Speed Geeking for quick tastes, leading to a good appetite....

It worked really well. With over 60 participants, the Technology 4 Learning (T4L) session last Saturday seemed to be a great success.
An early breakfast followed by an excellent Keynote from Mariam Mathews (via Blackboard Collaborate) got the event rolling.
Mariam took us through the developments in technology in schools and gave us three trends:

1. Devices - choice is growing, BYO or school provided?
2. Pedagogical innovations - Flipping, student response systems (eg Twitter), blended learning, challenges in moving from bricks-and-mortar.
3. Social Networking in the classroom.

Good session, we learned that we should have shown the videos locally and given our staff some Collaborate training.
The  Speed Geeking session was fun. We had 12 stations with a range of technology on show - four minutes at a time for groups to have a taste:

1. (Kidspiration) Inspiration 

2. Scratch Programming

3. Facebook or Fakebook in the classroom

4. Simple Booklets

5. Gaming

6. Animation / iMovie

7. Robots

8. SketchUp

9. iPads

10. iPod Touch Apps

11. VoiceThread

12. Digital Portfolios

The student presenters were great! Four minutes each presentation proved really too short and, as usual, teachers have their own ideas about which groups they should be in. But it was enough to get an idea so as to return in the later digital playground sessions.
Congratulations to Jennifer Garcia and Judith Shorrocks for all the organising - excellent!

 

 

Stephen Downes on Knowledge

This week's #change11 subject was "Knowledge" and from Stephen Downes himself. His preparation piece (Knowledge, Learning and Community) took us from the traditional model of knowledge (propositional or representative) towards building a model which is about the state of organisation of the neurons of the brain and our of bodies that results after our interactions with the world. This same definition was linked to how knowledge resides in the state of organisation in communities, and how language was also part of this picture, with the rules of language NOT being the rules of the knowledge:

Language follows learning and experience, is reflective of learning and experience, and does not constitute learning and experience. A sentence is like a picture: an abstraction, a snapshot, a moment, an artifice. It is not inherently true or false, does not inherently contain its own meaning. When we read, when we comprehend, a language, we do so by recognizing, and not by decoding.

These are my notes from the Wednesday sessions, with some comments in italics.

What is knowledge? A set of connections in a network. Knowledge IS the network

What is "knowing" ....

• facts? 
• laws? 
• concept of a fact slips away once we analyse language used, once we analyse in any depth

Old: universals

• rules 
• categories

New: patterns

• similarities
• coherences

This view changes nature of knowledge; how we recognise, how we know.

• How we perceive patterns of connectivity
• Take the actual connections, and interpret them as a distinct whole
• Take the distinct whole, and interpret as a set of connections
• As Hume would say: our perception of a causal relationship between two events is more a matter of custom and habit than it is observation

So:

• knowledge as recognition, 
• knowledge as emergence of patterns, 
• knowledge as distributed representation.

Distributed representation - a set of connection between neurons = a pattern of connectivity.
Brain is a pattern matching machine; same network is used to remember different entities.

How did you learn that a photo was Nixon? You didn't - you learned it over time, repetition.
You are having an experience, it creates a set of connections, you have an experience and you create a similar set of connections, until this becomes the remembered knowledge.

Organisation

• Personal knowledge: the organisation of neurons
• Public knowledge: the organisation of artifacts

They are different things, made of different things, but they are both networks. People confuse between personal and public knowledge; personal knowledge is not transferred public knowledge - things that make it public knowledge are different from what makes it personal knowledge.

What is learning?

• creating personal knowledge
• forming connections of sets of neurons
• pattern recognition

Downes Theory of Pedagogy

To teach is to model and demonstrate, to learn is to practice and reflect

Personal learning 

Developing personal knowledge is more like exercising than like inputting, absorbing or remembering.

Paolo Friere's views on an act of knowing came to mind (from http://www.slideshare.net/GeorgeH/learning-and-teaching-part-a):

"Maximally systematised knowing" could be interpreted as well established networks and the act of knowing achieved through synthesising, is the establishing of the networks in the learner.
 
Personal Learning Environment: a PLE is a tool intended to immerse yourself into the workings of a community. Physicist learns by being a physicist. PLE allows you to create, participate and engage in the community.

(More notes to come on the collaboration/cooperation distinction)

Openness - do not define it by the walls, openness is about flow, plasticity

We have homework! For Friday - create and present a learning artifact and think about it from the perspective of this theory.

Flipped Classroom at a glance

Created by Knewton and Column Five Media

Thanks to Knewton for this.

