Participate, just participate

Friday, May 4th, 2012

Did you watch the Kony video?

Have you planked?

Have you created a Hitler learns video?

Did you participate #pencilchat?

If you’re a programmer have you investigated node.js?

No? Maybe you should have.

Self-directed learning is dependent of making good informed decisions, the better informed we can be the better decisions we can make about our learning. What to investigate, what not to. Memes and other things become viral because the Internet amplifies things of worth. For self-directed learners this is profound opportunity.

Many of these memes may have short shelf life if they, they spring to life and quickly fade, but what they do is articulate and amplify an important idea or concept. While often they may seem superficial on the surface, the reasons that they become viral is because they contain something deeper. Participating in these memes, leads to a collective sense of understanding of agreement. Pencil chat a short lived twitter hashtag, parodied the absurdness of many schools technology policies. Similarly, the Hitler videos allowed anyone to voice a complaint about anything. Both of these not only raised the issue but also used humour to maybe suggest that sometimes our complaints and concerns are over the top. Other memes draw great attention to new or interesting things, think Kony or node.js.

Of course, none of this would be obvious, or an opportunity for learning, if we didn’t participate. Rather it would be an opportunity lost.

As schools, rather than banning things such as planking, we should be participating in it, rather than ridiculing trying to understand it’s worth. For our students and for us as life-long self-directed learners, the message should be participate, just participate.

Filed in Thoughts | | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Business Model Canvas

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012

I really like the lean startup movement as a learning community, their work on iterative project design and measuring real metrics (as opposed to vanity metrics) is really interesting.

 

Recently I “discovered” the Business Model Canvas designed by Alex Osterwalder. The canvas is used to map out a business model against nine building blocks.

 

Alex gave the canvas a creative commons license so lots of people and sites use it. One of those was Steve Blank from Harvard Business School who uses it to teach entrepreneurship. Steve also started Lean Launch Lab, which has taken the business model canvas, and turned it into a web application. The most interesting thing is that the canvas isn’t static its iterative, imagine a graphic organiser meets a wiki. Note: Lean Luanch Lab wasn’t the first to do this, if you want a have a play with a simple iterative graphic organiser go here, no sign up needed.

 

I believe that the opportunities for formal and informal learning are profound. As schools we try to pretend that authentic projects move from a known problem along a linear step by step path to a known solution. This is not the case. If our students are to tackle real authentic problems and projects that do not have a known solution, and often do not even have a known problem, then we need to approach project based learning in a new way.

At the lab, inspired by the business model canvas, we’ve begun investigating how these projects might look. Our first step has been to create a project template in BuddyPress that individuals or groups can use to track their projects. We believe this not only leads to greater learning along the way, but the transparent nature of the tool, with every project visible, allows students to learn from and with each other. We’re about to begin some trials with this, if you are undertaking student projects and you’d like to trial with us, please get in touch.

For our iterative graphic organiser,  we currently using: Project Goal, What we know, What we need to find out, How we will find it out, What we have learnt. Down the track we’ll try other templates, again, I would be interested in hearing any ideas on this.

Filed in Thoughts | | Permalink | Comments (2)

Transforming digital writing on Monday (and Someday)

Tuesday, May 1st, 2012

Occasionally, I get accused of being “too big picture” and not practical enough. I’ve decided to start blogging about how these ideas might look in the classroom. I’ll tag these posts with “For Monday”

“My answer is that if you have a vision of Someday you can use this to guide what you do Monday.”
Seymour Papert 

In cherish plagiarism I argued that complex and creative work is always built upon the ideas of others and the individual isolate inspiration is a myth. So how might this new view of copyright and creativity be realised in the classroom.

Take writing for example. Our typical classroom approach for narrative writing still operates the same way as it did when I was at school. All students working on the same task, each starting with a blank piece of paper, or a blank screen, and working in isolation. While there may be some discussion between students together, the writing is largely isolated and individual.

