Brief Intro to Social Networks

These are my notes from the Learn Trends: Networked and Social Learning online mini-conference. This isn’t my usual comprehensive live blogging, just snippets of things that caught my interest. I wanted to actually participate in the chat and watch Twitter too, and I couldn’t juggle all of it at the same time. This is post 1 of 3.

Intro to Social Networks

George Siemens & Tony Karrer

Social & Networked Learning combines psychology and technology

Developing the whole person wasn’t valued–behaviorism didn’t care what people think, just what they do. If you’re running an assembly line, it only matters what employees produce, not what they are thinking.

Cognitivism was the shift to recognizing that what people think matters.

Tony: coming less from the theoretical underpinning, seeing more of this in the changes in how he gets information. What used to be search/research is more conversation now.

A lot of the networking and connecting has been going on with different structures for a long time, but it’s changing.

“We can be more productive with an individual, expert-based model.” –George

More on Tony’s ideas on networked learning.

George’s definition: connecting, often using technology–using the value of other people to be more productive and better at what we do

Moderator (Will Thalheimer): My thoughts at the moment: Learning at a cognitive level is individual. It affects the cognitive neural substrate of the individual. It can be augmented, influenced, controlled by social interactions. STILL, it is an individual thing. Sometimes being social can help learning. Sometimes it can hurt.

CCK08: Iterative, Appreciative Change

Recursive flower

These are my liveblogged notes from this morning’s live session for CCK08. Although I usually aim for a fairly complete transcript of live sessions, I spent more time paying attention to and participating in the backchannel chat today. Therefore, some of the questions and discussion near the end aren’t included in my notes. My comments are in italics. There are a few comments copied directly from the chat. The recording will be available at some point under Week 9.

Nancy White of Full Circle Associates was the guest speaker, with Stephen Downes moderating.

Key Points

Much of this discussion was about how to get change to happen, with (I think) a very practical and realistic acknowledgment of the barriers to change. The idea of iterative change came up several times. Where traditional project and change management follows a linear process, what may be more effective for emerging technology is to do lots of little projects, see how they go, and adjust as needed.

Nancy mentioned another idea that I thought was great: an appreciative approach to change. Basically, you look at what strengths you have and start there, building on what already exists. Extending this idea, I think when we build on those strengths and stretch people to grow more, we can iteratively build on the new strengths.

If you’re looking for the nuts and bolts of the ideas, skip down to the “Change Ideas” list near the bottom of this post. This was the collected brainstorming of the group on how to make change happen.

Notes

Love the intro here—a circle of clip art chairs, asking people to put their names under a chair. Not a perfect solution for huge groups, but nice for imagining community with smaller groups.

Tech + Social
“Technology has fundamentally changed how we can be together”

Learning Communities

Understand the relationships between the me, the we, and the many. The boundaries aren’t always clear.
Me: The individual. Personal identity.
We: Communities. Group identity, bounded membership, shared interest.
Many: Networks. Boundaryless, fuzzy. “intersecting interests”

Networks are about value of weak ties; Obama’s win reflects that value

Not so interested in learning theories; more interested in emerging roles and practices
Enabling people to be stewards of online communities

Stephen: Teachers just trying to change current practice. “How can I apply this in my current practice”
Nancy: You can’t usefully apply the technology unless you understand the teaching. Understand the teaching, then look at why it’s important. BUT sometimes looking at the technology first can spark an idea.

Is it just change, or is it the scale of change?

Stephen: Can we do the change just partway?
Nancy: Value of networks is that we don’t all have to do everything. One teacher doesn’t have to do everything by him/herself. We need safe places for people to explore, and sometimes privacy to try things out.
bradley.shoebottom: “Change is acceptable for only the amount people are willing to allow change. Therefore change needs to be iterative”
Nancy: Different roles for different people within the network

Use an “appreciative approach”—build on the strengths that already exist rather than trying to jump the chasm

Stephen: So many technologies are blocked
Nancy: sometimes people need to be taken outside the firewall to see what’s possible, but sometimes we need to look at workarounds and not our first choice tools. Demonstrating with limited tools can help changes occur.

Jo Ann Hammond-Meiers: @Lisa and others– yes — then it is important to stimulate the right questions from the teacher/learners. What do they want to happen?

How do you get change to happen?
Demonstration, validation
Money can be a pressure point.
Concrete purposes rather than wide solutions can get to a lot of people. What’s the tangible benefit?
Do lots of little experiments on multiple fronts to figure out what works

How do you find the time to make the connections?
Nancy: we connect to people all the time. It’s as natural as breathing. Create the conditions for change to move the direction we want, rather than pushing hard for our own position. Make building community and ties into your meetings and time together with groups, without labeling it as “community building.”

