Connecting with H806

The end of a beautiful relationship

2006-09-08T04:03:00.000+01:00

I'm tempted to sign off with "so long, & thanks for all the fish", but that's already been done....

Life came along & interrupted this blog, as my husband's heart attack happened less than 48 hours after my last entry, & threw all sorts of things into confusion. His treatment isn't yet complete, so there's still an air of limbo about the place, but H806 is finished. Although failing to complete the course was never an option, inevitably some enthusiasm evaporated & I didn't take as full a part as I would have liked in the final weeks.

I've been back though my Learning Objects, de-ampersanding them & removing the sarky comments, to polish them into a suitable form for assessment. I couldn't help but be struck by the irony of reading about e-learning's potential to bring about profound pedagogical shifts & even, perhaps, "the death of the course", whilst laying my own work on the procrustean bed of ECA criteria. Nevertheless, if I've made a good enough job of this last task, it will be gratifying to come out of 2006 with a PGCertODE(Open).

I hope all my fellow students achieve success & a sense that the frustrations have been outweighed by the sheer variety & innovativeness of the course. To a large extent, H806 was what we made it, & each of us probably made a different H806.

Another one bites the dust...

2006-05-20T02:46:00.000+01:00

Submitted TMA 02 with just 3 hours to spare! It was, as they say, a damn close run thing....

Strangely (or perhaps not so strangely) I think I learned more from doing the TMA than from studying the module, though of course the latter flagged up the key areas. To begin with, I had to fill in a lot of gaps in my knowledge about the OU as an organisation, which was useful in itself. Then an almost randomly chosen subject for my TMA project actually turned out to be highly relevant & topical. I resented having to take a day out from it to attend an OU meeting (couldn't skive off it because I was leading one of the sessions) but came away with a whole new set of connections to explore & have been invited to submit my TMA to a working group that's looking at exactly the topic I'd decided to write about. The hypothetical exercise suddenly became real & I had to stop myself getting carried away by it!

Good stuff, this learning :-)

Guilt-free selectivity

2006-04-16T00:03:00.000+01:00

This is a reflective one...

Two weeks into the second module, & the new approach seems to be working out. Pick'n'mix, on my terms, is making me feel much more in control of my learning. I know there aren't enough hours in a week to study everything thoroughly, partly because my brain's not as young as it was & I have to go through academic articles several times, slowly, to absorb what they're saying. But instead of panicking or sacrificing other activities to indulge my perfectionist tendencies, I'm only giving one or two topics per week the deep treatment, & it feels great :-)

I've reminded myself of my primary reason for doing this course: to gain a better understanding of my own organisation (the OU) & my role within it as an online tutor & moderator. That's not to say I'm ignoring all the material about "training", because what happens in the corporate world will spill over into the academic world, as universities become ever more more business-oriented - & in fact the most interesting case studies have been about e-learning at Shell & company intranets at a pseudonymous "Eurobank". But I'm not beating myself up about collecting knowledge I'll never need to apply.

I'm also introducing a greater element of instrumentalism into my study & giving more attention to those activities I'm likely to be able to re-use for the end of course portfolio. The others are being read closely if they're intrinsically interesting or potentially useful for the end of module assignment, or just skimmed if they don't meet any of these conditions. Or if they clash horribly with my preferred learning styles - my scepticism about the validity of learning styles analysis goes out of the window when I'm asked to make an audio recording! Instant Messaging was difficult enough....

I still haven't completely skipped any sections of the course (some old habits die very hard) but my personal learning is definitely changing, & that, conveniently, is what the course is all about.

Non-dependent learning

2006-04-09T01:19:00.000+01:00

I'm using that term intentionally, in contradistinction to "independent learning", which could be a private & solitary affair. "Non-dependent learning" (I made it up) is simply learning that people get on with, without waiting for somebody to come along & hold their hand & tell them what to do.

I've read statements like this before:

"Instruction can foster a dependency relationship, in which the learner waits for instruction rather than takes charge of their own learning agenda. Effectively, this presents a barrier to self-directed learning."
(CIPD Report: How People Learn, p. 10)

I've probably even written them, during casual discussions of didactic versus constructivist approaches to learning.

But old habits die hard, & I found myself feeling adrift during the first module of H806 because I was waiting for somebody to tell me what to do. How silly is that? I'm going to be more grown-up in Module 2.

looping the loop

2006-04-07T00:24:00.000+01:00

Lots of new learning this week!
Here's one I hadn't come across before: Argyris & Schön's three levels of organisational learning (1978).

Seriously simplified, these are:

single loop learning - find out what has gone wrong, & fix it. This tends to preserve the status quo (an organisation's practices & assumptions) regardless of what's happening 'out there'.

double loop learning - find out why it has gone wrong, & fix the underlying causes. This can enable an organisation to change its habits, in response to external change.

deutero learning - find out how best to do the first two (learning about learning). This can enable an organisation to be ready for external change before it even happens.

Seconds out, round two...

2006-04-01T20:27:00.000+01:00

So, we've had our Recovery Week & now it's on to Module 2, Learning and the connected organisation. My first instinct is to quibble (surely all organisations are connected, otherwise they're not organisations....) but I really must try to keep my scepticism under control for a while.

So it was just paranoia...

2006-03-18T03:09:00.000Z

No threat to my blog at all - simply a glitch. I've seen it several times since & often simply refreshing the page is all that's required to restore access. But it was an odd coincidence at the time & a reminder of how fragile our freedoms are.

While we agonize over the definition of "learning objects" (this week's course topic) & fret about the withdrawal of classroom access to blogs, there are still billions of the world's population who've never encountered a digital learning object, or had blog access in the first place to be removed.

This is five years old & unreferenced, but I suspect it isn't far from the truth:

Census of the Global Village
If we shrunk the world's population of six billion to a village of 100 people, it would contain:
70 would be nonwhite

70 would be non-Christian

11 would be gay

6 people would own 59% of the wealth and all 6 would be from the United States.

80 would live in poor housing conditions or not have a home at all

70 would be unable to read 50 would suffer from malnutrition

1 would be about to die

1 would be about to be born

1 would have a college education

2 would own computers.

