Happy Birthday to It (again)

I missed this blog's birthday, making my general neglect of it all the more apparent. Unlike last year's blog birthday angst (and the lengthy follow-up), I'm not feeling strongly about the process or the product of what's been happening here. As I look through the posts, I see that it's mostly turned into a link blog, which reflects the lack of time I've devoted to it and is closer to what I started doing two years ago. I'm figuring out that my interests in this field are pretty narrow, and not often shared by many others, which is fine.

Part of what I hoped to do last year was focus some blogging energy on more specific projects with more tangible outcomes, and I've done that in the past year. I've collected a year's worth of material for my thesis project in my lifestylism blog, and started a community blogging experiment that turned into a citizens' association web site. Both of these projects have been satisfying, and I'm realizing that this blog is still important to me for different reasons.

To those of you who are still reading, thanks for coming along for the ride and staying in touch.

Merritt Workshop: Online Learning Communities

The first half-day session I chose in Merritt was called Online Communties: Virtual environment for networking, collaboration, and communication. It struck me again that you can't "skim" at a conference, because I would have liked to attend all of the morning sessions, but I was glad I ended up in this one.

SFU's Co-op Community

Quentin Beck talked about the site they've set up for SFU's Co-op Education Program. It has a fantastic look -– with the photos of people and clean layout, it feels inviting and personal. Not that looks are everything, but so many of these educational sites and applications are so clunky and ugly that the interface creates barriers to further exploration.

I thought that one of the best features of the site was the ability to browse student profiles in each academic discipline (scroll down). So if you're a student considering a co-op option for human resources, you can see profiles of the students who have done work terms in that discipline. Clicking into a profile gives you the student's take on their experience and work-term employer, even including contact information if you're logged in. Potential employers can also browse profiles for their recruiting efforts. It's fairly simple and powerful, offering great networking potential. I imagined the value for a high school student trying to get a sense of a potential post-secondary program and what kind of work it might lead to.

Although this is a definite strength of the site, I'm not sure that it constitutes a community, at least not in the sense that I understand it. It's fantastic marketing and provides a great information resource. It gives the impression of a student-driven network, but all of the content in the profiles is carefully monitored, edited and approved by the webmasters. They can't have co-op students slagging employers. So although the exercise may be reflective for the students, the primary utility is for the institution -- it's more about marketing than the spirit of blogging or community-building. I don't mean that as a criticism. This is a very specific focus, and it appears to be working exceptionally well -- but calling it a community seems to stretch the definition.

This attempt to balance institutional control and personal freedom is interesting. It appears that the discussion boards are more free-form (although still moderated), but there hasn't been a lot of activity in there considering the overall usage and number of members. Other than that, the rest of the site has all kinds of learning resources that apparently get a fair bit of traffic: job interview practice, resume help, portfolio guidance, and work trends. They built the site themselves over a year and a half and adapted open-source tools for some sections.

Learning Times

The next two communities we saw in the session came across a bit like sales pitches for Learning Times, which is a very expensive subscription-based application for creating hosted online communities that reminded me of what the big LMS vendors are offering -- packed with features and locked away behind virtual fences. Paul Stacey was representing BC Campus, but he's also affiliated with Learning Times -- he presented BC Campus's online communities for educators. These are closed systems, so I can't show you what they look like. If you're not directly associated with a BC public university, you can't even view their main community as a guest.

This one is more open, but still requires registration and login to read an article. I understand the need for permissions and security, but these kinds of sites just don't feel like part of the web -- they seem to represent the opposite direction of the best possible future for the web. They do not enrich the wider network or take advantage of it.

We also saw an online community for this fascinating research project, also hosted by BC Campus/Learning Times at the cost of about $8000/year, which would be way more if they weren't associated with BC Campus. I wonder why they wouldn't have gone with Bryght or IncSub for a tiny fraction of the cost, with better interfaces and open-source foundations? It seems like they might have succumbed to feature-itis, thinking they needed every possible networking feature (chat, listserv, message board, blogs, permissions, etc) all in one application, rather than choosing separate tools as needed.

