21st Century learning mindmap

To view my mind map go to my wiki. After you click on the image, be sure to click on the 'view in original size' option. Otherwise you won't be able to read it.

Curt Bonk's Presentation

The essence Dr. Bonk’s presentation can be summarized by quotes he offered from Bryan Alexander:

“The Web 2.0 relates to microcontent. Such microcontent takes the form of streams of revisions to a Wikipedia document, blog postings and hyperlinking, and status changes in a social networking software space. And once up, this content can be saved, shared, copied, and quoted as well as repurposed for still other uses. In our time-crunched society, it is much easier to start a wiki entry or compose a blog summary of an event, than to write an article or a book. And when posted, there is some immediate sense of personal empowerment or identity.”

This, I think, illustrates both the greatest power of Web 2.0 and its greatest weakness. The power is that everyone has a voice; and the weakness is that everyone has a voice. Critical thinking—the ability to sort the wheat from the chaff—will be a crucial educational skill in years to come.

Also, Alexander’s statement about microcontent is very apt. Everywhere on the web I see the trend to abbreviate words, thoughts, even meaning. That is its greatest threat to scholarship—the tendency to remain on the surface of things. How that tendency will affect higher education is anyone’s guess.

Bonk quoted Alexander further: “How much more broadly will this connective matrix grow under the impact of the openness, ease of entry, and social nature of Web 2.0? How can higher education respond, when it offers a complex, contradictory mix of openness and restriction, public engagement and cloistering?”

How indeed? Perhaps it will bring a much-needed pragmatism, a focus on real-world issues in real-time, rather than the production of ponderous academic tomes with little relevance to the ordinary person. One can only hope. Perhaps, rather, we’ll become a society of intellectual light-weights.

Emerging Technologies for Learning

For me, the most interesting part of this article for me was the section on misconceptions and assumptions about today’s learners. Some of the relevant parts were:

Technology preferences
While this generation shows no fear of technology, ‘digital comfort’ does not necessarily mean technology proficiency – particularly with academic tools. Nor does comfort with technology equate to a full appreciation of issues such as intellectual property, privacy or security.

Information fluency
Students need to know how to find and use information, and technology is a critical enabler. However, only 31 per cent of information searches are successful. Just because students know how to open a Web browser, educators should not assume that everyone knows how to search for information. And just because students can find information doesn’t mean it is reputable or truthful.

Access to technology
In a wired world it is easy to assume that all students have access to a computer and the network, whether at home or at school. However, a digital divide still exists in many communities – one defined as more than just having access to a computer. A ‘second-level digital divide’ may exist based on machine vintage, connectivity, online skills, autonomy and freedom of access, and computer-use support.

Maturity
It is easy to assume that learners – with their tech-savvy attitudes and worldwise veneer – have greater maturity than their years. We are cautioned that this presumption of maturity is unfounded on many levels. In a multi-tasking, fast-forward world, learners may not be stopping to reflect on what they know, how they behave, and the values they hold. In fact, the tendency of young people to not be reflective – to pause, think, and ponder – may simply be a characteristic of youth. However, in an environment where students are posting their lives on the internet, stopping to consider what they are doing and its future impact is essential.

I have assumed, apparently mistakenly, that younger learners have Web 2.0 technology mastered. It hadn’t really occurred to me that many young people might know how to log onto Facebook and upload video to Youtube, but not much else.

Flat Classroom Project

I looked at the Globalization and Outsourcing segment of the flat classroom project. To answer Kim's questions:

1. What are the instructional objectives?

There were no specific objectives listed by the instructors. This I thought was a good thing, overall. Why limit the creative freedom in a project like this, where the learning unfolds from the process as much as the content? Some instructions were provided however:

• Discuss ways technology has changed the way people do business with each other and give specific examples from around the world
• Provide evidence of how the development of outsourcing has changed job opportunities and created new areas of expertise and opportunity in both areas. Discuss this in relation to both sides of the world (eg offshore tutoring)
• Discuss what job skills are necessary for the 21st Century and how this impacts on plans and trends in education for your country and the rest of the world

2. How were technologies are used by the students?

The digital technologies (listed below) were used to communicate some factual information, but mostly opinion and emotion dominated, particularly in the digital stories. This may be appropriate, but I thought some data regarding the effects of outsourcing and globalization would have made the presentation more compelling. (This was my one criticism of the project: there was a paucity of research.)

