Technology Defined

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Albert Ip has changed the name of his blog from Random walk in elearning to Random walk in learning. Albert says that there are no specific learning technologies, just technologies that can be used for learning.

Of course we can talk about how to use a certain technology in a certain way to help some learners learn something. This is the process and context. Technology, information, artifacts, classrooms, chairs, etc are just part of the context. The actual process occurs between the ears of the learners, may be influenced by the process organised by the teacher.

My working definition of technology is similar, in that I see my work as a combination of 1) helping people to learn, 2) helping organisations and people to work better and 3) using information & communication technologies appropriately. Hence the name of this site, “Conversations at the intersection of learning, work and technology”. As far as technology is concerned, I use Harold Stolovitch’s description as my working definition:

Technology is the application of organized and scientific knowledge to solve practical problems.

Perhaps the creation of the “learning technologies” field has done us a disservice in spawning a separate discipline from learning (or education or training). As tool builders and tool users for millennia, we cannot escape our technologies, nor should we give them over to a small priesthood of experts.

Instruments of our success?

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I’ve just watched Reds, Whites and the Blues on CBC TV, described as “Four savvy teenagers from the Rez take us to their White high schools and show us why most native kids don’t graduate.” I watched four kids record video for several months as they go through school. What struck me was that these are intelligent and articulate kids but they don’t connect to the school. As one boy says, “I’m proud to be Chief Dan George’s great, great grandson … and he stood for education.” But the school system is not designed to encourage connections and there is no connection between this First Nation and the public school system; they are separate worlds.

Their stories once again reminded me of Roger Schank’s Student Bill of Rights. Almost everything that we see in this documentary by Duncan McCue breaks an article of the bill of rights, particularly these three:

Clarity of Goals: No student should be required to take a course, the results of which are not directly related to a goal held by the student, nor to engage in an activity without knowing what he can expect to gain from that activity.

Passivity: No student should be required to spend time passively watching or listening to anything unless there is a longer period of time devoted to allowing the student to participate in a corresponding active activity.

Arbitrary Standards: No student should be required to prepare his work in ways that are arbitrary or to jump through arbitrary hoops defined only by a particular teacher and not by the society at large.

Duncan says that teachers have no skills in how to teach native kids, but I think that part of the problem is that “One size fits nobody” and the system’s defects are just more evident here. The choice for these kids is to conform or else. With everything that we purport to know about pedagogy and neuro-science, can’t we create better learning environments than this? Do students have to write arbitrary exams to be certified as successful, and if they fail they’re branded as losers for life?

Chief Dan George said in 1967, “Oh, God! Like the Thunderbird of old I shall rise again out of the sea; I shall grab the instruments of the white man’s success—his education, his skills, and with these new tools I shall build my race into the proudest segment of your society.” However, I’m not sure if the instruments of our success are worth taking.

Choose your bedfellows carefully

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Obviously, there are some big software vendors that just don’t know how to be good citizens. For many, it’s all about the bottom line, no matter what.

Anyone in the learning technology space knows about Blackboard’s greedy grab for intellectual property that was originally created by the community (yes, the initial suit is against D2L, but will open source be next?). And now along comes Oracle into the open source space and tries to squeeze Red Hat out of the enterprise Linux market, as reported by Matt Asay.

I would say that this proves Churchill’s adage that first we shape our institutions and then they shape us. The nature of the beast that is the corporation is that it is self-serving and motivated by profit at all costs. Community-based projects, like open source are built on a different premise.

One thing I’ve learned as a free-agent is that your real partners are the ones who have the same level of risk as you. When I partner on a handshake with another free-agent, I know that that person has as much at stake as I do. When I’m asked to enter into a partnership with a corporation, I know that it cannot be a real partnership with the same risk on each side. What happens if one of us decides to change the rules of engagement? If it’s the corporation, then I’m left high & dry because I don’t have the means to take on their retained legal counsel.

Therefore, I only partner with equals and I sub-contract to larger corporations. With corporations, it’s a contract, not a relationship. I can have a relationship with a person, but not with a disembodied corporation.