Merritt Workshop

Last week I attended BCCampus's Spring Workshop on Educational Technologies in Merritt. As usual, I learned more over beers with new friends than I did in most of the official sessions, but that's kinda the point of these things, right?

I picked the all-day session on e-portfolios with David Tosh and Kele Fleming. There were lots of interesting tidbits in the first part of the day, but my notes are focused on overlaps with my own interest in planning portfolios. Here are my highlights and ideas in point form, because I'm too lazy to craft decent paragraphs out of my scribblings:

• David talked about the UK's focus on Personal Development Planning for Higher Education, which will require university students to have their own PDPs by 2007 -- this is an obvious example of the convergence between e-portfolio implementation and the type of work I'm doing with Bridges on career and education planning
  
• Further to that career planning/e-portfolio connection, Kele mentioned that she's been noticing a trend toward e-portfolio implementations in universities that are initiated in the schools' Career Centers. That seems like a real difference from what I was hearing a year or two ago, when portfolios were going to be used primarily for collecting artifacts and assessing coursework -- I like this "new" focus on personal portfolios for planning the future. I need to do more research on what college career centres are up to these days.
  
• For the reality check along those lines, they mentioned York's cancelled project to initiate e-portfolios from their career centre. It reminded me that I hadn't checked back on Karina's excellent project blog for a while -- it struck me that her research probably helped her organization realize that they weren't ready for e-portfolios on the scale they thought...but then after the project died, smaller groups (faculties, departments) started poking around and asking her questions about e-portfolios. This is significant.
  
• Universal, one-size-fits-all e-portfolio solutions seem destined to fail in universities. Successful implementations will be more focused on very specific learning goals (maybe documenting your student-teaching experience) within smaller groups. I wonder how many organizations will go further in the process than York did and build or buy complex campus-wide portfolio "solutions" that don't get used because they never properly figure out what they are trying to accomplish? E-portfolios are in buzz mode...still generating more light than heat.
  
• Kele talked about an initiative with Paul Stacey to explore connections between BC's portfolios and post-secondary admissions. Cool idea, but there seemed to be some skepticism in the group about it. Having talked to my operative in UBC's admissions department, it seems a bit far-fetched -- they've got a very specific assembly line approach to applications that leaves no room for personal expression.
  
• We had a good discussion about whether employers will value e-portfolios for hiring, and the consensus seemed to be a general mockery of the concept in our group. I tried to reframe it a bit: the portfolio as a rich representation of someone's professional and intellectual identity that would only be important to the employer when they were down to a few finalists for a position, rather than the portfolio being seen as an uber-resume used for filtering out hundreds of applicants. The group was curious about my on-the-fly example of current employers googling an applicant and using the search results as a sort of emergent e-portfolio for the applicant that was never intentionally assembled. They didn't much like this idea, but it's the reality already.
  
• We covered some of the tired process/product talk and assessment for learning vs. assessment of learning -- no real insights here, but it was good to talk a bit about student resistence to the whole thing, either assessed or not.
  
• There was some discussion about "selling" the benefits of e-portfolio usage to students and instructors, but I’m not convinced that you can dress them up to make them “cool”. Apparently students want to see examples of good portfolios, and they also want to see their instructor’s portfolio ("why should we do them if you're not even bothering to try?").
  
• Dave talked about the importance of social interaction and customization (personal control over the appearance of portfolios). The former got me thinking about obstacles, especially how hard it is to get students to blog and create connections around curriculum -- why are they going to care enough in an assigned portfolio project to really get into it?
  
• In the second half of the day, we got to work with three e-portfolio applications to compare their philosophy and interaction, which was really interesting. The Open Source Portfolio is a glorified resume builder with a terribly clunky interface -- it felt like punishment to have to use it for half an hour. The interface for KEEP Toolkit was way worse, using all kinds of bizarre interaction that seemed to ignore the past five or six years of usability and web development. I failed to see why anyone would use it for anything. As I've written elsewhere, ELGG was great, but people seem to have a hard time seeing it as an e-portfolio solution.

