“I don’t really care what technology wants. It’s up to people to develop technologies, see what affordances the technology has. Very often these affordances tap into our vulnerabilities. I would feel bereft if, because technology wants us to read short, simple stories, we bequeath to our children a world of short, simple stories. What technology makes easy is not always what nurtures the human spirit.”

In other words, Technology is not like dancing with the bear (the bear tells you when to stop or how to dance). Humans have learned how to train bears. We need to realize that we are in control of technology. We need to stop sitting around worshiping what technology tells us is happening, and start making things happen ourselves.  Too many adults sitting around drooling over youth that we are forgetting that we need to actual be adults. As Bono once said “Many people die at 17 and put the funeral off until they are 77.”

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That sound you hear is the collective world of EduGeeks around the world firmly planting their palm to their fore head. Online lectures are ten times as boring as the face-to-face version, so no wonder they performed so bad.

(that last statement is based on the results of my scientific study of the volume of snores originating from a few online lecture video based courses I know of)

One of the authors even had this to say: “It’s limited evidence, but I think it’s the highest-quality evidence that’s available.”

Sorry, but it is not anywhere near as good as the other evidence out there.  The previous analysis of online learning by the U.S. Department of Education (that this article mentions) actually looked at many different actual forms of online learning. Not the wanna-be online learning beast called video lectures.

UPDATE: just as a note, The Chronicle did edit the original article and title to “more accurately characterize the research.”  The original title is in the link above. Also, the quote from the authors above was also removed, but it was originally there.

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Finally, however, the New York Times brings some reality… and some actual science… into the debate with “The Defense of Computers, the Internet and Our Brains.”  My two favorite quotes:

“Critics of new media sometimes use science itself to press their case, citing research that shows how ‘experience can change the brain.’ But cognitive neuroscientists roll their eyes at such talk.”

…and…

“It could be argued that the Web, which is the ultimate library of words, video, images, interactivity, sharing and conversation, is the quintessential place to learn.”

And thousands of EduGeek around the world then said… “amen”…

Edit: made some changes, just in case people didn’t get my use of humor with the word “stupider.”

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In other words, forecasting the weather is starting to incorporate crowd sourcing.

We have seen a giant push to get websites to work intuitively… and to even start thinking for us.  So on one hand – the Internet is starting to look more like the real world.  But I think even more often we are starting to see the world around us looking more and more like the Internet.  The powers that be are starting to see that there is power in crowd sourcing and social networking.  I wonder what real-life social networks we will see spring up next?

The real question for us is – can we use these ideas in education?  What if we took this weather stations ideas and applied them to a class? What if, instead of one large class, we broke that class down into smaller units based on geographic location.  Each smaller group forms a study group of sorts that watches issues related to the class subject in their area.  The small groups are loosely tied to one another in a way to share what they are learning about the subject.  The small groups would study local events or places. In this situation, the LMS would become more like the newscast – aggregating all of the input in one spot for everyone to benefit.

What if time and location became irrelevant for synchronous classes? What if you were grouped with a small group of people that lived near you when you sign up for a class, and then that group decided what day and time to meet for class?  The instructor would then send out assignments each week or maybe record a video for the group to work through. Maybe the instructor even met with each group.  then the groups send in their work to the class and the instructor aggregates all of the information coming in from each group and summarizes them for the entire class (which would essentially include all small groups no matter where they meet in the world).

Potentially, you could ave hundreds of students all meeting in a synchronous fashion, but all still in a way that fits their schedule.  This is, of course, another area where there is technology to do this… but we need one that is more specifically geared for educators.

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If you take your time and follow the ADDIE process, you will end up with great course content.

For many people, this is a great statement. For an active learning constructivist like myself, this is a bad statement. Sound crazy? Here is why.

First of all, most of us aren’t afforded the time that it takes to go through the entire ADDIE process.  That is just life. People want their class now. “Well then,” you might say, “you are still going through ADDIE whether you realize it or not.” Is that really a good thing? Do I really want to walk into a restaurant someday and have the waiter tell me “sir, you already ate a nice steak. You didn’t realize it, but you really enjoyed it. I have charged your credit card, and thanks for the generous tip.”  You may not agree with me, but personally I want to be aware of what I am doing in life.

