Virtual Canuck

Our Spanish adventure

September 20, 2016Written by terrya

Unlike most of our voyages, this month I was accompanying my wife Susan on a trip to her conference. She registered in the 16 European Symposium on Suicide Prevention that took place this month in Oviedo, Spain. We took the opportunity to rent a car and bought a GPS with European maps (thank god!) and travelled through most of northern Spain. We headed up to the Basque country with stops in Pamplona (fortunately no running bulls this month) and then to the beautiful, but tourist plugged town of San Sebastian. We then motored through Basque countries, many mountain passes and tunnels (a bit white knuckled at 120 Km/H) to visit Guernica (site of first mass civilian bombing and immortalized by Pablo Picasso) and then to Bilbao.

guggenheim-museum-belboa Of course, like all good tourists we couldn’t miss the Guggenheim Museum and it did not disappoint.

We then headed west to Oviedo, capital of Asturias. I didn’t attend much of Susan’s conference, except for a couple of sessions in which Danish and Belgian online Suicide prevention systems were presented. I was impressed with the scientific rigour with which these interventions were tested – though trying to randomly assign suicidal participants to interventions presents a variety of ethical challenges.

We also travelled by car, (I know it was cheating) along some of the Camino de Santiago routes, trying to assess if we have the interest and the legs for such adventures. I had not realized the number of different Camino routes nor the number of pilgrims on them. I learned that in one day they ‘processed” over 600 pilgrims who were finishing the pilgrimage in Santiago.

We then headed south to Madrid with a stop in Leon. I was fortunate to be invited to give a talk at Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, which is the largest University in Spain with all courses delivered at a distance. Like Athabasca University, this University has had considerable challenges moving from its roots as a correspondence university to interactive online delivery. We visited many of the tourist spots and of course the famous museums in Madrid – though the huge line ups at the Prada scared us away.

Next we headed back to Barcelona, but we ventured into the hinterland for a brief visit to Belchite

belchite-1296 This town was left in ruins after a horrendous battle during the Spanish Civil War and a new town was built beside the ruins. These ruins now stand as a monument to the destruction of war, though they seem far off the tourist trail and we were the only visitors that day. It is strange that, unlike the American Civil war which is celebrated by numerous monuments and re-enactments, Spaniards seem to want to forget this sad time in their history. Perhaps because the “good guys” lost??

We then headed to Barcelona. As always, Barcelona with the inspiring architecture was a treat. It was interesting to see the progress on the Sagrada Familia, sagrada-familia Gaudi’s most famous design. It looks to be on track for completion marking the 100th anniversary of Gaudi’s death in 2026. The new stain glass (abstracts and NOT crucifixion scenes) in the windows (though still far from complete) adds blue and green hues to the whole interior – in keeping with the natural and forest like feeling. I am sure that this is the most spectacular building that I have seen anywhere and I hope to live to see its completion!

I then spent 2 days and 2 web-cast lectures with my old friends at Open University of Catalonia. The first talk was a repeat plus additions from a chapter I recently did on Theories for Online Learning and Research.

For the second talk, I overviewed the chapter that Jon Dron and I (mostly Jon) did on the Future of E-Learning.

After a great weekend with friends in Barcelona – we even made it to the beach and to watch my first game of handball, we headed back. Susan home to Edmonton and me to Helsinki, where I am the “opponent” in a PhD defence here on Friday.

Distance Education, Personal, Travel spain

1st Birthday – Riverdale’s Little Free Library

August 29, 2016Written by terrya

1 Comment

1st Birthday – Riverdale’s Little Free Library

My Little Free Library celebrated its birthday with a party for its patrons on Saturday. Unfortunately, the weather wasn’t terrific, but the rain held off long enough for cake, music and wine!

The only challenge is that the party goers each bought books and the Library is already FULL! I had to open Riverdale Little Free Library Annex #1 – a cardboard box (see photo above). I am confident though that we will be getting a run on reading as the proverbial winter chill sets into Alberta.

