I spent a few learning filled days last week at the Canadian Network for Innovation in Education Conference in Banff. This was the first conference of the new organization created from the merger of the Association For Media and Technology in Education and the Canadian Association for Distance Education. I suggested at the final plenary session that presenters upload their slides to Slideshare using the tag CNIE2008, (or just CNIE) and many have.
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Year: 2008
Tragedy of Books
Two recent encounters with books have left me wondering how long we can afford this medium for knowledge production and distribution.Read More
Back Channel Contention
Bud’s Deihl’ posted an interesting (and flattering) post in response to my web conferenced seminar delivered last week to the EduCause NLI via Adobe Connect.
In the post Bud reflects on the advantages and challenges of the back text channel available to the audience in this type of distributed, real time presentation format. Bud wonders if we need a new form of net etiquette to keep us on track, or at least communicating civilly, when more than one channel is available to a group. Bud also links to a reflective post by Gord Campbell in which he apologetically describes the “roasting” of a not too effective key note speaker, in F2F real time, through Twitter dialog among the audience.
Two issues come to mind. The first is the challenge of continuous partial attention. This may be related to your generation and certainly to your exposure to various modes of communication, but I know from my own experience, that I can productively attend to a talk, while scanning my email or looking up a reference to a site noted by the speaker. If things get very interesting, I flip my focus back to the talk. But that doesn’t mean that I am very good at composing, debating, challenging or rebutting while really paying sufficient attention to the speaker to achieve maximum benefit. Of course if I am only expending partial attention, I should also be satisfied with only partial return on knowledge gain from the talk. So, rather than etiquette rules, we need to understand our own capacity for multi tasking and use different numbers of channels depending on the cognitive load of the activity, of the channel(s) and the amount we are willing to attend and thus benefit.
I found myself paying only VERY partial attention to the text window as things scrolled by during the NLI presentation. There was a few hundred attendees and probably 90+ % of my attention was directed to my presentation and the slides that accompanied it. Fortunately, the session was very aptly facilitated and questions and comments were filtered and presented to me by a moderator during pauses in the presentation. This extra support though isn’t available when I do my regular distributed teaching using Elluminate in the Masters program at Athabasca. There I try to attend to multiple channels including text chat (though fortunately SKYPE and Twitter) conversations that may be taking place among the students are not shared with the teacher!! I find that after 2 hours of this type of teaching that I am much more tired than I am when I teach in classroom contexts- but maybe I’m just getting older! I think I will experiment this next term by assigning one student to be the “text wrangler” to:
- make sure I don’t miss relevant comments or questions
- type in and correct URLs as noted or provided by myself and others during the class
- respond to simple technical issues
Of course this all means that the designated ‘wrangler’ has to further spread their attention, but it may be justified by the benefits to the class as a whole.
The second issue relates to issues of respectful attention. My wife is always on at me for multitasking my attention by reading, listening to the radio or otherwise paying less attention to her (or others) at meals than she deems appropriate. On the one hand the partial attention provides clear benefit. Reading cereal boxes in French is the way most of us English Canadians gain our greatest exposure to written French! On the other hand, most of us have heard the rants from teachers and business colleagues about the irritation of seeing students at their mobile devices during lectures or business colleagues on their Crackberries, during meetings.
My own cut, is to advise those who feel deprived of 100% attention, to just get over it! I don’t feel compelled to repeat things missed the first time from those paying less than sufficient attention, but I respect that person’s right to decide for themselves how much attention to give to my presentation. Of course the line is drawn when partial attention taking forces others to loose part of theirs (as when the cell phone rings, or one starts verbally chatting so as to distract those attending to the speaker).
New etiquette will and is evolving, but I think the era of 100% attention, 100% of the time to teachers, preachers and spouses may have ended (if it ever existed – lets not discount pre technological day dreaming!)
Networks Versus Groups in Higher education
The following is a rather long and scholarly type post arguing for the use of Networks in addition to groups commonly employed in formal campus and distance education. The essay will probably find its way into a published paper or book chapter, but I thought I would post it here in case anyone has interest and especially comments.
Thanks
TerryRead More
Pan-Canadian Research Agenda
A couple of years ago Tim Buell and I wrote a paper entitled Towards a Pan -Canadian E-Learning Research Agenda.
This literature review was designed to answer two foundational questions:
1. What constitutes a “research agenda, generally;” and
2. What is the current state of the literature surrounding research agendas in e-learning generally, and in Canada, specifically.
We had hoped to move to a next phase of surveying and meeting researchers, teachers , administrators, industry reps and policy makers to actually create this agenda. I had attempted to build partnership with Canada Council on Learning to undertake this task, but didn’t get anywhere.
In discussion with George Siemens we thought that the process should be revived. Canada continues with a complete lack of a national agenda to develop, research and exploite the power of e-learning. Many countries recognize that lifelong learning afforded by e-learning provides an empowering tool to address a wide variety of social, economic and individual needs. Our absence of planning, much less action, remains a national shame and huge opportunity lost.
Athabasca's Technology Enhanced Learning Research Institute
We are FINALLY recruiting for a director for the about to be launched TELRI . The Institute is designed to fund chairs, postdocs, research assistants and of course major research programs at Athabasca. TELRI has selected three initial research themes:
- mobile learning
- socially enhanced distance learning
- adaptivity and personalization
We have been creating research agendas for each theme in prepation for a expert think tank to be held after the CNIE conference in May.
I hope readers of this blog with interest and expertise in this area and especially those qualified for the Director’s position will be in touch.
