I decided early in this very active and interactive session, to trying to pull things together into some basic themes, and it became clear that we were not just talking about school.  We were also talking about classrooms, teachers, and even future students.  So I divided my summary into this breakdown.

The school

• Walls are adaptively transparent, enabling real connections with all education institutions, local community, and any and all other potential resources.
• Leaders who are visionary, value collaboration, enterprising, and who “get it”
• Flexibly structured and valuing the time that teachers need to constantly retool their classrooms
• Shared vision and mission but respects risk taking

The classroom

• Walls are adaptively transparent, serving as a window on the world
• Life long learning is what happens here — new conversations that are rich, multi-directional, and respectful
• The classroom includes technology that facilitates and provokes rich, multi-directional, and respectful conversations.
• More happening in the Long Tail

The Learner

• independent
• playful
• adaptive
• resourceful
• self-directed
• sense of wonderment
• unrestricted
• international/global
• creative/inventive
• connected
• confident
• self-aware
• able to teach themselves
• respectful

Assessment

• Are we testing the right things?  Should we be rethinking curriculum first, invent ways to teach it (facilitate its learning), and then figure out how to assess it.
• Test for disposition?

Social networking is an integral and essential part of all of this.

Best Quote — “what goes on in school stays in school”

Technorati Tags: warlick technology education necc07 edubloggercon07 ebc07fs

[live blogged — please forgive misspelling and awkward writing]

I’m now in an EduBloggerCon session trying to identify the elements of the pitch that people can use to promote social networks. Vickie Davis says that it needs to be simply, not a laundry list. David Jakes suggests that we look to the current political campaigns, what John Edwards and Obama is doing. Chris Lehmann is against preparing the 21st century workforce. He says we should be preparing the 21st century citizen.

The conversations seems to keep coming back to Internet safety. I agree, but it’s not the focus. It’s just part of the issue. It’s so much bigger than that. Chris to chiming in on this, that, “You put it out there, you educate the parents, and you midigate. Then you can get to the next piece of it.”

Doug Johnson has submitted the concept of intellectual freedom as part of the story that we tell. Technologists are seen more as the censors. This is an interesting concept. But what Chris describes as “gatcha moments” where anyprincipal at any time is at risk of getting fired. He says that “if you aren’t willing to get fired, then you aren’t doing your job.”

I’ve asked, “how do we make kids advocates?” Doug Johnson describes how his district has added students to their policy committees and that kids have actually saved them on several occassions with new ideas and perspectives.

Mark Wagner says that perhaps we are getting past fear as to motivator. I think that “opportunity” is the none fear leverage point. Steve Hargadon has just told us to break. I hope that Will has been creating three bullets.

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I am flabbergasted at the transformation.  It’s just 7:00 and I walk into a conference center that was still in shambles last night when Jakes and I were here.  It’s a conference now, full of color, and full of people.  I’ve already run into Kevin Jarret, a Second Life bud, as well as Victoria (SL Name).  Diane Midness of iEarn was just behind me in the registration line along with a young woman she introduced me to (already forget her name) who is in charge of a program there that is turning students around the world into journalists.  Too cool.

And everyone seems so alert.  I’m in trouble!

More to come!

Technorati Tags: warlick education technology edubloggercon07 necc07

Dave Jakes and I found this huge window at the conference center last night that opens onto an exhibitor’s hall, whose size is just barely hinted by this picture.

Will Richardson referred to a recent post by Lawrence Lessig yesterday (Bigger Challenges), where the Standford law professor has announced a shift in his academic and activist work, away from the persistent mis-match between our copyright laws and the information environment that they address, to a broader curruption of how things are done here (U.S. governments).  These are my words, my interpretation.  Please read Lessigs extended post, Required Reading: the next 10 years. 

This shift in focus/mission is something that would catch Richardson’s ever observant eye.  Not only does he confess that, “Lawrence Lessig is one of my heroes,” but this broadening focus is also something that Will has talked about in his writings and in his conversations with many of us.