Class Mobility and College Dropouts

Via George comes this interesting story about rising numbers of college dropouts. Even more fascinating in the context of my thesis project were the links off to an excellent interactive exploration of class mobility (Flash). As educational technology, it's a great example of a fairly simple learning object that helps people understand a heavy-duty concept.

Looking at the actual content of the interactive display and the article, I'm interested in how we're generally sending more people to college, but more are also dropping out. Check out the differences between how people from different socioeconomic levels perceive their prospects and the value of education. I was also fascinated by the grid comparing incomes and education levels and seeing how it changed for different types of occupations.

Early Planning, Later Success

Gwen sent me this research brief of an interesting study -- The Effects of Students’ Middle-School and High-School Experiences on Completion of the Bachelor’s Degree: How Can School Counselors Make a Difference?

The study followed over 5,000 college-bound 8th Graders for 12 years and found that eight years after high school, 53% of participants had realized their goals of completing the bachelors and 47% had not. The researchers found that there were a few main variables from middle school and high school that "predicted" later success in completing degrees:

• The strongest effects were from the academically intensive science and math courses that participants took in high school. For example, when students added one high-school unit in intensive math (Algebra 2, trigonometry, pre-calculus, or calculus), their likelihood of completing the bachelor’s increased by 73%. Adding one unit in intensive science (biology, chemistry, or physics) increased the likelihood of completing the degree by 45%.
• The effects of intensive course-taking extended well beyond the effects of eighth-grade reading and math ability. That is, the intensive science and math courses that students completed in high school were more important to degree completion than the levels of ability they brought to high school.
• Socioeconomic status (SES) had a strong effect. A one-standard-deviation increase in SES increased the likelihood of degree completion by 62%.
• Students’ good attendance behavior in high school (not skipping school or classes) had a positive effect on degree completion.
• When students participated more in school-sponsored extracurricular activities, they were more likely to complete the bachelor’s degree.
• There was a moderate gender effect. Women were more likely than men to complete the bachelor’s degree.
• Asian Americans and White Americans were more likely than Latinos or African Americans to complete the bachelor’s.
• When parents were more involved in their children’s education and when parents had higher postsecondary educational expectations for their children, young people were more likely to complete the bachelor’s.
• Eighth-grade reading ability had a modest, positive effect on degree completion.

The second part of the brief focuses on strategies for guidance counsellors and other educators to help students avoid pitfalls and take advantage of this knowledge. I thought this one was most interesting:

2. Develop and use an effective system for individual education-career planning.
a. Help every student develop an appropriate, written (electronic or printed) education-career plan. In schools where student-to-counselor ratios are high, use guidance as a format for developing plans.
b. Pay particular attention to students’ long-term education-career goals and the degree of consistency between goals and academic effort.
c. Inform students of various postsecondary education-career options; and when appropriate, help students develop back-up plans (alternative plans).
d. Include parent and teacher input into education-career planning.
e. Use students’ education-career plans as a means for helping them become involved in rewarding extracurricular activities.

I don't think many of these things are done in any systematic way in most schools. The most college-focused middle and high schools in wealthier neighbourhoods may require very specific post-secondary education plans, but usually without reference to career possibilities or other future goals. You'd think they'd be more interested in this stuff...or maybe they're interested, but don't know how to go about it? Also, this focus on the four-year degree as the only path worth pursuing is obviously limited, but it represents the perception of the majority of high school students right now.

One Size Fits All

Education as Commodity explores the implications of the standards/testing movement on a wider scale, and the discussion emerging below is excellent.

Could this be your life?

I've often blathered here about a vision for a sort of simulator for visualizing and "trying out" future lifestyles. It may become the focus of my masters thesis if I can buckle down. A career plan builder is a step in the right direction, but it doesn't really go far enough. Could This Be Your Life? is an interesting take on the concept. It's not exactly a rich experience, but yields some interesting results.

The Learning Landscape for Groups

I'm excited about the latest installation of the open-source ELGG platform, called TeacherEd, not because it's anything earth-shaking (although it appears to be an excellent start), but because it shows how easily the application can be adapted to different purposes. At its core, it's basically a blogging application with the ability to host and share files, but it also has functions for forming communities with user-defined permissions on everything. It was originally billed as a type of e-portfolio application, which it certainly could be, but I'm thinking that other possibilities may be more fruitful.

I'm thinking that ELGG could be used as the platform for association and club web sites -- basically any group of people who want control over who sees their content and interactions. For example, our local citizens' association could have sections that were open to the public (news, membership info, links and documents) as well as private discussions or strategic documents that were only for members. Members could form project teams with their own posts and files, and individuals could post their individual feedback and research. It would be more personal and accessible than a discussion board, less annoying than a listserv and more flexible than the group blog we've got now.

Perhaps this is an example of how the web is changing and a possible display of how powerful it could be for groups. The tools themselves have been around for a few years, but the application of free, open networking software to very specific niches is where things could really take off. What about study groups and homeschooler networks, sports clubs and project teams? Dave and Ben have done great work here, and I think it's only a matter of time before customized versions of their alpha applications (and the related work of others) are changing the way groups interact online.

Will on Fire

I can't believe the quantity and quality of writing coming out of a few of the bigger-named edubloggers lately. Will Richardson in particular has really been on fire, throwing wisdom around like it's going out of style. Highlights:

• A quote I loved, because it articulates simply in 21 words what I tried to say in a thousand words: "I write my blog because I wish that things were different, and I'm thinking about how to make them that way."
  
• The Case Against Textbooks: You can't share it in any meaningful way...You can't have the most up to date information about the topic...You can't edit it...etc. It all seems quite absurd when you consider the costs.
  
• More reflection on the big questions: "The question is how long will it take us to see the growing irrelevance of the traditional system of education and seriously rethink what we do in the classroom to make learning more meaningful to our students. Right now, it's feeling like this mountain is pretty darn high..."

The Learning Landscape and Community Building

I've been meaning to link to David and Ben's excellent vision for their learning landscape model: A Roadmap for the Personal Learning Landscape. What struck me suddenly this week was how a simplified version of their elgg application could be used for small community groups like our Association of Citizens for Summerland project.

At the root, it's an educational project, getting people together to learn, collaborate and get to know each other. Some of the communication of the group could be done privately and some displayed publicly, with the potential to share documents and links in one place...all with the benefit of being tied into the larger web to make outside connections. Although the members are all local, we're already finding the e-mail load quite onerous and the blog has some limitations as well -- sharing documents and files would be beyond many of the older members, and it's not good for tracking several threads or projects at once. Great potential...

More Rob Paterson on Education

In School is so Boring, Daddy, Rob bounces off of Will's excellent post with this comment that makes me so happy he's actually taking action to provide better models:

"I am now convinced that our approach of 'Imposition' vs 'Invitation' is at the heart of the profound disengagement that we are seeing in our schools. I am off this afternoon to join a group who seek to change this on PEI. We are made up of folks from our local Community College, the Faculty of Education at UPEI, the School Board and a few odd folks like me. Our intent - to ask kids what they would like to do and find out ways of making this happen."

He's had a few other gems lately as well:

• Schools - The gateway to corporate life?
  
• A look to the past for better education models

Corporate Pathology

Brian Alger consistently bends my brain with the biggest and most difficult questions about the purpose of schooling. Last week he was examining the pathology of corporations and how they relate to the perceived purpose of the education system:"In schools we help students 'prepare' for the workforce, or the world they will live in (at least as we imagine it). Many students, however, look out into the world and wonder exactly what is going on and ask why they would want to participate in it in the first place. I have seen many students ponder over a decision for long periods of time -- and so they should. It may be, that taking time away from school and traveling or experiencing some other dimensions of life are precisely what is needed to fuel a student's inner strength.

So many students graduate from school system to corporate existence. And if the corporation as generic structure is at least partly, 'a pathological institution, a dangerous possessor of the great power it wields over people and society' then is all our career planning merely fueling the pathology?"

Open Source ELGG

David Tosh is looking for developers to help them take his open-source learning landscape application to the next level. It's a great model with excellent potential, combining portfolios and social networking. If you can do some PHP programming and have an interest in working on the project, let Dave know.

