Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Learner-centered do-it-yourself Learning Management Systems


This post was originally made on the Posterous blog DIYLMS March 6, 2012; Posterous scheduled shut down on April 30, 2012

Vance Stevens (English Teacher Coordinator, HCT/CERT Naval College) has prepared this paper

The following is the version submitted to TESL-EJ on March 13, 2012 (before editorial tweaking)

Abstract
 
This paper addresses situations where teachers are expected to develop viable courses quickly as well as make use of available technological resources, often on minimal budgets.  Flexible creativity is achieved with DIYLMS (do it yourself LMS) using a mashup of Web 2.0 tools such as a wiki portal for course information and links, Google Docs for student writing and feedback, Google Hangout for live sessions, Skype group chat for synchronous and asynchronous communication, and blogging as a means for students to showcase their work and enter into conversations about it.
 
1.       LMS and CMS
 
Learning management systems (LMS) are often used by teachers to help manage student learning.  I have been using them for a long time myself, one of my first being Nicenet <http://nicenet.net/>. One of the better known is Blackboard (Bb), an expensive but effective means of allowing teachers to set up courses, populate them with content and features such as forums and links to resources both inside and outside Blackboard, and then allow the input of student work and record marks according to a specified assessment strategy. More recently I have been managing classes using Moodle, a free and open source LMS which includes many of the same features as Blackboard.

Learning management systems are distinct from content management systems (CMS). A CMS is a place for storing content in the form of web artifacts where they can be made accessible to learners.  Wikis and blogs can be used as CMS; for example Wordpress, PBWorks, and Posterous.  Drupal and Joomla are both examples of open source CMS with powerful and attractive features for content storage and management. However CMS differs from LMS in that there is no means of tracking student performance, such as grade reports.

The distinction can be a fine one.  For example, Nicenet does not provide a gradebook tool.  However, Nicenet has many features that distinguish LMS from CMS. Goldsmith (2010) lists these as tools for teachers to “create an online course space, enroll a group of students, post documents and course reading, create discussion conferences, add links to other resources and publish a class schedule. In other words, the basics for an online class.”  The distinction is not consistent among even respected colleages.  Lane (2009) writes about disadvantages of CMS, though she includes Moodle and other LMS products in her examples.

2.       Why DIYLMS?

Even when teachers have free access to one of the more common LMS tools, such as Moodle, or Blackboard by virtue of the license for its use being paid for by their institution, they sometimes find these complicated and constraining. By that I mean that the complexity of Bb often results in teachers learning just enough of a subset of the program to be able to house their courses on Bb, but they might not learn enough of the advanced features to break free from a template that makes Bb courses appear redundantly similar.

Many teachers and their institutions paying the bills question whether what so often results from Bb is worth the expense considering there are free and open source alternatives.  One of the most commonly used free alternatives is Moodle.  For teachers using basic features of Bb, Moodle can accomplish much the same thing.  It can store content and allow students to upload assignments, and it will manage learning as well by weighting marks according to an assessment strategy. In addition to its similarities, since Moodle Is open source, it is free to set up, and it allows developers to download content into zip files for easy restoration on other Moodle servers. As Moodles are often run on a collective basis, it is easier for users to have administration rights and be able to manage available features and resolve problems with student logons, whereas with Bb this kind of thing is often managed through an IT department, whose staff may approach systems management differently from those who have opted to work within the mindset a free and open Moodle system.

But worse are the pedagogical implications of reliance on one-stop LMS. To varying degrees both Bb and Moodle tend to put course developers into a strait jacket when they call into play the same features over and over. This is not to say that neither program allows imaginative development, but it’s difficult for lay teachers to break away from templates that look alike and do exactly what they purport to do, manage learning.  The problem is that too often, it’s the LMS that manages the learning and not the teacher cum course designer. Lane (2009) calls this “insidious pedagogy”.