Teachers and school leaders are a hard audience to reach.  We work an education system that is not only seated in an archaic past with enormous momentum to resist change.  But we are also operating within a political environment that seems to have its own reasons for hammering our schools, our administrators, our teachers, and our children down to a vision of teaching and learning that is shallow, rigid, dis-empowering, and oriented toward a past that seems to give us  comfort and security — but no hope.

I respect and support anyone who is ready to commit themselves to knocking some of the rust off of the engine of politics, freeing it up adapt, empower, and to continue the great experiment.  My focus will continue to be on school, classroom, and curriculum, because I believe that to affect change, we have to be able to describe an alternative to factory style education, one that is logical, adaptable, and compelling.  I read, hear, and see a lot of great ideas out there, and even bold new practices from courageous educators.  But I am not yet satisfied that we have that story.

I hope to learn some new technology here in Atlanta over the next several days.  I already have.  But even more important than that, I hope to (and challenge you to) look for that story, to expand and refine your vision of what teaching and learning really should look like and how it should behave in your home, a vision that fits today’s and tomorrow’s market place, that resonates with deeply held values, and a vision that we can describe and model.

We need to tell a story that dissolves education practices that distrust, insult, and punish teachers and learners — one that builds an education vision that empowers, respects, and celebrates meaningful learning experiences and the people who engage them.

2 Worth!

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If my first evening in Atlanta is any indication, this is going to be one humdinger of a conference.  I’d just landed in my room, and was trying to get organized and to figure out how to move photos from my new Canon SD1000 digital camera to my computer when David Jakes called — just back from his afternoon health walk. 

“Dinner?”  “You bet!” 

After some Bison Chili, we took another walk, finding the conference center and walking the floors, eying the site of tomorrow’s EduBloggerCon.  What an amazing city.  It’s big and it’s modern, and there’s style — at least by my judgment.

But I have to take a moments like these to reflect, to find an equilibrium.  I think of myself as a learner, as one who is learning to use this new information landscape to keep on learning and growing.  But it’s nothing compared to what I learn when I sit down with someone like David Jakes, who’s smart, who cares about what we are doing as educators, and who is fortunate to still be able to use what he’s learning and inventing with kids, and see the moving effects first hand.  I suspect that I learned more and was exposed to more new ideas this evening than in the past several weeks of web 2.0′ing.

Thanks, Dave!

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I slept last night, in the room that I grew up in, two blocks from the train tracks.  The 5:30 freight woke me up.  When I was young, it was the 5:00 rooster, one block away.

Last night, my parents and I pulled up old skits from The Smothers Brothers and Laugh-In, and even visited some of Bill Cosby’s early recorded monologues — “Ding!” — all thanks to YouTube.  In a few hours I’ll head out for my last leg to NECC.  I noticed on Hitchhikr that the first on-sight photos from NECC are now appearing, thanks to Tim Wilson (see right).  Check out his NECC PodCave.

I thought it would be a good opportunity to share some tips for foreigners who are flying in from far away places.  It’s a different world, down here, where we talk slow, think slow, eat slow and consider it a virtue.  So, to get the most out of your conference experience, follow these very simple tips.

• If you want to employ a euphemism, find a way to include a tic and a hound dog — or lots of tics and a hound dog.

• If your last name is Sherman, find a way to hide it on your name tag with conference swag.  If that doesn’t work, learn to say, “..but my people are the Birmingham Shermans,” and have a white handkerchief ready.  If your first name is Sherman, affect a foreign accent and start with Nepal.
• Order the grits but don’t eat them.  Order Mint Juleps and drink them all.  Bein’ Atlanta, the bar tender may not actually know how to make a Mint Julep.  It’s:
  
  

  2 cups granulated sugar
  
  2 cups water (branch water is ideal)
  
  Fresh Mint
  
  Crushed Ice
  
  Kentucky Bourbon (2 ounces per serving)

