2.0."). Interesting they not only posted a discussion of ideas about open science and laboratories, but they the article itself is posted prior to publication with the invitation to readers to provide comments and feedback.

The article doesn't provide a provide a definition of Science 2.0, but roughly the suggestion is that scientists will begin to do their work with open data, lab notes, results, etc. in ways that allows for this work to be viewed and commented on by others.

The most discussed example is MIT's OpenWetWare, which is a wiki designed for biologists to open their laboratories to others and share information.

There are a lot of issues to work through, but this quote sums up my feelings about this effort:

"the real significance of Web technologies is their potential to move researchers away from an obsessive focus on priority and publication, toward the kind of openness and community that were supposed to be the hallmark of science in the first place."

George Siemens continues to expand his discussion of a "world without courses." His latest post expands his discussion of this idea.

He identifies for major problems in the creation of open learning enterprises:

1. Finding quality content
2. Creating pathways through content
3. Fostering connections between teachers and learners
4. Determining competence (accreditation of learning/teachers/schools)

I would add the following challenges to this list (some of these only apply to higher education and graduate education)

1. Creating quality content. We have models for textbooks, f2f lectures, etc and know somethings about effective teaching in traditional classrooms. We have not identified the effective models for open learning and we have barely begun to learn how to create effective multimedia instruction.

2. Creating learning communities. Perhaps this idea is encompassed in Siemen's "fostering connections," but there is a lot of work to be done regarding the creation of effective learning communities in regards to roles of instructors and roles of students. Here are some ideas I have been working on in regards to the roles of teachers and learners.

3. Developing collaborative relationships online. I think we have underestimated the amount of time, effort and skill that it takes to develop effective collaborative relationships from a distance. This is at the heart of advanced learning between teachers and graduate students. We have much to learn in this area.

4. Conducting research online. I am not sure if this is true, but I think that effective graduate training will require that we have our research tools online. In short, this means that we need to put our research labs online. The challenges of this task vary by field. Some fields already have much of their labs online (astronomy) and some fields would have significant difficulty moving all their work to an online space-- biology and chemistry for example. Some types of social science research can be moved online, but there are ethical and privacy issues that need careful attention.

Changing Distance Educational Landscape

Educators who have been on the Internet for the past 10 years have often tried to tell those who were not on the Internet that the world of education is rapidly changing and that institutions who currently are primarily invested in F2F residential programs may be at-risk.

There is lots to debate about this issue and there is a variety of evidence both for and against the growth of online education. Here is a small glimpse at online education in Illinois that tells you something about the patterns.

In Illinois in 2007 there were 158,362 online distance education enrollments and there were 8,679 online class sections offered. See Distance Education Enrollments 2007 for the complete report.

These numbers have dramatically increased since 2001 when there were 19,764 enrollments in 1,753 courses. Complete report.

So let's take a look at the major residential university in Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. What is the pattern over these six years? In 2001, the University of Illinois had 1400 Internet enrollments and in 2007 there were 2,032, not much change. Clearly, Illinois is not leading the change in regards to offering courses through the Internet.

So who has been leading the change? The biggest single change seems to be DeVry University, a private, for-profit university that focuses on technical skill training. In 2001, DeVry had 196 Internet enrollments and in 2007, they had 74,021 enrollments. In 2001, DeVry accounted for less than 1% of the online enollments and in 2007, they account for 47%. In 2001, the U of Illinois had 7% of the online enrollments and by 2007 it had only 1%.

If this pattern holds true in other states, then you can begin to see how higher education is changing. These patterns show how the landscape of higher education is changing and which institutions are going online to educate students.

Shared Learning Environments or "what is teaching?"

A number of people have been thinking about how to develop "personal learning environments" which are tools or platforms for gathering information and ideas together, but Stan Shanier suggests that in addition to needing tools to manage one's own learning, there also needs to be tools to learn together--- a idea that he calls: "shared learning environments".

Personal Learning Environments are a compelling concept and one that makes huge sense whatever angle you look at it from. However, I can’t help feeling there’s something missing or simply something wrong with the terminology? We cannot escape the fact that, in order to learn, we need other people. Both formal and informal learning requires human interaction – whether that be the words of someone written down, media others have created or the acknowledgement from others of our grasp of concepts.

For me this translates into classrooms, schools and other learning spaces. The problem is that when you mention these concepts it is easy to get locked in on existing versions. For example, most of the existing online learning management systems recreate the tools and processes of F2F classrooms with lectures, assignments, multiple choice exams and the like and with a rhythm of weekly activities, etc. It has been hard to break out of this mindset and begin to understand that we do not have to replicate all the structures of the F2F classroom online. Many of these structures exist because you had to manage people moving in a limited physical space.

So here is my beginning list of the things that I want a shared learning environment to have from the perspective of a teacher:

• Multiple ways of creating content (text, audio, video)
• A series of formats or structures (both small and large) to convey ideas.
• Ways to create multiple paths through content.
  
• Ways to communicate synchronously
• Ways to communicate asynchronously
  
• Tools to check understanding, comprehension.
• Tools to create complex illustrations
  

Do we need "courses"?

George Siemens in a very interesting presentation asserts that we are beginning a process of unpacking our educational process into smaller and more distributed units and that we can begin to construct educational environments without courses.

Here is his general definition of a course:

Courses are structured, organized, bounded domains of information that are administered to students by educators who seeks to wrap some form of interaction or learning activities to that the experience will ultimately be able to achieve value primarily defined by academic standards through accreditation.

He unpacks courses into four parts: content/information, conversations (that is, instruction), connections (relationships between teacher and students, and among students) and recognition or accreditation.

We have been able take courses apart and distribute them, but how do we put them back together?

Here is how he frames this issue:

The key challenge that remains and it has not been addressed to date…is how do we pull these pieces (accreditation, content, conversations, and connections) together. How do we bring together the informal reputation points that we might derive through interactions with other or the referral process that may occur in our interactions with learning content and how then does that come together in an academic setting so that we have some degree of comfort when we dialogue with someone who stated they’ve received their degree from global online and distributed university as evidenced by these thousand learners who’ve assigned reputation points and as a result of having gone through x-number of sources of learning material, podcasts or whatever else. At this point this is a key missing piece. Pulling together the distributed conversations with the distributed content and finding a way to assign a degree of value is one of the biggest challenges of discussing an educational model that moves from the largely traditional hierarchical structure most of us recall.

This is a bigger problem than just "accreditation." The other aspect of courses is that there are sequences of learning various topics. It is generally important to learn to add and substract before learning to multiple and divide. Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody has been exploring ways that organization is formed on the web, but there is still much that must be done to pull distributed learning back together. And we still need guides through this sequence. Most learners will not find their own paths through all the possible material.