3. Put yourself in the students place, and assess what they may learn from the learning experience

One of the most interesting things about the Globalization and Outsourcing section was how a couple of the digital stories incorporated segments developed by students in other countries, as a way to illustrate outsourcing. This helped develop cross-cultural awareness and collaborative skills. There was also an evaluation/critique section at the end of the wiki, which required some critical thinking skills. But, most of all, I believe the students were learning about using a creative medium (film) to communicate content.

My favorite digital story was from Qatar, where the presenter was a girl in a Muslim head scarf and the narration was laid over a hip-hop track. It also included bloopers, which seemed to me a very Western concept. I suppose one could interpret this as evidence of the hegemony of Western (particularly American) culture, but to me it represented the common interests of teenagers world-wide. Mind you, these were English speaking students from international schools--not a particularly representative sample.

4. List technologies they are using in order to create their digital stories, write research on background, news, impact on education, etc in their wiki site.

The primary technologies used were: the wikispace container that held the content, audio-visual technology for digital stories, word processing software for text, internet for research.

Blogs vs. Wikis

The key difference is that wikis can be used for collaboration, while blogs are typically one-way communications. Of course, in practice, things are not quite this clear cut.

Blogs most often have an option for readers to leave comments, which can form a kind of multiple-level communication where the blogger and readers leave various replies to comments, creating a discussion string ( blogoshere ping pong, if you will). Blogs can also be linked together, creating a community of bloggers, sharing ideas and opinions.

Wikis, which are very useful for collaboration because people are empowered to add to and edit the work of others, can also be set up without permissions for outside users, in which case they act like crude websites, in that they are one-way and can have multiple pages and sub-pages.

What it means to be educated

In Growing up with Google--What it Means to Education [Emerging Technologies for Learning – Volume 3 (2008)], Diana G. Oblinger writes the following:

"Learners need skills that go far beyond reading, memorisation and communication. Educational institutions have an obligation to help students cultivate those skills that learners have the most difficulty attaining on their own, such as:
1. judgement, or the ability to distinguish the reliable from unreliable information
2. synthesis, or the capacity to follow the longer argument or narrative across multiple modalities
3. research, or the activity of searching, discovering, and disseminating relevant information in a credible manner
4. practice, or the opportunity to learn-by-doing within authentic disciplinary communities
5. negotiation, or the flexibility to work across disciplinary and cultural boundaries to generate innovative, alternative solutions."

Is there a single one of those five points that wouldn't have been equally relevant in Renaissance Italy? The technology may have changed, but the principles of true education remain the same.

Gordon Dale

Learning in the Digital Age

In Learning in the Digital Age, John Seely Brown begins by defining the key differences between the terms information and knowledge. Information, he says, “is usually considered independent of any particular individual—it can be looked up in a book or retrieved online—whereas knowledge is usually associated with a knower, that is, it resides in someone’s mind. Knowledge is something we digest rather than merely hold; it’s usually deeply intertwined with the knower’s understanding of the practices surrounding its use.”

He then describes two kinds of knowledge, explicit and tacit: “The explicit lives in books and in our brains as concepts and facts and deals with the “know-what.” The tacit deals with the “know-how” that is best manifested in work practices and skills. The tacit resides in action, most often in participation with others. As a consequence, tacit knowledge can be distributed as a shared, socially constructed understanding that emerges from collaboration.”

I was very pleased, actually, to read these definitions, because they clarify an issue I’ve struggled with for some time. It’s been obvious to me that there’s a difference between information and knowledge, but I haven’t been able to describe it satisfactorily. Information is something that can be looked up; knowledge is something we digest rather than merely hold (and I would emphasize the word merely) captures the difference perfectly.

Brown then goes on to talk about enculturation. He states: “Learning by doing with others offers students the opportunity for in-depth enculturation into a particular practice, where one learns to be a physicist, social scientist, historian, etc., in contrast to just learning about such professions. Enculturation is crucial to learning, since relatively little of the complex web of practice can effectively be made the subject of explicit instruction.” Graduate education today, he says, “usually involves a form of apprenticeship, offers the intensive, in-depth enculturation that stems from participation in a particular community.”

This past summer I did an instructional design internship at Genentech and it was just as Brown describes it: learning about being an instructional designer rather than learning about instructional design. I highly recommend the process.

