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The Narrows and the Shallows

2011-08-03T10:40:00.063Z

Most of us can relate to the befuddled lady in the "Age-Activated Attention Deficit Disorder" video http://tinyurl.com/6xcej6g. With the constant distractions of modern life interrupting completion of any tasks begun, the lady depicted can't keep up with frequent alterations to her memory synapses which are potentially activating a few genes capable of creating protein for memory storage which might find their way into the gene pool in case reproduction was on her agenda (oh, NOW I remember where I was going in the car :-)

For many of us, these distractions would be Internet-activated: checking email, Facebook, and hey what's this? Google Plus! This is new, can't wait to check this out! We get a pleasant jolt of dopamine in our nerve synapses just anticipating the next Internet event, the classic addiction syndrome, to which many of us succumb at the expense of other things we should be doing. Worse, our brains are being altered in favor of accommodating our newly learned horizontal tracking behaviors and this is drawing resources from areas that used to accommodate our more focused vertical thinking skills. These facts are as certain as global warming. The question is, as with global warming, to what extent should we be concerned?

In his book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr lays out a case for his contention that our infatuation for Internet is costing us our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection. In one collapsible argument after another, Carr follows up with a next level of argument in which he says he's aware that we would have spotted that flaw, but hang on, here's more evidence.

My video conception of denizens of this planet being overwhelmed with inputs impinging on focus takes place during Neanderthal times, in a cave. Someone is hungry so Daddy goes looking for his club but on the way gets distracted by a painting on a wall near where he sometimes leaves his clubs but he's out of a certain pigment, so he calls to the wife who suggests he go into the forest and collect some moss off the trees. Meanwhile granny is remarking on the fact that their last child was born with a forehead with distinctly less of a slope (due to re-allocaton of brain cells, get it?). Distracted, she fails to prevent another child touching a hot coal near the fire. The child starts crying.

So what else is new? Learning creates new synapses. It changes our brains. That's positive isn't it? We survivors are here thanks to that process of species improvement.

Paul Howard Jones uses the analogy of fire to compare its use with that of the Internet http://www.thersa.org/events/video/vision-videos/dr-paul-howard-jones. Fire brings warmth and access to fine cuisine but it can be the source of tragedy and must be treated with caution. We have trained ourselves and our children over eons to take advantage of its affordances while avoiding its pitfalls. The title of Jones's video lecture, "What is the Internet doing to our Brains?" echos the subtitle of Carr's book. In this lecture Jones assesses whether the latest scientific findings support popular fears about how technology is rewiring our brains.

Jones addresses three popular beliefs: (1) that technology is a 21st century addiction, (2) that Facebook is infantilizing us, and (3) that Google is degrading our intelligence, as Carr famously suggested in his Atlantic article, "Is Google making us stupid?" http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/ (which prompted Stephen Downes to write that if that were true he must be a raving lunatic by now, or something to that effect).

In taking on the notion that using search engines takes something away from us in neural terms, Jones reminds us that "learning is always associated with changes in the brain." He cites research where naive and experienced Googlers used search engines; and another case where subjects practiced difficult multiplication problems. These studies found that in unpracticed subjects processing tended to take place in areas of the brain already taxed by demands of short term memory; whereas with experienced subjects this activity moves to the rear of the brain, areas associated with automaticity. Yes, experienced subjects had learned how to search or multiply more efficiently, and yes their brains had been rewired. That always happens in learning.

Jones addresses other areas of research, dismissing findings of decreased socialization with Internet use done on teenagers in the 1990s because the friends of the research subjects would not have been themselves connected. But nowadays, kids are, and current research shows that where social networking is used to augment existing relationships, this leads to happiness and well-being. Does screen readng disrupt sleep (apparently reading from small screens does)? If so, it would disrupt memory and learning as well. Does use of technology contribute to obesity by suppressing exercise? Jones finds after weighing the results of 178 studies "no evidence of digital technology's special influence on the brain."

The social media site Facebook might indeed be a panacea for a major problem for the elderly. Nick Harding's http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/science-of-the\
-social-network-2329529.html reports on a year-long study by Daniel Miller, Professor of anthropology at University College London, which he has reported in his book, Tales From Facebook. "If there is one obvious constituency for whom Facebook is absolutely the right technology, it is the elderly. It allows them to keep closely involved in the lives of people they care about when, for one reason or another, face-to-face contact becomes difficult... Its origins are with the young but the elderly are its future."

Furthermore, with all this talk about what is lost with the new technologies, Facebook is seen here as a throw-back to a time when everyone in small communities knew everyone else's business: "As Facebook transforms our relationship with public and private, it also updates the notion of community, becoming a simulacrum of the neighbourhoods lost in the West over the past 50 years - a place where people can keep abreast of the lives of their online neighbours. "

Such findings support Jones's contention that, as with our use of fire, maybe the positive aspects of technology can be emphasized through our better understanding of what it does do for us. Looking at past research on technology used in training memory and other useful skills, Jones notes that transfer has been shown to be a problem in traditional studies, but that research in video games suggests the opposite. Gaming research has revealed that enhancements can be achieved in performance on motor tasks, ability to task switch, to filter distractions, and in inference ability. And the reason for this is that in each instance the addictive response to the constant distractions of the Internet (the dopamine hit) is harnessed toward these outcomes. Jones grants that technology can generate addiction and aggression but more importantly, "benefits arise from exactly the same processes, learning new skills, pro-social behavior, and immense educational potential." So it's not whether we use technology but how we use it (we know fire burns, so use it safely).

NPR's On the Media did a show recently on video games, including a segment on the Future of Gaming http://www.onthemedia.org/2011/jul/01/future-gaming/. In this segment Brooke Gladstone explores how the potential envisaged by Jones is playing out in today's marketplace, culminating in Jane McGonigal's TED talk from February, 2010 on her research into how video games can contribute to training for a better world:

George Siemens has been expressing some dissatisfaction with the shallower aspects of social media in his Elearnspace blog; e.g. http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2011/07/30/losing-interest-in-social-media-there-is-no-there-there/. Here, George dismisses social media as being mostly about flow, not substance. Perhaps, but without flow, substance would be lost, and that to me is one importance of social media.

George is saying, I think, that SM is impoverished where it doesn't create content, but simply kicks it along. This is certainly true in many cases of vanity posting (and just look at Farmville); however social media's significant impact in contexts where mainstream media is locked down is well understood. Clay Shirky dwells for a chapter in Here Comes Everybody, on the idea that popular uprisings occur not when "everyone knows" and not even when "everyone knows that everyone knows" but when finally "everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows" that the king has no clothes. Social media like Twitter is highly significant in creating that awareness. But George points out that it can also appear self-serving, cliquish, and a waste of time if you're spending mouse clicks sorting your friends yet again into this circle or that.

But in this post George doesn't count Blogging as social media. On the contrary, where "Social media=emotions", "Blogging/writing/transparent scholarship=intellect."

Michael Coghlan notes in a recent talk on The Shallows (http://michaelc.podomatic.com/entry/2011-07-12T07_08_48-07_00; and print version http://tinyurl.com/6xcej6g) how he becomes productive only when he disconnects. I can relate to that, I've been mulling over this blog post for over a week now, articulating it bit by bit in posts to the Webheads Yahoogroup. Such fora comprise another form of social media, time consuming, unproductive, and shallow only if you consider such deliberations as avoidance of a more deeply construed final product. However anyone who teaches writing knows the importance of process in achieving a well-crafted product. The most progressive writing teachers are putting their students in touch with peers via social media (here, including blogs). Is this misguided? I think George and Michael are bringing their valid and treasured perspectives on a 'problem' which I guess I'm saying is actually a part of the process.

Harold Jarche has been blogging about PKM, the gist of which he encapsulates in 5 minutes in this video presentation on "Sense-making with PKM, personal knowledge management":
http://www.jarche.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/2009-11-08_1413.mp4

This complements Siemens's views on some of the dilatory effects of social media with an explanation of how what are suddenly being called distractions fit as part of the process of knowledge management, with an assertion at the end that Jarche's critical thinking skills have improved as a result of his cycle of PKM (which I suppose would be anecdotal evidence of lateral thinking processes leading to vertical ones).

Jarche defines PKM as "a set of processes individually constructed to help the flow from implicit to explicit knowledge." Managing the flow of knowledge, "staying abreast events and advances in our respective fields takes more time than many of us have." Consequently "the lines between learning and working are getting blurred," and proper management of workflow becomes essential.

Knowledge management seeks to make implicit knowledge explicit through Internal (how do I deal with this) and External (who can I work with on this) processes. This entails a continuous loop of four internal elements: sort, categorize, make explicit, retrieve; while percolating these through the key external elements of Connect/ Exchange / Contribute. This enables us to observe, reflect, put tentative thoughts out; read, listen, converse, and reflect. Jarche points out that this is more about attitude (what I call paradigm shfts) than a particular set of tools, but the rest of the presentation is essentially about what tools go with which part of the flow.

Jarche concludes by saying that PKM is "part of a social learning contract" wherein we have an "obligation" to participate so that we can learn from each other. "Cooperation is the glue that holds together the important social networks in which we work and live."

This helps put Siemens's insights into perspective, but Jarche also touches on Carr's when he says at the end that he feels that he has been creating a powerful resource, "a growing and connected digital library. It has also helped me to better develop my critical thinking skills."

However Carr comes to similar conclusions himself in his series of beguilingly collapsible arguments, but then explains why all the input we're subjected to now is different from previous information revolutions (e.g. the one where using calculators freed our minds for better internalizing maths concepts) because this latest onslaught isn't freeing up mental processing power so much as it is making what's left impervious to keeping what flows past around long enough for proteins to form that will put it into long term memory.

I would argue that again these resources are being optimally allocated. We are evolving systems for tagging and bookmarking that are placing information at our fingertips where and when we need it, so we can process perfectly well once we recall where we can link to what we need. I guess I am arguing that resources devoted to long term memory are increasingly being devoted more to tracking linking mechanisms; whereas Carr seems to be saying that this is the shallow part, we index it but don't process it. On the other hand, this very process could be developing a level of abstraction that further pushes the boundaries of our cognition which distinguish us from other less capable species.

Samuel Johnson was aware of this distinction in the 18th century ("Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it." from Boswell's Life of Johnson). Coghlan mentions this in his talk where he contrasts the relationship between horizontal thinking (multitasking, allowing us in the midst of composition to link out to the Internet for the source of a certain quote by Johnson, for example) vs vertical thinking (layered and focused, to allow us to complete the piece in which the quote is inserted). He shows us Howard Reingold's video (http://www.screenr.com/rNl) about how Reingold finds, organizes, curates, filters, and begins to compose using an impressive array of tools which have everything to do with generating two paragraphs of prose with awsome face valididy. Coghlan intends this as an illustration of how a wired academic can harness distracted horizontal processes to contribute to deeper vertical ones, but in the example we see no direct evidence of developing or adding value to content (though we can see that Howard is about to take that step, if the phone doesn't ring :-). Reingold's workflow appears however to work for him, he is after all a Stanford professor with an impressive publication record, and his output and workflow illustrate how he is able to manage and leverage certain processes for linking and abstraction to eventually produce a well-crafted final product.

Carr however seems to be saying that this kind of workflow is making us incapable of deeper processing. True I was listening to an instructional designer in a VTE podcast the other day saying that whereas before you could count on a 12 min attn span now you had to reach learners in 5. But this doesn't mean we are incapable of processing. We are reading Carr's book aren't we? We are deeply examining the ideas to the extent that they engage us. So? We're distracted! - isn't this the human condition? From time immemorial? (And if it's immemorial then it didn't form the protein to make it into long term memory back then either.)

The skill of indexing and retrieving through networks is at the core of connectivism, an idea whose development is anything but shallow. Siemens for example says in his free ebook, Knowing Knowledge (available at http://www.elearnspace.org/KnowingKnowledge_LowRes.pdf).

"Once flow becomes too rapid and complex, we need a model that allows individuals to learn and function in spite of the pace and flow. A network model of learning (an attribute of connectivism) offloads some of the processing and interpreting functions of knowledge flow to nodes within a learning network. Instead of the individual having to evaluate and process every piece of information, she/he creates a personal network of trusted nodes: people and content, enhanced by technology. The learner aggregates relevant nodes…and relies on each individual node to provide needed knowledge. The act of knowing is offloaded onto the network itself. This view of learning scales well with continued complexity and pace of knowledge development."

David Weinberger has an interesting take on The Shallows. He says that "if the Net is the shallows (a brilliant title, by the way), then the old media that Nicholas romanticizes was the narrows: narrowing the richness of shared experience to a manageable trickle." http://davidweinberger.sys-con.com/node/1453793/mobile.

Today's learners must learn to navigate between the narrows and the shallows. A recent CIBER meta-analysis of the reading and learning behaviors of student visitors to libraries, both brick & mortar and virtual, highlights trends it sees for the near future (next 5 years, 10 years from 2008) as noted in CIBER. (2008). Information behaviour of the researcher of the future. UCL. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/research/ciber/downloads/ggexecutive.pdf

The report finds on p.9 that the emerging form of information seeking behavior of those in the study appears indeed to be "horizontal, bouncing, checking and viewing in nature." These users are "promiscuous, diverse and volatile." This poses "serious challenges for traditional information providers, nurtured in a hardcopy paradigm and ... still tied to it."

As with any data, these are subject to interpretation. My interpretation is that as information becomes more accessible patterns of access are of course going to change. On the other hand, maybe not all that much has fundamentally changed. I can't tell you how many nickels I put into photocopying machines when I was in grad school in 1981 in order to take away copies of journal articles I possibly skimmed at home looking for factoids I could use to augment my references, or perhaps didn't read at all. Except that back then, the library was neither able to track my behavior apart from monitoring my expenditure of nickels, nor know what I did with the material once I got it home and put it on the growing stack of accumulated papers.

I'm taking the stance that this is much ado about nothing much. Carr points out early in his book that, regarding the "torrent of new content ... one side's abundant Eden is the other's vast wasteland." Young people might tend to be hitting at links in their recreational browsing, as we all do, but to extrapolate from this to 'they therefore never engage in deep vertical absorption of what they are browsing' is in my view quite likely false. It could be that they have so much more data to scan that they simply click on a lot more horizon, as we all do, before we latch on to the bits we feel we need to explore in greater depth (possibly because there is so much horizon out "there", and now in my mind I hear Siemens warn, "there's no there there" :-).

As we learned from Clay Shirkey's Cognitive Surplus it's not so much a question of what someone is doing at a particular time but what they would otherwise be doing. Dan Pink asked Shirky in an interview, what was your favorite episode of Gilligan's Island, an inside joke because Shirky counts himself as one of a generation plunged into the vast wasteland of passive addiction to the shallows of television. It would have been impossible when Clay Shirky was curled up on the couch to know how young people in his day ('the TV generation') would develop as researchers and academics of the future. Shirky nevertheless seems to have undergone some positive plasticity considering his subsequently observable ability to grasp concepts and convey them to others in deeply textured literature.

Regarding my own cognitive surplus, I hardly ever sit down for any length of time in front of a TV anymore, and though my kids might do that, they don't just watch whatever's on, they'll have chosen their program and have some purpose in watching it. I would think that this observable change in behavior is freeing up time and cognitive surplus for the kind of horizon scanning that emerges in some of these studies.

In other words, if you have some moments where you are tired from a long day and you have no pressing deadlines, what do you choose to do? Do you play solitaire? sit down in front of a TV? Pick up a good book? See what's on YouTube? Check email / Facebook/ Twitter? If you tend toward the latter end of the scale you're in good shape in my view. And when many of us were growing up we didn't have the latter options, but now that we do, we learn a lot from YouTube / email / Facebook / Twitter, and other interactions with our PLN which, when it's time to write and reflect, we switch off and get down to it, as Michael said he did in writing his article. Switch it back on and it feeds and stimulates the times when it's switched back off.

The CIBER report recommends that "information skills have to be developed during formative school years and that remedial information literacy programmed at university level are likely to be ineffective [and that libraries should] go with the flow and help children to become more effective information consumers."

We should be making ourselves and our kids aware of how to successfully leverage the affordances of the new technologies while avoiding the pitfalls, same as for fire, TV, the telephone before that, books in the 16th century (much decried by writers back then, get the irony? writers?). What we would need (but will never have) is a comparative study of how much deep cognitive endeavor people did during the TV era vs what they engage in now. I think that, in Shirky's terms, a lot of cognitive surplus was merging with recreational time and now that we invest more of our cognitive surplus in recreational time, we still can only devote so much energy a day into that deep cognition, and for recreation, we web surf rather than watch TV, storing up links (utilizing our tagging and feed systems) for retrieval later during our focused work hours.

This is actually a positively enlightening development, making possible, in my view, a renaissance in thinking and sharing, along with a reversal of power directionality, as when cognitive surplus gets invested in Wikileaks, for example. Many people are scanning those superficially, but there are many others demonstrably capable of delving into the revelations deeply and distilling what they find into packets appropriate for consumption by the scanners. Is that a problem? (answer, only if it's your power that's being reversed :-)

There is an interesting quote in a post where Andrew Keen interviews Nicholas Carr regarding the central thesis of The Shallows: "Indeed, the depth and sophistication of much of the debate about the book—especially the thoughtfulness of many online critiques—might be taken as an argument against its thesis."
http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Interview/Nicholas-Carr-The-Shallows/ba-p/3095

Case rested (for now, until the next comment or blog post :-) I'll just switch my network back on now and see what they have to say about this

Incidentally, Michael Coghlan and I and others had a discussion of these ideas on Sunday August 7, 2011, at our weekly Learning2gether event, in Elluminate. You can access the recording at http://learning2gether.posterous.com/the-narrows-and-the-shallows-a-discussion-of

TinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/narrowshallows

Some of my network are saying ...

From Elizabeth Hanson-Smith
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evonline2002_webheads/message/28066

From Mark Pegrum

MOOCs raise questionable practices

2011-07-14T12:03:00.011Z

Many questions have been raised in EduMOOC 2011

How big is a MOOC? What is the importance of a cohort in a MOOC? Where is the center? What is its optimal time frame? Can participants dip in and dip out whenever they feel like it? in which case can they dip in and dip out over a number of years? or can they band together informally in a space that's not called a MOOC? Would that then still be called a MOOC?

Some of these questions are developing answers in the literature. For example, User:Mackiwg created a post in WikiEducator where (s)he asks "How big is a MOOC? Double the number from one week to another". As attrition in MOOCs is also an issue, the answer could just as easily be "halve the number from one week to the next." Still, for the question of what number constitutes a MOOC, most references point to McAuley, Stewart, Siemens and Cormier (2010) http://davecormier.com/edblog/wp-content/uploads/MOOC_Final.pdf, where for an open online course to be massive, it has to have hundreds or thousands of participants.

McAuley et al. are also relied on for the definition of a MOOC. For example http://wikieducator.org/OER_university/eduMOOC_planning_group/MOOC_comparison quotes this definition:

"a MOOC integrates the connectivity of social networking, the facilitation of an acknowledged expert in a field of study, and a collection of freely accessible online resources.
Perhaps most importantly, however, a MOOC builds on the active engagement of several hundred to several thousand “students” who self-organize their participation according to learning goals, prior knowledge and skills, and common interests.
Although it may share in some of the conventions of an ordinary course, such as a predefined timeline and weekly topics for consideration, a MOOC generally carries no fees, no prerequisites other than Internet access and interest, no predefined expectations for participation, and no formal accreditation."

However those working on the Wikipedia article are less committed on numbers, saying only that the course must be 'large'; "A Massive open online course (MOOC) is a course where the participants are distributed and course materials also are dispersed across the web. This is possible only if the course is open, and works significantly better if the course is large. The course is not a gathering, but rather a way of connecting distributed instructors and learners across a common topic or field of discourse." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course

When is a MOOC not a MOOC?

Size is one thing that MOOCs seem to have in common. As can be seen, it is often pointed out that this is a necessary characteristic, but I've been experimenting with what I call Miniscule Open Online Courses, which is where I think that the principles on which MOOCs are based apply to courses run on a much smaller scale e.g. http://goodbyegutenberg.pbworks.com. This fits at least the Wikipedia definition of MOOC, where size matters ("works significantly better if the course is large") but is not essential. Some of these characteristics are:

extremely student centered,
highly networked,
course consists of rich content,
facilitators provide coherent PLE,
participants navigate curriculum according to their interest and individual choices

Ray Shroeder posted his adherence to much the same principles in the way he and his colleagues conceptualized EduMOOC 2011. To better display his ideas, I've bulleted his points in the passage quoted here:

"We have approached this MOOC in a way similar to how we teach a graduate seminar.

We respect the knowledge, diversity and innovative spirit of those who choose to participate in a MOOC.
Our approach has been to create opportunities to learn;

to mention thought-provoking ideas where we can;
to invite some people who care about the topic to our panel discussions,
and mostly to point people to interesting resources in the area of online learning.

Our approach is not that we, the organizers, will teach in a traditional hands-on way, but that we will provide the opportunity to engage, interact, and learn.
We set the original agenda, invited some panelists, created some spaces - though many more spaces were created by the participants - to give some form to the MOOC blob so people would have an idea what it might become."

(http://edumooc.blogspot.com/2011/07/week-three-turning-to-technology.html)

What's missing?

Mary Rearick, a prolific contributor to EduMOOC 2011, observed in a Facebook post (in the MOOC group on July 15, 2011) in answer to someone trying to find their way in the MOOC, that "one can find oneself going in circles... Since distributed groups have formed and content is scattered everywhere... a person can waste a lot of time and there is really little opportunity to collaborate on anything significant." I replied that "Sometimes I feel I'm going in circles with Google+ but with EduMOOC I'm learning every day. I mentally leap to ePortfolios where individuals can specify their learning goals (significant to them) and document how they achieve them. In this context I wonder if we can consider time wasted if a learning goal is achieved. In a MOOC some of the goals are likely not achievable in other learning environments."

In recent renditions of my multiliteracies course, assessment has been by means of ePortfolios. ePortfolios are a logical accompaniment to MOOCs, and there is in fact an upcoming MOOC being arranged on

that topic, starting later this month: https://sites.google.com/site/eportfoliocommunity/epcop-mooc.

One good example of how connectivist learning takes place is Twitter, where people follow one another in an effort to expand their PLNs and maximize contact with postings leading them to learning even one thing over coffee in the morning. This one thing (and often it is many things) can be considered a significant learning increase over what was previously available. Similarly, Mary created another post in the vicinity of the one mentioned above (July 18) http://screencast.com/t/js2O41WX8h. When I saw it, I Scooped it http://bit.ly/r8l3Ou and then tweeted that http://twitter.com/VanceS/status/92852508422180864 thereby spreading the knowledge throughout my network. The article worthy of so much attention is a study of PLENK 2010, ellucidating patterns of learning to emerge from that recent MOOC: Kop, R. (2011). The Challenges to Connectivist Learning on Open Online Networks: Learning Experiences during a Massive Open Online Course. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning 12, 3. Available: http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/882/1689.

I think these ideas are revolutionizing how we (we in this particular choir) are thinking about how we might configure and deliver educational products, but as with most revolutions, the ideas have been there all along. It's just that now the spark is there, or that connectivity is such that learning-directed interaction is now possible on truly massive scales, and the time is right for many of us to realize that the people in the next cubicles (or at least in the ones we've been connecting with online recently) have been mulling these issues in the same way we have for some time now.

