Teachers as Consultants

Thanks to Seb for sending me this vision of teachers as consultants. It brings to mind my current beef with this idea of creating a national daycare program in Canada -- why duplicate the mistakes of institutionalized schooling with younger kids?

Future of Learning

I've hardly been writing about technology these days, instead focusing on how our perceptions about learning are changing. I think technology (especially the web) is at the root of much of this thinking, changing our relationship with information and putting individuals in charge of their learning. There are so many good thought spinning around this concept that I'm barely keeping up. Stephen Harlow tied together a bunch of great posts on the subject, including this article by author Philip Pullman, which is chock full of great ideas about how writing should be learned. A sample:

"It's when we do this foolish, time-consuming, romantic, quixotic, childlike thing called play that we are most practical, most useful, and most firmly grounded in reality, because the world itself is the most unlikely of places, and it works in the oddest of ways, and we won't make any sense of it by doing what everybody else has done before us. It's when we fool about with the stuff the world is made of that we make the most valuable discoveries, we create the most lasting beauty, we discover the most profound truths. The youngest children can do it, and the greatest artists, the greatest scientists do it all the time. Everything else is proofreading."

Pat Kane linked to the same article last week and added another quote I liked: "true education flowers at the point when delight falls in love with responsibility". And finally, Will Richardson has been on fire with his thinking about the future of learning, and this post (bouncing off this one) really nails it: Curriculum as Conversation. Pulling the Cluetrain Manifesto's ethos into education is exciting and necessary.

Our Media and Digital Lifestyle Aggregators

Marc Canter's stuff about new web applications and the business of the web is always interesting, even when I can't figure out how it necessarily applies to anything I'm doing or thinking about. In the last few days, he had a couple of posts that stood out. The first was his link to someone who's understanding and articulating what he's trying to do with his digital lifestyle aggregator concept.

The second post is obviously related, revealing a bit more about his plans for ourmedia.org. How does this sound for a sweeping vision?

"Folks will be able to upload video, audio, images and text - attach all sorts of meta-data and tags to their published work - and then share it within a community - using internal messages, buddies, forums, personal pages - yes - that's right - a social network for media trading and sharing. CC licenses are built in, storing it all at the Internet Archives - free, free - absolutely free. Free storage. Free bandwidth. Free culture."

So if it works as well as it sounds it might, why couldn't it be used to run courses and create e-portfolios? It sounds like David's learning landscape application (elgg), but on a potentially massive scale.

Masters Thesis

I've applied for a leave of absence from my masters program. After completing the coursework (including an inexplicable A in the final course, which I honestly expected to fail), I realized that I wasn't ready to launch right into my thesis. The leave gives me a few months to catch my breath and focus on a meaningful thesis question. It has to be related to education and technology (both of which have a fair bit of latitude) and could involve some original research, but wouldn't have to.

I’m tossing around a bunch of ideas, all centered around how people are using (and will be using in the future) the web to discover, define and pursue their aspirations. There’s also an element of mapping aspirations over values, both stated values and how they’re reflected in lifestyle choices (how we spend our time, energy and money), which I’m exploring right now through my lifestylism blog.

An example at the mundane end of the spectrum might be how high school students use college searches and college sites to decide where they want to go and what they want to study. It may also include some aspect of online career planning, which I’ve been working on for the last few years. I think the web can be used in better ways to help people envision their future work, especially by putting it in the context of figuring out how work will fit into the rest of their future life, including relationships, leisure, and learning.

Myron is doing some amazing work with high school kids, getting them to use the web to create a presentation of what they want for the future, using MLS to choose the home and location they envision themselves in, AutoTrader to select their vehicles, Expedia to plan their annual trips, etc... They create a sort of "surface view" of what their future life might look like, and then they add up the main costs to figure out what type of work will sustain those lifestyles, discussing values and choices in the context of what kids want. I love that approach, and I've seen how powerful the learning is for his students.

I'm fascinated by the psychology of aspiration and the concept of possible selves. Eddy Elmer sent me a helpful list of psychologists to use as a starting point for researching identity and self-actualization: Alfred Adler, Abraham Maslow, and Carl Rogers seem to be the most promising.

43Things could be right in the middle of this stuff -— it’s currently the best example of a site that really harnesses the power of the web to help people figure out what they want to do. I love how it connects people with shared goals and informal expertise. It led me to this fascinating paper about goal-setting and the Delmore Effect.

So I’m not lacking interests...just need to focus. Any ideas for further reading, or more specific questions that emerge from these ideas? E-mail me or leave a comment here, and I will be most grateful.

