A high school with more clicks than cliques
A Stanford University program offers gifted students an online education. They log on to class from all over the world. Read more
I like watching online education evolving.
dotedu
blogging about .edu stuffArchive for educational technology
Exploring postmodernism
I know I’m a bit late. I’m not even sure whether pomo is over, kaputt or simple not in vogue. My inquiry into Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard came about during a literature review which spun out of references from David Boje’s Narrative Methods for Organizations. You see these authors cited yet you really haven’t read them. You wonder who has. They’re dense, cryptic and time vampires. But gotta do it.
I stumbled on this article about pomo instructional design. I knew something wasn’t working for me, every time I’d say yes, but in these ID meetings.
CSU – Reed
Reed said he “envisions students becoming more like
telecommuters. They might meet with faculty and peers one day a week
on campus, and then use simulations, virtual worlds and downloaded
information the rest of the week to complete coursework.” Read more
Feels like I’m on the crest of the big Kahuna wave, here….
Pseudo-science taxonomies — digital natives and immigrants
I was glad to participate in this conversation with others who question the whole digital natives/immigrants, net geners “movement.” Of course many are off to the ELI annual meeting where this movement seems to generate its ideas.
Being relatively new to academic discourse from the inside, I’m wondering if this is the way it goes. There’s popular culture that may or may not be grounded in rigorous investigation, but nobody seems to mind. We all jump on the bandwagon, cause it’s there, the D.J.’s good and the celebrities show up.
As was pointed out in this conversation, where’s the discussion of class, SES, ethnicity and I’ll add gender? It’s painfully obvious, (to me anyway) that this talk is coming from predominantly white male voices. The circling conversations as well. I think I might have posted this white paper before,
Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, which gets at the issue from a different angle, defining and categorizing via activities and use.
Intermingling worlds
Second Life and Pedagogy of the Oppressed seem to be two very different worlds at the moment for me. The people, the themes, the points of departure are incongruent and I don’t think they have to be. I don’t think I’m missing the point when I argue that liberating educational practices might be achieved with the aid of emerging technologies in ways that may not have been conceived of before. Participatory culture, the ways in which social technologies enable us to express, share, create and use artifacts and ideas, is one of those ideas that seems new, but in fact is an old notion recast to convey what is happening in our connected world.
intelligent agents
I was recently at a webinar about a next generation learning environment, epsilen.com. I’m always excited about the potential of next generation ideas, the built-stuff that follows them is usually disappointing.
Learning objects sounded like it had potential in 2002 when I first started looking into it. When SCORM hit the pavement running, I became uninterested, not only because the US Department of Defense created the standard, but that no one seemed to mind. I still like the idea of learning objects; I don’t think they’ll be used by most instructors in higher ed, at least not in the near future. The term is too hyper-modern, the notion too abstract for most faculty.
The same is true of the term and notion of an intelligent agent.
By and large, I ignore the intellience in Amazon. And I recently noticed the intelligence in emusic; I’ve already started ignoring it too. I may actually see if I can disable it; I spend enough time there to justify the effort.
Intelligent agents are one of those cool ideas. The ones I’m aware of, like the Paperclip in Word, Amazon and eMusic-like vendors who remember what you’ve done, are more annoying than not. They get in the way of my experience. They structure; they categorize; they further dehumanize by acting as if they “personalize” an already impersonal experience.
Vendors are about commerce and there are rules of commerce. Since I don’t follow them for the most part, the agents don’t work.
I use help menus extensively now and have acquired a certain intelligence about them. If I’m stuck, it’s often because I don’t have the language to find the answer. The paperclip can’t give it to me either.
The missing links of intelligent agency are linguistically and contextually bound, utterances and contexts are infinitely unique and profoundly human.
What are personal learning environments?
This paper is chock full of ideas nicely pulled together:
informal/formal learning, bricolage, peripheral participation/lurking, social software/learning management systems to name just a few. I’m increasingly intrigued by conversations that distinguish issues of learning from issues of teaching.
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informal distributed education in social software
This Educause article by Bryan Alexander entitled Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning? gets me to thinking. It’s the question mark really. I’m wondering too what to make of all this. And diving in myself hasn’t yet given me much clarity. Maybe it’s because of that hammer looking for a nail thing: Here are all these cool tools, now let’s find a situation to use them in.
But what’s driving us old folk to hang out on this edge? My initial and continuing interest lies in distributed learning/distance learning.
I have no doubt that it’s an approach to learning that meets real needs and solves real problems. And so maybe my thinking should drift back in that direction. And I should follow up on that previous post about transactional distance and its relevance to Web2 and social computing. In this post where I connected up with a distributed conversation on online communities, I got a taste of something very interesting–a conversation that transcended location and to a certain extent time.
In a paper about informal learning, Smith suggests that informal education (not learning) is driven by conversations not curriculum. Education he argues intends to foster environments that produce learning.
To that end, isn’t the edublogosphere and the distributed conversations it generates informal distributed education?
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social software, web 2 and transactional distance
Christopher Sessums does some nice reflecting on the social software/web2 paradigm in this post.
He only touches on transactional distance though.
“A transaction is a mutual exchange between parties. Moore recognized that in a course high in structure, such as a pure lecture course, there is generally little dialog between educator and learner and transactional distance is maximized. Conversely, as dialog is increased, the structure decreases, thereby minimizing the transactional distance between educator and learner.”
While the theory is used in distance education I wonder to what extent it can also be applied to web 2, particularly in the edublogger domain. It might be worth exploring one’s experience of geographical distance as a starting point. I’ve often shared a personal story in support of distributed learning, the one about interacting more with my mother since email. For the past 28 years we’ve lived no less than 3,000 miles apart and in many ways I’ve never felt closer to her as a result of email. A colleague shared a similar story about being separated from her partner for over a year.
There’s a lot to chew on. There’s personality type/learner preferences. I think maturity and psychological development play a role too in that until fairly recently working adults were the primary consumers of distance education (I like the term distributed learning). However, Pam Tate at CAEL points out the profile of an adult, for educational purposes is rapidly changing.
And then there’s the comparison to our experience of transactional distance in familiar educational settings. How does that experience of TD impact learning in a 500 seat classroom? For some learners I can imagine it’s perfectly acceptable and preferred. I’d guess though that they’d be above average students, more field independent, and intrinsically motivated.
Add to that scenario, virtual office hours and a thriving online exchange of discussions and group work. In the former, the lecturer is actually available more often because the technology makes that more feasible and cost effective. In the latter, the technology enables pedagogy that is impractical in a face to face setting. The other student, the one who’s more field dependent, now has a place to land.
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