For example, the epcop_learnspace MOOC portal at https://sites.google.com/site/epcoplearnspace/home/mooc sports a quote by David Wiley who was asked, "Do I think MOOCs can be effective in supporting learning?" He is quoted here as answering, "Yes, absolutely. The MOOC is not terribly different from the learning I saw occurring in 'Online Self-Organizing Social Systems' a decade ago, which we published an article about in 2002. I thought the possibility for informal learning in these settings was intriguing then. Add the new 'Web 2.0 / social media revolution' that has happened since the article was published into the mix, and it’s downright exciting." (Incidentally the link on the epcop page is broken, but the article is available here: http://www.opencontent.org/docs/ososs.pdf

In our Learning2gether EduMOOCast July 10, 2011 http://learning2gether.posterous.com/vance-stevens-and-jeff-lebow-will-lead-a-disc Nellie Deutsch was hypothesizing on what has given this particular MOOC its legs. She attributes a lot of that to the relaxed degree of control that the moderators here have been exercising, but I would say also that the participants in their present mindset are also more in a position now to take their own control. There are many experienced MOOCers here, which could not have been possible with the first one just a couple of years ago, when the ground rules were only then being formulated. But that was when this phenomenon was first called a MOOC.

How long have we been MOOCing about like this?

Jeff Lebow blurred the line further by suggesting in one of his EduMOOCasts that perhaps EVO or Electronic Village Online could be considered a MOOC. EVO has never represented itself as a MOOC, but it is an ongoing event taking place each January-February since 2001. It's massive on a scale of hundreds to thousands, it's open, it's online, and it's a set of courses. It rolls over year after year at http://evosessions.pbworks.com, and it sustains itself year round as its coordinators line up mentors prior to the call for moderators, who then undergo training which is also organized year round, so they can conduct the sessions in January and February.

Jeff could just as easily have mentioned his own http://worldbridges.net network of webcasting educators. The network of committed and productive educators at http://edtechtalk.com/ continues to churn out podcast after podcast, almost every one including a word of thanks from godfathers Jeff Lebow and Dave Cormier for providing the server and the opportunity. Many of these podcasters matriculated through http://webcastacademy.net/, a MOOC by all the standards listed in McAuley, Stewart, Siemens and Cormier (2010); i.e. a coherent course with a syllabus and timeframe for training participants in the complex techniques required in webcasting. It's free and open, richly socially networked, and has hundreds of participants who organize themselves around helping to write and update content.

I'm starting to think that communities of practice such as http://webheads.info could conceivably be construed as a MOOC. This group is also massive on the scales discussed here (over 1000), it is open, online, and is a course insofar as its members are constantly learning from one another, overtly in the case of its weekly online events which have taken place every Sunday since 1998, and have most recently manifested themselves in the seminar series archived at http://learning2gether.posterous.com.

I just happened on a post I made in 2009 when I was following a SCoPE seminar (possibly yet another MOOC) and reflecting on my learning then: http://vancestevens.posterous.com/reflections-on-how-we-learn-through-networks. At the time, networked learning was catching on in a big way (this was just after the first MOOC in 2008, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course) and this post recalls what I was learning at the time and more importantly how I was doing it, and more important still, how I and others in my PLN had been learning from one another from almost the moment ubiquitious connectivity became possible with the advent of Web 2.0.

So, I'm starting to wonder, have we in fact been MOOCing all along?

Reference:

McAuley, A., Stewart, B., Siemens, G., and Cormier.D. (2010). The MOOC model for digital practice. Created through funding received by the University of Prince Edward Island, Social Sciences and Humantities Research Council's "Knowledge synthesis grants on the Digital Economy." Available, http://davecormier.com/edblog/wp-content/uploads/MOOC_Final.pdf.

This post was published on July 14, 2011 and then updated on July 15, and again on July 18

Orienting and declaring in eduMOOC 2011

2011-07-02T12:06:00.009Z

The concept of MOOC really appeals to me as a way to organize learning. It apparently appeals to others as well, judging from how so many sign up for them. When MOOCs are announced, the news spreads across overlapping PLNs like a swarm of locusts and thousands are attracted like moths to a flame. There's one on now at: https://sites.google.com/site/edumooc/ for 8 weeks starting on June 27, 2011.

I was wondering how to get myself writing about EduMOOC. It was natural that the impetus should come from this thread on the eduMOOC Google Group forum: http://groups.google.com/group/edumooc/browse_thread/thread/6d264a22386f7b99#.

The thread relates to the optimal amount of time such a course should run and how much time participants should spend with it.

B.D.Boardman asked:

As I find myself checking in with the various discussion threads,

posts, online articles, and misc content throughout the day I notice
that I'm beginning to "chunk" my MOOC time into small 5-10 minute
segements that perhaps, by the end of the day, may add up to an hour
or more. I am wondering if other participants are having a similar
experience, and what the larger implications are of this approach to
learning.

In addition, as my attention wanders a little throughout the day, I am
also wondering if 8-weeks is the most appropriate span of time for a
MOOC? Given the content and online dynamic, I wonder if a more
"concentrated" time span (like 2-4 weeks) might be more effective for
this particular learning model?

So, does anyone have any comments or thoughts on the topic that they
would like to share?

I've dabbled in MOOCs before and use Dave Cormier's videos in a course I teach on Multiliteracies at http://goodbyegutenberg.pbworks.com/w/page/33070377/Week3EVO2011. I have lately modeled my approach in this course on the MOOC model, only there I call it miniscule open online course, on the assumption that the approach scales downwards nicely.

That course is a part of the TESOL Electronic Village online sessions, http://evosessions.pbworks.com which also run for a similar length of time. The first round in 2001 was just for 4 weeks, but apparently the coordinators thought that amount of time was not enough because in 2002 they went up to 8 weeks. In 2003 however, they decided they had overstepped and the time was reduced to 7 weeks. For a while after that we ran them for 6 weeks, but the last couple of sessions have been reduced to 5. The feeling is obviously that when the session goes on for too long, people get worn out toward the end of it. Eight weeks is intensive for the volunteer moderators, a long time for them to have to sustain momentum.

But in a MOOC it really shouldn't be up to the moderators to have to drive the course for 8 weeks like a 20-mule team. A course that is set up nicely around provocative aspects of a topic can run itself, especially once you get people interacting. Dave Cormier for example points out that the over-riding take-away from such a course is not a certificate, as you would expect from a 'formal' learning situation, but the network you develop through participation in such a course. This dovetails nicely into the idea of learning and knowledge being essentially connectivist. As George Siemens told me once, in answer to the last question I asked him at the end of this recording: http://vance_stevens.podomatic.com/entry/eg/2009-01-28T03_19_19-08_00, it is the moderator's job to provide a coherent structure to the course. After that what can you do with 2000+ participants? They learn by constructing their own coherence in their run-up to the end of the course, based on what they are learning and how they are restructuring their knowledge and perceptions of the part of their world they are exploring in the course, and an important part of that is not relying on the moderators to do this restructuring for them.

Nellie Deutsch tweeted a question on the #edumooc tag asking " I wonder if it's necessary to stay to the very end of a MOOC. What will you gain by completing a MOOC?" I replied "asked another way, what will you gain by starting a MOOC or lurking in one? The answer is 'whatever is gained' :-)" to which Nellie muses: "Maybe there's more learning in quitting before the end. Would it be the same if the MOOC were not free and for credit?" (an aside to Nellie, see https://twitter.com/bnleez/status/86976985615708160 who posted this also on the #edumooc tag).

This reminds me of a line in one of my favorite Rush songs, "the point of the journey is not to arrive." http://www.metrolyrics.com/prime-mover-lyrics-rush.html

Anything can happen

From the point of conception, to the moment of truth

At the point of surrender, to the burden of proof

From the point of ignition, to the final drive

The point of the journey is not to arrive

Anything can happen

The double meaning here is either that arriving at the destination is not the reason we travel, or that the point of traveling is to stay on the road and never end the journey. The question of 'arrival' is what Nellie seems to be getting at. However B.D. Boardman brings up the amount of time we should spend on the journey, and asks for insights on that question, which is what I am addressing here.

To me it's transcendental. The point of the journey is to be on it. It doesn't matter how much time you spend on it or when or where it ends, if it does. YOU could focus on EduMOOC for 2-4 weeks if that's right for you, or 5 min. a day for whatever duration of time will benefit you. That's why I said to Nellie that you gain "whatever is gained." Whatever that is, it's quantums over gaining nothing by not participating at all.

As Ken Robinson says in "The Element" (see his TED video at http://blog.ted.com/2009/01/08/sir_ken_robinso_1/), there are 6.93 billion different intelligences on the planet, a number that he would have to revise upward as people are born (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population). Accordingly I would say there are 2000+ approaches to coping with this particular MOOC, and the same number of opinions on how much time would be optimal for it.

I glanced over the reading on Disrupting College suggested for this week, and I'm reading the book by Clayton Christensen et al. on Disrupting Class http://www.claytonchristensen.com/. There, the point is made that the book is researched and written partly to counter the notion that education is often construed as one-size-fits-all (or 'no child gets ahead' as I like to call it). People learn differently, evincing 6.93 billion different intelligences or learning styles, to use Ken Robinson's rough figure (and I was amused by "Clay's" recollection of being involved in distance learning in the mid-70s when distance in the huge auditorium at BYU was anything past the 5th row, where the teacher was reaching the students only asynchronously, e.g. Clay slept while the teacher lectured, and the teacher slept while Clay read the coursebook.)

I'm participating in EduMOOC by blogging around the topic, tweeting, trying out a Scoop.it on the topic at http://www.scoop.it/t/edumooc/, and working whatever and whomever I encounter in this course into my summer workflow. This post is one salvo among many being inspired by EduMOOC 2011 as we speak, with slim chance of my reading many of those other salvos, or of a significant number reading this one ...unless we consider that one person changed through encountering the opinion of at least one other is a significant number, which it is.

Learning is change; which is to say that if nothing changes, then nothing has been learned. Ergo, as we learn we change and as we encounter one another in that process of learning we change one another. The idea of a MOOC I think is to create one cauldron into which you pour a heap of ideas and stir, and change emerges.

Stephen Downes was once asked why he put himself in the position of having to support such a huge endeavor, and he said, because he would learn from it. What is clear from the premise of Christensen's books for example is that there are many aspects of education that need to change, and what we are doing here is coming to grips with that.

The questions of how long or whether to see the course through to the end are good ones to be asking, but the problem with the answer(s) is that there are 6.93 billion of them.

The suggested reading for Week 1:
Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn, Louis Caldera and Louis Soares Disrupting College: How Disruptive Innovation Can Deliver Quality and Affordability to Postsecondary Education
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/02/pdf/disrupting_college.pdf

How cognitive surplus drives us to helping one another

2011-05-03T05:37:00.012Z

Why am I taking my time to write this? I discovered the other day that it has something to do with Josh Groban, a ‘popera’ singer who Clay Shirky, in his book Cognitive Surplus, says appeals to teenage girls and their grandmothers. I had never heard of Josh Groban nor imagined that I could possibly have anything at all in common with him. His entry in Wikipedia doesn’t mention Grobanites (yet), but Shirky dwells mostly on these Grobania fans who have banded together to raise money for Groban’s charities. Intriguingly, they have a lot in common with Webheads.

The Grobanites are young fans of Groban’s who met through the community on Josh Groban’s website http://www.joshgroban.com/ and at some point tried to decide what to get Josh for his birthday. After rejecting teddy bears and other fluff, they decided to collect money and give it to one of his charities. The first year they raised a thousand dollars, the next a magnitude amount higher, and by now they have raised over a million dollars for Josh Groban charities.

Shirky puts this into perspective. When you donate to a charity there is usually an overhead associated with running the charity, so that only some fraction of what you give actually reaches the beneficiaries. It’s considered acceptable if a charity retains 40% in overhead, whereas holding back only15% for administration is excellent. With Grobanites, 100% reaches the beneficiaries.

This is because they are all volunteers. The webmaster is a volunteer; accordingly, the website is a little funky, homegrown, but friendly: http://www.grobanitesforcharity.org/. Shirky talks about Geocities, one of the first online hosts that allowed just anyone to create web pages, and how at the time he thought Geocities would fail because those web pages were going to pale next to what professionals could do, but Shirky says he was proven wrong. He had not factored in the heart and passion and the spirit that causes amateurs (in the etymological sense) to care more about having their say than about how their web presence online stacks up against slick professional look and feel.

Shirky goes on to detail how home-cooked websites invite sharing and interaction. This is exactly what we have inadvertently achieved with http://webheads.info, or as an example of 'class roots' modeling and interaction, what we are trying to inspire with http://learning2gether.pbworks.com.

Shirky analyzes such spirited initiatives. He cites research on motivation, e.g. seminal work by Edward Deci (1972), who gave students Soma-cube puzzles to solve and then left the room to take a break. There were distractions lying around the room, Playboy and other magazines, so the experiment was to actually to see what the students would do during the experimental treatment, the 8 minute break. On average, they were intrinsically motivated to spend a few minutes of their free time working on the puzzles.

Permission to use granted under creative commons license; attribution: http://fr.fotopedia.com/items/flickr-3661361368

Then he ran the experiment again, but this time he paid some of the subjects for each shape they were able to create. During the break he observed that those who were paid spent a minute more of their break time working the puzzles than before, since they now saw this skill as a source of income, whereas those who had no money involvement behaved pretty much as before. Then he ran the experiment a third time, with the same subjects, without offering to pay for puzzles completed, and he discovered that during the break those he had paid spent on average 2 minutes less of their free time on exploring the cubes. In other words, the introduction of the extrinsic motivator, money, had depressed free choice and “crowded out” the intrinsic motivator.

Shirky concludes: “Doing something because it interests you makes it a different kind of activity than doing it because you are reaping an external reward.” This research and others with similar findings overturned the intuitive assumption that you get what you pay for, that putting money into a mix would increase the incentive for people to engage in a given behavior. Deci’s research suggested that this worked only as long at the extrinsic incentive was there, but if that was withdrawn then the desire to do it intrinsically was “crowded out” resulting in a reduction of motivation to do the task at all, or as Shirky puts it: “increasing extrinsic motivations can actually decrease intrinsic ones.”

Grobanites and Webheads on the other hand work entirely on intrinsic motivation. Shirky says there are three reasons people engage in such efforts. First, they crave the autonomy. Second they want to be perceived as competent. And third, they want to feel connected. Also, the desire to contribute to society and to help others is also a motivator. Shirky cites another experiment where people in a town in Switzerland were asked if they would accept a hazardous waste dump in their precinct. The request was couched in two ways. For both groups a reason was given why the town had been selected for this, but in one form of the request, it was stipulated that the town would be paid for accepting the wastes. Of course there was opposition, but the acceptance rate was significantly higher when the request was made appealing to civic duty rather than when money was used as the carrot.

So money is not necessarily the most powerful stimulus for producing change for the better. People will volunteer to do good when they feel they are acting autonomously and when they will be seen to be competent at what they do. The third reason, the connected aspect, is the one that Shirky particularly explores in his books. Previously when connecting was hard to do, it was hard for charitable ideas to scale. It was possible last century for volunteer donors to work through a church group, for example, but if you wanted to organize 100 churches, you needed to hire a manage, an accountant, a publicist, etc. and incur overhead. But with Grobanites and Webheads, the tools are now available for people with purely altruistic agendas to promote their niche interests voluntarily and scale those interests to reach thousands of others without needing to resort to extrinsic motivators such as money.

Shirky cites work by Yochai Benkler and Helen Nissenbaum to help explain how this works. Benkler and Nissenbaum (2006) write about “commons-based peer production" in which they discuss how the social motivations of connectedness or membership, and sharing and generosity, support the personal motivators of autonomy and competence. Shirky says: “The motivation to share is the driver; technology is just the enabler. This feedback loop of personal and social motivations applies to most uses of cognitive surplus, from Wikipedia to PickupPal to Grobanites for Charity. Grobanite donors and supporters get two messages: both I did it and We did it.”

All this is precisely what drives Webheads, an amateur movement of educators with accumulated cognitive surplus who truly enjoy helping one another, and benefit from being helped in the bargain. As Benkler and Nissenbaum suggest, Webheads have a strong feeling of belonging, of membership in a group with a funky name "webheads". The group's members are overflowing with sharing and generosity, as is evidenced time and again in their thousands of messages posted at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evonline2002_webheads. This leads many of us in this group to realize what Sir Ken Robinson calls our element, "the place where natural aptitude and personal passion meet," and to define our epiphanal aha! moments.

This leads into Shirky’s chapter on "Amateur Motivation, Public Scale", which begins “Amateurs are sometimes separated from professionals by skill, but always by motivation … Keeping a large group focused can be a full-time job ... Organizing groups into an effective whole is so brutally difficult that, past a certain scale, it requires professional management … salaries … bookkeeping and all the rest of the trappings of a formal organization ... As always, high hurdles to an activity reduce the number of people who do it, and the hurdle of large-scale coordination has largely separated amateurs from professionals ... when pursuing an intrinsic goal in public required considerable work, the amateurs largely opted out of public action. We have always wanted to be autonomous, competent, and connected; it’s just that now social media has become an environment for enacting those desires rather than suppressing them

"… Back when coordinating group action was hard, most amateur groups stayed small and informal. Now that we have tools that let groups of people find one another and share their thoughts and actions, we are seeing a strange new hybrid: large, public, amateur groups. Individuals can make their interests public more easily, and groups can balance amateur motivation, and large coordinated action more easily as well.

“Globalization isn’t necessarily about size; it’s about scope. Now that the difficulty of coordinating interactions has fallen, it is entirely possible to have a tiny global organization. Geography still matters, but it is no longer the main determinant of participation.”

These ideas are echoed in Lawrence Lessig's book Remix (2008), available now as a free eBook: http://www.archive.org/details/LawrenceLessigRemix. Lessig talks about two distinct economies, commercial and sharing. Purely sharing economies thrive on just the dynamics that Shirky describes; i.e. a set of social values where members are essentially paid for their surplus time in recognition for competence and generosity. Lessig also discusses what he calls hybrids, or ventures that incorporate vestiges of both economies. Whereas there have been some ventures that have succeeded in going from commercial to sharing and visa versa, Lessig cites many more instances in which this has proven impossible. Some of the studies cited by Shirky, notably Deci's, give crucial insights into why this is so. If projects are started as sharing ventures, attempts to monetize them simply suppress the motivations that gave them their traction.

So why am I writing this? For the three reasons noted, I am intrinsically motivated to do so even though my extrinsic motivators are telling me that I’d better get working on things more relevant to my paycheck. And why do participants in a large community of Webheads invest so much of their cognitive surplus in joining me in sharing with one another? Because, as with Grobinites, there’s no money involved. They have not come to see the good they do as being a part of the money economy.

Now why did I know all that instinctively? Why do so many others pursue the same altruistic goals without demanding the most obvious extrinsic compensations? Because it's the natural thing that humans have always tried to do for one another. Shirky, Lessig, and others are just, after all this time, telling us why we do it, and why in our connected era, it is now possible to help one another on the scale on which we do it.

Notes:

There has been a lot of Internet traffic on Shirky's citing Deci's Soma experiments to explain how intrinsic motivators can be crowded out by extrinsic ones: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=deci+soma+shirky
There's an interesting dialog between Dan Pink and Clay Shirky where they discuss Shirky's ideas on cognitive surplus, published here: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/05/ff_pink_shirky/all/1. In this dialog, Shirky reveals his favorite episode of Gilligan's Island.
Dan Pink's books are about intrinsic motivation as a driver that is often not properly utilized in business and in education, and he talks about those four books here: http://www.edtechcrew.net/2011/08/24/ed-tech-crew-171/

References

Benkler, Y. and Nissenbaum, H. (2006). Commons-based peer production and virtue. The Journal of Political Philosophy 14, 4: 394-419. Retrieved May 1, 2011 from http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/papers/jopp_235.pdf

Deci, E. (1972). The effects of contingent and noncontingent rewards and controls on intrinsic motivation. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance 8, 2:217-229; Received 23 September 1971.
Available online 26 August 2004, doi:10.1016/0030-5073(72)90047-5 (Elsevier Inc.) More info here

Lessig, L. (2008). Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy. New York: The Penguin Press. Available as eBook from http://www.archive.org/details/LawrenceLessigRemix.

Robinson, K. (2009). The element: How finding your passion changes everything. New York: Viking Penguin.

Shirky, Clay. (2010). Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. New York: The Penguin Press.

This post has a TinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/advanced-cogsurplus

Reflections on a teaching philosophy

2011-04-17T15:16:00.018Z

When applying for teaching jobs, you are often called on to write a mini-essay stating your teaching philosophy. Sometimes you are forced to be overly concise (state your philosophy of teaching in 150 words or less) but I just started one for which there are no guidelines.

Obviously, it needs to be something someone can pick up off a pile and read in a few minutes, so it can't be too long.

I was writing one like that just now and I realized that my philosophy of teaching suggests that:

I should myself write in the way I would expect of those whom I teach; in other words, I should ‘transfer’ or carry over from my personal habits (my blogging for example) into my workplace and professional spaces.
I should not treat my writing as something I do for an audience of one. I should direct it at a wider audience.
Writing like this is obviously directed at a purpose (to get a job for example, or to get a high mark) but its true purpose should be directed at the search for wider knowledge.
When teachers write about their profession (or when anyone writes about their true passion) that act of reflection should be pumped into the ongoing peer conversations around that topic.
My articulation of the teaching philosophy I am trying to convey can be improved on the basis of feedback I might receive by doing the above.
When writing is personal in addition to purposeful, writing becomes a joy, a liberation, and it becomes better writing, writing that writers want to improve through a process based in peer appreciation and feedback.

With that in mind, here is my short philosophy of teaching …

I love teaching. In fact I thrive on it. I realized this was so when I had completed my first 20 years of teaching and went into CALL software development and then worked on the management team of a language center. Working in an office, I felt a kind of withdrawl. I missed teaching so much that I started doing it on a volunteer basis online, just to be working with students and to explore and learn myself how learning takes place online.

I teamed with colleagues I met online to work with our shared students at first, but eventually other teaching peers began getting interested in what we were finding out about online learning, and gradually started to join us. So in 2002 I set up a course to model for them how to make their students feel a part of a community online by applying those very techniques in the new course I was facilitating. This small community of teaching peers, which we have since called Webheads, has sustained itself to this day and now has well over 1000 participants in its associated communities, and touches thousands more through its larger extended networks. Many who have encountered our community have said that this association has produced an epiphanal moment in their teaching and learning careers.

Several aspects of my teaching philosophy can be gleaned from this story. First, it’s a story, and I believe that story-telling is an appropriate technique in helping learners to consolidate and internalize their learning. In this story I started out talking about teaching, because I was asked to write about my philosophy of teaching. But as soon as I could I turned that word over onto its flipside, learning. At one point I used the word facilitating in place of the word teaching. Then I mentioned ‘teaching peers’ to soften the concept of teaching, and level out its hierarchical overtones.

A major role of teachers should be, in my view, to facilitate learning environments which enable students to tell their stories. In a language or writing class, they might do so overtly. But in other classes this might mean that the teacher strives to enable students to relate the material to how they envision themselves in the context of their own stories.

I like David Warlick’s idea of a teacher as ‘master learner.’ I often cite that phrase in conjunction with Stephen Downes’s distinction between teachers and learners. Downes says that teachers model and demonstrate, whereas students practice and reflect. If you consider teachers to be master learners then you could argue at one extreme that there is no such thing really as a teacher, only learners. At the other extreme, you could say that teachers are really learners in disguise -- master learners -- who constantly percolate the processes of modeling, demonstrating, reflecting, and practicing.

Language is not something in my view that can be taught, like a scientific principle or theorem. Most of us know for example that e=mc2, or how to calculate the length of a hypotenuse of a triangle. Many of us have been taken through the proof of that theorem, but I would think only a tiny fraction of all students who have regurgitated that proof on a geometry test have actually learned it, or can explain clearly what would happen to time if light were ever to exceed the speed of c (or even what happens as it approaches that speed in the vicinity of a huge mass the size of a black hole, which in turn would be tending toward the size of a pea, a flea, and so on). Similarly many have been taught some expressions in a foreign language (for example, “frère Jaques, dormez vous?”) possibly without knowing hardly any other French.

I said in a plenary address once that there was no such thing as a language teacher, only language learners. Here we must distinguish teaching from training. It is possible to train someone to speak a grammatical subset of a language. In how many languages can you (1) greet people? (2) thank them or express dislike? (3) negotiate food and a place to stay? (4) speak to them about topics of concern to them or to you? (5) talk politics? or (6) understand a wide range of media in their language? As all language learners know (or find out, if it’s their first time), these tasks chart a progression (from 1 to 6) of increasingly difficult and complex skills. It is possible to train people to do the first three with some degree of competency (as you can train them to sing Frere Jaques). But the last two require that the learner has taken the training further through curiosity and motivation to learn the language.

This is what I mean when I say that language at this level cannot be taught. I mean that someone who succeeds as a putative teacher to such learners is creating contexts in which they can more efficiently and successfully learn. This then is the true work of a teacher, to motivate students to want to learn, to challenge them, to construct environments whereby learning will best take place, to model the behaviors of good learners according to what the teacher has found works best as a master learner, to demonstrate, to practice what is learned, to reflect on what he or she is learning, to do, and to model for the students how to do, all of the above.

-------------------------------------------

And my brief philosophy of teaching ends there. That is about the right amount of prose for a job application. It reads like a story, it’s neatly ended. But there is of course more. When I was writing this out, freewriting as it were, I continued in this vein …

Like others, I love to learn but I hate to be taught. To be taught implies a teacher with a long ruler standing over fidgeting students bent over desks except when called on or to sneak furtive glances at the clock on the wall. In my perception, a learning space should take on much more pleasant, more flexible dimensions. Ideally it should be a space that learners want to go to (there have been studies of such spaces, such as children’s museums, space centers, etc. where people go voluntarily to learn). Using Web 2.0 tools it is possible to construct such spaces online where students feel motivated to treat each other as collaborators in and audiences for projects. The Internet allows us to scale such efforts out to highly significant dimensions, so if technology is available, it can be used for this purpose. But even if IT tools are not available, the focus of learning (as facilitated by teachers) should be on collaboration and appreciation of individual strengths, with deficiencies rectified in ways that students can see lead to success and progress.

When I have free reign to facilitate as I like (when I construct and facilitate my own online courses for example), I am able to tailor curricula around individual needs. I do this in part by letting students define their learning goals and document their progress in what I am now calling me-portfolios in open spaces of their own construction (not using a kind of e-portfolio software designed to place the entire e-portfolio into a single proprietary server space). In this way, when I have freedom to construct my own courses, I balance learner needs vs. a variety of choices in my curriculum to keep course materials flexible, adaptable, driven by students, and by their response to teacher trial and error.

Sean Banville articulated this give and take in teaching quite well in an interview with Larry Ferlazzo, reported in Larry’s blog here: (link). Sean referred especially to face-to-face language teaching, where teachers must listen carefully to students and then move in one of any number of possible directions either thought out and prepared in advance, or (and this is where it becomes an art) invented spontaneously.

Another important aspect of teaching is that it is necessary to have two general philosophies, or approaches, one for mature learners with developed literacy skills who can understand and articulate the metalanguage of learning and dissemination of knowledge, and another for learners without sufficient experience to enable them to express as well what they wish to accomplish in their learning environment. I most often encounter the first group in online environments, where people tend to self-select to be there. Many of whom I am referring to as online students are in fact teaching peers carrying through on their master-learner roles, and for these learners I try to model how to use technologies to help them discover and learn what THEY want to know, and extend their learning through productive networking. I often find that one of the rewards of working with such learners is that I am able to learn from them (again, in my role as master-learner). Here, there are usually many opportunities to show-through-doing that to teach is to model and demonstrate, and to learn is to practice and reflect.

For the less mature learners, the young men and women I teach in my day-to-day teaching at tertiary level in Arab countries, my over-riding goal as a teacher (as opposed to trainer) is to model and demonstrate for them the literacies I feel they will need to reach the next level. This involves giving more discrete guidance, much of it directed at affecting change in the culture of the learning environment itself.

One more important aspect of teaching is the role of doubt and confusion. If my courses include many instances of realia and options, students can be confused at first. I tell them, reassure them, that confusion is the state where learning begins. If there is no stress or tension, then it is possible that training is taking place, but not necessarily learning in its optimal self-questioning sense. So confusion serves a purpose and can be anticipated in stages where learning is most strongly internalized, and can be dissipated where interactions between participants are rich enough to help them resolve that confusion.

And now, as Auden said about great poems, never completed, only abandoned, I must leave off my exploration of teaching philosophies, or I would never actually complete any job applications ;-). However, if the topic interest you, won’t you continue this conversation in the comments section below?

Coda:

I didn't get the job but my teaching philosophy got two retweets!
http://screencast.com/t/iSFXJX65y71

Original links:
http://twitter.com/ozge/status/67529362387374080
http://twitter.com/WackJacq/status/67538421492613120

Yes, I accept pay in karma :-)

Hold Presses:
This just in, here's a teaching philosophy in action from a teacher in my PLN, linking her students to the world from a class somewhere on the planet. This just popped up on my computer while I happened to be editing this blog post ...

This is what she was doing:
http://classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=56473

Transforming learning with creative technogogy: Achieving the aha! moment

2011-03-10T20:29:00.050Z

In starting this article about the interplay between technology and pedagogy, I wanted a term to combine the two whereby pedagogy would come first. I googled 'pedagology' and got no hits. Great, I thought I had coined just the term ... until I realized there is a term andragology, meaning the study of the science of andragogy. Therefore, pedagology would logically be the study of the science of pedagogy, so I tried the term in reverse.

When I found that the reverse-term 'technogogy' got 22,000 hits, I realized I'd come across the word before. There are many blogs containing that term, and many of the hits are related to ELT, for example Nik Peachey's Web page at http://www.technogogy.org.uk/. There is a posting by Zaid Ali Alsagoff (well known for his blog on Web 2.0 resources: http://zaidlearn.blogspot.com/) defining technogogy as "the convergence of technology, pedagogy and content in the transformative use of technology to foster learning," http://elearningmalaysia.blogspot.com/2008/01/technogogy-convergence-of-content.html.

Zaid has added here the notion of 'content' to otherwise the same definition in the first paper he is aware of on Technogogy, a keynote cited as Idrus, R.M. (2005). “From Facilitation to the Transformation of Learning: From Pedagogy to Technogogy,” from the 5th International Educational Technology Conference (IETC2005) in Sakarya, Turkey (see the correct link in Idrus and McComas, 2006).

It's not surprising that ELT practitioners should be in the lead on co-opting a term such as technogogy, but I still find it remarkable that I can have all this information at my fingertips before I'm but halfway through my first cup of coffee in the morning. It's not at all remarkable to be using Google, even though it does make possible access to knowledge that when I was younger would have required hours of tedious research through card catalogs and Reader's Guides available only by going physically to a brick and mortar library across campus or across town. More remarkable still is that the library gave us access only to works that had made it through a publisher as arbiter of what we can find in the library; yet the Internet gives us access to a lot of that plus the extended knowledge of anyone with the wherewithal to post to a blog or wiki. And it's not as Andrew Keen (2007) would have us believe, that this exposes us to a lot of "amateur" drivel ... well perhaps it does, but then publishers let in a lot of drivel as well, but theirs isn't subject to the scrutiny of anyone with the wherewithal to leave a comment, and in aggregate, it's that free-for-all crowd sourcing of opinion that gives the blogosphere its edge in currency and credibility.

This is what Howard Reingold, in his list of 5 crucial new literacies skills, calls 'network awareness' (Rowell, 2010). It's access to that network of advice and opinion, trusted because it's vetted by peers who comment, that is the truly remarkable aspect of what you can find on the Internet. And yet you still hear (or I do) very knowledgeable people, professors, remark that computers are isolating, when undoubtedly the opposite is true. It's because computers are anything but isolating, because they bring people together in innumerable modalities, that they are transformative in learning. Yet this is not widely accepted as fact due to the ineffable nature of the process. Technogogy has to be experienced to be understood, and many simply do not grant themselves the opportunity to experience it; therefore they never achieve that aha! moment.

It's widely noted that there is lack of transfer between the social networking people do in their private lives and that which they apply to their professional environments. Therefore, use of Facebook, for example, to track friends and relatives and share photos and pithy observations is not necessarily to experience social networking in a transformative way for learning (though it is certainly transformative in the way people deal with relationships nowadays -- breaking up is much harder to do when you have to update your status, redefine your friends and friends of your ex-friend, and cull through your photos posted online ;-). It's often the case that people who delve into social networks for buying books online, shopping at eBay, couch surfing, or finding apartments and good restaurants do not transfer these social networking skills into their professional spaces. This ability to transfer social networking skills from social to professional settings is just one of 10 paradigm shifts required of educators noted in Stevens (2010, see the revised version online, as presented in Slide 3, June 10, 2010: http://www.slideshare.net/vances/shifting-sands-shifting-paradigms).

People who expose themselves to Web 2.0 technologies generally want to learn more about them, but those who do not blog, or use Google Docs, or bookmark with Delicious (to give a few entry-level examples) often cannot fathom what the fuss is about. Their ways of doing things seem perfectly fine to them, and if they are teachers, their students have been doing very well for years with the tried and true techniques, thank you very much. Teachers who don't buy into social media or use it to any great extent for their own learning can hardly be expected to model its use for their students.

Many students (and their teachers) in my own face-to-face workplace tell me don't feel they need Google Docs when they can share flash drives and email attachments. They don't need Delicious when they can bookmark in their browsers on their own computers (remember when organizing and sharing those bookmark files was our sole means of social bookmarking?). They don't see the value in blogs, resist blogging themselves, and don't see why they should refer to others' blogs to leverage their own learning. Because they tend to be not predisposed to utilizing social media with each other, let alone with students, it follows that proponents of the use of transformative technologies in education are often preaching to the choir, to one another via their PLNs, or personal learning networks, and only those who have experienced the affordances of transformative networked learning firsthand can really understand what the benefits are.

These technologies only become transformative when their use becomes second-nature to the point where we and those around us use them in our normal workflow. When that happens, ways of thinking and doing change in dramatic ways. When the culture of an institute or network of peers changes significantly in such a way that what was once merely desirable is not only possible but opens new possibilities, this is transformative. Having had one aha! moment, users of transformative technologies tend to have another, then another. Doors open to other doors, and then things become possible that were concealed behind doors which were obscured by other closed doors before. Insights occur to those who have been through those doors that can't occur to those who have not opened even the first doors to see what is on the other side. Once the doors are wide open, imagination is freed, creativity is given fertile ground in which to thrive. Leaps are taken and then more leaps, and the connection with those left behind is sometimes lost as those who are delving into new technologies absorb more of the new cultures and make more and more connections that those who have not experienced those aha! moments are at a loss to understand.

Thus the real loss to an institute when Web 2.0 and other educational technologies are not encouraged is the potential for creativity. This is a loss that cannot be measured because it would be a measure of what would have happened 'if only.' Transformative creativity cannot occur in an institution where professional development is driven top down and limited to the ideas of people only within the confines of the institute, and often only to those with power to push their agendas. It thrives in an environment where conversations among stakeholders are to some extent socially networked, held in open spaces where everyone has a voice. Transformative development occurs within communities of practitioners intrinsically motivated to open doors and discover what lies beyond the doors they find on the other side, who have access to common spaces where they can share stories about their learning journeys.

In a recorded 15-minute multimedia keynote, Shelly Terrel says “when we want to transform education we have to share our stories and show how we became the innovative, passionate, motivated teachers we are today.” She acknowledges that we are not all like this, that many of our peers need encouragement, but that sharing stories is key to transforming education to the point where we break out of existing cycles:
http://teacherbootcamp.edublogs.org/2011/03/04/considering-the-curriculm-teachmeet-newcastle-keynote/

There should be no teacher left behind, but those still in the "cycle" that Terrel decries often don't know where to begin to bridge that gap. Colleagues in this situation often tell me they would like to bridge it, but feel hesitant to make those leaps. They feel vulnerable in social networking systems that frankly, few of us fully understand, or worse, leave newcomers exposed to failure and ridicule. Often overworked teachers argue that they don't have time, that they need training (when what they need to know can be found readily online, along with communities of like-minded-peers eager to help them). They might rationalize that the leap really isn't necessary anyway. They don't see the need for it because those who have moved through multiple doors to the other side seem so far out of touch with the 'real world' left behind.

Whether this is a problem for those who incorporate educational technology in their teaching or for those who do not depends on who is controlling the paths to the doors of discovery. If those in control are progressive, there is impetus for everyone to move ahead, and those most progressive will put in place scaffolding to help the ones who wish to learn and develop. But if those in control have not experienced themselves the affordances of new technologies that facilitate social learning, then they might cling to the status quo and find it against their vested interests to encourage progressive use of those technologies, and those who attempt to use them anyway might find little sympathy or cooperation from their immediate peers. Lacking support from their immediate workplace, advocates of teaching through technology will experience frustration unless they connect with like-minded educators in the world at large, as many do!.

How can these two worlds be bridged? How can teachers who are making transformative use of technogogy in teaching reach those who need assistance in understanding how to at least learn about the potentials for professional development and appropriate uses with students? Of course this is happening as we speak. The gap is narrowing, more people are making the leaps required. As Elizabeth Hanson-Smith used to say, in case anyone doubted this trend, "there will always be more technology" (personal communication with anyone who happened to be in hearing distance).

Resistance to advances in technology in education are not unique to this century. When I was involved in setting up a language department in Oman in the mid 1980's we allowed newly-hired teachers to choose whether to have on their desks a typewriter or a computer with WordStar, a word processor popular at the time. Many chose typewriters, though those vanished rapidly over the next few years. Of course, word processors were revolutionizing writing, not only in terms of speed, ease of revision and correction, and variety of text genres that an individual could produce, but how writing was taught as well. At those times there were teachers who clung to the notion that students should write out each revision of each paper they were working on, something to do with penmanship. I argued at the time that it was hypocritical to be teaching a process of writing that those teachers themselves were no longer using.

Change comes slowly, and is facilitated through constant and patient modeling by those who are incorporating new technologies in their own working lives. Terry Freedman made a good presentation on change agency for the first K-12 Online conference (Freedman, 2006), and Kim Cofino has produced excellent posts on affecting change when administration is fully behind the process (e.g. Cofino, 2008). Other presentations archived at the K12 Online conference web site include inspiring examples of how schools can transform their learning environment through embracing Web 2.0 and encouraging its use by students and teachers, and throughout the community at large (Carozza, 2009; Curtis, 2009).

More such examples abound in conversations in the podosphere. For example, in the episode of 21st Century Learning found at http://edtechtalk.com/ETT21_148 you can hear Peter Smith, head of the Middle School at St Andrews School in Savanah Ga., explain how the school recently underwent accreditation and were told they needed to upgrade their technology, so they gave iPads out to students and teachers, on the understanding that everyone would document their discoveries in open forum spaces. The process that allowed students and teachers to evolve how the devices would be used is an excellent example of how a learning community institutionalizes tranformative learning.

The iPad rollout was transformative because it avoided the top-down model of change agency. Results would likely have been different had teachers been introduced to iPads in a presentation by management staff, given a one-off workshop, and told they had better start using them if they wanted to keep their jobs. Instead they were given the opportunity over time to model best practices and learn from one another. Only by going through an experiential learning process can the ineffable be shared.

Twitter is a good example of a tool that those who don't use it find difficult to comprehend, because only through using it are its affordances understood. I myself didn't see the value in Twitter until its use was finally modeled for me. In this excerpt from Stevens (2008) I attempt to elucidate the ineffable in describing how ...

I 'finally got' Twitter when I heard Jeff Utecht's presentation entitled “Online Professional Development,” podcast as part of the 2007 K-12 online conference: http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=205. Jeff recorded his presentation as a description of what he was doing at his computer in Shanghai while walking us through how he was using Skype and other social networking tools to connect with his professional network from there. So he was crafting his presentation as a live Skypecast, and he mentioned that he had just put a message out on Twitter inviting anyone online to Skype-in and discuss with him how they were using these tools themselves. A few minutes later, he had a bite, as someone responded to his tweet and spontaneously joined him in Skype. The presentation then became a conversation which illustrated how Jeff's network functioned in connecting him with other educators to further each other's professional development through taking advantage of such opportunities to learn from one another. That was when I decided to start using Twitter myself.

Another good example of how modeling technology alters approaches to problems and changes the nature of the solutions people take for granted is webcasting. I first connected teachers online with participants at a face-to-face conference at the 1999 TESOL conference in New York, and the following year in Vancouver I was invited to give a live demonstration with student voices and avatars online as an "invited speaker" to an even larger audience. In the years that followed my fellow online teachers and I appeared with our distance students often at both face-to-face and online conferences. In 2002 in Salt Lake City we were asked if we would require an Internet connection for our CALL-IS Academic Session. Most other presenters said that it would not be necessary but I insisted on it, and once the connectivity had been granted it then became possible to webcast the event live, which we did; so again an environment that had been perceived as localized became one that was opened up to the world because we took advantage of the technology that was available and let that transform our thinking about what then became possible. Because this leveraged our ability to model and hence to inform others, our use of technology in this way allowed those present to experience the process and thus became an example of creative technogogy, in Zaid's sense of "convergence of technology, pedagogy and content in the transformative use of technology to foster learning."

Flash forward and we find that my colleagues at annual TESOL conferences are now taking advantage of this capability as a matter of course. There is a list of webcasts planned from the 2011 convention in New Orleans here: http://www.call-is.org/info/course/view.php?id=22. The technology being used (Elluminate) is almost the same as it has been for the past decade, but the acceptance of it, familiarity with it, and understanding of what it does for the learning environment are now all generally understood, and the acceptance and use of synchronous presentation tools to connect peers with one another to produce learning outcomes is not at all uncommon now. A transformation has taken place.

This example of webcasting illustrates how a personal (or professional) learning network works. PLN is another of those terms that causes eyes to roll when you try and explain the concept to someone who is not in the habit of connecting with peers online. My own network extends not only into groups of people with whom I interact in listservs and Nings and other forums, but over communities where people meet in online spaces for presentations and conversations often resulting in podcasts. Sometimes I join them live but given the tendency for these gatherings to be recorded, I am quite happy to download the podcasts onto my mp3 player and join in the proceedings at my leisure asynchronously.

It was in the course of listening to one of those that I came to know about an online service with potential for webcasting, Spreaker Online Radio, http://www.spreaker.com/. The podcast I was listening to was Parents as Partners on the EdTechTalk channel http://edtechtalk.com/node/4909. Cale Birk, principal of South Kamloops Secondary School in Kamloops BC, was saying that he could hardly expect his staff to come on board with Web 2.0 if he didn't "roll up his sleeves" and get in there with it himself. As such he is an exemplary model for leading his school and community forward towards the transformation of learning into a mode where stakeholders don't just learn, but learn how to learn in the new age of digital literacies. He mentioned Spreaker as of one of the tools he uses to set up online recorded tutorials for teachers and students in his school, so that if he can't explain something to them live, he can at least put it online and show them asynchronously when they land on one of his web sites.

Once you've experienced a few times the serendipitous workings of a PLN, you won't find the following to be entirely coincidental, but when I checked out the site and landed on live broadcasts, I found that Worldbridges (http://worldbridges.net/) founder Jeff Lebow (see Lebow, 2006) was featured in a broadcast he appeared to be recording at that moment, so I sent a tweet out to my network to let them know that Jeff was trying out a new webcasting tool, and I included the link where people in our PLN could go to listen: http://twitter.com/VanceS/status/43956127871938560. Meanwhile, Sean Banville retweeted my post, and Jeff tweeted right back what amounted to a review of the product: http://twitter.com/jefflebow/status/43957560960757760. Thus works the system whereby, as David Weinberger (2002) puts it, small pieces are continually loosely joined.

Harking back to the fact that there are technologies we use in one aspect of our lives that we don't apply in our professions, the big question is: why is this technology not being used as a matter of course with students? Synchronous voice technologies are being used to link classrooms in different parts of the world using free programs such as Skype or WiZiQ (e.g. the annual earthcast at http://earthbridges.net/, Youth Voices at http://youthvoices.net/, and the Flat Classroom Project at http://www.flatclassroomproject.org/, to give just three examples). Still, relatively few teachers are familiar with those technologies, and often the technologies that enable them are blocked in schools. If this is inexplicable considering the potential for enhancement to learning, then the main problem is lack of understanding of how peer to peer interactivity can transform a learning environment, one symptom of what I have called elsewhere the "firewall of the mind" (Stevens, 2001).

Photo credit, Barbara Dieu: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bee/5737375/ (shared here per creative commons: attribution, noncommercial, share-alike)

When that happens, when we as teachers apply social networking skills to learning from one another as a matter of course in our day-to-day workflow, and then apply those same techniques in practicing our profession with students, in the normal routine of teaching our day-to-day classes, a transformation will have truly taken place. For that to happen there will have to be general acceptance of creative technogogy applied to curriculum and syllabus design. Experience shows that such change comes slowly, but that it will come. Happily, in an environment where teachers and students are networked and sharing knowledge, the ecosystem is such that people in general help one another to achieve their learning goals. You might rightly say that this is the goal of teaching with or without technology, but when we share and model digital literacies skills with one another, aha! moments occur to bring us closer to the ideal, and these are greatly facilitated through social aspects of creative technogogy.

References

Cofino, K. (2008). Making the shift happen. Always learning. Retrieved on March 28, 2011 from http://kimcofino.com/blog/2008/02/24/making-the-shift-happen/

Curtis, P. (2009). Building A Web 2.0 culture. Multimedia presentation at the K12 Online Conference 2009. Retrieved on March 28, 2011 from http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=457 .

Carozza, B. (2009). Embracing Web 2.0 for the Administrator. Multimedia presentation at the K12 Online Conference 2009. Retrieved on March 28, 2011 from http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=455.

Freedman, T. (2006). Overcoming obstacles: Selling Web 2.0 to senior management. Paper delivered at the K12 Online Conference 2006. Retrieved on March 28, 2011 from http://k12online.wm.edu/overcomingobstacles.pdf.

Keen, A. (2007). The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture. Crown Business. 240 pages.

Rowell, L. (2010). An Interview with Howard Rheingold. eLearn Magazine (n.p.). Retrieved March 28, 2011 from http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?article=111-1&section=articles.

Lebow, Jeff. (2006). Worldbridges: The Potential of Live, Interactive Webcasting. TESL-EJ, Volume 10, Number 1. Retrieved March 28, 2011 from: http://www.tesl-ej.org/ej37/int.html .

Rozhan M. Idrus and Karen McComas. (2006). From Facilitation to the Transformation of Learning: From Pedagogy to Technogogy. A keynote given at the Third International Conference on eLearning for Knowledge-Based Society, August 3-4, 2006, Bangkok, Thailand. Retrieved March 28, 2011 from:

http://www.ijcim.th.org/v14nSP1/pdf/p5.1-9-fin-58-keynote-Rozhan-%20Karen.pdf.)

Stevens, Vance. (2010). Shifting sands, shifting paradigms: Challenges to developing 21st century learning skills in the United Arab Emirates. In Egbert, J. CALL in Limited Technology Contexts, CALICO Monograph Series, Volume 9. pp.227-239. Revised version available from http://tinyurl.com/vance2010calico.

