Transcript Association for Learning Technology Manchester, UK, 8-10 September 2009 Terry Anderson, Ph.D. Canada Research Chair in Distance Education.

Association for Learning
Technology
Manchester, UK,
8-10 September 2009
Terry Anderson, Ph.D.
Canada Research Chair in Distance Education
Introduction
Terry Anderson’s CV in Wordle Tag Cloud
Anderson & Anderson,( submitted for publication)
Presentation Overview
• Brief scan of the environment
• Taxonomy of the Many
• The Open Scholar
Values
• We can (and must) continuously improve the
quality, effectiveness, appeal, cost and time
efficiency of the learning experience.
• Student control and freedom is integral to 21st
Century life-long education and learning.
• Education for elites is not sufficient for
planetary survival.
Harmonizing Disruptive Technologies
• “Managing and aligning
pedagogical, technical
and administrative issues
is a necessary condition
of success when using
emerging technologies
for learning”
• But it takes leadership
and disruption
Educating the Net Generation: A Handbook of Findings for Practice and Policy , 2009
Recent history of Higher education
Innovation
• Last systemic innovation was the emergence of the
community colleges and open and alternative colleges
of the 1960’s
• Last 40 years of reform:
– Examples: Problem based learning, faculty development,
community, collaborative, technology enhanced learning
– Peripheral and outside of main stream rewards and
strategic planning
– “ We can no longer pursue an add-on approach to the
changing faculty role”
• Rice, Eugene. (2006). From Athens and Berlin to LA: Faculty Work
and the New Academy
Promising Signs
• Ubiquity and multifunctionality of web 2.0
• Growth of openness and
online resources, OERs
• Increasingly effective
pedagogical models and
learning activities
• Real educational
alternatives – including
private sector
• Death and retirement
Aligning with 21 Century students
• Students are NOT deeply digitally engaged, empowered,
nor skilled and certainly not homogeneous
• But they “arrive at college with well-established methods of
sorting, doubting, and ignoring”
• “odd kind of student — one who appears polite and dutiful
but who cares little about the course work, the larger
questions it raises, or the value of living an examined life”
Tom Clysdale, 2009 Wake Up and Smell the New
Epistemology
• Or is the life that we examine in formal education?
• We can no longer maintain interest and enthusiasm based
on respect and superior knowledge
Net presence means Creating and
Sustaining Social Capital
• “Relationships, more than
information, determine how
problems are solved or
opportunities exploited.” p.
17 Looi 2001)
Choosing the right tool(s)?
VLE
http://www.go2web20.net over 3000 apps
13
Taxonomy of the ‘Many’ –
A Conceptual Model
Dron and Anderson, 2007
Group
Conscious membership
Leadership and organization
Cohorts and paced
Rules and guidelines
Access and privacy controls
Focused and often time limited
May be blended F2F
Metaphor :
Virtual classroom
14
Formal Learning and Groups
• Long history of research
and study
• Established sets of tools
– Classrooms,
– VLEs
– Synchronous (F2F, video
& net conferencing)
– Email
• Need to develop face to
face, mediated and
blended group learning
skills
Garrison and Anderson, 2001
Critical Tools for
Group Learning Environments
• Collaborative tools
– Document creation, management, versioning
– Time lines, calendars,
– Strong notifications
• Security, trust
– hosting on institutional space?
– Behind firewalls, away from search engines
• Decision making and project management tools
• Synchronous and asynchronous
conversations/meetings
Groups as Communities of Practice
• Wengler’s ideas of Community of Practice
– mutual engagement – synchronous and notification
tools
– joint enterprise – collaborative projects, “pass the
course”
– a shared repertoire – common tools, VLEs, IM and doc
sharing
• Online communities are a means to help
preserve and continue the interests,
knowledge and culture of a group bound by
common interests. Looi, C. K. (2001)
Looi, C. K. (2001). Enhancing learning ecology on the Internet Journal of
Computer Assisted Learning, 17(1), 13-20
Distributed web 2.0 Group Tools
Problems with Groups
• Restrictions in time, space, pace, &
relationship - NOT OPEN
• Often overly confined by teacher
expectation and institutional
curriculum control
• Usually Isolated from the authentic
world of practice
• “low tolerance of internal difference,
sexist and ethicized regulation, high
demand for obedience to its norms
and exclusionary practices.” Cousin &
Relationships
Deepwell 2005
• Group think (Baron, 2005)
• Poor preparation for Lifelong
Learning beyond the course
Paulsen (1993)
Law of Cooperative Freedom
• From Groups to Flocks ?? Michael Wesch
• Do groups still only make sense in education?