Flipping classrooms - why and why it has to be the teacher that does it

The Flipped Classroom idea - where the presentation is videoed by the teacher and seen by the student for homework prior to the lesson, and the actual lesson is used to provide one-on-one and one-on-several help - seems to have real merit. Traditional approaches make differentiation difficult but flipping could allow the student to self-differentiate at the presentation stage. Since the student has control over viewing the video, s/he can self-pace.
Later, in the classroom, the time can be spent working through and applying, with peer support and teacher facilitation.
This is still new. There is little research on it. I wonder how flipping all classes will look like from the point of view of the student - particularly those who cannot access this learning in this way and need much more support/scaffolding than the videoed presentation.
Katie Gimbar has two videos which put the case for flipping well - the first is why she flipped her classroom and the second why it has to be her (and not Khan Academy or other OER). #change11

View over the walled garden - 21st Century Universities

A very informative session in yesterday's #change11 MOOC where Jillianne Code and
Valerie Irvine gave their views on the subject of the 21st Century University, using their university. They are Educational Technology professors and Co-Directors of the Technology Integration and Evaluation (TIE) Research Lab at the University of Victoria.

Clearly a time of change - issues facing brick and mortar universities

• diminishing funds, cutbacks
• decreasing 18-22 demographic
• increase in colleges with degree-granting status
• increase in online programmes
• demands from learners for flexibility

They (or their university) saw as solutions two aspects:

• Recruit more international students
• Change registration options to allow for combined f2f and online by existing students

The second seems a natural way to go, although getting professors on board to teach online seemed to be a very big issue - comment from one that they would rather have the top professor from a particular field than have them be tech savvy. This surprised me - professors were spoken about in awe and seemed to be ivory-towerish.

The back channel mentioned the riots to enroll in South African universities, such was the pressure to do so. Putting the meaning of this incident (massive pressure from the rest of the world for university education) against the wish of well off Western universities to make money from international students, left me concerned. Should this be the approach? And the point was made that these international student places should be mainly residential and not online, so that real fees are paid. Wow! Talk about business ruling...

Had not realised that administration system changes have such huge costs, even for relatively minor changes, and so changes of the status quo is really costly and difficult.

They categorised the registration option changes as follows - Multi-Access vs COOL Courses

• COOL - collaborative open online course - a Multi-Access course but open
• Multi-Access - not necessarily open, LDAP connectivity

Discussion followed on the use of MOOC as a name for such courses, or perhaps COOL (or even MOOSE!).

There seemed to be some real constraints in the 21st Century University. It seemed that universities are 21st Century only on the timeline but not really changed much from the 20th Century versions. Knowledge seemed to be trapped in universities due to restricted delivery method options. Instead of ivory tower, my mental metaphor changed to be walled garden, not being able see out nor others to dare to see in.

The Patriot Act and ownership of data in Elluminate were mentioned as constraints as well as internal university rules: they can make material open but for evaluation of students they have to be enrolled in the course.

Thanks for such insights - which I think are probably too stark out of context of the discussion, but forms my list of issues.

Consequence of change in learning - teachers have to give up power

Listening to Howard Rheingold at the questions session on #change11 MOOC brought home to me how reliant we are as teachers on control. Control of the learning environment, control of what is taught, control of what is assessed, control of the learner. Some of this is inevitable. But if we are to go towards open processes, then some of it we have to replace.
Rheingold had three relevant statements on the subject:
He tells his students that "absorbing all is not the goal but making sense of it together is" and that it is "scary and difficult for a teacher to give up power to the student. It is very rewarding once you do it, but you give them the responsibility to learn." Also, students "students cannot come into the classroom to be passive".
Of course, age is a factor. I agree with this approach 100% for university level students. We in schools should be weening our students towards these approaches. When? Well, I do think we have some of this in many Primary schools just by the nature of how they operate. In ours, we use the International Primary Curriculum and so the approach hands over some curriculum and learning control (although teachers work really hard in planning for such a programme).
It has caused us to re-think our 6th - 8th grade programme and to plan for more "open" approaches. To do this, teachers have to give up some power. How much? With what and where?

"Chance favours the connected mind"

Looking around for resources to explain our Open Learning initiative in school, I came across Steven Johnson's video describing his book "Where Good Ideas Come From - the Natural History of Innovation".
He ended with the comment that "chance favours the connected mind" - and his presentation illustrates the way that new ideas are generated (basically mash-ups of own and other ideas put together over time, discarded and improved).
In a time of multiple (too many?) connection channels, the chances for being fertilised by good ideas improves, so connections to new knowledge and understanding are made.
The idea of Connectivist learning is not so easy to grasp but I found this presentation a reassuring explanation for the concept.
Thanks to John for the well put together set of resources on the question of assessment and learning, which connected me to Active Learning and then on to the connected mind - showing the concept in action. #change11
(version in Spanish below that in English)