Policy

The World is Not Flat – It is a Plateau

Yes, I am referring to The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman… and I must admit that I have not (yet) read it. I have been to a large number of conferences and blogs that discuss this book – some praising it, and some disagreeing with it. I think the book sounds interesting, and I will read it soon and probably agree with many of the ideas covered in it. But, I have to say that I do tend to fall on the side that disagrees with the basic thought that globalization has leveled the playing field for all countries.

Friedman apparently went to India and had a revelation that globalization had changed core economic concepts there. The funny thing is, I have also traveled to India. My experience there tended to reveal to me how wide the gap is between countries that have wide-spread access to electricity, technology, and the Internet – and those that do not. Most people in India (a large percentage, actually) do not have access to all of three of these.

My theory is that the world is not flat – but it does have one large plateau surrounded by badlands. When I was in school, they taught us that plateaus are mountains with flat tops. On a family trip I discovered that this example was kind of an over simplification. I was following our trip on a map and noticed it said we were on a plateau at that moment. I looked out of the car and thought “we’re not on some flat mountain – we are just in the middle of a flat desert!” The thing about plateaus is that they are relatively flat – but while you are on them, you can usually only see the plateau itself for as far as the eye can see. Until you come up on the edge and see how high up you are.

Those that see the world as flat are on the plateau – all they can see is the flatness. So, they think the world is flat because they haven’t explored around enough to see otherwise. Leave the plateau and you will find a virtual badlands of rough terrain, pot holes, difficult terrain, and dead ends.

If we try to teach people in the badlands how to work in a flat world, they will fail. Because it is not flat for them. We could try to teach them how to climb up to the plateau, but what if they are not able to? What if they don’t want to? Why should we force them to do things our way? The badlands are a beautiful area of rugged scenery that don’t necessarily need to be abandoned. They really aren’t “bad” at all – that just happens to be the name for them.

Those of us in the technology world need to think how we can adjust our strategies to include those that are not constantly connected to a high speed internet connection through multiple devices 24 hours a day… because the edge of the plateau is not just dividing us from people on the other side of the world. It is separating us from people just down the road from us.

The Death of the Learning Management System? (part 3)

This is the third post in a series examining this topic. See the first two posts for background and a brief disclaimer that sets the stage for this discussion.

So, I’ve been going on about how we need to save the Learning Management System. I gave a list of things that need to happen with current LMS programs for this to happen. But – we’re not there yet. What can one do with the current LMS programs to integrate global communication, ongoing class communication, and active learning?

To be honest with you, if the LMS can’t add this kind of stuff in someday, then it should die. For now, all you can do is link to other sites from inside of your LMS.

Since we are not there yet (Blackboard, Moodle, and a few other companies have shown signs of promise in this area), here are some ideas of what schools and universities can do in the mean time. I will start with the most radical one first.

Install and use an LMS that has already integrated social networking tools. I only know of one that exists so far, but there may be others out there. As reported here last year, DrupalEd mixes parts of Moodle, Drupal, Elgg, OpenID, and MediaWiki together. It is still new, and some people tend to be squeamish when going with solutions this new, but it is open-source and available for use.

Install tools school-wide on your servers. Want to use blogs or wikis in learning? Then get together others that also want to and petition your IT department to install them on your school server. This has proven successful at UT Arlington. Blogs, wikis, and other tools have been opened up to faculty, students, groups, or anyone else employed with the university to use. The log in for these are also tied to the University’s NetID system, so everyone uses one password for everything… including the existing WebCT LMS.

Decide as a school or university to officially use a specific website for a specific tool. This is sometimes easier said than done. Maybe you can’t install a certain tool on your school servers, or it makes more sense to use another site (like in social networking). Then why not make it easier on everyone and decide on an official one to use – maybe even setting up an official presence on that site?

Decide as a program to use a set of websites. Setting up your own blog or choosing an official social networking site really sets up extra areas for students and teachers to bring people in to your school’s online presence. But you also want to get students out on the web, interacting with others outside of your school (like on discussion boards or blogs). If students have to go to one site for one class, and then another site for another class – they will end up with too many sites to track and will eventually dump some. Why not work together with other instructors in, say, a specific program to choose two or three good sites for your program. Sites that students will use in all classes. Give teachers the freedom to have class-specific sites, but also create a school presence on forums, wikis, blogs, and other sites related to your subject that can keep students connected after the class is over.

Create one instance of a tool per class for all students to use each semester. Sometimes, you might just have to go at this active learning thing alone. Consider having students contribute to a group project – say a blog or wiki – instead of creating individual projects. For example, create a class blog and put students in groups. Each group posts with a tag that identifies the group they are in. When a new semester starts, keep the same blog going, with the same tags, but with new students in the groups. Old students can come back to the same blog, and people from around the world can visit the blog to contribute to the conversation. If you have every student create their own blog every semester, you and the students will have a hard time keeping track of each other’s blogs, and outside people will be less likely to join the conversation.

No matter what you do with any tool, try to keep four goals in mind: keep it manageable (especially over the long haul or for future adopters), create a place where the world will want to come join with you and contribute, get students out on the web contributing to the global conversation, and create methods to continue the class’s global conversation after the class is over.

Have any other ideas? Share them in the comments.

The Death of the Learning Management System? (part 2)

This is the second post in a series examining this topic. See the first post for background and a brief disclaimer that sets the stage for this discussion.

As I mentioned in a previous post, there are several concepts in the “Death to the LMS” campaign that I agree with. Here is a list of some the ideas that I think all online instructors should use when designing an online course:

  • To truly learn, students need to get out of their LMS shells. They need to engage the world around them – publishing content for people other than classmates to read, and participating in the global discussion that surrounds the topics covered in class.
  • Students need to think critically and blog their experiences for others to read.
  • Students need to work collaboratively with other students in their class.
  • Students need to socialize with other students that aren’t in the same classes they are in.
  • Students need to continue learning on a particular subject beyond the last class date.

These ideas I agree with – mainly because they are all forms of active learning. But I don’t feel that these are necessarily reasons that we should kill the LMS. I feel that that these are reasons that we should push LMS companies to add some features and functionality to their programs, rather than dumping the LMS and using websites that offer these tools.

The main reason I fell this way is future scale. Dumping the LMS and doing stuff from the list above in a set of free Web 2.0 sites is great for one class. Your students will probably learn a lot and love the class. But what happens when more classes at your school or university begin adopting this? At some point, it will become too scattered and unmanageable for your students… and for your school. Social interactions will suffer. The web landscape will be littered with the shells of dead blogs and wikis, abandoned because students had too many to keep up with.

I think a better approach that can sustain a manageable future scale for active learning is to push LMS companies to add functionality to their programs that will allow educators to move students outside of the LMS when needed. Some of the things we could push companies to do:

  • Add a multilevel blog system. One that gives each user a blog, as well as course blogs, teacher blogs, group blogs, etc. Give users the ability to publish one entry to multiple sources. Give each blog the ability to be seen by the outside world with a short, simple url (but keep the ability to hide it behind the LMS password system for users that are still learning or need to limit access for whatever reason. And, yes, there are good reasons for that.)
  • Add a social network to your program. They are not that complex. Just look at the popular ones (MySpace, Facebook) for ideas. Even go so far as to give your networks the ability to interface across colleges, or even with existing social networking sites.
  • Create extension tools for classes that allow certain activities to continue beyond the course cut-off date.

However, once you get all of these tools in to an LMS, you could still run into problems. As long as courses are trying to interface with the global idea-exchange marketplace, while still operating as a lone ranger class – separate and not connected to other courses at their own school or university – you are going to end up with a different set of problems. Instructors will actually need to get together with other instructors at their school or in their program and map out what students will learn, as well as what tools and techniques they will use in those classes. Think about it: what if five classes in the same Spanish program all went to five random discussion boards over five different semesters to participate in the global discussion on Spanish culture? There would be a ton or repetition and scattered-ness. But what if all the Spanish instructors got together and picked two or three discussion boards that all students would participate on across all five classes? I hate to use a cliché word – but that would be synergy.

Next time I will look at specific suggestions that classes and programs can use to actually accomplish this kind of synergy and active learning, even if their LMS does not support it.