What's wrong with tags

A lot has been made of "tags" as ways of organizing and grouping disparate information and ideas. It has been said that "tags" create the opportunity for novel constructions and links between various ideas that get a similar tag and that these tags create new "folksominies" rather than rigid "taxonomies."

However, it seems to me that these actual create a lot of noise and grouping of stuff together that rarely makes sense. Tagging may be a good way for find an idea or to begin a search for information, but they are not helpful for organizing the information. Organizing information takes more than tags or keywords, it takes "structure" that links information and ideas in coherent useful ways. This is more than an "aggregator" or a "tag cloud" again these are useful in seeing a bunch of information that various people think seems to go together, but rarely does this provide us with a coherent or integrated picture of what this all is.

This makes me think that we need another set of tools that allows us to link tags (that is, ideas, topics) together in an easy and convenient way so that I can create an organized structure for the information that I have gathered. This allows me to throw away some pieces of information that have the same tag and organize other information into a more coherent structure.

A Missing Part of eLearning

The Internet has solved the problem of making a lot of information (easy web-based publishing tools) available and building a systems of finding information (search), but the task of organizing this information remains the "user's problem." And it is a big problem. I am not talking about better search strategies that help me find information more specific to my interests. We need that too, but I am talking about organizing the information that is on the topic that I am interested in, but comes in lots of disparate pieces.

I think one of the reasons for the popularity of Wikipedia is that the information has a structure. If I look for information there, I know that it will be organized in some type of framework and if the topic is related to other ideas, then I can go read those other ideas. In short, I can follow a logical path through the content.

So clearly one solution to the problem of lots of information is organizing it. But if "Everything is Miscellaneous" as David Weinberger tells us, then how to be put it back together. There are a variety of "aggregator" tools, but this is a long way from satisfactory, this simply puts all the miscellaneous stuff into one big pot.....There is still no "organization" to the stuff. I can tag it and hook various ideas together... again a useful tool, but still there is only limited organization.

It seems to me that I need an "outline" tool. A tool that allows me to take my miscellaneous tags and give them structure and pattern. I want to provide structure to my "cloud" of ideas. So what am I missing here?

Products and Services in Education

A team of U of Illinois educators spent part of this week with a business consultant, Andrew Neitlich, who provided guidance about ways to incorporate business strategies into our educational work. He has lots of good ideas, but one idea that I found especially powerful is this idea about linking products and services.

Most of education is an intensive service that requires us to teach the same material over and over again to new students. This is costly. Neitlich reminds us that along the way educators can create various products of these teaching activities-- lecture notes, teaching aids, curricula, textbooks, etc. that could be part of overall teaching enterprise that may be sold/marketed to students who are in the course or even to those who are not in the course, but who are just interested in learning about the topic.

Obviously, we already do this some with lecture notes and textbooks, but this could become a more central strategy to the overall educational enterprise such that it is more commonly and more easily done.

Personalized Learning

The National Academy of Engineering has identified the "grand engineering challenges" that face society and suggested some of the work that needs to be done to address these issues.

One of the areas they identify is personalized learning. The problem is described as follows:

Throughout the educational system, teaching has traditionally followed a one-size-fits-all approach to learning, with a single set of instructions provided identically to everybody in a given class, regardless of differences in aptitude or interest. Similar inflexibility has persisted in adult education programs that ignore differences in age, cultural background, occupation, and level of motivation.

They suggest that what we need are personalized learning systems that are more closely tailored to the needs and interests of the learner and suggest that "web-based expert systems could be designed to address this need. This has long been a dream of computer-based instruction, but the record on our ability to create these systems is dismal. This indeed makes this a "grand challenge" and one that continues to need our attention.

Learning versus Practicing a Profession

"The practice of a profession is not the same as learning to practice the profession" (p. 83).

This interesting quote appears in a article by Paul Kirschner, John Sweller and Richard E. Clark, titled, "Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential and Inquiry-Based Teaching (Educational Psychologist, 2006, 41(2), 75-86.

I know that this should not be an insight to me, but it is. In this article they review efforts to prepare medical and law students using problem-based methods of instruction and demonstrate effectively that these methods are not as effective as more direct techniques of learning the basics knowledge of medicine and law before attempting to apply these in practice settings. In general, studies have found that problem-based learning is not superior in terms of various outcomes such as clinical problem-solving skills.

The authors conclude that medical students like other students need to acquire basic knowledge and conceptual frameworks for organizing that knowledge prior to trying to put this information into practice through problem solving. They note that techniques such as a process worksheet can guide students that provide a description of the phases one should go through in solving a problem may be a more structured way of introducing effective problem-solving strategies.

Does Discovery learning work?

At least one of the reasons I have been attracted to the use of online instruction is because of the possibility of creating more authentic learning environments. In general, I have had a bias towards creating problem-based, discovery, constructivtist approaches to instruction.

In the past few weeks I have been doing my homework which means that I have been reading the literature on instruction and I am increasingly skeptical of my simple ideas about instruction. Here are a few highlights from an article by Paul Kirschner, John Sweller and Richard E. Clark, titled, "Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential and Inquiry-Based Teaching (Educational Psychologist, 2006, 41(2), 75-86.

The main point of this article problem-based learning makes too many demands on novice learners' working memory. In short, beginning learners are trying to identify the basic facts and issues related to the problem while also trying to employ novel problem-solving strategies using that information. The authors write,

"cognitive load theory suggests taht the free exploration of a highly complex environment may generate a heavy working memory load that is detrimental to learnning" (p. 80).

They also cite the work of other researchers who note,

"when students who learn science in classrooms with pure-discovery methods and minimal feedback, ... often become lost and frustrated, and their confusion can lead to misconceptions.... Other researchers found that "because false starts are common in such learning situations, unguided discovery is often inefficient" (p. 79).

So why do many of us resonate to the contructivist theories of teaching and learning? These researchers also offer us insight here. Just as novice learners benefit from direct instruction, expert learners seem to benefit from the contructivist, inquiry-based approaches. In other words, the point is not that all constructivist teaching is wrong or ineffective, it is developing teaching strategies that over the course of a students' experience shifts from much guidance to less and less guidance.

An Extension of Kevin Kelly's Qualities for Education

Here are some addtional thoughts I have had about Kevin Kelly's article, Better Than Free, about values of information when copies are free and lots of information is available.

At least in educational settings the quality of "interpretation" can be expanded to include the ideas of "guidance and explanation." The value of a good class is not the syllabus, the text or the classnotes, it is the value of the instructor. It is the opportunity to seek further clarification or to get to ask questions that link your current knowledge to some new idea.

This is why MIT can afford to give away its course content and still find students willing to buy the opportunity to be in the classroom with an instructor.

Somewhere is the qualities of "accessibility" and "findability" is the quality of organization. The value of an article in Wikipedia is more valuable than the same article that stands alone because the article embedded in the organizational structure of an encyclopedia can be easily linked to deeper information and related ideas. There is great value in this "organizational structure."

