StigmergicWeb

Working on two online course projects has given me the impetus to take a look back at some of the things I learned and some of the work that I did while working on my M.Ed. I think I have learned a few things about online learning and instructional design. One of the constant themes - almost a fundamental principle - that I found in my classes and readings was a simple and obvious one. Online learning is different from classroom based learning. If you have experience developing online course this may elicit a “Well - d’uh”, but if you are a novice at online course design you would do well to keep this in mind.

The most eloquent articulation of this concept came from David Wiley in an article he wrote in TechTrends entitled The Polo Parable. Go ahead and have a read. If you haven’t read it before, it’s well worth it. I’ll wait here until you get back.

Good story, that one. I think David gets right to the kernel of the concept in the epilogue:

The moral of the story is that the concatenation of English words “move my class online” is perhaps the most preposterous sequence of syllables ever to escape the mouth. And yet we all unconsciously fall prey to the subtle wiles of the siren’s song – “just do what you always did… those tried and true techniques you have battle tested in the classroom will serve you well online … trust what you know… do what you have always done… that’s the responsible thing to do.” Imagining that classroom teaching techniques can be successful transplanted into an online environment is even more ridiculous than assuming that the water polo play book will, unaltered, lead to a winning polo season on horseback.

I’ve been re-reading a paper I wrote in which I developed some of these ideas. I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find that the paper, written way back in 2004, still seems relevant. I guess that although three years in internet time equates with about a decade of real world time, basic concepts about teaching and learning persist. If you nodded your head while reading the Polo Parable, that proves the point.

At the time Rick suggested that I revise the paper a bit and get it published. I think he meant the dead tree kind of publishing where a few other people get to judge the quality of your work then decide if it’s worth the rest of the world seeing. Bah, I say. I have the interweb to disseminate my work to the rest of the world. It’s a longish read - about 23ish pages of dead tree, not including the references, but here it is: Before you snorkel that horse ….

Yes, this entire post was written just to pimp my paper. I feel cheap, but it’s out there now. I think it was the best work I did during my M.Ed. so I wanted to share it with you. I’m hoping to revise it and bring it up to date, so if you have any comments leave them here.

I’ve been mostly neglecting this blog for a while. Sorry about that, but it has been a season of endings, beginnings and renewals.

First - some endings. I suppose the biggest ending has been the conclusion of my M.Ed. I don’t have the official piece of paper in front of me conferring that esteemed title upon me, but I think I can safely say that I have finished the degree (before it finished me). My project - an educator’s guide to using digital audio - started off as an interactive web site, spent a short time as a CD-ROM, then finally ended up as a video on DVD. I was happy with a lot of the process of creation, and I learned a lot about using audio to support learning. As for the final product, I’m extremely unhappy. I’m sure that a big part of that is the hard drive pooched during the editing of the videos. I’m also unhappy because I don’t think I created the right product for my topic.

As I was doing the final re-editing of the video, it occurred to me that I was mostly doing talking heady stuff. I had originally intended to have a lot of instructional, semi-geeky screencasts on things like using GarageBand, but when I thought about who this was designed for - teachers who are interested in some quick info so they can use audio as part of their instruction or as a method for student learning - I realized that the how to approach was all wrong. Teachers do need some this is how you do it instruction, but even more important they need and want an idea of how this tool works pedagogically. So, I re-shot and re-edited with that focus in mind. What didn’t occur to me is that changing the focus of the project should have changed the nature of the final project. The final project could have worked much better as straight audio in the form of a CD or as a podcast or both. Considering the nature of my project, I found this epiphany to be rife with irony. It would be nice to re-visit this as a podcast one day. I found some exemplary educational podcasts that I intended to be used in the final project but ended up on the cutting room floor. If you were one of the people I talked to, I apologize for cutting you from the project. I think it would be very interesting to talk to some edu-podcasters as part of an educational audio podcast series. I’ll put this on the someday/maybe list.

