Monday, May 6, 2013
Learning scales, teaching doesn't
I grabbed a quick Audiobook download for my commute this morning, Douglas Thomas and John Sealey Brown on A New Culture of Learning. One chapter starts with an adage from Heraclitus that a man cannot step into a river twice, for it is not the same river, and it is not the same man. This is a good reminder of an inconvenient aspect of research into how people learn with or without technology, not to mention the difficulty of projecting how a given population (in space and time) will respond to a particular technology (dependent on platform, programming, media, etc.). It might be possible to gather fairly reliable data on say an increase in heartbeat across a range of subjects when on stepping into a river a certain portion of their body was suddenly immersed in temperatures ranging over so many degrees. However it might be difficult to extrapolate given fluctuations in more complex aspects of the river (as Sidhartha noted, always changing yet always the same) vs the many contexts in which the man might approach the river. These contexts might change widely over time, and change is in fact an accelerating variable in education, especially with constant developments in educational technology.
Which brings us to the next adage mentioned in the chapter, that if you give a man a fish, you feed him for day; teach him to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. Not so fast say Brown and Thomas, this assumes both a constant supply of fish stocks, and an assumption that the techniques used to catch them today will maintain in the future. However, in our modern world, neither are given. Change in what we need to know now vs. what we need to know tomorrow is happening at an accelerating pace. Many degree programs today didn't exist ten years ago, and we must assume that teachers are preparing students today for jobs that no one can predict will exist.
It is this certainty of accelerating change that a culture of learning must address. Brown and Thomas introduce the concept of the collective in conjunction with their observation that teaching doesn't scale. This is exactly the problem that Siemens has addressed in his theory of connectivism (connectivism, meet collectivism?) and hence that MOOCs are experimental solutions to. It is understood that two forms of MOOC are emerging. One kind, the cMOOC, is where learning occurs through interaction within the collective, and the other kind, xMOOC, is developing as a means of offering viable courses to thousands at a time. Both are attempts to scale access to learning when traditional "teaching" fails under the sheer weight of numbers.
And then the final insight on my drive this morning: regarding the problem with corporate and other institutional training programs. They are attempts to teach participants in these programs to fish in an era where the tools of fishing are evolving rapidly, perhaps so fast that fishing will be supplanted by something else in the near future. For example, the benefits of training in educational institutions in the use of particular branded technologies may be growing less appropriate as change becomes more likely in a rapidly approaching future. In other words, such training doesn't scale. It becomes less efficient the more rapidly evolutionary change approaches. Training should focus instead on the wider issues of finding a range of tools available to address desired pedagogical tools.
The answer is learning, not teaching. Learning scales. This is what MOOCs are about. They are experiments for scaling learning. The xMOOCs do this in a sense by finding ways to scale the teaching, but insofar as the learners have a lot of flexibility in choice of MOOCs and other options for open learning, they are also part of the scaled-learning solution.
Brown and Thomas were discussing gamification as another tack in the quest for scalable solutions to learning, but I was pulling up to work by then, so we'll get to that in another post, or in an extension to this one.
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
LTMOOC starts today, where to blog it?
I had to miss the first hangout for the latest MOOC to get under way. Here are some details on LTMOOC
Week 1 starts April 15
- Orientation (30 min) - You’ll be welcomed to the course (view live or recorded)
- EdLab Seminar (60 min) - You’ll learn about the Instreamia Platform and its methodology
- Instreamia Tutorial (30 min) - You’ll learn how to use Instreamia as a student
- Introduction Blog Entry (30 min) - You’ll get a chance to introduce yourself to the class
- First Hangout (30 min) - You’ll get a chance to meet others and discuss online learning
Week 2 starts April 22, through week 6, end of May
This MOOC has a friendly flair to it. It's one of those endeavors that's sure to inspire others to simply declare MOOCs on the theory that, 'hey, I can do this!'. This one I think has about 400 subscribers, not a huge MOOC, off by a factor of 10 from a celebrity cMOOC and by another quantum from a robo-graded xMOOC. The participants in this MOOC seem to be normal teachers, first-time MOOCers. The conveners Ryan and Scott Rap are IT professionals with an interest in language learning and a start-up called Instreamedia to promote that effort, which we're sure to hear more about shortly.
This is my first post for the course, meant to be more an introduction than an analysis of this MOOC (more of that later). But by way of introduction, there are some ways that whomever I cluster with in this MOOC and I and can converge.
Foremost, this MOOC is sure to converge with Learning2gether, the weekly seminar series I've been coordinating since 2010. As the conveners find convenient times for hangouts in the middle of my night, I can cater to those who would be more active around noon GMT on a Sunday or Monday. We announce our events here, http://learning2gether.pbworks.com/w/page/32206114/volunteersneeded#Nextupcomingevents, and I'm reconstructing the Posterous archives in Wordpress, http://learning2gether.net. I'll generate interest there and invite participants to join me in a session in a couple of weeks.
Apart from that, I am a teacher of EFL and long-time coordinator of Webheads, http://webheads.org. I have a number of other blogs, now being also resurrected in Wordpress. One is at http://vanceposterous.wordpress.com/ and another at http://curiousvance.wordpress.com/, from a Posterous blog I call "Just Curious" (that name unfortunately not available at Wordpress).
The last post at that blog was one year ago on the occasion of Earth Day which falls on Monday April 22 this year. In that post, http://curiousvance.wordpress.com/2012/04/25/learning2gether-with-earth-day/, I invited others to join me this year. In fact, I just scheduled an event for it this Thu April 18 involving my students at work: http://earthbridges.wikispaces.com/Earthcast13+Schedule, where I'm trying to interest other teachers. If any LTMOOCers are interested in joining in, all you need to do is sign up at Wordpress and enter your event at the wiki.
Incidentally, I was thinking to make my Tumblr blog my LTMOOC blog, but I don't see how to make comments to posts there ??!!! Off to work now from Vance ...
Meanwhile, Scott Rap explained about Tumblr:
Meanwhile, Scott Rap explained about Tumblr:
As for the tumblr blog, the interaction is somewhat cryptic...
You have to
- Click into the blog-entry (not the blog homepage)
- Click reblog in the top right.
- This posts the blog post to your blog
- You can add a comment to the original poster
- It shows up as an interaction on the original blog, and a blog post on your blog
I hope this helps those who'd like to interact with the tumblr bloggers!
And OK, I followed steps 1, 2, and 3, and I now have Scott's post in my Tumblr blog at http://vancestevens.tumblr.com/. Also, if you click on the title of Scott's post in my blog you are taken to his blog, which now shows that this post has a NOTE! Success, this note says that "vancestevens reblogged this from scottrapp." However, the process remains cryptic. I don't see how to make a comment to Scott either on his post or on his post embedded in my blog.
Playing around with it, unexpected results occurred. As noted, I was trying to work out how to make some kind of comment on Scott's post, so I went into my dashboard and EDITED the post, I was able to add a reply but when I clicked SAVE nothing happened for a while. It seemed to be prompting me for a URL, so I gave the URL to this blog post and saved that. This made it so that when you clicked on Scott's blog post title in my Tumblr blog you didn't go to see what he had written, it brought you here instead. So I went back to the dashboard and re-edited the link to return us to Scott's blog but when I saved that, all of his post disappeared from my blog along with my comments, apart from 3 words, which you can read as what I 'added' if you visit Scott's post from my Tumblr blog.
So my first experience replying to a post in Tumblr blog has resulted in data loss and consumed much more time than if I simply left a comment in almost any other blog, which would put the comment below the post in the original blog and not alter the appearance of my blog.
However, I'm here to learn :-) Awaiting further explanation ...
Playing around with it, unexpected results occurred. As noted, I was trying to work out how to make some kind of comment on Scott's post, so I went into my dashboard and EDITED the post, I was able to add a reply but when I clicked SAVE nothing happened for a while. It seemed to be prompting me for a URL, so I gave the URL to this blog post and saved that. This made it so that when you clicked on Scott's blog post title in my Tumblr blog you didn't go to see what he had written, it brought you here instead. So I went back to the dashboard and re-edited the link to return us to Scott's blog but when I saved that, all of his post disappeared from my blog along with my comments, apart from 3 words, which you can read as what I 'added' if you visit Scott's post from my Tumblr blog.
So my first experience replying to a post in Tumblr blog has resulted in data loss and consumed much more time than if I simply left a comment in almost any other blog, which would put the comment below the post in the original blog and not alter the appearance of my blog.
However, I'm here to learn :-) Awaiting further explanation ...
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
When is a MOOC not a MOOC?
