abject learning

Jim "I’ve got your children" Groom – Edupunk Posterboy, originally uploaded by bionicteaching.

Three recent triumphs by everybody’s favorite edupunker Jim Groom that merit some shout-outs:

I was on an airplane when the recent NMC Online Conference in Second Life session with Jim and Tom Woodward went down, and while I feel very fortunate to be here in Barca, I will always regret having missed out on this. The Revolution Will be Syndicated is a wonderful summary of where the work of personal toolsets and radical reuse stands right now, and it’s done with a sense of fun and inspiration that is simply awe-inspiring. Toward the end of the video, when Wish You Were Here (one of my all-time favorite songs) kicks in, and Jim and Tom open fire on the audience with their flamethrowers, and a voice pipes up “Jim Groom I LOVE YOU MAN!!”… I nearly wept tears of joy.

WordPress Revolution by Tom Woodward

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It’s tempting sometimes to get swept away with Jim’s anarchic nuclear-powered presence, or his wild symbolism and humour, and to forget just how seriously and intelligently he works through these issues. So it’s a real treat to hear Jim finally get to do a keynote at WordCampEd in DC. The richness and deep thinking on the subject rings clear, and the passion is unparalleled – as about ten people who were at the session have subsequently commented on their blogs or on Twitter: “now I know why they call him The Reverend.”

If you care about blogging in education, hell, if you care about education you must check out the slides and listen…

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But in terms of a contribution to the broader culture of education, Jim may have made his most profound contribution to the field with a criminally under-recognized post entitled Cloning the UMW Blogs Empire. It’s been understood for some time that UMW Blogs is pretty much the gold standard when it comes to the establishment of a WP blogging system as an educational publishing platform and as the basis of a campus community. But there’s only one UMW Blogs, and only one Jim Groom, right? Well in this post Jim describes how “two years worth of iteration and development [has been] given to Longwood in less than an hour” by the full sharing of a toolset, configurations, customizations, and documentation.

In an era in which budgets are tight, and getting tighter, I cannot fathom how work like this isn’t banner news across the blogosphere.

I’m pleased and more than a little relieved to pass on the news that the Moose will once again be loose next year, as the Northern Voice Personal Blogging and Social Media Conference will be back for its fifth year next February 20-21. Like some of the other organizers of years past, I have scaled back my involvement with the planning for this go-round, but happily there has been an infusion of new energy and inspiration, evidenced by the snazzy new design of the conference website.

I’ve always been proud of the contribution that educators have made to this event, both in terms of formal participation and the sheer mad party mojo, so I do hope you will not only attend but give some thought to a creative session proposal.

My good feelings about Northern Voice are tempered by news of the arrest of Hossein Derakhshan (aka Hoder). He was on a panel I moderated at the first Northern Voice in 2005. There isn’t much known for certain about the circumstances of his imprisonment, but suffice it to say that I am hoping for his safety and immediate release.

A good morning’s work, originally uploaded by MrGluSniffer.

The above image represents a snapshot of about two hours out of two days of intense dialogue with my primary host here at the UOC, Julià Minguillón. I will not begin to try to reproduce or even summarize the extensive range of our discussions, but I do feel somewhat tapped out in terms of inspiration… and am hoping by putting some of this stuff out that network effects might kick in.

As you may know, I am a self-described refugee of the mainstream learning objects movement, but one of the projects we are working on strikes me as a legitimate and fascinating application and extension of that approach. The UOC has accumulated a huge collection of resources created for the teaching of statistics via its online distance courses. These resources include exercises, examples, textbook chapters and excerpts, applets and Flash animations, audio and video clips and equations. Presently, these resources are filed on a series of intranet drives and folders; browsing, searching and retrieval are difficult.

The project has proceeded so far with the intention of using the DSpace Repository system to store and share the resources. DSpace is a powerful, media-neutral system, widely adopted by a solid open source community. It is especially strong in terms of its provisioning for long-term archival of media. However, it has primarily been designed for the storage of open access scholarly publications and ePrints, not as an interactive space that supports the learning process. Julià likes to compare DSpace to an Egyptian pyramid – great for preserving the mummy, but maybe not a space you would want to live in.

So the primary question as I see it is can DSpace be extended so that the acts of searching and interaction around these resources can themselves be learning experiences?

Julià and I have spent a lot of time discussing how DSpace might serve as something of a “backend” application, one that can be augmented with something like a “social layer”. Could the API be used to support an interface that employs such new media features as tagging, ranking, annotation and discussion? I’ve done some searching, and so far have found nothing like what we are talking about, with the exception of an interesting presentation from HP Labs entitled Making DSpace Personal, which covers this ground very well, though not exactly in the senses we are considering.

