Sunday, April 27, 2008

Re Content and Reputation - Ideas spurred by George Siemens



Hi everyone,
As I was reading Twitter yesterday George Siemens had posted that he had presented on Connectivism and Instructional Design and it was not well received. I had to look! I printed and have reflected on the following slide from that presentation and would love to put it up here for comments and consideration......(with a HUGE caveat that this is only one slide, out of context and not probably one that was intended to engender this level of focus).

He points to three tension points: finding quality content, creating a pathway through it as we learn and fostering connections between teachers and learners. If our larger educational context moves more to the world without courses that he imagines, then I agree with his tension points- in ascending order as they are listed. For now the online universities that I work for largely manage all three of these tensions for our doctoral students (for which they receive hefty fees largely supported by student loans). This brings to mind questions of the transitioning of our world economies and whether and to what extent personal debt will continue to finance our institutions, but that is a subject for another post.

What interests me today, and links with my earlier post about doctorate life's rite of passage into peer-dom within academia, is that reputation is linked to "sustained participation in a learning network (ie the distributed world that evolves out of ideas that interest us). I want to unpack the idea of reputation using his three columns and adding another one: Educational Practice. Maybe he just didn't have room to put reputation in all three columns, but to me that is where it belongs.

First and foremost (at least in academia) we are responsible to and for the quality of our ideas. Using George Siemens as an example, I follow him on Twitter, his blog etc. because I find his ideas provocative, although as yet it is too early to see what types of practice develop from them. Joyce Epstein (whose work is the central part of the classes I teach on community involvement) had some really good ideas on which two decades of other people have built strong practice. This leads me then to say we need four columns - because education is more than content, connection leading to, recognition and accreditation - in fact its main purpose from my point of view (pragmatist that I am) is to foster new and better practices in the world as a whole and for future education.

This leads to four ways that I see us developing reputations: first from the quality of our ideas (which hopefully translates to quality content). In the new world we are evolving to we will be responsible for designing distributed content so that our ideas have a chance of influencing wider audiences. We build our reputations as well through connections with others as peers and as educators. As education evolves probably fewer academics will earn their living with only one institution which provides excellence traveling from one university context to another. Third, our reputations WILL advance through our participation in learning networks, but I would not put this one in all caps. I think there are too many learning networks (just look at the proliferation of journals as an example) and believe that the future slide such as this one will show a big white box in the third column labeled: Big vat of networks.

At the end of the day, I believe that our reputations will continue to be based on the triple prongs of our ideas, our relationships and the actions that result from both. This adds two more tension points: 1) finding the efficiencies where content, relationships, foster and measure new practice and 2) determining efficient ways to feed those back into the rest of the pathways diagrammed.

If these ideas are interesting to you, then I encourage you to read other posts below about the larger participatory action research project group I would like to see form. By working together in diverse world context on linked local issues, we can move the general understanding of these ideas forward.

All the best,
Alana

Provocative Logical Sequence: The importance of distributed content from doctoral students

Hi everyone,
This mornings reflections about distributed educational content and doctorate life brings this logical sequence:
  1. IF getting your doctorate is supposed to make you a peer in academia - based on your developed expertise in the area of your dissertation....... AND
  2. IF we now know that in the near future the strategic placement of distributed content will be key to both establishing reputation and maintaining it.....THEN
  3. We should be coaching doctoral students to be establishing trails of their content (i.e. self publishing) so that when they move into their next professional iteration they have a foundation to build upon.
I posit that there are a couple of reasons institutions are not supporting this idea:
  • it runs contrary to their marketing efforts of building their reputations on the backs of the work of their students and faculty
  • the faculty is not equipped to do this as they themselves do not know how.
Perhaps this is a good starting point for our distributed content research - with everyone working on the challenges of putting their own expertise up in a truly distributed way.

Please comment below and let me know if you interest in pursuing any of these ideas with a group of us working on distributed content and how it may affect our careers and the future of education.