The Death of the Learning Management System? (part 1)

First of all, I want to preface this with a reality check: I am only talking about ideal situations here. I realize that many educators are hampered from realizing the ideal due to budgetary constraints. I am a huge supporter of doing the best with what you can get. I love creative solutions. But I also love discussing what the best ideal is. This discussion will be in that realm.

I have been noticing a slight under-current theme at a few conferences and on a few blogs recently: people calling for the death of the learning management system (or the course management system or the virtual learning environment, depending on your favorite term for this tool). What is usually meant by this is dumping a centralized program – such as Moodle, Desire2Lean, Blackboard/ WebCt, etc – and using some free online tool such as a blog to administer your online course. The “free” part of this is gaining the approval of many educators on limited budgets, but the idea is also gaining traction with people that do have the budget for an LMS.

I love free tools online. I have to resist blogging daily about the free, great tools available at Zoho.com. But I personally feel that, instead of calling for the death of the LMS, we (the EdTech community) should be calling for specific changes to the LMS that fits our needs.

I get the attraction of sites like Facebook, Blogger, WordPress, pbWiki, etc in online learning. They are all social constructionist sites, and social constructionism is proving to be very effective in online learning. Even LMS providers like Moodle that are based on social constructionist pedagogy are slow to adopt social networking in to their program system (even though I suspect future releases of Moodle will change that).

But we need to consider that there are serious pitfalls to killing the LMS.

First, lets look at the issue that has caused the largest headache for people that have already killed their LMS: they are storing their content on someone else’s site, without the safety of a contract in their favor. If those sites go bankrupt, their course could disappear overnight without warning. Even though this is unlikely to happen, it has. Or, if the company decides to change their business model – they could start charging for usage per user, and now you and your students have to fork over money mid-semester just to get what was already yours. Once again: unlikely, but has happened.

Not to mention that some sites reserve the copyright for all content loaded on to their site. Yep – it’s not yours. It’s theirs. And that can lead to a whole host of legal problems – especially if you are storing any thing resembling a student record (like grades or feedback on why a student was given a certain grade) on a server that is not owned by your school or university. Yep – even a blog comment that communicates why you graded a student the way you did on a blog assignment could violate federal laws.

You also need to consider the fact that the decentralized nature of a course built after the death of an LMS can complicate the educational process. There is just more overhead in organizing the different pieces of the class at the beginning. Time is spent learning how to get to the pieces of the class instead of actually learning the content itself.

One of the arguments of using a blog for course content delivery is that students need to learn to engage the world instead of hiding in class. They need to get their course content out of the LMS and in to the world. They might also keep the blog going after the course is over – which is a good thing. I agree with all of this. But what if every course were like this? Students would have 50 blogs, wikis, or other sites to keep track of before they graduate. They would possibly even get burned out on it and just stop engaging the world at large online altogether. Clearly not a feasible system.

Course designers need to really think why they need students to do something – don’t just have students create another blog for your class because you want to look cool as an instructor. Is there a sound pedagogical reason within your discipline for having students publish to the world? If not, maybe look for other alternatives.

Many of the concepts behind the death of the LMS I do agree with. I just think we need to go about them in a different manner. Part 2 will look at how I think we should be taking a different approach to this issue.

The Great Copy Protection Debate

Like it or not, the great copy protection debate is sucking education into it’s vast void of murky confusion. Fair Use law or suggestions or whatever they are supposed to be called in education have been poorly defined and confusingly tricky for decades. Now we get the pleasure of murking it up even more with record companies and television giants and all kinds of other people who are trying to protect their money above all things jumping in to the fray.

The New York Times is publishing a series of articles that looks at this issue (more from a legal issue than an educational issue, but still with major educational implications). Both sides of the debate are represented by a fairly balanced individual. I guess you could see the two sides as being the ones that want restrictions or locks places on digital media (books, music, movies, video, etc), and those that want them removed totally. The debate can be found at this link.

The general counsel of NBC represents, well, I bet you can pick which side they represent (pro-lock), and a Columbia Law professor represents the other (anti-lock). Now, I have to say – I agree that you shouldn’t steal stuff that you don’t have the legal right to own. But I have to say that the non-protection lock down side makes much better points in round one.