I built a new reading bench and carved “Libellus Libertas” which I think and hope is Latin for Books Free – as in ‘take a free book’ or ‘books are freedom’

Reflecting on the 1st year I can make a few observations:

Physical maintenance on the building has been minimal. I spruced up the exterior (for the party) with a quick coat of varnish, I had left over from another project. I’ve had to replace one of the door knobs and that’s about it.
The upstairs, library studio flat had no bird tenants although it was guarded by a fat sparrow for a week or so this spring.
The Head Librarian has become a promiscuous reader, as he has started way more books than he finishes and is currently reading 6 books.
The collection size has remained quite steady (current glut not withstanding). I’ve culled about 20 books that weren’t moving, but most seem to disappear in about 2-4 weeks.
I’ve met many more neighbours and been thanked for the library by many.

So all in all a great 1st year. This winter, I plan to build at least one more library.

Little Free Library, Personal

Downe’s great summary article, but…….

August 21, 2016Written by terrya

1 Comment

The good news is that Stephen Downes has posted the full text from a chapter he wrote for New Models of Open and Distance Learning in Open Education: from OERs to MOOCs, Editors: Mohamed Jemni, Kinshuk, Mohamed Koutheair Khribi, 2016.

This is good news for two reasons – the first is that the full Springer book retails for $139 – but you can get it as an ebook for ONLY $109!!. This means the text is basically unavailable to the vast number of practitioners and scholars who would likely find it of great use. The second reason is that it is a really good historical summary – describing the dance of education and technology as they have evolved with each other over the past half a century.

The bad news is that the very first sentence of the chapter (and first of the whole book!) is blatantly false. Stephen writes “Historically most learning that has ever taken place has taken place in a classroom with a teacher giving instruction and students reading books and writing on paper.”

Surely Stephen is not arguing that he “learned” to program the Painted Porch Mud in the 1980’s; devised Connectivism, or co-invented MOOCs by sitting in a “classroom with a teacher giving instructions”! In fact only a very tiny fraction of the “learning” that has ever taken place historically and of course 100% pre-historically, has occurred in a classroom. Only beginning in the 19th Century have a few children of rich minorities been able to learn part of what they learned in life in a classroom. For the vast majority there were no classrooms for them to attend. Even more so today, learning takes place from Google and Wikipedia searchers, from mass media, from social connection and the innumerable historical and pre-historic ways of learning – observation, apprenticeship, story-telling, guided practice and many more ways of learning.

Obviously Stephen’s mistake is to conflate learning with formal education. It is common enough because it is in the interests of teachers, educators and professors to promote their work context and their own self-interest by elevating education to encompass all forms of learning- but it does not. That is why it is especially strange to find this slip from Stephen Downes who has build a career and inspired many, based upon his championing of learning – and not only that subset that happens in classrooms. It is especially ironical that within the essay Stephen covers formal and non formal learning and argues that both have benefited from the wealth of online resources and communities.

Having gotten this irritation out of my system, let me strongly recommend this chapter. It helps if you mentally do a cut and paste and switch ‘education’ for ‘learning’. Perhaps Stephen will do it for us.

As with all of Stephen’s writing you get very clear, precise and knowledgeable argument, illustration and rationale. And similarity with all his writing as you always get a good dose of “Downism” – where Stephen injects his personal insights, experiences, opinions and convictions. The sections on PLE’s and PLN’s are especially good as is Stephen’s overview of connectivism. Strangely, this overview chapter ends without a summary or conclusion, but PERHAPS you have to cough up the $139 for that. So as not to make the same mistake with this post, let me again recommend this article for anyone trying to figure how both ‘learning’ and ‘education’ have evolved to both exploit and create technologies and pedagogies to make the most of our networked world.

Distance Education, MOOCs

Front Lawn Fun-Raiser concert

June 16, 2016Written by terrya

Susan and I were really pleased to host a fine evening of music last evening here in Riverdale. Our neighbour Cam Neufeld is touring this summer with Jez Hellard & The Djukella Orchestra (Jez and bassist Nye Parsons). Jez and Nye are from the UK and royally entertained us with a rich collection of origional and traditional tunes.

The concert was a fund-raiser in support of the two Syrian families that have been sponsored here in Riverdale. So always good to be able to support a good cause, while having a great time and listening to some fine music. As you can see the Little Library did double duty as a welcome sign.

Little Free Library, Personal

Order of Athabasca University

June 10, 2016Written by terrya

Yesterday at Convocation in Athabasca, I was deeply honoured by my former colleagues at Athabasca by being installed into the Order of Athabasca University. Most other members have been individuals from the community who have made exceptional contributions to the University. I was the first Faculty member (other than Dominique Abrioux, who also served as President) to be so honoured. The hupalo started with the blurb below published in the Edmonton and Calgary daily newspapers.