All the best,
Alana

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Citations and References vs. Hyperlinks

Hi everyone,

This post finds me in Houston, sipping my second double tall latte at a Starbucks. In a few hours I begin the 14 hour travel home to Ireland. Thanks to everyone who saw me present and who helped my ideas about participatory action research and its relations to dissertation work evolve. I promise to write about those ideas in the next weeks.

For today my musings focus on the communication factor between writers and readers and the use of citations and references to help that transference of resources. I love to learn. I want to know the resources others are working with - and as I learn to write blogs efficiently I find that hyperlinks naturally insert themselves in much the same ways I use citations and references in my formal writing.

What I hint at here is that there is life after APA! I think students would struggle less with reference styles and where and when to use citations if they would imagine them as hyperlinks to the resources with which they have recently been working. For example you would naturally put in the hyperlink the first time you mentioned a resource and you would be unlikely to link to the same place over and over in the paragraph. Both rules are true for citations as well.

When I write a blog I consciously use the links to help my readers go off on their own tangents of ideas and distributed learning web walks - hoping they come back and share, starting a great asynchronous conversation. I will also go back at the end of a blog and see if there are resources to which I may want to link my ideas for the fun and interest of my reader. Unfortunately I learned citation and references more as a way to "prove" something in the academic world, and I have to laugh that what was frequently shown is how much I was struggling with citations and references! (lol)

While I don't have the answers here, and I haven't had the time to research whether others are writing on a similar subject, I hope these thoughts provoke a personal voice in other writers as they use both the tools of citations, and hyperlinks. For myself, the journey to life long learning has taken a sudden uphill turn and I am likely to find myself back tracking those ideas to their sources - and beyond! I look forward to your comments - just follow the link below.

I hope everyone is having a fabulous day,
Alana

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Interesting project is developing


Hi everyone,

I am half way through my presentations at Colorado Technical University. On Saturday I presented to doctor of management students and this coming Thursday I will present to the doctor of education students. An interesting project is developing that I would like to invite all who read this to consider:

Proposed Participatory Action Research Doctoral Team:

A group of doctoral students searching out whether and to what extent ideas of distributed education are interesting and/or successful in increasing ________(interest in, skill sets during, - professional development, further education, etc) across a variety of learning situations.

PREMISE(s):

1. Education is knowledge of basic skills, academics, technical, discipline, and citizenship that we use to help us in learning. Our paradigms are changing due to technology – no one knows where it is going but some suggest that we are evolving to a world without classes.

2. High quality distributed content exists across a variety of easily attainable web based resources thus diminishing the need to constantly reinvent ways to distribute content to learners.


3. Learners prefer to go find their own resources anyway.

4. These premises come together in the theory of Connectivism

5. The purposes of schools and teachers in this new world is evolving, but I suspect that:

a. Institutions, businesses and non profits will hold the keys to certification that knowledge has been learned through developing standards of output or assessment

b. Teachers increase the speed (and quality?) of learning through being conduits of:

  1. i. new skills
  2. ii. provocative ideas
  3. iii. modulation of emotional stress.

The Project as I see it (April 11, 2008):

“Non Course” content (moving us out of the old paradigm while staying connected to its parts) to be discussed and derived by doctoral students in a variety of contexts would include:

1) Content (taken care of by independently studying the above resources),

2) Links between content and discussion (taken care of through sharing resources and participatory group Wiki work),

3) Developing relationships and networks (Twitter? – other social networking tools)

4) Reality based projects (in this case the dissertation process for the participants building and studying their own distributed education projects in the field –linking knowledge to the group – modeling PAR as a tool for development of new models within complex situations

5) Other things??????