(What MOOC means to me)
I have to admit I would not be drawn to a blog post entitled so vacuously as, "what MOOC means to me" (so I thought up something catchy and made the real purpose of this post its subtitle). However, it's early days for working out what MOOC means for anyone. People have different ideas about what MOOC means, period. Obviously, the most relevant meaning is the one that reaches any one of us personally. MOOC means a lot to me, I'm going to try to pin down that meaning here, and maybe this will help you get your own grip on what MOOC might mean to you.
John Hibbs and I presented on the topic November 14, 2012, at the Global Education Conference (http://www.globaleducationconference.com/, which Steve Hargadon has pointed out, is a conference on global education, not an international conference particularly). John has prepared a few documents on his own blog:
MOOCs for ESOL and language learning
There are two thrusts to the presentation. One is that an excellent audience for MOOCs might be in ESOL and language learning in general. To my knowledge, this is indeed an avenue not particularly explored or developed as MOOC, though my own online credentials stem from what might be viewed as one of many precursors to MOOCs. Dave Cormier takes credit in the "The True History of the MOOC" for invention of the term MOOC in the spring of 2008 (mp3 available, http://www.downes.ca/presentation/300). He does point out that there have been many MOOC-like configurations for learning since the 19th century, but that the term MOOC to describe them began with his inspiration, which Leigh Blackall says (in A True(er) History of Moocs http://www.leighblackall.com/2012/10/a-trueer-history-of-moocs.html), that MOOC's emergence as a meme for universities and businesses, has become 'irritating'. I have argued that we had MOOCs before 2008 as well, one example being http://study.com, which offered language lessons to all comers, and which spawned Writing for Webheads, which started leaving artifacts online in 1998 <http://prosites-vstevens.homestead.com/files/efi/webheads.htm>. So regarding what MOOC means to me, one interest I have in it is as a platform for what we were doing in 1998, when we were experimenting with platforms for teaching people ESOL and other languages for free online.
It was around this time that I became aware of John Hibbs's work in the pre-MOOC era. John had created a web page from which he launched a virtual ship each year to make a journey around the world hour by hour in 24 time zones <http://www.bfranklin.edu/gld8/gld8.htm>. He had organized people in different parts of the world to manage the program for that region and in 1999 I was tapped by the Middle East organizer Neil Hynd to make a presentation of some kind. I remember that the first one I did, I was patched into the stream through a POTS phone line, but in subsequent years John was using Real Player for streaming the audio, Though our team again presented in 2001 from Abu Dhabi using a POTS phone patch, we listened via Real Player. At the time this was impressive stuff, right on the cutting edge. John was one of the first pioneers of free (that was unusual!) online seminars of educators who could meet in real time through his web pages. John's effort stimulated me to do something similar in organizing three WiAOC's (Webheads in Action Online Convergence), each one a 3-day round the clock free all-volunteer online conference that I coordinated in 2005, 2007, and 2009 <http://wiaoc.org>.
Webheads in Action (WiA, http://webheads.info) came about in response to the fact that an emerging community of educators had started overwhelming the ESOL student voices in the original Writing for Webheads community. How this happened has been documented elsewhere (e.g. http://tinyurl.com/tacon2012L2g), but again as far as MOOCs are concerned, Webheads began focusing on teachers as opposed to students when it started giving EVO (Electronic Village Online, http://evosessions.pbworks.com) sessions in 2002, and the WiA community grew from there, to over a 1000 members today in just the Yahoo Group alone. Again, this is not meant to be a description of WiA or EVO, but simply to suggest that if WiA and EVO are considered to be courses, and if 1000 members is massive, then they are definitely open and online, and had we started them 6 years after we did we might have called them MOOCs. At the time we called them variously groups, communities, and networks (Stevens, 2009).
multiMOOC
Meanwhile I have been teaching a Multiliteracies course for EVO and the last couple of years I've been utilizing MOOC elements in the course at http://goodbyegutenberg.pbworks.com. It's essential for such a course to have a framework. When I started the course in 2004 I patterned that framework on Stuart Selber's aspects of functional, critical, and rhetorical multiliteracies. After attending WorldCALL in 2008 and meeting Mark Pegrum there, I divided the course into the lenses through which he viewed the topic in From Blogs to Bombs. But as I learned more about MOOCs and experienced them more and more firsthand, in 2011 I started dividing the topics of the available five weeks into those suggested in Dave Cormier's viral videos explaining the 5 steps to Success in a MOOC: orient, declare, network, cluster, and focus (this link will point you to all the videos in the series: http://youtu.be/r8avYQ5ZqM0). Now, in 2013, I have renamed the course Multiliteracies-MOOC (or multiMOOC for short) and Ana Cristina Pratas and I are going to run it even more overtly as a MOOC, as described in the proposal and rationale here: http://TinyURL.com/EVO2013MultiMOOC).
In this course, the syllabus is just a suggestion (orient). Participants decide, each individually, what they want to accomplish in the course (declare). They network with one another to collaborate on shared goals, they produce what I call Me-Portfolios to reflect on how well they have accomplished their goals, and this next time around I hope to introduce some form of badging to help participants focus their goals and vis a vis their accomplishments in the course. In our last Learning2gether event, on Sunday November 11, Jonathan Finkelstein offered to help us envisage and realize that through the LearningTimes BadgeStack facility, http://learning2gether.posterous.com/jonathan-finkelstein-walks-us-through-learnin.
So what is a MOOC course then?
First of all I should point out there there are different kinds of MOOCs, and mine is just one of those kinds. Lisa Lane has isolated at least three strains in the wild, as shown in this graphic from her blog post here: http://lisahistory.net/wordpress/2012/08/three-kinds-of-moocs/.
In this scheme, multiMOOC would straddle network and task-based. Many people these days would make that distinction in reference to cMOOCs and xMOOCs. The kind of MOOC that I am emulating is a cMOOC, a connectivist one, where the course facilitator lays out a cohesive structure for what is to be learned but, in Siemens's words, does not walk the path for the participants, expecting them to follow <http://youtu.be/VMfipxhT_Co>. The facilitator instead encourages the participants to find their own pathways through the material. What George actually says is transcribed in part here:
http://goodbyegutenberg.pbworks.com/w/page/48177073/GettingStarted2012evo
"I’m not aware of any research actually that says linear structure produces better outcomes than more chaotic meandering structure. Our intent, based on our theories of learning is to argue that the experience of learning, making sense of that chaos, is actually the heart of the learning experience, but if an instructor makes sense of that chaos for you and gives you all the readings and sets the full path in place for you then to a degree you are eviscerating the learner’s experience because now you’ve made sense of them and all you’ve told them is walk the path that I’ve formed. When it comes to complexity I’m a great fan of letting learner’s hack their way through that path and getting the value of that learning experience and that sense-making process.”
If the facilitator for whatever reason (too many participants, thinks it's better if s/he stands aside) gives the responsibility for sense-making to participants in a MOOC, then they might negotiate how to make sense of their syllabus with one another. This is where the massive part of MOOC kicks in. If the critical mass of participants is correct, then nuclear fission will occur in some people's brains, and they will be driven to blog and tag and comment on each other's posts, and leave reflections up as artifacts on the web. If the MOOC is run by Stephen Downes then it aggregates these posts through a script called gRSShopper <http://grsshopper.downes.ca/description.htm> and publishes them each day in a daily 'newsletter' generated from that aggregated content. If the MOOC is run by me then we have to replace the word 'massive' in its acronym with something more appropriate to the scale of the venture, say, 'minuscule' for example.
In any event, this addresses the first issue of our presentation, the appropriateness of MOOCs to teaching ESOL and other languages. Also the kind of MOOC best suited to a communicative and socially-driven endeavor such as language-learning is cMOOC, based on the concept as initiated by Siemens and Downes, with Cormier's contribution of the just-so acronym. As for why anyone would want to run such a course, the Internet is full of sites already where language teachers are competing with one another to share their knowledge with students in the most clever way possible, for free. Stephen Downes was once asked why he would flog himself across the back with a course open to thousands (of course, they didn't know at the time it would attract so many :-) when he could have left it at just the two dozen enrolled in the course at the college, and he replied simply, because he would learn from it. This is the prime motivator for setting up a cMOOC.
xMOOC vs cMOOC
I thought George Siemens (2012) had coined the term xMOOC (but have since heard Stephen Downes taking credit for that distinction in this recording: http://youtu.be/DGaUfWkJdi4) when he (Siemens) added a tentative ? to his remarks about "the well-financed MOOCs by Coursera and edX (xMOOCS?)." While taking pains to explain that feedback on xMOOCs suggested they were effective in achieving their purposes, he went on to explain:
John's is not a voice in the wilderness. Mike James in an article in I Programmer says that "the methods used by the hugely successful courses are little changed from the dark ages" http://www.i-programmer.info/professional-programmer/i-programmer/4494-massive-open-online-courses-fail-students-with-dark-age-methods.html. James refers to Sebastian Thun's co-professor in the Stanford AI course, Peter Norvig, who had made reference to the dark ages in his TED Talk on the AI MOOC, http://www.i-programmer.info/news/150-training-a-education/4398-peter-norvig-on-the-100000-student-classroom.html.
