I’m pleased to acknowledge the excellent efforts of MET alumnus Lorne Upton in pulling together the original seed materials for this section.
Mobile and open learning are becoming an integral part of education, K-12, post-secondary, and a myriad of formal and informal learning contexts. There are examples of it everywhere, from singular classrooms to institutions, and entire districts. Increasingly, learners are engaged in learning environments leveraging mobile devices such as smart phones, tablets and notebooks perhaps linked to cloud-based ubiquitous computing, and a host of communication and social networking channels. Yet, in an ever changing landscape, the challenge is finding a solid framework to guide effective instructional design, and to consistently evaluate the quality of teaching and learning while leveraging mobile and open technologies.
I offer two priming thoughts:
The beauty of constructing understanding via concepts, theories and frameworks is that we begin to back practice with research while becoming more informed of the possibilities, and, as a result, we are able to maximize our potential as it relates to our academic and professional setting. Articulating theory of mobile and open education is challenging. Built into the idea are some really tough epistemological and ontological questions, as well as, difficult to define terms such as mobility and technology.
During this week you are encouraged to pursue a better understanding of mobile and open learning relative to broader learning concepts such as cognitive apprenticeship, collaborative learning, informal learning, lifelong learning, problem-based learning, situated learning, etc., and in relation to theories including behaviourism, cognitivism, constructivism and connectivism, knowing that our topic is substantially emergent and such applications cannot be authentic.
In addition, your instructor’s long immersion in the innovation side of mobile and open learning has demonstrated to him that academic research and journals are typically at least five years behind the leading edge of ideas, applications and trends in digital technology and culture, which is quite different from many other fields of inquiry. So look to journals for consolidation (which is essential on its own), not inspiration, surrounding the future of learning. Your mandate as a graduate student here is to keep a critical eye on the civilized research and as well as the untamed frontiers.
An example of an untamed frontier I am currently pioneering is a project called “Peer Effects“, which looks at the issue of accountable competency management in knowledge-based professions. We usually look at the issue from a public trust perspective, meaning how can society be assured that every professional (doctor, lawyer, architect, engineer, teacher, etc.) is competent to practice, but the inverse issue is equally challenging: how can any individual professional maintain an effective understanding of their own competencies relative to rapidly evolving knowledge, standards and norms?
Regulatory bodies for most professions mandate remarkably similar continuing professional development (CPD) programs, typically requiring each professional to undertake a minimum number of hours of continuing education (CE) classes over a 1-5 year cycle. The problem is that most professionals dislike this process, the quality of courses is uneven, and the process rarely determines whether competencies have actually been updated or that they have been put into practice successfully. Starting with the health professions, where there is greater perceived public risk, governments everywhere are beginning to consider regular examinations and random office inspections as a better solution. While the public might indeed feel safer, the problem here is that these approaches undermine the essential spirit of a “profession” and they don’t actually work any better – examinations and inspections offer a poor assessment of overall competency.
In a volunteer professional capacity I serve as Chair of the Quality Assurance Committee for the College of Dental Surgeons of British Columbia (CDSBC), the regulator for dentistry in BC. I’m not a dentist, so I serve as a “public member” more closely aligned to the CDSBC’s mission of public trust. I could offer dozens of examples of issues we consider on a regular basis that have no good answer (in the sense of “public good”) via traditional CPD, and here is one example:
A registered dentist may perform any of the myriad restricted procedures which define the profession, yet most dentists focus all of their CE on the small range of procedures they do most often. This seems reasonable, but it also means that any dentist in good standing, with fully up-to-date CPD, can choose to perform a procedure they encounter rarely, including ones where they haven’t taken any CE in perhaps decades. The only safeguard here is individual professional integrity – which shouldn’t be underestimated, by the way – but is this how a modern profession should work?
The Peer Effects demonstration project mentioned above looks to apply principles of professional networking, similar to those in this course, to automatically and continuously distill competency metrics from an individual professional’s interactions with their peers, and with professional content, within virtual private networks. It isn’t a “big brother” approach: it is designed to offer every professional an ongoing dashboard of their status across all competencies in their profession, calibrated in relation to their peers. Clearly Peer Effects involves learning analytics, and it is distinctively mobile, but it’s primary frontier is massively open learning. The vision is about profession-building – about an internally-generated quality improvement process for a profession’s knowledge and accountability – all enabled by mobile, open learning technologies. It should work equally well with any knowledge-based profession. Anyone who might be interested to discover more is encouraged to connect with me.
And now it is over to you:
In this activity, you are expected to explore resources available in the Knowledge Mill under the “Mobile Education” category. Many of these resources are assignments posted by previous students, but there are also items of independent news, analysis and research on this topic discovered and posted by your peers. Your role is to add value to this stream as follows:
Step 1: Peruse (browse, search, sort, filter, etc.) the posts in the Mobile Education category sufficiently to identify at least two (2) posts of particular interest to yourself.
Step 2: Critically consider your selected posts, along with any existing reviews that may be present. Add critical value to the post by: A) providing a “thumbs up” recommendation for any reviews that are particularly insightful; B) rating the post itself using the star rating criteria introduced earlier; and C) if you have something original and worthwhile to contribute, author your own review using the Comment (“Leave a Reply”) field.
Elaborating on your experience with the existing set of 523 resources, go forth boldly into the full Mobile Internet to find other (better, more recent and different flavored) resources to expand our Knowledge Mill. Here are some tips to help your mining:
Tip 1: Use keywords or ideas you encountered in Activity 1 or the Frontiers Poll to narrow your search range.
Tip 2: Use your mobile browser to find mobile-friendly content. We’re only at the dawn of Mobile Internet – most content is still created by desktop authors for desktop readers. We’re looking for resources designed for, or at least easily accessed on, mobile devices.
Tip 3: Count how many seconds it takes to access the resource and give up any site or file that cannot be opened in 8 seconds — that is an optimistic limit of a mobile user’s patience.
Tip 4: Choose content based on credible sources, unbiased research and thorough reporting, not advertisements or marketing material. Consider the origin date — mobile technology is developing so quickly that content even a couple of years old may be out of date — if possible select content posted within the last few months to ensure you don’t duplicate something already present in the Knowledge Mill.
Tip 5: It might be strategic for you to mine one or two topics you are considering for your Assignment #1 – this activity would be a great way to get a head-start.
Tip 6: If you don’t find anything of significant interest or critical value, don’t post something inferior just for posting’s sake.
When/if you find an appropriate new resource, please make a new post under the category of “Mobile Education” in the Knowledge Mill, embed the resource link in your post, or upload in a file format. Then write a brief review for it, including why you consider it worthwhile.
Once you have completed the activities above, please move on to this week’s discussions.