It continued at Convocation where Rory McGreal made a terrific and over flattering introduction to me at the beginning of the ceremonies. Rory’s introduction contained comments from Mark Brown, Alan Tait, Morten Paulsen and Wayne Macintosh – thanks to each of you. The life stream of the whole convocation ceremony is streamed at goo.gl/ZziwsG . Rory and my part begins around Minute 53

The celebrations ended with a banquet. All very moving, and I am trying hard to not leave with a swollen head! But thanks to all who have helped make my time at Athabasca very personally rewarding and recognized!!

It was also flattering to have AUPress over 40% discount on three of my authored, edited or co-authored books.

I was asked to do a 3 minute speech which I addressed to the graduates and to the wider Athabasca Community. Here is the text;

Madame Chair; Mr. President; Distinguished guests; Members of the Platform party; Graduands: Ladies and gentlemen:

Thanks to each of you!

I think I am the first faculty member (who wasn’t also a president) to win this award, and so I feel very deeply honored for your recognition—of not just my contributions—but of our work, together, here at Athabasca University.

Today is a day primarily for the graduates—and thus, I would like to use this time on the stage to congratulate each of them—and their family members and friends networks that you created —who have helped to get them here today.

All of my research has been focused on the distance learning experience. One of the most common questions is:

“Is distance education as good as campus-based education?”

Well … my colleagues and I have been asking this question for more than 30 years! And in roughly 90 per cent of studies, the results have shown that there is NO significant difference in learning outcomes.

And even when there is a difference it is likely to be in favour of distance learners. However, there is certainly more to being educated than just simply ‘learning outcomes.”

What distance education students build—and usually in larger doses than campus students—is self-efficacy. The belief in yourself and the knowledge that you can succeed in the tasks you set for yourself.

Distance learning builds knowledge and belief in yourself and an empowered understanding that you can achieve your goals.

You didn’t earn a distance education degree without being—or getting—good at creating and meeting deadlines and producing quality output—usually without the help of peers or classmates.

And so, today I celebrate your earned increase in self-efficacy!

But, to be sure, this graduation milestone does not mark the end of your learning. Technological and social change continues to happen—and more rapidly than in it changed in the past.

Luckily, I know this for sure: Because of your experience with AU, you are armed with the confidence and the knowledge that you can learn—and learn successfully.

You have self-efficacy. You can succeed—and you will succeed—as life-long learners.

Finally, I want to speak to my colleagues and friends in our broader Athabasca University community:

Bear with me as I don my sailor’s cap,—one of the pleasures of retirement! —obviously, as an institution, we’re continuing to sail through some rough waters. We are facing weather winds and that are very hard to predict. However, “the glass is rising”. Certainly there is value and risk in every decision we make.

But I want to continue to urge us to use the ever-increasing power of networks—and importantly, our own networking skills—to work together to build a new kind of university: A university that is not like the Athabasca University of 1970, nor that of 2016, for that matter.

But one that marries academic knowledge, collegial support and governance with cost-effective ways to study and teach. Alone, and together, we need to support and create better and more effective personal, academic, administrative and community networks.

These networks have demonstrated they produce the power to be critical components of the new ‘net-era’ university—and thus, they are a challenge for each of us to navigate—but a necessary one.

Oh, have I mentioned the Athabasca Landing yet?

Thank you very much!

Distance Education, My Work, Personal

Research–Practice Partnerships in Education

May 19, 2016Written by terrya

My Google Scholar alert notified me that one of my articles was cited in an as yet not publisher preprint in Educational Researcher. I don’t usually bother with articles hidden behind paywalls, but I was intrigued by the title:

Coburn, C. E., & Penuel, W. R. (2016). Research–Practice Partnerships in Education: Outcomes, Dynamics, and Open Questions. Educational Researcher. http://edr.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/01/28/0013189X16631750.abstract.

However, I was NOT prepared to pay SAGE to rent the article for 24 hours for $36 US and I didn’t really want to wait until I could access it through my University library. Luckily Mr Google found an excellent white-paper article by the same authors that was sponsored by a Foundation and so available for free download :

Coburn, C. E., Penuel, W. R., & Geil, K. E. (2013). Research-Practice Partnerships. A Strategy for Leveraging Research for Educational Improvement in School Districts. William T. Grant Foundation, New York, NY. http://rpp.wtgrantfoundation.org/library/uploads/2016/01/R-P-Partnerships-White-Paper-Jan-2013-Coburn-Penuel-Geil.pdf.

