Virtual Canuck

In these slides I go over two ideas- one old and still growing – one new (for me) and evolving. The first part previews my ‘Interaction Equivalency Theorem” and the second talk about Unbundling the services of traditional university Education in order to decrease cost and increase access.

Unbundling Universities

Earlier this month Jon Dron and I were attending and keynoting at the Networked Learning conference in Maastricht Holland and I had the pleasure of meeting and socializing with Etienne Wenger (of Community of Practice fame) and Maarten de Laat from the Open University of the Netherlands.  I also picked up a copy of a very interesting paper, that I comment on below. The report was released last year and covered by  a number of bloggers including Steven Downes, but not surprisingly, such  information becomes relevant and important when it serves to inform or address a problem or something in my  immediate context. The report is especially relevant as we try to document and assess the value of the elgg based social networking system (Athabasca Landing) that we are building to expand distance education to informal learning for students and staff at Athabasca University.

The 56 page report Promoting and assessing value creation in communities and networks: a conceptual framework was co-authored by Etienne Wenger, Beverly Trayner and Maarten de Laat and its production was supported by the Dutch Ministry fo Education.  The report consists of  quite lengthy differentiation between communities (short for Communities of Practice) and networks. These distinctions are not unlike those Jon Dron and I have made (2007), but we prefer to call social entities defined by strong bonds and a commonly felt and articulated sense of common purpose as groups, since communities has so many different meanings and connotations. However, we certainly agree that groups and networks are different social beasts and that a network  can develop into a group and vice versa. The report distinguishes the different types of membership,  leadership  and organizational structure that defines both entities. Read the rest of this entry »

I am please to announce issue 13(2) of the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Education has been distributed to our over 5,600 email subscribers today.  I’ve pasted the table of contents below, but it looks prettier (with pictures!) if you go directly to www.irrodl.org

As you see there are 9 research articles, 2 field notes and a new section focussed on leadership in open and distance education.  As I noted in my editorial, I am really pleased to see that IRRODL continues to be an International Journal with articles this issue from  Japan, USA, Nigeria, Switzerland, Spain, Catalonia (Spain), Turkey, Iran, Canada, and Malaysia.

Thanks to all the authors, reviewers and of course our hard working Managing editor Brigette for what I think is a very good issue – enjoy!

Terry

Vol 13, No 2 (2012)

Table of Contents

Editorial

Research Articles

Field Notes

Leadership in Open and Distance Learning Notes

First Day of Spring

Road my bike to work along the river

Saw two geese warily watching a coyote wearily watching them

from the ice and wishing the lead would close

Saw two rabbits on the trail, brown tufts pushing through white coats.

Saw my short cut through the woods,  brown turfs pushing through white snow.

First Day of Spring.

Last year I was asked to do a keynote talk for the FollowtheSun conference that had been founded three years ago by Prof. Gilly Salmon, then at the University of Leicester in the UK. The idea was to be a part of  an online conference that mirrored a typical academic/professional conference with keynotes, trade show, demos, poster sessions etc. My presentation went OK, but I wasn’t sitting up and participating for 48 hours!

I’ve been interested in online conference for many years (insert plug for 2011 book by Lynne Anderson and myself Online Conferences: Professional Development for a Networked Era), but the idea of 48 hours, continuous seemed a bit much, even for a conference junky like myself.

However this year, George Siemens and I were asked to gather a team and host the North American section of the conference from Athabasca University.  As many of you know, George is not very good at saying ‘no’ and I’m not much better, so together with colleagues Marti Cleveland-Innes and Bob Heller and other staff at Athabasca, we have organized two 8 hours sessions of the conference. We managed to persuade the other sponsoring teams (from University of Leicester, UK and the University of Southern Queensland, Australia, to make this an open conference, thus allowing free registration for all. Ironically the largest expense during the first two Followthe Sun conferences was the administrative cost of collecting the registration fees from delegates!

Thus, on March 28 and March 29 between 9:00 and 5:00 PM Mountain time (check out other times from other continents here or local times here), we have lined up two full days of really top quality speakers, demonstrations and expert panels. You can check out the schedule and most importantly Register at tinyurl.com/followthesun

If you haven’t had enough “conference’ from the North American sessions, well, you can begin 16 hours earlier  from Australia and the UK, and just keep right on conferencing for 48 hours straight!!  The sessions will be delivered via Blackboard Collaborate (the old Elluminate platform) and hosted by some well known figures in the elearning world, including  George Siemens, Grainne Canole, Gilly Salmon, myself  and others.

The theme of this year’s conference is Knowledge Futures, and we have tried to keep away from having keynotes be the usual ed tech evangelists. Rather we have selected disciplinary experts who will present, and our discussants will further elaborate, the ways in which knowledge, and thus teaching and learning, is changing across multiple disciplines.

