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Half an Hour

• 

  A Theme Park E-Learning Application

  Posted: May 9, 2013, 10:11am COT

  Here's the challenge (from the E-Learning Professionals Group): "Can anyone give me suggestions of how to blend learning objectives with ELearning. My goal is to have the user not know they are taking a course." Here's the context: " Based on his other questions, Brian is looking to develop training for visitors to theme parks that will teach them about the park. As such, the learning objectives would be fairly low level knowledge about the park."
  
  
  In the 'Learning for Theme Park Visitors' case (as in so many others) there are two sets of learning objectives:
  - the objectives the learners will have - find washrooms, skip line-ups, avoid the spoiled chicken, keep track of kids, etc
  - the objectives the theme park will have - get people to buy food, get them to go to less popular rides, promote upsales, keep them out of lineups and having fun, etc
  (Obviously these learning objectives would need to be validated by interviews or surveys)
  
  These objectives, in addition to theme park logistics, inform the design of the e-learning application. Probably you're looking at a mobile application (because visitors are mobile) that contains:
  - a general overview and guide, for pre-visit
  - easy location-based lookup and search ('find washrooms')
  - ride and attraction booking in a few minutes in advance ("have a hot dog instead of standing in line")
  - in-app purchasing (avoid fumbling around with money)
  - individualized push messaging ('the wave attraction is now open, have a look") (these need to be individualized, otherwise every person in the park heads to the wave attraction, creating crowds and lineups, which is the opposite of the desired impact)
  - group interaction and family tracking, including approval/reject of in-app purchasing by children
  
  Nobody will know it's an e-learning application. But it is in fact a very powerful and dynamic e-learning application that serves real (verified) learning objectives.
• 

  CN1376 AcadMOOC

  Posted: May 8, 2013, 7:06pm COT

  
  7:54 pm
  Stephen DownesT -5 minutes 7:55 pm
  Mary ZedeckHi Stephen! 7:55 pm
  Janesh SanzgiriExcellent. Almost midnight here. 7:55 pm Javier Benítez disconnected 7:57 pm
  Susan DixonAloha from Hawaii! 7:57 pm Javier Benítez connected 7:57 pm Kenneth Ronkowitz disconnected 7:58 pm JH Shannon connected 7:58 pm
  Janesh SanzgiriHello from Manchester, UK! 7:59 pm Kenneth Ronkowitz connected 7:59 pm JH Shannon disconnected 8:00 pm JH Shannon connected 8:00 pm
  Stephen DownesOK, I`m set - it has been ages since I`ve done a text chat 8:00 pm
  Kenneth RonkowitzI feel like some kind of Mac vs. Windows battle has been created with the cMOOC vs. the xMOOC. Is this useful or harmful? (or does it just confuse & frighten newbies?) 8:01 pm
  Stephen DownesMostly it just confuses newbies. It's not really harmful, as the xMOOCs will gradually evolve to become more like cMOOCs - witness Coursera's new 'teacher support' announcement today. But it won't matter because the companies won't survive too long; they'll most likely be acquired by Pearson o Blackboard 8:02 pm WILLIAM A. SHAPARD III connected 8:02 pm George Meghabghab connected 8:02 pm
  Janesh SanzgiriI'm not sure if the average MOOC participant(if there is such a thing) is even aware of this distinction? 8:03 pm Wendy Gilbert connected 8:03 pm
  Stephen DownesProbably not 8:03 pm
  Caryn Nis cMOOC or xMOOC still an acronym? 8:03 pm
  Caryn Nkind of confuses things a little, imho 8:03 pm
  Stephen DownesThe experience of course is different, tho - they certainly notice when they're in a cMOOC - but there isn't much crossover from xMOOC to cMOOC, I don't think 8:03 pm
  Kenneth Ronkowitzthere are plenty more in the acronym soup now 8:03 pm
  Kenneth RonkowitzAre you currently teaching a MOOC? 8:04 pm
  Stephen DownesMOOC = 'Massive Open Online Course', cMOOC = 'connectivist MOOC', xMOOC = 'eXtended MOOC' 8:04 pm WILLIAM A. SHAPARD III disconnected 8:04 pm
  Denise KreigerStephen, when you say the "companies won't survive too long" are you talking about Coursera and Udacity? 8:04 pm
  Stephen DownesNot teaching one right now, maybe this fall (buit with National Research Council's new mandate to serve business only, it gets harder) 8:05 pm
  Stephen DownesCoursera and Udacity, yes 8:05 pm
  Denise Kreigerwhy do you think they won 8:05 pm
  Denise Kreigerwon't survive? 8:05 pm
  Kenneth Ronkowitzbecause universities will take over? 8:05 pm
  Stephen DownesThey're too small, they're too new and inexperienced, and the mainstream LMS companies have a huge advantage over them 8:06 pm
  George MeghabghabAre you saying edX will make it 8:06 pm
  Denise KreigerBut Ed-X is university -based, no? 8:06 pm
  JH Shannonthe only universities with the resources to do that are those with great research bases, more likely the big higher Ed publishing houses will jump into the content development and perhaps delivery side 8:06 pm
  Stephen DownesEdX has a better chance if it attracts an open source community, but there is the danger of it becoming niche, like Sakai 8:07 pm
  Janesh SanzgiriIsn't the signature track that Coursera is offering a valid long term monetization strategy? 8:07 pm
  JH Shannonsorry, resource bases 8:07 pm
  Stephen DownesMOOCs don't dfepend on content publishing - that's one of the myths that the new MOOC companies propagate, that MOOCs must be developed from the ground up at great cost - but in fact, MOOCs arfe the ideal vehicle for using existing open educational resources - just the way they linked to a bunch of my resources in this chat area before the chat started 8:08 pm
  Mary ZedeckFrom your experience teaching MOOCs, what do you think is the most difficult part for the instructor? And, what is the most difficult part for the students? 8:08 pm
  Stephen DownesThe signature track is Coursera's best bety - but it's too easy to commoditize 8:08 pm
  Stephen DownesThinking... 8:09 pm
  Kenneth Ronkowitzabout signature track http://blog.coursera.org/post/​40080531667/signaturetrack 8:09 pm
  Stephen DownesFor students, it is and always has been a combination of motivation and finding the time 8:09 pm Michelle Mansfield connected 8:10 pm Caryn N disconnected 8:10 pm
  Stephen DownesFor instructors, it varies 8:10 pm
  Kenneth RonkowitzPersonally, I think many of the "issues" academics have with MOOCs are ones that have been discussed about online learning in generals for a few decades (such as academic integrity, encouraging engagement) What are issues that are unique to MOOCs? I'm thinking it's more about grades (peer grading etc.), credits... 8:10 pm Caryn N connected 8:10 pm
  Stephen DownesThe xMOOCs demand a lot of instructor time as they make 80 or so 5 minute videos 8:10 pm
  Stephen DownesThe cMOOCs can be crazy and chaotic and for instructors the realization that they don't control the course can be difficult to ddeal with 8:11 pm JH Shannon disconnected 8:11 pm JH Shannon connected 8:12 pm
  Stephen DownesFor xMOOCs the issues are your straightforward issues - quality control, keeping students interested and active, assessment and credentials 8:12 pm JH Shannon connected 8:12 pm
  Janesh SanzgiricMOOCs demand a lot of effort from participants to engage within the community. Do you foresee this as a drawback from getting truly "massive" cMOOCs? Just not enough motivated learners? 8:12 pm
  Stephen DownescMOOCs don't worry about any of that, because cMOOCs allow anyone to bring in resources, let participants choose & select quality resources for themselves, support various degrees of participation, and don't really worry about assessment 8:12 pm
  Wendy GilbertThis is my first MOOC -- and first "chat class." My question is, we have been hearing about MOOCs for a few years now -- why are they suddenly SO popular in the media? 8:13 pm
  Stephen DownesAnything tyhat demands effort will have trouble attaining mass participation, but that's ok, the goasl isn't to be massive (anything over 150 will work fine) the goal is to be open, accessible and personal 8:13 pm
  Wendy GilbertWe are starting to use the phrase "I am 'MOOCed' out" because we are bombarded with articles about MOOCs. 8:14 pm
  Denise KreigerWhen offering a MOOC 'for credit' (cMOOC or xMOOC),' how do you offer a comparable quality learning experience for students where their work will be evaluated to see if they've met the outcomes = course credit? With thousands of students, it's difficult to 'manage' that many students and evaluate their work (including discussion boards which are unwieldy) - and peer-evaluation does not seem a comparable evaluation for course credit. 8:14 pm
  Stephen DownesThey are suddenly so popular in the media because people with the right media contacts and PR departments launched some 8:14 pm
  Kenneth RonkowitzThe NY Times needed an end of year article for the education section and decided 2012 was "the year of the MOOC" ;-) 8:14 pm
  Wendy GilbertAha... 8:14 pm
  George MeghabghabA project based MOOC is the answer ( I am thinking in the sciences) 8:15 pm
  Janesh SanzgiriProject based MOOCs.. interesting. 8:15 pm
  George MeghabghabI am developing one for my college as a pilot. I am doing a project based MOOC. 8:16 pm Rob Straby connected 8:16 pm
  Stephen Downes@Denise - even if I were teaching an xMOOC, I wouldn't be trying to 'manage' students, or for that matter, much of the learning process at all - because management at scale becomes either inefficient (you tend to manage more poorly, because you don't know individual people) or impossible (because you can't get to know that many people) 8:16 pm
  Caryn None of the MOOCs I took had a lab exercise, but it only used "household items" - it was very interesting! 8:16 pm Rob Straby connected 8:16 pm
  Kenneth RonkowitzI said up front that this "course" was not a course but a Conversation with most of the trad course stuff left out (assignments, grades...) Is that a use of MOOC platforms you see occurring more? 8:17 pm
  Janesh SanzgiriI was thinking about the sciences as well... most cMOOCs that I've looked at have been on education related topics, attracting people largely within academia.. how will the cMOOC framework translate to a science/math course that traditionally requires a lot of "instruction" and "testing"? Really curious about this one. 8:18 pm
  Denise Kreiger@Stephen - then how do you offer MOOCs for course credit and have it be transferable-worthy to other colleges and universities? 8:18 pm
  Stephen DownesMy own take on course credit is that it's irrelevant. We have software now that can examine your work and determine whether you are qualified. People will do more and more of their work online. Over time, this will become mainstream. Course credits and academic credentials will become pointless, as work evaluation systems will examine your academic work directly, with each employer using a different set of criteria, and assigning you a different grade deopending on their needs and interests 8:18 pm
  George MeghabghabMOOCs are here to stay whether you play or not. The content is free on youtube, Khan's academy. You cannot just delete that. 8:18 pm
  Stephen DownesLab exercises for MOOCs - there will be a long-term demand for physical learning facilities 8:19 pm Mohamed Khadim connected 8:19 pm
  Caryn Nre: the sciences on MOOCs - one tool that is used is ALEKS ( [www.aleks.com] ) 8:19 pm
  Rob StrabyStephen, your thoughts about credit are interesting, what do you think of the Mozilla Badge project? Is this a viable or desirable option? 8:20 pm
  Caryn Nre: physical learning facilities - that also raises concerns about the "internationalization" of these MOOCs, yes? iow, we might have great facilities in areas of the US, but that's not necessarily true around the world 8:20 pm
  Stephen DownesEg. I just learned yesterday how to make cheese sauce using sodium citrate - but who keeps Spdium Citrate around? Better to go to a fully stocked food preparation learning centre and try it out ( http://www.chow.com/recipes/30​493-perfectly-melting-cheese ) 8:20 pm Rob Straby connected 8:20 pm
  George MeghabghabedX offered a "hardware" course without labs. It was only electronic simulation. And very successful.. 8:21 pm
  Stephen Downes@George - yes, the content is free. People don't realize this. This was the basic insight behind cMOOCs, in 2008 (well, one of them). We realized we didn't have to 'design' a course, we just needed to weave together a network of related resources. Which is, after all, connectivism. 8:22 pm
  Kenneth RonkowitzGenerally potential students are confused by all the MOOC providers - though they may only know the big 3. This also happens with OER. Would it be helpful to have one aggregation point for MOOC registration - or is that no "one world" monopolistic? 8:22 pm
  Kenneth Ronkowitztoo "one world" monopolistic? 8:22 pm
  Javier BenítezDo you foresee learning analytics becoming more robust in assessing the learners in courses online? 8:22 pm
  Stephen DownesThere's so much free content- there were millions of resources before Khan, millions since. It's like poeople have no idea. cMOOCs, once people realize how they're built, will become mainstream, because they make use of existing content. (= no cost) 8:22 pm
  Stephen Downes@Rob I haven't pursued badges with any sort of vigour 8:23 pm
  Mohamed KhadimWhat's the difference between MOOC and the flipped classroom.? Is it the sheer numbers? Or is it that there is still physical contact with instructors and students in an actual classroom ? 8:23 pm
  Stephen Downes@Caryn - I agree re:internationalization - but the content and instruction have always been the really expensive part, and MOOCs eliminate most of that cost 8:23 pm
  Janesh Sanzgiri@Mohamed, I think flipped classrooms are a more blended learning approach, with actual physical classes to complement the online learning materials. 8:24 pm
  Stephen Downes@George - yeah, I've seen a lot of 'lab' courses using simulations. That's one area for significant future growth. Unfortunately, building sims is high overhead. It's a place publishers will focus on, and generate good return. 8:24 pm
  Susan DixonI always thought with all the FREE content ...why do we spend so much time re-inventing the wheel. We need a revolution! 8:25 pm
  George MeghabghabThat is why Pearson is working with EdX. 8:26 pm
  Stephen Downes@Javier - learning analytics will be useful, to a degree, but run squarely into privacy and security problems (eg., do you want people being trained for corporate or military learning submitting their analytiocs to Google (or their subsidiary overseas)? 8:26 pm
  Stephen DownesIn a MOOC, instructional activities take place online (like today's event, for example). And they're open. In a flipped classroom, instructional activities take place offline, in a classroom, and they're closed. 8:27 pm Susan Dixon connected 8:27 pm
  Susan DixonWhat is Grasshopper? 8:28 pm
  Stephen Downes@Susan - exactly. The *big* lesson people *should* have learned from Khan is that the content can be pretty low quality and still be useful. I watched a video today to repair my web radio station - I had to set up a YP Hash - and it had no sound or anything, and minimal guidance - but it was the quiclkest & most effocient eway to address my problem 8:29 pm
  Mary Zedeckbut you figured it out yourself - with no instruction from a teacher 8:29 pm
  Stephen DownesgRSShopper is software I authored in order to support cMOOCs - I think it's the only cMOOC sofwtare that exists (though people can use WordPress with some plugins to get some of the effect, that's what ds106 does) 8:30 pm
  JH ShannonThen is not that the question vis-à-vis the relationship between books and higher Ed, the differentiation between higher level learning and simply figuring out how to do something? 8:30 pm
  Stephen Downes@Mary - I figured it out for myself, using the video, with no teacher, yes. Which tells me that having a teacher for this would have been inefficient. 8:31 pm
  Javier BenítezBesides having a set length of time, what are the advantages of having a "course"? Can't we just put all the content online and let people interact with it whenever they like? Thanks 8:31 pm
  Mohamed KhadimI think MOOCs can be quite useful from an accessibility perspective once the student is able to overcome some of the overwhelmingly technical barriers. For example not everyone may be comfortable with a chat session and this creates barrier. How does one approach differentiation from a technology perspective. 8:31 pm
  Mary Zedeck@Stephen, then why school? 8:31 pm JH Shannon disconnected 8:31 pm
  Rob StrabyWhich plugins support a MOOC delivery in WordPress? 8:31 pm Rob Straby connected 8:32 pm Roz Hussin connected 8:32 pm
  Stephen Downes@JH - a couple of things: first, formal learning tends to be knowledge-oriented (deep enquiry, and all that), while informal learning tends to be task-oriented (I need to know x to do y) 8:32 pm
  Susan DixonSorry about spelling...gRSShopper....Funny​ how the articles I read a week ago etched in my brain as Grasshopper. ; ) 8:32 pm
  Stephen DownesOne of the things offering a *course* did was to make the informal learning a bit less task-based, and to foster reflection over a series of activities and events, promoting the deeper form of learning 8:33 pm
  Roz Hussin@Stephen, have you seen any GOOD qualitative studies YET done on MOOC outcomes? 8:33 pm
  Javier Benítezis informal learning equivalent to tacit knowledge? 8:33 pm
  Stephen Downes@Mohamed - that was key for us - we set up our MOOCs to allow people to participate with *any* online technology they were comfortable with (in contrast to the platform-based xMOOCs, which demand you adapt to their approach) - because people have different issues with different tech 8:34 pm
  Stephen Downes@Rob the major one is FeedPress 8:34 pm JH Shannon connected 8:35 pm
  Stephen Downes@Javier No, informal learning is not tacit knowledge, though the two are often spoken of as the same thing - informal learning is learning that takes place onm an occasional basis, without a structure or plan, while tacit knowledge is knowledge that is ineffable, that is, knowledge that cannot be expressed in language or visual images 8:36 pm
  Kenneth RonkowitzMary posted a link to "I’m Still Confused as to Why Lecture Hall Classes Are Bad and xMOOCs Are Good? [tinyurl.com] How would you answer that question? 8:36 pm
  Javier BenítezI think it's difficult to have people buy in to the connectivist learning theory because they've depended so much on textbooks for knowledge. what are the advantages you see in a connectivist learning theory that's not present in others? thanks 8:36 pm
  Stephen Downes(Most of our knowledge is tacit knowledge, very little of what we know is explicit and expressible - which is why learning based on memory is insufficient, you miss most of what an expert knows - and why part of the MOOC model (well, the cMOOC model) is based on immersion into an authentic environment 8:37 pm
  Stephen Downes) 8:37 pm
  Mohamed KhadimIs there a worry that individuals with means in the developing and third world countries may exploit the free offering because they have access to computers and telecommunications while an entire village may not. How does a university avoid potential exploitation. 8:37 pm
  Javier BenítezI really like that about the cMOOC model 8:38 pm
  Stephen Downes@Kenneth Lecture Hall classes are bad because they do not have the support of a major public relations campaign and marketing; xMOOCs are 'good' because they do. (tongue-in-cheek) 8:38 pm
  Roz Hussin@Stephen - clarification on "qualitative studies" - has anyone looked at the impact of MOOCs on how people have changed their interaction style/efficiency after engaging in successful cMOOCs? 8:38 pm
  Stephen Downes@Mohamed - yes there is - I remember when OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) was first being launched, there was concern that the wealthy people in the communities would steal the laptops from the children and would use them for themselves 8:39 pm
  Stephen Downes@Mohamed - of course, this isn't just a problem in the developing world - in North America the wealthy people attend their own very expensive universities where they learn from high-priced professors and forge a business network that will serve them over a lifetime - giving them, for example, access to public relations and media campaigns should they launch a new product or service 8:40 pm
  Stephen Downes@Roz good question - Rita Kop may have mentioned it, but I can't say for sure 8:41 pm
  Janesh SanzgiriThere was an interesting paper by Rita Kop on the challenges of connectivist learning in MOOCs, worth a read. http://www.irrodl.org/index.ph​p/irrodl/article/view/882 8:41 pm
  Caryn NThe other concern with access is *internet* access, correct? It's one thing to have a laptop, it's another to be able to connect to a website with the bandwidth that's necessary to view the videos 8:41 pm
  George MeghabghabAnd now these same universities are offering courses free to the public while only the rich and famous could afford them. 8:42 pm
  JH Shannon@Stephen what do you think will be the longer-term impact of hoax 8:42 pm
  JH ShannonMOOCs on higher ed 8:42 pm
  Stephen Downes@Geworge - yes, they give the courses away - but people go to Yale or Stanfoprd (etc) not for the courses, but for the social, business and political connections - you pay a lot of money for that, and they're not giving *that* away 8:42 pm
  Denise KreigerHaving to do with the "Why Lecture Halls are Bad; xMOOCs are Good" article, I have a concern about the instructional design of MOOCs - if the lectures are chunked and moved online - the MOOC can still resemble the traditional lecture-based model that we're trying to move away from in universities - towards more engaging student-centered learning. Looking at resources in a cMOOC doesn't make a course 'engaging and collaborative with deep learning and critical thinking' necessarily, does it? 8:43 pm Maribel Pepe connected 8:44 pm
  Roz Hussin@Janesh Thanks 8:44 pm
  Stephen Downes@Caryn - internet access is a huge issue - I just talked with a group of administrators working at University College of the North, in Manitoba, where many communities don't have roads connecting them to the outside world, where services are minimal, and internet is onbly available by dial-up or sdatellite - it really changes the dynamics - my thinking here was, focus on what makes MOOCs (cMOOCs, at least) work - create mechanisms for creation and interaction, even if you have to fly DVDs full of content back and forth 8:44 pm
  Caryn Nthat's an interesting idea - media on the fly! 8:45 pm
  Janesh Sanzgiri@Stephen, based on the Kop paper I just linked, she mentions the need for "critical literacies" to engage in cMOOCs. While we're on the topic of the developing world (I come from India), I can't imagine how learners from my country would actually engage with cMOOCs, as the "instructivist" approach is so deeply ingrained within the learning culture here. At the same time, if we look at some of the data on xMOOCs, Indians make up the largest contingent of learners (after the US/Britain).. any comment? 8:46 pm
  Roz Hussin@stephen - what is your opinion on the current LANGUAGE divide? that MOOCs only benefit the English speaking world right now? 8:46 pm
  Stephen Downes@Denise - you're exactly right - the resources are not what make the MOOC (either cMOOC or xMOOC) and it is a mistake to focus too much on them. I call them the McGuffin - the thing that catches people's interest, and makes them want to follow the story, but something inherently meaningless and interchangeable - what makes a MOOC work are the connections and interactions - a community of people working throught he ideas and conceptrs for themselves 8:46 pm
  Javier Benítez@Stephen is learning in a cMOOC just a display of understanding the content? 8:46 pm
  George MeghabghabYou can use a translator and view the whole content in your language. 8:47 pm
  Mohamed Khadim@Stephen - perhaps a governance model may emerge that will Address issues of access, hoax, quality, deep instruction etc. or perhaps individual universities have already developed governance and qualitative evaluation models. 8:47 pm
  Janesh Sanzgiri@George, yes you can view the content, but can you actually participate? Surely learning is more than just viewing content. 8:47 pm
  Maribel PepeOf course you have a good connection speed help, but we have found that the most important is access to content, students often go to a cyber if they have problems at home with Connect 8:48 pm
  Stephen Downes@Janesh - I've seen some evidence of the deeply ingrained instructivist nature myself - I remember doing a tywo-day seminar in Malaysia - the first day they all sat and waited for me to teach them, the second day, my instruction to them was, basically, 'teach yourselves' - I have them an assignment, a project, and in groups they needed to work it out 8:48 pm
  Susan DixonStephen ... Are cMOOCs "Montessori Gone Wild" for big people? O_O 8:48 pm
  Stephen DownesMOOCs can have that effect - the 'critical literacies' Kop talks about related to a course we taughht, where participants are given the basic tools they need in order to learn for themselves 8:49 pm
  George MeghabghabMontessori went free!!!!!!!!!!! 8:49 pm
  Rob StrabyStephen, your piece on Internet access is key, access is a real issue in northern and rural Canada. I worked on a hybrid project for northern communities, we used WordPress as it was functional on a dial-up connection. I think we need to be sensitive to the technology issues on the learner side. 8:49 pm
  Roz Hussin@Stephen and @Janesh - I am working on a qualitative research project (in hope of) mapping out Connectivist literacies needed for engaging in cMOOCs... Would you have any advice/input? and/or better yet, can I contact you to get advice/input? 8:50 pm
  Stephen Downes> just a display of understanding the content? No - unless you thing of 'understanding' very broadly - to me, learning is *literally* the formation of a series of connections in the brain, learning X is *literally* forming a set of connections such that the cognitive capacities of a student of X are relevantly similar to those of an expert in X, where relevant similarity can be measured through a comparison of the totality of their interactions of practitioners of X, artifacts having to do with X, and performance of functoions related to X 8:51 pm
  Denise KreigerHow does a university offering MOOCs deal with all the digital-divide issues on a global scale so that students can communicate, access/view content, and 'create' content - not just 'consume'? 8:52 pm
  Stephen Downes> students often go to a cyber if they have problems at home with Connect -- cybercafes are one of the world's great invention - they are essential in many areas of the world (coffee optional but nice) 8:52 pm
  Javier Benítez@Stephen thanks 8:52 pm
  Maribel Pepe@Stephen Thanks. As the number of participants in the MOOC, how many (number) of teachers or assistants must have? 8:52 pm
  Janesh Sanzgiri@Roz, not sure if I can be of any help, but I'll do whatever I can janesh.sanzgiri@gmail.com 8:52 pm
  George MeghabghabSpeaking of digital divide: Students own smartphones 2 to 1 compared to Faculty. 8:53 pm
  Stephen Downes@Rob, yes, I am sensitiv e - that's why for example in addition to having live video chats, I broadcast an audio feed on my radio station - because people using mobile phones can access shoutcast and listen to the class, even if they don't have good internet 8:53 pm
  Stephen Downesphew, was falling behind there 8:54 pm
  Janesh Sanzgiri:) 8:54 pm
  Denise Kreiger:) 8:54 pm
  Stephen Downes@Marfibel, there's no number that I've observed, we've always taught MOOCs with three or four people, plus weekly guests, but I imagine it could be done with less (but there's never really a reason to, there alwasys seems to be someone willing to step up and help out) 8:55 pm
  Maribel Pepe@Stephen thanks 8:56 pm
  Janesh SanzgiriTo be honest, I am quite sceptical about cMOOCs being popular in India, it will require a major paradigm shift in order to do so. In fact, most of the participants in the "xMOOCs" from India can be attributed to the "big name universities" and the additional line it might add to their CV. 8:56 pm
  Stephen Downes@Geworge - absoluetly, and they don't use email or the web in anything like the numbers older people do - part of the core design fro cMOOCs (but not xMOOCs) was to be platform-agnostic, so we supported and encouraged people to use Twitter, Facebook, Posterous, Tumbly, whatever 8:56 pm
  Rob StrabyShoutCast, great idea, I like how you adapt material so that it can be accessed in multiple sources! 8:57 pm
  Janesh SanzgiriIt's great to read about pedagogical innovations and experimentation such as connectivism, but this is quite a long way from reaching fruition in the developing world, where access to a basic education itself is always not granted. 8:57 pm
  Stephen DownesHard to say Janesh - the people from India I've spoken to have been enthusiastic - I take your point about the line in the c.v. but at a certain point it becomes about what you know and can do, not just your c.v. 8:58 pm
  Janesh SanzgiriYes, I am just generally very pessimistic :-) 8:59 pm
  Maribel Pepe@Stephen How do we encourage participants to create learning networks? 8:59 pm
  Susan DixonI tried to register for your course...It says the site is not open to new registrations. ??? 8:59 pm
  Stephen Downes@Rob I use windows 'stereo mix' as my default audio source for everything, put up with a little microphone echo in my earphones, and stream out the same audio feed to Shoutcast, Hangout (or Skype, or Elluminate, depending on what I'm suing), and Audacity (for the recording) 9:00 pm
  Stephen Downes@Susan I'm not doing any courses right now, that's why 9:00 pm Mohamed Khadim disconnected 9:00 pm
  Kenneth RonkowitzWe are coming up to the one hour point and I don't want Stephen to get trapped here - but anyone can stay and continue this chat.
  
  Last chance for questions? 9:00 pm
  Caryn NIt also seems like many of the courses that have been developed are very university/intellectually minded (i.e. physics, algebra, etc) - any idea why there aren't more practical MOOCs (i.e. how to grow a really great crop, or organizing a grass-roots movement, etc) 9:00 pm
  Stephen DownesBut you don't need to register, all the materials (including videos and recordings) are available on the website 9:00 pm
  Caryn NI should have put "practical" in quotes... 9:01 pm
  Rob Straby@Janesh, I have Canadian students with similar issues. I deliver a constructivist approach that I feel is in between connectivist and instructivist models. The reflective projects help to lead students in a more self directed way. 9:01 pm
  Denise Kreiger@Stephen - thank you! 9:01 pm
  Susan DixonThank you Stephen!!! 9:01 pm
  Roz Hussin@Maribel, in my humble opinion, based on first hand experience watching learning networks start out strong, then sizzle out, it isn;t about engaging or starting... the key is to SUSTAIN the learning network... 9:01 pm
  Janesh SanzgiriThankyou Stephen for taking time out to do this. And Kenneth for organizing :-) 9:01 pm
  Roz Hussinthanks for the chat 9:01 pm Denise Kreiger disconnected 9:01 pm
  Stephen Downes@Caryn - because they're not needed - people just Google what they need to know - if they want lessons, they just search specifically for videos 9:01 pm JH Shannon disconnected 9:02 pm
  Kenneth RonkowitzIt has been very active here - imagine if a few hundred people DID show up! 9:02 pm
  Mary ZedeckThank you Stephen for joining us. Great discussion! 9:02 pm
  George MeghabghabTHANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 9:02 pm
  Stephen Downes@Rob interestingly I have the most problems with teachers whjo are constructivists - they want my course to be completely conmstructivist, but of course when people define their own learning path, it isn';t 9:02 pm
  Caryn NThanks, Stephen - your input is greatly appreciated! 9:02 pm Mohamed Khadim connected 9:03 pm
  Stephen Downes@Kenneth if a few hundred people showed up I would have tyuped as many answers as I did today, but more people would have read them :) 9:03 pm
  Roz HussinKenneth, I think some people got lost in the time zone difference... 9:03 pm
  Janesh SanzgiriGlad I stayed up for this :) 9:03 pm
  Kenneth Ronkowitz@Stephen Yes, but 400 questions? Geeeez 9:03 pm
  Stephen DownesThanks everyone, this has been a lot of fun - can I ask the organizers whether there will be an archive of this chat available in open access somewher? 9:03 pm
  Roz Hussinyes, archive would be GREAT! 9:04 pm
  Mary ZedeckI will create a chat archive and send it to you Stephen 9:04 pm
  Stephen Downes@Kenneth - the trick is to not feel oblicated to answer 400 questions, or even to read them all 9:04 pm
  Stephen DownesThe expert is just one person in the conversation 9:04 pm
  Kenneth Ronkowitzwe could post it - what do you think would be a good place for it? 9:04 pm
  Roz Hussin"the trick is to not feel oblicated to answer 400 questions, or even to read them all" .... this sounds like a MOOC literacy too! 9:04 pm
  Mohamed KhadimThanks folks. It was a good experience. 9:04 pm
  Rob StrabyThanks for your incredible insights Stephen, you have covered an incredible territory! 9:04 pm
  Stephen DownesI can post it on my blog 9:05 pm Caryn N disconnected 9:05 pm Michelle Mansfield disconnected 9:05 pm
  
  9:05 pm
  Mary ZedeckAnd, post the chat archive in the course as well. Feel free to post it to you blog as well, Stephen. 9:05 pm
  Kenneth Ronkowitz@Roz MOOC aphorisms... 9:05 pm
  Kenneth RonkowitzI will also blog it on mine at [www.serendipity35.net] 9:06 pm
  Roz HussinYes, Kenneth, we should start a dictionary for MOOCs 9:06 pm Mohamed Khadim disconnected 9:06 pm
  Rob StrabyThanks Kenneth! 9:06 pm
  Roz HussinKenneth, if you have a minute, may I engage in a chat with you? 9:06 pm
  Maribel Pepe@Roz thanks 9:06 pm
  Roz HussinThanks everyone! Wonderful questions! I enjoyed this so much! 9:06 pm George Meghabghab disconnected 9:06 pm
  Kenneth Ronkowitzhttps://learn.canvas.net/cours​es/42/wiki/mooc-aphorisms Add to it! 9:07 pm
  Stephen DownesOK, archive is openly posted here: http://halfanhour.blogspot.ca/​2013/05/cn1376-acadmooc.html  
• 

  Open for business: Refocused NRC

  Posted: May 7, 2013, 12:12pm COT

  
  So here is what has been roiling Canada's National Research Council over the last three years:
  
  NRC held a press conference in downtown Ottawa this morning with Gary Goodyear, Minister of State (Science and Technology), John R. McDougall, President of the National Research Council of Canada and, Deputy Leader of the Government at the Senate, Claude Carignan. Maybe NRC management will send the information to all staff, but in case it doesn’t, here is the relevant information. Essentially, NRC is now making public its transition from the old model to a program-based Research and Technology Organization.
  
  The NRC Launch (as it is called) has its own Twitter Hashtag: #NRCLaunch And there's a lot more commentary on the plain #NRC hashtag.
  
  Here was the announcement: [www.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca]
  
  I have made an audio recording of the press conference, which is available here:
  [www.downes.ca]
  
  Here’s the press release that accompanied today’s press conference:
  
  

  The National Research Council of Canada (NRC) has transformed into an industry-focused research and technology organization. The refocused NRC will work with Canadian industries to bridge technology gaps, helping build a more innovative Canadian economy.
  
  “NRC plays a pivotal role at the heart of Canada’s innovation system,” said the Honourable Gary Goodyear, Minister of State (Science and Technology). “The refocused NRC will provide Canadian industries with access to strategic research and development, technical services and specialized scientific infrastructure they need to succeed.”
  
  “The Government’s top priority is jobs, growth and long-term prosperity for all Canadians,” said the Honourable Claude Carignan, Deputy Leader of the Government at the Senate. “By refocusing the NRC into a research and technology organization, our Government is ensuring that Canadian firms have the instruments and tools they need to become even more successful on the global stage.”
   

  The refocused NRC will support Canadian industries by investing in large-scale research projects that are directed by and for Canadian business. It will also develop international networks to ensure timely access to primary research and will open the doors to world class scientific infrastructure, technical expertise and people.
  
  “We are very excited about this change. Our organization is now easier for business to understand and access,” said John R. McDougall, President of the National Research Council. “We are committed to being a strong partner for innovation, and focused on achieving the concrete outcomes that will contribute to a stronger and more prosperous Canada. We will measure our success by the success of our clients.”
  
  Research and technology organizations are mission-oriented providers of innovation services to firms and governments, dedicated to building economic competitiveness and, in doing so, improving quality of life. The refocused NRC will strengthen Canadian industry by encouraging more business investment to develop innovative products and services.

  
  [www.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca]
  
  Here is some CBC coverage of the announcement: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/story/2013/05/07/technology-nrc-business.html
   
  

  The Harper government is telling the National Research Council to focus more on practical, commercial science and less on fundamental science that may not have obvious business applications.
  The government says the council traditionally was a supporter of business, but has wandered from that in recent years — and will now get back to working on practical applications for industries.
  
  The council has become a loose web of individual fiefdoms, each pursuing its own goals, Gary Goodyear, minister of state for science and technology, told a news conference Tuesday.The result, he said, was an inflexible agency that had lost its ability to respond to the demands and needs of industry.

  I wasn't sure I could share this outside NRC, but all staff received a message from the NRC president later today saying, in part, "This is indeed a defining moment for NRC. And I invite all of you to join me in helping to tell the world about all that we now have to offer." So I'll do that.
  
  The President also wrote,
  

  Today’s public announcement is the first clear signal to businesses both large and small that our doors are open and we’re ready for their business. We’ve positioned ourselves to be a valued partner aligned with strategic national and industry needs.

  We can now all feel a tremendous sense of satisfaction in being able to widely broadcast our new agenda. Our revamped, more businesslike practices are in place and we have a strong roster of robust programs ready to go. Our IRAP program, widely recognized and highly successful has received new funding and new responsibilities in the last two years - through it we will also continue to support Canada’s small- and medium-sized companies.

  I’m proud of what we’ve already accomplished and I hope you are too. Today was the first public announcement on the national stage, but there are many more to come. I think you’ll find there is much about NRC to be proud of as we publicly roll out targeted new research programs in coming weeks and months.

  I have a lot of good things to say about IRAP and I think they've done a lot to get some good Canadian startups off the ground.
  
  Some notes (these are not a part of the official announcement and constitute my personal observations solely):
  
  The German Fraunhofer Society was mentioned numerous times as the inspiration for the new model for the NRC. We should note especially that the Society has “€1.9 billion annual research budget totaling. Of this sum, €1.6 billion is generated through contract research. More than 70 percent of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft’s contract research revenue is derived from contracts with industry and from publicly financed research projects. Almost 30 percent is contributed by the German federal and Länder governments in the form of base funding.” [www.fraunhofer.de] This is really downplayed in the press conference, but there is a mention of it at the 38:50 mark of the recording.
  
  That said:
  
  - the Fraunhofer Society is divided into some 60 institutes spread throughout Germany, each focusing on different fields of applied science, in contrast to the program-driven approach NRC has adopted
  
  - Wikipedia notes, “the size of the society's budget depends largely on its success in maximizing revenue from commissions. This funding model applies not just to the central society itself but also to the individual institutes. This serves both to drive the realisation of the Fraunhofer Society's strategic direction of becoming a leader in applied research as well as encouraging a flexible, autonomous and entrepreneurial approach to the society's research priorities.” We have yet to see this applied at NRC. [en.wikipedia.org]
  
  - Science Research in Germany is also conducted by the Max Planck Society, which supports “basic research in the interest of the general public in the natural sciences, life sciences, social sciences, and the arts and humanities. They have a total staff of approx. 13,000 permanent employees, including 4,700 scientists, plus around 11,000 non-tenured scientists and guests. Their budget for 2006 was about €1.4 billion, with 84% from state and federal funds.” With the shift of NRC to an RTO, Canada will have no equivalent to the Max Planck Society, and no direct federal investment in basic research.
  
  Obviously I would prefer to be on the Max Planck Society side of the house, rather than the Fraunhofer Society side of the house. It concerns me that the only people able to access my services as a researcher will be those able to pay for them.
  
  But this is where I am, and NRC does pay the bills, so I have been doing my part to position the Learning and Communications Technology part of NRC in such a way as to offer support for the Canadian e-learning industry. But to be clear here: there are six layers of management above me, not counting the PM, Minister and Deputy Minister, and they all have more say in what an e-learning program looks like than I do, which has made it very difficult to innovate, to meet the needs of industry, and generate economic and social outcomes.
  
  A lot of what made NRC an attractive place to work has been taken off the table. I'm not sure what I will be doing in the future.
• 

  Assessment in MOOCs

  Posted: May 4, 2013, 10:17am COT

  I was asked: "I was wondering how they might work with the Humanities, as I teach Seventeenth-Century Literature, Shakespeare and other related subjects, which require research papers and final examinations. I can see using MOOCs for people who simply have a (non-credit) interest in these subjects, but I can't see myself marking 5,000 term papers, and a similar number of exams. Multiple-choice evaluation, as in science, is easily taken care of electronically, but not in humanities. I am sure this looks like a naive question, but I think MOOCs are a wonderful idea for people who simply wish to enrich their knowledge, and would like to know a little more about them."
  
  First of all, the MOOCs I have worked on have not focused on assessment - they have been courses, yes, with a small number (20 or so) taking them for credit, but the vast majority of participants auditing. So the question of marking term papers never came up. And like you, I would not contemplate multiple-choice exams in humanities and literature courses.
  
  If you really need assessment, a few solutions have been proposed and, to a limited extend, tried out:
  
  - automated essay assessment - this is not as far-fetched as it may seem, though it's not necessarily a cure-all. Automated essay assessment needs to be seeded with a large number of already-marked essays; on being given this seed, it extracts the properties of high-quality essays, and then matches new essays to those properties. There's a really good essay describing the process here: [mfeldstein.com] Here's another article: [tlt.its.psu.edu]
  
  - another form of automated assessment is based on task-completion or success-based metrics. The best example of this is Codeacademy. [www.codecademy.com] It's a bit like programmed learning [www.gsis.kumamoto-u.ac.jp] where people can be stepped through the material soliciting active learner responses; "The extent of a learner's understanding is ascertained from what is demonstrated in the responses." In many casdes, this can be supported through a form of self-assessment, using simple techniques such as flash cards and more complex techniques such as sample responses to questions; the participant can determine for themselves whether they passed and can move on.
  
  - peer assessment - essays are graded not by professors but by other course participants. This would require that each essay be graded by a largeish number of other participants, otherwise, the grading would be no better than random. How large is enough? It might be too large, especially when you account for people who grade without reading, people who grade based on poor criteria, etc. Peer grading can work really well for blog posts and discussion lists, where it can be managed with a simple thumbs-up thumbs-down metric. Here's an example: [www.nytimes.com] And the fact of being graded by peers often spurs people to greater accomplishment. There's some discussion of peer grading here: [degreeoffreedom.org] And here's a critique of the technique: [www.insidehighered.com]
  
  - network-based grading - in this model, individuals are not graded by means of grading individual pieces of work, but rather are graded according to network metrics; the idea is that quality work will produce quality network metrics. The model is not unlike that pioneered by Klout [klout.com] which counts the number of Twitter followers, Facebook likes, and similar indicators, to produce a single Klout score.
  
  The problem with Klout is that it is simplistic and easily gamed. Nonetheless there is potential for a more fine-grained assessment to look at how ideas created by one person propagate through a network, to look at whether a person's reading recommendations have become influential, and similar less obvious measures. These can be pretty fine-grained, based on semantic analysis. Here's a simple example, of a Twitter scanner that looks for instances of bullying (obviously, something that would lower the person's score): [phys.org] And here are some links to research by my colleagues at NRC on the analysis of sentiments and emotions in online postings: [www.umiacs.umd.edu]
  
  Each of the last two methods run some risks:
  
  -  the "blind-leading-the-blind" phenomenon, whereby the collection of participants in a course can elevate myths about the subject matter to the status of fact (I remember instances from my childhood, where the position of "backcatcher" became a baseball position, and "touching iron" became a foul in basketful).
  
  - the "charlatan" phenomenon - Students not already expert in a subject matter may mistakenly believe that one of their member is an expert.
  
  For these reasons, I have always recommended that a MOOC seek to attract not only students and novices in a discipline, but also practitioners and experts in the discipline. Such people will quite rightly gain the greatest 'authority' according to peer or assessment measures, and as a result, their actions (such as relaying an idea, passing on a link, etc.) will gain more weight, shifting the outcome of peer or network based assessment to one based more on credibility.
  
  The difficulty lies in attracting these people, who are often very busy, to a MOOC. This is one of the benefits of scale; a very large MOOC is more likely to attract experts (and the presence of experts is more likely to increase the size of the MOOC). But experts aren't likely to attend a carefully choreographed "Intro to Victorian Literature" course; it's all very old and familiar to them. The model of learning needs to changed to involved the experts.
  
  This is what we attempted, with some success, in our connectivist MOOCs - rather than set it up as a series of lessons, we set it up as a series of discussions. The experts would participate at a high level, often interacting mostly with each other, while participants at other levels observed and were able to emulate this practice. Yes, we did provide scaffolding, to help the novices get into the flow of the discussion, but the scaffolding did not become the course.
  
  Another model of MOOC addresses the issue by sharing the assessment.
  
  The "distributed MOOC" is essentially a MOOC that is shared by a number of institutions (again, this was something we attempted in the earliest connectivist MOOCs). Today this is sometimes being called a 'wrapped MOOC'. The idea is that some of all of the MOOC contents are shared by members of classes from any number of institutions. Participants interact with each other, and follow online events and resources together. Each, though, is subject to individual assessment by their home institution, which may attach whatever rubric to the material they wish.
  
  A final option is to bypass grading entirely, and let a person's outcomes stand on their own as evidence of accomplishment in the course. this is the objective of portfolio-based courses, more common in the arts and writing, but also increasingly popular in the sciences, and especially design, engineering and computing. The idea is essentially that a person presents an artifact that can be studied directly by potential employers. This artifact may or may not be subject to peer grading, which may produce a course score. But the course score is secondary to the artifact itself. Here's a quick guide to portfolio-bases assessment [www.unm.edu]
  
  One of the advantages of portfolio-based assessment is that it removes the ambiguity inherent in grades that result from tests and assignments. Here, for example, is an article describing how portfolio-bases assessment can help parents see directly how well their children are performing. [www.earlychildhoodnews.com] Portfolio-based assessment is often based on matching production to rubrics; this example [www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov] demonstrates portfolio-based assessment in medicine.
• 

  McLuhan - Understanding Media - Summary of Chapters 11-14

  Posted: April 14, 2013, 6:11pm COT

  My contribution to the Understanding Media Reading Group
  
  Chapter 11
  
  McLuhan writes, in Chapter 11 of Understanding Media, that "The mysterious need of crowds to grow and to reach out, equally characteristic of large accumulations of wealth, can be understood if money and numbers are, indeed, technologies that extend the power of touch and the grasp of the hand."
  
  Numbers, he writes, grip us and keep us in their thrall. The driver toward unlimited growth, the pleasure of being among the masses - these both illustrate an anti-intellectualism that has long been subject to the suspicions of the rational among us. The power of number can be contrasted with the light of reason that is the hallmark of the written word.
  
  Numbers are related to the sensual and tactile in the way that language and literacy relate to the visual. "Just as writing is an extension and separation of our most neutral and objective sense, the sense of sight, number is an extension and separation of our most intimate and interrelating activity, our sense of touch."
  
  Because numbers represent a form of pre-literacy and pre-civilization, it may seem off that someone like Oswald Spengler in 'The Decline of the West' express concern with 'the new math' as a retreat from numbers, and specifically, the rise of non-Euclidian geometries and the rise of functions in number theory. But, argues McLuhan, the primacy of literacy isn't the the primacy of reason, it is the primacy of the visual sense.
  
  But the primacy of the literal isn't the the primacy of reason, it is the primacy of the visual sense. And the fragmentation of civilization results not from the rise of science and mathematics, but from the elevation of one sense over the others. The fragmentation occurs when we isolate properties that can be detected visually, but are beyond the reach of the other senses.
  
  Indeed, the modern properties of numbers are not derived from primitive society at all. As Tobias Dantzig writes in 'Number: The Language of Science' "the parity or kinesthetic sense of these [primitive] people is stronger than their number sense." They counted in terms of "One, two, heap." The new math Spengler railed against resulted from the introduction of key ideas of language to numbers, specifically, "correspondence and succession." The awareness of zero, and of infinity, in particular, have their origins in the application of ideas from language to numbers.
  
  As an aside, interestingly, McLuhan writes, "Western man, were he determined to cling to the fragmented and individualist ways that he has derived from the printed word in particular, would be well advised to scrap all his electric technology" because fragmentation by visual stress occurs in isolation of moment or space beyond the power of touch, etc., and "by imposing unvisualizable relationships that are the result of instant speed, electric technology dethrones the visual sense and restores us to the dominion of synesthesia, and the close interinvolvement of the other senses."
  
  
  Chapter 12
  
  "Clothing," writes McLuhan, "as an extension of the skin, can be seen both as a heat-control mechanism and as a means of denning the self socially." Changes in clothing reflect changes in society. For example, post-war Europe emphasized fashion and style at the same time American society seemed to be revolting against it. Europe, in turn, had its own revolution in the late 18th century as the courtly dress, once vastly different from the peasant style, was replaced (sometimes by necessity) by more common attire.
  
  Clothing, when presented as an object of art or sculpture, represents a society that is visually oriented. But the new styles are reflecting a society that is incorporating all the senses once again. "In a word, the American woman for the first time presents herself as a person to be touched and handled, not just to be looked at." It is now easy, says McLuhan, to see clothing as an extension of the skin.
  
  
  Chapter 13
  
  McLuhan writes, "Recently an imaginative school principal in a slum area provided each student in the school with a photograph of himself. The classrooms of the school were abundantly supplied with large mirrors. The result was an astounding increase in the learning rate. The slum child has ordinarily very little visual orientation. He does not see himself as becoming something. He does not envisage distant goals and objectives. He has deeply involved in his own world from day to day, and can establish no beachhead in the highly specialized sense life of visual man. The plight of the slum child, via the TV image, is increasingly extended to the entire population."
  
  The intent of this chapter is to show not only that housing is, like clothing, an extension of our skin, but also, to depict housing as a means of communication. Included in this idea is an important definition of the concept: clothing and housing are media of communication "in the sense that they shape and rearrange the patterns of human association and community."
  
  We can see this by drawing out the distinctions between housing in pre-literate and literacte societies. Housing for preliterate societies was connected to the world, while "Literate man, civilized man, tends to restrict and enclose space and to separate functions, whereas tribal man had freely extended the form of his body to include the universe." Pre-literate houses were round houses, or triangles, shapes that these are not visual spaces,  not 'enclosed' because they follow dynamic lines of force, while a square moves 'beyond' such kinetic pressures. "The square room or house speaks the language of the sedentary specialist, while the round hut or igloo, like the conical wigwam, tells of the integral nomadic ways of food-gathering communities."
  
  The bulk of the chapter describes ways elements of housing can shape and rearrange patterns of living, how (for example) with glass, "the world is put in a frame" and industry and commerce can now proceed without regard to rain or wind, or (for example) they way we can paint with light, both inside houses, with light on walls, or beyond the enclosure, with Gyorgy Kepes's  "landscape by light through" rather than "light on." McLuhan writes, "Painting with light is a kind of housing without walls."
  
  
  Chapter 14
  
  McLuhan describes the progression of money from its origination as a commodity to its modern incarnation as a medium of information, a language of exchange. "Today, even natural resources have an informational aspect. They exist by virtue of the culture and skill of some community."
  
  The birth of money as commodity is well known, with McLuhan relating examples such as the use of whales' teeth on Fiji or rats on Easter Island. Even in literate society, commodities may be used as money in extreme circumstances, with the trading of jewels and cigarettes, for example, common in occupied territories.
  
  The function of money in this "commodity and community character" is of  "extending the grasp of men from their nearest staples and commodities to more distant one." In early usage, this function is very small, and the utility of money is not clear. McLuhan describes the confusion created by "the dramatic arrival of paper currency, or 'representative money,' as a substitute for commodity money."
  
  To use currency, he observes, requires a "letting go" of objects, letting go of the commodities that first serve as money, in order to extend trading to society as a whole. Elias Canetti , in 'Crowds and Power', draws the analogy of learning to swing on vines in the forest. "The primitive grasping, calculating, and timing of the greater arboreal apes he sees as a translation into financial terms of one of the oldest movement patterns."
  
  But money has always had value as more than just a medium of exchange, as early societies knew well. The tradition of the potlach, for example, or ceremonial exposure of rice to the rain in Borneo, demonstrates the social and cultural dimension of money. McLuhan writes, "Money, like writing, has the power to specialize and to rechannel human energies and to separate functions, just as it translates and reduces one kind of work to another."
  
  In the age of paper currency, money becomes less personal and more sterile. The modern use of money is tied intrinsically to literacy, and with literacy "money, as a social means of extending and amplifying work and skill in an easily accessible and portable form, lost much of its magical power" (as money becomes more like a language, and less like number, money becomes more literal and less sensual and tactile).
  
  The phrase "money talks" resonates because money is a communications medium. We have seen already that money is a storehouse of communally achieved work, skill, and experience. But just as the clock separates time and space, money separates work from other aspects of human experience. "Time is money," it is said, and money is the storehouse of time spent at work.
  
  It is important, writes McLuhan, to understand the underpinnings of literacy that are required to make sense of money. "The West is little aware of the way in which the world of prices and numbering is supported by the pervasive visual culture of literacy." Early societies would make no sense of the concept at all. "The fragmentation of the inner life by prices seemed as mysterious in the eighteenth century, as the minute fragmentation of space by means of calculus had seemed a century earlier."
  
  In primitive society, money has intrinsic value, and the whole concept of 'work' doesn't exist. But in literate society, money is a means of storing and transferring 'work', where 'work' begins with the division of labour and the role of money is enormously increased after money begins to foster specialism and separation of social functions. Money both fosters and represents this transition from a cohesive and unified society to a literate, fragmented, separated one.
  
  As money becomes less and less like currency, however, and more and more like information, it begins to regain some of its commodity value. "All media," writes McLuhan, "or extension of man - are natural resources that exist by virtue of the shared knowledge and skill of a community."
  
  "Today information gathering resumes the inclusive concept of 'culture,' exactly as the primitive food-gatherer worked in complete equilibrium with his entire environment. Our quarry now, in this new nomadic and 'work-less world', is knowledge and insight into the creative processes of life and society."
       
• 

  The Great Rebranding

  Posted: April 13, 2013, 11:38am COT

  Responding to Michael Feldstein, who on summarizing the recent EDUCAUSE MOOC conference (see my summaries from this blog) represents MOOCs as yet another form of artifact in support of traditional instruction, diagrammed as follows:
  
  
  I was at the same conference of course and viewed it a bit differently. The attendees are self-selected from an audience consisting almost entirely of instructors (people outside this community were prohibited from attending). The presentations and discussion seemed to me to be repeated instances of "please please please let MOOCs be whatever they are so long as they don't touch the sacred role of instruction."
  
  People who live and work exclusively within these institutions need to get out more. They need to see beyond an idea of education where the students come from cookie-cutter upper income homes and whose deepest problems are motivation, distraction and information overload. They need to get beyond facile debates about quality and enter the real-word debate around access.
  
  Seriously, what else can be said about a statement like this: " it will be offered locally with teachers at a scale of between 1 to 20 and 1 to 50. Because teachers matter.” It's like saying "we must at all costs limit education to small groups of people led by a teacher." The "distributed flip", advanced as this Great New Thing, is the connectivist model of MOOCs, but with small-group in-person attached.
  
  The arguments in which the four elements of MOOCs - 'massive', 'open', 'online', and 'course' - are one by one putated to be 'optional' or 'unnecessary' seems to me to be a desparate attempt to cleanse MOOCs of any disruptive impact they may have on the traditional action of in-person teaching to a teacher to a small group of people.
  
  These arguments miss the point of the MOOC, and that point is, precisely, to make education available to people who cannot afford pay the cost to travel to and attend these small in-person events. Having one instructor for 20-50 people is expensive, and most of the world cannot afford that cost. That's *why* the institutions - from which the attendees of this conference were uniquely selected - charge thousands of dollars of tuition every year.
  
  MOOCs were not designed to serve the missions of the elite colleges and universities. They were designed to undermine them, and make those missions obsolete.
  
  Yes there has been a great rebranding and co-option of the concept of the MOOC over the last couple of years. The near-instant response from the elites, almost unprecedented in my experience, is a recognition of the deeply subversive intent and design of the original MOOCs (which they would like very much to erase from history).
  
  --
  
  My summaries from the EDUCAUSE Conference:
  

  • Everything You Thought You Knew About MOOCs Could Be Wrong, Phil Hill and Michael Feldstein
    
  • Faculty Perspective: Teaching the Humanities to Humanity, Peter Struck
  • Designing and Implementing MOOCs that Maximize Student Learning, Seth Anderson (Duke), Amy Collier (Stanford), Cassandra Horlii (California Institute of Technology)
  • MOOCs for Credit: Current State of the Art, Cathy Sandeen, Centre for Education, Attainment and Innovation, ACE
  •  What’s In It for Us?: Benefits to Campus Course of Running a MOOC, Jason Mock 
  •  Who Are Our Students? Bridging Local and Global Learning Communities, Derek Bruff, Vanderbilt University, @derekbruf
  • Using an Open Source Platform to Meet Online Learning Goals, Amy Collier (Stanford) and Jane Manning (Stanford)
    
  • Backgrounds and Behaviors of MOOC Participants and Implications for Faculty, Lori Breslow (MIT), Jennifer DeBoer (MIT), Andrew Ho (Harvard)
  • Multiple Lessons Learned from Implementing MOOC Environments at San Jose State University, Ellen Junn
  • Digging into MOOC Mania: One Investor's Key Research Questions and Approach, Stacey L. Clawson, Anh Nguyen, Gates Foundation
  • Assessing the Efficacy of Third-Party MOOCs in Hybrid Instruction, Rebecca Griffiths, ITHAKA
  • International Perspective: The MOOC and Campus-Based Learning, Phillip D. Long, University of Queensland
  • MOOC Provider Panel: Coursera, Academic Partnerships, Instructure, edX, Maria H. Andersen (Canvas by Instructure), Relly Brandman (Coursera), Rebecca Petersen (EdX), Barbara E. Truman (Academic Partnerships)
  • The MOOC as a Vehicle for Learning: Observations and Conclusions, Michael Feldstein, Phil Hill

  
  
  
• 

  Who is Funding the Canadian Taxpayer's Federation?

  Posted: April 5, 2013, 8:48am COT

  I think it's time to ask who is funding the self-styled Canadian Taxpayer's Federation, and what they are funding them to do. A little transparency here would go a long way. Certainly they do not represent taxpayers - as a taxpayer, I've never been invited to vote for my CTF representative.
  
  I write this because the latest intervention supposedly on our behalf from the CTF is in regard to the expense undertaken by City Council to send representatives to Russia to attend the annual SportAccord convention, which as CBC notes is "a gathering of more than 2,000 representatives from international sports."
  
  The trip does not meet the approval of Kevin Lacey, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation spokesman. “This is too much for taxpayers,” he said. “They’re giving a lot and it’s up to the city to do their part, rather than send people on fancy conferences.”
  
  And as CBC reported, "Coun. Daniel Bourgeois raised questions at a council meeting on Tuesday about whether the city was setting specific targets on what the officials were expected to accomplish."
  It's not clear to me that these critics understand how cities create economic activity, activity which, in turn, lowers the load on individual taxpayers.
  
  Events like the Rolling Stones and other concerts, the CFL football games, the World Track meets, and the like, bring in millions of dollars to the city directly, and attract millions more indirectly. They are part and parcel with a more broad-based but less glamorous strategy of attracting a range of businesses and industries to the city.
  
  These industries and events employ people, both directly through hiring, and indirectly through purchases of goods and services. And they're important because, unlike government employment, they create economic activity, creating a flow of income in the city which would not otherwise be there.
  
  But just as you can't find a job by sitting in your kitchen and waiting for someone to call you, you can't attract enterprise to the city by sitting in your office and waiting for U2 to give you a call. It doesn't work like that. You have to go out into the world, meet with people on their own home ground, demonstrate your interest, and build a relationship.
  
  It takes time, it takes effort, and yes, it takes money to fund travel to places like Russia.
  So given that all this is the case, one wonders just what Daniel Bourgeois and Kevin Lacey are hoping to accomplish with their criticisms.
  
  Bourgeois wants "specific targets". How ridiculous. What is the 'specific target' of a conversation? What are the representatives supposed to report: "we built trust by two octaves and enhanced relationships by one degree?" No, the results are occasional and not the result of any single direct input.
  
  We all knew that Ian Fowler got results because we could see the concerts and events on the ground, and could watch the excitement and commerce flow through the city. But it would have been ridiculous to require him to report 'specific targets' for each conversation he had, for each trip he took.
  And as for Kevin Lacey, one wonders what he is thinking at all, beyond a knee-jerk response to any government spending. One wonders, indeed, why Lacey is even quoted in the CTV article. He has no particular knowledge of Moncton politics and has not demonstrated that he is an expert on economic development. So why phone him up for comment?
  
  Somehow Lacey has made himself a favorite of CTV and also of the Roger's-owned News 91.9 talk radio show, where he is interviewed on what seems to be almost a daily basis. He (and others with similar views) are given a platform day after day to complain about this, that or the other government expense.
  
  Here is Lacey's bio, from the CTF website: "Kevin has experience in both the public and private sector. He recently ran his own consulting business providing advice to leading politicians and corporations. He’s served in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s office and was a senior advisor to Nova Scotia Premier John Hamm. Prior to this he worked as an associate with a large Atlantic based public affairs company. He’s also worked for both The Atlantic Institute for Market Studies and The Fraser Institute."
  
  So for this reason one wonders who is funding the Canadian Taxpayers' Federation. They demand accountability time after time - let's see them open their own books. Ditto for the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies. And the rest of these very political 'think tanks' and lobby groups.
  
  Because whatever else they're doing, their undermining our ability to develop and grow a sound economic foundation in the city. And their ongoing campaigns hurt the wider community by undercutting any good governments are willing and able to provide.
  
  Their short-sighted calls for lower taxes and minimal government ignore the reality that prosperity in society is generated largely by government intervention and redistribution of wealth, and that austerity in a time of recession is what produces crises like the great depression.
  
  If you're broke and unemployed, you can't hope things will get better by cutting your expenses and sitting in your bedroom. You have to invest - even if it means borrowing - and educate yourself and develop your skills and get involved in society, meeting people and earning a reputation. Just as - I'm sure - Kevin Lacey does.
  
  Let's see some openness and transparency from the Canadian Taxpayer's Federation. Who is paying the bills, how much does Kevin Lacey get paid, how much does he spend on travel and schmoozing? This will put their missives into a much clearer light - and expose, I would suspect, the contradictions.
  
  p.s. Here is the Canadian Taxpayers' Federation annual report
  154 people donated more than $1000 to the CTF - we are not told who, though. No salaries are disclosed. Also worth noting is the CTF expenditures of almost $500,000 on 'events', $108,000 for 'travel' and an additional $684,000 for 'communications. It seems these expenses are good for the CTF, but not for governments.
• 

  Advice to OcTEL

  Posted: April 5, 2013, 6:06am COT

  Context: email to David Jennings, on the occasion of the start of the OcTEL MOOC, in which participants have been flooded with introductory emails from the course mailing list.
  
  Hi - here are some suggestions - posted here because you’ll probably not get them if I send an email (heh)... feel free to remove this once you’ve received the message. -- Stephen
  
  Hiya David,
  
  In all the MOOCs I've done I've never had an open one-to-many channel, precisely because if you have 1000 people using it, it becomes unmanageable.
  
