EduGeek Journal

I have talked to many people that have taken a class online entirely through FaceBook. I can honestly say that none of them liked it.  They found it really hard to go back and read things they missed, or to keep track of what was said in the class group. FaceBook groups and pages are good ideas that are poorly implemented in the overall program, so I can see their points. But I think the core of FaceBook’s success rests squarely on good, old-fashioned educational theory… and most educational software companies are missing that and still missing the boat on how to really engage learners online.

Whether you follow Dewey or social constructivism or connetivism, the main thread to most educational theories is that we learn best when we are sharing what we have learned with others (or when we are teaching others, or making social connections, or whatever your particular slant is… they all say the same basic thing).  We also know that we humans are curious creatures at our core that like to learn.

What if FaceBook (and Twitter and blogging for that matter) is not about narcissism…. but about us sharing what we have learned? What if the whole genre of “Web 2.0″ is really just the best implementation of educational theory that we have observed so far (and is popular not because it is cool, but because it is helping us to learn)?

“Okay,” you might be saying “I see how sharing links to current events and fighting for our political beliefs might be learning… but what about all of those posts that are just about our lunch? How is that learning? That has got to be pure narcissism, right?”

Don’t we need to learn as much about ourselves as we can? How can we understand the world around us, if we can’t even figure out ourselves? What if all of those so-called narcissistic status updates and tweets and blog posts are just us learning about ourselves…. in the best way possible, by sharing what we have learned with others?

The more I think about it, the more I think that is mostly what it is. As many times I have read someone’s update about brushing their teeth, I have also seen the profound update where that same person has made a major self-discovery. And this profound experience helps me learn about myself… making all of the mundane updates that I read worth it.

To be sure, FaceBook is really just a mirror that reflects more of our true personality than we would like… the part that we hide behind masks when we are in face-to-face communication.  So, if you are a very narcissistic person, then your status updates will be narcissistic in nature. But if you are a learner at heart (as I believe most people are), then FaceBook is just reflection of your desire to learn – both about the world around you and yourself. And about how to brush your teeth. Learning is not always pretty :)

Of course, FaceBook is missing some keys administrative details that make it difficult for the focused learning that needs to happen in a true class setting. If only ed tech companies would catch on to this and take their tools in a different direction, I think we could have some truly great tools created.

That is exactly what Harriet and I are trying to do with the “New Vision for the LMS” series that we are pushing for. Hopefully, there will be more on this in the new year. For now, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

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For the few that haven’t heard yet – Blackboard and Desire2Learn have both reached an agreement to stop all legal activities against each other. And that is about all we know about it, because both sides are not revealing any reason or motive for this move. Many are happy to hear this and are proclaiming that we can finally move on in the educational world, instead of worrying about the future apocalypse.

Of course, there are those that see something ominous brewing in this decision, while others are just down right concerned.  Count me in the concerned camp.  Can we really move on, when we have no idea why we are moving on?  I am sure there are always a few lemmings that question where the group is heading, only to be shushed by the others. “Just be quiet and be glad we are getting such a great view of the scenery off of this…..”

I could be happier about this if I actually knew why it was over (even if I didn’t agree with the reasons). Did Desire2Learn just run out of funding for further action? Did Blackboard realize they were losing the battle and decide to get out before the P.R. nightmare got worse? Did Blackboard finally get a clue and realize their patent was bogus? Or maybe even realize what they were doing was hurting the educational community more than helping, and decide to do the right thing?

(had to pause for a second…. tough to ROTFL and type at the same time…)

But as many have pointed out, this settlement is probably going to be worse than any possible final outcome of the original legal action. Is Blackboard going to sue others now? Are they going to file more patents and claim to invent stuff that they really didn’t?  We have no idea.  What if you want to start a new company, with a fresh idea? Will you find yourself in the cross hairs of a massive legal team, just because you used an obvious idea that they claimed to have invented? If we don’t know why this process was stopped, we can’t even possibly know where to move forward. Too many land mines hidden out there now.

