Drive by learning

Evidence that learning cannot be contained within the boundaries of a course, I’ve taken a couple double takes reading both Audrey Watters’ and Mike Caulfield’s excellent critiques about Sugra Mitra and his Hole in the Wall project in India.

Caulfield also tweeted a link to this excellent essay by Morozov touching on the topic of his book about solutionism,: which is “an intellectual pathology that recognizes problems as problems based on just one criterion: whether they are solvable with a nice and clean technological solution at our disposal”

This harkened me back to last year during #Change11 week 24 session hosted by Geetha Narayanan. I was totally blown away by her live session (of which I can’t seem to find the archive). I took many notes. Even on paper!

I still don’t feel my final version did her work justice, but it still works for me as an excellent memory anchor of her wonderful thinking about deep, meaningful learning which she describes as slow learning.


cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe

This short clip George Siemens recorded after Geetha’s keynote at the Global Summit 2006, summarizes her perspective very succinctly.

Paraphrased:

Slow learning can best be understood in counter position to fast knowledge.

Slow food movement, we enjoy the flavours of the food. We appreciate cultures, traditions, food making and world making that comes with it.

You must understand that food is a complex phenomenon. You can’t just eat it while doing something else

This is what is happening to learning.

Learning is happening very much on the run. Many of the discussions have been to destabilize the school structure. We are asked to do more and more and more in less and less time, such that students don’t understand flavour of their learning.

Slow learning is about the first person consciousness. It’s the primacy of experience, to make learning directly embedded in your first person consciousness.

We’re finding the major patterns and trends in teaching and learning are memetic; composed of fashions and fads, rather than search for true value inherent in learning.

There is a place for technology. In fact technology will be at the core of new learning and will contribute to a lot of change. But not as long be wary of policies and corporations eager for a marketed product.

You can’t put learning in an information kiosk.

The current mantra of the government of India, “have kiosk, will learn.”

ATM as a learning kiosk

Learning Kiosk

Data Mine

Another great #etmooc session this eve. Audrey Watters dropped some awesome thought bombs. She posed some challenging questions, as we move beyond the analog manilla envelope (like her mom collected of her school artefacts) into the digital realm and quintillions of bytes are collected daily.

How do students, teachers, administrators, schools, and governments decide who owns what, for what purpose.

Starting with the terms of service, which we admittedly all quickly click through without thoroughly inspecting who is giving and who is taking value. (TLDR= too long, didn’t read ~ TOSDR = terms of service, didn’t read!)

Issues of control, protection, privacy (anonymity, pseudonymity) are all factors. Now that so much of our learning is digital, it’s not only the data from our transcripts of our final grades that schools hold. Such good questions about the data that exists from our assignments, time on the LMS, time watching videos, number of attempts at quizzes, frequency of comments on blogs or discussion boards, chats, location and many more that boggled my mind thinking about.


cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe

Keeping something for future generations is the definition of posterity, which is deeply ironic given the announcement this week that the online blogging platform Posterous will be shut down next month. Again this highlights the importance of hosting one own’s data or at the very least maintaining your data in a format that is portable, mobile, in an open standard. This is intrinsically linked to the importance of keeping the web open so that our data can be machine and human readable on multiple platforms. We should be able to inspect and reflect on our own data, to be subjects not objects of our own research for our own purposes. In the matter of utility, we should be able to decide when to share our data and for what purpose.

Props were given to UMW’s Domain of One’s Own project, of which of course, I’m a big fan. Listening to Audrey discuss the issues, I’m ever more certain that even if you don’t want your data to be permanent, that agency is critical.

Audrey’s ideal solution is akin to a concept of the Personal Data Locker, where we have an open, standard login identity like OAuth. While Facebook and Google would love to hold the keys to our login identities, this control should belong to us so we are the masters of the many remnants of ourselves online. Managing your own data is a key literacy. Controlling your data is controlling your memories.

