Flexknowlogy

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, which examines the past, present, and future roles of universities. For instance, George says:

At one point, we thought content was the value point of universities. Wrong. MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative changed that.

In my opinion this is only partly true at best. First, MIT’s OpenCourseWare is not the same as the content of MIT. MIT OCW is “not … a MIT education”, nor is it claimed to be. Having looked at a lot of the OCW that is available on MIT and other sites I don’t see that the majority of “OCW” qualifies as a full course, let alone worthy of being labeled the professor’s “content”. While the better examples of MIT OCW include video lectures with instructor notes, many are simply syllabi with reading lists, outlines, or loose notes. Does this represent MIT’s content? How does one define the university’s content as a value point?

We might proceed by asking, what is content? Is content a static thing that can be documented on the Web? Where is content contained? In the university libraries? If so, interlibrary loan crossed that boundary decades ago. Is it in the faculty themselves? Quality faculty are never static; their lectures change as their research develops as their expertise expands or deepens as their knowledge grows. To me having access to an expert is quite different from having access to that expert’s syllabus and lecture notes. As mentioned, some of MIT’s OCW includes taped lectures (as does UC Berkeley’s Webcasts), arguably taking one as close to being in the classroom as possible without being a student. Other OCW (like the UK Open University’s LearningSpace) replicates full or nearly-full online course materials as OCW, though still not approximately a true classroom experience as they leave assessments and interaction to the self-learner’s own means. This brings us to George’s second value point declamation:

Ok, then the interaction with faculty is the value point. And wrong again. Open communication and collaboration in online environments with networks of peers and experts gave us control over our interactions.”

This statement assumes (1) that all your favorite experts are online or connected to online environments, and (2) that these experts are willing and able to interact with anyone that makes a demand of their time. If this were true, I’d be following Harold Bloom on Twitter, and making impromptu Skype calls with him on Sunday afternoons. Or perhaps the implication is that even though Harold Bloom is not online or willing to communicate with me, someone else like Bloom is, or even better: dozens of willing, online enthusiasts will do in Harold Bloom’s stead. I would counter that while base information may no longer be scarce, lucidity and expertise is still uncommon, and true genius remains rare.

Admittedly I may be missing the forest for the trees; the thrust of George’s original post was to suppose that “the role of university may well become one of being a coherence-maker, helping learners make sense of information abundance and change”. I agree with that, but I have to echo’s George’s final comment that “university’s have always done this”. I am not convinced that the privileged access to unversities is anything more than superficially endangered by online content repositories and social networks. I still see the university’s value points centering on content and expert interactions. Coherence-making will continue to be a value point, if one that does need to be consciously magnified as we continually orbit closer and closer to information and the gravity it impresses on our daily lives.

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:

• LilaTov Cocktail: “Creepy Treehouse” effect: Twitter & Facebook suck when they’re required by your professor
• Marie-Jose Klaver Met je professor in een boomhut (In a Treehouse with Your Professor) (Dutch — does “kippenvel” mean “goosebumps”?)
• AnneC Trouver l’équilibre (French — relates personal experiences with student resistance to instructor-implemented social media)
• History-ing: Creepy Treehouse

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.

As several other bloggers have pointed out (Michael B. Horn & Clayton Christensen, Guide to Online Schools), there is a clear and surprising disparity between the two US presidential candidates volubility on the matter of online education. While Barack Obama has been “mum” on the subject of online education or virtual schools, John McCain has explicitly stated his support for online education and virtual schools for k-12, and has even gone as far as promising federal funding for online learning programs.

My take on this is fairly mundane. First, I think that the online learning thing was not Mr. McCain’s idea; rather, he likely had a savvy adviser who laid out the potential benefits of online K-12 education, and online learning’s growing attraction to students and parents alike. Nonetheless, he has taken a position that may rankle those who favor the traditional means of obtaining that coveted piece of paper, whereas Mr. Obama has not.

