Learning

Learning

Non scholae sed vitae discimus

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Our school district is holding a public “focus group” on March 1st in order to answer three questions:

  1. What is working in education in NB?
  2. What is not working in education in NB?
  3. What, if any, suggestions do you have for the DEC?

I have attended many such focus groups, including the recent one held by NextNB, and I am becoming cynical about the process of asking for public input and promptly ignoring it. I also have my doubts whether any input at the district level is going to have an effect on the system, as everything is controlled by the Minister of Education – curriculum, budgets, standards, etc.

I tend to agree with Peter Drucker’s points on public education – that schools tend to focus on weaknesses instead of strengths. I also believe that our schools focus too much on content dissemination and not enough on meta-skills like learning how to learn or information literacy. I’m not sure how to address these criticisms without some serious structural changes, and these will not happen at the district level.

Public consultation exercises strike me as something akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic – a bit futile. I know that the facilitators of this meeting are well-intentioned, but I don’t think that this session will have any impact on learning in our schools. Am I too jaded?

As a start, I have bookmarked a list of Public Education links to some interesting commentaries on the subject.
Any advice?

ePortfolios

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If you’re wondering about the value of ePortfolios in high school, then read Helen Barrett’s article in response to a student’s question, "I am a student in high school. Why is it manditory for me to make a proficient on my portfolio for me to graduate? I have all of my credits to graduate, but if I make lower than an proficient I don’t get to graduate."

Would you rather spend a day taking a series of tests that just make you nervous, don’t help you learn and only assess how well you can remember a lot of facts or solve a lot of problems, most of which are irrelevant to your life? And if you don’t pass those tests, you have to keep taking them until you do pass? Isn’t it much better to carefully and reflectively develop a portfolio that showcases your strengths and your growth over time?

For those interested in ePortfolios at the university level, take a look at ePortfolio@York

* You can also go to the Open Source Portfolio Initiative and see what this community initiative is doing around ePortfolios in general.

Via Jeremy Hiebert

Research on the Web

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Will, at Weblogg-ed (an excellent resource for educators), discusses teachers, students and information literacy on the Web.

"I think it’s better for everyone if we just give them a list of sites they can use when they do their papers," the principal said, "and tell them they have to have a certain number of those resources in the final product."



Now, this is a loose transcript of the conversation, but the point is clear. Instead of teaching effective use of the tool, the easy way is to limit the reach of the tool, rein it in and limit its effect. If that is or will become the prevailing view, we are all in serious, serious trouble…

I see with my children (Grades 5 & 7) that research skills and media literacy are not developed at all in the New Brunswick school system. These are critical skills, especially since there are fewer resources in our school and public libraries. My own research has found two good online resources for students. The KVL Research Portal is easy to use and my son has found it quite helpful. The Big 6 Information Literacy site has some good information, but is not as dynamic as KVL’s. My perspective is that if the schools don’t teach information literacy, then it’s up to parents.

Any other recommendations would be appreciated. I put "Student Resources" sites on FURL for future reference.

Jay on Workflow

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Jay Cross has posted his recent article, co-authored with Tony O’Driscoll, in Training Magazine – Workflow Learning Gets Real. Workflow learning is the next step in the transition from apprenticeship to instructor-led training and now to workflow learning, which incorporates many of the principles of performance-centred design, but now within a networked environment. If you’re in the business of training, consider this:

If the training organization in every company evaporated into thin air or disappeared through a wormhole to teaching heaven, individuals would continue to learn.

Incorporating the current reality, where anyone can be connected with almost everyone, at any time, Jay says:

As we enter an age of informal and workflow learning, authority is less centralized than ever before. "Learning is best understood as an interaction among practitioners, rather than a process in which a producer provides knowledge to a consumer," says Etienne Wenger, a social researcher and champion of communities of practice.

So if you’re still in the "training" business, you had better get focused on the "performance" business very quickly. The workflow approach incorporates learning directly into work, not as a separate activity. I see this as the intersection of process & system design, cognition and especially social behaviour. In other words, how people work, learn and interact – all at the same time and in a messy and very human way.

 

Action Research

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Robert Paterson offers some good advice to federal Social Development Minister Ken Dryden, in the spirit of action research, to stop trying to be all things to all people and get on with creating an effective child care programme:

Instead of trying to do a deal with everyone – why not put out the DNA of what you want. Not just baby sitting but development. Development that most can access. Attach say 2 Billion to this and say that the first 3 provinces that agree will get the deal as offered. You will then monitor the deal for 3 years and we will all learn what works.