Furthermore… I wonder if the concept of “Lenses” in the Connexions Project might be applicable.

I remember D’Arcy’s post about using Drupal as a socially-oriented content repository (we even tried to collaborate on building one for the Social Learning site, but the project ended up going in another direction), and I wonder if Drupal might be able to provide most of the “social layer” we are discussing.

Two other considerations that will merit follow-up posts on their own:

* Stephen Downes has written an epic, must-read article, The Future of Online Learning: Ten Years On, and he details so much there that is essential to consider in a process like this one.

* Julià showed me a fascinating site called El Rincon del Vago, which is essentially a sharing site for cheat sheets for students. It seems to me ad-supported sites like this have no choice but to pay close attention to what users want and how they want it presented, and we have much to learn from them. Indeed, I wonder if there might be a whole avenue of worthy study in the genre of illicit learning. I’m also keenly interested in how sites like these can motivate users to contribute the cheat sheets in the first place.

Any thoughts on anything above is very welcome – and may well contribute to the development of an open content site, one with a presentation model that can be useful to others in the community…

a line of screens, originally uploaded by phitar.

Note: this was mostly written last Friday, and I only write here a small fraction of what I wanted… But I do not want to hold this post hostage until I get it right.

I do not have the time, bandwidth (technological, cognitive), or battery life to properly respond to this week’s sessions at the UOC’s Open EdTech and Digital Divide conferences. Though again, I am pleased to point you to Ismael’s incredible liveblogging performance – and I believe the video archives will soon be available.

I will say that I was as provoked and moved by Dr. Sugata Mitra’s session on his Hole in the Wall project (also here) and subsequent work as by any session I have ever attended. I won’t attempt a synthesis, but will suggest that watching his TED Talk will be twenty minutes very well spent.

And two sets of related questions that I can’t get out of my head:

* If we can so rapidly mobilize a trillion dollars or more to rescue a financial system from the incompetence, greed and depradations of the people who are still in charge of it, is it not in our self-interest to spend a small fraction of that amount for the countless millions of extraordinarily deprived and vulnerable children of the world? Dr. Mitra estimates a cost of 3 cents US per student per day for his method. If we won’t do it because it’s the humane thing to do, let’s do it out of our own self-interest and self-preservation (if nothing else, think of the global conflict and security implications).

* What are the broader implications of “minimally invasive education” and “self-organizing educational systems”? Dr. Mitra is convinced that these methods cannot work for adults. Based on my own instinct and experience, I have to reluctantly agree with him. Why not? And what would adults need to unlearn in order to learn the way these kids do? I again find myself thinking that the teaching of skills is less important than changing attitudes – but I have no idea how best to do so.

Finally, thanks to the scale and intimacy of this week’s events, I (and members of my family) had the privilege to spend time interacting socially with Dr. Mitra in a casual environment. He was unfailingly kind, generous, irreverent and immensely amusing, evidently more or less devoid of ego… Funny how so often the most impressive people I meet in this field seem to share those attributes.

Hopefully I’ll have more reflections on this remarkable week in future posts.

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Sometimes you slave over a post that you hope will get people thinking and clicking and get no response. Other times, something dashed off in a moment seems to connect with people for mostly inexplicable reasons.

My previous post triggered a surprising number of comments and posts, many of them very provocative, and it has been frustrating to not to have the time and network access (still no internet at my hotel here) to properly respond to them. I’m still under the ticking clock, so I will acknowledge that reading the comments on the previous entry are probably a better use of your time than this post…

First off, I was not trying to suggest that content is not important, or that we should not make our content openly available. To me, those propositions are for pretty much self-evident. I’m reminded of David Wiley’s catcy phrase content is infrastructure… I was trying to quickly restate a question that had been posed to me, one that had left me flat-footed… Essentially, are there better uses of my time and efforts to promote open education in its broadest sense than fighting this particular problem?

I do not know the answer to that question. I do believe that as things seem to be going, the reluctance of higher education to engage the new realities of information publication and diffusion will ultimately diminish its influence. But I’m not an academic, just a dirty edupunky technology support staffer who likes to think about things he can only begin to understand.

I warned a couple posts back that I would be posting some “half-baked musings” here, and the danger with writing something so quickly is being misunderstood. The upside in this instance is that many of the responses were very thoughtful and useful to me, and I expect to engage some of the points raised more directly in future posts.

I hate grading, and as a result don’t think enough about the potent and vital role of assessment in learning. I admit it’s a shortcoming.

