StigmergicWeb

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 …

I’ve just read this post from Andy Carvin about Seymour Papert - Andy Carvin’s Waste of Bandwidth: Prayers for Seymour Papert. Seymour Papert was hit by a motorcycle and “gravely injured” while in Hanoi for a conference. According to a report at boston.com, the accident on Tuesday left Papert, 78, in a coma. An e-mail from Hanoi says On tuesday afternoon, Seymour Papert got run over. He hit his head, and has had to undergo emergency neurosurgery.

I don’t think that educational technology would exist in its present form without his influence. We need to keep his ideas about the importance of play in learning ever present in our minds as corporations try to claim control over learning (by patenting e-learning, perhaps?).

I’m reading a paper right now entitled Comparing Weblogs to Threaded Discussion in Online Educational Contexts by Donna Cameron and Terry Anderson, published in the November edition of the International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning (thanks to Stephen for the pointer to this). When I write that I’m reading it right now, I mean that pretty much literally as I flip between the windows for this entry and the paper. I’d usually wait until I’m done reading the paper then write about it, but this is too compelling to resist putting thoughts on paper - er, web in real time.

Donna and Terry discuss the use of blogs as tools to create and sustain a community of inquiry. The community of inquiry model was developed by Terry Anderson, Randy Garrison and Walter Archer. It describes three elements of educational transaction - cognitive presence, social presence and teaching presence - and their use in designing online education. Their original research is available online at the Communities of Inquiry (CoI) website, and is well worth the read. At the time of the original research, they were looking mainly at threaded discussion, but these elements also work extremely well if one looks at blogs as the communication tool. This line of thought actually occurred to me two years ago when I was at a presentation by Walter Archer entitled Fostering Critical Thinking in an Online Environment at the Instructional Design conference in Saskatoon, in which he discussed the community of inquiry model. Dirk Morrison had also used the CoI model earlier in the day. One of my first thoughts when looking at the CoI model was that blogs could be used to create cognitive, social and teaching presence, not in any sort of centralized location, but in a much more diffuse and distributed fashion. Here are my notes from the presentation - Fostering Critical Thinking in an Online Environment. (I also blogged some notes about Alec Couros’ presentation on education blogging, and Alec has his educational blogging presentation slides online) My first podcast also describes the conference - StigmergicWeb podcast #1. (link is to blog entry)

OK - back to the paper. Donna and Terry (I keep wanting to retreat back into academic speak by saying “The authors …” or “Cameron and Anderson …”, but that wouldn’t be very blog-ish of me, would it? Informality is an inherent part of the medium. But I digress …) then show how blogs have positive and negative aspects with regard to all three types of presence. One particular thought I like is about teaching presence:

This means that the design of LMS based courses tend to exclude use of emerging Internet tools such as collaborative bookmarking, FOAF, podcasting, synchronous web conferencing and other social software and external database systems. Thus, the design and organization component of teaching presence is generally more restricted when LMS based conferencing systems are used as opposed to blogging tools.

Hmmm - maybe the choice of an open-source LMS versus a proprietary one is not as important as the consideration of why we need an LMS, and what other tools we might need to bring into the design of online learning. But again, I digress …

I enjoyed the paper and did a lot of nodding as I was reading it, more from my own ideas being affirmed rather than from any new perspectives. I think that these ideas have been around for a while; I’ve written and presented (at AMTEC - audio also posted - and a LORNET research symposium) about the utility of blogs as tools in online learning, along with many others far more intelligent and well-spoken than I am. If you are reading this, then you might have the same sense of familiarity. I think that having what we know fit within an established framework of online education should help in trying to get our ideas out to the larger educational structures we work in. Why not print a couple of copies of the paper, leave them strategically placed in your staff/faculty room and then see what happens? Of course, if you want to blog about the experience, that would be even better!

Just saw this via Brian Lamb:

Stewart Mader has published a book Using Wiki in Education, which has some interesting sounding (I haven’t actually read the book yet, so this is one of those Read The Fine Article reviews) case studies of wikis being integrated into a variety of settings. Stewart’s publishing model is an interesting mix of traditional publishing and open content. Intially, two chapters (of ten) are free then every month a new chapter is made free. For $19, you get access to the entire book, the ability to download chapters as PDFs and access to edit the tenth chapter. If you just want the content online, it’ll be free in 8 months. If you want the whole book now, you want access to the PDFs or you want to be able to participate in the content of the book, you fork up the $19 (which is not a bad price for a good book). I’ll probably pay the $19 just to support a great publishing model.