One of the commentators on this article also identified "community" as another possible quality that would be of value beyond the information itself. This again has lots of applicability in regards to education. We are still trying to figure out ways to replicate online the "community of scholars" aspect of F2F education. We don't yet have all the tools we need to create this experience online and one of the dangers of creating online graduate degrees in particular is this missing piece. The value of synchronous, spontaneous, or serendipitous conversations that can occur in a lab, classroom, hallway can easily be overlooked in the design of online education. The variety of educational experiences in traditional, campus-based education is still much richer than the online world.

Creating Educational Websites that Matter

By now everyone and every institution has a website and there is a lot of good information available. However, most of us probably have some sense that we haven't yet found very satisfactory ways of creating educational websites or online platforms that have the qualities for functions that seem to take full advantage of the Internet. In a recent article, Better Than Free, Kevin Kelly describes properties of the information on the Internet that have value beyond the content of the information itself. He provides a lot of interesting ideas about how to approach online education and what is often missing from our online educational enterprises.

Kelly's first point is that the cost of reproducing digital content has been reduced to almost nothing. He describes the Internet as a huge copying machine that can produce copies over and over, copies of text, video, sound, etc. So he asks the question, what can't be copied? He suggests these things that can't be copied may be the qualities that are valuable in a time cheap copies.

He identifies nine generative values or properties that he suggests have "intangible value that we buy when we pay for something that could be free." I have tried to link these to aspects of education.

1. Trust of the source. Everyone can produce information about a topic, but people and institutions that have developed a long-standing reputation for providing information based on science or technical expertise have a special value. The value of "trust" reminds us why established schools and institutions have a huge advantage over newly created "online universities" that have to build a reputation. At the same time those established institutions who create a poor online presence will be damaged. Increasingly, many people will use an institution's online presence as a basis for judging their quality.
2. Immediacy. Getting what you want easily and without effort is worthwhile, perhaps especially in a time of infoglut; it is powerful to obtain information via email or feeds directly to you. Also, for people who have special interests in a topic, there can be attention to the most uptodate information. Our ability to communicate new scientific information beyond an almost exclusive scientific community is very limited. The Internet provides a much faster method of translating new scientific information to people than what we could do in F2F classrooms and textbooks.
   

1. Personalization. Most information on the web is very generic-- specific information or answers to your questions or your needs is valuable. One specific example is a newsletter tailored to the age of your child so that you get information about topics that are common at a particular time in a child's life. The closer that we can get to creating information a person needs the more value this will be. For example, two people may both need to learn geometry, but the odds are that we not be at exactly the same level. A good pre-test that more closely identifies the right place to start learning would be very valuable. There are huge opportunities to personalize learning. Students at any level don't necessarily need the same "dose" of a topic.
   
2. Interpretation, Guidance or Explanation. If reading the textbook were all it took to learn most subjects, there would have never been schools, but most of the time it is helpful to have someone around to answer questions, extend the meaning of the text or connect ideas together for more meaning. MIT can make it's lectures and course materials available for free, but if you want to get the guidance of a MIT instructor, you have to pay a hefty price.
   
3. Authenticity. This is related to trust. Certain people or institutions have a reputation of providing a certain quality of information.
   
4. Accessibility or Organization. Kelly describes the value of ease of access, but I also think that obtaining things in an organized structure or the ability to create various organized structures is valuable. The value of an encyclopedia or wikipedia is that it is organized in a way that you can easily understand how to navigate the information. There would also be value in tools that would allow you to assemble your own personal wikepedia. "Tagging" is great for anchoring various pieces of information, but creating your own structured resource would be even more valuable.
   
5. Embodiment. Here Kelly acknowledges that sometimes it is worth having a physical object like the actual DVD, CD or book. The National Academy of Sciences makes all their books available for free online and anyone can read these books on the Web, but if you want to get the physical book, you pay for it. They report that they have been selling more books since they have been making them freely accessible. Sometimes it is helpful to have the "whole thing" rather than just the parts.
   
6. Patronage. Kelly writes, "It is my belief that audiences WANT to pay creators." Maybe this is naive, but there is some truth here. It should remind us that we should always provide a means for our students/audience to contribute to the work.
   
7. Findability. When Kelly talks about this quality, he has Amazon in mind in regards to aggregating lots of books together and creating tools so that customers can find other similar books or can read reviews that provide guidance to potential buyers. This is another quality that also has potential applicability to educational enterprises. It is easy to find lots of information about almost any topic regarding children and families, but it is rare to have the opportunity to read other people's comments about those articles. These comments would provide others with more insight about the value about the particular article. Likewise, it is rare that one bit of information leads to more extended information in any logical or valuable way. If I am searching for what to do with a child that is biting, I might also be interested in other negative behaviors in young children, managing children in group settings, general topics related to young children, and so forth. Creating good paths and directions through the mass of information is more valuable than ever.
   

Good educational websites cannot simply be more information, they need attend these qualities and include tools that address these issues for their clients.

Open Science among plant science

Here is a good example of where we need to be heading in terms of creating open systems of scientific development. There has been alot of talk about Learning 2.0, perhaps we need to begin talking about Discovery 2.0. (or maybe we are still at 1.0). The point is that there are many new tools and strategies that can be employed by scientists, science educators and the interested public around research and discovery.

NSF just funded a major effort to bring together plant scientists to share data, work on common problems, etc. Here is a quote from iPlant about its mission:

"This is an exciting time for science education! A user-friendly cyberinfrastructure will mean that for the first time in history everyone can work with the same data using the same tools in the same timeframe as high-level researchers. The goal of our Education Outreach and Training (EOT) is to ensure that everyone – students, teachers and faculty, from middle school to graduate school – will have the access and training to use these data and participate in research in real time."

They note that there is even room for social and behavioral scientists in terms of their willingness to create opportunities for social and behavioral scientists who are interested in collaborative processes and other other aspects of people working with each other across time and distance. As we know from some limited work in this area, there are substantial questions in this area. Well here is a chance for others to take a first-hand look.

More thoughts about data and extending science

Some of the most expensive data that we collect is qualitative and/or observational data. Making these data available to other researchers so that they can ask other types of questions or re-analyze data seems like an especially good idea.

There is one good example of this at the U of Illinois that begins to open up these data. This project is called the "Ethnography of the University." Faculty and students have agreed to share their data, publications, etc. in a common space. This allows more students to have access to the data, extend the questions, develop new ideas and exchange information.

Students who are interested in various topics about student life among university students have the opportunity to view multiple perspectives on this topic. Students interested in learning more about how scientists create ethnographies can see science in action.

Scholarship in the Digital Age by C. Borgmann

In this book, Christine Borgmann writes about all the ways in which scholarship among academics is changing and is likely to change as a result of digital publication.