As open source projects of all varieties get bigger, they will be befriended by large corporations. My advice is to choose your bedfellows carefully.

Six Words

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Mark Oehlert has set forth the following challenge:

“So here is the challenge – think of six word lesson plans. Use just six words to describe the objective(s) of a course, a unit, a module, a lesson, an entire college career – whatever your preferred length of instruction is -“

This made me think about my post on Story-based Curricula, so I’ve created these Six Word Lesson Plans based on my suggested curriculum for our community:

  • Year One – Scientific Reasoning
    • Observe, experiment, discuss, then observe anew.
  • Year Two – Life on the marshes
    • Four seasons of ebb and flow.
  • Year Three – Green Energy
    • Deconstruct the myths; construct the future.
  • Year Four – Natural Enterprises
    • Collaborate to make an honest living.

$50M Digital Media and Learning Initiative

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The MacArthur Foundation launched its five-year, $50 million digital media and learning initiative in 2006 to help determine how digital technologies are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life. Answers are critical to developing educational and other social institutions that can meet the needs of this and future generations. The initiative is both marshaling what is already known about the field and seeding innovation for continued growth.

So reads the press release from the MacArthur Foundation. I followed various articles to find out more about the MacArthur Foundation, but what really got my attention was Spotlight: blogging the field of digital media and learning. There is a good variety of commentators on this group blog, and it looks like it could become an important voice on the topic. The launch itself took place live and in Second Life, adding to the buzz already created by the funding envelope.

Formal education needs more informal learning

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One of the reasons that I’m fascinated with informal learning is that it has not been studied anyway near as much as formal learning (education & training) and my experience with workplace performance has shown how important informal learning is in getting the job done. A ten year study of Japanese education methods by the University of Leicester has revealed, among other things, how important it is to link formal and informal learning as early as possible:

Dr. Jenny Rogers said: Moving between formal and informal situations causes major problems for learners as it demands transformations in the type of knowledge that they have already acquired. These transformations cause problems which are not only common but have proved intractable. They lie at the heart of difficulties with computation, performance and problem-solving that have dogged education, test results and employment over many years.

Our research here at the University of Leicester and nationally shows that these problems arise very early in children’s education and cause difficulties as much for the nursery as for education and employers. Children need to be helped to develop their talk and problem-solving to a far greater extent in informal, implicit situations during the formative years alongside the formal and explicit elements of lessons. This will enhance their flexibility and their ability to understand and deal with wide-ranging written texts as well as formal and real-life problems in the later years.

My own experience shows that some people who function very well in formal learning environments become rather disoriented in an informal environment, such as our series of online workshops on informal learning. In order to be successful learners, people need to be comfortable with their disorientation. According to Marilyn Taylor [PDF see page 51 for a reference to Taylor’s model], disorientation should be a natural state in formal education:

Stage 1 : Disorientation: The learner is presented with an unfamiliar experience or idea which involves new ideas that challenge the student to think critically about his/her beliefs and values. The learner reacts by becoming confused and anxious. Support from the educator at this point is crucial to the learner’s motivation, participation and self-esteem.

I believe that disorientation is an almost constant state in many workplaces today, so we had better prepare learners for it. Incorporating informal learning experiences in an ever widening variety of contexts could help prepare students to be better informal learners throughout their lives. In this study, formal education has been shown to foster dependent learners who have difficulty in the disorienting contexts that often accompany informal learning. If we truly want to foster lifelong learning, we need to create more informal learning opportunities in our entire educational system.

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Story-centered Curricula

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I was introduced to Roger Schank through his book Engines for Education and still find his Student Bill of Rights an excellent reference point from which to discuss educational reform. In a recent article published in The Pulse, Schank talks about the implementation of story-centered curricula:

These are story-centered curricula. Students work in teams in virtual apprenticeships with experts producing deliverables that get increasingly complex throughout the year. No classes. No tests. One curriculum per year — complete four of them and you graduate. Ideally there would be hundreds of curricula to choose from but we have to start somewhere so I chose those four.

