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!

2008 was certainly a very different year from my 57 previous ones.  Even though I had worked with computers for years and had engaged in online learning for the past dozen years, in many ways I was a creature of the Web 1.0 era.  I did not grow up with interactivity – I grew up with Basic computer language and dial-up modems.  The computer was a tool that I used primarily offline, but I did go online to go places (my online class in Blackboard, Google, Mapquest, even Wikipedia).  In my developmental years, my web interactions were mostly one-way and teacher-oriented.  I remained in control of my journey and knew where I was headed.

With my colleagues at the Center for Teaching Excellence, Jeff Nugent and Bud Deihl, I had begun dabbling in Web 2.0 apps like Ning sites (Classroom 2.0 and College 2.0) and delicious in 2007, but I was still primarily a voyeur.  My colleague Jeff would prod me to try out different sites or check out different blogs, but I did so rather passively.  My “network” for the most part consisted of people I worked with and a couple of others.  At the start of the year, I was subscribing to about ten blogs and a variety of journal and news sites. It was not until January 13, 2008, that a blog post by Michele Martin grabbed me.

Over the course of a couple of days last January, Michele discussed her own growth online and illustrated this with her social media spiral shown above.  I saw myself in that spiral, and recognized that to grow, I needed to move higher up the spiral.  I had moved from isolated consumption to aggregation in 2007, but I was still of the mindset that few would be interested in anything I might have to say.  I really cannot say why, but Michele’s spiral was the tipping point for me that moved me to start my own blog.

Michele cheered me on during that first month, as did Sue Waters, a new “friend” whose advice and guidance helped be grow as a blogger.  My network began to grow as I entered the spiral of commenting and blogging.  By May 2008, I felt confident enough to join the 31-Day Blog Comment Challenge.  It was exhausting but illuminating, and it added new friends like Ken Allen to my network.  Along the way, I learned that my “personal” learning network was really a social one and not an individual one.  I was learning from the likes of Will Richardson, Michele Martin, Wes Fryer, Vicki Davis, Jeff Utecht and many, many more – and that learning was social.  These superstars were interacting and commenting on my comments and blog posts!

As I taught this fall, my frequency of blogging slowed.  Part of that is due to the time spent microblogging in Twitter with many of the same people I follow through their blogs.  Part of it was due to redesigning my online course – Instructional Uses of the Internet.  The redesign was driven in large part by my experience in the spiral.  2008 was the year I made the leap to social networking, and it was transformational.  I now view my life and my job through a different lens than I did a year ago, shaped by the global friendships I have made and continue to make.

Learning in a Flat World.  The name still fits.  This will be my 125th post this year.  There have been 310 comments, comments that helped me learn – and comments from all over the globe.  I am still humbled by the ClustrMap above.  My readership is worldwide with nearly 4,600 hits since I started tracking it last February.  More importantly, I have gotten to know some of the gifted people behind those red dots marking the globe.  I see them as mentors, colleagues, collaborators, and friends.  I see the world as a different place from the way I viewed it pre-2008.

Tom Friedman remarked that the world had gotten flat and closer due to the internet.  While I loved his book and had done several seminars on THE WORLD IS FLAT, I do not think that I really understood that until 2008.

To those who have journeyed with me this past year, my deepest thanks!  You have made me a better educator!

Just think what 2009 might bring!

Will was commenting on sections of Axel Bruns’ new book Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage, and their relevance to the concepts of teachers as co-learners, co-creators, co-producers with their students. In the book, Axel notes:

“…the argument that they {teachers} should be respected by their students is made no longer on the basis of their role in the academic hierarchy, their positions and titles, but by their established track record as produsers themselves.”

(Bruns’ word – one that a few of us question)

Will suggested that we might “at some point begin to value and respect the ability to model the participatory literacies that these tools require as much if not more than the degree on the wall”. A valid question and one I hope to explore next year in a Faculty Learning Community here at VCU on 21st Century literacy. Bud Hunt of St. Vrain Valley School District in northern Colorado had the first of over thirty comments on Will’s post. He first discussed “…this kind of teaching / co-learning / co-creating…” and then added:

“I’m uncomfortable with that word “expert” – I think because it carries with it, to me, the idea that an expert is someone who is finished learning. Probably my own baggage.”

Gary’s reply:

“It is your own baggage. A learning community relies on expertise of varying degrees.

A concern I have about the blogosphere is that it celebrates and elevates newbies and diminishes the importance of prior knowledge, expertise and history.”

There is an old joke about the definition of an expert. Divide the word into two parts – an ex can be defined as “A has been” and a spurt is a “drip under pressure”. We certainly do not want teachers to be seen as has been drips operating under pressure! But I also think we need to recognize that expertise today comes in many forms.

