Month: August 2010

by Clint Lalonde on My Masters, Social Networks

An Amazing Story of Openness

More reading for my thesis lit review has uncovered a story that would fit nicely into Alan Levine’s growing collection of Amazing Stories of Openness; “personal stories that would not have been previously possible, enabled by open licensed materials and personal networks.”

This one involves Twitter, and comes from a research paper called How and why people Twitter: the role that micro-blogging plays in informal communication at work.

The open subscription feature in Twitter not only allows users to find interesting people to follow for exchange of information and thoughts, but may also help to establish valuable personal relationships for future collaborations. Tom told us an amazing story about such an experience. A while ago, he tweeted about a book that he was reading and liked a lot. Natasha, a social constructer, was reading the book at the similar period of time. She found Tom’s tweets about the book very interesting and they started following each other on Twitter. Natasha worked on a project with the Kenyan government working to pull Kenya people out of poverty through ICT. Several months later, Natasha sent Tom a message on Twitter asking whether she could talk with him to learn more about Tom’s company before her meeting with executives of the company about the Kenya project. After the meeting with Tom, Natasha invited him to the executive briefing and also invited him as a representative from the company working on the Kenya project. In Tom’s words:

“So, that’s the type of relationship that can be built simply through Twitter. I never knew Natasha, and haven’t been knowing anything about Kenya. She finds me because our common interests and developed a positive relationship that I am very proud of and very interested in continuing.”

Later in the paper, the researchers elaborate more on this relationship.

In the story that we have described previously about Natasha inviting Tom into her Kenya project, Tom told us that this collaboration opportunity not only came through a personal relationship built between him and Natasha, but also because she was able to get to know him from his Twitter updates.

“One of the things that I said to [Natasha] is that I am not an executive and I don’t have any related to executive pool. She said, yeah, I know, I have been watching you for 4 or 5 months now, I understand who you are and I understand your position, but I still want you to be part of this conversation because I know you understand [the technology]. She didn’t care whether or not I had any executive poll, she knew from following me on Twitter, what I was interested in and she knew how I could help her.

Would this type of opportunity come about for Tom BT (Before Twitter)? Perhaps, if Tom and Natasha were in fairly close proximity to each other, and had the opportunity to interact on a fairly regular basis in such a way that Tom could showcase his expertise in an area that Natasha was interested in. But the fact that Natasha was able to follow Tom’s work for such a long period of time, and observe, in such an unobtrusive, ambient way, the level of Tom’s abilities and understanding on a topic Natasha was interested in says to me that there is a different form of relationship building happening here. And, more importantly, a different measure of how we determine who the “experts” are who can provide us what we need when we need it.

Zhao, D., & Rosson, M. B. (2009). How and why people Twitter: the role that micro-blogging plays in informal communication at work. In Proceedings of the ACM 2009 international conference on Supporting group work (pp. 243-252). Sanibel Island, Florida, USA: ACM. doi:10.1145/1531674.1531710

 
by Clint Lalonde on My Masters, Teaching & Learning

An interesting dichotomy in formal and informal online learning

More lit review reading for my thesis, this time an article called “Exploring the Role of ICT in Facilitating Adult Informal Learning” in which an interesting dichotomy emerged from the research. It’s one that I have heard before which goes something like this.

The researchers conducted a survey of 1100 people in the UK on the role that ICT (information and communication technology) plays in learning, both formal and informal. Among their findings was the tidbit that people who might never use ICT for formal learning use it regularly for informal learning. That is to say, they would not consider taking a web-based college course in, say, photography, but yet they are likely to use the web to learn about photography.

Interesting. And raises some questions. The first one is why the hesitation to take a formal online course in a topic they are interested in? Here is the first response, from a 38 year old woman who owns her own web development company, who the researchers suspected would be a prime candidate for an online learning course.

Researcher: But have you been tempted by all the online courses you can take, never actually having to leave the comfort of your front room?

Interviewee: I’ll tell you what puts me off those—I’ve had scan through the leamdirect courses—and it’s the feeling that they’re trying to teach basic skills without teacher interaction, and I personally like classroom interaction. And I don’t think you can get the same buzz doing it online. I chat [on the Internet] quite often to friends in the States. In chat rooms the difficulty is that it becomes very disjointed and you lose threads very easily and you lose the interaction that you get when you’re face to face. And I think that’s the disadvantage of it…if I wanted to learn maths or something I think it would be great. But I think if you were learning something that required a bit more interaction, I would treat it with a bit of distrust.

Distrust. Strong word. So, not only does she perceive that there would be a lack of interaction with classmates in an online course, but she also goes so far as to say she would approach a course that didn’t offer interaction with a “bit of distrust”. Her preconceived notion is that a formal online course would lack interaction. Granted, this research was done 6 years ago and I suspect her perceptions were probably closer to truth in 2004 than in 2010, but it is surprising how often I hear attitudes like this in casual conversations with people, especially those who have been away from formal learning for the past few years.

What about that photography example from earlier? Here is the response from a 63 year old male:

Researcher: Would you consider doing a formal photography course on the Internet?

Interviewee: Yeah, there are camera courses. I’ve thought about It, but I’ve probably got to the stage now that I don’t want to be bothered. I think I’ve learnt enough, but I pick most things up. I can sit down and read something on the computer and I’d have the gist of how to do the job.

Now, there is no explanation as to why he can’t be bothered (maybe it’s too expensive, or he considers this “just a hobby” and does not require a formal course – his incentive to attend isn’t great), so this speaks as much to learner motivation as it does to the perception of the quality of an online course. Seems to me, however, that his response is an endorsement for his perception of the quality of open educational resources and open communities available on the web. Not that he thinks they are better than what he might find through an institution, but they are good enough to satisfy his learning needs.  If a learner is getting what they need from the open sources on the web, then does that reduce the motivation for them to attend college or university? Is their learning itch being scratched by the availability of open resources on the web?

According to the authors, these two examples are not isolated responses in their study, and “these attitudes towards ICT-based formal learning permeated our interviews.”

Neil Selwyn and Stephen Gorard, “Exploring the Role of ICT in Facilitating Adult Informal Learning.,” Education, Communication & Information 4, no. 2 (May 2004): 293-310.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Teaching & Learning

Pragmatic Collaborative Autodidacts

There have been many posts and accounts of the One Week | One Tool project in which a group of twelve digital humanists from diverse backgrounds got together and created something from scratch; the wonderfully useful Anthologize WordPress plugin that will turn your blog (or collection of feeds) into an eBook. The project was coordinated by the Center for History and New Media.

One of the participants, Douglas Knox, has written a post that examines the project from a pedagogical perspective.

The pedagogy of One Week | One Tool was grounded in tacit values that are recognizably characteristic of people who are drawn to Digital Humanities, and yet much of that culture is not necessarily overtly tied to technology at all. There is a kind of geeky communitarian anarchy, a tropism toward the values captured in the phrase “rough consensus and running code,” that lends itself to a paradoxical kind of pedagogy: self-taught lessons in group dynamics for a team of pragmatic collaborative autodidacts. With the right group, or the right expectations and balance of uncertainties, twelve people can all be simultaneously service-oriented and capable of exercising leadership, flexibly and as needed in pursuit of a common goal.

I love that phrase “pragmatic collaborative autodidacts” as a way to describe the characteristics of the people involved. Collaborative autodidact does seem like a paradoxical term. After all, when you think autodidact, you probably think of someone who places a high value on personal autonomy, rather than someone anxious and eager to collaborate with others on a project. But it feels like an important term when you start thinking about a world that places increasing importance on collaborative skills, and where the ability to continually learn what you need to know is crucial, as the half-life of skills continues to decrease.  To me, pragmatic is the key here, and what binds the other two concepts into something powerful. Pragmatic is important because it suggests a humbleness; a willingness to know when to let go, when to step up to lead, and when to fall back and follow, all in the name of getting the job done. Not an easy mix to find, and one that Knox himself wonders if it is reproducible in other contexts with other participants.

However intensely production-focused One Week was, and however use-focused its resulting tool, as a pedagogical intervention it raises some important questions for which the answers don’t seem at all obvious yet. Was this a pioneering laboratory experiment under exceedingly rare, carefully prepared conditions? What would it take for its lessons to be replicable in other contexts?

It’s a good question, and I wonder if we can get a clue from the subtitle of the project: “a digital barn raising“. A traditional barn raising saw members of the community come together to create something tangible for other members of the community. Some groundwork was established ahead of time, and the more experienced members of the community coordinated the on site work, alternatively leading, training others, and constructing. A contemporary model might be the Sustainable Living Arts School in Vancouver, where small groups of neighbours gather for a  learning party centered around the theme of sustainable living. One week you might be the teacher, the next the student. These might have analogies to, or commonalities with, the One Week | One Tool project.

At any rate, the end result is a useful tool that will benefit many in both the academic and non-academic world, and will perhaps inspire others in academia to take on a project like this to create useful digital tools for academics, something not manufactured by Google, Apple or Microsoft. And, as Douglas notes with a nice riff on Margaret Mead at the end;

There is power in the premise that there are many latent groups of a dozen people ready to imagine themselves into existence to get something useful done.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Teaching & Learning

Are these threats to institutional higher education?

As my thesis research continues, I find myself getting increasingly drawn into the world of informal learning, autodidactism and self-directed learning, and the role that the web plays in facilitating this type of learning. Thinking about these topics makes me think about the future of the formal higher ed institution, which, incidentally, is not a topic of my thesis, but seems to naturally flow into my thoughts when I start looking at this type of learning.

More and more I wonder about what post-secondary institutions will look like in the future as a result of the increased availability of not only high quality educational content, but also ready built communities of experts that learners can tap into and interact directly with. With a little know how and motivation, the sky is the limit as to what a self-directed learner can learn on the web IF you know how to learn.

Some things that I have come across this week that have made me go hmmmm about this particular topic.

The example of Ryan Genz, a fashion designer who, along with his partner Francesca Rosella, came up with CuteCircuit, a clothing design company that creates wearable technology – intelligent clothing that integrates technologies like LED lights and cell phones into fashion using smart textiles and micro electronics.  According to Francesa, when they first started the company and approached engineers to realize their designers, they found that engineers couldn’t get past the idea that they wanted their circuits to look a certain way.  They were dismissed by the engineers, and Francesa felt like the engineers thought “they were insane” for wanting them to design a circuit board that looked like a heart. So, rather than getting rejected and packing it in, Ryan – a fashion designer with a background in Anthropology – decided to teach himself how to build circuits. It took three months for him to learn, but in the end he taught himself how to engineer electrical circuits to build clothing like this, and go on to forge a successful company in a highly competitive field. (via the Outriders podcast from the BBC)

The recruitment practices of Zoho. Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho, a well known tech company that develops online collaborative and productivity tools, recently gave a talk called “Alternatives to College” in which he outlined Zoho’s recruitment and talent development process. Sidar is a PhD from Princeton, but yet looks away from academia when hiring for his company.

Based on a few years of observation, we noticed that there was little or no correlation between academic performance, as measured by grades and the type of college a person attended, and their real on-the-job performance. That was a genuine surprise, particularly for me, as I grew up thinking grades really mattered …

Over time, that led us to be bolder in our search for talent. We started to ask “What if the college degree itself is not really that useful? What if we took kids after high school, train them ourselves?”

Bill Gates, is also publicly questioning the idea that young people have to go to university to get an education. Now, granted, Bill is perhaps one of the worlds most famous autodidacts and university dropouts, but having someone with his cachet publicly question the role of the university as it is currently structured will engage some people, and might spark more debate on exactly what the role of higher education institutions will be in the future.

Finally, there is the example of James Marcus Bach, who refers to himself as a buccaneer-scholar and has written a book on the subject called Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar: How Self-Education and the Pursuit of Passion Can Lead to a Lifetime of Success. The book is his account of how he “found success in a highly technical field without the benefit or burden of a conventional education”. Now, I haven’t read the book, or know much about the methods he talks about to help others become buccaneer-scholars, but the point being is that here is a person who has no formal training or education in a field (software testing), and, through self-directed methods and with the help of the web, forged a successful career.

Now, I am not ready to espouse a view that learners are going to become self-directed learners in the future and flee screaming from a formal higher education and the public institutions that provide them. I still think many students, especially at the under-grad and college level, will want the structure and guidance that an institutional education offers. Heck, I want it, and I do consider myself as someone who is a self-directed (if not always highly efficient or focused) learner.

