Virtual Canuck

I have been a fan of Jessie Brown and his podcasts (notably SearchEngine on CBC and now TVO). I’ve spent many a pleasant walk to work listening to Jessie on my iphone. Thus, I was pleased to be able to hear him speak F2F at Can. Network for Innovation in Education (CNIE) in Hamilton. He talked about his personal education as a 1977 vintage “net generation” boy in Canadian schools – more interested in comics and media than formal lessons.

I had no idea he was one of the co-founders of Bitstrips the toolset that lets ANYONE create, mix and remix cartoon characters and strips. He told of the over 1,000,000 published strips being done by school kids in Ontario schools (and no doubt after school) half of whom are being written by boys. One small, but important, step in battle for literacy amongst that threatened population of too many illiterates – young boys.

Jessie is an engaging speaker and of course embraces the learning that can and does embrace new and participatory media for learning. His answer to “Does the Net make you stupid” ended “it doesn’t matter and or who cares”  Ideas of stupidness and smartness do and have changed over time and the Net is embedded in 21st century life “The past and the future share the world” educators must embrace learning from  both. A bit technologial deterministic to my mind, but probably true

My favorite quote from the talk in regard to web 2.0 and social software like Facebook “If you don’t pay for the product, you are the product”

The talk reminded me that I haven’t shared my one and only cartoon – created a year ago, so here it is: http://bitstrips.com/

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My friend Rory McGreal and I are very fortunate to have been invited to by the Estonian E-Learning Development Centre (oh to have a funded, national e-learning group and strategy!!) to present at the 8th annual Estonian E-learning conference in Tartu starting tomorrow.  Yesterday morning we spent the day gawking at the wonderful ‘old town’ here in Tallinn. Although Rory kept grousing about the Disneyfication of Europe’s old cities, we were pretty impressed.

Tallinn, Estonia old town

The town was settled by European immigrants in the 12-14 century. It has the highest town wall (complete with towers) that I have seen and the center is chalked full of very old houses, Inns, churches and the current Estonian houses of Parliament. Of course all of this beauty comes with a zillion tourist and handicraft shops, outdoor booths and restaurants.  The season is just beginning as there is still dirty snow piled up on the corners (reminds me of home). (more…)

Our friends at Digital Education Research Network (DERN) alerted me to an interesting review of Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN) which is largest capital project ever undertaken by the Australian government. The NBN is a 43 billion dollar, 8 year project begun in 2010 which “will deliver high-speed broadband to all Australians” through provision of a wholesale connectivity to thousands of Internet providers throughout the country. They have an ambitious goal of providing fibre to the end user for 93% of users.

The Australian’s were seeing their connectivity continue to lag behind other developed countries – in terms of connectivity, use and end-user costs.  The OECD (2010) rated Australia 18th most connected country (23.4% of citizens compared to the Netherlands as most connected with 36% of citizens using broadband and Canada in 12th place with 30%.

Of recent interest is the establishment of a parliamentary committee to investigate the role and potential of the NBN.  The terms of the committee are both interesting and very broad. They empower the committee to investigate the current and potential value of broadband networking to education, health and other services. (more…)

I’m a few days late with this Solstice Greeting to you!

I decided to loose a few pounds before Christmas excesses this year, by having stomach flu for 4 days and so even missed our annual Unitarian Solstice Service at Westwood. However, in Northern Canada it is not easy to forget the promise of a return to light and new life, in the midst of some very dark days.  Sun rises here around 9:00 AM and sets at 4:00 PM so we get  less than 8 hours of daylight. But Canadians always think about the season coming up, and so we are planning a special event for the summer solstice at Athabasca University.

Athabasca’s Technology Enhanced Research Centre (Tekri) is sponsoring our second, week long  doctoral seminar. This year’s theme is Social Networking. The format is quite casual with an opportunity for doctoral students and faculty to present, discuss, critique and argue about research projects that they are involved in. Each morning one of our faculty or invited guests does a half day presentation with lots of chance for group interaction. In the afternoon  the Doctoral students or visiting faculty members present their work/ideas and gets the whole groups feedback. In the evenings we do something fun around Edmonton and generally get a chance to really  know 15-25 interesting new friends from around the world.

This year’s core faculty include Jon Dron, Sabina Graf, George Siemens and myself with shorter drop in presentations by other TEKRI fellows such as Dragan Gasevich and Kinshuk. Special invited faculty include Bruno Poelhuber from U. of Montreal and  a couple of others who haven’t quite confirmed yet. Last year Stephen Downes, Alan Levine, and Michael Barbour dropped by, so who knows who will be in Edmonton next June?.

If this type of event is of interest to you and you are an active online researcher (student or faculty) please consider joining us.

The seminar takes place over the summer solstice June 20-24. Those days the sun gets up at 5:00 AM and it stays light till 11:00 PM, so lots of time to enjoy Northern Canada. if you are thinking of coming from overseas (and our 15 participants last year came from 7 countries), you may also want to take the opportunity to see the Canadian Rockies. One can quite easily rent a car, or hop a bus  in Edmonton and spend a couple of days on the Banff to Jasper Icefields Parkway- argueably the most beautiful highway in the world.

So for more details, costs etc check out the TEKRI website

Social Networks and Learning 2011.

From the site:

Social media and networked technologies have altered the ways in which society communicates, educates and produces. Research into social networks and learning is progressing rapidly. In order to advance the conversation around current and future research, the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute (TEKRI) at Athabasca University is pleased to sponsor a doctoral seminar on Social Networks in Learning. This year’s seminar will be held at Athaabsca University in Edmonton from June 20-24 2011.

Finally Best Wishes for a Rejuvenating Holiday and a wonder filled New Year!

Terry

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…)

I’m always interested in learning from the prognosis of the New Media Consortium‘s Annual New Horizon Report. The 2010 preview (7th annual report)  is out – with still a few weeks to go in 2009!

As usual the report categorizes new educational technologies in three time frames.  And the winners are :

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: One Year or Less

• Mobile Computing
• Open Content

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Two to Three Years

• Electronic Books
• Simple Augmented Reality

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Four to Five Years

• Gesture-Based Computing
• Visual Data Analysis

Rather than squint into my own crystal ball, to attempt to validate or refute this latest publication, I thought it might be fun to look backwards to the first New Horizons Report issued in 2004.

(more…)

Jon Dron and I have received funding to enhance social networking amongst the distributed students and staff at Athabasca University. This is a two year position and requires programming skills and communications abilities to help create and sustain AU’s system and contribute to the elgg community.
For more details check Athabasca Human resources listing

I had the pleasure of attending a recent meeting (and dinner) of the advisory board  for the ReVica project and wanted to share some of the work and results of that project. I’ll skip over the obvious fact, that the project could have spent a little more time creating a more inviting acronym and get to the accomplishments.

ReVica is a two year project, funded as part of the lifelong learning program of the European Commission. The idea of the project is to conduct inventories of EU and other ‘virtual campus’ projects and to extract best practices, lessons learned etc. The main tool to do this has evolved into a fairly sophisticated wiki at www.virtualcompuses.eu Besides the Wiki (discussed below) the project has produced a number of research papers and a set of newsletters, that I found quite informative (more…)