This is not how writing happens in the real world. When faced with a complex task, good writers look for sources that they can reuse, that they can build upon. Good writers do not start from scratch and good writing is not isolated and it is not individual.

Modern word processors now have powerful collaboration features built into them. It is easy for multiple authors to work on a single piece of work, using track changes to review or using merging tools to combine and track changes between different versions of the same document. It is now extremely easy to share our work simultaneously with a large number of people. It is easy to get feedback. It is easy to allow others to improve our work.

What are the opportunities we now have for narrative writing?

Building upon the work of others
Students create a character profile, save it to shared location. Other students then choose a couple of characters from the pool of characters to include in their story.

Students create a character profile, save it to shared location. Other students choose a character at random from the pool and improve the character in some way before saving it back into the pool.

Students build upon characters from a movie or a novel to create a new piece of work.

Students save a completed story into a shared location. Other students then choose a story at random and write an alternative ending.

Students rewrite a story from the point of view a different character. The source may be another student’s work or a work sourced from outside of the classroom.

Providing feedback
Students send their half completed story to three other students who use the track changes feature to offer suggestions on how the story could be developed.

Students use track changes to write an alternative beginning to their story, they send it to three other students for feedback.

 

These examples are far from complete, would love to hear your ideas in the comments.

Note: For the purposes of this article I haven’t looked at networked writing on the Internet, where the opportunities for collaboration and coauthoring are obviously great. 

Filed in For Monday | | Permalink | Comments (0)

everything is scaffolding

Monday, April 30th, 2012

I recently suggested that there are two ugly evil twins trying to sabotage modern learning. I’ve previously argued that we need to cherish plagiarism rather than submitting to first evil twin and accepting an unreasonable and overly restrictive view of copyright. Today, I argue against the second evil twin, the over the top view of cyber safety, explaining that everything is scaffolding and therefore [almost] everything should be available for all of our students, all of the time.

Scaffolding, traditionally done by a parent or teacher acting as a “more knowledgeable other”, to provide support and guidance that enables the learner to successfully achieve a learning task or activity. Without scaffolding a learners capacity to achieve is limited.

Scaffolding is no longer the domain of teacher and parent. Scaffolding is no longer the domain of the expert. Thanks to transparent and real time sharing via the Internet, everything is scaffolding. When learners follow and subscribe and observe their learning activities, it is scaffolding. When learners remix or build upon the work of others, it is scaffolding. When learners respond, reflect and contrast having consumed ideas of others, it is scaffolding. When learners participate in memes, it is scaffolding. When learners friend. When learners follow. When learners like. When learners tag. When learners comment and post. When learners search. Everything is scaffolding.

When schools ban, filter and restrict access or the activities of our students they limit the scaffolding opportunities and therefore limit the learning opportunities for our students. No one would argue that the worst of the worst of the Internet should ne filtered, but let’s leave it there, lest we compromise the education of our students. When we develop policy, when we advocate, when we provide expert opinion let’s come from the side of what modern technology makes possible for our students, rather than what might go wrong in some scary evil make-believe alternate reality.

Let’s start calling cyber safety for what it is, an ugly evil twin trying to limit the opportunities for our students to achieve more.

 

Note: Dave Winer has previously blogged that everything is scaffolding I’ve stolen (refer to ugly evil twin one) the term from him 

 

Filed in Thoughts | | Permalink | Comments (0)

there is no next big thing

Sunday, April 29th, 2012

There I said it, there will be no next big thing in education, so stop waiting for something better.

Luckily for us, our schools and our students, what we have now is fantastic and it is all we need.

The paradigm shift that was Web 2.0 has provided us with all we need. It was a big shift, we realised it at the time but I think some of the wonder might have worn off.  There will not be another paradigm shift, there will not be a Web 3.0.

I’m not saying that there won’t be new products and new technologies created in the next 10 years or so, of course there will, they’ll get faster and cheaper and easier to use (hopefully we won’t trade too much functionality for ease of use). But that these new products will build upon the foundations that are available to us now.