What You'll Wish You'd Known

Gwen linked to Paul Graham's graduation speech, which he unfortunately never delivered. It's more honest and realistic than most talks about finding your path in life (although not as gritty as Dave Pollard's undelivered commencement speech). His general advice relating to high school and self-actualization it to treat school as a day job and spend as much time as you can pursuing interesting questions and projects (outside of school, mostly):

"And what's your real job supposed to be? Unless you're Mozart, your first task is to figure that out. What are the great things to work on? Where are the imaginative people? And most importantly, what are you interested in? The word 'aptitude' is misleading, because it implies something innate. The most powerful sort of aptitude is a consuming interest in some question, and such interests are often acquired tastes."

It's all about taking responsibility for your life (and learning), rather than deferring responsibility to your school, employer, parents or peers. I suppose it would probably still sound preachy to any teenager, but I think it's closer to the truth than most advice about figuring out your future. It's really worth reading the entire thing.

This came hot on the heels of great thoughts from Aaron Campbell and Will's discovery of a wonderful post dug up by Rob...all about a new vision for learning that is entirely focused on what people care about.

Context, Blogfolios and Managed Learning

I guess I'm linkblogging mode these days. This too shall pass...

• Rob has been on fire in the last few weeks, and I love his take on how we've taken all kinds of learning (formal and informal) out of its proper context.
  
• Brian shows off the blogfolio concept they're working on, along with some good commentary on the intersection of blogs and more traditional portfolio presentations -- the comments are worth reading as well. It looks very close to what I was describing last week, which was sort of dismissed by Karina's excellent second round of explanation of why she thinks blogs are not a good tool for portfolios. She didn't seem too impressed by Brian's blogfolio concept either, but I don't understand the parallel between it and fill-in-the-blank institutional systems.
  
• Fascinating conversation centered around James Farmer's vision for learning management (or unmanagement), with follow-ups here, here, and here.

And finally, Aaron Campbell had one of the best short posts about the mismatch between the intrinsic motivation of students and what we require of them in schools:

"Students are motivated inwardly to learn. Like all people, they're driven in some form or another to pursue what interests them, be it video games, sports, nature, books, or the proverbial 'sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll'. What propels many students through the educational institutions of society is not these genuine interests, but rather those motivational factors applied from without: pressure from parents and society, fear of failure, the power of authority. If a student is lucky enough for his or her intrinsic interests to be aligned with what school offers, fine. But for a significant number of students, much of what school offers is a grinding chore. In many school settings, there is little outlet for students to pursue what truly interests them. In this sense, their interests are supressed, their creativity stiffled, and their freedom curtailed. Is it no wonder so many behavioral problems exist?"

Navigation Blindness

Gwen sent me this article about navigation blindness, which pokes big holes in the neccessity of consistent global navigation, focusing on the specific needs of a goal-oriented visitor.

University for Everyone?

Gwen's collected an excellent set of articles and observations, mostly around the concept of whether we should be pushing more and more kids into university after high school. She also sent me a fascinating NYT article on the topic:

"The leveling off of the wage premium for a four-year college degree has lasted long enough to suggest that it is not just a pause in an otherwise constantly rising payoff for those with bachelor's degrees, but another significant shift in labor market dynamics."

Blogs as E-Portfolios?

Rob's got another great post on e-portfolios again today, still struggling with the question of why blogs can't be used as e-portfolios. I left an overly long comment over there including this part describing what I'd want my blogging application to do if it was going to be properly used for creating a type of e-portfolio presentation for a job application:

"I'd like to be able to go to my blog editor and publish a new copy of my blog that only contained the categories, posts (with comments and trackbacks) and artifacts that I had selected for the specific audience. I'd like to be able to customize the front page so that it created context for the rest of the site instead of just listing a bunch of disconnected posts -- I might also emphasize a couple of key artifacts (presentations, case studies) there that deserve better prominence than an interesting post. I'd want to reorganize (combine, split, make new) the categories for the specific audience. I'd also like to be able to make this entire site copy private, so I could include work samples or case studies from clients who don't want their stuff to be opened up to the web.

None of this is designed to keep potential employers from seeing the rest of my stuff -- like you said, they'll find it with google if they're curious anyway -- it's to help them easily find the most relevant reflections of my self and work that have the most impact in their context. It's mostly a question of good design, but right now it would be very challenging to do this with the most popular blogging applications."

A note I just thought of now...a site like this is already easy to create if you have web design skills. The process of selecting your own content, customizing, organizing and publishing it would have to be as easy to do as as blogs are now, at least if expected the masses to do it.

Education Purpose

Rob also outlines his frustration with the education system in PEI (and everywhere else, really) and offers his vision for a better way:

"Can we try an experiment? Can we set up one school on PEI where the kids can choose what they want to do and then we pile in and help them get there. It would be likely that such as school, would have a string bias towards the arts of all types. This does not have to be big at first. See it as a living experiment."