From a report of the TechLearn conference, 2001.
Now that is something to worry about.

Censored?!

2006-03-06T16:47:00.000Z

Copied from my personal blog, which has mysteriously been blocked.... HTTP Error 403 - Forbidden (hope it's just a glitch!)
-------------------------------

Blogs under threat

I'm blogging this here, because it's far too important to be tucked away in the academic discussions on my H806 blog.
Thanks to my fellow student Lesley for finding this.

Will Richardson, self-styled "blogvangelist" & promoter of blogs & similar internet technology for enriching classroom learning*, reports a very disturbing development in some USA school districts. School networks been blocked from accessing any material on blogs - where pupils were publishing their projects, interacting with fellow pupils around the world, having fun while they learned together in a way that prepared them for the 21st century world.

Not only that, but it seems the ban extends to any site that's 'within three clicks of a porn site'. As Richardson comments, all this does is demonstrate the ignorance of those issuing the rules, since Google gets you there in two...

Have a look at the unfolding story & see if it makes you gape in disbelief the way it did me.

I've been shut down
The "3 click rule" challenge
It gets worse

So here we are, on the verge of a revolution in communication & learning, & the next generation is being shut out of it? In the land of the free? Yeah, right.

*Here's a UK-based project of his:
Back from Britain

Critiques of Kolb

2006-02-28T22:19:00.000Z

Critiques of David Kolb's theory of experiential learning

Roger Greenaway, UK training consultant, has put together a list of the main challenges to Kolb's theories, organised by perspective.

Learning styles - a waste of time & money?

2006-02-28T14:52:00.000Z

Learning styles and pedagogy in post-16 learning: a systematic and critical review

This report, produced by the Learning & Skills Research Centre, a UK government agency, is available for download only.

This is an extensive document, which I've not had time to read in its entirety (182 pages onscreen & the sample pages I printed out are barely legible). I was drawn to it by Atherton's reference.

Section 9 of the report identifies nine "continuing problems within the research field of learning styles":

Theoretical incoherence and conceptual confusion

Learning styles in practice: labelling, vested interests and overblown claims

The variable quality of learning style models

Psychometric weaknesses

The unwarranted faith placed in simple inventories

No clear implications for pedagogy

Decontextualised and depoliticised views of learning and learners

Lack of communication between different research perspectives on pedagogy

The comparative neglect of knowledge

Each is developed at length, in quite damning terms. Item 1, for instance, refers to the "sheer number of dichotomies" (page 136 lists 30 separate pairs) creating a situation where "the constant generation of new approaches, each with its own language (...) is both bewildering and off-putting to practitioners and to other academics who do not specialise in this field." The report quotes Reynolds' (1997) description of the whole field of learning styles as "a bedlam of contradictory claims".

The previous section had briefly presented the "semi-public critique" expressed by "those hostile to the learning styles camp, who mutter at conferences in the informal breaks between presentations, who confide their reservations in private, but who rarely publish their disagreement." These objections boil down to 5 main points:

the unacceptability of basing conclusions on statistical analysis of subjective scores derived from self-reporting

the meaninglessness of certain items on the questionnaires

the influence of commercial interests on promoting certain tests

the lack of evidence that changing teaching styles to cater for different learning styles has any significant effect on learning

the simplistic 'common sense' conclusions drawn by many learning styles studies

The report authors end with a call for further extensive & co-ordinated empirical research, but remain unconvinced that this is likely to make any real difference. Might it not be better, they ask, to direct the funding into other, more fruitful areas of enquiry? The report's closing lines are worth quoting in full:

Finally, we want to ask: why should politicians,
policy-makers, senior managers and practitioners
in post-16 learning concern themselves with learning
styles, when the really big issues concern the large
percentages of students within the sector who
either drop out or end up without any qualifications?
Should not the focus of our collective attention be
on asking and answering the following questions?
Are the institutions in further, adult and community education in reality centres of learning for all their staff and students?

Do some institutions constitute in themselves barriers to learning for certain groups of staff and students?

If I'm able to return to this topic, I would like to look in more detail at the 2005 Demos report & the work of Michael Reynolds.

Purpose of this blog?

2006-02-28T00:41:00.000Z

Now that we're officially in "blogging season" it seems worth reflecting on what I'm seeking to achieve here. We have our Tutor Group conference for discussion of issues arising from the course. We also have databases where we can upload our work for certain activities, in order to share it with fellow students. Some of our activities we probably shouldn't be posting on a publicly available site such as this one, if we're hoping to use them in an unchanged form for our end of course portfolio. What does that leave?

It could be a study journal, recording my reflections on the course.
It could be a place to publish notes on issues arising in the course.

This post comes under the first heading; most recent posts come under the second. I suspect it's the second use that will work best for me. I find it very helpful to put my reading into a fit state for blogging. Note-taking on the computer is a skill my first OU course taught me; polishing those notes for a small potential audience of peers gives me a little more discipline. It also protects them from fire, theft & lightning stike :-)

Heterodoxy

2006-02-27T04:26:00.000Z

TheHeterodoxy section of teacher-trainer James Atherton's website has a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek piece on learning styles:
Learning styles don't matter

There's 'orthodox' coverage of learning theories, too:
Angles on Learning: An introduction to theories of learning for college, adult and professional education

Atherton describes himself as "a pragmatic practitioner, sceptical about any panaceas, who nevertheless believes that every practical choice embodies a value-position which is worthy of discussion."

It's a lovely site to visit, with some great design touches.

Kolb

2006-02-27T04:25:00.000Z

The Kolb Learning Style Inventory
Developed by David Kolb in the 1980s
this uses a 12 item questionnaire to classify learners into four types, based on permutations of their learning preferences as follows:

Diverging (experiencing + reflecting)
Assimilating (reflecting + thinking)
Converging (thinking + doing)
Accommodating (doing + experiencing)

Again, it seems to boil down to dichotomous pairs, as this summary makes clear:

Concrete Experience - CE (feeling) -----V-----Abstract Conceptualization - AC (thinking)

Active Experimentation - AE (doing)-----V----- Reflective Observation - RO (watching)

The fuller descriptions of each learning type offered on that page bear an uncanny resemblance to the sort of 'personality profiles' one can read on astrology websites.