Brown then describes what he sees as dimensional shifts in the way digital learners learn. They are:

1. The ability to communicate and express oneself with images (still and moving), sound, and other media is a crucial aspect of the new literacy. Beyond this, information navigation is perhaps the key component of literacy in the digital age.

2. A shift is taking place in learning from an authority-based lecture model to discovery-based learning.

3. Classically, reasoning is linked with the deductive and abstract. Yet young learners working with digital media seem to focus more on the concrete, suggesting a form of bricolage, a concept having to do with one’s abilities to find something (perhaps a tool, some open source code, images, music, text) that can be used or transformed to build something new.

4. There is a growing bias toward action—to try new things without reading the manual or taking a course. This tendency shifts the focus to learning in situ with and from each other.

I don’t have any argument with these hypotheses, but I’d like to see some actual research. In ITEC 800, Kim said that there was a lot of discussion about the changes Web 2.0 etc. is fomenting, but not much actual research. I agree. Maybe things are changing so quickly that research is out of date before it even gets out of the design stage, but I would like to see discussions such as Brown’s that are based on something more substantive than anecdotal evidence. Perhaps in time they will be.

Gordon Dale

Connectivism: George Siemens

Because I was in Canada last week and, due to a comedy of errors (not actually very funny at the time), didn't have access to a computer, I'm writing this with the benefit of having read some of the other posts.

I shared some of the frustration others felt with the article in general (not much of a theory, contained many truisms, etc.), so I won't cover the same ground. Instead I'll focus on a single line, not about connectivism per se, but from the list that Siemens gives of significant trends in learning (not that he offered any evidence to back up his claim that these were trends): Technology is altering (rewiring) our brains. The tools we use define and shape our thinking.

Earlier this year, in an article entitled Is Google Making Us Stupid? published in the Atlantic (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google), Nicholas Carr wrote: "Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory...I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy...Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do...The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle...what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles."

This rings true for me. I see it in my own blog entries. The temptation is to blast out a few superficial thoughts and move on. I'm worried about boring my audience. There's too much information and too little time. And our instructional methodologies mimic this fragmentation: blogs, wikis, podcasts. I recently received in my email inbox an article on designing elearning for PDAs.

Carr ends his article as follows:

"Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking."

If Siemens is correct and technology is altering (rewiring) our brains and the tools we use define and shape our thinking, then we'd be well advised to think not just about how to use the tools we are given, but how to wisely choose the tools we use.

Reflections on September 4th class

There might have been a time when an educated person could expect to know almost all that was worth knowing (a polymath such as Aristotle, for example), but in modern times, with increasing specialization and the exponential growth of superficial knowledge, this is no longer remotely feasible. There's simply too much information for a single brain, or a thousand brains, to hold. And it's growing daily. Sometimes I sit in my courtyard with a cup of tea and think about all those writers, writing, all those bloggers, blogging. I think about all those words piling up, words written but largely (and justifiably) unread, and it makes my head hurt.

Chuang Tsu, in the 4th Century B.C., wrote: Life has a limit, but knowledge is without limit. For the limited to pursue the unlimited is futile.

Maybe his head hurt, too.

Connectivism, as I understand it, is about process, not content. Today, more than ever, we need to know how to find and store information (I was originally going to write: we need to know how to find and store knowledge, but of course as information grows, knowledge diminishes. And as for wisdom... well, as the Monty Python crew might have said, wisdom is right out.).

Forget committing information to memory. The people who will survive best in the next hundred years, I suspect, will be those who can swim daily in an ocean of information without swallowing a sip.

Reflection--August 28th 830 Class

So far so good. It looks like 830 will be an interesting class. I particularly enjoyed the group exercise in which we defined Web 2.0. I was recently asked about Web 2.0 in a meeting and was able to talk about it being collaborative in nature, but this exercise helped clarify my thinking. One group talked about the web user's evolution from a consumer of information to a co-creator of information, and that rang true for me. I have an interest in leadership development and am beginning to see more clearly how 2.0 technologies can enhance that process, particularly by providing geographically disperse leaders/managers with a way to share their experience and learn from peers.

The textbooks also look to be very interesting, not just as resources for this course, but in their own right.

Finally, I have to say I missed Walter, who was unable to attend the first class. He's quite ill, and I wish him a speedy recovery.