Shouldn’t we have the right to forget, delete, keep, own and share as we navigate the boundaries between private, public, and personal?

For more info, read Audrey’s post, watch the ETMOOC archive, and check out the Google Doc chock full of resources.

More Learning from MOOCs that Matter #ds106 #etmooc

I’m excited to be a guest in #ds106 this evening for Week 6: It’s All Designed. Of course, DS106 is not like any other MOOC and is not big on the M part of the MASSIVE, but its specialness is important to reiterate in this time of MOOC madness.

I’m hoping some of the students take up @cogdog‘s suggestion to do one of the assignments I submitted, Learning by Design.

I’ve done many visual notes of talks over the past couple years, but I’m always happy to do a new one. Luckily, this week I was able to catch the inimitable Howard Rheingold‘s interactive and informative talk to Alec Couros‘ successful experiment in community-course-MOOC, ETMOOC.

After the session I reflected a lot on the intersection of my note taking, attention, participation, and critical consumption. This spurred pages of reflections which then stalled me from hitting the publish button. (THIS ALWAYS HAPPENS!)

I get so caught up in all the connections of ideas that run through my mind that I have a hard time creating a coherent post. Of particular note, this is extremely relevant to the ETMOOC topic this week about digital literacies. If I am not a part of the participatory culture and all I do is send out a doodle of some key words with cute stick figures, how am I contributing?


cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe

Some presenters really like the drawings, others not so much. I showed my daughter the drawing from Howard’s talk and she said, “that’s just a confusing jumble of words”. Hmmm, much like my brain, jumping from one idea to the next. Great ideas come this way, but also great procrastination.

A post of coherent thoughts often gets mired down by my attention, or inattention as the case may be. I loved Howard’s suggestions about dealing with all the things that cross your desk in a day and prioritizing so that your ATTENTION matches your INTENTION. Today, I made a list, as he suggested, of all the things I want to accomplish. This post is one of them. Harnessing the power of my attention is definitely a goal for me today.

Keeping my attention is not a new problem. In the days long before cell phones and laptops, I often had difficulty paying attention in university lectures. I simply would fall asleep. My notes started very tidy and organized but after about 20 minutes they would devolve into almost electrocardiogram style notes just barely registering my pulse.

In biology class, I noticed that if I started doodling I was able to stay awake and I tended to remember what the prof was saying. Sadly, I didn’t do this often because I was embarrassed about my doodling. Doodling was decidedly NOT academic.

I’ve since learned that taking notes visually has helped me maintain my focus and learn more.

If I could travel back in time, I’d give my teenage self the permission to draw as much as she wanted during lecture. In the absence of time travel, the best thing I can do to contribute to a better learning environment is to encourage doodling in more university classes.

Now that I work in educational development and am a part of a great network of learners and teachers, I have had the pleasure to listen to some of the greatest teachers and they incorporate numerous ways for learners to keep their attention on learning. In ETMOOC, I’ve attended a couple sessions and the use of the whiteboard and chat as a way for learners to share their perspectives is really great. Unfortunately, JAVA is still forbidden at my university so I only connected via the iDevice Application. This NO Java situation is fairly good, you can listen, watch the slides read & type in the chat, but unfortunately no whiteboard ability. As such, I decided to continue on with my drawing of notes vs interacting directly.

I learned from Howard’s talk that 5% of the population can multi-task. That is definitely not me. Taking notes is not multi-tasking for me. It is an integral part of my listening. It allows me to make immediate connections to the things I hear and prevents my mind from drifting onto other topics. This comes at a cost, I cannot do much else than draw and listen. No chatting, no tweeting.

In addition to what was happening in the chat, whiteboard and probably twitter, Howard had the folks in the group also volunteer to retrieve links and provide context to the links inside an etherpad.

We’ve been using etherpads and wikis here at Brock and it’s always great to see such rich uses of collaborative editing documents.

