All The Young (Edu)Punks

Do you agree their roles are changing?

Whether or not I think educator’s roles are changing depends on the point of view of the educator. If you are a professor who believes that they “profess” the truth and ideas then it is up to the student to get what you say. If you are an instructor who teaches skills, maybe this change applies to you; maybe you investigate how to facilitate skill acquisition. Another factor in whether or not educators roles are changing is how responsive are educators to student needs?

Yes – clearly students today are not the same as students in previous generations. Several blogs and papers (Media Multitasking Among American Youth, Teens And Social Media, Defining “Creepy Treehouse”) have looked at how this generation functions on the internet. As an educator, I believe it should be your duty to use whatever format is necessary to enhance learning; a Hippocratic Oath for teachers. Similarly, part of the Hippocratic Oath that “acknowledg[es] that it is impossible for any single physician to maintain expertise in all areas. It also highlights the different historical origins of the surgeon and the physician“, an educator cannot maintain expertise in all areas of their field of study. As such, educators should go out of their way to find the knowledge experts in the field and bring them to the classroom, using educational technology and communication technology to do so. Much like how surgeons are specialists, guest speakers take those roles in our classrooms – guest lecturers. The physician’s role is played by the teacher/facilitator.

If so, what are appropriate responses?

Again, this all matters on your teaching philosophy. If the power of didactic lecturing is your preferred mode of knowledge dissemination then you won’t be affected by a paradigm shift as much as someone who thinks that the learner has a role in their own learning. One response that could occur and is not at all dependent on technology is to shift your personal role from teacher to facilitator – help students facilitate their own learning. Facilitated learning often leads to deeper understanding and comprehension of the subject matter. But, as Lisa states in her second paper for CCK08 “[a]ctive learning and facilitation creates a more participatory learning environment, but its basis is still in the learning of the individual via the method controlled by the instructor. It is ‘learner-centered’ but not ‘learner-directed’.” So really, two shifts need to occur for some educators. One change, from teacher-centered to learner-centered; then a second change from learner-centered to learner-directed.

Another shift that could occur is to recognize that students are generally more comfortable with new technologies – make sure that alternative options are available to a student who might not put the same effort into an essay as he or she would into a YouTube video, flash presentation or some alternative form of analysis. A Skype conversation with an industry or technological leader may bring greater learning that still matches pre-determined learning outcomes. This could provide more learning than a simple essay. This customization may not increase educator workload during the marking phase, but it does demand that the educator think in creative and complex ways that may be outside of their norms.

What are impediments to change?

The main impediment to change is the educators themselves. Many educators have a vested, personal interest in the power they command at the front of the classroom. For these educators, lecturing is a display of their power, their knowledge and their position in life. Just looking at the language of that sentence, the implied ownership of knowledge and even the arrogance that didactic educators own something like knowledge that is so nebulous and ever changing is to someone like me, a ridiculous statement.

The other major roadblock to change is the administrative power that cannot see how to capitalize on a new learning theory such as connectivism. People who administer in higher education institutions cannot figure out ways to keep money flowing in – even though current classroom deliveries are lacking in the methods those students want them in. Modern students require more flexible options – some want online delivery, some want different hours of instruction, some want credit for what they already know. The current models in most higher education settings are incapable of that level of flexibility.

Beyond that Bob Bell states in this Moodle discussion that K-12 learning is affected by safety issues. Brookfield talks about safety in the classroom in his book The Skillful Teacher (p. 94) and discusses how one way he deals with it is by letting students know what’s coming. I can’t describe a better way to help students discover new learning than by letting them know what might be out there. Certainly, that requires a maturity about others’ viewpoints and beliefs, which may be absent in the K-12 classroom.

References

Bell, B. (2008, November 9). Changing Role: Fast Forward To The Past. CCK08 Moodle Forums. Retrieved November 9, 2008, from http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/moodle/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=1064#p6758

Brookfied, S. (2006). The skillful teacher. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.