I agree with Gary’s statement that a learning community relies on expertise of varying degrees. His comment that paying attention to newbies in today’s participatory read-write web world diminishes the importance of prior knowledge, expertise, and history is one I have trouble with – it seems to imply that new knowledge being created by co-learning/co-creating students is therefore diminished. I hope he did not mean that.

Given my background – including developing a few years back the largest online college program in the state of Georgia – I bring expertise in online teaching to the table, but with the online world continuing to evolve as it is, I still consider myself more of a newbie. I can celebrate my doctorate without assuming, as a good friend once said, that that gives me any “cred.” I can celebrate my 12 years of teaching online without assuming that my way of teaching is the only way. I certainly recognize that I have grown personally this year through open sharing in the blogosphere and twitterverse, and my online teaching continues to evolve as well. I do try in every online and face-to-face class to build a learning community, and community carries with it certain words of baggage as well, such as trust, sharing, values, and boundaries. One way in which I build that community is by openly sharing my own learning and celebrating those occasions when the students can become the teacher.

This sharing and celebration of learning gets at what both Gary and Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach discussed about community of practice. However, Gary seemed hung up on co-learning. He asked:

“With all due respect, if you place newbies on an “even playing field” with experts, doesn’t that elevate them?”

My blog is called Learning in a Flat World for a reason. I do believe that Tom Friedman had it right – the internet has flattened our educational landscape, and newbies are entering the field with expertises that I do not have. It seems to me that the denigration of newbies and their contributions is not unlike the story of Galileo and the Catholic Church told so well by Dava Sobel. When new paradigms are emerging, those who held leadership positions in the old paradigms have difficulty seeing the new. Gary suggests we avoid buying Bruns’ book. Is not that what the Catholic Church did with Galileo’s book at the time? I would be happier if we all read new ideas like Bruns’, discussed it, took lessons of relevance for application, drew constructive criticism where appropriate, and did not instead simply stand on our laurels as experts in the field. I think that we are under pressure to seek out and find the new paradigms…something I think Will and others do daily in their blog postings.

[Photo Credits: phauly, CoreForce]

In the business world, firms are always attempting to develop a competitive advantage over their competitors. A competitive advantage suggests that a firm is doing something that is distinctive and cannot be duplicated by others.

With that as background, I observed two events in the last 24 hours that have me thinking about competitive advantage…and worried about our country.

First, I had an engaging and energetic asynchronous discussion with my online class last night. This graduate class consists of a group of K-12 teachers working on the masters in education. Through a discussion board, we were “discussing” the merits of Web 2.0 applications in the classroom, as well as the negative aspects of allowing younger children to go online unsupervised. These two topics generated over 100 postings in two days from ten people! The synopsis from these teachers was that schools were forced to block access to web sites to prevent kids from going to unsavory sites…and that these blockages impacted their ability as teachers to model behavior on the internet or highlight new knowledge from web sites they might have discovered at home – only to find blocked once they returned to the classroom. Some of their frustrations lay in the seemingly arbitrary way that different schools and school boards locked down the web, including no differentiation of rights and privileges between teachers and students and limited policy on getting a website approved.

In fact, most of my graduate students cannot access the social bookmarking site I am using in this class due to its being blocked by the county.

So that was on my mind when I came to work this morning. There, I talked with a colleague who had just completed a Skype call with friends in Asia. They were discussing an innovative program being set up in Bangkok where both teacher and student use of Web 2.0 applications will be the norm. Jeff Utecht of Learning 2.0 is involved, and I have already seen some innovative uses he has made of Ning social networking, Twitter, and digital video. As I listened to my colleague, the excitement he felt was palpable.

A side discussion last night with my students involved Tom Friedman’s book, The World is Flat. Tom recently discussed his latest edition in this MIT video. One of my favorite quotes from his book was:

When I was growing up, my parents used to say to me: ‘Finish your dinner—people in China are starving.’ I, by contrast, find myself wanting to say to my daughters: ‘Finish your homework—people in China and India are starving for your job.’

These two events 12 hours apart brought home to me the digital gap emerging with children around the world. Children in this country attend schools that restrict access to the very tools that they will need to be competitive, while children in Asia gain expertise with these very tools. Now granted, the percentage of children in Asia that have access to this wired environment is small, but as that wonderful SlideShow “Shift Happens” noted last year, a small percentage of honors Asian children still outnumber our total school population. As Tom Friedman’s quote suggests, we should be worried about these gifted Asians with high digital literacy skills.

The last 12 hours have brought into focus for me the fact that our diligent efforts to protect our kids in our public schools in many ways simply removes the competitive advantage that they ought to have, growing up in this wonderful nation. As the PBS Special, Growing Up Online, pointed out – the kids know how to take care of themselves and are hungry to use these tools. Our policies across this nation need to relax and give our kids access to the skills they will need to be competitive in a global economy.