It is time for us to act.

We now have the conditions for modern learners to tackle projects of complexity previously unimaginable. Through building upon other’s work. Through organising complex data. Through self-organising project teams. Through ad hoc project teams. Through managing complex group projects. Through quickly obtaining high quality feedback.

We now have the conditions for self-directed moderns learners to be better informed and therefore make better learning decisions. Through learning from others by following their activity streams. Through obtaining feedback on published work and ideas. Through learning analytics seamlessly generated. Through conditions that allow others to inform and intervene.  Through participating in memes.

We now have the conditions for modern learners to construct knowledge and make meaning together. Through consuming diverse content and ideas. Through publishing successes, failures and ideas.  Through personal learning networks. Through communities forming around objects of interest.

If we take advantage of these opportunities, we’ll see student learning outcomes that are broader, deeper, more relevant, more complex and more creative than we could ever imagine.

There is no next big thing but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t exciting times ahead.

Filed in Thoughts | | Permalink | Comments (0)

diversity trumps curation

Saturday, April 28th, 2012

TED Ed launched this week, it is doomed to fail. It is yet another solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. Modern learners don’t need high quality expert content, they need diversity.

Diversity trumps curation

TED Ed’s tag line is “Lessons Worth Sharing” apparently according to TED its not delivery of content that is the problem, it is that the content isn’t high enough quality, wrong. People learn by doing, by solving problems, by identifying the important ideas and understandings from those that are not and through learning conversations with mentors and co-learners. TED Ed thinks learners learn by consuming expert content then taking a quiz to check their learning, wrong again. Totally wrong.

Just like Khan Academy, TED Ed thinks that learning is about pushing content and testing comprehension. Just How Small Is an Atom is one of the featured lessons, it is well produced and very nicely done and it serves as a good illustration of the purpose and limitations of TED Ed. After 5 and half minutes of video students can take the TED Ed quiz. These are simple comprehension questions, What is in between the nucleus and the electrons in an atom? or The number of atoms in a grapefruit would be equivalent to … Watch the video answer the questions and then forget, rinse and repeat. All recorded by the TED Ed software so that the teacher can see all the good learning their students are doing. How anyone can think this type of rote learning has any place in any learning situation is beyond me.

Then there is the Think section, in this case three open ended questions. These questions move slightly on from the recall of facts with the first two questions asking about visualising scale, Describe the size of the atom and Come up with your own analogy as to the size of the atom. These questions highlight the missed opportunity because this video lesson does not provide any method for students to visualise extremely small or extremely large numbers and therefore I’d expected answers to these questions to provide simple substitutions, for example rather than using blueberries and football stadiums lets think of something half the size of both, and voila, demonstrated learning. Because the “lesson” does not attempt to teach the student strategies once the facts are forgotten the student will be back where they started. Of course, this won’t really matter as the facts are only a click away anyway. And given that it is so easy to look up these facts, what really is the point of this rote learning? Trivia nights? People use the Google at those nowadays.

But isn’t curation a good thing?

Curation is only worthwhile when done by either the individual or by the collective, that is a highly interconnected group formed around an object of interest. When we attempt to curate for others we fail miserably, we either curate too narrowly trivialising the object of study or we curate too widely losing focus and failing distinguish what is important. Curating for others also delivers the false impression that domain knowledge or understanding is rooted in static facts. Curated collections need to be dynamic, recognising that they are simply a point in time representation of personal/collective understanding.

Whether it be TED Ed, Khan Academy, Codecademy, Udacity, Moodle courses, Blackboard, Coursera, learning objects, MOOCs, Open Course Ware, iTunes University or any other new old fangled way to deliver content to learners, they are all doomed to pale imitations of what really is now possible because…….

diversity trumps curation.