Terry
EdTech use in online and F2F conferences
The latest issue of EduCause Review headlines an article Conference Connections: Rewiring the Circuit by George Siemen, Peter Tittenberger and myself. The work is mostly George’s but I was happy to play a supportive role in its production and editing. The article does a good job of overviewing the ‘augmented’ use of network technologies in F2F conferences, use in blended f2F and online conferences and those virtual conferences that are hosted entirely online.
One can’t help but notice the demand for (and extensive use of) wireless connectivity by delegates at face to face conferences these days. Of course, too much of this activity (especially emails) likely situates delegates (virtually) back at home and likely the F2F session suffers from contention for attention. However, we highlight in the article means such as blogging, IMs, audience question possing and polling that can be used to focus and enhance interaction even during F2F conferences. The article also describes ways in which the net is used in blended fashion to support learning before and after the conference.
But of greatest interest in the article (to me) is the overview, examples and (limited) evaluation data from conferences that run completely online. The growing awareness of the ecological and financial cost of travel, coupled with the opportunity cost associated with spending days away from home and workplace, make completely online conferences increasingly attractive. This article is chocked full of links and provides a good discussion of the techniques, benefits and challenges of using net technology to enhance professional development conferences.
Well worth a read, but then I’m biased!!!!
Terry
More Collective connections
My friend Jon Dron has finally nailed his own (and no doubt others) ideas about the collective nature of Wikipedia. His recent post notes:
- the individual actions that create most of the articles,
- the groups of administrative types who manage the overall infrastructure and set in place the algorithms that manage the look, feel and performance of the system
- the networks of mostly regular users responsible for maintenance and collaborative development of the articles and finally the way we mine
- the wiki as a collective resource.
I realize that some folks think this task of dividing and allocating ideas into categories is an arbitrary function that just gives rise to arguments (see for example Dave Snowden’s diatribe and his focus on ‘crews’.)
However I think our ‘Taxonomy of the Many’ classification system has value and defend it and classification systems in general in the rest of this post.
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A very Special Issue of IRRODL is Out the Online Door
Special issue 9(2) of the International Review of Research on Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL) is now available for open access. This is first collaborative effort we have undertaken, simultaneously publishing on a common theme (The Right to Education) with 5 other peer reviewed Journals. The articles cover a wide range of issues, in multiple languages, from many countries of the world. Many readers of this blog will find the articles on Open Educational Resources of interest, but as always, technical solutions to access and equity, by themselves, rarely resolve human concerns.
The peer reviewed articles from all 6 journals are accessible here. Besides the seven reviewed articles in the combined collection, additional research notes, a book review and recordings of CIDER sessions are also available in this issue at the IRRODL site. All the articles are also available in Mp3 format.
The six collaborating journals are:
Open Praxis
Asian Journal of Distance Education
Distances et savoirs
EURODL
Journal of Asynchronous Learning Network
IRRODL
Enjoy the read and learning available in these special issue works!
Terry Anderson, Editor IRRODL
Collectivism and Connectivism
Recent posts have gotten me thinking further about the “taxonomy of the many” groups/networks and collectives that Jon Dron and I have been interested in for the past year or so.
First there has been a small buzz about “Personal Learning Networks” I enjoyed Jim Lerman’s post Will Richardson adds some nice comments on Utube [kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.youtube.com/v/mghGV37TeK8″ width=”425″ height=”350″ wmode=”transparent” /] and Stephen Downe’s 2006 slideshow and George Siemens (early) thinking on the topic. A compelling feature of these arguments is the need to extend learning, via connections with others, beyond the small group of people in ‘class’ or work team or more generally a group.
In a more recent post George Siemens worries about his personal discomfort with the term Collective or collectivism and argues in Collective Intelligence? Nah. Connective Intelligence
"For reasons of motivation, self-confidence, and satisfaction, it is critical that we can retain ourselves and our ideas in our collaboration with others. Connective intelligences permits this. Collective intelligence results in an over-writing of individual identity.”
In the work by Jon Dron and myself, we have argued that it makes sense and helps use develop learning activities for ourselves and others to divide learning into four aggregations of the many (well, make that three of the Many plus one). These are:
- Individual learning – Most of my learning takes places as I read, watch and listen with no desire or expectation for human interaction, connecting or networking.
- Groups – the tightly formed aggregation typical of work place teams and educational classes (f2F or online), that are directed, managed, focused and often private collaborations.
- Networks – free flowing interactions, loosely governed, often transitory membership, and span both loose and close ties among members (think Edubloggers, members of churches and hockey fans). This is the type of aggregated relationship that George defends in his post.
- Collectives – These are non personal aggregations of the Many. They allow us to compare ourselves to the many, collectively predict and make decisions, ask questions of all, vote and visualize our aggregated opinions and ideas, match our interests and find networks, groups and individuals and in many other emerging ways help us understand and control our collective worlds. In collective learning activities we are not directly searching for human connections – only mining for information. Allison Littlejohn and her colleagues at Caledonian have nicely recounted some ‘collective’ educational history and explicated the idea further in a nice posting titled Collective learning
These categories are not totally exclusive and some applications (like Wikis for groups and networks) serve more than one aggregation. But I don’t think it adds value to prejudice one above the other, or to argue as George does, that we will lose something (ourselves? our ideas?) if we exploit the affordances of collective tools and applications.
Rather, one should use the best tool for the job. I have no intention of losing my identity nor having it “overwritten” when I click on Google and effect in a small way the page ranking systems, nor when I buy a book from Amazon and it effects their recommendations to me. These are examples of collectives working. But if I want a ‘connection’ then groups or networks (likely both) are my best choices.