Continually Improving Courses

Some of the continuing conversation from Will’s It’s Not Just the Read/Write Web post has been about, well, continuing conversations. It’s the idea that learning shouldn’t be about memorizing for a test or completing a project, but lifelong learning. David Warlick wonders if we can focus more on learning and less on just what has been learned. Carolyn Foote writes about how these tools can help us focus on the process rather than just the product.

I admit that my initial reaction to David’s post was pretty much, “That’s nice, but how would we do that in the real world?” David said that in real life, “It’s all ongoing. It’s all conversation,” arguing that it isn’t about creating finished products, whether they are papers or podcasts. I’m not convinced on that though. When I develop a course with a SME, there is a product at the end. All the web pages and Blackboard setup and Flash files are products. I have deadlines, and my products have to be done at a certain point. That my real life. David’s ideas didn’t seem to mesh with the reality of my job.

Fortunately, what Carolyn wrote forced me to look at it from a different perspective.

How can we refocus students on the process? How can we extend the conversation beyond the specific project? And how can we connect cross curricular content so it’s more meaningful, as it is in the “real” world?

I think one of the powerful things about blogs and also about social networks, is that you can create an ongoing community conversation as a class or as a school, which can serve to unite those discrete assignments or efforts into a more unified and continuous learning experience.

When I read David’s post, I saw it as only conversation, without any products or milestones along the way. But I think I was wrong. I don’t think he meant we shouldn’t have these projects and products, just that we should view them as part of a larger conversation and process. Instead of a project being just an independent thing that isn’t connected to any other learning, it’s connected to a process and a network and dialog. I was too focused looking at the trees to see the forest.

Looking at it from that perspective, I can see how it relates to what I do. I know that no course I develop will ever be perfect. I can always do more to improve them: make them more engaging, more relevant, more visually appealing, more usable. We have that idea built into our review process. Yes, we have to have courses in a reasonably “finished” state so students can take them. So I do have deadlines and I do complete projects, and I celebrate the milestones of finishing and launching courses. But they aren’t really done when they launch or even after a field test; we’ll keep working on them and continuously improving them. Our conversations will mostly be internal, between the instructors and our course development team, but it is the same idea. Continuous improvement is my real life experience.

Now that I see how this relates to what I’m doing in my development, it makes me wonder how to create this kind of environment for our students as well. I’m not sure I’m really creating that kind of environment, at least not consistently. That’s a post for another day though.

Technorati Tags: continuous+improvement, learning, conversation, david+warlick, carolyn+foote, will+richardson, instructionaldesign

Sensemaking through Networks

Will Richardson writes that much of the chatter about changes in education due to technology is missing the point. Getting students and teachers and everyone to publish and write–yes, that’s a good start. Improving communication between schools and the community–yep, that’s good too. But Will argues that those are really just ways of doing the same thing we’ve been doing for a while, just with a nicer set of tools.

But here is the bigger question, I think. Through teaching them to use these tools to publish, are we also teaching them how to use these tools to continue the learning once that project is over? Can they continue to explore and reflect on the ideas that those artifacts represent regardless of who is teaching the next class? Can they connect with that audience not simply in the ways that books connect to readers (read but no write) but in the ways that allow them to engage and explore more deeply with an ongoing, growing community of learners? Isn’t that the real literacy here?

Part of what I think Will’s talking about here is connectivism: the idea that learning is about creating connections, both between people and between ideas. When I first heard of connectivism, I didn’t really get it. Actually, I’m not sure that I get it now. However, I think I might have figured out one piece of it.

My initial reaction to connectivism was that it was just about using people in your network basically as sources of information. Instead of looking something up in a search engine or encyclopedia, you ask a person. Will quotes Jay Cross in calling this the “outboard brain.” That didn’t seem very revolutionary to me though; it just seemed like more of the same stuff, just with different tools.

But I don’t think that’s what Will’s really talking about. The network isn’t just a source of information; our connections actually help us make sense of that information. We see patterns in what people talk about and how they discuss it, and that helps us in our sensemaking. We weigh information from trusted sources more heavily than those we don’t trust, and that becomes part of our understanding too. Our networks are part of our filters keeping some information out, but networks also help us connect ideas and dig deeper. We get feedback from others, and hopefully we learn to improve because of that.

What do we want students to be able to do? If I understand Will correctly, he’s hoping we can teach students to use the network as a way to make sense of the vast amounts of information now available to us. What the technology lets us do is connect with people so we can understand more and keep learning. We don’t have to stop learning when a course is finished; we can keep interacting with our network and learning together. Really, that shouldn’t just be a goal for students; lifelong learning should be a goal for everyone.