Doctoral students interested in these ideas work as a participatory group to use the dissertation process to study, invent, research and write about projects that implement distributed education across the variety inherent in their local contexts. The group as a whole is facilitated and researched (using mixed methods) with participants by Dr. E. Alana James. As we go we publish what we are doing across a distributed group of contexts – consciously building a digital footprint of the larger project, linking the output and explicitly sharing group learning. We publish in traditional settings (peer reviewed journals and books) as appropriate. We become in essence a network of participants and participatory research projects over diverse settings, exploring linked ideas and using linked output to help move the world of education the next step.

For more information contact:

E. Alana James, Ed.D.

www.doctoratelife.blogspot.com

james.alana@gmail.com

Saturday, April 5, 2008

Where is your focus? Try the long view as well as the close up

Hi everyone,

I have had a note on my computer for a few weeks to blog about taking the long view. When we are young and learn the skills required to do well in school we learn to focus on the end product required for that lesson, that class and (only occasionally) the unit. Doctoral work, when well done focuses our attention on the rest of our lives, what is important to the whole of the field we are studying AS WELL AS the immediate work of the class and the research we are doing. Like camera shots in a film with excellent cinematography we benefit from developing the regular habit of looking at both the long and short views.

These are the reasons this blog looks at both the specifics of writing a lit review AND the indications we may pick up from the horizon as to where education is moving. For instance, in the blog previous to this one I used the title to link to a presentation on the use of mobile phones as educational tools - why? because in some parts of the world mobile phones have much deeper penetration than laptops - making these technologies potentially keen for developers.

I'll close this short note with a few examples of how the long view may be important to doctoral work:
  1. By understanding the policies that affect our topics we can be in touch with the district and state personnel (in the US) and/or other types of civic officials who are responsible for managing the funds associated with these initiatives. Depending on our topics, their may be funds to help support doctoral efforts. In my case the Colorado Department of Education paid about half of my salary and gave stipends to the participants I worked with. Because of their support, Regis university donated classroom space for our meetings.
  2. Technology is interesting to young people, in a time when motivation for standard techniques associated with learning lags. Perhaps there are ways in which incorporating video (and uploading it to YouTube) or starting a blog (that is partially written by your participants) may be both a great source of data but energizing for the students you include in your study. But you have to know what is the most current to catch them - for instance do you Twitter (www.Twitter.com) ? If so, let's tweet! I am alanajames
  3. The new and different is energizing - that is a key reason humans are always inventing - it gives us life. On the other hand doctoral work may sometimes seem like a heavy weight (after all will you EVER have your life back again?). Spending an allotted 10 minutes on web walking, searching for new and tangential ideas - reviewing what is up on www.slideshare.com or www.YouTube.com and you may regain your perspective.
Don't forget to search out movement videos when on YouTube! The latest brain research tells us that the chemicals that flood our brains with aerobic exercise are also important - remember our health is also part of the long view.

I look forward to your commenting using the link below if you found this helpful - share what you might have found in your latest webwalk!

All the best,
Alana

Friday, April 4, 2008

Mobile computing issues for the classroom

Hi everyone - Let me suggest that anyone who is studying student motivation view the video classroom link above. A professor from Nottingham discusses mobile technologies as a bridge from home learning to school learning, but he proceeds his efforts with a succinct and thoughtful explanation of why our students may not want to be learning in schools.

I look forward to your comments as you tell me what you think of his ideas.

Alana

Thursday, April 3, 2008

Catching those ideas without killing them

Hi everyone,

Today I am writing the sixth class for the Jones International Mentoring courses. In this section students such as your selves are asked to take the 100+ resources they have collected for their reviews of the literature that pertains to their topics. I find myself musing about ideas and how:
  • They enliven when they run freely,
  • Excite when we organize them but
  • Drop dead after seven rewrites!
  • We can avoid death by diagramming before we write
It is amazing how ideas can scamper around in our heads. When we chase them down and put them into an outline we have something to work with. One good way to work with ideas without having them lose their vitality is to run them through a group of graphic organizers. For instance does the literature you have discovered cluster into groups? Perhaps with a few ideas that don't fit with the others in between?