Second problem is the major focus on the production of content. Look… I know ADDIE. I teach ADDIE in an online class. People need to know what ADDIE is to see if it works in their corner of the work world.  I have seen hundreds of people go through the ADDIE process, and they always produce a mountain of passive learning-based content. I know ADDIE well enough to know that if you focus enough, you can come out with an active-learning based class.  But there is just something about ADDIE that steers so many people into writing a book. We need a process that just naturally steers people in to creating active, hands-on, higher-order thinking focused lessons, not sit-and-soak passive online lecture reading.

What is my beef with content? Some people today even talk a lot about how quality online classes MUST have quality content. Well, I’m about to say something that may rattle a few cages out there. Ready?

Content production is becoming irrelevant more and more every day.

Do you really think that you are the first and only person to ever write about the subject you are writing about? Let me introduce you to a site you need to use more.  Every piece of content you could possibly write is already online somewhere. Probably half of the opinions you want to write are already somewhere. In education, we need to get over the notion that we are producing so much original content. It is already out there – in probably a hundred places.

Just reading content is becoming less important today. Knowing what to do with content is what people need to know in more and more jobs. They need to evaluate, reflect, connect, and expand ideas. Your students do not need to know how witty you can be in re-stating what is already in the textbook. They need to take content and do something with it.

That is the world we are coming to today. Can you use ADDIE to create a course that prepares students for this? It is possible.  In my experience, it is not likely. That is why we need a new instructional design process.

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For most of us, a blog has been the extent of how we keep the content flowing while avoiding the creation of online textbook monuments.  Blogs are great for that, but they do have a few short-comings.  For one, they tend to be text heavy – which can grow stale after a while. You can insert images, videos, and audio clips in posts – but that takes a lot more time and effort to accomplish even after you have produced the media.  And even if you own a iPhone, blogging is much easier if you are sitting at a desk. Blogging on the go sounds great, but it is still pretty time-consuming.  If only there were a way to make this all easier…

Enter in to this equation Posterous.  Their tag line says it all: “The place to post everything. Just email us. Dead simple blog by email.”  That is the basic idea – but here is low-down. You create an account, based on your email. Then you create an email and send it in.Posterous takes your email and turns it in to a blog post. The subject becomes your title and the body becomes your post. But that is not all. You can add tags with ease.  But you can also attach images, audio files, and videos – andPosterous will crunch it all for you and add it to your post. You can even designate where you want the pictures to go in the post.

But that is not where it stops. Posterous will then push that content out to any site you want it to:  Twitter, Picassa, Flickr, YouTube, Delicious, and even a WordPress blog (there are even a few sites they publish to that I had never heard of).  They only give you about a Gigabyte or so of storage (you can buy more) – but you can always use other sites to hold your larger media – like videos (on YouTube). Posterous does all of the heavy lifting for all of that.

So how can this help the educator/coach/what-we-are-supposed-to-call-ourselves-now? Well, for one – it makes mobile blogging much easier.  There is even an app that lets you take advantage of the built-in camera on your smart phone to shake things up a bit each week. After a couple of weeks of text blogs – why not record yourself and post a video blog? Or why not go somewhere in the city and film something that connects with your content? A civic event, an art exhibit, building architecture, etc?  Maybe even go talk to a colleague or content expert and record the conversation (with permission, of course), and then upload that audio one week as a blog post. I know these will not be the best produced videos in the world, but the spontaneous nature of them will give the students a sense that they are “following you around” as you practically apply what is being taught in class.

Why not even make it seem more like a tour of your subject? You serve as the lead journalist of the group. Take them on a tour of the city from the perspective of your subject. Mix up the media (text, audio, video, images, etc) each week. Don’t get so formal with everything you say. Start off some of your posts with statements like “You know, I was pondering the engineering concepts in this week’s reading while at Starbucks – and I had this revelation about the relationship between this coffee cup and this week’s subject.”  But really film yourself at Starbucks having the revelation.

