Curation As A Method of Digital Teaching
George Siemens, Connectivism ruminator, has explored the idea of teacher as a curator previously, and it has come up again today courtesy of a tweet from @hjarche. Even though I was a participant in CCK08, and marginally involved in CCK09, I didn't recall these ideas of what the teacher would become, although I do recall discussing the concept a few times in the chats in Elluminate. Curation is an interesting metaphor for teaching in the new technological environment - gather and display evidence, sometimes in a structured path, and allow conversation to develop from there. Allow the user/learner to make sense and meaning, then interject to either drive conceptual points further, or provide counter-points. I'd like to think this is what I do, but I'm not so sure. Even though feedback about my teaching is always positive, and people feel that they've learned something... I don't know if that's true. Maybe I need to ask better questions.
Complexity
It's interesting to see the theme of complexity pop up in unexpected places. A couple nights ago on the Daily Show with Atul Gawande. He was talking about how complexity is a problem for many experts, and how a simple checklist can save lives, but many experts felt that a checklist was too much of an ego bash to take. And I guess he was plugging his book, the Checklist Manifesto. Guess that Connectivisms ideas about complexity are getting around. I know that this isn't a new idea, they are in fact, fairly old. When we go through our primary school education we learn using building blocks (and pretty much the same building blocks that we've always learned with). We learn a new concept, repeat it until it becomes second nature, then build on it. What ways can a simple tool like a checklist improve education?
As subjects become more complex, perhaps we could take this approach to remind educators (or ourselves) that even though we are at an advanced stage of understanding a subject - perhaps deeper and aware of more facets than our learners - we should always consider the fundamental underpinnings of those topics. Maybe checklists can assist us in seeing patterns where grouping makes sense; that makes checklists useful as a sensemaking strategy.
Corporate IT Policies and their Relation to Teachers and Students
Slate recently published an article that was brought to my attention by Harold Jarche on Twitter - the article blasted the monolithic IT policies that exist in the corporate world. After reading it, it was amazing drawing the parallels to how some teachers treat their students in the classroom. Where corporate IT policies restrict people to browse what they want, some teachers want to cut off the Internet entirely from their students. I understand that idea in a testing situation, but otherwise, if someone has paid money to sit in your class, I think it's your job to convince them to pay attention to you. Whether that's through logical reasoning, or providing interesting, captivating commentary on issues, or engaging activities. If they're surfing while you're talking, clearly what you're talking about isn't demanding their attention.
So you have to get them to pay attention. Make the connections to relevance. Much like how in the article the first paragraph contains an example of why using Firefox is better, you need to give your students why this subject is relevant. A lot of professors forget this - they know why recursion is important to a programming example or why the subject and verb need to agree in a sentence. Your student, on the other hand, may not. If you're not giving them this relevance, they might just be checking on the Internet to find out why. Or, more likely, they don't see the relevance, and give up and go do something that matters. Instructors, teachers, professors, whatever you call them have to recognize that the Internet isn't going away, it's going to become more pervasive. You can shut off their desktop's access to the Internet, but not the laptop grabbing a wireless connection nor a phone or another device...
Why not turn it into a game? Tell your class in groups to find out how to do stuff and teach it to the rest in mini-sessions. You can guide them easily, and the knowledge is out there. You can then fill in the blanks, if they miss bits. And that strategy works for every skill, idea, course and concept. Need to teach Word? It works. Need to teach thermodynamics? Still works. Connectivism? Yep.
Riding the Wave of Crowds
There's a lot of talk out there amongst y'all about distributed learning. Considering that we're on the web and all, that's a fairly insightful statement. Crowd sourcing was an interesting concept that I hadn't heard about before, of course I'm not up to date on my marketing theories. I started thinking about how this is partially a business to individuals relationship and how it really emphasizes the power of crowds. Of course, marketing has always been about public opinion and (in my opinion) the power of many to influence.
