Abject Learning: Waves
I don’t pretend to be a McLuhanesque visionary, I’m just one of millions of nodes bobbing out in the digital wonderland, riding waves of information, with socially filtered antennae-bots probing out in innumerable directions and sending back data that I have no expertise to analyse. Lately I’m receiving increasingly strong and troubling transmissions…

Brian doesn’t need *my* juice to add to his message, but damn this is one beautiful bit o’ bloggery.

Why most conferences suck Scripting News
[I]f you want to have a truly useful conference that everyone gets something out of, structure it so that everyone has something to do at all times. Hopefully things that involve other people or the venue, if not, what’s the point of going somewhere to do this stuff?

We try to fill the time with sessions so people will have something to look at, but that’s not the same as having something to do.

Extending the argument, those who grew up with VCRs understand movies differently because their clocks don’t blink. While it may be true that those with the remote in their hands tend to stop, back, repeat, and slow mo more often than those without, I’d have to submit that the reason they do that is because (a) they can and (b) it occurs to them. Having a blinking clock is merely an artifact of prioritization. If it bothers you enough, you fix it. The underlying appreciation of the medium is based less on affordance than exposure to and knowledge of the vernacular.

The reality, of course, is probably more complex, but I would maintain that this notion is not that much different than looking at the difference between “pedagogy” and “andragogy.” I’ve long maintained that the distinction is arbitrary, artificial, and more an indictment of the shameful ways we treat kids in school than it is any kind of actual distinction in the way people learn. Compare the list of the characteristics of “adult learners” to what are alleged to be the characteristics of “digital natives” and the parallels become obvious.

The problem is, of course, that when we actually face the world of the Digital Ignorant — whatever age they are — we tend to see what we expect to see. The kid using the cell phone to text his gf with “<3 u - xx" isn't being any more technologically savvy than the study hall note passer of 40 years ago. He just has more tools at his disposal. The odds are good that he's still struggling with his history class and bored out of his skull learning English grammar. The adult that prints out email is, more often than not, translating to a "more convenient" (read: more familiar) medium. Is that really so different than having your inbox forwarding to your cell phone?

What *is* different is that the rich stew of available resources is being used by kids to learn a whole lot of stuff that just appalls parents and sends paroxysms of dread thru entire school districts. It's as if the kids all have access to the "secret notebook" and they're using it to learn things that adults can't learn or don't know. This activity is -- and please correct me if I'm wrong -- characterized by these cognitive and behavioural tags:

1. Involved in the planning and evaluation of their instruction
2. Experience (including mistakes) provides the basis for learning activities
3. Most interested in learning subjects that have immediate relevance to their personal life
4. Problem-centered rather than content-oriented

Those who looked up the andragogy link above will recognize these characteristics of adult learners as provided by Knowles but have to admit that they bear a striking resembance to the characteristics attributed to Digital Natives. The only thing different is a statement of the kinds of technology that the Natives are using.

But this fails to address the issue of why the “kids” are using it and the “adults” aren’t. Well, perhaps that perception isn’t really very accurate either as evidenced by a recent Harris Poll that finds that 80% of adults are going online and many of them are using the same technology as the “Natives.”

Could the reality be nothing more complex than an application of classic adoption? The early adopters — in this case kids who have more time on their hands than adults and fewer options available for socialization — are using the tools and toys provided by their parents in ways that many find as offensive and dangerous as drinking cadged beers behind the 7-11 and smoking cigarettes behind the barn was a decade or three ago.

The next time you’re tempted to drop a tab of “Digital Native” or label yourself “Digital Immigrant” ask this question:

Do I eat microwave popcorn differently than my kids?

I’ve been here since Sunday night. This week marks the end of the road with my involvement with the convention planning process.

Some frustrations:

• We still have no way to contact the membership at large.
• There’s a new website (http://aectnow.org) but it’s still pretty much closed to open communication
• We have some addenda but I’m not sure what the process will be to get them out

On the subversive upside, Donal and I are organizing an Open Space Technology event to happen here even as the normal convention process is underway. We’re doing it by the seat of our pants and taking advantage of the fact that we have access to the full schedule that shows which rooms are empty because of cancellations and scheduling conflicts. If you’d like to participate in this effort, email me and we’ll get you connected to the rebel underground.