The less you script it out for yourself, the more fun you will have and the more students will enjoy it.

Remember what I posted a few weeks ago about Delicious as content? Posterous can push your content to Delicious. So add your class tags every week and your content will be inserted in to your class stream on Delicious seamlessly.

Oh – and don’t forget those web cams on your desktop computer. You don’t necessarily have to have a smart phone to do any of this. I know this might be hard to believe, but good revelations can also hit us while we are sitting at our desks.  So do some media productions there if you like.

(this post was cross-posted at Soundings)

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In other words: BORING!

The classes that most students end up liking are taught by instructors that are talking to them about current events and new information related to their subject. The course that you get this semester is slightly different than the one last semester. In other words – there is a a greater value in showing up to this course, because it will be interesting and relevant (and slightly different from what your roommate learned last semester). The instructor is reading and researching the subject and keeping you up to date on the course subject.

But… can this be done online… where classes are usually canned and solidified months before the first day of course?

Through the modern miracle of technology, the answer is yes – if you plan ahead.

You are probably teaching a course in a subject that you like. That means you are also probably reading blogs, articles, journals, and other websites related to that subject.  What if your students could follow you as you do all of this reading? What if they could research with you – and this research became the course content? What if they discussed what you read that week, instead of some canned, stale question you stuck in a “discussion board” months ago?

Technically, this is possible with a blog. But do you really want to log in and create an entire blog post for every article, blog post, etc, etc. that you find… several times a week? Sound too tiring to you? Well then I have two words for you:

Social Bookmarking

You have probably heard of sites like Delicious and Digg.  Did you know that you can use these sites as the content for your course? Ditch the pre-processed cheese html zip file, pdf, or (shudder) audio lecture recording and go flexible, relevant, and easy.

Here is one idea: create an account in Delicious. Then come up with a tag just for each class – edtc3320, for example.  Then install a Delicious bookmark plug-in for FireFox or Chrome (if you are using Internet Explorer, well… I am sorry).  You can then send your students to the page for your specific class tag, and they can use whatever RSS reader they want to follow you. You can even create multiple tags for different classes.

As you come across different articles and links that would apply to your class – bookmark them in delicious and tag them for the class you want to read them. Maybe even add a second link of ‘edtc3320week1′ or whatever to help students organize them better. Delicious lets you write short comments on each link – so let students know why you bookmarked the link. Then add a discussion question for each link. For your class discussion, tell students that they have to answer at least one question raised during each week’s readings.

But don’t ditch the blog just yet – you are the content expert, so you have great insights to add to everything you read, and delicious has a short limit on comments.  So blog about what you want, and then bookmark your blog post in Delicious. It gets added to the flow that students have to read each week.

Dynamic content, active learning, reflection, and rapid course design all in one neat package! Want to be really fancy? Get a RSS feed widget, and then insert that in to your LMS course for the students that don’t get RSS. They can just click on the content page and it will be there for them in the walled garden…errr… Learning Management System.

Want to see what this could look like? Well, as I find resources I like online, I have created a Delicious tag just for EduGeek Journal readers to follow:

http://delicious.com/grandeped/edugeekjournal

Follow me in your favorite RSS reader to see what this could be like.

{this post is being cross-posted at Soundings: Best Practices in Teaching and Technology]

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Barker pointed out that with more tech-savvy learning, the curriculum will have to change, too. He and his wife funded a five-year experiment in Chattanooga, Tenn., to create a 21st-century curriculum founded not just on learning the ABCs, but also the “EFGs”: Eco ed (“How do we interact with the planet?”), Futures ed (“How do I shape my future?”), and Global ed (“What is my relationship with other human beings?”).

Each student had to learn a 500-word vocabulary in six languages and, in sixth grade, choose one in which to be fluent, including cultural knowledge. Physical fitness focused on lifelong sports such as tennis and golf, not team activities. Grade levels were kindergarten “through competence” — that is, when students accomplished all of the program’s lofty goals, they graduated.