• If you see an older gentleman wearing a seersucker suit, remove your hat.  If you don’t have a hat, then lower your self to one knee.  If you don’t know what a seersucker suit is, then have that handkerchief ready.
• It’s OK not to like CNN, but don’t order a Pepsi.
• Be ready to cite your lineage to before the Civil War (or War of Northern Aggression).  If you are from the North, find a way to work a Lee in there — or a Percy or a Beauregard.
• Finally, and most importantly.  Don’t even ask for unsweatened tea.  In Georgia, you want your spoon to stand up in the glass.

Have a fantastic conference and see you there. …and have that white handkerchief out anyway to dab the moisture on your forhead.  We don’t sweet here.  We sheen!

Technorati Tags: warlick technology education necc07 necc2007

Future of Education II - 10 years later.

Published June 3rd, 2007

Preamble

I was struck by how difficult it is to choose the wording for questions like the one that George Siemens tossed out to get people thinking about education and the future.

What do you think learning will look like in ten years?

There are a bunch of qualifications I would like to add to that sentence, and so many eventualities that could come in the way of a move in any different direction. But I don’t think there’s a better way to ask it… The history of the public education system is replete with examples of people’s agendas, fears, ignorant well-meaningness, hopes and dreams controlling what might have otherwise been a more positive vehicle for making a ‘better’ society. That’s not to say that it is currently ‘bad’, just that it tends to move with the prevailing winds.

We all have different ideas of what learning is, and what it’s for. Some of us think of it as primarily normative… a way to sculpt a society in our image (and this is not necessarily bad… we do need a consistent vehicle to pass on the mores that we hold dear). The funny thing here is that this is one of the few places where the arch-conservative and the hippie-liberal come together… they would both like to (and have before… indeed… this was the original purpose of the public education system) use the school system to train for ‘moral rightness’ or ’social justice’. On the other end there are those that believe that life is a gigantic DACUM chart… that learning is a process of checking off competencies that can be assessed and measured through national testing. Neither of these positions really gets at the true complexity of the violently ad hoc ‘learning’ concepts we carry around with us today. There is something decidedly repugnant in the Orwellian idea of a sculpted society and the only convincing argument I’ve heard in favour of standardized testing is “what else are we going to do?”

Introduction

In the face of all of this indecision and uncertainty, I’m going to take a different path from my normal one. I’m going to be optimistic. I’m going to imagine what I might like learning to look like in the future. I’m going to be focusing on a couple of things… one is the community of practice model of learning (See posts here for emergent training communities) and the other is the ‘focus’ of the learning. I certainly don’t mean to claim that no one is doing this now… indeed, I think of edtechtalk as my main learning community. And as for focus, there are many people who are starting to focus on concepts and letting plain literacies follow along when they are needed.

Community Education - why edtechtalk works for me

Imagine a group of very busy folks trying to keep up to date on a field that is constantly changing. We have six groups of folks who get together once a week and present the best that they’ve been able to put together that week. We have a much larger community of people who are involved in finding stuff, submitting it to the group pile and participating as guests/members on the live shows. i am personally responsible to the show I do… and free to participate (as is anyone) in the rest of the work done in the community. Now, we use bunches of newish tech to get this done, but I don’t think of that as particularly important… it’s fun, but not essential. I get to stay current by hanging out with my friends online. It’s a pretty good deal… and its sustainable. It has that feeling of a conversation at a conference (minus the airfare and other expenses) but I get to have it at least once a week.

Where is the focus?

When a learning community has a strong idea of what its there for… and all the people who are there have self-selected themselves for that particular kind of learning, staying focused is not particularly difficult. People come to the community with something in mind. In the case of edtechtalk, the focus is on learning and technology… The skill set that is needed to participate effectively in that community is gradually acquired through the act of participating.