 

Filed in Response | Tagged | Permalink | Comments (4)

Cherish Plagiarism

Friday, April 27th, 2012

At yesterday’s presentation at the QSA Conference I suggested that we should cherish plagiarism, and that over the top concerns about copyright and privacy/cyber bullying are the ugly evil twins trying to stop technology-driven pedagogical transformation. There was pushback from some, and unfortunately we didn’t have time to finish the discussion. So here is why I think plagiarism is fantastic, crucial for learning and should be encouraged and celebrated, and why schools’ obsession with copyright and attributing is so harmful. 

 

My son Ned is seven years old, he doesn’t often write for fun yet last weekend he spent about eight hours writing out a user guide for the computer game he is creating called Moptropica. If you’re familiar with Poptropica you’ve probably realised that many people would consider Ned a plagiariser. The names of the games are almost identical and the similarities don’t end there! Poptropica has islands such as SOS Island, Ghost Train Island, Moptropica also has islands, such as Radio Island, Fire Island and Upside Down Island. On each island in Poptropica you need to collect items to solve problems, in Moptropica you also have to collect items in order to solve problems. Poptropica has a user guide to help you along the way, and so does Moptropica.

It seems that Ned’s Moptropica game is a direct copy of Poptropica but I think that is only a small part of the story.

You see Poptropica is not original, it is classic adventure game, Poptropica didn’t invent the narrative puzzle solving game style but rather copied it, using a tried and tested formula. The islands that set the various locations in Poptropica have also be “taken” from other games, in fact, Scott Adams, the creator of Adventure game after which the genre is named, created a second adventure game, Pirate Adventure that was set on an island. Hundreds of other adventure games have also been set on islands, probably because they are such good places to search for treasure! Except for the name and the fact that Ned loves playing Poptropica, many many other games could more legitimately claim that it is fact stealing from them.

Looking beyond the name and the islands, Ned’s Moptropica is chock full of creativity and individual ideas. On Upside Down Island you get thrown in gaol because you’re not upside down, on Passage Island you use fire to melt the Ice Demons while protecting your eyes with sunglasses and on Cow Island you have to dig holes under the cows which they fall into. While Ned has certainly been inspired by Poptropica’s name and settings (which  as we’ve seen aren’t original) the most important bits, the ideas are his. That is certainly not to diminish Poptropica’s role, without Poptropica Ned wouldn’t have been able to create his game, just as without previous adventure games Poptropica would not have been created. Poptropica was the inspiration and the catalyst, it allowed Ned to create something that more creative and more complex than he otherwise could.

 

Nothing is truly original, everything is built upon someone else’s work. If you don’t believe me go and watch Everything Is A Remix. Ideas and creativity don’t come from thin air, they are built upon other people’s work and ideas. Think of something original you’ve created lately, now look at bits that have been borrowed from others, I bet your original part is less than 1% of the total product. The other 99% is copied, your small piece of originality is only possible because of the other copied 99%.

Creativity and innovation require openness and the relinquishing of ownership. The innovation we have witnessed across the Internet has been built upon openness and a relaxed (and reasonable) view of copyright and ownership. Open source and creative commons have seen innovation flourish because they encourage others to reuse and build upon their work. They realise that claiming ownership of things that are obvious is not only silly but is counter-productive to progress. That building on the work of others not only reduces costs and time that it takes to create a new product but also increases the level of creativity and complexity of the product.

My hope is that schools (and everyone) moves on from a restrictive and erroneous view of ownership and copyright and starts to cherish plagiarism.

 

Footnote: Trying to give something a name doesn’t mean you own it

I’ve been quietly concerned by a number of educators claiming ownership of ideas that clearly not theirs. You can’t add 1% of new material and then claim you own it. When educators try to do this, they damage the potential of technology and they create artificial barriers to progression. We see patent trolls and the damage they do, lets not see it happen in education. Often these educators think they’ve created a tiny piece of originality, which usually is not only not original but also completely obvious, and then not only do they try to claim ownership of the idea but also retrospectively claim ownership of ideas and concepts beyond their tiny non-original idea.