THE RULES

1. Post these rules before you give your facts.
2. List 8 random facts about yourself.
3. At the end of your post, choose/tag 8 people and list their names, linking to them.
4. Leave a comment on their blog, letting them know they’ve been tagged.

EIGHT RANDOM FACTS ABOUT ME

1. I know how to mend net - and I use my feet.
2. I used to spend my summers working in a factory - until I became old enough to get legal work
3. I hate weeding — gardens, collections, file structures …
4. I love reading books and spend most of my spare time with a paperback
5. I don’t believe in protecting children at any cost. Prison is the ultimate protection and I don’t advocate locking up kids — or their minds. Ever
6. I’m a coffee snob. I don’t like Starbucks coffee because they have only one roast — too dark — and their blends are pathetic. But I drink it anyway.
7. I have too many blogs. Some don’t have my name on them. No, I won’t tell you what they are.
8. I write science fiction novels and publish them as audiobooks at http://podiobooks.com

THE MEME TRACE STOPS HERE

These memes are sometimes interesting, often cute, but I don’t know 8 people who blog that Clif hasn’t tagged already.

The problem seems to me that Education isn’t science.

Psychology, that’s a science. I’m ok with that. Microbiology, sure. No problem. Physiology, ok, sure.

But it seems to me that all our Educational “science” is lacking a bit on rigor. Yes, we have Bloom’s taxonomy, and Gagne’s nine steps, and there are theories and paradigms abounding, but is it science?

My problem is basically, the notion that science is predictive. I mean, that’s the whole point of science, isn’t it? To explain and predict? And if that’s the case then we seem to be a bit short in the Educaiton arena because the same “intervention” which works stunningly with one student completely misses the mark on another. Sure, I did something that looked like science in my dissertation research that looked at what factors contribute to how people perceive distance, but that’s hardly on the same level of rigor as … say … DNA sequencing.

Now before I get a lot of people hyperventilating, I’m not sure that not being a science isn’t a good thing. One of the difficulties is dealing with the definitions. Education is the business of providing instruction. We tend to confound the term Education with Teaching, and I’ve purposely used that fact in this post so far. What I really mean to say is “Teaching Isn’t Science.” Of course, Education isn’t science! It’s business.

So, with that cleared up, we’re still left with the question about the labs. What would the specialties be? What skills?

A statistician, certainly and for obvious reason.

An educational psychologist? I think so. Emphasis on assessment, probably.

How about a brain physiologist?

What about an instructional designer? I’m not sure on this one.

But that begs the question, doesn’t it? Not about the personnel, but should there even be a lab? Forensics labs investigate evidence from crime scenes. Bio-research labs examine a variety of established problems. Are there parallel “problems” in Teaching? Could we do basic research into the relationships between teaching and learning? And how do we get those findings into the schools?

I don’t know. I’m feeling very unsettled about this.

We know the law is working, so now is the time to reauthorize No Child Left Behind and continue the promise of a quality education for all of America’s children.

At what point do we stop the “promise” and start the delivery??

I’m just askin’ …

David Warlick wrote this reflective bit about the space today:

2 Cents Worth » Starting to Get It?
I’m coming to suspect, however, that there are many kinds of networks, and that they are, in a sense, part of one network, tied together (attracted to each other) through the conductivity of conversations and the gravitational pull of logic.

He goes on to talk about attention and how when we started blogging, there was a lot of attention available but that as more and more voices flooded into the space, the natural limits set by hours in the day begain to overwhelm attention. I think a lot of people (at least those who’ve been doing this for more than a few months) have had the experience of trimming back their feed lists because it’s just too much. So the idea of attention has merit, but this other notion of a variety of interconnected networks precipitated another discussion.

In an ancillary conversation I was having with Mrs B on the subject of professional organizations, we began to analyze what it is a professional organzation offers to its members in a networked world. Why would anybody pay dues to be a member of a club? What could a club offer that would make it worthwhile?

She pointed out that humans are tribal animals, so we want to belong to something — that old Maslow affiliation drive. Which made me go back and think about the idea of “professional organzation” as a way of permitting its members to address the top half of Maslow’s hierarchy. I don’t know quite how this all works yet, but I wanted to get it down while I could remember it.