Technorati Tags: lifelonglearning, connectivism, will richardson, learning, community, patterns, web2.0

Visualizing Del.icio.us Networks

Courtesy of NSWLearnscope, here’s a way to visualize how del.icio.us networks are interconnected. The tool is called del.icio.us network explorer. Enter your del.icio.us username (or someone else’s) as a starting point, and you see your network. Click on anyone in your network to see their network. Mutual connections are in red, one way connections are in blue.

In this screenshot, Vicki Davis (brightideasguru) is at the top, Wes Fryer (wfryer) is in the lower left, and Will Richardson (willrich) is in the lower right. My network (christyinsdesign) is in the center with the colored lines. Looking at this image, I can see that Wes and Will have several people in common, but Vicki only has one network connection shared with Wes and none in common with Will. I was a little surprised by that; I would have expected a bit more overlap there.

I wish this had some way to directly link to the del.icio.us accounts of people in the network. When I explore and see that several people in my network have a connection to someone that I don’t, I’d like to see what links that person has. However, since the usernames are there, it’s not that hard to find people. It’s just an extra step.

Overall, I thought it was fun to explore and to see the connections. George Siemens has written numerous times about visualization as a way to deal with the information overload and to help understand patterns. I definitely think I was able to see patterns more quickly using this tool than just working through the del.icio.us interface, even though I could get the same information in text form there.

Technorati Tags: delicious, visualization, network, Vicki Davis, Wes Fryer, Will Richardson, George Siemens

Lifelong Computer Skills

Jakob Nielson, usability guru, has posted a new Alertbox called Life-Long Computer Skills. This article summarizes what he considers to be the essential computer skills which will still be relevant when today’s elementary students join the workforce.

Here’s his list of lifelong skills:

• Search Strategies
• Information Credibility
• Information Overload
• Writing for Online Readers
• Computerized Presentation Skills
• Workspace Ergonomics
• Debugging
• User Testing and other Basic Usability Guidelines

Most of these I agree with. Search skills are not going to go away, even though the tools may get easier. Understanding how to evaluate information and filter what isn’t relevant is also definitely important. By credible, I think he probably means closer to published sources rather than blogs or Wikipedia, and I disagree with that philosophy. However, his specific examples deal with helping kids recognize ads and paid search results, and those are valuble skills. Information overload may not actually be quite a big a problem for younger students as it is for adults, as more children are accustomed to the fast paced multichannel flow of information. Knowing how to manage the overload and filter appropriately go hand in hand. Many people at the Online Connectivism Conference discussed how to help students learn how to build effective networks and how to filter and verify information.

“Writing for online readers” is something that I think we definitely need to help teachers learn as well as students. I feel fortunate that my job gives me the opportunity to do just that. My current major project is a course to teach K-12 teachers how to use blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other technologies. This is a very relevant quote:

Thus, we should teach students how to write hypertext and not how just to write printed documents.

With “Computerized Presentation Skills,” I don’t think he goes far enough. I think multimedia literacy should be part of the education, including audio, video, and animation. I also find it odd that he uses Microsoft Excel training as an example of what not to do in his introduction, but PowerPoint training as a necessary skill. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t teach these software applications; I think it’s important that we teach word processing and spreadsheets and slideshow programs. Every one of these programs that you learn makes it easier to learn the next one. I don’t think it’s a waste for students to learn Microsoft Excel formatting in Office 2003 even though Office 2007 will be very different. In seventh grade, I took a course that covered AppleWorks with the word processor, spreadsheet, and flat database. Those skills have been tremendously useful to me because they helped me understand the differences in the applications and their uses. That was fundamental for me, and I think there is still validity in teaching students these kinds of programs (although OpenOffice or any of the free web apps would be fine too). I don’t think that’s all we should teach, but it can be part of the skills.

Ergonomics and debugging are fine; I think usability is on his list just because it’s his pet subject and not because it really belongs with the rest of the subjects.

The big thing I don’t see here is how to connect, interact, or work with people online. I would add “Connect, Converse, and Collaborate” to his list. I suppose it’s not that surprising from a man who doesn’t have a blog or an RSS feed on his site, but I think the interactions will be increasingly important.

What would you add to the list of lifelong computer skills that we need to teach students–and teachers?

Image citation
2 & 1/2 and already a computer junky! from machado17’s photostream.

Content is NOT King

Last week, someone emailed me this article, Writing for E-Learning. to help support a point she was making about adding a search function to online classes. I think her idea of a search function is great, but I mentioned that I disagree with several points in the article, starting with the assertion that “content is king.”