"People with a Diverging learning style have broad cultural interests and like to gather information. They are interested in people, tend to be imaginative and emotional, and tend to be strong in the arts."

Right.

Herrmann

2006-02-27T04:23:00.000Z

I turned to Wikipedia & the author's own site for an overview of the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument.
Developed by Ned Herrmann in the 1970s, the HBDI uses a 120 item questionnaire to classify "thinking preferences" into four quadrants, as shown in this graphic from the Herrmann International website's FAQs:

The quadrants are (according to Wikipedia):

Analytical
Sequential
Interpersonal
Imaginative

Although based on disputed theories about how the brain works (an example of the sort of rhetoric this topic inspires) this particular model is at least clear in its emphasis on the desirability of "whole brain thinking".

It seems directed more at learners than at educators, as a tool for self-awareness & hence self-development. In other words, it throws the responsibility for acting on the results of learning style analysis onto the learner. This makes more sense than requiring educators to tailor their delivery to an impossibly complex multiplicity of learning styles - the implicit demand ridiculed by Stahl.
Nevertheless, the Funderstanding site offers a summary of ways in which educators can take left-brain/right-brain preferences into account.

Anecdotal aside: I interrupted today's study for a coffee. On the kitchen table I found a booklet of exercises from the British Academy of Advanced Training. My 16 year-old daughter is taking part in a short programme of "thinking workshops" led by Roy Paget, British authority on "brain-based learning", which seems pretty close to what Herrmann is ~~leveraging for profit~~ offering.

Still sceptical....

Funderstanding

2006-02-27T04:21:00.000Z

Thanks to Nigel for flagging up this handy site, especially the Engaging Kids section.

While this East Jersey company's raison d'être would make Noble shudder:

Once we have product concepts that meet your needs, we'll test them on kids. Testing early in the product development cycle lets you improve the product at the point that it is least expensive - before you go to production. We offer you the ability to do virtual testing. In virtual testing, we'll create software proxies for your product that our community of kids can test online. This accelerates the rate at which you get feedback while decreasing the cost of prototypes.

they've certainly put together a useful starter guide to learning theories.

second home

2006-02-25T22:59:00.000Z

http://bluefluff.livejournal.com/

Using this as a back-up while blogger is "being difficult".

Learning Styles (1)

2006-02-25T15:12:00.000Z

Decided to be a good student & take a closer look at learning styles, despite my scepticism based on previous encounters. The course material & set book list five major systems.

1. Myers-Briggs Type Indicator [1957]

This uses a 126 item questionnaire to classify learners into 16 types, consisting of permutations of their choices within four pairs of dichotomous preferences. The pairs are:

EI - Extraverts/Intraverts
SN - Sensing/Intuitive
TF - Thinking/Feeling
JP - Judging/Perceptive

The first recommended website wasn't available.

The second provided most of the above information.

The third observed that there is "infinite variation, even among people of the same type" which casts something of a shadow over its usefulness (didn't we already know that human beings are infinitely variable?).
It quickly became impenetrable to the lay reader:
Phi coefficients, statistics for categorical data, corrected using the Spearman-Brown prophecy formula, could be expected to underestimate reliabilities of type categories because the MBTI data are not true categories, but rather a result of scoring.Tetrachoric r correlations....
so I moved on.

2. Felder Silverman Learning Model [1991]

The first recommended website wasn't available. ("UniversalEducator.com is for Sale!")
The second recommended website hastily redirected me from www2.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/ILSpage.html
to
http://www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/ILSpage.html
Restraining myself from speculating on what might have been happening in the locker rooms of North Carolina, I learned:
This uses a 44 item questionnaire to classify learners into 16 types, consisting of permutations of their choices within four pairs of dichotomous preferences. This time, the pairs are:

Active/Reflective
Sensing/Intuitive
Visual/Verbal
Sequential/Global

Definitely more economical than Myers-Briggs.
I tried this one out, here, & found it almost impossibly vague. For example:

When I am learning something new, it helps me to
(a) talk about it.
(b) think about it.

Where's the option for "both the above"? So I play "ip dip penny ship", pick one at random & irrevocably shift the balance of my learning style? Hmm. Telling me in the FAQs that "if you find that you have a hard time answering many questions that relate to a particular dimension, it just means that you are fairly well balanced on that dimension." doesn't really reassure me.

3. Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument
Recommended website not available. I'll come back to that one.
4. Kolb's Learning Style Inventory
Recommended website not available. I'll come back to that one.

5. Honey and Mumford's Classification
Recommended website is... Peter Honey's Online Shop.
Since I haven't "already registered as a pay-as-you-go user", my explorations are limited, but in between the exclamations NEW!! "Only £10" "market leader", it appears that:
This uses an 80 item questionnaire to classify learners into just 4 types:

Activist
Reflector
Theorist
Pragmatist

Although it is a relief to escape the dichotomous pairs, I can't help suspecting that £10 won't make my learning "easier, more effective and more enjoyable".

I'll be back....

Different Strokes

2006-02-21T02:30:00.000Z

I've had an intuitive suspicion of "learning styles" for a long time. Learning style inventories always struck me as being somewhat akin to those "personality quizzes" one finds in magazines & blogs. Even if they did reveal some truth about how people learn, it was never clear how this ought to translate into educational practice. But I carried on pretending I believed in them, because they were dressed up in fancy academic language, & everybody else seemed to believe in them....

Tonight I found a sceptic.

Different Strokes for Different Folks: A Critique of Learning Styles

In this 1999 article, Steven A. Stahl argues that not only is learning style analysis seriously flawed, it is also practically useless as an educational tool.