Presentation at FOE on June 4th - 1:30 pm CST (Check Local Time)

Snowclones, Clichs and Memes

The learning community that I’m trying to model tomorrow is one where we have self-selected ourselves to learn about how to be better community ‘joiners’. The different focus on this came from a conversation with Stephen Downes on a panel at the POM conference last week. I had asked Stephen how someone was supposed to learn a complex task without formal education. He responded by saying that they could go out and find people on the internet who knew how to do it and learn from them. My response to this line of argument is always the same “easy for you to say, you do this all the time, but how does someone unfamiliar with learning communities get comfortable with joining them?”

You could, I suppose, simply keep trying to join communities until you got better at it. I decided that it might be more interesting to look at what a community could do to work through the idea of ‘proper community joining and forming’. It requires people to be open about how they feel about the ways that people are talking to them. It requires people to choose the kind of education they want and then be responsible for brining good work to the table. It would mean that learning is something we commit to, when we need it, and, indeed, when we find it. It’s decentralized, and the personal assessment model looks like “this works for me.” The group assessment model kind gets turned on its head. The rest of the group needs to tell the leader for that day how well they’ve picked up what they were trying to get across.

My goals for the session - Assessing the ‘leader’

It is important, in this kind of assessment that people are honest. Giving positive feedback where it is not deserved can poison any community. Kind but direct criticism is the best way to ensure that everyone stays happy and productive in any community. Indeed… this is one of the primary responsibilities of every member. So, following are a list of my goals… I hope to hear back from you on how I did

Live meeting #6 - Snowclones, Clichs and Memes

The purpose of this meeting is to discuss how snowclones, clichs and memes affect community participation. My proposed goals are:

1. grasp the terms by using them
2. follow an example of snowclones, cliches and on to memes from start to finish
3. participate in that example
4. discuss how awareness of language affects the ability to participate in a community
5. develop a list of strategies for discovering local language use in a community
6. using that information to choose if a community is right for you
7. participate in a new community

Future of Education - snowclones and ‘cliches’

Published May 30th, 2007

I’m in ur nowlige, spukin’ ur mind.

This post is my first shot at developing the ideas that I want to talk about at the futures of education conference. I’ve spent bunches of my time recently writing and talking about communities and digital ecologies, and I thought I would do something a little different and talk about a specific case of how the new tools lead to new ideas of ‘knowing’ and how that could have a direct impact on education. I’m going to take a quick journey through the history of meaning making, and then talk a little about how specific tools can support things like cliches, memes and snowclones and what that means about learning and community belonging.

Why is belonging to a community important (or being in a network)?

I’m going to take it as given that most people who read this blog are going to believe that belonging to a community or network can be valuable. The most important learning i do is through the networks that I travel in. It is one thing to be able to find bits of ‘information’ on the internet(or have fun for that matter), but quite something different to be able to interact with people places and things all over the tubes. In order to do that, you need to understand what is going on in those communities… you need, in effect, to know how to adopt the given context. Many people have told us that in trying to become part of edtechtalk they need to ‘lurk’ for while to understand what is possible… what is allowed. They also take time to see how things ’should’ be done. Knowing what to do in a community is essential for efficient membership. And, again, membership is key to learning deep things from a community or network.

How language plays a role

We have a running myth (or call it a shortcut) in the English language, that there are specific definitions for given words. When pushed on this issue, however, most of us will admit that, of course, those definitions change by context. I use the word ‘boat’ very differently at home among lobster folk than I use it around people who sail competitively. I also treat those boats very differently. The same could be said for the word house… or the word soup. Yes, most words that I’m using right now are quite standard, but if i used the word standardized, many educators out there might see a different implication. In his ‘Ancestor’s tale‘ Richard Dawkins talks about the difference between two different kind of gulls. They are situated as ‘different species’ but when you observe them in the wild, it’s more of a continuum from one bird to another… in some places it is not possible to tell them apart.