Originally I read crowd sourcing as crowd surfing, which in my head, could describe the way individuals survey ideas on the web. Pick and choose from search results, go on facebook and ask your network of people questions, search on twitter for tweets about it, read wikipedia - you get the idea. Anyways, like a crowd surfer - you ride the crowd like a wave, eventually crashing to the floor when you have enough information to make a concrete connection to reality again - whether that's to buy a product, engage in a service, or not do any of that at all.
I like that description of how online activities work sometimes. Plus it's a nice tie-in to edupunk.
CCK08 Wrap Up
I'm listening to the CCK08 Wrap Up and one of my favourite topics - lurking - came up again. I stated at the time that lurking was a selfish statement - although you could lurk in CCK08, but take your knowledge elsewhere to a different group or network of connections.
Stephen said this in the chat, then expanded on it around the 53 minute mark:
Moderator (Stephen Downes): Yes - the activities themselves bcome patterns that are mtched to competences or expertise - activities = demonstration of performance
Here's another drawback to lurking, you get no feedback on your thoughts. Yes, I understand the reflective learner, I'm almost always better when I've thought about things for a bit (at least that seems to be the pattern). But if you provide no activities to demonstrate your learning, you have a fundamental problem in getting anyone to recognize your ability in that area. Sure, it may be satisfying enough to know you can do it... but unfortunately, very few people will take you at your word. It's a lot like trustworthyness - you have to earn it. External sources validate the internal ones.
So I'm sorry I missed the wrap up, there's lots of things I wanted to add during the session, but couldn't because I was only 8 hours late.
Twittering Connections as Volatile as the Wind
I've never been a huge fan of Twitter and as such, I don't think too much about it. Although this entire morning I've run into several articles talking about it. One of the major reasons I don't like Twitter is that it's not deep. I like reading something that gives me context, something to mull over, thoughts to consider, links to other content and more. Twitter is less. And rightfully so, that's the purpose of it.
Nevertheless, this article mentions Twitter and uses it as a comparison to blogging to see how social networking enacts power laws. It's interesting, because it grabs everything under the Web 2.0 umbrella and while that's maybe useful for an overview, it does a disservice to the entire thing. Web 2.0, like every complex structure is made up of differing parts, many times operating with different objectives, if any at all. I don't think Twitter works like blogs at all (certainly they can, but for the most part don't) and I don't believe that social power structures in each system work the same.
The value of being followed is important, yes. It doesn't mean that communication is enacted. I could be followed by several thousand others, it doesn't mean that what I'm saying is understood or even further something that anyone would act upon. That requires real power. So when @BarackObama is followed by a hundred thousand.... that's power and the cult of celebrity - would hundred thousand follow his blog? Or would a million watch his vlog? Oh wait, maybe they will - it's called the State of The Nation address... Sure Web 2.0 has created it's own celebrities, who in turn have influence and power, but really we're not changing the power structure at all. While social networking is allowing people to connect more freely, real power acts as it has done for hundreds of years.
Clay Shirkey's article about Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality talks about this, especially well summed up in the concluding statements:
In between blogs-as-mainstream-media and blogs-as-dinner-conversation will be Blogging Classic, blogs published by one or a few people, for a moderately-sized audience, with whom the authors have a relatively engaged relationship. Because of the continuing growth of the weblog world, more blogs in the future will follow this pattern than today. However, these blogs will be in the minority for both traffic (dwarfed by the mainstream media blogs) and overall number of blogs (outnumbered by the conversational blogs.)
I see the value of Twitter as a method to deal with quick messages (the idea that a language teacher could use twitter to provide new vocabulary each day that student could subscribe to is interesting), I don't see the power laws enacted with it. Perhaps that's because the power of Twitter is in the instantaneous nature of it, the connection is gone in a second... the lasting impression is not always long lasting.