Stevens, Vance. (2008). Trial by Twitter: The rise and slide of the year's most viral microblogging platform. TESL-EJ, Volume 12, Number 1. Retrieved March 28, 2011 from: http://tesl-ej.org/ej45/int.pdf.

Stevens, V. (2001). Implementing Expectations: The Firewall in the Mind. Plenary Address delivered at the 'Implementing Call in EFL: Living up to Expectations' conference at the University of Cyprus, Nicosia May 5th - 6th, 2001. Retrieved March 28, 2011 from: http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/cyprus2001/plenary/index.html.

Weinberger, D. (2002). Small pieces loosely joined: A unified theory of the Web. Perseus Books. Preface and chapters 1 and 2 available from http://www.smallpieces.com/.

Notes
This post was completed and submitted to TESL-EJ to appear in the On the Internet section March 29, 2011
TinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/advanced-aha

This comment appeared on my wall in Facebook (thanks :-)

Interview with Alex Hayes from EDUPOV

2010-09-15T08:18:00.121Z

On September 15, 2010, the combination TESOL pp107 Multiliteracies course, TESOL Arabia EdTech SIG professional development series, and the regular Webheads meeting each Sunday noon GMT conducted an interview with Alex Hayes. Alex is the CEO of EDUPOV (http://www.edupov.com/), a company that sells wearable technology for education. Because it's wearable, it presents itself from the wearer's point of view, or POV.

Alex left us his PhD proposal to read in preparation for his talk:
https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1_TGVgWsJjbx5f0wxLQPSSjdsAluvF2Bgpnk9XMw1K4Q

In reading this over, if I were a Wordle, the word I would make most prominent in Alex's proposal is CONNECTIVISM. On p.8/16 of his proposal Alex mentions the role of connectivism in networked learning to be one where participants build "a living literacy that embodies electronic connections amongst all other human considerations," which seems quite relevant to the topic of the Multiliteracies course. He says also that his proposed research "posits a Connectivist theoretical framework as most suited to examining the risks inherent with adding more veillance to flexible education settings." Wearable POV technology is as rich with affordances (for vocational training, for example) as it is fraught with potential for invasion of privacy, especially when the technology is geo-locatable, contains photographs of others, etc. These latter issues conjure a world of veillances: sousveillance, uberveillance, and of course surveillance, which we already (think we) know about (http://works.bepress.com/kmichael/187/).

This word 'connectivism' stood out for me because although Alex and I have never met in person, we have interacted on numerous occasions. Alex and some friends of his held a relaxed chat for example as a keynote address at the 2009 WiAOC convergence, which I moderated (http://wiaoc09.pbworks.com/AlexHayes; I haven't located recording yet). Apart from that I have occasionally crossed paths online with Alex sometimes socially but always in connection with some learning event. This is not surprising because connectivism is how we both learn best (Siemens, 2005: http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm).

Quite a lot of what I know about Alex I acquired not live but asynchronously, through podcasts (http://talkingvte.blogspot.com/, for example). He is an organizer of conferences in Australia (e.g.http://mobilizethis.wikispaces.com/). Because Australia is a big country with huge distances separating learners from places they would previously have had to go in order to learn, their educational system tends to be strong on distance learning innovation, and the conferences Alex organizes feature speakers discussing how POV technologies help trainers overcome some problems inherent in those distances. Having had this wider context in which to understand Alex's work, I realize that participants in the multiliteracies course I'm teaching might, without this perspective, be wondering what connection his work has with them.

Thus the frameworks underpinning Alex's work are not so apparent when Alex discusses the products of his work; however, I hope that we are modeling here with one another new insights into connected learning. One good example of connected learning was reported just the other day when a teacher in Brazil had her students blog and then requested comments on their posts through the Webheads list. This message reveals the serendipitous outcome of that:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evonline2002_webheads/message/26545

Another practical intersection of Alex's work and pedagogy is where Alex mentions in his proposal the New Media Consortium's Horizon Report. The NMC's annual reports of what's new on the near and distant horizon in educational technology make interesting assessments of trends for the near and far future: http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2010/. For example, this trend: "People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to. Life in an increasingly busy world where learners must balance demands from home, work, school, and family poses a host of logistical challenges with which today’s ever more mobile students must cope," http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2010/chapters/trends/ helps explain the prediction that "On the near-term horizon — that is, within the next 12 months — are mobile computing and open content." http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2010/chapters/technologies/

So I invited Alex to talk with us because I too feel that mobile technologies are crucial to the near future, if not the present, of connected learning, which is in essence the field that Alex is working in. I think mobile technology is moving faster than teachers are at this point; for example in Argentina, almost all bars and restaurants have wifi which customers frequently access through their mobiles, which they all seem to have; yet classrooms there block mobiles and seem resistant to technology of any stripe. Where I am in the UAE we are at the stage where all students have mobiles, often more than one, and bring them to class, and use them to get on the Internet, yet teachers here in the UAE are not really exploiting even computer-based internet that much in teaching (I mean, falling short of its true potential; mobile tech hardly at all: Stevens, 2010, http://tinyurl.com/vance2010calico). I noticed when traveling this summer that more and more travelers are carrying smart phone and using them in conjunction with Facebook for what they used to do in Internet cafes.

This question of how what Alex talked about is relevant to teachers touches on the issue of cohesion, which has been raised in the multiliteracies course I'm teaching. There is some suggestion that cohesion could best be achieved if we worked from one learning platform (Desire to Learn, for example) rather than spreading ourselves thin on the Internet (wikis, blogs, Ning, YahooGroup and Grouply).

Cohesion should not be confused with simplicity. Simple things are easy to understand. For example if I show you black and white and frame these with respect to a color scheme, this is cohesive, and easy to understand. But if I explain that color is only one aspect of human subjectivity, and that the importance of color might depend to some extent on whether you are right or left brained, and whether your eyes can detect colors in the first place, whether you have a prior schema based on racial prejudices or the color of hats in early cowboy movies, then you might feel that this topic is not so simplistic, though we might be able still to supply cohesion to our discussion.

We would have to provide a platform for our discussion. If I chose just one then this might simplify our task of discussing the topic, but when the topic itself is multiliteracies and connectivism and how cohesion is achieved when people try to learn and disseminate knowledge on the Internet, then not modeling how that works through some sort of emulation of real life in choice of learning management system could in the long run be detrimental, like presenting simplified native-language based language learning materials as opposed to exposing students to authentically communicative situations. Of course if the students know nothing of the language then some simplification is in order, but if the topic is multiliteracies and connectivism and new ways of learning and knowing via networked learning environments, rank beginners are becoming fewer and farther between. Some degree of immersion is appropriate.

One way to draw a distinction between beginner and experienced learners of a topic is to ask whether they are ready to learn on their own. If they need guidance at the start of their learning path, then the teacher can consider simplifying both the material to be learned and the platform for delivery. But if the learners are capable of driving their own learning, then a real-world simulation might be the best platform for them.

This what I was hoping to discuss with Alex, some of the connections between his work and new literacies, and how we achieve connected knowledge by mobilizing that!

MobilizeThis! and StreamFolio are two initiatives of Alex's I also hoped to get him to talk more about.

Also, Alex and I had both reviewed the slide show here
http://smarterware.org/6561/what-to-expect-from-google-me?
which I intended to ask about with respect to a podcast Alex left online recently at the Australian eLearning09 conference: http://talkingvte.blogspot.com/2009/12/elearning09-alex-hayes-streamfolio.html

This would have been a discussion of interface vis a vis what people actually do when using social networks online. The issue of privacy would have come up (veillance and uberveillance, and Adams's thoughts on distinguishing your networks by strength of ties, and preventing items meant for one set of ties, close friends for example, from getting out into another, a professional network for example). You can judge how closely we came to these goals when you listen to the recording of the interview in Elluminate at: http://tinyurl.com/150910alexhayes.

Tiny URL for this post: http://tinyurl.com/evomlit100915hayes

One further comment, and thanks for this one, not sure I deserve it but I am humbled

Welcome to the latest version of the TESOL pp107 Multiliteracies course

2010-09-08T15:56:00.005Z

The TESOL Principles of Online Teaching PPOT 107 2010 session on Multiliteracies for Social Networking and Collaborative Learning Environments takes place from September 6 to October 3, 2010

This course is part of TESOL's Principles and Practices of Online Teaching Certificate Program; see http://www.tesol.org/s_tesol/sec_document.asp?CID=664&DID=2642. The course has fee paying participants but in such cases I focus on them while inviting the network of past participants who have taken previous TESOL or EVO Multiliteracies courses to join us if they wish. In networked learning, it takes a network! (at least a personal one, or PLN). So if you are reading this message you are welcome to participate.

The central URL for the course is at http://goodbyegutenberg.pbworks.com, but we are carrying out conversations at http://multiliteracies.ning.com/ and http://multilit.grouply.com/.

We have a calendar of events with events we have arranged for this course, especially our noon Sunday GMT sessions at http://tappedin.org. We are also arranging events for 13:00 GMT in various presentation venues each Sunday. You can find the calendar at http://multiliteracies.ning.com/ and note that it includes events from this Calendar as well, http://live.classroom20.com/calendar.html, which is in turn a mashup of calendars from other communities actively producing webcasts and podcasts keeping conversations going around topics of interest to 21st century educators (these are listed and color coded at the Classroom 2.0 site. What I did was I got the embed code for that, figured out what line of code aggregates each part of
it, and then added a line for the calendar in my account when I got ITS embed code so the result was their calendar plus mine in one embedded object. I added pp107 in front of all the items I've put in the calendar so you can tell which are for the Multiliteracies course. At the moment it's noon and 13:00 GMT each Sunday and one other event at 11:00 GMT Sept 15. There will be more.

Now you might wonder why include the other calendars? That's because it's a berry bush full of berries. When offered a berry bush we can choose the berries we want to try and maybe some of us go there. If I gave you only events that I think you should see, that would be a conduit: today we do this at this time,
and next day that at that time. I prefer the berry bush as a metaphor for setting out learning activities, you choose from a menu.

This post began as a stub to see if I could get one of its tags, evomlit10, to show up at http://spezify.com/#/evomlit10. Tweets containing #evomlit10 show up immediately, but YahooGroup/Grouply posts and pictures on Flickr took hours to appear. The Flickr photos tagged evomlit10 eventually appeared at http://taggalaxy.com/ as well. So far this tagged blog post has not appeared at Spezify, nor have any of my delicious bookmarks, all tagged evomlit10. Oh well, go figgah!

Meanwhile, here are some thoughts on my philosophy for this course:

Networked learning

Personally I like the network aspect. We haven't seen people from previous courses post here yet, but I'm sure they are lurking. We've had a number of people not enrolled in the TESOL course join both our YGroup and Ning just before the course started, so again I like the public aspect and the potential for wider perspective. All are welcome to contribute constructively.

Berry bush vs. Conduit metaphor for course delivery and access

I first read about the berry bush / conduit dichotomy in a work by Scallon and Scallon that I cited in my MA thesis in the very early 80s. A conduit is a linear progression of learning benchmarks, as would be presented in a book or on cassette tape; whereas the availability of random access via computers was opening up the possibility at the time of learning being accessed via a menu of choices, as one would pick berries from a bush, going for the most succulent and accessible (watch for thorns!) morsels.

With this in mind, the readings and media files at Goodbye Gutenberg are all suggested for you but you don't have to do them all or in any order. You can treat those as berries on a bush too. If I set up a conduit
(now we do this, next that, then this) it gets a bit teacher directed. I realize some people are most comfortable with this and others are UNcomfortable if NOT this, but at least if we set up the items as a berry bush, the LEARNERS determine direction.

Someone asked about a Common Area for our course. I replied, think of a university campus, some might choose the TV room in the dorm, others might hang out at the campus center, others might frequent the pub down the road, many might be found in all these places. Plus you have your cell phone; I guess on the Internet that would be the trail of tagged artifacts you leave online. We might find you through your postings to one of our common areas, or through the spaces you tag. It's a berry bush, we'll look for you in the bushes. You'll find others there. One of the things we'll learn in this course is how this works.

ePortfolio assessment

I expect each participant in the course to have an ePortfolio. This could be a blog where participants could link to other spaces in their sidebars, as I do at this blog http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/. The ePortfolio I have in mind could resemble a table of contents, of which participant blogs would be but one entry.

To create an ePortfolio table of contents, one way would be to open a Google Doc and keep a list of links to accomplishments in this course (and Publish it and share the link with us). Or create a Wiki with the same effect, or even a Delicious URL that points to all the items you had tagged 'pp107eporfolio-me' for example. Items pointed to could include your blog, your tagged URLs for the course at your delicious or Diigo account (as another example),and it could include also the URLs of any blog posts you had created at our Ning, as each post should be accessible via its URL on the Internet.

Basically it's somewhere the rest of us can go to see what you've been doing in the course. I might go there in the first week in October to decide who deserves credit in the course. I would think that anyone who had an ePortfolio linking to a reasonable number of artifacts documenting reflection on the course topics, and who had interacted with others during the 4 weeks of the course, would deserve credit for having learned something during our time together, as demonstrated in the ePortfolio.

Future of Learning in a Networked World, Argentina and Brazil 2010

2010-07-26T16:07:00.009Z

This is a quick post from a pleasant outdoor bar/restaurant with free wireless in view of the beach where I was just swimming in Toque Toque Piqueno, Brazil. I composed offline and I'm taking advantage of available time and bandwidth to get this into the cloud. I'll be back with URLs and photos to illustrate. (Here's one from Michael Coghlan http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikecogh/4848259991/.) Meanwhile enjoy this first draft ...

FLNW, or the Future of Learning in a Networked World, has a home: http://flnw.wikispaces.com. According to this URL it began with a meeting of minds not only in networked cyberspaces but in physical space in moveable feast progressing around New Zealand in 2006. Participants in that initial encounter included Stephen Downes, Leigh Blackall, Alexander Hayes, Konrad Glogowski, Jo Kay,Teemu Leinonen, John Eyles, Rose Grozdanic, Derek Chirnside, and many others along the way, http://flnw.wikispaces.com/participants, etc. Michael Coghlan flew over for it from Australia, and Barbara Dieu, or Bee as we know her, traveled to New Zealand all the way from Brazil.

The idea was that a group of networked educators would come together face to face and while interacting with one another, produce web-based artifacts that would allow others in the network to savour the experience vicariously. My own take on that event at the time was to marvel at the use of tags to aggregate content, a concept that was new to me then, and that I started to understand from watching Leigh produce collages of photos from Flickr, etc. http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=flnw&m=text

Attempts to replicate the event have not been so stellar. I participated in one in Thailand in January 2008, when John Eyles met Michael Coghlan and I in Bangkok where we met Kim Cofino, were joined by Trish Everett, and traveled on to Korat to give workshops to quite a few appreciative Thai teachers (see http://vancestevens.com/papers/index.html#080116, http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2008/01/future-of-learning-in-networked-world.html and http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2008_01_01_archive.html). I had to get back to work after that, but John Eyles and others continued on to Thai TESOL in Chang Mai and on into Cambodia. It was a form of tourism that was new to me, and I enjoyed the feeling of contributing my expertise while being hosted to some extent (some accommodation and a few memorable meals) by colleague educators who were benefiting from what FLNW had to offer. True to form, John, Trish, and Michael and I blogged and photographed and recorded on iRiver mp3 players and other devices and posted audio and video files online along with numerous photos and blog posts. Kim and her colleagues at the International School of Bangkok left us full uStream recordings of our time there (I think he uStream itself has disappeared, but remnants exist here: http://mscofino.edublogs.org/2008/01/19/the-future-of-learning-in-a-networked-world/,
and http://learningnetworkedworld.blogspot.com/2008/01/isb-bkk.html)

There was an FLNW event in 2009, unfortunately for me at the end of August, right on the week that my duties at the Petroleum Institute resumed, so I missed being able to join Leigh Blackall, Sylvia Curry, Derek Chirnside, Michael Coghlan, and others for a trip to the Northwest USA, including kayak trips around Puget Sound, http://www.fullcirc.com/2008/01/14/flnw-event-january-16-drawing-together-online/. Nancy White wrote a blog post afterwards expressing disappointment that the deep conversations and constant posting of artifacts online were taking second place to what others regarded as vacation time (having come all that way, in the summer time ;-)

So when Bee got the idea to host the 2010 FLNW in Brazil to be anchored at BrazTESOL in Sao Paulo I submitted two proposals for the conference which were both accepted. Bee created a wiki page for the event at http://flnw.wikispaces.com/brazil complete with links to participants and itinerary and waited for others in the group to fill in the wiki. When Michael and I signed up she arranged what funding she could for us (in my case, a hotel room for 5 nights in Sao Paulo, highly appreciated, beats a kick in the rear :-). Tantalizingly, a Vivo Institute in Sao Paolo was arranging an event for about that time, inviting Stephen Downes, George Siemens, and Teemu Leionen, so the ingredients were in place awaiting critical mass to kick it into gear.

But somehow the mass failed to congeal as hoped. Scheduling problems caused Vivo to postpone their event to the following month. No one in the movement besides Michael and I actually appeared in Brazil. However, we turned it into an FLNW / Webheads in Action event. Starting in Buenos Aires, we met Webheads Rita Zeinstejer and Jennifer Verschoor, president of ARCALL, and along the way picked up Paula Lesdema and Maria Laura. We left a spirited Flickr photographic record

and on July 16 flew to Sao Paulo where Bee and her husband Pierre met us at the airport and whisked us into the countryside for a taste of rural Brazil unplugged, offline.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikecogh/sets/72157624561950146/
Michael's video collage at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIbEc6nKAQM

On Monday we returned to Sao Paulo where Bee had arranged for us to present morning and afternoon at a PCI (pre-conference institute). I had presentations myself on Wednesday and Thursday and was mulling how to best set up an ePortfolio portal for them when on Tuesday I settled on a wiki format. So what happened in these days is best viewed at that portal http://braz2010vance.pbworks.com/ with links from that page and from the sidebar to more information on the PCI, my demonstration of tag games Wednesday, and my talk on PLNs for educators Thursday; with photos aggregated on the tag braztesol10:

http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=braztesol10&m=tags

There is a link at my wiki to the next stop on the itinerary. Casa Thomas Jefferson in Brasilia were hosting a conference on Thursday and Friday and we flew up for the second day. We were taken to a great buffet lunch and then to a room at CTJ where our event was scheduled. I had got my colleagues to title it "Thinking SMALL" to accommodate my new acronym for CALL, social media assisted language learning. I don't think we actually mentioned the acronym during our presentations, which took on a sort of free-form structure, where we asked participants to tell us why they had joined us, and took it in turn from there. As usual we took videos and pictures and posted online to leave a record of the event; e.g.

From there the FLNW crew enjoyed a Saturday with samba in Brasilia and progressed by plane on an early flight back to Sao Paulo where we arrived at Bee's flat and got onto wireless just in time to catch Claire Siskin in Pennsylvania, Anitha Devi in India, and Rick Rosenthal in Amman Jordan at the tail end of the weekly Webheads Sunday noon GMT meeting at http://tappedin.org. We then hopped in Bee's car and drove 4 hours to the tiny bay of Toque Toque Piqueno, at a picture postcard beach house where Pierre was waiting for us with the shrimp and vegetables that would become our dinner. Visions of wireless dancing in our heads were quickly dashed by reality, and we were forced to postpone a projected podcast with Alex Hayes and turn our attentions instead to the white sand beach with its alluring cool water for bathing.

Hopefully the future of learning in a networked world will include ubiquitous access to always-on connectivity, where bandwidth is as plentiful as water. In our case, access to Internet, when we had it, was limited due to the incessant hospitality of the Brazilians we were with, who liked to sit for hours in restaurants, enjoying each other's company, while sipping the local beverages.

Here at Toque Toque Piqueno, where we have time but no bandwidth, I'm composing this blog post with hopes of posting it on arrival at our hotel in Paraty, where we should end up at some point today (and which SHOULD have wireless, and we'll see when we get there).

If we do find a connection, we might try to hook up with FLNW as planned, and after two nights in Paraty we'll return to Sao Paulo and go our separate ways, Michael back to Australia via Chile, Bobbi back home to UAE via Houston, and me on to Porto Seguro where I'll meet (at long last) Felix Zaniboni, one of our orginal webheads from 1998 or earlier http://prosites-vstevens.homestead.com/files/efi/efwbahia.htm. Then I'll be back in Buenos Aires on Aug 8 for a pair of talks on August 9 and 10 with webheads there, an additional day in BsAs in case anyone wants to meet me on Aug 11, or otherwise I might pop on the ferry to Uraguay for a day trip, and then I leave the FLNW trail for a brief sojourn in Peru before returning to Houston and home to Abu Dhabi to reunite with my dear wife Bobbi.

on reflection ...
No comments yet, but here's a good question:

A cookbook for 21st century project management

2010-06-16T04:39:00.008Z

I just returned to Abu Dhabi from the CALICO conference in Amherst where I talked about my chapter in the book for which I was a section editor and that was featured on CALICO’s portal web page prior to the conference https://calico.org/page.php?id=452;. The book is on CALL in limited technological contexts and my chapter “Shifting sands, shifting paradigms: Challenges to developing 21st century learning skills in the United Arab Emirates” discusses not limited technology per se, but limited experience with the latest uses of technology causing educators to not exploit its full potential and benefits. I point out in my chapter what some of the hurdles are preventing teachers from embracing the new technologies and I set forth a strategy for overcoming them. In a nutshell the strategy explains how we can be change agents by getting our colleagues to interact with us using 21st century Web 2.0 technology tools and writing use of these tools into the curriculum where they are taught by teachers whom we help to familiarize with some of the uses and affordances of these tools.

I posted the slide show outlining the chapter at Slideshare.net, direct link http://tinyurl.com/vance2010amherst. I put the full text of my final draft of the book chapter itself at Google Docs and create a tiny url for it at http://tinyurl.com/vance2010calico. The text is hyperlinked from the slide show, and I linked to the slides from the Google Doc. I hope to make a slidecast for the slide show and podcast that at http://vancestevens.podomatic.com/ if I can find a spare moment. This would further model my ideas for teacher training, and for helping students acquire the multimedia skills essential to communication in the 21st century.

The paper articulates what is needed for several projects I’ve got going at the moment. The slides would probably get me through several talks I’m giving in Brazil and Argentina in July and August this summer. For example, in my presentations at BrazTESOL I’ll be talking about some of the affordances of teaching and learning through a PLN (personal learning network) and the social networking, tagging, RSS, and paradigm shifting associated with that concept.

I know I need to couch all these topics, unfamiliar to many, in terms that teachers can easily understand, to help them see the benefits and importance to them. It won’t be the first time I have addressed such audiences; for example, explaining tagging to Ministry of Education English teachers at their most recent Nile TESOL Conference, where they were in Cairo and I presented online from Abu Dhabi http://justcurious.posterous.com/powerful-ideas-and-tools-for-getting-the-most-0.

I wrote the book chapter in 2009 after having proposed a set of technological innovations to a previous director of the department where I work, but I have since got my teeth into some other projects, which I hope will help teachers learn more about the technologies they might be using with students as they prepare to teach from materials I am writing in conjunction with one of these projects.

Curriculum for students

In curriculum development, I am helping to develop a computing support course to students in an intensive English program at the Petroleum Institute. My part of this project is to create curriculum introducing tools such as Google Docs and Delicious to support an English dept. focus on collaboration, team building, and Internet search. The problem for teachers is that in order for them to effectively teach these skills to students they have to themselves be experienced users of the tools. As this is not yet the case, I will need to find ways for the English teachers to use the tools in the run-up to these components being taught.

