David Tosh, Ben Werdmuller & Misja Hoebe have launched Curverider today. This is a services company built around the Elgg Learning Landscape open source learning platform. I have been a proponent of this business model for a couple of years and it’s good to see that others view it as viable. What’s great about Curverider is that the developers are supporting their own code but have also involved a growing community so that it’s more than just three guys in a garage (not that they work in a garage). For instance, look at how Mancomm, a private company, paid for the development of a calendar function that is now in the latest version of Elgg.
For the end-user, this business model is a dream. You can get the developers to support you, but if your needs change or you want to work with someone else you are free to leave with your source code.
Customers are not handcuffed to their technology providers. I believe that this industry model will encourage more innovation and that companies like Curverider will prosper based on the value of their services.
Dave and his team have also created a resource site for Elgg learning landscape that shows what’s happening in terms of development.
Learners as contributors – the end of the industrial model
I’ve just read one of the best posts that shows how the Internet changes everything in education; many just don’t realise it yet. Christian Long at Think: Lab has a long post on the connection between blogging and formal education. Christian starts by describing a new billboard from AT&T that has only one word on it – Blogging – and then talks about a major difference in life for a 15 year old today and ten years ago. This is the ability to connect with anybody in the world on any subject, no matter how narrowly defined:
We’ve discussed a basic definition of blogging (web-based journaling). We’ve accepted that anyone can immediately create a website now called a blog. And if you think about being a 15 year old and wanting to share your ideas about music or sports or whatever comes to mind in a creative and individual way, a social and collaborative way, you can see why someone would create one. Even see the potential for a teacher and a class full of students to create ‘class blogs’ for a project or portfolio. But is there more?
Yes, and it all comes down to something so fundamental to the very existence of schools and even education itself that it’s actually pretty easy to overlook: information and who owns/creates it.
This final point, the question about information and who owns/creates it – is shaking our concept of education to the core. The ability to be the co-creators of worldwide knowledge now lies within the means of a large percentage of the world. For example, anyone can contribute their individual area of expertise to the wikipedia knowledge repository.
The discussion at Education Bridges echoes a similar vein. In the creation of wikibooks as online textbooks for the world, should only the experts build and distribute the accepted official curriculum or should learners be involved in the co-creation of knowledge? Personally, I feel that this is no longer a valid question because of the nature of digital networks. If you don’t allow for the co-creation of information (construct, deconstruct, reconstruct) then your information will gather electronic dust in its uselessness.
Albert Ip states it another way with this picture, which asks how anyone could limit peer interaction to "just" the classroom.
Teachers and educational organisations can longer hide behind the classroom firewall. As Christian says, just imagine:
Now, go back to that original 15 year old. Imagine you as a 15 year old with a blog of your own.
Imagine that student able to create a blog in seconds and within days or weeks or months have an audience spread out around the world that is genuinely interested in the ideas and stories and links and images that are on the blog, beginning to be taken seriously as a writer or an expert or a legitimate voice, and beginning to use the blog as a way to further explore ideas and develop a far-reaching network of thinkers and beginning to be seen on a level playing field as any adult. And now imagine that student going back to school the next day and being asked to sit still, read books or notes that expect no interaction, being forever being seen as inexperienced and incapable, and not being able to contribute any ideas or questions to the larger body of research or ideas.
Imagine that student able to create a blog in seconds and within days or weeks or months have an audience spread out around the world that is genuinely interested in the ideas and stories and links and images that are on the blog, beginning to be taken seriously as a writer or an expert or a legitimate voice, and beginning to use the blog as a way to further explore ideas and develop a far-reaching network of thinkers and beginning to be seen on a level playing field as any adult. And now imagine that student going back to school the next day and being asked to sit still, read books or notes that expect no interaction, being forever being seen as inexperienced and incapable, and not being able to contribute any ideas or questions to the larger body of research or ideas.
Both of my boys are in middle school and have their own blogs. One of them writes a lot, including the creation of a fantasy religion, while the other builds animations and shares them online. The eldest is learning Java on his own, via tutorials he finds online. At school they can use Google as an online library (find, access, use) during their limited time available during "computer lab". The physical library does not have any information for a report on the Avian Flu, and there is only one computer available. Access to Blogger is forbidden.
Teachers cannot teach the students how to get involved in the co-creation of knowledge because they don’t have a clue. The kids live in a completely different world than school. School is fast becoming irrelevant.
Next year, our eldest son will be 15. What will he think of school then? [I think I know the answer]
Three Conflicting Pillars – Revisited
This post was prompted by Jay Cross’s discussion on how comments to blog posts get lost by not being tracked by most RSS readers.