Fortunately, now that we’re well into the read-write century (Lessig, 2008), there are Web 2.0 antidotes to this. The most used features of LMS programs, storage of content, interaction in forums, and handling submission of student work and providing appropriate feedback, can be accomplished in a variety of freely available Web 2.0 programs that can in some ways do each of these jobs better, and with more flexibility for learners than what Siemens (2004) calls “‘locked-down, do-it-our-way’ platforms”.

Some people might not warm to the idea of doing in several programs what learning management systems typically do in one.  However, there are advantages to using Web 2.0 tools; for example, ease of use and control over tailoring the learning environment that teachers have as administrators of their own class wikis and blogs. Cobbling together a course out of freely available building blocks also increases variety and fosters creativity. Moodle and Bb both constrain where (and whether) users can upload and display things.  Moodle courses tends to appear as one long page arranged in topical or chronological order.

A wiki can be more easily divided into less cluttered and more easily navigable separate pages. It can have a sidebar with links to other course elements including separate pages for past or future content. Access to past content, and the communities of learners who populated it, is often denied users of lock-down LMS, but is on Siemens’s wish-list for what is needed in a learning environment. Siemens (2004) succinctly articulates how the pre-packaged LMS straight jacket is at odds with rapidly changing demands on learners: “It appears that our real-life manner of learning is at odds with the design and implementations of most LMS'. Strongly structured tools, with limited extensibility, face short life cycles in rapidly changing environments. Modularized approaches give the instructor or learner (not the administrator or organization) the control to follow the meandering paths of rich learning. Selecting specialized tools to achieve specific tasks - and being able to add them to the learning environment quickly - are critical to rich learning ecologies.” This approach is also taken by Dowling (2011).

Nowadays, attitudes toward sharing and creating content on the internet are changing rapidly. There are movements toward open source and away from proprietary software, people are eager to share, and there are improved mechanisms for doing so, like creative commons. There is greater awareness among teachers and their new generation of students of how social media can contribute to collaboration and language learning in ways supportive of those wishing to use such media to learn. Using wikis and blogs for learning management exposes teachers and students alike to this new age mindset online and expands their awareness of how these tools can be extrapolated into a variety of uses which can accommodate their learning goals; see Stevens (2012) for elaboration on the paradigm shifts driving acceptance of Web 2.0 mashups to augment or replace prepackaged LMS.

I call the use of such mashups as alternatives to LMS systems like Moodle and Bb “do-it-yourself learning management systems.” I coined this phrase to describe a movement whereby Web 2.0 tools are used to accomplish learning management in a way that is more open and more flexible, and potentially more powerful, than systems developed by just one company, or in the case of Moodle, by myriads of developers working nevertheless on the same set of code. Both products are exemplary, but I feel that use of a variety of tools teaches 21st century skill sets and gives teachers more control and flexibility over how they design and create learning environments for their students. DIYLMS also allows sharing of work publicly with other teachers and students from around the world, something that is neither so convenient nor encouraged, nor even at all possible with Moodle and Bb.

3.       What does DIYLMS look like?

Since 2004, I have been teaching an online course once and sometimes twice a year on Multiliteracies for both the TESOL Principles and Practices of Online Learning program, and for the Electronic Village Online (EVO) which conducts free teacher professional development sessions online each year <http://evosessions.pbworks.com>. Since 2009 I have been maintaining the Multiliteracies course in a wiki <http://goodbyegutenberg.pbworks.com>.  This was conceived initially as a content management portal, but it has come to incorporate many social network sites, including a Posterous blog at http://multiliteracies.posterous.com which acts as a kind of forum for the course, where participants can upload (email, actually) and dialog over postings there, activities which border on learner management.  Although it is essentially CMS, by maintaining and constantly fine tuning this wiki, I have learned and implemented many techniques for online course design and delivery.

This knowledge was put to good use this past academic year when I found myself teaching research writing to non-native speakers at New York Institute of Technology on the Higher Colleges of Technology Abu Dhabi Men’s College campus <http://fcwr.pbworks.com>, and then started teaching an Academic Composition course for HCT/CERT at the UAE Naval College <http://academiccomposition.pbworks.com>.  Both contexts have required me to develop or adapt viable courses quickly, effectively gauge learner response and interest, and adjust materials on-the-fly to better meet learner needs. As Siemens suggested back in 2004, flexibility, creativity, and organization beneficial to both instructor and student are achieved using DIYLMS, which looks and feels much different from “‘locked-down, do-it-our-way” LMS platforms.