The problem that I have with the pro-lock NBC side is that I am American. In America, we believe that you are innocent until proven guilty. The pro-lock side seems to believe that we are guilty until proven innocent. They rely on the thought that the speed of transmission of files means that they have to clamp down as a “speed bump” to discourage honest people from becoming dishonest. Technically, though, in an “innocent-until-proven-guilty” society, you would have to go after the people that downloaded the files, and then prove that they don’t have the right to own a copy of the file. Anything that goes beyond that (including prosecuting those that offer the files for download) steps into a “guilty-until-proven-innocent” mindset. I can a set a CD out on the sidewalk for any one to see, but no crime is committed until some one walks along and steals it. You can’t give up going after individual down loaders just because it gets hard.

Of course, that last sentence or two kind of uses a bit of logic that the pro-lock side uses. But not to the same effect. They address the fact that every lock can be picked: “Despite the existence of lock picks, identity thieves, and hackers, cars and homes still have locks, e-mail accounts have passwords, and computers have firewalls.” The only problem with that is, these locks have proven effective. A car lock has proven to cut down on your chances of being broken in to by a large percentage. Digital locks seem to have about a zero percent success rate so far. And breaking in to a locked car causes damage to the car – which also doesn’t happen when cracking a locked file. Stop comparing apples to oranges, please.

And, sorry pro-lockers – the technology just isn’t there to prove very good locks. No matter how much you try to guilt geeks in to admitting that they are, the geeks won’t lie. The technology just isn’t there yet. MySpace and Soapbox filters seem to have prevented much more legal blocking that illegal blocking.

My big question – how do you tell if someone has the rights to upload their own content? Won’t that become a first come, first serve basis deal? If I make an independent film, but a competitor steals it from me, they can jump online and claim that they have the digital rights to it. I can sue in court and win it back, but the protected files in his name are already out there and will cause mass confusion and headaches for me when I start to try and get my stuff back out there the right way.

I believe that we will find a way to protect stuff better, and I think that it is a great idea to search for something like that. But I also believe in creating better business models that don’t require the sale of physical products or even the transfer of files. The entertainment industry is just trying to keep an ancient business model alive – one that most consumers never liked in the first place. Let’s face it – who really liked buying a whole album just to find out that the song on the radio was the only good song on the whole disc? Who really loved building up a tape collection only to have tapes go obsolete – forcing you to re-buy all of your albums on CD? Who jumped for joy at the fact that tapes, records, VHS tapes, soft cover books, and CDs wear out and break easily, forcing you to buy an entire new album at full price just to fix that.

I would bet that a true comprehensive study of the loss in revenues for companies would show that they lost money most from people that stopped re-buying broken stuff, or stopped wasting money on an album full of filler, or stopped upgrading formats every few years. Every person that I have ever know to download music still spent the same amount of money on CDs that they did before they could download. Personally, I stopped buying new CDs or DVDs once I discovered I could wait a few months to buy them used on Ebay or Amazon for $3-4. You never see companies talking about that.

The real problem with digital files is that they kill all of these ways that companies had of raking us for extra money. Instead of buying a whole album of fluff to get the one song that they actually spent money on, you can just buy and download that one good song. Digital files never scratch as CDs and DVDs do (but they can be erased) – so the companies lose a sizable replacement income on them. And, since they are digital, they will easily convert into new future formats with no or very low cost to the consumer. Upgrade income is also a sizable amount of the income for many companies.

I just wish that movie companies would see the massive amount of extra income they are missing out on by not giving away movies to teachers. When I taught Junior High Science, I would mention scenes from the movie Twister to my students when studying weather. So many students would proclaim – every class period – “I love that old movie! When Mr. So-and-So showed that in 5th Grade, I made my parents go out and buy a copy!” But, sadly, Mr. So-and-So probably got sued for showing it in class. Can’t see the forest for the trees and all….

New Study of Online Behaviour

Teach42.com reported yesterday about a new study by the National School Boards Association and Grunwald Associates LLC that explored the online behaviors of teens and ‘tweens’ in the United States. The press release can be found here, and the report itself can be read here.