A while back I made some comments on Education’s Three Conflciting Pillars, and a discussion ensued with excellent comments from Brian Alger, Rory McGreal of Athabasca University, and Terry Wassall.
It went sort of like this this [this is abridged and you can read the full conversation on the main post]:
Three premises compete for attention in our public education systems:
- education as socialization
- education as a quest for truth (Plato)
- education as the realization of individual potential (Rousseau)
Brian: Given the fact that we have frozen knowledge and skills in something called curriculum, I would characterize today’s education system as something that is completely static and far removed from the practical realities of everyday life. So in that sense I would say that the very idea of a primary premise is plural and inseparable from the circumstances and situations we find ourselves in. I have not read Egan’s book, but I see no reason why the three premises mentioned above, and others, cannot co-exist simultaneously. Nor can I think of a reason that we would want to identify one and follow it exclusively.
Harold: The point that I remember was how the three premises have historically competed for primacy in the education system. When one dominates, then the others get less attention. We see this in initiatives like ‘no child left behind’ or the demise of music and physical education in the Canadian public school systems. My main concern is that there is no clear idea of what our education systems are trying to achieve, and we constantly go through ‘flavour of the year’ initiatives.
Brian: If I was to express a first principle it would focus on the desired quality of communication in education (in contrast to the current one). It seems to me that it is the nature of communication that needs to be changed in education more than anything else.
Rory: Western education has NEVER been based on those three pillars. Perhaps some lip service has been paid to them in the universities, but the schools K12 were formed for the benefit of employers in the manufacturing economy. They taught students how to sit still, do as they are told, and shutup and do monotonous tasks without complaining AND most importantly to arrive on time and respond to the bell and leave only after the day was over with the final bell — and by the way if they could become literate while these skills were being taught, that would be considered a good thing.
Harold: I think that curriculum development is a black art because we as a society and educators have not confronted what we really want from education. The disagreements that I hear over our education system are focused on symptoms and we”ll continue to tinker with the system unless we can find a way to address the foundations, such as “what the hell are we really trying to do and how are we going do it?” ; and even more importantly “how are we going to measure ourselves?”.
Terry: The extension of education to the masses was viewed with deep suspicion by the ‘natural’ and traditional ruling class. Education has always had the dual role of both enabling and controlling and has always been a double-edged sword. Teaching individuals how to read in order that they can read the Bible and employers” instructions always risked the possibility that they would also read subversive pamphlets if available. The controlling aspect was seem as crucial to those that begrudgingly conceded that they were having to ‘educate our masters’ — the Duke of Wellington I think. Whatever the other contradictions and tensions in education today I think this fundamental one between the enabling agenda and the controlling agenda is still very much in evidence.
Effective communication for learning
Dave Pollard has a post on what communication methods are most effective. He has created a table that compares several media as to their cost, impact, value and cost/benefit. This is a good table for instructional designers to consider before creating educational media, and as Dave says, it’s open to revision.
Dave goes on at the end of this post to list his principles of human learning preferences:
- People like information conveyed through conversations and stories because the interactivity and detail gives them context, not just content, and does so economically.
- People hate talking heads, and are increasingly intolerant of them.
- People no longer have the opportunity for serendipitous learning and discovery — everything they read and learn is narrow, focused, bounded, and the tools they are given in their reading and research reinforce this blinkered approach to learning. The consequence is the intellectual equivalent of not eating a balanced diet — a malnourished mind.
- People do not know how to do research, or even search, effectively. They think these two things are the same, which they are not, and they have never been trained to do either properly. It’s a good thing the search engines are so smart, because our use of them is mostly dumb.
- People search as a last resort. They prefer to ask a real person for what they want to learn or discover, because it’s faster and the answer is more context-specific. And if there is a single good browsable resource on their subject of interest, readily at hand, and they have the time, they will usually prefer to browse that resource rather than looking at a bunch of disconnected, often irrelevant, search engine matches.
Continuing from my last post on Controlling Chaos?, I would suggest that these preferences show that learner behaviour indicates that better tools, like tag clouds, are needed to enable serendipitous learning (Point #3) and that better built-in search is critical for finding good learning resources (Points #4 & 5).
Dave’s principles also support the idea that we should put more effort into contextualising online learning and less on cataloguing information/learning objects (Point #1). This is similar to the concept of Stock & Flow, because having meticulously catalogued & tagged Stock (learning objects) is of little value without the contextual Flow (conversations & stories).
