In the Elluminate session tonight Alec Couros suggested that his personal metaphor to knowledge that was: Knowledge is more like a river than a reservoir. I like that a lot, although as an aside, I thought to myself that knowledge is like a virus, you cough out an idea, and if someone likes it, it latches on to their system and mutates. As they think it changes… and spreads to a new host.
CCK09 – Initial Thoughts
Connectivism and Connected Knowledge, 2009 begins again. One of the themes that keeps running through my head is the idea of individuals in this structure of sense-making. In traditional, and constructivist classes, the individual is very connected to a class as a social construct, there’s an emotional bonding that occurs with people going through the course even on a subconscious level. I found myself in the Elluminate session tonight looking for familiar names, a sense of community and belonging. Belonging to a group. Even having this event (a course by any other means) is a social construct, which will lend itself to creating groups (which as Stephen said last year in CCK08, can lead to group think). What power does the network have over group think and what sorts of counter-force opposes group think by distributing the resources? There will be people who will immediately gravitate to thinking one way, based on their history with the subjects. I suspect that the people who think one way will invariably have a similar background. I wonder if they will gravitate towards each other naturally. Enough thinking, more sleeping.
Rubrics for Discussions and Wiki-Based Work
I’ve been refreshing a course I created in 2004 about Searching the Internet. Instead of the antiquated handouts I’ve replaced those four assignments with a wiki – each learner will contribute links, text, audio, images and video to the wiki. I decided that I can’t let them go and work in it without giving them some expectations so I spent a couple hours drafting this wiki rubric. I also cut 10% out of the mark and added it to a discussion component to drive people to talk in the talk pages of the wiki and the Discussion tool in the LMS. Here’s that discussion rubric.
The course I teach generally is to people who are older, may have a job during the day and are aspiring web designers. I would say that most of these people are carving out a second career. This course is taught at a distance, but I intend to tweak the rubric for a continuing education delivery (maybe take out the discussion element, or reduce it for a face to face class).
If you see some glaring errors I’d appreciate any feedback, in the comments or on twitter (@dietsociety), or something that I didn’t consider in my language. Thanks.
Aesthetics and Self Defined Identity
I wonder if there’s a benefit to allowing the end user, the learner in educators cases, control of how online spaces function and look. How we design places, how we as educators/teachers/instructors design places is a egotistical idea, imposing a will of how things will be viewed and the order of viewing, that’s unlike anywhere else on the web. I can choose to go to Google in the middle of writing this article, no one says I have to finish writing this blog post before I can move on to looking at LOLcats. In the same sense why are we ordering students to complete tasks in an order that may not work for them? Maybe someone wants to engage in discussion before attempting the readings…
Similarly, who’s to say that my idea of what pleasant aesthetics are? Certainly they might appeal to a European or North American aesthetic set, but maybe my use of white, black and greys are not appealing to an African or Asian aesthetic? Wouldn’t it be nice to have educators select a default stylesheet, for those students who don’t have a preference, and allow the end user to choose how their localized content looks. I mean that was the hope with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and XML, where CSS would describe to the browser how it would look and XML would describe the data being transmitted. Instead of creating courses with content, generate a mass of XML that would be styled by the learner. Then you of course avoid all those nasty problems with mobile platforms, e-readers, etc.
Learner. A word that exemplifies the role, but seems so clumsy… I’ll have to look for a better one – don’t know if one exists though. Neither here nor there…
In this situation where the end user/learner styles the content, what happens to the identity of the instructor? Part of the deal with aesthetic judgments one makes about e-learning spaces is that it informs the student about the instructor. What happens to this implicit “understanding” (or misunderstanding)? The way we organize a page informs the reader of the page about the designer. Traditionalist? Times New Roman font, twelve point, one inch margins… Amateur? Comic Sans, larger, clip art that isn’t really relevant… Modern? Helvetica, ten point, maybe two columns, with images? Is it important to have this information as a learner at a distance? Is anyone thinking about this stuff?