Perhaps you might see one idea grow out of others, maybe to begin to spiral back to the place you began.
what every diagrams spurs both your creative analysis of the ideas you have encountered AND helps you keep them fresh in your mind is appropriate for this purpose.

If all goes well with technology I am also embedding a short sketchcast somewhere in this blog. You might also want to Google graphic organizers and look to see the static models provided by Microsoft with their Office software packages. Make up your own or use others, either way I hope this helps you enjoy the learning you are doing be bringing your creativity to the front.

Alana



Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Take those shoes out of your refrigerator!

Hi everyone,

Those shoes in the title above are defensive reactions. We all have them, and they all come from the part of our jobs as learners and teachers where we park our egos. for instance I was talking to a teacher and she was telling me about the power struggle she had with a student - oops there go those shoes jumping into refrigerators again!

Where did I come up with this phrase? It was given to me by my good friend and fellow facilitator in our Reinventing Life Retreats (see www.reinventinglife.org). John is a chiropractor and I was in his office for an adjustment and just fuming about an online student who was really rude in our interactions. He told me to "take my shoes out of my refrigerator! They had no business being there!" His point was that too much emotion was being tied up in my heart (and in my body) and it was inappropriate - I should let it go.

I have come to realize that only ego makes me defensive - because only my ego thinks that I have anything I need to defend. The rest of me cruises along knowing that I am doing the best that I can and offering the world the most that I know how to offer. Of course that is enough. If any one student doesn't understand why I work the way I do - then maybe their spirit is telling them I am not the person they should work with - and all of my caring can't change that.

I have students who care way too much about the grade that they get. They are not usually my best students. They may be my most technically proficient - but doctoral work is not about technical proficiency it is about guts and skill and confidence. You don't get any of those things when you worry about every small comment anyone makes to you. You develop those characteristics when you develop a sense of the larger picture.

Step one - take those shoes out of your refrigerator. If you find yourself defensive, take a deep breath and give yourself a moment of love - after all we all get there, and we all get out of it too. If those shoes just won't stay out of that refrigerator then move on to another relationship as soon as you can - life is too short.

In the meantime, don't work so hard you forget to feel the breeze on your face or to enjoy the lovely spring weather when it come your way.

All the best,
Alana

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Networks and Lit reviews

Hi everyone,

As has been mentioned here before, I have spent the last few weeks learning about new technologies and how they pertain to learning. Many tools, such as Wiki’s, web conferencing, and learning management systems pertain to the process of learning, but some are changing the way we access content. For anyone reviewing literature, social networks and the work of aggregators may be key new tools worthy of consideration.

George Siemens’ (2008) presentation (http://www.elearnspace.org/media/worldwithoutcourses/player.html )starts this same discussion by pointing out that many stakeholders overlap in their concern about education. Societies care when education promotes citizenship as it does in the parts of the world that are to some degree democratic. Economies prosper when the needs of the marketplace are easily supplied by the expertise of the employable. Educational institutions in tandem with the educators they employ and the students who attend all prosper because the status quo appears to work.

The structure of this academic world that we all inhabit to some extent has been predefined as based on courses and pre-arranged curricular processes. These are designed for efficiency rather than fun and are built to help as many students as possible lock step their way through the processes of education absorbing the required amount of content as they go. Doctoral dissertations can be seen (at least partially) as a move away from that lock stepped approach as you venture into the murky lands of discovery and inquiry based on your own motivations. While you must ultimately meet certain standards in your work, you each will follow your own path towards that goal. This blog is meant to help you have more fun doing that – as discovery of the new and uncharted is fun!