From the article:

Content is King
The quality of e-learning material depends on the quality of the writing from the subject specialist. When converting written materials to web pages it is the original content sets the standard. So what was bad content in print will probably produce poor material online. Conversely, it is usually the case that well written printed material will convert to good e-learning material.

I think it’s the whole idea of whether we are in the business of providing content or providing an educational experience. If teaching was just a matter of presenting content, then those two would be the same, but reading or listening aren’t the same as learning. If our main goal is to provide content to students, then we should be in the publishing business—it’s a much more effective and efficient way to get lots of text content to students. If our goal is to provide an educational experience, then it may start with content, but it can’t end there. With the constructivist theory, it’s about providing active learning experiences; with connectivism it’s about building a learning network and collaborating with others. I’m not so concerned with which theory we label our work, but I do think that learning isn’t just about pouring information into students’ brains.

The “content is king” view is that pouring quality content into their brains is all that’s needed. The reason this article ends by talking about having printable content is because it is written from a publishing standpoint rather than a learner standpoint. His points on quality writing and structure are good, but I disagree with the fundamental purpose of online learning (and probably any learning) that this author presents. The author assumes that the instructor knows everything and must share this expertise to the students; the author doesn’t show that he believes the students have anything of value to share with each other and the instructor. Especially with adult learners, I think that’s the wrong approach; I think our students’ experiences and ideas are very valuable.

I’m not convinced by the connectivist idea that the “pipe is more important than the content.” I don’t want to have to choose either the pipe or the content. Can’t I have both? Does this have to be an either/or, or can it be a both/and? Garbage content in a great network isn’t that beneficial, nor is great content with a lousy presentation and learner experience. Am I just being naive here, or can we find a middle ground that values both the content and the presentation?

Technorati Tags: e-learning, connectivism, constructivism, instructionaldesign

Text Messaging to Teach ESL

Courtesy of Matthew Nehrling, I just found this article describing the use of text messages to teach English as a Second Language (ESL). This pilot program is from Athabasca University, which I heard of for the first time last Friday during Terry Anderson’s presentation at the Online Connectivism Conference.

While mobile learning through cell phones will be limited for certain things, I agree with Matthew that language training could be very effective in this medium. I think mobile learning will be like any other technology–great for certain things, not as much for others. It probably wouldn’t be my choice for having students get feedback on their body language, for example, at least not with the current technology.

Mobile learning does have possibilities for all sorts of lifelong learning applications though. It takes learning out of the classroom and makes it accessible in their everyday lives. It’s learner controlled, so they can learn what they want when they want it.

“You’re controlling it, which is so nice,” said Tracey Woodburn of Athabasca University. “A lot of people have been telling me, ‘Oh, I can do this when I am watching my kid’s soccer practice or when I am on the bus coming to school.’”

I think this might be an example of connectivism in practice–decentralized, out of the classroom, informal, when the students want it. I wish the article had more explanation of the design and whether or how students connect with each other as well. It sounds like it might be self-study, which may be fine for what it is. I could see self-study text message lessons like this used in combination with face to face synchronous practice as well.

Technorati Tags: m-learning, connectivism, athabasca, matthew+nehrling, terry+anderson

Connectivism’s Implications for Instructional Design

Yesterday I watched George Siemens presentation on Situating Connectivism in preparation for the Online Connectivism Conference. The presentation was helpful in providing context, but I admit that I’m still not sure I completely understand connectivism. Right now, I feel like I know it sort of superficially, but not well enough to do anything with it.

With Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, it means I should try to introduce concepts and allow practice through multiple channels. Same with VAK (Visual Auditory Kinesthetic) or any of the variations. The implications for me as an instructional designer are that I can’t design classes that are just online textbooks with multiple choice quizzes at the end.

With constructivism, it’s all about active learning instead of passive learning. As an instructional designer, I need to expect students to do more than just read something–I need to have them do something.

OK, those are greatly oversimplified summaries. Hopefully you get the point though.

This is the question: How do I apply connectivism in my instructional design? Is it just about allowing people to network and create connections through discussion boards or blogs or wikis, or is there something more? I feel like I missing something, but it’s just out of my mental reach right now.

I guess that is the big question for me that will be in the back of my head as I attend the conference. Who knows? By the end of next week I may have some great answers–or I may realize that I was asking entirely the wrong question. Do you have any ideas?

Technorati Tags: occ2007, connectivism, constructivism, instructionaldesign, e-learning