More endings - my final class for the M.Ed. I was intending to take a class in the fall/winter of the coming year, but realized that more than anything I just wanted to be done, a sentiment shared by my wife. There was one class in spring session that caught my attention - EDCMM 478: Still Photography in Education. My interest was partially based on my desire to get the degree done but also based on my long-dormant interest in photography. The biggest reason for being interested in this class was that it would be the last class taught by Barry Brown, one of my mentors and advisors in the EDCMM M.Ed. program. It turned out to be a perfect choice. Photography is one of Barry’s great passions in life, and he got me going on taking pictures again. The class was a lot of work - lots of time in the darkroom for the b/w photography section, and two nights a week of driving to and from Saskatoon - but I feel like I’m a better photographer as a result, and I’m enjoying taking photos more than ever. Thanks, Barry, and I hope the retirement thing works out for you.

A minor ending - I finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Wow - when the engine room flooded with radiation and Harry had to go in there to restore warp drive. Oh … wait a second, that was The Wrath of Khan. My bad ;^)

Short review - good book, not the best in the series but it does provide an ending to the series that feels satisfactory to me. A number of unresolved questions get answered in the book, and it does give a proper sense of finality to the overall story arc.

Now some beginnings. At work I’m going to be involved in the design of an online course for my school division’s impending online schooling initiative. I haven’t been involved in the design of a complete online course before so this will give me a chance to work more deeply in the world of online learning. This work is especially interesting and daunting since it is the beginning of a new initiative for the school division.

I’ve also started working on a project with Alec Couros. The project is Alec’s - I’m just along for the ride - so I’m not sure it is up to me to give away any details. I think, if I may be allowed a teaser, that the project has to do with tools that are open, connected and social. This ought to be a blast, and I’m really looking forward to working with Alec.

More beginnings start on Monday (yikes - where did the summer go?) when I head back for another year of teaching, learning and other coolness at NBCHS where I’ll be teaching some fun classes and also working with teachers and students using digital tools for learning. I’ve got a few ideas about what I’d like to do this year, but I’m going to work with teachers on the idea of digital storytelling. I’d also like to hold some digital photography workshops for teachers and students during the year. I’ll give Barry the credit for inspiring me to take on that project.

Finally, the renewals. Most important has been renewal of time spent with the family. My wife has been extremely patient while I was working (and playing) my way through the M.Ed., so I’m planning on spending a lot more time with her along with The Boy and The Girl. The boy’s entire life and over half of the girl’s life have gone by while I’ve been working towards the M.Ed. degree. A greater presence in their lives is long overdue.

I should also be doing a little more blogging, and some more podcasting with the posse. I’ve got a show that was recorded in March that is still in production. I’m hoping next year the production process is a bit faster!

OK - that’s the state of my life as the summer draws to a close and a new school year looms in front of me full of new adventures in learning. If you are in the same situation, I wish you good luck and lots of fun in the coming year. Stay tuned for the details of my continuing learning journey and the meagre thoughts and reflections that pass through my brain.

Along with some colleagues, I toured around two different implementations of online learning in the K-12 system. In both cases, they have experienced substantial increases in the number of students that they serve. The growth in online learning among K-12 students is burgeoning and ready to cause some real changes in the way that we think of schools.

The first visit was to the Saskatoon Catholic Cyber School - thanks for the info, Darren. They have a comprehensive approach to online education, providing not only courses to students, but also some supports and even some ways to provide a sense of school community (some of these were student driven). Some (most - I’m not actually sure of the ratio) of their courses are managed through WebCT, but a substantial number of their resources were public and blog based. The use of blogs, RSS and aggregators were key elements of their communication and information dissemination plan. I was delighted to see that my own meager blog was included in a screenshot of Darren’s aggregator!

