Open Social Learning Bits I

Finding the right title for noting down some of the ideas arisen during any seminar is difficult. Finding an unique title for summarizing some of the key aspects of George Siemens’ and Alejandro Piscitelli’s presentations during the VI International Seminar of the UNESCO Chair in e-Learning about Open Social Learning seems me impossible, specially when my intention is to collect some personal ideas and relations their speaches have suggested me rather than writting a proper report about the event. In short, this is the reason why I’ve decided to name the posts about the seminar under the label “Open Social Learning Bits”.

Anyway, despite these initial words, titles matter and can/should be helpful. So, is fair that, despite my subjective approach, I include the titles of the presentations I’m referring to:

George Siemens:

Connectivism: Socializing Open Learning.

Briefly, the aspects in which I want to focus of George Siemens’ presentation are sensemaking and the idea that “the social” is understood as something continuosly build. According to Siemens, sensemaking is defined as the ability to participate in the place we live meaningfully. Taking into account the strenght paid to connections (rather than networks) in connectivism, it seems that connections are a key issue of sensemaking. Here there is educators’ power as “the way they design the course determines the kind of connections that are build”. However as it has been also mentioned, educators don’t have the last word as learners adapt their own connections to what they feel meaningful for their context. After this, Open Social Learning should be:

-Responsive to needs of individuals.

- Adaptative.

- Fluid, variable and contextualized.

Up to here there’s a very short summary of his presentation. From here, there are some questions I haven’t manage to answer. First, I’ve some doubts about sensemaking definition. Can sensemaking be defined as just building connections? What’s the difference between learning and sensemaking? How can an educator promote a critical attitude that affects sensemaking processes? Sometimes I have the feeling that too much attention is focused on technology, but not in questionning it (why we use a certain tool, what it implies, but overall what are we – as learners – supposed to learn and why) by using that technology.

On the other hand, there are some questions dealing with the practical implementation of this connectivist approach of Open Social Learning. What should be the role of educators? How could encourage students building connections? Are all connections equally valid in a specific learning context? How this approach woul affect big institutions such as universities?

Alejandro Piscitelli:

The Facebook Project. Edupunk and the redesign of power/knowledge relations in a public university setting.

Trying to keep brief, Piscitelli’s presentation narrates the use of Facebook as a way to break traditional teaching paradigm (teacher’s monologue with low or nule students’ participation). Inspiration for this educational approach can be found in edupunks’ ideas, connectivism as well as the idea of fun applied to education and learning (please, visit thefuntheory.com, it’s worth – at least to have a good time). Main key issues for the use of facebook in class have been listed as the following:

-         Participation.

-         Media conversion.

-         Virtual communication.

-         Arquitecture.

-         Construction of identity.

-         Economy.

From a point of view of changing class dynamics and engage students to actively participate, the course was, according to Piscitelli, successful. Anyway, the idea isn’t to spread the benefits of Facebook as a learning tool but to arise collaborative knowledge production, that’s why he mentioned that, most probably, next course they would try another tool/platform. Piscitelli’s presentation was engaging and from an edupunk point of view, it seems that using Facebook suited their intention of changing a certain way of teaching. However, personally I lacked a more reflective attitude towards the limits of the tool, at least from an educational point of view. At some point during the speech, Piscitelly commented that what was really important was information visualization, how to think with images and use visual metaphors. Personally, I consider there are many different fields under these words. However, if the idea is to develop a visual literacy among students, I consider crucial to, first, learn to interpret visual discourses in order to fully understand the implications of visual metaphors… Producing nice and enganging videos, graphics… can be valuable, but in a learning environment I would expect that among the necessary skills, students develop a critical attitude towards visual narratives than invade our everyday life.

Mark Bullen – Digital learners: Rethoric or Reality?

The title of this speech it’s a clear allusion to Prensky’s definition of digital natives and digital inmigrants. Obviously Prensky isn’t the only one who has approached this issue, but have been really constated that those persons named as the net generation (that’s to say, those ones born after 1982) are experts in multitasking, needing fast feedback, prefering teamwork and collaboration, experienced learners, social, ambitious, career-oriented, willing fro freedom and customization?

