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 stuffThinking ahead for students
When I think ahead in terms of what students could do after college I’m perplexed. On the one hand I believe in the value of liberal education; on the other I remember working at Jimbos in the 80s, managing the deli and looking over applications from college graduates, wondering why they wanted to make sandwiches for $5 an hour. Envisioning what one could do in life with a degree in psychology or communication has never been easy. It’s why I left school after an associates in the early 80s. I knew a degree didn’t secure anything I was interested in, like music. It’s of course very different now. I don’t hesitate saying that the world is very different, more competitive and without a foundation, it’s difficult.
This article is interesting in that it sheds some light on the changing landscape of work. It helps us as educators connect students with what’s next. I think it might be part of liberal education after all, helping students envision connect what they’re doing in college with what they could be doing as a result of their education. There are so many “jobs” that require a composite of skills, like the ones illustrated in this article about Nokia.
Read more
Mobile Learning – Are you ready for it?
Are you Ready for Mobile Learning? a recent article in Educause.
The idea of mobile learning has been circulating for several years now. It’s one of those catch-all terms, like e-learning, or podcasting, that has a dozen descriptions. It’s a phenomena; it’s has instructional, institutional and strategic implications; it’s the future; it’s here; it’ll pass, etc, etc.
One of the ways to talk about these things with each other is to describe our experiences and share our opinions.
Using the digital native/immigrant descriptive framework, we forget that business people have been working and learning mobil-ly for more than a decade and that many young people are very bound to traditional methods of learning, which for purposes of this post, are not the kinds of learning strategies, skills and characteristics a successful mobile learner would need. I’m thinking of self-direction, independent as well as interdependent, motivated, manages time well, is organized, technologically literate and connected (involves tools and money). None of these ideas are new but exist in the literature of distance and progressive education dating back to the early 1900s.
If we draw a bit from the corporate world, we see that mobility, tele-commuting and similar ideas stemming from the ubiquity of ICT, have not delivered as expected. For all but a few progressive companies, whose business plans designed teleworking, such as Jet Blue, organizations want to keep an eye on most employees. People I’ve spoken with have said they couldn’t and wouldn’t want to work at home because they “don’t have the discipline;” going to a workplace with co-workers and colleagues provides a structure.
Mobile learning provides little structure, or so it appears from an orientation stemming from traditional, time/place specific, teacher-centered learning. It’s not for everyone nor for all kinds of learning.
I can’t read a dense passage for deep understanding in a noisy airport nor do I believe a “digital
native” can either.
The next 5billion users
on the internet. How’s it shaping up? Where’s it going? If connectivity and the social webare what’s been said they are, and as the podcast suggests, globalization has only just begun, the distance horizon might look very different. The web is presently dominated by American culture socially, technically and politically. Cornel West would argue that good innovations are adopted by other cultures, (his is a teleological argument), simply because they are good. Dominant groups’ technologies are dominant for a complex of reasons. According to his historical world, no culture remains untouched by others. Those with the capacity to adopt good innovations and adapt them to their needs, are often those which survive.
West doesn’t seem to think that domination/oppression is problematic.
Foucault’s argument begins with questioning West’s orientation to rendering history in terms of Darwinian and capitalist notions (turned truths) of progress. To disrupt these discourses and question these notions turned truths, has not only been Foucault’s project, but that of critical theorists over the last four decades.
I’m working out Foucault’s ideas; they seem to make sense. They seem to be the subtext or the essence of conversations I come across.
This podcast was aired in June, 2006.
Open verses free — in the web
To participate in freedom (here ‘open’) requires a tremendous amount of effort and thought. The trend George is observing below isn’t surprising. Prioritizing ease of use is expected, as is a general confusion in distinguishing between freedom and choice. I’m speaking about the larger society, but I don’t think it’s irrelevant. In general people choose free/no cost more often than not. Or so it seems. I’m always astonished at the effort invested into getting something for nothing. I’m not sure it’s possible to mainstream the ideology and practice of open source.
Tim Berners Lee Keynote at 3GSM
GSiemens
The reason that I could just design the Web by myself and set it running on a couple of computers without asking anyone, was that the Internet in turn had been designed to be used for anything, constraining its users as little as possible. So this is one of the qualities of an open platform: it is built to enable, not to control, and it does not try to second guess the things which will be built using it.Over the last year, I’ve noticed a big shift in attention and focus on the ideology of open source software (and, if trends hold as they have in other apsects of education) and the parallels in education content. Many educators are proclaiming the value of openness…but are increasingly using closed tools. Content tools with great functionality and ease of use…but which are closed in format. Openness and free are being confused (or, perhaps for many educators, is not something that is important).
Who’s doing all the editing in Wikipedia?
This Nature article says “right now there are around 6.4 million articles on Wikipedia, generated by over 250 million edits from 5.8 million contributors.
About a month ago I began noticing that Wikipedia was the 1st hit on many Google searches. And I’m reading a printed book, a 2006, 2nd edition, which references Wikipedia. Something’s happening over there, participatory culture, the social web…somethin’
Knowing Knowledge
I’ve been reading George Siemens blog for a year or so and it’s often one of the most interesting in the educational blogosphere.
I missed the Connectivism online conference, I see.
But it looks like he’s got a book together, not coming out, but congealed and connected. It’s online; it’s got a Wiki, and a photoset on Flickr.
Cool…
Twitter-What are you doing?
Twitter: A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing? Answer on your phone, IM, or right here on the web!
Now the 2nd time I’ve heard about Twitter…I’m interested in it because it captures the gap between web2.0ers and simple surfers, browers and shoppers. The immediate question: “Why would anyone want to do that?” typifies the paradigm shift in thought and understanding. People are doing it along with commenting on Flickr, cruising MySpace and gambling in SL, and in droves.
I can’t think of anything comparable from my younger days, I mean comparable in terms of relating, and socializing.
Reading Foucault
What makes Foucault a challenging read? The complaints I’ve heard most often are his long and winding, illustrative sentences. That’s exactly it. He fills his sentences with illustrations and explications that intellectually ornate. He’s utterly French, even in English. The trick, I’ve found, is to know that’s what he’s doing, to fast-forward ahead, then circle back, summarizing along the way.
What a workout.
Courses vs. Content
What is an online course? What is an online education?
When it was launched in 2002, MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) was emphatically declared to be a limited online offering. “OCW is not about online degree programs. It isn’t even about online courses for which students can audit or enroll,” wrote Phillip D. Long. It was intended to be nothing more than “the content that supports an MIT education.”
The understated message in an initiative such as OCW is that an MIT education is not equivalent to the resources that support the education, that it consists essentially of the contact with the professors and the community that develops among the students.
We talk about learning in terms of design and environments more than in terms of lesson plans and classrooms. The mix of course, content, people and place seem to be shifting dramatically. This has to do with how technology expands complexity, the ways information is co-created and disseminated via Web 2.0, how Web 3.0 (SL) releases us from the dichotomy of real/virtual, and how underneath all this the nature of information and knowledge is changing.