One of the things the “tribe” needs is identity and that comes from a shared vision, shared values, and shared goals — a sense of “us.” The tribe also needs a center. The center becomes the instantiation of identity through that shared vision, value, and goal. Someplace where, if you go there and meet another member of the tribe, you know you have something in common — just by virtue of their being there — even if you’ve never met them before.

The next question, logicially, is the nature of this ‘community center’ and I thought it could be decentralized. A technorati feed with the tribe’s name as tag could provide the center, but that would require a level of skill, and expertise that I don’t think a lot of people have yet. It’s going to be hard to identify with a feed and most people don’t see the river of content flowing from a feed as a center.

And that brings us back to Ning and other centralized spaces like TappedIn or MySpace or The ORG. They provide a place to go to find the tribe. To see what the members are doing. They provide a baseline that’s easier to deal with than the dispersed and distributed model. The problem with the ones I know about are that there’s no good way to merge distributed and centralized content together.

Eventually, I began to think that the community center needs to be centralized as a symbolic commitment to the tribe. We can each have our own spaces but the tribe needs a kind of metaphorical long house. It’s an answer to Stephen Downes’ perennial question of “why does there need to be another place?”

I’m working in analogy here. In metaphor. Bear with me if it breaks down.

If I go to the market and meet somebody, we share some things in common, and for a short period we even share a common goal - getting whatever we came to the market for. But the meeting is co-incidental. It’s not being driven by any kind of common vision or shared outlook except in the most superficial way. We’re not tribe.

So if I tag a post as “online community” and it merges with something that somebody else posts, it’s co-incidental. We might have opposite views and opinions, and while that has some value, it’s not the view of the tribe. While it’s true that the person is part of my network, that person is not one of “us” and is not part of my affiliation set.

And that brings me back to David’s notion of the gravitational attraction of ideas and linked and related but not congruous networks. People are finding Classroom 2.0. People are joining, reading, writing, participating. There is a rudimentary sense of identify forming — an idea of tribe. We’re still in the storming-norming stages but it’s already beginning to shape up. The conversations that happen in there tend to stay in there. They don’t appear to be pinging out (altho it’s entirely possible that I’m missing it). A few people are cross posting content from outside in and from inside out, but the link out of the community seems to consist primarily of links to the individual members’ blogs and web sites. So this sorta looks like David’s idea of connected networks holds up with one network inside the Ning garden and links in and out.

All of this leads me to the conclusion that the value of places like Ning is in forming centers around which networks and affiliations can form. Not as a replacement for the distributed world of feeds and aggregators, but as kinds of hubs. Cross pollination centers. Tribes.

“Community and Collaboration on a Scale Never Seen Before”
[I]f 2007 is going to be the watershed year that it seems to be shaping up to be, we need to do more work in traditional spaces and spend less time blogging back and forth to each other. While this is a powerfully engaging and nurturing environment, if we are going to make our voices and ideas truly heard, we need to start building a grassroots movement “out there,” one that highlights the realities of the world and successes in the classroom through channels that those decision makers (read parents, board members, etc.) are still wedded to.

Here’s the problem, Will.

The report is calling for a new system, not a patch to the old. In the same way the airlines have replaced passenger rail, this new system of education will replace what we know as school. What will it look like? How will it be implemented? I agree that “blogging among ourselves” amounts to “preaching to the choir” but how would engaging the railroads in developing the airlines have helped? If we take this commission’s report seriously and start thinking about what a new — replacement — system would look like, why would those with vested interest in maintaining the status quo be willing to engage?

The Cluetrain holds — pardon the expression — a clue as does Kat Herding and Doc’s Latest writings. If business in the Industrial Age has been about economies of scale and de-personalization, then the new economy might buyers and sellers talking to each other to create products and services specific to the need. In many ways, we’re talking about artists and artisans being the workers in this new economy. Whether your art is accounting or marketing or distribution, when we start talking about creativity and imagination, we end up with art. Think: The Secret of My Success.

Which brings us to the model for this new economy. Is it something akin to a global “open mic night” where people form ad hoc collectives to create a specific work? A kind of jazz combo? Can we build cars that way? Or airliners? Will we need to, or will we let other parts of the world deal with the cheap-labor/mass-produced commodity goods?

I don’t know. ‘M just askin’