One of the comments on my earlier post deserves some attention:

Considering Education
Education, I think is often seen as formal instruction, and learning as something that can be concretely measured.

Unfortunately, I think Monica’s right. That IS the perception.

My problem with that perception is that it’s completely backwards.

Learning — as educational psychologists have known for decades — cannot be measured accurately. One can only attempt to assess some subset of interest and then only by measuring it indirectly with a test of some kind. The more authentic the test, the more likely you get a true measure. The classic task of “making change” is a good example. I can teach you about money, and give you strategies for making change, and then assess you by a) giving you a quiz on paper, b) giving you some money to handle, or c) sending you to the store to find out whether or not you can make change accurately for 125 customers in a day (without the cash register that tells you how much you owe them).

Education is the only thing that can be measured. “Do they appear to have learned what I intended to teach them?”

Logically, you cannot ask whether or not they actually learned it, only whether or not they can demonstrate it on a given day for a given assessment. Logistically, you can’t go back two years later and give them another assessment to find out if they still know it, if they’ve made the learning part of their lives or only picked it up long enough to pass your test and move on to the next course. And you can’t test for things you didn’t intend to teach them. You don’t know what it might be - how significant or how meaningful it is. It’s not relevant to the educational experience you’re presenting, even though it might be more profound than the actual lesson.

Case in point: I did a stint as a teaching assistant in the Teacher Prep program at the University of Northern Colorado. My job was to teach Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to preservice teachers. My assessments were all intended to assess whether or not the students could use the tools to accomplish specific work related tasks. But on more than one occasion, what I taught them was that the computers were just tools — mostly simple tools — that they could master. That they could get beyond the mechanical and use the tools with students in ways that enhanced their abilities to teach. Those lessons came through loud and clear, and while I didn’t intend to teach them, they weren’t on any syllabus, the reality is that these unintended lessons in technology were the ones that were the most profound.

That’s why I teach the way I do now. The syllabus has one set of requirements. That’s what’s intended by the course, but I’m paying a lot more attention to teaching to the unintended. By doing so, I’ve learned that I can exceed those intentional objectives by orders of magnitude.

And while I learned it in school, my teachers didn’t know they were teaching me.

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Will Richardson has a great post about a framework for assessing network building. This paragraph stood out for me, because I’ve been looking at my own network recently as well:

Weblogg-ed » Assessing Network Building
I constantly struggle with my own work in this. The last few weeks, I’ve been reflecting a lot on the nodes in my network, trying to think critically about diversity, reexamining the tools I use to access it, looking at the ways I interact and what I contribute. For all sorts of time-related reasons, I’m not happy with the scope of my work right now either; it feels too text heavy, too comfortable. And, for many of the same reasons and even though I have made some changes of late, my network seems static. I need to come up with some strategies for freshening things up around here.

Looking at the nodes, yes. I’ve been looking at the nodes on my network and doing some reflection there. It would be easy to just look at the nodes represented in my ‘gator. Easy and misleading, because my ‘gator is only portion of my network. It represents - for the most part - the textual portions. There’s a whole ‘nother side represented by my twitter friends, the people I have on IM, the podcasts that load to my iPod, and the work that I produce in audio myself.

There are people that probably aren’t adding a lot to my ‘gator. With over 450 feeds there, more than a few of them get a cursory glance and “mark as read.” There are folks in my twitter-space that don’t contribute much, but I keep them because, every once in a while, they say something funny, or poignant. My ‘gator as education, news, technology, and political feeds. My twitter-peeps are split between educators and podcasters with a smattering of miscellaneous gems that I stumbled on by accident.

Then there are the avatars I know from SecondLife. And the MUDders I play with occasionally. And the folks I know (and owe a visit to) from TappedIn.

And that’s just the electronic network. I count the people I know in RL but don’t talk to all that much because I really only get to connect to them when I meet them in person. Relatives. Professional colleagues who aren’t connected (yes, and don’t get me started on them).

There’s probably part of my network that I’m overlooking.

On of the interesting challenges in assessing network building, then, is even figuring out who and what your network is. Much like trying to assess learning, there’s a limitation on that assessment which is imposed by the nature of the assessment. You can only assess what you’re looking for. Incidental learning, which might actually be a more profound learning, disappears. If I’m examining the nodes I’ve specifically added to serve - say - education, I might well overlook the developing relationship with my barrista who speeds me on my day by recognizing me by my drink and offers an interesting perception on humanity from behind the expresso bar.

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Distance education is a redundant term. You can read my take on the subject in On Distance Education.

As you’re working through this muddy field, remember that the institution has a vested interest in assuring that the classroom remains the gold standard. When the only mechanism for education was the classroom, that was an easy case to make. Once there are alternatives, defense mechanisms kick in. Arguments like “You don’t know who’s really in your class” and “Students can cheat more easily” and “I can’t tell who’s not getting it if I can’t see their body language” start popping up. All red herrings intended to create a perception of difference between “classroom” and “distance” education. Anything to maintain the status quo.