Traditional project management is very linear, but we need something more iterative. Iterative change is a recurring theme here

Change that happens at the edges instead of in the middle

Change Ideas:

• Skunkworks—under the radar
• Small, iterative projects
• Distributed learning
• Start with your personal practices because you have control there, then apply that to your work
• Get outside validation
• Find related projects outside and work together
• Nike Strategy: Just do it
• Put in the infrastructure people need to change your practice. Instead of trying to directly change what people do, make it easier for them to do it—sort of letting them choose the tools
• Give what they WANT in a nonthreatening way
• Listen carefully for needs, not just openings for your own agenda
• Do easy things in an easy way
• Openness: share what you do openly (network value)

It’s not just about technology; it’s about how you see the world and connections and how we interact with each other. It’s about asking the questions to get people to see the world differently.

How do you measure success? Benchmarks? Would another course modeled like CCK08 be a success?
Nancy: it depends on the goals and learning. Not sure how to answer the question. How do you measure success with iterative learning?

Image credit:

‘Recursive Flower, Second Time 100 visits!!!‘
www.flickr.com/photos/98621082@N00/428277413

CCK08: Connectivism, Equity, and Equality

In Groups Vs Networks: The Class Struggle Continues, Stephen Downes makes this statement about assessment:

I want to change the system of assessment in schools because right now we have tests and things like that that are scrupulously fair, particularly distance learning where we outline the objectives the performance metrics and the outcomes and all of that. I want to scrap that system. I want testing to be done by at random by comments from your peers and other people and strangers based on no criteria whatsoever and applied unequally and unfairly.

I found this a little jarring at first. Don’t we want things to be fair, to apply the same rules to everyone?

But applying the rules uniformly to everyone isn’t fair. The rules of baseball require that people run between the bases. Would you ask someone in a wheelchair to get up and run though, just because the rules say so? No, of course not. It’s absurd, not fair.

Most of the time, our educational system is set up with equality held up as the ideal. Everyone should be treated equally; we should hold everyone to the same standards. No exceptions should be made for individuals to bend the rules. In the US, NCLB is a prime example of this: every child is expected to meet the grade level goals, regardless of learning or other disabilities. We start from the assumption that everyone will learn and be assessed equally.

A better ideal for the system would be equity. We can move the emphasis away from applying the rules consistently across the board to giving people what they need as individuals to be successful. We should recognize that people do have obstacles to overcome and provide support for them to get around those obstacles. Being in a wheelchair means someone won’t run, but it certainly doesn’t mean they can’t participate in any sports.

The ALA article Equality and Equity of Access: What’s the Difference? describes equality as “fairness as uniform distribution” and equity as “fairness as justice.”

It occurred to me as I read Stephen’s ideas about assessment that connectivism may be a better way to get to the ideal of equity. It’s better for equity and accessibility when you don’t start from the assumption that everyone will learn and be assessed in the same way. If we start with the assumption that individuals will find their own path in learning, and that our job is to give them lots of opportunities and ways to participate, we’re more likely to help people get past their obstacles.

The CCK08 class is modeling that approach of letting people find their own path and giving them a chance for equity. Everything Stephen talks about with valuing diversity over uniformity reinforces that idea. The 2000 people can figure out what works best for them–lots of time in the Moodle forums or none, multiple blog posts or just reading and lurking, concept maps or word clouds, live sessions or only asynchronous. It’s what allows me to still be a participant in this class even though I knew I’d be out for a few weeks while I moved. I could take that break when I needed and step back in now.

I don’t know whether anyone in the course is visually or hearing impaired, but I can’t see any reason why they couldn’t find ways to actively participate and learn. Not everything is accessible to everyone, but you don’t need to see every image or hear the audio presentations to find value in the course.

I do wonder though–with the course so open and flexible, and with so many people participating, how much diversity is actually represented by the participants of the CCK08 class?

Metaphors and Language of Learning

Oak Tree Seedling

The discussion around whether learning grows or is built has been terrific. I can definitely sympathize with Sarah Stewart’s comment about enjoying the conversation even if I’m not sure I understand it all. I’ve got a nice collection of metaphors for learning now:

• Building: This is the classic constructivist language, constructing and building your own learning.
• Growing: From Stephen Downes’ What Connectivism Is
• “Learning As Advancement Of Ideas”: George Siemens’ suggestion to find a middle ground and avoid the conflict between building and growing
• River or Stream: Virginia Yonkers’ metaphor, shared by Ken Allen, is about the process of change as well as learning. Her idea is that we have a “river path” where the river of learning flows. The paths generated are the connections in the brain. One a path is made, it’s hard to redirect the river.
• Connections: At the chemical-physical level, learning is the connections between neurons in our brains. This is a literal description rather than a metaphor, but is we think of connections as the essential element of learning, it might affect us differently than if we think of learning like bricks in a building.
• Browser Plug-Ins: This isn’t so much a metaphor for learning as a whole, but for what the idea of neural connections actually tells us. As long as the plug-in is working, we don’t need to actually understand how it works to be able to use it. By the same token, we don’t need to necessarily understand the brain at a chemical-physical level in order to learn or help others learn.