Watch for my book Turning Random Streams of Consciousness into Content soon.

Rick, Alec, Heather and I were sitting around a table at the SACE conference, and I had a recording device. Here’s the post at the EdTech Posse blog (I apologize in advance for the noise):

EdTech Posse Podcast 2.2 - SACE conference conversation

I saw this on Digg - Wireless PCs Motivate Students Says Study - Technology News by TechWeb

Students are self-directed and get highly personalized instruction with their own computers and Internet access, according to The Center for Research in Education Policy at the University of Memphis, which released results of a report on the subject at the National Educational Computing Conference Thursday.

Hmmm - I don’t want to sound like a educational technology skeptic, but there is so much information missing from this article and, sadly, there is no link to the original research article. I did notice, however, that the students in this study were given HP notebooks and - what a surprise - HP is the founding sponsor of the One to One Institute, and was involved in the Michigan Freedom to Learn program that was the subject of the study.

I really do believe that computer technology offers tremendous opportunities for learning, but the efficacy of such programs seem tainted when they seem to be driven by hardware manufacturers selling a model of technology integration to educators. I don’t know all the details, but that seems to be what is happening in many of the one to one or laptop based learning programs. To be completely honest about my involvement in these programs, I was a division computer coordinator during the implementation of a SunRay thin-client rollout in my school division, and I enthusiastically cheered the party line about using the technology. But all the real innovations that I’ve seen since then (we switched over to thin clients in 2000) have been initiated by teachers, students, administrators and other division personnel (we have been fortunate to have a very knowledgable technology leader in our school division). Real innovation has distinctly not come from hardware or software companies looking for new market segments, which is what most “one-to-one learning” programs seem to be.

I don’t want to denigrate the hardware and software companies, since they will obviously have their role to play in the technology-driven innovation in education, but they should be assisting and following, not leading the change. Do we need an educational cluetrain manifesto to educate corporations about the needs of learners and teachers?

If you listen right now, you can hear that the edublogosphere is buzzing in outrage at the U.S. congress’ proposed Deleting Online Predator’s Act (DOPA). I found out about it from Will Richardson (Congress Targets Social Network Sites), but Stephen, Danah and Raj have mentioned it as well. (and on Kairos News, and Bryan Alexander).

My mind is reeling at just how ignorant this is. If legislators were really concerned about protecting children from predators, they would ban minors from going into shopping malls and school yards, since I’d bet many more children face threats from predators in those venues than online. We’d best ban the kiddies from skating rinks too - who knows who might be taking their picture without permission?

Sayeth Will:

It’s not safety. It’s politics. It’s a hot button issue. It’s fear mongering. It’s power, or the potential loss of it. It’s got to stop.

Too right, Will. It seems to me that this is much more about denying people the right to communicate more than safety. I’ve talked with students who use MySpace, and they know how to choose who to talk to - generally they only allow people they know (and like) in RealSpace to be on their buddy list. And the girls are quite able to discern who the creepy guys are, just like they can in the rest of their life. The kids, to quote the ever-quotable Mr. Townshend, are alright. We’d be much better off spending our time teaching children and young adults how to deal with the creepy guys in the world instead of isolating them for 18 years then expecting them to cope in a world they’ve never been allowed to experience. Will, I think, agrees:

I’ve got two days left in the public school system, so I can still feel insulted. Insulted that I’m not trusted to make good decisions about the technology. Insulted that I’m not trusted to teach my students what they need to know to be safe. Insulted that my school space is being trotted out as a place where kids are running amok online all for the sake of political gain. Talk about dangerous…

I’m glad to hear that Will is full of righteous indignation. I hope that , whatever he ends up doing after the next two days, he’ll remember that the students and teachers in the school need his help (and your help, too) to protect their right to communicate.

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!

Daniel Mittleholtz is presenting about Multimedia Learning Theory (Mayer), and how media should be applied to provide optimum retention of information. (Daniel has a MLT blog, as well as a podcasting blog).

Started with an overview of the presentation and a slides summarizing Multimedia Learning Theory.