Personally, I get more excited about these approaches to changing education than others.  The “death to the university” concept is too much “baby and bathwater” to me, and the open education movement is too caught up in hopeless romanticism (or unhealthy bitterness) for my taste. I don’t think people in either one of these movements have really thought about what would happen if they got their way.

Think about it – you don’t want to drive across a bridge designed by someone that learned engineering through following an engineering blog do you? Or, for that matter, get operated on by a surgeon that learned surgery by watching a bunch of YouTube videos.  After Universities die and education goes free and open, people will begin to realize that we need to be able to prove that people learned what they needed to in order to do certain things. Then we will need to hire people to track who learned what, and those people will need a place to work and store records. We’ll go out and buy the empty college buildings, which will cost money, so we will start charging for education again. We’ll just end up right back where we started.

Or, we could listen to the people that want to reform what we have and end up in a better place overall in the end.

Anyways, the article I mentioned above covers a lot of ground in 4 pages, so give the whole thing a read with an open mind. Assessment, socialization, and realistic school reform (i.e. ideas for change that involve educators keeping their jobs) are all covered.

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I’m no fuddy-duddy open education hater myself… but I have felt a little discomfort over several aspects surrounding the open education movement.  One of the oddest to me has been the predictions that universities will disappear by the year 2000.  Opppsss… missed that one… I mean 2010 for sure.  Oh, wait… gonna have to make that 2020 now.  I wonder how long people have been predicting the death of the university now?  I remember those claims associated with closed circuit tele-courses many decades ago.

Finally, though, we have George Siemens breaking through the cute kitten syndrome barrier (as he calls it) on open education and raising some concerns that need to be addressed… not as a person that hates change for the sake of hating change, but as a person who likes the ideal but wonders if things aren’t going that well overall:

http://www.connectivism.ca/?p=151

One really disturbing aspect of the open education movement is the continued association with the fragmentation of the entertainment business (mp3s, Hulu, etc, etc).  I have no love for greedy music companies, but the fragmentation of that industry is seen by many as destroying it.  Less and less money is filtering to the artists, and most attempts to fix that have not worked.  Do we really want to change our educational systems to mirror a system that is choking the life out of the very people it needs to survive?  Sure, you will still have people making music even if there is no money in it, but you can only get so far on free services and volunteer work.  Trust me – I have tried.  Eventually, you have to have money flowing in to a system in order to keep the people in that system alive (at least as long as food costs money).  That flow of money will not happen with fragmentation on the level that we are seeing in the music business.

But that is how many have proposed we get rid of universities: make teaching volunteer work.  Really?  I would have to say “good luck on that one!”  How many classes can a full-time worker, parent, spouse, etc. handle in their spare time?  Many of you reading this are wondering what this spare time myth is.  One professor typically teaches something like 3-5 classes.  This would mean that someone out there (this faceless entity that will someone guide education once universities die) will need to grow the general pool of teachers by three to five fold to get all of these volunteers.  Did I miss the end of the teaching shortage some where?  Was there a memo I missed?

Of course, I know I am dealing with some of the more radical ideas out there.  But they always get brought into the mix when open education is discusses.  Don’t get me wrong – I think at its core, open education is a good idea.  I am just glad it is finally getting some close scrutiny.

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Bitstrips are quick to make and they can convey information to your students visually without much effort. It is also a simple way to create a static avatar for your course.

Bitstrips are not just for instructors, either. You could assign comic strip writing as creative exercises. A great thing about Bitstrip comics is that they can be edited by more than one person, if the designer desires. Therefore, students can work on creating a strip together. For example, a group could design a strip reflecting their interpretation of something that motivated a character to do what she or he did in a novel. Or perhaps they could draw up a case study graphically reflecting a prescribed course of actions.

Bitstrips are easily transferable, both on-line and off. They can be embedded into websites, downloaded as a image file, e-mailed and/or printed. Clearly this flexibility makes Bitstrips quite open as an assessment opportunity.

So, with that being said, I would be really interested to know what uses for this you might have. Send me a note @clongstr on Twitter and I will gather them to post later.

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