Anyways…. The biggest problem is that we see a clear example of Blackboard breaking a vow. They vowed to appeal this to the Supreme Court and then didn’t.  What does that say about their vows to not hit open-source companies like Moodle and Sakai with lawsuits? Better start watching your back some more, Martin Dougiamas!

Of course, Desire2Learn valso broke a vow: to fight this to the end. I guess it is just the Blackboard Effect. Heck, they even got the CEO of the once-rebellious Angel LMS to turn into a boring corporate suck-up, so I guess they can turn Desire2Learn into complacent zombies.  Who will probably get bought soon.  Blackborg indeed.

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Digital Natives are better at multitasking than older generations? Please.  My generation (Gen X) practically perfected multi-tasking.  Let’s take a look back to the 80s for a second:

• Our multitasking was in the form of listening to a Walkman while sitting in front of the TV and doing homework – none of which were made for multitasking. So you can do_______ and ______ and _________ with a computer and iPhone and all that. Yawn. Computers and iPhones and all that are practically designed for multi-tasking. Next I guess you want a cookie for learning to drive a car on a road.
• Social networking happened online back then too – it was just over a telephone party line instead of an Internet line.
• We always had to have a phone with us back then, too – but for us it meant a pocket full of quarters to hit every available pay phone there was. Which was hard to do in public because of the crowds of teenagers standing around them.
• Texting happened all the time in the 80s. Back then, it was done with a piece of paper (we probably went through a tree a day sending short pointless messages back and forth).
• In fact, we pretty much did everything you can now do on a cell phone just using a pencil and piece of paper.
• Twitter? Please. We could get short updates about life to an entire school in the span of two class periods just using paper and no electricity. And that still worked even if your cell battery went dead.
• Writing on FaceBook walls? Too temporary for us. We had this thing called a bathroom wall. Much more interesting and permanent. Well, at least until the school budget allowed for a new can of paint.

Still think I am wrong? Still convinced that digital natives are totally different than older generations? Then here you go: a recent report from Forrester has been tearing down a few stereotypes about the so-called “digital natives.” Turns out, they aren’t necessarily as different from past generations as some would make them seem:

The results, published this month, portray a generation that, in some ways, is more traditional than some media executives might fear. And it seems that Morgan Stanley’s intern, Matthew Robson, is out of sync with the mainstream of European teenagers in a few of his media preferences.

Who is Matthew Robson? Well, he is 15-year old intern for Morgan Stanley that created a stir recently by publishing a report that some said proved the stereotypes about digital natives are true.  Like, for example, digital natives watch less traditional television because they are watching online video sites like YouTube.  Not true, according to actual research: they still spend more time watching television than they spend online.  Wow – what a novel concept. Research people’s statements, rather than take them as Gospel truth.

And this statement is really going to rock your boat if you blindly listen to the Marc Prensky’s of the world:

Instead, wrote Nick Thomas, an analyst at Forrester, “real-world social interaction with friends remains important for online teens.”

Of course, none of this is any surprise to those of us that know any real teenagers.

You can read the New York Times summary of this story here.

I’ve told this story before, but this report reminds me of the time I went up to actual teenager and told them that I heard that “email is for old people.”  That person’s response? “What idiot said that? I hate it when people my age just say stupid things to get attention, and then old people run with it like it is the truth or something.”

It is about time that someone did some actual research.

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Earlier this year, Harriet and I went to a few conference presenting on “Will Web 3.0 Change the Way We Educate?“  It was a fun presentation that involved play dough, audience participation, and our New Vision for the Learning Management System.

As we were getting ready to present another round of conferences in 2010, we realized that the term “Web 3.0″ is soooo 2009. So we updated the presentation:

TITLE: The Web is Changing. Time to Dethrone the LMS!

ABSTRACT: Rapid changes in online learning concepts – such as learning communities, personal learning environments and complexity – are driving a need to dismantle the Learning Management System as we know it. LMS software programs and instructional design theories are in danger of becoming obsolete if they don’t evolve. Students need a place to connect and collaborate at complex levels rather than hide inside a “walled garden.” Two colleagues at UT Arlington will present a new paradigm that is intended as an innovative alternative to the existing LMS concept as we know it.

We really just noticed that the typical “Web 3.0 concepts” weren’t driving the need for change as much as some of the concepts mentioned above are. The main gist of the presentation will still stay the same, of course – we would like to see LMS/CMS/VLE concept go away, to be replaced by a Social Learning Environment or a Personal Learning Network Aggregator of some kind. And there will be even more play dough!

We also plan to have a few new things, like an interesting viral video that will mock the LMS mercilessly and even a working model of New Vision to also show everyone.

First up on our conference schedule will be the EDUCAUSE Southwest Regional Conference in February.  Stop by and say “Hi” to us if you are there!

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The new year is almost upon us. Resolutions are being made as predictions are flying left and right.  Oh… and nothing that was supposed to die this year has died yet.

So now it is time to just change the year on those predictions to ‘2010′ and hope that no one notices that our predictions from past years haven’t come true.

I apologize for the lack of posts this month, but most of the EdTech news has been so monotone recently.  Google Wave, Google Wave, Google Wave. I love to explore emerging technology just like the next person, but there are other things out there.  And many of them we can actually use now in education… not wait until some secret date in the future finally arrives.

The college I work for recently hosted a presentation by  Daniel M. Russell, a research scientist with Google. His insights into search were fascinating.  And his comments about Google Wave were concerning. He bluntly stated that the interface isn’t working for people at all. Then he clarified what the current status of “preview” means to Google: they can change or cancel the Wave project at any time if they want.  The email killer itself could get canned if Google just decides one day that it isn’t cutting it.

And just why does everything in the world of technology have to die? Why are there so many technology killers out there? iPhone killers. Email killers. Windows killers. University killers. Sheesh.

Why do we have to get rid of something just to get something new? Email works just fine (and 94% of the online activity of the millennial generation is spent using email (still), so I doubt it is just for old people). Why do we have to kill it? Why not use it with Google Wave?

I am one of those odd people that will listen to a vinyl record and an mp3 in the course of one day. I’ve always felt that if something has value now, it will have value in the future. New ideas and products should come along side existing ones, not kill them altogether.

Well, except for 8 tracks. Those never made sense to me.

Of course, since nothing that is predicted to die actually ever dies, I am really just making a big deal about nothing. I guess I am just growing bored waiting for people to realize that nothing ever really dies in the technology world, and that Google Wave is still too around the corner to be any use to us right now. Then maybe we can get some interesting ideas flowing again.

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Yesterday I got to meet the original EduPunk himself, Jim Groom.  Not sure who Jim Grrom is?  Well, watch this video for an idea:

Jim has some great ideas for what you can do with blogs in education.  The basic ideas can be found here:

http://blog.uta.edu/~jgroom/presentation/

Also, you can see how they actually use these ideas at UMWBlogs.org.

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Finally – my Google Wave invite is here. I have heard that if you get invited by someone else, don't mention their name on a public site – because that person will get inundated by requests for an invitation!  Of course, the person that sent me an invite knows who they are – so to that person: thank you! You rock!

If you are still wondering what Google Wave is, you can head over to the handy Complete Guide to Google Wave for more information.  Of course, I am in Wave now and I still can't really describe what it is that well.  You see, it really just isn't what email would be if email was invented today. Gmail is what email would be if it was invented today.  Email is just electronic mail – a system to send messages and documents electronically.  You can't really change that much, because it was never meant to be synchronous communication. Even though I have been in many situations where the emails are flying so fast and furious, you kind of have to wonder…

So far, Wave seems more like a slick mixture of a synchronous wiki and a synchronous discussion board.  The ability to slip in and out of the conversation – to go from asynchronous to synchronous as you wish – is really cool. What few plug-ins they have are pretty cool. Watching others type in real time is creepy, but still kind of cool.