The parts of this book that are especially interesting to me are about the social side of this technological change. For example, she writes:

Collaboration, especially over distance, has high overhead costs. (p. 29)

Much remains to be learned about the factors that make collaboration more or less successful, and the circumstances under which it is most likely to be worth the effort (See Cummings and Kiesler for more examples of this problem). (p. 29)

datebases and scholarly communication

The primary way in which scholars have communicated new scientific knowledge and to the advancement of science has been through the publication of research findings. (this ignores theoretical contributions, but that matters also.)

It seems to me that the vast increase in the ability to store large amounts of information affords the opportunity to ask the question what other ways might scientific scholarship be advanced in addition to publishing findings.

One idea that intrigues me is the sharing of data sets with others and developing interactive data analytic tools to explore these databases. Here is one nice example. The KidsCount Data Center keeps track of over 100 child and family indicators of well-being. At the data center you can select indicators, create comparision's and compare data in a variety of other ways. By making the data available in this fashion, other researchers or even the public at-large can answer questions using this data. No one is going to make scientific breakthroughs with this data, but all of us can find answers to questions that may be of interest to us: Are the trends in teen pregnancy in my state above the average in the US? Are children's reading scores improving? What has happened to teen drinking in the US?

With more powerful tools it would be possible to look at correlations, compare whether differences between counties or states were statistically significant, and so forth.

Imagine if more specialized data collected by scientists were routinely available to other researchers and the general public, wouldn't this advance science all the more quickly?

A lesson from the BBC about elearning

In David Weinberger's new book, Everything is Miscellaneous (2007) I have been struck by one particular example that I think we should heed as elearning educators. On page 112 he gives an example of the BBC's efforts to make their content available digitally. Weinberger writes,

" The BBC system standardizes over three hundred different attributes that may apply to recorded material, including subject, producers, language, length, type of media, even whether it has won any awards."

I am thinking that if radio and television requires 300 attributes to capture all the dimensions of this work, how many attributes do we need for learning materials. I am thinking that we have underestimated the extent of metadata that we need to add to text, images, etc. in order to make this material easily usable by other teachers. We have not understood the conceptual work that we need to do to make learning materials easily modular for use by others.

Weinberger also reports that Tom Coates and Matt Webb also have given much thought to how find programming, navigate it and use it. They ended up with a decision that the "the most useful object-- the one that accords best with how the audience thinks about programming-- was an episode, ..." Here is another lesson for elearning designers. Have we figured out the right "unit of teaching" or "unit of learning" for our audience? Is this different for teachers than students? It seems to me that rather than work on "microlearning" or "learning objects" we might be better off trying to figure out the "most useful object" for our audience.

What is microlearning and is it a useful idea?

I recently stumbled on to "microlearning.org" which has held several international meetings and produced a series of conference papers about this topic. On the one hand, I am pleased by some of the ideas that I have read in these papers, but I still think that we are using the term of "learning" in a much too loose fashion. Consider the following statements:

“The developments of computers, Internet and mobile phones in the last ten years have transformed our living, working and learning environments to such an extent that we are actually continuously engaged in microlearning” (p. 7). [emphasis mine]

“Microlearning” has become the most common everyday practice in the information society. It’s the way we breathe in information and exhale communication” (p. 7).

(Source: Bruck, P. A (2006). What is microlearning and why care about it? In T. Hug, M. Lindner, P.A. Bruck (Eds.), Micromedia and e-learning 2.0: Gaining the big picture (pp. 7-10). Innsbruck: Innsbruck University Press. http://www.microlearning.org/MicroConf_2006/Microlearning_06_final.pdf)

Are the above statements true? Are we really learning in these exchanges? This seems somewhat true to me, but how is this different to listening to television or the radio? Clearly, some learning is taking place, but this seems like at least an imcomplete notion of learning. Is exposure to ideas enough for learning? Shouldn't a person get feedback about their knowledge on a topic and doesn't this lead to more informed learning or knowledge?

On the Relationship between microcontent and learning objects

This chapter describes the relationship between microcontents and learning objects.

Definition of microcontent:

“A [very] small unit of digital information that is self-contained, individually referable/addressable, allowing use/re-use in different loosely structured macro-contexts and macro-containers” (p. 297).

“a microcontent piece with educational purpose plus metadata describing the piece itself and it educational usages may be considered as a regular learning object. However, the microcontent vision entrails those descriptions should come from subjective personal views of the world., e.g., those views offered by blog authors” (p. 296).

I am not sure about most of the middle of this article as it seems to focus on the engineering side of the problem of building repositories.

The concluding paragraph is telling about what remains to be done:

“ On the conceptual side, the main open problem is how to embed micro-pedagogies or micro-didatics into usable ontologies, so that software tools can be developed to aid humans in the setting of microlearning contexts—but for this, studies of learning theories must come before actual ontology engineering” (p. 302).

This captures one of the biggest problems in the use of terms like learning objects and microlearning—it is not at all clear how the “learning” part gets folded into the definitions. At present we do not have a metadata formulation that captures of the “learning” or “educational” dimensions of these data.

Source:

Sanchez-Alonso, S., Sicilia, M., Barriocanal, E., & Armas, T. (2006). In T. Hug, M. Lindner, P.A. Bruck (Eds.), Micromedia and e-Learning 2.0: Gaining the big picture (pp. 295- 303). Innsbruck: Innsbruck University Press.

Microcontent is Everywhere

Leene 2006 Microcontent is Everywhere

“MicroContent are self-contained indivisible structured pieces of content, which have a single focus and a unique address for (re-)findability” (p. 25).

He suggests there are five common characteristics of a unit of microcontent—focus, structure, self-contained, indivisible, and addressability.

Focus refers to the idea that the content focuses on a single thing, a single idea, a single topic. He gives the examples of a blog post on one topic, a review of a single book, a music track, etc.

(I don’t think this works very well. Is a book on microlearning a document that focuses on one topic? And is a review of two related books in the same article disqualify it as a piece of microcontent? He is trying to provide a definition of “small” but this is very difficult, because small depends on the context. A book is small in the context of a library, but it is large compared to a paragraph.

Structure is an interesting idea. This is an attempt at specifying the appropriate metadata that should accompany microcontent. He lists the following basic elements for a structure:

Title

Description

Tags (keywords)

Author

Creation date/time

Change date/time

Geotags

I also have some trouble with notions of self-contained and indivisible. These are interesting ideas, but they depend a lot on context.

For teaching and learning I am still troubled by the lack of any information or metadata that captures the information needed for learning—level of difficulty, reading level, etc.

I also wonder how we construct the “difficulty” or “complexity” path through information. This is what teaching is about. I still think the part we haven’t done is to add the metadata about learning to our content.

In this article I am most disappointed in the discussion of microcontent types. The “types” seem to be based on information technology formats, eg., text used in blog posts is different than text used in a recipe because they have different data formats. This leads to an infinite number of types of microcontent formats. Maybe this is okay, but I am not sure.