The report contains a wealth of information that can be chewed on for hours. What I found really interesting is the fact that blogging and content creation online is increasing (when compared to 2002). Wasn’t blogging supposed to have died out, or at least become ‘uncool’ with the younger generation, several times over the past few years? I guess not.

Also, I found the student use of social networking stats very interesting, and also full of ideas for educators. Using social networks to create virtual objects? Or how about participating in collaborative projects? Interesting stuff.

The report also suggests that the Internet is also not as dangerous as the news makes it seem. Only 0.08% of teens report that they have met someone in person from an online encounter without parental permission. To that I say – so what? Just because parents gave the permission, it’s automatically safe? Not true. Also, we’re talking about self-reported data here. No matter how you promise to a teen that you won’t share this data with parents, I think fear of getting busted, or even the desire to make the Internet look safer so parents will ‘chill out’ (or what ever the correct lingo is now-a-days), would skew the data significantly.

Also in the report is some great statistics and suggestions for teachers and administrators.

Does "Anytime, Anywhere Education" Include Teachers?

One of the biggest selling points to online education is that it is “anytime, anywhere” learning – meaning that you can learn according to your schedule, where ever you can get access to the Internet. I know it doesn’t always equate to this exactly in real life, but it does get close most of the time.

At a recent focus group, I was discussing how I had a hard time figuring out the plagiarism rules for a class I was in online. The issue wasn’t stealing someone else’s work – it was reusing a portion of my own work. Both papers in question needed a section on the history of EdTech and, well, there’s not a wide range of ways to cover that in a few paragraphs. I couldn’t find info about self-recycling in the syllabus of either class, so I researched it online and found that the academic community seems to be split on it. So I decided to try as hard as I could to make both sections totally different (which proved difficult) and not chance it.

The response at the session was the usual: “why didn’t you just ask the professor?” My response was supposed to be “I’m a pretty do-it-yourself guy, and I didn’t want to wait for the response.” All that came out was that I didn’t want to wait for the response. Then the uproar followed: “well, those professors should get on the ball and respond faster! How dare they wait more that 12 hours to respond to e-mail!” (yep, someone said all that)

Really? I mean – if your bossed required you to check your work email at home and respond at all hours of the night, what would you think about that job? In a face-to-face class, if the professor’s office hours were on Thursdays, and class was on Tuesday, and you had a question on Friday – guess when you would get your answer? Maybe on Monday, bu probably In four days. Definitely not 12 hours.

If we are going to promote “anytime, anywhere learning,” I guess we do need to expand office hours beyond the fours hours a week that they traditionally have happened. But there has got to be a balance. Professors have lives, too. They need to take time away from work during the week to be refreshed themselves. And they need time to keep up with their field of study so that they can give us current, relevant information. So, where is the balance?

Technology to Support Students With Disabilities

Let’s face it – the Internet is not very friendly for those surfers out there with disabilities. Web designers can design their sites with accessibility issues in mind – but very few do. It takes extra time, and not mention the fact that they may not get to use all of those really cool, flashy spinning gif headers that are so hip now-a-days.

But with 6.3 million students with disabilities in our schools – we don’t want to keep acting like this is an issue that will resolve itself. Which is kind of the thing that some of us in the Instructional Design field hopes will happen. We just hope that screen reader technology and accessibility options will increase in sophistication to the point that they will overcome all of our bad design techniques.

When ever I am designing a class, and the professor wants a podcast, I always point out that they will have to have something ready for students with any type of hearing issues. Notice I said “have something ready.” Some professors understand, but many just wave it off and say “I’ll throw something together when the issue is at hand.” Yeah – great idea – especially when the issue won’t be at hand until you have 2 days to transcribe 10 hours worth of podcasts!

Sheryl Burgstahler and Lyla Crawford of the University of Washington have recently published a paper titled “Managing an E-Mentoring Community to Support Students with Disabilities: A Case Study.” Basically, students are mentored by other students that come from where they are – but you use technology to connect students that may not be in the same geographic location as others. Brilliant, really. And a little more complex than that – so go read the article.

Now, if we can only classify “digital doofus-ness” as a disability and force people with this condition to get mentors – online education could really take off!