Virtual Canuck

Map of Oman

The hard part of my whirlwind trip to Oman is finished after doing the opening keynote yesterday at the First International Conference of the Omani Society for Educational Technology. I survived the 16 hour plane trip with the help of the business class ticket supplied by my hosts.  The trip was scheduled on a new flight from Calgary via Emirates Air, but the dustup over landing rights in UAE meant I had to fly from Toronto to Dubai and then a short flight to Muscat, capital of the Sultanate of Oman. If you aren’t sure where Oman is (as I wasn’t), I’ve embedded the map above.

Oman is a country about half the size of Alberta with about the same population. It is mostly arid desert, with a small area of tropics in the far south that benefits from monsoon rains. Like Alberta, a very high proportion of Omani income comes from resources and particularly one resource- petroleum. Like Alberta they are attempting to diversify away from that single resource dependency. Higher education is a priority, but they have little higher education history, with the first Omani University established only 25 years ago.

Oman this week is celebrating its 40th anniversary as an independent country and so the first Ed Tech conference was designed to share the celebrations of this anniversary. Like many Arab countries, Islam figures prominently in the conference and in Omani life. I’ve seen three very large new mosques under construction and the conference opened with a reading from the Koran. The conference iself is in a new “Knowledge Oasis” which houses the campus of Middle East University of Technology. This complex, in the desert 18 kms from the City of Muscat has many new buildings occupied by computer, graphics and other high tech companies and at least two postsecondary institutions. The students and staff wear traditional clothing and there seems very minmal interaction between the women and men – both students and faculty. I couldn’t quite get over the women at the back waiting for all the men to eat, before heading to the generous buffet meals.

The theme of the conference was mobile and blended learning and my talk on Three Pedagogies of Educational technology, seemed to fit as a pedagogical focus. One of the other keynotes was by Paul Kim from Stanford. He talked about evolutionary forces in higher education with a focus on private ‘solutions”. Paul is involved in many startup universities in the US, after serving as one of the first employees of the University of Phoenix. His evolutionary analysis of postsecondary education and the need for change to adapt, resonated with me – except with the common American perception that change has to be fueled by private capitalism to work. His later examples of mobile innovations that Stanford has been involved in developing countries was VERY impressive. He demonstrated the variety of ways that students embrace mobile devices for learning, even where electricity is not available- think bicycles! A third keynote by Mourad Diouri from the University of Edinburgh, demonstrated the use of ELGG (the platform we use for social networking at Athabasca) for teaching/learning Arabic – too bad I haven’t take his course.

The first day of the conference ended with an outdoor banquet featuring the first evening of a world class fireworks contest. Much as I am impressed by Canada Day fireworks in Edmonton’s river valley, this display was quite a bit more elaborate, impressive and longer – see $$$$$ exploding!

One of the concurrent talks featured an Iraqi professor with photos and stories of the destruction of his university by American bombs and local looters. The university has only recently restarted operations and not with American aide, but with the help of Malaysian funding. It is heartening to see the ending of this war (hopefully) and the VERY slow rebuilding of this ancient nation. Too bad we have never really understood why the west needed to start this war nor held our leaders accountable. I guess oil finances more than Omani construction and fireworks displays.

As often happens it is really nice to meet people F2F who have been following my web and paper writings over the years. But I was humbled by one honest women, who told me how surprised she was that I didn’t look like my pictures on the Net – face to face I look much older!! Note to self – get new pictures uploaded or book a facelift!

One more day of the conference and an afternoon of tourist site-seeing, then I’m back home on Thursday.

Terry

I am a big supporter of Open Access presses – largely because they serve potential readers without means or capacity to purchase books and as importantly, because they increase the readership and dissemination of ideas.

Athabasca University Press (AUPress) was Canada’s first open access, scholarly press, and provides all of its books for free download in PDF format and of course sells paper copies. These paper copies are offered for sale from the AUPress site, on Amazon and in epub format via sonybookstore. The download statistics for books and individual chapters are impressive and paper sales are about the same as scholarly publications from commercial or non open access scholarly publications.

For example my own edited book “Theory and Practice of Online Learning has been downloaded well over 90,000 times, read online by a large number of google book readers of the 20% offered at this site for free, and sales of over 1300 books. AUPress does pay royalties (about the same % of sales as commercial publishers). Interestingly I also got a small check from Copywrite Canada, from Universities who are paying for including chapters in reading packages- even though the students could download them for free!