Connectivism (Siemens, 2004) has much to offer this conversation both as a theory and as a model for education. At http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm Dr Siemens writes:

Learning theories are concerned with the actual process of learning, not with the value of what is being learned. In a networked world, the very manner of information that we acquire is worth exploring. The need to evaluate the worthiness of learning something is a meta-skill that is applied before learning itself begins. When knowledge is subject to paucity, the process of assessing worthiness is assumed to be intrinsic to learning. When knowledge is abundant, the rapid evaluation of knowledge is important. Additional concerns arise from the rapid increase in information. In today’s environment, action is often needed without personal learning – that is, we need to act by drawing information outside of our primary knowledge. The ability to synthesize and recognize connections and patterns is a valuable skill. (page 3).

The phrases highlighted in yellow have direct implications to the process of developing and writing a review of literature, as in this endeavour you will need to show that you have evaluated the worthiness of what you have read as well as synthesized it, pointing out connections and patterns between what networked technology calls nodes of information.

Without going too deeply into his discussion of neural, social and other types of networks (2007) (http://www.slideshare.net/gsiemens/living-learning-communicating-in-an-immediate-world ) he quotes Kieran Egan (1997) when he says, “the tools we use, when learning, shape and very largely determine what and how we can learn.” I would translate this to doctoral students I mentor to mean – if you stay with the traditional modes of information transfer within academia (peer reviewed journals, etc) you likely will analyse only safe data and information. If your heart desires to build new bridges across gaps in our field then it is likely you will have to build those bridges to the networked resources available on the web. Be prepared for a wild ride in comparison, but one that should take you out of the silos of academia into a more holistic view of the world.

First let’s consider that packages of content (knowledge) have been published on the web in a variety of formats. Do you feel like listening to lectures (www.YouTube.com ) or are you in the mood for reading (search for blogs using www.blogsearch.google.com )? Do you want to see a presentation (www.slideshare.net )or have a discussion (find and join networks, make comments on blogs, search out people to follow on www.twitter.com. Whose work will you find from these sources? They may cluster at younger ages and with fewer degrees than those in peer reviewed journals, but just as likely you will find the latest from the same people you would find in the more traditional sources. Because of the speed of being able to publish as you go on the web, you may have access not only to their current thinking, but through their blogs to the people themselves.

During this type of exploration (which I call my morning web walkabouts) you will discover some networks, and aggregators of information. Like this blog, they are full of links to other sites and regularly perusing their work keeps you as current as they are on the subjects of mutual interest. Because in a networked world, the very manner of information that we acquire is worth exploring you may find yourselves wanting to: a) trackback from the sources of interest to their sources, on the web following conversations and links back in time, and b) be very careful about the tools you use to capture your sources, so that you can search through them again in the future. I use Firefox as my browser because I can easily add on other tools. I always capture my bookmarks in Del icio us because I can easily give multiple bookmarks to significant links and track them as to importance etc. I sometimes use Yoono or Stumble on to suggest other resources. You will find your own tools, and I would be delighted if you would comment on them here for this community.

You may also find rubbish, but that is no different from a long day at the library when you find nothing of interest. It is up to you to decide which are gold and which is for fools. Now we loop back to “The need to evaluate the worthiness of learning something is a meta-skill that is applied before learning itself begins.” Just how to go about building that meta skill AND how to develop the equally important ability to synthesize and recognize connections and patterns will be the topic of future blogs.

All the best,

Alana

References:(Egan, 1997; George Siemens, 2007, 2008a, 2008b; George Siemens, December 12, 2004)

Egan, K. (1997). The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Siemens, G. (2007). Living learning and communicating in an immediate world. Paper presented at the ADETA. from http://www.slideshare.net/gsiemens/living-learning-communicating-in-an-immediate-world

Siemens, G. (2008a). Connectivism: Rethinking curriculum, knowledge and learning. Paper presented at the EDUCAUSE. from http://www.slideshare.net/gsiemens/connecitivism-curriculum-knowledge-learning

Siemens, G. (2008b). World without courses. from http://www.elearnspace.org/media/worldwithoutcourses/player.html

Siemens, G. (December 12, 2004). Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age [Electronic Version], from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm