Learning In a Flat World

Interesting infographic from InternetProvider.Org on the positive and negative influences of hyperconnectiveness, based on the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

For six years now, Jane Hart has annually compiled the Top 100 Tools for Learning.  She does this by crowdsourcing the list and having learning professionals in the field provide their top ten tools.  One can submit their top ten tools via Twitter or Facebook or a survey.  The 2011 list has had over 160,000 views on her website and over 560,000 views on  Slideshare.  I have been submitting my top tools over the past few years, and both my list and hers continue to evolve.

My top ten tools this year are:

1.  WordPress – a blogging platform that I use and suggest to my students.  I am increasingly seeing WordPress as a potential learning management system that is more open than Blackboard, Angel or D2L.

2.  Google Reader – my main aggregator for feeds from news sites, journals, and blogs.    It seems like RSS is losing steam (or simply disappearing off websites), so not sure how much longer I’ll be using this.

3.  Diigo – my social bookmarking platform.  I continue to use it heavily for personal use, but have been using it less instructionally, primarily again because RSS has become problematic.

4.  Twitter – My social networking platform of choice to maintain loose connections with my personal learning network.

5. Tweetdeck – a useful desktop application for managing tweets.

6.  Netvibes – I have used both Google Sites and Netvibes to aggregate student blogs for classes, and my preference is Netvibes, both aesthetically and for ease of use.

7. Facebook – Where the students are…though I have used it more for maintaining connections with past students than for learning with present students.  I plan to play with Facebook group pages for my class this coming year.

8. Camtasia – still very useful for creating short screencasts for my classes.  I tend to point students to Screenr as a free alternative.

9.  Prezi – I have shifted from PowerPoint to Prezi this year and may never go back!  I like the creativity that Prezi allows.  I still use Presentation Zen to guide my Prezi production.

10.  Dropbox – my file service on the cloud.

I stated up front that these are my top tools for learning “at the present moment” – but I do see shifts occurring in the next year.  I think this is the first year that I have not listed my learning management system (Blackboard) in my top ten, which is pretty telling on its own.  My home institution has moved to Google Apps for email and productivity, so potentially I will shift from using Dropbox to Google Drive, which folds in another favorite tool of mine, Google Docs.  As we all move to more open platforms and mobile friendly applications, some of the above will evolve as well.  I did not list smartphones or tablets in my top ten, but I am increasingly aware of how well my tools work (or do not work) on mobile devices.

Thank you, Jane, for continuing to provide this service and for pushing our thinking about the tools we use for learning!

{Photo Credit: Ontario Wanderer}

Infographics seem to be the rage right now, but I was impressed by one published today by Ryan Glass (a blogger at Frugal Dad):

Source: FrugalDad

Thoughts?

My wife was shopping at Jo-Ann‘s Fabrics this afternoon, which meant I was across the street with a cup of coffee and my Nook ereader.  I have just started Larry Rosen’s 2010 book Rewired: Understanding the iGeneration and the Way They Learn.

So far, I am only up through Chapter 2, but I came across an interesting quote in Larry’s book that made me reflect on this past week in our GRAD 602 course.  Jeff Nugent and I are co-teaching this course, Teaching, Learning and Technology in Higher Education - part of VCU‘s Preparing Future Faculty program.  We have 24 bright doctoral students / post-docs in the course.

In his book, Larry examines the way generations approach technology, from Baby Boomers like me through Gen Xers (my daughter gags at that term – “What? Named after a letter in the alphabet?”), then NetGen or Millennials, born in the 80s and early 90s, to the latest generation – the iGeneration.  The newest kids on the block have lots of technologies with “i” in them – iPod, iTunes, Wii, iPhones, and of course, my granddaughter’s favorite, the iPad, as shown below.

One of my favorite quotes starts the chapter:

“My younger brother, Aiden, is only 7 and already he is doing techie stuff that I haven’t even tried.  And he picks it up so fast.  He was on the web when he was 3 and already has a cell phone and knows how to text me.  I can’t imagine what he will be doing when he is my age.

