abject learning

So let me try to trace the outlines out…

–> Feeling a bit uneasy, and fuzzy, I sketch out a post, drenched in undergraduate nostalgia, outlining objections to some discourse concerning the “net generation” and speculating on a counterintuitive role the web might play in family life…

–> The post generates a number of thoughtful comments, some from people I know, some from people who were unknown to me…

–> My friend D’Arcy, who I really got to know via blogging, writes his own post in response, drawing on a Malcolm Gladwell TED talk that discussed the search for the perfect spaghetti sauce and that after crunching the variables discovering that there was no one perfect sauce. He extrapolates from there to postulate three observations of students, including this killer bit:

We need to better understand the variables that affect our interactions with students. It’s not enough to say that students are “Digital Natives” or “Net Genners”. There is no One True Student. Individuals vary by learning style, experience/comfort with various strategies (online and offline), socioeconomic status, maturity, locus of control, etc… and we need to identify common clusters of these variables and develop strategies to support these groups (and the individuals that compose them).

–> D’Arcy’s post inspires Jim Groom — whom I have yet to meet but have come to think of as a friend anyway — to explore what “locus of control” might entail:

To what extent do we need to be moving towards proliferating the locus of control for one’s own “educational learning environment” (to quote a recent conversation with Dr Glu) that enables them to define the space within which they learn. “Spicy,” “Chunky,” and “Extra Chunky” Spaghetti sauces capture a lot more diversity that the prominent, proprietary LMSs we have out there today -but they’re still canned!

One key may very well be working towards a series of unique spaces (with shared tools) that students bring with them to their education experience. Hosting space is cheap enough these days to build it into tuition costs (or require it as a four-year text), and it would work towards allowing students to actively frame the virtual learning spaces they inhabit. Just think about, what if you have thousands and thousands of college students hacking, playing and working towards defining a truly distributed, collaborative, and loosely integrated learning network.

So from an initial, very fuzzy beginning I’ve been guided through a set of responses by a network of peers… and it’s been fun, after all I’ve gotten to communicate with my buds. The whole process in itself something of an object demonstration of how this approach to learning can function. (Now, I suppose to demonstrate that real learning has occurred I should be able to write a sharper post than this one — but this is pedagogy in process.) I’m not the first person to make this observation, in fact I’m pretty sure I’ve made it before myself. But in the face of continued skepticism and sometimes just plain ignorance I’ll assert it yet again.

Jim’s vision is reminiscent of a professor here at UBC who I shared a working beer with last night. A common theme in our collaboration has been trying to develop tools and techniques that allow for coherent management of course weblogs on various platforms chosen and managed by the students themselves. He (I’m keeping it anonymous as I never asked if the conversation was bloggable) related an anecdote of a Spanish lit course he was teaching, taught in Spanish, in which the handful of native speakers tend to be the most enthusiastic participants in discussion, sometimes losing the other students that are still learning the language. Anyhow, one of the non-native speaking students chose to write a blog post, in English, that was framed as a rant expressing her frustration with this state of affairs. In other words, this new blogger already understood the space was hers, and used it as such, but in a fashion that did not divert energy from the academic subject at hand.

A long-winded way of thanking the many people who pushed my own learning along this week.

Gus Goldkey (front, with ‘stache & mullet) tries to pretend he knows what the hell is going on

So, feeling terribly left out by my absence from the ELI Annual Meeting (hi everyone!), Gus Goldkey decided to crash the NMC’s session on Second Life. Alas, I burned 45 minutes getting the technology in order, and when I arrived realized that there was no session audio. Most attendees were sitting, staring peacefully ahead… backchannel chat clearly responding to the live session that I was missing. It kind of felt like a Quaker silent worship meeting. When things were wrapping up, Gus jumped onstage and started screaming like a maniac, just like I would have done had I been there in person. The other attendees (perhaps fearful, perhaps unamused) did not respond, they just ignored me, again, just as if I’d been there!

A bit comical. But not as comical as being positioned as an SL booster, as last Christmas I wrote a short press release for UBC’s Public Affairs office on the theme of “The Next Big Thing.” Others here at the University wrote on progress in personalized drugs, biofuel, and animal emotions. The best I could do was point to the growth in 3-D immersive environments. On the one hand, I was worried about piling on to the hype. Then again, I couldn’t think of any other area in online education that had advanced so much in 2006, or was more likely to grow in 2007. Plus, my experience with the NMC Regional Conference had convinced me there was something there worth paying attention to, hyped or not.

So I put my misgivings and laughable lack of expertise aside and wrote the damn thing. And in terms of the stated objectives, the piece was received fairly well. I was interviewed a few times, and I think the Public Affairs people must be pleased by the media attention generated by the initiative. The piece has gotten some surprising readership — it was published in a UBC newspaper, and today it’s featured on the UBC homepage (I see they came to their senses and put something else up)… so a lot of people I know who normally don’t care what I do have seen the piece and asked about it.