My hope is that we see less and less of this. Cherish Plagiarism.

 

Filed in Response | | Permalink | Comments (5)

going dark

Tuesday, February 7th, 2012

I’m always fascinated when people declare that they are “going dark” for a while.

The inference is that they’ll be more productive that way, less distracted or maybe they’re doing something secret.  I don’t buy it, when I need to be “super productive” or am tackling a “wicked problem” or need to produce something of the “highest quality” that’s precisely when I need my network, that’s precisely when I need the benefits of discussion and ideas that only social media can offer.

And what about the benefits to the network? During these “super productive” times, doing “super important” thinking, wouldn’t not sharing these ideas and thoughts be letting down the network, robbing the network, breaking the network?  And wouldn’t the results of the work be that much better if instead of going dark the work was influenced and improved by others?

Me, I’m not going dark anytime soon, and I hope those in my network don’t either.

Filed in Thoughts | | Permalink | Comments (2)

compromised access leads to failure

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

I’m really interested in project management software, and how authentic inquiry-based learning might be possible in schools if students adopted these types of workflows with their learning.

Asana, is one of the best. Founded by Dustin Moskovitz (Facebook co-founder) and Justin Rosenstein they want to create a service that is to your work life what facebook is to your social life.  I guess even for people like me that don’t use Facebook.

There is a great video here and while it is 50 minutes long, there are some really interesting things said in it.  Most of all why project management software fails. They contend that when project management software is too slow, too cumbersome, missing features, not always available, people will resort to low tech substitutes and therefore miss the benefits.

All this caused me to think that if we don’t allow students to have access to their own laptops at all times then trying to implementing technology rich ways of working will ultimately fail, and it won’t be the technologies fault.

Filed in Response | | Permalink | Comments (2)

TPACK and the fallacy of integration, wicked problems and protean technology

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

Note: This post is longer than I planned, sorry

I was a little surprised when Punya Mishra commented on my concerns about the TPACK Framework, and even more surprised with his comment that he mostly agreed with me. Punya suggested I read the handbook chapter on TPACK to get a better description of the technology issue I had raised.

So I did and here is my response.

Wicked Problems

The first argument for the worth of TPACK is that teaching with technology is so foreign and so difficult that it needs to be viewed as a wicked problem.

Personally I can’t see how teaching with technology is any more of a wicked problem, than teaching foundational mathematics with or without concrete materials. Forgetting for the moment that MAB blocks and bundles of icy pole sticks most likely fall into the technology category. Tellingly, Koehlar and Mishra also site medical diagnosis (I guess that seems wicked), decision making (huh?) and writing (hang on a second, this wicked definition is getting a bit weak now?). Its a shame that Hayes & Flowers’ paper “Identifying the organization of writing processes” isn’t available freely anywhere on the Internet so I can’t really be sure what makes writing a wicked problem, teaching with technology a wicked problem but teaching without technology not a wicked problem.

Instead let’s have a look at the other evidence that Koehler and Mishra give for this wicked problem suggestion.

“characterised by a complexity of concepts of cases with a wide variability of features across different cases”

So teaching with technology is a wicked problem because of the wide a variable nature of technology? In fact a short while later, Koehler and Mishra admit that while Mathematic seems highly structured, professional mathematician know it is not.  Mathematics is a wicked problem!

“teaching is akin to other real-world problems are ill structured”

Again, teaching is a wicked problem, even teaching with technology but wasn’t the fact that technology is a wicked problem the reason for Koehlar and Mishra adding technology to Shulman’s model?

“do not have correct or best known solutions”

Huh? This is especially confusing when we consider the definition they use for technology.