—Adrian, age thirteen”

I cannot imagine either!

On Thursday night, Jeff introduced Twitter to our class.  None previously had accounts in Twitter, and in fact, many had stated they had no intention to start.  When Jeff told them that exploring Twitter was a component of this class and that they would all have to set up accounts, there was a collective groan from the room.  Some of their initial reactions can be found here and here and here.

Those groans were background noise as I read Larry’s book today.  And while Adrian’s quote was neat, the one that blew me away came from Ashley…who helped title this post:

Larry stated (p. 29):

“I have interviewed thousands of children in both formal research studies and informal settings.  I will never forget an interview with Ashley, the ten-year old daughter of a friend of mine.  I asked her why she liked technology so much.  Ashley looked at me blankly and said, “What do you mean why do I like technology? Isn’t everything technology? I guess I don’t even think about it. It’s sorta like the sky, ya know.  I don’t think about the sky.  I just know that when I look up it’s there. Same with technology. It’s just everywhere.” To Ashley, technology is not a tool to use, as it is for many adults.  It is the center of her life…she most certainly is consumed with it and by it.”

Jeff and I have been introducing our students to various web technology tools over the past five weeks.  As Jeff noted in “No guarantees…“, we have used the 7 Principles of Good Practice as a lens to examine whether to adopt a particular technology or not.  So far, these technologies have included blogging, social bookmarking with Delicious and Diigo, RSS feeds and aggregation, and last Thursday, Twitter.  I think I can safely say that our students do not feel that technology is the center of their universes…though thanks to Jeff and I, they may feel consumed by it!

Yet, these future faculty will be facing (live or virtually) students from this iGeneration in not too many years as they teach in higher education.  Larry’s research found that 16-18 year-olds now spend on average around 2.5 hours a day online, not counting the other media with which they are engaged simultaneously.  They are texting on average around 3.5 hours a day.  Nearly half of all high school students have their own computer in their bedroom.

If one assumes that communication is a key element of their lives, then what does that mean for our future faculty?  How connected will they be with their students?  What will be the expectations of these faculty and how will those expectations mesh with those of their students?  I really do not know, but I see the future as both exciting and a little scary.  Jeff and I both gave our cell phone numbers to our students, yet in six weeks, I have not received one text message from any of them.  Will that be true of their future?  If technology is sorta like the sky, what will that mean for teaching and learning?

As always, if you have thoughts on any of these questions. I would like to extend the conversation.

Our office has a new iPad and we are taking turns playing…I mean exploring its instructional uses.

But I could not help notice the fingerprints after I turned it off (they are not ALL mine!)

: – )

Michael Bugeja’s opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Reduce the Technology, Rescue Your Job,” struck a nerve today.  He started by noting that for “most of this decade, professors embraced the pedagogy of engagement, wooing students via technology and ignoring the costs because traditional methods, from textbooks to lectures, purportedly bored students who multitasked in the wireless classroom.”  He then noted the massive cuts occurring across higher education, and suggested that these “facts alone merit an immediate technological and curricular assessment, or else hundreds more professors and staff members could lose their jobs in the coming weeks and months. You may lose your job.”

Bugeja raised the valid point that too often technology decisions are made without factoring in true costs, but he then suggests that teaching centers (like the one at which I work) are part of the problem for pushing the use of technology for teaching and learning.  His final paragraph reads:

• “I challenge anyone objecting to these arguments to look in the eye of secretaries, janitors, adjuncts, advisers, and professors of eliminated programs and say that avatars, clickers, social networks, and tweets—and the pedagogies, IT expenses, and teaching centers supporting them—are more important than feeding their families. To believe we can afford both indicates how incapable many of us are of making the difficult choices that the times require.”

It would be easy to dismiss this article if I did not think that his way of thinking was not reflective of many in mainstream faculty.  I have seen a number of faculty in higher education, as well as teachers in K-12, who see technology as an evil.  In many ways, they want to wall off their classes from the outside world.