Controlling Chaos?
Scott Leslie comments on the recent release of the CETIS Vocabulary Project, which includes two reports and a series of recommendations [my emphasis added]:
But the 121 pages that comprise the first two survey reports, the Pedagogical Vocabularies Review and the Vocabulary Management Technologies Review, seem hardly to justify the tepid 7 page ‘Recommendations’ document that follows. Study study study, disseminate, more study, pilot a bit, repeat. Sorry guys, I wish I could be more enthusiastic about this; I want to take succour in the belief we can control the growing chaos, find sense through old patterns and methods, but you know what, I can’t do it anymore, I have seen the light, and this is not it.
I’m not an expert on ontologies, the semantic web, metadata or controlled vocabularies, but I’ve had enough conversations with enough experts to know that more control will not address our information management needs. Recent conversations with people smarter than me have me concluding that Smart Search is (will be) an excellent tool and that the RDF standard seems to be quite useful with its minimalist approach. From the CETIS Report (MS Word Doc, page 23):
What really sets RDF apart from XML and other things is that RDF is designed to represent knowledge in a distributed world. This means RDF is particularly concerned with meaning. Everything at all mentioned in RDF means something, whether a reference to something concrete in the world, an abstract concept, or a fact. Standards built on RDF describe logical inferences between facts and how to search for facts in a large database of RDF knowledge.”
I recently asked if metadata was dead and received some good advice:
- From Anol: "Problems with folders and metadata – that’s a closed system, somebody else define the taxonomy. Theory of entropy proves itself when the closed system of folders and metadata goes into a complete chaotic mode."
- and from Keith, "Maybe metadata structures are dying, but there’s a distinct difference between metadata and metadata structures. If you’re going to ask, "Is metadata dead?" why not also ask, "Is tagging [with METADATA!] dead?"
After perusing the 121 pages of the two CETIS reports [I didn’t read every item], I came away with the feeling that trying to control chaos is a losing game. Instead of asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, it’s time for the learning industry as a whole to shift its effort to more pragmatic solutions, because the answers from CETIS et al are not very clear. Having watched the enormous efforts ($$$) that the military, academia and corporations have put into metadata and controlled learning structures, without any measurable improvements in learning or performance outcomes, I have to ask if this is worth the time and money. My suggestions:
- like Lego, use the simplest of basic structures (RDF?)
- build better search into online learning applications
- only build taxonomies, ontologies & controlled vocabularies based on a specific user need, not "just-in-case"
- give learners and facilitators more tools to manage their information (tags, tagclouds, smart search, etc)
- focus on tools to surf the chaos, not control it
Individual and Company Blogs
I recently received an invite from Ankush Gupta, who has the Learned Man! blog, to look at the company blog of Tata Interactive Systems. I’ve read Ankush’s blog on and off for a while and found that he provides some solid commentary on elearning, so I checked out the Tata Blog. It’s a multi-user effort with posts so far from the CEO and various instructional design consultants. The review of Allison Rossett’s First Things Fast is worth a read, as this is an excellent handbook for performance improvement.
It will be interesting to see how this corporate, multi-user blog evolves over time. One successful multi-user blog, though not from a single company, is the Learning Circuits Blog. Whether a company blog can have the same depth of conversation remains to be seen. So far, I like the initial posts on the Tata Systems blog, especially on their work for learning disabilities and participation in the Mumbai marathon.
A different approach to company blogging is SilverOrange, a web-systems company on Prince Edward Island. There are no direct links from the company website, but the individual bloggers proudly link back to their company. SilverOrange bloggers include Dan James, Daniel Burka and Steven Garrity.
Here are two approaches to blogging and work. In one the blogger is part of a corporate blog while in another the blogger is an individual who happens to work (or own) a company. The use of blogs is evolving over time and there may be a day when a company blog is identified (by the majority) as a separate entity from an individual blog. Does it matter? I think that the level of comments and interaction, especially when controversial subjects arise, will show if there is a difference. Dan James has even stated that "Companies don’t blog, people do".
My interest in all of this is how this medium is being used and what its effects will be. Will blogs become the equivalent of the e-mail scourge of the next decade? Will employees be forced to blog on the company site? These are the early days of blogging for the mainstream and it’s still fun to watch the field change and read new blogs.
nonscholae.org Launches
It’s still very new with not much content, but James Farmer has one more website to his credit – nonscholae.org. The premise is:
nonscholae.org is a site devoted to the responsible use of blogs, instant messaging and other social software in schools.