Learning the Pursuit of Happiness

I've been pouring my limited blogging energy into two of my other online projects over the last couple of months -- a community blogging experiment, and an exploration of ideas for my masters thesis. The title of this post popped into my head as a possible unifying concept for my thesis. Each of the key words is loaded with meaning, and the intersection between them is where my interests lie. Some questions that are demanding answers right now:

Learning

• How are kids currently learning about which possibilities for their future are likely to make them happy?
  
• Is this learning effectively helping them make good decisions? Do they have the information and skills?
  
• How might these skills and information be learned better? Technology, social software, planning portfolios, mentoring, overhauling career development and guidance programs, etc?
  
• How could a more holistic focus on lifestylism (or entire future lifestyles, as opposed to just family or career goals in isolation) help us make better decisions?
  
• How would rich visualization, simulation and reflection help kids understand the implications and interdependencies of their future choices? How might the concept of "possible selves" be applied in a meaningful way?
  
• What differences exist in how kids from different socioeconomic backgrounds learn about their future options (career, education, lifestyle)?

Pursuit

• How are young people currently setting goals or directions for their futures? What are the ecological and social consequences of an entire generation of people pursuing those goals? Are they sustainable goals for individuals and society?
  
• Are the goals or directions generally meaningful, realistic, and aligned with their personal values? Are they pursuing what they actually care about? Do they know how to identify and take the best steps to achieving those goals?
  
• How could the process of helping kids set and achieve lifestyle goals be improved so that they'd have better tools and motivation to succeed by their own measures of success?
  
• How does fear motivate and paralyze young people when they think about their future options?
  
• How much of the goals and dreams of young people are borrowed or absorbed from society and the American Dream as opposed to being authentic and personal?
  
• Do young people believe that they can create their own futures, or that they must choose from existing options? How much desire is there to create future ways of living that are more satisfying and sustainable?
  
• How are differences in socioeconomic status manifested in the types of lifestyles kids pursue? How could those differences be minimized? Is class mobility a myth?

Happiness

• How likely are the most common or popular goals to make young people happy, both in the process of pursuing them and in their attainment? How happy is the American Dream making adults right now?
  
• How might lifestylism as an orientation or approach to the future help us better enjoy the journey and the destination?
  
• How could people better understand the connections between their personal happiness and the collective or common good of their communities and planet?
  
• How do kids define and pursue happiness in the present? What needs and wants do they believe will make them happy in their futures?
  
• What do young people believe about the relationships between work and happiness? Is work mostly viewed as the means for generating income to fuel consumption (which should equal happiness)? How well is this model working now? What should replace it if it's not making most people happy?

As I said in a previous post about my thesis topic, it's not a problem of not being interested in enough things -- it's a matter of organizing these questions into some kind of coherent approach or conceptual model. I'm glad I took a few months off from my program to ponder some of this stuff, because I feel like I'm at least identifying the questions I care about. The comments to my last thesis post were extremely helpful, even the abusive ones. Please feel free to comment on the questions I've included here -- even though I'm mostly just thinking out loud, it's great to have others bounce off of them as well. Which ones are most interesting to you (they're all interesting to me)? Which might be combined or expanded to yield the most interesting exploration?

Missing Skills

To the High-Tech Employers: Sorry About Those Missing Skills
A quote to give you the flavour:

"You see, in the big rush to bring accountability to schools and to make them performance-based you who supported those measures--largely from the business community I might add--failed to account for all the things that would have to go. 'Elective' classes--where you might see your future workers doing digital design work, doing animations and video, learning programming fundamentals, and all the other things that we used to be able to do with our kids--well, we had to cut all those way back. Sorry. You said that standards were what was important."

I thought Stephen's comment was spot-on, too:

"I am in agreement with the sentiments in this post and echo the author's request of the high-tech community looking for innovative and creative workers that it stop with the 'back to basics' and 'standardized' test regime that makes fulfilling that request impossible. Creativity requires, above all, freedom."

March Hodgepodge

As my recently pared-down Bloglines account fills up with great stuff and I don't have time (or haven't made time) to properly process it, I'm left with skimming and linking with no real reflection. The first three are loosely related to Bill Gates' call for school reform a couple of weeks ago, and the rest is a hodgepodge of gems:

• Albert Ip's Our world is changing, our schools are failing...
  