Knowing how a bit of language is used in a given context or community is key to membership there. If I called someone a soup nazi, or when someone says ‘get off my lawn’, there is a literal meaning and a much more important contextual meaning. It was, at one time, that only people like novelists and politicians (and the newspapers and ads through which they were reported) had the capacity of creating this kind of thing. Expressions like ‘now you’re cooking with gas’ and ‘where’s the beef’ came from advertisements and spread into modern culture. The one that comes to mind most often for me is “the lights are going out all over Europe and shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” Thought provoking… and chilling… if you know the context.

Enter online communities - fark.com

I’ve been saying for months (maybe more) to anyone who will listen (mostly my cat) that I think that people like 40below are going to have as lasting an effect on the English language as any living novelist. This is going to be a little difficult to explain to someone who is not familiar with the website. Fark is a website where people from all over the world ’submit’ weird news stories, with funny replacement headlines. 40below (who’s real name I don’t know) is responsible for 5155 ‘greens’ on fark.com. Those ‘greens’ or accepted headlines, occasionally become the basis for a cliche or a snowclone.

Once this happens, the comment (or picture) then becomes a matter of lore to that community… like the soup nazi is to Seinfeld fans. This understanding of a contextualized concept can be key to understanding and joining any community.

Snowclones and cliches evolving

Just today I heard a snowclone in my office… (actually i heard several today, my partner and I llove them) One of my office mates said “what happens in the office stays in the office.” A snowclone of the famous ‘what happens in Vegas, stay in Vegas.’ We have many of these in our culture, but most of them come as lines in famous movies or ad campaigns. What we have happening now, is that communities are evolving these expressions in a fraction of that time. The information is being spread through new media tools, and communities of meaning are developing. The same is happening for cliches… as least in web usage of the term.

So what does this mean for education?

It’s an example of how ‘making meaning’ is changing. There was a time that study (and enough experience in modern culture) would give you access to most of the cliches used in modern discourse. What’s happening now, however, is that these new expressions and ways of speaking are developing everyday. What we need to do is teach strategies for discovering these expressions and learning how to adopt local community dialects online.

This is a single example of how teaching is going to be different. In this case, we need to teach the students the strategies needed to understand a new discourse, without knowing what that discourse is going to be. They are going to need to use their personal networks, need to use community driven sites like wikipedia… If they need to ‘break into’ a community to get a certain kind of information, they will need strategies… to learn how to be respectful, to suss out the rules in the new environment and MOST IMPORTANTLY, to then decide if this is the kind of place they should be getting information from.

Or they’ll be just like this guy

Building Ecologies - making room for communities and networks

Published May 21st, 2007

I had a really fun time hanging with folks at the CADE/AMTEC conference last week. The main thrust of most of the conversations was about the building of communities and I was fortunate enough to be talking to Stephen Downes, George Siemens and Terry Anderson. I rounded out a great deal of my thinking in those discussions, and have decided to adopt George’s ‘ecology’ language to find a place for my rhizomes to live. It’s a very strange thing to have to find a bunch of language to describe what is already happening… but it is the way of things. Until the language is there… it’s very difficult to describe to people what you are talking about. For now I will just say that the method of learning is rhizomatic (see earlier posts) and the structure that supports these rhizomatic discussions is a particularly tuned ecology.

An ideal ecology for a learning community would have some basic structures about it. It would be consistent in the face of expectation. It would have ‘values’ or ‘branding’ that would define what it is, would be policed or disseminated by members of the community. It needs to have some kind of economy that sustains it. It needs to display its membership rules and benefits in some way. Successful ecologies either have to be so simple that they are transparent, or have a training system that is useful or transparent.

Ecologies - A sketch starting point.