Stahl's thesis is "the utter failure to find that assessing children's learning styles and matching to instructional methods has any effect on their learning" (p.1). He systematically demonstrates the absence of empirical evidence, drawing on 14 years' worth of research reviews. (It's almost as if the reviewers couldn't believe their eyes & had to keep looking again!) & concludes:

These five research reviews, all published in well-regarded journals, found the same thing: One cannot reliably measure children's reading styles and even if one could, matching children to reading programs by learning styles does not improve their learning. (p.2)

The main problem with learning styles inventories, for Stahl, is that they rely on statements that have a ring of truth about them, but are actually so vague as to be almost meaningless - rather like the 'convincing' declarations made by fortune-tellers. More seriously, perhaps, they fail to take into account other forms of difference between individuals (prior experience & current skills levels, for instance) that do have a proven impact on learning. Furthermore, claims Stahl, they are low in reliability: repeated tests do not produce repeated results (either because they fail to measure learning styles accurately in the first place, or because learning styles change over time).

Stahl believes that the energy invested in assessing children's learning styles & attempting to produce learning situations that cater for all the learning preferences the tests supposedly reveal, is misdirected.

I'm inclined to agree.

Digital Diploma Mills

2006-02-17T22:49:00.000Z

Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education

I've been reading one of the early articles by David F. Noble (Canadian historian & famous/notorious opponent of e-learning) published in FirstMonday back in January 1998. It makes a very clear statement of the case for one of the claims about e-learning that the course asks us to consider:

"It will lead to the commercialisation of all education".

Noble argues that the introduction of e-learning to Higher Education is both a vehicle & a cover for the take-over of universities by corporate capitalism. Unable to maintain their industrial dominance in the post-oil-crisis world, claims Noble, developed Western nations have turned to education as their new arena for profit-making activity.

He sees this as a two-phase development:

1. the commoditisation of universities' research function

(through new partnerships between academic & corporate interests, the conversion of laboratory discoveries into patented products, the shift of funding from education to research - with a corresponding rise in class sizes, reduction in teaching staff & narrowing of the curriculum)

2. the commoditisation of universities' education function

This is where e-learning comes in, as a supposedly cheap fix for the problems caused by the first phase. According to Noble, four separate interest groups are promoting e-learning for their own, profit-driven purposes:

vendors of e-learning hardware, software & packaged 'content'

corporate training specialists, who see it as "yet another way of bringing their problem-solving, information-processing, "just-in-time" educated employees up to profit-making speed" (p.5) - preferably at public expense

university administrators, who see an opportunity to make savings on premises & staff, assert control over the academics & maybe even become vendors themselves

"ubiquitous technozealots" (p.6) who see computers as the answer to everything

Consequently, Noble goes on, universities are no longer considered as places of education, but as production sites:

Teachers are de-skilled and reduced to the status of factory workers, working long hours, constantly monitored and losing ownership of the course material they produce, which can be sold on to other institutions, where cheaper people can be employed to deliver it. Any who protest are dismissed as "obstructionist", "standing in the way of progress" (p.9)

and markets:

Despite evidence that "students want the genuine face-to-face education they paid for, not a cyber-counterfeit" (p.10) universities are forcing them to become consumers of e-learning, & even using them as guinea pigs in "thinly-veiled field trials" (p.11) of educationally unproven products.

Noble concludes gloomily: "Quality higher education will not disappear entirely, but it will soon become the exclusive preserve of the rich and the powerful."(p.12)

Noble has continued his crusade against e-learning in the face of institutional opposition. A trenchant - if necessarily biased - account of that opposition is given in this excerpt from his 2001 book version of Digital Diploma Mills.

So, is he a lone voice of sanity crying in the wilderness, or as one right-wing (Zionist) opponent put it recently, a "flaky academic extremist", embodying "a strange hybrid of Marxism and crackpot Luddism"?

The counter-argument is my next task!

Bloom's Taxonomy

2006-02-15T01:34:00.000Z

Kept coming across this in my reading, so I thought I'd better look it up. It turned out to involve quite familiar material that I'd just never known by its proper name.

Benjamin Bloom (1913 - 1999)

His taxonomy (1956)

Learning is divided into three categories:

cognitive (mental knowledge)

affective (emotional attitude)

psychomotor (physical skills)

This is at the top level of the taxonomy.
After that, being a taxonomy, it subdivides. The cognitive subdivisions are ranked from most basic to most advanced.

knowledge

comprehension

application

analysis

synthesis

evaluation

That's enough, I think - plenty of websites out there with the fine details!

Making a meal of it

2006-02-08T03:45:00.000Z

First, there was a question:

"How does the shift towards programme-based planning & accreditation fit with the shift towards greater granularity of content offerings?"

Then there was an answer.

It was one of those lovely moments when things connect. Daughter #3 & I were comparing homeworks over tea (as you do) & she wanted to know what Learning Objects were. By the time I'd finished explaining, & my husband had thrown Learning Outcomes into the mix, it suddenly made sense.

I changed them into Shopping Outcomes, eg "a balanced meal for Monday tea". The pasta carbonara you buy for it doesn't come labelled as "Monday tea", because it might also be suitable as "Tuesday lunch" or "Wednesday supper". It's a Shopping Object that can be chosen for lots of different purposes. You might choose to add a green beans Shopping Object to accompany it.

So... the Shopping Outcomes are not embedded in the Shopping Objects. They're on the shopper's shopping list for the week's menu (the programme). Perfectly obvious, really, but it took a while for the lightbulb to come on.

The question came from a webcast of the OU's recent conference on Curriculum Futures.
The Learning Objects came from H806 (even though I'm not up to that part yet).
The pasta carbonara came from Asda.

Induction Week

2006-01-31T03:17:00.000Z

A strange mixture of feelings.

It's odd to be studying at postgraduate level again when all I've done in recent decades is have babies & potter about at level 1 & 2 doing hobby courses & now suddenly I have to be all grown up & serious. Heck, I wasn't much more than a kid myself last time I did anything like this!

Apprehension & a sense of inadequacy creeping in when I read my fellow students' intros & the throwaway line in the induction materials that suggests most people will be coming to this course after other MA modules, ready-equipped with a sound knowledge of learning theory.

Doubts as to whether I'll have time to do justice to such a rich course when my working life has just become impossibly busy.