• Rob's take on raising standards for schools
  
• Designing schools for the present age,
  via George
  
• Doug's vision for improving graduation rates (50-page PDF), which he feels are being ignored in the rush to focus on testing
  
• Doug also covers the bigger picture surrounding portfolio learning, focusing on real personal benefits rather than the tools or institutional motivations
  
• One of my favourite thinkers, Pat Kane, writes eloquently about moving Towards a Players' Education
  
• More play, less 'work' for early years
  
• Seb's excellent notes from the Information Architecture Summit in Montreal

100 Bloggers Article

I'm involved in a book project called 100 Bloggers, along with a few blogging friends who were kind enough to invite me. I can't say I'm thrilled with my just-under-the-wire contribution, but I welcome any feedback. Here are my group's contributions so far:

• Cynthia's Seeking
  
• Rob's Utility -- Paradise Lost/Regained
  
• Brian's The Value

---

Bloggers as Lifestyle Designers

Blogs interest me most when people are using them to design better lives for themselves. I’m not talking about blogs that are focused specifically on self-improvement or even posts that explicitly outline someone’s future plans or desires. Aspiration is more of an undercurrent in the process of most good blogging, rather than something you can point to on any individual site.

A great blog reads like an artifact of a quest. The best ones aren’t broadcasting in search of an audience -- they’re seeking out information and people that interest them. Blogging is all about collecting and reflecting on information, which often facilitates connections and collaboration with people online. As we make meaningful connections between information and people, we are implicitly creating possible futures for ourselves.

Collecting Interesting People (and Information)
Outsiders mostly see news and opinions being linked and quoted on blogs, as if the main point was to augment our poor memories. Collecting information is only a starting point. Blogging is also about collecting interesting people. A shared interest in a topic may lead us to someone who exposes us to valued ideas and experiences we wouldn’t have pursued alone.

It’s not hard to find information on nearly any topic, but when you find a person whose voice really resonates with you, it’s an opening into real learning – learning about how someone experiences their life and thinks about the world. Even small glimpses into the stories, hopes and ideas of the voices we grow to trust give us a deeper and richer pool of experience to draw on when we make the decisions that construct our own lives.

This lens into a lifestyle does not feel superficial to me. You can walk around your neighborhood to get some clues about how your neighbors live. At worst, this exercise arouses empty consumer desire if they have houses or vehicles you think you want, but you’d never know if their lifestyle choices were making them happy. When you regularly read a person’s writing over a period of time, you get a sense of how well the different parts of their life fit together. They’re also collecting the stories, experiences and ideas from the people they find interesting, which give you access to more potential models for how people style their lives.

Who Are We Becoming?
Bloggers are always asking themselves how new information or experiences fit into their own perspectives. This on-the-fly reflection isn’t as fascinating to me as the types facilitated by collecting your thoughts over time. Many of us feel like we’d follow our bliss or passion if only we could figure out what it was. Looking back over my writing from the past year helps reveal patterns in my own interests. After some time blogging, I’m finding that I’ve created a fairly rich historical record of my lifestyle. Reflecting on the patterns that emerge from this archive leads to the inevitable question of identity: “Who am I?”

I know that nobody cares what I ate for breakfast or about any of the details from my life. But all of those irrelevant little pieces of personal history merge with ideas and connections to create a sort of composite view of the things that matter to me. It’s a record of process, showing both progression and blunders. Over time, the record shows how I spend my time, energy and money – my lifestyle choices and identity. It becomes easier to see where my choices reflect what I really value, and exposes unpleasant gaps where they don’t.

This gap analysis shows the limitations of fixating on who I am – it’s only a first step in using reflection to understand the progression of identity. The next step is look for indications of who I am becoming and determine who I really want to be. This vector into the future creates an opportunity to design a style of living that is aligned with my values. In order to do that, I’ll need good models, support, and a fair bit of learning. If you’re still with me, you’ve probably already realized that the process of blogging helps achieve these goals, even if they’re mostly subconscious.