But this article is about what MOOC means to me (to me it means "cMOOC"). However, the extrapolation of the MOOC concept to xMOOC is I think part of what is irritating both John Hibbs and Leigh Blackall. When Sebastian Thun took the MOOC concept to the point where he demonstrated that he could not only teach Artificial Intelligence in a MOOC, and scale that to thousands of comers, AND assess and evaluate those participants through algorithms developed by Amazon, the proof of concept he had shown was xMOOC. Thun proved the concept so well that he decided his tenured position at Stanford was beneath him and left there to work for Google and ended up with his own xMOOC, Udacity, (http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/nov/11/online-free-learning-end-of-university). Thun is fully convinced that he made the right move, and he might be recognized as a visionary for it, and like Stephen Downes he will surely learn from the experience, but the motivation for this effort is more toward the flip side of education from that of cMOOC. Whereas one obvious limitation of cMOOC is that participants need to be highly motivated self-starters who are driven to learn about a particular topic, xMOOC is addressed more at the masses, the hoards of students for whom expensive Ivy League education (or increasingly, even community college education) is less and less an option. Candace Thille, director of the OLI at Carnegie Mellon University, worries that this development might lead to a "bifurcation" in educational opportunities in the not-that-distant future, http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/05/10/candace-thille-talks-moocs-and-machine-learning.
Given the downward spiral in the world's economies and shortage of resources, abundance is a word more and more applied to knowledge resources than to natural and manufactured ones, which are approaching scarcity. Where the ascendancy of knowledge abundance intersects with the increasing lack of natural and economic resources, xMOOCs may well be the most viable path of quality education for learners of the future. John's point has to do with the present state of the quality of THAT instruction, and how that might impact branding of universities associated with the current xMOOC players.
When is a MOOC not a MOOC?
So as not to get off on a semantic battle, technically, a MOOC is a MOOC if it has lots of participants, if it's open to anyone, which means for free (otherwise it wouldn't be open), if it's online, and if it's a course. All of the sites mentioned in this post are MOOCs in that broad definition.
So my conclusion applies to the spirit of MOOC, what I in my heart of hearts feel is MOOC in its pure form.
If I were to conceive of a diagram giving the whole spectrum of MOOC from the 19th century (as Cormier mentions) up through the 20th (with http://study.com and Writing for Webheads) and into the turn of the century (where for example EVO started teaching open courses massively online) - then I would put those early efforts off to the left and place cMOOC as conceived in 2008 squarely in the center, with the current evolution of xMOOCs veering off to the right and into the future.
I would say that open online courses we used to organize and try to scale massively predated a window of opportunity for social networking and aggregation of content that the cMOOCs slotted nicely into. And I would say that these early efforts depart from what I think of as truly MOOC about as equally as do the later renditions, which though technically massive, open, online, and courses lack a lot of the flavor of the middle-cMOOCs by virtue of not having well developed the connectivist aspects of the 2008 model.
MOOCs in the future: A return to center?
Stephen Downes thinks that MOOCs must evolve in a return to their roots. He illustrates this for us in a sketch in the Bb Collaborate / Elluminate version of the True History of MOOC (shown in this screen shot from
https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2012-09-26.0742.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350).
The sketch began with MOOCs in the middle and with the entities at the end of each line setting up free open online courses but monetizing some aspect in the form of accreditation, help facilities, etc. The circle around MOOC indicates that MOOCs utilize OER (open education resources) and the "open web of content" as illustrated in the diagram Stephen inserted and then relegated to the top left corner. Then Steve Hargadon asked in the discussion if these entities (the new xMOOCs) were paying tribute to their roots in cMOOC. Stephen said off the top of his head, "no" but did note that in something he had come across lately, it was found that the biggest predictor of success at Harvard (apart from getting into Harvard) was participation in study groups. As others commented, Stephen proceeded to wipe the MOOC from the center of his diagram and put in xMOOC with study groups forming around any given xMOOC.
Stephen then explained, for xMOOC to be truly viable, it will inevitably have to move in the direction of cMOOC. In his words, “The connectivism model will become the primary model … [xMOOCs] have to grow to become cMOOCS ... They will do that over time." You heard it first there, read it first here :-)
Referenced websites
Blackall, Leigh. (2012). A true(er) history of MOOCs. Open and Networked Learning. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://www.leighblackall.com/2012/10/a-trueer-history-of-moocs.html.
Downes, Stephen. (2012). A true history of the MOOC. Stephen's Web. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://www.downes.ca/presentation/300.
Hargadon, Steve. (2012). Tonight - A true history of the MOOC. Education, technology, social media, and you! Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://www.stevehargadon.com/2012/09/tonight-true-history-of-mooc.html.
Hibbs, John. (2012). MOOCs Global Education Conference Presentation. Ben Franklin. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://oregonhibbs.com/2012/10/29/moocs-global-ed-conference-presentation/
Hibbs, John. (2012). MOOCs For Credit – Coursera & Antioch. Ben Franklin. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://oregonhibbs.com/2012/10/30/moocs-for-credit-coursera-antioch/.
Hibbs, John. (2012). Crown Jewels, 21st Century Diploma Mills, MOOCs on the Moon. Ben Franklin. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://oregonhibbs.com/2012/11/13/crown-jewels-21st-century-diploma-mills/
Hibbs, John. (2012). Global conference Hibbs prepared remarks. Ben Franklin. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://oregonhibbs.com/2012/11/14/global-conference-hibbs-prepared-remarks/#more-682.
James, Mike. (2012). MOOCs Fail Students With Dark Age Methods. I Programmer. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://www.i-programmer.info/professional-programmer/i-programmer/4494-massive-open-online-courses-fail-students-with-dark-age-methods.html.
James, Mike. (2012). Peter Norvig On The 100,000-Student Classroom. I Programmer. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://www.i-programmer.info/news/150-training-a-education/4398-peter-norvig-on-the-100000-student-classroom.html.
Kolowich, Steve. (2012). MOOCs and Machines. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/05/10/candace-thille-talks-moocs-and-machine-learning.
Lane, Lisa. (2012). Lisa's (Online) Teaching Blog. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://lisahistory.net/wordpress/2012/08/three-kinds-of-moocs/.
Pegrum, Mark. (2009). From Blogs to Bombs: The Future of Digital Technologies in Education. UWA Publishing, Crawley, Western Australia.
Selber, Stuart. (2004). Multiliteracies for a digital age. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Siemens, George. (2012). MOOCs are really a platform. Elearnspace. http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2012/07/25/moocs-are-really-a-platform/
Stevens, Vance. (2009). Modeling Social Media in Groups, Communities, and Networks. TESL-EJ, Volume 13, Number 3: http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/past-issues/volume13/ej51/ej51int/.
Stevens, Vance. (forthcoming). Learning2gether: Wiki-based worldwide teacher professional development Paper presented at the annual TESOL Arabia conference in Dubai, March 9, 2012. Submitted for publication in the proceeds. Version available online: http://tinyurl.com/tacon2012L2g.
Tracey, Ryan. (2012). The future of MOOCs. E-learning Provocateur. http://ryan2point0.wordpress.com/2012/11/26/the-future-of-moocs/
I have to admit I would not be drawn to a blog post entitled so vacuously as, "what MOOC means to me" (so I thought up something catchy and made the real purpose of this post its subtitle). However, it's early days for working out what MOOC means for anyone. People have different ideas about what MOOC means, period. Obviously, the most relevant meaning is the one that reaches any one of us personally. MOOC means a lot to me, I'm going to try to pin down that meaning here, and maybe this will help you get your own grip on what MOOC might mean to you.