‘Ecology’ as I mean it for this conversation represents that sometimes ephemeral idea of place. What is it about a certain coffee shop, in a certain place in time, that seems to create such great conversations? Or how does a given teacher just seem to have that knack to have their students create such great work. And what is it about certain things that it doesn’t matter how much money is thrown at them… people never gather there… or the work never gets done. These ‘ecologies’ good and bad, contribute to the way things get done in them. A well designed ecology, I would argue, also includes the inter-relational agreements between the folks in that ecology. Let’s take the coffee shop analogy and stretch it out a little…

One of the formative intellectual experiences of my life was sitting at the Grad House at Dalhousie University. There were a group of folks that came there most days… some philosophy students, business, german, history, biology… who would sit around the same group of tables and talk. Some times for hours. It’s also where I learned to play pool. And taunt people while they’re playing pool, without making it completely obvious. (If you know, for instance, that your opponent is particularly obsessed by time (or almost late for class) asking the person next to you for the time just as they shoot can be very helpful) This was not an organized group, there was no one who made phone calls to anyone… matter of fact, I think I only had the phone number of one person in that whole group at the time. There was no real shared background… or shared interest… except in arguing about stuff. Those discussions were frighteningly rhizomatic in their journey around the disciplines that we were all familiar with… by the time that the six months that it really held together were over, I understood both how to debate properly and, more importantly, I had my first rhizomatic sketch of a theory of knowledge.

My position then is that this particular ecology was near perfect for allowing those discussions to happen… indeed… as it formed the structure within which those discussions did happen… that particular conclusion is inevitable. There was a basic expectation that things would be there when you arrived… the seating, the coffee, the lack of music, the beer and the people at the same time everyday… or thereabouts. The setting, in this sense, becomes transparent. But it only remains so as long as it is consistent… I believe that this is a key feature of successful ecologies - consistency in the face of expectation.

Another feature of a successful ecology are clearly understood ‘values’ (you could also see this as ‘branding’ if you like. This is a funny word, and one that Stephen particularly didn’t like in our discussions in Winnipeg, but I can’t think of a better one. Call them mores, call them guidelines and ethic… it’s a semantical argument no matter where you turn. But this coffee shop community had a few very solid rules that were never discussed but were strictly enforced. All rhetorical arguments were immediately ridiculed. Any argument that broke any of the 50 or so philosophical rules governing logical fallacies were pounced upon. Taking personal offense to a critique was returned by a mob taunting response. There were others… I suppose… hard to recall now.

It should have some kind of functional economy. The way this comes out in a university is clearly different than on a website… but it should be there. In this case, we were keeping our den open by buying their products… which had them clean our mess.

A word about membership

Membership in a community or network needs to mean something. This is, contrary to the new cool of ‘inclusion’ by necessity an exclusive thing. It is something that needs to be EARNED in order for it to be worth something. This is, I think, partially where the traditional education model breaks down. The old apprenticeship model was somehow based on the need to be ‘responsible’ for your education. You were ‘earning’ your way towards your profession.

While membership is a community (or network) activity, the way that it becomes clear to the larger community is an ecological issue. Whether a small community is needed and the membership is increased through word of mouth, or whether its amazon.com, membership needs to mean something to someone. Often good ecologies manage this by counting forum threads or posts… or by offering contributors some kind of ’street cred’ based on their form of membership.

Training and MUDs

Terry and Stephen got into an interesting discussion during the “best online course” discussion. Stephen had described that in the old MUDs in order to be trusted to help design the online world, you needed to go on ‘quests’. In order to accomplish these quests, you would need to have both the dedication and the programming skills which would qualify you to build the world. You became a ‘wizard’ and were allowed ‘membership.’ Terry responded that it was people like Stephen who kept him from being a member.

The webcast academy has been an interesting model of this. In order to become a ‘webcaster’ in the worldbridges community, you are required to accomplish a certain set of goals. You need to webcast three shows, of your own planning, with your own guests, and be able to save and publish that work. For some folks it takes up to a year… others a couple of weeks. It is a sufficient barrier, however, that people feel proud of finally making it to the community. We created a ’sub-ecology’ that allows for the necessary training to attain a certain level of membership.