On the train back to Barcelona from the IN3 offices yesterday, I had a provocative conversation with Julià Minguillón about the problem of structuring assignment schedules in virtual courses. Essentially, how might it be possible to make assignment deadlines more flexible for distance students? If deadlines for ongoing assignments are simply extended deeper through to the end of the course, wouldn’t there be a natural tendency on the part of most students to hand in their assignments at the latest possible moment, to the detriment of their learning? My own experience as both student and teacher (as well as the virtual learner data that the UOC has analyzed) confirms this fear…

While we were talking, my mind went immediately to incentives for students to hand in their work earlier than is strictly necessary. Such as bonuses to students who get their work in first… But, are there any meaningful and justifiable reasons to turn admission submission into a race?

So what if we had students submit their work in a forum in which other students could see that work? Students submitting later would be able to build on that work, and perhaps improve on it – indeed, that would be an expectation… But if we expected students who submitted later rounds of assignments to read the work of their forerunners, and to incorporate it, and to cite it, we would see the work of the “original” work identified and rewarded (perhaps with a bonus of some kind), much as innovative work in an academic field is recognized by early publication and citation. This would provide an incentive to publish work ahead of others, yet would still allow those who publish later to do well. Those relative latecomers would, however, be expected to account for, synthesize, criticize and augment the work of those who had published before them.

Is this idea too facile? Is anyone using this model already? This strikes me as an approach to submitting work and grading that might: a) provide for a more ‘open’ model of assignment submission and online publication, and b) more accurately model a real-world economy of sharing ideas via publishing.

I don’t suggest this approach would work in every instance. And as I mentioned at the top of this post, I don’t think near enough about assessment, so surely I’m missing something here…

Plaça Catalunya – Barcelona HDR, originally uploaded by MorBCN.

I haven’t blogged about it yet, because for some reason this opportunity seemed too good to be true. But here I undoubtedly am, in the great city of Barcelona, working with the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) of the Open University of Catalonia for the next month. I’m fortunate to be sharing this visit with Keira and Harry, and I expect they will fall in love with this city too.

It’s so wonderful to be back here. I had the good fortune to visit with the UOC at a couple of events last year, and in all honesty I’m as excited for the dedicated time to work with these brilliant and progressive people as I am for the travel. Some of the immediate highlights:

* Tonight and tomorrow I will participate in the Open EdTech Summit, part of “a small group of around 30 open, educational and technology experts [who] will get together to share best practices, as the basis for discussions to help identify future education and technology needs and trends for next-generation educational and learning environments.” Looking at the participant list, I am truly humbled and privileged to be involved – some of my favorite people in the field will be there, as well as a few heroes I’ve never met, and I’m sure there are others here who will be blowing my mind for the first time.

* Immediately following, I will be attending the UOC’s UNESCO Chair in E-Learning Seminar “Fighting the digital divide through education”, which features a similarly impressive program.

After that, I expect I’ll be settling into more focused work with the UOC, with a set of tasks including, but not limited to:

* Giving a talk, which will focus on the work of the fantastic team I work with at UBC’s Office of Learning Technology, in partnership with Fellows of the Worldwide EduGlu Symposium. One of my goals on this trip is to strengthen communication and collaborations amongst my various homes (permanent, temporary, virtual) over the next month.

* Developing a day-long, hands-on workshop on mashups for developers (and anyone else who is interested) at the UOC.

* Working with the IN3 on a research project concerning the personalization and the “opening up” or is that (“mashing up”?) of its virtual learning environment.

* A specific off-shoot of the above, hashing out the enhancement of a DSpace installation here with something like a social layer of some kind.

While I’m here, I also hope to learn more about the UOC’s provisioning of its vast virtual learning offerings, and its broader efforts in the open education movement, where it is a recognized global leader.

All of this sits well outside my current comfort zone, so this will be a highly disruptive immersive learning challenge for me. If I wasn’t expecting to have so much fun, I’d be terrified. Well, OK, I am terrified… There is no way I can hope to pull all of this off on my own, and to be frank the only way I can hope to justify the faith that both the UOC and UBC-OLT have placed in me is to tap my greatest resource – my network. So my plan is to blog this trip quit aggressively… Writing up my learning as it happens, posting provisional half-baked musings and plenty of queries. I hope the posts will feel less like “cries for help” than my best efforts to share this experience with all of you.

UPDATE: I gave the above a rewrite to correct some gawd-awful writing in my initial draft. Apologies if this pops up in your RSS reader again…

Generally, Halloween makes me think even better of my neighbourhood. The kids running around are terrifyingly cute, of course. And it’s hard not to get a warm feeling from the generosity and evident fun being had by the treat-givers as well (especially some of the older folk).