I had a meeting with AUPress staff yesterday and we discussed ramping up production and promotion of the Issues in Distance Education series for which I serve as series editor. The series currently has 5 titles and 2 more “in press’.

If any readers are interested in producing a volume for this series, I hope you will contact me or the Press for author’s guidelines and further details. Like all AUPress books, each volume must survive two rigourous peer reviews. We are developing new guidelines for editors of edited volumes. The current practice is to accept publications only after the complete draft manuscript is submitted. This is problematic when an editor is trying to solicit chapter contributions and has no guarantee that the Press will accept the completed volume. However, an editor can communicate that the volume is being readied and hopefully published in open access format by AUPress, but there is no guarantee that any individual chapter or the whole book will survive the review process. The upside of this process is that a completed chapter or a book, can likely find an outlet someplace, even if fails AUPress’s review.

So please forward this post to any potential DE, online learning or even blended learning author wannabes and check out, download, or if you can afford it, order an AUPress book!

I just read a very interesting article in the Globe and Mail A regulatory nightmare: Facebook and its goal of a less private Web The article overviews the use of web analytics to track and then recommend/target users, products and services. At Athabasca University we have been building our “partially closed” -(restricted membership but not necessary restricted reading to members of the Athabasca community) . Our social networking system is based on the ELGG platform and hosted on our machines. We choose this route rather than Facebook for two primary reasons – enhanced privacy controls for indiviudals and the control that we (not a commercial company) have on the data generated.

It serves reminding that the customer of Facebook and other commercial networking sites, is NOT the user. Rather, their customers are those who pay for ads, information about users or both. Athabasca has participated (both officially and unofficially) in a number of groups on Facebook and students, of course, start their own groups focused on our courses or programs.  But you can imagine a private university or other company paying for the contacts, friends lists, behaviours and other data generated by the members of these groups and targetting (or at least learning about) students enrolled at Athabasca.

I am a huge supporter of the value add to students (and lifelong learners) of  social networks and especially those studying at a distance (see my 2005 article Distance learning: Social software’s Killer app?), but I am very glad that we are not gathering information for Facebook or other commercial sites.

We also experience the challenge of attracting students (and our staff) away from Facebook and I know of at least one University that had their social network become a ghost town when Facebook opened its very compelling doors. But I continue to think that the University tradition of offering a safe space for study and exploration can and should be maintained in our networked era.

So, to answer my title question, Facebook MAY not be evil, but they are commercial company with interests, values, mission and vision that is far from that maintained by a public university like Athabasca.

After a long gestation, Lynn Anderson and myself have finally seen the images of our new book Online Conferences: Professional Development for a Networked Era. The book is available from IAP publishers for $39 and for a free preview at Google Books. For some reason the book can also be ordered from Amazon.UK, but not yet from Amazon .com or .ca  We still haven’t held it in our hot little hands, but maybe that is appropriate for a book on online conferences. Supposedly a copy is on its way for Lynn  and I to drool over!!

I’ve long had an interest in online conferences- likely because I’m so cheap and recent paying high conference fees. But more recently, we are all becoming aware of the green and opportunity costs of attending face-to-face conferences. My one (and ONLY) internet claim to fame, is that I think I organized the first ever online conference. This was done in connection with 1992 International Congress of Distance Education conference held in Bangkok. I was a poor grad student in those days and was not able to fly to Bangkok, so I organized a two week conference that (virtually) sat on top of the F2F conference. This was in the days before the Internet was ubiquitous, so a variety of networks including FidoNet, NetNorth, BitNet, UseNet and mailing lists were used to support the text presentations and interaction. The conference was quite a success and Robin Mason and I wrote an article evaluating the outcomes. For more of this historical account see a book  chapter here.

During a sabbatical a couple of years ago, Lynn Anderson (a Grad student in the MDE Program at Athabasca) and I decided to write a longer history and analysis of online conference. The book is a guidebook for organizers, with enough scholarly and theoretical content to interest academics and teachers. We also  interviewed organizers of the longest standing and largest online conferences to determine best practices and suggestions for those new to the game.