This also causes me to wonder about a format for “learning content.” This is roughly what people were trying to do with “learning objects” but again we got stuck in the technical specification that had little to do with the context of learning.

Again I find myself wondering if what is wrong with our efforts in this area is that we still don’t have the right metadata descriptions attached to text, images, etc.

I also find myself asking whether we need to develop a "learning content" standard? Is that what people were trying to do with learning objects?

Maybe the problem with learning objects is that we don't have the right metadata description attached to text, images, etc.

Education Needs to Embrace Miscellany?

I am about half-way through David Weinberger's new book, Everything is Miscellaneous (2007). In this book Weinberger suggests that order can emerge out of the miscellaneous disorder of the web.

In short, he suggests that when people are not restricted to the order of the physical realm or even the order of simple physical forms of metadata systems (e.g., the Dewey decimal system or the index in the back of a book), then people can create many new orders (he calls them "third orders") that reflect a particular individual.

These ideas have many implications. I have been thinking about the problems of learning objects and the sharing of teaching materials in general. Most of us expected that as teaching materials were converted from classroom lectures and textbooks to online modes, then there would be much more sharing and construction of courses from web-based teaching materials. Well, mostly this hasn't happened. There are probably lots of reasons, but I have begun to think that we have never gotten the model right for sharing teaching materials. If you look at most of the stuff that we share in repositories like Merlot, you find that we share whole courses, or lectures or web-based laboratory exercises. These are all nice, but they aren't easily adapted to another course or another teaching activity. In short, we don't have a third-order system for sharing teaching stuff. We haven't invented the Amazon or Wikipedia for teaching and learning. Maybe the model is out there, but it is not readily apparent.

Status of Learning Objects

On the one hand, writing about learning objects as the solution to better online education has been decreasing, but there is still some discussion of this idea. David Wiley wrote the following:

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about these declarations [learning objects are dead] since they started appearing, and I’ve come to the somewhat troubling conclusion that I don’t think I care if learning objects are dead or not.

Almost everyone cites his original definition of learning objects so it is interesting that he has come to this conclusion.

In another article, Michael Feldstein writes that there is no such thing as a learning object and goes on to say

I believe the term "learning object" has become harmful. It hides the same old, bad lecture model behind a sexy buzz phrase.

I think we may be giving up on the idea of learning objects too soon. I think Wiley is correct in saying that the current way of thinking about learning objects is dead or perhaps a deadend. I also think Feldstein is correct in saying that "learning objects" got a lot of buzz, but maybe there wasn't that much there.

Perhaps the most telling is that Wikipedia has a note in May 2007 on the "learning objects" page that says this article maybe confusing or unclear for some readers.

If even the Wikipedians can't figure out how to talk about "learning objects" we are really in trouble.

I think what has discouraged a lot of people is that efforts to develop learning objects and repositories has proven to be much more difficult than anyone imagined. Teaching and learning is complex and has many dimensions. We were naive to think that we could easily create online learning that would overcome all the complexity that exist.

However, I think we should still work on the ideas of sharing learning materials and the idea of reusing existiing materials. This time we need to do the hard work that it will take to make this happen.

Why hasn't educational technology made teaching more efficient?

The advent of the Internet was supposed to make the work of teaching and learning more efficient. If you read what many of us wrote over the past ten years you will find continuous reference to the idea that computers and the Internet would transform education into a much more efficient process. Few people who have built course websites and been involved with various course management systems (e.g., Web CT, Blackboard, etc.) would say that their work has gotten more efficient.

There have been important efforts to create teaching resource warehouses to store teaching materials-- the most extensive is Merlot which seeks to store a wide range of teaching materials.

Despite some significant strides in this area I think we are still only at the beginning and I think that we have several things wrong with our basic elearning educational model.

Here are my major criticisms of our efforts so far:

1. We haven't gotten the unit of production right. Yochai Benkler states, "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.

2. We haven't opened the doors to full participation in our business of teaching and learning. Few teachers are prepared to let our students help write the curriculum and few of us are willing to invite people outside of education into the work of teaching and learning. Most of us are not willing to trust that anyone but other credentialed experts can contribute meaningfully to teaching and learning in our classrooms.

3. We haven't gotten the basic unit of learning right. We continue to try to teaching online in the same ways that we teach F2F or we try to adapt previous teaching tools to the web (for example, books). Mostly this stuff doesn't work very well. I would suggest that the basic unit of learning is questions and answers. The basic learning exchange is a student asking a question and a teaching giving an answer or a teacher asking a question or being given a problem and asking a student to solve it.

4. We haven't really created learning objects. There has been much talk about developing learning objects and repositories like Merlot make a point of suggesting that they are collecting learning objects, but they are really teaching objects. In other words, they are resources for teachers to use to help students learn, they are not resources that a student can engage with independently to learn something. Both types of materials are needed, but we need to call them by the right names and make this distinction.

5. We haven't really utilized computers, the Internet and web to create really interactive learning situations. There are some interesting new ideas about using games, virtual worlds and the like to create some interactive learning environments, but the level of technical expertise needed to develop these types of resources is very high. Rather than continue to develop another course management system we need an interactive platform to develop learning experiences that can be used by a wide range of educators.

Participatory Education in Universities

"Blogs represent a powerful tool for engaging in these larger public conversations....We make a mistake, though, if we understand such efforts purely in terms of distance learning or community outreach, as if all expertise resides within universities and needs simply to be transmitted to the world. Rather we should see these efforts as opportunities for us to learn from other sectors equally committed to mapping and mastering the current media change" (Chronicle of Higher Education, Feb. 16, 2007, p. b9-b10)

This quote is how Henry Jenkins describes the evolution of the ways in which universities should begin thinking about how to engage the world in a more participatory fashion.

He goes on to say, "

The modern university should work not by defining fields of study but by removing obstacles so that knowledge can circulate and be reconfigured in new ways."

Students and the use of technology for learning

Here is a good example of the fact that how students use computers may have no connection to their learning. In this New York Times article, they report that some schools who provided laptops to all their students are abandoning this practice because there is no connection between the computers and learning. Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops

Now one important caution about this article is asking what else happens in classrooms and schools that has nothing to do with learning. And what we missing about schools that does have a connection to learning, but we often overlook it? For example, there is emerging evidence that extra curricula activities improve learning outcomes for students. (See the research by Dr. Christy Lleras at the University of Illinois We don't know exactly how this works, but these findings should make us more thoughtful about how learning occurs and what happens in schools outside of the classroom that may be important to learning.

Communicating with Today's Undergraduates

I remain skeptical about the various talk about "digital natives" and other terms to use about today's young people. I know that they use various forms of technology to communicate, but I am not sure they use technology to "learn" or at least they don't use it in the ways that I think about learning.