In situations where there is really great pedagogy at play, taking visual notes is extremely difficult and perhaps unnecessary. Par of me wishes I had participated fully in Howard’s talk and then did visual notes afterwards on my reflections on the enduring learning.

This type of metacognition or mindfulness about my strengths and weaknesses, learning preference and learning goals are all part of what Howard called infotention. Awareness of these factors should allow me to make better, faster decisions next time; knowing when to listen and when to participate and when to do both.

This is what literacy means to me. It’s personal but it’s evolving, so sometimes it should be public and shared.


cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe

Permanence Lost

Reading Chris Lott’s poetic comment about loss in response to Jim’s assertion that Nothing is Lost

…there’s not only nothing wrong with writing one’s poem and sending it down the river on fire, it might be a significantly better way to transcend the technical issues and consider what it means to *be*

the idea struck me so much, I decided to do this very thing in a literal sense.

We wrote.

cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe

Set alight.

cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe

And sent the burning boats afloat.

animated gif of borges boat

*Borges Boat

It was quite a lovely little experience in impermanence, shifting the metaphor into a literal act.

As the boat burned and floated, I  ruminated on the analogy, wondering if this is what it is like to release the essence of my creative contributions into the web, into the unknown, allowing it to be freed, destroyed, reshaped or potentially disappear.

I decided that with both the boat and my online presence, it’s not the permanence of the act that is powerful but the agency. Of course, nothing ever stays the same. Everything is shifting and changing. I accept this fully. It’s the agency of the act that I have a difficult time relinquishing.

I made the boat with my paper. It was my decision to burn the boat. Even if natural disaster had caused my boat to capsize and sink, it was my choice to let it float away. The agency of loss is my own.

Parts of me are fragmented in ways that I’ll never know about. @DrGarcia likens this to a social media horcrux, where portions of your soul are splintered across multiple objects (or in this case, websites).

We can still maintain stoicism about impermanence. Disappearing online artifacts can stand tribute to this. But this is happening less and less. It’s not the disappearing that is the problem but the fragmenting. When my artifacts get locked up and these pieces of my soul get shifted behind walls, I am robbed of my agency.

It is the loss of agency that is worthy of concern.

And more importantly, this is the loss of agency that we can actively prevent by keeping our spaces and helping others set up their own spaces. This is a role I see as ever more important for librarians and educators in higher education.

To dramatically mix my metaphors, I’ll pull in D’Arcy’s thoughts. We may be the funky downtown losing business to the giant box stores. I’m okay with that. I like to think every time I blog, release a picture into the creative commons, pingback, comment on my friends’ blogs, help others create open spaces I consider that my contribution to the Funky Downtown Economic Development Office.


*Again another opportunity just #ds106 #GIFest it up.

Nothing Can Stop It!


cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe

Starring Sebastian Thrun and all those xMOOCS: Udacity, Coursera, EDx (because they are the ones that get all the attention) but produced, directed and thought about by George Siemens, Alec Couros, Dave Cormier, Stephen Downes.

Poster based on The Blob illustrated movie poster, aptly named Design Assignment 666 (number of the BEAST!!!)

I read some comments in the Openness in Education newsletter today about whether MOOCs should be feared by institutions because they threaten their financial viability.

Will MOOCs disrupt the regular university experience?

Hopefully!

At first I was offended, like BrainySmurf about the talk of monetization since that completely bastardizes the O part of Open. Monetizing MOOCs is NOT OPEN.

 

If MOOCs start making money they should call themselves University of Phoenix or any other university at this point for that matter.

The more I think about it, I universities do have something to fear. But the monster is not the MOOC, however, the MOOC just one of the solutions to a problem that already exists.

The best thing to come out of the MOOC phenomenon is that people are talking about teaching, instructional strategies, and assessment. Lots of people.
Some of my favourite.
#jiscwebinar <a href=What Is A MOOC? @dkernohan @mweller @jonathan_worth @loumcgill @daveowhite [visual Notes]“>