Secondly, as has been suggested by at least two Obama supporters on their my.barackobama.com-hosted blogs, Mr. Obama would probably prefer to focus on investing federal funds in existing “real” schools. This is akin to a comment purportedly made by our current university President, who said, “I don’t want online learning to flourish because it takes revenue away from the brick-and-mortar.” Someone needs to let these folks that online learning is more cost-effective than brick-and-mortar, especially if built right. At the same time, I will disclaim the disparity by suggesting that Mr. Obama, once fully informed, is likely to counterprove some of his supporters by coming out in support of online learning and virtual schools when challenged on the issue. In the big game of presidential election politics, this is not a campaign-breaking issue.

But since Mr. McCain has beaten Mr. Obama to the punch, let my proffer my opinion on his suggestions:

1. “…$500 million in current federal funds to build new virtual schools and support the development of online course offerings for students.”
2. “…$250 million through a competitive grant program to support states that commit to expanding Online education opportunities.”
3. “…$250 million for digital passport scholarships to help students pay for Online tutors or enroll in virtual schools. Low-income students will be eligible to receive up to $4,000 to enroll in an online course, SAT/ACT prep course, credit recovery or tutoring services offered by a virtual provider.”

Total: $1 billion. For a fiscal conservative who is adamant about reducing government spending, that’s a lot of money, right? As they say, a million here, a million there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money. I had to put this in perspective: While the US annual spending on K-12 education is around $536 billion, only about $43 billion comes from federal funding. Adding in Mr. McCain’s proposed $1 billion would become just under 3% of the current annual federal expenditures for K-12. Because the US Constitution leaves education funding primarily in state hands, I think Mr. McCain is right to offer 25% of that billion as grants to states, and another 25% directly to students. This reminds me of Clayton Christensen’s Disrupting Class, which suggests that the monolithic nature of K-12 public education will make the sort of necessary disruptive innovations difficult at first, and that the first stage of the disruption will likely happen through outside server providers. In fact, Mr. Christensen uses nearly identical key language that Mr. McCain uses: “tutoring services offered by a virtual provider”.

I’ve been itching to write a post on “edupunk” since Jim Groom first added the term to our edtech lexicon. The term “edupunk” is both provocative and deeper than it seems, and so it deserves the benefit of a close analysis. My problems with “edupunk” have been:

1. I have a hard enough time converting faculty to use edtech as it is; a label like “edupunk” will only further alienate those faculty. And as john Krutsch suggested, “cliques suck, especially when you are on the outside”.
2. “edupunk” presumes a politik that Mr. Downes has already claimed as “progressive”, but that is too exclusive for me. (I am not “a progressive” [but it’s amusing how vilifying that statement sounds–”liberal” was far more neutral, though admittedly it had gained some negative connotations in the last several decades. Ergh, I digress.]), and implies a knee-jerk or overgeneralized anti-establishment/anti-corporate mentality that I am not willing to fully accept.

There might be other reasons for my distaste. I may be taking the term in an altogether too personal context, for as a youth I was pretty active in the punk music scene, but I wasn’t ever on the inside of punk. You see, my friends who were into the cookie-cutter punk politico dug a lot of my libertarian ideals, but didn’t understand my capitalism, and my Brave New World “elitist” interpretation that conservative/traditionalism is served by (if not necessitates) punk-type counter-culture just as punk-type counter-culture is served by conservative/traditionalism. Even if we had a utopia (by anybody’s definition), we would always need an other, and some other’s are more harmless than others. Also, punk itself is not so punk as it would like to think it is–as I suggested, it’s often cookie-cutter, it’s often whiny or anti-corporate, and not because of strong ideals as much as it is because of failure or missed opportunities to exploit the corporate system for it’s own benefit. Most “punk” bands will “sell-out” if they get the chance. Sell-outs are sell-outs, and “true punk” treats them as such, maintaining a superficial fraternity with the black-white-black-sheep punk bands through artificial sub-labels like “pop punk”.