Lane, L. (2008, November 6). Paper #2: Insurgence for Emergence. Lisa’s CCK08 Wordpress Blog. Retrieved November 9, 2008, from http://lisahistory.wordpress.com/2008/11/06/paper-2-insurgence-for-emergence/.

Wikipedia (2008, November 7). Retrieved November 9, 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath

Howdy y’all.

I’ve said before I don’t dig Concept Maps, they don’t do much for me. On the other hand I haven’t found a visualization tool that does… so as part of the course requirements for CCK08 here’s my concept map in all it’s glory.

http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y80/dietsociety/connectivism-midcourse.jpg

CCK08 – In the Friday wrap up session I pointed out that lurkers in the course didn’t contribute anything to the group (the ones that do contribute to the class). I thought this was essentially a selfish stance, one that was taking and not giving. Lisa Lane responded in the backchannel that you can’t take what can be reproduced infinitely – it’s still there after you “take” it. My initial reaction was something like “oh, well my wording is imprecise”. And it was. After reflecting on it, maybe the wording is inadequate. In a connectivist classroom, giving and taking denotes a power structure that isn’t there. Plus the lurker “takes” from class and may do nothing with that information, or may share it with another set of people. Maybe everyone talks about it and comes up with great ideas. Do they connect back and push the idea further?  I’m sure Stephen would say “I don’t care” about what happens to the knowledge, and maybe that’s the sort of existential attitude one needs to take. Maybe I’m hung up on the ownership of knowledge, which is an exhibition of power?

So what happens if everyone is a lurker? For instance, if everyone taking the class made no comment in Moodle, on blogs, on Twitter, in the Google group, Second Life, Facebook and wherever else this course lives, would the course essentially cease to exist? Can Connectivism account for passive learners? Or because of the distributed nature of Connectivism, it is statistically impossible to have everyone passive in a network. Someone, somewhere, will be contributing something. We just may not see it. What does this mean for instructors? I think that’s a huge thing.

Back to power – if we follow this line of thinking, and only a small percentage (and the numbers bandied about on a couple of internet sites has been 20% and 10%) of people are comfortable posting, will they continue to post? Are they the new posting elite? Is there power from posting? This blog post, seems to think so. So does this article by Jakob Nielsen, who’s been pushing for a useable web since the beginning. One point that Nielsen makes is that blogs have worse participation percentages. Well duh… the nature of a blog is personal. To get a response on a blog one has to really throw a big hook out there. A blog is not a community (although it can be collaborative, which could lead to a community over time).

And in the spirit of this blog, considering the title and all, I contribute…

CCK08 – I’ve been doing a lot of connecting this week – polished off Introducing Wittgenstein which was a nice light read that makes a lot of sense in regards to the Connectivism course. I also saw Religulous which is tied into the idea of self-determination and control (this time, the control that religion imposes on behaviour, something that education also does).

Instructional design for me has always meant the “stuff” you do in class. It strikes me that instructional design (which implies a power structure from the get-go) is not how one would want to approach the process of using a connectivist approach to teaching (again, another word filled with power implications). If connectivism is chaotic by nature (as nature is chaotic), if connectivism is distributed, if connectivism is reacting to student needs rather than proactively dictating then how can one design what happens in the classroom?

This thought originates from a comment by Guy Boulet in Harold Jarche’s blog that went:

“In my mind, this is the university of the future, and the future is now. It is time that faculty stop thinking that what they teach is gospel. The role of faculty staff must shift from teacher to tutor. Students must be guided, not taught in order to better prepare them for the reality of the workplace.”

Hmmm, tutors… is that the future of teachers(/facilitators/instructors…)? What an incredible jump for someone to make! If instructors are to move to the tutoring model, does that not assume that we have to be subject matter experts, able to deftly move from one aspect of a topic to another? Certainly there are people in education who are there because their intellect and ability to think grants them some power. Sometimes, this power is granted through the mere act of publication – but now that self-publication is de rigeur, we have all fallen into a popularity contest of sorts – whoever has the most hits and links, whoever publishes the most is the “expert”. Critical thinking will sort some of this out (trash is still trash whether it’s Chomsky’s or my trash). The implication of higher education moving towards making professors into tutors is idealism without any sort of grounding. Maybe I’m so cynical that I believe that the power strutures that exist are unmoveable.