But this is the problem I now have – I have to separate the geek side of me from the educational side of me.  The geek side of me loves Wave so far, even though I barely ever use it (because so few people I know are on it).  The educational side of me is a little more skeptical.  It is true that Wave is information overload. Even one active wave is hard to keep up with, because people can be adding information and responding to other people all over the place.  You can be reading the bottom of a wave and find out that a better exchange is taking place two scroll lengths up. Kind of frustrating.

I have seen many of the long lists of ideas people have for educational uses.  Which all look nice, but you have to realize that you can also come up with a long list of educational ideas for NotePad (I have seen them).  The problem is, most of those ideas sound good on paper, but they turn out pretty boring in implementation.  Will people be able to implement these Google Wave ideas in an effective manner?

That remains to be seen. The learning curve for Wave is steep. Second Life is floundering in many areas because of this same issue, while FaceBook keeps growing and growing.  FaceBook is way more complex than Wave, but it is fairly simple to ease yourself in and then explore new features as you feel comfortable.  I don't know if I see Google Wave as being as simple to ease in to. Maybe they are working on that.  All of this is just to say that Google is going to have to get Wave to appeal to more than geeks like me for it to go anywhere.

I also find it interesting that Mozilla has recently announced the Wave-like Raindrop product.  Raindrop is different in many aspects, but I already understand what they are going for… while I still struggle to get exactly what Wave is going for.  I bring up Raindrop because competition is good, and I think the best thing for Wave will be a good, solid competitor.  So keep your eye on Raindrop.

Of course, don't let my reality check fool you – I will still be using Google Wave as much as I can as long as I can.  And no, I don't have an invites to give!

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The university I work for recently hosted a luncheon with Douglas Rushkoff, social media theorist and author of books such as Life, Inc.  If you haven't heard of Rushkoff, he has some pretty good ideas (some that are fully radical in nature) that are all good food for thought. He was asked to comment about online learning and what he thought of it. His response was, unfortunately, based on the same mistake that I see many people make when discussing distance learning. He compared an excellent face-to-face course with a mediocre-to-poor online course.

We have all had really good face-to-face courses – taught by an energetic, enthusiastic instructor that really had some creative teaching methods. The truth of the matter is that most face-to-face courses are not like this.  Excellent face-to-face instruction requires a certain personality type… one that is semi-rare.  Rare enough that I can probably safely say that there is only a fraction of the number of really excellent teachers out there to cover all the classes that are being taught face-to-face.  Not to mention that even the best teachers will have off-days from time-to-time due to getting tired or even sick.

An excellent online class, by contrast, is more dependent on the skills of the instructor, rather than the personality.  These skills can be taught if the instructor is getting it wrong. You can't teacher people how to be an interesting, entertaining public speaker – but you can teach them how to build community, social presence, and immediacy, as well as how to design activities and assignments to take advantage of the online setting.  Not to mention that the more asynchronous a course is in design, the less it depends on an instructor's enthusiasm or energy level at a specific time of the day.

This is why I feel that online courses have a more realistic long-term sustainability than face-to-face courses. You need teachers with skills and not a certain personality to make them good.  We will always need face-to-face courses for certain subjects and just to keep human contact alive, but I think it would also be a good idea to transition the face-to-face courses that aren't working in to an online environment (training the instructors that don't have the personality to teach face-to-face on how to run a successful online course).

Rushkoff also quoted someone from Second Life as saying that SL will be photo realistic in 10 years time.  Rushkoff disagreed with this, stating that no matter how much we advance, something else will come up to keep it from being realistic.  I have to also slightly disagree here. If you go back in time and study art history, you will come to a time when people thought you would never have totally realistic paintings and portraits of real-life people.  They thought there would always be a limit to paintings.  Then, the camera was invented, and before long… you had totally realistic portraits.  I think with virtual worlds (and computer graphics in general), it is only a matter of some new discoveries to make them totally photo realistic.