My plan is to create documents for them in Google Docs, create a project tag, and show the teachers how we can track latest versions of shared documents pertaining to our own collaboration and find them online via Delicious and other tools that will track tags.

Community building and professional development for teachers

I’ve been speaking and writing at length for much of the time I’ve been at the Petroleum Institute on these tools and on my many experiments with how they can be used with students as well as teachers in their professional development, but it is only recently that there has been wide enough interest among colleagues with whom I work face-to-face to allow me to take my ideas mainstream.

One manifestation of this interest is where colleagues and I in TESOL Arabia are rejuvenating the TESOL Arabia EdTech-SIG with emphasis on online potentials for promoting the “three C’s” of collaboration, communication, and creativity. Jim Buckingham and I kicked off this latest phase in a joint presentation recently at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi where we connected with Phil Cozens presenting on-site that same morning in far-away Ras Al Khaima http://justcurious.posterous.com/modeling-and-demonstrating-professional-devel. We used the Adobe Connect platform that PI recently purchased and where I have been granted permission to set up and conduct online meetings.

Since that success, those interested in taking the lead on promoting use of such tools in the UAE have met online to discuss leveraging them to help bring teachers up to speed with technology throughout the UAE. To this end we might have regular online training sessions this coming year, and the English teachers at the PI might want to get involved, in part as a preparation for teaching the intensive English course in the Fall. So these developments could play into one another.

A further opportunity for teacher training will arise when I teach my PPOT (Principles and Practices of Online Teaching course on Multiliteracies online again for TESOL from September 3 to October 6, 2010 http://www.tesol.org/s_tesol/sec_document.asp?CID=664&DID=2642. I am planning to run the course in conjunction with a face-to-face continuing education course for colleagues at the PI where the live audience can benefit from interaction with the distributed one and visa versa. If English teachers at the PI take advantage of that then this will serve to ground them in some of the tools and competencies they’ll need to most effectively teach the materials I’m creating for our students. One of the English teachers completed my previous rendition of that course http://tinyurl.com/21centuryskills4pdo, so we’ve made a start here already.

Tagging

To organize and promote such courses and show how the many parts of the overall endeavor are loosely joined, I am starting to conceive of a cookbook for 21st century project management. Here is its first item, a recipe for getting a project off the ground using open education resources.

1. The first thing you should do is agree on a tag for your project. For example, the one we agreed on for the TESOL Arabia EdTech SIG was taedtechsig. Some of us had already been using uaedu which seemed like a nice choice until we tested it in Twitter and with Spezify and found it was already in use and that some of the hits were not especially educational: http://twitter.com/#search?q=eduae and http://spezify.com/#/eduae. Similarly, we found that edtechsig produced hits from NileTESOL in Cairo http://spezify.com/#/edtechsig. Now this brings up another point. If we wish to aggregate content only for us then we need to create our own unique tag (taedtechsig produces no competing hits, thereby fitting this bill). However, if we wish to call attention to colleagues in Egypt to what we are doing then we could use their tag, and our content will appear when they attempt to aggregate their own.

So two affordances of tags can be immediately seen. First, they can help you aggregate content on your topic. That is, if we want to see content placed on the Web related to this topic, we can use certain tools to locate and pull into one place content where its creators have used that tag, and second, if we want to create content and bring it to the attention of colleagues in a common endeavor, we can tag it, and hope they will be able to find it.

For TESOL Arabia EdTech SIG I will use the two tags that will cause content I view or create to aggregate with other content tagged taedtechsig, and also I’ll tag the same content edtechsig in an effort to get the attention of our colleagues in Egypt.

2. The second way to loosely join the disparate parts of a 21st century project is to tag them. Tagging can be done initially by creators of content. However, consumers of content can also tag content they find online using Delicious or Diigo, or other such tools.

Delicious for example can be used to illustrate to both teachers and students how quickly a web site tagged by one user can become known to another. Delicious is a great way for anyone collaborating on a project involving Internet research to see what has been found by team members, or a way of aggregating content on a tag; see for example, http://delicious.com/tag/writingmatrix.

As another example, both creators and consumers of content on Flickr can tag there. In other words, if I post a photo on Flickr I can give that photo (or set of photos) a tag. However, I can also tag photos I find interesting on Flickr (assuming I’m logged on to Flickr, and that the photo has been granted a creative commons license allowing others to tag it). Many are familiar with this same concept from Facebook, where we can tag photos of friends there, and the site provides a means for seeing on one page all the photos tagged for a particular user.

So to summarize this as a recipe in the cookbook, once your group has settled on a tag, then all members should tag as many sites used by the group as possible. This can be done by both creators and consumers of that content. Group members who create content (post photos or create blog posts, for example) should apply the agreed on tag to that content. Those who view that content online should tag it using their preferred social bookmark system. Then search tools such as Spezify and Delicious and Diigo can be used to find content as it aggregates around that tag.

Another important use of tags is as ‘hash tags’ or #tags in Twitter. Using #tags has affordances beyond a simple search. You can search in Twitter and find #tags (and other content matching your search) but if you use #tags then you can click on them to bring up all content using that #tag.

The 3 C’s

Use of these techniques puts the “3 C’s” of 21st Century Learning into your online projects and those of your students. The three C’s are communication, collaboration, and creativity. Here are a few ways that these are addressed through the cookbook for 21st century project management. These lists are simply starters; they could be added to endlessly.

COMMUNICATION
(how you can communicate with others in your group using these techniques)

Create a tag for your project
Create a portal and link all of your stuff here
Create a #tag
Tag all sites and associated sites in Delicious and Diigo
Tag other artifacts as needed
Set up Tag Games to see what others are tagging

COLLABORATION
(how you can work with others online)

Wiki for content (like this one!)
Etherpad clone
Ning Alternatives (see http://tinyurl.com/ningthing)

Cloudworks
Spruz
Mixxt
Grou.ps
Etc. etc.

CREATIVITY
(some ways you can be creative and innovative using Web 2.0 tools)

Wordle
Wallwisher
Tag Gallaxy (works only with Flickr)

In an attempt to crowdsource additions to this list, I've created a wiki here:

http://21centuryskills4pdo.pbworks.com/FrontPage

If you'd like to add more tools, visit that link and add them, and I'll synch the lists from time to time
(must be a better way :-( Vance :-))

Thanks to these tweeters in my PLN :-))

Is this blog good enough to make the Lexiophiles list of best blogs on language technology?

2010-05-15T16:40:00.002Z

I received this in an email from Priscilla Andrade at Lexiophiles.

Dear Vance Stevens,

We have received 495 nominations for The Top 100 Language Blogs 2010 competition. For each of the four categories we have admitted 100 blogs into the voting phase. Your blog ‘adVancEducation’ (http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/) is included for voting in the 'Language Technology' category. Congratulations!

As stated in our language blog Lexiophiles, 50% of the final score will be based on user votes. You can promote your blog by embedding the above voting button in your page. Simply add the code to a blog post so that your readers can vote for you directly:

The voting phase starts today, May 12th, and ends on May 24th 2010. Winners will be announced May 28th.

Good luck!

Priscila

on behalf of the bab.la and Lexiophiles team

---------------------------------------------

This is the first I've heard of Lexiophiles but a visit to their site reveals why they started this competition: http://www.lexiophiles.com/language-blog-toplist/the-list-how-and-why

It seems they are in the position of recommending blogs related to language and language learning, and to corroborate their own choices they decided to ask their followers to vote on their favorite blogs.

To my knowledge this is the first time my blog has been nominated for anything, so I'm flattered if not deeply honored. I don't think I will go to any great effort to request that people in my network vote for my blog. If I were to make the Lexiophile list of 100 best blogs related to language and language learning I would be head over heels, but I would prefer to win strictly on merits; whereas if I asked my network to vote for me and even that did not yield the desired results, I would have lost two popularity contests :-)

But if you happen by here and think it's a blog worth voting for, that would be great, and you should be able to do that by clicking on the button (and then scrolling through the list to find AdVancEducation near the top, ticking in the radio button, then scrolling down and clicking "Vote" :-)

How long will Facebook last?

2010-05-11T04:22:00.004Z

I'm overdue for a blog post here (funny how real life intrudes at times on the virtual one :-). Someone asked on the Webheads list this morning, how long will Facebook last? This person was trying to decide if she should delete her professional contacts from her Facebook account since she was finding she used it more to stay in touch with friends and family, and her professional contacts in that mix seemed increasingly a mismatch. So I answered something like this:

How long will Facebook last? According to the stats cited in its Wikipedia article (the same page also comes up high in a Google search on 'Facebook statistics') growth in use of Facebook was 145% last year in the USA, and in over-55's an astounding 923%. I don't think it will go away next year or the year after.

http://www.istrategylabs.com/2010/01/facebook-demographics-and-statistics-report-2010-145-growth-in-1-year/

I went to a TESOL presentation once where a teacher in the UAE was using Facebook with his students and he had a separate account for that apart from his main one. So I guess it would be possible to maintain two personas, but without that personal touch we wouldn't know about Ruth Vilmi's colorful paintings, that Wesley Fryer almost encountered a tornado at his last presentation, that Serpil Sönmez just got married, or the context from which Carla Arena and Aiden Yeh derive their amazing inspirations with students. ( I got this list from scanning my own Home page in Facebook just now. These are just a few updates from my professional contacts listed there, so I think you get the idea.)

I think one reason for Facebook's success is that it helps us bridge that gap between our work and social and family lives that used to be studiously, and artificially, kept separate. We take bridges for granted now, it's human nature to build them, they're generally positive developments. Webheads does this too. Personal + professional = natural, and thanks to technology we CAN build these bridges now, whereas before digital natives, this was impossible on such a grand scale.

As an inveterate cat herder I instinctively steer away from trying to drive social media. It's media, it drives us (The Machine is Using US, right?). So I would advise to accept the way our world has headed, blended learning, blended professional development, blended families and friends. There's no need to build artificial walls unless you really find a problem. A lot of times we assume there will be or could be, but when once we accept that healthy mix of personality and professionalism, it turns out the two often go compatibly hand in hand.

Of course, don't keep skeletons in your digital closet, but I think there is growing awareness of how to manage that downside. I encountered recently the ameliorating concept of "mutually assured disgrace" where people are learning not to rattle the skeletons in the closets of others since we are all equally vulnerable to inappropriately abusive probes of our digital online artifacts - but for most of us, our digital footprint speaks highly of us, well beyond reproach, and the real issue here is making students aware of the ramifications of similarly maintaining their own web presence.

Accordingly, I haven't had any problem yet, and I find my use of Facebook changing as I use the media. As one example of this change, check out http://screencast.com/t/NGRlZjMwMDg, where I expressed surprise at finding out about http://www.paper.li in Facebook from Carla Arena's post rather than first on Twitter as I would have up to now expected, and this attracted comments from Michael Coghlan and Jennifer Vershoor, who both concurred with this observation.

The times they are a changing, at an accelerating pace, rapidly approaching Singularity, http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1. Until we reach that point of infinitely altered intelligence (which in Kurtzweil's words, "can manipulate matter and energy to do whatever it wants"), best to go with the flow.

To teach is to learn: Modeling, demonstrating, reflection and practice

2010-04-23T09:38:00.005Z

Recently, a member of my personal learning network has asked me to advise her on a training strategy for introducing CALL to teachers in Algeria. I've had some experience with her situation; though it is universal across cultures for appropriate uses of technology to be misunderstood by educators, particular contexts have their particular concerns. I've long been trying to make inroads on computer literacy and multiliteracies in Oman and the UAE, and even in Tunisia in 2004: http://prosites-vstevens.homestead.com/files/efi/papers/tunisia2004/mahdia.htm.

One problem with the Tunisian event was that its organizers could not articulate beforehand what it was they wanted me to do there. They wanted me to show them how to teach online, so when I arrived I implemented a program whereby I got the participants blogging, and I took pictures and put them online, and tried to get the teachers acting as a community. I got some resistance at the time in the form of: OK, we don't know what we want, but this isn't what we expected! Blogging? They did it and many enjoyed it, but the majority didn't see the point. However, now, six years later, the YahooGroup I set up for them still functions and I'm still in touch off and on with some of the teachers I met there via some of the artifacts we placed online way back then.

I think I've been modeling this form of training ever since. I've just had an interesting experience with my students, on the occasion of International Earth Day April 22, 2010. Events of this nature are gaining traction where I work; there was another barely a month ago: http://justcurious.posterous.com/arzanah-campus-participation-in-the-march-11

To organize the project, I created a wiki for them using Etherpad technology. Etherpad is a company that's been absorbed by Google and the technology is now apparent in the greater collaboration speed of Google Docs. The code for Etherpad is open source so it's been replicated at other sites now that the original Etherpad no longer functions.

So here at http://typewith.me/GzXAtU8oml I introduced the concept of wiki and writing collaboratively on the web, by anyone, for free without passwords. This concept is set in the context of a practical site where students can see that they can contribute (on the typewith.me site, they all wrote in their session descriptions, prompted only by a note in the wiki asking them to do that). A model for project management is established, where participants can collaborate and communicate and display creativity (the 3 c's of 21st century learning).

The Wikispace site http://earthbridges.wikispaces.com/Earthcast+2010 was the wiki used for organizing the event in the first place. In looking at the history of this wiki we see how the seed was planted and how it grew into a full-blown project and successful event with hundreds of collaborators around the world on April 22, 2010. (This led my students into a discussion of how a wiki's history protects it from vandalism, and how that works with Wikipedia; with Jon Udell's viral screencast on "Heavy Metal Umlaut" serving as an instructive example: http://jonudell.net/udell/gems/umlaut/umlaut.html).

For our portal I created the much easier to remember TinyURL:http://tinyurl.com/earthcast10pi. Now we've expanded the notion of Web 2.0 with the concept of creating URLs that are mnemonic and shortened (especially important if you want to tweet them).

If you look at the content of the typewith.me portal site you find that Twitter is well represented here. It is one of the ways we announced our event, and there is evidence here of responses on Twitter, so we weren't working in a vacuum, far from it. By connecting students with real people, Web 2.0 makes learning relevant to them.

An even more direct connection with real people was achieved using Adobe Connect, which was slotted into another event, the 24-hour "earthcast" webcastathon at http://earthbridges.net. Through this event, more contact with students and other teachers was made via Java chat, live streaming, and Skype backchannels. Participants become aware of the world of knowledge seekers available to them, and how to contact and keep in touch with them.

The Adobe Connect event produced a recording, so an archive was made here: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/6357041. More archives were created in the blogs that I keep and was writing in to announce the event, which might have (or might still) attract comments; e.g. http://justcurious.posterous.com/earthcast-2010-at-the-petroleum-institute-abu. This post illustrates one of the wonderful affordances of Jing, http://jingproject.com, the free webcast tool that gives your images and screencasts URLs which you can embed in an email to your post@posterous.com so the picture comes out displayed in the blog post (I still marvel at that!)

Archived recordings, blog posts, and site portals preserve the event online after it has ended and give participants a greater understanding of the importance to them and to others of the phenomenon in which they took part. Further learning could occur if the students themselves would write blog posts, and accumulate these and other artifacts appearing online through aggregation on their tags, but this is the next level of understanding of how the web works and hangs together as a cohesive networking device and repository of knowledge (and how that knowledge is accessible through personal learning networks) - see http://justcurious.posterous.com/powerful-ideas-and-tools-for-getting-the-most-0

One such tool modeled, demonstrated here is Delicious, which uses common tags for keeping track of links pertaining to the event and for communicating socially what links others are finding. The common tag for the event my students participated in was earthcast10. That tag can be searched in Twitter at http://twitter.com/#search?q=earthcast10, and to get a good illustrated overview of what how the event was celebrated around the world, visit http://spezify.com/#/earthcast10.

These tools taken in and of themselves can appear too numerous and overwhelming to beginners, but when pieced together into a project such as this one, how the components work together is easily understandable. The idea is for the teacher to model the use of each part, to bring tools to bear on an as-needed basis, and the learners learn by using the tools. The learners in this case had conceivably used or heard of none of these tools beforehand. The tools were simply placed before them and they used them as they needed them. They aren't hard to use and they work well for what people want to accomplish. It's not necessary that each person know about all of the tools, but only that someONE knows about these and others and can place the tools near the learners where they are needed, and model the use of the others as they come in handy.

In my own experience working this semester with students I find that it would help if they had some preparation in the course of their traditional classwork, because depending on the nature of the project, they don't necessarily see the affordances of the tools, and can end up not taking advantage of them. I have tried to address this by mainstreaming some materials I use with my students, here: http://issuu.com/vances/docs/social_networking_2009_lessons1-3.

When students respond to the modeling, demonstrating, and reflection put into practice, the result can be a transformative learning experience. And to make it happen teachers need to be connected in order to create and be available for opportunities to collaborate on projects such as this one, into which students can be drawn. In Downes's scheme, where teaching is to model and demonstrate, and learning is to reflect and practice, I model the learning part by creating posts such as this one, where I reflect on the experience and try to understand how it happened, and then put the next iteration into practice with my students. My own addition to the Downes scheme is to teach is to learn, by which I mean it's a percolative process, one that true teachers model as they re-learn how to learn, and then show the way to students, whom we are training for jobs and careers that haven't even been invented yet.

coda

To cap a busy day I participated in a second Adobe Connect event on April 22, as one of the panelists on a Virtual Round Table discussion of EVO's global training camp. Here I got to articulate some of these views having just come away from the Earth Day event. A recording should appear eventually here: http://virtual-round-table.ning.com/events/panel-discussion-evos-global. This topic of teacher training and how to inculcate the "culture" of learning necessitated by changes we face in the 21st century figured heavily in the discussion. The word culture was introduced there by Barbara Dieu, and it speaks to the difficulty of the task to realize that a person of her calibre and expertise, a world-reknowned leader and frequent speaker on the educational applications of social media, appears unappreciated and marginalized in her own workplace.

Eventually I'll podcast the recording of this discussion at my Vance's GeekSpeek http://vance_stevens.podomatic.com/. Podcasting is perhaps a third level of a CALL training strategy, what I am now calling SMALL, or social media assisted language learning. There will be a discussion of that topic at the next Virtual Round Table panel on which I will sit later today: http://virtual-round-table.ning.com/events/panel-discussion-connected-and. This should be an interesting discussion because Stephen Bax will be there, and we might discuss whether CALL has become essentially normalized, and would SMALL be the next challenge for computer-based language learning? Stay tuned to find out more :-) ...

Modeling your PLN: Backchanneling with Students

2010-04-09T09:13:00.007Z

When many of us think about PLN, or Personal Learning Network, what we envisage involves colleagues sharing information in a social network or community of practice (see http://delicious.com/vancestevens/PLN and http://delicious.com/vancestevens/PLE for numerous examples; and I've always liked Scott Leslie's nice collection of PLE diagrams: http://edtechpost.wikispaces.com/PLE+Diagrams.

We less often think about setting up PLN's with students, but at http://tinyurl.com/vance-socialnet09 I list one of the ten paradigm shifts that I think educators must make as they move into facilitating learning in the 21st century as being "transfer [or] using technology and social media in one walk of life and then transferring those heuristics for learning into the classroom and other teaching situations. For example, people who frequently use Facebook or Twitter might tend not to use social networking or backchanneling in the classroom, because they don't see how to transfer what they do in one part of their life to how they manage their more formal teaching and learning environment, because it's not in the curriculum, etc."

Educators backchannel through their PLNs but in fact we should all be doing this with students (see "Where 3 R's meet 3 C's" about what we should be teaching as 21st century life skills: creativity, communication, collaboration - http://www.britannica.com/bps/additionalcontent/18/34037342/The-Three-Rs-Meet-the-Three-Cs). We should be modeling how we network in order to show students how they can do the same in order to become productive knowledge workers in those jobs in the future that haven't been invented yet, as articulated in http://webheadlink.wordpress.com/2007/01/08/jobs-that-havent-been-invented-yet/.

The problem is where networks might collide, as when we mix our social networks on Facebook or Twitter with the very different worlds of our students, and risk distracting clutter in our professional networks if students are allowed into them, or suspicion of impropriety at worst.

Twitter itself has introduced a solution: LISTS. Now you can create a list for your students or separate classes of students and add them to the appropriate list without having to "follow" them. In this way, they don't appear in your Twitter stream, but you can open a LIST and catch up with what they are up to that way.

There are other means of backchanneling in classrooms. Edmodo is one which I have used with students. It works well if people in the class monitor it, but the problem is, it isn't 'real'. We go to Twitter every day in the course of our normal workflow. You check Edmodo only when it occurs to you. Your students do the same. It lacks traction. But many teachers use it as a backchannel tool similar to Twitter, and because you need a code to join a group, it's safe for students.

Another good backchannel tool is Etherpad. This tool was so good that Google bought it to use its technology in Wave. Consequently the tool at http://etherpad.com is shutting down this month (http://etherpad.com/ep/blog/posts/transition-update). However its code has been released as opensource (http://code.google.com/p/etherpad/) so it has already been resurrected in other implementations, and its code will live on as part of Google Wave, which could serve as a model for backchanneling with students or on any kind of project in their productive lives in the future (though a tool that would be effective with students needs to be a lot simpler to use than Wave is right now).

You can use Delicious or Twitter or Google to find other sites that have used the Etherpad code already; e.g. http://twitter.com/#search?q=etherpad and http://delicious.com/tag/etherpad. Readers of this post could help one another by leaving links in comments below to sites that use the Etherpad code; for example: http://piratepad.net/ and http://typewith.me/.

As to why we'd want to backchannel with students, I've found a couple of articles that explain the rationale and suggest some tools:

This one is something of a classic: http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2008/twitter-for-academia/
Here's an article that talks about 9 ways Twitter can be used in the classroom: http://derekbruff.com/teachingwithcrs/?p=472. These include note-taking, sharing resources, commenting, amplifying, asking, questions, helping one another, offering suggestions, building community, and opening the classroom
For backchannel tools: http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2010/01/five-platforms-for-classroom-back.html. The tools introduced are Chatzy, Todaysmeet, Edmodo, Present.ly, and Google Wave
I've got almost 200 bookmarks for Twitter here: http://delicious.com/vancestevens/twitter, many of them mentioning ways Twitter can be used with students.

This posting derives directly from my PLN. It was originally a response to Lori Teng's comment on my post in one of my other blogs here: http://justcurious.posterous.com/how-to-start-your-pln-on-twitter. If Lori hadn't commented on that post, and triggered in my brain all the synapses there I'd been storing up related to backchanneling with students, this article would never have been written.

This post therefore is yet another example of how a PLN works to cause us to model and demonstrate for one another, to reflect on and practice what we are learning, and to percolate how we develop our knowledge back into our communities and networks in an ongoing process of lifelong learning.

NOTES:
This post figured into a presentation I gave for a TESOL Arabia chapter event April 10, 2010. The blog posting for that event, including a link to its recording, is here:
http://justcurious.posterous.com/modeling-and-demonstrating-professional-devel

Here are some Twitter reactions to this post:
http://screencast.com/t/NjI5YWY0M

Nurturing your PLN for everyone’s ongoing professional development

2010-03-23T04:52:00.024Z

This is the blog post I intended to fire off after the last TESOL Arabia conference March 11-13 at Zayed University in Dubai. I made a presentation there that I did not complete. The part I gave was recorded here: http://tinyurl.com/100312vance-dubai. The slides of all I had intended to say are here: http://www.slideshare.net/vances/nurturing-your-pln-for-everyones-ongoing-professional-development. Since they were posted online they have been favorited by a number of people :-)

http://twitter.com/VanceS/status/10410955223 shows the above Twitpic of Gavin Dudeney presenting at TESOL Arabia, Dubai, March 13, 2010. I took the pic on my iPhone during his presentation, Twitpic'd it, and Gavin showed it to his audience when he checked his Twitter feed 5 minutes later in his presentation.