CCK08 – This week was interesting in that the ideas put forth have been things I’ve been saying for a while. Life is complex. Nothing is simple. Chaos and complexity is illustrated  well by the everyday classroom, and the things that can occur in it. The same material taught the same (and it could be argued that it’s never exactly the same) way has different outcomes depending on the contextual.

Complexity. It’s funny how the two courses I’m currently taking and the myriad of stuff I’m doing outside of schoolwork has a way of intertwining. I’m applying some of the things that the Connectivism course is doing to my Distance Ed course I’m teaching. The stuff that the Brock facilitation course talked about this week was context-heavy: that’s a big piece of the Connectivism course. Serendipity? Maybe. I don’t want to believe that anything is that mystical. Might as well start believing in unicorns and pegasii too. It does, however, speak to the idea that things are interconnected in ways that we don’t always see. Could that be the real-world application of connectivism?

CCK08 – Well, I’ve taken a couple days off to rest my weary brain, and come back to work and still have a pile of things to do. One of the questions (that I haven’t ventured forth) that I have is that if groups behave as one cohesive body (much like an individual) can groups be networked? I suppose the easy answer is yes, that in both the real and virtual worlds that groups act together to leverage legislation, work together to complete game objectives and other acts. The devil’s advocate might say that they are just acting as a larger group – for a common goal. Then the question becomes more about when groups act together do they become a larger group or a network? And if the larger groups goal is accomplished, does this larger group then become splintered to be two smaller groups networked as each group reverts to their original (and different) purposes?

I don’t have neat answers for that. I guess that’s the nature of what we’re doing here.

The second point I’m going back and forth on is information overload – specifically connections overload. I’ve seen quite a few things surfacing (namely at Lisa Lane’s blog, the readings this week, a post from Fake Plastic Fish, a couple of blurbs on TV…) about basic information overload, and how it’s a bad thing. I don’t see it as a bad thing, but as  a good thing. What you take out of the information dump defines who you are, it says a lot about you. Now certainly, you could end up at the bottom of the heap burried under all those bits. More often than not, humans find a way to deal with it (some by going out into the woods and sending letter bombs to academics… not the best way to channel it). I think dealing with all this information you find a way to conceptually handle it and sort out the wheat from the chaff. You have to prioritize. I know, I know not eath shocking. I guess I’ll be able to better understand some of these concepts after the readings this week.

I discovered this week that the discussions that happen on Friday for this course are really what people should be tuning into. They’re great conversations and are the stuff of good discourse. As for the historical perspective on last week, well, meh. I didn’t get much out of it, and I suppose the point was that one should know how we got to where we are to know where we can go. Again, the Moodle forums were much more interesting than either of the readings and I did try to keep my toe in the water there, so to speak. I think things are settling in the course, with people finding their roles and hopefully I’ll be able to attend one of the two video sessions on Wednesday or actually chat at noon on Friday (coincidentally when we have a meeting here at the college regarding online courses).

So, to further a thought that I had while reading and commenting on one of the other participants statements that SARS was the most successful network, I responded that connectivism could be the virus that SARS contained. The meaning I was driving at was similar to the McLuhan quote I posted back in early September (that a couple people either coincidentally started using or read here and liked the analogy), was that networks are organic and created by humans, so in some essense they will be reflective of what we do, see and feel. The information carried by the network can be all sorts of things, so the way it is accessed is important because that’s what provides context (and to borrow from constructivists, that’s how we create meaning for ourselves, context).

CCK08 – I will wholeheartedly admit, I don’t particularly get much out of concept maps, or concept mapping. I know Downes said in the Friday discussion that we should do what we want, yet if something in the course is requested it seems that I feel compelled to respond. So here’s a link to my concept map.

