Immersed in New Brunswick

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On Tuesday the government of New Brunswick made a decision on early French immersion education, after having been forced by a court to reconsider an earlier decision. The “final” decision is one that baffles me from a research perspective but makes sense from a political one. This decision makes people feel better about being unilingual and gives a false sense that literacy in the first language will now improve.

Early French Immersion, which begins in kindergarten or Grade 1 in all Canadian provinces will now start in Grade 3 in Canada’s only officially bilingual province. It seems that New Brunswickers need to concentrate on first language skills before being saddled with a second. That is in spite of the research that shows that learning a second language actually enhances first language skills. Our politicians and bureaucrats are not ones to let data cloud their preconceived notions of what actually works.

French immersion is a program that is open to all, where the demand exists. One problem has been that not all parents want it. The other issue is that special needs children cannot get services in French, so they must opt for the English program. It creates what the Minister calls streaming. This is streaming because the Department of Education has never put adequate resources into the immersion program. And so it gets watered down.

This government and the education system have been pushing the idea that an optional second language immersion program, fought for 30 years ago, is detrimental to the education of all children because only a minority take it. Streaming is presented as the root of our educational woes, even though the immersion program received very little of the Department’s teaching support resources last year.

Now we have the only early second language immersion program in Canada that starts in Grade 3. What would you do if you were from another province and had a choice of schooling your children in New Brunswick? This is a real decision for military families or those considering a career move to this province, such as university professors. Would you move here or would you stay away from this anomaly and give your children more educational options?

I can see nothing about this new program that is attractive to anyone outside of this Province. It is not innovative in any sense. An innovative approach would have been second language immersion for ALL students beginning in kindergarten. This move is a retrograde action. The drive-through province has become the drive-away-from province.

A governing principle for work literacy

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Work literacy aims to help people develop skills necessary for the knowledge-intensive and interconnected workplace, or as the website says:

Work Literacy is a network of individuals, companies and organizations who are interested in learning, defining, mentoring, teaching and consulting on the frameworks, skills, methods and tools of modern knowledge work.

I’m all for that and believe it’s necessary; it’s just not enough. Michele Martin says on the Work Literacy blog that:

… knowledge workers need to figure out how to leverage the social aspects of the web to make their traditionally solitary online activities more effective and useful. As Tony [Karrer] points out, this will be a big challenge because people are not necessarily aware of the extent to which these social changes impact how they do their work. We first have to make them aware of this changed context and then help the develop the skills to be successful in this new world.

The context of work is definitely changing.

When Henry Ford developed his automobile mass production system he based it on the results of the time-motion studies of F.W. Taylor. Taylorism was the unifying theory that work could be standardized and workers could be organised around jobs, tasks and responsibilities. Ford implemented that theory. I think that for work literacy to become part of the workplace it needs to be grounded on a common vision. If not, then work literacy is just an incremental way of making the industrial workplace (with its org charts, line & staff, job classifications, etc) a bit more efficient.

The industrial model needs to be replaced because more and more work cannot be organised along Taylor’s guidelines. I think that the governing principle of Wirearchy, “a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology” is a good start. Embracing this principle would create havoc in most organisations though.

A two-way flow of power and authority exists in few organisations but it is possible and I think necessary in an interconnected world. It’s how open source projects work and it is part of the tacit pact in many Web 2.0 ventures. Companies have to treat their customers in a trustworthy way or they may all leave, which of course will destroy the company as most of the value resides in the community. Think of YouTube without contributors.

Work literacy focuses on the tools and techniques for social media but there is an underlying subversive component. Social media are the equivalent of an industrial factory for each worker. Almost every worker has the ability to get a message out to the world in the blink of an eye. That message can go viral and the organization has no control over it. Workers can also connect to massive amounts of information or find specialists in any field. They don’t need the company database, which is probably out of date anyway.

As anthropologist Michael Wesch states, “when media change, then human relationships change“. The Internet has already changed everything. The social contract that we call employment has been changing for a while. Unions are shrinking, the self-employed are growing (2 million in Canada, which is more than all manufacturing workers) and low wage service jobs are our largest growth sector. What unites us is our ability to easily connect with each other, without traditional intermediaries. We’re just not used to it yet, but initiatives like CarrotMob show what the future may hold.