Quick wrap up

Ecologies then, are the structures that allow good community to happen. Rhizomatic learning is wonderful… but it needs a place to live and needs to have some of the above criteria (if not all of them) in order to be able to thrive. I’m very curious about this could transfer into our traditional places of learning. How would we need to change our schools and universities in order to allow people to feel responsible to their learning?

note : (i’ve been fussing with this post for days and have finally given up and posted. Hopefully my next post on the issue will be more lucid)

CADE/AMTEC - day 2 - Best Online Course Ever?

Published May 16th, 2007

Very different kind of post from the conference today. This was from a panel presentation this morning and it was so good that i thought i would try and record it all. The notes are still a little sketchy… hope it’s readable italics for dave’s thoughts

Vicky, the first speaker started by talking about the Open courseware initiative first brought to us by MIT. As the world didn’t panic, other universities followed. Now 200 universities in a dozen countries have added courses to opencourseware websites. This is what started this conversation going…

Fritz Pannekoek - President, Athabasca University

“What would the worlds best online course designed for online access look like?” This is the question that began a series of discussions.

I was handed a worksheet… on paper… a paper handout asking me to participate. How can we possibly be serious about doing online work when we have a panel with no projector even turned on. My feelings about this changed a little as the conversation continued… but the conversation could have been so much richer with a backchannel from the crowd recording people’s immediate responses to what was a remarkable series of short talks.

President’s sometimes have trouble with practicalities. “everything we produce must be MIT compliant” the MIT stuff had become the standard simply because it was adopted. This was an interesting insight as to how many of these standards get chosen… seemingly by random or by very smart marketing people at MIT

If open courseware is to be there and is to be transformative, how can we achieve that?

Surpise surprise… if we use a little blended learning give more personal control of learning student’s seem to succeed much more… wouldn’t that be nice.

What if we created a series of standardized year courses that were available to all institutions based on a set of international standards. That would be nice.

How do we do readiness? Allow for culture? Modes of delivery? What about the outcomes? (I’m very concerned about outcome driven pedagogy) government seems to be pushing this by the ‘performance envelope’. Intellectual sustainability? How do we operationalize it? What’s the business model? Could you make money?

It’s a bold plan. And one that i would be very interested in watching. It seems that they do indeed plan to go about trying this… I might even like to get my nose into it somehow. there are problems… doubtless… starting with do we even need ‘courses’.

George Siemens

The ‘Best course model’ would be ‘networked’ and an ‘ecology’. The onus for the network is on the student and the ecology is the responsibility of the institution. Content is not really the centerpiece of what we’re doing anymore. Very expensive courses are now going out of date as the content changes so quickly. Couldn’t agree more. Wikipedia is nice. An academic wikipedia would be nice. Ummm… well… this is already being tried by the digital universe people… and I don’t think this model makes sense. I understand how it makes sense politicallly… just not in practice. The creation process shouldn’t be the only creators of the content. The users need to be involved. The content needs to be pedagogically neutral. yup yup yup

When we start deceminating we move into a network type model. Read/write tools represent a level of democracy, and empowerement… think of them as a philosophy not the actual tools we have now.

The new set of courses needs to be multinarratived. It should be available in any device and in any format. Our content should come to them. The discussion needs to occur in our students’ existing devices.

There is a change in the fundamental charateristics of knowledge. It changes everyone’s role. The institution is no longer in charge of disseminating the knowledge but should be in charge of creating the ecology, the space for it to occur.

Joan Collige

Picks up on George’s chaos. I’m gonna agree with george and go beyond.

When I look at this from the perspective of an instructional designer… I agree. As an administrator, (and part of the cohere project) I am concerned about many of the difficulties.

Iam interested in the big picture. I see so many authors and so many canvases and depending on where they are and what they believe… what kind of picture would they want to create. How would the pedagogies translate?

We need to prepare learning materials and opportunities for people. I am interested in the metrics. What is good? What is excellent?