The term “research-practice partnership” was new to me, though the idea has resonated with me for some time. The term comes from many types of professional practice in which researchers and practitioners & administrative agents in the practice, develop a formal partnership to undertake research together. Coburn et al. list 5 defining characteristics of these partnerships:

The article describes and gives example of successful partnerships and goes into some detail about challenges and concludes with recommendations for researchers, practitioners and funders. The paper highlights one of the most challenging (and vexing problems) of educational research. Most educational researchers work at Universities. In these contexts some educational researchers play a double role in both professional and pre-development of teachers for the K12 world and in developing and supporting innovation and improvement in teaching and learning at their home universities. I’ve mostly been involved in the later having undertaken a number of major projects (most notably the Athabasca Landing, with Jon Dron).

The systematic problem in higher education is that innovations that are developed within education faculties have a terrible time of moving to production and systematic use outside of the pilot contexts in which they were developed. The system sort of works in that the educational researchers publish in their own research journals and compete with other social scientists in the University and nationally for research funds to continue development. However, this type of research is much more strategic and mission critical to the University, than most of the other research taking place at the University. I don’t wish to denigrate research in other disciplines, but the University itself has (or should have) a vested interest in continuously improving its educational practice – across all disciplines. However, to both colleagues and administration this educational research is usually seen as merely one more form of social science research and thus very few “practitioner-researcher partnerships” with the characteristics above result.

In the science, medicine and engineering contexts, partnerships between commercial firms and university researchers regularly arise and in Canada we have government programs to seed fund these ‘scientific’ partnerships. In addition there are programs to encourage work placements, early trials and other incentives for partnership development. In the K12 world some school divisions have also partnered with educational researchers but those that I have been involved with have had challenges related to publication rights, participant permissions and as always, funding shortages.

Some Universities are broadening their “Teaching and Learning” units to include a mandate for innovation, which could serve as a home for these partnerships. However, in most contexts that I have observed, the Teaching and Learning units are focused more on professional development, mentoring and in some cases short-term funding for projects or conferences . They usually have little interest or funding to champion the type of long-term “design-based research” that I believe is critical to both understand and then to implement and continually evaluate new educational pedagogies and technologies.

Jon Dron and my own work in building the Athabasca landing is a prime example of opportunity lost. The Landing is an Elgg-based social network, that is designed to grow “beyond the LMS” to give a networked home for the distributed university. However, to date we have been unsuccessful at building a “research-practice partnership” with the university. From the University’s perspective, the Landing is just another research project, owned and championed by two individual faculty. The University has no real strategy or desire to implement this or other educational initiatives, in a production capacity. Without this type of testing and if successful, guarantee of support and adoption across both administrative and academic units, the Landing, as social networking platform, has not and will never reach “critical mass”.

Huge opportunity lost…..

Design Based Research, educational social software, My Work research-practice partnership

Success with FlyKly Wheel and Kickstarter – at last

May 11, 2016Written by terrya

Despite what may be an idealistic techno-solution, I was attracted the FlyKly video when I first saw it advertised two years. The video shows a cool European 20+ cruising along on his electric assisted bike and then EASILY able to take it off (theft issues?) and or share the wheel with his girl friend. The unique thing about this design is that the battery and all controls are right in the hub of the powered back wheel. I thought my wife just might also be interested in an electric assist on her commute to her counseling office. So….

I got out my Visa card and soon I had contributed to the KickStart folks for nearly $500 – a big amount in those day even if the Canadian dollar was at near parity with the US dollar. Then the wait. Weeks, turned into months, turned into years. The good news was that the original company had merged/been bought out by a company with a better battery. So redesign and longer waits!! Finally an email note that they were shipping! Then a second note saying that US and European customers would get the first shipments – Don’t they like Canadians??? Promised dates for delivery slide by. Finally not 2 days after I wrote a nasty email asking if they were just a rip-off company – my FlyKly Smartwheel arrived.

First surprise, my last bike had been stolen and in the meantime I had upgraded to one with disc brakes- the FlyKy wheel doesn’t work with disc brakes. Second surprise, I had ordered the wrong size! Both Susan’s and my bike have 28” wheels and I had ordered a 26” wheel. So shopping on Kiiji, I found a pretty good used mountain bike for $90.