Please check out the full schedule to make sure you hear a keynote in a discipline with which you are interested. These keynotes come from Psychology, Law, Communicatiuons, Ethnomusicology, English Language, Nursing and Midwifery, Sports Psychology, International Relations, Engineering, Computer Science and GeoScience.

I was really pleased to be able to have my friend Erran Cramel from American University in Washington volunteer to windup the conference by reflecting on this type of global event in light of his new book” I’m Working While You’re Sleeping, which as the title suggests, focuses on global business and organizations that “never sleep”.

Please check  out the full program and more importantly – REGISTER at tinyurl.com/followthesun

I was pleased to hear Rev Brian Kiely talk this morning at Westwood Unitarian Congregation, where I am a long term member. Brian spoke about the effect, impact and opportunity presented by the Net for Unitarianism. His talk was inspired by a blog post from Peter Morales the current President of the US Unitarian Universalist Association.  Morales argues that the day of large churches and exclusively face-to-face communities is over, and that both mileniums and boomers are demanding organizations that allow for more flexibility, multimode interactions and greater networking opportunties. Brian reinforced these ideas with a challenge to broaden Unitarian contribution, engagement, influence and service beyond the increasingly aged population who shows up at Church on Sunday monrings.

These messages were, of course, “music to my ears” as I have preaching this message for over a decade. The service this morning reminded me of a talk I gave in 20o0  to the Canadian Unitarian Council annual meeting  in which I outlined three generations of net-enhanced churches (Sigh,  after an hour search through old machines, CD roms and flash drives, I think the text of this paper is truely gonzo! – Not to self – Get organized!!)

The first generation (where Westwood is today) uses the Net to facilitate  and adminstrate face-to-face organization. Our Westwood website is an example of a first generation tools as it serves as a useful resource for general information, announcmeents, newsletters and docuement management for our largely place-based organization.  The second generation (which Brian was urging us to grow into) blends face-to-face activities with net-based ones. For example holding meetings, rites of passage and celebrations in SecondLife, via SKYPE or using a myriad of other means by which spiritual and community activities take place both in person and on the Net. The eco-advantages of this blending are obvious, but more importantly it opens the door for participation beyond geographic borders. It also meets the lifestyle  of those who are managing an increasing large part of thier social, professional and leisure activities online. Brian also noted the capacity to add backchannels to Sunday service, running up twitter feeds, as reactions to or comment on the live service from F2F or distant net-based participants, as is comingly done in many of the Ed tech conferences that i attend these days.  The Third Generation I overviewed was religious or spiritual organizations that were “net-native” and that manage to broach temporal and geographic boundaries entirely by existing exclusively online. Even in 2000 a few of these “cyber churches” were operating but now a see a listing  of 23 Christian Cyberchurhes and numerous links to cyber Buddhism, Digital Islam and TechnoPaganism.

The key message from Brian was both the opportunity and the need to develop a support and outreach network that nourishes and energizes those  who idenify as Unitrains (or lapsed Unitarians) or the much larger groupo of people who can’t stand dogmatic, creedal religion, but who already belive and ascribe to the 7 principles of Unitarian- Universalism  (even if they have newer heard of them)!!. Many people today are socially committed to justice, seek diverse forms of spiritual, intellectual and social stimulation and learning, but they are not now, and never will be ,”church people”.

Groups, Nets and Sets in Religion and in Education

The talk also resonated  with work that Jon Dron and I have been doing on the type of social organziations that we use in education, but now I see they are equally relevant to religious organizations. The first of our “taxonomy of the many” is the well known group. Groups have been the focus and major organizational model for both classrooms and local religious congregations. Groups excel at building trust,  creatng and sustaining strong links among members and creating the extensive support systems that have sustained human life from earliest tribal origions to modern families. Groups however can be marred by group think, exclusiveness, and manipulation by powerful and occasionally unscrupulous leaders including teachers or ministers. Groups are the organization that defines Westwood and most other religious organizations today.

The second aggregation that Jon and I wrote about is Networks. Networks connect indiviudals and groups with a mix of strong and week ties. They are typically very fluid and bursty as network members slip in and out of active participation. Leadership in nets is mch more distributed than in groups, and thus a diversity of idea and background much easier to support. Networks arise at denominational level in Christian Churches and the network itself is sustained by strong groups at congregational level. Social Capital Theorist, Ronald Burt wrote that “members of networks are at higher risk of having good ideas” – a goal for both education and any thinking religion!

The final aggregation is Sets, in which indiviudals or larger groupings or even objects are sorted and selected by nature of belonging to a defining set. One doesn’t join a set, rather, a set is calculated based upon the behaviour of otherwise unconnected individuals. Sets allow us to discover and utilize the ways in which we are like (and unlike) members of other sets. For example, one can use the net to find the set of Youtube videos, or facebook posts that have been “liked” the most times in the last week, or find the set of people who recently purchased a partciular book on Amazon. From this set we can find links to other sets or make inferences such as  determining what other books they also purchased or are likely to purchase. We are just beginning to develop aggregation and analytic tools to exploite sets for edcuational and religious use, but marketers are becoming very good at using set techniques for advertising, solicitation and recruitment purposes.