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Aesthetic Attention
Ran across an article about aesthetics from Carleton University called Aesthetics, visual appeal, usability, and user satisfaction: What do the user’s eyes tell the user’s brain? which had confirmed my previous assertions that you have 3 seconds to make an impression with a website – in fact, according to the article, you have 50 milliseconds. It also confirmed my idea that if your first impression is bad, then you’re fighting an uphill struggle to merely regain your credibility. This is a doubly bad situation for an e-learning space, where you have to not only fight to maintain attention, but also external preconceived notions of e-learning from other professors or teachers work online can have an effect on your credibility as an instructor. That credibility can be a class killer, especially at the College level in Canada. Colleges were built on trades, and being an instructor at College requires some real-world experience in the field that you’re instructing in. Any knock on your credibility can be overcome with good teaching technique, or personality but you have to fight for attention. When you are interacting with a screen though, as your sole “interaction” with a teacher, that initial impact is crucial to retaining attention. Positive first impressions will also allow users to forgive minor usability errors, although I didn’t see a definition of what minor was.
The article also goes on to say that users prefer things that they’ve seen before – which seems like an obvious statement – and also contributes to explaining why we see so many two and three column layouts on the web – familiarity. Three columns mimic the newspaper, which is familiar to most members of the 20th century (although, may not be to the members of the 21st century). Never mind that columns organize information into groups which allows users to better scan and assimilate information, but order on a page is aesthetically pleasing. Disorder is disorienting. So a logical ordering of information will help with your credibility long after the initial impression has occurred. Does it follow that a positive first impression and an orderly page improve your credibility? Or is there a finite amount?
What I Learned This Week
According to the World Internet Usage Statistics, North American Internet use is 15% of the world, and the penetration of the Internet in North America is almost 74%. To contrast, Asian Internet use is 42.2% of the world and the penetration of the Internet in Asia is at 18.5%. Clearly, I interpret this to mean that as Asia grows and becomes more connected, we will see more Chinese, Japanese and Korean language webpages on the internet, meaning the end of English as the dominant language of the Internet. What this means for education is that there’s a huge distance education market growing, and the forward thinking education institutions will be grabbing at those folks.
Mobile video is an emerging technology that is coming into the mainstream. The mobile video ad market is growing (slowly). The reason this has been slow to develop is that fast wireless networks and data plans that weren’t an arm and a leg are relatively new to North America. This will become more mainstream as 3G networks become commonplace. When Microsoft and Ford are beginning to buy ad time with mobile video in mind, you know it’s going to be important. Again, educators need to keep this idea in mind – so that the technology we use isn’t locked into one intended use. I can certainly see that mobile video will be important in developing countries as well – as internet connectivity has skipped over home use and gone directly to cellphones in places where technology is a luxury.
Two interesting things coming out of this Wall Street Journal blog about Wikipedia. The first is that approximately 20% of editors of Wikipedia pages have a Master’s or better. I wonder what that means for the authority boogey man that people trot out everytime someone says that Wikipedia isn’t a good source. I think this means that it is a good source, if you do the leg-work to ensure that it’s correct and are not lazy about fact checking. Secondly, people contribute to Wikipedia for mostly altruistic purposes. It’s not a huge deal, but it’s pleasant to see that people actually are good sometimes. Yes, the fact that Wikipedia users are predominantly men is interesting, but the blog comments by Tara Deck covers it pretty good, and I have nothing to add to her comments.
Also from the WSJ, a blog post about the EFF’s DIY test (called Switzerland) to see if your ISP is blocking packets for peer to peer transactions.
LMS Review
I’ve spent 19 hours at work the past two days, so I come home, plop down in front of the computer and blog about work.
As with all Colleges, we’re in the final days of preparation for the first classes next week. For us at Mohawk, that means manually (well, through input scripts) creating classes, enrolling students and creating instructor accounts. Until last year, Mohawk has never had a policy that said “we as an institution will use one LMS”. So the e-Learning department (of which I am a small part) has been very very lucky to be able to experiment with several different platforms. FirstClass is one of the longest running options at the College – having been in use for at least 9 years, probably more. If you’ve never used it, you’ve missed out. It’s a standalone client, so it’s not a web browser based solution, and while it’s quirky, it has lots of options for collaboration. In fact, having used it for around 8 years, I think it’s still heads and shoulders above the other LMS’s in that aspect.
WebCT is still running at Mohawk as well, and I never really had to use it but the instances I’ve had to develop content and media for it, it’s fine. I never liked the view options (switching from designer to student view to see how things look and function), and it actually plays nice with others (sort of). I mean you can export something and import it somewhere else and it kind of works fine.