I don't want to make it seem like I am picking apart everything Rushkoff says – those were just two points I wanted to comment on.

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I have to admit that I am not an expert in Personal Learning Environments. I really don’t follow much of the thought on them, not because they aren’t important, but mainly because I tend to focus on other areas of education. But when it comes to the “New Vision for Learning Management Systems” discussion, they are very important… so I want to talk about where they fit in the New Vision equation.

In many ways, the Learning Management System is the antithesis of the Personal Learning Environment.  So, as we talk about creating a new vision for the LMS, are we talking about something that competes with or super-cedes the PLE as well as the LMS?

I hope not, and here is why.  The New Vision for LMS is not meant to create a new way of managing learning, but rather it is meant to get rid of the current idea of an LMS totally and go in a different direction.  That different direction would take the focus off of a centralized learning management system and place the focus on the personal learning environment.  The difficulty of that is the personal part – what you personally choose to use might not easily interface with what I choose, or might require a lot of work for me to find. Then multiply that by 30 (or more) for the instructor.  We want to begin to think of the LMS as a PLE aggregator.  The main reason for this is to make it easier for instructors to track student learning and to assign grades or give feedback, but another good reason is to also help other students track each other more easily.  Sure, there are systems now (such as RSS feed readers and bookmarks) that can help us track everyone’s personal stuff, but these weren’t really designed for educational purposes. I don’t know about you, but I am tired of cobbling together stuff that was made for other purposes in to a franken-monster collection of good ideas that kind of works. I want something made by educators, for educators!

Of course, even though we are working on a sample idea of how this would work (built on top of Moodle), we also envision that this will not take on the form of one “New Vision LMS” program that everyone would have to use.  We would like to start seeing all LMS solutions drop the LMS label and go for the SLE (social learning environment) approach.  We would like to see an SLE built on top of Google Wave… and as plug-ins for WordPress… and as a whole host of options that aggregate PLE in different formats, so that you can choose which SLE design works best for your class.

Ultimately, we don’t just want to see the students get a personal learning environment – we want to see teachers get to choose a personal teaching enviornment.  Wouldn’t it be great if, someday, your institution doesn’t have to choose a program for delivering classes online?  As an instructor, you choose the one you want, plug-in a custom code from your school, and then your Personal Teaching Environment (where ever it resides) would be plugged in to your school? Students would be automatically enrolled, grades would be ported back and forth, etc.?  Student authentication / log in would be handled by a central program on your school servers maybe, but clicking on the link for your class takes them to your class where ever you choose to host it.  Maybe it is in a Google Wave, maybe on your own website where you self-installed your own program, or maybe even on a third party hosting solution.  The technology exists to do this now – we are just trying to get it all put together. Just wish that it didn’t take so long to get the first Alpha release out there!

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I wish I could tell you that I have been secretly playing with Google Wave for the last week, and this was my report on what I found. But, sadly – no Google Wave invites have appeared in my account. The good news is that I finally got my Google Voice invite! (how long has that been out?)

What really worries me is that there are probably about a thousand or so technophobes out there sitting on their invites because they had no idea what they were signing up for. “Oh, Google Wave. That sounds so nice and refreshing, don’t you know. Sure I’ll sign up. Is it a new soft drink or something? Well, I’ll agree to all this mumbo-jumbo talky-talky on this page and find out.”

Anyone got a spare invite? So far, I have read some good feedback and some not-so-enthusiastic feedback. I am guessing that some of the negative feedback is coming from people that just like to be anti-hype. There have even been people that have made a list of Top 10 Google Wave problems. Already? Sounds kind of speculative at best, and others have already successfully argued that it is too early to dismiss the G-Wave so easily.

The real question is whether or not Google will draw out this private Beta stage so long that people will stop caring about Wave by the time it is open to everyone. If you want to change the way that people communicate online, you’ve got to get everyone on board pretty quickly. People can prove to be resistant to change if it takes too long.

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