Finally a test drive! But alas, the new wheel was ‘skipping” on almost every revolution of the wheel. After expending all my knowledge about chain skipping, I knew it was time for a bike shop visit. But then horrors – I lost the wheel’s electric charger. It had to be either in the house or in the garage and I thought it had to show up someplace. Months pass and sadly it is still missing, so I very reluctantly paid $159 US plus $50 shipping to order what I thought should be $20 charger. A few more months go by… Finally it arrives and I’m off to the bike store. It turns out the chain was not tensioned properly when the cassette of gears was removed from the mountain bike. So $35 for a chain tensioner and $30 labour and I was set to go.

Well it’s a wonderful invention! The wheel parameters, by which one sets the amount of electrical assist, maximum speed for the assist and the amount of braking (and recharging when pedaling backwards on down hills) are controlled via an App on my smart phone and connect via Bluetooth. The wheel itself as no controls – it starts by itself after a few seconds pedaling. It gives a very nice push, and goes into neutral when you stop pedaling. Unfortunately, the chain doesn’t synch with the three gears on the front crank and so I am stuck with a one-speed bike. However it does really well on the hills and cruising on the flat at a good speed is easy to manage.

Of course I’ll have to see how it survives and the BlueTooth connection from the Iphone is not very good, but it works! So all told I’m in for about $900 Canadian and I see they are now retailing for $999 US. My first Kick Starter experience and despite the delays it may be a winner!

Personal

What’s So New about the New Atheists?

April 27, 2016Written by terrya

Image from https://allahbepraisedlettheglassberaised.wordpress.com/

Last week I gave the Sunday sermon at Westwood Unitarian Congregation here in Edmonton. While trying to organize my book shelves, I noticed that I had nine different books on Atheism – many by authors labelled as “New Atheists”. In most Unitarian Churches members are allowed and encouraged to present a sermon on a topic that they find of interest and hopefully of relevance to the other members. I therefore created this talk.

Atheist Sermon text

The talk was generally well received and as always, the author learned as much or more than the listeners through the preparations.

The work is about 10 PDF pages and took 30 minutes to present, so you may wish to just skim it.

As always your comments and questions are welcomed!

Unitarian Atheism

My New Hammer Dulcimer – FINISHED

April 3, 2016Written by terrya

2 Comments

After nearly exactly 3 months on and off work my new 15/14 hammer dulcimer is finished. I’ve have been playing my Dusty Strings 13/12 dulcimer (the numbers stand for the number of notes (or courses) on each bridge) for the past three years. For those not very familiar with this instrument Ardie Davis has a description and a nice American-slanted history article. It is a great starter instrument, but I began to crave a lower register, more sound and an opportunity to revive my wood shop. This project met all three goals.

It isn’t really necessary to take 3 months to build a hammer dulcimer and I wish I had of taken better attention to the actual time taken. But needless to say, this project was working on ‘retirement time’. For me that meant renovating the downstairs bathroom, moving through 2 of my Grad students defenses, skiing with my brothers and three writing “beyond LMS” articles for Contact North besides building a dulcimer.

Being both an amateur woodworker and a very amateur dulcimer player, I asked Mr Google to recommend a set of plans or a good book. Luckily Ardie Davis has a great, ‘step-by-step” book that I followed quite religiously. The rest of this post is likely only of interest to those thinking about constructing a hammered dulcimer and thus I go into more detail than the average reader will likely find of much interest.

As Northern Alberta is not known for the quality (nor quantity) of our hardwoods the first move (after a good reading of the book) was a trip to the commercial hardwood store. Exotic wood like walnut, sugar maple and baltic spruce are NOT cheap, but for $170 I walked away with 3 large hunks of rough cut wood (one walnut, 2 hard, sugar maple) and a 1/2 sheet 5/16″ baltic birch plywood. These hunks of wood were all that my 30 year old 3/4 horse table saw could handle (note to self – buy a new table saw!) but fortunately with a trip to a friends thickness planer they came out OK. I cut one pin block twice and it was still too short (sigh), so I had to glue on a thin piece, which you likely wouldn’t notice, except I’ve just told the world.