Mohawk’s also running an instance of Blackboard CE 6, which as I understand it is some hybrid between WebCT and Blackboard. Like WebCT, it’s ok. Fairly locked in, and creating user accounts on it is a real pain, involving a custom hacked Perl script, XML massaging and a CSV. Getting students in shouldn’t be this difficult should it? Of course Blackboard offered to integrate the system with our Student Information System, for a fairly large (to me anyways) sum. No thanks, how about creating a way to bulk import students that doesn’t take half an hour?
We also have an installation of Moodle. Which was pretty daunting for faculty to use as there’s not a large support component for them. That’s not to say that Moodle doesn’t have a large support community, it most certainly does. Our faculty are not the most e-learning adventurous, and the ones that are, are already using one of the 5 systems in place (FirstClass, WebCT, Blackboard, Desire2Learn and the Portal CourseTools, which e-Learning doesn’t have any control over). So the ones who might’ve been interested in trying Moodle were probably scared away by the lack of immediate help with the system. Which is too bad, because the flexibility it can deliver is really nice. It’s the MySQL of osCommerce (or WordPress?) of Learning Management Systems.
Last year, e-Learning (I was only peripherally involved with the department as I was working with technology for second language learners at the time) went through a nine month review process, to look at acquiring one system to replace the six. Desire2Learn came out on top. The final paper is on the LMS Review blog.
Having worked with Desire2Learn for about four months, I’m disappointed with the collaborative tools (blogs specifically, but online documents were something I had hoped they would be developing). I guess I shouldn’t be, my expectations of a modern system is far and above what the average instructor or user would expect or need. And it’s perfect for that beginner user – I just hope that we don’t end up down the garden path and find out that it’s not quite robust at that level. Of course, I know it sort of is. Barry Dahl and Kyle Mackie are always posting about interesting things to do with D2L and I hope that our faculty can get to that point. I guess it’s part frustration that we haven’t used it before, and even though our admin has been using a lot since February, he still feels he has no mastery of it. That to me suggests there’s some depth to the system. Maybe we’re all a bunch of self-deprecating navel gazers? It is an exciting time at Mohawk. I talked to two faculty members today who were genuinely excited to use the system, which is all I need to get through the day I suppose.
Changing Nature of Relationships
So I haven’t written for a couple days, and I swore to myself that I would keep active on my blogs. It’s hard to balance writing content constantly and keeping it interesting , so I’ve backed off on my daily-ness in favour of quality. Amazing that after all these years (3 years blogging on another service, this blog over a year now, a year at Fear of Smell) that I still haven’t figured it out (the mix, I mean, not blogging).
Was interesting to see this post about the future from The Working Guy at Yahoo (and a similar one by the boob who wrote about how people are getting dumber), who contends that kids who use high-tech social media are lost in face-to-face relationships. Well, he hedges his bet with saying “may be lost…” but it’s the same scare tactic from media. Your kids are going to be turned into mindless zombies incapable of any emotion or thought, or will be unable to function in the “real world”. What’s really interesting is that the notion at the end of the Working Guy article where the author states that the time it takes to study this stuff is too long for the published results to be relevant. Really? Guess you should tell that to the McArthur Foundation or perhaps the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Instead of scare-mongering, perhaps the inverse is what we should be looking at? Instead of social zombies, ready to be strafed like some Resident Evil game, we should look at what is being enhanced.
Another line in the article got my attention (and at 8:30 AM, that’s a bit of a feat) was the tie-in to work environments. Well, again, instead of the negative side, maybe this is a push to create a community of telecommuters. Lots of people have been pushing this idea, and while I’m not in favour of having my work with me all the time, there are tangible benefits environmentally and economically. The continuous partial attention is something that work has forced on us anyways, as more work gets put on less workers, something has to give. Also, the fact that work has become less of a defining role on who we are as an entity, another benefit of social media, in my opinion, will give less importance to work as a whole. Never mind that many workers feel undervalued in their jobs and at the end of every pay period.
I’m also seeing a lot of mainstream media talking about this continuous partial attention and I think this Social Media boom is in for a bust soon. We are becoming saturated with social media, ways to connect, and people are becoming more and more selective with which products they choose to use because they are feeling this pressure. It seems that people are paying attention to is based on the network that their connections are connected to. Sure, that’s a fairly simple observation to make, but the deeper meaning is that new and innovative products, like Twitter say, have to provide something new and tangibly innovative to users or it’s going to struggle. I think a lot of the skepticism around Twitter is because it doesn’t do anything new, except truncate context and provide more immediate access to people. Truncating context, an interesting phenomenon sure, but may be not all that useful to the end user.