John Hibbs and I presented on the topic November 14, 2012, at the Global Education Conference (http://www.globaleducationconference.com/, which Steve Hargadon has pointed out, is a conference on global education, not an international conference particularly). John has prepared a few documents on his own blog:
- Our proposal, which John mainly wrote, with my feedback and input, is here: http://oregonhibbs.com/2012/10/29/moocs-global-ed-conference-presentation/#more-623
- John's "Willy Sutton" post: http://oregonhibbs.com/2012/11
/13/crown-jewels-21st-century- diploma-mills/ - John wrote out his talk for the GEC conference and blogged it here:
http://oregonhibbs.com/2012/11/14/global-conference-hibbs-pr epared-remarks/#more-682
- The Bb Collaborate recording is here:
- https://sas.elluminate.com/site/external/jwsdetect/nativeplayback.jnlp?sid=2008350&psid=2012-11-14.0429.D.53B5764000FF19A76D1D92E78857D7.vcr
- TinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/2012nov14gec
- Our slide show, revised after the presentation:
http://www.slideshare.net/vances/the-new-frontier-of-mooc - The mp3 version of the presentation is podcast here:
http://vance_stevens.podomatic.com/entry/index/2012-11-15T07_04_05-08_00
MOOCs for ESOL and language learning
There are two thrusts to the presentation. One is that an excellent audience for MOOCs might be in ESOL and language learning in general. To my knowledge, this is indeed an avenue not particularly explored or developed as MOOC, though my own online credentials stem from what might be viewed as one of many precursors to MOOCs. Dave Cormier takes credit in the "The True History of the MOOC" for invention of the term MOOC in the spring of 2008 (mp3 available, http://www.downes.ca/presentation/300). He does point out that there have been many MOOC-like configurations for learning since the 19th century, but that the term MOOC to describe them began with his inspiration, which Leigh Blackall says (in A True(er) History of Moocs http://www.leighblackall.com/2012/10/a-trueer-history-of-moocs.html), that MOOC's emergence as a meme for universities and businesses, has become 'irritating'. I have argued that we had MOOCs before 2008 as well, one example being http://study.com, which offered language lessons to all comers, and which spawned Writing for Webheads, which started leaving artifacts online in 1998 <http://prosites-vstevens.homestead.com/files/efi/webheads.htm>. So regarding what MOOC means to me, one interest I have in it is as a platform for what we were doing in 1998, when we were experimenting with platforms for teaching people ESOL and other languages for free online.
It was around this time that I became aware of John Hibbs's work in the pre-MOOC era. John had created a web page from which he launched a virtual ship each year to make a journey around the world hour by hour in 24 time zones <http://www.bfranklin.edu/gld8/gld8.htm>. He had organized people in different parts of the world to manage the program for that region and in 1999 I was tapped by the Middle East organizer Neil Hynd to make a presentation of some kind. I remember that the first one I did, I was patched into the stream through a POTS phone line, but in subsequent years John was using Real Player for streaming the audio, Though our team again presented in 2001 from Abu Dhabi using a POTS phone patch, we listened via Real Player. At the time this was impressive stuff, right on the cutting edge. John was one of the first pioneers of free (that was unusual!) online seminars of educators who could meet in real time through his web pages. John's effort stimulated me to do something similar in organizing three WiAOC's (Webheads in Action Online Convergence), each one a 3-day round the clock free all-volunteer online conference that I coordinated in 2005, 2007, and 2009 <http://wiaoc.org>.
Webheads in Action (WiA, http://webheads.info) came about in response to the fact that an emerging community of educators had started overwhelming the ESOL student voices in the original Writing for Webheads community. How this happened has been documented elsewhere (e.g. http://tinyurl.com/tacon2012L2g), but again as far as MOOCs are concerned, Webheads began focusing on teachers as opposed to students when it started giving EVO (Electronic Village Online, http://evosessions.pbworks.com) sessions in 2002, and the WiA community grew from there, to over a 1000 members today in just the Yahoo Group alone. Again, this is not meant to be a description of WiA or EVO, but simply to suggest that if WiA and EVO are considered to be courses, and if 1000 members is massive, then they are definitely open and online, and had we started them 6 years after we did we might have called them MOOCs. At the time we called them variously groups, communities, and networks (Stevens, 2009).
multiMOOC
Meanwhile I have been teaching a Multiliteracies course for EVO and the last couple of years I've been utilizing MOOC elements in the course at http://goodbyegutenberg.pbworks.com. It's essential for such a course to have a framework. When I started the course in 2004 I patterned that framework on Stuart Selber's aspects of functional, critical, and rhetorical multiliteracies. After attending WorldCALL in 2008 and meeting Mark Pegrum there, I divided the course into the lenses through which he viewed the topic in From Blogs to Bombs. But as I learned more about MOOCs and experienced them more and more firsthand, in 2011 I started dividing the topics of the available five weeks into those suggested in Dave Cormier's viral videos explaining the 5 steps to Success in a MOOC: orient, declare, network, cluster, and focus (this link will point you to all the videos in the series: http://youtu.be/r8avYQ5ZqM0). Now, in 2013, I have renamed the course Multiliteracies-MOOC (or multiMOOC for short) and Ana Cristina Pratas and I are going to run it even more overtly as a MOOC, as described in the proposal and rationale here: http://TinyURL.com/EVO2013MultiMOOC).
In this course, the syllabus is just a suggestion (orient). Participants decide, each individually, what they want to accomplish in the course (declare). They network with one another to collaborate on shared goals, they produce what I call Me-Portfolios to reflect on how well they have accomplished their goals, and this next time around I hope to introduce some form of badging to help participants focus their goals and vis a vis their accomplishments in the course. In our last Learning2gether event, on Sunday November 11, Jonathan Finkelstein offered to help us envisage and realize that through the LearningTimes BadgeStack facility, http://learning2gether.posterous.com/jonathan-finkelstein-walks-us-through-learnin.
So what is a MOOC course then?
First of all I should point out there there are different kinds of MOOCs, and mine is just one of those kinds. Lisa Lane has isolated at least three strains in the wild, as shown in this graphic from her blog post here: http://lisahistory.net/wordpress/2012/08/three-kinds-of-moocs/.
In this scheme, multiMOOC would straddle network and task-based. Many people these days would make that distinction in reference to cMOOCs and xMOOCs. The kind of MOOC that I am emulating is a cMOOC, a connectivist one, where the course facilitator lays out a cohesive structure for what is to be learned but, in Siemens's words, does not walk the path for the participants, expecting them to follow <http://youtu.be/VMfipxhT_Co>. The facilitator instead encourages the participants to find their own pathways through the material. What George actually says is transcribed in part here:
http://goodbyegutenberg.pbworks.com/w/page/48177073/GettingStarted2012evo
"I’m not aware of any research actually that says linear structure produces better outcomes than more chaotic meandering structure. Our intent, based on our theories of learning is to argue that the experience of learning, making sense of that chaos, is actually the heart of the learning experience, but if an instructor makes sense of that chaos for you and gives you all the readings and sets the full path in place for you then to a degree you are eviscerating the learner’s experience because now you’ve made sense of them and all you’ve told them is walk the path that I’ve formed. When it comes to complexity I’m a great fan of letting learner’s hack their way through that path and getting the value of that learning experience and that sense-making process.”
If the facilitator for whatever reason (too many participants, thinks it's better if s/he stands aside) gives the responsibility for sense-making to participants in a MOOC, then they might negotiate how to make sense of their syllabus with one another. This is where the massive part of MOOC kicks in. If the critical mass of participants is correct, then nuclear fission will occur in some people's brains, and they will be driven to blog and tag and comment on each other's posts, and leave reflections up as artifacts on the web. If the MOOC is run by Stephen Downes then it aggregates these posts through a script called gRSShopper <http://grsshopper.downes.ca/description.htm> and publishes them each day in a daily 'newsletter' generated from that aggregated content. If the MOOC is run by me then we have to replace the word 'massive' in its acronym with something more appropriate to the scale of the venture, say, 'minuscule' for example.
In any event, this addresses the first issue of our presentation, the appropriateness of MOOCs to teaching ESOL and other languages. Also the kind of MOOC best suited to a communicative and socially-driven endeavor such as language-learning is cMOOC, based on the concept as initiated by Siemens and Downes, with Cormier's contribution of the just-so acronym. As for why anyone would want to run such a course, the Internet is full of sites already where language teachers are competing with one another to share their knowledge with students in the most clever way possible, for free. Stephen Downes was once asked why he would flog himself across the back with a course open to thousands (of course, they didn't know at the time it would attract so many :-) when he could have left it at just the two dozen enrolled in the course at the college, and he replied simply, because he would learn from it. This is the prime motivator for setting up a cMOOC.
xMOOC vs cMOOC
I thought George Siemens (2012) had coined the term xMOOC (but have since heard Stephen Downes taking credit for that distinction in this recording: http://youtu.be/DGaUfWkJdi4) when he (Siemens) added a tentative ? to his remarks about "the well-financed MOOCs by Coursera and edX (xMOOCS?)." While taking pains to explain that feedback on xMOOCs suggested they were effective in achieving their purposes, he went on to explain:
Our MOOC model emphasizes creation, creativity, autonomy, and social networked learning. The Coursera model emphasizes a more traditional learning approach through video presentations and short quizzes and testing. Put another way, cMOOCs focus on knowledge creation and generation whereas xMOOCs focus on knowledge duplication.
