Harold Jarche

Information, Learning & Feedback

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If you have access to the Internet, then there is no shortage of information. For most formal learning settings, access to information is not a barrier. Therefore, I would suggest that content dissemination is not a major requirement of the instructor in any networked environment, and that includes schools, where students may have Internet access outside the classroom. Information is everywhere.

The recent post by Susan Nash at The eLearning Queen focuses on some of the ways that feedback, through active listening, can be given in an online class. I questioned Susan whether there were similarities with practise & feedback loops when learning a physical skill, as I had previously posted. Susan responded with some more insights and so the conversation continues.

My memory of formal teaching courses, in the military, at some professional development sessions or during my graduate studies, does not include much focus on the various types of feedback, and how best to use them. It seems to me that in this era of open source content, like MIT OCW or Google, then a major job of the instructor is to provide feedback at the appropriate times. Online learning is retrieving the master-apprentice model but with a twist, as the apprentice today may have access to more information (not necessarily knowledge) than the master. Instructors today need to master the teaching processes, not necessarily the content, but are our schools of education and our training programs preparing them for this environment?

Atlantic Wildlife Institute

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I have been volunteering at the Atlantic Wildilife Institute for just over two years. It started by helping with a funding proposal (I’ve written too many proposals to remember), and gradually I became the Director of Education. I help out with planning and fundraising when I have some spare time, but it hasn’t really been a hardship. On the other hand, Barry Rothfuss and Pam Novak, the founders, have dedicated their lives to the Institute. They often work 24 hours a day helping an animal in distress (as they did over the weekend with a moose), as well as the constant fund raising and operational issues to deal with. There are no full-time paid staff, so Pam and Barry have to take up all the slack, which they have been doing for the past nine years.

AWI is unique in that it is the only federally and provincially licensed facility in eastern Canada that can take in any and all types of wildlife. We have had moose, bears, seals, eagles and all other types of injured and orphaned animals. AWI is not just about saving these animals, as the hundreds of animals that pass through the facility are only a sampling of what is really happening in the environment. However, from the animals that arrive on our doorstep, AWI can identify key issues for public attention and response, such as animal-borne diseases and toxins in the environment. One wildlife care operation alone cannot address all of the distress factors affecting our wildlife, so AWI is also focused on education and community outreach. This is what attracted me to the organisation and keeps me with it.

To me, AWI represents how non-profit/charitable organisations can work to address issues that seem insurmountable. AWI does a lot of hands-on work with animals in distress, but it also provides an opportunity for veterinarians and vet techs to come on-site to learn more about wild animals. Veterinarians don’t see wildlife during their professional training and at AWI they get a chance to treat injured wild animals.

Our wildlife care services inform all of our work, but the critical part is in training and educating a growing network of supporters. This network includes environmentalists, businesses, resource companies, forestry workers, etc. There is no way that we can do all of this alone, and it’s not just about money – educating the public is the key. I think that this model, of action-based research and education, is a solid and sustainable model, and is what has kept the organisation going for the past nine years. Just addressing the symptoms of injured & orphaned wildlife, would not be enough.

At the Atlantic Wildlife Institute, I’ve been learning more than I’ve been teaching.

Blogs in Higher Ed

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Blogs in Higher Ed: Personal Voice as Part of Learning is a short article on four cases of blogs in higher education, including doctoral students, professionals, undergraduates and second language learners. The comments of the instructors and students make for a good read, and show the variety of reactions when a new technology is introduced into an older form (the university class). Some embrace it, some reject it and some learn to love it. However, the recommendations in the article miss the main point.

I think that the important lesson here is that good teaching and effective learning are the results of many factors. Blogs can be used to enhance the process, or they can distract from it. Missing from the recommendations are the links between the pedagogical framework, the instructors’ abilities, the learners’ capabilities and the technologies and tools available. I would suggest that if you wanted to increase self-reflection, and wanted to use blogs, then you might prepare the students with a framework, such as Marilyn Taylor’s learning cycle in formal learning – Disorientation, Exploration, Reorientation, Equilibrium (see page 53 of this PDF for more on Taylor’s model – Adult Learning from Theory to Practice).

