George Siemens posts frequently and with clarity on his blog elearnspace, and often I find myself nodding my head as I read or questioning my assumptions or bouncing around to other web sites as I hunt down reinforcing or contradicting information. Today I challenged a couple claims made in his posting, Explaining leads to information (more…)
The Chronicle’s Wired Campus column published a short commentary on the creepy tree house effect, quoting Alec Couros and myself. I then stumbled upon a couple really great blog posts on the subject that simply popped in response–definitely worth the read, as each offers an in-depth reaction to the concept and term:
The persistence of this discussion should be encouraging for John Krutsch and Marc Hugentobler, who will be presenting at this year’s WCET Annual Conference specifically on the creepy tree house effect in a session titled “Taking the ‘Creepy’ Out of ‘Creepy Tree House’”. I look forward to seeing educators and administrators engage in discussion and debate on the meaningful/meaningless-ness of the term, any deleterious effects it might have on teaching and learning, and how we can leverage technology without wasting our time.
UEN and USHE are hosting a showcase of current learning management systems tomorrow, August 14th, at the Marriott library in Salt Lake City. I get to present Moodle at 9:30am, so here’s a quick link to my Moodle Demo presentation page, which includes an overview document and a backchannel for chat.
George Siemens gave a great end-of-first-day keynote session at 2008’s Distance Teaching and Learning conference, in which he addressed connectivism. It was forward-thinking, heady, and deep, which I love in a keynote; unfortunately, I think a number of attendees were expecting it to be “keynote lite”.
George put his slides for this keynote online on SlideShare. Here are my fast-and-furious, almost-at-George’s-pace notes (which I hope to come back in and edit);
Task of education is to “combat” for lucidity
Knowledge is in the connections
more college students in china than in any other country
we are not in control of where education is going
we are not in control of these tbs of information
Complexity
putting together a puzzle
metaphor of a weather pattern – that’s why we can’t predict (Photo)
education is meant to be more like a puzzle
too much information
we end up with extra nuts and bolts
fragmentation
(I remember reading EVERYTHING in a book, in a newspaper, in a magazine, in a comic—hungry for knowledge. Now there’s too much)
“Fragmentation requires re-creation”
Fragmentation challegene coherance”
freedom of creation = abundance
(how do we filter)
There’s something else I need to read.
Need to filter out the noice, but that’s beyond the capability of our tools
fast-paced deep stuff. I feel like I’m a smooth stone George has skipped across a deep water
Brings up Kerr’s challenge
“Something is happening.
“But is it sufficient to warrant a reconsideration of learning theory?”
Web 2.0 is hype. “I never thought I’d hear myself say that blogs are hype.”
oh shiny object slide (George should use more of these—great response, great illustration)
Long timeline ofslwo change: Information (great slide showing transition upwards)
what do the tools allow us to do that they didn’t before
reminds me of the idea that technology returns us from individual thought (intraspersonal/intraspective) to collective though, or thought heavily influenced by the sometimes rash opinion of others (interpersonal/extraspective). Can we have a balance of these when everything is published open, for everyone.
Gutenberg press was one of those technologies that spilled blood
Let’s look at this; don’t look at the tools. It’s about those bigger factors of openness, access, creation, control.
Connectivism.
Tagged his critics on his del.icio.us account—great modeling of the true scholarly approach toward getting at truth.
How is this unique?
(pause. Man, he’s a bullet train barreling down the track)
a unity of learning and knowledge
not a significant difference between learning and knowledge
learning != process; knowledge != product
Abundance
I say overabundance. Scarcity of quality may remain proportional? Of course not exactly, but there will be a quantity of crap that may equal the proportional quantity of silence we had before the Internet. Now instead of not having enough I have too much information. Instead of being hungry and savoring the crumbs of information, I am overfed and nauseous at the sight of more platters of information.
Levelsof networked learning
Neural-biological
Conceptual
External-social
neural
connectionism and ai
what fires together wires together
biologically learning is creating a network
conceptual
when we make a concept map it makes explicit what we know
the occurrence of words reveals connectedness of concepts to create meaning
do network properties exist at a conceptual level?
We do have network attributes to knowledge seems intuitively right
PERSONAL BRAIN
novak on concept maps (see his delicious)
our concepts are understood by filtering through networks
simulations dont teach us steps, they teach us sequences of patterns
enable individuals to form patterns
external and social
we are connected to each other
On Friday, August 8 2008 I presented at Distance Teaching and Learning 2008 with Marc Hugentobler and John Krutsch. I’ve posted the the slides and the rubric from that session as the page, “The Cheatability Factor”.
For this session I added several slides that illustrate my gut reaction to a number of the new technologically-based approaches to inhibit cheating in assessments which I hope you will find amusing.
We had a lively and interactive discussion of the problem of cheating in online courses, and possible approaches to inhibit it. We took one participant through our cheatbility rubric explaining criteria and concepts along the way.
For the first time John administered Buzzword Bingo live in-session with bingo cards printed with key terms from our presentation. We did this not (only) as a self-deprecating joke, but as a means of focusing participant attention on the presenters and the dialog. I believe at least 6 participants scored a prize during this session while playing Buzzword Bingo, though John and Marc had to coax more than one participant to simply shout out BINGO instead of raising their hands!
Notes taken at Distance Teaching and Learning Conference 2008 in Madison, Wisconsin.
Presenters: Sarah Bryans Bongey, Diana Johnson
This presentation initially focused on showcasing a faculty professional development course on teaching to Gardner’s multiple intelligences. The course tries to model MI approach for faculty who are in the online course as students.
Example: Using a guest speaker for interpersonal intelligence
Shows detailed lists of course’s activities.
Some interesting options for participants: interview an online faculty, write a syllabus, etc.
What about a rubric? Faculty know how to write a syllabus. Seems like writing a rubric would appeal to logical-mathematical-strong learners.
All-in-all, the lecture approach to this presentation generally let me down. The second half was more engaging, as it showed explicit examples that purported to approach different learning styles. The hard part about teaching to multiple intelligences is (1) thinking of teaching strategies that will efficiently affect learning in the different intelligence strengths, and (2) finding or making materials or activities for each of those intelligence strengths. Another approach would be to teach students to find their own learning materials or activities online using search engines and repositories, but I fear too much time would be spent by students finding (and hopefully evaluating) the learning resources, not learning and applying the information.
Show more activities, like “podcast videos” (i.e. downloadable mp4s without RSS) for visual-spatial learners.
Listening to the presenters flounder at times with activity ideas for some of the intelligences makes me suspect that it’s at least untenable to teach any subject to all of the supposed intelligences. Thus, I have to ask if it might not be as useful in the long run to try to develop a few core intelligences necessary for learning through student learning skills training.
Show more activities, like online articles for linguistic learners.
Exit, Mr. Stein.
On a similar note, I read Clayton Christensen’s Disrupting Class this month, and much of it’s premise is based on Gardner’s multiple intelligences theory. Christensen suggests that online tutoring resources and tools will help education better address these intelligence strengths. His emphasis on disruptive technology makes it seem possible by suggesting MI approaches can only thrive through user-developed, user-networked access to these resources and tools. And, having recently authored a few pages of content for a learning module that bridges Disrupting Class with open educational resources and learning branches, I think I may have found a new presentation topic.
Notes taken at Distance Teaching and Learning Conference 2008 in Madison, Wisconsin.
Presenter: Dam Lim
Learning games are built for mobile devices using SWF and XML. Mr. Lim talks about how he would like a single interface, and comments on possibilities for inter-institutional collaborations. I’m sure John Krutsch will be talking to him afterwards.
How does this work cross-(mobile-)platform? I know you can play YouTube videos, but you can’t generally run Flash content on iPhone or on Treo’s Blazer. Mr. Lim is using Windows Mobile on a PocketPC to demo this.
Plays a YouTube.com videos that show how making of the game works.
YouTube.com video is too small to see. Should make it full-screen.
Quickly demonstrates how the game is made and loaded in PocketPC.
I’d like to see the game itself in greater depth, and discuss how these are implemented into a course structure, and at least the predicted impact on learning.
Sums up with plenty of design challenges–so many broad and disruptive challenges leave me pessimistic.
Shows what Krutsch labels “simulated screenshots” of what a game might look like on iPhone (if it supported Flash).
Exit Mr. Stein.
Notes taken at Distance Teaching and Learning Conference 2008 in Madison, Wisconsin.
Presenters: Tina Parscal, Maureen Hencmann
Session presents an extremely brief overview of cognitive apprenticeship. Uses obnoxious, unnecessary terms “more knowledgeable other” (MKO) instead of “expert”, and “less knowledgable other” (LKO) instead of learner.
Implementation aspects of cognitive apprenticeship educational approach:
Content
Modeling
Coaching
Scaffolding and fading
Articulation
Exploration
Reflection
Let learners decide what tools to use to solve a problem
Idea for application: Would it be neat to give 3 lessons that are optional, and give 3 different projects that may use some or all of those lessons?)
As part of cognitive apprenticeship, “facilitators” should “encourage discovery”. Learners should “Learn to learn”
Does this help learners learn? If so, why? Does it cement or reinforce the important information or skills?
Prompt students to seek answers in a (general) document (learn to navigate the course and use resources–not spoon feeding).
Is this annoying, inefficient? Is there a faster way to deliver the information? Or is learning to navigate a system (that they may never use again, or use infrequently) that important? (Counterpoint: you could send them to a system that they should use, but is this now an information management task? E.g. Google, Wikipedia, etc. Is that appropriate here, or better in a learning skills course? Do computer literacy courses require this?)
Write good questions and robust feedback.
Discussion – articulation, reflection, exploration
In a lot of ways, my DGM 2120 and 2740 courses are modeled on cognitive apprenticeship, though I’ve found that in 2120 greater structuring was necessary.
Course design has a lot of cute representative icons relating to the content. Are these useful? Will these symbols be used beyond the course? I’m always looking for how what we learn or do in class is applicable beyond the class. That’s the epitome of education.
Shows off interactive Flash “office” to simulate a few questions principals might have to deal with daily, with MC options for responses to e-mail, phone call.
Presenters walk through these pretty intensively, but I got lost thinking about the tool and the scenario as a learner. Participants need to be reminded to think about this as an example to reflect upon as an educator. We do reflect on this at the end.
Break into groups for corrabolative discussion.
Exit, Mr. Stein.