Connections That Matter
The type of personal reflection I’ve outlined above could also be done quite nicely with a paper diary, but you’d miss the opportunity to have your ideas influenced, supported and critiqued by other people who care enough about you or your shared interest to comment on them over time. As we reflect on what we learn through our blogs, that network of interested people becomes more valuable in shaping our emerging voices.

When I talked earlier about collecting interesting people, I was referring to the kinds of passive connections that often start by regularly reading someone’s blog. Their stories and experiences might help shape our perspectives and values, which provides the foundation for trust and closer contact. The connection might progress to linking, comments, e-mails between writers and other contact. We get more and more interested, or the connection lapses as we focus on others.

These connections help shape who we are becoming. At the most basic level, we bounce ideas around and reflect back what we’ve heard from each other. We share resources and connect each other to other people in our networks that we can learn with or from. We may offer friendship and support. Ideally, we invest in a shared future, collaborating on meaningful projects and really engaging in the process of creating the lives we want.

More Future of Learning

No time to craft clever connectors for these additional ideas about the future of learning:

• Will is getting ready to Take Back the Web as he explores Transparency and Education -- this is...such...good...stuff.
  
• Aaron riffs on a similar note -- The Wow! Factor in learning.
  
• Helen's response to A High School Inquiry actually explains the point of e-portfolios in learning in simple language...great post.

More Lifestyle Learning

Is Yourself Fitness a game, a simulation, or one of the most interesting e-learning applications I've heard of yet? It runs on the Xbox, but it's different than the usual game or simulation -- there's no storyline or environment to explore. Perhaps it's most like an instructional video on huge digital steroids, complete with a gorgeous virtual personal trainer (Maya fan club, anyone?) who learns about you, teaches you how to do new exercises and customizes your workout each time to keep you progressing, focusing on different areas and staying motivated. You choose the visual background and music for the workout.

Before this becomes a nauseating ad for software I've never actually used, I should say a bit about why this interests me:

• it seems like a great example of "lifestyle learning" using technology to achieve specific self-directed goals -- informal learning, but meaningful and integrated into peoples' lives
  
• running it on a gaming console stretches our idea of what they're for -- why shouldn't the Xbox go beyond games to be a music system, DVD player, personal trainer, digital storage device, communications center, etc?
  
• Maya is a virtual teacher of one very specific subject area, but couldn't she guide people through almost any kind of learning activity in a way that took the learner's needs into account? Inviting users to participate in different ways, both within virtual environments and in their homes or schools? Connecting learners to experts or each other? Taking advantage of webquest-like research activities?
  
• educational CD ROMs were supposed to be the next big thing 15 years ago, but the technology has come a long way since then. Production values matter -- if the graphics are fabulous, the characters compelling and the music rocks and the pacing is perfect...you stand to keep people more engaged

Thanks to Gwen for the link.

Learning Civic Engagement

Late last year, George linked to a neat post about the ladder of participation. He noted the parallel to learning:"Many courses are structured to give the instructor control (treating the learners as 'objects' to be manipulated into a place of 'right thinking and knowing'). Moving up the ladder, however, learners gain control over their learning."

I like the connection to learning, and I'm also connecting with it the way it was originally intended -- as a model for civic engagement. I've started an experiment in online activism in the last few weeks that is primarily educational, but not in the formal sense. Summerland (the town I live in) is in the process of revising their official community plan (OCP), and there has been a fair bit of conflict surrounding the desired rate of growth and types of developments the residents want to encourage.

The more I found out about it, the more I realized how little I knew about the background to the main issues: preservation of agricultural land, water supply, NIMBYism, infrastructure spending, sprawl, and commercial development. So a few of us started up a simple blog to collect and share ideas as we're learning about the issues -- it's called Summerland Citizens. It's intensely local, but is already providing connections I hadn't thought possible.

One thing that's interesting about the process is that although you have to be pretty motivated to start something like this, once it's rolling, it motivates you to learn more, connects you to more interested people, and gives you a sense of belonging that is harder to initiate without the web. I'll let you know how it goes.