That image of a wall is particularly relevant today, the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.  President Reagan has always been one of my favorites, and one cannot think of him without hearing his exhortation:

“Mr. Gorbachev…tear down this wall!”

That is the line most remember, but I like his comments later in the same speech, in which he stated “this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.”

Bugeja’s comments to reduce technology in order to save jobs ignores the realities of a changing world…much as the Berlin Wall did.  Technology in and of itself is not evil, and technology integrated into education is opening minds, not closing them.  The participatory web and open access to information has created freedoms that never existed in the past.  Those freedoms directly and positively impact learning.  As Derek Bruff noted in a comment to Bugeja’s piece:

“…point out that Bugeja has focused here on the cost of instructional technology, but not on the benefits to student learning. There’s plenty of research that shows that student learning is positively affected by instructional methods that involve more active student engagement before, during, and after class. Technologies that support or facilitate such instructional methods are certainly worth exploring, if our goal is student learning. When conducting a cost-benefit analysis, it’s only appropriate to spend as much time thinking through the benefits as it is thinking through the costs.”

“…if our goal is student learning…”  Well said, Derek!  If one shifts the microscope from technology to student learning, one might find many traditional classrooms in trouble!  President Reagan made his speech in 1987, and during that same period, Chickering and Gamson developed a seminal work on teaching and learning, their Seven Principles of Good Practice in Undergraduate Instruction.  They synthesized fifty years of research on teaching to develop these principles:

Good practice in undergraduate education:
1. Encourages contact between students and faculty
2. Develops reciprocity and cooperation among students.
3. Encourages active learning.
4. Gives prompt feedback.
5. Emphasizes time on task.
6. Communicates high expectations.
7. Respects diverse talents and ways of learning.

Rather than cast technology as an evil, I would suggest that technology is a powerful tool that encourages contact between students and faculty, provides avenues for reciprocity and cooperation among students, creates new venues for active learning, enables more timely and prompt feedback, and gives new opportunities to keep students on task.  High expectations can now be communicated in multiple ways across social media that students are using, and these diverse and multiple paths respect the talents and new ways our students are learning.

We certainly need to be fiscally prudent with taxpayer and tuition-funded monies, but now is not the time to build walls and isolate our students from a 24/7 wired world.  Instead, we need to actively help our students create the learning networks that they will need to thrive in the 21st Century.

So to Mr. Bugeja and others who agree with him, I say “Tear down this wall!”

I just finished reading Curtis J. Bonk’s new book, The World is Open: How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I will tell you that Wiley, the publisher, emailed me after I reviewed Dan Willingham’s book in a previous post and asked if they could send me Bonk’s book for possible review (with no strings attached).

I said yes and the next week received a copy of this book at no charge.

With that said, this book has resonated with me and I found Bonk’s approach interesting.

In many ways, Bonk is as much a fan boy of Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat as I am.  Just as Friedman had ten flatterners, Bonk has ten openers:

Ten Openers: (WE-ALL-LEARN)

1. Web Searching in the World of e-Books
2. E-Learning and Blended Learning
3. Availability of Open Source and Free Software
4. Leveraged Resources and OpenCourseWare
5. Learning Object Repositories and Portals
6. Learner Participation in Open Information Communities
7. Electronic Collaboration
8. Alternate Reality Learning
9. Real-Time Mobility and Portability
10. Networks of Personalized Learning

WE-ALL-LEARN provides a framework for his book and the premise that anyone can now learn anything from anyone at anytime.  Bonk  spun out chapters on each opener, illustrating each concept with stories, a bit of research and statistics, and implications for education in the future.  Working in the field, I recognized some of the people he named, but I also learned new pioneers.  Bonk continually reinforces that these openers ought to be changing education as we know it, as our world is quite different from our parent’s world.

In Bonk’s view, these openers need to viewed through three overarching trends.  First, the pipes are getting bigger allowing access to tools and infrastructure.  Second, more and more pages of content is becoming available as free and open content. Third, a participatory learning culture is evolving around social media.