Any technology will have effects (Enhance, Retrieve, Reverse, Obsolesce) on the learning process, and no technology is truly neutral. But we still need to base any formal learning environment on some pedagogical framework, or we will continue to just grab the next technology for no real reason.

Open Source 2005

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Please don’t take it from me; just read this article if you still think that open source software is a fringe movement and will have no impact on the software development business. By Steven Vaughan-Nichols at eWeek:

Sometimes people don’t know when a revolution has happened until afterwards. Then, the historians tell us that 2004 was the year that open source started to become computing’s mainstream.

From e-Learning to s-Learning

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James Farmer has started an excellent conversation on learning management systems and how new systems can be developed on a looser configuration of individual controlled nodes by using blogging software. The general theme is that less management is better, and that individual learners could write all of their posts, assignments and papers from their own site, and these could be directed to each class as web feeds. The classes would aggregate the feeds from all the students and instructors. The beauty of this kind of system is that each student keeps all of his/her content, and it does not get locked away in an inaccessible archive of a centrally controlled LMS.

Boris Mann and Will Pate add their comments, especially from the Drupal perspective, with Will pushing for a move away from electronic learning to social learning. I think that a shift of focus (and development effort) away from the management aspects of learning and more on the social aspects of learning can only be positive for the learner.

We have the technology to do this, and Drupal only needs a few more functions in order to be a “learning community in a box”. It’s exciting to know that we are getting to the point of having a real alternative to the LMS. I have tried in the past year to convince some organisations to move away from the LMS model, but the alternatives have been a bit messy, especially for the IT department. Rob Paterson’s course at UPEI showed that an online course could work without an LMS. The development of an “off-the-shelf” social software tool, designed for formal learning interventions, could really kick-start a new direction for learning technologies.

Update — and the Drupal development community has begun to discuss the creation of a module for educational sites, starting with quizzes, but ending who knows where.

Pedagogical Praxis – Shaffer

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David Williamson Shaffer’s paper on Pedagogical Praxis: The professions as models for post-industrial education provides a theoretical model, with case studies, on how educational institutions can better bridge the gap between learning in formal education and learning in the workplace. These three studies show how relatively easy it is to ground a learning program in a post-industrial workplace context, by using what are today quite cheap and accesible technologies.

Perhaps the power of new technologies to bring professional practices closer to the purview of middle and high school students provides an opportunity to move beyond disciplines derived from medieval scholarship constituted within schools developed in the industrial revolution. Learning environments such as
those described here, based on professional learning practices and deliberately
constituted outside the traditional structure of schooling, suggest a
way to move beyond current curricula based on the ways of knowing of
mathematics, science, history, and language arts.

These case studies include students working as biomedical negotiators, online journalists and architects using complex mathematics. These three stories make this academic paper a delight to read.

For a more academic review, see this eLearning Review.

Update: Link fixed :-)

The New Skills – Inventiveness, Empathy, Meaning

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Just before I stepped out on my own, I read Daniel Pink’s Free Agent Nation, which I would recommend to every freelancer. The CS Monitor has recently featured Pink in an article on the end of jobs. Pink sees another shift in the employment market, speculating that off-shoring is going to continue, and that “There are going to be plenty of opportunities…. But it’s not going to be ‘knowledge workers,’ it’s going to be creators and empathizers.” His new book, A Whole New Mind, is based on this idea:


The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind. The era of “left brain” dominance, and the Information Age that it engendered, are giving way to a new world in which “right brain” qualities – inventiveness, empathy, meaning – predominate.

I take this to mean that synthesis and conceptual thinking will be in high demand, as businesses and organisations keep up with technology, market and cultural changes. Seeing patterns will be necessary. If this is the case, then Dave Pollard’s critical life skills will be essential for more and more people [take the hint, educators].

Pink’s first book was based on many interviews with free agents across the US, and I hope that this next one will have good data to back it up. The book is due out in March 2005.

Wink

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Via the Educational Bloggers Network, is this pointer to a freeware capture and presentation application, which looks like a simple version of Robo-Demo, called Wink:

Wink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software, primarily aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel etc). Using Wink you can capture screenshots of your software, use images that you already have, type-in explanations for each step, create a navigation sequence complete with buttons, delays, titles etc and create a highly effective tutorial for your users.