Career and Technical Education

Christian at think:lab posted some interesting thoughts back in December about The Evolution of Vocational Schools. He brings up the old stigmas about vocational education as a path for the non-college-bound kids who can't make it in the "real" courses, but he then suggests that there may be hope for this model of learning despite the old stereotypes. A quote:

"Well, it has nothing to do with the evolution of vocational training in my mind, but the future demand to offer 'relevant' and 'engaging' learning opportunities for all students, as well as the blurring of the line between 'real world' and 'college' as acceptable options once you graduate."

The article he links to from St.Louis implies that the trend back toward career and technical education may be a reaction to growing awareness that four-year college won't be for everyone, and that a degree doesn't guarantee good-paying work. But I wonder how difficult it will be to swing that pendulum -- Doug wrote recently about how parents think getting more kids into the trades is a great idea until you suggest that maybe their kids should consider it.

In another post that isn't quite as old, Christian reflects on how guidance counsellors will prepare kids for career planning in future schools -- excellent stuff.

Welcome to the War Zone

These articles are nothing new, but since it's the school district my daughter is in now, it feels more personal: B.C. school district locks down desktop access to iTunes, MSN. It's not a bad article, giving us a glimpse inside the IT workings of a school district and outlining the challenges...but this quote just killed me:

"Managing a high-school student is akin to being in a war-zone, said Danny Francisco, IT manager at SD67 in Penticton."

A war-zone? I'm trying to be sympathetic, and acknowledging that on the ground it's not all about dreamy-self-directed-self-actualization-web-as-universal-translator-knowledge-base-etc...but treating students like enemy combatants can't be the way to teach them to use the web. And what's with the military metaphors? Last week it was minefields.

I mean, blocking MSN? This is how young people communicate about their lives, their friends and their homework.

"Video games can reshape education"

Forgive me for being skeptical about "U.S. scientists" saying that video games can reshape education. It sounds like there was a study of some kind that showed that kids don't learn much if they watched TV and played video games all evening. Through some convoluted path I can't really follow, the author attempts to connect this to the vast learning potential of video games, as if they just appeared this year.

A couple of years ago, I was interested in this contest to create "stealth learning" games, and three years ago I was thinking similar things about Why Video Games Won't Thrive in Mainstream Education . Although the quality of the games and consoles have improved since then, what's changed about education to make them thriving in schools more likely?

A Scary Minefield of Ideas!

I guess this is supposed to be a good news story, and really it's just a relaunched school district site, but the slant of the article just seemed so wrong somehow that I wanted to post it -- County education Web site unveiled:

"Already in place in some Pajaro Valley schools, in a month, every student and teacher in the county will have free access to subscription encyclopedia sites that are aligned with California state education standards and are designed to keep kids from culling half-baked or just wrong information in a general Internet search.

On Google, for example, typing Martin Luther King Jr. pulls up www.martinlutherking.org, a site that acts as platform for white supremacists.

'The great myth is that if it's on the Internet, it must be true,' said Thom Dunks, director of technology for the county office. People think of porn and that which is harmful for kids, but there's also a whole minefield of ideas out there.'"

Yeah, porn is one thing, but imagine kids having access to IDEAS! Lock the doors! Shutter the windows! They just don't get it.

Recommender Systems

Stephen Downes linked to this older (1999) page on Recommender Systems in his recent paper on Learning Networks and Connective Knowledge. It pre-dates the social-software boom, but still acts as a nice overview and notes the value of recommendations in finding people in addition to movies, books and other items:

"Although currently recommender systems are mostly used for finding things, such as books and CDs, Resnick thinks that one promising application may be recommending people. You could use recommender systems to find the right consultant or colleague - or even a potential mate."

Most people sharing a learning goal in 43 Things aren't necessarily looking for people to collaborate with (although there is functionality to form explicit groups to pursue a goal together). It could be used as a sort of recommender system for finding people ("I'm looking for people sharing my goals"), but it looks to me like it's being used more as a recommender system for things you might like to do or learn. The network that emerges around a goal does loosely connect people to each other, but that may not be as valuable as the connections between the artifacts themselves: the entries outlining what their experiences have been in pursuing the same goal, why they decided to pursue it, what they hope to accomplish, how the learning helped them, pitfalls to avoid, etc.