For me, work literacy is showing people that they have access to the most powerful communications medium in history and that individuals have to grab hold of it, understand it and use it for the good of society, because we are society. Work literacy is not about doing your job better. It’s understanding what it means to work, to create and to be responsible, all within the context of being visible to everyone else. For workers, work literacy means growing up, damn fast.

So here’s my reading of the situation. In an interconnected, interdependent and highly-stressed world there’s no more us and them. It’s just us. We can all figure this out together and maybe our organization will survive. It may not, but we may have learned how to cooperate in the process and then some of us may create something new. Trust is the foundation of the new workplace and work literacy can help us build trust because these social media tools are transparent. That means that bosses are going to lose control – better now than later.

Work literacy is the way in which we connect with information, build knowledge, gain trust and strive for credibility in the Internet age.

Online learning tips the scales

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The price of fuel seems to be driving an uptake in online learning for higher education. Ray Schroeder has even started a blog about Fueling Online Learning, which I discovered via George Siemens.

I remember about a decade ago the discussions around the return on investment of online learning and the major factor was the reduction of travel time. You could save a LOT of money by not sending people on courses. However we learned that most people like to travel, get out of the office and socialize while learning. Some may even say that learning is a social endeavour.

So the scales may have finally tipped in favour of learning at a distance. Luckily for learners, there are a lot of social tools to add to the mix and a course doesn’t have to be a page-turning electronic book. Even if the institution only provides the content, learners can create study groups or plug into other networks, just avoid places like Ryerson if you intend on being a social learner.

Getting enough people wanting or needing to learn online should tip the scales toward more social learning. Perhaps we may escape the course/module constraint, especially as more workers use the Net for professional development. We, the pioneers in working and learning on the Web [check the header here], know the advantages of connecting to multiple networks and learning either serindipitously or just-in-time to solve a problem. It’s like water for fishes; we just do it.

As we get more online learners, let’s reach out and show them that it may not be easy but it’s possible to have rich learning experiences and meet some very interesting people online.

On literacy

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printing press

Jay Cross and Clark Quinn hosted a session this week on The Future of the Book:

The net has changed everything. Young people read screens, not paper. Plus, we’re all potential publishers now.

Publishing traditionally provided editorial, production, and marketing services. Today I can buy very rapid, very good, very low-priced editing from India. On-demand publishers will print as many (or as few) copies as you like. And publishers’ traditionally shoddy marketing is even more worthless in the days of online reputation and long-tail distribution.

The issue of literacy is a hot button topic and in my experience can be promoted for the wrong reasons and often without the data to back up the premises. I haven’t researched literacy in detail but I’m starting to keep some references, especially those that go against conventional wisdom.

Mark Federman introduced me to the idea that literacy is changing and we had better understand these changes, in Why Johnny and Janey Can’t Read:

… the notion that our beloved literacy is now nothing but a quaint notion, an aesthetic form that is as irrelevant to the real questions and issues of pedagogy today as is recited poetry – clearly not devoid of value, but equally no longer the structuring force of society.

Even The Economist, conservative as it is, questions the value of linear print literacy:

So, no surprise that when we incarcerate teenagers of today in traditional classroom settings, they react with predictable disinterest and flunk their literacy tests. They are skilled in making sense not of a body of known content, but of contexts that are continually changing.

I have feet planted in both camps, as I enjoy reading books but also spend much time following hyperlinks and co-creating written conversations online. I’m not sure what the future holds, but we have to look at literacy from a scientific and not a romantic perspective. For example, literacy groups and educators should broaden their perspectives on the definition of literacy as 4 billion people connect to the Internet with their mobile, text-messaging, video-enabled devices.

SocialLearn

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Yesterday, I attended Martin Weller’s presentation on SocialLearn, hosted by George Siemens, with the recording now available online. SocialLearn is a project of The Open University and takes Weinberger’s concept of small pieces loosely joined and applies it to higher education. I wrote about Small (learning) pieces loosely joined three ago and have long been a proponent of getting outside the LMS box set of constraints. In the case of SocialLearn, I think that they have the right concept for social learning on the Web and now have to clarify their own business model (yes, even universities must have business models).