Often when we try to address complex problems that involve multiple parties and perspectives, we can get analysis paralysis, because we will never have all of the answers. Sometimes it’s best to just get on with it – by starting small, being open to learn from our experiences and adjusting as we go. Rob’s advice makes sense to me.

 

More eLearning Jobs

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Following up on last week’s post on PulseLearning, it seems than another Fredericton company is hiring – Isomni Solutions. The word is that they’re looking for an instructional designer, two business analysts (with over 10 years experience) as well as a passel of .NET programmers. From their website, Isomni states that they are focused on eHealth and portal development, amongst other areas.

ATutor 1.4.3

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ATutor, a Canadian Open Source Web-based Learning Content Management System (LCMS), has just released its latest version 1.4.3. ATutor’s trademark function is that it is designed with accessibility and adaptability in mind.

New in this release:

Forum Upgrades: System wide and shared forums for communication across courses. Create communities around groups of course forums, or around an entire ATutor course server. Alumni participation in course forums.
Subscribe to general forums or course forums, or subscribe to specific topic threads to receive messages by email. Quickly access current forum messages through the Forum Posts menu module.



Enrollment Manager Overhaul: Create, import, and export course enrollment lists, and manage enrolled students and alumni. New tabbed display for managing student information, managing course lists, managing roles and privileges, as well as creating and managing groups.



Language Overhaul: Language management has been completely re-designed. Translate, import, and export language from within your own ATutor installation. Support for the UTF-8 character set. ATutor is available in more than 30 languages.



Question Database: Create tests by adding questions to, and retrieving questions from, a test item repository.



Test/Survey Manager Upgrade: Create image based test items, arrange multiple choice questions vertically or horizontally, assign tests to a class, to groups, or to individual students, analyse test data and generate statistics.



Theme Manager: Easily copy, import, and export ATutor themes.



RSS Feeds: Syndicate ATutor course announcements to display them on remote Web sites.



Embed ACollab: Embed ACollab [collaborative workspace] into ATutor, or open it in a new window to participate in course group activities.

Easy Enrollment: Students can now enroll in courses through the Browse Courses screen.

Open source learning systems, like this SCORM compliant LCMS, are steadily improving and becoming viable options for any organization, public or private.

New eLearning Company in New Brunswick

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Well, this is news to me, but I’m probably way behind on the local gossip.

It appears that the Irish elearning company, PulseLearning has opened an office in Fredericton, NB. The company focuses on compliance training, which seems like a sustainable business model, as the creation of new rules and regulations is not likely to end soon. PulseLearning is currently hiring project managers and instructional designers, and they join a number of established elearning companies in Fredericton, making for good job prospects in the capital city.

Some Free Advice for Higher Education

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Here is some free advice for any university or college, public or private. If you are wondering how you can stay in touch with your graduates and foster a sense of community, especially when it comes to future fund raising, then offer free blogs. This beats collecting addresses, making phone calls and all the other ways that development officers try to raise interest and money. Let your graduates be part of your university when you’re not asking for money, and they will be there when you need them.

Wellesley College is already doing it, so get on the wave now. If you need any advice, give me a call [shameless self-promotion].

Drupal for Learning

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Do you want to be in on the ground floor of the development of a new web-based learning system? Boris Mann sums up the activities of a lot of people who want to create a learning-oriented Drupal CMS. The time has come to get things going, and I know that Will already has a lot of ideas.

Having been on the inside of one proprietary LCMS, and having evaluated dozens of LMS/LCMS, I would like to see the creation of a much looser, but still learning-oriented, structure. I think that Scott Wilson’s graphic of a next generation virtual learning environment has some promise. I also believe that we should try to push the envelope and allow for different instructional strategies; something beyond testing through quizzes and questionaires. For example, Dave Jonassen has developed an instructional design methodology for problem-based learning and I know that he has been looking for someone to implement it on the web:

For the past few years, I have devoted most of my professional research and development to better understanding problem solving. Why? Primarily because the field of instructional design has largely ignored problem solving, so there is very little understanding of how humans solve problems or how to support learning, how to solve problems.

Does this sound like an interesting project for the Drupal community or anyone else?