This brings us to the second brunt of John's post, the second thrust of our presentation, and this is that MOOCs, and by this John means xMOOCs, as conceived by Coursera and Mechanical MOOC, might damage hard-earned university branding. John and I have both enrolled in such courses. I have experienced the very humanistic gentle reminders and suggestions issued by Mechanical MOOC, http://www.i-programmer.info/news/150-training-a-education/4684-mechanical-mooc-offers-introductory-python-.html, almost as if there was a human there, while John can (and will in the presentation) document very different experiences of frustration with Coursera. John's contention is that in their rush to sign on with mechanical courseware generators, universities might be weakening the quality of their offerings until the purveyors of such courses can improve their quality to the standard of instruction expected from those institutions. Though written to a different topic, Siemens's quotable "there's no there there" springs to mind from the anecdotal evidence that John reports (Siemens's quotable article: http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2011/07/30/losing-interest-in-social-media-there-is-no-there-there/).John's is not a voice in the wilderness. Mike James in an article in I Programmer says that "the methods used by the hugely successful courses are little changed from the dark ages" http://www.i-programmer.info/professional-programmer/i-programmer/4494-massive-open-online-courses-fail-students-with-dark-age-methods.html. James refers to Sebastian Thun's co-professor in the Stanford AI course, Peter Norvig, who had made reference to the dark ages in his TED Talk on the AI MOOC, http://www.i-programmer.info/news/150-training-a-education/4398-peter-norvig-on-the-100000-student-classroom.html.
But this article is about what MOOC means to me (to me it means "cMOOC"). However, the extrapolation of the MOOC concept to xMOOC is I think part of what is irritating both John Hibbs and Leigh Blackall. When Sebastian Thun took the MOOC concept to the point where he demonstrated that he could not only teach Artificial Intelligence in a MOOC, and scale that to thousands of comers, AND assess and evaluate those participants through algorithms developed by Amazon, the proof of concept he had shown was xMOOC. Thun proved the concept so well that he decided his tenured position at Stanford was beneath him and left there to work for Google and ended up with his own xMOOC, Udacity, (http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/nov/11/online-free-learning-end-of-university). Thun is fully convinced that he made the right move, and he might be recognized as a visionary for it, and like Stephen Downes he will surely learn from the experience, but the motivation for this effort is more toward the flip side of education from that of cMOOC. Whereas one obvious limitation of cMOOC is that participants need to be highly motivated self-starters who are driven to learn about a particular topic, xMOOC is addressed more at the masses, the hoards of students for whom expensive Ivy League education (or increasingly, even community college education) is less and less an option. Candace Thille, director of the OLI at Carnegie Mellon University, worries that this development might lead to a "bifurcation" in educational opportunities in the not-that-distant future, http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/05/10/candace-thille-talks-moocs-and-machine-learning.
Given the downward spiral in the world's economies and shortage of resources, abundance is a word more and more applied to knowledge resources than to natural and manufactured ones, which are approaching scarcity. Where the ascendancy of knowledge abundance intersects with the increasing lack of natural and economic resources, xMOOCs may well be the most viable path of quality education for learners of the future. John's point has to do with the present state of the quality of THAT instruction, and how that might impact branding of universities associated with the current xMOOC players.
When is a MOOC not a MOOC?
So as not to get off on a semantic battle, technically, a MOOC is a MOOC if it has lots of participants, if it's open to anyone, which means for free (otherwise it wouldn't be open), if it's online, and if it's a course. All of the sites mentioned in this post are MOOCs in that broad definition.
So my conclusion applies to the spirit of MOOC, what I in my heart of hearts feel is MOOC in its pure form.
If I were to conceive of a diagram giving the whole spectrum of MOOC from the 19th century (as Cormier mentions) up through the 20th (with http://study.com and Writing for Webheads) and into the turn of the century (where for example EVO started teaching open courses massively online) - then I would put those early efforts off to the left and place cMOOC as conceived in 2008 squarely in the center, with the current evolution of xMOOCs veering off to the right and into the future.
I would say that open online courses we used to organize and try to scale massively predated a window of opportunity for social networking and aggregation of content that the cMOOCs slotted nicely into. And I would say that these early efforts depart from what I think of as truly MOOC about as equally as do the later renditions, which though technically massive, open, online, and courses lack a lot of the flavor of the middle-cMOOCs by virtue of not having well developed the connectivist aspects of the 2008 model.
MOOCs in the future: A return to center?
Stephen Downes thinks that MOOCs must evolve in a return to their roots. He illustrates this for us in a sketch in the Bb Collaborate / Elluminate version of the True History of MOOC (shown in this screen shot from
https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2012-09-26.0742.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350).
Referenced websites
Blackall, Leigh. (2012). A true(er) history of MOOCs. Open and Networked Learning. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://www.leighblackall.com/2012/10/a-trueer-history-of-moocs.html.
Downes, Stephen. (2012). A true history of the MOOC. Stephen's Web. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://www.downes.ca/presentation/300.
Hargadon, Steve. (2012). Tonight - A true history of the MOOC. Education, technology, social media, and you! Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://www.stevehargadon.com/2012/09/tonight-true-history-of-mooc.html.
Hibbs, John. (2012). MOOCs Global Education Conference Presentation. Ben Franklin. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://oregonhibbs.com/2012/10/29/moocs-global-ed-conference-presentation/
Hibbs, John. (2012). MOOCs For Credit – Coursera & Antioch. Ben Franklin. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://oregonhibbs.com/2012/10/30/moocs-for-credit-coursera-antioch/.
Hibbs, John. (2012). Crown Jewels, 21st Century Diploma Mills, MOOCs on the Moon. Ben Franklin. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://oregonhibbs.com/2012/11/13/crown-jewels-21st-century-diploma-mills/
Hibbs, John. (2012). Global conference Hibbs prepared remarks. Ben Franklin. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://oregonhibbs.com/2012/11/14/global-conference-hibbs-prepared-remarks/#more-682.
James, Mike. (2012). MOOCs Fail Students With Dark Age Methods. I Programmer. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://www.i-programmer.info/professional-programmer/i-programmer/4494-massive-open-online-courses-fail-students-with-dark-age-methods.html.
James, Mike. (2012). Peter Norvig On The 100,000-Student Classroom. I Programmer. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://www.i-programmer.info/news/150-training-a-education/4398-peter-norvig-on-the-100000-student-classroom.html.
Kolowich, Steve. (2012). MOOCs and Machines. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/05/10/candace-thille-talks-moocs-and-machine-learning.
Lane, Lisa. (2012). Lisa's (Online) Teaching Blog. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://lisahistory.net/wordpress/2012/08/three-kinds-of-moocs/.
Pegrum, Mark. (2009). From Blogs to Bombs: The Future of Digital Technologies in Education. UWA Publishing, Crawley, Western Australia.
Selber, Stuart. (2004). Multiliteracies for a digital age. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Siemens, George. (2012). MOOCs are really a platform. Elearnspace. http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2012/07/25/moocs-are-really-a-platform/
Stevens, Vance. (2009). Modeling Social Media in Groups, Communities, and Networks. TESL-EJ, Volume 13, Number 3: http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/past-issues/volume13/ej51/ej51int/.
Stevens, Vance. (forthcoming). Learning2gether: Wiki-based worldwide teacher professional development Paper presented at the annual TESOL Arabia conference in Dubai, March 9, 2012. Submitted for publication in the proceeds. Version available online: http://tinyurl.com/tacon2012L2g.
Tracey, Ryan. (2012). The future of MOOCs. E-learning Provocateur. http://ryan2point0.wordpress.com/2012/11/26/the-future-of-moocs/
Friday, September 21, 2012
Why School Indeed?
Will Richardson has just
written an interesting book called Why School? He publicized it on his social networks, it was only $3 for an eBook copy, so I got one on my Kindle Fire and read it on the plane from Dubai to Istanbul, where I was going to present a paper at the aPlanet conference at Yeditepe University on Saturday, http://aplanetconference.wordpress.com/.
And finally, Sugata Mitra on re-envisaging learning ...
Will's TEDx Melbourne video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ekcWQxgk3k
I was coming to Istanbul to give a talk on http://learning2gether.pbworks.com which I have been organizing each week since 2010. The time it takes me to archive and podcast the outcomes of those weekly events, at http://learning3gether.posterous.com, is one reason I've been blogging here so rarely lately. But now, having had the opportunity on the plane to read Will's book while coming to speak on my project, I've come up with some pieces I can loosely join in a blog post, and again in my presentation.
