Making Sense Of New Technologies And Media: An Opinionated Digest by George Siemens - June. 14 08

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Learning to learn. Questioning and deconstruncting our long established educational paradigms. Thinking and looking at how to cope with our need for survival and growth in new, innovative ways. This is the end goal of those who see education as a means to better understand and cope with the world we create and live in rather than the means to accumulate informational data on how specific systems did or do work.

Photo credit: Vasyl Yakobchuk

"The quality of academic content is a function of how well it has been designed to accept feedback for improvement after initial creation. Opportunities for improvement need to be added during the initial stage of course development.

Too many course/learning designers assume that a course is complete once it has been created.

While that may have been the case twenty years ago, today a course is the starting point, not the end point of the design process."

George Siemens, educational technologies and learning expert, takes you into another short journey to see, discover and understand of media and new technologies are rapidly changing the way we think, work and collaborate.

 

Building a Collaborative Workplace

Anecdote has released a free whitepaper on Building a Collaborative Workplace:

"Today we all need to be collaboration superstars. The trouble is, collaboration is a skill and set of practices we are rarely taught. It's something we learn on the job in a hit-or-miss fashion. Some people are naturals at it, but most of us are clueless."

It's a good paper that will help get people thinking about the importance of thinking and working in collaborative modes. My only mild critique: the paper discusses three types of collaboration: team, community, network. This goes back a bit to Anderson and Dron's discussion of Collectives, Networks, and Groups (.pdf) or Stephen's discussion of groups vs. networks.

I'm inclined to say that all forms of interaction are network based. Groups, collectives, teams, communities, etc. The underpinning structure is a network. As such, groups/collectives/teams are all certain types of networks.

The key challenge is one of determining what type of network we require in a particular situation.

How much autonomy is required? How are individual voices captured/projected/aggregated? Who has control and power?

Accreditation and the Catholic Church

David Wiley b suggests that:

"Educational reform is much like religious reform, and our openness movement and desires to innovate in higher education are much like the Reformation. When the Church was the prevailing power, it took Luther a significant amount of courage to stand up, nail a list of issues to the door, and say "Go ahead and excommunicate me. I've tried reforming from within with no success. You leave me no choice but to leave and try again on my own.""

I appreciate his analogy. I've found many parallels between the systemic reforms of the enlightenment, industrial era, and economics, with what we are confronted with in education.

A small note of clarification, however: in most systems of reform, the first departure from the established norm is not radical. Luther, for example, was subsequently appalled at the direction the revolution took. His desire was to reform the church, not recreate it. Calvin and his followers took things in an entirely new direction.

Similarly, the French revolution of the late 18th century sought to accommodate a monarchical presence. It was only subsequent thinkers and reformers that wanted to do away with the monarchy. I think this is an important consideration.

First generation reformers still carry much of the ideology of the existing system into their reform activities. Subsequent thinkers, however, aren't tethered to the ideology of the system. It is here that true and significant change happens.

Connectivism and Connective Knowledge

Stephen Downes and I will be offering an online course starting September through University of Manitoba on Connectivism and Connective Knowledge. The course is available for credit (enrollment is required) or for personal interest (no fee).

All discussions and learning resources will be freely available online. More information on how the course is run, weekly topics, etc., is available on the course wiki. If you are interested, you can sign up here in order to receive more information on participating or enrolling.

Quick update: for some reason, the above link to the wiki doesn't work for everyone. It is also available here: http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/wiki/Connectivism

The New News

I've posted this before, but was again reminded of the value of seeing the full process of content development with regard to news: The new news.

Key point: while much of the initial process for gathering information (or, if you will, creating a course) is unchanged, what is most unique now is the iterative, corrective, and subsequent interaction and enhancement around the content after it has been created (again, think courses and programs if you're an educator).

The quality of academic content is a function of how well it has been designed to accept feedback for improvement after initial creation. Opportunities for improvement need to be added during the initial stage of course development.

Too many course/learning designers assume that a course is complete once it has been created.

While that may have been the case twenty years ago, today a course is the starting point, not the end point of the design process.

Of related interest, Martin Weller has put together a short online presentation on the future of content.

Desire2Blog Interview

Yesterday, Barry Dahl conducted a short interview with me in preparation for my upcoming presentation at Desire2Learn's conference in Memphis: Fusion 2008. The interview is available here. The conversation ranged from the social nature of learning to "connectives and collectives" for learning.

Future of Media?

Ballmer on the future of media: "...there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form."

I enjoy broad sweeping proclamations of the future. But 10 years? Yes, the digitization of everything continues to plod forward. But the impact of those changes are hit and miss. Even now, countries in developing regions of the world are still grappling with consistent electricity access.

Ballmer's prediction, while interesting, are not likely to be experienced outside of small pockets/regions.

Is Google Making us Stupid?

This article - Is Google Making us Stupid - has been receiving a fair bit of attention. The author states:

"My mind isn't going--so far as I can tell--but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages."

The concept of reduced attention span has drawn criticism. Mind Hacks states:

"In terms of any new technology, it's obvious having tools to hand changes the strategies we use to solve problems, but so far, there is no strong evidence that Google, YouTube, Facebook or any other part of the web affects the fundamentals of how we think."

While the evidence supporting the idea that we think differently due to technology use may not exist, anecdotal seems to trump empirical for most people...

EdTechTalk

EdTechTalk provides an excellent weekly analysis of educational technology. In addition to providing discussion of various trends, they explore (and use) numerous tools educators might find valuable. This last week, they used ooVoo for video conferencing for up to six people. Looks like a useful tool.

Chris Lott: The Only Netgen Nonsense

Chris Lott takes issue with those who dismiss netgen learners:

"I suspect that we will see, in retrospect, that there are biological and neurological changes occurring due to technological changes, but it's not really important. The remonstrations about the evidence remind me of scientists concluding that bumblebees can't fly and philosophers concluding that there is no physical reality. Like Berkeley, I refute you thus, with the students I teach every term..."

He then adds an additional (and quite interesting) metaphor of eating to support his case:

"People eat very differently in times of abundance than scarcity. Their biology doesn't significantly change (though it does some), but it would be foolish to look around and argue that people aren't really eating differently, it's just a change in their food context. It would be wiser to recognize that the socioeconomic context is an important factor to consider when it comes to nutrition and try to teach proper eating habits in an environment that is not just no longer one of hunting and gathering, but one that is very different for most of us from even 50 years ago."

Learning 2.0 Panel

Case Western Reserve University recently held a panel on learning 2.0. The recording is now available. I appreciated Susan Metros opening points on how technology as a tool looks past the impact - i.e. when faculty use an iPod, is the issue about "the tool" or is it about mobility? Gibson's notion of affordances of tools (.pdf) is particularly apt here.

 

Originally written by George Siemens and published as weekly email digest on eLearning Resources and News. First published on June 13th 2008.

To learn more about George Siemens and to access extensive information and resources on elearning check out www.elearnspace.org. Explore also George Siemens connectivism site for resources on the changing nature of learning and check out his new book "Knowing Knowledge".

George Siemens -
Reference: eLearnspace Blog [ Read more ]