The basic model is to provide the interface (API) that enables learners to connect with other systems and platforms. This strategy allows the “connector agency”, in this case the university, to quickly adopt new applications as they are used by students and teachers. Check out the diagrams on the SocialLearn blog for examples.

I see this approach as enabling critical thinking tools for each learner, as the situation warrants, and I strongly support this model.

Changing the role of The Open University from main content and application provider to a more facilitative role, with constantly changing technologies, will require a new business model and that is what Martin and his peers are looking at. The real money in higher education has almost always been around certification. That’s why Harvard can charge more, because Harvard certification is worth more on the market. Universities charge more than community colleges and for the most part, on-line degrees aren’t valued as much in-place ones. Certification, or how many degrees are granted, also drives the funding model for many state-subsidized institutions. Control the valued certification and you control the money flow. Just remember that the market may change its mind on what is valued.

Here is an excerpt from a proposal that Rob Paterson and I wrote this year:

Organizations that are decisively moving to the web are doing well. For example, iTunes is the second largest music store in the world, and the BBC have so much action online now, that some ISP’s in the UK are having bandwidth problems. NPR in the US is decisively moving to the Web and has a number of pilots out in the market and tools in development. Organisations that only partially moved to the open Web are doing less well – Barnes & Noble is really a bookstore with a web presence that fears that if its web presence was successful it would damage its store business.  The New York Times has the same issue. It has more web subscribers than paper subscribers but all its costs are tied into the paper. The music business tried to stop downloading and to hold onto bundling where its main revenues were derived. But in working to protect its current model it killed its future.

This is the problem. In this revolution, the old model is where the current revenues are located. Going to the new has to threaten this model. So leaders in the old hesitate or act half heartedly. They cannot put the new inside the old.

The answer to this paradox is to locate the new in a separate unit and to go after customers who are not served by the current model. This way you can hold onto the value of your existing franchise for as long as possible while building up the new in parallel.

Perhaps the best way for SocialLearn to go forward is to create a completely new playing field for the millions of non-consumers of higher education and become the de facto leader in a new space, much as the OU did in the 1960’s. It will be interesting to see if there is room for several players in this space and who else is moving into it.

New work, new attitude

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Nine Shift has a series of posts on the changing nature of work and how the idea of responsibility usurped morals during the industrial age (See Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3).

“In the Industrial Age of the 20th century, you didn’t have to be of good moral character to work in the factory. But you did have to be responsible.  And so teachers in the 20th century schoolhouse and college taught (still teach) responsibility.   And by that  teachers mean specific behaviors.

Those behaviors are now obsolete. They made sense in the factory …  But not in the virtual office.”

This post had me thinking about our approach to work literacy, and its foundation on skills, such as how to deal with information flows or personal knowledge mastery. What if the real challenge to be productive in the new workplace will be an attitude shift? Organisations may not be concerned if you work a full shift or are spending time at your work space. Compensation may become focused not just on results but creative solutions to the organisation’s issues. The required attitude may be creativity, as in “what have you done that’s different?”.

As we moved from morality to responsibility one hundred years ago, are we now shifting from responsibility to creativity? If we do, then most of our organisational tools and measurements about productivity may have to get thrown out.

Photo sharing

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I’ve been playing a bit as a very amateur photographer and started a Flickr account when I purchased my first digital camera three years ago. I just upgraded to a Pentax Optio M50 which has a 5X optical zoom and I’m looking forward to some better wildlife photos. I also prefer that Pentax uses the much cheaper SD cards rather than the XD cards required for my last Olympus Stylus.

I’m looking at different online photo sharing services and am considering upgrading to a Flickr Pro account or perhaps changing to Photobucket or SmugMug. Any advice or opinions?

Update: I later came across this R/WW review of 10 Photo sharing services.