Tried to kill two birds with one stone by putting some of the day's frustrations into a response to my first tutorial activity, replying to a fellow student's reflections on the effects of connectivity on learning organisations:

Having spent much of today troubleshooting the messes that can arise when various sections of a supposedly connected organisation fail to communicate effectively with each other, I share your ambivalence. It seems to me that connectivity alone isn't enough; there needs to be co-ordination, too. Distributed knowledge can mean we each hold our own little portion of knowledge & the big picture is lost.

I'm not really as cynical as this message makes me sound, just more keenly aware of possible dysfunctionality today than usual.

I've started, so I'll finish!

We have lift-off!

2006-01-20T01:53:00.000Z

& so the journey begins :-)

In defence of Wikipedia

2006-01-02T18:12:00.000Z

Now that the excitement over Wikipedia's removal of an inaccurate story has died down, some timely turn-of-year reflections...

The BBC's columnist Bill Thompson already attacked the hysteria evident on both sides of the debate & drew attention to the coincidentally published Nature report that found Wikipedia's scientific accuracy to be on a par with that of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

The latest edition of David Weinberger's JOHO newsletter offers a witty critique of the misinformation circulated about the episode by conventional media, who see their monolpoly on knowledge threatened by this snotty little upstart. He relishes the irony of newspapers misreporting the measures taken by Wikipedia to improve the trustworthiness of their material, but also makes the more serious point that conventional media have been wrong-footed by a shift in the nature of knowledge itself:

The media literally can't hear that humility, which reflects accurately the fluid and uneven quality of Wikipedia. The media amplifying our general cultural assumptions have come to expect knowledge to be coupled with arrogance
(...) The media have a cognitive problem with a publisher of knowledge that modestly does not claim perfect reliability, does not back up that claim through a chain of credentialed individuals, and that does not believe the best way to assure the quality of knowledge is by disciplining individuals for their failures
(...)With Wikipedia, the balance of knowing shifts from the individual to the social process.

He makes illuminating points about the way "identity" works in such ventures, too.

Structured blogging (again)

2006-01-02T15:17:00.000Z

David Weinberger's provisional reactions to structured blogging are pretty non-committal ("interesting and could be important") but I think he captures one issue precisely, when he says:

the success of structured blogging depends on how easy it is for bloggers and how appealing the benefits are

I followed up a few links, to see whether my own negative reactions were shared by other commentators. Here's a sample of quotes I came up with.

Charlie Wood's Moonwatcher
Structured blogging in the enterprise

While having different forms for different kinds of content may sound complex to a TypePad or Blogger user, it's been the way users have interacted with enterprise content management systems like Stellent and Vignette for a decade.

Highly informative, as it told me more about how structured blogging is supposed to work - not an overall tagging system, but a set of forms you need only use if you're making a particular type of post & choose to have it, as it were, indexable. That certainly makes the idea sound less threatening, even if the hackles do rise again immediately on realising its "enterprise" origins & suspecting a major use may be for targetted advertising...

Frank Gilbane's Gilbane Report Blog
Structured Blogging - Enterprise Only?

winning the hearts of bloggers will not be easy. It will be far easier to do in the context of enterprise applications, but the difficulty should not be underestimated. I am a fan of structured blogging and authoring in general, but the concerns being raised are real.

Recognition that the main obstacle may be emotional rather than intellectual/rational... & again the acknowledgement that this may be an innovation that serves the needs of business first.

Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed
Structured Blogging Will Flop

Darn it all, techno utopians are so cute. Nevertheless, structured blogging, the over-ballyhooed idea that people will post to their blogs using different forms depending on what they're posting is going to be a flop.
Its the usual three reasons I trot out repeatedly to technologists with utopian visions who want to change the world on the back of altered user behavior:
People are lazy

People are lazy

People are lazy

There is simply not enough benefit to the average blogger to compensate for the added irritation of having to pull up a separate form for each type of content you post.

A differently slanted synicism, but one it's hard to refute.

Stowe Boyd's Corante
Structured Blogging versus Messy, Messy, Messy

My bet is that Structured Blogging will fail, not because people wouldn't like some of the consequences -- such as an easy way to compare blog posts about concrete things like record reviews, and so on -- but because of the inherent, and wonderful messiness of the world of blogging.
Because blog posts don't have to conform to any structural standards, they can be used to do anything: nothing is out of bounds, because we haven't created the boundaries. The messiness of the world we are living in is one of the reasons that it is such a rich and rewarding experience.

That's the criticism I was groping clumsily towards in my previous post.

I haven't completely changed my mind, but I'm starting to see that educational blogging (OK, all blogging is educational - I should probably say 'blogging as a deliberate educational tool') could benefit from the structuring initiatives. After all, there's a point when organic messiness has to give way to structured writing for assessment purposes (OK, we might deplore that, but l don't feel inclined to take on the entire western academic system this afternoon). So, if I can insist that my students conform to certain structuring conventions when they offer work for assessment, maybe the sky won't fall in if similar structuring conventions are offered (not imposed) in blogging.

Oh, & I'm not unaware of the irony involved in using w.bloggar to format this post, insert hyperlinks & so on!

Standards?

2005-12-29T01:19:00.000Z

Some thoughts prompted by NG264's piece on standards in the blogosphere.

Doesn't this whole idea assume a homogeneity in the purposes & uses of blogs that doesn't, indeed maybe shouldn't, exist? Sure, it would be neat if everyone who wrote a software review (for instance) followed a certain format that would allow the reviews to be collated/indexed/rendered searchable. But where does that leave individuality, creativity, our right to be different? The joyful messiness of an organic form of self-expression?

If I feel moved to write about a particular piece of software, I just want to say what I have to say (which may be trivial, technical, practical, frivolous....) without shoe-horning my comments into some predetermined standard.

I may be misreading the SmartMobs entry, which is less coherent than I would expect from a student assignment:

"Datamining" ourselves "democratizies"[democratizes?] tools that were previously cost [costly? cost-effective? something else?] and prohibitive [huh? what did they prohibit?] for most people. They can also make it easier for many more people to contribute more effectively to a general "knowldge [knowledge?] commons". The idea of creating databases about different aspects of our [our what??] has actually been around for a while.