When I talk to people who might be interested in radical education reform I always ask what curricula their communities might need so we can think about how to produce those as well. The idea that every high school should be more or less the same offering of the same potpourri of algebra, American history, and Charles Dickens is just absurd, so I ask what they need in their world.

These types of curricula could be implemented in any community. For instance, here on the Tantramar Marshes, we have more biologists per capita than most communities. We could easily develop a four year program based on environmental stewardship. We have resources at the Atlantic Wildlife Institute, the Canadian Wildlife Service, Mount Allison University and various other small businesses and non-profit organisations. Other communities have their own strengths and should be able to use them for their children.

Schank has suggested these four, one-year each, learning experiences as a pilot project:

  1. Scientific Reasoning
  2. Health Sciences
  3. New Technology
  4. Engineering (aerospace focus)

He also gives this example for a Native-American community:

  1. scientific reasoning
  2. alternative energy issues
  3. land management and forestry
  4. casino management or entrepreneurship or tribal governance

I would suggest this as a starter for our community:

  1. scientific reasoning
  2. life on the marshes
  3. green energy
  4. natural enterprises

Roger Schank is presenting us with a viable alternative to the subject-based industrial school model that was designed 100 years ago.

The communication of bias

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Here’s a comment e-mailed to me by Graham Watt, friend & neighbour, in response to my post – A Greater Need for Trust:

The communication of bias

My argument against the centralizing use of planners for developing creative thought can be placed within the Harold Innis idea of the periphery being the source of ideas which can offer original perspectives. Whether we talk of rebel groups forming in the mountains, religious sects taking over mainstream religious thought or even the fact that Toronto seldom develops its own talent, instead attracting it from the perimeters then blending it into its normality, we can picture original thinking starting to build, moving to the centre becoming a monopoly and finally consuming itself. Innis showed how civilizations moved into being before ideas from the perimeter began competing, overcoming a balance and these ideas then becoming a monopolistic force. We can see this in the sixties in advertising when the Bernbachian approach moved from the outsider Jewish milieu into mainstream New York advertising and dislodged the incumbent Presbyterians, the chosen ones themselves then eventually dislodged by the advertising technocrats and their acolytes, the planners.

Perhaps we can see something of Innis’ later observation on the power of the periphery to generate perspective if we consider the operas of Wolfgang Mozart and his lyricist Da Ponte. Jane Glover, in Mozart’s Women, explains how the extraordinary creative team of Mozart and Da Ponte worked together so productively. Both Mozart and Da Ponte were essentially outsiders, never fully accepted by the establishment; yet their peripatetic lives, together with their current situation on the fringes of society, had furnished them with superb powers to observe, accumulate and interpret the infinite varieties of human behaviour. Each could therefore portray immense subtlety in theatrical characterization, whether for instance in the modes of expression and colloquialism between the different classes or in overt manifestations of real human emotion “what is said is not necessarily being what is felt, which nonetheless is acutely revealed”. How similar this sounds to the feral advertising team; observers distanced from the power structures of their agency milieu but able to observe, being away from the every day systems, but firmly within the environment of their audiences and fully capable of reaching them persuasively.

My argument is that it is the feral, free range thinkers, the creatives, and misfits, perennial dwellers of the perimeters of power, whose talents are lost here. Their move to the centre ultimately deprives them of their power which is the individuality of the perimeter, in terms of creative thought. When the best of these creatives set up their own agencies they prosper for a time but inevitably become so centralized that they themselves are forced to adopt the technological additives which eventually assure their downfall.

Therefore, agencies like Taxi, Grip, Palmer Jarvis DDB and others of great creative force, are in constant danger from their own success, because success attracts big money, and with it comes technology which breeds systems which are enclosures and enclosures breed complacency.

Thanks, Graham.

Vyew 2.0 Released

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When we ran our last Informl Learning Unworkshop this Summer, we tried out several technical configurations, but the standard for international, online, synchronous group sessions was a Skypecast for voice and Vyew for slide sharing & text chat. I know that there may be more robust [expensive] platforms for web conferences, but both of these applications are free so the setup is easy to replicate for anyone, anywhere.