Rather than making strong strong statements, what Mark Bullen faced during his talk was the lack of rigor of many studies in the academic world. What methodology have they followed to arise that conclusions, was the sample really significative or just by studying 100 students who already use technology are they making assumptions for a hole generation? Who is financing the study? These were some of the questions that he introduced before taking any position.

Really, I must confess how, step by step, he build a devastating and well-sustained criticism about studies and research in the academic field. I couldn’t avoid smiling when he mentioned the name of the blog in which they publish the results of their research about digital learners: netgenskeptic.

In relation with the dilemma already raised in the title, mainly what he said was that there hadn’t been proper research to define what students need. The assumption that immersion in digital technology is making net generation fundamentally different has to be reviewed. The use of technology isn’t just a generation issue. It affects all age groups as the use of technology is growing. Therefore, it can be considered that educational institutions are facing the consequences of a social change rather than a generation one.

Innovation days + Laurence Johnson’s presentation at UOC

Last Friday, I attended to the “Innovation days” organized by the Innovation office of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. During the morning, there were several innovation projects’ presentations. They were grouped in four categories: Tecnologic Resources Development, Educational Use of ITC, Educational Metodology and Processes and Institutional Quality.

As the session was organized in corners, presentations happened simultaneously. Here, I must confess that, mainly, I attended to the projects selected for they Educational Use of ITC.  In short, I would summarize the main topics in: content organization, communication (development of an annotation tool), image (hipervideo and machinima) and simulation.

In the afternoon, Laurence Johnson presented the Horizon Project. Seven Ways Technology isUnfolding, Everything We Look. Again, main points of his presentation can be summarize in 3D visualization, use of games in education (concretely: serious games), development of new interfaces which are no longer seen as technology due to its intuitive and friendly use, user content creation, collective intelligence, ubiquitous networks (people can connect wherever they are) and cloud computing. He also notted that internet is becoming a third place, that’s to say, people is using the net as place to socialize.

Of course, this a very short summary, but as further information about technologic trends in education can be found in the on line Horizon Project, I prefer to just make the link and note down some of my impressions after the talk.

First of all, oks we are living in each time more tecno-society , or whatever you prefer calling it, but…what happens when there aren’t the condition to use all that online applications that are changing the way we learn, work, socialize? What happens for those who don’t have fast broadband or just can’t pay it? There’s no alternative to avoid “that phenomena” called “digital divide”?

Second question is quite related to the first one… are these trends really global? As far as there are many different contexts, it’s a bit strange that everywhere can be applied same trends (even in some cases, to guarantee a general access to technologic developments can be quite far in time speaking terms).

Finally, technological developments can’t be understood aside cultural/social aspects. What I mean is that for the normalization of a new technology is necessary some social measures/attitudes that ensure the future of that technology. For instance, nowadays, collaboration and mash up seem to be keywords of web 2.0 phenomena. However, strict copyright laws can difficult the work of those who “mash up” content. May be, strict laws won’t stop individual acts, but certainly they will, at least, make the generation of mashed up content much lesser than if it was completely allowed.

Thus, how are technologic developments affecting the social sphere? What kind of societies are arising as a consequence of the introduction of these tools?

Collaborative anarchy vs. controlled individualism

Does it make sense to talk about authorship in collaborative environment? Should all web 2.0 knowledge builders be anonymous? What’s the value of authorship?

These are some of the questions that started to arise after reading a post in zephoria’s blog. Here I copy the part I consider resums the key issue:

“Since Knol launched in beta, folks have been comparing it to Wikipedia (although some argue against this comparison). Structurally, they’re different. They value different things and different content emerges because of this. But fundamentally, they’re both about making certain bodies of knowledge publicly accessible. They just see two different ways to get there – collaborative anarchy vs. controlled individualism. Because Knol came after Wikipedia, it appears to be a response to the criticisms that Wikipedia is too open to anonymous non-experts.”

Collaborative anarchy vs. controlled individualism, is that what we should consider at the time of developping collaborative environments for knowledge building? Does authorship guarantee the credibility of a text, or any other material?