Incidentally, I've been following Will since his early days with http://weblogg-ed.com/. He made one of the first Elluminate webinar recordings I ever watched (I watched it in 2003) wherein he explained with screenshots on the whiteboard how teachers could get their students to blog and then follow what they were doing in Bloglines, amazing stuff back then. This technique still works in Google Reader. When I have my students blog I can follow their blogs and see when they have updated content when the blog title turns bold.
In his book Richardson explains how schools
are designed on models of information scarcity, when now that we live in a
world of abundance, people can, and do, learn what they want to know, when they
need to know it. This renders many aspects of the top-down model of
teaching irrelevant, and there are two approaches to the problem. Since school is a $500 billion-a-year business in K-12 in the
USA alone there is a money-politics faction that seeks to cash in on the solution by
delivering the old model better. Richardson argues that the answer is not
better, but differently, yet educators whose experience with school is rooted
in an era of scarcity are poorly equipped to grasp the concept of different in
a world of abundance. Going on Herbert Gerjoy’s definition of illiterate as
being not those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot ‘learn, unlearn,
and relearn’ Richardson articulates 6 steps to help teachers relearn their
trade. These are
- Share
everything (or at least something)
- Discover,
don’t deliver, the curriculum
- Talk
to strangers (filter and interact with others in your personal learning network)
- Be
a master learner
- Do
real work, for real audiences
- Transfer the power (over who drives curriculum)
To help teachers become
master learners, that is teachers adept at unlearning and relearning how an
abundance of tools can be applied to transformative outcomes for students, a
number of educators worldwide have been meeting regularly online each Sunday
afternoon (in the UAE) in some form or another for the past decade, but since
2010 as http://Learning2gether.pbworks.com.
Since EdTech SIG started its Ning Learning2gether events have always been
listed at http://taedtech.ning.com/events.
Learning2gether is a wiki, which means that anyone who wishes to contribute a
presentation, or lead a discussion, can join and write that event in. Through this way of learning together, we
seek to model for one another how to best prepare students to relearn how to
compete for jobs that haven't been invented yet. By discovering for ourselves how
learning occurs using online tools and connections with one another in real projects
with meaningful outcomes, we learn how we can empower our students to learn likewise
once we have gained familiarity with the available tools and processes.
Seth Godin provides his own take on "What is school for?" Good morning boys and girls, listen up!
Richardson, W. (2012). Why School? How Education Must Change When Learning and Information are Everywhere. Ted Conferences and Amazon Digital Services, Inc., 51 pages (estimated).
http://www.amazon.com/kindle/dp/B00998J5YQ/ref=rdr_kindle_ext_eos_detail
Will's blog post on his book: http://willrichardson.com/post/31465872495/why-school
Seth Godin provides his own take on "What is school for?" Good morning boys and girls, listen up!
Richardson, W. (2012). Why School? How Education Must Change When Learning and Information are Everywhere. Ted Conferences and Amazon Digital Services, Inc., 51 pages (estimated).
http://www.amazon.com/kindle/dp/B00998J5YQ/ref=rdr_kindle_ext_eos_detail
Will's blog post on his book: http://willrichardson.com/post/31465872495/why-school
And finally, Sugata Mitra on re-envisaging learning ...
Saturday, March 17, 2012
DIYLMS: Do-it-yourself learning management systems
It's been a while since I've posted here, but meanwhile I've been laying tracks in other spaces around the Web. I still consider this to be my central blog where I try to record my most introspective thoughts on social media assisted learning but I've been posting my most recent writings in other blogs and wikis.
I've just returned from a stint of edutourism in Morocco and Turkey, interspersed with two presentations at TESOL Arabia in Dubai, and I'm leaving shortly for Philadelphia where I'm due to give yet another presentation, followed by another in Sharjah April 3, and then a final one scheduled for Taichung in May, before I finish my teaching and take a break for the summer.
The talk in Taichung is a co-presentation with Aiden Yeh on "Thinking SMALL: Facilitating online teacher professional development" and is along the lines of a book chapter I had promised to produce last summer, before losing my previous job and finding myself up against a wall, which I've now managed to climb and scramble over. In the process of finding a way over that wall, the book chapter fell by the wayside.
As a part of that protracted scramble I took on a part-time teaching job with New York Institute of Technology in Abu Dhabi teaching research writing to expat and local UAE students at NYIT. I was given a syllabus to cover but was left to my own devices as to how I would realize it, so I created a wiki with links to online versions of all the course materials at http://fcwr101.pbworks.com/ and got students to submit their work primarily in Google Docs. When I finally got a full-time job with the Higher Colleges of Technology Abu Dhabi Men's College, CERT, I carried over what I had learned working with student writers at NYIT to my new posting teaching academic composition via yet another wiki, this time tailor-made for cadets at the UAE Naval College. Here I employed similar techniques as at NYIT, taking submissions in Google Docs and organizing the course with links to syllabus materials, screencast tutorials, and other course resources at another wiki made for that purpose, http://academiccomposition.pbworks.com/.
I felt more comfortable with constructing courses in this way than I did using Moodle (as I'd been doing in my previous teaching position at The Petroleum Institute, http://www.pimoodle.org/course/category.php?id=9, guest access allowed). My realization that a wiki-based environment could do much and more of what I had accomplished with Moodle led me to coin a concept I dubbed DIYLMS, do-it-yourself learning management systems. When I was invited to go to Marrakech as guest of the IATEFL Learning Technologies Special Interest Group (LT-SIG) and MATE (Moroccan Associate of Teachers of English) to give the keynote speech at a conference there, I suggested DIYLMS as a topic. This was fine with them, my talk was very well received, and I archived the event with recordings and other image artifacts at one of my Posterous blog spaces, since moved to http://advanceducation.blogspot.com.au/2013/04/learner-centered-do-it-yourself.html
Here are the slides from that keynote:
I had already written a rationale for the DIYLMS concept as a link from the course at NYIT http://fcwr101.pbworks.com/DIYLMS but I expanded this into its own wiki when I was asked to help with a pre-conference development course in Dubai the day before the official start of the 2012 TESOL Arabia Conference at the HCT Dubai Women's College. The professional development course was entitled "Online Teaching and Learning in TESOL", and I followed fellow-presenters Nicky Hockly and Justin Shewell to give my workshop on DIYLMS. True to form, I created a wiki as a portal for the workshop and gave a hands-on follow up to the rationale I'd laid down in Marrakech. The wiki portal is here: http://diylms.pbworks.com/ and the slides are below:
I've just returned from a stint of edutourism in Morocco and Turkey, interspersed with two presentations at TESOL Arabia in Dubai, and I'm leaving shortly for Philadelphia where I'm due to give yet another presentation, followed by another in Sharjah April 3, and then a final one scheduled for Taichung in May, before I finish my teaching and take a break for the summer.
The talk in Taichung is a co-presentation with Aiden Yeh on "Thinking SMALL: Facilitating online teacher professional development" and is along the lines of a book chapter I had promised to produce last summer, before losing my previous job and finding myself up against a wall, which I've now managed to climb and scramble over. In the process of finding a way over that wall, the book chapter fell by the wayside.
As a part of that protracted scramble I took on a part-time teaching job with New York Institute of Technology in Abu Dhabi teaching research writing to expat and local UAE students at NYIT. I was given a syllabus to cover but was left to my own devices as to how I would realize it, so I created a wiki with links to online versions of all the course materials at http://fcwr101.pbworks.com/ and got students to submit their work primarily in Google Docs. When I finally got a full-time job with the Higher Colleges of Technology Abu Dhabi Men's College, CERT, I carried over what I had learned working with student writers at NYIT to my new posting teaching academic composition via yet another wiki, this time tailor-made for cadets at the UAE Naval College. Here I employed similar techniques as at NYIT, taking submissions in Google Docs and organizing the course with links to syllabus materials, screencast tutorials, and other course resources at another wiki made for that purpose, http://academiccomposition.pbworks.com/.