The sound board is the most important part of the dulcimer as it supports the 2 bridges and resonates under the strings giving the volume to the instrument. This design has a “floating sound board” meaning that it fits into dado slots on the sides and has a 1/2 gap at top and the bottom. This design allows maximum vibration of the sound board and lots of space for the sound to emerge. I was very fortunate to be given a piece of old growth, quarter sawn cedar, which a friend’s father had milled 30 years ago on Gambier Island off British Columbia. The grain was incredibly straight and we managed to cut it down to 1/4″ thick pieces and then laminate two together to make the 20″ wide sound board. Thank heavens for access to a thickness sander which did a terrific job on this heirloom cedar.

Following Ardie’s instructions carefully, I managed to cut and then glue up the 2 walnut end rails, side rails and the side pin blocks. Thankfully I had invested in 6 more bar clamps – you never have too many clamps! These outside pieces enclose the Baltic birch plywood bottom in dado slots (also bought a very nice new dado blade!). Notice from the picture that 2 one inch hardwood dowels were inserted before the 4 sides were glued together. These are designed to take the load on the pin blocks when the 87 strings are finally tuned up. You can also see the three bridge supports – the only local wood (Aspen poplar) that a friend had milled in Northern Alberta. The bridge supports are needed, as besides lateral tension the strings also push the bridge down and would likely distort the soundboard without support.

Next came the making of the bass and treble bridges and the two side bridges also from the sugar maple. The sound bridges have holes drilled in them so that the strings can move across from one side bridge all the way to the opposite pin block without hitting any vibration ending pieces of the second bridge. I made the bridges slightly different than Ardie recommended and followed the design from my smaller dulcimer and others I have seen (see photo). I also didn’t thread the strings through the side bridges as Ardie recommends but led them on top under a piece of black devron plastic rod.

Next came adding a few screws and covering plugs, routing the rails and then hours of sanding!

I struggled with the decorative rosettes. On a floating sound board dulcimer like mine, it isn’t really necessary to have a sound hole to let the sound out, but they look so nice! So a good friend and I spent an afternoon on his CNC milling machine, taking some groovy pictures off the net and then importing the JPEGs into the machine’s software. Unfortunately, the cutter bits we had available were not fine enough and we eventually gave up and I ordered to two very nice rosettes ($14, US each) from the good folks at MusicMakers.

I ordered the hardware – tuning pins, hitch pins, and strings and received great service from James Jones Instruments ($168 US). How the low Canadian dollar hurts! Drilling the holes for the tuning pegs was relatively straightforward -AFTER you find the correct bit. Ardie recommends a #15 drill bit, which is not metric, and not American but an obscure machinists’ standard – sizes not carried by the local hardware stores. Fortunately, asking around, I found a friend who lent me a set of these specialized bits. The holes have to be exact as the very fine thread of the tuning pin has to dig into enough wood to provide a stable and long lasting bite into the wood, without requiring a guerilla sized arm to turn.

Finally, I was ready to start finishing (after more sanding). I decided to use MinWax Wipeon Poly and put on about 15 coats. Each coat dried quickly and although the finish isn’t factory perfect (I did it in my dusty wood shop) it looks OK. Ardie’s design allowed me to finish the soundboard before assembly and install it later, which was nice.

At this point I considered the value of installing a pickup to plug into my small guitar amp. I wasn’t sure it would really need the amplification, but if I didn’t do it now, I would never be able to get the amplification directly off the soundboard AND have it nicely concealed. So, I purchased a K&K 2 head acoustic pickup ($100) and installed the jack through the bottom rail.

While the finishing was taking place, I constructed the stand from maple according to the design Ardie recommends. In retrospect I should have made an adjustable stand that I could use standing up or sitting down, but this one works OK.

Finally the day for the big string up! 87 strings makes for a whole day of twisting, turning and coaxing wires around twice as many pins. I should have ordered a few spares of the top thin wires as one broke immediately and a second the following day. However, with 3 strings per note, you can get away with a few missing strings! The tuning seemed to take forever as the strings stretched and the whole dulcimer creaked! My trusty tuning app on the IPhone was indispensable for this task. Numerous times, I would finally get the last strings in tune, only to find that the ones I had started with had all gone out of tune – sigh.

But eventually they stabilized and WOW what a sound compared to my smaller dulcimer.

All in, the instrument cost about $500 – in addition to providing rationale for buying a new (to me) router, router table and two new saw blades. The retail cost of such a dulcimer is around $1500 Canadian – and the pleasure of playing is priceless!