One of the things I found fascinating was my own reaction to the book.  I buy the basic theme that openness ultimately improves education, and I consider myself someone who is part of a participatory learning culture.  I was pleased that Bonk provided a companion website with hyperlinked references and other resources.  But my first inclination was to begin following Curt Bonk’s Twitter account…and I could not find one for him!  Other than his blog, I did not see Bonk participating to the same degree that he discusses in his book.  I have never met him and may be way off target, but I was somewhat surprised that I could not immediately connect with him the way I did with some of the people he mentioned in his book like Stephen Downes, Vicki Davis, Clay Shirky or Dave Weinberger.

So I was thrilled with the content and miffed a bit by the author!  Weird reaction!

I also found that increasingly with books like this one, I read it with a laptop nearby, so that I can quickly go look at something new and immediately start the learning process for myself.  I had never seen Dancing Matt before, so really enjoyed viewing his Youtube video while reading that section of the book.  This bouncing between the web and the written word is a new but interesting process…and it suggests that in many ways, this should have been an e-book as opposed to a print book.

His final opener has to do with personalized learning…something we reflect on often in faculty development.  Bonk stated that we should be striving to move from where we see personalized learning as the ideal to a culture where personalized learning is the accepted norm.  With the pipes, pages, and participatory culture, anyone can establish their own learning path on any topic, whether it be improved teaching, learning a new language, or finally programming the VCR (…just kidding).  The implications for faculty development are huge!

Bonk has fifteen predictions at the end.  I will leave it to you to check them out, but I liked that he is questioning the status quo.  With the availability of all the world’s knowledge in our pockets/cellphones, the typical four-year college process no longer makes sense to Bonk.  He suggests that formalized education will expand rather than contract.  But informal learning with global partners will play an equal role to the formalized higher education model.  Learning will be authentic from passionate teachers…but those “teachers” may no longer be credentialed.  Bonk also served up a dozen issues that will have to be solved for openness to succeed.

I work with faculty daily on best ways to incorporate the internet into their teaching practices.  In the past three years since I came to VCU, the access to learning on the web has exploded.  Bonk’s book is pushing me to reconceptualize how I should facilitate faculty development in an open world.  I recommend the book to you and would be interesting in your thoughts on the evolution/revolution of faculty development in these exciting times!

Yesterday was the final day of Blackboard World 2009.  It was an enjoyable conference.  I met some interesting colleagues who are all grappling with best ways to teach online.  It was great seeing old friends from Georgia Virtual Technical College.  Twitter as a backchannel was going strong, and I added quite a few new contacts in Twitter.  The hashtag #bbworld09 allowed us to attend a session but keep up with several other sessions simultaneously.  Yet, as compelling as the digital links were, I think I enjoyed most the quiet retrospective back in the hotel room with my colleague Bud Deihl about what the two of us were experiencing.

Thursday was only a half day.  I started the day the way I start every day – up before the sun, coffee, and a review of emails, tweets, Google Reader, and Facebook.

Before the closing keynote, I attended two sessions.  Kathy Keairns of University of Denver discussed leveraging Web 2.0 tools for teaching, research, and fun.  I liked that she provide her wiki handout link.  She focused on four tools:

• Jing

- A great screencast tool that I frequently use
- Free but limited to 5 minute videos

• Picnik

- Free online image editing tool
- Works in the cloud, no downloads
- Good for quick resizing, cropping, and neat effects like Polaroid view

• dVolver

- Cute and quick animated video program’
- Text based cartoon – no audio (other than canned music)

• Gabbly

- Chat Box on the fly
- Just add ‘gabbly.com/‘ in front of any URL

After her session, I attended an interesting session by two gentlemen from England.  Mark Kerrigan and Mark Clements discussed using Web 2.0 as an assessment process to improve institution retention and learning.  They noted that students come to college to get a degree, but the reality they find is that they are enrolled in 24 siloed courses.  At University of Westminster, they have integrated a process where by every student is assigned a “tutor” – what we would call an academic advisor.  After every major learning event in each course, the students are automatically sent a questionnaire/ survey, with the results forwarded to their advisor.  The students are also encouraged to blog about their learning journey after each learning event.  The advisors use the survey results and the blog reflections to help the students see the relevance of their course work and the interconnections with their chosen degree.