Vyew has just released version 2.0 which is advertised as a major upgrade. Our experience with the previous version was positive overall and the company was helpful in quickly addressing some of our particular needs, all for no cost. Anyway, the new features, which we’ll probably test out during our next unworkshop, include:

  • Multiple Vyew Books per User (handy if you’re running several web conferences or variations thereof)
  • A new layering architecture to bring objects forward or move them back more easily (gotta try this out)
  • More functions for Mac users on Safari (a good thing for my Mac friends)

Anyway, this is a nice little company with a solid product that is “Always FREE”. Our experience in researching dozens of applications was that there is currently no other product available with this functionality at no cost. Vyew, especially when combined with Skype, makes for a powerful platform for rapid informal learning.

A Greater Need for Trust

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According to Tom Malone in The Future of Work, there are three basic decision-making structures in society – Independent, Centralized, and Decentralized. From early civilisation we have moved many of our structures from independent to centralized ones. This culminated with the Industrial Age beginning in the 20th century. Independent structures (e.g. small, autonomous companies) have the lowest cost of communications while decentralized structures (e.g. virtual work groups) have the highest cost of communications. Centralized structures are somewhere in between.

Our society is currently dominated by centralized structures in education, health, government and corporations. Our industrialized world needed control systems so we created centralized structure but commmunications were still relatively expensive. Enter the Internet and communication costs start dropping toward zero. Add in the decline of the manufacturing sector and the rise of the creative sector and you can also call this the end of the Industrial Age.

In Small Schools Loosely Joined, I suggested a structure of community-based schools, linked by information technologies to other communities of learners. The basic premise was of local control but global participation, without the layers of the current educational system’s bureaucracy. I took the title from “Small pieces, loosely joined”; Dave Weinberger’s Unified Theory of the Web. As Dave says:

“The Web is a new public space, solving the old contradiction between viewing ourselves as faceless members of a mass and as “face-ful” unique individuals.”

To paraphrase Dave, on the Web we are not Independent (“face-ful” unique individuals) nor Centralized (faceless members of a mass), but rather Decentralized and interconnected citizens. As the Web becomes our main communications environment, so all of our structures will be influenced by this decentralizing effect (as long as the Internet remains neutral, of course). It’s not so much a matter of solving an old contradiction, but rather of transitioning from a society of centralized structures to decentralized ones.

We are seeing experiments in decentralization happening in various sectors of society. Virtual companies with minimal control are on the rise. It’s easy for a team of independents to get together for a specific project and then disperse to create some other group for another project. I am certain that we will see further decentralization experiments in business, education, health and government over the next decade. It’s not that centralized structures are bad; they’re just not necessary any more.

If you are working in one of these centralized structures, consider your time limited. The same if you’re teaching in one. Now is the time to develop models and ways of working in decentralised structures, while you still have a job. Those in the learning professions have the opportunity to be leading the way, because we are in a period of change and many people don’t have the skills to work in a decentralized world. A good place to begin re-learning is with Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind, that suggests this skill-set for our near future:

  • Design or creativity [right brain thinking]
  • Communicating stories, not arguments [more right brain thinking]
  • Working as part of a “symphony”, instead of a single-minded focus [even more right brain thinking]
  • Being empathetic, not just logical [need I say it?]
  • Being playful in your work [yup, right brain stuff]
  • Creating meaning, not just accumulating knowledge [that would be right brain again]

The first step in all of this is beginning to trust again. Trust was easy in independent structures, like the family, but almost negated completely by copious rules & regulations in centralized structures like multi-national corporations. However, you cannot participate in a decentralized world without trust. Rules and laws can do so much, but a culture of trust is necessary. For example, when I work in a decentralized project team amongst equals (about 75% of my work) we almost never sign a contract, a non-disclosure agreement nor a non-compete agreement. All of the work is done on trust.

I would suggest that the next time we perceive a problem in one of our structures, such as kids at school on those pesky Internets, that we first take a look at how we can foster more trust in all directions.

For further reading, Robert Paterson has several articles on the need for Trusted Space, and this need for trust is also part of the rationale behind the concept of the Commons.