Components in my conception of DIYLMS include

·         A wiki portal for course information and organization, with links pertinent to course content and management, and other relevant resources, such as screencasts and tutorials
·         Google Docs for student submission of assignments, and teacher feedback on student writing
·         Blogging, to showcase student work
·         Etherpad clones for group collaboration tasks
·         Jing and Screenr to create and annotated screen-capture and screencast tutorials
·         A back-channel tool such as Twitter, Skype group chat, or Edmodo
·         In teacher training, I also use these synchronous learning tools

o   Skype group chat as a synchronous AND asynchronous forum

o   Google Hangout for live webcam and voice-enabled interaction
o   WiZiQ


3.1 DIYLMS portals

I have found that it’s a lot easier to start a course in a blog or wiki than it is to develop one in a Moodle or with Bb.  In the latter LMS systems, you have to tediously add components by means of pull-down menus, and copy/paste is rarely an option. With a wiki you can just start writing out your materials as you would an e-book or a handout, and by adding contributing editors you can collaborate with colleagues and peers on your work.  The first time I create such a course, I generally start with a front page and as I develop the course I move material off the main page and store it in separate pages with links to it from a sidebar.  Obviously, as with any LMS, no matter how you develop it, the next times you teach the course the structure is now in place, the content is accessible, and components are navigable for students..

Navigation is much easier in a wiki or blog than with Moodle or Bb.  Blogs (e.g. Blogger) allow tabs that link to pages in your project, while the sidebar in a wiki forms a table of contents for a course. A Pbworks wiki page itself can also have a table of contents automatically created according to H1, H2, H3 headings etc.in such a way that users see an outline of that page with hyperlinks to each heading. Thus navigation in a wiki can be much more fluid than in Moodle or Bb, where users are sometimes forced to scroll through a wall of text to find what they are looking for.

Wikis and blogs are more intuitive than Moodle or Bb to embed pictures and multimedia into; they are easier to decorate, and to arrange elements on a page. Wikis and blogs these days allow easy embed of a variety of media content (images, YouTube and other videos, slides from Slideshare.net, Jing and Screenr screencasts, etc.)  The affordances of working in wikis include being able to upload media such as PDF documents and sound files to the wiki in such a way that any such media stored in that wiki space will then have a unique URL and can be linked to or embedded from elsewhere online. This is less conveniently accomplished or is even impossible in Moodle or Bb, depending on how “open” the Moodle or Bb course is configured to be.

3.2 Student submissions in DIYLMS

For an LMS to be able to “manage” student learning, it must have a means for students to submit their work and receive feedback on it.  Without such a system, a portal of learning resources would be a CMS, or content management system.  There are many such portals created for teaching purposes; e.g. MIT http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm, P2PU http://p2pu.org/en/, the recent spate of MOOCs, etc. Curt Bonk lists examples of such repositories in his book The World is Open (2009) but he points out that although students can access any MIT course they want “there is no teacher there.” With an LMS there is; there is a teacher present who reviews and provides feedback on student work.  This might be to some extent automated, but feedback on student work is what distinguishes LMS from CMS.

Student work in any medium can be collected via Drop Box, for example.  Drop Box allows upload of large files, and each file submitted can be assigned a URL, so work can be submitted in any kind of media file with its own URL. Alternatively, media such as video can be uploaded to YouTube, slides can be uploaded to Slideshare.net, images to Flickr, etc.

In my writing classes I use two genres of online collaborative sites for working with students in class in real time or asynchronously. One of these genres is the so-called Etherpad clones, and the other is Google Docs, into which Etherpad technology is now being incorporated.