  You'll find that web forums become unmanageable as well if used by 1000 people.
  
  I have also discouraged the ubiquitous 'introduction' posts, for the same reason. A dozen introductions make sense. 1000 do not.
  
  Right now, any message you send to people will get lost in the mass, so you can't fix the problem by sending messages to people.
  
  What I would do (and I feel really badly, because I could have offered this advice earlier):
  
  - redirect all mail to a web-based discussion board or mailing list archives, and cease sending out mailing list emails
  - give people a few days to catch their breath
  - give people a link to the discussion board
  
  This cuts off the flow and makes it possible to communicate with people in the course. next:
  
  - set up a system whereby you are sending out one email a day to people
  - in this email, put your course announcements at the top
  - also put a link to the mailing list archives, or (even better) links to the current topics on the board archives
  
  Finally, you can use this system to incorporate 'publish in your own space' responses
  
  - create a mechanism to allow people to register their blogs
  - set up an aggregator of participant blogs
  - include the aggregator listings in the once-a-day email
  
  Additionally
  
  - aggregate the Twitter posts for the course tag (I forget what it was; I'm sure it's in an email somewhere)
  - aggregate from the diigo group - [https:]]
  - list these posts in your once-a-day email
  
  Here's an example of such an email I've used in my own courses:
  [change.mooc.ca]
• 

  The MOOC as a Vehicle for Learning: Observations and Conclusions

  Posted: April 4, 2013, 4:00pm COT

  
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  Phil: There has been a very rich discussion about the different reasons for participating in MOOCs, the variety of people participation in MOOCs.
  I’ve also been interested in the channels of communication here, there’s been an active discussion in the chant, on Twitter, the blogs.
  Veronica: a lot of this reminded me of what a speaker called ‘revolutionary innovation’ that should make up 10 percent of our portfolios, not to make a profit or replace existing things, but to learn. That’s a perfect way to think about the MOOC: learning about learning, research about learning. Maybe for the moment we can be OK with that being the value of the MOOC.
  Michael: Thinking back to the cMOOCs, I always though the purpose was to impose the minimal amount of structure, to raise the possibility of what can be done. But something shifts when you’re talking about MOOCs for credit. Now we’re back to talking about getting what you pay for, which is the degree. The difference between having a satisfied conversation with a biologist about what they do and working side by side with that person in the lab. I heard people ask, is it learning, and the answer is, maybe it’s not the same but it’s fine – but if it’s a degree program, is that enough.
  But I also think, if you’re a school, and you’re spending money, you’re not sure how much, and you’re not sure will lead to the core mission you’re funded for, and if on top of that tuition is going up and classes are harder to get into, then you have to ask whether it’s an ethical decision to spend that money. There isn’t a right or wrong as to whether MOOCs are worth the investment, but you have to be clear about it.
  Question: what is the trajectory here?
  Michael: what we heard here in contrast to the uncertainty was a lot of confidence and enthusiasm about MOOCs as course materials and part of the course environment. I love the term from Stanford, the ‘distributed flip’. Right now schools are struggling with bottleneck courses, increasi8ng lecture sizes and decreasing quality – to engage in a conversation with each other about how we can increase the quality in a way we can afford by collaborating and doing some classic flipping, and yet still have support at the home institution. If that also results in the cost of course materials coming down, so much the better.
  Veronica: one we move away from institutional limitations, all kinds of limitations – payment, platform, credit – then we can focus on what works best – and then we can look at things like disaggregation of the course, modularization of the course, etc.
  Michael: sure, one of the greatest services MOOCs have provided has been to reawaken the imagination. Let’s invest in trying some things, lift some constraints and see what happens.
  Phil: It’s already having an impact. It’s really people rethink and get past the Carnegie unit, the seat time.
  
  
• 

  MOOC Provider Panel: Coursera, Academic Partnerships, Instructure, edX

  Posted: April 4, 2013, 3:43pm COT

  
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   Summary of a panel with  Maria H. Andersen (Canvas by Instructure), Relly Brandman (Coursera), Rebecca Petersen (EdX), Barbara E. Truman (Academic Partnerships)
  Question: How do you think the MOOC will evolve over the next two years
  Maria: it’s a bit hard to say, we’re in an experimental phase, we’re mostly looking at uses at the graduate level where people already have experiences
  Relly: I like Maria’s answer. It’s early days. First, we can look for innovations in pedagogy, because of the work with such diverse participants. How does participation in discussion forums influence learning? How does putting themselves into the place of the instructor influence learning? And even cultural aspects, eg., the notion of ‘what is a class?’ – many of these MOOCs have become learning communities. I think we’ll see innovations in the technology, eg., more social tools. There will be many more classes. 
  Rebecca: We all say it’s early days. But it’s true. This time last year EdX wasn’t even an entity. But what’s really evolving is a broader conversation about online learning. Those of us who have worked in online learning for many years know it occupies a specific space, and note that what it’s doing is pushing the conversation about teaching and learning. The conversation now is wide open.
  Barbara. I would agree with my co-panelists, we are in the early days. I hope we see an increase in the number of campuses figuring out their MOOC strategies, and that we’ll see engagement – maybe a movement from X to C, toward communities.
  Question: How do you see the MOOC transforming learning in online and other delivery modes?
  Relly: Trying to engage students in lots of active ways. We’re seeing in MOOCs not a lot more attention paid to pedagogy and teaching in STEM classes, bringing the benefits of online learning back to the the university and live classes.
  Rebecca: the MOOC is pushing the conversation about pedagogy and learning. One of the experiments in EdX, taking the MOOC and offering it on campus. What we’re hearing in focus groups is the community, the interaction. We have conversations with faculty really not thinking about this. Now faculty are thinking about how we teach well for MOOCs and the very diverse audience, and bringing it back to their classrooms. There is a lot of energy thinking about he methods that are working online.
  Barbara: it reminds me of the need for a flux capacitor in some of our MOOCs. ;) It brings us back to the discussion of how online learning began in the first place. It’s the same conversation. MOOCs are becoming a test-drive and an onramp to degree completion. Not only will we see an improvement in teaching and learning, but also a reduction in cost.
  Maria: maybe one insight: now I think of SPOCs, small private online courses, how they made professors rethink things. Now MOOCs are focusing institutional questions.
  Question: How do you see intellectual property and ownership issues evolving considering that some institutions are using each other's course content via MOOC providers—an uncommon practice in higher education.
  Rebecca: from the EdX space, people have been remarkably open and flexible. Faculty are generating their own courses, but we have San Jose State using our course, etc. Our faculty are habving the opportunity to see how their material is being used and how it appears to different kinds of students. There are different cultures – MIT has a very open culture, but as we work across partnerships, there are different cultures, different levels of openness.
  Barbara: many of the IP discussions are going to be the decision of the institution. We will br promoting OER and CC, these will be campus decisions. But where it gets interesting is when we get more and more student generated content.
  Maria: how does the 2002 TEACH act apply to MOOCs? Doe sit still apply? And also, who owns student generated content? How can it be used – can it be used for research?
  Relly: Things are still evolving. At Coursera IP does not belong with us; we provide the platform and our partners provide the content.
  Question: In your courses, how can you ensure that a students' work is their own? Is there a way to structure courses to address this concern?
  Barbara: every type of course is going to have the vulnerability of not knowing work is performed by that students or learner, but just as in online learning there’s a way to solicit information to essentially create a profile of the student. But when we don’t have this data it’s more difficult. We want to make the academic rules made clear before and up front in the course, this is especially important for student generate content.
  Maria: this becomes an issue only when we are giving credit. When they’re just vehicles for learning, as most of them are not, it’s not that big a deal. We hope it will mostly be like that. It’s a delight now, we don’t have any ‘hostages’ to the course.
  Relly: it really becomes an issue when people start to use their MOOCs in context with other things. We started a pilot called ‘signature track’, where we give a certificate where they verify their identity as they go through the course; they have their webcam photo and keystrokes identified. They get a certificate and a URL they can share.
  Rebecca: we’re experimenting with similar things, in one project we have a partnership with Pearson for proctored exams. But it goes back to the motivations why students are taking these courses – we have people who are learners, not students.
  Question: Matriculated students enjoy full support from their institution's library; how can the MOOC provide similar support to the many thousands of students enrolled in the MOOC, the majority of which are not enrolled at the institution that is offering the course.
  Maria: You must have been monitoring my Twitter stream. I’ve been really frustrated, I have no access to institutional libraries any more. There’s a real irony to an institutional system that teaches students to access the library and then kicks them out with no more access to it. There’s a role for these libraries. But I don’t see a way for them to do it for free.
  Relly: in an idea world we make everything open source. We’ve seen a few classes that try to work with publishers, to provide part of a resource for free, and an opportunity to buy the full item.
  Matriculated students enjoy full support from their institution's library; how can the MOOC provide similar support to the many thousands of students enrolled in the MOOC, the majority of which are not enrolled at the institution that is offering the course.
  Relly: like Coursera, we have arrangements with folks, and we try to find out what we can offer for free access. Within our consortia, we work with librarians to see what can be offered across the consortium.
  (UCF Viewing Room (MOOCer Wannabes): Many of our MOOC students are outside the US and have trouble ordering our textbooks.)
  Barbara: I’m spoiled rotten – not having access to libraries and librarians is like not having access to the internet. Perhaps this is a point where we can get libraries involved with the MOOCs and get our digital literates really rockin’.
  Question: Do you think the learning that takes place in a MOOC is on par with a face-to-face based course?
  Relly: I think this is an apples and oranges comparison. We have to ask, why is the student taking the course. Online learning and live learning have their strengths. Online learning si good for mastery learning, helps people with say autism. And live learning has strengths as well.
  
  Rebecca: this is a question that’s always asked of online learning. I’m waiting for the day we ask whether face-to-face learning is as good as the MOOC. Keep an open mind of just how learning takes places across a variety of settings.
  Barbara: I’ve been engaged in creating five different MOOCs, and it has been such a delight to watch faculty pouring their heart into designing them. But I have in mind a phrase I heard: “The world gets online learning.”
  Maria: these are apples and oranges. In a MOOC, it’s for the world, for people who are learning for learning’s sake. In an institutional course, even online courses, it’s for a certificate. It’s like comparing a book club to a literature course.
  Question: Some critics suggest that the MOOC is a "retreat" to the old transmission course model.  How do your course designs address this possible criticism?
  Rebecca: one of our signature pieces is learning sequences, very short sessions interspersed with problem sets, virtual labs, to get students immediate feedback. We’ve learned from research that students are looking for just-in-time feedback. So we’ve been doing things like green checkmarks, etc. Our students are looking for a high level of interactivity. So are our faculty. They aren’t looking to be just transmitters of information. So we’re looking at how to engage folks beyond just watching the lecture. I hate it when we all get categorized into just one course type.
  Barbara: In some cases they probably are, but hopefully they won’t be. The question is how we can incorporate learner choice. The opportunity to offer a variety of different pathways for learners. The use of social media is so exciting, it will give us the ability to use social constructivism.
  Maria: the key here lies not in the word MOOC but in how the learning design is done. It revolves around how we look at the old transmission model. Traditional learning was done by showing, the lecture model really is recent.
  Relly: I think of the old traqnsmission model with the big lecture hall and the professor speaking and the students passively taking notes. The MOOCs are more interactive, with short videos, with activities and quizzes, lots of interactions on the discussion forums, outside in real life meeting with study groups.
  Question: Some providers feel that peer review of student work is a sufficient replacement for feedback from an expert like a faculty member or a TA.  Would you agree?
  Barbara: we know from publishing from our faculty how important peer review is for tenure track. But in the MOOC here really volume is in our favour. It goes beyond whether we can just get expert feedback. It’s about getting diverse voices.
  Maria: I think that peer review demands that students really be familiar with certain topics. Eg. A grasp of grammar. Perhaps a cohort of experts, of people who have already shown they know the material. Universities did this with TAs. But TAs get paid. But we need to ask: are we doing peer review so students can learn, or for formal assessment. The prior is OK, the latter is questionable.
  Andrea Nixon @ Carleton College: Automated grading of essays via edX [www.nytimes.com]
  Relly. The short answer is yes. The first response is, how can you grade when there’s 10s of thousands of students? It gives them the opportunity not only to write an assignment but also read an assignment contributed by another student. We found that most instructors hadn’t done peer assessment before, they needed to be more attentive to things like writing a rubric. People are starting to look at this. But the answer is yes, peer review in MOOCs is working quite well.
  Rebecca: one of the tricky things is the context, what purpose is it serving? It can be very misused and very confusing to the student. It becomes about helping the students understand what it is to do peer review. This is especially important in a cross-cultural setting. A careful framework must be developed. We’re doing some really quiet pilots to figure out how to balance the efficiency and the pedagogy behind that.
  Question: Do you think that the current learning technology tools are sufficient to support MOOCs?
  Maria: I don’t think learning technologies will ever be finished, so how can you ever say they are sufficient(Stephen Downes: "Space technology will never be finished, so how can you ever say a certain space technology will be sufficient to get to the moon?")Relly: I would say yes. I often bring up the example of the lecture videos, where there is a knee-jerk reaction that we want lecture videos that are really professional. But students want them to seem more real, to see the professor’s office, etc.
  Rebecca: this is a tricky question where the technology isn’t the driver of the pedagogy and the learning design, we want it to be reversed. Obviously it has been sufficient to start the MOOC movement. But it's ’bout making sure the innovations are being driven by the teaching and learning conversations.
  Barbara: clearly the tools can get better, and they will, but I think of my experience with Gardner Campbell’s MOOSE, about doing things I didn’t think could be done with a community. It’s really starting a professional revolution. Looking for crowd-sharing around design of the tools.
  Question: Do you have any inkling of a funding model for MOOCs? Does anybody?
  Relly: what’s happening at Coursera, we are experimenting with a couple different ways of bringing in revenue. It can’t be for charging to take the class. One way is the certification, charging $50-$60 to verify their identity. We’re also starting with career services, putting companies together with students.
  Rebecca: we’re experimenting with a lot of different models. Our effort is mostly toward rounding out our first courses. We’re trying to be sustainable, but also being clear about what it is we’re trying to sustain; our courses and materials will always be open to people. One thing –w e won’t call it licensing, but reuse – is one of the options we’ve been exploring.
  (Kathy Fernandes @ Calif. State University: MOOCs don't bear the weight of supporting career centers, counseling centers, health/rec centers, writing center, and other cost centers. So are we going back to a model that financially is ONLY about the cost of the actual teaching and learning?)
  Barbara: AP has a business model in that we’re working with institutions that have an online program. Hopefully as we attaract students into these programs we share in the revenue. But also we hope we are helping institutions fulfill their social contract with the communities.
  Maria: enough money needs to be made to support all these platforms, so there will be experiments. Hopefully the cost of tuition will be controlled or even lowered, and the quality of education even rise as a result.
• 

  International Perspective: The MOOC and Campus-Based Learning

  Posted: April 4, 2013, 1:58pm COT

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  Role of the University:
  - Drew Faust, Harvard: it’s not really about what’s happening term by term or even graduatiomn, but it’s about the experience with us that shapes their life long learning and which transfers a culture one generation to the next.
  - By contrast, the view of the role of the university as a function of the economic system, to drive economic wealth. Eg. Australia’s Chief Scientist Robin Batterham.
  The impact of technology is one of diasaggregation.
  
  
  
  Technology is splitting off, for example, assessment into different modes of doing it. And then learning is split into doing it online, on campus, in a MOOC, all in the background for many of leveraging personal learning environments.
  Our campus at UQ is like yours I suspect. The campus is tradition in that most students bring technology for themselves. What may be different is the extent in which the LMS on campus is affecting the social experience on campus. We actually have more people logged on online concurrently than physically we have on campus.
  
  
  
  The access to the LMS and services on campus is documented here – they access the LMS more than they access their own Facebook accounts. That’s part of the cultural context we find ourselves in.
  What we find absolutely pervasive in Australian institutions is that every class with more than 50 students is automatically recorded (with Lectopia). The experience of the majority of students is through lecture capture. We are effectively doing distance learning whether we meant to or not.
  (Nathaniel Ostashewski @ Curtin University of Technology: Lecture capture in Australia also allows for many students who are working and cannot attend campus to access the lectures. At least in our University - which is very different from North America. )So that’s the background, the context.
  A little history.
  The MOOC space begins in a context 11 years ago with MIT OpenCourseWare. Another significant marker was when Berkeley put up its lectures in iTunes. And then the Khan Academy came along and began putting up videos on YouTube. And then 18 months ago Stanford came along. Now it’s MOOC-mania.
  (SD - a real history of the MOOC: https://sites.google.com/site/themoocguide/  )
  What we find in Australia is more a reaction to the opportunity. Here’s a series of presentations and postings on MOOCs from ‘the Conversation’. One institution in Australia had joined Coursera (Melbourne). There were concerns about the North American invasion.
  We’ve seen this all before, maybe. The technology context and the setting has changed in this third or fourth major attempt to do these kinds of things, access being more pervasive, more rich media, more automated assessment. The context of this wave of online learning is different from what we have seen in the past.
  The typical online course is a structured content repository; the instructor has thought about which resources and the student is instructed to move through them in the crudest form possible, read this, do that, and that is the extent of the orchestration. That’s because most academics rely on the fact that we’re coming back to class and can deal with the gaps in person.
  But now we can’t address those gaps in person any longer, and we’re trying to engage the student with ambition and intent, trying to get them to maximize their own thinking space and environment.
  It’s an idea of generative scholarship, creating next experience and I n fact new scholarship in traversing the course. In MOOCs, we use reusable learning content, a traditional structure, but really focus on what the students are generating in this context.
  An example: a MOOC to you, a module to me:
  
  
  The students on campus now have co-learners to join them in that particular course model until that particular focus comes to a reasonable conclusion, the outside world’s perspective, which is the MOOC, concludes, while the on-campus student’s perspective continues.
  What of place in all of this. Our interest is not in becoming an online environment for millions of people all around the world, our interest is in really leveraging the experience our students can have with the students around the world. It’s really the flipped classroom kind of model. The way in which we use physical space can change.
  We want to see the learning design patterns change, we want to see phy6sical participation in the profession, that is, engagement with the content and the practice, in the rich spaces that we have, and let the content engagement, which can be well-designed online, be the place where content is delivered. (Eg. Pictures of classes, eg., composed of ‘terraces’).
  Recently, we tried bringing people together en masse. We took a large space that is a sports facility and turned it into a learning environment, tables of nine, an instructor and two TAs, and engagement simply in terms of ‘showing up’ is stunning, 85-90 per cent attendance.
  Our engagement with MOOCs, and we’ve just started to partner with EdX, is because we are learning how to refactor how learning on campus takes place, to put the effort into learning design into the online context, moving away from these little boxes, and looking at the campus as a series of practice spaces.
  (SD- Stephen Downes: This is a good model - but one wonders why it would be reserved for tuition-paying students - why not move it out into the community as a whole - you'd get *much* better 'tables of nine')
  
• 

  Assessing the Efficacy of Third-Party MOOCs in Hybrid Instruction

  Posted: April 4, 2013, 1:16pm COT

  Summary of a presentation by Rebecca Griffiths, ITHAKA
  
  Why did we start this study? It’s very difficult to engage students ‘in the wild’. They come in with a great deal of different backgrounds. So we’ve chosen to study the efficacy of MOOCs inside an institutional environment.
  Secondly, we want to study the efficacy of instruction itself. There’s a lot of discussion of ‘online’ vs ‘in-person’ but we are looking more at hybrids.
  Third some of our recent work on barriers to adoption: administrators and faculty still feel there is not a sufficient supply of high-quality materials to choose from. The supply is growing, but we think if there were more materials there would be more likelihood to work with the new formats.
  So, why MOOCs? There is not only the high quality content, there are the interactive formats, and the potential for feedback loops for continual improvements.
  These MOOCs were not designed to be used in institutional settings. They were designed to teach a public audience, not as a service to other faculty and students. So for that reason ITHAKA and the University of Maryland have formed an alliance to explore these questions.
  We are asking specifically:
  -          Can MOOCs be used to improve student outcomes – competition rates-          What models of adoption are out there, and what are the potential benefits and challenges-          What implementation challenges arise?-          What can we learn about cost savings?-           To answer these questions, we will be conducting 14-15 test cases incorporating MOOCs into hybrid sections at the University of Maryland. For these test cases we will create local instances of the MOOC, a MOOC just for that instructor that only the students can enroll in, and where the instructors can release the material at their own rates then. We’ll have two sets of sections, those where the students take hybrid MOOCs and those where students do traditional face-to-face.
  (SD - So - the study is to 'remove all elements of the MOOC that make it a MOOC, and then compare with traditional learning')
  For the case studies, these will be more anthropological studies – we will document the experience of the instructors and the students working with these materials. Finally, across all of these test cases we will be doing cost analyses.
  The process:-          Students will not be randomly assigned, they have a choice between hybrid and face-to-face-          We will collect student data on recruitment with their permission-          Baseline measure at the beginning of the course, pretests in some subjects-          Collate outcome measures – completion rate, pass rate, scores on final exams, student satisfaction survey
  Costs: it always costs more to do something the first time than in subsequent times. Instructors are learning to teach in a new way, they’re creating new materials. And the comparison is with instructors who have taught the same way for many years. So we want to think about how the third or fourth instances of the courses will be different – these are predictions but they’re probably pretty good.
  (Some examples of test cases – Intro to Sociology from Princeton at Frostburg State University and Community College Baltimore County, for example, or Intro to Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh “that never really had video before, just reading assignments”).
  What have we observed so far? Can’t say much yet, the tests are still progressing. General reactions from faculty wondering about how to mix and reorder, wondering about global community.
  What might the study tell us? Studying one MOOC will not tell us whether another MOOC is any good. We can at best disprove a negative – to show that MOOCs can in fact be used in a hybrid format.
  Question: it’s very clear this study is focused on campus-local hybrid courses. This isn’t the newest thing. Do you see the use of the MOOC to provide content as being something new?
  Respone: That’s a great question? We had faculty saying “how is this any different from me going to YouTube and pulling off videos?” EdX has resulted in really great content that isn’t really available yet. The MOOCs are tightly bundled packages of platform, content and assessment, and faculty the first thing they want to do is pull that apart. But I do think there’s something different about these comprehensive courses. And as was said in the last session, they have started a conversation that wasn’t taking place before.
  We will be talking to faculty in each course, asking if the assessments are getting what they want to get out.
  Question: you said you will measure outcomes by exams, but also experiences. What will you be asking in that dimension?
  Response; We’ll ask them whether they enjoyed the course, how much they feel they learned compared to the face-to-0face section, I think we will expand on those and ask about interaction, what sort of activity they did that required synthesis, etc.
  (May Lit @ Singapore Management Univ: If an instructor has already built good online materials and learning activities in an LMS, how easy is it to convert the stuff in the LMS to a MOOC course? Anyone has experience in this?
  Stephen Downes: @ May Lit - both Blackboard & Desire2Learn have already run MOOC pilots (I was involved in the D2L one) - your best bet is to contact the LMS people and ask them about converting the course to a MOOC within the LMS (especially if you're not really doing a MOOC but just one of the hybrid deliveries being described in these talks)).
• 

  Digging into MOOC Mania: One Investor's Key Research Questions and Approach

  Posted: April 4, 2013, 12:37pm COT

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  Summary of a presentation from Stacey L. Clawson, Anh Nguyen, Gates Foundation
  (Stacey) MOOCs are one of the trends that are top of mind for institutional leaders.
  
  
  
  Institutions are pursuing MOOCs for a variety of reasons: to increase brand, to improve completion, to understand their effect on teaching and learning, and to understand their impact on the business model itself, to address bottleneck issues, etc.
  Why do we (Gates Foundation) care about this? MOOCs can potentially be a tool or tactic to improve learning. And we believe MOOCs have been a really interesting resource to catalyze other conversations, about quality, about accountability, etc.
  (Anh) The Gates Foundation is interested in serving low-income first-generation children, and we see MOOCs as a catalyst for change, and though they haven’t reached that population, we do see light, eg. San Jose using MOOCs as wrap-around support. So we’re looking at how we can use MOOCs to drive adoption, especially in blended-learning approaches.
  We’re also looking at use cases in efficacy and cost savings, to take those learnings and feed them back.
  Some of the questions we’re looking at are on the slide.
  
  
    We plan to announce a MOOC research grant. We want to encourage a wealth of different kinds of small action-oriented iterative projects that can help and bring out and make more visible the learnings and share those out.
  (Stacey) the learning is not just about the media comparisons – there are a lot of online learning environments – we don’t want to do comparisons of the platforms only, much more important, we want to understand, how are students learning – that can involve platform features, but also pedagogies and different kinds of learning strategies. These are the same kinds of questions we have been asking about online learning but now we have a broader platform to do that on.
  Question: Does the Gates foundation fund X?
  Response: It really depends on the grant. (Generic Q&A to cover several questions)
  Question: How does the Gates Foundation feel about the selection of only certain educators as the rock stars of future MOOC offerings?
  Response *Stacey): does there need to be 5,000 intro to biology courses? Probably not. Just five? Probably not. So we’re trying to understand just what the market it, at some point it will settle, but why are they rock star professors, and what do we know about their teaching and learning, and are the rock stars in the classroom effective in the online environment.
  Question: Not having MOOC sites mobile ready is very limiting, any thoughts on that?
  Response (Anh): we know the importance of that, but we don’t have a research project with this in mind, but through our research grants we encourage those sorts of research questions. (Stacey) it revolves around how those MOOCs are being used, eg., the broadcast MOOC, a significant number of those educated have access to the device, at least in the US (our work is pretty domestic in nature), and much of our work is in this blended format, and in those instances the students have access to broadband and a computer. Some research suggests students prefer less that videos are available and more that the assessments available on mobile.
  Question: is part of the Gates research agenda about finding a business model for MOOCs to deliver learning at scale.
  Response (Anh): the short answer is yes. Why wouldn’t we look at this, to challenge current assumptions and policies? It’s part of all our responsibilities.
  Question: How do you work with the NIH here syndrome faculty often take in adopting material developed elsewhere?
  Response (Stacey): we don’t have a great answer to that. Many grants are focused on courseware and online learning tools. Some were required to apply as consortia to address the not-invented-here (NIH) problem. We’re also seeing some natural cohorts form. Eg. The institutions called ‘Completions by Design’, community colleges, particularly for low-income adults.
  (SD - to me MOOCs allow us to move away from "the best lecturer from here, the best content from there, the best facilitators from here, the best mentors" and move toward access and availability - we don't need 'best', we need accessible - we don't need the 'expert', we just need someone who knows how, who knows the answer)
  Question: do you see MOOCs as being more disruptive in publishing than in teaching?
  Response (Anh): that’s really a question about online learning in general, but MOOCs give us an opportunity to examine that. From a market perspective, online learning has been disruptive of the publishing market, but those publishers are responding, so I think we’re all responding and changing. But the pedagogy question is a different one, it related to how we design, and I hope the research we’re doing, that we’ll learn more about that.
• 

  Multiple Lessons Learned from Implementing MOOC Environments at San Jose State University

  Posted: April 4, 2013, 12:06pm COT

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   Summary of a presentation by speaker Ellen Junn
  Technically our MOOCs aren’t MOOCs any more, because we’re doing them for college credit, so there’s a fee involved. Also not all the things we’re doing are completely online.
  Survey mof the major MOOC providers:
  
  
  
  What we wanted to do is survey different types, first with EdX and then with Udacity. These are very different platforms.
  What did we do with EdX? In the spring of 2012 EdX launched its first MOOC course. We asked Anant Ararwal if we can participate; he agreed to fly out several faculty to MIT, and they worked with MIT faculty for a week. We decided to pilot-text this with one of our classes, about 80 students.
  Instead of being fully online, we did a blended ‘flipped’ model, 80 percent of the materials were used online, and then in class, two 75 minute in-class twice a week they worked in small groups of 3, they wer  able to ask questions directly, etc. Students had the opportunity to switch out of the section if they wanted.
  How did this change learning? It was a dramatic reversal of how out instructors teach; they tyoically did large lectures. The results were astounding and remarkable. The pass rate went from 60 percent to 90 percent (see figures in red below).
  
  
  We found that when you combine high-quality content from a MOOC provider with a flipped model you get dramatic improvements in student performance.
  The next thing we did was to work to create our own MOOCF. We went to Udacity, which was interested in partnering with us. We got NSF funding (we were the first to do a study to assess student and faculty outcomes). We offered three courses that are more challenging gateway courses – remedial math, intro algebra, and intro statistics. We increased instructor contact, and lowered tuition.
  In creating the courses, we used the same student outcomes, integrated apriori assessment and evaluation, and will include future LMS analytics.
  Faculty considerations were: we tried to build on faculty goodwill, provided robust training and compensation, defined a clear process for regular communications and consultation, etc.
  Administrative considerations: be clear on the central goal of the MOOC, understand the continuum of F2F to online to MOOC, consider all stakeholders, align institutional resources and leaders, clarify business plan, consider legal issues, and prepare marketing and communications.
  (SD – There is no continuum - but saying there is one allows you to misrepresent a closed offline on-campus course as a MOOC)
  Question: can you speak to compensation?
  Response: we offered $15K to one faculty member, broken into three installments.
  The Gates money wasn’t to offset the cost of creating the course, it was to offset tuition costs.
  Question: high quality content and active learning are really keys to success, but can you say what you learned about supporting underprepared students?
  Response: we find students from underserved high schools need a lot more hand-holding, and we are able to provide this. Also, issue of not being able to access computers at home, and that’s not a trivial thing.
  
  
• 

  Backgrounds and Behaviors of MOOC Participants and Implications for Faculty

  Posted: April 4, 2013, 11:38am COT

  Summar of a presentation by Lori Breslow (MIT), Jennifer DeBoer (MIT), Andrew Ho (Harvard)
  (Andrew) Although open sources and online teaching is not new in a passive way, open learning as an active process is new, so there hasn’t been a lot of research. Most of the research has been about how instructors have met the world through MOOCs, but we’re also looking at how the world meets instructors through MOOCs.
  EdX is a joint venture between Harvard and MIT and now includes 12 institutions. We have a shared mission to provide open online education, to improve the residential student experience, and to advance research.
  What differentiates EdX from other initiatives is that there is a clear institutional brand, eg. HarvardX, MITX, etc. You can actually Google HarvardX research, for example. MITX has a similar structure. Each institution receives all data for its own courses. You can see that on the HarvardX page; there is a way to request access to this data. [harvardx.harvard.edu]
  (Jen) What characterizes these MOOC experiences is the immense diversity of students participating. Here are some sample stats from an electronics course. First, how are the demographics different, second, what are some of the unique challenges. It’s not completely new, we’ve seen diverse student groups before, but MOOCs are an extreme case.
  We had representatives in our course from 194 countries – they didn’t all interact in every part of the course, but imagine how the instructor felt. There was a cluster of high-use countries and then a massive tail. Canada, Colombia, Greece, the UK, Poland – these were the high-use countries. Now students in these countries have a peer group of unprecedented size.
  Now the instructor has students sitting in classes from these other countries, with different contexts, which they have to take into account. Different time zones, for example, which impacts awareness of due dates. The class was in English, but many students had different languages – more than 100K answered ‘English’ but 50 other languages were represented, and 50K students responded with more than one language. So we needed to adjust – allowing students, for example, to watch lectures at slower speeds, bonding students with similar language backgrounds, and by contrast, students bonding with students from different language groups.
  Finally, we observed students participating with a potentially challenging array of previous educational experiences. Here we had a really heterogeneous classroom. More than a quarter surveyed responded that the highest degree they attained was high school. Some students reported not having a math background, even though that was a prerequisite. So it forces us to question for whom we are tailoring instruction.
  We anecdotally observed that students are continuing to participate in the discussion forums nearly a year after the course has finished. So we can ask of LMSs whether we should be allowing students to participate after the course has been completed.
  (Lori) I want to talk about some implications for faculty, both in MOOCs and in residential classes.
  I can tell you that it takes about 100 hours to prepare a MOOC (source: Chronicle article), and pretty much the case for John (husband) as well. Questions to ask: strength-weakness of technology, how to accommodate diversity of students, how to maintain quality, planning for tech snafus, etc.
  [chronicle.com]
  Question: is it 100 total for everyone involved, or just for the faculty member, can you break it down?
  Response (Lori): I can’t. (Jennifer) Anecdote, from a faculty member, it took about four times the preparation process for a traditional course, but she said she was willing to make the investment because it was a more long-term investment, because she would be able to reuse materials in the future. (Andrew) I don’t think it will change the mission, we hope it will advance the three-part mission in all ways.
  Question: online versus offline courses.
  Response: (Andrew) we don’t want to infer from one group to the other, we are doing research in both areas. (Jennifer) We should think of it along a continuum, not just as research from one or another category. We think that requiring the online participation will change their local experience, for example.
  Question: Are any of the EdX courses constructed as research projects?
  Response (Andrew): this whole enterprise is seen as an experiment by our faculty. That’s the advantage of having the committees and cross-university structure is so we can share the data, we’re thinking about how to share it.
  Question: can you speak of the tech back end?
  Response: (Jennifer) It’s a lot of people, allowing each class to have its own flavour, to offer the course, but also having some continuity across classes. (Andrew) It’s been incredibly energizing for the faculty. Eg. A meeting with junior faculty, usually it’s about “Oh God and I going to get tenure” but today it was all about teaching and how to connect with EdX.
  
  
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• 

  Using an Open Source Platform to Meet Online Learning Goals

  Posted: April 3, 2013, 3:56pm COT

  
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  Eventifier tweets: [www.eventifier.co]
  (Jane) If you haven’t seen it already, EdX has announced it will be releasing its entire platform on GPL on June 1, and Stanford announced it will be collaborating with them on this.
  Let me tell you a story about David Glance. He wanted to host a MOOC at university of Western Australia. When he emailed Coursera to host a MOOC, he was rebuffed. And he wanted UWA to manage the look and feel of the platform, and to use it for other activities, which he couldn’t do with Coursera. And then he found out about Stanford’s Class2Go platform. He forked a copy from Github, discussed layout with the authors, and built a UWA site. Soon, he was contributing code. (This story is reallycondescending – SD).
  (Amy) When you sign up with Coursera, you benefit from your courses being listed alongside the other courses. We think this effect will reduce over time as there are more courses and as sites like coursetalk.org create listings. Coursera also has a community with discussion threads, webinars and documentation, and this week, its first user conference.
  The problem for universities is that students taking courses on the platform feel an affinity for the platform, and maybe the professor, but not the university. Compare to the open source branding, where students are tweeting ‘thanks Stanford’, not the platform.
  Also, with a commercial platform, students may receive email from the platform owner, that you have no control over. Also, you may encounter re-use terms you can’t live with. You’ll want to be aware of terms-of-use limitations on commercial platforms.
  Yes, these statements are pretty oversimplified. There is a wide range of approaches – Coursera and Udacity are for-profit platforms, Moodlerooms is commercial offering an open platform, etc. Stanford has opted a complex multi-platform strategy, and that works for us, as it allows us to experiment with a variety of approaches.
  Question: what’s the difference between an LMS and a MOOC platform?
  Response: (Jane) there’s a ton of overlaps – but there are things in LMSs that MOOCs lack, like sign-up for discussion, sign-up for field-trips, etc. LMSs don’t have sort of support for videos and auto-grading that MOOC platforms do. We’ve seen requests from faculty for more LMS-like features.
  Question: what would you say to institutions that are hesitant to locally host a MOOC platform?
  Response (Jane): that’s why people use Coursera, they make it easy. I’d like to see an ecosystem of third-party providers that host open-source platforms. (Amy) The concerns around hosting your own platform have always been a concern. But you might run into them with a third party platform as well.
  Question: Students are not in your database, like an LIMS. What about capacity? Etc.
  Response: we’ve been advising people about things like, what size they should get if they’re setting up on Amazon. We want to help some, and hope others will help others.
  It won’t be Class2Go any more –we’ll be merging with EdX.
  Question: How will this merge of platforms work? Will there be just one entity?
  Response; We’ll keep Class2Go for people who are currently using it, and we’ll figure out what to do with people – probably migrating over to EdX and maybe migrating some features over to EdX.
  [allthingsd.com]
  (A few responses to my question along the lines of no this is not at all like Blackboard acquiring WebCT).
  Question: what lessons have Stanford and MIT learned from Sakai?
  Response: It will be a small group that is making decisions, because Sakai there was a very long response time. What we don’t want is for it to be a big consortium where 25 institutions all have to agree on something.
  [www.insidehighered.com]
  
  
• 

  Who Are Our Students? Bridging Local and Global Learning Communities

  Posted: April 3, 2013, 2:46pm COT

  Summary of a presentation by Derek Bruff, Vanderbilt University, @derekbruff
  
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  ‘Wrapping a MOOC’ – an experiment by Doug Fisher, where he flipped his classroom using someone else’s MOOC. It was a 14-week semester, a graduate level course in machine learning. The first 10 weeks overlapped with Ng’s course.
  
  
  
  After some focus groups and research with his students, some themes emerged. First, students liked the online learning components (eg. Watching videos at 2x speed). But the 24 local students didn’t really interact with the global community – if they had questions, they went to the discussion forums, and found that someone else may have already answered it.
  It also presented a design challenge – being able to align the MOOC content with other content he was trying to teach (he authored an article on this). His role shifted in the course – he was not the deliverer, he became the person who answered questions. There were challenges flipping the classroom with someone else’s MOOC – it was different from just assigning a textbook to be read outside class.
  Some other experimentation: we’ve been trying to combine the global and local learning communities. We’ve already seen some courses with meetups (SD – we had them in CCK08). We tried to have some meetups on campus, getting people from the community to join in online in with the people in the course. But we wanted to be careful not to privilege the people who were on campus. And this created some interaction. But if you’re going to broadcast a local meetup, it limits what you can do at the meetup – eg., networking, small groups, projects, etc. would be a lot harder to broadcast.
  Some examples of opportunities for students: graduate student Kathryn McEwan (now Dr.) worked all year with me on the MOOCs had worked on wikis on the past, led the meetups, and also enrolled in every Coursera course she could (she didn’t complete all of them). We’re not in a position to recommend best practices, because we don’t k now what they are, but we can look at common practices. We put together a resource guide which was a huge help.
  Another example: Blaine Smith, doing doctoral work on education. Volunteered with Doug’s course (and wrote a paper based on it).
  Curtis Northcutt, math CS student, undergrad, doing independent study. The opportunity for data-mining is just off the charts. He has been working with me learning how to do that. Also, Guy Kopsombut, who is a good illustrator, helped out. Especially for the grad students, who are planning faculty careers, they need to get their minds wrapped around this.
  173,810 students. That’s more students than have enrolled in Vanderbilt’s history. 170K new members of the Vanderbilt community. They’re not paying tuition. But their presence counts. Think about the other things Vanderbilt does to offer free learning to the community. We do a lot of this sort of thing anyways. We’re used to thinking of our mission as enrolling students and granting credit. But we want to expand our role beyond that.
  Question: has there been pushback from online students paying for a class that’s available free online.
  Response: we did focus groups, we did a survey – I didn’t see any pushback. I think they probably viewed the MOOC as more of a super-textbook than as a course. It was easy to see the value-added that Doug brought to it.
  Question: can you speak of student success in the course you studied?
  Response: we were looking more at student experience and not at student success. It seemed similar, but I can’t say for sure. Normal 0 false false false EN-CA X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:8.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:107%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;} Question: what were the challenges of using the flipped method, and of assessment?
  Response: the DJ vs diva analogy – when I use a stats textbook, I can pick and choose fairly easily what we’re going to use. With the MOOC it was harder to do that picking and choosing – there was only one MOOC happening at that time on that topic. And he wanted his graduate students to go beyond the undergraduate MOOC. It was hard for students to navigate the easier MOOC with the harder grad-level content.
  Question: about the engagement with the global community: thoughts?
  Response: much of the foreign interaction is Q&A on how to do the work, and students didn’t have to participate in hat. In humanities it would be different. It had to do with the nature of the course. Also, Doug wasn’t giving assignments based on interaction.
  
   
  
  
  
• 

  What’s In It for Us?: Benefits to Campus Course of Running a MOOC

  Posted: April 3, 2013, 2:18pm COT

  Summary of a presentation from Jason Mock
  
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  [moxbox.info]
  Let’s talk about the reasons institutions and people are getting involved in MOOCs 
  
  
  
  We can look at brand reputation, or just keeping up, for institutions. But I want to focus on the pedagogical innovations, influences on campus courses and improvements in course quality.
  Ken Robinson: “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original.” In MOOCs, we’re prepared to be wrong. On campus, people have very definite motivations and expectations, but in MOOCs, this doesn’t apply, so we are motivated to experiment.
  At Illinois, We’ve had the experience of very large enrollment traditional classes. So an experience in a MOOC can help us learn how to manage an on-campus class of, say, 350. For example, how to manage the discussion forums, especially the graded discussions.
  We have tens of thousands of students in these courses, so it’s literally an opportunity to experiment. Eg. We are conducting A-B test in one of them.
  We are also experiencing institutional collaboration in new ways, for example, with other colleges involved with Coursera. We learn from each other, and as a side-effect, apply the lessons to traditional classes.
  MOOCs also offer courses free to everyone in the world, and that attracts a lot of people. But we can’t pull a bait-and-switch, saying the MOOC is free but you have to pay $200 for a textbook. So we are depending a lot more on open or freely licensed works, like the materials used for these sessions. One instructor collaborated with colleagues to create an open textbook – he could then then around and offer that to his traditional students.
  Many MOOC materials are created as videos. These can then be used in the traditional setting; for example, if the professor is sick or away at a conference, he can assign the video. Similarly, in the vein of ‘flipping the classroom’ where all the lectures are viewed by students individually, and the classroom time is used for more interactive activities,
  Another question is how we can leverage the tens of thousands of students for our benefit – we are trying to help them, but they can help us as well. Think about the emotions and thoughts we have when contemplating tens of thousands of people at once. 
  
  
  What do we gain from them? We gain a lot of data. Every click, every video pause. There are research projects going on right now. But even without that, we can learn things. For example, we can identify distractors, we can spot questions that are badly worded or misleading. We can take a large bank of questions and look at where we want to focus our attention, and apply the fixes to the campus courses.
  Another thing is that people can submit material for future offerings of the course. We ask them permission, of course. We have tens of thousands of ‘worker bees’ and many of them have been happy to contribute their materials.
  A lot of our students are international. A MOOC is a great way to get a diverse set of perspectives. A simple example: ask them ‘what is the strongest earthquake you’ve felt’. You can see the results come in as expected from the geologists – but it’s not cold science showing this, it’s living people. Or, we can ask them ‘how much is a cup of coffee?’ and get a range of perspective.
  When we are on the world stage, we are highly motivated. And when we miss something, as Eric Raymond would say, we have tens of thousands of people ready to find everything wrong with the course.
  We’ve learned how important it is to express our thoughts clearly and simply.
  Question: isn’t MOOC data and campus data apples and oranges? Isn’t the data very different?
  Response: yes, there’s something to be said, but there the medium level of education is pretty good, so they have a pretty good sense of things. Also, we don’t just take their responses as the correct answer, just as a way of flagging something to be looked at.
  Question: what were the things you had to come to grips with?
  Response: first, that the MOOC should be just a mirror of the traditional on-campus course. Eg., some people may be lurkers, just curious, or had a real-life challenge they were trying to solve. Also, for example, using badges, we could offer multiple pathways to success. Or maybe a project, a real-life project, so we could ‘double dip’, getting something done in the workplace, and getting credit (except we don’t offer credit).
  Question: where do you seek resources that were equivalent to TAs and librarians and other sorts of non-faculty equivalents that were important?
  Response: we often think in terms of staff-student rations, but in a MOOC wouldn’t think in those terms – so we had some independent-study graduate students helped us, not in a TA role, but as a ‘community TA pro bono role’. Their ‘first look’ at the course can be helpful.
  Question: do you really think volunteers will be as good support as people who are paid to do it?
  Response; they may not be as good individually (though I did have some PhDs providing support) but when you have 20 providing support the best rise to the top. It’s not an exact analogy, but the volume of the community TAs helps offset that.
  Question: is the MOOC a good a good vehicle for learning?
  Response: It depends on how you define learning. In MOOC learning could be as simple as ‘I want to understand what environmental economics’ means, and if they get that one thing, they’ve learned what they needed to learn. People learn what they can out of the course, but then go beyond that, and learn from the community.
• 

  MOOCs for Credit: Current State of the Art

  Posted: April 3, 2013, 1:45pm COT

  Summary of a presentation by Cathy Sandeen, Centre for Education, Attainment and Innovation, ACE
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  I am actually a MOOC completer – I thought it was a good idea to experience a MOOC first-hand.
  First a word about American Council on Education – we are a Washington D.C. based umbrella organization with about 1800 institutions and work mostly with presidents and chancellors.
  ‘MOOC Mania’ started in 2012. Some courses had tens of thousands, others hundreds of thousands of enrollment. They were free, anyone could take them, and people took them for all sorts of reasons. They were not for credit. Completion was 9 or 10 percent – but that rate is understandable.
  For those who did finish, they wanted a way to recognize their achievement. There were grass-roots methods that were happening – some were posting it on LinkedIn, for example. But the question was, how we could get real academic credit for these courses.
  This falls into a category called ‘extra-intuitional credit’. Or ‘prior learning assessment’ (PLA) or ‘credit for prior learning’. This is a transfer credit, and like any transfer credit, it’s up to the degree-granting institution whether or not to apply that credit.
  There are three, maybe four, categories of PLA:1.       Credit by Exam – this is well recognized, they take an exam and get credit.
  2.       Course Review – this is the type of PLA that ACE does – we are joined by the National Course Review and Recommendation Service based in New York. We examine the course, and make a recommendation about the type and level of credit that the course is equivalent to. The student sdoes the course, ACE puts them on a transcript, and the student takes the transcript and petitions the institution for credit.
  
  3.       Portfolio review – a student takes a course and learns how to create a portfolio, sort of like an artist’s portfolio, but in this case gaining experiences – Council for Adult and Experiential Learning is a real leader here – it’s not as well known as the first two
  4.       Digital Badges – Mozilla is a leader here – it is a recognition of competences, mostly for an occupation or a job; there’s no real equivalence to an academic qualification. But some institutions are looking at how to incorporate badges into their courses.
  Only 30 percent of the U.S. population has earned a bachelor’s or higher. Compare this to 55 percent, which is attained by countries like Japan, Canada or South Korea. Various organizations – Gates, Lumina, the Obama administration – are proposing a goal of 60 percent by 2020 or 2025. This is a big gap to fill. 
  Why is this important? According to a Georgetown study, 63 percent of occupations will need a degree. That means we will need to educate a million more students than we do today.73 percent of students are categorized as non-traditional students. We are learning how to measure them differently, measuring outputs rather than inputs (like seat time). 
  We want to think of the system as a whole (it’s not really a system, mainly a set of disconnected entities):
  
  
  So – back to ACE and the credit review. They are widely accepted and students are mostly getting their credit (82 percent) accepted by a degree-granting institution. But there is still some resistance in place.
  ACE thought about its course review process and received a grant from the Gates Foundation to see how this could be applied to MOOCs. A pilot was done with five Coursera courses, all four math courses.
  Poll in the most important factor to address for MOOC creditworthiness: winners, learning outcomes, with a bit on assessments and proctoring. This is what ACE looks at: not just learning outcomes, but also student engagement and interaction, and authentication and proctoring – making sure the student is really the student doing the course.
  Poll: biggest barrier to acceptance: Winner: lack of direct control over academic quality (I (Stephen) voted ‘protection of status quo’). ACE’s response is to make people know faculty are doing the reviews, that it’s voluntary, and that ACE has been doing it for quite some time.
  Question: were the guidelines for courses changed when applied to MOOCs?
  Response: for the MOOCs we reviewed, no, the guidelines were not changed. They are the guidelines described above, plus ensuring there are ways to prevent academic dishonesty. We don’t prescribe the method, we just have the basic requirement. There are different biometrics – fingerprinting, palm vein, etc. There are two major categories: proctoring at a test site, and web cam proctoring. Coursera uses web cam proctoring, and our faculty found that adequate.
  Question: After ACE grants transcripts, it’s still up to institutions to decide whether to accept credit, right?
  Response: yes, in this way it’s just like transfer credit. They could examine the MOOC themselves; we help the institutions by doing this for them, if they wish. (Note that there’s an additional fee that’s charged to the student if they opt for the credit option). Many institutions already accept ACE credit recommendations, especially for veterans, who receive credit for training they did during their military service.
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  Response: We should know soon, the courses are finishing shortly, and Coursera and ACE will have to decide what is revealed.
  Question: Do you see that business will be brisk?
  Response: Well, yes. We’re not doing this for the sake of doing it, but it could be big if it meets the needs of the system.
  Question: What about the DOE’s statement about giving support to th competency method of gaining credit?
  Response: there is a general trend away from an input model toward a general output model, for example, general competencies. We’ve operated under the input model – seat time, class hours, libraries, etc. but we’re moving away from that. Many public institutions are transitioning to a performance-based funding model, rather than an enrollment-based model. The recent guidance is yet another bit of evidence of that trend shifting.
  
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  Response: one of the most exciting aspects of MOOCs is the rapid experimentation. For example, I didn’t talk about the use of predictive analytics. We’re seeing a lot of progress on learning, on the cognitive side, and on authentication of identity, and proctoring – once there’s more transparency in that there will be more confidence. 
  
   
• 

  Designing and Implementing MOOCs that Maximize Student Learning

  Posted: April 3, 2013, 12:56pm COT

  Summary of a presentation by Seth Anderson (Duke), Amy Collier (Stanford), Cassandra Horlii (California Institute of Technology)
  
  
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  Amy: What is unique about online learning in MOOCs? Kurt Vonnegut once said “I want to stand as close to the edge as possible without falling over.” MOOCs are taking institutions and faculty to the edge. They present a unique design challenge. Some of the data makes this clear
  In most of the MOOCs Stanford has offered, fewer than half the students have come from North America. Nearly half the people in a MOOC may not have a knowledge of English as a first language. They have a more varied educational and cultural background than in traditional courses.
  
  
  The majority of active users say they’re taking the course for fun or a challenge, rather than a credential. The tendency to judge MOOCs based on completion rates overlooks the reasons why people join a MOOC. The majority engage in sampling behaviour – like the people in this webinar. Many are MOOC auditors, but they don’t engage, and they aren’t motivated by completion records.
  A fun design challenge at Stanford has been to design MOOCs for reuse, by targeting local learning communities, eg. A database course used by local professors. We have some professors working on this with communities around the world.
  Can we scaffold students’ prior knowledge? Can we design for learning in MOOCs?
  Seth: how does one go about designing a pedagogically good course for 100,000 students? There weren’t exactly guidelines when we started, so we set about creating one to guide our faculty.
  First, we need to follow sound learning principles, eg. to design goals and learning objectives. And we need to address the particular challenges of 100K students.
  The wide variation in student demographics – in a traditional course, you can make generalizations or assumptions because of the admissions process. But you can’t do this for a MOOC. Also, there’s a wide range of expectations – it’s difficult to design for so many objectives.
  What are the strategies?- clear communication- consistent process- supportive learning community
  These might look familiar – they are fundamental to good course design.
  Communication is particularly important in a MOOC. You have to make it clear exactly what it is that you need them to do. Answer questions up front, thoroughly and simply. Yes, students can ask each other what’s expected, but it’s up to instructors to make these clear. Students need to know what it takes to be successful.
  Consistency: create a consistent process defining the way information flows between instructor and student. Minimize frustration and confusion by creating a consistent schedule and sticking to it (SD – that’s what I did not do in Change 11 & CFHE12, to our detriment).
  Learning community: many modern learning theories talk about students constructing knowledge in a way that makes sense to them by connecting with the material and communities of enquiry. So provide a place where students can connect and construct – make sure the forum is used in a meaningful way. The instructor needs to provide guidance, but students bring in knowledge to be ‘sewn in’ to the large fabric of knowledge, and the instructor needs to be a part of this community.
  Cassandra: building an institutional support structure:
  There are different models of course support, for example:
  
  
  
  Normally when we offer a course, we pull out all the stops at the last minute. With MOOCs, the process must begin a lot earlier. For example, a professor may be working with th material moths ahead of the course to figure out how to ‘make the material come alive’.
  When there are 10s of thousands of students watching, there are politicians and alumni, which makes the stakes a bit higher. There are different workflows. The novelty factor is huge. We are thinking about how to adapt our pedagogies to the tools we already have.
  Here’s our organization chart:
  
  
  Our business and finance people broker with course platform providers, our CIO and IT department are coding, our provosts are thinking about how to fund the effort, and the division heads are thinking with faculty about the time allocated, how to appoint TAs, and how to purchase the tech we need to provide courses well. As well as the other departments and people to the right.
  Here are a few helpful practices we found useful:
  -        -   We instituted a teaching and learning summit, not only about MOOCs, but also about other issues of interest.-           -        -  We created a single point of contact for faculty and TA to reach out and seek support, so they can focus on the instruction-           -        -  The course design processes may look stepwise, but in a MOOC the processes have to happen in parallel – once a piece of the MOOC is ready, we need to begin deploying even if the rest isn’t ready-      -         - Anticipate the abnormal – we are learning about the new kinds of requirements, time commitments, etc.-           -         - We document and generalize on our experiences, but we stay flexible to allow us to adapt; there are models that function as starting points, but they’re only starting points
  Q&A
  Question: Do other organizations have policies, eg., IP policies? How does that impact course delivery?
  Response (Amy) we generate our own content, so there’s nothing unusual there. Using other institutions’ content is allowed, and treated like bringing in a textbook. (Seth) We have people creating content for MOOCs and using it in their own classroom. (Cassandra) These are like aany other materials that faculty would produce or use.
  Question: what about costs?
  Response: (Cassandra) It’s hard to come up with a specific answer. But: purchasing the deployment equipment, purchasing tablets to manage a number of simultaneous MOOCs. Production time and staff costs, some funded directly by the provosts, some by distributing staff time. (Amy) production values change across MOOCs, professors may produce $100 videos, while others might produce things that cost a lot more.
  Question: More about the team that works with the instructor
  Response (Cassandra): mostly the academic and media technologies group, working behind the scenes and presenting a united front. Also the Center for teaching and learning, but that’s more of a drop-in thing, how to use the platform, how to troubleshoot.
  
  
  
  
• 

  Faculty Perspective: Teaching the Humanities to Humanity

  Posted: April 3, 2013, 12:17pm COT

  Summary of a presentation by Peter Struck
  
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  I (Peter) am coming from a background as a practitioner, beginning especially with web 2.0 courses. We then offered a course over Coursera, 50,000 clicked ‘ok’, and about a quarter of them are active – it’s more in one course that I taught in a whole career at Penn. There’s clearly something happening and we need to be involved in it.
  Let’s take a look at a picture of the ‘future’:
  
  
  This picture obviously appears quaint, and not predictive. But why? Not because the medium couldn’t handle it – obviously TV could perform as described. But this function was not condusive to doing long-term serious intellectual work.
  Now we’re moving into a new ‘future’, characterized by the microchip. We have a new kind of thing that’s happening in this new medium. But no one has answered the question of whether this medium is capable of helping us perform long-term intellectual work. I value most these long-form open-ended questions that allow us to interrogate ideas and each other’s words over an extended period of time.
  The main problem is that the medium is mainly build on a form of distraction. It’s made with lots of things happening all at one; it’s a very low bar for people to respond to any twitch of curiosity that happens at one. In addition to this window, there’s any number of other windows. There’s email. This is what this medium does well.
  The things I value most in the humanities might not survive in this new medium.
  Cliff Naas, Stanford: I refer to his work. He talks about euphemisms in the contemporary setting, eg., ‘multitasking’, which is a euphemism for distraction.
  Presenting to a video camera: I need to gin up my enthusiasm when speaking before a blank camera. My ‘classroom’ is a green screen. My course outline is a number of things – video is a big part of it, multiple-choice quizzes with radio budgets (because they can be graded ‘at scale’ – I’m really unsure about that). We have ‘peer-reviewed writing’ that’s a wonderful thing Coursera came up with, but it’s not good for high-stakes evaluation.
  All of this is based on the premise is that what’s happening in the normal face-to-face class has been replaced, in the ‘flipped classroom’. This is a euphemism – but what we’re really doing is taking the live lecture and flipping it into the dustbin. But I don’t agree that the live lecture is broken and needs to be tossed out.
  The live lecture is like the play, compared to the TV program. But we need to look at our lectures more critically. Are they any good? I think if I replaced my lectures with Coursera videos, I think my students would find the live lectures preferable.
  The tradition as it’s handed down says that 50 minutes is the perfect amount of time to do what we’re doing in the humanities. But now we’re questioning it, which is good – but only because we have a new orthodoxy, which says that the idea time is 12 minutes. Or 8 minutes. But that’s what suits the medium, not necessarily what leads to a more vibrant learning experience.
  My purpose, indeed, is to get my students excited about spending really long periods of time with people like Homer and Plato. If I can do this over Coursera, then maybe I’m doing the same thing at scale. I got lots of people emailing saying ‘this course changed my life’ – well that’s the sort of thing I care about it. People have their narrowness pointed out to them, and they explode beyond that. This format may allow us to do that at scale.
  
  
  
• 

  Everything You Thought You Knew About MOOCs Could Be Wrong

  Posted: April 3, 2013, 12:15pm COT

  Summary of a presentation by Phil Hill and Michael Feldstein.
  
  
  
  Phil – there’s so much hype or madness around MOOCs, and there’s a lot of discussion from people who were not previously involved in online education. They sometimes act like online education was invented in the last two years. And they sometimes get terms wrong, like using the terms ‘MOOC’ and ‘online education’ interchangeably.
  View of the history of MOOCs:
  
  Most discussion is based around the Stanford branch of MOOCs, which started in 2011. They are a content distribution from a central perspective.
  All of the MOOCs had the following problems:-          Revenue models, or becoming self-sustaining-          How students will get credentials from MOOCs
  Michael – the main contribution MOOCs have made thus far is to reawaken our imagination about what’s possible in online learning. While students have become very interested in MOOCs, we need to think about what institutional problem we are solving with MOOCs.
  We think of MOOCs as massive, open, online and courses. But what if they’re not? 
  Non-massive MOOCs: the number of students could be limited, for example for reasons of pedagogical quality. In some cases, some part of a MOOC may be massive while other parts are not. There is (says a commenter) Stanford’s SPOC (small private online course). 
  Non-open MOOC: most xMOOCs are not open in the sense that their content is not provided under Creative Commons. Mostly, ‘open’ means ‘open access’, meaning anyone can sign up. But that’s not the same as ‘free’.
  Non-online MOOCs – the blended model. This is also related to the concept of ‘classroom flipping’. But there is nothing about MOOCs that demands that they be offered online.
  Non-class MOOCs. They can be communities, like project-based communities. Like eg. Photo-a-day communities. Or ds106. They are based around a class, but with ‘drive-by accountants’. Or they can be self-organized, the way a students self-organized a sequel.
  We like to think of them as a continuum, between the little bits of material an instructor might hand out, all the way up to how much of a course you can put up online, a range from minimal materials, to courseware, to full courseware, to a full course.
  
  
  We think that MOOCs are beginning to span these two categories, and that the interesting future for MOOCs may be in the ‘courseware’ category. If so viewed, MOOCs as courseware begin to compete more directly with traditional publisher offerings.
  Phil (responding to chat room): where do instructors come in? Are they interchangeable?Michael: the answer is yet to be writer; there’s a good chance it’s a move in the opposite direction. The MOOC is self-sufficient; ‘MOOCs as courseware’ suggests there’s a definite role for local facilitators. (SD – aka the Triad model).
  Whatever the future of MOOCs, it should be adapted to meet the needs of the students you’re serving, rather than copying from somewhere else. We ought not take a factory approach and suggest that we think we know what they ought to look like.
  Phil: MOOCs are reflecting a trend toward a much more team-based approach to design, and teachers can get involved in that.
  Next slide: if we look at where MOOCs are most influential, their major influence is not from MOOCs in and of themselves. There’s the suggestion that MOOCs as they are in 2012 is what will replace learning. But this model is still evolving. There’s a difference between the foreign element – the MOOC – and the transforming idea, which is what actually creates change.
  
  
  
  The xMOOCs in particular are the foreign element that dismantles the status quos, and what creates a lot of the push-back to the idea. And we see a lot of resistance to MOOCs in higher ed these days. There’s a lot of arguing, and a lot of chaos, but change hasn’t started to happen. Our performance during this period could even be worse than what was traditional.
  The transforming idea is when groups begin saying ‘aha’ – if I apply it this way I will get performance benefits. And then we progress to a new status quo.
  So when we look at how MOOCs are adapting, in a perfect storm with budgets coming together, people are no longer arguing that online education cannot work. So the status quo has been disrupted. But now people are trying to work them out. But we shouldn’t assume that MOOCs as they are now are the final model, nor that by applying MOOCs of 2012 we can make everything better.
  What we eventually adopt might not be the original idea that triggered everything else.Question: is the MOOC, then, a good vehicle for learning?
  Phil: I think it opens up a whole new potential for new types of learning, eg. Student-to-student learning. But the current design of MOOCs aren’t necessarily very good for learning.
  Michael: it’s a bit like asking whether a poem is a good vehicle for communication. The answer is: sometimes. The xMOOCs are sonnets, and the cMOOCs are haiku, and they have very different characteristics. 
  The CMOOCs have done interesting work in self-organization and community for learning. The xMOOCs have scaled the lecture hall. Those are very different approaches. The value that you see in them depends on the value you see in those goals.
  Phil: xMOOCs have really opened up a campus dialogue. I do think that’s been a big change.
  