I felt more comfortable with constructing courses in this way than I did using Moodle (as I'd been doing in my previous teaching position at The Petroleum Institute, http://www.pimoodle.org/course/category.php?id=9, guest access allowed). My realization that a wiki-based environment could do much and more of what I had accomplished with Moodle led me to coin a concept I dubbed DIYLMS, do-it-yourself learning management systems. When I was invited to go to Marrakech as guest of the IATEFL Learning Technologies Special Interest Group (LT-SIG) and MATE (Moroccan Associate of Teachers of English) to give the keynote speech at a conference there, I suggested DIYLMS as a topic. This was fine with them, my talk was very well received, and I archived the event with recordings and other image artifacts at one of my Posterous blog spaces, since moved to http://advanceducation.blogspot.com.au/2013/04/learner-centered-do-it-yourself.html
Here are the slides from that keynote:
I had already written a rationale for the DIYLMS concept as a link from the course at NYIT http://fcwr101.pbworks.com/DIYLMS but I expanded this into its own wiki when I was asked to help with a pre-conference development course in Dubai the day before the official start of the 2012 TESOL Arabia Conference at the HCT Dubai Women's College. The professional development course was entitled "Online Teaching and Learning in TESOL", and I followed fellow-presenters Nicky Hockly and Justin Shewell to give my workshop on DIYLMS. True to form, I created a wiki as a portal for the workshop and gave a hands-on follow up to the rationale I'd laid down in Marrakech. The wiki portal is here: http://diylms.pbworks.com/ and the slides are below:
DIYLMS = Do it yourself Learning Management Systems, Part 2 the Workshop
View more PowerPoint from Vance Stevens
This event took place just before a deadline I was supposed to meet as editor of the On the Internet column in the TESL-EJ journal, so I drafted an article explaining the components of DIYLMS and posted it to its own blog which I'd created in case any participants wanted to subscribe and experience firsthand the particular affordances of Posterous as a tool in DIYLMS:
http://diylms.posterous.com/ (Posterous shut down at the end of April 2013; the post has since moved to http://advanceducation.blogspot.com.au/2013/04/learner-centered-do-it-yourself.html). All of this was meant to model for participants at the TESOL Arabia workshop how a DIYLMS might be constructed and convey something of its look and feel to those who participated in the workshop. The TESL-EJ version has since been published as:
Stevens, Vance. (2012). Learner-centered Do-it-yourself Learning Management Systems. TESL-EJ, Volume 15, Number 4, pp. 1-14: http://tesl-ej.org/pdf/ej60/int.pdf. Also at http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume15/ej60/ej60int/
Meanwhile I was invited to travel to Turkey as guest of Erzincan University to give seminars to their students and teachers March 13 and 14, 2012. Details were ironed out at the last minute, and I was not given adequate notice to prepare handouts for the students, so again I used the tried and true techniques of working from a wiki which I created for the occasion: http://erzincancalling.pbworks.com/. Again my intent was to teach through demonstrating and modeling how learning can accrue from appropriately configured use of social media-enabled Web 2.0 tools.
The workshop was a challenge because it was given to four dozen participants sitting at as many computers arranged in rows set perpendicular to the front of the room, so those in the back of the room were for all intents and purposes distance learners. I reached into my hat and pulled out one rabbit after another in an attempt to attract the students to spaces we could all cohabitate online. At some point, one of the brighter students asked the correct question; essentially, how does this all hang together and what does it have to do with learning English?
In answer to that I got the students to crowd-source sites they were using for learning English in TitanPad, one of the more robust Etherpad clones, and had just pasted their contributions into a Google Doc when the workshop abruptly ended with the students simultaneously exhibiting signs of not wanting to miss lunch, but not before they had almost all registered in the Google Doc I had just created for them as the next step in their interactive learning process.
I was at that point only midstream in where I was trying to take them but I realized I had a powerful tool in that they were all registered in this one Google Doc, so I registered their teachers there as well, and began imagining that this could potentially be just the start of an extended blended learning journey, if the students wanted to carry on where we'd left off through use of the tools I had just put in place for them.
Meanwhile one of my Facebook friends had been asking if anyone could contribute an article needed right away for a journal in Serbia, so I agreed to write up my observations as further explanation to the students and teachers in Erzincan of what we had started together, and I invited my Serbian colleagues to publish it if they wished. That writeup has been moved here: http://advanceducation.blogspot.com.au/2013/04/turning-3-hour-face-to-face-seminar.html
I'm due to trot all this out once again April 3rd at the 6th eLearning in Action conference at the Sharjah Higher Colleges of Technology: http://194.170.54.16/events/edtechpd2012/index.asp, which I hope to simulcast in Blackboard / Collaborate (Elluminate). If you can stand more, stay tuned :-)
I hope to add here links to that recording, as well as links to my TESL-EJ article and to the one for the Serbian journal, both of which I think should be published soon.
This event took place just before a deadline I was supposed to meet as editor of the On the Internet column in the TESL-EJ journal, so I drafted an article explaining the components of DIYLMS and posted it to its own blog which I'd created in case any participants wanted to subscribe and experience firsthand the particular affordances of Posterous as a tool in DIYLMS:
http://diylms.posterous.com/ (Posterous shut down at the end of April 2013; the post has since moved to http://advanceducation.blogspot.com.au/2013/04/learner-centered-do-it-yourself.html). All of this was meant to model for participants at the TESOL Arabia workshop how a DIYLMS might be constructed and convey something of its look and feel to those who participated in the workshop. The TESL-EJ version has since been published as:
Stevens, Vance. (2012). Learner-centered Do-it-yourself Learning Management Systems. TESL-EJ, Volume 15, Number 4, pp. 1-14: http://tesl-ej.org/pdf/ej60/int.pdf. Also at http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume15/ej60/ej60int/
Meanwhile I was invited to travel to Turkey as guest of Erzincan University to give seminars to their students and teachers March 13 and 14, 2012. Details were ironed out at the last minute, and I was not given adequate notice to prepare handouts for the students, so again I used the tried and true techniques of working from a wiki which I created for the occasion: http://erzincancalling.pbworks.com/. Again my intent was to teach through demonstrating and modeling how learning can accrue from appropriately configured use of social media-enabled Web 2.0 tools.
The workshop was a challenge because it was given to four dozen participants sitting at as many computers arranged in rows set perpendicular to the front of the room, so those in the back of the room were for all intents and purposes distance learners. I reached into my hat and pulled out one rabbit after another in an attempt to attract the students to spaces we could all cohabitate online. At some point, one of the brighter students asked the correct question; essentially, how does this all hang together and what does it have to do with learning English?
In answer to that I got the students to crowd-source sites they were using for learning English in TitanPad, one of the more robust Etherpad clones, and had just pasted their contributions into a Google Doc when the workshop abruptly ended with the students simultaneously exhibiting signs of not wanting to miss lunch, but not before they had almost all registered in the Google Doc I had just created for them as the next step in their interactive learning process.
I was at that point only midstream in where I was trying to take them but I realized I had a powerful tool in that they were all registered in this one Google Doc, so I registered their teachers there as well, and began imagining that this could potentially be just the start of an extended blended learning journey, if the students wanted to carry on where we'd left off through use of the tools I had just put in place for them.
Meanwhile one of my Facebook friends had been asking if anyone could contribute an article needed right away for a journal in Serbia, so I agreed to write up my observations as further explanation to the students and teachers in Erzincan of what we had started together, and I invited my Serbian colleagues to publish it if they wished. That writeup has been moved here: http://advanceducation.blogspot.com.au/2013/04/turning-3-hour-face-to-face-seminar.html
I'm due to trot all this out once again April 3rd at the 6th eLearning in Action conference at the Sharjah Higher Colleges of Technology: http://194.170.54.16/events/edtechpd2012/index.asp, which I hope to simulcast in Blackboard / Collaborate (Elluminate). If you can stand more, stay tuned :-)
I hope to add here links to that recording, as well as links to my TESL-EJ article and to the one for the Serbian journal, both of which I think should be published soon.
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Turning a 3-hour face-to-face seminar into an opportunity for extended online blended learning
Originally published in the Posterous blog ErzincanCALLing, March 15, 2012; Posterous shuts down April 30, 2013
an article by Vance Stevens
Higher Colleges of Technology, ADMC, CERT, UAE Naval College
This article reports on a 3-hour seminar which I was invited to give on March 13, 2012, at Erzincan University. The purpose of the seminar was to raise the consciousness of Aviation College students in Erzincan, Turkey about techniques for learning English and how to use online resources for self-study.
I showed an example of how my own PLN had worked that very morning, to alert me to a course that Mark Pegrum had just stated on advanced e-learning. At my request, he provided the URL: http://e-language.wikispaces.com/e-tools
In such an environment it's difficult to get to know one another and to engage participation from even a small percentage of those present. So I explained that we would be applying a tag to everything we produced during the three hours. The tag would be erzincancalling.
We began with Wallwisher at http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/erzincancalling. Wallwisher is one way to get feedback from a large group, without participants having to create an account somewhere and log in.
I asked the students to post on at Wallwisher their names and whether they were primarily creators or consumers of content online. I sorted the notes in my version of the wall so we could see the creators and consumers. As the position of all the notes gets scrambled any time the wall is refreshed, I captured my re-orderiing by making a screenshot of our Wallwisher using the Jing tool, available for free from http://www.techsmith.com/jing.html (another similar tool is available from http://www.screenr.com/).