The cyber school operates on a continuous registration system - students can register at any time during the school year, and they have 150 days to complete the course, which may result in students picking up their work in September where they had left off in June. All work is done asynchronously and all the interaction within the course is teacher-student, so while their might be a school community there seems to be little opportunity for any kind of classroom community to flourish. A goal of the cyber school is to offer course materials and resources so that teachers in face to face classrooms will be able to use some sort of blended or hybrid learning with a combination of classroom based learning and online learning.

The second stop was the Online Learning Center of the Saskatoon Public School Division. The model they have adopted is to deliver courses online and also to provide resources for classroom teachers. They are not a school so much as an alternate delivery system for courses. The courses are delivered asynchronously and offered over a school semester. Students register at the start of the semester and the final exam is at the end of the semester. Since all students are proceeding through the course at the same time, although not necessarily the same pace, the opportunity exists for some class community to develop. Since the model is to deliver courses, not create a school, there isn’t any opportunity for a school community to develop.

Of the two, I think the first model - the fully fledged cyber school - works best. Students are offered not just courses but a school community. I would expect that students would be much more likely to take further classes if they already felt part of a community. Course communities are great, perhaps even essential for some courses to succeed. The problem with course communities is that they expire on the last day of the course. An ongoing community in which the class is embedded would better support student learning. There are also public parts of the community - the various blogs - and a private part of the community supported within the WebCT framework. (I’m sure it would also work very nicely in Moodle!)

The school division where I work is looking at developing some online learning. We’re a geographically large division with all varieties of schools from small town K-12 schools all the way to comprehensive high schools. I’m not sure what kind of model will work best for us. I expect we’ll copy a bit from both of these models, steal borrow from others and make up a few things of our own along the way. These sorts of things tend to take on a life of their own after a while, so I’m not sure where we’ll end up but it should be a fun ride! Stay tuned for further details …

Thanks to Steve Dembo for pointing this one out. I had read Taylor Mali’s poem before, but the power and passion he delivers in performance speaks for all teachers. As the school year draws to a close, this is a great message to remind us why we do what we do!

I should be working on the project, but I have to shine some light on this piece by Christopher Sessums (brought to my attention by Stephen)

Christopher D. Sessums :: Weblog :: Intellect, Emotion, Spirit, and Will: Another Side of Connectivism

His post is an exploration of some of the ideas of/quotations from The Courage to Teach (is this worth reading? - comments welcome on this), and its connection to connectivism. One thing that Christopher says

teaching is not about the methods you employ, but instead about the personality, the disposition, and scruples one brings to the learning environment

Too right! I’d even add one more item to the description of what teaching is not about - teaching is not about the content, its about the process - what we do much more than the course/subject/teaching. One of the difficulties teaching at the secondary level is that we tend to lose track of this, misdirected by being “subject experts”, whereas Kindergarten teachers seem to do the best job of this. Perhaps that is why Kindergarten is the place where we learn all we really need to know, at least according to Robert Fulghum. The Kindergarten teachers I’ve met all understand that teaching is about process.

I attended a teachers convention last week (brief aside from the depths of my addled brain - why are they called teachers conventions instead of teaching conventions? Perhaps that is where our focus begins to be misdirected). There were actually two teachers conventions in the same building, and I followed the crowd into the other opening keynote address. The speaker (sorry - name is forgotten) was talking about the power of media in the lives of our students. I appreciated her emphasis that we are not helpless or unimportant in the lives of our students. In fact, she said that the greatest predictor of school success is a strong connection with a caring adult. That connection is a greater influence in a young person’s life than all the media that permeates their lives. (This was in the week following the fabulous online connectivism conference, so the word connection had a particular resonance.) Often, that caring adult will be a teacher. What an incredible responsibility! Years ago, in one of the schools I taught at during my “temporary contract” career phase, there was a great thought written up on blackboard in the staff room - they don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. That’s a thought I try to keep in my head as the faces turn toward me when the class bell sounds.