3.3 Etherpad clones

Etherpad was an open source product which allowed users to start an online writing space which can be worked on either synchronously or asynchronously by other users anywhere online.  In using Etherpad clones with students, there are a number of compelling features. Anyone can start a pad, distribute its URL, and anyone with the URL can write on the pad. Everyone has access to the pad’s timeline.  Anyone can slide the timer backwards or forwards and see any keystroke version of the document.  Any such version has a unique URL, so this particular version can be shared with others.  Or in case of corruption or other need, the pad can be reverted to any previous state (it can also be saved by any user at any time and any of these saved versions can be recalled and shared). Etherpad clones can be used effectively with students who are with you in the classroom, each student contributing from his/her own computer to the document projected at the front of the room. They can also be used effectively asynchronously in an online or blended learning environment.

One example of how I use such spaces is to go over homework assigned students. Suppose students are asked to complete a worksheet with ten open-ended questions.  Traditional ways of checking such work in class include going over the answers with the class as a group, or dividing students into small groups or pairs to have them check each other’s work.  Either way, some students will not be engaged for significant periods of time, and the teacher can’t effectively monitor the students. So I put such worksheets up in Etherpad and when class convenes I assign various groups of students to fill in different parts of it.  Students can watch the answers appear on the screen all at once as the various groups write, I can monitor all the groups at once and make corrections or suggestions to the document as it’s being worked on, and all students can see each other’s work and help improve any part of it. During such exercises, the work gets done in a fraction of the time it takes either of the traditional ways, and most if not all the students are visibly, even enthusiastically, engaged in the process

Another way I can use Etherpad is to have students work collectively on various components of a good essay.  For example we can work as a class on effectively revising topic sentences, introductions, conclusions, thesis statements, etc.

Etherpad was so good that the company was bought by Google, and its developers became Google employees.  Since the acquisition of Etherpad, Google Docs have improved in speed with simultaneous multiple users.  Although Etherpad is no longer available at its original website, its open source code has been downloaded and installed at a number of host servers as clones of the original service.  These can be found in a Google search on Etherpad clones, so it is still possible to use the software with students (see Lowenson, 2010 and postings to this Quora forum: http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-currently-available-free-EtherPad-clones).

Besides reliability of the host server (the likelihood of your document being preserved online “forever”) another important consideration is the number of users that can simultaneously work on a document.  Sync.in for example stops accepting contributors when only 8 have accessed the document, making it not so useful for large classes.  TitanPad on the other hand works with possibly as many as 30 simultaneous users < http://titanpad.com/>.

3.4 Google Docs

Google Docs are a second way I accept student submissions, and with Google Docs, in a writing class, I can work closely with the students both in and between classes. To use Google Docs I have to insist that all students get a Google ID.  This poses a problem for people who feel  that cobbling together an online learning environment from freely available Web 2.0 tools suffers from the need to remember and manage multiple passwords whereas with Moodle or Bb there is only one, but with Google providing so many tools for education it is getting to where a Google ID is becoming a passport to a lot of the best free educational tools available at any one-stop online, so this objection is suppressed as users become aware of this. A more serious frustration occurs if all students in one class attack the Google site at once, and Google falsely detects a spam attack and temporarily blocks further account creation from the offending IP address.

But once students get their Google IDs and can submit drafts and revisions in Google Docs, then many affordances appear as teaching opportunities arise. For example, teacher feedback can be given in-class interactively in real-time via an in-class projector, with individual students following along on their laptops. Asynchronously, effective feedback can be given in such a way that it can be immediately seen whenever and wherever students sit down to revise their work.

From a teacher’s perspective, it is necessary to understand how Google’s “collections” work but once the filing system is understood then it is a trivial matter to file students’ work where you need it in order to manage it.  I file student work by class and within a class, by assignment. If we’re working on a particular assignment, any work a student has touched will be highlighted in bold in my list of submissions for that class.  By the same token, once I have provided feedback on any student’s work, its filename becomes bold in their view. With this system I can work more closely with students than if I collected stacks of paper from them, or even if I relied on email attachments.  In one instance recently I was reviewing a student’s work in my office and I noticed that the student, whom I knew to be in a lecture hall elsewhere on campus, was following my cursor (we could see each other’s) and responding to my feedback in real time. This kind of feedback corroborates my impression that the system is working.