Perhaps it's more important as a way of finding content (advice, resources, opinions, possible applications) than as a way to find like-minded people. The primary "pivot" is the goal itself, with the people associated with each goal as secondary pivots. It is interesting to find out what other goals someone is pursuing besides the one you share with them -- that function is more exploratory than the process of figuring out if you want to pursue a specific goal.

Elgg for Professional Development

Dave linked to this story a while back, and I finally got around to checking it out: Saugus Union School District creates hot spot for collaboration, distance learning. The cool thing about this approach is that a school managed to get educators excited about social networking for themselves -- as personal professional development and as a communication tool -- before wading into the oh-so-scary world of students using the tools. Now that they're seeing the benefits, they want to get kids using it too. From there, it probably improves the chances of getting kids really learning as part of the wider web...help them learn in a safe place first and then gradually open things up. Elgg makes that progression relatively easy with flexible permissions. While I'd love to see schools diving straight into the deep end, this kind of approach probably makes more sense for most institutions.

New Systems for Sharing Learning Goals

I think the intersection between learning goals and social software is heating up. The popularity of 43 Things must be contributing to the interest, and maybe some of my babbling here has helped moved things along, but I think there was probably a certain inevitability about it -- in environments where people are deciding what to learn, who to learn with and figuring out how to go about it, these tools could be really valuable.

George Siemens introduced the U of M's Virtual Learning Commons a few weeks ago and linked to a backgrounder on the project. I had it saved in Bloglines for too long, and thankfully Brian nudged me to take another look at it. It's a system for students to post their learning goals as a way of recording them, finding related resources and connecting with others who share the goal. It seems to be pretty slick, and even in the current closed mode (registered students only) with relatively few participants, it looks like there could be the critical mass to make it useful. George's note about it:

"It sets learning in a conversational spaces...knowledge as a pathway through connections with others...learning as a constant in life. I'm confident that this implementation of social learning (integrated with institutionally provided academic support) is a first indicator of more prominent trends. Learning not as an explicit task...but as a constant action."

I also got an e-mail about Learning Flow and Lee Kraus explains what it's for:

"LearningFlow is a web-based application that allows (you) the learner to identify learning goals, then associate resources from across the web to that particular learning goal. The goal can also be shared with others interested in learning that goal."

It's also got a pretty nice, simple interface and some cool features for sharing goals. The kicker with any system like this is that it depends on large numbers of users and goals to start being really valuable. Until you have a few people sharing a (often quite unique) learning goal, it's just a place to store yours. So we'll see if it catches on. Elgg integrated this kind of functionality last year as well, in the context of a much richer feature set -- I should ask Dave if he's received any feedback about it.

Update: Roger Stack is paying attention to these goal-based networks as well. He describes a cool program at his school where mentoring/counselling groups have formed around areas of interest.

Groups and Networks

I've been enjoying Stephen Downes' recent writing, talking and showing on the distinction between groups and networks. On Half an Hour, he has two solid posts called Groups and That Group Feeling, and digs in really deep on a full-length paper: Learning Networks and Connective Knowledge. In multimedia territory, he's also got a video explaining the differences (Google Video), as shown in this whiteboard full of goodness, and also audio of one of his talks in New Zealand (mp3), covering somewhat broader territory.

I like how the concept of the personal learning environment pops up in all the right places, but I've been stewing on other personal connections to some of these differences between groups and networks. I got thinking about the kind of angst I had after blogging here for a year. I had been naively (and egotistically, I guess) expecting some sort of community to form around my blogging experience, but I didn't know what it should look like. I thought it should feel like joining and belonging to a group. At that time, Seb Paquet wisely pointed out that I had actually become part of a network, but Stephen's ideas now have really helped clarify what exactly that meant.

I also realized that some of my initial investigation into 43 Things was misguided because I was looking for people learning in groups; something more like the classroom discussion boards in the courses I had been taking. I thought that once you found a bunch of people who shared a learning goal, you would really have to become a "group" to learn much of anything that mattered. I noticed that there wasn't much evidence of conversation or interaction between the people sharing a learning goal and interpreted it as a potential weakness of the site as a learning space. But of course the people sharing a learning goal are part of an emergent, informal network. Stephen's main network words all apply: diversity, autonomy, openness, and connective. There is the potential for powerful learning, but it won't look like a cohesive, unified group of people busy learning something together.