I'm automatically suspicious of the quality of argument, when the quality of expression is so low.

Software reviews may also be an unfortunate example. The main purpose of standards often seems to be to facilitate interoperability, in the interests of promoting manufacturing efficiency & profits, with user benefits an almost accidental side-effect. So standards applied to blogged software reviews would speed the process of sorting sheep from goats, help consumers choose between competing products.

Fine, but is it why we blog?

Blogging for journalism students

2005-12-18T23:28:00.000Z

Technology commentator Bill Thompson's contributions to the BBC World Service "Go Digital" programme are published weekly in The BillBlog.

His December 3 piece, Two-way conversations, explains the thinking behind asking his journalism students to produce blogs as part of their coursework. There are lessons here for all educators, not just those involved in journalism courses.

He draws a parallel with the paradigm shift in e-commerce:

A few years ago readers of the Cluetrain Manifesto were exhorted to see the market as a conversation where customers engaged with sellers. This was presented as a break with the one-way advertising and marketing model that used to hold sway, made possible by the internet.
The blogosphere is doing the same sort of thing for journalism, whether in print or broadcast. Its no longer enough to write or say something and consign any responses to the letters page or occasional 'have your say' programme.

I'm not convinced the shift in e-commerce is as extensive as Thompson implies (though peer-to-peer e-commerce on the eBay model maybe comes close) but I like the example set by his course.

Blogs & Wikis

2005-12-13T16:26:00.000Z

A useful starting point for this topic is Blogs & Wikis: Ushering in an Era of Change.

Alongside interviews with Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales & the co-founders of Bytes for All, it includes links to definitions & basic resources.

This is part of the Development Gateway's special report: Information Society: The Next Steps, which covers a range of issues around the recent WSIS Tunis Summit.

Thanks to Nigel's H806 blog for the pointer to this multi-topic portal.

Google Print revisited

2005-12-13T13:04:00.000Z

I'd vaguely registered the American publishing industry's legal challenge to Google Print, but not looked properly at what Google's proposals involved. Scanning the contents of books held in public libraries, in order to make them available online - right? Wrong. Well, not exactly wrong, but seriously incomplete.

An article by Prof. Tim Wu, Leggo My Ego: Google Print and the other culture war spells out & challenges that assumption:

There's a key difference between Google "Print" and the regular Google "Web." On the Web search, if you find something, you can then just click through to the Web page. But using Google Print is different - you only get the results. To get the "full" result, you actually have to buy the book. This is a common misunderstanding about Google Print - it is a way to search books, not a way to get books for free. It is not, in short, Napster for books.

Wu argues convincingly that this is part of a web-driven shift from "a culture of control" to "a culture of exposure". He draws a useful analogy with map-making: if cartographers had to seek the permission of every individual property owner to include their land on maps, what chance would there be of having complete, affordable maps?

Just as maps do not compete with or replace property, neither do book searches replace books. Both are just tools for finding what is otherwise hard to find.

He concludes by pointing out that it's in authors' interests to make their books easy to find, if books are to continue competing successfully with the web as a publishing medium.

Given Google Print's potential value to online learners, I'm happy to have had my eyes opened by this defence of what it really involves.

Three warnings

2005-12-05T04:34:00.000Z

Rheingold's coverage of the major risks associated with developments in communciation technologies (in a spirit of "know thine enemy") identifies three main schools of criticism:

1. commodification of the public sphere

Here he draws on Habermas & Baudrillard to argue that the "public sphere" as the place where democracy happens ("People can govern themselves only if they communicate widely, freely, and in groups - publicly") is especially vulnerable to being changed for the worse by advances in ICT. Not just by direct censorship, but by "the corrupting influence of ersatz public opinion". The PR industry & the packaging of policies & politicians as commodities are both facilitated by new technology. ("What used to be a channel for authentic communication has become a channel for the updating of commercial desire").

2. the Panoptic school

Using the analogy of Bentham's proposed prison architecture, where all cells could be viewed from a central point, this is the "Big Brother" argument - that the digital traces we leave, as we interact online, lays us open to malicious surveillance by commercial, criminal or controlling forces of various sorts. This is where we need to exercise a healthy amount of cynicism. 'I do nothing wrong, therefore I have nothing to fear' only stands up as long as I'm not in conflict with my government.

3. the hyper-realist school

A logical outgrowth of postmodernism & therefore difficult to refute (because ICT utopians are hardly in a position to deny the power of symbolism) this criticism raises the possibility that cyberspace is a place of illusion, replacing reality with a "slicked-up electronic simulation" that deludes us into believing we still have authentic relationships with each other & with those who exercise the real power. Rheingold cites Debord's 1968 Society of the Spectacle allegation of a "worldwide hegemony of power in which the rich and powerful [have] learned to rule with minimal force by turning everything into a media event".

Now, whilst I'm quite prepared to accept that I'm being disempowered, spied on & generally conned (& that online communities in education may all be part of the same Evil Plot) I have to ask myself: does it matter? I'm with Rheingold in thinking that it's only "when we forget about the illusion that the trouble begins". If it's war, the Internet provides weapons for both sides.

These are only notes - not how a blog should work, but if I stop to seek out appropriate links, it will be even further into tomorrow than it is now....

Synchronicity?

2005-12-04T22:28:00.000Z

Just been reading about Richard Branson's latest move, the Virgin/NTL "merger":

A deal between Virgin Mobile and US-listed NTL would radically shake up Britain's media landscape, as operators move to offer their customers a full range of TV, entertainment and telecom services.

Then I opened up Rheingold's Virtual Community where I'd left off, & immediately read his 1993 comments about Prodigy in its pre-Internet incarnation, as:

a preview of what could happen if a small number of large companies manages to dominate a global telecommunications industry that is now a competitive market of small and medium-size businesses that manage to survive and thrive along with the giants (...) The prospect of the technical capabilities of a near-ubiquitous high-bandwidth Net in the hands of a small number of commercial interests has dire political implications.