TESOL Arabia conferences in the UAE have not historically been well connected. Often they are held in hotels where there may be wireless only in the lobby, or perhaps even in some of the presentation rooms, but in all venues presenters could expect connectivity to be patchy to non-existent. Certainly you wouldn't plan to rely on an internet connection under such conditions, and so I arrived at TESOL Arabia this year with a PowerPoint presentation safely stored on my laptop and backed up to a flash drive, having made no preparation for delivering it to anyone beyond the brick and mortar campus at ZU apart from a mere mention on my PLN that I might try to webcast from there.

The part of the presentation that I didn't give because I ran out of time was to be a complaint against conferences which forced participants to remove themselves from their networks (fortunately, not an issue at this happily interconnected conference in Dubai - the only issue was that hardly anyone was using the connectivity; but that's the next step beyond the scope of this post, and something I hope to address in a TESOL Arabia chapter presentation from Abu Dhabi April 10, 2010; preliminary info at: http://bit.ly/Apr10_prez_TA_Auh).

As I ran out of time, I was leading to the question of what TESOL Arabia, or any viable configuration of practitioners interested in futhering their professional development, is or should be. To arrive at what I was leading up to I had presented a distinction between groups, communities, and networks, and was showing how knowledge resides in networks and is passed around the network through modeling and demonstrating practical applications of knowledge applied to practice. In this model of how knowledge is disseminated in the 21st century, I suggest that it is never appropriate to cut anyone, at any time, students in class, participants at a conference, or knowledge workers attending meetings, off from their networks.

As a result of this trend, professional development less and less happens mainly at conferences. For many professionals, development happens every day in the course of using Skype, Twitter, or Facebook, reading blogs and wikis, or viewing and sharing tutorials and presentations on YouTube, TeacherTube, Drop.io, uStream, TED Talks, etc. etc. This means that for many professionals, face-to-face conferences are of decreasing importance.

As most of us agree that learning is mainly social, such conferences seem most appreciated for their networking potentials rather than for the papers presented there, which more and more often can be read or their recordings viewed online, as archives of such materials become more and more widely distributed. Travel to distant cities to participate on site in conferences has become inefficient and less necessary than before, and is less crucial for gaining knowledge than opportunities available in cyberspaces dedicated to education. Accordingly, one can argue that face-to-face meetings (in the workplace) risk a similar obsolescence, or that the notion of forcing students to attend classes is becoming archaic when podcasts of lectures are available, and indeed interaction around their subject matter can be made more rewarding using a combination of synchronous and asynchronous online resources.

In other words, to face-to-face gatherings, add a networked dimension. Hold the meeting, or conference, or class in a brick and mortar edifice as usual, but configure the space so that it lets in the network. Now you have the best of all worlds that blended learning has to offer. Participants in the physical spaces are able to look each other in the eye and benefit from each other's company, but they can share what they are doing with the wider world, or draw in people and resources from their PLNs or personal learning networks. In this way consumers of content at a face-to-face gathering can generate content online, and as this content is reflected on, remixed, and recycled, and filtered back to participants either physically at or virtually enjoying the live event, everyone involved would be learning more than they possibly could if the event were cut off from the networks of those who participated.

There is opposition to this notion. Wide Web of diversions gets laptops evicted from lecture halls is an interesting article, recently discussed on the Webheads list, about how PLN's can be distracting, but I think this will continue to be a problem only in the short term. This article calls attention to how inappropriate use of PLNs in contexts where greater focus is called for can be detrimental to the individuals who engage in such behaviors. With greater experience and sophistication, such behavior is likely to dissipate, as people come to distinguish the affordances of network enhancements to how they learn in face-to-face situations from uses of networks that are decidedly unprofessional in such contexts.

I had meant to suggest in my presentation (as I did in the slides) that in future, successful conferences and professional organizations will have to combine opportunities for face-to-face interpersonal connection with the connectivity to allow seamless interaction with distributed personal learning networks. Those that do not will become decreasingly relevant I am aware that not all agree that this should be the case. As the article indicates, not everyone sees networks intrusion as a positive force in the dynamics of face-to-face interaction. So I was hoping to raise the question, if conferences are networked, who benefits? who loses?

I argued this point February 20, 2009 at the AACE's Spaces of Interaction online conversation on improving traditional conferences, http://aace.org/globalu/. The last slide posted at http://www.slideshare.net/vances/success-in-modeling-blended-learning-in-theory-and-practice-at-f2f-and-online-conferences has the dinosaur image, and the talk itself was recorded and is available here: http://aace.na4.acrobat.com/p92907860/

At that event, George Siemens agreed that conferences that do not provide and encourage networking are "unacceptable" but this is what one expects at annual TESOL conferences, for example, which are always held in corporate convention centers, and where getting computers inside and setting them up and networking them is done by unionized labor, and any bandwidth provided is done at a surcharge that prices it beyond the range of most individual educators. Even to get a data show to make a presentation there, the presenter has to pay an inflated fee to the convention center to cover the costs of union wages and to line the pockets of the shareholders investing in the convention center, a mindset quite at odds with that of most educators who pay so much of their limited resources to attend those conferences.

The CALL-IS (interest section) in TESOL has done a remarkable job of gaming this system so that a room full of Internet ready computers has been available for presentations at all TESOL conferences since the mid-80's, and I've made a number of presentations at TESOL-sponsored events where thanks to TESOL subsidy for its own sponsored events, Internet was provided.

One of the most memorable of these was at an academic session CALL-IS put on in Salt Lake City in 2002 http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/evonline2002/academic.htm. Each interest section has the right to place its academic session in the program and as the event is TESOL-sponsored it is possible to request an Internet connection. Thus the panelists at this event were asked if they NEEDED an internet connection. Bearing in mind that this would be expensive, and even when Internet is expected, experienced presenters always prepare a backup slideshow that can be delivered unplugged if needed, and so as not to waste precious resources, every panelist but me said, no, they didn't need it.

What would I need it for? I wasn't exactly sure, but I had the notion to stream the session live. The year before I had been asked to give a plenary address at an IATEFL conference in Nicosia, and we had streamed that along with several other of the talks at that event http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/cyprus2001/index.html. This had come about because on a mailing list, Neteach or TESLCAL, someone had mentioned they wanted to do a voice hookup for educational purposes and Eric Baber had replied that he had an underutilized streaming server which he was using to deliver live voice and video language courses from NetLearn Languages that he would be willing to offer as a solution to what the lady wanted to do.

I twigged immediately to the potential of what Eric was offering the community. I wrote him and asked if I could use it to stream from Cyprus. I don't remember how it came about, but Sophie Ioannou-Georgiou, who was in charge of the conference, was so keen on the idea that eventually all conference presenters were asked if they would consent to be streamed, and for all those who replied affirmative, Eric set up web pages where each presentation could be accessed live, and where the recording could later be replayed. He did this all for free, and the conference was a great success especially due to this remarkable commitment and innovation.

Curious footnotes:

I was the first presenter at the conference, the first to be streamed, and the first to be recorded. When the second plenary was streamed and recorded, the person managing the stream at our end, unfamiliar with the process, over-wrote my file with the recording of the second presentation, and my talk was forever lost to posterity.
Michael Coghlan, another visionary as ahead of his time as I, was the only presenter at the conference who had offered to be streamed IN. That is, whereas a dozen presentations were streamed worldwide FROM the conference, only Michael had realized he could take advantage of the option of making a talk at the conference from a remote location, in his case Adelaide, Australia. Michael's session was a concurrent one. All the presentations took place in good sized auditoriums, in which Michael's talk only had a few attendees. I was managing the stream in from the podium, Michael asked me more than once how many people were in the audience, and more than once I evaded the question, not having the heart to tell him only three or four people. Not only that but one lady in the audience was a fan of Michael's and had come to the presentation specifically to meet him. When it became obvious that he wasn't actually there, she complained loudly how cheated she felt when in fact she was witnessing a pioneering event illustrating how we were on the verge of realizing grand potentials for global collaboration in independent learning and ongoing professional development.

This audience reaction to our early online adventures was nothing unusual. Later in our collaborations together, Michael and Buthaina Alothman both flew in to Abu Dhabi to present with me live and in person from the main auditorium at the Petroleum Institute as a part of a virtual event: one of John Hibbs's last epic 24-hour Global Learn Days http://bfranklin.edu/gld/. I had announced the event to my colleagues at the PI but unbeknownst to me there was an important rugby match on at the time and I was later told that that event was well attended. Michael and Buth and I presented from the stage of a 100 seat auditorium, which was packed during our presentation with three or at the most maybe 4 people, but, get this, we counted at least 60 in the synchronous online chat. Buthaina archived the event here: http://alothman-b.tripod.com/wia-buth-gld.htm.

Although the concept has been slow to take off, it's getting these days more common for there to be strong online components at on-site conferences. I can think of numerous examples: Shanghai 2.0, NECC, Educon 2.0 etc etc. IATEFL has been expanding its online events; for example at Harrogate this year: http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2010/, and CALL-IS has made a major effort to announce a series of streamed events from the Eletronic Village, Boston TESOL 2010, http://academics.smcvt.edu/cbauer-ramazani/TESOL/2010/Webcasts/Sessions-Schedule.htm.

But getting back to the UAE, the TESOL Arabia conference this year was at Zayed University in Dubai, a remarkably beautiful campus with ubiquitous Internet. I got to the conference in time for the plenary at 9:00 on Thursday. I saw Gavin Dudeney with a spare seat beside him, sat down and said hello, and he remarked that the wireless was working quite well there. I pulled out my iPhone and sure enough it was. I tweeted to my network that this was a good sign. I might be able to present live at 11:00, as I had "mentioned" earlier on the Webheads list.

After the plenary session, I went to the room where my own session would be and half listened to the presenter at 10:00 there while firing up my laptop and connecting flawlessly to the wireless. Elluminate came up perfectly. I uploaded my presentation to the whiteboard in Elluminate. Elluminate is available to Webheads thanks to a grant from Learning Times, whom I can never thank enough for this remarkable service, one of many pieces loosely joined in a network of globally connected educators. Speaking of networks, I then tweeted to my PLN that I was preparing to go live online, and I sent an email to the webheads list with the same information. When it was my turn to set up at the front of the room I had already been joined by one or two people in Elluminate.

I was easily able to record my presentation, both voice and webcam. I turned the cam occasionally to give a sense of the surroundings, not just present a talking head. Cristina Costa joined in and although circumstances compelled me to present somewhat didactically, I managed to engage her for a moment in reminiscence of a chat we had had the summer before with Etienne Wenger, where she had remarked that she knew she was a member of a community of practice when her practice changed. The audience, sometimes sceptical at such events, warmed to the occasion and became noticably relaxed and engaged as we went along. Their satisfaction plus that of the online audience, plus getting everything to work and connect, all presented more than one ball to juggle. The last ball to pull out of the air is closing the Elluminate session, then retrieving the URL of the recording minutes later, then posting the URL onto various spaces including Twitter, the webheads list, and blogs. Later someone asked me to put it on Facebook, they could get it there. The Twitter posting makes a particularly good link for the slides and session recording.

The point I'm making here is that this is the way conferences should be. We shouldn't all have to leave our networks at the door, or at home, or wherever the last hotspot was. Face-to-face conferences are augmented by connectivity and backchanneling among participants, as are our classrooms.

This is another important point: how we connect at conferences is how we connect in real life. And that should carry over to how we connect with students and they with us and how we all connect with peers both face-to-face and online. Conferences are places we go to network and to learn. As I pointed out in my presentation, echoing Stephen Downes, teaching is modeling and demonstrating. This is what we should be doing at our conferences, modeling the tools we can use with each other and YES with students. None of this connectivity should be blocked or suppressed. The Washington Post article referenced earlier may indicate an attention deficite disorder inherent in multitasking but it also reveals a phase through which we all must pass.

As a teenager I used to show off to peers by driving fast and irresponsibly, in an era where seatbelts were not the norm. Now in the UAE I see much evidence of this same lack of sophistication. But we all grow out of it. We educate one another how to maximize the potentials of the technologies we harness while avoiding the pitfalls that many of us toy with when the technlogy is new to us. In other words, if people are checking cell phone messages in class or meetings, diverting attention from the meeting itself, they are hopefully going through a temporary phase. In time it will become understood that there is a time and place for that.

It used to be that in my classes students would sneak onto MSN messenger. Now they almost never do that. These days they might switch in and out of Facebook, but Facebook is less intrusive. Use of mobiles is more of a problem now, but in time we will have learned how to use them appropriately to effectively leverage our learning by widening our networks and accessing data needed for class or workplace intelligence. (Actually I found today two of my students on MSN, but it turned out they were in communication with each other, back-channeling in the classroom. I thought that this was an appropriate use of the tool).

I remember one time Gavin mentioned in a recorded presentation his discomfort with people interacting with their media while he was presenting, but now I'm glad to see that he has his iPhone and laptop with him and happily uses them in enjoyment of always-on connectivity. The back channel at the conference was all aTwitter. At one point Gavin asked his Twitter network for advice on what to do evenings in Dubai, and I rose to the occasion with the definitive 140-character travel guide for Dubai: "@dudeneyge in Dubai, go to the creek, cross it in an abra, walk through the souks at either end of the abra ride, Deira & Bur Dubai, & dhows" <http://twitter.com/VanceS/status/10368130620>. I don't know if Gavin ever got the chance to actually follow my itinerary, but at least he and hundreds of my followers were 140 characters wiser for what Gavin was missing.

That's how knowledge spreads throughout a network, and what we should see a lot more of at face-to-face conferences, wherever they are held, although where they are actually held is getting to be increasingly irrelevant in our increasingly networked world.

PS: I just stumbled on Terry Freedman's compilation of resources at http://www.ictineducation.org/free-stuff/ and found there an article on "What I look for in a conference". On the wish list is "#7 I wanna be connected: The best conference will have wi-fi throughout the venue, including the hotel. There must also be a conference Twitter feed, and Flickr and Technorati tags." Indeed.

TinyURL for this post: http://tinyurl.com/230310advanced

Paradigm Shift as an Agent of Changing Practice

2010-02-24T06:06:00.013Z

I hope to have the opportunity travel professionally this summer and give some live face-to-face presentations along the way, starting as early as May 7-9 (if invited to speak at an IATEFL conference in Belgrade), CALICO in Amherst June 8-10 (if invited to be on a panel there discussing a book I helped co-edit), and culminating in Sao Paolo at BrazTESOL July 19-22 as part of this year's annual Future of Learning in a Networked World event (http://flnw.wikispaces.com/brazil), with stops along the way or afterwards in Argentina if specifically invited to come there.

This will not be my first FLNW event. I participated in FLNW in January 2008, documented here:

If given the opportunity, this is what I hope to be speaking on ...

Teachers these days, struggling to cope with technology overload, can sometimes misconstrue the nature of the beast. Dogme language teachers espouse teaching "unplugged" but are grappling with to what extent technology facilitates or detracts from that process (see links below). Musicians who play unplugged for example, still use technology to amplify their clean sound, and perhaps podcast their recordings. Technology, therefore, helps musicians to be heard when digital literacies are understood by those around them. Used correctly, technology can greatly facilitate the process of language learning; incorrectly (as with bands who rely on technology) it would be a distraction, perhaps an obstacle. Prensky has gone so far as to say teachers shouldn't use IWB's because they would use them inappropriately, but their students should use them (http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2009/04/prensky-on-interactive-whiteboards.html).

Why, what assumptions underly so provocative a statement?

I'd like to talk this summer about the dozen paradigm shifts that users of technology need to understand before they can apply them in ways that can be transformative to students. When teachers think of technology challenges they often have in mind learning to use the latest educational and administrative gadgets and software systems,such as those listed by Allen in his article in TESOL Arabia Perspectives, to which I responded here: http://multiliteracies.ning.com/profiles/blogs/how-can-teachers-deal-with (and this article contains as well my latest characterization of the dozen paradigm shifts). This mindset addresses certain functional literacies skills that often fall short of accommodating how technology is transforming the way we view and interact with one another in our world, with immediate ramifications to our educational systems and our students themselves.

Using technology is only partly about interfaces and settings. It's more correctly about having a theory of how people learn, and how the many different technology tools can be made to work together to foster development in a subject matter in ways commensurate with that appropriate model of learning.

Web 2.0 is the driving force for technology to be applied in constructivist and connectivist models of learning. Web 2.0 puts learning where it belongs, in the hands of learners. I will explain how a number of Web 2.0 tools can be used to enhance language learning by allowing learners to produce artifacts and leave them online where other learners can find them and interact with them in a process that develops communicative and critical skills while intrinsically motivating students to produce quality work in response to a palpable awareness of audience (e.g. http://writingmatrix.wikispaces.com, Stevens 2009a, and Stevens et al. 2008).

I hope to talk this summer about how student peers can find one another in a seemingly chaotic online environment. The quick answers to that regard the paradigm shift from taxonomies to folksonomies, such as tagging and RSS, which I will also address. I could perhaps elaborate on the concepts in workshops such as the one delivered here: http://justcurious.posterous.com/powerful-ideas-and-tools-for-getting-the-most-0; however, a short presentation can only give glimpses of the paradigm shifts necessary to move away from the old ways of information dissemination through more traditional gatekeepers. In order empower learners, teachers must truly grasp the fundamentals and principles of applying technology to transformative learning. To accomplish this, practice with peers is necessary, where teachers themselves become lifelong learners and mentors for one another while sharing discoveries and experiences with students, as I point out in Stevens, 2009b.

I have had long experience in many online and face-to-face settings with helping teachers form communities of peers, and suggesting ways that they can develop their own PLN's, or personal learning networks to ensure their continuous lifelong learning (Stevens, forthcoming). Teachers who agree that learner autonomy is something that should be encouraged and developed in students should see the need to cultivate autonomy in themselves. So I will address the issue of teacher autonomy, where the teachers are in their roles by virtue of being, as David Warlick suggests, "master learners," (as I did in my presentation November 6, 2009 entitled Modeling social media in groups, communities, and networks, relevant links blogged here: http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2009/11/modeling-social-media-in-groups.html; and in written up more formally in Stevens, 2009c).

Change is the most important outcome of this approach to professional development. Too often teachers are put in situations which are labeled professional development but which in reality are (a) driven top-down, (b) don't assess or address teacher needs, and (c) do not lead to development. Teachers who drive their own professional development through participation in learning communities and PLNs are constantly expressing and assessing each other's needs, and promoting professional development on an as-needed basis. Once one is familiar with and comfortable in this style of learning, it is only a short leap to applying it to students.

Etienne Wenger once asked Cristina Costa how she knew she was participating in a community of practice, and she replied, "When my practice changed." (Wenger, 2007) This is the kind of change I hope to be an agent of if I am invited to present this line of reasoning at any professional gatherings this summer.

References

Stevens, Vance. (Forthcoming). Webheads and Distributed Communities of Practice. To be published some time after October 2009 by the TESOL EFL IS Newsletter, as part of a summary of the EFL Academic Session from Denver TESOL 2009. Draft here: http://tinyurl.com/vance2009denver

Stevens, Vance. (2009a July 15). Engaging Collaborative Writing through Social Networking. In Koyama, Toshiko; Noguchi, Judy; Yoshinari,Yuichiro; and Iwasaki, Akio (Eds.). Proceedings of the WorldCALL 2008 Conference. The Japan Association for Language Education and Technology (LET). ISBN: 978-4-9904807-0-7, http://www.j-let.org/~wcf/proceedings/proceedings.pdf pp.68-71.

Stevens, Vance. (2009b). Life-long learner autonomy meets Electronic Village Online. TESOL Arabia Learner Independence Special Interest Group, Conference Newsletter 2009, p.9. http://tailearn.googlepages.com/LISIGNL09.pdf

Stevens, Vance. (2009c). 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, Nelba Quintana, Rita Zeinstejer, Saša Sirk, Doris Molero & Carla Arena. (2008). Writingmatrix: Connecting Students with Blogs, Tags, and Social Networking. In Stevens, Vance & Elizabeth Hanson-Smith, Co-editors. (2008). Special Feature: Proceedings of the Webheads in Action Online Convergence, 2007. TESL-EJ, Volume 11, Number 4: http://tesl-ej.org/ej44/a7.html

Wenger, E. and Nyrop, S. (2007). Communities of practice in an interconnected World: New geographies of knowledge and iIdentity. Keynote presentation at Webheads in Action Online Convergence (WiAOC 2007). Retrieved October 9, 2009 from: http://webheadsinaction.org/wiaoc2007/EtienneWenger; audio recording at: http://streamarchives.net/node/56 and http://streamarchives.net/node/55.

Links for Dogme:

Scott Thornbury's "Teaching Unplugged" page: http://www.thornburyscott.com/tu/portal.htm
SEETA course with "Myths about the 'anti-tech' crowd" (must register first): http://www.seeta.eu/course/view.php?id=28

Who are you and what have you done lately?

2010-02-11T03:52:00.005Z

The last time I was asked to write a personal assessment of my work I turned it into a blog post: http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2007/11/who-are-you-and-what-do-you-do.html. That was in November 2007 but now two years later, the time has come again to take stock of my professional self-perception, and here it is.

I feel that my work is having an impact on the field of social networking in education, and is getting some attention in the area of learner independence as well. I was invited in 2008 for example to participate in a Learner Autonomy SIG Pre-conference event at the annual IATEFL conference in Exeter, and I was asked to contribute an article to the SIG Newsletter on the topic. My take on the issue is that teachers must first become truly autonomous; and this in fact is the connection with social networking.

Stevens, Vance. (2007). The Multiliterate Autonomous Learner: Teacher Attitudes and the Inculcation of Strategies for Lifelong Learning Independence, Winter 2007 (Issue 42) . Retrieved November 9, 2007 from http://www.learnerautonomy.org/VanceStevens.pdf

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/vances/lets-start-with-teacher-autonomy-multiliteracies-and-lifelong-learning

Recording: http://tinyurl.com/468qrp

There is no good comprehensive handbook on social networking of which I am aware (the best references on the topic tend to be circulated around the network). Social networking has to be done. In other words, in order to learn about it, people have to teach themselves through informal learning and collaboration with peers. The collaboration is important because in order to DO social networking, you have to have a network with which to experiment. So my work recently has been to promote and examine the formation of social networks and how they work. It is complex but intuitive at the same time; still the complexity makes it difficult to introduce the concept to those who are not engaged themselves (overtly) in social networking. This is again the link with learner autonomy. Teachers who know something about the topic introduce its many components gradually to those who want to learn, a premise which I have exercised in my several annual renditions lately of my course in Multiliteracies taught for TESOL (http://goodbyegutenberg.pbworks.com), parts of which I have included in materials on Computer Literacy for students I teach face-to-face (http://issuu.com/vances/docs/social_networking_2009_lessons1-3), and also a short course for teachers taught for the first time in January of 2010 (http://tinyurl.com/21centuryskills4pdo).

My work with this process of introduction of both the content and process of social networking has evolved from looking at the topic from the evolution of groups to communities, to arrive at a perspective of distributed learning networks (I was invited to talk on groups, communities, and networks at the most recent TESOL conference, http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2009/04/global-and-local-visions-webheads-and.html). This has taken me through a line of inquiry examining the perspective of communities of practice, which had great traction earlier in the decade, and which I have been often asked to speak on recently. When I was asked to design and teach my TESOL course on multiliteracies a few years back this gave me further perspectives on the issue and brought my inquiries to bear on social networks, and the new theory of connectivism, which is considered to be a participatory or connection multiliteracy, depending on how that topic is viewed.