It may be that some edtech’ers feel the same way about educators who toe the corporate line, and thus find “edupunk” a great metaphor for their societal angst. While I have plenty of of my own societal angst, it rarely fits under any the de facto “edupunk” political posturing. At the same time, I’ve found that I can sit down with edtech’ers on the other side of the political fence and agree a lot on issues of educational strategies and philosophies for technological adoption, which makes Ken Carroll’s suggestion the more useful and bridge-building: “I would not recommend that we politicize learning 2.0″. Let politics stump us when it can; I’m here to make teaching and learning better and easier.

But at the same time, the DIY, question-authority aspect of edupunk is not only attractive to me, it resonates with my daily activities–to an extent. Martin Weller nailed the middle path (my emphasis):

it’s not about being an edupunk, but rather preserving some area of what you do where you can do edupunk kinda stuff … universities and educators need to have edupunk time - a period when you can explore stuff away from the mass of concerns that arise.

Martin suggests 10% of your day for edupunk time, i.e. innovation, experimentation, DIY, whatever. I wouldn’t do it for less than 33.33333%.

There’s some palpable hypocrisy in the response by many educators and administrators to the results of two recent research studies on the 2002 - 2007 efforts of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), and NCLB’s Reading First program.

Let me preface this by stating that I do not argue one way or another for either Reading First or No Child Left Behind–I have not examined enough information to be competent to make any conclusion, nor am I sure that current research efforts have been appropriately thorough or scientific. Though I have opinions on what is most effective in reading education, and though I am troubled by a report that suggests our brightest students are languishing under NCLB, I haven’t yet bet on a pony.

Not too long ago we received an interim report from the National Center for Education Evaluation covering 2004-05 and 2005-06 school years. While this report showed some positive increases in the amount of time spent on reading education in the classroom, it found no significant statistical increase in reading scores from Reading First programs. Opponents of Reading First leapt on these results as more evidence to condemn the program itself (and NCLB by simple association).

Reading First is a program that we already know to be beleagured by mismanagement and hindered by internal corruption. So to me, an interim report showing no statistically significant increase in student results is insufficient evidence for termination. Yet popular news reports have called the program “ineffective” and opponents accused it of outright “failure”, when the reality is report shows at least Reading First is at least as effective as existing instructional efforts, though not proven to be more effective. And not surprisingly, Congress and Senate education panels have both voted to drop funding for the program.

What irks me is how opponents of NCLB and Reading First were perfectly willing to accept the standardized test-based results of the Reading First report because it supports their position, and yet then turn around and completely discount a new report out today that finds that since the implementation of No Child Left Behind, student test scores have been on the rise by stating that standardized testing is no way to measure student ability, and is in fact contrary to the higher goals and purposes of education in general.

Am I the only one that sniffs and cringes at the hypocrisy here? Or is it merely that the hypocrisy and hyperbole comes mostly from the lowest common denominator of anti-NCLB bloggers and commenters, made pungent for being broadly accessible and visible through Our Connected Web?

Continuing from yesterday’s post, 31 Out of 95 E-Learning Ideas Ain’t Bad, here’s the second half of my pick of the strongest e-learning ideas found in Patti Shank’s useful book, The Online Learning Idea Book: 95 Ways to Enhance Technology-Based and Blended Learning.

17. Use electronic flash cards (p 184). (Coincidentally, @KenWoodward and I are working on providing an extremely reusable flash cards app for both desktop Web browsers and handheld devices.)
18. Drag-and-drop activities for self-assessment within a lesson (p 194).
19. Use pre- and post-assessments to demonstrate the value of the e-learning (p 205).
20. Provide flowchart(s) to illustrate processes (p 216). (I’ve found these are easy to create in most spreadsheet programs.)
21. As part of prototyping and design, write a learner scenario to describe possible interactions with e-learning (p 221).
22. Tap into learners’ “emotional brain” with personalized learning models (Concrete experience; Reflective observation; Abstract hypothesis; Active testing) (p 226). (This model is similar to Stevick’s Observe - Span - Do, which I’ve found to be effective in language learning.)
23. Use content templates to rapidly turn out lesson pages with a consistent look and feel (p 228; p 232).
24. Use concept maps and causal loops for navigation as an alternative to linear navigation for complex concepts (p 240). (I do recall some early studies of hypertextual learning suggested that non-linear navigation is risky at best.)
25. Embed hyperlinks to glossary entries within the lesson content (p 249).
26. Provide a printable summary of lesson content as a study aid (p 265).
27. Develop a virtual campus to help wholly distance learners orient themselves and feel connected (p 287).
28. Use visuals to show relationships between course concepts (p 291).
29. Slow down or speed up motion to demonstrate complex physical skills (p 301).
30. Create an interactive, multidimensional timeline for subjects such as history that weave events in places and times (p 308).
31. Use still and interactive graphics for complex or obscure physical concepts (e.g. atoms, cells, galaxies, tidal pools) (p 312; 315; 318; 321; 324).