Singularity and Connectivism
Last week, I watched a documentary on Alan Moore, who's a fairly interesting fellow. One of the things that he said was the rate of information was growing at an exponential rate. For anyone who knows calculus, you can half any number an infinite amount of times and never equal zero - you only get so close to zero that you approximate it. In this case, zero is the length of time it takes for human knowledge to double. So doing some internet research brought up this article about the law of accelerating returns. That article refers to the moment that the double exponential growth of human knowledge and the moment when knowledge grows almost instantaneously as the singularity. Mindblowing, especially so considering that it was written in 2001. If you're familiar with The Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy, you know the Vogons come and "pave 
over" the Earth at the moment that the Earth (as computer) is to uncover the meaning of life, the universe and everything. So maybe everyone's read a few too many good books?
As a total aside, if you want to create some bad Vogon poetry, the BBC has decided to allow that to happen. I don't think they understand what they have unleashed...
Now what does this all have to do with education? Well, clearly, a new paradigm will be required for knowledge growth that expands immediately.
In connectivism, it's more important to know how to access data, than what the data is. Getting information and assessing it is crucial to applying that information in a successful way. It also addresses the concept of singularity and instantaneous exponential growth of human knowledge. Now, the Kurzweil article talks about how artificial intelligence will be able to exceed human intelligence in the next twenty years or so (although this isn't a fixed number by any stretch). It certainly is only one hypothesis. The article continues on to speculate about what might occur to allow for this singularity.
Bringing it back to Alan Moore, he also talks about the singularity and addresses it in a more spiritual manner - where this singularity might be seen as a spiritual enlightenment. Kurzweil also points to this as some sort of transformative incident, although the article doesn't really speculate that much about the future beyond the singularity.
Reflections on The Future and Research – Week 12
CCK08 - I missed the Friday session last week, and the review of it is one that I'm sad I missed. It's a huge relief to have it over. In the future I hope that courses in this reality we go in a couple of slightly different ways.
The Daily - you need some sort of central location to allow people to sift through the vast array of materials before they can select their aggregation of feeds.
Moodle - I would not use it next time. Strongly suggest blogs, and e-mail a listserv (the Daily listserv?) to announce your blog.
Emotionality - Stephen makes a point about emotions and motivation at 9 minutes or so in the wrap up, and how the student should be responsible enough, and intellectual enough, to disavow those emotions. I don't think that's right, or even just. I would hope that someone in my peer group would think of the consequences of their actions, and how it might have an effect on others. I would've thought that Stephen would consider another's emotions, and the emotionality of learning - this stuff isn't as dispassionate as that. Learning is confusing, frustrating, angering, reflecting... It's part of the role of a facilitator to consider the emotions of the participants. I don't know if there's anything else than that.
Twitter - I never really got this technology. I'm into depth of understanding. I don't think this provides it. I have an account, follow a few people... but largely I'm not that interested in twitter.
CCK08 Concept Map as of Week 12
Here is my "final" concept map.
Overall, I guess my position has softened somewhat on concept maps. I no longer loathe them, merely dislike them. Maybe they reveal how confused and muddled my thinking is?
Tags Used
Administrate Meta-Phor
Twitter Feed
- "Study found that 51% of major websites violate the most basic design guidelines." from HCI:Designing Effective Organizational Systems 2006
- Just added myself to the http://wefollow.com twitter directory under: #hamilton_ontario #webdesign #education #edtech #criticalthinking
- Ten Years Later (after the dotcom boom) courtesy of Wired Mag: http://bit.ly/cqUh7r
- First time I can remember (for Mohawk College) a Student Election having a fan page on facebook http://bit.ly/9ldoWQ
- @hjarche heh, wasn't that cold this winter (in Southern Ontario anyways...)
Blogroll
- A List Apart
- Bava Tuesdays / Jim Groom
- Clay Shirky's Internet Writings
- Connectivism
- Educational Technology.ca / Alec Couros
- Elearnspace / George Siemens
- Howard Rheingold
- Presentation Zen / Garr Reynolds
- The Ed Rush / Ed Webb