Ideas fascinantes

• 

  Industrias Culturales en la Era Digital: Nuestro reto en este 2013

  Posted: March 29, 2013, 2:17pm COT

  El año pasado gracias a una invitación recibida por la Fundación Sociedades Digitales de Argentina, participé como orador en el V Foro de Sociedades Digitales realizado en Paraná – Argentina, esta experiencia gratificante por donde se le mire me dejó varias reflexiones;  una de ellas (quizás la más importante) fue la necesidad de propiciar espacios de reflexión y diálogo en torno a cómo las industrias culturales en Colombia convergen en entornos digitales, y fue así como nos pensamos con los amigos argentinos organizar en Bogotá - Colombia “Sociedades Digitales Colombia 2013 – Industrias Culturales en la Era Digital”
  Este encuentro que busca convocar a hacedores culturales de Colombia inmersos en entornos digitales y protagonistas internacionales, promoverá entre otros aspectos, discusiones alrededor de cómo las políticas públicas e iniciativas privadas en esta materia vienen ganando un lugar en nuestra sociedad, para esto esperamos congregar más de 50 expositores tanto nacionales como internacionales, 500 personas de manera presencial en la ciudad de Bogotá y más de 2.000 personas de manera virtual.
  En este contexto, queremos con este post presentarles lo que será “Sociedades Digitales Colombia 2013 – Industrias Culturales en la Era Digital” e invitarlos a sumar su voz al debate e intercambio constructivo sobre diversos aspectos que se abordarán en cada una de las jornadas que llevaremos a cabo, así mismo invitarlos para que nos acompañen por esta travesía digital y cultural que hemos emprendido, siguiendo cada detalle en las redes sociales que hemos habilitado en Twitter y Facebbok.
  Con estas acciones seguimos siendo fieles al objetivo que nos hemos trazado en Okku Tecnología e Innovación: Fomentar la Cultura Digital en diferentes sectores de la Sociedad colombiana.
  Para más información visite el sitio Web que hemos creado: http://sd13colombia.org
  
  
  

Half an Hour

• 

  Future Work

  Posted: March 27, 2013, 9:37am COT

  I had a brief chat with Georges Corriveau this morning that got me to thinking about the future of work. Specifically, I was thinking to myself, if I were just starting out in the world, where would I focus my interests?
  
  I think back 35 years or so when I was just getting started (has it been that long?) and my first post-secondary courses out of the gate were in computing science. It was pretty hard to see where it was all going to go back then, with card-punchers and line-printer output, but you could feel there was something interesting going on.
  
  At best, the applications of computing technology back then were pretty limited - I eventually landed work running computers for seismic data processing, doing plots of the Beaufort Sea, Hibernia and North Sea exploration areas. But the attraction of computing wasn't in what it did in the oilfields - it's that it was a mixture of electronics and media. And this interested me very much.
  
  We don't think much these days about where all this came from. We don't think about the investments we had to make not only in the engineers who created Northern Telecom, nor especially the investment in public money that paid Marshall McLuhan's salary.
  
  Alec Bruce wrote this morning, " if you don’t invest in good ideas, for the sake of good ideas, you can hardly expect to benefit from the commercialization of new technologies and processes at the end of the cycle. That’s because ideas belong, first and foremost, to people.
  
  "The fewer people exercising their intellectual chops in university research institutes, the fewer people remain to give industry what it most desperately needs: the ability to compete domestically and internationally."
  
  He cites James Turk, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers: "Basic research really is what creates the scientific capital out of which applied research, practical things, commercial things, arise."
  
  The same logic applies for individuals as much as it does governments and societies. If you plan your future around what makes money now, you'll always be chasing whatever it is that makes money now, always a bit behind, never able to catch up.
  
  Industries and industrial ages span generations, not business cycles. This remains as true today as it did in the era of the railroad or the age of plastics. We feel what appears to be rapid change, but that is because we are so close to the ground. Looked at more globally, we've hardly sped up at all.
  
  My conversation with George Corriveau revolved around farming and food production, agriculture and agribusiness. My first thought was that we would be foolish is we turned our backs on basic research in farming. Part of this is demand - there are 7 billion people that need food every day right now - and part of this is innovation.
  
  I heard the other day  about a girl who grew algae under her bed to produce oil; her work won top prize in an international science fair. Now it's nice work, though of course the science of extracting oil from algae is well-established. Even the NRC has a fuel-from-algae program. But like the information sciences the generation before, what's interesting isn't the oil exploration, it's the basic scientific ideas underlying the technology.
  
  That's why my first thought was to put the concepts of food production and algae together. And again, after a moment, to reflect on the basic medium of algae as a means to broader application, ranging from energy to food to plastics to whatever. Because algae are basically carbon extraction and conversion mechanisms - tiny small scale factories we are now learning to grow.
  
  I'm currently falling behind in our online McLuhan reading group. But there's still enough McLuhan resonating in my brain right now to remind me that algae isn't a food source, nor an oil production technology, but rather, it's a medium, an information-bearing substrate, onto which we can (and will) write any of our needs and values.
  
  Another thing I read about this week is the graphene supercapacitor. Graphene is essentially a mesh of carbon atoms - think of it as like chicken wire composed of bonded carbon atoms one atom thick. It's touted as the world's lightest material. Meanwhile, capacitors are things that store electricity. It's like a battery, except that it doesn't generate free electrons, it only stores them. Graphene capacitors have the potential to charge more quickly and store more electricity than conventional batters (good thing, too - the world supply of lithium is limited).
  
  Well, if you can grow oil, you can grow graphene. All you need are tiny carbon extraction and manipulation factories, like selected algae strains. Or genetically enhanced algae strains. Or other forms of microbial life.
  
  So, if I were looking at a career in 2013, thinking about what I would want to be a world-leading expert in by, say, 2050, I'd be looking at a career in carbon.
  

  I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Benjamin: Yes, sir. Mr. McGuire: Are you listening? Benjamin: Yes, I am. Mr. McGuire: Carbon.

  But what does that mean, exactly? Well, at this point in time, it means getting a basic education in organic chemistry and the life sciences. Not so much medicine, because it's so consumer-driven. But basic biology. Genetics. Microbiology. In the way I learned how to program in the 1980s, I would today be wanting to learn how to make new forms of life do things I want them to do.
  
  Tiny life forms will be the dominant technology of the mid-21st century. We will use virii as DNA and anti-cancer delivery systems. We will microlife them instead of ink to create objects in 3D printers. It will produce our food and energy storage systems. We will learn to see ourselves not as single entities but as complex organisms composed of microlife, and learn about how to manipulate and regulate our internal microcosms.
  
  I could go on along this vein, but you get the idea. I don't know today what the carbon culture will look like, no more than I could have predicted where the silicon culture would lead us in the 1980s. But list like I could feel a sense of something developing in electronics, I can get the idea of something developing in 21st century bionics.
  
  And I'd be telling the youth of today (like my father told me, in an earlier generation) to become an expert in this new technology - don't worry about the job, the work, the income, worry about developing that capacity and expertise, so that you live, breathe and speak bionics - if you in the next generation can become as familiar with the carbon atom as I became with the bit, then you'll be in a good position.
  
  That may feel like a long way from farming. But it isn't - not really. As McLuhan would observe, they're both part of the same industry.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• 

  Some Recent MOOCs (March-April, 2013)

  Posted: March 20, 2013, 7:02pm COT

  These are based on emails sent to me announcing recen MOOCs. It's a bit hard to keep up, but I've posted what I can here (mostly copied and pasted from the emails).
  
  
  
  OCTEL is the Open Course in Technology Enhanced Learning
  
  Starting on 4th April, you will be able to participate in an online course to understand better how to use technology to enhance your teaching in Higher Education. The course is aimed primarily at people teaching at Higher Education level, whether in Higher Education Institutions or Further Education Colleges. Registration is open now and free of charge. [octel.alt.ac.uk]
  
  
  MOOCs @ ScHARR
  
  
  New MOOC courses run by ScHARR (The University of Sheffield). These 3 new courses are offered through Blackboard's CourseSites platform. There is more information about each course below. To enroll on a MOOC, please use the self-enroll links on the right.
  

  • Health Inequalities»
  • Health Technology Assessment»
  • Sustainable Healthy Diets»

  
  
  
  ich.kurs 2013
  
  The ich.kurs 2013 is the first Coaching-MOOC addressing topics like reaching your goals, training communication and discover beliefs and values. It is hosted by a Publisher (ich.raum GmbH), and offers all of the content as open and free resources. The course will start April 22th 2013. Hashtag at Twitter and Google+ is #ichkurs. In German. [ichkurs.de]
  
  
  
  
  Tareas Plus
  
  
  2500 video tutorials in your MOOC list? More than 50,000 lessons are delivered per day to students from Latinamerica. We have courses in the following areas: Differential Calculus, Algebra, Differential Equations, Organic Chemistry and many more.
  www.tareasplus.com
  
  
  Molecular Dynamics for Computational Discoveries In Science
  Will be taught by Nishikant Sonwalkar, a scientist, academician and adjunct professor of physics at UMass Boston
  [umb.sgleducation.com]
  Register now - begins March 25
  Features Adaptive MOOC technology that enables students to be taught according to individual learning strategies
  
  
  Introduction to Management
  
  The University of Oklahoma will be offering a MOOC titled "Introduction to Management" at  [management.ou.edu]  this summer. Just thought you might be interested for your website.
  
  
  Gamification
  
  Kevin Werbach. Gamification is the application of game elements and digital game design techniques to non-game problems, such as business and social impact challenges. This course will teach you the mechanisms of gamification, why it has such tremendous potential, and how to use it effectively. Click here.
  
  
  
  E-learning and digital cultures MOOC
  
  
  The MOOC site is now open, and you’ll find it at: [https:]
  
  We suggest you start by going to the ‘Welcome to E-learning and Digital Cultures’ page, where you can read more about the course structure, and how we invite you to engage with it.
  All course content is now available, and the discussion board for Week 1 is open.
  The ethos of the course is one of collaboration (driven by you, and a great start has already been made!) and multidisciplinary content, which we hope will lead us into a broad, exciting and scholarly assessment of ‘e-learning’ as part of our collective digital cultures. We hope you enjoy it.
  
  
  Un cMOOC sulle tecnologie internet per la scuola – #ltis13
  
  Un cMOOC sulle tecnologie internet per la scuola - #ltis13
  Locandina del cMOOC #ltis13 con i fatti essenziali Dove si racconta dell'origine dei cMOOC per capire in cosa consisterà questa offerta Testimonianze di studenti che hanno vissuto un'esperienza sim....
  
  
  German MOOC about OER
  
  #COER13: www.coer13.de COER13 shall offer a summary as comprehensive as possible of theory and practice of OER. The course will start at 08.04. and will run till 28.06.13 Many thanks to you, Stephen: We (Markus Schmidt & me) did the website & 'backstage behind' with your gRSShopper. We will start the full functions stepwise.
  

  
  Today’s Blended Teacher: A MOOC made for Community and Curation
  
  For the first time ever the blended schools network is hosting a massive open online course (MOOC). Starting on Monday, April 15, 2013 this course is designed for educators who wish to:
  

  • Improve their knowledge of what identifies quality blended learning;
  • Improve the quality of their existing blended lessons; and
  • Grow their professional peer network.

  Here is the link: click here.
  
  
  
  Hyperlinked Library MOOC
  
  The San Jose State University School of Library and Information Science (SJSU SLIS) will be offering a massive open online course (MOOC) in the fall. The open online course will bring individuals from diverse backgrounds and geographic regions together in an interactive online learning environment. SJSU SLIS award-winning instructors will spearhead this professional development opportunity. The MOOC is available to the public for free, and anyone can register. MOOC students will not receive college credit. The information school’s first open online course, the Hyperlinked Library MOOC, will begin September 3, 2013, and it explores how libraries are using emerging technologies to serve their communities. 
  
  Today’s Blended Teacher: A MOOC made for Community and Curation
  
  For the first time ever the blended schools network is hosting a massive open online course (MOOC). Starting on Monday, April 15, 2013 this course is designed for educators who wish to:
  

  • Improve their knowledge of what identifies quality blended learning in the K12 classroom;
  • Improve the quality of their existing blended lessons; and
  • Grow their professional peer network.

  This MOOC is free to all and is designed for content curation and community building. Each week will include consuming course materials, curating quality resources and developing and critiquing new lessons. Click here
  
  
  
  
  “Blended Teaching of World Languages” or Language Teaching MOOC (LTMOOC)
  
  LTMOOC is a collaborative course for language teachers of all levels to discuss and gain a deeper understanding of emerging trends in blended teaching and learning of world languages, including the methodology, best practices, and practical application of the blended and online classroom. The course will facilitate discussion and development of ideas in a connectivist-style MOOC, inviting all course participants to contribute.
  
  This announcement comes in response to hundreds of inquiries and requests received regarding the Instreamia adaptive learning platform and its popular flagship course SpanishMOOC, which is known as one of the first MOOCs for teaching a foreign language. Its professor, Scott Rapp, will facilitate LTMOOC and share his experience teaching SpanishMOOC, including its many challenges and successes from both an educational and technological perspective.
  
  
  
  
  #EDCMOOC
  
  the MOOC I am currently enrolled in, #EDCMOOC, could be added. It is run through Coursera, but the pre-course community-building has been so strong, that I believe it is a cMOOC. I am absolutely willing to defend that point of view, if you would like more info.
  Please come have a look at our Google+ community. This would be a good start: [https:]]
  
  
  Information Visualization MOOCIndiana University, Information Visualization (started 22nd Jan)
  [ivmooc.appspot.com]
  
  
  Introduction to Complexity
  
  Santa Fe Institute course announcements page : [www.santafe.edu]
  and their first course page: [www.santafe.edu] (began Jan28th)
  
  
  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4
  /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";}
  NPTEL-India
  
  NPTEL-India makes available about 50 courses in electrical engineering: [nptel.iitm.ac.in]
  
  These are OER, made available CC BY SA NC.
  
  
  
  
  
• 

  Evaluating a MOOC

  Posted: March 18, 2013, 6:11am COT

  I was asked (along with Dave Cormier and George Siemens):
  
  "How might it be possible to show that cMOOCs are effective for learning, in the sense of providing evidence that institutions might accept so as to support opening up more courses to outside participants (a la ds106, Alec Couros' EC&I 831, etc.)? Or, more generally, providing evidence that participation in and facilitating cMOOCs is worthy of support by institutions... What I'm looking for are criteria one might use to say that a cMOOC is successful. What should participants be getting out of cMOOCs?"
  
  I think the best way to understand success in a MOOC is by analogy with, say a book, or a game, or a trip to the city.
  
  The person taking the MOOC is like a person reading a book, playing a game, or taking a trip to the city. It is impossible to talk about 'the objective' of such an activity - some people want to learn something (and others something else), others are doing it for leisure (and others as part of their job), others to make friends (and others to get away from their friends for a while), etc.
  
  If we were a commercial enterprise we could focus on sales. Then we could focus an ad campaign on  the actual reasons people take MOOCs - but we wouldn't need to worry about whether they were met, only about whether our advertising enticed people to pay the fee. But I think that's a pretty narrow criterion for success.
  
  I would adopt George's suggestion, and look to the institutional goals for offering MOOCs. But again here we find a wide array of interests: some want to use MOOCs as advertising, to entice people to enrol in other courses; others want to experiment with new methods of delivering learning; others want to support products or services they sell; still others want to serve a social good and provide free learning from the community. Each objective will have its own metric for success.
  
  My own response treats a MOOC for what it is: a network. I then ask whether it satisfied the properties of a successful network. I can do this from two perspectives: first, from a process perspective; and second, from an outcomes perspective.
  
  The process perspective asks whether the MOOC satisfied the criteria for successful networks. Of these, the most important are contained in what I call the Semantic Condition, which ensures that the MOOC remains a living system. The semantic condition contains four parts: autonomy, diversity, openness, and interactivity. The MOOC is assessed against each of these and a degree of compliance may be found.
  
  The outcomes perspective looks at the MOOC as a knowing system. By that what I mean is that the MOOC should exhibit network properties on a macro scale - in other words, that we should be able to say things about the MOOC without reference to particular individuals in the MOOC. This is to treat the MOOC as an entity which perceives, or which learns, as a whole.  These things are emergent properties, for example, emergent knowledge or emergent learning. Did the MOOC as a whole produce some new insight, or recognize some new phenomenon in its area of study?
  
  MOOC success, in other words, is not individual success. We each have our own motivations for participating in a MOOC, and our own rewards, which may be more or less satisfied. But MOOC success emerges as a consequence of individual experiences. It is not a combination or a sum of those experiences - taking a poll won't tell us about them - but rather a result of how those experiences combined or meshed together.
  
  This may not reflect what institutional funders want to hear. But my thinking and hope is that over th long term MOOCs will be self-sustaining, able to draw participants who can see the value of a MOOC for what it is, without needing to support narrow and specific commercial or personal learning objectives.
• 

  The Investment in Oil and Gas

  Posted: March 17, 2013, 10:39am COT

  I don't think Wendman's comments really respond to the concerns expressed in the Mayes article.
  
  Mark Wendman's argument is essentially:
  - the delays have been caused by the protests in the U.S., now four years old, and we should really have gotten past that by now. We should just get on with it, and get past the hand-wringing.
  - the potential for tax revenues is much larger from oil sands development than it is from (other sorts of) innovation (though innovation in the oil sector would be welcome)
  - mining is dirty, but people involved in mining know that and quickly get over it
  - technology innovation in Canada should be funded by private capital seeded by tax policies
  
  Stated this way (as opposed to long and convoluted non-sentences) the argument is transparently weak, though I have tried to present it in its best light. It is essentially an argument that there is no bubble, and if these is a bubble, we should have and can still take advantage of it while it's still a bubble.
  
  The argument in the Mayes article raises some points not addressed here specifically related to the cost of extracting oil from the oil sands:
  - the oil is land-locked and requires an expensive pipeline system
  - the oil meanwhile also requires massive investments of energy and water to extract
  I would add, related to this, that the short window of opportunity for oil extraction in this way has passed, and that Alberta oil is not cost-competitive with new discoveries, and particularly with recent gas discoveries employing hydrofracking.
  
  For these and related reasons, Mayes questions the need to buiild the pipeline at all. Given the cost, and therefore undesirability, of Alberta resources, "not building the pipeline would have almost no impact on jobs; on US oil supply; on heavy oil supply for Gulf Coast refineries; or even on the amount of oil sands extracted in Alberta." One would then necessarily question the wisdom of building the pipeline.
  
  The second thread of the Mayes article focuses on the harm caused to the Canadian economy caused by an over-dependence on oil and gas."Canada has historically been a natural resource based economy, which has led to complacency and neglect of investment in innovation."
  
  Wendman responds that the revenues from oil and gas dwarf those from innovation, but this does not respond to the concern that, outside of oil and gas revenues, Canada's economic development has been flat, according to OECD. This raises the significant question of what happens should the oil and gas revenue go away.
  
  That's why Mayes argues, "Canada is now locked into the urgent need for the pipelines, with no other options or strategy," either to sell oil to the U.S., or to China, or to whomever cannot obtain more conventional sources.
  
  As I mentioned above, I don't think Wendman's comments really respond to the concerns outlined in the Mayes article. Moreover, I think that the concerns go beyond what Mayes outlines:
  
  - first, there is a concern that Canada's dependence on oil and other resource exports has a direct negative effect on other sectors. This is created when these exports push the value of the dollar artificially high, making Canada's other industries less competitive. This is the 'Dutch Disease' Thomas Mulcair has cited, and a convincing response to that argument has not been forthcoming.
  
  - second, there is a concern that Canada's dependence on oil and other resources has created a significant disincentive to develop clean alternatives to energy production. Should global warming persist and intensify (an all signs suggest it will) other economic concerns will force a global divestment from oil and gas extraction. This leaves Canada with no alternatives, since development in alternative energy is underfunded or non-existent.
  
  
  Finally, I would point out that Wendman's criticisms misrepresent the underlying argument against the Keysone pipeline and oil sands development generally. Yes, it's true that mining is messy, and the oil sands especially so, but people have not protested the extraction of aluminum or iron ore with the same vehemence.
  
  The argument against the oil sands and the keystone pipeline relates directly to the appropriation of investment in energy directly related to global warming, at a time when we should be focusing our attention and resources at emissions-free energy production.
  
  The development of the oil sands and related pipelines may serve short-term economic interests, but at a significantly greater cost in the not-too-distant future. It is this fact that makes these investments unwise, not simply from the wider perspective, but even in terms of the viability of the short-term returns, as the end of the current oil and gas era will come suddenly, and urgently, leaving investors holding the bag.
  
  
  
• 

  Inputs for an Article

  Posted: March 12, 2013, 6:18am COT

  Brief quotable answers to a request for input to a forthcoming article on open online learning.
  
  Do you want to reduce the 'lurkers' as used in an article on your website for any reason? Which is to say, how can the courses be designed to minimise the drop-outs if at all
  There's no reason to reduce the number of lurkers. They're no causing any harm, and their curiosity may eventually progress to greater engagement. When a course is open, it attract a large number of people who just want to take a look, and that's fine.
  
  We should not confuse people who take a look and then leave with "drop-outs". The people we think of as "drop-outs" are people who have made a significant investment in time and tuition, and then fail or withdraw. In an open course, there is not such a significant up-front investment, and therefore much less concern about people who would rather do something else.
  
  
  

  
  The way that MOOCs can influence career prospects of a candidate. For example- if a hopeful in India wants to use Coursera to find a job abroad- would that be a viable course of action? 

  
  The short answer is yes. Let's not forget that when people take courses online, even Coursera courses, they learn. This improves job chances because it makes a person better qualified. Additionally, being able to cite participation in such courses - particularly with a portfolio of work to substantiate your active participation - is a significant indicator of work attitude and committment. Taking a course in Coursera is far batter than doing nothing.
  
  
  

  
  How would a free online courses site make money on its own (besides grants)?
  

  
  I personally see no reason why governments would not support free and open online learning. They are a far more accessible means of offering advanced education than  traditional tuition-based universities. In India I would see the provision of open online courses as a natural extension of IGNOU's mandate and mission.
  
  I question the premise that a core purpose of an online course provider is to make money. We have to remember that in many cases the source of this money is the people least able to pay the cost: the students. Online course providers should be looking for funding from those who benefit from a mobile and educated workforce: governments and industries.
  
  
  

  Any emergent thoughts for future growth.

  
  I tink that open online courses will take on a life of their own. What that means is that while today the courses are offered by a single educational institution, tomorrow they will stand on their own and be accessed by a number of educational institutions to support local programs.
  
  Companies like Coursera and Udacity who offer online courses now will learn (as we learned) that these courses need online community to best serve participants (and that participants will build such a communityh with or without the organizers' participation). As these communities grow stronger, they will assume a greater role in the management of the course.
  
  

  Five best online course portals according to you- in terms of variety and quality of courses, ease of site navigation and contribution to job success 

  
  There are not yet five online course portals - what we are seeing today is mostly lists of courses offered by a single provider. A number of sites have set up crawlers that are scanning the websites of major providers. But there is not yet a single directory that taps into the rich range of free an open learning opportunities on the web.
  
• 

  Sustainability and MOOCs in Historical Perspective

  Posted: March 7, 2013, 6:06pm COT

  Stephen Downes: Thank you everyone. Buenos Dias. It's a genuine pleasure to be able to be back in Bogotá, back in Colombia, and to be able to speak with you today. I have good memories of my time in Colombia, and I'm adding to those memories with this trip.
  
  Today I want to take you through a bit of a historical journey. We're going to talk about the factors that led to the development of the Massive Open Online Course and Connectivism and the new phenomena in learning today. But, a few preliminaries before I start the talk, because it's all about open education. :)
  
  This presentation is available now at that website. The slides are already posted on the website so you can download them at any time. They're pretty close to what I have here. I was making some last minute changes during the introductions.
  
  There will be audio recording as well on this site. And I know that they are recording video back there but I always like to do things myself as well. So I'm recording video off of my own computer and I'm just using Google Hangout so it's free.
  
  And because I can, I'm broadcasting this talk, using a YouTube live video stream, to people around the world. I have no idea how many people are watching this, probably not that many, maybe none. But the idea is that it's possible.
  
  Online learning begins in the 1980s, it begins in the 1990s and it's born out of two major things. And like the strands of DNA we will see these things repeated through the history of online learning. The first basis is in distance learning. Distance learning is the idea of learning that takes place outside the classroom at any time, at any place. Distance learning therefore required the creation and distribution of learning content, of course packages that would support independent study.
  The other basis for online learning is the traditional classroom, learning that we all grew up with, where there is a class, a cohort of students, who go through a body of content or a curriculum, who interact with each other when they conduct activities and conduct projects.
  
  We see the two major sides here. We see the content side, and we see the interactivity side. And there are two major pedagogies of online learning when they're born out of these two bases.
  
  There is a transmission model of learning that is born in more transactional distance learning, distance education. It has its origins in communications theory, and it's about the integrity of the message being sent from the professor to the learner and being able to be sure that what was received by the learner was the same message that was sent by the professor.
  
  We also have a more recent theory, constructivism, which has so many varieties I cannot count and won't try, but it's based essentially on the idea of social interaction, negotiation of meeting, finding a common ground, and a model of learning where learners construct their own model. So the content models of distance education with the course packages and the content would follow the transmission models, and the class-based interactive models, which follow the constructivist model.
  
  In the mid-1990s, people began to develop learning management systems. I'm sure you're all familiar with learning management systems.
  
  It's a basis in technology that we all understand and we're all more or less comfortable with. Companies like Blackboard and WebCT and Desire2Learn started companies, commercial enterprises, based on the idea of managing online learning.
  
  They had these two different models. They had the model of the course packages, and they had the model of the classes. WebCT in English stands for "Web Course Tools." It was intended to be a set of tools that a classroom instructor would use, but it was adapted to distance learning.
  
  In addition to this commercial stream, we had the open-source stream and, most especially, learning management systems called Moodle, which I'm sure you may be familiar with, and Sakai, which is less common, but was created by a consortium of American universities.
  
  So we had two models for learning management systems. One model where the company, and Blackboard began this way, would post all of the technology on their site, and you would buy the service from them.
  
  Or the other model, where you would obtain the software and install it and complete the work yourself and host it on your own website. You see what's happening here, underlining these already, we're beginning to get the basic building blocks of technology and pedagogy in models of online learning.
  
  For the rest of this stuff, you'll see more and more of these building blocks being added and interconnected. As my wife likes to say, "It's all a great tapestry."
  
  Early online learning featured conferencing and this, of course, would be the interactivity type of online learning. I remember in the 1990s taking a massive Internet course "Welcome to the Internet" and it was delivered by email. I would sign up for it. It was based on a mailing list. Thousands upon thousands of people would receive emails every few days introducing them to a new aspect of the Internet. It was my first experience with massive online learning.
  
  There were also conferencing systems, early conferencing systems. Early discussion board systems. People would log on and leave messages. Simple to be able to use that technology. We began to see systems like FirstClass developed specifically for online learning. Here are technologies that may not be familiar with you because they're so old. They disappeared almost a decade ago but they were important elements in the development of the Internet we have today.
  
  Of course, we had instant messaging. I remember using ICQ. In English, it stands for "I seek you." ICQ. Get it? Very clever. That was copied by AOL instant messaging and Microsoft messenger. My ICQ number was 1287181. It was one of the earliest. I was so proud of it, a low ICQ number, and then the company went away.
  
  At the time, things began to be more formalized and an idea came out, partially out of the United States, partially out of Canada, mostly out of the military and the aviation industry, to create something called learning objects. The idea of a learning object was to patent some educational content, digital content, in a standardized way. There was something called LOM, Learning Object Metadata, that was used to describe these objects.
  
  The intent here was to create a system whereby educational resources would be discoverable, sharable, and interoperable, where we could have a common pool of learning resources that these technologies could draw upon. This is a very significant development and people today say learning objects were a waste, but they were not a waste because they established the fundamental principles of educational objects, educational resources, and the sharing and distribution of these resources.
  
  Then the IMS, the Instructional Management System consortium, based mostly in the United States but with participation around the world, built a series of standards around learning objects. One of these was content packaging. Content packaging was a technical way to represent the original distance education course packages. Learning design was an attempt to emulate what was called programmed learning in the course packages, a way of leading the student through the materials one step at a time. It was the idea of managed learning or learning management.
  
  Over time, the concept of learning objects and learning object repositories lead to the idea of learning object repository networks. We can picture this really simply in our head. We think of learning objects as objects, maybe like books, maybe like Legos, maybe like flowers, whatever. A repository is just a place where we keep a whole bunch of them. The idea is we create our learning object and we store it in the repository.
  
  Over time, as different institutions developed their own repositories, to encourage the idea of sharing, they created repository networks. I spent a number of years in Canada with people from across the country building a repository network of Edusource. Edusource no longer exists, sadly, but the idea was interesting and we learned a lot during it.
  
  One of the things we learned was the tension that exists between open online resources and commercial resources. When you're creating a network of repositories, how do you enable sharing freely while at the same time allowing commercial resources to remain commercial and not shared in the way music was shared? This was early 2000/2001/2002. Content producers looked at things like Napster and music sharing and they were having heart attacks.
  
  One of the reasons why our repository network failed was because of the constraints that commercial publishers wanted to place on it. There's a fundamental dichotomy between open content sharing and commercial markets and that's what we were experiencing in repository networks.
  
  There were also open content repositories developed around this time. The Open Archive Initiative (OAI) created software and a set of specifications for uploading and downloading objects from repositories. That was taken by MIT and turned into something called DSpace. That exists even to this day. It's used mostly for academic publications, not so much for learning objects and learning resources. That's because academic publications is a big industry, learning resources not a big industry. So far so good? Excellent.
  
  It's like this story. We progress through and bit by bit we're adding elements to the mix here. It's important to see this not just as a history but as a cataloging of the elements that are going into contemporary online learning. Here's another major element, and this element was developed around the same time as the learning management systems and around the same time as the learning objects, and that is the idea of learning communities.
  
  I remember doing a talk about Etienne Wenger and mispronouncing his name the whole way through. That was the first talk I recorded on audio so the evidence falls into the saying, "Sometimes there are mistakes you cannot escape." The concept of the community of practice is important. It actually has its origin in the philosopher Thomas Kuhn who talked about networks of researchers who shared a common paradigm.
  
  Kuhn is most famous for the idea of scientific revolutions, but equally important, I think, is his characterization of what he called "normal science." What "normal science" is, and I should probably put it in quotation marks, what "normal science" is is not simply the facts and the data related to a discipline. Physics, the discipline of physics, is not simply about the formulas but it's the vocabulary, it's the interaction, it's the shared assumptions, it's a common understanding of what evidence is important and what evidence is not important. It's the dialogues. It's the feel for what it is to be a physicist.
  
  Kuhn used to say that the knowledge of being a physicist isn't the material at the front of the chapter; it's knowing how to solve the problems at the end of the chapter. It's a way of seeing the world and being able to solve the problems is demonstrating that you see the world in the right way.
  
  This is a kind of learning that is generated not through transmission, not even through knowledge construction, but through something else. The ideas of community and practice are important and the fundamental building blocks to the concept of learning that we have today. Like everything else, there were the, what would we call them, open communities of practice. We've heard so few formal accounts. There's almost no history of them.
  
  Then there were the more commercialized communities. I remember being hired by the University of Alberta to create a commercial community practice called MuniMall and it was modeled on a book called "Net.Gain" by Hagel and Armstrong. The idea of this online community was that it would be like a shopping mall. A shopping mall of physics or, in my case, a shopping mall of municipal governance.
  
  The idea was content providers would share their resources or, more accurately, sell their services and their resources, and participants, people who work in that community, would interact with each other. The interaction part of MuniMall worked really well and, in fact, the community lasted for 10 years from the original design. The commercial part, not so much. Interesting lessons.
  
  As we began to see more of these connections, we began to see learning objects. We began to see online communities that look like shopping malls. We began to see content packaging. There was a stream of thought based on the idea of open source software, based on the idea of open sharing and open content. It came, over time, to be called Open Educational Resources. This name, Open Educational Resources, was formalized by the UNESCO in the early 2000's.
  
  The idea represents educational content that is shared openly. They came up with an early version of open content and an open content license and the idea here is that a person or a company or a university would create an educational resource like a learning object (but maybe not a learning object; we don't need to be that particular) and would attach to it a license that allows it to be shared freely. The resource has two parts, the content of the resource and the license.
  
  A major initiator of that support for open educational resources, I'm sure many of you are familiar with this, is Creative Commons, and, in just the same way, Creative Commons is a way of attaching a license to a piece of content to allow that content to be freely shared. This is really important. It's really important because the default assumption for content is that content is privately owned and cannot be shared. In my mind, that's the single largest barrier to open learning as of today, the default assumption that open learning is illegal, and so we need the licensing to make open learning legal.
  
  If it was up to me, it would the other way around. If it was up to me, content would be free by default but if you attached the license to it then it would be commercial, but people don't agree with me on this. It's interesting, though. I look sometimes at the roots of open content licensing and creative comments and think that open licensing and Creative Commons come out of the same place that open source licensing comes out of, places like Berkley, places like Stanford, places like MIT.
  
  At MIT, I give a talk and saw Richard Stallman's office with a paper handwritten his name on the door (since he's not that permanent). It's interesting that this perspective, that the default is commercial, and the exception is open, has its origin in these major commercial American universities. We will come back to that.
  
  My involvement in open educational resources, aside from producing them, producing photographs, producing reporting, whatever, was in the area of sustainability. I did a study for OECD on models and sustainability of open educational resources. This is where the thread of sustainability enters the picture. Hasn't been in the picture so far. We've had the thread of opening resources versus commercial resources or open source software versus commercial software, but now we have this idea of sustainability, which is almost like the middle ground.
  
  The core idea of sustainability is, if you have or if you want to produce open educational resources,  how do you pay for them? That's a good question. I analyzed a few different models of sustainability that existed at the time. This is a quick summary. That picture looks much nicer on my screen.
  
  One model, and this is a model that's actually in the field of academic publishing, is called the Gold model. It's a model where the author pays a fee in order to publish the resource and then the publisher makes the resource available. There are some journals, academic journals, that operate along this principle. I don't know of any educational resource initiative that operates on this because I haven't seen a big willingness on the part of people who create educational resources to pay for their publication.
  
  It happens informally a lot. I pay for my own website. In a way, that's an author pay system. People pay for their own Internet access and that's kind of like an author pay system. There's certainly an element of author contribution here. The size of that element of author contribution tells us how accessible the market to create open educational resources is for people. People don't often think about that.
  
  Another model that's very popular in the United States is the foundation model. You have the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, you have the Wellcome Trust, you have the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. There's the Shuttleworth Foundation and there are many other foundations. What these foundations do is contribute money to develop the development of learning resources.
  
  The thing with the foundation model is, foundations run out of money or foundations stop providing money. So when you're funded by a foundation, you are always faced, at the end of this funding, with the question now of "How do we become sustainable?" About half the time what happens is the open educational resource becomes a commercial resource.
  
  I just spoke of David Wiley. He was involved with a company called Flat World Knowledge. Flat World Knowledge was started with foundation money and it was intending to publish learning resources for free and they would make their money on the printed version. Only recently, Flat World Knowledge announced they would no longer publish learning material for free. There would now be a fee, but they would be competitively priced. This is a pretty common sort of thing.
  
  Here's the public service model, and that's actually mostly my model (where I work). That's where government pays for the cost of the infrastructure and the cost of ongoing support. It'd be very similar to the public broadcasting model. Is there a public broadcasting in Colombia? There is? It's one of these things I should check before I do my talk. In Canada we have the CBC, which is a publicly funded radio, television, and Internet broadcasting.
  
  Just as an aside, it should be available here - if you want to hear great new Canadian music go to CBC Radio 3.. Fabulous. I hope it's available here. I listen to it all the time. It's all independent Canadian music. It's like the open educational resources of the Canadian music industry. I love it. That's an aside.
  
  Finally, there's the community model. The community model is very important because the community model taps into the idea of the community of practice and it taps into the idea of the people who consume, to use a bad word, that consume the resources are also the people who produce the resources.
  
  In the end, this is the model that I recommended to OECD. The pro-commercial organization promptly rejected it, but the model is that people create their own educational resources. People create their own educational communities. One of my major arguments for this is, in the long term it's the only truly financially sustainable model, the community based model of resource production. Any other model, I think, will eventually lead us to a commercial model.
  
  We have, now, this other piece of the puzzle. Around that time, things really became interesting because the idea of consumers producing their own content was found not only in learning but in the Web as a whole. In English there's a term "prosumer." It's a combination of the term producer and consumer. Is there a similar term in Spanish? Sorry? Prosumiero? I'll work on the pronunciation of that after the talk.
  
  This is happening around the middle of 2005, 2006. People were now gaining access to websites and web services that allowed them to create their own content. These are all sites you're familiar with. Blogger.Right?  Blogging exploded. People don't talk about blogging so much now but there's a lot of blogging happening right now. YouTube. Right? Remember when everything was YouTube? YouTube was going to change the world? It actually did change the world in many ways. I'm using YouTube now. Hi, YouTube people. A site I use a lot to store photos, because I take a lot of photos, is Flickr.
  
  It's interesting because these content sharing sites adapted an innovation that was created by the instant messaging services. Remember I talked about ICQ? The way ICQ worked was you have a list of friends. AOL called them buddies (typical AOL casual language). I don't know what MSN network called them because I never used MSN network. The idea is you would have a list of friends. When we started using systems that allowed us to create our own content like blogging systems we imported this idea. The original version of blogging was something called the blogroll. I don't know if there's a Spanish word for that but in English it's the blog roll. It's a list of blogs that you read.
  
  Also in other things, content sharing sites like what came to be called social networks the list of friends almost became more important. What you had was a combination of content creation and a list of friends. Everybody focuses on the social of social networking, but the content creation is equally important. Facebook is the world's largest repository of photographs. People don't realize that. They should because they've been uploading them like crazy.
  
  A content sharing network like Twitter borrowing from SMS, which is why they use 140 characters. With these kind of services comes a bit of an evolution in our understanding of what a website actually is. It used to be all about presenting content. Web 1.0, that was old learning. That was the content based paradigm. Web 2.0 became about interaction and communication and it made us think about content a bit differently.
  
  Content is very important. It became data. Content was something that was stored in a database and then presented in different ways or shared or manipulated around what was called the mash-up.
  
  The mash-up, what you'd do is take content from one database and content from another database and mash it up. You would take Google Maps, for example, and a list of every Starbucks and create a map with all the Starbucks on it (which I never use because I hate Starbucks). In Canada we have Tim Horton's coffee.
  
  What's interesting is these websites became places not only where you shared data, they became places where you manipulated data and created new data. Websites actually became like little programs, like little applications. There was a slogan, "the Web as platform." That phenomenon is still very much at work today. Every website you go to almost is a platform of some sort. Different platforms, different ways of doing things, but what they are all doing is integrating data. All of them, except old websites that were created in 1995 and nobody's done anything with them since.
  
  Here's what I worked on. This is a version of Web 2.0, a version of the whole idea. What I would do is, I would take data from different websites in a data format called RSS and all you need to know about RSS is it's content computers can read. That's all you need to know. I would take that content and I would use my computer programs to join it and use my computer programs to filter it and produce output. That's pretty handy.
  
  I started, for example, and I did create a single feed (which is what the output is called, a 'feed'), a single feed of all the content about a certain subject. I have one you can look at it now, I'll do it right now, listen to the music, on www.mooc. [indecipherable 0:42:21] . It looks like a great site, that I write every day, but I don't. I read it. It's pretty interesting. I don't do a thing to create it. It's just aggregated content on the subject of MOOCs joined together and then output as a newsletter.
  
  This is an incredibly powerful technology. I cannot emphasize how powerful this technology is. It puts into the hands of people the capacity to create qualitative resources, the capacity to bring resources from wherever they may be on the Internet and create a single resource. Or the capacity to create a single web page that is dynamic, that is always current, and draws on data from different places.
  
  If you go look at a weather page they operate in the same way. Exactly the same way. There are hundreds of weather stations around the world and they pull these weather stations, the content is in a certain code, they decode the content, and then they present the information. That's how weather sites work. This leads us directly to the concept of connectivism.
  
  You see how easy this is? We've gone from connecting content, connecting content, to connectivism. The idea here now is that we have all of these resources, all of the content produced by all of the people on their blogs, on YouTube and Flickr accounts, wherever, and you can have all of these people with lists of their friends in social networks maybe or as email contact lists or whatever. They create this network. We have the technology now, finally, to join all these things together.
  
  Connectivism is the theory of education that you come up with when you think about how education can work using this connected technology. The term, of course, derives from George Siemens who wrote an important paper called "Connectivism" and he describes connectivism pretty much as a pedagogy.
  
  The phrase, "I store my knowledge in my friends," is one of the slogans from his original characterization and the idea is I do not need to memorize everything I know, in other words I don't need to know everything I know, I simply need to know where to find it. It's a new type of skill. It's the skill of creating networks and traversing networks. It's a new kind of understanding.
  
  My contribution to connectivism is the depiction of knowledge as a network state. What I mean by that very precisely is to know something is to be in a certain connected state. That's kind of a hard concept, in one sense, but it's an easy concept in another sense.
  
  To know something, in my theory, is to be able to recognize it. That's how I know Diego when I see him. He doesn't wear a name tag, although if I did that's how I would recognize, but I look at him, I see his face, I do this. Sorry, I'm just kidding. I recognize him.
  
  That's how a physicist solves the problem at the end of the chapter. The physicist looks at the problem and recognizes "Oh, it's that kind of problem." What is that recognition? What is that capacity? We, as humans, are composed of a network as well. It's a neural network. You have, I don't know, 100 billion neurons. These neurons are all connected to each other.
  
  To learn is to create those pathways between neurons. To know something is to have a certain set of connections. What happens technically and literally? When I recognize Diego certain connections fire in my brain. Those connections are created from previous experiences. That's how I created them. I got out there, I went to Columbia, I saw Diego, I walked around, I talked with him for a while. I'm not very good with faces so it took several visits. I formed the neural network in my mind.
  
  What's interesting about connectivism is that societies learn that way, too. Societies have knowledge that way, too, and this is what George was seeing. George was seeing social knowledge. I see personal knowledge. It's two different kinds of knowledge but it's created the same way.
  
  In society, we connect to people and we connect objects like learning objects, like flowers, like maps, like YouTube videos, like photographs, like pictures of my cat. We connect all of these together. What a society knows is expressed by those connections. Society learns by creating new connections. There is some knowledge that only a society can have. It's knowledge so large, so complex, no individual person can have it.
  
  There are examples all around us of that kind of knowledge. Look at this room. Could any of you or any one person build this room? Not possible. Nobody could know that much, especially if you include the computers and the software on the computer and all your clothing and all the wiring and the lighting systems and the translation booth and the knowledge of two languages to make that work. No one person could do it, but collectively, or maybe more accurately cooperatively, all of us together, through interaction, create the knowledge that is represented by this room.
  
  This phenomenon of creating knowledge in an object is called [indecipherable 0:50:40] in English. I have no idea what that would be in Spanish. It's the same thing for an anthill. An anthill shares knowledge one ant to the other by creating physical artifacts. A scent, a tunnel, an object left behind. That's how ants communicate, using objects.
  
  We have this picture of connectivism. We have this picture of learning as connecting, as knowledge, as a network of connections. We have this idea of learning as immersion into an environment. What we want to do, what we want to happen, is for people to recognize.
  
  We know that we cannot create recognition just by telling people things. You cannot create recognition just by describing. Sometimes people can recognize me by description, but generally it doesn't work very well.
  
  In order to recognize you need to be in the situation, you need to be practicing with the materials that you want to be able to recognize, the type of material. There's a whole complex series of connection through inferences that we make. Jay Cross characterize this as informal learning, and what is informal learning? Informal learning is learning that you conduct for yourself, through your interactions in a community. That's a model that should by now in this talk sound very familiar.
  
  What Jay is adding to the concept of informal learning is that now there's no structure, now there's no organization, now there's no professor. People learn for themselves and they design their own learning. This was demonstrated, and I thought demonstrated very effectively in the EduCamps at the edge of [inaudible 0:53:10] here in Columbia. It's a model that's been replicated elsewhere, where the idea is you bring people together, and you don't have a formal agenda of, "First we'll learn this. Then we'll learn this. Then we'll learn this."
  
  What you have scattered around in a room are different stations. People who have knowledge go to these stations and share that knowledge. People who need knowledge go to these stations and listen to the people who have knowledge.
  
  Except they don't just talk and listen, they actually have whatever it is that they're interested in right in front of them. They can learn to create blogs by creating blogs, learn to record audio by recording audio. The structure is not defined. There is this concept, and this is what EduCamps come out of, this concept of conference that is generally called barter camps.
  
  A barter camp is simply a room, or a series of rooms, and a starting time. You say, "We will have a barter camp at such and such a place at such a time." You might suggest a topic, online learning, audio recording, high definition photography, whatever.
  
  People arrive in the room, and if they have something they would like to share, they write it up on the wall. If people are interested in learning about that, they sign up for it. If you put something up on the wall and nobody signs up for it, that's fine. You go somewhere else, and you learn from someone else.
  
  There is no preset structure there. The idea of running these barter camps is, "Whatever we talked about was the right thing to talk about. Whatever the outcome was, was the right outcome." It's the idea that, when people interact together in this kind of environment, in this learning environment, they are able to self organize.
  
  They are able to prioritize their own learning. It's a very interesting and different educational experience, and it gets you right into the community that you are trying to learn about. The technological equivalent of the barter camp is the personal learning environment.
  
  This is a diagram by Scott Wilson who works in Great Britain. The idea of the personal learning environment is that you treat the entire word as your learning environment. Then you connect to different kinds of resources. You can connect to blogging sites, photo sites, learning management systems, to-do lists, videos, your own website, Facebook, Twitter, whatever you want. The actual technology is RSS or other standards similar to RSS.
  
  The same sort of bringing together of content, that I described earlier, happens in a personal learning environment. Learning as a whole in this model, becomes a network created by hundreds, thousands, millions of individual personal learning environments.
  
  Our learning network is, each one of us connected to our list of friends, our list of learning resources, our list of activities. Connecting to them, making new connections, interacting, creating this new [indecipherable 0:57:30] . By this interaction, by a creating these connections.
  
  Into that mix now, comes the idea of open courses. If you think about it. Here's our personal learning environment. Here's a learner, a student, a person who wants to learn. All of these around the student, are open educational resources. If you organize them a little bit, or even just create an environment for them here, and called it a course, now we have an open online course.
  
  The idea here is, that an open online course is composed of. Well, I'll come back to that, whatever a course is composed of, but the important thing is that it is open. That anybody in the world can access that course. Without paying money, without filling in a form, giving your email address, and your telephone number, and your dog's birthday.
  
  [laughter]
  
  Stephen: Open courses have a long history. Open courses began to exist in the idea of "OpenCourseWare" created by MIT. Yes, the same place that we got creative contemplacency from.
  
  We get a number of initiatives. MIT OpenCourseWare, and then there's the OpenCourseWare Consortium of various universities producing the same thing.
  
  What this is is all materials that you would need in a course, the readings, the curriculum, the problem sets, maybe some videos, etc.
  
  Connections is the same thing. It was created at Rice University. What they did is they created an environment that course authors could enter and use to create their open courses. Pretty innovative. A lot like Blogger, only for courses.
  
  OpenLearn is an initiative of the Open University of Great Britain -- still exists, very important, very widely used -- that has complete course packages.
  
  You remember at the start of this topic, talking about the two models of distance education? One model was the content model. This is the twenty-first century version of that model.
  
  Edith, a self-standing course package, is programmed learning. It takes you step-by-step through the material.
  
  We have the commercial models, we have the publicly supported models. We also have the sharing or open-source models. I mentioned three here, WikiEducator, Curriki, and Wikiversity.
  
  They are all initiative that use a wiki, which is simply a website that anybody can read and anybody can edit. They use these websites to create courses or to create curriculum.
  
  The model they follow is Wikipedia, only they use the Wikipedia model, instead of creating an encyclopedia, they create coursework. Good idea.
  
  David Wylie -- remember him? -- created a wiki for his course in open educations, the course that he taught at Utah State University and, later on, at Brigham Young University. The idea that he had was to make the course materials that he was offering his class not just readable, but editable by anybody.
  
  Reinhard Weiner wrote up a whole bunch of his classes for him. Well, I didn't write the whole class, but I wrote bits and pieces and added stuff and gave myself all kinds of credit.
  
  Man 1: Good tip.
  
  Stephen: Alec Couros, who's an instructor in Saskatchewan, Canada, launched open courses and what he did is he opened up his online communications environment. He was using, and still uses, I think, a product called Illuminate. Today it's called Blackbird Collaborate.
  
  What he did is he said, "I'm having my course in Illuminate at such-and-such a time. My class, from here in Saskatchewan, will join me, and anyone else in the world who wants to join me can do so as well.
  
  Now, that was pretty cool. His [indecipherable 1:03:09] and there's people from around the world were sitting in on Alec's classes and interacting and discussing the topic of the day.
  
  If you think about it, it was a way of giving the students in his class a way to become a part of a wider community. They wanted to learn of it, because now, instead of just talking to each other, they started talking to experts around the world.
  
  That also happened in David Wylie's class. Now, instead of just getting content from the professor, they were getting content from anywhere around the world.
  
  What's really cool here, I think, is by opening the content and opening the interaction, we're almost able enough to blend these two major threads of distance learning, the content and the interaction. Opening them both, we can make them both work together just in the same way we did with e-learning, just in the same way we did in things like [indecipherable 1:04:27] and informal learning. Now we're doing this in an institutional environment.
  
  The very first Nice chain to be called massive open online courses. When you first look at them, they're a horrible mess. What they are really is a combination of all of the things that I've been talking about so far in this talk. All of the different pieces of the puzzle come together to form these massive open online courses.
  
  The very first MOOC was hosted by George Simmons and myself. It was called "Connectivism and Connected Knowledge" and we launched it in 2008. This picture is a representation created by one of the students in the class. It was a representation of a class. We didn't do this. We couldn't do this.
  
  The idea here of MOOCs is to take the concept of open content, the concept of open interaction and open community, and the concept of open classes and bring them all together. That's exactly what we did.
  
  We offered it out of the University of Manitoba. It was a credit course and the students who were enrolled in the University of Manitoba needed to do some assignments and we opened it up to anyone in the world and we had nearly 300 people join us and that was a real surprise to us. That's when open online courses became massive open online courses.
  
  How did we design this? Remember, we are creating a network and remember that to learn is to create a network, knowledge is the state of the network. I asked what constitutes successful knowledge, successful networks? That's a good question. We all know about networks that can fail. The power grid is a network. When we have a blackout it fails. A community of people is a network, but if a disease comes through and wipes out half of the population that's a failure.
  
  These things are called cascade phenomenon. What it is is the network is effected by a force that attacks every entity all at once and it leads to segmentation and network fail. A viral idea or a piece of propaganda is a cascade phenomenon. You have an idea. It can be something simple like a tune, like a [indecipherable 1:07:55] tune maybe. They were pretty viral. One person says it and then two people and four people and eight people and eventually everybody's singing a hit song.
  
  An idea like racism. Again, one of these viruses that starts in one place and they can spread through society as a cascade phenomenon. It's an example of network failure. You need to design networks so that they can grow, so that they can adapt, so that they can change, so that they can learn. Just the same way as humans. You need to design humans in the same way except you don't get to design humans. It's hard. You don't really get to design societies, either. They're too large for one person to design.
  
  What you do is you can design the pieces that go together. You can design the properties that, when combined, will lead to more effective network. This is what I call the semantic principle. Sorry about the name. What these are, are my idea of principles of successful networking. I don't pertain that they're necessarily true or that all of these can only lead to work but they are what I see at this point in time from my vantage point.
  
  Autonomy, diversity, openness, and interactivity. Diversity. You think about a network, you think about a successful network. A successful network is made of pieces that are different from each other, not the same. Imagine you had a conversation where everybody said the same thing. Imagine you had a debate where everybody had the same idea. These would not be productive. They would not lead to anything interesting. Networks need diversity.
  
  Networks need individuals with different points of view. One of the things that we really tried to promote when we designed our MOOCs was to promote the idea that people would read different things and not the same things. We did not have a single assigned text. We had 100. Nobody can read 100 texts but you would pick and choose from those texts and then everybody would have a different perspective and that's how we had interesting conversations.
  
  Openness. We need to be open to new information. Closed systems become stagnant. Closed systems literally choke on their own waste. The system has to have input, has to have output. Raw materials that come in, finished product that goes out. The idea here is for any communication to happen there needs to be an open flow from one entity to the next entity. This is why so often we find openness in conflict with commercialization, because commercialization very often, not always, but very often is based on a model of closing what was previously open.
  
  Autonomy. This is a hard principle for many people to accept, but it's the idea that each individual manages his or her own learning. As John Stuart Mill said, "Each person in a society perceives his own good in his own way." This is essential to produce diversity. This is essential to produce communication and interaction. It is essential to support learning.
  
  If you do not have autonomy then the knowledge of one becomes the knowledge of everyone. If the one is corrupt then everyone is corrupt. Autonomy is what protects the system from cascade phenomena that damage the network as a whole.
  
  Finally, interactivity. This is the idea that I was talking about earlier that knowledge is created by the interaction between the members. It's really important to think of this because in traditional learning, remember the transactional theory of learning where the knowledge is in the head of the professor and then will be put into the head of the student. This model isn't like that. In this model, the knowledge is created by the interactions.
  
  When we interact with each other, we as a group, or maybe not a group, but we as a network will create knowledge that only the networks could create because it's too large for any one individual. Then each individual in the network will look at that knowledge that we created and learn their own thing from it. All of us together form a society. That society is greater than any one of us. Then each of us individually draws an individual meaning, individual knowledge, from that society.
  
  That gives us a story about MOOC pedagogy. That gives us a story about self-directed, informal learning where the process is informal rather than the content, where the emphasis is on selecting these resources, finding these resources, creating them, mashing them up, mixing them, using them to communicate with each other.
  
  The pedagogy of MOOCs is the pedagogy of immersion into a community, of interaction with that community. The technology supporting the MOOC is the technology that has been used to support these learning object repositories, these social networks and social networking sites, these individual places where you can create content, these RSSs that join content together.
  
  Think about the sort of content repositories you have now. One famous content repository that, all at once, was called the Khan Academy. All the Khan Academy was, originally, was a bunch of individuals. Very badly done, but well enough done that they worked. They weren't produced by a professional corporation. They were produced by some guy who knew a little math and physics and wanted to share. That was our learning object repository.
  
  It's not a horrible institution that created objects anymore. It's a community based model. When it began, Khan Academy was a community based model. Then the Gates Foundation got a hold of him and it's not community anymore. It moved into a different model which will eventually lead, in my mind, to commercialization.
  
  There are different technologies. There are a huge, huge range of technologies today for creating, updating, polling, and sampling these repositories. I mentioned Sword, which is a deposit for polling contributed content to a repository, Core, which is a way to connect repositories, and Saw. This top is too short to allow me to even begin to list these, but, trust me, there is a lot of technology for creating and linking repositories.
  
  Interesting work that is about to begin, that is beginning, is our ability to build personal learning environments and MOOCs that tap into repositories. This is software I built in order to do this task. It's called Grasshopper. The model is really very simple. You get input from community, input from content. You put it into a database. You turn your content into data. You mix it and mash it up and then you send it forward as email letters, as web pages, or as RSS or other feeds that will feed into somebody else's Grasshopper.
  
  This is also a model of the activity that individuals are expected to perform when they take a MOOC. Aggregate, re-mix, re-purpose, feed forward. That is the pedagogical design of a MOOC, at least the MOOCs the way they should be. In this environment, we are working with open content and it works best with open content. As soon as we put a barrier then your aggregation and re-mixing begins to fail.
  
  We also opened not just the content, we opened the instruction itself. We opened the way we organize our courses. We combine our courses in a wiki. We opened up the course sections. The year 2008 we did two sessions a week. We had several hundred people at first join these. It got kind of chaotic but that was fun. Different degrees of openness lead to different types of open educational resources and different kinds of open courses.
  
  James Taylor or Jim Taylor from the University of Southern [indecipherable 1:19:47] has come up with what he calls a logic model, which is neither logical or a model but I digress. I'm kidding. Talking about different aspects of openness. Accessing open educational resources. Accessing open support via volunteers. This is what I would call accessing the community, interacting with the community.
  
  Open assessment. This is the next stage of these open online courses is open assessment. Then finally, open credentials, open degrees. There are degrees of openness here beyond what we have experienced thus far. We've begun to explore them in the MOOCs that we've begun following up.
  
  In CCK09, our second MOOC, much to our surprise, the students from CCK08 came back and then, even more to our surprise, they started teaching the course. We had competing teachers of the same course. It was all very interesting. Jim Grim's course, DS106, and I can do a whole talk on that, several talks, had an emphasis on projects and creativity. DS stands for digital storytime. It's about how you use different media to tell stories. They explore different types of media in different ways of telling stories.
  
  He opened that up and what he opened up was the list of assignments that he gives students. He said, "I don't want to be the one to decide on the assignments. You," to the world, "you come up with assignments and then the students will do them." people from all around the world suggested different assignments and it became creative channels. It was amazing. It was wonderful.
  
  Another course we did was critical literacies. That focused on the underlying skills because one of the common comments we have is people need to have certain literacies, certain basic abilities, in order to be able to learn for themselves. I gave a talk and asked could we use a MOOC to teach how best to use a MOOC? We use a MOOC to help people learn basic skills.
  
  It still is inclusive, I think, although we learned a lot. I started in 1995 with something called "Stephen's Guide to the Logical Fallacies" as my first open content. This whole idea of critical thinking and critical reasoning has been something interesting over the years. This is the latest phase of that. I think, personally, that we can indeed use distributed, open, online learning in order to foster the skills needed.
  
  You need to think of this as a process where people learn through immersion and they learn good argumentation through immersion. They can learn how to spot good resources through immersion. It's exactly how somebody learns how to make a salad or cook a steak. You put them in a kitchen, you tell them to do things, they begin to do things, they watch the master, and eventually they become it. It's the same with critical thinking. It's the same with critical limits.
  
  After we had been doing MOOCs for three years, commercial MOOCs came on the scene. The first one that was launched was the Stanford AI course last year. It attracted, I don't even know what the real numbers were, but something like 160,000 registrations. I think something like 40,000 people finished the course, I think. I don't know.
  
  Different sources have different numbers. The main message here is the numbers are huge. Then there were commercial spin-offs from this based on models like Khan Academy, based on the traditional elements model. The idea is they would be MOOC companies. They would offer courses that were very similar to the Stanford AI course.
  
  The Stanford AI course was not a MOOC the way we did it.
  
  The Stanford AI course was the course materials and the course sessions open and accessible online. Then assignments were given. What they added, which I thought was really interesting, was automated evaluations of submitted assignments. I find it very interesting that this model of content-focused MOOCs, which is what they are, they're content-focused MOOCs, there is no element of community in them, these models came out of the same places as creative comments, as MIT open source.
  
  They come out of MIT, Stanford, Harvard, the large commercial US universities. There's a certain way, a certain approach, that they have.
  
  Now, we're in a world of MOOCs and certainly in my world, and maybe in your world, when I read about educational technology today everyone is talking about MOOCs. MOOC this, MOOC that. We offered a MOOC on the future of higher education. I was at a website. Here it is again. www.mooc.ca. If you go to that you will find links to hundreds, maybe thousands, of MOOCs.
  
  MOOCs of the connectivist model that we use, we call them CMOOCs, MOOCs of the MIT, Stanford nexus or XMOOCs, MOOCs that are network based like the ones that George and I built, MOOCs that are task based like Jim Grune's DS106 with all the projects and assignments, MOOCs that are content based like Stanford AI. Of course there are other [indecipherable 1:27:17] .
  
  The future of MOOCs...I'm really sorry about this diagram. That's me drawing by hand inside the Illuminate environment, but it's a visual representation of the future of MOOCs. At the center, because there is a historical origin of this, are the content based XMOOCs. Around that center is the network, the community of practice, the interaction and participation. All of the elements that went into making the C, the individual creations, the sharing, the aggregation, re-mixing, re-purposing, forwarding. None of that is in the center. All of that happens outside of the center.
  
  In a university context, none of that is in the university. All of that happens outside the university. Outside of the CMOOC are the web services that people use. Twitter, Facebook, RSS, Google Plus. Hi, Google Plus people. Delicious. Outside all of that is open assessment. Open assessment may be priority assessment, it may be open assessment as in Indiragandhi national open university. It may be testing. There's a site called Brain Bench that does online testing. It may be [indecipherable 1:29:03] badges. This is the least well defined, but you can see this ecosystem being formed.
  
  This ecosystem is the future of online learning. So where are we going? I'm almost done with this talk. This is the good part so hang up your phones. What's coming very soon, maybe even tomorrow, who knows, I don't know, but soon, open educational apps. Of course. They're based on the app store model. What is the app store? The app store is an object repository. That's all it is, filled with products because it's commercial.
  