“as tools created by human knowledge of how to combine resources to produce desired products, solve problems, fulfill needs or satisfy wants”

So technology is created for solve a particular problem, if so how can understanding how to use it be a wicked problem? They give the example of a hammer to solve the problem of banging nails into a wall. They are argue that a hammer (old technology) is inherently different to PowerPoint (new technology) as old technology have limited uses and new digital technologies do not? The example they give is that PowerPoint can be used as a medium for artistic creativity and presumably a hammer cannot. Obviously the authors do not believe youths using hammers to smash up the the train station in the middle of night is artistic creativity? [Note: obviously finding creative and artistic ways people have used items such as hammers for creative purposes would not be hard, Pro Hart for instance]

This idea that teachers need different knowledge or specific frameworks to overcome the  ”functional fixedness” of modern technology as opposed to the “functional fixedness” old technology is false. Using technology in creative ways and meaningful ways in teaching is no different to using any other technology “concrete materials” eg MAB, icy pole sticks, big books, counters in creative and meaningful ways.

 

Integration and Protean Technology

The second argument is that digital technologies are protean.

Now we get to one of the big dangers of TPACK, integration. What an evil concept integration is.  Why do Koehlar and Mishra argue we need to integrate modern technology into learning and teaching? Note: here we have switched from technology that is all encompassing to modern technology. Computers are in, pencils are now out.

“Traditional technology are characterised by specificity” while “digital technology are protean.”

While the computer or mobile devices might be protean, their individual applications are designed and used for a specific purpose, no different from how a pencil is used only for writing. The authors might at this stage remind how PowerPoint can be used to create presentations or be used for artistic creativity, I’ll remind them that a pencil can be used to write and to draw.

This is the major danger of TPACK and why it is so badly used and unfortunately used to justify anything. When we view digital technology as protean, we perpetuate the myth that the digital technology is pedagogically neutral.  It iss not the technology but it is how it is used, they says, in Koehlar and Mishra language, digital technology is protean and therefore different. But computers and other digital technologies aren’t used like that, when we used a digial technology we use them for a single purpose. Yes, we might switch back and forth, we call this multitasking, because we are performing multiple single tasks concurrently.

 

Technology is a wicked problem

The third argument is that technology needs to be integrated with pedagogy.

“to find the appropriate solutions to pedagogical problems”

If pedagogy is the science and art of teaching then technology is not best viewed as the solution to pedagogical problems,  but rather viewed as offering new pedagogical opportunities. When we limit digital technology to solving the pedagogical problems to those that we had prior to its invention, we deny its transformational possibilities. Maybe it would be easier for those to see the weakness in TPACK if pedagogy was more accurately called Traditional Pedagogy, and TPACK’s purpose was more accurately described as helping teaching integrate technology with traditional pedagogies.

Modern (digital) technology offers new profound new pedagogical opportunities, separating and integrating, modern technology with traditional pedagogical problems, results in a compromised education for our students. I do like Rittel and Webber’s approach to solving wicked problems, I just think viewing technology and pedagogy integration as a wicked problem or even a worthy problem is wrong. And treating it as such leads to compromised education for our students.

 

The TPCK Model

Yes, modern (digital) technology is in a state of flux but I disagree that technology is any more in a state of flux than content or pedagogy. When we see modern technology as profoundly transforming pedagogy then arguments that pedagogy is not in flux seem weak.  When we don’t see pedagogy in a state of flux, we miss the transformational opportunities that modern technologies offer. When we see the vast amounts of new content being created and uploaded to the Internet every second, we see that the arguments that content is not in a state of flux are weak.

The TPCK Model’s insistence that technology is separate to pedagogy and is harmful as it undervalues transformational potential of modern technology and celebrates compromised integration.

 

When seeking to understand technologies role in learning and teaching, we are much better to seek to understand how technology is transforming learning and what the new pedagogical opportunities. TPACK does not do this, it instead seeks to justify the integration of digital technologies with traditional pedagogies leading to missed opportunities and a compromised education for our students.

 

 

 

Filed in Response | Tagged | Permalink | Comments (0)