Obviously, wikipedia seems to be “the” Example of collaborative knowledge production. However, isn’t the critical mass of editors as well as other measures of control, a guarantee for information veracity? At this point it’s useful to take into account the following

“a controversial study by Nature in 2005 systematically compared a set of scientific entries from Wikipedia and Britannica (including some from the Britannica Web edition), and found a similar rate of error between them.”

http://yupnet.org/zittrain/archives/16

Possibly, the next question I should ask myself is… What determines our level of trust at the time of evaluating information? Quite probably, in many contexts Britannica seems more trustful than Wikipedia when, from my point of view, we should keep the same levels of skepticism in both cases. I don’t know why, but it could seems that “collaborative anarchy” can easily get associated with chaos and lack of rigor. And really, after reading a bit about wikipedia history I’ve realized that information posted there is much more supervised and can be corrected more fastly than any other online encyclopedia. Obviously, scalability in collaborative knowledge production environments is a problem or, at least, a difficulty to overcome. However, if it succeeds it brings an additional value: the consolidation of a digital identity. We don’t know who are britannica redactors nor wikipedia editors, so authorship can always be a non answered question. At this point, I would say that, possibly, wikipedia can have a stronger digital identity than many other online encyclopedias.  Anyway, the issue behind authorship is closely related with responsability. Who will accept responsabilities (legal, economical…) in case someone feels offended by false information?

I don’t want to underestimate responsability in everything I/you can say, write, post or just reproduce, but I’m not sure if the solution is an economic or legal penalty. Wikipedia has develop its own mechanisms to avoid/solve errors and its corrections are the result of a public debate. This it’s more effective than simple posting a note accepting the mistake as many media do.

When will we start to care about web 2.0 terms of service?

Trying to read Twitter’s new terms of service I realized why I never look at this kind of documents. And I guess I’m not the only one who automatically press the acceptance button once the “Terms of service” screen appears…

This time I’ve make an exception and I’ve read it and tried to understand (but it’s so boring…) the text. Even there are many sections, there are two that draw my attention: Privacy and Your (my, our) rights (this one I’ll leave it for another day).  In order to try to keep loyal to the original source, I’ve decided that the best would be to copy-paste it here:

Privacy

Any information that you provide to Twitter is subject to our Privacy Policy, which governs our collection and use of your information. You understand that through your use of the Services you consent to the collection and use (as set forth in the Privacy Policy) of this information, including the transfer of this information to the United States and/or other countries for storage, processing and use by Twitter. As part of providing you the Services, we may need to provide you with certain communications, such as service announcements and administrative messages. These communications are considered part of the Services and your Twitter account, which you may not be able to opt-out from receiving.

I don’t have a background in laws, so obviously there would be many aspects that I can easily misunderstand. However… shouldn’t there would be a limit of time for using and keeping our personal data once we’ve stopped using the service? If there isn’t any specification of a “deadline”, should I assume that twitter’s administrators will owe my personal information forever? I’f I’m not wrong, not very far ago people was complaining about Facebook terms of service because they said something as:

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service.

Is Twitter doing the same? If so, should we care about it?

Anyway, may be the question is not about what exactly twitter and facebook are doing, but what is happening with users data, specially the personal information, in web 2.0 applications.

Why should I continue this blog?

The course about “Microblogging and its possible uses for education” has ended, or almost, and I feel I should decide what I’m going to do with this blog (and some other ones I started one day, long ago, and now are kind of abandoned). Is it worth continuing/starting a blog if there isn’t an active community or network of people who could give feedback and, therefore,  add some value to these comments?

Stop, may be I’m being too pessimistic… the lack of feedback doesn’t mean the lack of readers. Probably there are lots of visitors who just read or have a quick look and after this they leave the blog …. Anyway, in case I decide to take this assumption, does it give me any strong reason for continuing writing? Why should I have to make public thoughts that, at first, are only interesting for me?

I ask myself all this because I conceive a blog as a tool for learning. In this case, it’s the appearance of a community, network, friends, whatever..what helps me learning by offering different approaches, ideas…whatever, but at least share something. If this feedback doesn’t exist, I need to think again why should I continue this blog.

After some days of doubts – and don’t know why but also a bit of guiltynes for not continuing the blog -  I’ve arrived to a conclusion. I’m going to use the blog as a personal diary of what I’m learning, reading or just to note down ideas that, otherwise, I would end forgetting and, who knows, may be can be useful for the thesis of the master.  By having the info on internet, I would be able to have access to from anywhere and the info won’t dissapear if my computer breaks down (although, who can guarantee that wordpress would always exist and keep the information forever?