• problem of engaging learners online. We use e-mails and forums to engage students but that doesn’t work to engage all students (text bias)
• Text is a graphic medium! (Ref Earl Misanchuk’s work on text and enhancing learning)
• Seven principles of multimedia design

• Multimedia - we learn better when corresponding text and pictures are combined
  
• Spatial Contiguity - corresponding words and pictures should be next to each other
  
• Temporal Contiguity - corresponding words and pictures should be presented simultaneously
  
• Coherence Principle -
  
• Modality Principle
• Redundancy Principle
  
• Individual differences - design effects are stronger for low-knowledge learners than for high knowledge learners and for high-spatial learners than for low spatial learners

Good design involves giving students choices (audio on/audio off buttons for example) so they can optimize. The design has to be flexible enough to permit all these options.

Video is really good for engaging students and getting their interest. (Great video of his grand-daughter laughing - yep, that was engaging).

So - how does this relate to podcasts:

• We learn best when the text (or audio for a podcast) corresponds with the visual, so we can include a link to a powerpoint or pdf
• iTunes U (Stanford is the popular example). iTunes has some great features - the podcast can be listened to using the software instead of having to open another program. iTunes can also let the user listener listen to the first minute without having to download the whole thing.
• Demo - how to post a podcast. (Using the Movable Type blogs available at blogs.usask.ca. This is great because this is the stuff we didn’t have a chance to do in our session yesterday).
• Dan also posted a vodcast (Photoshop TV)

Dan mentioned a Windows program that generates m4v video files called Cleaner XL.

A grade 11 biology class that I teach has been involved in an interesting project that I’ve meant to pass along to you. The course objectives include a study of classification of organisms and a study of some basic ecological principles. I wanted to combine these two into a long term project for the course on the study of species at risk, a topic that I think is only going to be of increasing concern as the effects of climate change begin to manifest in increasingly dramatic ways.

But I didn’t want to do the standard go-to-the-library-and-research-then-hand-in-a-report sort of project. I want to concentrate more on the process of the research than the product. To be honest, I still don’t know what I want to do as a final product. My students find this vaguely disorienting since they seem to be very focused on whatever that final product is. To be completely honest, I also hate marking essays, so if I will avoid it if I can.

In consultation with Donna DesRoches, teacher-librarian extraordinaire, we came upon the idea of having the students create a pathfinder - a sort of expert guide for a topic - to document their research process. We’re using a couple of tools for doing this:

• Wikka Wiki - a very robust, easy to use, easy to install wiki engine. One of the most important features of it is that it can easily integrate an RSS feed so that as the feed is updated, updates are automagically made on the wiki. It also provides RSS feeds for pages so that changes can be monitored and wiki-spammers can be thwarted. Wiki-spam actually hasn’t been a problem (we’ll see how it holds up once the URL to the project is posted). A pathfinder template page was created so that students can paste it into the pages for their species at risk.
• Scuttle - a free (beer and speech) social bookmarking tool. Similar to del.icio.us in many ways such as tagging, but we have the luxury of being able to resrict access to the school community so that there is no tag-poisoning by spammers. Scuttle can, like del.icio.us, create an RSS feed for a tag, so that it can be integrated into the student’s pathfinder on the wiki. You can download Scuttle and install it on your own server, and there is a small but growing Scuttle documentation wiki.

The students have each picked a species at risk from a list I posted on the Pathfinder wiki. They registered on the wiki to be able to edit it (take that, wiki spammers!), copied the student Pathfinder template to their species page, and started the research process. I had them focus on reference resources, especially print resources, for the first two days. After about a week back in the class, we went back to the library and I showed them how to bookmark, tag and comment web resources using Scuttle. The next session, I showed them how to integrate the RSS feed into their wiki page.

I’m still not exactly sure what I’ll have them do as a final product for the project. Right now I’m leaning towards having the work in pairs to prepare and present to an elementary classroom on one of the species they have researched, but I’m open to suggestions.

Links:

• Species at Risk Pathfinder research wiki assignment page
• Pathfinder template (thanks to Donna for putting this together)
• Species at Risk pathfinder list - links to students work. Some notable ones are:
  • Nilgiri Tahr
  • Peregrine Falcon

I’ve told my students I would publicize their research. If you have any comments, you could leave them here, or on the wiki pages.