Before I forget, Will also had an insightful post about the frustrating gap between the needs of the system and the potential he sees for authentic learning with technology:

"Now I'm not saying my school can't get there, but it won't be anytime very soon. And unfortunately, you won’t find much to support that in the new tech plan, which, for all intents and purposes, seems pretty much rooted in sustaining the NCLB model for preparing a country of factory workers; everyone knows the same stuff and has the same skills. Does anyone see the irony in educating kids for jobs which are being shipped offshore? And I mean really, what relevance do iPods and blogs have for standardized tests, anyway? Right? Way too risky.

What’s even more ironic (scary? sad?) is that we have an educational system that still asks students to basically try to learn independently (they work collaboratively but seldom learn) and use that learning to impress a very limited audience of teachers. Meanwhile, what the real world expects are students that are able to truly learn through collaboration and share that learning with large, extended audiences for meaningful purposes."

The World Question Center

Another amazing collection of responses to this year's Edge question: "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" There's enough real learning and striving for human knowledge in there to keep any thinking person reading for days.

E-Portfolio Flurry

My PEI friend Robert offered his take on e-portfolios this week, and got into another discussion surrounding Karina's post about George's e-portfolio article. David also responded to Rob's article with some solid points. I'm staying neutral and just enjoying the conversation for now.

Update: Another solid post from Karina about e-portfolios and blogging, with some interesting distinctions related to the purpose of e-portfolios.

December Hodgepodge

My bloglines account is getting absolutely clogged with wonderful stuff this week, and I can't seem to get it together...so this is one of those bookmarking posts that I hope I can return to and expand:

• George Siemens was on tour in the last while, eloquently summarizing the e-portfolio realm and supporting his fascinating theory of learning, which he's calling connectivism.
  
• Karina exposes some key issues with selling people on e-portfolios, asking great questions about why there are so few examples of excellent portfolio usage. My old concern goes a step beyond that -- I think educators who see excellent portfolios assume that they can force the experience on everyone with similar good results. She also linked to another e-portfolio project/resource with an interesting team.
  
• James asks another great question about the LMS I cannot like, wondering aloud why anyone should be forced to learn how to "compile" in WebCT (to read the discussion board). I asked the same question in a software evaluation course (taught through WebCT) that started a session of students wondering how the course site could have such a terrible interface.
  
• Apparently, I'm a plagiarist of sorts, along with a few million other bloggers who quote other people (with attribution) in their writing.
  
• 43things deserves its own in-depth post. Many smart steps beyond Twinkler, their new site helps organize people around the things they want to do in life, connecting people who have already done them with those who want to try. The potential for informal learning is unbelievable, and they've done some very smart things with tagging and clean interface ideas. I think it's still invite-only, but I'll invite any interested folks who promise to play nice. The Robot Co-Op is doing some fantastic work here that takes a very cool approach to some of my less-exciting ideas about getting people engaged in their futures.
  
• The Experience Designer takes on e-learning with a pick axe.
  
• Only Connect had two short posts about using stories in learning and the role of narrative in games...and I don't want to lose them.

Hip Science Teacher

A while back I wrote about the apparent mismatch between the experience and savviness of the next generation of teachers and the archaic system they find themselves teaching in. Today Gwen sent me a link to wockerjabby, the blog of another hip young teacher who's starting to bang her head into the wall of curriculum:

"I don't yet (and I may never) know exactly what I think of standards and their progeny, the prescribed unit plans and bubble sheet tests and workshop models, but the more I see of curricula, the more I become convinced that they need to be dramatically reduced if not eliminated altogether. where is the joy in visiting each of nearly two hundred destinations on a map for only forty-five minutes each?

in my classroom we have a policy that any question about science may be asked at any time, and depending on a number of factors we will either save it for later, when it can get the attention it properly deserves, or I will derail the entire class so that we can talk about something else that we are deeply interested in. the curriculum says I have to visit each of several dozen topics in turn. but I want my kids to ask questions, to explore, to pick up the rocks and sift through the mud below, to really get their hands dirty"

This is the kind of teacher I want for my daughters. She's an advocate for kids who is obviously passionate about teaching, she's web-savvy and writes wonderfully, and I'm sure she makes the best of a difficult situation in New York's public school system.