And then there is the whole idea of the value, both perceived and real, that comes from having an institutional accreditation stamp of approval next to your name. This will continue to provide incentive and motivation for students to attend a formal post-secondary institution for their education. But I am left with an uneasy feeling that, in an age where learners are going to have so much choice as to how they get “an education”, post-sec institutions are going to come under increasing pressure to maintain their relevancy, beyond being the place that merely provides “the papers”. Because someday soon, someone will figure that out that piece or, perhaps, just stop caring so much about it.

Photo: Threat Level updates by opacity used under Creative Commons license

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Teaching & Learning

Over 70% of faculty feel they are not proficient using online web space to teach

Going through some lit for my thesis this evening I came across this study on higher education faculty self-perceptions of technology literacy and how it relates to their pedagogical practice. Not surprising, the research shows that faculty who perceive themselves as technology literate are more likely to integrate technology into their teaching and learning practice.

What I did find interesting about this study was that 71% of faculty do not feel proficient enough to publish content to the web.

Perhaps the most overlooked area of software use has been in website/web page construction and/or personal web spaces. According to the survey results, only a mean response of 2.18 (16.5% of faculty felt that they were proficient in creating learning-based websites/pages, and 19.9% of the faculty felt that they were proficient with the integration of word processing software and websites/pages). Using online web space to teach or add breadth to a course ranked even lower, registering a mean response for faculty self-perception of 1.61 (71.2% not proficient).

It’s not that this is a particularly surprising result, but given how important the web is these days it does feel like a bit of a clarion call. After all, if faculty don’t feel like they have the necessary technology literacy to do something as trivial as post content onto the web, then having them move beyond this relatively basic function and onto more engaging models of pedagogy is going to be a big ask and, as the researchers note, a missed opportunity.

This may be a missed opportunity for faculty; students are working with learning-based web spaces from the time they enter elementary school until the time they graduate from high school. It may be time that faculty became more familiar with technology tools in order to better facilitate student learning.

David A. Georgina and Myrna R. Olson, “Integration of technology in higher education: A review of faculty self-perceptions,” The Internet and Higher Education 11, no. 1 (2008): 1-8.

 
by Clint Lalonde on My Masters, Social Networks, Teaching & Learning

How students benefit from open networked learning

Helen Keegan is a Senior Lecturer in Interactive Media and Social Technologies at the University of Salford, UK, and recently wrote a post outlining one particular experience in using social media with her grad class. Working with MSc. students, Helen had the students blog and use Twitter as part of an exercise in developing a digital identity. She goes on to describe “the eureka moment” for the students on how powerful these tools can be in connecting and engaging with people who are working in their field of study. For some context on the excerpt below, Jeremy Silver is (among other things) the acting-CEO of  the Featured Artists Coalition in the UK and a prominent figure in the UK music industry.

There were some hugely influential and heart-warming examples of the benefits of students developing a professional online ID. One of these took place after our IP/Digital Rights week, when each student was asked to write a post in response to Jeremy Silver’s blog. Silver had found this post (pingback?) and left a really positive comment. That was a eureka moment for all – the idea that they could write a post, and one of the industry’s leading figures value their perspective, treat them as peers, and take the time to enter into conversation with them. This was soon followed by one of the group telling me how he’d tweeted his Audioboo blog post, and ’this guy retweeted it, said something really positive about my post – think he might actually work for Audioboo’. It was Mark Rock, the CEO…

When Jeremy Silver and Mark Rock took the time to read the student blog posts, comment positively and re-tweet, they added so much to the learner experience and i’m pretty sure they won’t have realised just how influential those acknowledgements would be – not just to the two students, but to the whole group. They were the missing link between our students seeing themselves as apprentices and professionals, the whole ‘linking education to industry through social software’ idea, which although we have been focusing on for a few years now, has never been experienced in such a potent way.

As a student, I have experienced moments like this. It is an exhilarating feeling to see that your words and thoughts have moved someone you admire or respect to action, and provide a response. It is a highly validating and motivating moment as you begin to realize that you are moving beyond being a student of a subject to being a practitioner in a field.