The third thing that popped into my head was my grown-up hockey experiences. I played as a kid, up until I was 16 or so. In recent years, I've half-heartedly started playing again. Last winter, I tried two very different formats. I played a few games for a local old-timer's team, and I played noon-hour drop-in hockey a dozen or so times. It hit me last night that the contrast between the two formats is very similar to Stephen's differences between groups (the old-timer's team) and networks (noon-hour drop-in).

The team was all about unity (us vs the bad guys), coordination (scheduled games, annual fees, obligation to show up, set lines), closed (you had to be invited) and distributive (core group ran the show, stars were central). The noon-hour drop-in hockey was all about diversity (whoever shows up today plays, regardless of skill level or age), autonomy (you decide when you want to come, when you want to rest), openness (everyone welcome every time), and connective (over time you talk to many more individuals than you would have on a single team).

While it is true that there are benefits to playing on a team -- added motivation to support your teammates, more cohesive relationships, and beers after the games -- I found that the drawbacks way outweighed the benefits for me. At drop-in hockey, I played more often, learned more (more ice time, more variety), spent less money, met more interesting people, and just had more fun. It may be a personality thing (some people really do seem to thrive in groups of all kinds), but I think networks make more sense for me.

Space Blog

So interesting to see someone's personal reflections on life in space: Anousheh Ansari Space Blog. Not sure if it counts as citizen journalism when she paid $20 million to get up there, but there's just something so cool about photos from the space station showing up on Flickr.

Xapped

Web sites aim to open doors -- some positive coverage of the work being done by the new corporate parent of the company I've worked for since 1999.

U of M LTC

George Siemens is going through Ch-ch-changes and moving over to my old alma mater the University of Manitoba as a research associate in their Learning Technologies Center. Looks like a great move, and I'm sure we'll all see the benefits of George being able to devote even more energy and time to this field. Congrats!

Paradox of Choice and Usability

Interesting Interview with Barry Schwartz, who I've been paying close attention to for his work on decision-making and the paradox of choice. He makes the point that our institutions (health care, for example) are trying to move toward offering more choice (and not always for altruistic reasons), but that in many cases, people aren't properly prepared or supported in making these new decisions. A fair bit of the article deals with design issues, and how more choices on screens/pages isn't always better either...but I was most interested in his comment about choice in post-secondary education:

"And you see this all over. In the domain I know best, the world of academic institutions, increasingly, especially in the more selective places, they essentially don’t tell students what to do. They give you this gigantic list of courses, 'Take 10 of these and you will have met our liberal arts requirement. We don’t care which 10.' Here are these 18 year olds who don’t know squat, and people who do know something aren’t willing to tell them what they ought to do."

I think this is the sort of thing that 43 Things is providing for people who are trying to figure out what learning to pursue -- advice of others who have already pursued the same kinds of things and the support of others choosing the same goals. Things like professor-rating sites also add more to the mix in helping individuals make better-informed decisions about their learning. I expect lots of growth in this area...

Technocentric Reminiscing

Seymour Papert wrote a version of this paper in the mid-'80s -- Computer Criticism vs. Technocentric Thinking -- shortly after the first time I was plunked in front of an Apple IIe and taught how to steer a turtle around the screen with LOGO, Papert's gift to the educational world at the time. It's interesting to me as a reminder that issues surrounding technology integration in education (and problems with research in the area) haven't changed much in 20 years:

"The 'treatment' methodology leads to a danger that all experiments with computers and learning will be seen as failures: either they are trivial because very little happened, or they are 'unscientific' because something real did happen and too many factors changed at once."

Using technology to its full potential in helping people learn will always require different goals and measures of learning than the ones currently propping up the education system. Although I remember enjoying time spent on TRS-80s in the '80s, our engagement was so old-school -- the exercises were completely abstract and disconnected from anything I knew or cared about. It was fun because it was new, but like everything else we were taught at the time, we had no idea why it mattered.