Blogging rhythms

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I’ve been helping out with OLDaily for the past several weeks, but Stephen is now back as editor-in-chief. The pressure of getting out a daily newsletter was much more difficult than I thought it would be. I found that I was scouring my feeds and looking for appropraite posts quite often each day, and then trying to give some kind of fresh perspective. Luckily, Gary Woodill and Barry Dahl were doing the same and I only had to do 2-3 posts per day. Gary also handled the daily publishing of the newsletter. Thanks guys :-)

I started the OLDaily project all full of energy, but was quickly called to task by a reader for repeating a post that Stephen had already covered. I learned to check the archives before posting, realizing that Stephen’s audience is quite large and someone will notice any slip-up. This was of course once I figured out how to track comments.

This co-editor stint has given me a new pespective on blogging. As of last week I was finding the grind a bit much and had stopped posts on this blog. I found that once I’d filtered, examined, pondered and then written for OLDaily that I didn’t have any interest to write one of my own posts. My own pace is much slower and I need to have three or four posts in the mill and let them stew a bit before I decide to post any of them. Many potential posts get chucked or wind up as a quick link on Delicious.

Each blogger writes for different reasons and I mostly do it to make sense of what I’m observing, reading or pondering. There is no pressure to create a daily post and I now know that I couldn’t handle that kind of pressure to deliver for very long. I have more respect for journalists and their deadlines. I also have an even greater respect for Stephen and the enormous cumulative value of OLDaily for our field. Adding a post numbered 45,167 showed just how small my contribution had been.

And now back to our regular programming …

User Generated Context for Learning

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Umair Haque’s short paper on User Generated Context has some insights pertinent to online learning. Haque says that “context” is what most users generate and that content remains an area for professionals or at least the well-known amateurs. The rest of us just add context to what is flowing from the main information nodes, like TechCrunch or the New York Times [kind of like what I’m doing with this post]. Understanding that most of us in the “long tail” generate context, not content, is an important differentiation.

For content players and publishers, user generated context means that connected consumers aren’t their competitors – but are vital, essential complementors, who create very real value for them. The more context there is, the greater demand for their content is likely to be. That means that it’s vital for content players to explode the amount of context connected consumers create about them.

In the online learning business most content is locked down and it is difficult for users to add context that is persistent. I discussed this gap in Learning Content Should be Hackable. Take MIT’s open courseware initiative for instance. The media are available and free but there is no easy way to add context without porting the content to some other place. Blogs, wikis and social bookmarks enable contextualization of learning content but most of this is ad hoc and dependent on the user’s choice of social media tools. Wikipedia is a good example of context being added through links and in the article discussions.

Creating good content on a platform that lets users (teachers & learners) add context may be the the real killer application in education. Content developers and institutions have been so concerned with protecting their content that they don’t see where the real value lies. Letting others add more context will only increase the value of their content.

Non-consumers in education

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Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn say that Computer-Based Learning Could Transform Public Education within a Decade through “Disruptive Innovation”. This is based on Christensen’s models of disruption from his Innovators series of books, which I’ve discussed in Entrants and Incumbents.

The authors use the model of innovation that shows certain advantages for entrants, namely motivations and skills that incumbents don’t want or have. Targeting “non-consumers” is the suggested tactic, as Sony did with its transistor radio against the higher quality vacuum tube radios in the 1960’s.

Using the same methodology in analyzing the public system and its reliance on text books,  they suggest:

Pitting computer-based learning directly against teachers or continuing to cram it into schools will not work. Producers of computer-based learning software must introduce it disruptively, by letting it compete against non-consumption initially. And software makers must customize the software for different learning types while other entrepreneurs find new channels to reach students.

One business model of this type is the University of Phoenix targeting adults who never would be able to attend a traditional university full-time or on site. Another would be the online language learning offerings cropping up all over the Web.

An example the authors provide is that of pharmaceutical makers advertising direct to consumers, so that patients can ask for a specific prescription from their physician.  In this case, centralized purchasing is being completely bypassed, and so with it the massive advertising dollars of the industry.

This could happen in public education. With students identified as “non-consumers” [who are never consulted and have no influence in the education system], they may have education options in the next decade that are “as good as” the existing school system. The next generation may just decide to opt out of the public system. Is this how our public education system will end, with the last student quietly turning out the classroom lights?