So to conclude, as I had predicted over a decade ago, the Net is becoming a dominent influence on religious institutions, as it has on education, commercial and government organizations.  Our challenges for religious organizations, as other institutions, is to learn how to best exploite the affordances of these very powerful tools, while not isolating or turning off either those who “get it” or those who wish it would “get lost”.

I was pleased to get an invite from the University of Dalarne to do a keynote at their Next Generation Learning conference tomorrow. Besides not having been to Central Sweden, this is Parish from which my Great-grandparents immigrated from in the 1870′s to come first to Minnesota and then to Canada.

I couldn’t help thinking what would have happened if they hadn’t left as I toured the Dalarne Museum in Falun. This picture helped my visual it – but I hope my partner wouldn’t be so blank faced !!

I also enjoyed the way you can watch the NHL here. On Sunday, you get to watch about 20-25 minutes of the highlights of ecah game played on Hockey Night in Canada. Just right for an attention deficit type like myself. But after the way the Canucks thrashed the Oilers last night, I wish Sweden had of kept the Sedin brothers home here in Sweden.

A problem with educational research publishing is that most of the most highly rated peer-reviewed journals are closed access, and though most are accessible to me through our library, I try as much as possible not to contribute to journals that are not available as open access. Especially in education, there are too many potential readers in schools, universities in developing countries and ordinary Canadians who just don’t have access to expensive closed publications. Thus, I strongly support the recent boycott of Elsevier (largest journal publisher in the world) but I extend a personal boycott it to all closed research publications (with the occasional exception).
However a year ago, I had an idea to research the impact of what for us in education was a new and i think very promising research methodology known as design-based research (DBR). The DBR model matches researchers with teachers in real educational contexts, to develop interventions (pedagogical technical, administrative etc.) and then test them in real contexts using a variety of qualitative and quantitative techniques and then extracting broader design principles explaining how and why the intervention works or fails to improve teaching or learning.

I was fortunate enough to recruit Atahabasca University doctoral student Julie Shattuck and together we analysed the 5 most widely cited DBR articles over each of the ten years since the methodology was first promoted. You are welcome to read the results published this week

Terry Anderson and Julie Shattuck (2012) Design-Based Research : A Decade of Progress in Education Research? Educational Researcher, 41: 16-25,http://edr.sagepub.com/content/41/1/16.full

Once the article was written we were faced with the question of where to publish. I thought the article would have considerable interest -especially in the US, as this is where the majority of cited DBR articles were published. Thus, I wanted to go beyond the open and distance education audience that I normally write for. I immediately thought of Educational Researcher. This is arguably and usually cited as the most widely read and prestigious peer reviewed journal in the educational world (ISO Impact factor of 3.774), so I really didn’t think we would get accepted.
However, although Educational Researcher is published by Sage (a commercial publisher) it is sponsored by The American Educational Research Association (world’s largest professional educational group) and is distributed in paper to all its members and most importantly freely in PDF format on the web. So the prospect of a very large audience in a very prestigious journal and close to open access publication was irresistible.

The submission process was very picky and exacting, with editors demanding very strict adherence to APA format, page length etc. before they would even send it to review. Not to my surprise, two months later, it was returned with requests for revisions which I must say all reasonable and likely to improve the paper. However, the returned manuscript must go through a second review, so we didn’t get our hopes up. Then last summer, to our surprise, a very quick second review and minor suggestions for revisions and we were accepted!! 5 months later everyone is able to read the article online and I await my paper copy in the mail!
So thanks to Julie, the reviewers and editors at Educational Research and celebration time!!

I want to document and maybe provoke a discussion and reflection on last night’s Change 11 web conference with Dave Cormier on Rhizome Learning. I felt pretty alienated and out of place.

But first a few caveats:
1. I like Dave a lot, count him as a friend and find his ideas on Rhizome learning interesting and relevant
2. This was my first synchronous session at Change 2011 MOOC (many mostly, time and priority related issues getting in the way). Thus my alienation may result from my failing to take the time and energy to become accustomed to and grow into the norms of this group/network.
3. The session was one of the most interactive, Elluminate sessions I’ve seen. Dave is a master at both creating the context through his slides and allowing comments to flow fast and furious.

However…..
One of the first slides Dave asked what was the purpose of education. There was about 30 replies entered onto the slide. Many like “create workers”, “babysit kids”, “create soldiers”, “give a space for teachers to endless repeat stories from their youth” and many more reflecting a distinctly EduPunk interpretation of the stuff of Hidden Curriculum critique of formal education system. But not a single comment about education being responsible for and or even associated with learning. This struck me as odd (and alienating) for three reasons.