I'll pursue that another time (the chapter is stuffed full of high level sociological ideas, from Habermas to hyper-reality) but I went off for tea pondering the coincidence. I usually steer clear of the business news (some sacrifices have to be made in the face of impending information-overload-induced insanity!). Maybe I should be taking more notice.

Paradigms

2005-12-02T21:27:00.000Z

... or paradiggems as they're affectionately known in this family!

On last year's Homer course, I met their ancestor, paradeigmata. A paradeigma was a mythological tale, a sort of fable that provided a key to understanding some particular dilemma by showing an example of how it had been handled in the mythical past. I wasn't quite sure how that related to the Kuhnian paradigm shifts I'd previously encountered on T171, but didn't stop to investigate.

Today I've been reading Rheingold again & came across his argument that the rise of online communities involves a paradigm shift of sorts: from the broadcast paradigm (one to many communication) to the network paradigm (many to many). What makes this particularly applicable to education is that the first fits a didactic, teacher-centred pedagogy & the second fits a constructivist, learner-centred pedagogy. I don't think I'd fully, consciously, made the connection between the two sets of concepts before.

Yet I should have done, as I saw the network analogy in Bob Taylor's horizontal management. (See Bluefluff's posts here & here.)

Rheingold's chapter is here.

I don't think Rheingold's usage of the term exactly matches either the traditional 'exemplar' sense, or the Kuhnian 'mindset' sense, but I quite like his middle way.

Blogging for writers

2005-11-29T01:55:00.000Z

The author's dilemma: to blog or not to blog

Although its target audience is professional writers, this article's overview of blogs - their purposes, pros & cons - is a useful primer for educators, too. The idea of "blog tours", with visiting guest bloggers, is one with definite potential for learning situations.

Langdon Winner

2005-11-23T22:27:00.000Z

That's another name I hadn't come across before... his views on the "political nature of artefacts" cropped up in Rheingold's Virtual Community discussion of early MUDs. The inference seemed to be that certain types of software actively encourage the emergence of certain types of community, running contrary to much of the evidence Rheingold provides elsewhere about the way online communities emerge spontaneously & unpredictably. The idea of producing software with a particular kind of interaction designed in is clearly relevant to the issue of VLEs, so I thought I'd look further into this Winner bloke.

I emerged a while later, having been beaten about the head by Engels v Marx, automatic tomato-picking machines & Platonic ships, but largely unconvinced.

Do Artifacts Have Politics?

This is Winner's 1986 paper on the subject. I really don't see that he's saying any more than 'technology reflects the values of the society that produces it, therefore its effects tend to reinforce the status quo, therefore it should be assumed to be a Bad Thing & regarded with deep suspicion'. No new insights there & a far from unassailable conclusion!

Interview with EDU-SHAM CEO

A 1998 satirical piece that shows Winner's deep hostility to the spread of e-learning. Amusing in parts (as much satire is, whether or not you're sympathetic to its aims) it seems to be based on a misapprehension of the subject, overlooking the transforming potential of online learning communities by allowing them no part in the EDU-SHAM dystopia. If e-learning was as Winner describes, or even moving in that direction, it would indeed be undesirable, but this reductio ad absurdum bears so little resemblance to reality that it's difficult to take it seriously.

(Incidentally, the design of his homepage speaks of somebody profoundly uncomfortable in cyberspace , on a mission to make his readers feel the same way.)

I see Rheingold has more to say about LW in chapters I've not yet reached, so I may be revisiting this one.

SCORM can wait

2005-11-20T02:31:00.000Z

OK, I tried. Some websites define it as "Sharable Content Object Reference Model" (eg the official US Advanced Distributed Learning site) while for others it's "Sharable Courseware Object Reference Model" (eg the, um, official US Advanced Distributed Learning site). Glad we got that sorted out.

So, let's look a little more deeply. Ah, now this sounds promising: Virtual University Systems.

"ADL Co-Lab defines Sharable Courseware Object Reference Model (SCORM 1.2)? which includes a Content Aggregation Model (CAM) and a Run-time Environment (RTE). The Sharable Courseware Object Reference Model (SCORM) and other instructional technology specifications are designed to facilitate interoperability and reuse of courseware across learning management systems (LMSs). Toward this end, CourseMate Course Builder course authoring software fully supports the creation of mandatory SCORM meta-data for discovery, use of SCORM data model elements for tracking the progress of learners at run-time, and the creation of SCORM-conformant manifests for exchanging content between repositories and Learning Management Systems (LMS)."

Got that? Good.

Time for bed, said Zebedee.

Course Taster

2005-11-18T20:24:00.000Z

The OU Course Taster page for H806 doesn't seem to be quite ready for public consumption yet, but it will be worth keeping an eye on.

Learning Objects & H806

2005-11-18T19:55:00.000Z

Putting the pieces together: What working with learning objects means for the educator

This 2002 paper by Weller, Pegler & Mason outlines the thinking behind H806's use of learning objects, along with a largely positive evaluation of their implications for course designers & authors. It looks ahead to their anticipated benefits & drawbacks during the first (spring 2003) presentation of the course.

Of particular interest here:

learning objects have their roots in a training rather than academic context

they are generally designed for use in online rather than F2F learning situations - hence the definition of a learning object offered by Pegler et al:

"a digital piece of learning material that addresses a clearly identifiable topic or learning outcome and has the potential to be reused in different contexts"

the loss of "narrative" implicit in a course built from learning objects may be beneficial, as students are required to make their own connections, rather than passively accepting the links put in place for them by course authors.

The paper concludes by noting that the learning objects agenda is currently "dominated by discussions between the various standards bodies and developers of e-learning platforms" & that the time is right for debate to "move into the practitioner's arena".

Learning Objects

2005-11-17T20:58:00.000Z

I decided to look into learning objects, since H806 is, according to Weller, the first OU course to be developed purely in this form. Now, in 2001/2 I wrote some learning objects for the OU, admittedly for its corporate division (COROUS) & that's where I first encountered the term. So I wondered if the meaning was perhaps subtly different from the one I'd been carrying around with me.