These 31 ideas are the choicest out of Shank’s 95+ picks. Note that I’ve written 95+; Shank explains at the end that there are more than 95 ideas in this book, despite the title. She suggests that the element of surprise can help learning along, yet at the same time she notes that she herself wouldn’t have noticed, and the book doesn’t even number the ideas so that you could know there were more than 95. Really, who’s going to be keeping count in their head?

Length and those minor complaints aside, I recommend this book to instructional designers or technology-minded teachers, if only to see the screen-shots illustrating the most useful and innovative ideas.

Patti Shank has put together The Online Learning Idea Book: 95 Ways to Enhance Technology-Based and Blended Learning, an annotated collection of 95+ examples of e-learning tools, scenarios, or applications. Her book delivers best-practices in e-learning in a format that is both accessible and well-illustrated. And while I am glad she put this book together as it will be especially useful to those just getting into the field of e-learning, my general reaction to the book was that it is too long, being packed with a number of examples that are either redundant or simply common sense.

I might correct myself on that last point to include “common sense” ideas that are of significant value; yet even so, I think I could edit Shank’s book down to simply 31 useful and noteworthy ideas for technology-enhanced teaching. My version would include just the following.

1. Provide a detailed, weekly study schedule (p 16).
2. Embed performance tips to direct study and discipline toward learner success (p 20).
3. Anonymous weekly surveys to collect formative feedback (p 31).
4. Have contingency plans in place for learning in the case of technology failure (p 39).
5. Explain discussion message protocols to keep students focused and comfortable in forums (p 78).
6. Let learners evaluate their own contributions to the course through online quizzes or surveys (p 82).
7. Use tables as graphical organizers to illustrate relationships between information or concepts (p 94).
8. Ask students to enter their answer and compare it to an expert’s response (p 101).
9. You mouse rollovers to show ancillary info, allowing students to learn more about topics or passages (p 105), or use collapsible layers for text or illustrations (p 244).
10. Share bookmarks to web sites online (p 112). (Surprisingly, del.icio.us or other online tools were not mentioned.)
11. Show an expert’s view of a question or issue surrounding a topic (p 118).
12. Use a table, or Word’s track changes for easy peer editing (p 132).
13. Moderate student chat rooms (p 142). (They recommend a “knowledgeable assistant”, but I say that’s the teacher’s job!)
14. Use word games, such as 5 summative words that start with the same vowel to reinforce concepts (p 161). (I like acrostics, such as are found in the Nintendo DS game, Brain Age 2.)
15. In synchronous lectures, let learners determine the order in which topics are presented (Gordon MacKenzie-style) (p 163).
16. Use games and puzzles to review (e.g. crosswords, fill-in-the-blank (p 180). (I recommend our GameGarten, aka The Play Station hosted by John Krutsch.)

I’ll stop at number 16 to give you the information in two manageable chunks. Chunking is one idea that I think is pretty useful in e-learning, though it is overlooked in The Online Learning Book. I’ll post the last 15 strong ideas on this blog tomorrow.

Today I am presenting at the SFo MoodleMoot on how Moodle can be used to deliver Open Educational Resources, especially through our modification of Moodle, the Open Meta Mod.

Presentation slides are now available and you are welcome to participate in the backchannel through the chat window provided below.