First, likely all of the participants (including Dave and myself) are products of, and beneficiaries of a variety of educational systems. In fact, many of us participating in the MOOC are the teachers or administrators running or at least participating in formal education systems, and thus the very enemy being bashed. I do not deny the culture homogenizing influence of education systems but look at all the definitions of education from dictionary.com:
- 1. the act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life.
- 2.the act or process of imparting or acquiring particular knowledge or skills, as for a profession.
- 3.a degree, level, or kind of schooling: a university education.
- 4.the result produced by instruction, training, or study: to show one’s education.
- 5.the science or art of teaching; pedagogics.

The conversation seemed to focus (and get stuck on #4 alone), whereas I like to think of number #1 and work to develop #5.

Second, I’ve spent 2/3 of my adult life trying to improve access to education through various distance education institutions, technologies and systems. My motives are certainly not to create soldiers or workers, but to expand opportunity and give people real choices. Sure, education does lead to better jobs, but it also leads to better understanding and management of our global environment, release of and development of creative juices, as evidenced by the formal education of almost all of the interesting and important cultural, artistic and philosophical leaders, models and trend setters. I recognize that education is a two edged sword and can also stamp out creativity, as evidenced by studies of changes in school aged children – but it also provides a context for students to learn how to create, think and get along with and tend the various weeds (personal and institutional) in our gardens. Education, like other institutional systems both creates and is created by individual and social hierarchies. You can also see that children don’t generally get any more creative when they are denied opportunity to go to school – maybe just the opposite. Except of course if they are the children of or exposed to educated adults or others with large (and often uncommon) personal gifts and abilities

Third, I like others am attracted to the romantic notion of the Nomad. During my 20′s and on, I spent 15 years on a homestead in Northern Alberta, so I am quite familiar with the value and sense of freedom of living outside the mainstream society, but I still had to learn (pre-Internet days) how to research, argue, support and protect that alternative lifestyle – and I was grateful for the formal education tools and skills that I had available and sadly were not, to many of my rural and First Nation neighbours. I also have seen the marginalized and not very pleasant or sustaining lifestyles of modern Bedouin communities in Jordon and Oman and Roma communities of nomads in many countries of Europe. Sure, they have at least equal doses of culture and maybe more creativity than others, but they suffer from all sorts of challenges, not least of which are health issues and the lack of educational opportunity for their kids. If you talk to these nomads, you will find that many of them have high aspirations and regrets about their own lack of education and make great efforts to provide educational opportunities to own children – and not just because they want them to be good factory workers or soldiers. One might also ask are the ecology, anti-war, Arab Spring, social, charitable and volunteer services that are trying to build and mend our world populated by educated people or by Nomads? I refrain from using the the older term of ‘learned people’, because I appreciate the distinction made between learning and education – but I don’t deny the correlation.

Finally, I realized last night how “out of it” I am in regard to skill using Blackboard, graphics, Twitter and other PLEs as compared to many of the Change participants. This is OK, as I am old fart (61 years) and I am at the stage of life, where I don’t feel compelled to keep up with all the new technologies and the skills required to exploit them. But I am light years ahead of most of my generation (Stephen notwithstanding!) and thus I see the EduPunk culture becoming a very exclusionary technocracy. And to be frank, not one that I really aspire to join. Maybe Moocs are its ‘educational schoolrooms’.

I belief connectivism has much to say to formal education systems, but change is a very complex and needs many advocates and workers – both in the trenches and by Nomads. If we really want to CHANGE systems, we have to insure that we don’t grow as rhizomes, reproducing clones of ourselves or establishing gardens in which only certain types of weeds can flourish.

I was honoured to be asked to do a keynote at the 2nd Congresso Mundial de E-Learning sponsored by the Universidad National Aberta y a Distance (Columbia’s Open University). The conference was held in one of the oldest and perhaps most well maintained  historic ports of the Spanish Main.

The Congresso started 90 minutes late, because the Internet connection to that part of the town was severed by tram construction. I thought at first that this was pretty odd to hold up a F2F conference for the Internet, not realizing that they had a few hundred paying registrants online and in Second Life. But I found that time-lines aren’t really hard in Columbia anyways!

There were about 900 delegates and they all seemed to know the words to the stirring martial music of the National anthem, the state anthem and UNAD school anthem. Someone I can’t imagine a stirring, trumpet filled anthem (with everyone singing) at a Canadian University event (do any of our Universities even have anthems??). Next came the official greetings by the Mayor and various Ministry officials. I was quite thrilled to be given the keys to the City (literally a big brass key!!)  but I didn’t manage to find any banks or chests of Spanish doubloons to which the key would fit. Read the rest of this entry »