  We're moving to an environment, especially looking at Android, where there are open apps already available. There are a lot of commercial applications. If you're wondering about the future of books, the book becomes the e-book becomes the app. Instead of buying a physics text book you will buy a physics app. That's the content. You still need the community around that.
  
  MOOCs, with access to app repositories, people will use different apps, they're already beginning to use them, to create other apps and to share. That's why you need open apps, so everybody can use them. These, in turn, as they get more and more interesting, educational content will be supported by things like IMSs, learning technology integration. All that is is language that allows one app to launch another app.
  
  Remember back in the 1990s we used to have launchers. Now we have learning technology interaction. The idea is if you have a learning resource and you have access to online MOOCs and that learning resource wants to start a chat you use LTI and starts the chat. If you use the same resource on a different MOOC you use LTI to launch a different chat. It's a bit complicated, well, it's a lot complicated. In essence, it is a way one thing can launch another thing the same way even though it's not the same as the first one. That wasn't clear at all. It's an app launcher. With the app launcher in MOOCs, an open app market will emerge.
  
  Here's the same concept represented visually. You see how bad the text based engine is. You have all these different kinds of systems, your learning management systems that I talked about at the start, MOOCs, and they use something like a launcher, LTI, so launch, eliminate, or big blue button or a PhD application or perhaps a spreadsheet or widget. The idea of LTI is that it is connecting distributed applications to educational worlds.
  
  The next step is we move beyond the idea of stand alone courses at all. This is already beginning to happen. When it hits it's going to be this huge wave. Right now, the model is a course belongs to a university or a course belongs to a college or a course belongs to a school. What if it didn't? What if the course was just out there? Then the university accessed the course as an external resource?
  
  That's what's happening. That's what the course server model is. They have a very narrow definition of a course, but basically you have a course and then all of these university partners access this course. If you have one course being accessed by a university, why not by two universities? Why not by three universities?
  
  Even better, why not have the people of one university communicate with the people in the other university? Why not have these people communicate with the wider community? You have this idea of the course at the center, it's that same picture we had earlier, the badly drawn picture, the course at the center shared by different universities. It becomes the nexus for a community, the nexus for a community practice, around that particular course.
  
  In the far future, courses will be out there on their own. They'll have their own management, their own structure. Or maybe not. They might just be a self-organizing community that a university taps into. You sign up for physics at MIT and your professor say good, sign up to the global physics community network. That's your course. Interesting. Makes you wonder why you're paying MIT $35,000 a year. Assessment models are going to change dramatically.
  
  Now already, today, there is commercialized assessment that stands apart from courses. Here is the model. Again, this is part of the courses and part of the university's plan. You sign up for your course at MIT. The professor says, "Here is the worldwide physics community. Go there, learn something, come back to me."
  
  You go there. Now you're in the worldwide physics community. You're interacting with all the people and you're learning from learning objects and watching videos and then you go back to the MIT professor and the MIT professor says, "OK. Now we have an assessment for you." He sends you to the Washington Post Kaplan assessment service. You do your assessment and then Kaplan sends back your assessment results to MIT and MIT gives you a degree and you've just received an MIT education. Only $34,000.
  
  In the far future, this model would be subverted because people will realize that it is ridiculous. In the far future, the idea of an assessment service will make less and less sense because you have been participating in MOOCs. You have been participating in your community. You have shared your content, your communication with other people. You have made connections. They know you. They know your ideas. You begin to develop a reputation in that community.
  
  That reputation in the community is your assessment. Right now it's very simplistic. We have clouts that counts the number of Twitter followers and says if you have a large number of Twitter followers you must be very intelligent. Pretty stupid. Pretty simplistic. That's what killed my clout. Imagine if you're using big data network analytics so that if you write a post or you create some content a system can track the ripple effect of that content through the network. It can see the influence that you have, can see the push back that is created, which is also good.
  
  You want people not just to agree with you but to disagree with you. The worst thing that can happen is if you are ignored. Seeing who is listening to you, seeing who is arguing with you, seeing where you place in that network. Where you place is a set of coordinates. That set of coordinates is a grade. That's assessment of the future. Almost done.
  
  Sustainability. How on Earth are we going to pay for this? $34,000 MIT degrees is not going to work. There are many, many people now attempting to defend traditional education with traditional classes and traditional universities and at the top you have MIT and Stanford and all the same people who take these ideas and commercialize them. Then you have your mid-level universities like University of Alberta, University of Toronto, and then you have Frank's Garage College or whatever.
  
  This model won't work. This model will be replaced, must be replaced, by a community based model and the reason for that is in the long term it's the only sustainable model. It's the only way to pay for a system that enables everybody to be educated.
  
  What you're going to see developing over time, what we are already seeing develop over time, is this community infrastructure. This is very often the part that is going to be provided by a social service or a government entity.
  
  Some entity with the resources to create a communications infrastructure and the interest to see it happen. Governments understand the need for communications infrastructure and the need for a certain level of education that is provided for everybody. That's why your government has invested so much in education. That is why my government has invested so much in education.
  
  There is a dramatic relation between education in society and the level of achievement and the standard of living in that society. This is why governments find this so important and why, in my mind, they should find it even more important than they do.
  
  You will have a commercial layer. It would be foolish to think there would not be specialist commercial services and there will always be competition between these services and the government infrastructure. That's just a little bit at the center.
  
  The vast bulk of learning will be these communities that are created. It doesn't show up well on that slide. I should rewrite that slide. The vast bulk of education will be content communities where learning content is created by the learners themselves and then shared with each other.
  
  It's an iterative process. It's a process that actually feeds into the professional domain of activity. I'll give you an example of what I mean. Climate monitoring will be something that is very important to people in the future. What is the air temperature, what is the rainfall, what is the wind? You need to get very good, very precise data from a wide number of locations. It's not just at the airport.
  
  People that are experts in climatology would design this system. Professors will be involved. Designers, instrument designers, will be involved. The guy who goes out and installs the weather station will be involved. Students, as well, will be involved. Individual students will play individual roles.
  
  The way to think of climate monitoring as a profession is to think of it as this large network with the experts very tightly connected and interacting at the center and then loosely connected to professionals and then more loosely connected to technicians and then even more loosely connected to students. But everybody playing a role in the actual work of measuring the climate.
  
  You don't have the artificial climate student center and then the real climate. Everybody's involved in actual climate measuring, actual climate modeling, actual climate predictions. Learning becomes a member of the profession. Being a member of the profession means being a learner in that profession. Everybody learns, everybody teaches, everybody creates, everybody consumes. As a whole, you create an educational system out of this.
  
  At the edges, the very edges, you have commercial media, you have commercial support, you have products that people buy, Internet access, computers, things like that that have to be paid for. At the center you have the government infrastructure, the core that makes the entire system possible. The bulk of learning in this model is the big middle, the donut that is composed of all of society. That isn't an actual model. I just made it up. I just made up that analogy, but that is the
• 

  Feel Want Willing

  Posted: March 4, 2013, 7:14pm COT

  Another response to a Joanne Jacobs blog post, this one called 'To fix college, ban ‘I feel’'
  
  When I was working for Texas Instruments I took a number of courses at their learning centre (Job Entry Subsystem, Multiple Virtual Storage, fun stuff like that). One of the courses was a communications course called "On the Way Up."
  
  The central theme of this course was a communications methodology called "feel-want-willing". Basically, it encouraged you to express your needs in three steps:
  - feel - describe the problem you face in terms of how it makes you feel
  - want - state what you want as a way to resolve the problem
  - willing - state what you are willing to do in order to achieve what you want
  
  The first stage isn't empty. It tells the other person how the problem is affecting you, developing a sense of urgency and empathy. The idea is that if the other person sees the consequence of the problem, and not just the symptoms, they can respond with something that solves the underlying issue, and not just the symptoms.
  
  Why is this important? If you skip the first stage - or can't express what it is that really bothers you about something - your communications with others become just a repeated set of "I want I want" statements. The other person, if they care what you want at all, tries one after another band-aid solution without ever solving the problem.
  
  I know there's a whole school of thought out there that thinks "I feel" is self-indulgent and inefficient, and should be banned from education altogether.
  
  But from my perspective, this would result in a generation of students who do not understand how to solve problems, express business needs, or satisfy customers.
  
  Because despite the way we objectively measure need, means and motive in today's economy, the driving force behind any enterprise, whether it be physics or rental cars, is meeting the needs, as expressed by the feelings, of some person.
  
  People may be objectively hungry, but what makes them eat is that they feel hungry. Ignoring this fundamental reality makes students not merely bad students, but bad employees and bad business-people.
• 

  Why Numbers Exist

  Posted: March 3, 2013, 4:15pm COT

  
  
   by Stephen Downes
  
  One exists to show us the way
  It is the self, it is today
  It is the place where we departed
  It is the one to get us started
  
  Two exists to join me to you
  It is the pair, it is the glue 
  It is the way we start out with math
  It is the choice, the fork in the path
  
  Three exists to give us hope
  It is the plan, the way we cope
  Three keeps us level looking ahead
  It is the rumple left in the bed
  
  Four exists to even the score
  Strong and square, the table, the door
  It is the meal we share to stay strong
  The hammer we wield to right the wrong
  
  Five exists to lead us beyond
  To see the night before it dawned
  Five is the spirit, the star, the cult
  The hand of man, the final result
  
  Six exists to show us the road
  It is the balance in the load
  Calmness and reason, power of sight
  It is the way, the path and the light
  
  Seven exists to hand out fate
  It is the luck we all await
  It is the random we see in chance
  It is the change we make in the dance
  
  Eight exists to give us our due
  It is reward, it is the new
  It is good fortune reaped from the land
  It is the harvest we always planned
  
  Nine exists to be the best
  Of mice and men and all the rest
  A sense of spirit and justice combined
  The steel we forge from iron refined
  
  Ten exists to give us measure
  Ways to add and count our treasure
  To understand that our greatest worth
  Is what we were given at our birth
  
  Eleven exists to imply
  A wink, a smile, a batted eye
  It reminds us that we need to smile
  To take a break and laugh a while
  
  Twelve exists to top the hour
  To mark the months our lives devour
  And on the days our lives seem hollow
  To keep our minds on those who follow
  
  Thirteen exists as a warning
  Lest we spend our lives in mourning
  A baker's dozen may feel quite nice
  But excess always comes with a price
  
  The other numbers are combined
  With proportion in each assigned
  A more complex universe begun
  By weight of the factors barring none
  
  The primes exist to keep us true
  For there's always something new
  The are like nature's memorandum
  To keep an eye out for the random
  
  Zero does not exist at all
  We made it so that we recall
  That though it all may seem so stringent
  It really just is quite contingent
• 

  Poor Snow Removal

  Posted: February 28, 2013, 5:28pm COT

  Hiya City of Moncton (Please distribute to Council)
  
  February 28, 2013. The snow-blower came up my road today, which is nice, because it gets too narrow to drive on, especially with people parking to go to the nearby hospital. But look at this - behind it, the snow-blower left a foot of ice and snow, leaving that space impassible to cars - just like it was before. So one wonders, what's the point of removing the snow if you leave a foot of it behind?
  
  
  
  I suppose I should be happy - it really seems like the City has a policy of not plowing the roads on weekends (or at least keeping staff minimal).
  
  While I'm writing, I wonder if someone could explain to me why the sidewalks along Portledge Avenue are plowed (when they're plowed, which is infrequently) on the west side of the road. This was started last year, and continued this year, despite being against City policy for sidewalk clearing, and despite being the least useful sidewalk for people struggling through the ice and snow to get to the Dumont Hospital. I would like the city to follow its own policy and clear the proper side of Portledge.
  
  I continue to be puzzled by the City's sidewlk clearing policy. In particular, I'm puzzled by the frequent sidewalk-plow traffic on Motron Avenue, not actually plowing the sidewalk along that road (even when it really needs it) but just up and down the road - this traffic occurs daily, whether there has been snow recently or not. It seems that when there's no snow, the sidewalk plows are very busy, but when the snow falls, they disappear.
  
  
  -- Stephen
  
  

Blog de Andrés Chiappe - Objetos de Aprendizaje - Learning Objects

• 

  Algunas reflexiones acerca de los Ambientes de Aprendizaje, virtuales o físicos.

  Posted: February 27, 2013, 12:35pm COT

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  Un cuestionamiento que muy a menudo se genera con mis estudiantes de Maestría en Informática Educativa en La Universidad de La Sabana tiene que ver con entender la figura de los Ambientes de Aprendizaje y reconocer la gran diversidad de matices asociados a estos.
  Surgen preguntas como:¿Qué componentes tienen?, ¿En que se diferencia uno físico a uno virtual?, ¿Un material educativo digital es en si mismo un Ambiente de aprendizaje?, o, ¿son los Ambientes de Aprendizaje los que contienen los materiales educativos digitales?
  Pues bien, a raíz de estos cuestionamientos me pareció adecuado documentar algunas reflexiones iniciales en esta materia y por supuesto, aún más conveniente me pareció socializarlos en este blog.Una primera precisión: Los interesados en este tema encontrarán mucha bibliografía que se expresa tanto en términos de “ambiente “ como de “entorno”. Con algunas mínimas diferencias semánticas, finalmente estamos hablando de lo mismo, es decir , lo que rodea, aquellas condiciones o circunstancias que hacen posible que un proceso de aprendizaje se lleve a cabo. Ahora bien, en el marco de la educación formal, el aprendizaje y la enseñanza son dos caras de una misma moneda, es decir que si bien son dos fenómenos diferentes, son interdependientes, tienen una estrecha relación entre sí. En ese orden de ideas, cabría la posibilidad de asumir una cierta equivalencia práctica (no semántica) entre los ambientes de aprendizaje y los ambientes de enseñanza.
  Quisiera traer a esta reflexión unos párrafos de un documento recientemente escrito sobre lineamientos institucionales para la educación virtual, en los cuales se expone una cierta conceptualización en esta materia:
  -->
  “Un ambiente de enseñanza y de aprendizaje es un escenario físico y/o virtual estructurado con la intención de lograr unos objetivos de aprendizaje concretos, a través de la articulación de diversos elementos como estrategias, métodos, actividades de aprendizaje y recursos educativos. Esto significa un proceso reflexivo en el que se atiende a las preguntas del qué, cómo y para qué se enseña (Coll, 1994, pág. 31).
  En él intervienen diferentes actores como el docente, los estudiantes, el currículo, los recursos educativos y las TIC como agentes mediadores que proveen los elementos necesarios para la interacción, la comunicación, el intercambio y la conceptualización de los estudiantes.
  En el marco de la educación virtual, usualmente los ambientes de aprendizaje son producto de la intencionalidad del docente o de grupos interdisciplinarios de diseño instruccional, de los cuales hace parte el mismo docente. Sin embargo, existen casos en los que esta intencionalidad responde solo a los intereses y expectativas del estudiante; un ejemplo de lo anterior es la construcción de un Ambiente Personal de Aprendizaje.”
  
  Ahora bien, para profundizar en las complejidades propias de un Ambiente Virtual de Aprendizaje, valdría la pena profundizar primero en los entornos digitales, como el sustrato sobre el cual se desarrollan conceptualmente.
  Uno de los grandes aportes de las ultimas dos décadas del siglo pasado fue la consolidación y crecimiento de las Tecnologías de la Información y Comunicación (TIC) entendidas en palabras de Adell (1997) como “el conjunto de procesos y productos derivados de las nuevas herramientas (hardware y software), soportes de la información y canales de comunicación relacionados con el almacenamiento, procesamiento y transmisión digitalizados de la información.”
  Esta definición propone un aspecto muy interesante a considerar y que dirige la atención hacia la naturaleza digital de la información. Si bien es posible considerar que en un contexto amplio las TIC no se circunscriben exclusivamente al ámbito de lo digital, seria necio negar que la tendencia general apunta a que dicho tipo de información (digital) es cada vez más la razón de ser de las TIC.
  Todos los aspectos de la vida personal, grupal y social de las personas se desarrollan en un entorno comunicativo que, antes o después, mientras trabaja o descansa, cuando consume o cuando produce, se va a ver traducido a ceros y unos, que corren a la velocidad de la luz. (Sierra, 2010, p. 310)
  Otra verdad de a puño tiene que ver con que las TIC han  permeado todas las esferas de interacción del ser humano en la actualidad, tanto que se ha empezado a considerar desde hace unos años la existencia de un entorno de interacción paralelo al que llamamos “real”. Según Negroponte (1995), lo anterior denota a “lo digital” como el factor que permite la existencia de “lugares sin espacio” .
  “Si realmente pudiera mirar por la ventana electrónica de mi living en Boston y ver los Alpes, escuchar los cencerros de las vacas y oler la bosta (digital) bajo el sol de verano, en cierta forma "estoy" en Suiza. Si en lugar de ir a trabajar conduciendo mis átomos en dirección a la ciudad, me conecto con mi oficina y realizo mi tarea en forma electrónica, ¿dónde está ubicado exactamente mi lugar de trabajo?” (Negroponte, 1995, p. 6)
  Es en la posibilidad de estarsin ataduras espaciales en la que se sitúa el concepto “entorno digital”, el cual se propone al menos en dos dimensiones, una de carácter perceptual y otra, no desligada de la anterior, que se ocupa del flujo de la información. En ese orden de ideas es posible entender los entornos digitales, desde el punto de vista perceptual como un asunto de representación distinta de nuestra realidad.
  “El término digital nos arroja en un territorio físicamente inexistente, por eso se utiliza también el término virtual que es una metáfora para indicar lo que está debajo: el proceso de cálculo digital.[…]Nuestra percepción —es decir, la realidad macroscópica— es un mundo de continuidad, nada aparece y desaparece de golpe; la realidad de nuestra percepción cotidiana es una realidad modulada, de transiciones. Pero la representación digital es una modelación de nuestra percepción, donde nos encontramos con estados que son o no son (los bits), sin transición. En un entorno digital estamos dentro de una realidad diferente: la realidad de lo imperceptiblemente discontinuo como fundante.” (Bosch, 2002, p. 37)
  En esta manera de reconocer los entornos digitales cabrían desde luego los desarrollos de realidad virtual, realidad aumentada e inclusive los espacios de interacción no inmersivos que se despliegan a través de los browsers o de las interfaces de los dispositivos móviles o los computadores personales e inclusive podría reconocerse como sinónimo del ciberespacio[1].
  La otra manera de entender el entorno digital se sitúa en el ámbito de lo ubicuo y lo imperceptible para el ser humano y su asunto principal radica en el almacenamiento y flujo de la información digital. Dicha información está y se mueve por un entorno sobre el cual no tenemos oportunidad de adentrarnos con nuestros sentidos, sin embargo por esa razón no deja de estar y de moverse. En ese orden de ideas el entorno digital estaría compuesto por artefactos cuyo funcionamiento y propósito son parte del resorte de lo digital. Interactuamos con aparatos que se muestran físicos para nosotros y que hacen parte de una red de flujo y almacenamiento de información digital.
  Relacionado con lo anterior, García, Portillo, Romo y Benito (2007, p. 3) hacen referencia a los “Nativos digitales” como: “el término que describe a los estudiantes, menores de 30 años, que han crecido con la tecnología y, por lo tanto, tienen una habilidad innata en el lenguaje y en el entorno digital. Las herramientas tecnológicas ocupan un lugar central en sus vidas y dependen de ellas para todo tipo de cuestiones cotidianas como estudiar, relacionarse, comprar, informarse o divertirse.”
  Bibliografía
  Adell, J. (1997). Tendencias en educación en la sociedad de las tecnologías de la información. Revista Electrónica de Tecnología Educativa , [online].Negroponte, N. (1995). Ser Digital. Buenos Aires: Editorial Atlántida.Bosch, M. (2002). La gestión del conocimiento en el medio digital: viejos problemas de tratamiento de información y aspectos nuevos. Ciencias de la Información , 33 (1), 35-44.Sierra, J. (2010). Mapa de ruta actual de la alfabetización: TICD el tratamiento de la información y la competencia digital o enseñar a leer, escribir y publicar en el siglo XXI. Concept Maps: Making Learning Meaningful - Fourth International Conference on Concept Mapping (pp. 305-315). Viña del Mar: J.Sánchez, A.J.Cañas, J.D.Novak, Eds.García, F., Portillo, J., Romo, J., & Benito, M. (2007). Nativos digitales y modelos de aprendizaje. Retrieved 03 31, 2011, from IV Simposio Pluridisciplinar sobre Diseño, Evaluación y Desarrollo de Contenidos Educativos Reutilizables SPDECE: [spdece07.ehu.es]
  
  
  
  [1] El término Cyberspace, fue acuñado por el autor de ciencia ficción estadounidense William Gibson, para describir la cadena de recursos de información disponibles a través de redes de computadoras o telemáticas (DAT No 131, Bs.As., julio/1999, pág.20)
  

Half an Hour

• 

  Current e-learning practice

  Posted: February 27, 2013, 9:08am COT

  I was asked, what areas would you recommend I focus on …  to illustrate  current e-learning practice?
  
  If it were me, I would do a three-stage presentation:
  
  - first, I’d show some COTS language-training and/or skills development software, typically what you can but from the computer store or download from an app store. The particular software doesn’t really matter – most people have heard of Rosetta Stone, that might be a start. I’d point out the strengths – self-management, self-pacing – but also the limitations of working from a CD or app on your computer.
  
  - then I’d show an online course offered in an LMS such as Desire2Learn, Moodle or Blackboard from a college or university. Maybe something from the U of M. The idea here is to highlight the differences – point to the interactivity and discussion, the cohort-based timeline, etc. I'd talk about synchronous learning environments that are used, and maybe some offshoots, like gaming and simulations, or mobile computing.
  
  - finally I’d show a MOOC or open online course. Being me, I’d probably show change11 [change.mooc.ca] but any MOOC would be OK. The idea here would be to show how MOOCs retain the interactivity and cohorts, but return some of the control over subject matter and format back to the student. Also the way MOOCs (or some MOOCs at least) incorporate social media such as Twitter, GGroups, blogs, etc. into the course materials. Also, I’d talk about price - $100 vs $1000 vs free
  
  This would pretty much capture the domain.
  
  

Blog de Andrés Chiappe - Objetos de Aprendizaje - Learning Objects

• 

  Arranca maratón-concurso de producción colaborativa de un video educativo - Starts marathon-contest of collaborative production of an educational video

  Posted: February 15, 2013, 9:22am COT

  
  Heyyy, quieres participar? Es una carrera colaborativa conta el reloj. Trabaja con tu red de contactos y produce un video educativo abierto.
  La información esta ACA
  @mcrealibre #mcrealibre2013
  
  Vamos!!!
  --------
  
  Heyyy, you want to participate? It is a collaborative race against the clock. Work with your network friends and produce an open educational video. If you are non spanish speaker you can participate too!!
  
  Information HERE
  @mcrealibre #mcrealibre2013
  
  Let´s go!!!

Ideas fascinantes

• 

  El Futuro del Aprendizaje: Una mirada de Sugatra Mitra

  Posted: February 9, 2013, 3:08pm COT

  Interesante mirada del profesor Sugatra Mitra sobre el futuro del aprendizaje y la educación; en esta charla el profesor Mitra hace un recorrido por los "orígenes" de la escuela reflexionando sobre las des-materialización que viene sufriendo la tecnología.
  

Half an Hour

• 

  My Scholarly Contributions

  Posted: January 31, 2013, 7:11am COT

  I was asked, "I am interested in your perspective on what you feel may be the greatest scholarly contribution you have made in the area of online learning, particularly your recent contributions on OER?  I also noted from your website that the focus of your research interests has shifted during your career and I am curious to know what prompted the change in research interest?  Was it an evolution of the use of technology as technology matured?  The interest of government and other funding sources?  A personal interest that was sparked by insights or events?  I would also like to know if there is any advice that you could give me as I attempt to make a meaningful contribution as an academic and perhaps even have some influence on the quality and availability of education around the world?"
  
  I don't really sort my contributions into linear order, and hence would hesitate to identify a 'greatest' contribution. Among the major work I have done:
  - defining a community-based sustainability model for OERs
  - designing content syndication mechanisms for learning resources
  - learning networks (ie., both using networks to learn, and learners as networks that learn), aka connectivism
  - massive open online learning, which is a combination of the three things above
  - the groups vs networks distinction, characterized by autonomy, openness, etc
  - the induction model of learning (ie, learning is not content transfer)
  (I may have left some out; I really don't keep score)
  - critical literacies and speaking in lolcats 
  
  Key events changing or modifying my interests:
  - I began life interested in the sciences, social sciences and media
  - I took up computer science in 1979 at the advice of my father, who worked in communications technology
  - I started studying philosophy in 1981 because all the English courses I needed fo my physics major were full
  - I began my focus on access to education writing with the student newspaper because I was denied access for so long
  - I was offered a job as a tutor at Athabasca University in 1987, which began my interest in distance education
  - Jeff McLaughlin and Istevan Berkeley introduced me to online games, MUDs, in 1992 or so
  - I discovered Connectionism in the early 1990s, saw Francesco Varela at UA Hospital, attended the Connectionism conference at SFU
  
  Government and funding agencies have never been interested in my work. My PhD committee at the U of A absolutely refused to consider my dissertation proposal on connective models of learning, inference and discovery (see here). My employers have generally opposed my development of an academic and research career (even now I am under a full travel ban, which I am defying by speaking at conferences on vacation time and at my own expense).
  
  Advice? Only this: find what you consider to be right and true, and pursue that. Not that this is not the path to material well-being or a successful career, though sometimes good things happen anyways. Do what you need to do to stay employed, but as the old sea-faring slogan goes for riggers working on the mast, use one hand for the ship, but keep one hand for yourself. But in all that, focus your work on serving others, not enriching yourself, because your work will have no value to you otherwise. Write from the heart; don't be a slave to academic form, but don't ignore it. Back up your reasoning with evidence, and reason soundly from what you know and what you have experienced, not what you have been told. Understand that argument rarely convinces anyone of anything, that an understanding of principles of reasoning is to protect yourself from error, not to correct other people in theirs, that time spent explaining what you are doing and why will often pay off, but not everyone will support you, and often nobody will, but if you are true to these principles, that won't matter. And, at the end of life, the only thing that will matter to you will be what you gave to the world, not what you took from it. Share.
• 

  Where's Our Corporate Tax Referendum?

  Posted: January 30, 2013, 5:08pm COT

  The big news today is that New Brunswick Premier David Alward is willing to consider a referendum on the HST. CBC News reports, "the provincial government could hold a referendum on an increase in the harmonized sales tax before the 2014 provincial election."
  
  Alternatively, the proposed HST increase could simply become an issue in the next provincial election, as the local newspaper suggsts today, with Alward running against it. No doubt the newspaper would enjoy that; it would be like the toll highway debate.
  
  As David W. Campbell observes, "if Al Hogan turns lock stock and barrel against you – you end up with 11 straight days with the front page story on the evils of toll highways. By election day poor old Camille Theriault had little horns coming out the sides of his head."
  
  The last thing we need is to have our electoral politics decided by our sad and biased little local newspaper.
  
  So I say - by all means, hold the referendum. But while we're holding the referendum, let's put some of the other taxes to the vote, too. In particular, why don't we find out what the electorate thinks about the corporate tax rate.
  
  After all - as was widely reported outside the traditional media today - it's Corporate Tax Freedom Day today - the day corporations finish paying their 'share' to the government of Canada, and begin paying themselves.
  
  (I listened to some whiny shill from the Canadian Taxpayer's Federation today on News 91.9 try to undercut the premise; he argued that corporations pay thirty-three percent of their net profits in tax, and that the corporate hoard of unused cash was created by their borrowing it - among other whoppers).
  
  We know how little corporations pay by looking how much rescinding the last corporate tax cut would raise. According to figures widely cited today, while raising the HST two percentage points would raise $270 million, and while rescinding the most recent income tax cut would raise 320 million, rescinding the previous corporate tax cut (which sent sent the lower rate down to 4.5 percent and the higher rate to 10 percent) would raise only $25 million.
  
  Of course, that just tell us how little tax corporations are paying. To put things in a little perspective here, let's keep in mind that the combined wealth of Arthur, James and John Irving is $8.07 billion. $25 million? They lose that in their couch cushions!
  
  So where are we in the world of corporate tax rates, anyways? The province is shrinking, there's almost no corporate investment coming in, and business is in the pits. So it must be the effect of high corporate taxes, right?
  
  No. In fact, the opposite - New Brunswick is rated as the lowest corporate tax province in the country. "The lowest METRs (Marginal Effective Tax Rates)  are in New Brunswick due to its relatively low corporate income tax rate of 10 percent, as well as the Atlantic Investment Tax Credit, which benefits the manufacturing and forestry industries."
  
  What does our government do in the face of a persistent deficit crisis? It lowers corporate property taxes - benefiting those starving industries like Costco and Walmart. "NB Power will save $1.5 million alone on its property tax bill once the policy is fully implemented, followed by J.D. Irving Ltd. ($800,000) and the Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan ($600,000)."
  
  Do you think that this is a tax measure that would be supported by the people in a tax referendum? It wasn't even supported by the province's Business Council, which is in fact recommending the government return corporate taxes to the 13 percent level (personally, I don't see why corporations which have billions of dollars can't pay taxes at the same rate I do, but that's another story).
  
  If pushing the corporate tax rate lower and lower would actually help the economy in this province, then I'd be in favour of at least thinking about it. But the evidence says otherwise. Corporate tax cuts are not some sort of magic cure for the economy. They do not create more jobs.
  
  Here's Rana Foroohar, in Time not too long ago: "Fundamentally, lower taxes aren’t the reason that businesses choose to invest, or not, in a certain country. As Warren Buffett told me when I interviewed him late last year, “The idea that American business is at a big disadvantage against the rest of the world because of corporate taxes is baloney in my view. In the 50s and 60s, corporate taxes were 52%, and we were making all kinds of [job] gains.”
  
  "True enough. In fact, you can see more and more evidence for the fact that business doesn’t locate in a particular country just because it’s cheaper to do so. Consider the recently released Harvard Business School study looking at insourcing and outsourcing decisions among 10,000 alumnae who are running American businesses.
  
  "The key reason for outsourcing wasn’t labor cost, but a combination of cost, proximity to market, and (most importantly) better worker skill sets abroad. In order for America to create jobs at home, we need to do the heavy lifting to reform education and develop workers who can do the sort of jobs businesses need them to do."
  
  But that's exactly the opposite of what our provincial government is doing. It's putting the squeeze on education and skills development. Remember just last fall, when education minister Jody Carr informed schools they'd only be getting 70 percent of their allocated funding?
  
  We have the money, apparently, to give tax breaks to Wal-Mart, but not to fund our children's education. Not because of any well-founded economic strategy, but because, um, well, ... why? We don't know.
  
  So, again, by all means, let's hold tax referenda. Let's get the issue out there. Let's have some kind of open debate on the matter (a real debate, not some Al; Hogan parody of a debate). How much is fair? How much should corporations pay to support the roads their tucks drive on, the trees they harvest, the skills of the people they employ, the health of the people who work for them?
  
  Let's have a referendum on corporate taxes. Let's have a referendum on how much the wealthy should pay in taxes. Let's also vote on the tax credits they get, the forgivable loans they get, and the other incentives they get. And then - and only then - should we have a referendum on the HST.
• 

  Progressive Taxation and Prosperity

  Posted: January 21, 2013, 6:31pm COT

  Responding to Justin Fox, editorial director of the Harvard Business Review Group, How big should a government be? in the Harvard Business Review blogs.
  
  Interesting discussion overall, and it would have been nice to see the actual data presented in the paper linked by the Washington Post article (instead of 'data table goes here' notices). It would be interesting to examine whether U.S. tax rates really are more progressive (and whether tax rates are really relevant at all to people without an income) but that would be t miss the main point.
  
  Which is this: while granting that government really should be bigger, Fox argues, "as his research also shows, it really can't be done just by raising income tax rates on the wealthy. The U.S. already has about the most progressive income tax system around. European social democracies tend to have flatter income taxes, plus value-added taxes that hit all consumers. They tax capital gains and dividends at lower rates than regular income, just as the U.S. does, but they also all have lower corporate tax rates than the U.S."
  
  But this doesn't follow. The proposition that the U.S. has a more progressive system than Europe does not entail that the U.S. system cannot be made even *more* progressive. Nor does it follow (from this assertion, at least) that making it more progressive would be a bad thing. Indeed, the difficulty with which tghe 'less progressive' tax regimes in Europe have had coping with the economic crisis suggests that having the means to tax windfall profits makes it easier for nations to cope with economic turmoil.
  
  This argument is pernicious because it infers that progressive taxation hurts growth - drawing from Peter Lindert the Washington Post article argues "European countries needed tax systems that could raise a lot of money without hurting growth, and only regressive consumption taxes fit the bill."
  
  The primary argument against progressive taxation, iterated in the Prasad and Deng paper (p. 27) is that income taxes penalize work effort in a way that regressive consumption taxes do not. Fox restates this point: "The economic logic behind all this is that progressive tax systems and means-tested social programs can carry with them big disincentives to work." An additional argument is that income taxes make the cost of government programs more apparent, prompting taxpayer backlashes. But none of this follows from the study either; it is speculation, at best advanced as putative explanation for the data, but not inherent in the data.
  
  More to the point, even if we accept the proposition that the U.S. has a more progressive system (and again, this is far from beyond dispute) nothing in the data supports any of the conclusions advanced in this article. For example, we find Switzerland, Canada and Australia all around the 28 percent income redistribution range, yet at opposite ends of the 'progressiveness' scale, with Switzerland not very progressive and Australia near the 'progressive' status of the U.S. On the other axis, we find Canada, Germany and Belgium all around 0.1 in the 'progressiveness' scale, but varying from 28 to almost 50 on redistribution, the opposite ends of the scale. So it seems very difficult to assert a correlation between progressiveness and redistribution without introducing a large number of caveats and qualifications.
  
  In fact, it is regressive taxation that is most obvious to the mass of people and which is most likely to create a voter backlash. Canada's Conservative government of the 1990s, after it introduced the Goods and Services Tax (GST), was reduced from a strong majority government to a 2-member rump. In Britain the Value Added Tax (VAT), introduced by the Conservatives in 1973, was followed by a Labour victory in 1974 and an even more extreme anti-tax government under Margaret Thatcher starting in 1979.
  
  The basis for economic success following the introduction of consumption tax is therefore not related to voter satisfaction with taxation levels. Rather, consumption taxes conferred on Europe, and later on Canada, an export advantage. These taxes replaced existing sales, corporate and manufacturing taxes. They were levied at the point of final consumption only; business-to-business transactions were exempt from the taxes. They thus represented a considerable state subsidy for export industry, financed by consumers, that created prosperity in increasingly competitive international markets, and especially against the United States.
  
  Europeans (and Canadians) have used this prosperity to support a range of social programs; these programs have in turn insulated the population from the worst effects of the economic downturn in those nations that could afford them. Would a GST or VAT help the United States? It may raise more revenue, but with corporate taxes already at historic lows, it will not generate an export advantage, and will not stimulate growth; indeed, the drop in consumption would create a recession, as it did in Britain in the 1970s and Canada in the 1990s, but on which, with no export upside, would be longer-lasting and more severe.
  
  In the face of recession, particularly a recession in which incomes have been hit hard and consumer spending is quite low, the best mechanism for recovery is to put more money into the hands of those most likely to spend it, which is as always the poor. This is what Stephen Harper did in Canada, reducing the GST by two percent. Because economic growth is hampered not by the disincentive to earn, but rather by the inability to spend. Indeed, the suggestion that higher taxation makes rich people work less hard is spurious and inaccurate; the wealth the rich earn year after year has little to do with their effort, and far more to do with the advantage derived from their existing wealth.
  
  To tell us, as this post does, that there is no point to taxing the rich is to build a fallacy onto a fabrication, to perpetuate the foolish presumption that it is the rich who generate wealth in an economy, and therefore only the poor who should pay for social programs. It is, frankly, an outrageous lie. Society requires not just the labour of its people to generate wealth, but also their active participation in the marketplace. When money flows disproportionately to the wealthy, they hoard it, or spend it frivolously.
• 

  What Makes a MOOC Massive?

  Posted: January 17, 2013, 2:43pm COT

  Responding to a LinkedIn Discussion.
  
  When people ask me what makes a MOOC 'massive' I respond in terms of the *capacity* of the MOOC rather than any absolute numbers.
  
  In particular, my focus is on the development of a network structure, as opposed to a group structure, to manage the course. In a network structure there isn't any central focus, for example, a central discussion. Different people discuss different topics in different places (Twitter, Google Groups, Facebook, whatever) as they wish.
  
  Additionally, my understanding is that for the course to be a *course* it has to be more than just a broadcast. Otherwise, 'Adventure Planet' is a MOOC. Or National Geographic Magazine is a MOOC. A course actually requires these interactive and skills development activities, rather than simply consumption of content.
  
  So what is essential to a course being a *massive* open online course, therefore, is that it is not based in a particular environment, isn't characterized by its use of a single platform, but rather by the capacity of the technology supporting the course to enable and engage conversations and activities across multiple platforms.
  
  In the first connectivist MOOC, for example, we have 170 individual blogs created by course participants (in Change11 we had 306 feeds). What made the course a MOOC is that these contributions were comprehended as a *part* of the course, and were all accessible to course participants, either directly, through the newsletter, or through alternative syndication using an OPML list.
  
  Similarly, there wasn't just a Twitter conversation, or Second Life event, that happened coincidentally with the course, but rather, these events outside the 'main platform' were construed as part of the course, and comprehended in the course description, relevant links, newsletters, etc.
  
  The big danger, to my mind, in a large online course is that through strong group-formation activities, it can become a small online course. This happens when a central clique or insider group is formed, or where you have inner circles and outer circles. The inner circle, for example, might expect and demand preferential access to and individual attention from the course facilitators.
  
  When this happens the dynamics of the course change - for example (and not these are my observations and opinions, not hard established fact) the primary value becomes cohesion and agreement, rather than diversity and distinct perspectives.
  
  When the course functions as a small group, there is an expectation that everyone will agree on the course content, objectives, and domain of discussion. But, in fact, to be a massive course, it must needs respect a wide variety of individual objectives, perspectives on course materials, and opinions about relevant topics of discussion (not to mention technological platform and language of 'instruction').
  
  Consequently, when I have been asked in the past what number a course needs to attain in order to be considered 'massive', after providing the caveat just given above, I provide the figure of 150, Dunbar's Number, as the cut-off line.
  
  Now to be clear, this would refer to *active* participants, and not merely the number of people who signed up. Thus for example the course that has 170 active blogs *does* qualify, while CFHE, which had 83 blogs, is on the cusp (it would need another 70 people active on other platforms, such as Twitter or Google Groups).
  
  Why Dunbar's number? The reason is that it represents the maximum (theoretical) number of people a person can reasonably interact with. How many blogs can a person read, follow and respond to? Maybe around 150, if Dunbar is correct. Which means that if we have 170 blogs, then the blogs don't constitute a 'core' - people begin to be selective about which blogs they're reading, and different (and interacting) subcommunities can form.
  
  I sketch the difference between 'groups and networks' in this diagram - [www.flickr.com]
• 

  Income Support

  Posted: January 9, 2013, 6:08pm COT

  Responding, again, to David W. Campbell, on  EI and local labour market distortions
  
  First. A statement that something "has a distorting effect on local labour markets" suggests that there is some natural 'non-distorted' state of those markets. One wonders what that state would be - does it include the 'distorting' effects of gender equity, the 'distorting' effects of minimum wage, the 'distorting' effects of government employment in the region? Or - more logically - should we not just conclude that use of the phrase 'distorting effects' is shorthand for "I have no argument here but I want to make the case anyway."
  
  Second. When you use the phrase "an income support program for seasonal workers" you suggest (as is typical in the media) that the primary beneficiaries are the employees. However, this "income support" mostly supports the industries that have been depending on governments to subsidize their operations, allowing them to hire people part time without vacation leave or other benefits. This is the sort of support large corporations and friends of the government routinely receive to subsidize their operations, but under a different guise.
  
  Without reasonable access to EI, people are not going to stay in the region unless they absolutely have to. If you want to develop a region economically, the first thing you have to do is ensure that the workforce has income security. Without that - under whatever name you call it - you have nothing at all. Conversely, the removal of income support is a very clear statement that the government is not interested in economic development. Which raises the question, what *is* it interested in?
• 

  The Times & Transcript Comes Out Swinging

  Posted: January 4, 2013, 4:04pm COT

  Our local newspaper in Moncton, the Times & Transcript, came out swinging today with an article attacking citizen journalism authored by new columnist Steve Malloy. The title sets the tone: "Even amateur news hounds should take responsibility."
  
  The article is of particular interest to me because, as a long-time blogger, newsletter author and sometime amateur journalist his criticisms are aimed squarely in my direction. One can only speculate whether the column is in response to the Moncton Free Press or has some other media in mind, but it still bears refuting.
  
  Malloy takes as his starting point the sad incident where a photographer captured an image of a man just seconds before he was killed by a subway in New York. Journalistic integrity didn't even cross his mind before he snapped the photo, writes Malloy. Maybe not, though the discussion continues.
  
  Although these photos were published in the New York Post, and not on some amateur journalist's website, Malloy writes that it's typical of a "disconcerting trend that has taken hold of our area."
  
  "Folks armed with cell phones, digital cameras and police scanners have dubbed themselves 'citizen journalists,' of a sort, and have made it their mission to share every single bit of 'news' that happens in our area."
  
  This particular description fits Moncton's own NewsChaser, Ray Richard (profiled here), and Fredericton blogger Charles Leblanc. There may be others with news scanners who chase down news, but I am not aware of them. But there are numerous others writing and reporting on local news and any of them might feel they are the subject of Malloy's remarks.
  
  Certainly, some of the Facebook groups covering local issues such as the high school and fracking might see themselves being described here: "if a crime or incident of great public interest occurs, a kangaroo court is instantly established in these groups with waves of information being discussed regardless of their validity."
  
  The people in these groups, or taking pictures at accident scenes, or reporting on "every single bit of 'news'" are not qualified to make these judgments, argues Malloy. "Journalists don't just wake up one morning and decide they're reporters. It takes years of study and honing their craft to earn the right to be called a newsperson."
  
  Moreover, "they are bound to a strict code of ethics and do their jobs with impartiality,  accountability, and with strict analysis and consideration of all fact before bringing their story to the public at large."
  
  Malloy likens the scrutiny of citizen journalists as being akin to being watched by Big Brother, but instead of being run by government, "it's 100 per cent powered by the folks you share a community with." Perhaps their time and effort would be better spent elsewhere, writes Malloy.
  
  Malloy admits that he's not a journalist, "just some guy with a lot to say who has been generously given a place to say it." In this he has unwittingly pointed to the major problem with journalism in Moncton.
  
  It would be nice if the journalists in our local newspaper were qualified to make ethical decisions, had benefited from years of training, and were bound by a strict code of ethics. There is no evidence, however, that they are. Indeed, the bulk of what is offered up by the Times & Transcript is the opposite of that.
  
  I've probably had more training in journalism than most of them: five years at a student newsletter, a dozen years running an online news site, and the last year with Moncton Free Press. And certainly Graham Decarie, one of the paper's most vocal critics, who has taught media ethics at university, has more background and experience.
  
  And while we in our efforts do not cover "every single bit of 'news'" that happens in our region, we have become painfully aware of just how much actual real and genuinely important news is simply overlooked by the local newspaper as irrelevant.
  
  Here's what Decarie says of the coverage such as that offered in the Times & Transcript: "The news media, far from having standards of any sort, are awash in prejudice, lying, manipulation, half-truths, ignorance. They are also whores for the owners. There is a whole library of books on this. I would give Mr. Malloy a list of the books - but anyone who can write for the TandT and not know what it is would not be able to understand a book."
  
  Through the last year I have been monitoring not just the newspaper and Facebook groups but also the city and region's alternative publications and news sources. There are dozens of them. This not only tells me exactly what the newspaper has been ignoring (which is most of it, especially from non-business groups) but also what press releases the newspaper has been copying word for word, without attribution, and publishing under the byline "Times & Transcript Staff".
  
  But most of all, what I have found is that the Times & Transcript is the least reliable source of media in the city, by a wide margin. Compared to local and regional coverage offered by CTV News, CBC news, News 91.9 and other media, it is generally last and least accurate. And there is the constant bias, not only in story selection, but in presentation and description as well.
  
  Malloy's own column is in fact just the most recent example of that. Is there any evidence that citizen media has been acting as he describes? Have we been covering the news irresponsibly, shocking people with accident photos of their beloved or reportage of bathroom spills? Have we been misrepresenting the truth, distorting facts, and behaving like Big Brother? No - there is no evidence of this. Malloy's characterization is a complete fabrication. It's based - like so much of our local newspaper's coverage - on what he thinks must be the case, instead of actual journalism.
  
  It makes me yearn for a way to be able to present all of that to people in the city, in a professional and convenient format, and that is what the Moncton Free press has been designed to do, and eventually, will do.
  
  Don't take my word for it. Review Decarie's columns, offered daily for the last year, for reams of coverage of the city's most yellow journalism.
  
  Of course, two wrongs don't make a right. The poor coverage offered by the professional media in this city does not excuse excesses by the city's citizen journalists. That's why there is such a need for as expertly developed and deployed citizen publication as possible. We still have a ways to go with the Moncton Free Press - we need more coverage, and better coverage.
  
  And yes, if someone were to ever become trapped in the Subway, we should put down our cameras and help.
  
  But at least we're trying to produce a professional product.
  
  And Malloy is actually right about one thing. We actually do have better things to do with our lives. We may have day jobs, or other interests, and don't have the time to do the work we'd like to do. What would be most ideal would be were it not necessary to develop and run citizen media in this city.
  
  But alternative media springs up, Facebook groups spring up and blogger websites spring up when the people of the community are denied a full and legitimate voice in their own media. When the publications that should serve the public good are co-opted to serve private and corporate interests. When the journalists who should be non-partisan not only take sides, but very transparently and deliberately resort to fabrication and manipulation to promote their (owners') point of view.
  
  We who are engaged in citizen journalism, not just in Moncton but around the world, have concluded that there is no alternative way to support and ensure a free and objective media. We have given up trying to convince these publications to do right, and have instead concluded that they can't.
• 

  Income Inequality and the Wealth Tax

  Posted: January 3, 2013, 11:01am COT

  Responding to Branko Milanovic, Lead Economist in the World Bank research group and a visiting professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, Why Income Inequality Is Here to Stay, in the Harvard Business Review blog.
  
  This article does not establish that "income inequality is here to stay" and beyond the discussion of two political philosophers does not address either the cause of income inequality nor the desirability of ending it.
  
  Income inequality is the result of a structural defect that allows those with more to continue to accumulate more, while at the same time limiting the gains or even forcing losses on those with less. It is the consequence of what might be called a 'scale-free economy', similar to a scale-free network, which disproportionately rewards prior advantage.
  
  Scale-free economics apply not just in the domains of financial wealth, but in other distribution systems as well. For example, web-sites on a given topic created earlier will accumulate more links, all else being equal, than those created later (all else is of course rarely equal). The principle applies independently of the cause of the increased wealth, which is why focusing on specific mechanisms (such as inheritance tax or free education) does not address the inequality.
  
  In nature, inequalities in networks are addressed by physical constraints. A tree trunk can only be so much larger than the branches before it collapses under its own weight. A major airport can only be so much larger that a small airport before being overwhelmed by too many flights. In economics, too, the best and only way to restrain income inequality is the imposition of physical constraints.
  
  In professional sports, franchise owners have learned that income inequality reaches unsustainable proportions unless some form on income or salary cap is imposed; even though the number of qualified athletes is almost limitless, competitive franchise owners will, unless restrained, spend more and more on even the smallest of an advantage.
  
  The same approach would be appropriate in wider society. Rather than address causes, the accumulation of wealth itself should be addressed by policy. Some measures that have come close to this are progressive income taxes and property taxes (the equivalent of baseball's 'luxury tax') but as we have seen, the wealthy are uniquely positioned to find ways around these constraints (thus, for example, Ilya Kovalchuk's17-year contract) as these penalize transfers of wealth rather than actual accumulation of it.
  
  To address income inequality, it should become structurally more and more difficult to maintain large qualities of wealth, either by individuals or by corporations. Accumulations of wealth, such as the trillions of dollars currently being hoarded unused in overseas accounts should be taxed directly. Nations that do not participate in a wealth tax should be penalized financially or excluded altogether from the financial system.
  
  Milanovic's only argument against such measures is the vague and unsupported assertion that "For all but the tamest of these proposals, any popular support is lacking." This is based on his assertion that "Citizens seem to wish for things that are mutually inconsistent: lower inequality, greater equality of opportunity (so that inherited advantages matter less), and a continuation of current low-tax policies." However, these policies are not mutually inconsistent if it is wealth, not income, that is taxed.
  
  Most citizens would be untouched by a wealth tax, for the simple reason that they have none. Upper-middle class and moderately wealthy people would be touched by a tax similar to one they would face today. As wealth rises, the tax would become more significant, and the return from increased accumulations of wealth would become less and less. At a certain point, a maximum sustainable income is reached, at which point, one's personal comfort being assured, people can begin to strive for other objectives.
  
  The concept of a wealth tax, despite being overlooked by Milanovic, is neither new nor untried. European nations such as Switzerland, Germany and France have instituted wealth taxes. It has been discussed by writers such as Edward N. Wolff in Boston Review (1996) and Barry L. Isaacs in U. Miami Law Review (1977). Donald Trump once even proposed a massive one-time wealth tax on the rich, in 1999.
  
  The primary argument against a wealth tax is based on capital flight to tax havens. This is partially addressed by the proposed Tobin Tax on international financial transactions. It is also why a wealth tax requires global cooperation, with penalties applied to non-compliant nations. Recent reports have counted about $21 trillion hoarded, unused, overseas. Taxing this wealth would eliminate the U.S. debt overnight, or if applied globally, would virtually eliminate the crushing impacts of third-world debt while relieving the obligations faced by nations such as Greece and Italy, while still cutting the U.S. debt substantially.
  
  Were the question put to the populations of democracies around the world, in free and fair referenda, support for such a measure would be overwhelming. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how the campaign opposing the measure would be conducted. The more serious issue facing the actual implementation of a wealth tax is the already existing hegemony of the wealthy. It may be too late to recover the trillions of dollars siphoned from the economy. If so, it may be too late not only for the economy but for democracy as well.
  
  I would urge the readers of Harvard Business Review consider ways of alleviating income inequality, and of redistributing the hoarded wealth. This would be far more supportive of business and enterprise than advancing facile and frankly flimsy arguments in support of a structural defect that is pushing the global economy over a cliff.
• 

  People don't need experts; they just need someone who knows

  Posted: December 24, 2012, 5:51pm COT

  This is a really good analysis. I think you correctly identify the missing bit – helping students over those rough patches.
  
  Interestingly, to my mind, although the problem of understanding and responding to a student question is an almost intractable problem for machines, it is generally pretty straightforward for humans. So what we have tried to do with cMOOCs is connect people with the humans they need to connect with to get over the rough patches.
  
  You don’t need an expert for this – you just needs someone who knows the answer to the problem. So we have attempted to scale by connecting people with many other students. Instructors are still there, for the tough and difficult problems. But students can help each other out, and are expected to do so.
  
  An example of what I mean: I just purchased a new xBox and a copy of MLB 2K12, which is a baseball simulator. My first effort to puitch saw me walk most of the batters, throw numerous wild pitches, and finally get out of the inning only after giving up 14 runs. The problem was, I didn’t know what to do; the MLB 2K12 instructions are far too vague, and if there’s in-game help,. I haven’t found it.
  
  I don’t need an expert in MLB 2K12 to show me how to pitch. I just need someone who knows what to do. Someone who can say “Well you move this control here then here and you’re trying to line this up with that.” Million s of people know the answer to this question. but I’m connected to none of them.
  
  Indeed, I don’t even need then to do the actual explaining. They simply need to recognize what my problem is, then point me to a video or instructions that outline the solution.
  
  Machines will eventually be able to do this, but they will first need to master natural language processing. This is going to take a while. In the meantime, if we want massive learning, we need o structure learning in such a way as to make asking questions easier, and as necessary, to provide more incentives to people to answer them.
  
  I don’t think the xMOOCs are ever going to do this, because their focus is on placing all the emphasis on the expertise of the instructor. To the extent that they respond to this need, they will become cMOOCs. But to the extent that cMOOCs become viable, the value proposition behind the elite universities is weakened. People don’t need experts; they just need someone who knows.
  
• 

  2012 in Words and Pictures

  Posted: December 21, 2012, 8:19pm COT

  It's Mayan Apocalypse day, I'm listening to 2112 as I type this, and it seems appropriate to reflect on the end of the world through the words that caught my attention over the last twelve months.
  
  
  
  K-Pop
  
  Some time today, fittingly, Psy's monster hit Gangnam Style is going to reach a billion views - it's about 998 million and counting as I type these words. The song is of course a parody of Seoul's posh Gangnam neighbourhood, and the style secret to the video is, "dress classy and dance cheesy." Making fun of the rich and their excesses is nothing new, but nobody did it better than Psy in 2012, and boy, it needed doing!
  
  What's ironic is the phenomenon that made this possible, K-Pop. Psy is but one of a collection of Korean musicians who hit the charts in 2012 - I spent a week in September exploring bands like Sistar, Girls' generation, Big Bang, SM Town, The Wonder Generation, and the puzzling Man With a Mission (from Japan).
  
  K-Pop is big business. According to Wikipedia, "The Korean music industry grossed nearly $3.4 billion in the first half of 2012, which amounts to a 27.8% increase from the same period last year, according to Billboard." Most of the music is manufactured; "In K-pop these record labels also function as agencies for the artists. They started operating as such at the beginning of the 2000sThey are responsible for recruiting, financing, training, marketing and publishing new artists as well as managing their activities and public relations." It's worth listening to this Al Jazeera examination of K-Pop.
  
  Korea as a country is a lot like the nouveau riche Psy is depicting; there's a lot of excess, a lot of cheesyness, a lot of prancing. We are tempted to be swayed by the success of some of the new economies - and here I would also include countries like Russia, India, Taiwan and China, Vietnam, Singapore and Indonesia - but it's important to realize that this new wealth is superficial, that much deeper issues remain under the surface, and that it could disappear as quickly as it was created.
  
  Oh, and the Gangnam Style view count? YouTube froze it for most of the morning at 998,976,706. So nobody knows exactly when the views hit 1 billion, nor exactly who viewed it. And yes, the image above is something I created this morning. Because in the brave new world of Gangnam Style, even our cultural moments and history are manufactured and fake.
  
  
  
  Superstorm
  
  OK, so Sandy wasn't a hurricane when it hit the U.S. eastern seaboard. It wasn't even a particularly big storm, historically. But what it did do is to dump an unprecedented amount of water into lower Manhattan and the New Jersey Shore, flooding homes businesses and subways while knocking out power for millions of subscribers. The term 'stormpocalypse' didn't really catch on, so we got 'superstorm'.
  
  The most immediate aftermath of Sandy wasn't the flooding, damage or power outages, however. It was the caterwaul of denials that the storm had anything to do with global warming. In an otherwise good article, for example, the Washington Post hastens to tell us "Sandy should not be 'blamed' on climate change. Climate change does not cause storms and did not cause Superstorm Sandy." Perhaps not. But what the Post could have - and should have - done was to say, "climate change caused Sandy to be a superstorm."
  
  Much better was Business Week's (surprising) headline, "It's Global Warming, Stupid." For a long time climate change denial has been a hallmark of all politics to the right, but perhaps this is changing. "If all that doesn’t impress, forget the scientists ostensibly devoted to advancing knowledge and saving lives. Listen instead to corporate insurers committed to compiling statistics for profit."
  
  Insurers pegged $71 billion of damage caused by the storm. It puts all those stories about the 'economic effects of the Kyoto Accord' into perspective, a bit. And maybe now that business (and insurers) are paying attention, perhaps climate change will recapture the attention it deserves.
  
  Hoarding
  
  Speaking of preparing for the apocalypse, one of this year's biggest (but unfortunately under-reported) story was the one about businesses hoarding trillions of dollars in overseas accounts. So it's official - the corporate culture has gone from being merely psychotic to full-blown cat hoarder.
  
  Here's what Psychology Today said about corporations back in 2011: "Corporations have no innate moral impulses, and in fact they exist solely for the purpose of making money. As such, these "persons" are systemically driven to do whatever is necessary to increase revenues and profits, with no regard for ethical issues that might nag real people."
  
  So the news this year should come as no surprise: "A global super-rich elite has exploited gaps in cross-border tax rules to hide an extraordinary £13 trillion ($21tn) of wealth offshore." To put that into scale, the BBC tells us, "The figure is equivalent to the size of the US and Japanese economies combined."
  
  Naturally the first reaction of business is to try to place a positive spin on the story. ""From another angle, this study is really good news. The world has just located a huge pile of financial wealth that might be called upon to contribute to the solution of our most pressing global problems." But of course, unleashing such a huge amount of money would instantly crash the economy.
  
  So of course we're in the middle of a recession, governments are deep in debt and going deeper, businesses are still lobbying for lower tax rates (and of course tax cuts for the rich), and from what I can see, all of this has been caused by the almost pathological siphoning of money from the rest of us by the super-rich, an amount of money so large there's nothing to spend it on. Except, maybe, paying off government debts (but of course, they would never do that).
  
  Ironically, about the only things the rich are willing to spend money on (besides floating cities) are elections. With regulations limiting super-PACs in the U.S. ruled unconstitutional, the dollars flowed into lobby group coffers, all with the intent of electing a government that would allow the rich to - what else? - keep on hoarding.
  
  “The establishment of the candidate-specific super PAC is a vehicle to completely destroy candidate contribution limits,” says Fred Wertheimer, president of the campaign finance reform group Democracy 21. “It is a vehicle that will spread to Congress and it will lead us back to a system of pure legalized bribery, because you will be back, pre-Watergate, to unlimited contributions that are going for all practical purposes directly to candidates.”
  
  
  
  Peak Apple
  
  So back in July I learned I could upgrade my Palm Pre (if only I would sign a newer richer mobile phone contract) and, wishing to join the rest of the world, I did. But I did not follow the masses and buy an iPhone. I bought a Samsung Galaxy SIII, which has just come out.
  
  So what inspired me to buy the latest in Korean technology? It was not so much the style and marketing of the phone (though I do admit, they're beautiful). It had a lot more to do with what I couldn't do with the Apple. I couldn't add memory. I couldn't change the battery. I couldn't run it without iTunes. And so on and on it goes.
  
  Today I am basically inseparable from my mobile phone - this was never the case with my Pre (which I frequently lost) or any other phone before then. I use it as my music player (replacing my small and locked-down iPod touch), my telephone, my calendar (which syncs with Google Calendar and Outlook), my pocket camera, my map, and much more.
  
  It's as though my new phone represented freedom while the iPhone represents control (but in the back of my mind I know it's all an artifice).
  
  K-Tech and the Samsung represent a trend that I have come to think of as 'Peak Apple'. I described it in my newsletter as follows: "Apple has long exhibited the 'NIH' syndrome - 'not invented here' - and sought to clamp down on the user experience with total control over key aspects of its operating system environment. It also has a penchant for launching billion dollar lawsuits against its suppliers. This is now biting them back. Your evidence: a Tumblr dedicated to the new Map application for the iPhone, widely touted as a disaster. Apple stocks, which have been nudging the magic $700 mark this week, will never be higher than they are right now. Never. Enjoy your maps."
  
  The problem, of course, is that Apple feels it must own, manage and trademark key aspects of the user experience. For example, in another move, it patented page-turning. Here's the patent. "It won’t be long before Apple files a trademark application for the first person pronoun, or as Apple calls it, 'A personal pronominal inanimate graphical mark or figure of the first person singular nominative, roman minuscule.' The goal in doing so? To improve our experience as users of ourselves."
  
  So yesterday, the eve of the Mayan apocalypse, it pleased me to read that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is rolling back some of the key patents in the Samsung case. The USPTO ruled that all twenty claims included in Apple's so-called "rubber-banding" patent are invalid. It had also ruled against the patent on 'snapback scrolling' back in October. So it looks like Samsung will prevail.
  
  One would think we have learned the dangers of business models based on hoarding - whether it be hoarding of knowledge, money, information or technology. Eventually, whatever has been hoarded becomes unusable. But no, that still seems to be the dominant model for our times.
  
  Fracking
  
  The technology known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has been a hot topic around New Brunswick this year, and so I read, across North America as well. Basically it involves injecting a mixture of water and chemicals at high pressure into sedimentary rock layers two kilometers or so deep, fracturing the rock in these layers, and releasing natural gas trapped in bubbles in the rock.
  
  There has been widespread opposition to the technology. People argue that it pollutes groundwater and causes earthquakes, among other things. It may well do these things; it's hard for me to tell. However, from my perspective, these problems pale in comparison to some of the damage caused by traditional energy, such as Exxon Valdez or the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, to name just a few.
  
  Many of the protests against fracking are well-intentioned. In general, I think, the problem people have with fracking has very little to do with groundwater or earthquakes, and rather more to do with the contribution more gas exploitation will do to the climate in the long run.
  
  
  Because, here's the thing about oil: it's making a comeback. Due to new discoveries and new technologies, the United States is poised to become the largest oil producer in the world by 2020, a turnaround that started this year. "In a report released on Monday, the world's foremost energy watchdog, the International Energy Agency (IEA), said the US would benefit from so-called unconventional sources of oil and gas, including shale gas and shale oil, derived from fracking – blasting dense rocks apart to release the fossil fuels trapped within."
  