Use and Abuse of Re-usable Learning Objects

This paper gives a useful overview of the confusion surrounding learning objects, arguing that it's inappropriate to define them so broadly that everything in the world becomes a learning object, yet equally unhelpful to narrow the definition down to a particular length or method of study, since this works against the principles of interoperability & re-usability.
The definition offered here:

A Learning Object is an independent and self-standing unit of learning content that is predisposed to reuse in multiple instructional contexts

seems a reasonable compromise between the general & the specific.

Learning Objects and Standards

This resource page from the e-Learning Centre offers a range of material on latest developments in the world of learning objects. I may need to spend some time on SCORM...

Martin Weller's homepage

2005-11-17T14:58:00.000Z

http://iet.open.ac.uk/pp/m.j.weller/

Martin chairs H806. I've studied with him before, on T171 (continuing for a while as a colleague). This is his homepage in the IET. I was fascinated to learn from it that H806 was the first (& last!) course launched by the ill-fated e-University.

His publications page looks rather like a reading list for H806.

Using text messages

2005-11-17T12:38:00.000Z

A small 'local' application of mobile technology occurs to me.

One frequent complaint amongst OU tutors concerns inactive students who can't easily be contacted because they aren't reading their OU email & haven't provided a landline number. We resent making private calls to mobiles, because our pay doesn't allow for incurring that sort of expense. So we grumble & resort to writing letters. Paper, ink, envelope, first class stamp... total cost 30p+ & still no guarantee of a response.

Solution: send the student a text.

"Urgent msg from your OU tutor: pls check your mailbox asap"

"No TMAxx rcvd - problems? Pls call"

Cost to tutor: 10p max (unless the student turns out to have left for exotic climes). Likelihood of being seen: high. Comparing response rates to letters/texts would make an interesting bit of research!

Knowledge Economy

2005-11-16T01:57:00.000Z

I kept bumping into this phrase on my travels around the education & training sites. It's one of those terms I've read, & even used, without properly looking into what it means & where it comes from. So that was tonight's assignment....

Google offered me this page:

The Knowledge Economy - What Is The Knowledge Economy? from the New Zealand Ministry of Economic Development.
The explanation here is quite clear & comprehensive; it doesn't assume too much about the reader's previous acquaintance with economic theory (just as well, because mine is slight) & talks about areas I do know something about ("death of distance" for instance). So far, so constructivistly good.

Narrowing the search to pages from the UK (because I was a little thrown by the NZ focus) took me back into the fluff'n'guff zone.

So I did what I always do at times like this & asked Wikipedia.

Knowledge economy

Statements such as the rules and practices that determined success in the industrial economy of the 20th century need rewriting in an interconnected world where resources such as know-how are more critical than other economic resources. told me that this is a topic of some relevance to H806! Good job I looked, really...

In one of those neat coincidences, I learned that the phrase is attributed to Peter Drucker, a management theorist I'd never heard of until earlier today, when his death was mentioned in a blog written by a fellow prospective H806 student. I'd even read the Guardian obituary out of curiosity & been none the wiser. (It doesn't mention the knowledge economy concept amongst Drucker's contributions to management theory.) Then tonight, there the name was again!

I do have a lot of gaps to fill.

Ferl & Becta

2005-11-15T19:41:00.000Z

Ferl Homepage

Becta Homepage

Ferl (Further Education Resources for Learning) is an organisation run by Becta to support the use of ICT & e-learning in post-compulsory education.

Becta ((British Educational Communications & Technology Agency) is the government agency responsible for ICT & e-learning in schools, adult education, workplaces & public bodies.

I know next to nothing about the institutional side of today's UK educational system. I also have an unfortunate tendency to nod off before the end of sentences containing more than three acronyms. This entry is a first step in unravelling the mysteries.

Ferl for you

This looks to be one of the most immediately useful pages. It highlights popular areas of the ferl website, including an introduction to VLEs & a range of downloadable online teaching resources.

How to get it all wrong

A light-hearted look at how not to introduce a VLE.

ferl Interview of the month

Interviews with practitioners, with links to related information & resources.

I've included these as good examples of the accessible way much of the material on ferl is presented.

Post-16 e-learning strategy

Typical sample of the official material on becta's site. I'll need to revisit this when I'm feeling more receptive to what I currently dismiss as "fluff'n'guff" writing.

Enough for Lesson One!!

Digital divide

2005-11-14T12:24:00.000Z

Where in the world is the digital divide?
BBC News Online "At-a-glance" feature with some startling statistics.
There are fuller sources, I know (& an argument that the true digital divide is not between the haves/have nots, but the use/don't use) but this struck me as a useful starting point.
Opening text:
In 2003 leaders at the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) agreed that by 2015, more than half the world should be in reach of the net.
The world is still a long way from that goal.
The second part of the summit in November 2005 takes stock of how far the world has come.

Reed's Law

2005-11-14T03:36:00.000Z

The successor to Moore's Law (microprocessors) & Metcalfe's Law (networks), Reed's Law is key in what Howard Rheingold calls "the next social revolution" - the role played by technical networks - wired or wireless - in fostering the growth of social networks.

I suspect that an understanding of Reed's Law will be important.

Reed's Locus is David Reed's Group Forming Networks Resource Page

Reed's Law - An Interview is included in Reed's Locus, but worth identifying separately. It's one of the first resources I found about Reed's Law, & reports an interview conducted by David Weinberger, probably my favourite guru on online matters.

Reed's Law - Wikipedia's somewhat dry summary!

Routes

2005-11-14T03:16:00.000Z

Routes

This page lists the H806 Course Team's recommended websites for H806 students. I haven't explored them yet - except Blogger, of course!

About this blog

2005-11-14T02:45:00.000Z

In February 2006, I start studying the OU post-graduate course H806, Learning in the Connected Economy. I've been writing a personal blog for a while now & it seemed natural to use the same medium to make an online notebook to capture some of the ideas & resources I may want to draw on during the course.
The title speaks for itself, I think. H806 should provide an exciting way to study "connecting" in the context of education, & this blog is my tentative way of "connecting" with the course before it begins.