Howard Rheingold makes a good point (as he almost always does) in this video about attention and multitasking. Yes, I linked it, as I wonder about the context of embedded links (another post I’m sure). He states that everyone already multitasks and pays attention, more importantly though, we pay attention to what we think is important. That decision making process is a critical thinking process, and if we want people to pay attention, we have to give them an indisputable reason to do that.
So where does that leave us?
Bits and Bobs
Lots of little items to think about:
First off, I’ve been talking theoretically about aesthetics a lot. That probably rankles people a little, because theory is useless without practice. Digital photos are an easy way to add a professional look to a text-heavy space. If you are composing photographs, there are lots of tutorials out there to compose a better picture. Here’s a particularly good, short and sweet, ten steps to creating a superior photograph. It’s not in depth, but a good start if you have no idea where to begin with shooting photos.
Secondly, this idea that Twitter is not being adopted by teens or Twitter is not being adopted by GenY. Well, the data in this report is really skewed – not too many 2-8 year olds on social media. And then to have the age ranges as 2-24, 25- 54, 55+ seems a little skewed. Having 24 year olds be grouped in with teens almost defies the normal definition of teens. I suppose the idea that Twitter benefits from celebrity tweets or Iran elections is an interesting one as this signals a shift away from corporate news broadcasting (which also might explain a further shift to entertainment from news channels) and to authentic reporting from people in the area. With Twitter looking to add geotagging, this will be even easier to do in the future. Of course, we’ve all heard about Gen Y using shows like The Daily Show as a primary news source. I’m considered Gen X, and I tend to use The Daily Show as a primary news source as I pretty much despise CNN and Fox News. CBC sometimes gets some consideration, but I don’t really gravitate towards dry delivery. I like a smartass approach. People raise this idea as some sort of spectre of the next generation being unable to discern fact from fiction, but I find this generally to be untrue. Gen Y, like all other generational groups get humour and sarcasm.
Third point, Pew Internet released a study about the Internet use of the different generations. I like that the Generations are better defined than the Twitter study earlier, but the conclusion that older generations are “dominant” in Internet use, seems like a no-brainer. Older generations have disposable income and use this stuff for work, so our Internet use will be higher. While much of education is pushing towards online activities, in my experience the elementary schools are still using computers in a way that treats them as a separate course. I do know there are forward thinking teachers, out there, just not at my daughter’s school.
Attention and Aesthetics
Aesthetics are one of the tools that advertisers can use to distract, deflect criticism or deceive. In websites, each viewer has a minimum standard for aesthetics that must be met or else they will go elsewhere. The content is irrelevant in this initial snap judgement of the worth of the site despite how well thought out, how good or how useful it is. Aesthetics are assessed almost instantaneously in an intellectual and instinctual way. By getting people to start paying attention to aesthetics, we can increase the intellectual assessment of aesthetics.
EDIT: In a fit of irony, I’m being distracted too much to do this subject justice.
EDIT: OK, now at a different venue, I can continue.
Paying attention to aesthetics is important for instructors because while good, tasteful learning spaces can assist learners in making good choices in what to pay attention to, ugly spaces make it difficult for learners to learn. Students already have a myriad of barriers in front of them, why add more?
Sure, I suppose I’m advocating that teachers invest time in “selling” their content – but that’s what we’re doing (poorly) already. And the model we’ve all been working under is not working for the intended audience. They aren’t buying what we’re selling – or if they are, they are doing so because they feel they have no other choice. With more choice introduced to the educational model, for-profit education that guarantees jobs, does it at an accelerated pace, and provides external accreditation with industry standards (such as many for-profit College’s computer programming programs in Ontario). We can’t wait for change to effect us, we need to flip the model and effect change.
Subpar and mediocre learning spaces need to be dealt with. Even if you have no technical skills, you should be able to style a page by choosing fonts, colors and sizes from a menu. All LMS’s have HTML editors built-in. Use them at a minimum.
If you have no “eye” for design, start to develop one. Pay attention to sites that appeal to you – and start thinking about them critically. Find out what works for you and repeat it in your own work. We ask students to do this – why not apply these rules to yourself as well?