But I can't help but try a little utopian thought experiment. Imagine her in the opposite learning environment of where she is right now -- set her loose for three or four months with:

• a dozen interested kids of different ages
  
• no curriculum except a flexible focus on science as an organizing principle
  
• the freedom to explore interesting places and environments where science can be experienced and seen in action
  
• no pressure to switch topics or disciplines every hour
  
• the freedom to follow ideas and trains of thought as far as they're interesting
  
• access to great equipment and technology, letting her kids reflect and learn as part of a network of interested people
  
• license to have fun

Those 12 kids would emerge with a completely different type of knowledge than 12 kids who had spent the term in school. They wouldn't do well attempting to regurgitate information on standardized tests, but they'd know a lot of information about a few things in context. And they'd go way beyond information -- they'd understand how to do science, how to recognize and pursue interesting questions, how to work through projects with their peers, and most importantly, they'd be engaged.

WebCT

James pulls out some fascinating bits about the costs associated with big-name learning management systems. Stephen's follow-up is also spot-on. The program I'm in requires my use of WebCT and I've occasionally vented about the terrible user experience...but the numbers James is throwing out there are amazing. Why, why, why, would a school ever go that route?

Passive Learners

I should link to more of Will's more enthusiastic posts too, instead of pulling out his minor crises of faith, which tend to be caused by the tension between the demands of the education system and the potential he sees for real learning:

"And, luckily, we've learned to love learning. Our kids, unfortunately, are still dependent learners for the most part. They're dependent on an educational system that force feeds them a prescribed curriculum in order that they can pass a high stakes assessment that certifies them as being 'educated.' They're dependent on us to decide what is important for them to learn and what isn't. Our system enables them, in the worst sense of the word, to become passive learners for the most part, because passive assessments are what determine both our students' and our schools' fates."

Will and others in his network are real change agents within the system, moving a giant dinosaur towards authentic learning through new kinds of connections and interaction -- but it must be frustrating to see how slow things are changing, especially when the old-schoolers keep throwing up obstacles.

Board Games and Competition

Via Seb, an article about successful board games designed to let everybody win. It's a fascinating take on competition in games with educational undertones, even drawing on Howard Gardner's work in multiple intelligences. The tension, as the designers see it:

"If there's too much competition in one of their games, it'll turn into a snarling Nietzschean contest. But too little competition can be just as bad. That's just plain boring, and risks turning into a well-meaning but tedious educational game that 'just doesn't have any juice,' as Alexander puts it."

Interesting that anything associated with an educational game is automatically shunned, even though these games are clearly great learning experiences. So much of school is competitive, and competition is one way to engage some students...but so much of the "real world" is collaborative and creative, with many shades of grey, rather than simple winning blacks or losing whites. The author of the article also blogs about it a bit.

CBC's News Feeds

Via Abject Learning, news of CBC's feeds for news of all kinds. You gotta love the CBC when they do smart things like this. Now if only they had included article abstracts...but the headlines are better than nothing.

The flipside of this improved access to information is its contribution to my own personal media obesity. Do I really need more unread items demanding my attention every hour of the day?

New E-Portfolio Resource

Judging by the first few entries in ePortfolio @ York, this should be a great resource. Karina is a veteran blogger who gets to research and write about this stuff as part of her job.

Great Use of RSS

I suppose ed-tech folks have been talking about the power of RSS for a couple of years already, and everyone already uses it for subscribing to blogs, but I had my eyes opened this week. Others have talked about using RSS for syndicating learning objects, especially objects that weren't simple html pages, but I guess I never really got it because I wasn't actually experiencing it. Yesterday I finally got it, thanks to Webjay, a great web application I use for online music playlists. Creator Lucas Gonze has worked some magic with Atom feeds that got me all excited. Take a look at the screenshot of a single entry from a feed showing which playlists have been updated.

So instead of seeing only the usual title, text and a few links out, you're seeing cool functionality that can be accessed right out of your newsreader. It has the effect of making Bloglines (or whatever you use) another interface for Webjay. You get lots of great information about a playlist -- how many playlists are related, number of comments, which new songs have been added, etc. -- but the real power comes in what you can do from these links. Without leaving your aggregator, you can download the newest songs from a playlist and listen to the entire playlist just by clicking which player you want to use. And a single click out lets you copy a track to your own playlist, view or leave comments, view all related playlists, and visit the sites the new songs came from.

Maybe I'm behind the times, but this seems like really powerful stuff. Imagine the educational applications -- combining learning objects, sequencing video and audio enclosures, using FOAF information to connect learners with experts and other learners, custom webquests, individualized research that could be easily assembled into reports or presentations, integrating good stuff from Furl and Flickr...it could go on and on. One thing Lucas mentioned was that the uptake on playlist feeds hasn't been very good -- perhaps he's still ahead of the times a bit, since we're still in the stage where subscribing to feeds requires manual intervention from keeners and tech-types.

Update: Seb describes in detail how he's crafted his own custom radio station and best-of playlists using Webjay feeds. Now imagine the richness if Webjay could be combined with something like Flitter to give you instant info about the new songs you're finding, and suggesting related artists?