I’m sitting at my kitchen table doing some marking (mid semester marks are due in 2 weeks), and I’m listening to and watching David Warlick in his keynote address to the K12Online Conference (thanks to Dean for the link). I like a lot of what David says, and I respect his thoughtfulness in the field of educational technology. Something is bugging me, however, about the keynote so far. Its not something that David specifically is responsible for instigating, although he and many others (perhaps even me) are guilty of perpetuating - the myth of the digital native.

Perhaps I’m just feeling like a cranky old man because “the big four-oh” is looming in front of me at the end of the month. Perhaps I’m just needing to get this off my chest. I don’t know exactly where this myth came from - I think that Don Tapscott or Mark Prensky may have initiated and incubated it. In his widely cited article Digital Natives Digital Immigrants Prensky describes digital natives thus:

Lest this perspective appear radical, rather than just descriptive, let me highlight some of the issues. Digital Natives are used to receiving information really fast. They like to parallel process and multi-task. They prefer their graphics before their text rather than the opposite. They prefer random access (like hypertext). They function best when networked. They thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards. They prefer games to “serious” work. (Does any of this sound familiar?)

It sounds very familiar to me - it is a particularly accurate description of children. I have a couple of them (and some would say my wife has three, but she is far too polite to say such a thing out loud), so I feel qualified to comment on this.

When I watch students working with computers, I don’t see any evidence of digital natives. Their ability to use a computer to create a product - graph, spreadsheet, movie, etc. - is no greater or less that adults. There are undoubtedly some students who are very sophisticated computer users, but as a percentage of the population I would judge that they are equally well represented in the adult population (although I tend to hang out with a particularly geeky crowd given the opportunity). Most students and most adults are quite naive users - they learn simple tasks easily enough, but more complex tasks take more time (although somewhat less with students) and at the end they accomplish these complex tasks by following a series of memorized steps. Quite often the steps they follow are not the most efficient ways of getting the job done, but it does the work. A colleague of mine observed that students don’t really understand the technology any better than most adults, they are just less afraid of making mistakes. They may figure things out on a computer faster, but they are just as likely to be mistaken as an adult.

My concern with the use of this convenient but, I believe, incorrect paradigm of digital natives and digital immigrants. If we project certain qualities and attributes onto our students, instead of learning what they really can do and what they really need to learn, we do them a great disservice by not providing the education (that is, formalized school learning) that they need. We also show great disrespect to them by attributing traits to them instead of coming to know them all as unique and valuable human beings.

Towards the end of his keynote, David suggests that we are learning in new, 21st century ways. I have to disagree and suggest that David (and others) seriously consider these sorts of statements. People are learning in the same way that we always have - mostly from each other, but in some cases we learn in formalized learning institutions. The elements that make for sound instruction, whether formal learning with a teacher teaching a math class to grade nines or informal learning with an apprentice welder learning the trade from a journeyman, have not changed. Indeed they cannot change since they are so deeply dependent on the way our brains work. While it is true that the scope of the communities from which we learn has greatly expanded, the way we communicate (that is, the genres of communication) has not changed although the tools used for communicating (that is, the media of communication) have changed. We write personal essays and journals as people did hundreds of years ago, but we publish them online and call them weblogs. Michel de Montaigne was undoubtedly the first a-list blogger. We send e-mail and messages back and forth to each other, but does this represent a qualitative change from written correspondence? Wikis, with their collaborative writing affordances, have always reminded me of the notes scribbled in margins of books which I personally experienced in university - some of the marginalia were actually quite thoughtful and well written. Our audience may now be world wide and the capability to publish may now be open to anyone, but we are still following genres that are well established and predate any so-called digital natives or their digital immigrant parents.

I’ve shared this link with my students, but neglected to put it here for everyone else to see. Stephen Downes has put together a guide to writing essays. II recall many teachers and instructors in high school and university explaining in many different ways how to write an essay - this simple, common sense guide tops them all. Not only do I think that its a wonderfully brief and straight-forward guide, but I’ve had some of my students tell me how useful this is to them.