U of Westminster is much smaller than VCU, yet I could see parallels between their effort and our Focused Inquiry program for first year students.  Their use of social media could enhance our process in which our students are together with each other and the same faculty member for both FI One and Two.  Food for thought!

The closing keynote was Lester Holt of NBC News.  He gave a very engaging presentation on the parallels between how journalism has been evolving and how education has been evolving. One comment I liked is that both good journalists and good teachers are in the business of informing and provoking deeper understanding.  He said that Brian Williams reminded them all the time that they were writing the first draft of history.

He focused on the timeshift that was occurring, where the new generation of students expect and demand both their news and their learning on demand 24/7.  NBC is partnering with Blackboard to provide its archived news material for online learning (details and costs about NBC Learn to be provided later).  Lester noted that he was not a super student, preferring hands-on to book learning.  He suggested that he might have had better grades if he had had the online opportunities today’s students have!

His keynote was upbeat and a nice way to end three days of learning at Blackboard World 2009.

{Photo Credits: Sheila Chandler, Glenn Harris}

I thoroughly enjoyed this second day at Blackboard World 2009.

Bud Deihl and I presented this morning on weaving the social web into learning while still using the Blackboard learning management system for the things for which it was good.  We used the class that Jon Becker and I taught last spring as an example.  In that class, Delicious was used to share resources found by students.  Wikispaces was used for collaboration and sharing.  And Wimba Classroom was used to bring in both guest speakers and total strangers who connected with us through Twitter.  Blackboard allowed for effective class management of rosters, grades, and safe discussions in the discussion board.  The web allowed for connections with other professionals involved in educational technology in K-12 settings.  It was not an either-or situation but a both-and.

We had around 130-140 people attend our session, and the dialogue was excellent.  Several reinforced our notion that social skills are a necessary literacy for the 21st Century.  When one person remarked that these skills were needed for 21st Century jobs, I reminded all that we have been in the 21st Century for nine years now!  I pointed them to danah boyd’s post from yesterday that nicely summarized some of our frustrations with faculty negativity about using social connections in education.

Needless to say, Bud and I thoroughly enjoyed both our presentation and the rich discussion it generated.

During the day, I attended several other sessions.  Connie Weber of Blackboard discussed the new Bb Grade Center, which has a quite different look and feel from earlier versions of Bb Gradebook.  I liked some features (locking columns, sorting features, special views) but saw other features as problematic.  Where you used to be able to simply click on a student’s name and see all grades associated with that student, you will now have to create a special report to achieve what one mouse-click did in the past.  As with any “progress”, we will adapt and learn to live with it, but faculty traditionally do not deal well with change…and this is quite a radical change!

I was disappointed with the Birds of a Feather session for Faculty Developers.  It turned out that no one was designated to moderate this session, and so after ten minutes of quiet, we all started sharing some practices, but it was not a session in which I gained much.

I then attended a session entitled “Social Networking, Text Messaging, and Web Technologies to Support Web-Based Teaching and Learning.  From the title, I thought the key words were “teaching and learning,” but it turned out the key word was “support” – in that this was a session about Help Desks targeted at other Help Desks.  Interesting use of social media that I sent back to VCU’s support staff via Yammer…but not what I expected.

The final session of the day was our own Sheila Chandler’s discussion of how Virginia Commonwealth University manages its Blackboard environment to ensure 24/7 availability of a system that is now considered mission critical.  I can only add my thanks for our support team who do an excellent job!