Virginia made this observation related to my tag clouds:

It appears to me that you are expanding your “words” to use through the connectivism course.

This really resonated with me. It does seem like I’m looking for a different set of vocabulary to talk about learning.

And I think that’s why the metaphors matter–the metaphor we use to understand learning influences the language with which we talk about learning, teaching, and education.

Build implies structure and order. Ken suggested it seems linear, although Diego Leal disagreed, saying structure isn’t necessarily linear. Virginia pointed out that “building” carries the image of a systemic, external plan. In her comment, Gina Minks used the words “scaffold” and “bridge,” both “building” words. Her language choices reflect the metaphor that makes sense to her.

So what language would we use if our central metaphor for learning was “growing” rather than “building”? Would we say we nurture instead of scaffold? Connect instead of bridge? Feed instead of support? Deeper roots instead of a solid foundation?

What metaphor for learning makes the most sense to you? How does it affect the language you use when you talk about learning?

Image: ‘Oak Tree Seedling‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/61226262@N00/2175245319

Visualizing My Connectivism Learning So Far

Prompted my Michele Martin’s Web 2.0 Wednesday task for this week, I decided to do a Wordle tag cloud of my blog.

Learning is the top word in my cloud, followed by connectivism. Think, information, and networks are all prominent. Growing and grow are both more prominent than build–an interesting observation after my post about whether learning grows or is built.

Although Michele’s task was originally about personal branding, I was hoping to get a better grasp of the discussions about learning and our metaphors for it. Sometimes I just need to look at it a different way to start making the connections and seeing the patterns.

Here’s a different version of the tag cloud, this time with just my post on learning and the comments (all 12 of them, at current count):

The discussion has been great, but I need some more time to process it all and figure out where I want to go next with these ideas. I’m not used to such deep philosophical discussions.

Does Learning Grow or Is it Built?

It’s Week 1 of the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge course. This is a massively open online course led by Stephen Downes and George Siemens. I believe 1900 people have signed up for the course, so it really is huge.

With something this big, no single person can follow all the conversations or absorb all the information. It’s simply not possible. I’m planning to try to delve more deeply into a few conversations, rather than skimming lightly on the surface of many.

This week, I’m taking that to perhaps an extreme level: it’s one particular phrase and a comment about it that caught my attention. I had read Stephen’s What Connectivism Is previously, but was intrigued by the embedded comments today. Gina Minks and Diego Leal used Diigo’s sticky notes to add comments on the reading. Unfortunately, I’m not sure that you can see their annotations unless you have the Diigo toolbar installed. I want to share a snippet of the conversation here though, so anyone can read it.

Stephen argues in his post about understanding being no “more than the process of making connections”:

The point is:
- there are no mental models per se (that is, no systematically constructed rule-based representational systems)
- and what there is (ie., connectionist networks) is not built (like a model) it is grown (like a plant) (Color emphasis mine)

Gina highlighted the phrase at the end, starting with “not built,” and added this comment:

I’m not sure I agree with this. If I need to learn something, sometimes I really need to work at thinking about the new information, trying to tie it to something else I already know, or look for more information to sort the new information out in my head. It is definitely work – I search for the connections in my existing frame of knowledge, and then look through all the relevant networks I have for something to help me learn the new information. To me, his is definitly more than just “growing” a new mental model.

Here’s my response:

If you’re connecting it to existing knowledge, isn’t that sort of like a new branch growing from an existing tree? I’m not sure it’s clear here, but from Downes’ other writing, I think this is more about it growing internally, driven by the learner, rather than constructed externally. I admit I struggle with this metaphor though, and I’m not sure I quite get what he’s saying. I don’t think Downes would deny that learning can be work, but he would likely characterize that work as growing rather than building.

It may be more helpful to think of it in terms of networks of people rather than what’s happening inside your head. If you try to build a network based on a model, from the top down according to rules, is it going to be successful, or will it always be artificial and forced? On the other hand, if you can provide an environment where relationships and connections between people naturally form, you grow an organic network.

What if learning, networks of thoughts or whatever, happens the same way as networks of people grow?

I’m still not convinced that I’m not completely off-base here trying to comprehend Stephen’s argument, let alone whether I think mental models exist or not. It’s an intriguing metaphor though, especially since I do tend to be constructivist and talk about learning in constructivist terms.

What do you think: does learning grow or is it built? What metaphor for learning makes the most sense to you?

Update: This discussion continues at Metaphors and Language of Learning.

Image: ‘Reaching out‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/68089733@N00/18115268

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.