Nevertheless, I am sure that they are using technology to find out information about which colleges to attend and what programs are being offered by various schools. In short, I suspect that most students narrow down their choices of potential schools based on what they learn from the web. But how does this connect with their choice of a major? For example, the well-known majors are probably introduced by a variety of people, but for students interested in psychology and sociology, how would be they find "human development" or "family studies" or "community development?" I don't know and I don't think anyone else knows other than to say that they either know someone or they accidental stumble across this information.

All this leads me to think about how those of us in more invisible majors connect with high school students and how this might be done through technology.

Digital Higher Education Institutions

Here is an interesting effort to begin thinking about how high education institutions might look if you were to start creating one today.

http://www.futureofthebook.org/HASTAC/learningreport/about

On of the most interesting parts of this effort is that readers of this document can add their own ideas about how they think institutions might change.

One of the most important changes in higher education in the digital world will be creating a system of peer participation and managing this development for learning. This is different than creating social connections on MySpace or with other social networking technologies and yet it takes advantage of these types of tools for a specific purpose of learning.

Has TV changed education?

If teachers don't use television is the classroom, does that mean that television hasn't changed education? I have been thinking about the use of electronic technologies in the classroom. Detractors of the web and other recent innovations in technology often point to the fact that few of the tools that were to revolutionize education have really made much differenence. In short, most schooling today is much the same as it was 100 years ago. So what does this mean?

If a teacher doesn't use television in the classroom , does this mean that television hasn't changed how people learn? I have begun to think that whether or not a technology is used in the classroom is not an appropriate measure of the impact of a technology on learning. I would suggest that the source of most current adult learning is through television. This is not to say that what people learn is right or that the focus on television learning is appropriate, but clearly people are learning about the world, health, finances, and much more via television.

As educators we must stop thinking about education as something that only happens in classrooms. It seems to me that if we continue to focus only on classroom learning we will miss the real opportunities to teach.

Technology vs. Learning Approaches

I have been reading Richard Mayer's work on Multimedia Learning. In his introductory chapter Ihe reminds us of central problem with a lot of the work that is going on in regards to blogs, wikis, podcasting and the like. Too many of us (me included) are focused on the technology and not on the learning. Here is the difference that he captures with these two questions:

Technology-centered people ask: How can I use these capabilities in designing multimedia presentations?

Learner-centered people ask: How can we adapt multimedia to enhance human learning?

He asserts that if we focus on web or other technologies we will be disappointed by the outcome just as we have been disappointed by all the previous technologies that were going to revolutionize education-- radio, televsion, etc. See L. Cuban, 1986, Teachers and machines for a more elaborate story about the failures of technology.

Online education will not revolutionize education

Richard Mayer writes a very sensible article in eLearn Magazine that captures many of the problems surrounding the current buzz about online education. In a few sentences he reminds us that if online teaching and education is going to be successful, then it will need to fit the ways in which learning occurs. His answer to the question of whether "video" is better than "text" nicely illustrates the point that it is not the medium one uses that matters, but how the medium is used to support to learning. Online teaching and learning needs to be built on our theories and research about how people learn. There is much hype about today's students learning different than students in the past. Despite the talk there is relatively little to suggest that humans learn much different today than twenty years ago-- perhaps even a 1000 years ago.

The real opportunity afforded by online learning is that we can build more flexible, adaptive and robust learning environments for people. The sad part is that most of today's online teaching does not incorporate much of what we know about how people learn. It remains lecture and multiple choice testing. We can do better.

eACES: Blogs, Wikis and Casts

In lecture I asserted that by the year 2010, College of ACES students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will be primarily learning through elearning methods. I also suggested that this learning would be better than previous instructional methods.

What do you think?

Here are some other questions to consider:

1. What are the advantages and disadvantages of an eACES curriculum?
2. How could blogs, wikis, and casts be used to improve learning?
3. Are blogs, wikis, and casts just a passing fad, why or why not?

Other Sources of information on eCommunities- Last Discussion Question

In the left-hand margin of this blog there is a list of eCommunity Resources I have found that provide information on communities of practice and web-based efforts to create virtual communities of practice. Look at these and tell me what you think about them? If you know of other resources, tell us.

What are the challenges of creating these virtual communities of practice?

What are some ideas about how we can overcome these challenges and build effective web-based communities of practice?

What about an ecommunity for leadership education?

Social computing…..the title on the cover of Newsweek (4/3/2006) reads “Putting the ‘we’ in Web.” http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12015774/site/newsweek/ One definition offered for this new stuff is “live web.” In short it is tools that allow lots of us to distribute our thoughts, pictures, video and to anyone else who is interested.

So what does this mean for “learning communities.” Is it possible to create an “e-learning community on leadership education?” What are some of the challenges of doing this?

Does anyone know of a community like this already exists that we could perhaps participate in?

Have you unlearned something today? Discussion Question # 8

Of all the statements in the Brown and Gray article, this one seems the most true to me: “We have not yet faced up to the imminent and gnarly challenge of “learning to unlearn.” http://www.johnseelybrown.com/intro_learningculture.html

Yet, I don’t understand the examples they give and I don’t get the 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 procedure. Can anyone explain this to the rest of us?

Building a broader learning system-- Discussion Question # 7

“In schools, changing the learning theory is a much deeper transformation,” writes Wenger. “[S]chool is not the privileged locus of learning. It is not a self-contained, closed world… but part of a broader learning system” (p. 5). http://www.ewenger.com/theory/communities_of_practice_intro_WRD.doc

This sounds like Extension work at its best. Does this seem right?

How close do we get to this in our work in leadership education currently?

What else could we do to connect leadership education to a “broader learning system?”

Is learning changing? Discussion Question #6

“[T]he days when learning meant training, knowledge meant information, and “content was king” seem to be fading.” http://www.johnseelybrown.com/intro_learningculture.html

Is this statement true about your work? The work of University of Illinois Extension?
When? Why or why not? Give an example?

A living curriculum? Discussion Question # 5

Wenger suggests that a community of practice “acts as a living curriculum for the apprentice?” http://www.ewenger.com/theory/communities_of_practice_intro_WRD.doc


What does this mean?

Discussion Question #4-- Learning at work

4. “[A] different model of human work is emerging,” write Brown and Gray. “People need to be trusted; work and therefore decision making must be distributed. Relationships among workers—as learners—are key.” http://www.johnseelybrown.com/intro_learningculture.html

If we decided to build a “learning community” around “leadership education” what are some things we would need to consider that would ensure we honor people as learners?

Current size of the Blogosphere--April 2006

Technorati recently reported that the blogosphere continues to grow at a very rapid rate.

Here is a quick summary of their findings:

• Technorati now tracks over 35.3 Million blogs
• The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months
• It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
• On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
• 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
• Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour

What is a "community of practice?"--Discussion Question # 3

3. In his introduction to "communities of practice,"
http://www.ewenger.com/theory/communities_of_practice_intro_WRD.doc

Wenger writes, “Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.”