Presentation Slides

openmod.ppt

Web Sites Referenced

• OpenCourseWare Consortium
• Open Educational Resources Commons
• David Wiley’s OpenContent Wiki
• David Wiley’s OpenContent blog
• Utah Open High School
• Creative Commons licenses
• MIT’s “Making the Case for OCW”
• Why a Reputation Economy?
• UK’s Open University LearningSpace
• OpenContentDIY
• Leigh Blackall’s slide on Another Way

P.S. After my presentation was over, I came back to my hotel to find this bus in the parking lot. It’s nothing less than a sign for a questioning open education convert.

It looks like I’ll be presenting at the 2008 MoodleMoot San Francisco, June 9 - 11, 2008 South San Francisco Conference Center on our Open Mod for sharing open educational resources. I’ll be dragging Kenneth Woodward along to explain the technical facets of the mod, and to delve into the community of Moodle developers.

Of course, prior to the conference Ken and I will have to work pretty aggressively with Clark Nielsen and John Krutsch to ensure that the mod’s features and functionalities are stable and presentable.

Marc Hugentobler, John Krutsch, and I will be presenting our online cheating sessions a couple times this summer, and would like to welcome everyone to attend:

1. The Cheatability Factor at Distance Teaching and Learning 2008, Madison, Wisconsin
2. How to Cheat Online & The Cheatability Factor at Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange 2008, Orem, Utah

Here are some details, reproduced from the proposals:

Promotional Summary

What is your online course’s “cheatability factor”? 75% of students have admitted to cheating during their college career, and according to some studies online assessment makes cheating easier. This session considers technical, philosophical, and environmental factors that may increase or decrease the cheatability of online courses from design to delivery, and presents a rubric used to assess those factors.

Objectives and Description

Presentation objectives:

Participants will..

1. Discover the extent to which cheating-related problems exist in online education and online-based assessments
2. Consider factors that may contribute technologically, philosophically, or environmentally to online cheating
3. Examine a rubric used to measure the “cheatability” of online course
4. Discuss practices and strategies to avoid or minimize the impact of cheating

Presentation description:

Nobody wants students cheating in their online class, yet an estimated 75% of students have admitted to cheating during their college career, and according to some studies online assessment makes cheating easier. The problem is not only one of practical importance for educators, it is one of growing importance to instructional technologists, administrators, and anyone else with a vested interest in the validity and reputation of distance education and technology-enhanced teaching.

This session will first present information and collected research data that summarizes the state of cheating in higher education in general, and in distance education specifically. While a general awareness of the pervasiveness of cheating may be in and of itself an eye-opener to many educators and administrators, the motivations behind cheating and the responsibility teachers have to recognize their own influence on cheating can provide an alternative perspective on what is normally considered a quite simple choice. McClusky’s theory of Power-Load-Margin, for instance, informs teachers of the impact they may have on students’ lives, and the impact students’ lives have on their studies, both of which can lead students to choose to cheat. A number of environmental factors are particularly salient in online courses, such as ambiguity of definitions of cheating, actual or perceptual “distance”, level of instructor-student interaction, individual relevance or meaningfulness of activities and assessments, etc. Additionally, there are a number of more technical and technological factors that can increase or decrease both a student’s propensity to cheat, and his/her ability to cheat.

By considering these technical, methodological, and environmental factors, Distance Education at Utah Valley University has developed a rubric to assess online courses and report on potential factors that may increase or decrease the cheatability of online courses from design to delivery. This rubric is (1) provided to teachers engaging in distance education course development or instruction, (2) made available to administrators and department chairs as an example of our mutual interest in preserving the integrity of online education, and (3) implemented internally as a tool in our course design process to better evaluate and recommend online assessments before, during, and after an online course is delivered.

Because cheating itself is a complex and sensitive issue informed by experience and diverse perspectives, this session seeks to engage participants in a dialogue on cheating, online assessments, and technology. We predict there will be naturally flowing discussion and debate between participants who may favor one approach over another, e.g. a “direct assault” approach which seeks to thwart any and all attempts at cheating using technology or applied strategies, vs. “hearts and minds” pedagogical approaches that focus on course environment, assessment design, and student engagement.