3.5 Showcasing student work in DIYLMS

Although the same could be achieved with a link from Bb or Moodle, it seems more logical in a do-it-yourself LMS that student work should be showcased in its own dedicated website.  One way to do this is to create a blog in Blogger and invite your students to join it and contribute to it.  Alternatively students can keep their own blogs, and these can be linked from the wiki portal, and updates to them tracked through Google Reader so the teacher can see in that one place when any blog has been updated (no need to open all the students’ blogs to see which have in fact been updated).

The way I prefer at the moment is to create a blog dedicated to classwork in Posterous.  I have my students subscribe to the blog and then I promote them to contributing writers and encourage them to blog there. There are several advantages to using Posterous as a class blog site.  It’s possible to make it accessible only to people who provide a code, in case you want to make it private only to your students (and the code is stored in a cookie so it needs to be entered only once on a given browser on a given computer). The friendliest feature is that you can create posts by email, as well as online through your browser. This is often preferred by students, as email is already a part of their workflow.  If you attach a picture or media file in the email where you submit your post, it becomes a part of the blog.  Posterous specializes in providing plugins for most media, so if the attachment is a picture, it displays in the post, and if it’s other media, it appears in an appropriate player.

3.6 Forum conversations in DYLMS

Forums or some means of participants having conversations on class topics is a common feature of LMS. One way to emulate a forum in DIYLMS is to use yet another affordance of Posterous. When a post is made, all subscribers receive an email. If they reply to the email, their replies appear as comments in the blog.  All subscribers in turn receive an email with this comment.  If they reply, more comments again appear in the blog.  Because of the email notification, and option to respond right there in email, the result feels more conversational than with comments to other blogs and wikis, yet the appearance of these responses in the Posterous blog is just as attractively presented.  

A threaded discussion forum is probably the best way to prompt and prolong an in-depth discussion, but unlike comments to blogs, posts to such forums tend to get buried and forgotten. Still forum and listserv discussions have their viable moments, and there are some very good forum options in the available Web 2.0 services.  Yahoo Groups has run reliably for the past decade, and allows you to set up a portal with links to messages, a files storage space where members can upload files, polls, and a calendar.  If messages are made public then they can be read as an RSS feed, which means they can be viewed in a feed reader like Google Reader, or aggregated in any number of web portals (e.g. Blogger, Pageflakes, Netvibes).  More recently Google has fielded its own groups site which integrates with its many other offerings for educators. Besides handling forum list traffic, Google groups also combines its service with compelling features for a group Web portal.

3.7 Backchannels

Another highly effective forum alternative is Skype group chat.  This is a feature of Skype where anyone can invite his or her contacts to form a group which can then engage in chat over time. The group members can see the ongoing chat in their contacts list (or they can key in the name of the group and fetch it) but they don’t all need to be on Skype at the same time, though as it’s Skype, often some members are, either by plan or coincidence.  The chat works by someone asking a question or offering an insight.  As other group members happen online they might answer or comment, and a thread is built up. I know of several groups who have kept such discussions going for years.  An annual April 22 Earth Day webcast is organized year after year in a perpetual Skype group chat where the back-channeling takes place as the event approaches < http://earthbridges.net/>.  Also, participants in the Worldbridges / EdTech Talk Webcast Academy used to interact with each other primarily in Skype chat as well as in their actual webcasts, collaborating on such projects as their crowdsourced eBook of Webcasting <http://webcastacademy.net/>.

Because Skype runs in the background apart from sites participants might be purposely going to, it creates a back-channel where members of a group can easily communicate with one another with likelihood of quick response at any time. Another such channel option is Twitter.  Twitter allows you to both follow people and put them in lists, in which case to see all the tweets of everyone in a particular list, you simply visit the list URL.  Assuming you create a Twitter list for your class of students, this is a good way to monitor a back-channel of student users without having to follow them.