Does this seem like the same idea as “learning to be?” Why or why not?

What are some of the typical activities of a community of practice?

Question 2--Is learning social?

2. The authors, Brown and Gray http://www.johnseelybrown.com/intro_learningculture.html , state, “First, learning is fundamentally social and second, learning about is quite different than learning to be, which is a process of enculturation.”

Take these two ideas separately, what do they mean by “learning is social?”

Is a blog social? Is a classroom automatically “social”? Why or why not?

What is “learning to be?” Give me an example of a time when you were either teaching “others to be” or “being taught to be.”

Are you being “taught to be” in this activity? Why or why not?

Learning Communities: Leadership and Social Software

There are two purposes for this discussion—1) to learn more about the principles of learning communities and 2) to explore the tools of “social software” that may facilitate the creation of learning communities (or e-learning communities).

Readings

Brown, J. S. & Gray, E. S. (2003). Introduction: Creating a learning culture: Strategy, practice, and technology. http://www.johnseelybrown.com//intro_learningculture.html

Wenger, E. Communities of practice: An introduction. http://www.ewenger.com/theory/communities_of_practice_intro_WRD.doc

Assignment prior to Teleconference, April 28, 2006

Prior to our teleconference you are expected to read each of the above articles and consider the discussion questions that I have outlined for these readings. The discussion questions are posted at the blog, Open2Learn at: http://open2learn.blogspot.com/

In all there will be 10 discussion questions. I will post the first one today and post additional questions each day for two weeks. (Just a note about blogs—the most current posting is always at the top so you have to scroll down to see the material from previous days.)

Additionally, you are expected to write your thoughts about at least two questions about the readings and post these at Open2Learn. In writing your responses you should also respond to the comments and ideas of others participating in this discussion.

If you have difficulty gaining access to the blog or figuring out how to post a comment, please email me at: hughesro@uiuc.edu or call at 217-333-3790.

First Discussion Question

1. Brown and Gray http://www.johnseelybrown.com//intro_learningculture.html suggest the challenge of becoming a learning organization means aspiring to do “double-loop” learning which involves the “ability to detect, determine, and perhaps even modify the organization’s underlying norms, policies, and objectives.”

Can you think of a time in an organization you have been involved with that was able to achieve “double-loop learning?” If not, why not?

What norms, policies and objectives within Extension need to be considered to make it a double-loop learning organization?

To comment on this topic-- click on the comment link below and write a response. You may also read comments from others and refer to those ideas as well. The purpose of this blog is to foster a discussion of "learning communities, leadership and social software."

Teleconference, April 28, 2006, 11:30 am - 1:00 pm.

The primary purpose of the teleconference is to continue the discussion that have been introduced in Open2Learn. Additionally, this will be a time to discuss your particular reactions to using “social software” as a learning tool and your thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of using this technology to foster learning communities.

A test of whether blogs improve learning

The teaching discussion at HighEdBlogCon continues today.


There is little empirical data about the effectiveness of blogging. Nicole Ellison reports on some research that she conducted regarding the use of blogs versus traditional writing assignments.

Roughly her findings indicate that students may actually spend less time writing when they use blogs when compared with paper assignments. Likewise, she also found that their comprehension of the material was also lower.

She notes there may be many reasons for this including the possibility that students were too new to blogging and might have been spending more time learning the technology than doing the assignment. Students also reported not being surre what "voice" to use in blogging.


Ellison notes that teachers need to be skepical about claims about the value of tech tools in learning.

Mark Ott and short lectures

One of the worst parts of audio and video lectures is that most live events were never meant to be very effective presentations. At the HigherEdBlogCon this week Mart Ott (Jackson Comm College;http://www.docott.com gave a nice example of a better way to do this work. He describes a process of using PowerPoint slides or other visual aid along with a nonclassroom-recorded audio track.

He provides lots of reason why this is much better to listen to or watch.

I think the most important idea in this presentation is his point of breaking the lecture into smaller parts. He suggests that this mini-lectures are 5-15 minutes in length and cover one or two ideas. We have to remember that the classroom lecture was created to fit in a particular time and place-- a classroom, a place in which students move in large numbers from one physical location to another. Once that learning is taken out of the particular space and distributed in an asynchronous method, there is no reason to fill up any particular block of time. In fact, most audio and video learning needs to be broken up into small, more managable segments. It needs to have detailed descriptors so that learners can quickly figure out what to expect from a given piece. It probably also needs to be transcribed into print for those learners who would rather read something at their own pace rather than listen to someone else talk through the topic.

HigherEdBlogcon Begins April 3, 2006

HigherEdBlogcon begins April 3, 2006. It will last throughut the month.

This week (April 3-7) there will be discussions of teaching in higher education via blogs and various other technologies. Participation is free.

This is a good chance to see what others are trying to do with these tools in higher education.

the "conversational era?"

In the closing paragraph in Naked Conversations, Scoble and Israel write, " Ulitimately, blogging has ended one era and ignited another. In this new era, companies don't win just by talking to people. They win by listening to people as well. We call it the Conversational Era" (p. 232)"

Good teachers will tell you and students who tell you about good teachers will say that "learning is a good conversation." It is not just about teachers "telling," but about listening thoughtfully and continuing the conversation.

Obviously, one of the reasons that a number of teachers have been drawn to blogging is because they understand that this tool allows them to continue to the thoughtful conversation outside of the classroom. Perhaps for those students who never had a chance to speak up in class, it is another opportunity to give their ideas, to reflect on class topics, to ask questions or to get feedback from their teacher and classmates.

Michael Bugeja's Interpersonal Divide is wrong

A recent book by Michael Bugeja, Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age is very disappointing.

The books begins by making a number of very strong statements that indicate the author is gravely concerned about the extent to which technology and media are harming interpersonal skill development and damaging our ability to create a “sense of community.”

The difficulty with these assertions is that these statements require some evidence. For example, the author says, “Historically, technology (in all its mechanical forms) precipitates displacement” (p. 14). He defines “displacement” as an “unfathomable feeling of isolation not only in our hometowns but also in our homes—connected, wired, and cabled to the outside world” (p. 13).

Taken as simple fact this assertion would essentially mean that civilization has only been in decline since the very earliest toolmaking. Surely this is too board a claim.

Another example of the terrible effects of technology is on our families. He writes, “Far from making life more convenient and work easier, media and technology have blurred the boundaries between home and work so that work intrudes on family and family on work to such an extent that many of us no longer know where we are—literally” (p. 16).

There are a couple of problems with this assertion. First, he provides no specific evidence that in fact, people can't tell when they are at work or at home. More importantly, he also doesn't provide any evidence that people find it problemmatic that work and family time is blurred.