Stephen Downes - How to Write Articles and Essays Quickly and Expertly

Graham Atwell has published a screencast of his presentation Personal Learning Environments - Live at Edinburgh.

There’s just so much I like about his presentation, but two main ideas stand out in my mind:

• A personalized learning environment is not an application. It is a suite of services which could be, I suppose, web based or locally run on a PC. Most important, Graham points out that the suite of services is made up of small tools, loosely connected. This is a theme I’ve written about before. I love hearing other people talk about it - it means I’m less likely to be raving or demented, at least about this particular topic.
• Learning, especially informal learning is not something that can be commoditized, monetized or discussed in the context of free markets. Learning, and education, is a public good - the more people in a society that are learners, the better off that society will be.

I keep meaning to write more on this last topic, but my life seems to drag me away from writing and blogging as much as I’d like to. Ah well, someday I’ll get back to being a more dedicated blogger. I estimate that day will come in 2011 when my son starts Kindergarten. Until then, we’ll have to make due with what I can fit into my schedule.

I just saw this via Darren Cannell - District blocks e-mail sites

In an effort to promote achievement, which students say does the exact opposite, the school district shut off access this week to Web sites that offer free e-mail service, like Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail. The crackdown was sparked by concern that some students were wasting their academic potential by spending class time writing e-mails to friends, officials said Friday. All the district’s 8,000 to 9,000 computers, including those used by administrators, have been affected, said Ralph Barca, district technology director.

It is so incredibly frustrating and disappointing to read about this. I’ve spent the past two days at the TLT 2006 conference, talking with some brilliant people about how using web resources and moving towards a more blended model of teaching and learning can improve educational opportunities and outcomes for learners. Then as I’m checking up on my blog reading only to be confronted once again by the real world.

I absolutely agree that students shouldn’t be checking personal e-mail in classes. But what about students who might be using their e-mail for academic reasons:

“For me, it’s not fine,” said Human, who said she doesn’t have a printer at home, nor does she have disks or a CD for recording her science lab reports. E-mailing herself the assignment so she can retrieve it at school is the only option, she said.

But do we want schools to discourage students from reading and writing? Even if it is personal e-mail, they are reading and writing for goodness sake!! I might be a bit radical in my ideas, but I actually consider it a sign of success when students pursue these two activities in my class.

Grrr - I had actually planned to do a little more blogging about the conference, but now I’m too irritated to focus on it. Hopefully I will manage to write some stuff out before I forget it all!

Jay Wilson is talking about using iMovie/iChat. Some key points

• Ugly is good. Don’t worry about making it beautiful - capturing good content is more important than competing with Spielberg. A lot of educational video is not played back under optimum conditions - low bandwidth, old equipment, etc. so spending a lot of extra time on gloss is not important. (Wildcat video)
• file formats: for streaming video, Jay’s experience has been that Real Player gives the best performance.
• FireWire (a.k.a. IEEE1394 a.k.a. iLink) is the most universal way of getting video from a camera to the computer. You can use the camera to shoot and the computer to record when they are hooked up. To record straight onto the computer, an iSight camera works well (autofocus, good microphone, adjusts well to various lighting situations)

Jay demoed iMovie. As always, iMovie is pretty easy to use and almost anybody can start using it right away.

(BTW - Heather Ross is sitting right across from me, and is blogging this right now. Well - I think she’s blogging this. I just checked - she is blogging about the conference in general. Cool. I wonder if she’ll mention me).

Back to demo. Jay has loaded clips from a video camera. Showing how to add clips to the product. After the movie is created, it can be exported (”shared” in MacSpeak) to e-mail, DVD, back to the video camera, etc.

Jay says the most practical way of archiving old tapes from the video camera with stock footage is to keep them on the tapes, and store the tapes in a cool, dry place.

Final Message - in relatively little time, we can assemble some video together that looks well packaged.