Of course a few kids "got it" and computers in general became a passion for them; the kind of thing they did for fun, programming simple games and other apps in BASIC. The rest of us quickly forgot what we had been taught, and didn't bother with computers again until we had to start handing in assignments written on word processors -- the first IT tools that had a tangible point for us.

Random Thought: Heresy

A veteran educator compares student engagement in class with how they engage in outside activities, adding a (baker's) dozen observations and suggestions of his own.

"Let me give you my baker's dozen of answers why students are tuned into teams, troupes, units, fraternities, sororities, clubs, ensembles, combos; why these are a turn-on for students while they're generally turned off and tuned-out in the classroom; why the outside activities are indelibly tattooed onto their souls while the inside the classroom activities are seldom more than temporary ink:"

Paradoxes in Decision Making

I've been researching decision making in my lit review, and I'm seeing that others are poking around the topic as well:

• Fascinating thoughts from Artichoke on educational freedom and choice in The New Zealand Curriculum Draft for consultation 2006: A scaffold for dissatisfaction and depression. It's an exploration of the paradox of choice and how the research might apply to educational reforms designed to increase the amount of choice at many levels in the system.
  
• I'm not sure about Lovaglia's Law -- "the more important the outcome of a decision, the more people will resist using evidence to make it" -- but there does seem to be some research indicating a kernel of truth. I also was looking into this stuff earlier in the year, and my thought then was that better tools and learning could help us make better complex decisions, rather than just throwing up your hands and following your gut (ignoring the evidence) when there are too many variables.
  
• Psychologist Daniel Gilbert is studying how people envision the effects of their decisions (affective forecasting pdf) and finding that most of us are terrible at forecasting the future impact of decisions and events in our lives (check out illuminating Edge.org interviews here and here).
  
• Paul Sas has studied what he has dubbed the Delmore Effect, which basically shows that "most people tend to set much more explicit goals for low priority domains than for their most important ambitions". There seems to be a common thread between his findings in goal-setting and decision-making, particularly in how we decide which goals to pursue (or learning goals, translating this to my research interest).

These few strands are all mixed up in a counterintuitive set of assumptions that seem all wrong:

• the more important a decision is, the less likely we are to make a good (reasoned, evidence-based) decision
  
• a decision with too many choices makes it so difficult to decide that the result tends to be disengagement rather than improved motivation
  
• we make decisions based on our projections of the possible outcome, but those projections tend to be way off the mark, especially overestimating the impact of individual decisions
  
• we tend to be better able to articulate (and probably pursue) goals that are less important to us

Instructional Music Mashup

Brian was reflecting on his own learning a while back and I thought it was spot-on: Instructional music mash-up, and my inability to learn alone. He's learning to play the guitar, and finding no shortage of excellent resources to help him learn techniques and strategies, but he's finding that there's something missing:

"What I find myself wanting is some means of online social interaction that might begin to replicate the vastly superior learning experience of sitting down with a patient, friendly musician willing to share a few licks and tips."

As I mentioned in a comment on his post, I think this is something the 4600-ish people in 43 Things who are also learning to play guitar could benefit from too. The "network" that has formed around the learning goal there isn't so much about helping each other achieve the goal -- it seems to be more focused on helping people decide whether to pursue it in the first place, and how to get started. Once they've adopted or rejected the goal, very few return to participate in any meaningful way. It's like the assumption is that once you've started, the learning will take place in isolation (or at least elsewhere).

Update: Only obliquely related through the guitar theme, but I enjoyed this post from Bill Kerr about how offical education will be (or is being) left behind as people realize they can learn more about what they care about on their own, seeking out other people and resources as necessary. He was bouncing off of a video of a young guy playing a ripping version of Canon in D on his electric guitar, which has been viewed over 7 million times on YouTube...talk about reach.

Artichoke

Artichoke's writing is seriously mindbending stuff. Check out this wickedly smart post: Why we will struggle to enculturate the key competencies. A quote:

"As any student will tell you our schools are not about preparing students to 'live a good life in a well functioning society' through the key competencies, and the current MoE focus on introducing them is exposing this. As one student claimed this year, 'how can schools be about developing student understanding of "managing self", when all they offer us at school is the "experience of being managed by others"?'"