These tools again enable us to communicate with large groups by making a screenshot or even a video of something happening on your computer (for example, I might say, "Here is how you do something ... I'll show you and if you need to see it again, I'm recording it, and you can replay it at this URL"). The recording is uploaded to Jing and then has a URL. The URL can be distributed to everyone in the group so they can all see what the teacher (or student) wants to show the group.
In order to make use of our tag I tried to keep the participants active during the seminar. I asked them for example, to take photos with their cell phones, upload them to Flickr, and tag them erzincancalling. The idea was to retrieve these photos from Flickr by searching on our tag, and then display them again on that tag in http://taggalaxy.de. This didn’t work well in the time allowed, but some of the photos are available in my photostream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/vancestevens/.
I also tried to get the group tweeting on our hash tag. During the workshop, no one actually did this apart from me and two teachers from Hong Kong and Uzbekistan who tweeted using#erzincancalling. This screenshot shows the result:
If there is a lot of tagging activity during a workshop, then we can usually aggregate these tagged items in various spaces as explained here: http://erzincancalling.pbworks.com/aggregation. As it turned out, we were only able to attract our tweets to our Spezify page http://spezify.com/#/erzincancalling.
Feedback
Vance posted this as a follow-up comment
Hi everyone, I don't know if there will be any follow up from the seeds of learning we have planted here, but if there is, I am ready at any time to help you follow up on the continuation of your learning journey.
an article by Vance Stevens
Higher Colleges of Technology, ADMC, CERT, UAE Naval College
This article reports on a 3-hour seminar which I was invited to give on March 13, 2012, at Erzincan University. The purpose of the seminar was to raise the consciousness of Aviation College students in Erzincan, Turkey about techniques for learning English and how to use online resources for self-study.
I began the seminar by explaining why I had called the seminar Erzincan CALLing. I explained that the title was a play on CALL, computer-assisted language learning, but that I was lately referring to this as SMALL, for social-media assisted language learning. Now that computers are coming to be normalized, the C in the acronym is no longer revelatory. However, I think that connecting people through social media is, and is how computers should be used for language learning. I advised the students that one good way to use computers to learn English is to put yourself in touch with others in a PLN, or personal learning network (sometimes called a PLE, personal learning environment). I showed the students one of the excellent PLE/PLN diagrams that can be found here: http://edtechpost.wikispaces.com/PLE+Diagrams
I showed an example of how my own PLN had worked that very morning, to alert me to a course that Mark Pegrum had just stated on advanced e-learning. At my request, he provided the URL: http://e-language.wikispaces.com/e-tools
The plan for the workshop was quite ambitious. The full plan can be seen at http://erzincancalling.pbworks.com/. The plan was only partially achieved, but what was accomplished was enough to set the group on a path for extended blended learning, should they choose to follow that path.
The workshop took place in a computer lab with around 50 computers, almost all of them taken by the 45 students and half a dozen teachers who attended the workshop. This is what it looked like:
In such an environment it's difficult to get to know one another and to engage participation from even a small percentage of those present. So I explained that we would be applying a tag to everything we produced during the three hours. The tag would be erzincancalling.
We began with Wallwisher at http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/erzincancalling. Wallwisher is one way to get feedback from a large group, without participants having to create an account somewhere and log in.
I asked the students to post on at Wallwisher their names and whether they were primarily creators or consumers of content online. I sorted the notes in my version of the wall so we could see the creators and consumers. As the position of all the notes gets scrambled any time the wall is refreshed, I captured my re-orderiing by making a screenshot of our Wallwisher using the Jing tool, available for free from http://www.techsmith.com/jing.html (another similar tool is available from http://www.screenr.com/).
These tools again enable us to communicate with large groups by making a screenshot or even a video of something happening on your computer (for example, I might say, "Here is how you do something ... I'll show you and if you need to see it again, I'm recording it, and you can replay it at this URL"). The recording is uploaded to Jing and then has a URL. The URL can be distributed to everyone in the group so they can all see what the teacher (or student) wants to show the group.
The above screen capture was uploaded to Jing, but its URL would be hard to communicate to the group. The URL for this one was “screencast.com slash t slash nR23u7qae”. It's hard for a teacher to SAY that, and if I write it down and display it, it's hard for students to copy it down exactly, with upper and lowercase characters intact. So here are three ways I can communicate URLs to the group.
- Since I am keeping a wiki, and for anyone who is on that page, I can write the URL in the wiki and invite the students to refresh the wiki, find the URL, and click on it.
- I can use http://tinyurl.com to turn a complicated URL into something that is easier for me to say aloud so that students can enter it into their browsers
- I can TAG the URL in Delicious and then students can find it by visiting the link where all our tagged items in Delicious will always appear. Since our tag is erzincancalling, we can find all URLs with that tag here: http://www.delicious.com/tag/erzincancalling.
If the teacher wants to show an item just tagged, it’s best to use the teacher’s Delicious account, http://www.delicious.com/vancestevens/erzincancalling, as shown in this Jing screen-capture:
In order to make use of our tag I tried to keep the participants active during the seminar. I asked them for example, to take photos with their cell phones, upload them to Flickr, and tag them erzincancalling. The idea was to retrieve these photos from Flickr by searching on our tag, and then display them again on that tag in http://taggalaxy.de. This didn’t work well in the time allowed, but some of the photos are available in my photostream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/vancestevens/.
I also tried to get the group tweeting on our hash tag. During the workshop, no one actually did this apart from me and two teachers from Hong Kong and Uzbekistan who tweeted using#erzincancalling. This screenshot shows the result:
If there is a lot of tagging activity during a workshop, then we can usually aggregate these tagged items in various spaces as explained here: http://erzincancalling.pbworks.com/aggregation. As it turned out, we were only able to attract our tweets to our Spezify page http://spezify.com/#/erzincancalling.
At this point in the workshop, one student asked me a good question, what did all this have to do with learning English? So I decided to elicit from the students web sites that they knew of that would help them with that. Again, in groups of so many students, it is difficult to elicit responses quickly and effectively from each person, so this time I used an Etherpad clone, a URL where all students could go and write at the same time their answer to our poll question (What is your favorite website for learning English?) at the same time.
- There's more about the Etherpad clones here:
Lowensohn, J. (2010). EtherPad dies this week: Here are six great clones. CNET News. Retrieved on March 6, 2012 from http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-20004686-248.html. - We found that Synch.in didn't work well (limited to only 8 participants)
- We moved to http://titanpad.com/WFs4aBbomd and got the results we wanted
At the break someone inadvertently (or for fun :-) deleted all the contents of the TitanPad, but one of the great things about this program is that you can get everything back by using the time slider. While the students were on break I restored what the students had contributed and copied the good contents into a Google Doc, and when the students returned they spent the next 15 minutes adding themselves to the Google Doc on my computer. And then it suddenly became lunchtime and the students all left after thanking me very much for the presentation :-)
And that is where most presentations like this end. When all the students leave, all is soon forgotten.
But NOT with this one ...
The most powerful takeaway from this presentation is that the presentation does not need to end. Now the learning can begin!
The students asked me to show them something that would help them learn English. I did. We created a Google Doc. We shared it. We gave it a TinyURL http://tinyurl.com/erzincancalling. It's still there. All the students can read it and write on it. All their English teachers were added as contributing editors as well.
This report was put in blog at http://erzincancalling.posterous.com. The students have been asked via the Google Doc and via their teachers to subscribe to that blog. If they do that I can promote them to authors. It's possible that they might comment on this post, or make posts of their own. If they do that, then email is sent to all subscribers of the blog. When subscribers reply to the email, their comments appear automatically on the blog and email is again sent to all subscribers that comments were made, and they can reply by email if they wish. Students can also post to the blog by email, and any attachment they include will be embedded in the blog.
This is one of the things I wanted to show them in the workshop, but even though time ran out, there is no reason in a connected world that time has to run out on learning :-)
Feedback
Hi everyone, I don't know if there will be any follow up from the seeds of learning we have planted here, but if there is, I am ready at any time to help you follow up on the continuation of your learning journey.
There are many ways to do this. For example, I meet with other teachers and any interested students to discuss education each week. We meet usually between the hours of 1200 to 1500 GMT each Sunday, and if you wish to join us, see where we'll be next at http://learning2gether.pbworks.com
Meanwhile, the article I posted here has been published in the online journal TESL-EJ. You can find the article here: http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume15/ej60/ej60int/
All the best and thanks for an enjoyable visit to Erzincan.
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