The day ended with a Client Appreciation Party.  The look-alike Barack Obama and George W. Bush had to be seen to be appreciated.  As “W” told Bud, he liked his name because he did not need to come up with a nickname for him!  I did complement “W” and told him I voted for him 3 times, and he asked “Which election?!?”  Good food, good humor, good music, and me with a bum knee!  Oh, well!  The conference wraps up tomorrow.  Overall, it has been a very valuable experience.

Just completed the first day at BbWorld 2009 in Washington DC.  The setting has been wonderful – the new Gaylord Resort in National Harbor.  Bud Deihl and I are attending together and it has been fun hearing his perspective on the various sessions.

There has been an active Twitter backchannel linked here, so check that out.

Seth Godin of Tribes fame gave the keynote, substituting for Sir Ken Robinson.  While I hated to miss Sir Ken, Seth gave a great talk.  In many ways, it was an expanded version of his TedTalk earlier this year.  But one take away was that education was the one industry Ben Franklin would have no problem recognizing.  He likened those of us in education to workers in a balloon factory.  It is nice work and we enjoy creating our balloons, but every now and then, a unicorn comes along and makes us nervous.  I would like to think that our work in online learning is one of those unicorns…and I kind of like the analogy!

After the keynote, I attended “Back to Basics: Five Elements of Exceptional Technology Enhanced Learning,” by Stephen Laster, CIO, Harvard Business School.  It was a good session and about 120 attended this session.  His five elements:

o Styles
* Learning Styles
* Cannot give every student every choice, but you can drive expectations on how learning will be delivered
* Also consider Teaching Styles
o Designs
* Course design is like creation of symphony
* A flow that comes naturally
* Design starts with objectives and outcomes and navigates based on learning and teaching styles
* BIg Question – How much mass customization can be support?
o Context
* Relevance
* While not perfect, students are pretty good at finding info
* My comment to him – all learning is now online  – he agreed
o Community
* New notion of teams
* Tribes
* Collective learning models
o Adaptability
* Leveraging Unplanned Opportunities
* New communication norms

Laster suggested that these elements gave a common language that geeks and non-geeks could get behind.  He did note that there was no need to mention technology – that technology should now be assumed to be transparent.  He also suggested that the overhead in education is administration, and that the internet makes higher education ripe for consolidations.

Jarl Jonas of Blackboard discussed Creative and Proven Ways to Keep Students Engaged.  It was somewhat a sells pitch for Release 9, but I did agree with his roles of instructors in an online class:

o Space Planner (Suggested students see our classes as blindfolded musical chairs)
* Consistency, flow
* eClass online model – Explain, Clarify, Look, Act, Share, Self-Evaluate
o Host
* First Impressions
* Keep Out the Welcome Mat
* Banners
* Orientations
* Icebreakers
o Pace Setter
* Manageable Segments
* Vary Discussions
* Individualize
o Connector
* Connect to Content
* Alternative Assessments
* Connect to Each Other
* Students as Teacher
* Groups
* Blogging
* Connect to Faculty
o Mirror
*Model what you are expecting of students

The corporate keynote after lunch was focused on welcoming Angel, as well as discussing strategic direction for Blackboard NG – universal access, increased ability to measure results, and increased mobile applications.  Ray Henderson discussed customer support and transparency, and Michael Chasen announced that Blackboard had just acquired TerriblyClever Design, creator of the iStanford mobile phone apps.

We attended two more sessions in the afternoon.  The one on Constructivist Approach to Distance Ed showcased some interesting use of videos but never really discussed constructivism.  The other was on faculty development and why faculty fail to come to training.  Their bottom line was that one cannot force training, so they have shifted their efforts to web tutorials and tip sheets.

We wrapped up the day at the poster receptions.  Bud and I talked to some interesting folks from Valdosta State University (smartphones in ed), West Virginia University (course design), and Texas Womens University (Quality Matters assessments).

Looking forward to tomorrow – Bud and I are on first thing in the morning discussing weaving the social web into Bb to make it more of a learning portal.  I hope we pop some balloons!