Non scholae sed vitae discimus
We learn, not for school, but for life – Seneca, Epistulae
We believe that these tools and resources should not be blocked or banned from schools. As educators, we should be familiarising learners with these technologies, supporting and facilitating their responsible use and equipping our students with the skills to keep them safe and savvy in the online world.
However, at the moment, many schools are simply closing their eyes, banning these technologies and doing their learners a disservice in the process.
Seneca’s words ring true for me, and I’m glad to see that James has taken this initiative. Enough of what educators want, let’s focus on what learners need, because Seneca was right.
Hot & Cool Election Campaigns
While I was in Montreal this week I received a call from a newspaper journalist, looking for some comments about the use of blogs in the current election. I was engaged in meetings and the deadline was only a few hours away, so I wasn’t able to to add an insights (not that I had any pithy comments ready anyway).
Instead, the journalist should have contacted Mark Federman who has some excellent comments on the election, especially around McLuhan’s work on Hot versus Cool media. For instance:
You cannot "label" a medium as hot or cool by looking at the medium, but rather by observing its effects. A hot medium is one that is hypnotic, decreasing awareness by providing explicit, often simplistic, information. It is intense, and tends to separate and fragment. There is little active, cognitive participation because of the explicitness; rather we take it in and nod in agreement, eyes glazing over. If you find yourself mindlessly echoing tropes and memes without really thinking them through (to discover a hidden context, for instance) you have likely been exposed to a hot media environment.
Mark goes on to show how a party could use the Internet as a cool medium:
One of the effects of UCaPP is for "consumers to become producers." In the context of the current campaign, this might mean that ordinary people could be given a venue on the campaign sites to upload their own podcasts. Consider the Liberal Party dilemma of lack of trust. Now imagine if the archetypal "ordinary Canadian" was given an open and free opportunity to upload a "why I’m planning to vote Liberal" podcast directly to the Liberal party site. At the very least, all the ideas that the central campaign can’t think of would immediately become available to them. What’s more, (as we learned from the Howard Dean Experience) even anti-Liberal trolls (a troll, of course is relative to the venue; one person’s troll is another person’s freedom fighter, so to speak) would be contributing to the passion, fervor and motivation of the Liberal team and their supporters (Dean raised a huge amount of money through people pledging donations for every troll post to Deanspace). Most important, allowing such a forum for democratic participation and conversation is the move that would help to create the trust, openness and welcoming that a cool campaign requires.
Montreal during a Winter Election Campaign
Currently sitting in downtown Montreal on a client project. Typical consulting gig – fly in; check into the hotel; spend a long day in a meeting room; repeat; fly out. I happened to be in the same hotel as the Liberal Party of Canada (the French leaders’ debate was last night) so there was more traffic than usual for a week day in January. Speaking of political campaigns (and I try not to) Rob Wall has an interesting post on a candidate who really blogs.
Perhaps during the next election the two-way web will be the norm and TV/Radio will be ignored. For myself, I’ve ignored the mass media and have read a few blog posts, including this one from Dave Pollard. I see elections like final exams; you have to do your homework prior to the end of the coursework, not during the pressure of exams.
Wikibooks
Dave Cormier is proposing more work be done on the concept of textbook wikis, or wikibooks. According to Dave:
I would see a well funded wikibook project as a viable alternative to the current publisher textbook hegemony. With the work done at wikimedia as a backbone, the right input, enthusiasm and knowhow, a full wikibook science program could be up within a year. The key to the success of such a project would be getting ‘everyone’ involved. Not just science people and curriculum designers, but teachers, science institutions and students as well. A solid organizational structure, a place for debate and disagreement, as well as areas for student input. It has all the potential for being a real turning point for education.
Most of us have used wikipedia, or at least heard of it in the popular press, and the wikibook is another open source model for education using the power of community built web pages. Dave goes through some of the pros and cons including the question of validity, or "How do we know that the information in the textbook is ‘true’?". In this world of information abundance I don’t believe that it’s necesssary to prove that something is true. Once posted, facts can easily be cross-checked, and a strong community will make sure that the information is fact-based. Learners and educators have to be media savvy and understand how they can check the verity of an information source. Truth is what we believe and we need to understand why we believe something.
I remember a course in third year on Canadian historiography (the wikipedia definition is number one on Google) that covered three textbooks, one English Canadian, one French Canadian and one American. Which one of these university textbooks contained the "truth"? In many courses, only one of these texts would have been required reading or required to purchase. A more open wikibook, transparent to all and open to debate, is a much better system, and cheaper, than an unchanging textbook.