  This is exactly the wrong development at exactly the wrong time. "If pursued with vigour, they would also lead to huge increases in greenhouse gas emissions that would put hopes of curbing dangerous climate change beyond reach."
  
  In posts this year I have supported fracking under three conditions:
  - the industry completely compensate for any damage caused
  - profits from the industry be shared with the people of the province
  - developments in natural gas be used to cease production of coal and dirty oil
  
  None of these conditions has ever come close to being met in any statement from out government ministers. I doubt they have any intention of fulfilling them. The intent is to add to the hoard of cash, to hell with global warming.
  
  
  
  Robocalls
  
  The jury is still out in Canada as to whether election results will be overturned, but the issue of robocalls points to a wider phenomenon undermining out democracy.
  
  The concept of a robocall is simple enough: a computer automatically dials phone numbers and plays a pre-recorded message.  They are so common as to be ordinary. It is when they are misused that they raise wider issues.
  
  For example, Canada recently instituted a 'do-not-call' list so that people would not be interrupted at the dinner table by marketing robocalls. What happened, however, is that people who registered for the list received an increase in the number of calls. Marketers were simply using the lists to program their computers, ignoring the law.
  
  The Canadian election of 2011 saw an even more disturbing use, and the case wound its way through the courts through 2012. Robocalls were used by unnamed parties - famously using the alias 'Pierre Poutine' - to tell people intending to vote for the Liberals or NDP that the location of their polling station had been changed.
  
  Although blamed on rogue individuals, it was a massive effort. "Documents show the probe of voter suppression calls has expanded to encompass 56 of the country’s 308 federal ridings... in a growing controversy that has led to accusations that widespread electoral fraud distorted the outcome of last year’s election and helped Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives win a majority government."
  
  The efforts to subvert democracy were not limited to Canada. There were widespread reports of efforts in the United States election to turn voters away or discourage them from voting. These efforts were mostly focused toward urban votes, as in Ohio, where advanced polling was going to be available only to Republican-leaning districts (the plan was cancelled at the last minute), and minorities, as in Florida where new voter ID laws were drafted to enable voter suppression.
  
  Not to be outdone, governments in other nations around the world, such as Russia, ran their own questionable elections. And so in the same year we were celebrating things like the Arab Spring, we were at the same time undermining the principles we have been working toward for so long. In psychology this is called self-sabotage. Just one of the many psychoses our society seems to display.
  
  Wolfgang
  
  Yesterday I paid five dollars online to download a rare concert recording of Neil Young and the Bluenotes in 1988 from a site called Wolfgang's Vault. I've been listening to concerts (and playing them on Ed Radio) for a number of years, so when the site converted to a subscription model this year, I was willing to pay the fee.
  
  I have been paying for an increasing number of online goods and services. I've always paid for internet access, of course, currently subscribing to Bell Aliant's fibre-op service. I pay for a dedicated server for my websites as well as another for my radio station, and of course I pay for domain registration. I have paid Flickr for several years, and also have purchased subscriptions from LogMeIn, Photomatix, and many more goods and services.
  
  I've even purchased access from Major League Baseball. Not video access - the blackout zone for Toronto Blue Jays games is all of Canada, which means that despite being 1,000 kilometers from home plate (pretty much on the nose; I've measured it) I cannot watch the games on video. No matter; I'm much more of an audio person anyways, so I listen to all the games on web radio.
  
  So where do I draw the line? It's clear from my own actions that I can at least tolerate, if not enthusiastically endorse, a commercial web. But it's also clear to me that I purchase these because I can, and that in the main, people get the web they can afford.Beyond a certain point, the commercial web ceases to be a good way to make a living (and a great source of rare music and fancy software) and begins to act against society.
  
  I find that in practice I react negatively to the commercialization of knowledge and research, education, and news media. So I have reacted negatively to reports that the local newspaper is behind a paywall, that the Globe and Mail (Canada's self-style national newspaper) has gone behind a paywall, and so on and on it goes.
  
  People who know me know of my lifelong campaign for free learning. But I am equally passionate about a free press. So one of my projects over the last 12 months has been the Moncton Free Press. This is a local news cooperative founded to create an alternative free and open media in the city. As a secondary project (since the primary Drupal site is so unsatisfying) I'm setting up gRSShopper as a news media aggregation service, which I'll roll out in 2013.
  
  The impetus for the original Moncton Free Press project wasn't news media paywalls - those came later - but rather last year's Occupy protests. The coverage of Occupy was so one-sided, and so contrary to what I actually witnessed with my own eyes, that it became clear that an alternative was needed.
  
  You see, it's not simply that commercializing science, education and news media makes them inaccessible to the poor. That could simply be addressed with money. It's that commercializing them changes them. It changes the message. It politicizes them. When you see the news from free, open and non-commercial sources - we aggregated the CBC, Rabble, NB media Co-Op, Global Voices, indyMedia, EFF, and many more - you see a different reality. A reality that is more about people, and less about manufactured history and culture.
  
  Oh yeah - I gave most of these money too. Not because I believe in 'voting with my dollars' - that game is rigged and I could never win. But because I can, and it seems like the only way to practice epistemology in contemporary society. I've very aware that my own prosperity could disappear in a moment, and all of this would go away. But I do what i can while I can.
  
  
  Wrecking Ball
  
  In the summer of 2011, U2 came to play in Moncton. It was the last show of their world tour, a huge event for the city, and a brilliant evening on a beautiful day.
  
  The internet has opened my world to music and art in ways that used to be impossible for me to imagine. I used to spend most of my mental life thinking in words - a constant internal monologue, playing and replaying scenarios, working out ideas, thinking in alternative realities. I would spend my evenings in silence, or listening to the radio, reading science fiction and philosophy, and of course writing.
  
  With the coming of MP3 players, music exploded in to my world. With the coming of digital cameras, everything around me became art.
  
  It's not like you think. I didn't suddenly take out a Napster membership. I actually paid for my music - most of it in te form of vinyl, some of it on CDs and casette tapes. I painstakingly recorded almost all my music collection from over the years, and the 1980s were reborn. Bands I had not listened to for years, like Luba and Styx, reminded me of the role music had played in my youth in helping me define and understand my own values.
  
  U2, of course, is well-known as the band trying to do some good for the world, sponsoring campaigns like Live Aid and One. The best progressive politics money can buy. These have faded into the background in these years of austerity. These campaigns have been, of course, trivialized by the media. But I am hopeful the seeds they plant bear as much fruit as those that were planted so many years in me.
  
  In 2012 we had a visit from an artist of a different kind as Bruce Springsteen brought his Wrecking Ball tour to the Hill. Springsteen's activism is different from U2's. Rather than haunt the halls of the United Nations, Springsteen seems more comfortable on the factory floor and the workplace. And he sings of a world that's more familiar to most of us:
  

  Now when all this steel and these stories, they drift away to rust
  And all our youth and beauty, it's been given to the dust
  When the game has been decided and we're burning down the clock
  And all our little victories and glories have turned into parking lots
  When your best hopes and desires are scattered through the wind

  
  
  Lockout
  
  Most  of the summer this year Moncton was without a bus service. Here's what happened: the contract expired and bus drivers sought to earn the same rate as other drivers for the city, proposing that the contract go to arbitration. The city refused, but at least they kept talking.
  
  Until after the election, that is. Less than a week after the mayor and most of council were re-elected, they pulled the plug and locked out the transit workers, refusing to budge for almost half a year. The city's responsibility to provide public transportation was essentially abdicated.
  
  The media couldn't help itself, continually referring to the lockout as a strike. The local newspaper (now helpfully behind a paywall, but still spreading its propaganda though its paper edition) called for the essential elimination of the service, arguing that we should instead embrace a system of small buses run by private operators.
  
  It was a bad year for public transportation in the region. The intercity bus service, Acadian Lines, announced that it was ceasing operations. The company, which had been purchased by a Quebec operator, was eventually replaced by a local company. The company planned to coordinate with the regional rail service, but that too was cut back - now we have one train three times a week.
  
  I would also use some of the space here to talk about the NHL payer lockout, but it's difficult for me to care. The union is dissolving, at which point it will file an anti-trust suit. The rest of us meanwhile are wondering how we allowed control of our national pastime to be monopolized by a couple dozen or so billionaire owners. But I'm thinking, why not? We've allowed the same of every other part of society.
  
  The local newspaper is owned by the local oil company. Its primary advertisers are local car dealerships.
  
  
  
  The Beautiful Wild
  
  Every summer for the last few years Andrea and I have been vacationing for several weeks by the seashore in Prince Edward Islands. This year was no exception.
  
  The Beautiful Wild is the name of an album released this year by Jenn Grant, a Halifax-based artist who grew up near where I go camping every year. I can picture it in my mind, because it's very similar to my own upbringing in rural Ontario. "Never knew we were living in the beautiful wild".
  
  I came to know of Jenn Grant through some advertising she did a few years ago for a local children's hospital. I found her most recent album by accident in a bin at the local used music store. I'm a regular in there; it's nice to go in and talk about the concerts and buy good music at reasonable prices.
  
  The beautiful wild keeps me sane - not the music so much (though it helps) but the wilderness through which I cycle every year, the highways and back roads of West Prince. That part of the island feels like my second home. It's far away from anything and in the opposite direction from the Green Gables house and the commercial development around Cavendish.
  
  This year my work is being pitted against my wilderness. While the bulk of my travel is funded by conferences and educational organizations, NRC has at least allowed me the time to go. This year management has decided I would do better research in the confines of my own office than by meeting firsthand with educators and researchers around he world. So I've been using vacation time to travel.
  
  Now, not only am I running out of the vacation time I've accumulated over the last ten years, my summers on Prince Edward Island are being threatened. It's all in the interests of our new business plan, a commercial focus, and an emphasis on outcomes.
  
  I don't think I would waste anyone's money were I allowed to manage my own time. But we've entered a new era in the workforce where management no longer trusts the employees. We've entered an era where management is embracing a sort of psychosis.
  
  At the end of the day, the world didn't end after all. That doesn't mean it's not going to. We as a global society are not well. We are imbalanced and behaving irrationally. Our institutions are psychotic. We are unable to cease self-destructive and self-defeating behaviour. We lie to ourselves, hoard all our resources where they cannot be used, and seek dirty energy like an addict looking for his next fix.
  
  Collectively, we need to stop. We need to put on some nice music and get out of the city, cycling in the open air, embracing the seaside and the forests and the farms and the cottages, hiking among the windmills of North Point and taking pictures of the seals in the bay. We need to stand out there, let the wind blow in our hair, watch the endless waves, and dream of the day after tomorrow, the day after the end of the world.
  
  
• 

  Badges and How I'd Make Them

  Posted: December 1, 2012, 9:55am COT

  This is my first set of submissions for an online course in digital badges being hosted by BC Campus's Scope Forum. I'm not really sure how I got enrolled, but I did, and it seems like a good thing to be following up on.
  

  Task 1: Describe the merit badge
  
  1. Identify a merit badge you earned during your lifetime.
  What did you have to do to earn it? Did you earn more than one badge? And were they awarded by the same organization?
  
  2. Describe how you displayed the merit badge(s).
  If you earned more than one badge, did you display them together? Did you display badges from different organizations together?

  
  1. Man of Letters
  
  This was a badge I received as a Boy Scout (I received a large number of badges as a Cub Scout and Boy Scout, mostly based around civic knowledge and wilderness skills - yes, I could survive in the wilderness, and not only that, I would like it). The Man of letters badge was awarded for performing some act of public writing (I forget what the exact conditions were). Specifically, it was awarded for my publication The Eagle Report, a monthly newspaper I wrote and published myself, distributing it around the community.
  
  2. On a Sash
  
  Badges are worn on a red sash worn over one shoulder. They are arranged as you wish (I arranged mine in neat rows, of course). All badges are equal (there is no 'Eagle Scout' designation in Canada). No badges from external organizations were displayed on the sash.
  
  More information:
  
  Here is the list of badges and stars awarded to Cub Scouts (I got all five stars when I was a Cub - there are more stars now - my favourite was the Tawny Star): [www.scouts.ca]
  
  Here are the Boy Scout badges, including some of the new higher designations ('Man of Letters' is now 'Communicator'). [www.scouts.ca]
  
  Just a brief note:
  
  In Scouts, it was very clear ahead of time what the requirements were for different badges, and you could set out earning them. In the examples badges I've seen online (eg. the Mozilla badge program, and this course, even) you are given a sequence of activities and badges just appear at (for me, unknown) intervals.
  
  
  

  Task 2: The digital badge
  
  3. Identify the digital and internet technologies best suited to create a digital merit badge. How would you create the digital file (image) of the badge? Is it possible to keep people from copying the badge without having earned the badge?
  
  4. Describe the technologies that could be used to attach (reference or link) the learning to the digital badge. Is there more than one way of "attaching" learning criteria (or outcomes) to a digital badge? Would this criteria differ from a learners evidence toward earning the badge? Could a badge criteria change through time?

  (Keeping in mind I don't know the details of how Mozilla set up its program - this is only how I would do it, off he top of my head): The badge itself would be a simple PNG image (or even text script; there's no reason why the badge has to have one and only one visual representation). The image of the badge is contained within a div structure indicating that it is a badge. The code is deliberately very simple: For example:
  

  <div class="badge">

  <a href="http://badgeissuer.org/badgename/badgewinner">

  <img src="http://badgewinner.com/badge.png" /> </a> </div>

    The awarder of the badge (or a third party) keeps a list of the people who received badges. The person is given an image and script referring back to the original list, so when a person clicks on the badge image, they are taken to the awarder or 3rd party certification that the badge is genuine. Here's a sample certificate (could also be in JSON):
  

  <badge resource="http://badgeissuer.org/badgename/">

  <badgewinner resource="http://badgewinner.com/" /> </badge>

  
  The certificate, in turn, links to badge criteria, again hosted on the awarder or 3rd party web site. This data, available as structured data (XML or JSON) is standardized: name of badge, issuing organization, criteria, category, etc.
  
  For example:
  

  <badge>

  <name>Man of Letters</badge>

  <issuer resource="http://www.scoutscanada.ca">Scouts Canada</issuer>

  <classification resource="http://schema.org/class/subclass">Class / Subclass</classification>

  <criteria> ...

  </badge>

  The criteria are created though any number of processes, and would be encoded using a JSON  or XML encoder (the number of badges should be sufficiently low that you don't need an automated way of generating massive numbers of badges).
  
  The badge code (hosted at [badgeissuer.org] ) lists criteria only - the criteria are listed distinct from any evidence of individual achievement. Each criterion has its own URL, eg:
  

  http://badgeissuer.org/badgename#criteria1
  or [badgeissuer.org] (if it's at a separate URL).

  Criteria do not change through time; if the criteria change, a new version  of the badge is created, and badges must be referenced through version number. Hence the record for a badge awarded to a person displays only the criteria in use at the time the badge was awarded.
  
  Evidence publicly displayed (unlike, say, this forum) can be listed in the certificate, by URL. For example, at the document hosted at [badgeissuer.org] the following code can be used:

  <badge resource="http://badgeissuer.org/badgename/">

  <badgewinner resource="http://badgewinner.com/" />

  <criteria resource="http://badgeissuer.org/badgename/criteria1">

  <evidence ref="http://badgewinner.com/badge/criteria1" /> </criteria>

  etc...

  </badge>

  At least, that's how I'd set it up, first draft...
  Do I get a badge now?
  
  
• 

  Free and Not Free

  Posted: November 27, 2012, 8:36am COT

  Everton Zanella Alvarenga tossed a hand-grenade into the OER discussion group: "An interesting text by Stallman... On-line education is using a flawed Creative Commons license ... 'the CC-BY-NC and CC-BY-NC-SA licenses, as they are today, should be avoided.'"
  
  When I asked Richard Stallman about the use of open licenses for educational materials, first he complained because I didn't use the word "free", then he said that he wasn't interested in educational content, that his arguments applied specifically to software. Clearly his views have been modified since then, as this post attests
  Without extending this into a full-blown debate, as I have already written at length about this elsewhere:
  

  • licenses that allow commercial use are less free than those that do not, because they allow commercial entities to charge fees for access, to lock them behind digital locks, and to append conditions that prohibit their reuse
  • works licensed with a Non-commercial clause are fully and equally open educational resources, and are in many cases the only OERs actually accessible to people (because the content allowing commercial use tends to have costs associated with it)
  • the supposition that works that cost money can be 'free' is a trick of language, a fallacy that fools contributors into sharing for commercial use content they intended to make available to the world without charge
    
  • the lobby very loudly making the case for commercial-friendly licenses and recommending that NC content be shunned consists almost entirely of commercial publishers and related interests seeking to make money off (no-longer) 'free' content.
    

  The problem with this is the Flat World publications or the OERu assessment scenario - content deposited with the intent that it be available without cost is converted into a commercial product. It's not free if you can't access it. Content is different from software, it can be locked (or 'enclosed') in ways free software cannot, without violating the license.
  
  
  In sum, this discussion would be better conducted without further debated about which open license 'is best' and especially with fervent declarations in favour of commercial-friendly licensing. The suggestion that the free sharing of non-commercial content is not 'practical' is not Stallman at his best, and is refuted by the experiences of millions in the field.
  
  Wayne McIntosh objected, "Stephen, your assumption is incorrect with reference to access to learning materials and the OERu assessment model.."
  
  Again, not to pursue the argument regarding the One True License beyond reason in the present forum...
  - I very specifically referred to OERu assessment, not content, and assessment will cost students $1000 for a typical 5-course semester
  - I have been following and commenting on WikiEducator and OERu since the beginning, and have expressed my concerns in this regard on numerous occasions
  - In particular, I expressed my concerns regarding the 'logic model' employed by OERu, as well as the 'founding partners' methodology, both of which entrenched educational institutions as an essential part of the process,
  - No mechanism for recognition of learning exists, or was even contemplated, other than institutional recognition, which as noted, carries a significant financial burden
  
  I have no objection to the mechanism whereby OERu converts OERs it receives for free from volunteers into revenues for universities. What I object to is the ongoing campaign by OERu staff to depict non-commercial OERs as 'non-free' and to lobby for their exclusion from the definition of 'free educational resources'. I wish to pursue my support of OERs in such a way that does not impose significant cost on students. To this date, the best and only mechanism for ensuring their use of OERs remains genuinely free is through the use of the NC license.
  
  As an aside: there is always in this context a reference to the 'original' version of open source licensing, and of course Stallman's four freedoms. I would like to point out that open source licenses existed before GPL, and open content licenses existed before Creative Commons. Until the intervention of staff from large U.S. universities (Berkeley-Stanford-MIT-Harvard) these licenses required that distribution be unencumbered with cost. It is only with the intervention of staff from these institutions that 'free' comes to mean 'commercial'.
  
  Again: people may attach licenses allowing commerical use to their work if they wish. I have no objection to this. But such people should cease and desist their ongoing campaign to have works that are non-commercial in intent, and free in distribution, classified as 'not free'. Content that cannot be enclosed within a paywall, and cannot be distributed with commercial encumbrances attached, is just as free - indeed, more free - than so-called 'free' commercial content.
  
  Also...
  
  
  To follow up on some points made by Rory:
  
  Content (under whatever license) is 'enclosed' when it is contained behind a barrier such as proprietary encryption, a digital lock or a paywall. Enclosure does not restrict the content itself, but restricts access to the content; access is granted (typically under some other name) only via some concession, such as payment, or provision of personal information.
  
  To my understanding, all of Flat World's content will now be enclosed behind a paywall. OERu assessments enclose assessment content. This mailing list (OER-community) encloses content behind a subscription requirement (I can't even link to discussions in my newsletter; all non-subscribers see is a barrier).
  
  Enclosure is an important concept because it leads to 'conversion'. The process of conversion is one where what was once a resource that could be freely accessed is (for all practical purposes) accessible only through a barrier of some sort; in other words, the content is free, but has been effectively completely enclosed. This is what happened (for example) to many UseNet newsgroups. It almost happened to Wikipedia, and would have happened, has Google not intervened.
  
  Having said that, let me be clear how perspective plays a significant role in the free / not-free debate:
  
  - from the perspective of someone who already has the content, the content is 'not free' if there are limitations on the use of that content, including the right to sell it
  
  - from the perspective of someone who does not already have the content, the content is 'not free' if there are barriers preventing the person from accessing the content (note that the putative assertion that the content 'could be made free somewhere' does not constitute a removal of the all-too-practical barrier
  
  It is not to me surprising that the people with wealth - namely those in U.S. universities - could view 'free' from the perspective of those who have the content. But I speak from the perspective of one who does not have access to the content. And my argument, in a nutshell, is that the second perspective is just as valid as the first (even though the second perspective cannot afford lobbiests).
  
  Content behind barriers - for example, content that is being sold - is 'not free'. This perspective matters. For 99 percent of the world, it's the only perspective that matters.
  
  And finally
  
  Totally agreed with David Wiley: "It would be great if the world were simple enough that One License to Rule Them All could exist, but it doesn't."
  
  It needs to be recognized that for many people, 'open' and 'free' do not mean 'commercial'. For many people, the idea of 'selling a free resource' is a contradiction in terms. For many people, access to the resource, rather than making money from it, is the primary concern.
  
  I don't wish to continue restating this (though it seems the campaigning from the CC-by people against NC is endless). I would simply urge UNESCO to respect the wishes of those people who are not commercial publishers or multi-million-dollar educational institutions, to recognize the intent of people creating NC-licensed resources to ensure they can be accessed for free, and to recognize resources licensed with a NC clause as OERs with equal standing.
  
  This is consistent with the 2012 Paris declaration, which I remind people, refers to OERs as "teaching, learning and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise, that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions." (My emphasis) 
  
  
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  Ilkka Tuomi  wrote,
  > Logically, CC-BY-NC is a subset of CC-BY. In this sense, it is more restricted.
  Not so. No entity in the set “CC-BY-NC” is also in the set “CC-BY”.
  It’s a trick of the way CC licenses were originally formulated. The designations in factmean:- CC-by-Commercial (CC-by-C)- CC-by-Noncommercial (CC-by-NC)So as you can see, the two sets are disjuncts, specially, not-C and C
  The creators of CC treated ‘Commercial’ as the default. There’s no reason why they should have had to do this. They could have established the licenses the other way (indeed, the way I would have done it):
  CC-by – allows all free uses, ie., no limitations on access and distributionCC-by-C – allows commercial vendors to restrict distribution contingent upon payment
  In fact, each of CC-by-C and CC-by-NC create restrictions. They create different sets of restrictions, which may be more or less limiting, depending on your perspective.
  The ‘commercial-by-default’ world in which we live is something recent and something that has been created through the use of language and the setting of assumptions. The creation of a ‘non-commercial’ clause is a way of setting ‘commercial’ as the default. It makes it seem as though ‘commercial’ implies no additional restrictions. But it’s just a trick of language, just a trick of perspective.
  That’s why it’s false and misleading to say that ‘CC-by-C’ is ‘more free’, and why people shouldn’t do it. 
  
• 

  Suppose the Irvings Had Not Set Up Shop In Moncton

  Posted: November 24, 2012, 8:52am COT

  Responding to David W. Campbell, Thanks, Robert. What’s next?
  
  Suppose the Irvings had not set up shop in Moncton...
  
  Would we have a transport company, like Midland? Almost certainly! In fact, we may have had several, with competition making them more productive, and wages reflecting national averages. Perhaps national and international companies would have set up shop here, creating potential for servicing and spinoffs.
  
  Would we have frozen potato products, like Cavendish? Of course we would; any region that grows potatoes would have such an industry. Maybe it would be McCains. Maybe it would be, again, a national or international company.
  
  Similarly, we would have agri-services industries as well. Perhaps more than one. Such an environment might have been much more favorable to the local agriculture industry, which may have resulted in greater conversion of land to agriculture, increased production, and again, better wages.
  
  Would Moncton have a tissue company, like Royale and Majesta (both owned by Irving)? Again, we may have international brands, like Kleenex, Kimberly-Clark, or some other wood product company. These companies locate anywhere there is wood, so there would be a substantial presence in Moncton and New Brunswick. Perhaps the province might even have a value-added wood products industry, like an Ikea, which it seems to be totally lacking now.
  
  Would the city have a disposable diaper manufacturer, like Irving Personal Care? Well - probably not. So we can give them that.
  
  What Irving brings to the city by way of transport companies, food processing and pulp and paper is minimal at best, and would probably exist without them. The companies that would have appeared here in its stead might have been larger, more productive, more competitive, and most importantly of all, might have paid better wages.
  
  And what Irving brings to the city needs to be balanced out against the negative influence of a single large monopoly owning pretty much the entire wood production, agricultural production, transportation, energy and newspaper industry in the province.
  
  Having one huge company has distorted the political process, pushed down wages, and left the cities of the province in a position where they need to grant extraordinary tax exemptions and Irving-friendly policies as they compete against each other for a share of the provincial behemoth.
  
  New Brunswick has no major cities; it is the only province in the country in that position. Even tiny Charlottetown carries more weight on the national scale. Look how long it took to develop a proper highway system linking our cities, decades after every other province in the country. Only this year did we finish our four-lane link to the U.S.
  
  The overt influence of the provinces major gas and oil company have left the transportation and energy industries in a shambles.
  
  With the fiasco surrounding our nuclear plant restoration, people forget that it was an Irving transportation company that dumped the turbines into the bottom of Saint John Harbour. (It was also the oil-dominated Harper government that gutted Atomic Energy Canada, delaying the refit by years).
  
  When we drive the highway to Halifax it's hard not to be struck by the wind turbines on the Nova Scotia side of Tantramar, and an emptiness on the wind-blown NB side. (Yes there are some windmills hidden in the hills; our province gave an Alberta company permission to build them and own them).
  
  Our power generation industry is otherwise in fiasco. We have over the years foolishly depended on coal and (often dirty) oil. We were so much enthralled with it we lost hundreds of millions in the orimulsion bitumen-based fuel fiasco (interestingly, bitumen-based fuel is what is being contemplated for the Keystone pipeline).
  
  The politics behind the deployment of natural gas in the province boggle the mind. Enbridge is the external company that took the risk to (finally!) bring a cheaper and cleaner fuel to the province. It has had a great deal of difficulty marketing to industrial partners, and (frankly) has been jerked around by the provincial government. Enbridge may not be the most pleasant company in the world, but here at least, it has been given a raw deal.
  
  Meanwhile, in a city with a newspaper dominated with car and truck and Jeep advertisements, pubic transportation has been decimated. Irving has led the campaign to break the bus drivers' union. We have had no bus service for months, and the company now envisions a system of privately owned small buses more commonly found in the developing world. The rail system has also been essentially eliminated.
  
  So, on balance, we are supposed to thank Irving for industries we would have had anyways? And ignore the harm a massive all-encompassing monopoly has caused to the province? This in the light of a provincial debt that has accumulated over the years, a debt that is coincidentally the same size as the Irving family fortune?
  
  We need investments over the next 15-20 years, there can be no doubt of it. But rather than depend on the all-giving (but legendarily stingy) hand of the Irvings, we should be asking how we develop an economic development and investment regime that benefits *all* of us.
• 

  Advice for the UNESCO OER Mapping Project

  Posted: November 23, 2012, 6:02pm COT

  Email written as advice to the UNESCO OER mapping initiative.
  
  This is beginning to read and sound very much like the debates around learning object metadata of the 1990s. I know that approaches such as LRMI represent an improvement in that elements are aligned with schema.org data types. But that said, knowledge of the history would be useful, and I do recommend to people making suggestions to look at IMS and IEEE LOM as well as LRMI.
  
  It would also be helpful (through probably not practical) to review the discussion surrounding these specifications. For example, below, we read a request for "technical requirements for using the material." This is better addressed by describing the resource format and specifications (eg., its mime type) rather than specifying application software. This is because software changes rapidly. Consider the requirements in IMS-LOM documents specifying that a resource is 'best viewed in Internet Explorer 3.0'.
  
  If course, this discussion is centered around OER *repositories* and not only the resources themselves. Consequently, mappings will need to describe repository properties. Consulting OAI or DSpace specifications would be helpful here. Minimally, we would want API specifications for resource creation, reading, update and deletion, as well as classification systems and resource metadata specifications.
  
  All of this is difficult to build from the ground up. It is a discussion that has occupied the field for almost two decades. I am thinking at this point that the OER initiative should be drawing from the experiences of OER repositories and repository indices that already exist. The most useful beginning of a needs project ought most probably to be a summary of the properties of existing repository indices, including the range of resources indexed, metadata fields used, and more.
  
  For those specifically interested in resource metadata, rather than repository profiles, may I recommend my article 'Resource Profiles' [www.downes.ca] (I'm sorry to recommend my own work but it will keep this post a lot shorter). It suggests approaches for the following sorts of metadata:
  - first party metadata, which is metadata specifically about the resource itself, eg., technical data, rights metadata, bibliographic data
  - second party metadtata (sometimes called 'paradata') related to the use of the metadata, such as ratings, accesses, etc
  - third party metadata, such as classifications, educational metadata (including things like curriculum, keywords, etc)etc.
  
  Additionally, readers should take account of the desirability of linked data. For example, the use of strings to represent authors and publishers creates the possibility of ambiguity, error and duplication. Contemporary resource repositories, such as Google Scholar or academia.edu, maintain separate registries of authors, which are linked to resources (JSTOR doesn't, but should, as a search for au:"Stephen Downes" already returns results from a bunch of strangers). It would be worth contemplating linking authors and OERs to additional resources, such as publishers and institutions (many of these are already described by schema.org). Another argument in favour of linked data is that any string data will need to have several properties, including character encoding and language. So it's best to use strings sparingly.
  
  All of the considerations above must also be mapped to a consideration of what people will actually do in the way of creating and using resource metadata. I recall a study by Norm Friesen, for example, examining the use of IEEE-LOM to index learning objects. Though the specification enables detailed educational descriptions, most people used only ten percent of the fields. Much of the metadata available will be minimal. Any mapping will need to contemplate listings using the most basic data: title, link (ie., URI) and description. Any system should attempt to automatically generate metadata (my own website automatically generates image metadata) and make good use of tags.
  
  Also (November 30): With respect to the summary and the map initiative itself, I would like to make one key recommendation: that it be a ‘submit-once’ system.
  
  Typically, OER data owners would employ a form or some interface to deposit content into the database that will eventually be used to produce the map. The result of this approach is that OER data owners must submit separately for each mapping initiative. Eventually they tire of this, and the result is incomplete data.
  
  So I would ask that any such map also *export* its data in a machine-readable format (plain XML will do, as would JSON, an RSS or Atom Extension, or pretty much any structured representation) along with licensing that allows it to be harvested and reused (pick whatever license you want). This would allow an OER data owner to submit *once* and have the data available for any number of maps.
  
  I would also recommend:
  
  - a mechanism that allows the OER data owner to update or edit records already submitted, to they can stay current
  
  - an export mechanism, or a stand-alone record-creator, so an OER data owner can create the structured representation and store it on his or her own website
  
  - a mechanism whereby databases of OER data repository information can publish and harvest each other’s data, thus essentially enabling them to sync records, so all databases will contain all OER information, no matter which database the record was originally added to
  
  In redundancy is reliability. In synchronization is strength. In distribution is durability. In structured representation is stability.
  
  
• 

  A Pathway for Advancement

  Posted: November 14, 2012, 10:27am COT

  Interesting commentary from Kevin Willey, which I quote at length from LinkedIn:
  
  

  Performance management is nothing more than buzz words in the government departments, and I speak from experience on this.  I entered the government back in early 2001, with the false impression that being creative and innovative would be rewarded, and that I could help to change things for the better.
  
  Was I ever wrong. The harder I tried to point out a better way, the more I was ignored, and eventually punished for being innovative. I was even told by one of the managers that attempting to, or suggesting alternatives was not part of my job function.
  
  We hear again and again from the political types they want to attract the brightest and the best, yet, everyone in Ottawa knows that a government job is a dead end, and that the only ones who get promoted are those who write tests well. Truly, they raise to their level of incompetence.
  
  I have lived in Ottawa for 54 years, and I have heard this same story over and over, before I joined the public service, and could not believe it as true. That impression was way wrong, all those people were correct.  I also have two brothers who work in different departments, and they have reflected the same story.
  
  In the public service, the managers are more interested about protecting their turf, than accepting new ideas for fear that they may be chastised for not thinking of the idea.  Twice this approach has caused me to have to take short term disability for clinical depression, before the last time it was almost not necessary because I came very, very close to ending my own life out of frustration.  Mental illness is almost at epidemic levels in the public service, I see it every day, and I have former friends who have killed themselves because of this frustration level. This is truly a sad state of affairs. 

  
  Interesting comment from Kevin Willey, and I can attest to his remarks about the stress of working in the public service.
  
  In my experience, the primary qualification for advancement to leadership positions is obedience. This may seem paradoxical, but it actually makes sense in an organization that should be taking direction from elected officials.
  
  However, the side-effect of obedience is that as it permeates through the ranks, the result is, as Willey observes, managers who do not take risks and who do not welcome innovation from below.
  
  That said, I am not sure that the situation is very different in large corporations, where again accountability is to external agencies, in this case shareholders, and where direction typically flows from the top down.
  
  But these observations tell us where we should be directing efforts to support innovation. The spin-off is a prime source, where experienced staff spot an opportunity and make their move. So is proactive recruitment of experienced staff from large organizations to management level positions in smaller organizations, for the same reason.
  
  I'm not sure how much discussion exists around regarding large organizations and the public service as sources for ideas and expertise that can be, if you will, 'mined' by the surrounding community.
  
  Indeed, the most productive way of streamlining corporations and the public service may be to develop programs that encourage exactly this sort of activity: it would provide a pathway for advancement and at the same time create economic drivers in the community.
  
  
• 

  International MOOCs Past and Present

  Posted: November 6, 2012, 6:01pm COT

  
  OpenLearning.com, a venture born out of the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia. Starting this week, you can begin taking two of their courses (Observing and Analysing Performance in Sport & Services Marketing – The Next Level).
  
  University of Western Australia. By next March, the Perth-based university plans to offer two courses (one in sociology, the other in oceanography) using an adapted version of Stanford’s open source platform, Class2Go.
  
  SpanishMooc? It’s billed as “the first open online Spanish course for everyone.”
  
  MobiMOOC Belgium - http://mobimooc.wikispaces.com/a+MobiMOOC+hello!
  
  Open University in the UK is about to run a MOOC, a Massive Open Online Course on Open Translation tools and practices. [www.ot12.org] [labspace.open.ac.uk]
   
  Sloodle MOOC - [https:]] - Europe (not many details on this one)
  
  Observing and Analysing Performance in Sport small open online course (SOOC) commences on the Open Learning platform. - keith Lyons, Australia
  
  eduMOOC 2011 (International) - [edumooc2011.blogspot.ca]
  
  Trainer MOOc - Larks Learning - India - [larkslearning.com]
  
  My Open Courses - India - a whole slew of (Khan video-style) open online courses - [myopencourses.com]
  
  Open Learning Design Studio MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) focusing on the theme of curriculum design with OERs, to be held in early 2013.  - UK - [www.jisc.ac.uk]
  
  Papers by Rita Kop on the Canadian MOOCs - [ritakop.blogspot.ca]
  
  Curriculum Design MOOC - Open University UK - [www3.open.ac.uk] see also [www.olds.ac.uk]
  
  Future of Higher Education (CFHE 12) - Canada - [edfuture.net]
  
  EduMOOC 2011 - International - [https:]]
  
  Mechanical MOOC - P2PU - International-ish - [mechanicalmooc.org] - A Gentle Introduction to Python
  
  Virtual Schooling MOOC - UK/US - 2012 - http://virtualschoolmooc.wikispaces.com/international
  
  Games MOOC - Shivtr - not sure where they're based - [gamesmooc.shivtr.com]
  
  UniMOOC Æmprende - Spanish - [iei.ua.es] - Instituto de Economía Internacional - Universidad de Alicante
  
  OMS2012. Germany. Run by DW Akademie. Citizen journalism and digital media in the Maghreb + beyond: [specials.dw.de] See also http://specials.dw.de/oms-en/?page_id=23#organize
  
  Introduction à la Programmation Objet (in French) - Coursera - École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne - [https:]]
  
  MOOC ITyPA - Internet: Tout est Pour Apprendre - 2012 - France - [itypa.mooc.fr] See also [www.studyramagrandesecoles.com]  
  
  Pedagogy First MOOC - international - 2012 - [pedagogyfirst.org]
  
  "La educación abierta en el siglo XXI"  (México-UNAM, Spanish, Feb. 2012) http://www.cuaed.unam.mx/portal/img/educacion_abierta.pdf  [www.slideshare.net]
  
  Distance Education in Portugal and Brazil. Taking about models of Distance Education, Tools and ending with the way ahead. 2012 http://www.moocead.net
  
  UNED in Spain has two MOOCs in Spanish on Open Data and e-Commerce. New courses will be added every momth: http://portal.uned.es/portal/page?_pageid=93%2C25731579&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL
  
  EPCoP Mooc Australia 2011, design team led by Coach Carole
  [https:]]
  
  iDESWEB, Introducción al desarrollo web (Introduction to web development), http://idesweb.es
  2012, more than 4,300 students enrolled. University of Alicante, Spain
  
  iXML, Introducción a XML (Introduction to XML), http://ixml.es
  November 2012, more than 200 students enrolled, University of Alicante, Spain
  
  UniMOOC aemprende (Key factors in entrepreneurship), http://unimooc.com
  November 2012, more than 6,000 students enrolled, University of Alicante, Spain
  
  First Steps in Learning and Teaching in HIgher Education MOOC (FSLT12) - [openbrookes.net] - run by Oxford Brookes University, UK
   
  MOOC EaD O primeiro MOOC em língua portuguesa - November, 2012 - Portugal
  
  
  Some U.S.-based MOOCs
  
  MOOC MOOC -   based in the U.S.  - [www.moocmooc.com]
  
  Faculty Commons - Engaging Technology and Online Pedagogy eTOP12 Micro-MOOC - U.S.-based - http://facultyecommons.com/engaging-technology-and-online-pedagogy-etop12-micro-mooc/ 
  
  Health Informatics mooc - 2012 - http://www.healthinformaticsforum.com/MOOC 
  
  CMC11 - Creativity and Multicultural Communication - started Fall 2011 - U.S., SUNY/Empire State College; Facilitated by Betty Hurley-Dasgupta and Carol Yeager [cdlprojects.com]
  VizMath - Visualizing Mathematics started 15 October 2012, facilitated by Betty Hurley-Dasgupta and Carol Yeager, SUNY/Empire State College, [www.cdlprojects.com]
  
  Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas (University of Texas at Austin): Introduction to Infographics and Data Visualization, Oct. 28 - Dec. 8, 2012 http://open.journalismcourses.org
  limited at 2000 attendees = full
  
  EDG6931 -- Personal Learning Environments for Inquiry in K12 -- College of Education at the University of Florida -- Spring 2011 (Feb-Mar)Wendy Drexler & Christopher Sessums.
  [community.education.ufl.edu]
  A Crash Course in Creativity, taught by Tina Seelig through the Venture Lab at Stanford University
  
  University of Central Florida (UCF),  BlendKit2011 (200 registrants), BlendKit2012 (1230 registrants), BlendKit Course materials,  see [bit.ly]   and for a quick intro, please see [slidesha.re]
  
  

Blog de Andrés Chiappe - Objetos de Aprendizaje - Learning Objects

• 

  Proyecto de Investigación sobre Prácticas Educativas Abiertas: ¿quieres participar? - Research Project about Open Educational Resources: ¿Want to join in?

  Posted: November 6, 2012, 5:00pm COT

  Hola a todos, quisiera compartir con ustedes un proyecto de investigación sobre Prácticas Educativas Abiertas que actualmente se encuentra en curso, el cual pretende explorar e implementar prácticas innovadoras en educación que se caractericen por aplicar los principales postulados del movimiento educativo abierto, como la colaboración, la adaptación, la reutilización, la remezcla, la redistribución, la inclusión, entre otras.
  
  Si quieren participar del proyecto pueden encontrar más información en: http://project-oep.org
  
  -----
  
  Hi everyone, I would like to share with you a research project about Open Educational Practices that is currently in progress, which aims to explore and implement innovative practices in education that are characterized by applying the main principles of the open education movement, such as collaboration, adaptation, reuse, remixing, redistributing, inclusion, among others.
  
  If you want to join in to the project, we invite you to visit the project website: http://project-oep.org

Half an Hour

• 

  The Paradox of Democracy

  Posted: November 6, 2012, 12:24pm COT

  During my days as a student activist studying philosophy in Alberta one wag described me as "a moderate socialist and a radical democrat."
  
  That description is probably still apt 20 years later. The bulk of my work in online learning and media is dedicated toward the idea that people should be able to manage their own lives and their own futures.
  
  But the phrase 'radical democrat' was and still is the source of some ambiguity. By 'democrat' I do not mean, of course, affiliation with the Democratic party in the United States. Rather, it means 'supporter of democracy', whatever that is.
  
  Modern democracies consist of two parts:
  

  • a mechanism enabling the majority to plan and carry out a form of self-governance for a region or nation as a whole, and
  • a mechanism defining and ensuring the protection of basic rights and privileges accorded to all members of society.

  
  Most people not surprisingly focus on the first part of democracy. Some even deride the second under the heading of 'judicial activism', as though democracy should only be defined by the former.
  
  But I have never believed that a simple counting of votes is sufficient for the governance of a region or a nation, not the least because of the likelihood of what Mill calls the 'tyranny of the majority',  but also because the majority is simply unable to govern without these basic rights and privileges.
  
  In modern democracies, one way we determine the will of the majority is by means of the vote (it may surprise people to know that this is not the only way to determine the will of the majority; a reading of Rousseau on 'the general will' for example reveals a more organic alternative process; others, by contrast, cite the 'invisible hand' of the marketplace).
  
  The premise behind the exercise of the vote is that it reflects the opinions of an informed citizenry. What constitutes 'informed' has varied over the years. Voting was once limited to landowners, a privilege still enshrined in bodies such as the British House of Lords and the Canadian Senate. It was also at different times limited to free persons, to men, and today, to adults over a certain age. Robert Heinlein has suggested it be limited to those who serve in the military.
  
  The need for this is found in a two-part argument formed by Thomas Jefferson:
  

  • "Compare again the ferocious depredations of their insurgents, with the order, the moderation and the almost self-extinguishment of ours. And say, finally, whether peace is best preserved by giving energy to the government, or information to the people."

  • "Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. Enable them to see that it is their interest to preserve peace and order, and they will preserve them. And it requires no very high degree of education to convince them of this. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty."

  It is a reflection at once of both Hobbes and Locke, the idea that peace in the land is ensured by a government that serves the will of the people, and that it is through this desire for peace that people will participate in, and support the mechanisms of, that government.
  
  But this, in turn, depends on the people actually desiring something worth desiring. Here is Heinlein again:
  
  

  "What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it… which for the majority translates as ‘Bread and Circuses.’"

  Two dilemmas occur. The first is created when a person's self-interest is contrary to the interest of the interest of society as a whole. The classic instance of this is criminal behaviour, but in a democracy, many forms of self-interest are legal, even encouraged, even though they act against the interest of the whole.
  
  The second is created when a person is mistaken about what lies in his own best interests. History is replete with examples of people acting, en masse, in a manner that harms their own well-being and security. And individual cases of self-harm or self-defeating behaviour exist in all societies. As Mill would argue, no person is best served by bread and circuses, but often, this is what they want.
  
  In my own discussion of autonomy, I describe four major areas in which a person can enjoy more or less self-governance:
  

  • the capacity to know - this includes being in a position to have relevant experiences, the capacity to reflect on those experiences, and to do so independently of incentives or coercions

  • the capacity to act - this includes flexibility and mobility, the absence of legal constraints, barriers and locks, and the resources and entitlements necessary to make action possible 

  • the range of behaviour - this is described by media of expression, association and transmission of ideas, background noise, tolerance and quality of choices

  • the capacity to have an effect - described by the audience for an idea or its efficacy, as well as the nature and extent of improvements possible

  In a simple democracy government by the votes of the majority, we can observe ways in which individuals, as well as the majority, are limited in their capacity to know, decide and act.
  
  In a full and complete democracy, individuals would have the widest degree of autonomy possible, in a manner consistent with the autonomy of other members of society, in order to define and pursue their own best interests, and as necessary the best interests of society.
  
  But it is clear that the protection and enhancement of this autonomy is not enabled by the simple process of voting alone (indeed, if even at all). For we find ourselves in a paradox: we need to vote to ensure the greatest degree of autonomy for ourselves, but we need the greatest autonomy for ourselves in order to show us how to vote.
  
  We can see in any election (including the present American election taking place today) ways in which the autonomy of the voters is subverted, and hence, their ability to act in the best interests of either themselves or society:
  

  • the information they receive is controlled and manipulated, they are unable to reason effectively on that information, and they are subject to rewards of government spending and coercion through loss of employment

  • individual mobility is limited, both internationally, by means of immigration restrictions, and nationally, by means of limited access to social services and health care; a person's first interest, in most democracies today, is employment and personal welfare

  • the right to associate and demonstrate is increasingly limited by police powers, while one's individual voice is being managed via copyright and trade restrictions, and limited access to the press and popular media

  • the desires expressed by individual votes, and the mass of votes, are being subverted by influences placed on elected officials

  In other words, it is not simply that people vote for bread and circuses, it is that, often, bread and circuses is the best they can get, because of the circumstances they find themselves in, and their inability to demand, and get, more.
  
  This is why - and how - I am a radical democrat. My commitment to democracy extends well beyond support for the mechanisms of democratic decision-making, but additionally, to mechanisms and measures supporting the greatest degree of autonomy and self-governance possible.
  
  In this (ironically and perhaps to some rather surprisingly) I am affiliated with the most conservative and libertarian voices in society today.
  
  Where I differ is that I do not define 'intrusion' in our lives narrowly as 'government intrusion', first, and second, I do not define 'autonomy' simply in terms of my own individual autonomy, but in a manner that promotes the autonomy of all persons equally.
  
  For if one of us is not free, none of us is free. 
  
  In this, therefore, my support for democracy hinges on two elements that are very similar to Jefferson's two major points.
  
  

  • The need to meet the basic conditions of autonomy for all of us, including a robust definition of rights that includes both the means and capacity to act and make decisions freely, and

  • The need to enable for each person the capacity to become critically literate, that is, to be able to reason cogently and arrive reliably at those measures and conclusions most reflective of his or her self interest.

  
  The former requires a charter of rights and freedoms that goes well beyond the 'bills of rights' that would be granted to people already in possession of the means to act upon them. 'Freedom of the press' is meaningless if one cannot own a press; 'freedom of speech' matters not at all if there is no means to be heard.
  
  In practice, I support something like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And in particular, I aver that no person can be free if he or she lacks sustenance and nourishment, housing, clothing, education, a sense of belonging, and a sense of meaning or purpose. If a person, or people, live in poverty, none of us is free. As Foucault might say, the rich are as bound by the trepiditions of the poor as are the poor. Or as Chandler might say, when people are poor, you always have to watch your back.
  
  We cannot be free if we are in want; we cannot form the conditions for self-government from the condition of poverty.
  
  With regard to the second, I have discussed elsewhere the needs of critical awareness and reflection under the headings of various types of literacy. And I have described, in much more general terms, what people need to learn. In both cases, the objective is to develop a capacity to perceive accurately, to reason with clarity, and to act with foresight.
  
  Ultimately, my understanding of democracy is one in which the emphasis on decisions taken by majority vote decreases and finally wanes to almost nothingness.
  
  The need for a vote, after all, represents and reflects an incapacity on the part of the electorate.
  
  In the first instance, the vote reflects an incapacity to govern at all. The vote is, in the first instance, not an opting between ideas, but rather, a selection of representatives who will do our governing for us. It reflects a time and an era in which the process of governance required more travel and more time than any of us could afford.
  
  This is a time that has arguably already passed. Modern communications technology makes most travel unnecessary. And today's legislators have had to spend so much time learning how to campaign, raise money, and earn our vote, that they are barely more capable of representing our own interests, even in complex matters, than we are ourselves.
  
  And in the second instance, it reflects an incapacity to resolve through more gentle means the tensions and conflicts that flare in modern society. The vote represents a form of conflict, one in which the ballot has replaced the bullet, to be sure, but one in which existing market or legal mechanisms do not enable people to govern themselves directly.
  
  And, in a final paradox, the tensions and conflicts being addressed in the ballot box today revolve around the question of whether there should be democracy at all. They revolve around the persistence of poverty and resistance to the efforts to alleviate it. They revolve around the persistence of ignorance and resistance to the efforts to educate. We are not now debating the question of what kind of society we would like to have, we are debating the question of whether we want to have a society at all.
  
  Democracy, predictably, is unable to resolve the paradox of its own existence. In an existential incompleteness theorem, it is unable to determine whether democracy is, after all, the best form of government. And perhaps most damaging, it is unable to ensure its own existence. Democracy tolerates, at best, and encourages, at worst, the prevalence of poverty and the subversion of reason that give society a reason to exist.
  
  For my own part, the resolution of the paradox lies in the explicit rejection of the proposition that some people are more important, or more valuable, than others. Or, more positively, an explicit endorsement of Kant's maxim that very rational being has intrinsic and not merely instrumental value, that to treat a person as a means to some end is to deny their essential humanity.
  
  Some people arrive at this maxim from religious reasons. "Not even one sparrow dies and falls on the ground without God noticing it." For me, the import of Kant's maxim lies in the nature of society itself. A society that subjects its members to arbitrary and discriminatory treatment cannot sustain. Such a society exists in a state of perpetual war with itself, a draining of wealth and resources that ultimately leaves nothing but death and stagnation.
  
  So today people vote, and exercise what limited social autonomy they have in their grasp. But in their vote, they should see the need for a wider democracy, one in which the vote is no longer necessary, but rather one based on a mechanism of exchanges of mutual support and benefit, a society defined not by cartels and cabals and conflict, but where sustenance and prosperity are ensured through cooperation, through exchanges between equals to their mutual benefit.
  
  In other words, the reason we have a democracy at all is that at some level we believe every human being has the same basic worth. We understand that this sense of a basic equality is necessary for us to have a society at all, and that having a society is our best and only hope of having and sort of existence worth having.
  
  That's why I'm a moderate socialist and a radical democrat. I believe this last is not negotiable. I believe that the basic equality of individuals in our society is all that protects us from the abyss, that the chains that bind us will, unless unshackled, be the weight that drags us down into oblivion.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• 

  Predators and Producers: Whither Flat World

  Posted: November 5, 2012, 12:05pm COT

  In what was probably an unintentional release of the information, Flat World Publishing made the world aware this weekend that it is ceasing distribution of digital textbooks without charge.
  
  Readers of Campus Marketplace were the first members of the public to know, but "The company is making direct calls to many of its bookstore partners." Flat World CEO Jeff Shelstad told the publication that “while free access goes away, our mission to be fair and affordable remains as strong as ever."
  
  A lot of people had banked on Flat World providing free access to textbooks, as it had promised to do.  "The only reason I gave Flatworld a chance was because it seemed like a great opportunity to try a text with no risk to the students," said one commenter on the Chronicle article. "I made the mistake of adopting before they changed their model with no notice to any of its customers."
  
  To understand Flat World's change of philosophy, it is important to understand the company's business model. It is neatly summed up in an Inside Higher Ed article:
  
  "Like traditional publishers, it commissioned and paid authors to produce high-quality textbooks, and to market those textbooks to professors to assign in their courses."
  
  The idea here was that the free digital versions would lead colleges and universities to order print versions of the same works, and it would be via the print versions that the publisher made its money. What happened instead was that the world moved to digital more quickly than anticipated.
  
  Inside Higher Ed again: "the shift in gears by Flat World Knowledge suggests that, for one company at least, providing free and open textbooks is not a viable business plan. While company officials hoped that they’d be able to persuade many of the consumers of the basic, free versions of its textbooks to pay for printed copies or versions enhanced with study aids and other add-ons, 'we don’t convert [from free to paid] as much as we used to,' said Shelstad, the Flat World co-founder."
  
  Flat Earth represented the 'have your cake and eat it' school of publishing. It represented the idea that business models would not need to adjust to the digital reality, that you could take a traditional concept - like academic publishing - and simply add free digital content on top, as marketing and promotion perhaps.
  
  It's the same model being embraced by the companies that are offering MOOCs, and it won't be long, as a commenter on the IHE article states, before they are offering closed open online courses. "Once we figure out the right word for 'much closer to free than we are now,' then we should let the folks at Coursera and EdX know. I think they'll probably need it in a few years, when MOOCs turn into MOCs, though at something less than the current cost of tuition."
  
  There are ways to do free. Indeed, free learning resources will probably carry the day when the smoke clears. But they won't sustain traditional business models. Alex Osterwalder has a nice presentation on SlideShare that makes this point. Consider the alternative business models that can sustain free content:
  
  - content is distributed for free, but once it reaches a certain threshold of popularity, it becomes commercial. This is similar to the NY Times model, which allows causal readers free viewing to a certain point.
  
  - content is distributed for free within the context of an all-you-can-eat subscription model. Netflix does this, offering access to movies and television shows online for about $8 per month (in Canada), less than a third of the cost of one Flat World textbook.
  
  - context is distributed for free, which stimulates demand for platforms and communications channels leveraging the content. This is what WordPress and Moodle have done, leveraging free software into hosting and consulting businesses.
  
  So why couldn't Flat World have adopted one of these alternative business models?Because it focused on a way to sell the content it developed, rather than to leverage that content to motivate consumers to pay for products they actually would buy.
  
  In Osterwalde's examples, consumers are paying not for the content directly but instead for free and online access to that content. It's the same thing they are paying for when they purchase computers or mobile phones and when they purchase internet accounts.
  
  Subscriptions and services represent an intuitive addition to that business model; per-title fees for texts do not. But providing subscriptions and services require access to a lot of content, not a few specially-commissioned titles. And you have to devote yourself to building a platform rather than to simply focus on producing titles.
  
  By structuring themselves as a traditional publisher, Flat World was not able to transition into a digital business model. This puts them on a path that now pits them as direct competition for traditional publishers, not an alternative approach. And while Flat World's Shelstad may claim to be able to compete on the basis of price, the company is now at best niche and at worst roadkill for the economies of scale.
  
  That's one thing. Another thing is the licensing argument.
  
  To begin with, I know Flat World published its work under the Creative Commons non-commercial license. At the same time, however, Flat World proponents such as David Wiley - not to mention other academic publishers in a similar context - have been arguing that authors need to publish their work under the "more open" CC-by license, which does not prohibit commercial use.
  
  The logic of using CC-non-commercial is evident, and Wiley explained it during our debate in British Columbia: "Text book development costs a lot of money and they want to make those textbooks and they want to share, they're willing to share them with the world for free but they don't want to get undercut in the commercial market so they use this non‐commercial clause because as bad as it is, it's the best thing we have available." (p. 52)
  
  Interestingly, this is very similar to my own logic in using CC-non-commercial in these pages. I don't want some commercial publish like Flat World to come along and take my content, enclose it, and start charging for access to it. I don't want the commercial pay-content industry to leverage its superior marketing and distribution capabilities to become the de facto vendor of what I had originally intended to be free and open content. So I use the NC license to protect myself.
  
  Ironically, Wiley's argument against the NC clause was precisely that NC makes it impossible for publishers to do this. As he described it, "I want to print this stuff out, I want to do this service for people, I, if I'm going to spend all my time doing that and I'm not going to be growing my garden or doing whatever else, I'd like to at least be able to eat off of that activity, and your non‐commercial clause is morally reprehensible because it means that I can't make a living trying to help people get access to this material. That's the morality argument around non‐commercial."
  
  This may seem to be a contradiction, but it's not. Here's what publishers such as Flat Earth want: they want access to your content for free, or for as low a cost as they can manage, and they want to be able to sell it for as much as possible. So it's good for them if authors make their content freely available, while at the same time they restrict the possibility of commercial reuse of the same content (ideally by eliminating the CC-share-alike clause).
  
  This is what I've always argued commercial publishers want to do. I have always argued that theirs is a model based on enclosure - that they would take free and open content and make access impossible unless you paid them money. And that's what Flat World did here - it dangled its open content out there to lure people in, and then slammed a paywall on it, midway through the academic year, trapping people who had thus been enticed.
  
  I think there are many ways Flat World and its proponents could have created a viable business based on free content.
  
  First of all, I think it's time that the community recognizes that 'free content' means content you can download, remix, repurpose, share - but not sell. That the 'free as in libre' sense of free is meaningless without 'free as in gratis', because without access to the content you have no freedoms at all.
  
  So I support Flat World's use of CC-NC, just as I support MIT OpenCourseWare's use of the NC license, and the rest of them - and that why, indeed, I am inclined to view suspiciously initiatives that are asking people to donate content under a CC-by license. They are just waiting for their change to pull a Flat World - to convert from a free-access to a paid-access model.
  
  After all, who wouldn't pay $10 a year to use Wikipedia? Right?
  
  Second, I think that Flat World could have found its sustainability niche if it had structured its offer around the idea of providing services for users of online textbooks. Services such as hosting, streaming, maybe even printing. Services such as authoring and editing and proofing. There is much more money to be made helping people create free content than there is in charging people for content.
  
  They could have learned, for example, from Simon Fraser University's Public Knowledge Project. This is an initiative that has been around since 1998, has employed some 40 graduate and undergraduate students over the years, and has just launched its Open Monograph Press. As PKP's John Willinksy says, "We have worked hard to create a virtual publishing-house-in-a-box, which, in the hands of publishers and scholars, will give life to a new generation of learned books."
  
  In general, let me say this: there are two types of commercial enterprise, two types of business, and they are: predation and production.
  
  The predation model thrives on scarcity and shortage. It seeks barriers in production, or creates its own, in order to stimulate greater demand and higher prices. It thrives on hardship and want, and fails in the face of abundance and prosperity.
  
  The production model thrives on abundance and plenty. It removes barriers in production, or enables new production, in order to stimulate widespread availability and lower prices. It thrives on prosperity and generosity, and attacks hardship and want.
  
  Production model companies make things possible, while predation model companies make things impossible. A production model company enables sharing; a predation model company prevents it.
  
  The predation model depends on legal mechanisms to force compliance - it depends, for example, on court-awarded monopolies, copyright and trade restrictions, prohibitions against production, and similar mechanisms. While predation model proprietors champion the principles of the free market, they rely on artificial scarcities to stay in business.
  
  Today's predation-model proprietorships include journal and textbook publishers, who rely on cheap or free academic labour paid for by public grants and/or universities, and required textbook purchases in college and university educations.
  
  But we've seen the model in the past, from the original corporate charters granted by monarchs to grant enterprises monopolies over trade and production of certain goods, from the ownership of land and agricultural production in the 1600 and 1700s, to the energy and transport charters of the 1800s and 1900s, to the communications, media and entertainment giants of the 1900s and 2000s. And with proprietary seed stocks and other biological goods being produced in the 2000s we are seeing an enclosure of biology and life itself under commercial ownership, creating, once again, scarcities where none existed.
  
  The production model focuses on helping people produce rather than forcing them out of the market. At each stage of its history, the production model has had to break the predatory monopoly that preceded it.
  
  The opening of the new world ended the proprietorship of feudal lords and fiefs, as a person need no longer depend on a landowner to create crops, but could now emigrate and own his or her own land. And as millions did, the serfs in one land after another were gradually freed, and predatory land-ownership became productive agriculture. And starvation, once common in those lands, was effectively ended.
  
  Where once only charter corporations could undertake business and commerce, the rise of such professionals as accountants, lawyers and clerical staff enabled families and small businesses to flourish. The financial and business services industry was, in the first instance, part of the production model.
  
  In a similar manner, the rise of the automobile and the creation of the road network ended the transportation cartels created by the railroads. For many years (and even today) the automobile has symbolized freedom - and this is not merely a metaphoric freedom, but one for the most part genuine, as people could now travel where they wished without tolls or fares.
  
  Motorized transport, and motors in general, stimulated an entire productive sector - people could transport themselves, procure their own goods, mow their own lawns, till their own fields, lift things, move things, make things - and an entire productive economy developed around these innovations, one so large it dwarfed what existed before it.
  
  Today we are witnessing the conversion of the intellectual properties from a predation to a production model. We are entering an era in which most of us can sing, act, write, draw and paint, compose, author, program and design. These skills, once the preserve of an elite, these products, once carefully hoarded (Disney still talks of the 'Disney Vault' as though it were a good thing) are becoming common and plentiful.
  
  Flat World is and was based on the predation model, even when it was giving content away for free. It was based on this model because it sought to be the proprietor and locus of content production. That's what made it possible for it to so easily add a paywall. If it were based on the production model, the idea of a paywall would seem absurd.
  
  To me, the NC clause means that my content is the output of the economic process, not the input. It is something produced by the productive economy, not something consumed by the predatory economy. It is something that is meant to be shared, not sold. It is something that is intended to be abundant, not scarce. It's value is calculated according to what it contributes, not by what it takes.
  
• 

  Learning in the Digital Age: The Reality and the Myth

  Posted: October 29, 2012, 2:58pm COT

  
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  Let me tell you story of the great bear. It's a story from First Nations People who lived near where I was born in Canada, the Iroquois people. It's a story from long ago.They didn't have very much. They had a small community around a campfire. They lived on deer and rabbit.Time passed and a great bear came to plague their campground. Every day when they woke up, they could see the tracks of the bear around their campsite. The bear was eating all the game, eating all the deer, eating all the rabbits. The people began to starve.They sent hunters out to shoot the bear, but when they shot bows and arrows at the bear, the arrows just bounced off. The bear would kill the warriors. One or two would straggle back and say, "The bear killed us." They were getting desperate and they didn't know what to do.Finally, three warriors on the same night had the same dream. They said, "I dreamed that I killed the great bear. I dreamed that we went together and we shot the bear. The bear bled and the bear died."The chief decided that it's a spirit dream; it must be true. He sent the three warriors, even though they were his best three warriors.They went out and they shot the bear. They were able to draw blood. They chased the bear. The bear was bleeding. They continued to chase around and around, but they never caught the bear.To this day, when you look up in the fall sky, you can see the stars, three hunters chasing the bear. You know that they're chasing the bear because the leaves all turn red, which is the blood of the bear that they shot.It's through the creation of myths that we talk to each other. Our myths are not just explanations of where the stars come from or why the leaves turn red. They're the expressions of the full range of human emotion, from human reason to irony, to anger, to argument, to explanation.We speak in myth because reality is ineffable. It cannot be expressed in words. All language is, as in the first instance, based in myth, based in some idealization, some abstraction.We forget this. We think today as though what we say expresses reality in some way. It's as though our words were fully and literally true, but this is seldom the case. Even the words themselves are metaphors, capturing reality through myth.You might think, how can this be? When you look at language itself, you can see this. There's a French word, croc. I'm picking French because it's not English and it's not Estonian. It's neutral. You can think of your own language and see if this is true.We have the French word croc, which means tooth or fang, something crooked, something hooked. We have the idea of the crocodile, an animal with fangs. We have in French the idea of crochet, and to crochet is to create a rug using hooks. We have the idea of entre crochet in French, between the brackets, between the hooks. You have crochet a bouton, or button hooks, the things you use. Or, in French, a crochet du gauche, a right hook.You see this over and over, in French and in other languages, how the single root morphs and twists. The single concept creates the image that underlies all of our concepts into the future.We comprehend the future in terms of what we understand today. This is the basis of the origin of these myths. This is really important to understand.When we start talking about what cannot be known we lose our place or we experience only confusion. We are lost in a swirl of chaos. It's chaos that, in fact, characterizes all reality.We project our thoughts, our ideas, our beliefs, our features onto the chaos. This is how we understand the chaos. We look at the chaos and we see ourselves. In seeing ourselves in the chaos, we comprehend the chaos, but it's a myth. A lot of the time these patterns, these projections, are primal and basic like bears, like tragedy, like fangs and hooks.At the same time, as we try to comprehend the future, we also make the future. We strive to make tomorrow safe and comfortable as it was for us in the past, or at least a mythical past ‑‑ a hearth, a home, a story, a family, a community. Another myth.Sisyphus, you may know, sought to cheat death and he succeeded.But he was caught by the gods and punished by being sentenced to push the boulder up the hill forever. When he gets the boulder to the top of the hill, of course, the boulder rolls down the hill. He goes down the hill after it, and has to push the boulder up, and so on for the rest of time. "The Myth of Sisyphus," it's very famous, very well known.When we worry about the future, when we worry about the Internet, when we worry about e‑learning it's not because we don't know what to expect, it's not the unknown. It's because when we project into the future, we project a future like "The Myth of Sisyphus." We project a future that has been taken away from us by some nameless form, e‑learning, and replaced with pointless labour at the service of the gods.In a future that's constantly changing, a future that we can never comprehend, a future where our degrees mean nothing a year or two years after we got them. That's a future we saw described just yesterday. It appears to be a future where we have no hope like Sisyphus.In such a scenario, e‑learning does not appear to be a solution at all. Rather, it seems to be a surrender, a ceding of our authority, our independence and our autonomy.One thinks of Adam Curtis' videography "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace." If you're not familiar with it, I certainly recommend you look it up and set aside several hours.What Curtis is saying is the Internet age brings us into an age where we lose our independence and autonomy and become parts in this large machine, that our contribution to knowledge is beyond our control, that there is no room for the individual, the thinker, the creator, the idealist. The only future is the one that's created as society as a whole that is, as Curtis says, all watched over by these machines.Some would have a say it's a future that we have to accept. Camus would say, "The struggle itself is enough to fill man's heart." One must imagine Sisyphus as happy.These days we say, "Well, at least Sisyphus has a job." We forget. We forget that Sisyphus achieved his objective. He set out to defy death, and in the end that's what he got, but it was at the cost of eternal labour. It's this cost that makes us wary.When people point to things and say, "It's just a myth, you're wrong," it's almost like they're asking us to surrender to this inevitability like Sisyphus. What we hope and dream has no meaning or, worse, will be realized and shown not to be gold, but to be worthless dross.It's funny how most myths seem to finish this way. The hunter forever chasing the golden bear, Sisyphus forever pushing the boulder up the hill.For all that, we never stop creating these myths. We never stop trying to understand the world, trying to comprehend the world by drawing pictures, telling stories and imagining what it could be.Steve Wheeler tells us the idea of the digital natives or the net generation is a myth. Of course it's a myth. It's just a story that Don Tapscott tells and you should not believe that what Don Tapscott tells is true. It's a myth. We shouldn't think of it as true.It's also a way of understanding the world and that's the value we need to draw from it. It's a way of saying that our children are different from us. They have different experiences, they have different ways of seeing the world, they are different people.Simply saying, "This is a myth," washes all of that under the bridge, reassures us that our view of the world is on solid ground. Why worry about change? It's all just illusion, it's all just a myth. You may have dreams, but the reality is it's all just a myth.We are warned by the story of Adam and Eve; we are warned by the story of Prometheus, who stole the secret of fire from the gods, to be aware of the dangers of too much knowledge. As Plutarch, so we are told, says, "The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled."Again, we can look at these myths as not-real representations of the story of creation or the story of the discovery of fire. Or we can look at these myths as cautions, not against education in general, but against a certain approach to education.We can see these myths as telling us, with some clarity, that knowledge is not something simply to be consumed, like an apple, that knowledge is not something that can be stolen from the gods like fire. I thought Christian Port yesterday expressed this really well. I think we were all interested to hear his presentation."Imagine," he said, "we built a robot." I love the myth making in the middle of a talk. "Imagine," he said, "we built a robot and sent it to a planet where there's something we need like some ore. We programmed the robot, the more you mine the better you feel." Remember that?The robot learns, over time, to know itself. It comes to realize that there's a button that makes it feel better, so instead of learning how to mine the ore, it learns how to press the button.Port asks, "What is it that motivates a human being to develop, to move on?" He says, "It's in the central nervous system where we get dopamine. We press the dopamine button and the outcome becomes a culture of cheating." It's like artificial sweetener. It's like caffeine. I love caffeine. It's like drugs, it's like green, it's like Facebook friends, it's like e‑learning.The concern that e‑learning is this thing that our myths warn us about. It's a shortcut. It's the pressing of the button. It's the activation of the dopamine, but it's not really the learning.What is this feeling? It gives us a confused feeling. The myth gives us two elements. It's an expression of what we want, but it's a warning about getting what we want too easily.Steve Wheeler talking about myths, I counted seven in all. I probably could have kept going. You analyze his talk; all of his myths really are cautions against the easy score.Consider what he says about learning styles. They're a lot of nonsense. You'll read that. There's all kinds of studies that say learning styles are nonsense.He says, "There is one true thing. There are as many learning styles as there are people. The problem," he says quite accurately, "with learning styles is they try to pigeon-hole students into categories. They try to define students by the activities you impose on them based on what you believe as teachers."If we think about learning styles as the magic shortcut to more effective learning, we are deluding ourselves. Even if it is true that people learn differently, and it is true that people learn differently, we don't achieve magical results simply by catering to that.A learning style isn't a shortcut to memory because learning isn't about remembering at all. It's a myth, but it's useful. It's a myth that tells us, that warns us, that not all of our students are the same. They're not going to react the same, and most importantly, they're not like us.There's a deeper lesson here that Wheeler touched on when he noted that learning styles motif had been visited over and over by people like Mumford and COLT. We could add Gregorc, Myers‑Briggs. We can also add that the stage‑based learning models, Piaget, Bloom, method‑based approach in Gagne, or I saw this morning the SECI model from Nonaka and Takeuchi ‑‑ I'm never good at pronouncing names ‑‑ described by Carayannis.All of these things where learning is described by slicing and dicing, categorizing, drawing into stages, outlining a process. It's the same model in each case where we're taking something very complex and trying to find little bits in it. We're going to try to study these little bits, these little segments, these little categories and that will be the shortcut to understanding the difficult process of learning.It's modeling. That's fine if we understand that modeling is myth making. In general, the approach of trying to pigeonhole students, pigeonhole stages of learning or whatever leads to methodology. It leads to, on the one hand, a struggle to understand the world, albeit without science, and on the other hand, an attempt to realize our objectives more simply, more easily, an attempt to create a shortcut.It's nonsense to say that there are no categories. There are categories. The world is filled with categories. What it's nonsense to say is that these categories are fundamental to learning, that they express the fundamental nature of perception. It's nonsense to say this categorization will, by itself, magically lead to some new understanding as though our mythical categorizations somehow expose the nature of reality.We do not make things simpler by multiplying entities. We do not make things clearer by breaking them down into parts, though we are tempted to do so.Today's candidate for breaking things into parts and making them simpler, so‑called, is competencies, as though we can understand the really difficult nature of mathematics by understanding 10 subsets of mathematics or whatever. In my mind, searching for competencies is taking one really difficult problem and breaking it down into 10 really difficult problems.Another myth. I was up this morning preparing this presentation, watching the news in English. You may have seen this if you were listening in English. You may have actually seen this commercial from DuPont and this is a quote. "The need for science‑based solutions is more pressing, as is the collaboration to find them. Coming together is how we will better protect the Earth and the billions on it."So says DuPont. So says, in her own way, Alison Littlejohn. She tells us, "People first connect, then they consume and use the knowledge, then they create new knowledge, an artefact, a conversation, a trace, etc."She gave us the use case of Sally, the new chemist, who has to create a new substrate for drilling a new type of rock. I don't know what that means because I don't know much about drilling. She needs to create a new tech. I'm drawing that from "Star Trek."She says that you draw from a whole range of different resources. You also draw from knowledge of different range of people and, at any point, you may be working as an individual, group, network, collective, etc. You connect, create, contribute, or you join with others with similar goals. This turns out to be central to the presentation."What are the binding forces," she asks, "that draw people or resources together?" Via social constructivism, people communicate via knowledge objects. People communicate working in networks, etc.I'm sitting there. I'm asking myself, how do I understand this? I can't understand it literally. She's talking about binding forces that draw us together as though we must succumb to being joined together by some external force like what, gravity?The myth somewhere through the talk has become the reality. She says, "We need something, an object, that brings people together, but what is this object? In turning, we use a goal as that object." I loved this. I really did.There's in English two words, objective and objective, and object and object. You can have an object, which is a thing, or you can have an object, which is a goal. You have the same word with two different meanings and it's interesting to see how the two different meanings slide together here.We have very traditional outcomes of this, various social objects such as work or learning activities, reports, patient health case report, common problems, learning goals, things that would be familiar to us from 20 years ago. The myth making has served its purpose and brought us back to the comfortable and familiar.There's another myth you may be familiar with. It's the story of King Midas. King Midas was a very greedy king, as you know, and was granted a wish based on a most thoughtless fantasy that everything he touches turns into gold.Of course, he starts turning things into gold. Everything seems really good until his daughter comes for a goodnight kiss. He gives her a little kiss and his daughter turns to gold.As the web page where I got this from, "Freezes solid like an Oscar statue." I love the way they use metaphor in order to describe a myth. Midas pleads to the gods for nullification. He's able to wash away his gift and lives a virtuous life thereafter.We can read the myth very superficially. You don't always want what you wish for, or some things are worth more than gold.I draw a slightly deeper lesson, or at least to me it's deeper. I'm going to say it's deeper because it's me. We often hear about gold of one sort or another described as a prescription for everybody.I was thinking of Stephen Harris's school and these terms that he described it just before this talk. Imagine if everybody had Stephen Harris's school. Would that even be possible? Would it make sense or would it bankrupt the education system? Can you imagine the furniture companies giving every school furniture? Who would they sell to?It's not just that. In the North American context, there's this idea that everybody should learn science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or the so‑called STEM courses, but if everybody learns science and technology, nobody's an artist.It's not that there's no art in the world after that, there's no conception of art. There's no way to represent art because we've lost the words. It does not scale, cannot scale. The principle of the categorical imperative tells us when somebody prescribes something as a solution, to imagine everybody in the world adopting that solution and then to ask whether it makes sense.Everything turning to gold does not make sense. Everything turning into that one special school does not make sense. Everything turning into science, technology, engineering and mathematics does not make sense.Sameness is a myth. Sameness is the shortcut. We think, we are tempted to think, if everything could be the same, it would be so much easier. It's inevitable, as we learn from Prometheus, that in our efforts to make everything the same, we destroy everything that we value and we come to discover that sameness is meaningless without that value.It's classic myth formation. The approaching presence of some evil or danger, globalization, the end of energy, I don't know, too many penguins. The only way to respond to that danger is to become part of the whole, to work as a team, to subsume our personal interests.Why, I would ask, should we suppose that sameness or subsumption to the whole will solve the problem? Why is the push to collaboration, shared objectives, shared goals, somehow the answer to whatever it is that's coming on us?There was a comment. Somebody made a comment in the session just before this one. There are too many convening theories, incommensurable vocabularies, and we could solve this if we had one vocabulary and one theory. That would fix that.I remember the RSS standards wars of the late `80s, early `90s. RSS was a syndication format and there were too many different flavours of RSS.Somebody said, "Let's create a new standard and there will be just one standard covering them all. We'll call it Atom." Then after that we had RSS and Atom, two different standards.Then somebody said, "Let's create one standard that will bridge the gap between RSS and Atom." Then we had three standards, and so it goes.The attempt to standardize creates multiplicity. Myths of conformity, as though conformity makes better.In 1793 they came up with the idea of interchangeable parts. Eli Whitney first put this into practice in the manufacture of muskets. Saying this really worked, it created more guns. We had the idea that in the long run, if we have sameness of production, all the changes that need to be managed by management.Here's something from Duncan Kennedy. "Legal education is training for hierarchy. Because students believe what they are told explicitly and implicitly about the world they are entering, they behave in ways that fulfill the prophecies the system makes about them and the world. This is the link‑back that completes the system. Students do more than accept the way things are and ideology does more than damp opposition. Students act affirmatively within the channels cut for them, cutting them deeper, giving the whole patina of consent, and weaving complicity into everyone's life story.It's Sisyphus all over again. Sameness simply brings us back to doing the same thing over and over again at, if you will, the behest of the gods. If we lose our difference we lose our meaning.George Orwell put it well. "It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete soaring up terrace after terrace 300 meters into the air. From where Winston stood, it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering the three slogans of the party. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength."Sameness breaks down the distinctions we need even to have a goal, or an ambition or a dream.An Indian legend, again.I'm sure you're all familiar with this legend, the six men of Hindustan who went to see the elephant. The problem was, these men were blind and so they could not see the elephant.Each man touched the elephant. One man touched the side of the elephant and said, "It's huge like a wall." Another man touched the tusk of the elephant and said, "It's sharp like a spear." Another one touched the ear of the elephant and he said, "It's flat and floppy like a leaf." Another one touched the trunk of the elephant and he said, "It's like a snake."The myth ends with these men fighting amongst each other, each of them sure because they had the experience for themselves of what the elephant was like. Of course, as the myth tells us, none of them were wrong, but none of them were right.It's interesting where Janssen is talking about in omnia, talking about it being lifelong learning, serendipity, but also entrepreneurship, e‑learning, m‑learning, etc., helping people meet their goals. She points to, I think quite correctly, adding value by combining competencies.She said, "In Nokia, they hired only engineers and that's where their problem started." What they tried to do instead was to bring together people who were young, people who were old, people who were students, people who were professionals. I think that was a good idea.The idea here was that people would do their learning in context, so it would have real meaning for them. They would have opportunities to succeed and to fail, where the intent was to bring out the expertise in everyone, the different types of expertise.The other side of her story was that these teams were to be entrepreneurial. They were to create entities that would compete in a marketplace. We have also in this picture this myth of the marketplace, this myth of the commercial approach solving the problems that the management approach cannot solve. It's the invisible hand of the marketplace, the myth created by Adam Smith. Surely, we don't think that this is real.I ran in my newsletter just the other day a report showing that study after study has looked for evidence that the marketplace moves forward toward some advantage, some stable position, some progress, but there is no built‑in advantage to the invisible hand of the marketplace. The invisible hand of the marketplace is a myth. There is no guiding hand. There's just chaos.Here's a model for understanding this chaos. It's just a myth, but it's a good myth. It will help us see through some of these other myths. It's called the TIMN theory, tribes, institutions, markets and networks. It describes the evolution of organization over the years. It may well be familiar to many of you.It also describes forms of learning. When you think of tribes and apprenticeships in the same light, institutions representing the model of professors, scholars and scholarship. Markets representing the model of arguments, debate, the clashes of ideas, classes, categories and theories, etc., and networks as communications. I put in my notes here creativity.The first two models are built on a kind of sameness, the sameness of genetics, the sameness of family. The last two are based on types of diversity. One type of diversity results in Atomism. The other type of diversity results in networks.Putting somebody into entrepreneurship programs is putting them into competitive markets. It's preparing them for, I would say, the world of the 1990s, the world before the Internet, the world before we began communicating with each other in these networks.It's interesting. Steve Wheeler talking about the flipped classroom, talking about the real flip, the flip toward what he called bear pit pedagogy, having them fight it out, debate it, arguing from both sides.I listen to that and I think of the competitive market approach. Having students argue and debate is like having students try to create companies, try to compete against each other and, again, preparing for the market model of the 1990s.What I want to say about myths is the same thing that I want to say about learning. It's that the content of the story is, for all practical purposes, irrelevant. That doesn't mean that there's no content. It just means that the content is the thing that moves the learning forward.What matters in learning is not what is said, but how it is said. As McLuhan would say, the meaning is, in fact, in the message or, maybe to paraphrase him a bit, the meaning is in the mode of the message.The TIMN model, again, different ways of teaching. The tribe model, story by the campfire. The institution model, a lecture by a university professor. The markets model, a shouting debate. The network model, a conversation.People like Weinberger and others tried to say this in the "Cluetrain Manifesto," markets are conversations. What he should have said, in my mind, is that our markets are becoming networks. Competition is becoming conversation.Networks aren't a shortcut, either. Networks aren't the magic solution any other than markets are the magic solution, any more than professors are the magic solution. Networks have to avoid two forms of what might be called network death.On the one hand, collapsing into sameness. That might be called the collaborative principle where every entity in the network becomes the same and, consequently, all dialogue, all meaning, ceases.On the other hand, the network has to avoid disintegration into atoms. That might be called the competitive principlewhere the network falls apart. Both the social and the individual are forms of network death. What we want is that happy middle ground where the network is dynamic and capable of reacting, adapting and adjusting to the future.I've tried to describe in my own work methodological principles that allow networks to do this. Of course, these are myths as well, but they're practical myths. As long as we don't think of them as describing reality, we can use them the way we can use other myths. The principles are autonomy, diversity, openness and interactivity.It's interesting when we look at the myths, when we look at the myths that I've talked about so far in this talk, that in many cases, arguably all of the cases, the myths are warning us against abandoning diversity, against abandoning openness. They warn us against trying to make everything the same. They warn us against trying to determine the objectives, the goals, the values of people.In my own work with a number of my colleagues, people like George Siemens, David Cormier, Rita Kop and others, we've created a type of online learning called the MOOC, or massive open online course. What a MOOC is, is a recognition. It is first of all a recognition that there are no shortcuts, that we are not going to try to design e‑learning as simply a faster way of cramming content into people's heads.That would be failing to heed the lessons from the past, the lessons that go all the way back to Prometheus, Sisyphus and the rest. A MOOC in the parlance of this talk is about creating a future, not succumbing to it. Kristjan Korjus talked about the open organization of the students at Tartu. This is the same principle, only applied to a single course.Success in the course is what you determine it to be. Participation in the course is what you want it to be. There is no content in the course. There are topics. We talk about different things. Each week we may bring in a guest or we may talk about some concept or idea, but it's a lot like the artist that was described, I forget which talk it was. I think it was Stephen Harris's.The artist, instead of teaching his students how to paint, went to the class and painted and led his class all the way through the process from painting all the way to hanging it in the gallery. Yeah, it was Steve Harris.The content is like that. It's what the instructor does, but it's not something that the student has to consume and memorize. There is no content or, conversely, there's too much content. The student needs to navigate or learn to navigate through this by connecting with themselves, by connecting with other people.The idea here isn't to teach content, but to start as a starting point for our thinking. You might ask, what's the purpose, what's the objective if there is no content? There is no purpose. There is no objective. More accurately, each person decides what their own purpose is. The idea here is to promote diversity and promote autonomy.There is a process that we talk about and recommend. It's only talked about and recommended, it's not required, of aggregation, remix, re‑purpose, feed forward. Very similar to what Alison's proposal talked about, but without filtering, without creating, without evaluation.I was going to say I’m more interested in people creating, but that would be incorrect. I’m more interested in people conversing with each other, using objects to express their hopes, their fears, their ideas, their dreams, creating their own myths.Not pedagogy, there is a way of talking about the skills that would be required to flourish in such an environment. I sometimes talk about them under the rubric of critical literacies.They range all the way from the skills involved in arguing, as Steve talked about, to skills involved in recognizing patterns, motifs, principles, organizations. Also, the pragmatics, the use of symbols and images, the context, the placement, and the frame in our world view and understanding change, dynamics, evolution, and prediction in this environment.These are skills you don't get in front of a classroom, say, "OK, we'll start with skill number one, part A." These are skills you acquire only in an environment where you see them and you acquire them by doing them, by practicing in them, by conversing, using the language in which these skills demonstrate success.I'll finish off with one more myth. It's a story by Arthur C. Clark called "The Nine Billion Names of God." There were some monks in the Himalayas. They'd been working for the last 300 years and they developed a new language. They're laboriously writing down, one by one, each of the nine billion names of God. It's calculated it will take them another 13,000 years to finish.When some Westerners arrive at their monastery and they talk about computers, the monks think and the Westerners think this could be a really good shortcut. We could get the computers to write out all the names of God for us. That's what they do. They set up computers. The Westerners are very careful because what's going to happen after you write out the nine billion names of God? Well, nothing.The Westerners set up the computer to print out the names of all the nine billion names of God, but to finish printing only after they've left so the monks won't be mad at them. The story ends with the Westerners are climbing down the hill and the computer finishes churning out all the nine billion names of God.They're walking down the mountain. They look up and, one by one, very simply, the stars are all going out without any fuss.I was thinking about Arthur Harkins' talk, cyborgs and preparing for the Information Age, preparing for the 1970s, and thinking about preparing for an age when computers take over. That's the future I was asked in the previous session, what's the future you most fear? It's the future where the nine billion humans are each, one by one, replaced by a computer.It's conceivable. We can think about it, but you know that there's a new myth here as well.The myth is that, one by one, each human is replaced by a machine, nine billion of them. After all this time, the machines are able to have perfect conversation with each other, no ambiguity, no misunderstanding, an ideal language, complete comprehension. They discover with all the humans gone there's nothing left to talk about.We can imagine a future filled with machines. We can't imagine a future without meaning. We have to continually hope for the impossible, not the possible, because if our ambitions were actually achieved, it would be a disaster.

El blog de la dulce Befana

• 

  Bot para twitter

  Posted: October 25, 2012, 10:43am COT by befana

  Estas son las notas rápidas sobre la instalación y configuración de un bot para enviar trinos, la primera parte estaba originalmente en la página de HackBo sin embargo por los cambios en la plataforma, la información que estaba ahí, no … Sigue leyendo →

Half an Hour

• 

  Improving Canadian Postsecondary Education

  Posted: October 23, 2012, 12:10pm COT

  
  We can read about 'five ideas to reform post-secondary education in Canada in a University Affairs article by columnist Léo Charbonneau. The strategies (proposed by a Globe and Mail reporter in a now-paywalled colum) are old canards, and I'll debunk them one at a time.
  
  1. A National Strategy
  
  Every time the subject of education reform in Canada comes up someone calls for a national strategy. Thus we are told "Canada 'is unique in its failure to develop a national approach to universities and colleges.'"
  
  As Charbonneau says, "It’s not going to happen, period." Education in Canada is a provincial responsibility; the federal government has no interest in intervening (nor should it), and the best the the Council of Ministers of Education Canada could come up with was the Canadian Council on Learning (CCL), a $64 million bonfire made of money.
  
  More to the point, though, the presumption that a national strategy would make things better needs to be deflated. Look at our national environmental protection strategy - is it somehow better because it's federal? I would be inclined to say it isn't. How about national trade strategy - are we doing better because it's federal? Arguably not.
  
  Things don't get better just because there's a national strategy. They get more centralized, and that means, when they go wrong, they go wrong all over the place, and there's no way to demonstrate a better alternative.
  
  2. Making Teaching Central
  
  This is another one of those things that comes up every time someone raises the subject of post-secondary education reform in Canada. It's hard to resist.
  
  But I have a radical alternative suggestion: make students central. Make learning central. Or even more to the point, make access (by everyone!) to learning central.
  
  As Charbonneau says, "good teaching requires resources, particularly human resources. This means hiring more full-time, tenure-track faculty. Who’s going to pay for that?" The answer, we know, is all of us, through our taxes, and students, through their tuitions.
  
  Again more to the point, though, why is it that the professors are central to the system? Yes, I know, they're the ones who provide the teaching, but (speaking very frankly now) they're employees. We wouldn't even be hiring them unless we wanted some sort of result. It's the result that's the important thing, not the process.
  
  The slogan 'make teaching central' is based on the presumption that the only way to effectively and efficiently provide a post-secondary education to the mass of Canadians is to offer (good old traditional) teaching. But we know (from experience) that this means rationing post-secondary education to those who are good enough or (more often) those who can afford it.
  
  I say, make learning central. Explore alternatives. I have no issue at all with the money we spend on post-secondary education; I'd go to the wall to defend it. But make that money count. Find ways to help Canadians educate themselves, and throw down the barriers to learning.
  
  3. International Expansion
  
  The call to 'expand internationally' rarely has any educational intent; it is usually intended as a way to raise money for our cash-starved system by enticing people (well, rich people) from China and India to pay premium tuition fees.
  
  When I was president of the Graduate Students' Association at the University of Alberta one of my greater privileges was handing out cheques of $435 each to international students, their share of the tuition-fee lawsuit we won against the university. These cheques were more than an international student working as a graduate assistant earned in a month.
  
  Some of these students made real sacrifices in order to study in Canada. Others, though, were the beneficiaries of corrupt governments or simply their nations' respective one-percenters.
  
  Canada's legacy shouldn't to leverage its educational attainment by squeezing poor nations for everything they can afford. Our legacy should be one or generosity, not parsimony.
  
  That's why, when a former president of the NRC came through our offices, I declared my mission to be to extend free learning to every person in the world (to his credit, the president didn't flinch, though the Director-General accompanying him just about had a heart attack).
  
  The idea of opening campuses abroad is a non-starter, especially in a world that is shifting away from campuses. These maybe worked back in the days when the American Universities were being established. Today they're just the educational version of McDonalds, fast-food-learning that the local poor cannot afford.
  
  I do, however, support Charbonneau's suggestion of "a Canadian version of the Erasmus student exchange program that would entice students to do a term abroad or even elsewhere in Canada." I've always thought this was one thing Australia did really well, sending its students and staff around the world to gain experiences and ideas (I've seen less of it recently).
  
  Of course, we had such a program, at least inside Canada. It was called Katimavik. The federal government ended funding for it last year.
  
  4. Accountability Benchmarks
  
  The old accounting maxim is, of course, "what is measured can be managed," or some such thing. The idea is that you don't know whether your policies are having any effect unless you measure outcomes. That's an idea that sounds fantastic in theory. In practice, it often fails.
  
  Here's why: measurement is, at best, only the first step in a feedback loop. For measurement to mean anything at all, it needs to progress through some mechanism (aka 'management', though if you skip management and go directly to staff, then it becomes 'formative' assessment - same theory, though) that reforms behaviour in such a way as to influence the outcome in the desired direction.
  
  This raises two questions: first, are you measuring the right thing? And second, does the feedback mechanism produce the right result? In many cases, the answer to both questions is 'no'. The reason is that most measurement systems, when implemented, are based on short term measures, such as grade scores. But education is a long term phenomenon.
  
  A lesson taught at the age of three results in a behaviour at the age of 23. You can't effectively measure the behaviour 20 years later, so you test whether the lesson was learned at age three. Which it may well have been - even if it was the wrong lesson. An intolerance or a prejudice taught at a young age is an undesirable outcome, but testing mechanisms have no way to detect for and correct this.
  
  Our demographic and economic data today are in effect measuring the effectiveness of the education system of the 1970s and 1980s. These data show (to me, at least) that while we excelled in the teaching of the arts and sciences, we were weak in literacy and severely lacking in ethics and policy. These failings (not test scores) should be fed back into our understanding of the school system.
  
  But, of course, as Charbonneau points out, while our national government should "adequately fund a robust education division at Statistics Canada," we've seen instead "recent cutbacks at the federal agency." We've seen funding for other research, such as by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario, curtailed. Much cheaper to advocate standardized tests - it's quick cheap data. Useless, maybe, but the portions are huge.
  
  5. Canadian Online Platforms
  
  I have long argued for a JISC-style mechanism in Canada that offers access to services, innovation, research and support. This includes, but is not limited to, online platforms. These calls have met with pretty much zero traction (at least we have innovative provincial agencies, such as B.C. Campus, in some regions).
  
  But even with this recommendation, we have to be careful. The last thing we need is, say, a nationally-mandated learning management system (it's bad enough that there are some provincially-mandated LMSs). Putting that much purchasing power into the hands of a single agency is a recipe for corruption at worst and golf-course-ware (*) at best.
  
  But there are many things we could support nationally and/or provincially here in Canada. Open up our library and museum collections. Open up a place were teachers and students can upload (and find, and use) learning resources. I've worked on various projects like this over the years - for example, eduSource - but they all founder at the rock of commercialization.
  
  We should have set up a system such that any teacher or student could set up an email list if they wanted, open a discussion group if they wanted, could host an online course if they wanted, set up a blog or wiki if they wanted, etc. Setting up and maintaining these basic services could (and would) be the basic platform for much more robust development and experimentation in online learning.
  
  But - again - there is a big difference between mandating this for use, and making this available for use. But that is the difference between a national 'strategy' and a national 'infrastructure'.
  
  And Finally
  
  My take is that there isn't a whole lot wrong with education in Canada - after all, our high school graduates are demonstrably among the best educated in the world, our post-secondary system teems with creativity and inspiration, and our society as a whole has developed into a peaceful, kind, tolerant and prosperous home for all of us. Pretty good metrics, if you ask me.
  
  The only major problem is that there isn't enough of it - too many people still miss out. People in rural regions are not able to access the diverse range of programs and services available in the cities. First Nations people miss out on even more (and have poor ('national standard') housing, economy and health care to deal with as well). At the post-secondary education the investment is large and getting larger, both in terms of time and money - too much effort is spent sustaining the system, while not enough attention is paid to the needs of students and (especially) potential students.
  
  And it's too expensive. Again, I do not begrudge the funding, but I do not agree that costs in education (and especially tuitions) should continue to rise so much more quickly than the inflation rate. We need to find ways to ease the cost pressures - but not by limiting access to the most eligible and not by privatizing core components of the education system (when we think about where privatizing book and journal publication got us, one would think that current excesses in academic publishing are a knock-down argument against privatizing any other part of the system).
  
  I do not believe in the wisdom or efficacy of trying to reform the system, especially when that reform comes from the top. I think we (developers, educators, policy-makers) need to work around the edges, supporting and developing creative and innovative programs. Some of these programs should support free and open access to learners in Canada and around the world. Others should support other agendas - it is folly to think that my vision of education is the only vision that should be acted upon.
  
  And let me clear about this, too - I loved university. Compared to the misery that was high school, it was academic paradise. I want to preserve what was insanely great about the experience - I want to preserve the madness and creativity and late-night sessions and arguments, I want to preserve the exposure to new ideas and cultures, the time to read great books (and these days, to watch great movies and videos), to be influence and challenged by music and art and culture and sports. Turning this whole experience into one in which the economic imperative prevails cheapens and destroys it: I want learning to be about developing into the most skilled and interesting person you can be.
  
  University may not be for everyone but something like it should be for everyone. I know, there are many people out there who have far better things to do than to study - but learning is about far more than studying. People in their late teens and 20s who are not at university should have alternatives,  things like (and I'm just thinking out loud here) rock camps, machineries (places where people assemble to work on - and create - machines), bakery and culinary schools (as at the colleges), and so much more. 
  
  
  (*) 'Golf Course Ware' is educational technology that is marketed to executives, usually at highbrow events on the golf course, rather than to teachers and learners who actually have to use the resource.
  
  
• 

  Aggregation Workflow in gRSShopper

  Posted: October 23, 2012, 6:47am COT

  A few points:
  
  First, on workflow, which is the topic of this post. Here's how gRSShopper currently works. It's more detailed than suggested in the post, but contains the same basic idea, with enhancements added through four years of experience running cMOOCs.
  
  For the participant:
  
  1. Go to the 'add feed' page. Eg. [edfuture.mooc.ca]
  
  2. If you are not logged in with a user account, log in - click on the link provided on the page, go to the login screen, then click on 'return to where you were' to return to the 'add feed' page.
  
  3. If you are not registered with a user account, create a user account - click on the same login link provided on the page, select the registration option, supply the information, click on 'return to where you were. (I have found registration to be absolutely necessary, otherwise you get flooded with a slew of marketing feeds).
  
  4. Fill in the feed information on the page - feed name, URL, optional description. Submit, and you're done.
  
  Note: feed information is updated from the RSS (or Atom) file. To edit feed information, edit the feed information at the source, and it is automatically changed in gRSShopper.
  
  For the feed administrator:
  
  1. Feeds submitted are set to 'provisional' status and won't be harvested until reviewed. List the feeds, then click 'approve' to approve the feed. Optionally, run a test harvest for the feed. A significant number of these fail - that is why the 'approve' step is required. Note that (1) the harvester will correct for the most common feed errors: it attempts autodetect if the blog URL is entered, it adds [http:] (or replaces feed://) as needed, it corrects for various feed formatting problems at the source.
  
  For the page designer:
  
  1. Items harvested from feeds can be displayed on a web page with a single 'keyword' command, eg. this command will include the feeds from the last 24 hours (truncating them at 500 characters): keyword db=link;expires=24;format=summary;truncate=500;all
  
  2. Pages may be optionally published as flat html, so they do not need to be generated dynamically from source each time a person lands on this (this gives a significant speed advantage); set 'autopublish' to a desired value (typically, once an hour).
  
  3. Pages may be returned into email newsletters; select that option and select an auto-send time (specify days of the week or month, time). When pages are set as email newsletters, they appear on the 'email newsletter' list. Check the 'default' button if you would like new registrants to be automatically subscribed.
  
  For course participants:
  
  1. When registering, a list of newsletters is posted on the registration page, with default newsletters check (using a checkbox format). Check or uncheck desired newsletters. Subscription will be created with registration.
  
  2. Or, alternatively, after registration or login, click on 'options' (upper right of screen). The options page provides the following:
  - personal information, including email, which may be edited
  - list of feeds submitted, and their status
  - option to add social network information
  - list of subscribed newsletters, and an option to edit subscriptions
  
  That's the entire workflow. The pages could be more beautiful and more interactive, but everything here described works pretty much without fail. I am of course open to ideas and suggestions.
  
  3. Or, alternatively, read the feeds on the website, either: (a) from the feedlist page (eg. [edfuture.mooc.ca] and then [edfuture.mooc.ca] ) or (b) using the viewer: eg., [edfuture.mooc.ca]
  
  4. Or, alternatively, from the feed list page, download the OPML and load the list of feeds on any other RSS reader. (eg. [edfuture.mooc.ca] )
  
  Second, on Yashay Mor's post (it won't allow me to comment there, so I'll comment here): There are issues with gRSShopper, I would be the first to admit. But requiring root access to a web server (as stated by Yashay Mor) is not one of them. I have gone to considerable effort to include the code you need to run it on out-of-the-box Perl, whic means any person with a web site account could run gRSShopper.
  
  The more significant issue is that it is still difficult to install and run. I am working in an installer that greatly facilitates the process, but it's buggy. I am also working on scripts that make it easier to run once installed.
  
  What would be ideal, of course, would be a hosted service that allowed people to simply open a gRSShopper account and start aggregating with a minimum of fuss. If someone provides me with start-up funding, I'll provide that. (And no, my employer is not inclined to provide the time and space needed for such a project).
• 

  The 30 Percent Solution

  Posted: October 20, 2012, 9:45am COT

  Let me be clear. If there is a way to reduce the cost of education by 30 percent while keeping the quality the same, I'm all for it. Who wouldn't be? Why would we pay 30 percent more than we have to for the same result?
  
  Of course, everybody - even the minister - knows that you can't cut education by 30 percent and maintain the same quality. And the minister is quick to argue that some, maybe even all, of the funding will be restored. So why go though this exercise?
  
  Here's the logic. The presumption is that the current funding structure is inefficient and needs to be changed. We can hear Carr say this explicitly. "The department is trying to improve its budget process, which the minister described as 'archaic.'"
  
  So the method - and I've seen this elsewhere - is to cut back budgets dramatically, keeping a pool of money in reserve, and then have people (or departments, or schools) compete for the remaining money. It may be the full 30 percent. It may only be 25 percent. We don't know.
  
  This mechanism delivers a psychological blow as well as an financial one. Staff in different schools or departments at once must write a budget they know they cannot sustain, and then fight against each other while trying to appease the minister to bring their finds back to level.
  
  If they're lucky, there will be some guidelines for this competition. But probably, there won't be. Because the exercise isn't about saving money. It's about asserting power. It's about reallocating finds in a manner that would be politically unacceptable. It's about not having to have a plan, about having people who would normally be your opponents craft your policy for you.
  
  And that's the worst of it. Carr is adopting this mechanism because, even if the current system of funding education is archaic, he has no idea what to do about it. At least, no idea that would be politically acceptable. He can't just cut salaries 30 percent. People have contracts. But if the schools cut staff, and then contract out to private suppliers, he can argue "it was their choice!"
  
  If someone has a plan, he doesn't announce six weeks into the school year that the current year's funding cannot be guaranteed. That's not management. That's panic.
  
  It may well be that New Brunswick is spending too much on education, but the way to address that isn't to create a winner-take-30-percent donnybrook. The minister may actually believe competition produces the best results, but even he must know that it doesn't when the game is rigged and when people who should be working together are scheming behind each others' backs.
  
  The education system should be based on trust, not chicanery.
  
  There are ways to improve efficiencies in education, but they are precisely the opposite of what the current minister is doing.
  
  Efficiencies can be found by decentralizing management, so people can exercise local knowledge to serve needs and priorities, ranther than centralizing control in the ministry. Imagine what could be done with the $110 million that is currently spent on centralized facilities planning and administration (Provincial Budget, p. 53)
  
  While funding should be collected and distributed provincially (that's how we maintain equity across regions) the funding should be managed locally, by elected school boards (it would probably surprise the minister to learn that this is how it's done in high-achieving provinces like Ontario and Alberta).
  
  Efficiencies can be found by providing centralized services that may (or may not) be adopted by these school boards. For example, Alberta's Supernet provides high-speed access to students throughout the province (and also to municipalities, libraries and hospitals). B.C. Campus provides educational technology and learning resources to students in that province.
  
  Imagine the good Carr could do by setting up a system to provide free online textbooks to all schools in the province, permanently removing the amounts these schools must spend on learning resources in the future.
  
  Investing in early childhood education is essential and the province is saving millions when it extends learning opportunities to four-year-olds. But imagine how much more it could be doing to make these opportunities and resources available for free into New Brunswickers homes, at any age.
  
  Cutting education funding panders to the interests that would like to see low taxes and a dull, compliant workforce unable to do much more than farm, cut trees and maybe build ships (we know who they are). But the people of this province deserve better. They deserve an education department that is willing to take the time to think about what it wants to achieve and how best to get there.
• 

  Downes's Business Hopelessness Scale

  Posted: October 16, 2012, 5:59am COT

  Certain businesses - Down East Coffee on St. George, for example - give you pleasure when you deal with them. Others, however (and the list is long) seem to go out of their way to ruin your day. Pearson Education is one such, as witnessed by reports that an ill-conceived DMCA claim resulted in the shutdown of 1.4 million blogs at eduBlogs.
  
  The Pearson claim revolved around something called the Beck Hopelessness Scale. As James Farmer explains, "one of our teachers, in 2007, had shared a copy of Beck’s Hopelessness Scale with his class, a 20 question list, totalling some 279 words, published in 1974, that Pearson would like you to pay $120 for."
  
  Now Pearson is offering teachers a free LMS. Should teachers take them up on this offer? Audrey Watters opines, "I'd like to think that, as consumers, we're getting a little better at questioning some of the healthful promises made on food labels." Lables like 'free' are just marketing, intended to pull you in, at which point you'll find yourself trapped in business with an onerous partner like Pearson.
  
  We need a way to gauge the hopelessness of our business relations with certain companies. We need a series of questions we can answer to tell us when is it time to fold our tent, and get professional help, because this company is doing more to hurt us than to help us.
  
  Accordingly, I have devised a grading scale, derived (in pure academic tradition) on the Beck scale. The Beck scale, of course, was based on questions clinicians actually asked their patients, and is the formalization of standard practice that evolved over decades. In exactly the same manner, this test formalizes standard practice in the field. Any similarity with the original is the result of academic citation and reference.
  
  I have used the term 'Pearson' to denote the company you are considering; simply substitute the name of the company you are thinking of, like 'Apple' or 'SAP' or 'Irving'. My use of the string 'Pearson' does not denote any particular company, and any relationship to an existing business is purely coincidental.
  
  ------------------
  
  This questionnaire consists of a list of twenty statements. Please read the statements carefully one by one. If the statement describes your attitude toward Pearson for the past week, including today, write ‘T’ or ‘true’. If the statement is false for you, write ‘F’ or ‘false’. Please be sure to read each sentence.
  
  TRUE/FALSE?
  
  1) I look forward to the future dealings with Pearson with hope and enthusiasm
  
  2) I might as well give up and stay with Pearson because there’s nothing I can do to make things better for myself
  
  3) When things are going badly, I am helped by knowing that Pearson can't stay in business for ever
  
  4) I can’t imagine what Pearson would be like in ten years
  
  5) Pearson leaves me enough time to accomplish the things I most want to do
  
  6) In the future I expect Pearson to help me succeed in what concerns me most
  
  7) My future with Pearson seems dark to me
  
  8) I happen to be particularly lucky and I expect to get more of  good things from Perarson than the average person
  
  9) I just don’t get any breaks from Pearson, and there’s no reason to believe that I will in the future
  
  10) My past experiences with Pearson have prepared me well for my future
  
  11) All I can see ahead of me from Pearson is unpleasantness rather than pleasantness
  
  12) I don’t expect to get what I really want from Pearson
  
  13) When I look ahead to the future I expect I will be happier with Pearson than I am now
  
  TRUE/FALSE?
  
  14) Pearson things just won’t work out the way I want them to
  
  15) I have great faith in Pearson for the future
  
  16) I never get what I want from Pearson, so it’s foolish to want anything
  
  17) It is very unlikely that I will get any real satisfaction from Pearson in the future
  
  18) Pearson's future seems vague and uncertain to me
  
  19) I can look forward to more good times than bad times with Pearson
  
  20) There’s no use in really trying to get something I want from Pearson because I probably won’t get it
  
  ----------------
  
  While the Beck scale was a reliable predictor of depressive behaviour, the Downes scale may not be as precise an instrument for dealing with businesses. This is because businesses value only their bottom line, and so relations with businesses are generally so self-defeating the test is unable to distinguish between the degrees of futility at the bottom end of the scale. This applies equally whether you are working for the company or whether you are one of the company's customers.
  
  Note that this test applies even if you are not "in business" with the particular company. Today's large corporations exert an influence well beyond their business sphere. Hence you may be looking at companies trying to interfere with elections, pollute your environment, start pointless wars, or (as mentioned above) take down your web site.
  
  If you would like to self-score the hopelessness you feel when dealing with Pearson, award yourself 1 point for each true answer from questions 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 13, 15 and 19. Award yourself -1 point for each true answer for the rest. The lower the score, the more depressed you are with your current corporate relationship. If your score is below -5, hire a lawyer.
  
  
  
  
• 

  Whose Connectivism?

  Posted: October 7, 2012, 2:07am COT

  I would like to make just one point, that it is not "Siemen's 'Connectivism,'" that he gave a name to a theory and approach a number of us had been working on for some time. I don't mind saying I borrow the name from him, but I would certainly say this is as much my theory (and that of numerous other people) as it is his. Here, for example, are four papers I wrote before Siemens's 'Connectivism' (which appeared December 12, 2004):
  
  - [www.downes.ca] Cascades and Connectivity  (Nov 29, 2004)
  - [www.downes.ca]   The Buntine Oration: Learning Networks (October 8, 2004)
  - [www.downes.ca]   Reusable Media, Social Software and Openness in Education (September 7, 2004)
  - [www.downes.ca]   The Semantic Social Network (February 14, 2004)
  and many more [www.downes.ca]
  
  or even read my newsletter from 2002:
  
  - [www.downes.ca]
  
  The whole point of connectivism is that the 'great author' theory of knowledge is wrong. I would never claim to have invented connectivism. But neither should Siemens be awarded such a claim (and to be very fair, I've never seen any indication from him that he would make such a claim). We all invented connectivism.
  
  
• 

  Daniel on MOOCs

  Posted: October 2, 2012, 3:44pm COT

  I previously posted an item on Sir John Daniel's discussion of MOOCs, but I have added more extensive comments on Tony Bate's review - I rather suspect it is much more likely to be read by him there than on any site of mine.
  
  Here is thus the comment I posted:
  
  > I will be interested though (as will the author) in your responses to the paper.
  
  Aside from (incorrectly) calling me wistful, the paper doesn’t deal with cMOOCs very much at all, and much of what it says about them is misleading.
  
  - “which are known as cMOOCs and xMOOCs” and “which we shall call cMOOCs” – this is my terminology, introduced to draw out the distinction between our MOOCs and the others – the ‘x’ is adapted from MITx and EDx (which in turn probably adapted it from TEDx and Edgex); the ‘c’ stands obviously for ‘connectivist’
  
  - the wikipedia disclaimer was put in place before the second definition was written and does not address the second definition (though it probably should)
  
  - the “aim of the course” was not to “follow Ivan Illich’s injunction” – it was to offer an open forum for the discussion of connectivism. ‘Open’ because that’s how we roll. We’re all pretty sympathetic with Illich but it is a stretch to say we are ‘followers’ – the phrase “furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known” in particular doesn’t represent what we’re up to – quite the opposite, we want people to make their opinions known in their *own* websites, not ours
  
  - “In this spirit ‘all the course content was available through RSS feeds, and learners could participate with their choice of tools: threaded discussions in Moodle, blog posts, Second Life and synchronous online meetings’…” This misrepresents the role played by RSS – we used RSS to aggregate content from different sites across the web – that’s what made it a network (something the xMOOCs still haven’t managed) – Daniel makes it sound as though we made it open by offering some content through RSS – that wasn’t it at all, not even close
  
  - “those who coined the term MOOCs and continue to lead much Web discussion about them draw little attention to this change” – I am perhaps paid little attention, but I think you’ll find frequent discussions of the properties of xMOOCs in my blog and newsletter
  
  - Platforms – the statement “Partly because they are so different, and partly because they exist behind proprietary walls, we shall make only general comments about MOOC platforms” – is quite misleading, at least with respect to cMOOCs. Three major platforms are used for cMOOCs, all of which are free and open source software:
  1. gRSShopper, the sofwtare I authored, used for the first MOOC and a dozen or so connectivist moocs, not mentioned anywhere in the article
  2. WordPress esp. with the feedPress plugin, used by eg. ds106
  3. Moodle
  The Siemens quote about platforms would have been more appropriately made when discussing intent and design.
  
  - “whereas universities own and operate multiple Moodle installations, the administrative components of MOOCs (especially if they begin to make extensive use of Learning Analytics (Siemens, 2010)) are too complex for a teaching unit in a university to operate without huge resources.” – surely an odd statement, and I’m not quite sure what the “administrative components” are that he refers to
  
  I think that Daniel is correct to point to the similarity between the current crop of xMOOCs and the elite universities’ previous unsuccessful forays into the world of online learning (does anyone remember Universitas 21 or California Virtual University?) but given that we (the cMOOC people) were around then and that this is what we built instead, it is all more disappointing that Daniel didn’t attempt more than a cursory look at cMOOCs.
  
  
  
  
• 

  The 'Course' in MOOC

  Posted: September 28, 2012, 10:20am COT

  A discussion taking place on the OER-Forum Discussion List. Posts by other people in italics.
  
  Abel Caine wrote, "I have to intervene with the developing country perspective. Millions of smart, motivated children/students for many reasons do not complete regular school or university. Given the opportunity, these learners have a burning desire to 'complete' the course. "Well-designed and smartly-delivered" MOOCs with a valid, transferable certificate of completion (learning experience) may be 1 viable solution. I hope new global initiatives such as Education First will take this into account."
  
  Andy Lane wrote, "Yes participants whether they complete or not can gain from the experience but we also know that many can be adversely affected by the experience through a sense of failure or lack of esteem. I have no issue with low completion rates as long as people do not claim that this is widening participation amongst the currently disenfranchised as I suspect most who complete MOOCs are already adept learners with plenty of privileges. At the UKOU we have struggled to support those suffering multiple deprivations in terms of access to education and the resources needed to support that education."
  
  With respect to cMOOCs, the student experience is more like joining a community than working their way through a body of content. In this sense, the concept of course completion doesn't really make sense - what is it to 'complete' joining a community? You are more or less engaged with the community; you are more or less engaged with the material.
  
  John Sener wrote, "I agree with Stephen's observations in that it is unrealistic to expect high completion rates from MOOCs because of their structure. However, this structural characteristic is one of several reasons why MOOCs are better seen through the lens of open learning resources rather than open educational resources IMO. Perhaps the "C" in MOOC should be changed to mean "Community" in that case, because the  concept of "course" does imply a sense of completion, i.e., something > with a beginning and an end which is determined by an entity besides the learner. (Or change the name to MOOLE where LE = Learning Experience.)"
  
  Here's why the C in MOOC continues to stand for 'Course'. A MOOC typically has a fixed start and end date. Between those dates there is a fixed series of events. I characterize them has being similar to a 'course of lectures' in the traditional sense (eg. [archive.org] ). Today, of course, they're not necessarily lectures any more. But the idea of a series of events structured around a topic continues. Hence, a MOOC is a 'course'. But again, it doesn't make sense to talk about 'completing' a MOOC, even if it is structured around a series of events, because again, like a community, you can dip into these events as much or as little as you want.
  
  It's like watching a TV series. We don't typically talk about 'completing' a TV series (though you can do that if you want; last year I watched all 134 episodes of Xena; I 'completed' the series (it took me half a year)). Even if there is a story arc across the seasons of a series, we typically feel satisfied watching an episode at a time, and enjoy chatting about the episide with our friends. We do not - nor should we - feel we have somehow been deficient if we miss an episode; we can always go back to it or (eventually) pick it up on Netflix.
  
  John Sener wrote a longish post saying, among other things, "Education requires societally-defined expectations (at worst, imposed one way; at best, negotiated between the learner and society through its proxy institutions), but if "you can dip into these events as much or as little as you want," then that's learning -- user-defined and driven. Non-user-defined learning outcomes mean a less open, less MOOC-like experience. 
  
  "Calling MOOCs courses also fosters an expectation of moving through an entire "series of events structured around a topic" to an end which involves recognition (certification, grades, etc.) of completion based on satisfactory demonstrated performance of something gained (knowledge, skills, attitudes, etc.) related to that topic, and usually a comprehensive or broad rather than selective mastery of that topic."
  
  John's post has two major objectives. First, it seeks to establish a certain definition of 'course' and 'education'. And then it uses those definitions to argue that MOOCs should not be called courses, and that people do not obtain an education from them.
  
  The basis for these definitions of 'course' and 'education', according to John, is that the terms create certain expectations - the use of 'course' suggests they will be like what he calls 'traditional courses', and the term 'education', he writes, " requires societally-defined expectations."
  
  I do not accept these definitions of 'course' and 'education', and John has not offered any compelling reason to accept them, except that he suggests people have these expectations. Perhaps some people have these expectations, but clearly not everybody does.
  
  This is especially the case with the term 'education'. John suggests it entails " requires substantive interaction with designated knowledgeable facilitators (instructors, TAs, field experts, etc.)." But few, if any, define education in terms of the process; they define it in terms of the achievement. And this achievement need not involve tests and certificates. When Abraham Lincoln taught himself to read and write and to be a lawyer, we say he earned himself an education, not a learning.
  
  And it is also the same for the term 'course'. I have already given an account of the traditional meaning of the word course, and this traditional meaning in no way entailed classes and lessons and tests and certificates. The formalized concept of the course is a recent invention, designed for a specific purpose, and today obsolete.
  
  What MOOCs have demonstrated is twofold, and these speak directly to our understanding of how we may obtain an education, and how we may be recognized for it:
  
  First, MOOCs taught us that rather than depend exclusively on "knowledgeable facilitators (instructors, TAs, field experts, etc.)," which are very expensive, a community working together can support itself. This is in fact how professionals further their own education, is common practice in existing instututions of higher learning, and now possible to the larger population via self-organized online communities (especially those formed around a series of learning events).
  
  Second, MOOCs taught us that an education - properly so-called - may be obtained in this manner, and the learning thus obtained demonstrated and recognized via the production of artifacts and actions related to the subject of the learning; there is no prior set of learning objectives nor formal test (both of which can be, and routinely are, subverted) but rather a mechanism of recognition via participation.
  
  These features satisfy quite well the meaning and usage of the terms 'course' and 'education', and they do so in a way which not only empowers students and enables them to design their own education, it does so in a way such that all members of society, and not merely those with wealthy and supportive parents, can engage and learn in the most challenging and professional environment possible,
  
  Indeed, I would turn John's argument on its head. I challenge that the artificial forms we have come in recent decades to call 'courses' and an 'education' are outright fabrications, plasticized facsimiles of the real thing to be offered at the greatest fee the market will bear to an unwitting public, while those who can afford it continue to have their much less formal and much more rewarding education at elite institutions.
  
  What you have when you assemble an education filled with structured courses, formalized exams, and high-priced credentials, is a potemkin village, a cargo cult experience in which people attending Your City High School or the University of Your State act out as though they were graduating Eton or Radcliffe and Harvard or Yale but merely go though the motions, obtain a piece of paper, and move on with their lives not realizing they have been cheated out of what could have been a worthwhile education.
  
  Ask anyone. Ask them what they valued from school and university: was it the learning objectives, midterm tests, and the accumulation of course credits? Or was it working on the student newspaper, participating in drama society, organizing a rally, or setting up a student enterprise? Or even leaving it all on the sprts field or spending it all at the student pub!
  
  No, I do not yield the ground regading the terms 'course' and 'education'. I take them back from the institution, and I return them to the people.

EDUCATIVA

• 

  Webinar: Edu 2.0 como apoyo a la clase presencial

  Posted: September 24, 2012, 6:13am COT

  El 27 de septiembre a las 19:30 (hora peninsular española) realizaré un webinar para Internet en el Aula sobre Edu 2.0, el sistema gratuito de gestión docente.
  
  La asistencia es libre, podéis obtener más información aquí. Os dejo a continuación la presentación que utilizaré.
  
  
  
  
  2012 09-27 webinar edu2.0 internet en el aula from Juan José de Haro
  

El blog de la dulce Befana

• 

  El robo de los bienes comunes

  Posted: September 20, 2012, 1:17am COT by befana

  Luego de meterse en los cuentos del activismo por el software libre y la cultura libre. Uno se da cuenta que la idea de los bienes comunes no es nueva y no se refiere solo al problema de la tecnología … Sigue leyendo →

Half an Hour

• 

  Being a Philosopher

  Posted: September 19, 2012, 5:35pm COT

  My response to a comment from Pandora on a post about philosophy
  
  > "Isn't philosophy taught mostly like read this, talk about it, write about it, argue about it."
  
  Yes, but it's how these are taught that results in the benefits. For example:
  
  - "read this" - means more than 'skim' or even 'read like a novel' - we are taught to analyze structure, examine context, find voice, and more - what some call 'close reading', except for a philosopher, it becomes second nature
  
  - 'talk about it" - means more than chat or describe experiences - it means learning to be an 'active listener', able to rephrase and reinterpret, to adduce information, to describe clearly, to again be sensitive to context, to be concise and clear
  
  - 'write about it' - but again, this is more than just jotting down your thoughts; philosophers are expected to have a clear structure, to be precise about the use of terms, defining them where necessary, to write logically clear (and hence grammatically correct) sentences, etc.
  
  - 'argue about it' - and again, this doesn't just mean defending your view (or as more frequently happens, restating it over and over) - it means responding to objections, examining evidence for and against, offering forms of inductive reasoning, inference to the best explanation, and more
  
  > "perhaps you learn there are no right answers just right ways of deriving answers... "
  
  More importantly, I think, you learn that what counts as an answer really depends on the question, what makes an answer correct really depends on the evidence, and what counts as evidence really depends on what you're looking for.
  
  It's not so much that there are no right answers - if there weren't, we wouldn't be able to function! It's that our answers are right 'to a degree' and 'from a certain perspective'.
  
  I'll give you an example. One belief we used a lot when I studied philosophy was the belief that the ground won't open and swallow you up the next step you take. We believe this is true, heck, we *know* this is true, and as I say, we couldn't walk down the street unless we did.
  
  And yet... and yet... always in the back of a philosopher's mind there's the possibility that something else might happen. And as it happens, just a couple weeks ago, reality triumphed over logic, not once, but several times:
  - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSeSsgLyJaw
  - [www.youtube.com]
  - [www.youtube.com]
  
  So, now we know that the ground can disappear and swallow you whole. Philosophy is about dealing with that - being able to cope in a world of imperfect information, imperfect reasoning, imperfect people.
  
  > "I wonder why epistemology and logic isn't seeded into more research methodology courses."
  
  So do I. Half the difficulties I face in talking about education lie in explaining to people why their conception of knowledge isn't sufficient to represent the complex phenomenon they are trying to explain. Yes, people learn things. No, knowledge isn't just stored in their minds like blocks of facts.
  
  > "Is the problem schools promoting the benefits of the study of philosophy that you have to think?"
  
  Yeah. The problem is that philosophy is hard; it's easy to address the central problems of  philosophy - morality, justice, knowledge, death, taxes - at a certain level. But beyond that level most people (rightly or wrongly, and we could debate that) simply hold firm to a belief, and will not yield to further argument.
  
  It's fair enough; people don't want to have their beliefs challenged, and they don't want their children to challenge their beliefs, because they have too much other things to do with their lives. I can respect that.
  
  Learning to be a philosopher is learning how to comprehend what people might believe even if those beliefs are not well founded, understanding *why* people might hold those beliefs, getting along with them anyways, and looking forward to a world in which the quality of beliefs and belief-formation gradually improve.
  
• 

  K-12 MOOCs and Communities

  Posted: September 17, 2012, 1:24pm COT

  Responding to questions from Paul Genge:
  
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  > My question is about what tools do you think I should use to connect students with genres or communities of practice based on their personal interests
  The short answer is, whatever tools the experts are already using (presuming they have formed a community of practice of some sort, which is increasingly likely). Different disciplines interact in different ways, and ultimately people wishing to join these communities will ned to use whatever tools they use.
  I can see the question from the perspective of what tools might be employed to prepare someone for success using whatever tools will eventually be used. This is a list that probably changes every year. Currently, I would be stressing reading and viewing (through learning resources, video sites and the like), content creation (through blogs or video production or something similar), interaction (through social network sites such as Twitter and Facebook), immersion (in games or simulations) and community development (through wiki or other cooperative authoring sites). This list could probably be refined, but I think it’s a good start.
  > connecting to communities of practice is problematic in terms of content, most will be blocked because the wholesome nature of that experience cannot be controlled.
  That may be, but I consider this to be an educational practice that needs to be reassessed. I think we’re going through a period of time in which we are over-protecting children from ‘unwholeseome’ influences. This is impairing their education. I think that in time as children who have grown up with the internet become parents we will have a more open attitude to what children can see and read.
  > I've checked some of the more progressive schools and can't find many people in the k-12 environment who are even talking about these ideas, which I'm sure will inform educational practice in the future. 
  Yeah, I wonder about that. There is an aspect of progressive education which depends heavily on close supervision and control; even as students are being challenged and encouraged to excel and respond to challenges, this is happening in a closed and protected environment.
  I think progressive education of the future might be more rough-and-tumble. I think of Teemu Arina from Finland talking about how he created his own business at age 15. You can’t create a business in a closed environment, and yet we want to encourage activities like this. Getting students into the community, even young children, means stepping back a bit from the constraints we’ve placed on them.
  I read about parents driving their children to and from school, to protect them from the dangers of the city. I can’t fathom that.
  > Do you think I should seek out individual communities of practice around each student's interest, connected to a cross curricular theme that a couple of my colleagues and I have come up with?
  No. Let them find these communities themselves. Give them the tools they need to seek out and find community on the internet, and have them report on what they’ve found (so you can take action if they have a run-in with extremists) but generally let them find their own way.
  I don’t think there’s going to be a nice pairing between communities of practice and curricular relevance. But again, if I had to choose between the two, I would choose the communities. Yes, I recognize that there are institutional challenges here. In the long run, educational professionals will be reactive – instead of bringing students to content and community, students will seek out whatever matches their own interests, and educators will supplement and support this work with resources from the curriculum, social- and content-related advice, and safety and supervision.
  > Have you heard of anybody having curated genres that work for k-12 students in any way? Would MOOC's work for this or are they pretty traditionally structured with a content laden syllabus? A MOOC that seeks to develop some of the literacies you spoke about in your talk would be interesting if you know of anything like that.
  I haven’t seen anyone curating work appropriate for K-12 students in this way, though I know that vast quantities of K-12 appropriate work have been created and indexed in various content websites. I couldn’t even begin to attempt a cataloguing of that work, but observe only that none of it was designed for MOOCs because it all pretty much predates them.
  Having said that, a MOOC organized for the purposes of K-12 education would be a fabulous idea.
  I would organize these MOOCs around themes – for example, building qudrocopter drones, or harvesting honey from community-based hives, or environmental monitoring of a local waterway, or community court reporting, or … well, you get the idea. There are tons of such communities already on the web – a MOOC could form a nice bridge between them and students in classes. I would set up the MOOC to be persistent – that is, the same MOOC would run year after year, so there is an archive of information. Inside the MOOC there can be specific time-limited ‘classes’, which would help create and support networks. I think there’s a huge potential for experimentation here.
  Again, if it were me, I’d set up the framework, and see whether students couldn’t organize their own MOOCs. And once they had done so, I’d join in the MOOC as a student, and model participation in a MOOC, bringing in resources and contributing to discussions.
  > I just wonder if you study just these high end spikes are your results generalizable to all of the others who practice that activity. Will our students need to be in the top quintile of whatever field they choose and therefore need to find that affinity group where their passion will get them to that high level and therefore find success in life.
  That’s a great question. My feeling is that the MOOC approach (again, thinking of a MOOC as an interconnected community of people creating and sharing) would appeal to all people. But this would of course be subject to confirmation in practice.
  What we have seen in the MOOCs we have run so far is a clustering of very interested, active and motivated people at the centre, surrounded by a less connected set of observers and less active contributors, and surrounded by a corona of lurkers. This is what may be called ‘legitimate peripheral participation’; there’s no problem inherently with lurking. But it seems likely this structure would be reflected in K-12 practice, and that those who are lurkers would be the less able students, and vice versa. This would be less idea, as it would become self-reinforcing. So I think there needs to be enough MOOCs so everyone can be at the core of one or another MOOC, and there need to be attractors in MOOCs that draw these peripheral participants in closer. I don’t think that’s a problem that has been solved yet.
  I think the demonstrated learning and feedback of students and parents would demonstrate the power of these ideas
  I agree, but I also think there’s a matter of setting expectations too. Student learning, properly so-called, might not be any better in a MOOC, and if they become deeply engaged in a project, might actually be impaired. I can easily imagine a student becoming totally engaged in, say, a science project, and ignoring, say, geography class. I think that what a student would learn about science – not formulae and theorems, but actual practice, interaction among practitioners, and even the ‘feel’ of what to look for in a scientific environment, would be greatly enhanced in these communities, but the impact of this learning might not be observable for years, especially if it is not actively being measured.
  Concordant therefore with the introduction of MOOCs I think it will be necessary to introduce alternative forms and systems of assessment. I’ve talked about this elsewhere. [halfanhour.blogspot.ca]
  I hope this helps.
• 

  Questions from students at Vancouver Island University

  Posted: September 16, 2012, 12:25pm COT

  I received a flurry of questions on some articles on my website yesterday, questions from students at Vancouver Island University. Rather than attempt to answer them individually, I'm grouping there here.
  
  Sharing in a competitive environment
  
  Breanne, Sonny and Marieke asked, "we wonder how as teachers around the province create content, do we set up a sharing network when there is a strong competitive nature, and enable all instructors to share?" Similarly, Ben, Tracy and Kim asked, "How do we change the culture of competition that is present in delivery of online content, to make it more of a collaborative and open process?"
  
  I would have liked to have heard more about the competitive nature of teaching in this environment. It could perhaps have to do with teachers' being ranked or given performance pay according to student outcomes, or some other competitive measure. Perhaps it has to do with schools competing against each other for funding, as occurs under legislation like No Child Left Behind.
  
  Or, it may have to do with competition between students, as suggested by studies that argue that this sort of competition produces higher test scores (but, it appears to me, lower retention rates). Or perhaps they are thinking of themselves as future academics promoting competing theories and seeking to fund competing research agendas.
  
  Speaking generally, I think that a perspective that views everything as a competition is limited and mistaken. It is clear that in many cases, including the four scenarios just described, there are instances in which every person in a group working together will achieve greater outcomes than a person working with nobody else.This is the economic basis for corporate organization and division of labour, as well as the formation of societies and communities.
  
  By the same token, I think that views opposing competition altogether are equally mistaken. Beyond the highly impractical matter of obtaining collaboration in all things, and the desire of people to pursue their own good in their own way, competition creates conditions under which different approaches and different hypotheses can be tested. Without competition there would be no evolution and no growth.
  
  So the question is, in all four scenarios, not how we can eliminate competition and foster an attitude of collaboration, but rather, what degree of competition is appropriate in such scenarios, and how does the practice of sharing resources reconcile with that degree of competition.
  
  I think that recasting our perspective on competition is important. Typically, competition is represented as competition against each other. We think of examples such as games or, in a jungle "red in tooth and claw," a battle to the death. But this is only one perspective of competition, a highly artificial one, and one that is limited in scope.
  
  By far the greater range of competition, and (in my opinion) all forms of competition that realize greater economic benefits, are cases where the individuals competing compete not against each other but against some third party, ideally a non-human agent. In many sports, such as darts or archery, the battle, as they say, is "with yourself". In other endeavours, the competitors attempt to achieve some outcome in a hostile environment.
  
  In this model of competition, it is not the diminishment of another that is the objective, but the augmentation of personal score. This is especially the case if the potential competition is not a single entity or team, as it is in artificial situations, but a large number of competitors, as is the case in more realistic environments. Though it may appear that you are in competition with the gas station across the street, you are in fact attempting to raise your own revenue, and this depends on the heath of the community as a whole. This is the basis of cluster theory, which attempts to convince businesses, even competing businesses, in a community to work together and build their strengths.
  
  And this is the basis behind cooperative theories of education. The premise is that students can learn more individually while working together than they could working as individuals in competition with each other. Cooperation is not simply the absence of competition (which is why studies that use the Herfindahl index are fallacious). It is the employment of mechanisms that promote interactions among individuals to create an environment that supports greater achievement for everyone.
  
  For a typically Canadian example, consider the case of clearing the snow on the outdoor rink. One individual could skate better than another if he is able to clear some snow and the other cannot. But he cannot clear the whole rink without exhausting himself. But if everybody cooperates to clear the whole rink, then everybody skates better, even the person who could clear a section of rink for himself. This may reduce his effectiveness against the other individuals in the rink, but will increase his effectiveness in the wider would of skating. Indeed, unless the entire rink is cleared, he will not be able to compete outside his own rink at all!
  
  So the argument to be made is, even if a condition of competition exists, if we analyze the nature of the competition, we can show that individuals who share resources are more likely to be successful than those who do not share resources. Cultivating a practice of sharing increases the baseline, so everybody is capable of that much more, which is useful in every form of competition except a direct personal combat between two adversaries.
  
  Indeed, even boxers train together, teams play exhibition games against each other, and all share their understanding of the game with the wider community, both to promote the game, and to encourage the development of new players.
  
  Responsible Internet Use
  
  Andrew and Behn ask, "How do we ensure that when we give students the ability to blog/post that they will do so in a mature and focused manner, most importantly the younger students?"
  
  My first inclination is to ask, "what do you mean by responsible?" The word 'responsible' is one of those code-words that hides a whole range of preferred behaviours, from respecting copyright to keeping the language clean to refraining from bullying and hurtful behaviour to staying on topic, sitting up, and paying attention.
  
  I further would want to ask, "what do you mean by responsible for young children?" When I ask this, I suggest that we need to be careful not to expect a level of behaviour that is unreasonable. We don't expect children to assemble in small groups, chat politely, and discuss the topics of the day in hushed and respectful tones while they're out on the playground. We expect rowdy, noisy, boisterous behaviour - and we even think this is good for them!
  
  So that's my first reaction to the question. My second reaction is that people don't learn what they're told, they learn what they're shown. It has always struck me as ironic that politicians who live one day away from indictment for fraud or tax evasion or whatever speak piously about the crime rates of about cheating in our schools.
  
  How many teachers tell their students to blog without giving them examples of what good (age-appropriate) blogging looks like? When I wrote about educational blogging, I advised that the best first step was to have potential future bloggers begin by reading other blogs. This is not simply because the best blogging is in response to something else (though it it), it's because people learn from examples of good practice.
  
  If we don't show children examples of good blogging, they will learn from and emulate the Simpsons, Fox News, the Jerry Springer Show, and similar unhealthy examples. The last thing we want our students to do is to behave like adults! Teachers who want their students to blog should begin by blogging themselves, and to develop their blogging tastes by linking to and talking about the examples of good blogging they find in the world.
  
  Finally, my third response to this question is to question the emphasis. While there are obviously limits we want to set - we don't want them to use their blogs to promote hatred (and violence in the Middle East), and we don't want them to use their blogs to share songs (and be sued for millions by the music industry) - it is unclear why we would make the focus on internet use 'responsible behaviour'.
  
  To me it is far more relevant to think about how we can use blogs and the internet to promote creativity, to promote lively interaction, to promote fun and games, to promote following one's interests and engaging with the wider community. While behaving responsibly obviously forms a part of this, it is in the greater scheme of things a smallish part.
  
  I think there's something wrong with an attitude that begins with a perspective along the lines of "how can we control this to prevent the bad" rather than one that begins "how can we support this to extend the good". Most of the bad could probably be dealt with if we would only set some good examples ourselves, and the rest can be dealt with on an as needed basis.
  
  The whole process of setting expectations is essential - but it's so much more powerful when expressed in terms of what you can do, as opposed to being framed in terms of what you can't do. Good learning empowers; it doesn't needlessly constrain.
  
  Cloud Computing and Learning Theory
  
  Laura and Margot ask, "We're part of Vancouver Island University's graduate program in Online Teaching Development and are wondering how you see cloud computing shifting online learning models/theories."
  
  
  I would begin by observing that the role of theory, properly so-called, is vastly overstated in education, and therefore would express the hope that cloud computing makes this a but clearer and more obvious.
  
  The vast range of educational theories should by itself show us that something is amiss. In physics we might disagree about the nature of gravity, but nobody disputes whether it exists. In education, there would be schools of thought devoted to the idea that gravity is a sham and that we ought to be studying natural motion.
  
  I don't think that the shift to cloud computing carries with it a substantial change in theoretical perspective in and of itslef, but I think it's a part of a wider change in perspective from education being a domain that studies how we teach others to a domain studying how we teach ourselves.
  
  Because of information and communications technologies, the ways people teach and learn are becoming more visible, and hence, easier to study and emulate. As a consequence, not only can people learn for themselves, people can learn how to teach from others, with a result that the overall practice of teaching and learning are themselves changing in ways we can observe and study.
  
  It may be premature to predict the the science of learning that will eventually result from such observations, but it seems clear that the scholarship that leads to such a science will change. Closed and tiny studies measuring incremental improvements in 'performance' as demonstrated in pre- and post-tests of a single mid-west American classroom will no longer form the basis for theory and practice.
  
  Quite the contrary. Many of the innovations will come from outside traditional scholarship. For example, few (if any) scholars predicted the Khan Academy, and most would have railed against the possibility, much less the educational effectiveness, but the success and widespread popularity of the initiative helped spawn a new approach to online learning and threatens to overturn what scholars believed they knew about the field.
  
  Educational theorists sometimes like to pretend that they are doctors and physicists and to study learning in fine-grained detail, but unlike doctors, they do not even know what they are studying, cannot agree on what counts as evidence, and have no generally accepted measure of what counts as 'improvement', much less 'good', in educational practice. And while doctors and physicists are at least willing to admit they are facing chaotic phenomena and to re-calibrate practice, educational theorists continue to play in the Newtonian world of objects and causes.
  
  In the years to come, we will re-conceptualize the role of the educator, and step back from a perspective of education as a domain in its own right, with a set of competing paradigms, and reimagine learning as a cpomplex phenomenon lying at the intersection of disciplines such as health and nutrition, psychology, perception and memory, communications technology and social network theory.
  
  Educators themselves will be professionals well educated in the above disciplines, functioning primarily in a support role (as do doctors and psychologists today) helping people manage their educational health and development in an information- and learning-rich environment. This isn't just a consequence of the move to cloud computing, but the move to cloud computing is a major part of this.
  
  A Level Playing Field
  
  Jane, Kevin and Michael ask, "How can we ensure that all students have the basic skills, equipment and competencies to use DL, bring all learners up to a level playing field... ie: software and hardware?" 
  
  This is actually a multi-part question that has no answer.
  
  It's multi-part in the sense that it asks about two very different things, about the "basic skills" and "competencies", first, and about "equipment", "software and hardware", second.
  
  And it has no answer because there is nothing anyone can do to "ensure" that all students have these, particularly for a wide definition of "all". Our best efforts may leave some children unprepared and under-equipped. We need to ask not how we can guarantee an optimal outcome, but rather, what steps we can take to work toward that outcome. It's a small shift in perspective, but an important open, because it changes us from a perspective of managing and evaluating others, to a perspective of being change agents in our own right.
  
  When we talk about the two parts, "skills" and "hardware", we need to ask a similar sort of question in each case: what counts as "basic", "adequate", "essential", and the like? These are both moving targets - especially when it comes to technology. What counted as "basic" just a couple years ago is considered "inadequate" today. Do your students have LTE wireless? Too slow! They must replace their iPhones today! (Just kidding)
  
  I have taken a stab at what I think are the essential skills with my account of the critical literacies. These are not the same as your typical definitions of either critical thinking, literacy in general, or computer literacy. I've tried to aim at a level that lies below those, to take into account varying languages and forms of representation, communications technologies and paradigms, and the rest.
  
  I think that the best mechanism for ensuring that students have these skills is to expose them to progressive environments where these skills are valued, can be obtained, are reinforced through practice, and have pragmatic outcomes - for example, in gaming and simulation environments.  I wrote a bit about this here and here in recent days.
  
  As for the technology (and actually, as to the education in general), I think that we need to be looking at policies that range well beyond education in particular. It has to do with the goals of education.  Consider what Pasi Sahlberg has to say about the state of education in Finland:
  

  Decades ago, when the Finnish school system was badly in need of reform, the goal of the program that Finland instituted, resulting in so much success today, was never excellence. It was equity... In the Finnish view, as Sahlberg describes it, this means that schools should be healthy, safe environments for children. This starts with the basics. Finland offers all pupils free school meals, easy access to health care, psychological counseling, and individualized student guidance.

   Ensuring children have access to technology means, in short, making it a priority. There is nothing particularly challenging about the concept, in the sense that we know how to do it and have a good sense of what it would cost. The challenge lies in the belief that somehow still prevails in some communities that education is a competition, and that you should reward the winners and drop support for the losers.
  
  The Content on Websites
  
  In a related question, Wendy asked, "We thought, though, that adults are more discerning when it comes to weeding through the vast amount of information on the internet, and youth tend to believe everything they see and read. Do you have any strategies to ensure that students evaluate the validity of content on the web?"
  
  My first reaction to this question is that the bulk of misleading content on the web comes from adults, and that it is adults who are mostly misled by this content. 
  
  I wrote an article a few years back, Principles for Evaluating Websites, which outlines the major ways people can evaluate online information for themselves.
  
  Having said that, I think the most important thing is to be careful not to foster an attitude in children that they can or must believe everything they are told. This actually runs counter to some educational practices, where they are intended to absorb information uncritically, and where the only educational value lies in demonstrating how well they have remembered what they have been told.
  
  Even if it is true that constructivist methodologies teach less efficiently (and I have my doubts abnout this) these methodologies have the advantage that they require students to build their own knowledge piece by painful piece. There is now a penalty for being misdirected, and that is that it will be more difficult to build on false information wrongly believed.
  
  Placing students in environments where the more important skills are to solve problems, communicate with others and create solutions will reinforce in them the values of critical evaluation, inference from evidence and experience, and deductive reasoning.
  
  Take computer programming, for example. You might be able to teach a person more quickly how to write a REST interface by giving them sample code and describing what to do - this is the 'worked examples' model. But these skills do not transfer to downloading and installing a security certificate - there's simply no conceptual overlap between the two. But if the REST assignment requires that students learn for themselves from examples and dialogue on the internet, they will not only learn REST interfaces, but also what to trust and what not to trust in online internet chatter about computer systems, which in turn will help them assess political discussion (say) more critically.
  
  That's the thing with education. What we think is the 'outcome' of the process is never really the outcome.If you simply case whether or not they learn how to code REST interfaces, that's all they will learn. But if you want them to acquire a wider range of skills, you need to place them in a more challenging environment (and then encourage cooperation so they have a decent chance of success in that environment).
  
  
  Innovative Tools
  
  Suzi and Michelle asked, "What innovative eLearning tools do you consider leading the way in the next 5 years?"
  
  I think Google's announcement thatmost campuses are not using Google cloud technologies, as well as their release of a course-building tool last week, point significantly to the direction of online learning in the future, particularly when you add to this things like Stanford's new platform, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), and even my own gRSShopper application, are pointing the way. These are all variations on the theme of the personal learning environment (PLE), and I think that this - or something like this - is the wave of the future.
  
  It is important to understand that a PLE might be nothing more than your browser. At its core, the PLE is a mechanism for accessing a wide variety of cloud environments, including, but not restricted to, the Google cloud. And add to that what will in the future be considered essential personalization aspects - your personal educational record, your portfolio, and other personal metadata. Here's my presentation on personal learning environments (plus some volcano footage). Enjoy.
  
  It's hard to overestimate the impact of this new approach. Last weekend I spent all day Saturday studying security certificates for websites. In my email the other day I received an offer from Coursera to enrol in a course on programming for IOS platforms that I seriously considered joining (even though it would cost $40). I've been reviewing a huge pile of information from James O'Reilly on a simulation platform hosted on Steam called Garry's Mod. I taught myself webcasting and this hobby led me to an extensive examination of K-Pop.
  
  Given the means, and given the ability to follow their own interests and passions, people will be able to give themselves a deep, invigorating custom education in pretty much whatever they want. This changes the very foundation of education, and is doing so at an increasingly rapid pace.
  
  Implementing Online Learning
  
  Justin, Jane and Jean ask, "How will brick and mortar schools in British Columbia successfully integrate the principles of online learning, given the obstacles of teacher training and the cost of equipment upgrade and management?"
  
  When you put the question like that, my answer is, "very badly." When means (once again) we need to examine just what is being said in the question.
  
  There are four parts to this question: what it is to 'successfully integrate', what the 'principles of online learning' are, what the 'obstacles of teacher training' and finally, the 'cost of equipment upgrade...'.
  
  The first part contains within it a presumption that what is currently being done is more or less correct, and that online learning is something that will simply be added or 'integrated' into what is already being done. But in fact, I think it will replace what is already being done.
  
  Let me demonstrate what I mean by analogy. Imagine that the great new technology wasn't computers, imagine it was 'field trips'. Suppose we decided for one reason that field trips should become an important part of education. Would we 'integrate' field trips into the class? Not really - you can't teach math while on a field trip, and you can't go on a field trip while you're teaching math - and efforts to combine the two will be strained an ineffective.
  
  No, what would happen instead would be that field trips are gradually introduced. You might take an hour a week the first year, a day a week the second year, three days a week by year five, and have a 100% field trip-based education by the time you were done. Things like 'math class' and 'chem lab' would disappear and the much more effective methodology would replace them completely.
  
  This is what I see happening with online education. I see it as gradually replacing traditional classes. Indeed, I see it as getting students out of those classes and into the community. This might happen only for a few hours at first, but over time, all traditional educational activities will be replaced with computer (and teacher) supported activities using computer technology to support participation in real world communities and activities.
  
  So, next, what are the principles of online learning? I think it's a mistake to suppose that there are principles, properly so-called. I think that online learning encompasses a range of behaviours that are not governed by principles but are more like a skill or a profession. To learn online is to interact with an environment the way a surfer interacts with a wave or a doctor interacts with a patient.
  
  The best way to obtain these skills is to practice. That is not to ignore theoretical background - even doctors have to study the books - but it means that the bulk of one's education is spent attempting to do the sort of things they are trying to learn to do, and beginning this process from a young age. So, say, when a kid says, "I want to be a firefighter," the result of this is that he actually spends some time in a fire hall learning how it's done. No, we don't send him into burning buildings, but he does learn how to put out fires using real fires.And where better to learn this than with firefighters?
  
  Is teacher training an obstacle to this? I think that thinking of it as 'training' is an obstacle. I think that thinking of teachers as production workers or semi-skilled staff is an obstacle. I think that a lot of the 'training' teachers get - in, say, educational theory - is an obstacle. But I think that advanced and professional education for teachers is not an obstacle, but rather, a necessary condition for making this happen.
  
  Which leads, finally, to the cost of equipment upgrades, which I addressed briefly above, but which I'll revisit briefly.
  
  In matters concerning expenditures the problem for the most part is not that we do not have the money, but rather, that the proposed expenditure is not a priority.
  
  In some cases, we literally do not have the money. Canada probably has the technical capacity to send an astronaut to Mars, but we don't have the financial resources (at least, I don't think we do - I could be wrong about this). But for most everything else we could do in society, the mosy is there, but is being spent on other things.
  
  I will highlight just two expenditures to make the point: F-35 fighters, and the frigate construction program. Between the two of them expenditures total about $50 billion. We could give every man, woman and child an iPad for that money, and stock them full of educational content. We won't do that because we have determined that the marginal improvements in security these military acquisitions would produce are more important.
  
  But that said, in the end, education is expensive. Providing an education is expensive. What we need to do, if we can, is to put the conditions in place where people are able to provide their own education. Yes, we need to put into place programs that ensure maximal equity. Yes, we need to ensure that teachers can respond to individual needs with professional responses. But in the end, the best and only way to address cost issues is to eliminate the cost, and to empower individuals.
  
  
  
• 

  Critical Thinking and Knowledge Domains

  Posted: September 7, 2012, 9:35am COT

  by Stephen Downes
  
  Responding to Alex Reid [www.alex-reid.net] (posting here in case he doesn't approve the post in moderation):
  
  It would be helpful if we understood what you mean by critical thinking, because critical thinking as I understand it (and have taught it) doesn't really resemble what you describe in this article. You write, "critical thinking generally means 'close reading,'", but that suggests to me that you don't know what critical reasoning is, not that critical reasoning is somehow deficient.
  
  As an analogy, think of critical thinking as being similar to math. That is to say, critical reading is not only a mechanism for study and representation (for example, 'close reading') but also a mechanism for drawing inferences and correcting errors. If a person says "I had four boxes and you have three, so we have eight," we have to 'close read' to understand the sentence, but beyond that, we want to use mathematics to correct the error.
  
  The same with critical thinking. If someone says "If he was polluting the river, we'd see it, and by George we see it! so he must be polluting the river," we need to read to understand, but it is an application of critical thinking (and specifically, the rules of propositional inference) when we say that this person's conclusion is not supported by the evidence and reasoning.
  
  Critical thinking cuts a wide swatch across all disciplines. Just like with mathematics, the principles of critical thinking do not change from one domain to the next. An argument that fails in history also fails in biochemistry. What counts as a good type of explanation in physics also counts in English (and the types of explanations are evaluated in the same way). We criticize definitions in geography the same way we criticize definitions in botany.
  12 comments
  
  AYDIN SARIKAYA29 Aug 2012hi, it is just a simple contribution not a critics, by me. But  the first part as cri or cry or cre, all referance for a simple problem model. In term of its etymology, the term of "critical" and its way of  thinking should represent a problem or contradiction or something else to reflect an unverified dimension, that makes a rule of methodic value in case of thematic frame rather than its dependency to any kind of data.  ... thanks and regards. 
  
  Charles Nelson30 Aug 2012To me, you reinforce Reid's article. That is, in English studies, critical thinking and close reading are close to synonymous, but as you noted, they're not the same, or in other words, what counts as critical thinking in one domain (i.e., English) doesn't in another domain.
  
  AYDIN SARIKAYA30 Aug 2012All seem a way to relativity theory.Yeap! the fresh news on higgs boson and so the quantum discourses are ringing even the ring is a circle as a closed term, per se. While to the relative domain adresses, the network itself is an interdepented system of doing a main ping  as an inquiry of theory of everything that may let a discourse for critical thinking of everything. Thus interdisciplinary thinking should have some critics. For example: Laser test on mars is called as a chemical test. But should it be called as if only  chemical, really?  
  
  Stephen Downes30 Aug 2012Edit> in English studies, critical thinking and close reading are close to synonymous,
  
  I'm sorry, they're not. Not in English studies. Not anywhere.
  
  Charles Nelson30 Aug 2012Perhaps the word "synonymous" was too strong, but they are closely associated in English studies as close reading is a part of critical thinking when reading and analyzing texts. For just a few examples:
  
  Amemic, Joel H. ""Close Readings" of Internet Corporate Financial Reporting: Towards a More Critical Pedagogy on the Information Highway." Internet and Higher Education, v1 n2 p87-114 1998.
  
  Elder, Linda, & Richard Paul. "Critical Thinking... and the Art of Close Reading, Part IV." Journal of Developmental Education, v28 n2 p36-37 Win 2004. (and see Parts II, III, & IV)
  
  Kelemen, Erick. "Critical Editing and Close Reading in the Undergraduate Classroom." Pedagogy; Winter2012, Vol. 12 Issue 1, p121-138.
  
  Webb, Allen. "Digital Texts and the New Literacies". English Journal, v97 n1 p83-88 Sep 2007.
  Abstract excerpt: "Using these online resources opened up possibilities for new ways of teaching and learning traditional skills of close reading and critical analysis."
  
  And from an English department's website:
  "Through courses in literature and in writing, our majors hone their ability to read critically, reason analytically, and write clearly."
  
  Stephen Downes30 Aug 2012Edit'Critical Reading' is not the same as 'critical thinking'. And being 'associated' is not the same as being 'synonymous'. If there are online versions, I'll review the articles you cite; otherwise, I'm hundreds of kilometres from any library that might have them.
  
  AYDIN SARIKAYA30 Aug 2012 (edited)
  It seems as happy end. I would like to conribute with a correction:
  the first referance: Amemic, Joel H.. It seems a result of copy-past accidents, as a good example of self-critical manners. ... Anyway, its original form is not AMEMIC but AMERNIC, and it may be caused because of Amemic and Amernic "similarity":).
  
  That seems other example of value of design pedagogy.. Here is online link for it and others as I realised for this nice case: Here they are dear Stephen:
  
  --
   AMERNIC Joel H. ""Close Readings" of Internet Corporate Financial Reporting: Towards a More Critical Pedagogy on the Information Highway."  http://www-2.rotman.utoronto.ca/~amernic/TIHE.pdf
  
  ----
  Elder, Linda, & Richard Paul. "Critical Thinking... and the Art of Close Reading,   [www.criticalthinking.org]
  
  parts are linked at bottom..
  
  ----
  Webb, Allen. "Digital Texts and the New Literacies".  This referance is also in the part of source:  Literature and the Web   [www.heinemann.com] 
  
  Charles Nelson30 Aug 2012"You write, "critical thinking generally means 'close reading,'", but that suggests to me that you don't know what critical reasoning is."
  
  One problem for me is that you are declaring that your version of critical reasoning is the only one that's valid and that other disciplines have no right to decide what critical thinking means in their own field. 
  
  Stephen Downes30 Aug 2012EditThere's isn't something that is "my version" of critical thinking - and your suggestion that there is begs the question.
  
  Howard Johnson00:00I think there are different levels of analysis that are possible and likely in play in this discussion.  Alex's point about transfer between contexts is valid.  We always speak into an ongoing conversation that shapes what is considered to be appropriate to say and to do.  Though it is possible to take a critical stance, the details are different, which may create transfer problems for anyone using a standard process.  An understanding of potential analytic lenses like rhetoric or assessment validity will deepen what is meant by any critical analysis.
  So, I do believe that a valid approach to critical thinking is not a process, but a stance or an attitude that is shaped to the context where it find its application.  
  
  Enaa Zausen13:07well....
  i havent read far into his piece yet...but even in the first few dozen lines i sense an odd disconnect between what you write and what he has written.....  there are obvious sentiment inferences he makes (despite his english errors) that make him not the target you take him for...
  perhaps you are 'transferring' from somewhere inside your head... to take advantage of his position and rather silly (rhinestone like) opening assertion... in order to acquire a target for your own ends....
  ...
  i often find my psychology attempting this over my own mindful and thinking processes....
  Stephen Downes13:32Edit
  It will probably be useful for me to at some time write about what actually varies from domain to domain, and what does not.
  
  For example, evidence.
  
  - in different domains, different standards of evidence apply - eg. a CSI requires forensic evidence, while a lawyer might need only circumstantial evidence
  - but in all domains, evidence must be tangible, publicly observable and documented (otherwise it is not evidence, it is something else)
  
  Or, for example, definitions.
  
  - in different domains, the word 'allowable' may be defined by different criteria, eg. what is 'legally' allowable may be different from what is 'morally' allowable
  - but in all domains, the definition must describe all and only instances of 'allowable', may be criticized for being too broad or too narrow, and is illegitimate if inherently contradictory
  
  In my own word, I describe six critical literacies, which define the fundamentals of critical thinking. They are: syntax, semantics, pragmatics, context, cognition and change.
  
  In 'context', for example, I discuss the changing standards of evidence. While we recognize that there are different standards of evidence for different domains, it is a general skill, not specific to any domain, to be able to identify the appropriate domain and, accordingly, the standards of evidence to apply.
  
  Similarly, 'definition' falls under the heading of 'cognition'. While we recognize that different definitions apply in different domains, it is a general skill, independent of any domain, to be able to create and evaluate appropriate definitions.
  
  I find that people arguing that critical thinking varies from domain to domain do not draw these distinctions appropriately, often because of a lack of clarity in describing exactly what changes from domain to domain.
  
  For example, Howard Johnson says, "An understanding of potential analytic lenses like rhetoric or assessment validity will deepen what is meant by any critical analysis."
  
  The use of the 'lens' metaphor is common in the humanities and social sciences, and indicates a process of looking for specific entities (such as the use of rhetorical devices, or an assessment of the validity of arguments).
  
  The nature and availability of these 'lenses' may vary from discipline to discipline (the use of rhetorical device, for example, doesn't apply (much) to cartography), but surely the process of identifying, selecting and evaluating a 'lens' is something not specific to any given discipline.
  
  The very suggestion that there are different domains of knowledge, and that we can switch between them, entails the existence of a meta-domain, called 'critical thinking', which consists at a minimum of the knowledge of,selection of, and evaluation of, these domains.
• 

  Future Learning Interview

  Posted: September 6, 2012, 10:17am COT

  
  by Stephen Downes
  
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  Hiya Peter,
  Answers to questions follow.
  1. What do you think will be the long-term effects of tools like Cousera and Udacity, as well as the online material posted by such schools as Stanford and MIT? Could these tools, combined with the increasing cost of higher education, lead people to follow an alternative model of higher education that does not require attending a four-year college or university?I just saw an announcement today [www.bbc.co.uk] to the effect that these institutions will be offering ‘real world’ exams in a global network of invigilated test centres. This does not surprise me at all, and has long been one of the predictions I’ve made about the future of education. What the net effect of such a development will be is to separate the functions of teaching and testing. I discussed this many years ago here: [www.downes.ca] I am not so certain about the speed (it could be very rapid, especially in Asia and South America) but I’m confident of the end result: the fragmentation of educational institutions. At a certain point, there will be pressure on colleges and universities to open testing to any person who wishes to attempt it. When this happens, this will create competition for learning, and people today paying large tuitions will look to less expensive providers. It’s hard not to predict the layoff of thousands of academic staff, beginning with the lowest paid graduate assistants and adjuncts, ultimately reaching professors themselves. It is possible institutions will consolidate and close.There is substantial commercial pressure for such a reworking of the system; indeed, they envision it reaching right down into the public school level, with testing allowing the proliferation of private schools, charter schools, home schooling, and other non-public school offerings. This is the reasoning behind such initiatives as Common Core. This creates an especial challenge for governments and school boards if these testing centres are privately owned and managed.To my mind there is no evidence that attending a 4-year college or university is a necessary condition for obtaining the degree of expertise indicated by a degree. However, I do think that this expertise consists of more than what is simply tested, and that a wider range of certification mechanisms will be required, including ultimately the evaluation of a person’s entire online data trail. This is already the mechanism employed in various fields, at least to a degree – journalism, graphic arts, and computer science spring to mind as instances where student portfolios are evaluated.So, yes, these new models are harbingers of much more sweeping changes to the education system.2.What, if any, distance learning tools or ideas do you think are overrated? What tools should we pay the most attention to?I think the idea of blended learning is over-rated. To my mind, blended learning is a concept that allows sceptics to hold on to traditional learning. But I see blended learning as a bit of an anchor, holding back people who are ready to thrive in an online environment. I think learning analytics, as currently conceived, are overrated. Most such are based on tracking access and length-of-time on LMS pages, checking test and quiz scores, and the like. There may be some predictive value to these, but I think analytics needs to look at wider and more varied data, and especially, data outside the LMS. Systems that can analyze data online inside a walled-garden will have to my mind a short lifespan. The future is in network-wide analytics, using non-structured data, to support dashboard functions for learners themselves.3. If you were placed by your government in charge of an initiative to promote wider adoption of online learning, what actions would you take?Government will play three major roles in education going forward: infrastructure, promotion of the public good, and accreditation. Additionally, with respect to the post-secondary system, government will continue to be a major promoter of research and development.Accordingly:- I would begin to design and deploy an open public education infrastructure. This in the first instance refers to the physical assets to a large degree already developed and deployed, such as fibre-optics to the schools. I would extent this and ensure wide community access, not just in-school access, in order to support lifelong learning. Also related to physical infrastructure, I would put in place measures and incentives to improve choice in access providers, preserve network neutrality, and ensure portability.In terms of application infrastructure, I would make available tools to all educators, including private citizens who wish to offer educational opportunities (to me, ‘educational’ refers to anyone who want to teach, not just formal institutions of learning). This includes support for and deployment of open access educational support software, such as conferencing environments, simulation software, and the like (I don’t want to prescribe a precise list because in my view the community should to a large degree determine its own needs here).- There is a public dimension to education, which is to promote the public good and preserve social order. To a large degree, this is reflected in curricular and pedagogical decisions made at school boards across the country. To a significant degree, communities should have autonomy in decisions regarding education. Nonetheless, in order to promote the public good, the federal and provincial governments should be primary providers of open access learning resources. These have the primary role of ensuring that every citizen has free of *very* affordable access to a quality education; accordingly these resources consist not only of digital content and services, but also a network of support centres (formerly known as schools) where learning professionals are available to meet specific individual education needs.Therefore I would approach this from two directions: first, to create a mechanism for the authoring and deployment of high-quality digital educational content and services (recognizing that this is not a one-time investment but most likely an on-going process). This isn’t simply a case of hiring publishing companies to create content; it is a process of mobilizing communities to contribute to, create and support educational resources, employing vendor support where needed. For example (this is only an example of process, not necessarily what I would do), in a given domain a domain wiki would be established, where an ISP would manage the technical aspects, where individual experts would be hired to set up content, and where registered members of the community could make changes, add resources, request additional features, etc., where the wiki would be open and accessible to learners, and employed by learning professionals in support of educational activities.In addition, I would put into place a mechanism for defining, educating, evaluating and accrediting educational professionals. - This feeds into the third major element, the maintenance of mechanisms to ensure educational services and resources are meeting the interests of public good and social security. This in the first instance entails the creation of an office of ‘education inspectors’, analogous to health inspectors, who review and rate educational content (ie., any content offered for sale or distribution publicly or privately). It is imperative that a more open educational community avoid incidents such as the ‘baby genius’ scam (where educational products are sold which have no educational value at all). Additionally, education provided must not be harmful to students or society – while wide latitude in content is desired, education which leaves wide gaps in knowledge or skills, which deliberate propagates fictions, or which inculcates violent and unlawful behaviour, needs to be curtailed.I would not develop a ‘Common Core’ approach as in the United States – that’s like using a 200 pound anvil when a scalpel is required. But beginning with broad and widely accepted definitions of what is agreed to be harmful or useless, educational inspectors can draw on scientific research and community consultation to provide an ongoing monitoring and accreditation of educational resources and practices.4. What schools or organizations are creating a model of best practices for distance learning?Hm. Google? The best practices are being developed outside educational institutions by communities that are sustaining and informing themselves. I would direct the bulk of my activities toward these communities, rather than toward either educational institutions, or existing corporate entities.5. What do you think of the argument that even well-developed online courses are inferior to face to face courses?
  I think it oversimplifies what is a complex discussion. It presumes that education ought to take the form of ‘courses’, that these must be ‘developed’, that there is some common measure by which some could be classed as ‘inferior’, and that these are actual alternatives in the educational sphere. People who are still debating this question have not to my mind taken the time to learn about the nature and needs of specific educational environments.
  Things about playing football, for example. The question would read, “are even well-developed online football courses inferior to face-to-face football courses.” My first reaction is to ask, why do you think there should be football courses? Most people learn football by playing it; instruction is usually in the form of coaching. But people who become serious about football soon turn to other media as well. There is, for example, the playbook to be created, read, memorized and practiced. Is a face-to-face playbook better than an in-person one? The question makes no sense. Then football players also spend time reviewing videos. Need these games be re-enacted by people, or will digital copies of the games be sufficient? Learning football is a complex task. Almost none of it involves ‘courses’. I content that most disciplines are like football, but that we teach them very poorly. When our practices catch up, questions like this will be obsolete.
  

Blog de Andrés Chiappe - Objetos de Aprendizaje - Learning Objects

• 

  Artículo de la Revista SEMANA sobre Educación Virtual...se mueve el tema en el contexto nacional?

  Posted: September 3, 2012, 10:04am COT

  [www.semana.com]
  
  ----
  
  Blog de Andrés Chiappe - Objetos de Aprendizaje - Learning Objects.
  "learning objects"
  "objetos de aprendizaje"
  "elearning"
  "e-learning"
  
  var aqid = "MFU39GC4URSZJEWA7CNA";aq_tag();

Half an Hour

• 

  The Robot Teachers

  Posted: September 2, 2012, 11:12am COT

  by Stephen Downes
  
  "Can you recommend a good doctor?" This is the final question in an article by Tony Bates about teaching, and it frames the debate nicely. We would be very disinclined to turn over the healing profession to automation, and in the same vein, should be equally hesitant when it comes to teachers.
  
  My first thought on reading the question was, "they're all good." Obviously there is some variation between doctors - and I had a dentist once the year before his retirement I would not recommend to anyone - but the difference is slight, especially when compared to the difference between having a doctor and not having a doctor.
  
  The quality of doctors is a combination of the educational system and the character of the individual who graduates from it. We live here in a society that values excellence in the professions, and highly skilled and motivated individuals join the professions. In Canada, this also includes teachers, mostly, and as a result, we have one of the best educated societies in the world.
  
  But it's funny. Medicine, of all the professions, is one of the most dependent on computers, machines and robots. From x-rays and MRIs to the monitoring devices of ICUs to electronic patient records (a work still in progress) to all manner of diagnostic and treatment systems. I take pills manufactured by robots (and dispensed by computer), my breathing at night is managed by a computer, the lenses on my glasses were shaped by an automated grinding system, and I get robocalls to remind me that I'm scheduled for a checkup next Tuesday at nine.
  
  So we have two sides to this. On the one hand, in education, we depend on the professionalism of our teachers, and trifle with that at our peril. We depend on their education being excellent, and on their passion and motivation. On the other hand, if our doctors were as hesitant to employ technology as our teachers sometimes are, our lives would be measurably shorter and inestimably less comfortable and less secure.
  
  So, while I understand what motivates Tony Bates to express such concerns regarding the automation of education, by the same token, I am wary of arguments that recommend we stop using the robots and the computers.
  
  Here's Tony Bates: "he (his editor) wanted me to change what I was writing to make the case that computers can replace teachers in higher education." Why? "He told me that his CEO and a number of CEOs from other companies all thought this was the right way to go, and were trying to influence the market to accept this."
  
  And this brings in the other side of the debate about health care: privatization and corporate control.
  
  In Canada we have a public health care system. Like our education system, it is one of the best in the world. Outcomes are comparable to those in the Unites States, and frequently better, and Canadians spend about half as much on health care. Wait times are comparable and, of course, nobody is turned away at the door of a Canadian hospital because everybody in the country has insurance.
  
  By and large, Canadians feel a conversion to an American-style system of privatized health case would be a disaster, even with the salve that is Obamacare. This isn't a close election-style preference.Polls show that 94 percent of Canadians prefer the public health care system. Even while Canadians face a barrage of contrary media (for example, from the Fraser institute) they aren't buying it. They can see the horror stories from south of the border, and express an almost zero desire to switch. Who can blame them?
  
  This is the sceptre Tony Bates faces in his dream. It is the conversion, erosion and eventual destruction of one of the best public education systems in the world, under the guise of automation. It is the eradication of the professional that we today call 'teacher' or 'professor' and his or her replacement with the educational equivalent of an automated food-services operator asking "would you like fries with that?"
  
  The results of such a system would be predictable, and again, one can point south of the border for evidence of that possible future. Though Americans pride themselves in having the best education system in the world, it just isn't true. What can be expressed with statistics is also experienced by Canadians as fact. It is perhaps shameful to admit, but Canadians have long made sport of the low level of American education. It's the whole health thing all over again.
  
  The explanations are myriad. There is the income gap, which is much larger in the U.S., and reliable the best predictor of educational outcomes. There are structural and institutional factors - the wealthier districts tend to get better schools and more funding. There are cultural factors - in some cultures, we are told, education and achievement are valued more highly than in others. There are those who blame the teachers and teachers unions (though of course teachers in Canada are almost 100 percent union).
  
  Most of these factors, though, are mitigated, if not eliminated entirely, with public support for education. Again, it's like health care - yes, poorer people in both Canada and the U.S. are likely to have lower health outcomes, for a variety of reasons. But in Canada, poorer people are less likely to delay a visit to the doctor, less likely to allow an illness to become too serious to treat, less likely to die an early death.
  
  Similarly, where education is a public good, the causes of low educational outcomes are mitigated. Funding between wealthier and poorer districts, instead of varying by parental income, is more or less equivalent (though the rich even in a public system extract a disproportionate share). Poorer people, in a public system, are more likely to be exposed to positive role models and to acquire the values of professionalism, passion, motivation, and the rest. And of course in a public system poorer people fund themselves - at least some of the time - in an environment that is informationally rich and intellectually challenging.
  
  If the rest of the automation of education is to undercut education as a public good, Canadians - and society in general - have a great deal to worry about. And it is clear, as Bates shows, that an organized campaign is underway to create this outcome.
  
  Bates again:
  

  • xMOOCs and automated marking and peer review to get around the awkward point that one instructor cannot provide adequate feedback to thousands of students. 
  • the Republican Party of Texas whose election platform contains the following (p. 12): "Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs..."
  • the California two year college system has undergone nearly $1 billion of cuts since 2008, resulting in a waiting list of 470,000 students who cannot get into classes
  •  Stanford University has just created a new Vice-Provost for Online Learning, who turns out to be a computer scientist  
  • the Ontario government is looking for more ‘productivity’ from the post-secondary institutions, and is asking how online learning can lead to improved productivity.

  This is just a small sample of the evidence he could have assayed to make the case that automation is being used as a mechanism to privatize the educational system.
  
  And again, probably every educational blogger experiences that gentle but incessant pull to write about and support initiatives that lead toward a privatized system. Want to get on TED? Don't support public education - instead, talk about how business and the markets can do it better. Want to get hired to write for Britannica? Espouse the market-based perspective. Want to win an award? Check the gotchas. Want to give your blog a boost? Be an Apple Educator or Google Certified Teacher. Want to be known as supporting 'free education'? Support the commercialization of educational resources. Want Shuttleworth or Hewlett money for your educational support or research project? Support the commercialized approach.
  
  There is an ongoing and incessant campaign afoot to privatize education. In the United States, education is almost the last bastion of public expenditure. In Canada, both health care and education face the forces of privatization and commercialization.
  
  The results are wholly predictable. In all cases, the result will be a system that favours a small moneyed elite and leaves the rest of the population struggling to obtain whatever health and education they can obtain with their meagre holdings. As more wealth accumulates in the hands of the corporations and the wealthy, the worse health and education outcomes become for the less well-off in society.
  
  But here's where the challenge arises for the education and university system: it was designed to support income inequality and designed to favour the wealthy.
  
  (Indeed, from my perspective, one of the greatest scams perpetrated by the wealthy about the education system is that it has a liberal bias. But if you separate out social issues - beliefs concerning  "'multiculturalism, immigration and racism' (the most common category chosen by colleges), or 'environmentalism, animal rights and food'" - and focus exclusively on questions of economy and distribution of wealth, the purported liberal bias disappears.)
  
  Examine the structure of the traditional university system, especially as instantiated in the United States, but also to a certain degree in Canada and many other nations. Admission is regulated by tuition, and in the most elite institutions, the tuition is the highest. The recent British experiment in voluntary moderation was a failure. Admission in private universities is also enabled by legacy, the result of favours granted by and to alumni of the university. There is in addition a bias in elite universities toward graduates of a small number of preparatory school.
  
  In this sort of environment the preferred model of learning is very personal and very professional. Having a teacher or professor in this sort of environment is less like dealing with a hospital or clinic, and more like having a personal physician. It's all hands-on, it's all very close, supporting and caring. And it is very effective, at least, from the perspective of securing positions of power, privilege and wealth. The associations created here last a lifetime, and are parlayed into wider influence. Want to go to Davos? Say the right things, support the right causes.
  
  So long as this is what educators believe they provide, they will serve as agents for the commercialization and privatization of their own discipline, rather than as protectors of the public system.
  
  That's why I'm so concern about the turn taken in the article written by Tony Bates. Here he is again:
  
  

  To successfully achieve such learning outcomes, learners either have to be incredibly self-motivated and already highly knowledgeable (i.e. already well educated), or they need an environment that supports the development not just of these outcomes, but also the development of their thinking and decision-making. This requires fostering or supporting their motivation to learn, dealing with gaps in knowledge or lack of learning skills, providing timely feedback, and above all providing guidance, criteria and direction to ensure that they meet the necessary standards to operate effectively in the real world. This is what I call teaching, and much if not all of it is difficult or impossible to automate.

  This is the model of the private education, of the personal physician, of the service reserved for the elite, not the least because we cannot afford to provide it for everybody. And this is a key point of this article: so long as we cling to this as the model for education, we push it toward privatization.
  
  To be sure, Bates is aware of this, I would think.
  

  Yes, this was possible 50 years ago because we had an elite system, and few students per professor. Now we have, especially in North American Tier 1 public research universities, very large classes and many students per professor (made worse in first and second year by tenured professors focusing mainly on research and graduate education). So we have fallen back almost completely on ‘instruction’ rather than on ‘teaching’ in undergraduate programs.

   And he is quite right. The system has drifted from the prep-school and Ivy-League model of learning, has drifted away from the boardrooms and warrens of Cambridge and Oxford, to resemble something much more structure, must less personal, much more 'outcomes focused', and much less attractive. It has devalued the role of the teacher and professor, relegating them to the role of tutor or instructor or semi-professional support system. In universities, much of the teaching is done by underpaid graduate students. In the public school system, teachers are under increasing pressure, facing lower pay. Even their pensions are under attack.
  
  No, it is not a good system, and simply taking this and automating it is not a solution. And Bates is quite correct to warn of the most likely outcome: an in-person education system granted to a small number of people who actually attend these elite universities, and a mostly or fully automated system sold like CDs and television programs for the rest of us. We - those of us who are not in the one percent - would be reduced to being educated vicariously through others.
  
  We know this model fails. " For over 30 years computer scientists, working in the field of artificial intelligence, have been trying since then to improve on ‘programmed learning’, which failed to deal adequately with the development of cognitive thinking skills beyond the level of comprehension and memory." Yet this is the sort of education being designed today though systems such as adaptive learning systems and common core. This is the sort of system intended to be supported by learning analytics. And yes, the Coursera, Udemy, MITx and similar initiatives are the means to this end. A Netflix for learning. An Amazon for achievement. Except that it will sell a hollow dream, as the divisions between those who are genuine participants in academic and literary society, and those who are not, will be permanently established.
  
  To be sure, this must be understood: this is as much a political outcome as an economic outcome. Those of us who end up on the wrong side of the vicarious education divide are and will be shut out not only from positions of wealth and power, but from any role or say in the definition of knowledge, intellect and culture. Those people we read, those influencers of public opinion, those who are credited with discovery and celebrated as innovators and inventors - they will all come from the in-person side of the vicarious divide. Political discussion, literature, culture - these are and will be shaped in the interests of, by and for, those with wealth and power. Dissent will not be suppressed, because it will no longer be necessary; dissent will no longer be possible.
  
  If we cannot have an educational system that was designed by and for the industrial age, with classrooms and textbooks and standardized curricula, then neither can we have the education system that existed before that age, with professorial discussion circles, individual advisers and mentors offering support and collegiality, personal instruction, guidance, criteria and direction. We must move beyond what we have if we are to have a public system worth keeping, but not in a direction that further reinforces the divide between a high quality education for some and a facsimile for the rest of us.
  
  I think there is only one way to achieve this: to develop teachers and instructors as a professional class at the service of a public education system, leveraging and working within a technological environment equally accessible and supportive of all. Not programmed learning, but also not the private-school education taken to be the high standard of learning today. Something better.
  
  Let's first look at the recommendations offered by Tony Bates:
  

  • using online learning, rather than building new campuses or physical facilities, to expand access.  
  • use of shared materials, and not just open educational resources, but developing courses or programs that can be used across several institutions.
  • economies in the delivery of programs by maintaining content quality through the use of tenured or research professors for the design and development and monitoring of course delivery, but reducing delivery costs through the use of well-trained online adjunct professors and automated marking where appropriate.
  • course designs that move the work away from the instructor to the student. Examples are collaborative learning, development of self-management learning skills, problem-based learning.

  This is the traditional system, with some technological enhancements, where education is still considered to be 'delivered' by means of 'programs'. It will not work, no more than a model of 'delivering' health care through 'health programs' would help a society be healthier (as evidenced by the failure of the HMO model, which is exactly that).
  
  We have to stop thinking of education as a delivery system. We have to start thinking of an overall publicly-accessible and supportive educational environment.
  
  It's not about duplicating the success of the private school approach that has characterized the design of 'the best' education through the last century. It's about making that advantage irrelevant. It's about making it so you can't get anything more if you take the personal-physical or personal-teacher approach, because everybody already has access to the best. And - like live music - is we want we can sample it from time to time in person, because it's fun.
  
  We must develop the educational system outside the traditional system because the traditional system is designed to support the position of the wealthy and powerful. Everything about it - from the limitation of access, to the employment of financial barriers, to the creation of exclusive institutions and private clubs, to the system of measuring impact and performance accordiung to economic criteria, serves to support that model. Reforming the educational system isn't about opening the doors of Harvard or MIT or Cambridge to everyone - it's about making access to these institutions irrelevant. About making them an anachronism, like a symphony orchestra, or a gentleman's club, or a whites only golf course, and replaced with something we own and build for everyone, like punk music, a skateboard park, or the public park.
  
  So what does a technology-enable 'public education health system' look like? As I said, it will be staffed by education professionals, and ultimately the design will be largely informed by these professionals, as once having taken over management of the system for themselves, they can begin to implement reforms that make educational sense, rather that follow prewscriptions emplpoyed by economicsts or put in place for political reasons.
  
  Education professions in this model may be affiliated with institutions, but are also regarded as providers in their own right. People in the community may access education either through the institution or directly through the professional. They don't 'enrol' in a particular institution, or 'belong' to a class or curriculum, though they may tend to favour one institution or one professional. As with the health system, (at least in Canada) they can attend any institution they want, and have a wide choice in the educator they want. They may from time to time seek the assistance of specialists, for particular needs (for example, language training or compliance training).
  
  What is most important is how education is thought of in such a system. It is not something that is 'delivered' or 'transferred' from an institution to a person. An education is property of a person ('property' in the sense of 'quality' or 'attribute', not in the sense of 'ownership' or 'possession') just in the same way as health and fitness are properties of a person, something they have all their lives, something they develop and grow and maintain, something they are themselves ultimately responsible for.
  
  Just as a healthy person needs affordable and accessible food and water, housing and transportation, so also an educated person needs learning resources, intellectual challenges, role models and examples, employment and invigoration. They need, in the words of Seymour Papert, hard fun. There are many ways this can be provided in a technologically advanced society - transmission (via books and videos) and programmed learning are only two possibilities, and (probably) the most minimally effective of those.
  
  In this model, the public education system isn't something you put aside 18 years your life to go to and 'access', no more than a child spends the first 18 years of his or her life in a health institution developing strength and fitness. In this model we find much more interesting, varied and engaging pass-times for children and young adults, integrating them more and more into the wide web that is society as a whole. Yes, children and young adults continue to have role models and mentors, but they only model in which every child can have access to this is one where every adult is in a position to fulfill this role.
  
  The way we need to design such as system - and we need to begin designing it now, before the privatizers destroy what we have - is to begin designing educational professional support systems: the array of software and services we would want an educational professional to have at his or her fingertips on an as-needed bases.
  
  We need also to begin designing the educational resource support system for individual learners, including access not only to free or easily affordable educational resources - the learning 'bread and butter', so to speak - but also learning environments, network support structures, and access to learning inside work and other environments. I have spoken in the past about treating educational reosurces as a utility like water or power; we need to begin building this utility and putting it to work in hospitals, courts, manufacturing plants, parks and museums, and any other place people get together to work or play.
  
  We will gradually begin assessing individuals by what they do and what they contribute, rather than according to what they earn or what they take. Systems that make this sort of assessment possible will need to be designed, and incorporated into the tools we use to make hiring decisions. (It would be the opposite of a phenomenon happening today, using a person's credit score to evaluate insurance or employment prospects - again, a measure intended to entrench the rich.)
  
  And we need to put into place mechanisms of association that undercut and make obsolete the associations formed by the elite in their private institutions - the networks of connections that serve as alternative fora for political opinion, language, culture and dissent. These networks - of which the connectivist courses are early prototypes - will replace the Skull and Bones and similar societies, making them obsolete and ineffective.
  
  And finally - we need to begin to define what we mean by a professional educator, a person who is the steward of this system and who accepts, as an individual responsibility, the support and maintenance of a high level of general education and intelligence, for all members of a society, in support of the individual and social good. I suggest it is a role that has very little to do with content delivery, very little to do with standardized curriculum, very little to do with textbooks and classrooms, and is only orthogonally attached to educational institutions.
  
  And it will not be performed by robots.
  
  
• 

  Computer Use Guidelines

  Posted: August 29, 2012, 6:26am COT

  Responding to Alfred Thompson's Ten Commandments of Computer Ethics:
  
  Leaving aside the questionable wisdom of framing generic advice within a construct specific to a certain religion...
  
  The commandments say, essentially, "don't take or use other people's stuff without permission," which is OK in itself, but the way it is repeated over and over reveals an unhealthy fixation on property rights, to the exclusion of almost all else.
  
  Here's my version:
  
  - don't use computers to hurt people
  - respect people's privacy
  - don't take or use other people's stuff without permission
  - be truthful in your communications
  - don't send people unwanted messages
  - don't write malicious or destructive code
  - be generous and share what you create
  - turn off the power when room and computer are not in use
  
  
  Have I missed any?
  
• 

  New Forms of Assessment: measuring what you contribute rather than what you collect

  Posted: August 27, 2012, 5:36pm COT

  Once again, as we do at the start of every school year, we are hearing about the rampant cheating that goes on, especially online, but in fact, everywhere, and without remorse or regret.
  
  As Nikhil Hoyal writes, "Cheating is an epidemic in schools across the nation. A 2010 survey of 2,000 Stuyvesant students revealed that more than 72 percent of students copied their homework from others and about 90 percent of seniors cheated on tests."
  
  In the past I've commented on the likelihood that students will emulate their role models, and so if there is a cheating epidemic in schools, it is likely the result of a cheating epidemic in society in general.
  
  So I've linked to articles with titles like "'Cheating culture' finds corruption everywhere in U.S. society." It reads: "Enron. WorldCom. Halliburton. These names are indelibly associated with ethics violations that have shaken the American economy and captured headlines in the past few years."
  
  The cheating hasn't stopped with this 2005 article, and it's not limited to the U.S. Indeed, in the wake of the 2008 crash and findings of widespread manipulation of things like the stock market and key interest rates, it appears that cheating has become mainstream. No wonder our students find cheating to be the most reasonable response to assessment and evaluation.
  
  I have often wondered what society would look like if we took wealth out of the equation. What would it look like, say, if we limited salaries to a million dollars a year, corporate incomes to $100 million, and set corresponding limits on the accumulation of wealth (to reduce the hoarding that is wrecking our economy)?
  
  Perhaps we can get some sense of this by taking the traditional incentives out of education. Typically, students perform tests, write essays, or complete projects for grades from instructors. Cheating occurs when they perform something other than the intended task in order to produce the result - copying answers, for example, in order to achieve higher grades than they would have earned on their own.
  
  Even when the incentive is minimal, when we set up learning based on grades accumulated in the traditional way, it leads to cheating. Thus we see recent lamentations in Forbes, the Chronicle and others "concerning recent articles on cheating and skepticism of online learning," according to Dick Lipton.
  
  The response from companies like Coursera and Udacity was predictable: an honour code prohibiting multiple identities (and authentication if that doesn't work), the long-standing idea of mastery learning, or creating in-person testing centres. And if none of that works, "the online exams are regarded as “practice” insofar as not counting toward a certificate of value."
  
  To me, this is a failure of imagination. Surely, both in schools and society, we can do better than the dog-eat-dog accumulation of numbers representing real or fictional value for power and profit. Surely we can reflect the achievement of individuals in some way that does not resemble a big stack of stuff.
  
  The first thing that both the financial system and the grading system devalue is the worth of assistance and generosity to others. Oh, sure, there is a token 'charitable donations' check-box in your income tax form. But imagine your income went up if you gave time, money or resources to charity, even if you were living on social assistance!
  
  In the schools, too, there is no reward for helping others (indeed, it is heavily penalized). Suppose educational achievement was measured at least partially according to how much (and how well) you helped others. The value of the achievement would increase if the person is a stranger (and conversely, decrease to zero if it's just a small clique helping each other) and would be in proportion to the timeliness and utility of the assistance (both of which can be measured).
  
  The financial system also values mass. That is to say, it favours the creation of consolidated institutions that act as a single entity. There is limited incentive to work with others - indeed, it is often more worth your while to go to court against long-standing business partners. A limit on corporate size, by contrast, would create an incentive to cooperate with others. Changes in patent and trade law would make costly lawsuits counterproductive. 
  
  But all this is for naught if people have been educated since birth to engage in cutthroat competition with each other. Sure, we hear about fair play, but it is so rare that organizations like the Olympics issue special awards when it happens. Far more often students see cheating, doping, and plain bad manners. Indeed, they learn it doesn't even matter.
  
  Suppose instead students were rewarded for cooperation. Not collaboration; this is just the school-level emulation of the creation of cliques and corporations. Cooperation, which is a common and ad hoc creation of interactions and exchanges for mutual value.  Cooperative behaviours include exchanges of goods and services, agreement on open standards and protocols, sharing of resources in common (and open) pools, and similar behaviours.
  
  Imagine receiving academic credit for contributing well-received resources into open source repositories, whether as software, art, photography, or educational resources. Imagine receiving credit for long-lasting additions to Wikipedia or similar online resources (we would have to fix Wikipedia, as it is now run by a gang of thugs known as 'Wikipedia editors'). We can have wide-ranging and nuanced evaluations of such contributions, not simple grades, but something based on how the content contributed is used and reused across the net (this would have the interesting result that your assessment could continue to go up over time).
  
  Society does not in general reward contributions to the public good. Indeed, quite the opposite - in order to earn profit, corporations and individuals bribe governments to act against the public interest. Companies are more interested in seeing services privatized, instituting user fees, or other measures designed to wring wealth out of what might otherwise be a universal program. As for long range public good, such as environmental protection, or society-wide public good, such as energy and information access, more money is to be made ignoring the public good than supporting it.
  
  Imagine it was the opposite. Imagine private enterprise and individuals were rewarded for supporting the public interest - suppose, for example, they were rewarded according to the actual good they produced, after they made the investment, rather than through some contract or billing system. Imagine a phone company made money, not from privatizing the telephone system, but by adding value to the existing public system. Imagine rewarding energy companies for producing the more environmentally sound energy, not the cheapest.
  