(more…)

The Chronicle of Higher Education interviewed me about  month ago regarding the “new” invention of self-paced learning and this week published the article  Will Technology Kill the Academic Calendar? After spending at least 30 minutes trying to explain distance education to the reporter, he managed to include a single quote from myself. Ironically, he wanted to interview someone with an opposing viewpoint and I suggested my former PhD supervisor Randy Garrison – who got much longer quotes, most of which I don’t agree with- but such is the way of journalists.

First, let me say that I am glad to have attention paid to both the benefits and challenges of self-paced learning. Self-paced (I don’t call it independent study- see below) is the model followed by a small (but growing) number of institutions around the world. However, most online and distance education, like campus based education, is cohort based-even that offered by the mega distance universities.

Self-paced programming maximizes individual freedom. Rather than making the obviously incorrect assumption that all students learn at the same speed, have access and control over their lives to march along with a cohort group of learners or are able, despite divergent life circumstances, to begin and end their study on the same day, self-paced study correctly  puts the learner squarely in control. Distance education clearly deals with geographic distance, but it can also afford  opportunities for individuals to set their own start dates, the type of relationships they develop with teacher and peers and more importantly their own pace of study. However, as has been documented by myself and others, that this freedom comes at cost of procrastination and often results in higher attrition rates.

Randy Garrison and other commentaries in the replies to the article argue that self-paced study denies learners the opportunity to engage in peer debate and discussion and thus leads to superficial learning. I’ll use the remainder of this post to respond to these concerns. (more…)

I’m wallowing this morning in the short lived glory of an article published yesterday in the Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration. My colleagues, Bruno Poellhuber (Univ of Montreal), Ross McKerlich and myself did a survey of students who enrolled in Athabasca in our self paced undergrad program in August 2009. We sent over  3,000 emial invitations and got survey response from over 950 – Not a great return, but not bad either for an online survey- with a draw for two iphones. The study was mant to measure the skills and interest of our students in a variety of social networking and to determine their interest in collaborative work in these individual learning designed programs. Here is the article abstract:

I was surprised at the generally low (but very mixed) self assessment of students in regards to their exposure and competency with various social media tools. As stereotype would predict, the younger males had a higher assessment of their own skills and assessment – but just maybe females assess themselves lower than their actual competencies.

We also noticed a very large split between those interested in collaboration and those who enroll in this type of programming with no expectation or desire to work with others. However the group of social learners is growing- and this even within a self-selected group of students who consciously pick this now rather unique form (continuous enrolment and no group pacing) form of online learning.

This work is part of a larger study aimed at developing real time (web cinferencign) and social networking (using elgg) interventions and assessing their value and adoption in self-paced learning modes of distance education.

Like many educators with a social media agenda, I’m concerned with fear mongering, accusations and sometimes deleterious effects of snooping, stalking and Big Brother invasion of private spaces. The arguments against and the fear of participation in even semi-private networks, such as the ELGG environment we are building at Athabasca University, are real and palatable to a significant percentage of current and potential users. However, potential harm masks an equally large potential for participation, connection and building of social capital. Despite the affordance to control privacy settings offered in ELGG environments, some have argued that they see little point of posting anything as all it does is raise the potential for abuse and misuse. I use this post to expand on arguments over disclosure and surveillance. (more…)

John Hagel and John Seely Brown have come out with yet another in their blockbuster best seller series on innovation, that I found quite enlightening. The book (with 3rd author Lang Davison) is titled The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion. The text is one of this here is how to safe the world and revolutionize your business genre, that I don’t usually find has much value beyond hyperbole. But I liked this book.

The Power of Pull is the capacity for new social and networking technologies to provide the engines by which whole industries, social movements or governments can envision and implement radically different ways of caring out their business or mission. Given the need for change on many fronts (think climate change, end of oil, access to quality postsecondary education etc. etc.) there is certainly opportunity and need for many ‘game-changing’ activities. Pull (as opposed to push products, ideas, or ideologies) is the capacity to find and access people, attract relevant people and resources and pull from ourselves and these aggregations radically improved solutions to existing challenges.  It all sounds very Utopian, right up there with How to Win Friends and Influence People. But the difference between Norman Vincent Peel, and Hagel and Seely is that these guys have the Net and understand its potential to empower change. (more…)