Frontiers of Group Learning
• From systems designed to tack, control and
lead learners, to systems designed to motivate
and inspire learning.
What motivates learners?
•Personal and social relevance
•Opportunity to do well and be
recognized
•Chance to meet cool people
and engage in cool activities
•Disequilibrium (Dewey)
•Rewards - formal education’s
last strategic advantage
Frontier College Archives
Groups Summary
• Groups are necessary, but not sufficient for
quality learning
Network
Group
Shared interest/practice
Fluid membership
Friends of friends
Reputation and altruism driven
Emergent norms, structures
Activity ebbs and flows
Rarely F2F
Metaphor: Virtual Community of Practice
24
Networks add diversity to learning
“People who live in the intersection of
social worlds are at higher risk of
having good ideas” Burt, 2005, p. 90
• Collaborative Learning In
Groups
• Cooperative Learning in
Networks (Paulsen, 2008)
Google Wave ??
Networks
Communities of Practice
•
•
•
•
Distributed
Share common interest
Self organizing
looser aggregation defined by a range of loose and
tight links
• No expectation of meeting or even knowing all
members of the Network
• Little expectation of reciprocity
• Contribute for social capital, altruism and a sense of
improving the world/practice through contribution
(Brown and Duguid, 2001)
Transparency
The ability to view and share
thoughts, actions, resources,
ideas and interests of others.
“radically increase learner
awareness of others’ learning
activities in the PLE”
Marc van Harmelen
Manchester PLE
Dalsgaard, C., & Paulsen, M. (2009) Transparency in Cooperative Online
Education
Major
Challenges in
Creating
Incentives to
Sustain
Contribution
to Networks
The New Yorker September 12, 2005
•
"the network contains within it antagonistic clusterings,
divergent sub-topologies, rogue nodes" Galloway and
Thacker, 2007 p. 34
“There is crack in
everything, that's how the
light gets in” Leonard Cohen
Image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/eeblet/423397690/
Connectivist Learning
• emergent practice, rather
than prescribed education.
• Helping and scaffolding
students to construct,
connect, explore and mash
resources and people to
create contexts, that induce
learning.
George Siemens
Network Pedagogies
• Connectivism
• Participatory Pedagogy- Students as content-cocreators, peer teaching
• Complexity
– Learning in environments in which activities and outcomes
emerge in response to authentic need creates powerful learning
opportunities
– Learning at the edge of chaos
– Complicity: An International Journal of Complexity and Education
See the Networked Student by Wendy Drexler
34
Student Organized Networks
Network Tool Set (example)
t
37
Stepanyan, Mather & Payne, 2007
Access Controls in Elgg
Voicethread.com
Network Learning Environment
Summary
•
•
•
•
•
Cooperative versus collaborative
Compelling but optional interaction
Persistence
Transparency
Finding, building and enriching connections
inside and outside of the “course”
Network
Group
Collective
‘Aggregated other’
Unconscious ‘wisdom of crowds’
Stigmergic aggregation
Algorithmic rules
Augmentation and annotation
Metaphor:
More used, more useful
Wisdom of Crowds
Data Mining
Never F2F
41
Formal Education and
Collectives
“a kind of cyber-organism, formed from people linked
algorithmically…it grows through the aggregation of Individual,
Group and Networked activities” Dron & Anderson, 2007
• Collectives used to aggregate, then filter, compare, contrast and
recommend.
• Personal and collaborative search and filter for learning
• Allows discovery and validation of norms, values, opinion and “ways of
understanding”
• Educational semantic web
“They follow not the logic of the network but of the set. They are
aggregations that appear in some ways as a single entity” Dron &
Anderson, 2009. On the Design of Collective Applications
42
Aggregation
Data Mining
Filter &
Select
Collective Tools
44
Collective Examples
Taxonomy of the Many
Groups
Dron and Anderson, 2007
Networks
Personal Learning Environments
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Easy to use
Personally configurable
Gadgets, widgets
Push and pull data
Multiple machines, portable
Reflective spaces,
Creating net presence and social capital
Dron & Anderson,
2008
Social Learning 2.0 Applications in
Educational Contexts
Groups
Personal
Learning
Environments
Formal
Education
Organizational
Learning
Networks Collectives
Open Scholar
• “the Open Scholar is someone
who makes their intellectual
projects and processes digitally
visible and who invites and
encourages ongoing criticism of
their work and secondary uses of
any or all parts of it--at any stage
of its development”.
– Gideon Burton Academic Evolution
Blog
Open Scholars Create:
• A new type of education work maximizing:
– Social learning
– Media richness
– Participatory and connectivist pedagogies
– Ubiquity and persistence
– Open data collection and research process
– Creating connections
Open Scholars Use and Contribute
Open Educational Resources
Because it saves time!!!
Open Scholars Self Archive
Quality scholarship is peer and public
reviewed, accessible, persistent
syndicated, commented and
transparent.
Open Scholars Apply their research
Open Scholars do Open Research
• Open Notebook: a laboratory notebook that is
freely available and indexed on common
search engines. …it is essential that all of the
information available to the researchers to
make their conclusions is equally available to
the rest of the world.
• —Jean-Claude Bradley
Open Scholars Filter and
Share With Others
Open Scholars support emerging Open
Learning alternatives
Open Scholars Publish in
Open Access Journals
• Open Access Journals have increased citation
ratings:
– Work in progress with Olaf Zawacki-Richter, Ferne
University, Germany
– Analysis of Google citations for 12 Distance Education
Journals (using Harzing’s Publish or Perish tool)
– 6 open access, 6 commercially published
– Early results show roughly equal citations/paper, but
recent gains in citations by open access journals
Open Scholars Create Open Access Books
Upcoming Emerging Technologies in DE edited
by George Veletsiano
Open Scholars comment openly on the
works of others
• Bookmarking and Annotation add value
• Cite-u-like, Brainify, Diigo, Delicious etc
• VLE additions like Margenalia.
Open Scholars Build Networks
Open Scholars Lobby for
Copyright Reform
Source: swiss-copyright.ch
Open Scholars Assign Open Textbooks
Open Scholars Induce Open Students
• Students as co-creators
• Students gaining experience as
writers, authors and teachers
• Getting over the use, but don’t
contribute barrier
• Students engaged in meaningful work
• Extensive literature on value of peer
instruction - especially for gifted
students
• Empowering learners as future
teachers
Open Scholars support Open Students
OpenStudents.Org
Open Scholars Teach Open Courses
George Siemens & Stephen Downes
Introduction au technologie émergentes
Dave Cormier
Alec Cuoros Open Access Course: Social Media &
Open Education (Fall 2009)
Open Scholars Research Openness
Open Scholars are Change Agents
• Open scholars develop tools and techniques
to help cross-pollination, sustain and grow
effective learning networks.
From (Looi 2001).
Open Scholars Battle with Time
Save Time by
using the efforts
of others
I haven’t got the time to save!
Open Scholars are Involved
in the Future
• Through personal experience we forge an
ecology of lifelong learning.
Conclusion
• “Open Access is more than a new model
for scholarly publishing, it is the only
ethical move available to scholars who
take their own work seriously enough to
believe its value lies in how well it engages
many publics and not just a few peers.”
• Gideon Burton, Academic Evolution Blog
Slides available on CrowdVine
http://altc2009.alt.ac.uk/attachments/0000/4595/ALT-C_Final.pptx
Your comments and questions most
welcomed!
Terry Anderson [email protected]
Homepage:
http://cde.athabascau.ca/faculty/terrya.php
Blog: terrya.edublogs.org