  There is, again, no reason why public service cannot be incorporated into individual assessment. Adding value to fire and police services by means of monitoring and reporting (not the piece-work model of something like CrimeStoppers, but actual prevention), supporting environment by counting birds, sampling water, servicing sports events by acting as a timer or umpire - all these can add to a person's assessment.
  
  I'm not thinking of the simple sort of tasks grade school students can perform. Indeed, a person hoping to attain a higher level qualification would need to contribute to the public good in a substantial and tangible way. Offering open online courses (that are well-subscribed and positively reviewed by the community) should be a requirement for any graduate-level recognition. The PhD used to be about offering a unique research contribution to the field; now it's about paying tuition and being exploited as a TA.
  
  These three things - helping others, being cooperative, contributing to the public good - are obviously not easy to assess. To be sure, it's far easier to ask students simple questions and grade the number of correct responses. But asking students simple questions, far from measuring putative 'content knowledge', is really an exercise in counting without any real interest in what is being counted. It acts as an invitation to cheat, as it places self-interest ahead of the values it is actually trying to measure.
  
  This list of three types of assessment is intended only to stimulate thought. No doubt there are many other forms of assessment along similar lines, all based on measuring what you contribute rather than what you collect. And until we begin measuring achievement - and wealth - in this way, we cannot expect better than dysfunctional students and a dysfunctional society.
  
  
  
  
  
  

Blog de Andrés Chiappe - Objetos de Aprendizaje - Learning Objects

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  (re)Conociendo las Practicas Educativas Abiertas

  Posted: August 21, 2012, 4:25pm COT

  (re)Conociendo las Practicas Educativas Abiertas
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  Acerca del sinsentido de "Desaprender"- "Unlearn" as a pointless word

  Posted: August 21, 2012, 2:46pm COT

  Hace unos días volví a escuchar un término que no me termina de gustar y que es muy popular entre la comunidad educativa: "desaprender". Una de las primeras veces que lo escuché fue de labios del Maestro Yoda cuando le dice a Luke Skywalker que debe desaprender lo que ha aprendido. En ese momento perecía una frase sabia, llena de la magia propia del aprendizaje de “la fuerza”. Pues bien, años después, ya considerando el tema en el contexto de la educación pereciera que continúa persiguiendo la idea del cambio, lo cual en si mismo es bastante acertado según mi opinión. Cambio de paradigmas, viejas ideas enquistadas por nuevas y frescas, en fin, parece un término pedagógicamente muy sólido.

  El problema con estos conceptos que lucen sólidos es que tienden a ser utilizados de manera indiscriminada. Recientemente lo escuché en el marco de una charla sobre aprendizaje significativo y de inmediato sentí que algo andaba mal. ¡Esto no tiene sentido! En ese momento comprendí que lo que me molestaba de este término no era su significado sino la palabra en si misma.

  En el contexto del aprendizaje significativo no tiene sentido referirse a “desaprender”. Es en este contexto en el que el aprendizaje se asocia con la construcción de significado por parte del aprendiz. Cuando un concepto nuevo es subsumido, es decir, cuando se logra relacionar con uno existente en la estructura cognitiva del aprendiz, el significado del concepto previo se reconstruye, se renueva, se regenera. El concepto Ausubeliano denominado “Diferenciación Progresiva” hace referencia precisamente a que a medida que pasa el tiempo, los significados que tenemos en nuestra estructura cognitiva cambian con la incorporación de nueva información; las nuevas ideas cambian las viejas. Eso es aprender.

  Si “desaprender” significa cambiar viejas ideas por ideas nuevas, entonces significa lo mismo que aprender. No tiene sentido utilizar esa palabra.

  -----------------

  A few days ago I heard again a word that I don´t like too much and that is very popular among the educational community: "unlearn". I recall I heard it several years ago from the lips of Master Yoda when he told Luke Skywalker: “You must unlearn what you have learned”. At that time it looks like a wise phrase, full of the proper magic of learning "the force." Now, years later, considering this issue in the context of education, still looks like it is chasing the idea of ​​change, which is pretty appropriate in my opinion. Changing paradigms, swift entrenched old ideas with new and fresh ones, well, looks like a very solid pedagogically concept.
  The problem with these concepts that look solid is that they tend to be used indiscriminately. Recently I heard it in a lecture about meaningful learning and immediately felt something was wrong. ¡This makes no sense! In that moment I realized that what bothered me about this term was not its meaning but the word itself.
  In the context of meaningful learning the word "unlearn" is pointless. In this context learning is associated with the construction of meaning by the learner. When a new concept is subsumed, I mean, when the new concept is related whit an existing one (in the cognitive structure of the learner), the meaning of the prior concept is rebuilded, renewed, regenerated. The Ausubelian concept called "progressive differentiation" means precisely that as time passes, the meaning we have in our cognitive structure change with the incorporation of new information; new ideas change old ones. That is learning.
  If "unlearn" means changing old ideas for new ideas, then, it means the same as learning. Use that word is pointless.

Ideas fascinantes

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  La Educación Prohibida

  Posted: August 15, 2012, 2:42pm COT

  Una película para aquellos que piensan que es válido otras miradas y sobre todo otras posibilidades en la educación.
  
  
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  No te tomes la vida tan en serio, al fin y al cabo no saldrás vivo de ella

  Posted: July 23, 2012, 1:26pm COT

  
  Me ha llamado poderosamente la atención el informe especial titulado "Corea del Sur: prohibido fracasar" en el se cuenta la dramática situación de los jóvenes en Corea del Sur, aunque este país es considerado la cuarta potencia económica de Asia, el costo lo están pagando los jóvenes, quienes viven una situación de infelicidad insostenible a tal punto que el Gobierno quiere cambiar su modelo educativo con el fin de que sus estudiantes sean un poquito felices.
  Esta situación me acuerda de algunos amigos que exigen a sus hijos al máximo con clases de inglés, natación, violín y cuanta oferta les alcance para mantenerlos ocupados, ¿será necesario tanto? Seguro que no, a la larga como dice el viejo dicho “No te tomes la vida tan en serio, al fin y al cabo no saldrás vivo de ella”
  
  
  'Informe Semanal': Corea del Sur: prohibido fracasarVer vídeo

  • 'Informe Semanal': Corea del Sur: prohibido fracasar

Half an Hour

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  Jobs That I've Had

  Posted: July 22, 2012, 10:57am COT

  Following up on this post from Blue Skunk blog, here's a list of the jobs that I've had over the years:
  
  - 1970-74 - Newspaper carrier - I started with a 24 Ottawa Citizen paper route from Frank Stanley in 1974, and gradually absorbed every other paper route in Metcalfe, including the Ottawa Journal routes, ending up with a couple hundred deliveries every day. Eventually I distributed the routes among my brothers. I still have dreams to this day of needing to get the Saturday papers delivered, and deciding that I don't want to do that anymore.
  
  - 1975 - Greeting Card Sales - yes, I sold greeting cards door-to-door in Metcalfe, and actually sold enough to buy various things, including a set of two very nice hockey nets to use when we played street hockey. Oh, it was so nice to have those nets!
  
  - 1974-5 Popcorn Vendor - I sold popcorn and drinks in the stands at Ottaw Roughriders games and Ottawa 67s hockey games. This work was for Versa services, and led to a bunch of other jobs. I still remember my first day, after taking the bus to where we would be picked up (we lived out in the country) I spent my entire day's earnings on a pizza. Best meal I ever had, bar none.
  
  - 1975 - Busboy - I worked for the full summer season at Rideau Carleton Raceway as a busboy in the restaurant. It was another Versa foods operation. It was good work, I would bet my tips, and some of us would race around the track (to the amusement of people who had arrived early for the races). The money I earned at Rideau Carleton paid for my two-week trip to England and Scotland.
  
  - 1976 - Dishwasher - I got a job at another Versa outlet at the Glebe Centre, a retirement home across the street from Lansdowne Park, as a dish washer. Not a pot washer - the distinction is important. I operated the Hobart dishwashing machine, a major appliance that ran dishes on trays through the washer on a conveyor belt. I was "let go" (not "fired", I was told) after a dispute where the pot washer took off for the evening and I refused to do the pots on top of my regular work.
  
  - 1976 - Cashier / Box Lounge Waiter - another summer at Rideau Carleton, and this time I was a cashier. Not a very good one, as it turns out. The manager thought I might be skimming (though I came out over as often as I came out short) and tested me by dropping an initialed $20 on the floor. I just tossed it into the till and then couldn't figure out why I was over $20. Then I transferred into the box longe and served meals and drinks. That actually paid a lot better because the tips were really good.
  
  - 1978 - Breakfast Cook - I had no training, and indeed (as it turned out) no experience even eating breakfast at restaurants, but I got the job of breakfast cook at Ernie's, near Metcalfe. My mother got me the job. This job didn't last long, because I didn't know what I was doing. For example: I never knew you were supposed to serve hash browns with bacon and eggs. On the bright side, it was at Ernies where I learned how to do (and prefer) eggs 'over easy'.
  
  - 1978-79 - Concession Stand Staff - I would from time to time work in the concession stands at the Civic Centre / Lansdowne Park. It was good work for minimum wage. Shifts would usually be 4 hours - the duration of an event - but on good days I'd do 8 or more for things like dog shows and trade fairs. My favourite moment was running a booth all by myself at a soccer game - we did it as a favour to the soccer people and nobody expected to make any money, but it was a cold day and I sold hundreds of hot dogs and coffees, working so fast the soccer people actually called Versa the following Monday and thanked them for the service.
  
  - 1978-1979 - Stand Supervisor - I did a lot of  'outside' work with Versa, involving keeping the concessions stands stocked and functional. I worked with the Coke people to set the drink taps, made coffee in huge urns and sent it around, delivered huge flats of popcorn, and the rest. During football games I was the 'Upper North Supervisor' and managed the staff of about 20 people.
  
  My work with Versa Foods ended when I became a shop steward for Local 237 of the Restaurant, Hotel and Tavern workers association. All of a sudden I wasn't getting any hours. I found I couldn't live on the less-than $100 month I was earning.
  
  - 1978 - Installer - My father got me a job with Northern Telecom for a summer (and a bit more; they kept me on as long as they could) installing telephone switching equipment at the Bank Street Bell Canada building (it's the large concrete building just south across the tracks from Billings Bridge). It paid really well, it was steady work, indoors and just challenging enough to be interesting. I soldered and spun connections, pulled cable, and even did some repair work. Too bad it was temporary.
  
  - 1979-90 - Security Guard - after the job with Northern ended I caught on as a security Guard with National Protective Services in Ottawa. My first job was at the Mitel construction site out in Kanata. I also did a shopping centre construction site out there. My first permanent spot out at Energy Mines and Resources Bells Corners (EMR Bells Corners) in the little gate house. I got the job because I had a car (a 1971 Mercury Cougar I split with my brother) and took the night shift. I lost the car (couldn't keep up with the payments) and eventually transferred to the Jackson Building lobby downtown, pulling the night shift while I attended classes at Algonquin College.
  
  During 1979-80 I was a student at Algonquin College. I had qualified for a grant but when I told them I had a job they took my grant away. I filed an appeal (a 60-page appeal I wrote during Christmas exams) and got the money reinstated, in the form of a loan. For December I lived on $100 my mother gave me.
  
  - 1980-81 - Computer Operator - in May 1980 I moved to Calgary with my girlfriend, slept on a mat in my brother's furnace room (he was renting a basement of a house) and caught a job with Geophysical Services Incorporated on 12th Avenue SW. GSI was a division of Texas Instruments, and my job was to run the TIMAP computers (along with a crew of us) doing seismic processing for various oil companies - I ran charts for Hibernia, the Beaufort Sea, and local Alberta fields.  I was sent to Texas for three months for training on the new IBM mainframes, and became a trainer myself. I left because some university graduates were hired out of school to supervise me; I decided I needed to get an education myself and got out of there. I was making $1368 a month when I left; it would be 15 years before I saw that kind of money again.
  
  - 1980 -  Dish Washer - I didn't really need the money, but when a new restaurant called Chomps - a paté and wine bar that open up on Edmonton Trail near where I live we became friends with the owner and agreed to help out in the kitchen to get him started. The job lasted a few months and I learned quite a bit about wine. Chomps lasted about five years.
  
  - 1981 - Pot Washer - to subsidize my education (I was living on student loads) I started work as a pot washer in the university cafeteria. It was hard work, but the pay was above minimum (about $6.75 an hour). I pulled the evening shift and generally worked by myself. It was OK, but they were leaving the kitchen messier and messier. One day I cut myself on a knife that had been left in dirty dishwater (a total wrong in a kitchen) and found the First Aid box to be completely empty of supplies. So I walked off the job, never to return.
  
  - 1982-83 - 7-Eleven Clerk -  after my first year at university I split up with my girlfriend and, after being on the road for a few weeks (living in basements and such) in southern Alberta and BC, I landed broke and unemployed at my brother's place. I landed at 7-Eleven, working in a store in Canyon Meadows. I would work at this store full time in summer, and the weekend graveyard shift during the fall and winder of my next two years at the university. This is where D'Arcy Norman hung out as a kid. It was good work and I was good at it, the pay was low but it kept me alive. I eventually quit because the travel was too much; it was way down south - and I wanted to focus on my studies.
  
  - 1984-85 - Student Newspaper Editor - at $800 a month it felt like a fortune, and after a failed attempt I was eventually elected co-editor at the Gauntlet. The first half-year was with Stewart Cunningham, and that was a great experience. I was re-elected and my partner this time was someone called Sat Katar Singh Khalsa - he was from Saskatchewan and had converted to Sihkism and changed his name, and he was completely new to the newspaper. It was a very turbulent time, we had business manager problems (I actually took over that job for three months before we hired an excellent manager named Albert Yip). It was a great experience, though, and I was completely dedicated to it.
  
  - 1985 - Welfare - my term as newspaper ended in April 1985, and at the same time I broke my wrist in a fall, and ended up unemployed and on welfare. Because of the injury I couldn't collect Unemployment Insurance (I appealed and eventually won all my back UIC money in late August) but until then I had to live on welfare. I was given $100 a month, of which $60 went to rent (I was renting a room in a basement). I took summer classes (I had already registered and paid for them; no student loans though), drew cartoons, and did nothing else. I also had to appeal for student loans money because I was in my fifth year; I won that appeal as well. I lived on student loans through 1985-86 and the focus paid off: I got a perfect 4.0 GPA in the fall and for the year had straight As except for one C (in logic).
  
  - 1986 - Programming Coordinator - I landed a summer job at the Arusha International Development Centre as a programming coordinator. This was an exceptionally enjoyable job as I organized international development events for the Centre - we did one called 'The Facts About Brazil' and another for the Filipino Society. And various others.
  
  - 1986-87 - Graduate Teaching Assistant - I went straight into a Masters program and secured a position as a teaching assistant, which paid my way. It was better (but not a lot) than student loans. I taught logic classes (they had the brilliant idea that I should teach in my weakest subject).
  
  - 1987 - Writer - The Development Coordinating Council of Alberta hired me to write manuals on fundraising, graphic design, and lobbying. I wrote three manuals over the summer. It turned out to be pretty good money, but it took a lot of time (especially as I was writing my Masters Thesis at the same time). I ended up finishing my thesis and these books in the computer science labs at the University of Alberta.
  
  - 1987 - 94 - Tutor - when I moved to Edmonton I was suddently in a better geographical location to obtain employment from Athabasca University. My main job with them was to tutor informal logic (Critical Thinking 252) by telephone, something I did for the next 7 years. I taught 2.5 'blocks' and earned just a little bit less than enough to live on. With Athabasca I also taught classes in-person at locations across northern Alberta: the Sunrise Porject in Slave Lake (later AVC Slave Lake), Grouard, Yellowhead Tribal Council in Spruce Grove, and Blue Quills in St. Paul. I really enjoyed this work and had really great experiences with the people in these communities.
  
  - 1987-91 - Graduate Teaching Assistant - I complain about the University of Alberta because I think they cheated me out of a degree, but I can't complain about the support, as I received three year's employment as a graduate teaching assistant. Again, they had me doing most of my teaching in logic. Eventually, I learned logic. I'm sorry for my poor students, though.
  
  - 1991-93 -  Assistant Professor - a.k.a. 'sessional instructor'. I taught a number of courses for the University of Alberta, all logic courses. I still remember my first course, 88 students in the Management Building. I spent way too much time revising their writing (but I'm sure they got a lot out of it). It was the one and only time my class applauded at the end of the year (the way they do in the movies).
  
  - 1995-1999 - Distance Education and New Instructional Media Design Specialist - this was my first full time job in 15 years and I was finally making as much as I did when I left GSI in 1981 to join that wild ride called 'a university education'. It was a fabulous job, mostly. I made websites, I created online courses, I built an LMS, I traveled with a LAN to northern Manitoba communities, I sent posts to mailing lists, and essentially built the career I have now.
  
  - 1995-1997 - Evening Course Instructor - With Conrad Albertson I made some extra money offering evening community class courses called 'Welcome to the Internet', and also a web design course. Those were some really fun times, I must say.
  
  - 1999-2001 - Information  Architect - in a risky move (but, when you look at my history, it wasn't really riskier than the rest of my past) I left my full time job at Assiniboine and took a tw-year contract at almost twice the money to work as an information architect, designing and building a website called 'MuniMall'. The project was a success; the University used the site for almost ten years after it was done, and I made the most of the second half of my job, which was to perform original research in the field. I did papers like 'Learning Objects', 'Content Syndication and Online Learning' and 'Hacking Memes'.
  
  - 2001 - Research Fellow - I received an email from Tim van Gelder who offered me a three month stint in Melbourne, Australia, assisting in the development of online philosophy courses. I did some neat things for him - like an in-line comment form - and set up what would eventually be the framework for my newsletter.
  
  - 2001-present - Senior Research Officer - for the last ten years I've had only one job, working as a research officer for the National Research Council. It's a good professional job and the pay is pretty good - and after everything it took to get to this position, I'm pretty glad it is!
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

Portal Educativo Colombia Aprende - Foro Educativo Nacional

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  Edusitio de la Primera Infancia

  Posted: July 17, 2012, 3:37pm COT by Portal Educativo Colombia Aprende

  La Dirección de Primera Infancia del Ministerio de Educación Nacional tiene un nuevo edusitio en el Portal Educativo Colombia Aprende. Lo invitamos a conocer sus secciones y toda la oferta de información e interacción que aquí encontrará. Con más información y una mejor distribución de todos nuestros contenidos, le cambiamos la imagen al sitio de [...]

Half an Hour

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  Transparency, Radical or Otherwise

  Posted: July 12, 2012, 5:47pm COT

  Responding to Doug Johnson, who in turn is responding to Miguel Guhlin, who has made his RSS work again. :)
  
  My managers and co-workers read my blog (though not as speedily as I would like). My mother reads my blog. So I don't "write as though" they read it; I write knowing they read it. They all know I am fallible, that I sometimes have bad days, that I'll call someone out if they deserve it, and (most importantly) that I'm passionate and care about my work. Which makes most mistakes permissible.
  
  I gripe where the griping will do the most good. If necessary, I'll redact names - my long tirade about my doctor didn't need to name the doctor, but it still needed to be said (and was probably read by him). I've written of the incompetence of our provincial government, just before the election in which it was defeated. I'll say good things where they're warranted - but the main point is, if I ever want to see my ideas implemented locally, I have to write about what's happening locally. (I find my influence on the global arena to be pretty minimal).
  
  I sometimes write for edited publications, but I don't like it when they edit my work. Part of this is my own style - I really hate revisiting work I've already written. But part of it is aesthetics - I find first draft work a lot more authentic, if rough around the edges. Some people think by means of writing; me, I write in order to express my thinking. These are two very different acts. My employers have reacted negatively to my blog in the past, so it's hosted on my own server, which I pay for myself, and any other concern is relegated to our common understanding that I enjoy freedom of speech, even as a member of the public service (I add in passing that I am amazed at how many Americans say they can't say this or that for fear of reprisals, all the while proclaiming to be the most free people in the world).
  
  I do write out of goodness, but it's not a stance I take in order to make the rest seem acceptable. I honestly believe that what I have to say is good and that I am producing good in the world by expressing it. This hasn't always been the easiest thing to believe. I have, as a matter of fact, been writing since I was young, but until I was 23 or so my writings remained mostly private. When I started university I joined the student newspaper, and had a very solid shell of shyness to surmount. I still grill myself on a regular basis: am I relevant? Is what I say accurate? Do people care?
  
  So - this is the thing about transparency. It requires a lot of courage on the part of the person being transparent, but it requires more that the people observing understand that they are viewing a real person, with real faults, real opinions, real ideas and real fears. We harm ourselves and each other by assuming that everybody must conform to some sort of magazine-perfection.

Ideas fascinantes

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  Cómo enseñar a los hijos para que sean emprendedores

  Posted: July 2, 2012, 10:53pm COT

  
  

  Hace uno días mi hija de 10 años me escuchó hablar con alguien sobre Okku Tecnología e Innovación, el nuevo proyecto de emprendimiento que he iniciado, al terminar mi plácida charla se me acercó y me preguntó qué era eso de ser emprendedor y porque me volví emprendedor después de tener un trabajo estable y con paga fija; lo que primero que le recordé fue una frase que me topé hace unos días que dice:

  “Cuanto más tiempo llevamos metidos en nuestra zona de confort, menor es el incentivo para arriesgarnos y probar nuevas ideas”

  Y se la recordé porque fue justo lo que me pasó, la falta de sentido que le encontré a mi trabajo (no por lo que hacía, sino por lo anulado que me sentía) me llevó a arriesgarme a probar nuevos escenarios laborales y aunque no puedo negar que es un camino duro vale la pena darse la oportunidad para probar de lo que somos capaces, pero también para enseñarle que en el riesgo existen miles de posibilidades de crear y co-crear nuevos mundos; a veces creemos que estamos en esta tierra para acumular y le hacemos el juego a un sistema que nos lleva a hipotecar nuestras vidas adquiriendo carros, casas, endeudándonos hasta la coronilla con tarjetas de créditos encadenándonos a trabajos que en ocasiones no queremos estar.

  Por todos esos aprendizajes estoy tratando de dejarle el legado a mi hija que no se necesita vivir para acumular dinero, que aunque el dinero sirve para hacer realidad muchos proyectos y poder viajar por todas partes, no podemos vivir en función de la plata, sino en función de mejorar o dejar un mejor mundo.

  Como la mayoría por no decir todos los papás, queremos lo mejor para nuestros hij@s, en mi caso quiero para mi hija un mundo en dónde sea feliz, bien sea como empleada (aunque estoy casi seguro que cuando crezca ya se habrán acabado los trabajos) o como emprendedora. Cómo seguramente este último escenario será el más retador y el que posiblemente encontrará hemos empezado a trabajar desde ya las siguientes acciones.

  • Acabamos la asignación fija para sus onces (para que no se acostumbre a los sueldos fijos) cuando se emprende esto casi que desaparece.

  
  

  • Estamos revisando sus virtudes o mejor en qué tipo de oficio se siente feliz, para que se acostumbre a que las cosas que se hace con pasión así no exista paga se disfrutan más.

  
  

  • Finalmente a que sea muy observadora, existen infinidades de oportunidades por desarrollar, de hecho empezamos un juego-reto; y es siempre que salimos a la calle apostamos quien ve más ideas nuevas para desarrollar o mejorar.

  Aunque en la escuela no nos preparan para emprender sino para ser aprendidos por el sistema, vale la pena darse la pela para explorar este mundo de la incertidumbre y de la creatividad, a propósito me vino bien esta charla TED que me encontré del tema, aquí el señor Cameron Herold quien nos cuenta por qué es importante inculcar modelos de emprendimiento desde la primera infancia, muy buenas reflexiones y muchos aprendizajes, que la disfruten.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

Half an Hour

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  My Charitable Giving Profile

  Posted: June 29, 2012, 7:56am COT

  Responding to a post from Beth Kanter
  
  My giving is focused and specific. In particular, I avoid charities performing functions that ought to be performed by the public domain. Specifically, health care and research, education and social welfare all ought to be managed by the government. These should not depend on charities because they are matters of urgent social need and because funding from charities disappears precisely when these are needed most.
  
  Consequently, my giving is focused in two areas that are outside the domain of government: advocacy, and socially-responsible investment. This means that I give to political organizations such as labour advocacy groups, Occupy, Live 8 and One, issues campaigns, political parties, and independent agencies such as Amnesty International. And it means that instead of investing to enrich myself, I invest to improve society, and in particular, support credit unions and co-ops, and support international microlending such as Kiva.
  
  Some people may not consider any of this charitable giving at all. Most of the recipients of my charitable dollars do not even qualify for charitable status. But the underlying purpose of my giving is to do good, rather than (say) qualify for a tax return or receive credit for funding. Moreover, many of the problems in society exist not because of a lack of means but because of a lack of political will.
  
  From my perspective, much charitable giving actually *contributes* to this lack of political will, rather than addressing it. The most urgent health and welfare needs stem from poverty and oppression, yet high-profile charitable research into advanced diseases diverts attention away from these issues. Meanwhile, these private charities also foster the perspective that medical research ought to be funded by private agencies rather than by and for the public good.
  
  My observation is that a great deal of the money raised by the foundations is directed toward those least in need of it. I have commented, for example, on the way educational foundation money is directed toward such needy agencies such as Harvard and MIT. Aid money - even research aid money - would have much more of an impact if directed toward nations and people unable to otherwise conduct the work.
  
  The WiserGiving quiz bears this out (I actually took it after making the above remarks, and was mostly able to identify each of the different approaches in the questions). Here's how it describes my responses:
  
  "Your dominant WiserGiving Style is Increasing Effectiveness of organizations, which strives to strengthen an organization so that it can better perform its mission, exert greater impact, and be increasingly sustainable over the long term. You have two secondary WiserGiving Styles, Direct Services, which focuses on the individual as the agent of social change; and Making Change Stick, which protects hard-won gains achieved in the legal and public opinion arenas."
  
  You might wonder why I wouldn't choose options related to 'building movements' and 'research and big ideas' or even 'public policy'. In general, each of these caters in some way to the elitism I criticize above; building movements is about leading people, public policy is about influencing leaders, and research is about funding people who already have money. It's not that I don't think any of these are important, it's that the methods described to obtain the aims are incorrect.
  
  Take 'leading people' for 'building movements', for example. The survey instrument describes these as including "Examples include: Occupy Wall Street, Anti-Bullying campaigns, Pro-Choice, and the Tea Party." These do not belong together in a single category. Some, like Occupy, are much less leader-dependent than others. Some, like Occupy, are not *mass* movements like the others, but are rather composed of relatively small actions intended to make a statement. Occupy doesn't have *followers* the way the other movements (and movements in general) have.
  
  My view is that, in general, in order to enable effective social change, we need to bypass and circumvent traditional power-centered approaches. Instead of trying to change banks, for example, we should work to achi3eve economic objectives, such as lending, in other ways. Instead of catering to elected officials, or running for office, we should create mechanisms through which we govern ourselves. Instead of charity as 'giving' from the powerful to the poor, whether it is direct aid or the giving of end-specific gifts (like, say, 'an education') we need to focus on reducing the disparity between rich and poor and in enabling the disempowered to create the putative 'gift' for themselves.
  
  Most writing and literature regarding charity actually undermines these objectives. Most charity still takes the perspective of a voluntary transfer (usually with conditions) of direct aid from the wealthy (rich, powerful) to the needy, and usually in such a way as to reinforce, rather than ameliorate, the division that created the need in the first place.
  
  People need to realize:
  - a donation to an anti-Cancer fund is a vote for a privatized health care system,
  - a petition campaign entrenches a hierarchical political system,
  - a research program typically entrenches the division between educational opportunities
  - direct purchased aid enriches western manufacturers and agriculture at the expense of those elsewhere
  
  Until they do, they will continue to conduct their charitable activities in such a way as to continue to create the need for charity, rather than to achieve its elimination.

Portal Educativo Colombia Aprende - Foro Educativo Nacional

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  Docentes Campuseros 2012

  Posted: June 28, 2012, 3:16pm COT by Portal Educativo Colombia Aprende

  La Oficina de Innovación Educativa con Uso de Tic, del Ministerio de Educación Nacional, realizó un taller denominado “Videojuegos, ¿una pérdida de tiempo o una oportunidad para innovar?”, en el marco de Campus Party 2012. Conozca qué dijeron los talleristas y los docentes campuseros que asistieron.

Ideas fascinantes

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  Foros Telefónica de Cultura Digital 2012

  Posted: June 20, 2012, 5:05pm COT

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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  18 meses de Cultura Digital en la educación

  Posted: June 18, 2012, 1:11pm COT

  
  Conozca en esta infografía el recorrido que tendrá el Encuentro Internacional de Educación que propone como pregunta ¿Cómo debería ser la educación del siglo XXI?
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

Half an Hour

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  Connectivism as Epistemology

  Posted: June 17, 2012, 9:08am COT

  Responding to questions from Vance McPherson
  
  

  1) What is your response to Rita Kop's suggestion that connectivism is a new epistemology but not a new learning theory?

  As I understand Rita, she understands the pedagogical aspects of connectivism to have already been present in constructivism, and hence, connectivism is not proposing something new when it comes to giving guidance to instructional staff. There are overlaps to be sure, however:
  - criticisms of a teaching practice, which may be grounded if working in a constructivist perspective, are not grounded in a connectivist environment. For example, I responded to criticisms from Heli Nurmi several times in this fashion.
  - there is a universalist aspect to constructivism that is not present in connectivism; to be a 'theory' requires statements of general principles of teaching, and connectivism mostly doesn't have these
  - and related, constructivism depends on intention in a way connectivism does not - it supposes that people are consciously building or constructing knowledge, whereas in connectivism this is not required
  
  Connectivism is *definitively* a learning theory, or more accurately, incorporates learning theories (specifically, theories about how connections are formed in networks). It suggests some teaching theories (I have capsulized them as 'to teach is to model and demonstrate' and suggested that connectivism argues for the creation of an immersive learning environment).
  
  But all of that said, whether connectivism is a *new* theory of epistemology or pedagogy is irrelevant to me and I don't spend any time worrying about it. I often preface my remarks with the sentence "everything I have to say has been said (often better) by someone else."
  
  

  2) My understanding of connectivism is currently as both epistemology and learning theory, which presupposes that it has ALWAYS been correct and is not contingent upon modern technological developments to "work." Rather, technology casts light upon the nature of the model.  But many authors are suggesting that the application of the learning theory is primarily to technology-based learning.  What's your take on this?

  It has always been correct (insofar as it has components that say anything is 'always' the case). Networks have always learned. Humans have always been a network (at least, since graduating from single-celled organisms).
  
  Other aspects of the theory change over time. At the deepest level, the principles for stable (dynamic, learning) networks - autonomy, diversity, etc - are probably reasonably constant over different types of networks.
  
  But the sort of environments that create learning vary greatly - the sort of environment that produces a modern information-age knowledge-worker for example varies greatly from one which would produce a skilled bow-maker in the middle ages.
  
  Additionally, with the development of technology, new types of networks have come into being. While human commerce has always formed a network, it has been a relatively simple network and certainly a slow-moving one. There's only so much connecting that can take place via personal communication and the Royal Mail. Technology greatly accelerated the size and speed of the human network, producing in a way not previously possible more observable properties of a network (for example, cascade phenomena as an idea or meme propagates through the network).
  

   3) M. K. Dunaway (2011) recently published a paper in Reference Services Review, where she describes connectivism as claiming that knowledge emerges from an individual's learning network as connections are recognized.  If I'm understanding your position correctly, then Dunaway's description is inaccurate in placing the locus of knowledge with the individual learner's recognition patterns, and not in the network itself.  But I may also have not correctly understood you, her, or both.  Could you steer me straight on this?

  I would have to read Dunaway to be able to provide a reasonable response - if you could link me to a copy that would be helpful.
  
  That said - 'recognition' is a core thesis of my own theory. To 'know' x is to be capable of *recognizing* 'x'. To recognize 'x' is to assume an appropriate neural configuration when presented with an 'x', where 'appropriate' may be described in any variety of manners. I sometimes talk of 'knowing' 'x' to having the right 'feeling' when represented with 'x', a feeling of recognition. To 'recognize' is a property of a successful network.
  
  Additionally, networks exhibit patterns or regularities. For example, a weather network may exhibit a characteristic 'storm front' or a mumuration of blackbirds may display shapes in the air. In my own work I often use examples like 'facves on a TV screen' or on the surface of Mars. These patterns in a network are phenomena that exist *only* as things that are recognized. To say a pattern 'x' exists in network 'y' requires a perceiver 'P' presented with 'y' and who instantiates an appropriate network state (a 'familiar feeling', a 'habitual reaction', a 'recognition') when presented with (a perspective of) 'x'.
  

   4) I sometimes get the impression that you and George Siemens are not exactly on the same page when it comes to the epistemological aspects of connectivism, which of course would be perfectly fine in the context of a dialogic process, but I wondered if you'd care to comment on this.

  
  George and I have our debates. My sense is that is is much more concerned with the pedagogical aspects of connectivism while I am much more interested in the epistemological aspects. Philosophically, George is a realist while I am more of an idealist - that is to say, he is more likely to say the phenomena we observe (be they chairs or colours or shapes and movements) are 'real' while I (for reasons just stated) say they require a perceiver.

   One more thing, something of a comment.  You've described semiotic processes (language, symbols) as epiphenomena of networks, but not essential to them.  This reminds me a lot of Stephen Jay Gould's idea of "spandrels."  I thought it was interesting because one of Bill Kerr's beefs with connectivism seems to be that there is not a good evolutionary / biological explanation for how connectivism is possible.  But I think that, on the contrary, connectivism, if correct, would prove conclusively Gould's spandrel hypothesis, which is widely accepted in evolutionary biology circles.  Just a thought.

  I have described the patterns we perceive as supervenient on the phenomena that produce them. So that does make them epiphenomenal in a way.
  
  The whole question of an evolutionary basis for connectivism is one I have not considered. But I think there's a good basis for such an argument. A network is at heart a recognition system; it responds in consistent ways to complex and variable phenomena. It embodies the capacity to adapt to change. The more complex an environment the more likely that a network, rather than a simple innate instinct, would ensure survival.
  
  A language I think emerges quite naturally out of this. Given that humans have the capacity to make noises and gestures, and that these would be consistently produced given certain phenomena, it would not be long before the adaptive advantage of communication ensured its adoption. Most - if not all - of actual language is (in my mind) learned. But there is no question that the networks we are born with at birth are sensitive to the sounds and movements made by people like ourselves.
  
  That said: language (as an entity) is a *social* phenomenon, not a personal phenomenon. Language is stigmergic. As Wittgenstein would say, there is no private language. Not because of some 'private language argument' (I think this is a recreation of Wittgenstein's thought after the fact, and not core to what Wittgenstein had to say) but because the properties of language - specific words (the associated sounds and symbols, and conventional meaning or reference), grammars and syntax, works in literature and art that constitute paradigms, etc. - are physical phenomena, present out there in the world and not in the humans that speak and write it.
  
  Is language a spandral - an accidental artifact of evolution? In one sense no - I think a look at language after the fact shows how important it has been to survival. But in another sense no - it's not an artifact of evolution at all, as it is not a property of individual humans.
  
  But should investigation show a particular innate sensitivity to some aspect of language - a 'mirror neuron for syntax', say, that might be a spandral. That might be a selected preference for a particular aspect of language that *could* have been different (you could have an equally effective language without it) but was the way it was, and was selected for. It might show up in the way, say, an innate preference for the colour red might have - as an aid to identifying dangerous stuff in the world, which in an alternative history could well have been blue or green (think Vulcan) or whatever.
  
  Good questions, interesting discussion, thanks. I will post these to my weblog, if you don't mind.
  
  -- Stephen

Ideas fascinantes

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  Quieres tener muchos seguidores, ve delante de ellos

  Posted: June 15, 2012, 6:41pm COT

  La era digital nos ha impuesto nuevos retos y nos está llevando a reinventarnos para sobrevivir en un entorno cada vez más competitivo, si lo dudas las únicas personas que te contratarán serán estos:
  
  
  
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  Conectivismo y aprendizaje en Red

  Posted: June 11, 2012, 3:48pm COT

  
  Una interesante mirada a las nuevas formas de enseñar y aprender
  
  

Portal Educativo Colombia Aprende - Foro Educativo Nacional

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  El Bicentenario de la Constitución de Cádiz

  Posted: June 11, 2012, 3:04pm COT by Portal Educativo Colombia Aprende

  En conmemoración del Bicentenario de la Constitución de Cádiz, más conocida como la Pepa o constitución española de 1812, el Colegio Mayor de San Bartolomé asistió a la ciudad de Cádiz, España, en representación de Colombia, para realizar una ponencia que desarrollaron dos de sus estudiantes de grado 11 con la asesoría de sus docentes, [...]

Objetos de Aprendizaje

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  Haciendo volar a Will Smith

  Posted: June 3, 2012, 4:40pm COT

  No se trata de una impresión, ni tampoco de una ilusión óptica, en efecto Will Smith sobre un monopatín levita ante el efecto de un imán. A principios de los noventa el Grupo CoLoS se propuso como lema aprender-enseñar jugando, así que ahora le ha tocado al Príncipe de Bell-Air. Antena 3, a través de El Hormiguero, recoge las experiencias de electromagnetismo aplicado, utilizando nitrógenio líquido y su aplicación al Moebius Maglev (tren de Alta Velocidad).

EDUCATIVA

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  Artículos sobre la web social educativa

  Posted: June 3, 2012, 6:51am COT

  Desde febrero de este año vengo colaborando con Wikisaber en la publicación de una serie de artículos relativos a la educación y la web social.
  Los artículos no son una serie de escritos independientes sino que tienen una estructura propia muy parecida a la que le daría si hoy tuviese que escribir un libro sobre el tema.
  Como el número de artículos ya es considerable pongo aquí la lista completa de artículos para el que desee leerlos desde una perspectiva de unidad.
  
  La web social
  
  
       01 La importancia de la Web Social
       02 Depredadores en la Web
  
  Intimidad, privacidad y normas de conducta en las redes sociales
  
       03 Protege tu intimidad en las redes sociales
       04 Normas en la Web Social
       05 Configuración de la seguridad y privacidad en Facebook
       06 Seguridad y privacidad en Twitter
       07 Privacidad y seguridad en Tuenti
       08 Privacidad y seguridad en Google+
  
  Redes sociales para docentes
  
       09 La red social de los docentes: Internet en el Aula
       10 Facebook para docentes
       11 Twitter para docentes
  
  Las redes sociales y los centros educativos
  
       12 Cómo crear la identidad digital de un Centro Educativo
       13 ¿Deben estar los Centros Educativos en las redes sociales?
       14 Creación de una página en Facebook para el Centro Educativo
       15 Gestión de las páginas de Facebook (1 de 2)
       16 Gestión de las páginas de Facebook (2 de 2)
       17 Twitter para Centros Educativos (1 de 2)
       18 Twitter para Centros Educativos (2 de 2)
       19 Google+ en los Centros Educativos
  
  Redes sociales para la docencia
  
       20 Caminando hacia el b-learning
       21 Una red social en la clase
       22 ¿Cómo debería ser una red social docente?
       23 Redes sociales para la docencia: Facebook
       24 Redes sociales para la docencia: Twitter
       25 Redes sociales para la docencia: Tuenti
       26 Redes sociales para la docencia: Edmodo
       27 Redes sociales para la docencia: redAlumnos
       28 Redes sociales para la docencia: Twiducate
       29 Redes sociales para la docencia: Schoology
       30 Redes sociales para la docencia: Edoome
       31 Redes sociales para la docencia: Educa Network
       32 Redes sociales para la docencia: Edu 2.0
       33 Redes sociales para la docencia: Ning
       34 Redes sociales para la docencia: Mixxt
       35 Redes sociales para la docencia: Wall.fm
  
  
  
  Continuará...

Half an Hour

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  Feelings of Science

  Posted: June 1, 2012, 1:17pm COT

  David Hume's philosophy of morality is distinct from most approaches in that it does not postulate some set of principles or criteria for moral behaviour.
  
  Rather, he argues that we are governed by a 'moral sense' that tells us when an act is right or wrong. "Extinguish all the warm feelings and prepossessions in favour of virtue, and all disgust or aversion to vice: render men totally indifferent towards these distinctions; and morality is no longer a practical study, nor has any tendency to regulate our lives and actions." (Hume, Of Morals)
  
  The idea here isn't that Hume is arguing for some sort of moral relativism and 'anything goes', though he has often been mischaracterized that way, but rather that other putatively ''objective' measures of morality are crude instruments, and that our own sensations are fine-tuned detectors of moral nuance that can be developed, through practice and experience, into reliable measures of morality.
  
  It's a bit like the difference between monitoring the gauges on a dashboard and a driver feeling how the car responds to the road around corners and while braking. An experienced and sensitive driver can tell if there's something wrong with the car well before any objective instruments can because the car doesn't 'feel' right.
  
  Note again that this isn't an 'anything goes' theory of auto mechanics. There is an objective fact of the matter as to whether the car is performing badly or not. But this fact is not equated with dashboard monitor readings, or indeed with any particular measure that can be determined a priori. Prior to an actual breakdown or measurable malfunction, it's no more than wear and tear in a car's engine the human mind can sense well before any more coarsely-tuned measuring device can.
  
  This sort of juding appropriateness by feeling isn't limited to ethics and auto mechanics. Rob Cottingham posted this cartoon today and then discussed how he came to produce it:
  
  
  He writes, "For me, the trick is to not overthink it, because that’s a sure route to paralysis... ultimately, the goal is to create the cartoon I want to make, and then reach more of the people who will enjoy that cartoon." In a cartoon there can be a million variables that go into the definition of 'good' and the cartoonist does not create a cartoon to specifications, but rather, works by feel.
  
  These considerations emerged today as I discussed the concept of a connectivist research methodology with Sheri Oberman. Now I hadn't really thought in such terms about connectivism - I remarked that I see myself as more akin to an explorer than an experimenter, and that my methodology is based more in Paul Feyerabend than in anything else: "The idea that science can, and should, be run according to fixed and universal rules, is both unrealistic and pernicious. It is unrealistic, for it takes too simple a view of the talents of man and of the circumstances which encourage, or cause, their development. And it is pernicious, for the attempt to enforce the rules is bound to increase our professional qualifications at the expense of our humanity."
  
  But again, this isn't an 'anything goes' methodology, and Oberman is right, I think, to suggest that a connectivist methodology would be based in some significant way on connections. And when I reflect on my own practice it does seem to me that my own work is based in forming connections - though, more specifically, it is based in acting as a node in a network, and not in network-forming per se (I think the concept of 'building networks' is a bit misleading; if we want to be a part of a network we must be in the network, as a node, and not outside it, as a god).
  
  But what would that methodology look like? Again, I could probably draw out some criteria - I've talked about the importance of autnomy and diversity, etc., in the past, and these qualities certainly characterize my own practice. And perheps, after the fact, you could measure my own research performance against, say, an 'autonomy index', and determine to what degree I practices and promoted autonomy in my own work.
  
  But that's not how I actually evaluate my own work. It's not that the criteria are wrong. It's that, first of all, the criteria that determine whether my work was a success or not do not emerge until later, and second, even then, I evaluate my work according to how it feels against any such criteria (indeed, it would drive me crazy to try to evaluate against such criteria).
  
  For example, the Skype conversation I had this morning, and practices like that Skype conversation (I have another in less than half an hour, and routinely have short conversations where I talk to people interested in this and that). I'll pose one 'research' question: should I record them? (Another: should I blog about them after? Etc.) I don't record them because I want the conversations to feel more like practice rather than performance. Is this a correct methodology? What would tell me whether it was? I won't know until some time in the future the basis on which these conversations were a success or otherwise. But I do know I have a pretty good feel for such things, so I that's what I use.
  
  Would it be better if there were some criteria against which I made my decision whether or not to record? No, because the success of the conversation is based in much more than whether or not it is recorded, and so any such standard would be artificial and arbitrary. And, in some important respects, wrong.
  
  Obermann mentioned knowing whether a dance is successful. It's the same sort of thing, again. I know whether I am dancing well by how it feels when I'm dancing. If I'm feeling awkward, not knowing where to put my feet, unsure if I'm holding my partner properly, and all the rest (and I speak from experience here) then I know I am dancing incorrectly. By contrast, if these concerns fall by the wayside and I feel only a smoothness of motion and attachment to my partner, then the dance is progressing well.
  
  Now, a couple of things. I could assess my dance against a dancing design pattern, consisting (for example) of a series of step marks imprinted on the floor (kind of like the old 'figures' in figure skating). This would certainly be objective, and measurable. But it would be incorrect - I could dance poorly even while hitting every step, and dance well even though missing the mark. Indeed, the point of the dance is do no more than to merely replicate a best practice, it is to take it and make it something more.
  
  Again, though, note that this is not an 'anything goes' theory of dancing. Nor is it even a theory that supposes that my own standard of 'good' dancing is static (and hence, forever primitive). As I dance, as I watch other dancers, as I discuss dancing with my dance partner (or with total strangers I've bumped on the dance floor) my sense of dance becomes more refined. What I feel changes. What used to feel pretty good now seems to me to be slow and simplistic. As I evolve, I strive to be a better dancer, and my sensation becomes one of detecting this improvement in my dance.
  
  This is an important point. One of the fundamental difficulties with the empirical sciences is that the science of measurement - which is what we need in order to obtain experimental results - is itself an empirical discipline, and itself subject to amendment and improvement over time. Nowhere is this more evident than in personal perception - our tastes in music when we are young are (typically, and with some caveats) laughable when we are older. Did I really buy that Bay City Rollers album? Yeah - I did.
  
  The literature of aesthetics is full of references to things like the refined palate in wine tasting, the expertise of the chef in cooking, the appreciation of a master carpenter for a fine mortise and tenon. People who study colour closely are able to distinguish differences in tint and tone that will escape a novice. Our quality of experience improves over time, and it does so because our capacity to perceive nuance, distinction and difference is improved, and this reflects the impact of hundreds of thousands of individual experiences over time on our mind. Our brains, quite literally, become shaped into better perceivers (given the appropriate practice and experience).
  
  As this is true of individuals, so it is true of the assessment of science and research in society generally. For while on the one hand we have today a trend toward objective criteria-based assessments of research and science, a connectivist approach (if there were one) would suggest that the acceptance of a research methodology or a specific research program is an emergent phenomenon describable only in terms of that programs placement in the wider network?
  
  What does that mean? One way of stating it is that society as a whole feels good about a given program, and senses discord about another. Think of the sort of social approbation or revulsion we feel for certain moral or immoral acts - there is for example in Canada a certain crime of murder and dismemberment that has just been committed, and there is a widespread sense of revulsion regarding the fact that it was recorded and posted on the internet. This isn't a matter of voting or counting individual preferences, or of violating some guideline, law or precept; it's more like a whole body response to the phenomenon.
  
  What constitutes it? Well precisely it is the set of interactions each of us with the others, the call-in radio shows, the blog posts, and the rest, combined with our inner sensations about the act as they are expressed in a myriad of ways, some not even connected to the act (that's why simply counting votes would be inappropriate; it completely misses the changed way we regard each other in the grocery store, a change imperceptible and almost unidentifiable, but if you were sensitive to it and looking for it, you might say you saw it there).
  
  This form of social perception is the ultimate judge of the adequacy of any research program (or musical taste, or dance moves, or cartoon, or any of the rest of it). Again, it is not an electoral process, nor a market behaviour (quite the contrary; these are mass phenomena intended and designed to magnify the needs and interests of individual members of society, rather than to reflect the sense of society as a whole).
  
  And - importantly - like personal perception, social perception is itself subject to refinement and improvement. It's as Richard Duscho writes, "the proper game for understanding the nature and development of scientific knowledge is engagement with the ongoing pursuit and refinement of methods, evidence, and explanations and the subsequent handing of anomalies that are a critical component of proposing and evaluating scientific models and theories."
  
  The mechanisms we use to validate are - or ought to be - similar to those used to validate great cuisine, or dancing, or auto mechanics. Both society as a whole and experts in particular play a role. Society probably defines relevance - and again, relevance may not be immediately apparent. Most of society understands this, and we have always kept a place for abstruse researches, not because we understand them, but because we don't. Experts in the mean time are needed to distinguish the gold from the dross, the genuine from the imitation; their own inner sense of the discipline has been finely honed.
  
  We need both, and we need these to be undefined, rather than specified in terms of some sort of code of guidelines or best practices or whatever, not only because such are hopelessly inaccurate abstractions on the judgements that are actually made, but also because by their very nature they are resistant to the sort of growth and personal development every society needs. When societies learn to feel and not just to measure, arts and sciences flourish; when they return to standards and specifications, they have lost that capacity, and a decline has begin.

Portal Educativo Colombia Aprende - Foro Educativo Nacional

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  Cumpleaños 8 Portal Colombia Aprende

  Posted: May 24, 2012, 3:10pm COT by Portal Educativo Colombia Aprende

  Con nueva imagen y diseño, con una estrategia de gestión de contenidos que promueve la diversidad de escenarios como televisión educativa, radio educativa y bancos de objetos de aprendizaje, y con más de 30.000 contenidos educativos disponibles para docentes, directivos docentes, estudiantes de educación preescolar básica, media y superior, así como investigadores, familia y comunidad [...]
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  Premio Fundación Telefónica de Innovación Educativa 2012

  Posted: May 15, 2012, 2:30pm COT by Portal Educativo Colombia Aprende

  Desde el 9 de abril hasta el 20 de mayo de 2012, los docentes de instituciones educativas de todo el mundo podrán inscribirse con trabajos en TIC, en el Premio Fundación Telefónica de Innovación Educativa 2012. La Fundación Telefónica a través de este Premio busca impulsar un cambio metodológico real en el aula, mediante un [...]

Ideas fascinantes

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  ¡Súmate al debate! abiertas las inscripciones para los eventos presenciales del Encuentro Internacional de Educación en Cali y Medellín, acompáñanos

  Posted: May 14, 2012, 9:42am COT

  El próximo 31 de mayo y 1 de junio se llevará a cabo en la ciudad de Buenos Aires el primer evento presencial relacionado con el Encuentro Internacional de Educación de la Fundación Telefónica, este evento que hace parte de una serie de diálogos en donde se discutirá entre otras temáticas el papel de la educación en el mundo conectado contará con la participación de muchos actores de la comunidad educativa.
  Para el caso de Colombia se realizará durante los días del evento una conexión en las ciudades de Cali y Medellín en donde a partir de mesa redondas lideradas por expertos se profundizarán sobre las temáticas abordadas en el evento presencial.
  Por lo anterior, si quieres participar en estos espacios de diálogo y asistir a esta mesas de trabajo en el siguiente enlace te puedes escribir: http://encuentro.educared.org/page/formulario-de-inscripcion-al-evento-de-conexion
  Otras ciudades con conexión:
  
  

  Ciudad	País	Día	Hora inicio	Lugar
  São Paulo	Brasil	31/05/2012	9:00h	Fundaçao Telefônica
  Santiago de Chile	Chile	31/05/2012	8:30h	Edificio Corporativo de Telefónica
  Cali	Colombia	31/05/2012	11:00h	Universidad ICESI
  Medellín	Colombia	31/05/2012	11:00h	Parque Explora
  Guayaquil	Ecuador	31/05/2012	15:30h	Auditorio Fundación Leonidas Ortega Moreira
  Madrid	España	31/05/2012	13:30h	Espacio Telefónica
  Huixtla, Chiapas	México	31/05/2012	09:00h	Escuela Primaria Fray Matías de Córdoba
  Lima	Perú	31/05/2012	18:00h	Centro Fundación Telefónica, Av. Arequipa 1155
  Caracas	Venezuela	31/05/2012	14:00h	Auditorio de la Universidad Monteávila

  
  
  
  

Portal Educativo Colombia Aprende - Foro Educativo Nacional

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  Nuevos representantes para el Parlamento Juvenil del Mercosur

  Posted: May 13, 2012, 2:15pm COT by Portal Educativo Colombia Aprende

  Tras varios días de evaluación, 5 de los parlamentarios del período 2010-2012 dieron a conocer a sus sucesores. Basados en aspectos como pertinencia de la propuesta, capacidad argumentativa y coherencia con los ejes temáticos del Parlamento, se eligieron 20 representantes titulares y 3 suplentes, quienes tendrán la misión de defender, en nombre de Colombia, los [...]

EDUCATIVA

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  EDUCATIVA Premio Espiral Edublogs

  Posted: May 11, 2012, 2:28pm COT

  Este blog ha sido premiado con la peonza dorada en la sección de Reflexión Educativa del Premio Espiral Edublogs 2012.
  
  El sábado 2 de junio se hizo en Madrid la entrega de premios en un ambiente difícilmente superable, donde el buen trabajo de muchas personas salió a la luz y donde las emociones salpicaron a más de uno. Felicidades a la organización de Espiral por la organización del acto que anima a seguir adelante sabiendo que mucha gente comparte el tipo de educación en la que creemos.
  
  Agradezco sinceramente el premio a la organización por haber seleccionado mi blog y a los sufridos lectores del mismo que son los que le dan realmente la vida.
  
  
  
  
  
  Muchas gracias a todos

Half an Hour

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  Experts and Empowerment

  Posted: May 8, 2012, 10:22am COT

  We all, as David Wiley writes, want to empower learners. While we read a great deal these days about education as job training and workforce readiness, what we really want to be able to do is to enable each person to make his or her way in the world, to pursue their own good in their own way.
  
  This, to me, involves reducing and eventually eliminating their need to depend on experts. As I imperfectly expressed the point the other day, "It’s about actually empowering people to develop and create their own learning, their own education. So not only do they not depend on us for learning, but also, their learning is not subject to our value-judgements and prejudices."
  
  Unfortunately, this is often read as a casting of the student into the world to rely solely on their own devices. David Wiley echoes the sort of misinterpretation of this view that is common:
  
  "It is hard to imagine any form of learning that does not involve an expert – except pure, unguided, trial-and-error discovery learning. Without reference to any person – or any artifact created by a person – of more experience than ourselves, all learning would be maximally inefficient. We would each be left to rediscover the entirety of physics from scratch. And the entirety of music theory. And the entirety of every other field, without a conversation or a textbook or a Wikipedia article to guide us."
  
  Such a proposition is absurd, and as it is absurd one should conclude (I would hope) that it is not the proposition I am arguing for.
  
  So let me be clear: in the world as I understand it, there are more than two options. There is an option somewhere between "depending on an expert" and "left to rediscover the entirely of physics from scratch."
  
  And - to be clear - a great deal of 'expert content' exists. There is not only the aforementioned Wikipedia, there are also academic publications, magazine and newspaper articles, open online courses, blog posts, NASA videos, TED talks, and a host of additional educational content. Indeed, in today's environment, and for the foreseeable future, we are virtually swimming in educational content. It would be rash, irresponsible, and unthinking to say that a person should not consult any of this when learning physics or any other discipline. So, that is not what I am saying.
  
  What I am addressing with remarks like "we should not depend on the expert" is the stance that ought to be taken by the learner with respect to the learning material extant on the web and elsewhere. And I mean this two two distinct but related ways:
  
  - first, the learner should not accept the report of the expert uncritically. Expert advice on any given subject may not merely be misleading or misinformed, it may also be offered out of context, it may be outdated, it may be misunderstood, and in some cases it may be malicious. Examples of any of these cases may be found in abundance, especially on today's polarized and politicized media environment.
  
  - second, the learner should resist the characterization of certain sources, certain perspectives, and certain content types *as expert*. While once we may have been able to rely on peer and publisher review to verify the authenticity and accuracy of the information, this is no longer the case. Moreover, an increasing body of verifiable and reliable information is being published outside tradititional channels.
  
  These two conditions amount to the assertion that the learner should take what amounts to a critically reflective stance with respect not only to expert content but with respect to all content. Maybe there was once a day when we could trust expert opinion, but today we live in an environment where not only can we not trust the experts, we cannot even trust that the people offered as experts in fact are experts.
  
  This is an important point. While it is common to use terms like 'elite' and 'expert' interchangeably, they are in fact distinct concepts. To call a person an expert refers to their knowledge. A person is an expert in a discipline if they have a deep knowledge of the field, a base of experience in the field, and can talk about matters related to the field rationally and reasonably. But to call a person an 'elite' refer to their position in a community or society. A person who is elite will have accumulated a disproportionate amount of power, wealth or influence.
  
  Sometimes a person will be elite as a result of their expertise. If we speak of, for example, "elite scientists", we may be referring not to the richest or most powerful scientists, but those with the most expertise. But in practice we are rarely so precise. And so the word 'elite' even in a scientific discipline may refer not to those with the greatest knowledge, but to those with the most power and influence.
  
  My own experience in life is that the people who become elite do not always become so as a result of their generosity, but rather as a result of their parsimony. They achieve their status as elite not by sharing but rather by hoarding. Such members of the elite carefully cultivate a culture of dependence. By ensuring that their followers depend on them for knowledge, influence and wealth, they augment their own position in society. The parsimonious elite are not interested in the empowerment of their students. They are greedy, selfish and self-interested.
  
  Not all members of the elite are parsimonious, and not all experts are members of this elite. But the membership is sufficiently large that a learner ought not, as a general policy, place oneself in a position of dependence on experts. With every word of advice received, the learner must be in a position to ask whom the advice is intended to benefit. And the learner must be in a position to seek alternative sources of expertise, to weight options, and to decide what to believe for him or her self.
  
  What is significant, to my mind, is that by being able to adopt such a critical stance with respect to expertise, learners are not only much better able to vet for themselves the reliability and authenticity of a piece of expert advice, they also acquire the capacity to look beyond a smaller set of 'trusted sources' and cast their gaze across the wider information landscape, as they will be able to select the reasonable and reliable even from such nontraditional sources as discussion lists, blog posts and alternative media.
  
  It's like being able to read. Before we could read, we had to depend on the priest to tell us what the book said. After we learned how to read, not only could we see what the book says for ourselves, we can also read other books that may say different things. Being able to read not only increases our understanding, it increases our power to choose what will inform that understanding.
  
  From my perspective as an educator, we should not be like the educator who reads to people, and who builds a large hall and charges fees in order to have people come to us to listen to use read to them.
  
  Nor should we be like the educator who reads to people for free. This does not achieve our aims. 'Giving content for free' does not reduce the need for people to depend on a reader. Rather, it creates a new problem, that of sustainability - how are we to pay people who read for free?
  
  We should be like the educator whose primary interest is in teaching people to read, so they do not need to come to us at all, so there is not only no need for a hall and for fees to be paid, but no need for our particular expertise, because everyone can have it.
  
  
  
  

Ideas fascinantes

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  De sobrevivir con lo mínimo a vivir con lo máximo (pero en tecnología)

  Posted: May 1, 2012, 11:15pm COT

  
  ¿Se ha imaginado Usted contándole a una persona que ha permanecido por más de 10 años privado de su libertad en una de las tantas selvas de Colombia cómo ha evolución la tecnología? bueno, pues imagíneselo porque eso fue lo que hicimos el pasado 30 de abril en el @Ministerio_TIC con el grupo de policías y soldados que regresaron a la vida luego de un largo cautiverio.
  

  Esta actividad denominada #HeroesDigitales, buscaba entre otros objetivos actualizar a estos hombres sobre los avances de la tecnología durante el tiempo que estuvieron secuestrados; durante el evento los soldados y policías recibieron de parte de varias empresas privadas equipos portátiles, celulares de última generación con planes de datos y voz durante un año, módem USB con acceso a Internet y tabletas, en fin pasaron de vivir con lo mínimo a tener lo máximo en tecnología.

  
  

  Con los “juguetes” abiertos cual niño cuando abre sus regalos de navidad y luego de las fotos, entrevistas , palabras , mensajes de los patrocinadores y el resto del protocolo, nos dispusimos con el equipo de facilitadores a contarles cómo el mundo tecnológico había evolucionado; palabras como Facebook, Twitter, Códigos QR, realidad aumentada entre otras eran recibidas nos extrañeza, así mismo ver las caras de asombro y felicidad de estos hombres al manipular sus aparatos evidenciaban uno de los tantos (en este caso tecnológicos) rezagos que les dejó este episodio.

  Como es usual en jornadas de alfabetización digital, nos faltó tiempo, muchooooo tiempo para acercar a estos #HeroesDigitales hacía el ecosistema digital que se perdieron, por eso les invito a que les manden saludos a algunos de ellos a través de los siguientes usuarios de Twitter: @jorgellon16 - @santosalin - @judas969 - @saoco2012.

  Aunque ninguna tecnología reemplazará el abrazo cálido de un ser querido, soy un convencido que con ellas entre otras muchas cosas podemos integrar sensibilidades, cerrar brechas y hasta olvidar episodios desagradables como lo presenciamos en esta de acercamiento tecnológico.

  
  

  Tres mensajes que me dejó la jornada:

  · Lo más importante no es el “qué” sino el “Para qué” de la tecnología.

  · La tecnología te puede apoderar o empoderar, tú decides.

  · Conciencia ambiental (que vas hacer cuando tu aparato no sirva o no lo quieras) y regular el uso (para que no reemplace las relaciones humanas) deberían ser dos principios de las TIC.

  
  

  Galería de imágenes: [www.flickr.com]

  
  

  Vídeo Héroes Digitales