The big advantage of both Skype and Twitter is that so many people use them in everyday life. As with Facebook, you are most likely to see messages from contacts in online spaces you follow in the course of computing every day, as a normal part of your work and social flow.  I find this to be the main disadvantage of Edmodo and Yammer, which sport a Facebook/Twitter-like interface in an environment supposedly conducive to relationships between teachers and students. However, since I don’t use Edmodo in my normal workflow, I might miss some of these messages until I think to check it.  This is changing with the advent of Edmodo communities, which might give educators a reason to check Edmodo more often, http://www.edmodo.com/communities/?language=en.

3.8 Online spaces for live interaction and subsequent replay

Skype also makes a space where live chat can occur augmented with both voice and video.  These chats can be recorded using third party software, either software specifically designed to record Skype calls, or screencast software that can capture video (in case web cams are used) and sound from both sides of the Skype conversation, which might require use of a USB mic so that sound can be harvested remotely from the sound card and locally via the USB.  There are also tools which cost money, for example Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate) and Adobe Connect, which can capture voice, web cam, and facilitate use of collaborative web browsing, screensharing, polls, emoticons, and interactive graphics and text via a shared whiteboard, among other features, and produce recordings of the session stored on cloud servers.  

These tools are fairly robust but there are a few free alternatives as well.  WiZiQ allows people to meet in spaces with many of these same features, and get a recording of the session.  Also Google Plus (Google +) allows users to enter a shared space where voice and web cams are activated, but recording must be done by someone who captures the interaction using third party software (see Elliot, 2011, for some examples of such software).

4.       Conclusion

This article has sought to establish that whereas LMS or learning management system  packages can assist teachers in laying out and managing and tracking courses of learning for their students where students can know at one Web address what that course of learning is and what their next step should be, they expose the learning environment to “insidious pedagogy” and can constrain pathways for creativity in course design.  DIYLMS, or creating LMS mashups from freely available Web 2.0 tools, can achieve similar learning objective plus model for learners ways that they might approach problem solving in their own learning and project management situations.

The DIY approach offers optimal flexibility for both learners and facilitators and since its components are adapted according to need, applies critical thinking skills appropriate to knowledge workers in a world where new problems must be addressed with novel solutions at an ever-accelerating pace.  Indeed, since new creativity tools appear on the Web 2.0 more often than changes are made to either proprietary or open source LMS packages, mashups of such tools might provide even more innovative solutions to hosting learning portals and managing submission and feedback on students’ work, as well as providing forum and live meeting solutions that keep pace with developments in educational technology in a Web 2.0 connected world.

References


Bonk, C. (2009). The World Is Open: How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Website: http://worldisopen.com/

 Dowling, S. (2011). Web-based learning: Moving from learning islands to learning environments. TESL-EJ 15, 2: 1- 27: Retrieved on March 6, 2012 from http://www.tesl-ej.org/pdf/ej58/int.pdf

 Elliot, A. (2011). 5 Free Tools for Recording Google+ Hangouts. Mashable. Retrieved on March 13, 2012 from http://mashable.com/2011/08/05/google-plus-record-hangouts/

 Goldsmith, J. (2010). NICENET: Free course hosting, LMS Web site. DE Tools of the Trade. Retrieved on March 6, 2012 from http://www.detools.ca/?p=3309

 Lane, L. (2009). Insidious pedagogy: How course management systems impact teaching. First Monday 14, Number 10. Retrieved on March 6, 2012 from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2530/2303

 Lessig, L. (2008). Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Retrieved on March 6, 2012 from http://www.scribd.com/doc/47089238/Remix

 Lowensohn, J. (2010). EtherPad dies this week: Here are six great clones. CNET News. Retrieved on March 6, 2012 from http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-20004686-248.html

 Siemens, G. (2004). Learning Management Systems: The wrong place to start learning. eLearnspace. Retrieved on March 6, 2012 from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/lms.htm

 Stevens, V. (2012). Learner-centered do-it-yourself LMS. Slideshare.net. Retrieved on March 13, 2012 from http://www.slideshare.net/vances/learning2gether

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Wednesday, August 3, 2011

The Narrows and the Shallows

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

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