The many views on the topic are part of a paradigm shift for education, the nature of which my work has also examined (http://multiliteracies.ning.com/profiles/blogs/how-can-teachers-deal-with). The many aspects in perspectives that this shift impacts deeply influence my view of the role of computing in learning, and how students and teachers should be learning to prepare themselves for changes that can be expected in the way they will work and learn into the next decade. Most of us can sense that this change is impending, and I feel that my work helps educators to grasp the nature of that change and see how they can leverage it to their advantage and to the benefit of their students. I have feedback on this as I participate in communities of hundreds of teachers worldwide, and coordinate several, including a significant community called Webheads, much appreciated by its members (http://webheads.info). As I am often asked to speak on the topic, or am followed on Twitter (http://twitter.com/vances), or re-tweeted, or as comments are added to my blog posts, as people ask me to write articles, or to edit sections of professional journals, I become aware that my work is trickling out over networked communities and having some impact and is earning a modicum of respect among others interested in the topic (http://vancestevens.com/papers). I’m also encouraged my work is gaining in interest where I teach at the Petroleum Institute in Abu Dhabi: http://justcurious.posterous.com/class-finale-january-19-2010-live-worldwide-w .

Another aspect of my work is change agency. I realize how difficult it is to be a change agent, and that change typically takes a long time to first penetrate and then filter up through an institution, but I’m getting some indications that the filtering has begun at the PI, and I hope to be a part of that through some aspects of social networking that might benefit colleagues where I work, and which could be taught (that is modeled, demonstrated) in turn to students (e.g. http://justcurious.posterous.com/earthbridges-earthcast10-and-earth-day-at-pi). After all, students are the focus of this work, but students by definition are learners, and that includes all of us.

Is DOGME for adVancEducation?

2010-01-18T10:02:00.014Z

According to its YahooGroup members listing (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dogme/), I joined Dogme on March 8, 2002 . I started following the group after James Farmer put Webheads on to it: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evonline2002_webheads/message/121 (in the 121st msg posted to the group), but as my interests gravitated toward edtech, I eventually lost interest and lost track. Since then there have been about 20 messages mentioning dogme in the almost 25,000 posted to the Webheads list, but only recently have there been overt recommendations for Webheads to pay closer attention to what was going on there; e.g., Graham Stanley early in 2009: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evonline2002_webheads/message/21479.

The founder of the concept for teaching (drawing on the film genre) is Scott Thornbury, and its minimalist essence is captured in the front page of this website: http://www.thornburyscott.com/tu/portal.htm (with links to a longer article on "teaching unplugged"). There's a Wikipedia entry on Dogme here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogme_language_teaching, where it states succinctly that "Dogme is a communicative approach to language teaching and encourages teaching without published textbooks and instead focusing on conversational communication among the learners and the teacher."

Now, what got me started on this posting was Karen Sylvester's tweet, here:
http://twitter.com/kalinagoenglish/status/7784038613

So, I bit. I popped over to http://eisensei.blogspot.com/2010/01/dogme-el-what-t.html and left a comment; to wit:

"Ok, here's Dogme from the perspective of teaching some other language as a foreign language. I wrote an article here Stevens, Vance. 2006. Learner strategies at the interface: Computer-assisted language learning meets computer-mediated communication. In Handbook for Arabic Language Teaching Professionals in the 21st Century, Kassem Wahba, Zeinab Taha, and Liz England (Eds.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., a pre-publication version of which I put online here: http://www.homestead.com/prosites-vstevens/files/efi/papers/cairo2004/hbalt-gvs05sep.htm At that URL, scroll to just above and below the section "A syllabus for language learning". I think that's Dogme."

I'd like to reproduce here what I said in that article, regarding my experiences in learning Arabic unplugged. The teacher referred to below as "Salem" is in fact the best Arabic teacher I ever had, Haridi Salim, and is still in touch with me from time to time from Cairo:

"... students made no elaborate preparations but spontaneously brought realia to the class. Simply put, the only operative rule was "No English, Only Arabic." We formed classes of students who would follow this rule. Salem, whose other classes were conducted in more traditional vein, often remarked about how much he was learning about language teaching through the experience of working with us. We were all learning that authentic materials were more motivating than traditional ones and that communicative approaches allowed us to use what Pinker (1994) called our "language instinct' to efficiently learn the language. This efficiency was also improved by focusing our concentration on Arabic, allowing us to actually think in that language, and cutting out the factor of code switching that constantly throws students off in bilingual language classes. We were learning what we needed to know about creating materials once the technology caught up with our need to find and present authentic language learning materials in Arabic.

A syllabus for language learning

This section elaborates on the idealized syllabus for learning a language such as Arabic and how it can be augmented with technology. The syllabus accrues from experiences with "'Salem"' described above and can be minimalistically characterised as finding teachers who will use only Arabic in class (spoken and written) and putting them before students who agree to read, speak, and write the same. I have had the opportunity to replicate this configuration in two learning situations since that time and in both instances, the technique was markedly effective with small groups of students who self-selected to learn on these principles.

However, creating such a pure and facilitative learning environment in an Arabic class is not easy in practice. I have faced problems with Arabic teachers who are not convinced teaching with only discourse in their target language is possible. They feel that students' first- language support is necessary and they tend to over-use it, thus suppressing opportunities for students to internalize patterns discernible from rich target language input. I have known Arabic teachers who refuse to teach Arabic script in the belief that this would be too great a leap for their students. However, the converse is true: using student-language emulations of target language features often disguises the patterns inherent in the target language and can actually hinder the learning of the language through elucidation of it's otherwise predictable features.

Resistance also comes from students who don't realize the possibility of learning Arabic using only discourse in the target language. They feel that first-language support is necessary and tend to ask questions in their native language, thus suppressing opportunities for internalizing patterns discernible from rich target language usage and input (when the response is made in the target language rather than the student's native). Oddly, some students in this group are themselves language teachers who teach classes using the target language only yet still persist in relying on support in their native language in their own Arabic classes rather than persevering in the target.

Once all concerned agree to learn and work in Arabic only and settle on a time to meet regularly, finding things to do in the class has never been a problem when the students are encouraged to raise topics for class discussion. They have the essential ingredients for good language learning; namely, an informant, a commitment on the part of students to digest the material, and materials proposed by and therefore relevant to the students themselves. The classes I've experienced have all gone well ala munasib (according to the occasion) but both students and teachers must seed discussion and activities."

Ironically that article is about teaching "plugged", not "unplugged". The latter term I know means (in music) without relying on electronic enhancements, but the article itself is about how technology can enhance the dogme approach. As I say in its conclusion, it shows:

"...how instructional technology supports current trends in language teaching methodology by allowing students to engage in meaningful, authentic, and truly communicative activities that enhance their ability to learn languages such as Arabic through the use of the Internet.. Computers have allowed the achievement of constructivist outcomes by facilitating the establishment of learning environments which have moved:

from making behaviorist teaching paradigms such as tutorials and drill and practice more efficient;
through more cognitive approaches such as simulations and better use and analysis of corpora and multimedia;
to comprehensive access of a world of authentic target-language documents via the Internet; and
most recently, to all of the above plus genuine communication and empathy with native and non-native speakers of Arabic through the formation of communities of practice online and in blended learning situations."

Graham Stanley, Dennis Newson and Gavin Dudeney are all vocal protagonists of dogme, and enthusiastic teachers, learners, and builders in Second Life, so I'm sure there are no real implication in the term "unplugged" that teachers should eschew educational technology (after all, unplugged musicians use microphones and sound systems that project what they do onstage to the far corners of concert halls; or in cinematic terms, even the most purist dogme director would still use hi-tech cameras), but I wish here to drive home the point nevertheless, that technology is capable of enhancing what Thornbury declares is the thrust of dogme: "to restore teaching to its pre-method 'state of grace' - when all there was was a room with a few chairs, a blackboard, a teacher and some students, and where learning was jointly constructed out of the talk that evolved in that simplest, and most prototypical of situations." Why not, then, a few rezzed furniture objects embedded in a holodeck in Second Life, that do marvelous things when clicked on, giving learners that much more to wonder at and talk about?

Thornbury, S. (2002) A Dogma for EFL. IATEFL Issues 153, Feb/March 2000. http://www.thornburyscott.com/tu/Dogma%20article.htm.

Pinker, S. (1994). The language instinct: How the mind creates language. Harper Perennial (Harper/Collins Publishers): New York, NY.

TinyURL for this post: http://tinyurl.com/100118advanced

Modeling social media in networks and bringing the pieces loosely joined together

2010-01-01T10:40:00.009Z

I haven't posted here for some time, but I've been quite busy, as you can see from my last-century web page at http://vancestevens.com/papers/. I've got a number of articles in the works for 2010, and in the last days of 2009, I managed to complete and submit in Wordpress my latest article for the column I edit four times each year (and often write myself) for the TESL-EJ online professional journal.

The article is entitled Modeling Social Media in Groups, Communities, and Networks: http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/past-issues/volume13/ej51/ej51int/. It's about the importance of teachers developing, nurturing, and interacting in networks and then modeling and demonstrating within those networks in order to scaffold each other's professional development. The Implications section starts out by saying:

"A major key to success in keeping current in one’s field is in nurturing productive contacts within a network ... the skill of leveraging networks is increasingly important in the 21^st century in plumbing and aggregating knowledge when that knowledge base is forever changing at an increasingly accelerated pace. For appropriate use of online social networks to be taught in schools, teachers themselves must be familiar with their impact on learning. One problem is that teacher-trainers without sufficient experience with technology and who are rooted in old-school methodologies are simply not modeling new age learning behaviors for their trainees by showing them how to reach out to networks."

It was only the second time I had used Wordpress for my submissions, and the first time, for the article I submitted 3 months ago, I scrupulously followed directions including watching a 20-minute screencast on using the interface. But this time around I tried to wing it and missed some steps, resulting in my article being the one to hold up the works as the editors were trying publish the issue. Pressed to finalize my part of the process, I got up at 5 a.m., went through the article one last time, put in some final touches, and hit the publish button, then headed down to my car to drive off to work.

When I commute I listen to my mp3 player, and the program that I had been listening to was from the Worldbridges megafeed, and it happened to be Wesley Fryer speaking with Kim Cofino, who had recorded a keynote presentation for the 2009 K12Online conference entitled Going Global: Culture Shock, Convergence and the Future of Education, http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=424. Worldbridges had hosted a "fireside chat" with Kim, mounted on their website at http://www.edtechtalk.com/node/4613. I had been listening to the first part of the chat earlier, so the part that came on just as I was pulling away from the house was the part of her keynote where she was talking about the importance of nurturing networks, how those already in such networks can model their cultivation for others, and suggesting six ways to start one.

It was uncanny that as I pulled out into Abu Dhabi traffic I heard Kim say almost exactly what I had just been working and re-working in my head in my apartment just then and for the previous week as I massaged my article to completion. Her words resonated with me at just the right moment, and I felt as if a jigsaw puzzle of thoughts inside my head and Kim's were coming together on my drive to work.

I decided to extract the part of Kim's talk where she made those points and share it here: http://goodbyegutenberg.pbworks.com/f/KimCofino2009FiresidechatPLE.mp3

My daily commute is an important part of connecting with my network for me. This is a time when I listen to what others in my network have recorded and podcast online, and I often arrive at work itching to get onto my computer and check out web sites and URLs I've heard mentioned while I was driving to work. Podcasts are a crucible of ideas for me, like Twitter, something I can monitor in the background and extract the nuggets of knowledge that are lurking in the stream as I run the sounds between my ears.

When Kim, and her colleague at International School of Bangkok Jeff Utecht, gave their keynote talk at the WiAOC online conference in May, 2009 (http://www.webheadsinaction.org/node/364), I introduced them by telling the story of when I met Kim in Bangkok while traveling with the FLNW (Future of Learning in a Networked World) traveling roadshow in January, 2008. This story is a great illustration of how networked worlds collide to release energy quantum levels above that of the disconnected component parts.

The FLNW roadshow is an un-event, loosely organized in 2008 by John Eyles who got Michael Coghlan, Trish Everett, and I to meet him in Bangkok for a few days or a week or two, whatever time we could spare, of hopping from one educational institute to another as John worked his way toward Thai TESOL in Chiang Mai and on to a village in Laos where he would deliver some books he had arranged to be donated there. Our first event was a stop at ISB.

I recorded the event here: http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2008_01_01_archive.html
and Kim blogged this: http://www.blogcatalog.com/blog/always-learning/04cc1ccaf9963683f905ae93219700b5

Talk about coming full circle and fitting together more pieces of the jigsaw, I have just re-read that and noticed where Kim said in that post "Not only was it fantastic to have three so well-respected and knowledgeable visitors talk to our teachers in a casual format about their questions, issues and problems, but it was so great to have them reinforce so many of the things Justin, Dennis and I say on a daily basis." So here we are, echoing one another again.

At the time of this event I had never met nor heard of Kim, she had not yet become a part of my network, and I was there simply because John had arranged a van to pick us up and take us to ISB. John had mentioned we had been asked to talk about reading, so I had prepared a slide show on that topic, and as one does when illustrating the future or education in a networked world, I had arranged with Doug Symington on Vancouver Island in Canada to webcast our meeting, which I had hoped to stream from Bangkok out to the networked world at large. We had of course asked in advance about the facilities at ISB and we were told we could have access to anything we wanted, but a disconnect occurred when we arrived on site and found that this was true only if we had specified in advance what we needed, and then their IT people would have allowed us to breach their firewall. However, I arrived and discovered that having arranged with Doug to meet him online at a certain time, I was totally unable to connect to Skype or Elluminate, and I imagined Doug having rearranged his schedule to accommodate ours and having set up a webcast, trying to reach me but being unable to, and not having any way to tell him what was going on.

Meanwhile, the ISB folks had set up their own webcast via Ustream, which they had working, having made the necessary arrangements with IT. And who should be in the chat there but Doug Symington!! So the network had come to the rescue. Doug was in Kim's network, whose tendrils had reached out and roped him in, and all was fine, the network had saved the day.

I find it really fascinating how a system so prone to chaos and entropy so often works through the wisdom of the crowds that populate it to keep the pieces loosely joined all heading in the same direction. Something is quite in synch here, and I hope in this post that I've been able to get at one small part of it.

You can share this post via http://tinyurl.com/advanced100101

Comments from the Twittersphere (Jan 14 and Jan 3, 2010):

Modeling social media in groups, communities, and networks

2009-11-03T19:27:00.014Z

I'm filling in this placeholder with links to my presentation at the AVEALMEC/ARCALL online conference on Social Networking, November 5-8, 2009, http://avealmec.org.ve/.

The complete schedules and PDF promotional documents for this conference are here: http://avealmec.org.ve/moodle/
This link gives a good overview of presenters with links to their presentation recordings http://avealmec.org.ve/moodle/course/view.php?id=4

My presentation is entitled Modeling social media in groups, communities, and networks. The presentation took place November 6, 2009, at 18:30 GMT.

The writeup is here:
http://tinyurl.com/vance-socialnet09
The presentation recording is here: http://tinyurl.com/vance091106wiziq
The slides are posted here: http://www.slideshare.net/vances/modeling-social-media-in-groups-communities-and-networks-socialnetworking-2009-online-conference

As the presentation was on knowledge dissemination and sharing throughout networks, it naturally touched on Creative Commons, so I took care to license the presentation with the attribution 3.0 license. I selected jurisdiction to be USA but I could have left it "unported"; anyone know what ramifications that would have?

Modeling social media in groups, communities, and networks by Vance Stevens is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at advanceducation.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://vancestevens.com.

If you have any comments on the presentation, you are most welcome to make them here.

AVEALMEC Conference on Social Networking November 5-8, 2009

2009-10-19T03:47:00.007Z

In the picture you can see a group of people I'll be joining in early November at a conference with infinite heart but no walls. But I'm having a heck of a time getting the slide show done for my presentation there because I'm so distracted. I'm up before dawn. I was looking for graphics till late last night searching Google Images and Flickr and Creative Commons for images I can use in my presentation. This alone could take hours wandering through other people's flights of fancy, which they have elected to SHARE; to allow me to put online if I will only acknowledge their hand in their own work, to pay forward to the community (Mireille's term on Webcast Academy). Creating a slide show for a respected audience is a journey where every step takes you halfway there; you never arrive!

I stop to reflect here, how did I KNOW about Creative Commons, and what it means? How did I know I could find CC images at Flickr and the Creative Commons website, and turn the license filter on for Google Images? Did I read that somewhere or hear it word of mouth? Yes, I did, but not in a book or in any traditional media. As we speak, Twitter is constantly bleeping my radar, and even my Gmail is flooding me with messages on the latest SCoPE seminar, The Art of Teaching (looks to be a great one). I just joined the Educator's PLN Ning ... now that's kind of a mirror within a mirror, messages are coming through for existing participants to Twitter in more (yet another layer of mirror within mirror).

I'm not sure what's going on with George Siemens's and Stephen Downes's CCK09 at the moment but I heard on EdTech Weekly that it had only a few hundred participants, not bad for a free online course, but down from its mega-status of thousands in its initial rendition. I know that Alec Couros is giving an interesting Open Course at the moment (which I had every intention of joining but never did), and Leigh Blackall is starting one as well, both of these inviting participants from anywhere, for whatever reason or benefit they hope to gain from it. I've never met either Alec or Leigh, but I've invited both to give keynote talks at WiAOC free online conferences, and both readily agreed. Why? Heike Philp has offered to try and set up a live synchronous discussion online with anyone her PLN suggests. Someone said, ok, I'd like to talk with Noam Chomsky. So she asked him, he agreed, she set up the discussion, and now anyone can replay the recording. News about all these events reaches not just me but everyone in my extended social network in ways we didn't have available last year, last month, yesterday even ... how about tomorrow, Google Wave anyone?

These events and courses have a wonderful dynamic, one that I apply instinctively to the EVO Multiliteracies course I'm about to moderate again. I don't really have time for any of these courses, nor for preparing for my ALVEALMEC presentation for that matter. My professional development cup runneth over with creative juices that spill in all directions. Matt Montaigne is one of these teachers who seems to be everywhere at once, pushing people forward in their learning with this project and that (Earth Day webcasts, for example, on the Worldbridges Network). I was surprised to hear him say on a recent EdTechTalk shows that these efforts were chaos, he gets them started and then they just surge this way and that and leave messes that no one sees and no one mops up, but enough energy reaches the target that the impression is one of sustained and directed effort. Why am I surprised? I'm like that. I imagine many creative people are, minds as cluttered as an artist's atelier. It would be interesting to sound some of the other presenters at this conference on social networking out on exactly that topic.

This is how energy is harnessed and channeled in a PLN. It's messy. And while trying to focus on meeting an arbitrary deadline to prepare slides for a presentation to be given two weeks hence (if it were two days, I would be genuinely focused; there's nothing like a real deadline!) I am moving all over the network that brought me to this point. If not for the network, I would not have been given the opportunity to make the presentation. If not for the network, I'd be able to actually put this presentation together in a timely manner. But you can't have the upside without the downside, so we need to get used to it, and revel in it!

Seth Godin has introduced the notion of "tribes" as being groups of people who congeal around an idea that some dominant figure within that tribe leads. Switching conventional notions on its head, charisma he says, is not what the leader needs to attract followers, it's what the leader gets from the act of leading others, or better said, moving to the forward position where the leader appears to be at the head of where the tribe was going in the first place. It's an interesting concept, and hopefully a tribe is something that can be subsumed in the framework of the talk I'm giving at AVEALMEC.

In this brief posting I've again taken a step leading me only halfway to my destination. But each step needs to end (even as the destination shifts like an amorphous paradigm. Wasn't it just there? Where is it now?) so I'll wrap up this thought. Where have I arrived in this step? This posting has been about the role of a network of peers and their peers which is constantly channeling us information which we can use to convert to the knowledge that makes us interesting enough that others will invite us to speak at gatherings ranging in formality from conferences (online or face to face) to ad hoc discussions (again, online or face to face).

If you follow this out to its logical end, it means that any of us in the network is potentially interesting enough, and therefore no better than, anyone who is speaking to them at a conference. I say potentially, because the information is there, but it has to be aggregated and processed into knowledge, and then be communicated effectively. Some people are better at that than others, or simply have more time. The network provides the information but the better the network the more time it consumes. Those of us who are getting used to that reality are reveling in it, and exuding an energy that makes us want to share our passion with others, like those who created and shared the graphics that I'll put in my presentation, as part of the scaffolding on the launching pad I am trying to create for the talk I plan to give at AVEALMEC.

The more I learn about this conference, the more I see of the buildup and the accumulation of artifacts on the web, the more I anticipate being a part of it. I'm looking forward to savoring the aggregation of content and hearing what the speakers have to say. This conference has a very appealing look and feel. It's being done right. Congratulations to those putting it on! For more information: http://avealmec.org.ve/

Personas and the multiliterate curriculum vitae

2009-09-26T11:13:00.009Z

I just posted this to YouTube:

"In a multiliterate society as it is emerging in the 21st read-write century, it may be that curriculum vitae in formats such as this one will replace the paper-based versions prevalent in the 20th read-only century. The distinctions between centuries were made by Lawrence Lessig, and Personas is an M.I.T. project from http://personas.media.mit.edu/ designed to reveal anyone's webpresence."

(Incidentally, I'm fortunate to have a unique name; all the output shown in this screencast is about me, but it doesn't work like that for everyone ;-)

Another interesting site that will aggregate content on your name is http://addictomatic.com

To make the screencast, I used Camstudio to produce an almost 400 megabyte AVI file. I then used VideoSprintLight (reviewed here: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/convert-video-files-to-dvd-mp4-vcd-mpeg-windows/) to create an MP4 version of only 77 megabytes.

It was crucial to do the conversion on my PC because I was having trouble (facing 4 hours upload time, not counting timeouts and retries) to upload the AVI directly to YouTube, and I figured I'd have the same problem sending it to Zamzar, or ConvertFiles, or Media Converter.

Social Networking for students and teachers who only know Facebook

2009-08-27T19:14:00.014Z

Struggling with my muses on a challenging project, I confided in a Facebook update: "I'm trying to write teaching materials to explain social networking to students and teachers who know little about the topic beyond Facebook. It's difficult."

To my surprise my off-the-cuff remark brought numerous comments (my social network in support; thanks, social network :-)). I decided that these responses deserved more elaboration than would be possible in a comment on my own status update (hence, this blog post).

Basically I'm trying to update what my colleagues and I have been teaching as "computer literacy" for the past several years. Our students' sophistication with computers changes year to year, and what seemed reasonable five years ago as an introduction to computing might seem simplistic and outmoded today.

I was fortunate to have been given the opportunity to revise some of the materials we introduce to students as "computer literacy" and thus articulate some of the concepts which I think our students should be aware of in order to consider themselves technologically literate in the 21st century, where there is general agreement among educators who concern themselves with such matters that a new skill set is emerging to prepare young people to be able to adapt to “jobs that haven’t been invented yet.”

My materials include a lesson on Google Docs (a popular example of doing in the ‘cloud’ something we have till recently been doing almost exclusively on our PC’s). This lesson also gets the students into the Google system, which they’ll need for the lessons involving Google Reader.

Google Reader is one of the topics in my lessons on Social Networking. These lessons focus on three key concepts: RSS, tagging, and aggregation.

The first lesson has us taking a look at aggregation, an excellent illustration of which can be found at http://addictomatic.com/. I have our students put in ADNOC and OPEC as these are safe and also could lead to a discussion of how this works (if students explore some of the aggregators used, which reveals a lot about what aggregators there are and how they work).