But another Vancouver tradition this time of year is less enjoyable. I have never lived in a Canadian city where selling and exploding fireworks is legal, much less so widespread. For a period of weeks, a firecracker can go off at any moment, and the evenings are a steady stream of explosions that often extend into the morning hours.

In previous years, I hadn’t thought much either way about the nightly banging, rattling, and whistling… It gave the city a certain pleasing, lawless atmosphere, and I certainly can understand the fun to be had in blowing stuff up.

Then we got a dog. Even sporadic firecracks can set him into an absolute panic, and when the steady Halloween barrage begins, well, the mental anguish is a sad thing to see… He quakes uncontrollably, cannot take comfort from us, wedges himself under furniture, jumps into the bathtub and tries to claw his way down through it…

We have since learned that our animal is not unusual. A great many dogs and cats experience similar panics this time of year, some of them so afraid to go outside for days that they suffer some truly gruesome problems with their digestive tracts… I can only imagine the effects on the wildlife in the city: the raccoons, the coyotes… and the birds are clearly being disturbed.

Last night was particularly hard on gentle, sweet Dexter. We were trying to find music on the stereo loud enough to mask the sounds but with some calming qualities as well. Then Keira remembered that Dex likes to sing along with the accordion:

This time, Dexter was too freaked to sing along, but the effects of the accordion were remarkably soothing. However, the calm was fleeting, the run of explosions outside was unrelenting. So we found ourselves in the wee morning hours lying in bed, desperate for sleep, taking turns playing the accordion, a quaking dog at our feet…

Not to be a killjoy, but I wish the annual firework party in Van Rock City didn’t involve cruelty to the creatures we share the space with…

Financial turmoil – whichever way you look at it!, originally uploaded by canonsnapper.

No question, a bad week for some traditional media heavyweights:

It’s been an especially rotten few days for people who type on deadline. On Tuesday, The Christian Science Monitor announced that, after a century, it would cease publishing a weekday paper. Time Inc., the Olympian home of Time magazine, Fortune, People and Sports Illustrated, announced that it was cutting 600 jobs and reorganizing its staff. And Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in the country, compounded the grimness by announcing it was laying off 10 percent of its work force — up to 3,000 people.

Clearly, the sky is falling. The question now is how many people will be left to cover it.

It goes on. The day before, the Tribune Company had declared that it would reduce the newsroom of The Los Angeles Times by 75 more people, leaving it approximately half the size it was just seven years ago.

The Star-Ledger of Newark, the 15th-largest paper in the country, which was threatened with closing, will apparently survive, but only after it was announced that the editorial staff would be reduced by 40 percent.

And two weeks ago, TV Guide, one of the famous brand names in magazines, was sold for one dollar, less than the price of a single copy.

And the above article from the New York Times doesn’t even mention its own problems, which are pretty much the story across the entire industry.

There does not seem to be much mystery or even debate on what the problems facing the news business might be… Sites like Craigslist cut the bottom out of the lucrative classified ads moneypot almost instantly. Nobody in the industry seemed to have seen Craigslist coming. People are consuming their news in new media forms, and old media is having trouble making these channels pay out the way the old print-object-to-sales models did… And the army of bloggers have made the “MSM” seem somehow out of step in an editorial sense as well, somehow less important, less relevant.

It’s not just privately held old-school newspapers that are in crisis. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the BBC are both supported by public funding, and both have made aggressive and (in my judgment) progressive steps to adjust their practices to the new media reality. Yet the CBC’s latest attempt to make its radio programming relevant has prompted a backlash from its core audience (and while I am less-opposed personally, I will say that accidentally listening to Tonic was a smooth jazz nightmare from which I feared I would never awaken). These changes have resulted in precious little love from the Canadian hipster digerati (a revolutionary movement with a population well into triple digits). The recent Brand-Ross phone row (disclosure: my son Harry and I maintain a private Manuel from Fawlty Towers fan club) — with the revelations of wild money paid out for expensive shock jocks working so very hard for cheap laughs — suggests nothing so clearly as a certain desperation all round: “There has been a trend in broadcasting to promote marketing figures to run channels and large editorial departments – the thinking goes, at least partly, that marketing skills are needed to “punch through” and have impact in our digital age. These figures, however, are left exposed when questions of editorial judgment arise.”

These convulsions might provoke some smug celebration from some blogvangelists, but not me. For one, I see little in new media prepared to replace the kind of detailed investigative reporting that old media is already abandoning as a cost-saving measure. And I see little reason not to expect similar forms of unexpected competition and crises of legitimacy in the future for higher education. Such crises might hit the academy in a nearer-term future than even those of us with apocalyptic temperaments might expect…