Connectivism

One of the issues surrounding connectivism as a theory of learning is whether or not it is a new theory of learning. One could argue that connectivism is merely learning from those who you have networked with, which has been done since the early days of the human race. The difficult concept that the learning resides in the network (Siemens, 2008) not necessarily in the interaction between the two parties (although that can occur in a connectivist manner as well). This networked approach to learning is what I believe to be a new development and advancement from constructivism and a constructivist approach to learning.

Weaknesses of connectivism

While Siemens does debunk some initial criticisms of Connectivism in a 2007 response, he states “[a]s knowledge complexifies, patterns—not individual elements—become of greatest importance in gaining understanding.” (Siemens, 2007) One worrying aspect of the phenomenon of knowledge complexification is that there is a possibility that as knowledge becomes more complex that the patterns sought to understand knowledge will also be so complex that it renders both the pattern and knowledge unknowable. As we have seen in the case of the irrational number pi, there is no discernable pattern in the remainder. Does this mean that at some point we will reach such a similarly complex pattern of connections that we will be unable to comprehend the meaning of such a web? Certainly, this may not be concern in the near future, but as information grows at what seems an exponential rate, this may be an issue In the future.

Strengths of connectivism

One of the great strengths of connectivism is that it recognizes and highly values the context of information and that it is flexible enough to adapt or add new information as it becomes available. Downes (2006) uses the analogy of a red apple looking different under different conditions to illustrate interpretation. Downes then goes on to say “emergence is interpretation applied to connections.” So our contextual understanding of something is inherently connected to something else. Under previous learning theories context may have played a role (certainly in constructivism, much less so in a behaviourist model) but never has there been such an emphasis on context. As individuals begin to publish information on the web, I believe that understanding the context of the information being published is of utmost importance to the learner.

Personal observations

An important point to note is I have witnessed the way many people (not just younger generations who have grown up with internet access and the web) interact with information today rather than a decade ago. The immediacy and convenience of information has forced many people to rethink how they deal with information. In this process many find using the internet for information frustrating and confusing. This frustration and confusion is a sure sign that there is a shift underway. I believe that connectivism does address many of the problems in this paradigm shift.

References

Downes, S. (2005, December 12). An introduction to connective knowledge. Retrieved on October 3, 2008, from http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=33034

Siemens, G. (2007, November 12). Connectivism: learning theory or pastime of the self-amused?. Retrieved on October 4, 2008, from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/Connectivism_response.doc

Siemens, G. (2008, September 8). What is connectivism? Retrieve on October 5, 2008, from http://docs.google.com/View?docid=anw8wkk6fjc_14gpbqc2dt

CCK08 – I think I’ve attempted some sort of distillation of the concepts for my own blog-notes and all I can say is “what a mess”. I guess that’s my network for ya. Despite having a sense of networks through a bunch of different lens’ (social organizing close to 15 years ago, network design courses close to 5 years ago) I’m not sure I can comment on this weeks events (not just readings). This is the disequalibrium that every normal course seems to inflict on people.

Of course, having real life interfere on a number of levels didn’t help either. Never mind that I wanted to have this done on Sunday. The best laid plans, neh? So, back to a Brookfield technique, what was the one thing I learned this week?

Well, the one idea that resonated with me was that networks need to continually be nourished. Weak nodes need to be used to be stronger, good connections need to be maintained to be useful. In that sense, Connectivism seems to be very organic – much like how networks are when they are not artificially created. I imagine this is how neural networks look – although my only fleeting moment of biology schooling was helping my wife study for the RN exam. Of course, to many people this may have been a self-evident idea, but I hadn’t grasped that the network that Downes and Siemens were speaking of were not only the ones made of fibre. As Mike Watt would say, “Baka!”

It’s also been interesting seeing the Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing dynamic that I’ve been reading about in the Bens text “Facilitation with Ease” for the facilitation course, and then to have a forum post about it – brilliant timing. It’s uncanny that my sense of timing is so good.