In the second lesson we have a look at blogs, but as observers only. It seems unreasonable to require teachers to themselves create blogs in such a short time, though this could be a technique any teacher could use to work with students on these materials. As observers we follow blogs through their RSS feeds, so I’m suggesting some blogs I hope will intrigue our students. I also have some practical examples of RSS at work (RSS is a KEY concept, absolutely essential).

Another key concept is that of tagging. For this I use Delicious, adapting materials I've already created some time ago.

This brings me to the last lesson. I was thinking of a lesson on how to develop a network of worthy peers. Social Networking is much talked about, I heard the term repeatedly on mainstream TV news just this morning, on both Al Jazeera and BBC. So I think students and teachers might be primed to learn more about it, but the hurdle for most people (the trick, or the hard part) is seeding that network in such a way that it develops into something that will feed you the kind of information that will transform your learning (which is what some people say it does).

One web application that’s having a great impact on information dissemination is Twitter. I’m thinking at the moment to create that final lesson on Twitter. Again this would iinvolve students as observers (in illustration of concepts introduced here). It wouldn't be necessary for our teachers or students to create their own Twitter accounts but they would be able to see other people’s Ttwitter streams and follow those in RSS and tag them in Delicious.

In both blogs and Twitter you can see where people who have interesting things to say are getting their information. This is in fact how you leverage your own network, since you can find others whose blogs and Twitter feeds you can explore. My post just previous to this one (http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2009/08/new-webheads.html) described how Twitter Mosaic could be used to plumb the networks of other respected colleagues, who could in turn plumb yours.

I published this post on August 27, 2009. Meanwhile I got this from my Twitter stream, which I can't possibly absorb in its entirety but which I pop into now and then for whatever pearls have been cast before me and frequently emerge with something spot on. This is an article published September 1 in Times Higher Education on exactly the topic I'm getting at here. As Russell Stannard explains, "The idea of Twitter is to network with other people who are working in the same area as you. You send 'tweets' of interesting articles, websites and the like, and you receive similar tweets from the people you follow. Soon your Twitter account becomes a constant flow of interesting information from people who are plugged into your area. So how do you create these networks? It’s probably here where most people stumble. The easiest way to build up your contacts is to 'piggyback'. You search for well-known people who are working in your area then click on all their followers. You can guess that most of the people who follow them will be interested in similar things to you." http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=407984&c=2

I couldn't have said it better myself! Thus your network is seeded, and it flourishes when you start interacting with it (going from passive to active would be the next step, but is outside the scope of my too brief introduction).

Icing on the cake: I see from my Twitter feed Sept 2, 2009 that colleagues in my network are actually reading this article. Thanks Cristina, and others re-tweeting!

And finally, this late-breaking addendum (Sept 10, 2009)

I've published the materials I alluded to here and I'm ready to share the URLs.

Basic Computer Literacy: http://issuu.com/vances/docs/computer_literacy_2009_lessons_1-3

Social Networking: http://issuu.com/vances/docs/social_networking_2009_lessons1-3

I'd appreciate any feedback, but keep in mind that they are pitched at my work context of EFL students just entering college. The materials are meant to be used in a classroom context where video media cannot be counted on to function, and pitched at students AND teachers who are only slowly emerging from a paper-based and teacher-centric pedagogical environment. That latter stipulation means that for the teachers themselves this is their first contact with some of the concepts here and they can't be made to feel that they are fish out of water when 'teaching' to a class of students who are in general have not embraced web 2.0 and social networking. So for people already learning through social networks, it's scaled back a bit, but I'm sharing in case you have a need for such materials, and also in case you might give me ideas for improvement.

Also I was working on a 4th lesson in social networking, "Starting your own network," when I ran out of time (I needed to get the materials into teacher and student hands AND realized teachers would run out of time in the 3 weeks allocated to the course originally). However, I plan to add that fourth unit at a later date. An inkling of what is to come can be found here: http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2009/08/new-webheads.html

The New Webheads

2009-08-22T08:36:00.012Z

The Webheads "gallery" (the one here: http://vancestevens.com/papers/evonline2002/webheads_evo.htm) has become well-known within certain distributed learning networks. Webheads arose in a Web 1.0 era and its webmaster-maintained artifacts have long been overtaken by Web 2.0 ones.

I stumbled on Twitter Mosaic http://sxoop.com/twitter/ via one of Hala Fawzi's blogs: http://englishonlinects.blogspot.com/.

Voila! The new Webheads gallery (happily most of those spam followers seem to have been filtered out when their accounts were suspended; I wonder if this updates live :-). Incidentally if you don't want someone appearing in your mosaic you can click on that person's avatar to delete it from the final result, simple.

This visualization has allowed me to see my personal learning network in a new light. This is the first visualization that I've become aware of where I could picture my network so clearly. Each thumbnail has a mouse-over that not only reveals a Twitter user name, but lets you click on the user name and pull up a Twitter profile. At that profile I can have a look at the follower's posts and if I think I'd like to see more posts like that, I can conveniently follow that person right then and there.

Anyone can do the same. That is, you can pull up my network in this way (you don't need my password) and I can pull up yours. So if I want to see who is in your network I can generate a mosaic like this and I can click on people and follow them if I have that much respect for your network that I would go to that trouble (and I just did that with someone in my network to test it out, respect!).

A final comment, I've discovered that at least two people in my network are no longer of this world. That's sad on one level, but on another, there's more respect again in networks where people can remain virtually after they have gone, where the work they have accomplished lives on in a sort of immortal online presence.

Get your twitter mosaic here.

Proposed chapter on Online Distance Training for ESL/EFL teachers: Case Study of a Community of Practice and its Distributed Learning Network

2009-08-03T01:59:00.008Z

Have you ever submitted a proposal for something and sent it off and then forgot where you'd put it, so when your proposal was accepted and it came time to act on it, you couldn't retrieve it or remember exactly what you had proposed?

I have just submitted a proposal for a chapter which might appear in a book on teaching ESL online, assuming the book proposal itself is accepted.

In writing the proposal I realized that it answers succinctly in 300 words what people frequently ask me, how did Webheads come about, and what is Webheads anyway, and how does it fit into a framework of professional development? I have referred to this 'fit' as 'teacher autonomy' in this post here, for example, and also in the Slideshare presentation embedded below.

So here's the proposal. It would be useful if it attracted feedback, but apart from that, since it's here, I'll be able to retrieve and remember it later, and in case anyone asks me again about Webheads, this will be a convenient place to point them.

============

Webheads started in 1998 as an online community of EFL students and teachers learning together how technology facilitates language learning through computer-mediated communication. By around the turn of the century it was being dominated by teaching practitioners who in 2002 came to see themselves as a community of practice (CoP) known as Webheads in Action (WiA). As communication over the Internet expanded rapidly into voice and video, and with Web 2.0 making it possible for many users to create content online and share it in cyberspaces promoting social networking, many such communities arose and began overlapping in multiple memberships. This paper explores the concepts of groups, communities, and networks, and relates how WiA evolved from a group to a community (specifically, a CoP), and how this CoP developed contacts with others to function as part of a much wider distributed learning network (DLN) of teachers training one another.

The case of WiA models professional development through connectivism. At each node in the DLN, there is a person who is passionate and knowledgeable (and wants to learn more) about some aspect of teaching through technology. Collectively the nodes comprise the knowledge-base to which each member in each overlapping community has access. Connectivism provides a framework by which the development of pathways of access to that information is of primary importance to the information itself. Professional development then becomes a matter of educators blazing pathways to create channels through which each other's knowledge can be shared and made to flow in all directions, creating a dynamic system conducive to informal, just-in-time learning.

This paper describes how members of WiA utilize such connections to maintain conversations that enable everyone to learn about and practice with latest innovations in educational technology, and contribute to innovative and transformative teaching practices.

Let's start with teacher autonomy: Multiliteracies and Lifelong Learning

View more presentations from vances.

SpeedLifing

2009-06-08T04:00:00.006Z

Webheads in action have once again invented an online phenomenon. SpeedLifing is an offshoot of SpeedGeeking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_Geeking, which Kim Cofino and Jeff Utecht mentioned in their excellent presentation at WiAOC http://webheadsinaction.org/node/364, and in this blog post: http://mscofino.edublogs.org/2009/04/05/take-your-faculty-speedgeeking/

This got Webheads thinking we could try the technique, so we decided to do it in Elluminate http://tinyurl.com/y3eh starting at 13:00 GMT June 14, 2009. There's more information at our wiki http://wiaoc09.pbworks.com/SpeedGeeking

SpeedGeeking is where a lot of participants show up and move at a signal from one presentation to another. The presenters keep repeating their presentations. In Online SpeedGeeking as Webheads will attempt it we will rotate presentations through our Elluminate presentation room at http://tinyurl.com/y3eh. Elluminate has a countdown timer. We'll set it to countdown 5 minutes. The SpeedGeeker's task is to present cogently and concisely on a topic of choice (non-commercial of course :-) in just 5 minutes. Anyone can present. Scope of topic is up to individual presenters, as long as the topic is covered in 5 min. Anyone interested can sign up at the wiki.

At our usual Webheads Sunday noon GMT chat on May 31 , someone had some questions about Second Life, so we decided to meet in SL the following week June 7

It gradually dawned on us, why not try a similar format in SL? We put the event down on our wiki page and invited people to show us their favorite places there, with the caveat that each tour would last 5 or ten minutes. We thought we could get people into SL, exchange friendships, and teleport each other from place to place. And guess what? It worked, and it was F.U.N.

On the day of the event, we had only two presenters who had signed up.

13:00 GMT, Webhead Link (Vance),
Landmark to be visited: Webheads in Action, EduNation III (72, 36, 21)
Next up: Ruta Maya, Mexico, Nina Liakos/Zaytsev

But it turned out that a lot of webheads appeared at http://tappedin.org/ between noon and 13:00 expecting the event to take place.

Doris Molero had come online for another reason and wanted take some pictures of me in Second Life to accompany an interview that she had conducted (and which I blogged here: http://tinyurl.com/090522molero). I said fine but in return she had to show us her favorite places in Second Life.

She took us to the Great Wall of Mao (85, 85, 36) and then to a Japanese village with the name Kansai in it (looking for it now, can't seem to relocate it, one of many builds containing the name Kansai). In Kansai Doris found a lovely kimono but the guys in the group could find no clothes, so we went off in search of men's clothing elsewhere, and ended up at Amity Island (116, 95, 23).

By then we had attracted a crowd, including Nina who conducted us to Ruta Maya, Mexico 2 (187, 25, 21). This turned out to be a charming place where we could 'rent' horses (for free) by touching them and then 'wearing' them. So we rode horses around the build, the beach, and the old ruins there.

The charm was somewhat compromised by a villain who appeared by name of Lucianopt Vita. This character first disrupted our outing with a confusing holodeck which scattered our avatars. He followed us to the ruins where he created storms and grey-outs, and then wrought a tornado that blew trees and telephone poles crashing around us. He can be seen in the picture above conjuring up his next episode. (I wonder if it was he who killed Mike Marzio's horse?)

Fortunately no one got hurt and we all escaped to Webheads Headquarters at EduNation III (72, 36, 21). There the tour ended. But it was interesting, all aboard enjoyed it, and we must do it again sometime.

Vance is interviewed by Doris Molero

2009-05-31T04:05:00.009Z

On May 22 at the start of the recent Webheads in Action Online Convergence, I had the pleasure to be interviewed by Doris Molero, who had requested an interview as a part of a project for her degree program. Doris was under close time constraints, but with WiAOC09 close on our heels, I was too. The constraints appeared so insurmountable that I suggested Doris conduct the interview as a session of WiAOC. She agreed and set up an event at http://wiaoc09.pbworks.com/May22. It happened to be the second event in the 74 hour online conference, and it was recorded here: http://worldbridges.info/wiaoc09/audio/WiAOC09-May22-0200GMT.mp3 (link updated Aug 2009)

A minor hiccup however was that Doris had connectivity problems right at that time and did not appear for the interview. Jeff Lebow was there as were some stragglers from Doug Symington's EdTech brainstorm just ended. Afterwards Jeff remarked that I had done a good job at interviewing myself. I can only assume he was being complimentary.

Meanwhile, Doris sent me a pared-down version of her original 30 questions and on a car journey between Abu Dhabi and the dive spots on the east coast of the UAE I managed to address them in writing. Here then is the somewhat delayed interview between me and Doris Molero, a glimpse at how it might have gone on May 22 :-)

Doris: What’s your opinion about teaching English as a foreign language in the university?

Vance: It’s been a great career for me. Lots of travel opportunities and good vacations, pays the bills while allowing me to interact with a great community of online educators. I like working with language learners.

2. What do you think about teaching a second language with the help of the Internet and computers?

Language is about communication. For most people, there is no purpose to learning a language apart from a desire to communicate in it (not counting theoretical linguists who might wish to study a language for other purposes). Since this is most people's goal, it is awkward and inefficient to study a language in a context where communication is not done purposefully. By purposeful, I do not include exercises that a student might do on instructions of a teacher which put the student in communication only with the teacher. Communication with others in the class is also possible but I have been a language learner in classrooms where the teachers did not exploit this potential, dominated the class with student to teacher interaction, and spent class time on exercises with printed materials which were not at all communicative.

Properly used, the internet opens a world of communication to language learners. They can blog and get comments, they can collaborate with others worldwide, they can engage in live voice conversations, and do constructive language play with real people behind avatars in Second Life (just as a few examples). No student needs to study language in isolation any longer. Teachers who have developed skills in productive use of Web 2.0 can model use of appropriate tools with their students and put them in touch with language learners in collaborative projects. Teachers who reflect on the results of such projects report remarkable gains in motivation to write and hone ideas for peer critique. Most importantly language learning becomes FUN and meaningful for all concerned. Communication is clearly restored as the true purpose of learning the language in the first place.

3. How have your students changed compared to the ones you used to have when you first started teaching?

I started teaching in the mid 1970’s and everyone has changed. I would say that the most significant recent changes, apart from going from questioning the efficacy of using computers in language learning to general acceptance of technology in all aspects of life, have to do with the ubiquity of mobile technologies, especially with younger people including students down to the K-12 level, and the integration of social networking into transactions ranging from making purchases on Amazon and eBay through to so many people, especially students, congregating on Facebook and in other socially networked spaces. These developments are poised to make even more significant impacts on our profession. I have suggested that CALL is becoming an outmoded acronym. These days I encourage people to think SMALL (social media assisted language learning).

4. What does it take to be multiliterate? Are you multiliterate? Why do you think so?

Multiliterate means to be conversant with media as it develops in conjunction with technology. It means to be able to communicate appropriately in these media, that is to know what multimedia tools are available and how to use them, as well as to be able to search and access the communications of others in their various forms of technological enhancement. I teach courses in multiliteracies so I feel that I am moderately multiliterate myself and generally aware of the issues (see http://goodbyegutenberg.pbworks.com/ for a last rendition of the course, and http://multiliteracies.ning.com/ for the Ning).

5. In your opinion, do you think that just using a textbook, a workbook and an audio program is enough to teach a second language at university level these days?

It could be enough depending on the motivation of the students to learn. I have met many people while traveling in foreign countries who had used such materials to achieve some competence in English and were grateful for the opportunity to meet a foreigner and have the chance to put their skills to use. However, as noted in question 2, the ability to learn a language well through communication with other learners and native speakers online increases the scope for language learning.

6. What do you do to teach the following skills: listening, reading, writing, critical thinking and speaking to your EFL students?

I taught EFL for 20 years but switched to computing and software development in 1995, so I can’t speak first hand about teaching EFL in the past decade. I have been working in teacher training since that time (online through webheads and other communities and networks) so I am aware of what others are doing. These people are blogging their experiences so my answer here would be to review their blogs and recorded experiences, but as the question relates to my personal experiences in EFL, I am not currently working specifically in that area.

7. What differences do you find between the traditional paper and pencil class and the class that integrated Web 2.0 tools?

These differences are those noted in my response to question 2.

8. What kind of text do you and your students use in your classes?

We use texts teaching computing written in-house by computing faculty.

9. How does participating in a community of learning help to learn more?

Peers in the community model the most productive behaviors to one another toward reaching the shared goals. They scaffold one another, support one another in collaborative projects, feed back to one another, provide encouragement, answer questions on a just-in-time basis, and provide a context for informal, social learning to take place. More importantly each ‘node’ in the network is connected with its own locus of other nodes, with the result that the knowledge contained in any one node is accessible throughout the connected networks to all the other nodes. In connectivist terms, knowledge can be defined not as what one possesses within one’s mind or the walls of one’s library, but in terms of ‘the pipes’ or how successfully one is able to nurture and access the nodes in the extended network. The knowledge contained in the network is the sum of its parts, and to be knowledgeable in multiliterate terms means to be able to incorporate this knowledge into one’s own Personal Learning Environment or Network.

10. How should we evaluate when we integrate web tools into the class?

This is a very good question, and my instinct is to say NOT how we evaluate traditional learning. To examine how we might evaluate alternatively, I refer to my answer in question 3, think SMALL. Techniques are evolving for measuring trust on the Internet. Examples are found in Google’s predominant algorithm for search, whereby trust is measured by calculating links from other trusted sites. E-bay, Amazon, and Couch Surfing all have trust systems set up whereby users rank each other according to expected performance. A system has been proposed for enhancing internet security whereby users might have a way of seeing who else has installed software that’s about to install on their machines as a means to helping them decide if they should authorize it (the information would come from tracking choices made by users as each made the choice individually). I think that these techniques could be adapted to pedagogical evaluation systems, whereby users were ranked on the quantity and quality of comments on their blog postings, for example, on measures relating to download and feedback on their podcasts, how viral their uploads to YouTube were, and other peer measures utilizing features of these so-called ‘trust’ systems.

11. What do you think about using project based approach as a learning tool to validate what has been learned in class?

Projects are the only valid thing to evaluate in a system described above. There would be little of this kind of feedback generated by user responses to a multiple choice test, these tests being designed solely for student-teacher interactions, nothing more. In a world where we are all connected to one another, peer evaluation, both by peers who knew and those who did not know the student in question, could become part of the evaluation matrix. Project based learning also lends itself to students' creating digital portfolios of inter-related artifacts which could be evaluated as yet another measure. These methods might produce a mindset whereby the answer to a question on history might not necessarily be 1492 (though a student could look that up if the exact date were required; as opposed to having memorized it) but something along the lines of, let’s see, Columbus was sent on a voyage of discovery by Ferdinand and Isabella, who at about that time ejected the Moors from Spain, so this would have been toward the end of the 15^th century …

12. What do you think should be the role of the teacher that integrates web 2.0 tools into his or her classes?

I like what I hear from teachers who successfully integrate interactive whiteboards in their classes. What works, I understand, is for the teacher to move to the back of the room and guide the students in turn taking at the IWB. Similarly with Web 2.0 the paradigm of learning has to change. In writing that last sentence I changed what I had originally written to replace ‘teaching' with ‘learning’. The role of the teacher is to not teach, but to become a master learner who is simply the model for how everyone in that class learns. With regard to language teaching, the ‘teacher’ is a language informant in that the teacher ‘knows’ what is accepted as correct language, and the teacher can facilitate the learning process. But the idea that anyone can ‘teach’ a language is a spurious one beyond the most rudimentary levels. Language has to be learned; it can’t be taught. What we still call a teacher is actually someone who is more experienced in learning and who can model tricks and tips for students to apply to their own learning. This is where web 2. 0 fits perfectly with this conception of the role of guide on the side facilitator of learning in a classroom. Web 2.0 tools put control in the power of learners, or anyone who uses them. They enable users to communicate online, to record to online spaces, and to tag their artifacts so that others can find or stumble on them. They are ideal tools for constructivist, connectivist learning environments. The role of the teacher in such an environment is to introduce them to students, model appropriate uses, suggest or help learners conceive of ways the tools might be used in collaborative language development, and then step to the back of the room and let the learners get on with it.

13. What do you think should be added or changed in the EFL class in the university?

What is generally needed is for teachers steeped in traditional ways of learning, who have never had the new tools modeled for them, to become first aware of the tools available, and then to form communities where they can see and experience the tools modeled so that they can learn which ones are effective with each other. Only then will they be tentatively in a position to try some of the tools out on their own students.

The fact that this process is not a straightforward one is its biggest drawback. Some awareness of a number of fundamental paradigm shifts is required. I have elsewhere set out ten or 12 of these and many have been covered here (see http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2009/03/celebrating-25-years-of-call-forging.html). Essentially they revolved around a fundamental underpinning of multiliteracies, that the way that people communicate online is becoming less arbitrated and more populist. It comes down to how readily people can accept that people on the Internet will regulate one another, so that it becomes possible for example to produce an encyclopedia (for free!) that anyone can write on that is more comprehensive, more current, and arguably of better quality than a very expensive and ecologically unfriendly one produced through the tradition publishing process. Not until this essential concept is grasped, accepted, and understood, can one make sense of the rest of it.

So the people who need to be reached are those who have not yet grasped a functional conception of the socializing and interconnectivist forces at play in an appropriately configured learning network. This is where the concept of change agency becomes crucial. Teachers already attuned to the role of multiliteracies in 21^st century learning have crossed a rubicon and must build bridges to those still on the other side. This is difficult. Those on the left bank, as in the one left behind, are not convinced that there is anything better on the right bank, and think they are being talked down to when those on the right try and explain why this is the ‘right’ place to be. It makes little sense to someone who feels the left bank has been perfectly fine for their entire teaching careers to go to the trouble to move off that spot for something that might be just a passing fad.

There are still people whom I work with who tell me they will never blog, and wonder how anyone could be so self-absorbed. Many (sometimes the same people) will tell you that the blogs they’ve read are just nonsensical journals, not for serious readers. I came upon a post on a mailing list the other day that argued that we should carefully consider how we use computers in teaching because learning is social and computers are isolating. Clearly the author of that post is broadcasting ‘knowingly’ from the ‘left’ bank.

There is also an interesting bit of research that suggests that people who are incompetent are blithely unaware of how incompetent they are (not meaning to question anyone's competence in the present instance, concerning colleagues I don't even know - just that this is an interesting bit of research: http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/health/011800hth-behavior-incompetents.html).

But what I have just written is anathema to change agency. Successful change agents do not belittle the shortcomings of others or, more importantly, appear to (I didn’t mean to just then; I might have appeared to - anyway the incompetent could be me, or any reader of this blog, blissfully unaware of course :-). Change agents need to start by forming cooperative partnerships with peers who want to learn. The change that’s needed in teaching programs is that these partnerships need to be somehow encouraged.

Thank you to Doris Molero for giving me the opportunity to post this interview here and link it from WiAOC09. The tiny url for this post is http://tinyurl.com/090522molero

Countdown to 3rd bi-annual WiAOC May 22-24, 2009

2009-04-27T03:38:00.007Z

Webheads have been busy piling on the web artifacts for the upcoming 3rd biannual Webheads in Action Online (un)Convergence. The WiAOC site since 2005 has been http://wiaoc.org but links point to our current social network portals:

http://webheadsinaction.ning.com/
http://wiaoc09.pbwiki.com/
and the schedule of events at: http://wiaoc09.pbwiki.com/schedule
text chat: http://webheadsinaction.org/chat

Planning under way ...
From WiAOC planning session April 26, 2009 hosted by Jeff Lebow at Worldbridges on http://webheadsinaction.org/

Community pitching in ...
From Minhaaj http://www.archive.org/details/WiaocPromo, almost ready for prime time, needs a few additional keynote speakers added ...