But in the words of Dr. Horrible:
“The status is not quo.”

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Most teachers never think about the classroom. While it may seem odd in a course about distance education, we need to acknowledge some realities about that box we call the “classroom.” Please read On the Classroom and tell me what you think about it.

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Many members have not yet posted much and at least a few are still struggling with the technology. As I indicated in a previous post, there is a method in my madness. The EduBuzzword is “Learner Centered.”

Learner centered is one of those oxymoronic phrases that educators use when they mean one thing but want to make it sound better than it is. There really is such a concept as “Learner Centered” but it can’t really be applied to schools where the teacher (or the school) gets to decide what the learner will learn. There’s something amusingly wrong about any program that declares itself to be learner centered and then requires the students to attend class at a given day and time for a prescribed number of hours.

For this class, we’re incorporating tools which you can use to create a learner centered environment of your own and will, perhaps, provide some insight into how some of these learner-controlled technologies can be put to use in online courses.

They fall into three categories — blogs/gators, community, direct message.

Blogs/Gators: I spend some time on this subject earlier in the week so I won’t belabor the point now. The key issue here is that blogs and aggregators provide a mechanism for reading and writing. You automatically become a participant in the professional discourse on Distance Education. These writings — your postings and your responses to others — provide the fodder for my assessment activities. Most of you have noticed that there are no tests in this course. You’ll have to do a final project to demonstrate mastery, but I don’t believe in tests as an assessment tool. Your blogs demonstrate your performance mastery each and every week. For those of you who maintain that online students must be more self motivated, this is one mechanism where I can help those who maybe aren’t quite so motivated on their own. You must write every week. You must read every week. If you want the best grade, you’ll do it almost every day and not wait until Sunday morning to post the minimum amount.

Community: TappedIn provides a community of educators. It’s kind of like a campus. In many ways, it’s what I’d like to see Blackboard become, but don’t get me started on the short comings of Blackboard. It’s too early in the semester. TappedIn gives us a place to hang out, meet people who aren’t in the class, and find people who may have similar goals and interests. Where the blogosphere provides one kind of community, TappedIn provides another — one that includes chat, repositories, and other features that are under your direct control.

Direct Message: IMs provide us with the ability to “see who else is here” in a real time basis. One of the things that we do in a school is look around at the other people while we’re there. In the typical Bboard course, you can’t see who else may be there with you. IM gives you a window into the shared online space that represents each of us as we participate in course activities. Some people will appear a lot. Some won’t appear at all. It’s a way for us to share, not only with me, but with each other.

Later in the course, we’ll be looking at a basic theory called “Equivalency Theory” that provides the theoretic framework for these tools but for now, we’ll just use them as a given and, once you’ve had a chance to become acclimated, we’ll be discussing their use from a meta-cognitive perspective.

Posted in Education, Technology | 6 Comments »

There’s an interesting event going on over on Supercool today. The following is from the 5am PST post:

Breaking the Chains…
I always enjoy reading the articles that talk about what kind of students that we need to create for our future, and I feel strongly that this is where I head in my own classroom. However, as I talk to many friends in education, they feel that they are educating industrial age workers, largely because the system is itself a product of the industrial age.

They’re planning on a about a post per hour thru the day from some of the more active and interesting people active in the EduBlogosphere.

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Will Richardson has been one of the front runners in the educational blogosphere. This post on scaring kids reports a phenomenon that’s just way too common.

Weblogg-ed » Let’s Just Scare the #$%& Out of Them, Ok?
Of course, this requires that the teachers in the room have the ability to educate their kids about the dangers AND the potentials of social networks. More often than not, unfortunately, that’s not the case. And I have to say that I’ve been surprised of late in my travels (4,000 miles worth just last week) at the almost palpable fear that a lot of teachers still exhibit when we start talking about putting content online or sharing documents or being transparent. In a lot of ways, it feels like we’re no closer to making social networking a K-12 curricular imperative than we were when I first started doing this four years ago.

Think about what your administrations might do if presented with the notion that teachers need to know about tools like My@pace and Facebook.

Posted in Education, Technology | 10 Comments »

Yesterday we thought about the concept of “Distance.” (Well, I did anyway. Your voices were conspicuously absent from that consideration.) Today I want to take up the idea of “Education.” See Considering Education.

What ARE we trying to accomplish?
Is it a good idea? Not? Why?
Do we talk the talk and walk the walk?

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As we consider the idea of “distance education” it might be useful to break down the idea into its component parts.

See Considering Distance for some additional questions you might fold into your thinking about distance education.

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And so, another semester begins as we scramble for lost passwords, new books, and the sense that it’s all slipping out of control before it even begins.

Historically, my traditional greeting for the class has been via email. With the advent of blogging and other simple tools, I’m able to create an archive of materials that I can use and re-use pretty much on demand and at any point in any course. Read the greeting at the following address:

Good Morning, Mr. Phelps

Welcome to your new world.

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