And, of course, if by the way, I receive feedback from someone, that would be a good reward!

Microblogging for social learning

Is twitter useful from an edupunk approach?

The first time I heard the term “edupunk”, I though I had heard it wrong… however, after thinking about it twice I couldn’t avoid smiling: the philosophy of “do it by yourself ” applied to education! Of course there’s nothing new about the term, there are many teachers who “survive” and manage to motivate their students thanks to experimentation… and what about those who learn by their own? Should they be called edupunks now?

“Edupunk, it seems, takes old-school Progressive educational tactics–hands-on learning that starts with the learner’s interests–and makes them relevant to today’s digital age, sometimes by forgoing digital technologies entirely.”

Stephen Downes

According to Downes words, the use of social networks, blogs and microblogging tools such as twitter, could be part of this punk approach of education as far as they follow students interests… Anyway, I guess the specific name of the tool has no importance, personally I’m starting to feel tired talking about myspace, facebook, twitter, orkut and so on… would any of them exist 5 years later? However, I’m quite sure that the attitude of adapting existing resources for solving personal needs will still exist.

Why there’s so much expectation with twitter in education, then? (or at least, that’s what I feel). Is it just a fashion or it is really adding something that didn’t exist before? To be honest, I should say that I find difficulties in answering this question because I still haven’t understonf what’s exactly the purpose of twitter… anyway, possibly that’s what make it so appealing from an edupunk point of view… as there isn’t an official way of using it, each one can use it according to their needs. At this point, I can’t avoid endind the post with a sentence I heard recently:

“Twitter has so few utility that it can be used for everything”

What do I think about blogs?

May be I should had written about this time ago…
but according to a spanish said “better late than never”, so here it goes my answer to the question “What’s a blog?”

Currently, my ideas about blogs are quite different that first impressions I got the first time I asked “but…what’s a blog?”

Obviously, reconstructing now what I thought at that moment is going to be quite difficult if not impossible. Anyway, in brief I would say that my understanding of blogs at that initial stage was “it’s something similar to a website, but easier to manage and free.” May be it was very simplistic, but for me, that was enough to loose fears associated to online publication and start believing that publishing on the www could easy and fast.

Actually, my ideas about blogs have changed, but I still keep in mind that reasons that encouraged me starting my first blog. Now, if I had to syntetize main aspects of blogs, I would point out to publication, networks and interactivity. By publication I’m referring to the fact that thanks to blogs many people with no skills in web development have been able to have their own online space  and public content regularly. Achieving some visibility has allow the appearance of networks of people with similar interests. Finally, thanks to interaction (although this is something that can be controled by the blog administrator) links with other users can be strengthen at the same time that it can be a first step towards online collaboration and cooperation.

Digital Inmigrants’ fears

This post is intended to give some ideas – or may be just to think about- adults’ fears at the time of writing a blog. Trying to find an answer to what Sabine commented in her blog entry “Blogging in the education of adults?” I just ended reading about digital native versus digital inmigrants. Despite the term coined by Marc Prensky offers multiple lectures, it can be interesting to have a close look at the following definition: “The importance of the distinction is this: As Digital Immigrants learn – like all immigrants, some better than others – to adapt to their environment, they always retain, to some degree, their “accent,” that is, their foot in the past. The “digital immigrant accent” can be seen in such things as turning to the Internet for information second rather than first, or in reading the manual for a program rather than assuming that the program itself will teach us to use it. Today’s older folk were “socialized” differently from their kids, and are now in the process of learning a new language. And a language learned later in life, scientists tell us, goes into a different part of the brain.”

Marc Prensky quoted at Henry Jenkins’ blog

May be this can help understanding why sometimes new media tools, such as blogs, aren’t used taking into account what they really possibilite. Personally, I must confess I haven’t any experience in adults education (except some unsuccessful internet lessons to my father…

Anyway, what I feel is that the introduction of tools such as blogs, wikis or whatever you want with adults, should come together with a reflection of the medium. What are the differences between a blog and a website? Why is it worth using a blog in this context? Possibly, encouraging adults to struggle with technology is more difficult than motivating kids to do something with a computer. However, if we manage to make our adult students understand the possibilities of that tools we are showing them, we would have done a very important step in order to help them  face part of their fears.