The book is filled with many assertions and little evidence. This is dismaying especially since there is evidence about these issues. In general, the eivdence suggests that email and the Internet do not create an "interpersonal divide." Most people use cell phones and email to maintain contact and sustain relationships with people that they also see face-to-face. Technology is not a substitute for face-to-face relationships, but an addition.

There are some real reasons to be concerned about your interpersonal relationships are influenced and how web technology and the like influence the development of community and a sense of community, but our understanding will not be assisted by outrageous claims that the "Interpersonal divide is coming!"

"Pulling learning" by John Seely Brown

I first bumped into John Seely Brown's work in the 1990s in a fascinating book called, Internet Dreams (1997) edited by Mark Stefik. Later I read The Social Life of Information, a book that I don't think I really understood, but I continued to be fascinated by Brown's thinking about the Internet, culture, technology, learning and community. These ideas get woven together in different ways that always lead to interesting insights.


His latest work From Push to Pull-- Emerging Models for Mobilizing Resources is directly reponsible for me trying out this blog idea.

Here is the kind of idea that he is exploring that is critical to how we need to be building online learning environments:

"Pull models treat people as networked creators (even when they are customers purchasing goods and services) who are uniquely positioned to transform uncertainty from a problem to an opportunity. Pull models are ultimately designed to accelerate capability building by participants, helping them learn as well as innovate, by pursuing trajectories of learning that are tailored to their specific needs."

He is thinking about businesses when he writes this, but I am thinking about students and anyone interested in learning.

Illinois Technology Conference for Educators

This week I am going to try to keep up with this conferenence in Illinois on technology for educators.

Illinois Technology Conference for Educators

Social ties online-- Pew Report

The Pew Internet & American Life Project today released a report describing how the internet improves Americans' capacity to maintain their social networks and how they gain a big payoff when they use the internet to activate those networks to solicit help.

The report is based on two surveys and finds that the internet and email expand and strengthen the social ties that people maintain in the offline world. The surveys show that people not only socialize online, but they also incorporate the internet into their quest for information and advice as they seek help and make decisions.

Disputing concerns that heavy use of the internet might diminish people's social relations, the report finds that the internet fits seamlessly with Americans' in-person and phone encounters. With the help of the internet, people are able to maintain active contact with sizable social networks, even though many of the people in those networks do not live close to them.

The report, "The Strength of Internet Ties," highlights how email supplements, rather than replaces, the communication people have with others in their network.

is blogging the next big change in our lives?

Over the past two years there has been increasing buzz about the business of blogs. A host of books have been written recently that assert that blogging or two-way conversations across cyberspace will change our ways of living and doing business.

Here is the first chapter is naked conversations.

Tell me what you think about this? Is something really changing?

Are you blogging?

Is this more than the usual diary stuff?

Is there something here?

Not many blogs about the U of Illinois

I have continued to read Naked Conversations. Much of the book doesn't seem to apply at the moment to higher education. Much of their advice makes more sense for businesses, especially tech businesses that already have a lot of people who are online much of the time. I checked to see how the U of I was fairing in terms of mentions in blogs (roughly 25,000 posts that mention the U of I. (See table below from Technorati.) In recent weeks we have had more attention to an announcment about the development of a quantum computer (another tech item) and a controversy at the student newspaper over publication of the Muslim cartoons.

In short at the moment I don't think there are lots of students or others who are interested in following news about the U of I via blogs, but tech folks have often led the first wave and what was only a "geek" phenonmena at one time has frequently become common in several years.


Posts that contain "university Of Illinois" per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

HigherEdBlogcon scheduled in April 2006

Highedblogcon is scheduled to begin April 3, 2006. This blog event is designed to bring together higher education people around use of the social web for teaching, alumni relations, websites, and much more. Seems like this would be an interesting way to see what is going on.

Shel Israel thinks educators should have naked conversations

As a novice blogger I suppose the first big thrill is having your first comment (by somebody other than a relative or somebody you put up to it.... My mention of Dan Gillmour got the first comment now I got mentioned in Shel Israel's naked conversation blog. Israel responds to the question I posed which is "should educators have naked conversations?" As would be expected thinks that educators should be bloggers and that this would be good for universities. This is not a surprising response from the blogging community, but I am more curious about faculty and administrators in higher education.

We haven't been the quickest to adopt technology. I wouldn't be surprised in overhead projectors are still more commonly used on college campuses than any other form of technology.

Of course, there are the technology-leaders among our ranks, but what's the mainstream doing?

Open2Learn--a Wiki experiment

Today I decided I had better try out this wiki idea and see how these things work. So here it is.


The "Open2Learn" wiki. Apologies for the advertisements. The Wikispaces software seems easy enough to use. I didn't have too much trouble getting a first and second page created. My goal is to put some of my longer articles here.

Wikis as an educational tool

According to the Wikipedia, a "wiki" is an Hawaiian word for "quick." Thus, a wikipedia is a "quick encyclopedia. " The main feature of a "wiki" is that the software allows for multiple users to creative a collaborative workspace. The Wikipedia is a collaborative encylopedia written by many users.

It allows people to build a shared knowledge space. Particularly for those educators who have been interested in contructivist-based approaches for teaching this ability to create a shared knowledge base allows educators to involve students in the construction of knowledge or information about an area of study and then provide feedback and elaboration of this information. (See How People Learn for a complete explanation of the current research on designing learning environments.)

Can educators have naked conversations?

The new book by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, naked conversations, arrived on my door step today. They are unabashedly enthusiastic about blogging for businesses. Here is a sample of their Introduction.

"We envision a day in the future when companies that don't blog will be held suspect to some degree, wih people wondering whether those companies have something to hide or whether the owners are worried about what the people who work for them have to say" (p. 1).

Are universities and schools in this category? If principals, teachers, professors, college deans and presidents blogged, what would this do for our schools and universities? Is this a way to get in touch our students, potential students, parents, taxpayers, critics?

Scoble and Israel go on to write:

"If you choose to join the conversation , your company will be better for it, and your customers will be happier. You will develop better products and services by enjoying their collective wisdom, and you will save a ton of money by dumping expensive marketing tactics that not only don't work, but annoy the people they target" (p. 2).

Sounds good to me. Who wouldn't want to get in on this? Is this real? Can I really engage in deep and meaningful conversations with people online or is this just true in some aspects of the business world? Sure there are haters and lovers of Microsoft, but do people have the same passion about their schools or their universities.... I mean besides the sports teams?

More from Scoble and Israel:

"The revolution is about the way businesses communicate, not just with customers but with their entire constitiuencies-- partners, vendors, employees, prospects, investors and the media" (p. 3).

School and universities have all of the audiences as well as businesses. For the most part we have been more distant than many businesses from our students, investors (taxpayers), employees, and so forth. And we have never had the resources to effectively market our products and services. Shouldn't we be exploring a technology trend that promises to increase our ability to talk with those who care about our work?