Lessons learned:
1. Don’t build an obscure instrument before the Internet – these long tail hobbies need a way to connect with suppliers and advice.

2. Use what social capital you have to beg and borrow both local expertise and tools.

3. Don’t strive for perfection – it is supposed to be a fun job!!

hammer dulcimer, Personal

End of Jobs in Online Education?

March 19, 2016Written by terrya

2 Comments

I started out my teaching career as a “shop teacher” – teaching middle school students how to work and built with a number of technologies. Thus, it was a bit disturbing to listen to recent CBC radio broadcast listing jobs that have disappeared and to hear that ‘shop teachers’ along with elevator operators, typists and postal worker were disappearing.

Two articles from the latest issue of Online Journal of Distance Education Administration, caught my attention for the same reason. Will technologies soon reduce or even eliminate the relatively new job position of “online teacher”.

The first article,

Vu, P., Fredrickson, S., & Meyer, R. (2016). Help at 3:00 AM! Providing 24/7 Timely Support to Online Students via a Virtual Assistant. Online Journal of Distance Education Administration, 19(1). http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/spring191/vu_fredrickson_meyer191.html.

directly addresses the issue of substituting the traditional teacher role of answering student queries with a machine. The article notes that most online students do their work in the evening and on weekends when many teachers are not interested and often not available to answer questions. In an attempt to provide some sort of 7/24 service the instructors built a chat bot and seeded it with a database of questions culled from archives of questions asked by students taking the course in previous terms. Chat boots have rarely been used in education, though colleagues at Athabasca worked developing a Freudbot. But chat bots are becoming ubiquitous on online shopping sites where they provide a type of 7/24 customer support.

During the design-based research project the Bot was involved in 475 sets of interactions with the 56 students enrolled in 2 sections of an early Childhood Education course. As expected more than half of the interactions took place on weekends and 88% were during evenings. Of course some of the questions were ‘off topic” and used by curious students to learn the capabilities of the bot. But many were on topic with 65% of queries focussed on information seeking – much related to assignments and exams.

Of perhaps most interest was the students’ reactions, which were queried by 5 point Likert perception questions. Only about half (m=2.5) found the bot did effectively answer their question, but nearly all (m=4.8) noted the extra service provided 7/24 by the bot and over half (m=3.3) preferred asking the bot rather than emailing the teacher. The effectiveness of these type of bots naturally grows as the data base expands through use and the searching algorithms improve. Thus, one can, even now, see how machines will undertake at least some traditional teaching roles which in a positive sense can give teacher more time for more important learning diagnosis and help and reduce time spent on administrative type queries. It is also interesting to think about the “teaching presence” of of the female avatar (displayed at left) used in this study. In any case a very nice exploratory, design-based study.

The second employment related article compared adjunct teachers employed in for-profit universities as compared to those in the not-for-profit sector. This is an important problem as more than half of online courses in the USA are taught by part-time sessional instructors. This in itself has huge implications on job stability for teaching faculty, but the rise (in the US) of for-profit universities with a tradition of not offering tenured positions, doing no research and not training next generation of scholars is also threatening.

Starcher, K., & Mandernach, J. (2016). An Examination of Adjunct Faculty Characteristics: Comparison between Non-Profit and For-Profit Institutions. Online Journal of Distance Education Administration,, 19(1). http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/spring191/starcher_mandernach191.html.

This study used an online survey to query 859 online adjunct teachers. The results were remarkable in the lack of statistical differences between the teachers at the two types of institution. No differences in age, satisfaction, education or a host of other variables. There were small differences in class size, but this was confounded by the higher percentage of graduate courses (with normally smaller numbers of students) in the public, not-for-profit universities.

The authors put a nice spin on the discussion by noting that the similarity means that professional development and support can be shared between the sectors – unlikely as that may be. But the study also adds empirical support to the notion that education can be and is being “privatized” with resulting decreasing employment for traditional, tenured faculty.

So what do I conclude from these two very good articles? I think one of the largest challenges for our global population (ranking right up there with climate change) is the capacity to meaningfully employ people in a context in which machines are more and more able to perform both mundane as well as high performance and high communication tasks. My Interaction Equivalency Theory speaks to this by noting the ways in which activity that used to be performed by live teachers (student-teacher interaction) can and is substituted by bots and canned media to create high quality student-content interaction.

Design Based Research, Distance Education, interaction equivalency theory