I would be remiss if I didn’t throw a shout-out to Northern Voice co-organizer Darren Barefoot’s new buzz project. I remember him mentioning his intention to launch Get a First Life at an NV planning meeting a couple months back, and thought it was a clever idea, but must admit the execution is even funnier than expected. I think the dude is gonna sell a lot of t-shirts.

And it looks like the response has been amazing (“it’s been Dugg, Boing Boinged and TechCrunched in the past 24 hours” — it’s even been Infoculted). And kudos to Linden for an entirely sporting and reasonable response.

Now that Mr. Barefoot has re-asserted his star blogger credentials, I should note that Mr. Big Shot is leading a session at Northern Voice entitled “Why We Blog“… I can testify that he’s at least as sharp and amusing in real space as his virtual presence might suggest. He’s got a survey up, and is dangling fabulous prizes.

Oh yeah, there’s a virtual worlds session at Northern Voice too.

Three or four bits, connected in some way I haven’t quite figured out yet.

Last night I attended a reading at the downtown Vancouver library by Don Kerr, one of a handful of very special professors I studied under at the University of Saskatchewan. The book he was promoting (Earth Alive: Essays on Ecology by Stan Rowe) is a worthy one, and I enjoyed the readings, but my main motivation was the chance to see someone who had opened my nineteen year old mind.

He was exactly as I remembered him — warm, erudite and very funny. No problem holding the room’s attention without any media except a copy of the book. I attended with an old friend who had taken the same Introduction to Film course, so the evening sent us back on something of an undergrad mindset nostalgia trip. We even went for beers afterward and grappled with big imponderable existential questions, just like old times. We ran into Professor Kerr in the pub, and it was satisfying for me to thank him for a fine course that enriched my life when I was sorely in need of some enlightenment. He seemed pleased that both of us had gone on to complete graduate degrees in English, and gave every impression of someone who had benefited from teaching as much as his students did.

This morning I found myself in a studio space at UBC listening to an EDUCAUSE ELI web seminar on net gen learners. It was a solid presentation, and we followed up with an illuminating discussion afterward. It was heartening to share experiences with fifty people here at the University each making an honest effort to better understand their learners.

I did have my quibbles… mostly objections to what I see as an oversimplified stereotype of today’s young people. Maybe it was because my undergrad mindset was more present than normal, but when people make statements like “students don’t understand the value of research as a process in itself”, I wonder when typical students ever entered university with that awareness — I certainly didn’t have it… I never consulted a reference librarian until I was in grad school, I did not even realise that such incredible expertise was available to me. Isn’t a sense of the structures and inter-relationships of knowledge something that is learned in university? And speaking for myself, it was seeing what an agile, educated thinker such as Don Kerr could do with a book, film or idea that convinced me of the intrinsic value of learning.

My other objection was the avoidance of considerations of economic class. Where do net gen’ers who can’t afford snazzy laptops and cell phones fit in? In the profile of Professor Kerr linked above, he notes that the biggest change he has observed is “more students now skip classes, particularly in upper years. Many work up to 30 hours a week to put themselves through.” When we invoke caricatures of the younger set for wanting fast answers to difficult questions, or their propensity to multitask, we should keep that economic reality and the attendant pressures in mind. Could it be they are “Starbucks addicts” (cited repeatedly as a characteristic today) in large part because they aren’t sleeping?

I was interested to read excerpts from this article in my morning paper (dead tree edition, I’m old skool that way):

“Home and family have become more important to today’s teens,” noted Anna D’Agrosa, editor of The Zandl Group’s Hot Sheet. The New York-based research firm interviews hundreds of teens each year to track trends.

“Ten years ago, less than a quarter of teens listed home as their favorite place to be, compared to nearly half in 2006,” D’Agrosa wrote in an e-mail to The Times. One in four teens list family as the most important thing about their day-to-day life, versus one in 10 a decade ago.

Now, one study by something called the “Hot Sheet” is not enough to draw solid conclusions, but this is a blog and nobody listens to what I say anyway…

The study cites more sensitive parenting and bitchin’ home entertainment centres as the primary reasons for this shift. Perhaps included in the latter might be all those web goodies in which we worry our young ones are losing their minds. Danah Boyd, among others, often argues that MySpace, IM, etc constitute zones of virtual autonomy for teens, spaces relatively free of adult intervention. What strikes me about the Hot Sheet study is the suggestion that by facilitating social activities that may be engaged from home, the web may actually be part of strengthening family bonds…

Now a skeptic might reasonably argue that having a kid locked in her room surfing the web or chatting with strangers is a recipe for alienation. But isn’t it conceivable that boundaries can be established (like regular family dinners) that allow for a balance between teen autonomy and familial interaction? So while some fret about online predators, could our kids actually be safer, spending more time under a looser form of parental supervision? And might some families be spending more time together as the result of the internet?