This isn't just a throwaway criticism of the education system, though -- as boring and irrelevant as "competencies" sound, they are a valid attempt to balance the reach of curriculum with personal goals and skill development. In the process of exploring these ideas, Artichoke invokes some classic Gatto and links to one of my favourite interviews of all time: "Truth, Beauty, and Goodness: Education for All Human Beings" with Howard Gardner. Worth digging into...

Learning Is Messy

Brian Crosby asks: Your Child's Dream Best School Day - What Does It Look Like? What Should It Be? He's been listening to the buzz on problem/project-based learning and throwing out a challenge to see what a real day of learning in a school setting would like like.

"If you are reading this you probably have some opinions, probably strong opinions about this, but have you ever thought about or planned a whole “typical” day? Here’s your challenge. Take your thoughts and biases and ideas and opinions and learning and experience and conversations and put them all together. Make it a comment here, or make it a post on your blog."

I'm only a few weeks away from sending my oldest daughter off to Kindergarten, so I have been thinking about these things. My challenge right now is more in accepting of what is, rather than spending time and energy envisioning better ways. Overall, it sounds like Kindergarten might be a better model for schooling than the grades that follow it, which lessens my anxiety about the coming year somewhat:

• provide an environment with different kinds of learning areas or stations in the room, with lots of rich resources
  
• provide lots of time where kids can choose which stations they want to spend time at, who they want to hang out with
  
• have caring grown-ups available for resources and guidance, and to help guide behaviour when necessary
  
• focus on personal expression and the arts, with lots of music and drawing
  
• a focus on practical life skills (tying your shoes, telling time) and interpersonal skills (playing and working in groups)
  
• have the kids in class two-and-a-half days a week, not five

The parts I'd like to change:

• ringing the bell every 45 minutes to change to some new arbitrary task
  
• starting at a set time every day -- why not start arrive and commence learning when it suits?
  
• age segregation -- why not have more mixing of ages and abilities?
  
• lessons paced to the slowest learners -- why force a five-year-old who is already writing her own stories to sit through "today, we're learning the letter D!" lessons?

So, I guess I've diverged a bit from Brian's original challenge...but I'm enjoying thinking about this one.

Why do we go overboard?

Nancy White had a nice reflection on Blackboard, DOPA, and Control: Why do we go overboard? I was as interested in Chris Corrigan's passionate comments below it, triggered by the discussion of control in education. That reminded me that I've been saving his advice to graduates from around grad time, bouncing off of an inspirational post from Will and some collective genius:

"My advice would go something like this: forget everything school has taught you about what it means to learn. From now on you will grow and learn and acquire new skills and knowledge from the most unlikely places. Don’t look at the people at the front of the room for the answers, look at the four people sitting around you and engage them in a deep conversation. The answer lies there. Or if not the answer, the next question, and it is finding the next question that is going to keep you going for the next 70 years."

Self-Directed Learning Terms

Any time you start studying something new, you realize pretty quickly that each area of interest has its own unique vocabulary. It's challenging to sort it all out, especially when individuals in each field seem to be intent on inventing new labels and terms for their own pet theories and ideas that aren't really that different from existing ones. In looking at self-directed learning, I found this very helpful list of Most Frequently Used Self-Directed Terms and Concepts, showing the main "Terms, Acronyms, and Concepts In All Books followed by Total Times Used" from ten years of research in the field:

• Autodidactic (learning) 85 (2) Derivative 124
  
• Autonomous learning 56 (2) Derivative 36
  
• Learning projects 231 (149)
  
• OCLI (Oddi Continuous Learning Inventory) 102 (15)
  
• SDLR (Self-directed learning readiness) 188
  
• SDLRS (Self-Directed Learning Readiness Scale) 1299 (35)
  
• Self-directed learner 436 (59)a
  
• Self-directed learning 2833 (502)
  
• Self-direction in adult learning 104 (2)
  
• Self-direction in learning 82 (24)
  
• Self-education 105 (5)
  
• Self-efficacy 107b
  
• Self-planned learning 118 (41)
  
• Self-taught adults 109 (2)