When we think about going global, and we say things like ‘everyone will be connected’ ‘everyone will be able to be connected’. This is not true. I see nothing wrong with consciously identifying who we will be able to serve. Assuming that our experience is the experience that everyone is having is just not true.

Story of an overseas student who could not get access and do ‘graduate level work’.

What is the metric? It will be the extent to wihich we become aware of our own cultural orientation, the extent to which that is different for other people in the world, the extent that we allow ourselves to be affected by that experience. Education is a transformative experience.

“In what way do we want this particular initiative to be transformative?” core curriculum created by who and to what purpose.

Ellen Wagner

Adobe wants to be the good tool maker. We want to make sure that the tools are there so that the experience can be there. Corporations and the academy have got to find ways to find a common ground. In my world and I start looking at the perfect learning experience. I don’t think that I would look at it as a course right now. I know that there needs to be an underpinning of thought. The tools will allow us to do anything that we want. I want to make sure that a learning experience is flexible. We focus the learning experience at a core set of competencies. Like creative expression. To contribute in a digital dialogue. To negotiate new knowledge.

The tools have to be able to choose which of those that matter when we need it. Reusable when we need it, disposable when we need it to be. Interoperable and repurposable. How to deal with the ‘flash blob’.

How many of us have the time to pursue treating education as ‘a craft’? How do we make the tool smart enough to make it practical for use in real environments.

\Stephen Downes

When carrol twigs work was introduced about lowering the failure rate from 40% to 10% that must have created a huge problem at the university as they just weren’t ready for that many people passing. The old model was to have people fail to filter out folks.

We need to change the whole model. One part open and one part closed creates a dysfunctional model

Are we doing learning opportunities? Cost savings? Learning objectives?

Is it to serve everybody or to serve some people? We should not do it in bits but we should also not do it all.

I try and focus on accessibility… but I know that other people are going to handle that.

There are smart people working on this… like broadband.

What would the best online course look like?

Canada’s best online course will not be written by an institution it will not be written by an academic or as a course? Online isn’t the sort of medium that supports that kind of content.

When we look at sustainability we have to look beyond this idea of ‘we provide this for you’ What kind of opportunities can we enable to allow people to do this for themselves. This will address the cost and the sustainability model.

We look at wikipedia and we see that people can create stuff that can sustain itself. We see that watching people’s behavior (like google’s search engine) Imagine what google would look like if we hired a hundred thousand academics designing the search organization.

You can’t produce localization. Oops is a project that takes open courseware and translate it into Chinese. They put the content into a wiki and let the community do the translation.

Is this academicly sound? Don’t know. We have a credibility issue.

We have a field of artificial scarcity

Credentialling is where the bottleneck is. It seems to be that if we are looking at enabling the widest range of opportunities. We would need to open source accreditation

Needs to be open understand it

Needs to be accessible get at it

Affordable less than a house

Sort of outcome… some mechanism whereby someone can demonstrate what they’ve done.

I get my models from things like games. Look at muds. Done by users but you have to ensure that people coulnd’t write very bad code. The quests ensured that the user would need to understand what was going on. Solving the quest required the code understanding to be able to affect the system. You’re promotion is base

These environments allow people to move content trade buy etc… progressive

Sounds like the ecologies that George was talking about.

Terry Anderson

Accreditation - I couldn’t be a wizard LOL. Where is the incentive? How do we make people contribute to it? You can buy a paper for 15$ bucks… An economic model that rewards assessment.

The connection between research and education… addressing the failure model. The literacies.

George seems to say that torture (in the form of PLAR) is the best way to encourage people to go to class.

Fritz says.

Euroamerican cultural empiricism is back again. How do we look at indigenous learning in Canada? Are we really looking at the ways in which other people are doing.

I usually once a month I get someone trying to buy courses. Sell us you BA and we’ll do what we want with it.

Such a great conversation… sorry i couldn’t do it as much justice as i’d like… but figured i should publish.