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When these learners complete the program, they have competencies relevant to 21c life-- they can communicate, collaborate, access and integrate information from diverse sources using electronic libraries. It is an exciting way to teach and learn and it is the wave of the future so we need to gain the skills needed to make these educational experiences consistently meaningful.

Working with online instruction requires different techniques. An instructor online cannot usually look at a student's face and see that she isn't grasping the point, for example, or when she has fallen asleep. I can see why instructors would miss this type of face-to-face communication; online feedback is both less immediate and in some cases more direct. But a lecture can be truly engaging or enormously incomprehensible even for the student who moves to the front row to try to understand it all. Online learning can also reap huge results or can suffer from another set of equally mind-numbing problems.

I have to agree with jsalmons and bghansel. It's not the fact that a school is online or on-ground that matters. It's the quality of the educator that matters. I, too, have gone to and taught in Ivy League schools and found them to be a mixed bag, just as I've found online schools to be a mixed bag.

Yes, softshellcrab, discussion questions are the backbone of online courses. Are you telling me they don't play a role in on-ground education? Are you telling me that only talking-head lectures educate? Is there something wrong with students doing self-studying? Haven't you seen lecture content in online courses? I'm puzzled as to why you think critical thinking, Socratic reasoning/questioning, and constructivism are bad or can't be done online, but can on-ground.

The most (Stress THE MOST)primary issue with distance education is the degree of affective education taught.

We can use SKYPE, WIMBA or other "video" based education, but what we lose is the subtle differences of students and their interactions with others that makes it difficult to determine their level of character (highest level of affect).

Bill Gates may think we will have less seated instruction in the future (see another Chronicle issue elsewhere), but the backlash against online will be in the form of those who cannot interact and thus not obtain jobs (except in the places where it wont matter because none have any affect in that place).The bottom line is that we are losing a major portion of our education system in a pure online education format. Until we recognize how to better teach affective education with online, and more importantly assess that type of education, we will have major issues not only in higher education, but also in industry/business.And this is an open invitation for Bill Gates to discuss this issue.

"Quality on-line teaching is harder than regular classroom teaching, but poor on-line teaching is easier than regular classroom teaching."

But can I make it more specific - "Quality on-line teaching is harder (taking more time, e.g.)than regular classroom teaching of the same quality (in achieving the same extent of satisfaction in students, e.g.)?"

However, no one has mentioned the preparation required for quality online instruction. Some building blocks of good online programs are high quality/targeted content, flexible tools for development and delivery, engaging and interactive design, attentive and responsive instructors during the class, self motivated learners, and as always outcomes-based curriculum.

Networks are ideal as enhancements for all four of these essential activities of lifelong learners, and they enable us to model, demonstrate, practice, and reflect constantly and effectively.

“teachers who practice autonomy in their own professional development formulate heuristics for harvesting knowledge within their personal learning spaces, and thus stand a better chance of inculcating the desired behaviors in their students, thus increasing the likelihood of producing potentially autonomous and lifelong learners. But it is a percolative process.

The wiki allowed anyone (anyone could write on it, not just Webheads) to leave an email address if they needed an invitation, and those who had spare invitations would give one to someone in need. The system worked to organize a quick and robust Webheads Wave, a sandbox for teachers to try out the tool and to model and demonstrate and practice with one another.

Networks provide the framework for this to happen.

Pedagogy

Networking

Literacy

Paradigm shift results when many people in a community or network follow the same process of seeing things modeled and demonstrated for one another in such a way that after considered reflection and weighing of the old and new ways of addressing a problem, they gradually alter their practice.

Heuristics

hose with knowledge and those seeking it treat each other equally, often reversing roles frequently as seekers and providers of knowledge and content.

multiliteracies approaches

When the Writing for Webheads group of students and teachers formed in 1998, participants were distrustful of sending their pictures to strangers on the Internet, and even to reveal their real names.

Photographs and voice/webcam communications enable group members to see the human behind the text message and enhance bonds leading to a sense of community

Scaffolding one another’s practice by modeling to one another and answering each other’s questions

the evolution of social media has enabled the Webheads CoP to interact with others to become part of a much wider distributed learning network.

Siemens has long espoused the notion of connectivism, famously summarized as “The pipe is more important than the content within the pipe.” (Siemens, 2004, n.p.). Here, Siemens means that it is more important to nurture a system of connections between knowledgeable people (the pipe) than to be concerned with what these knowledgeable people know (the content within the pipe) since this content can be directed as needed to anyone with appropriate connections within the pipe.

Communities and networks help us to aggregate, filter, and assimilate this information into some kind of knowledge structure and then disseminate it throughout the community or network.

distributed learning networks (DLN’s), or personal or professional learning networks (PLNs), or personal learning environments (PLE’s)–all provide direct (and indirect) contact with many people in one’s network, each possessing a reservoir of knowledge which contributes to the entire pool of knowledge residing in the network. This can be accessed through listservs or sometimes almost instantaneously through Twitter or RSS feeds, or Skype, or instant messaging. Therefore the knowledge possessed by any individual, or node in the network, is the sum total of all aggregated knowledge within that network. It is to this that we ascribe the incredible power inherent in distributed learning networks which often comprise to some extent communities of practice.

Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder (2002, p. 6) promote the CoP model as an anecdote to the fact, as he puts it, that “increasing complexity of knowledge requires greater … collaboration; whereas … the half life of knowledge is getting shorter.”

the skill of leveraging networks is increasingly important in the 21st century in plumbing and aggregating knowledge when that knowledge base is forever changing at an increasingly accelerated pace.

or appropriate use of online social networks to be taught in schools, teachers themselves must be familiar with their impact on learning. One problem is that teacher-trainers without sufficient experience with technology and who are rooted in old-school methodologies are simply not modeling new age learning behaviors for their trainees by showing them how to reach out to networks.

research indicates that teachers don’t necessarily activate the knowledge they are exposed to in training curricula. The example he gave was on reverting to traditional methods rather than utilizing knowledge about communicative language teaching (Richards, 2009: 4), but the same applies to knowledge of technology.

In order for training in pedagogical affordances of networking to take hold it is crucial that teachers be trained not only in social media, but through its use. Those who use social media in their professional networking find this self-evident, but there is at least annecdotal evidence for the need for modeling by mentors.

teachers need to be shown the connections between their use of social media in their personal and professional lives. Glogowski and Sessums pointed out in their presentation at the WiAOC 2007 conference their surprise that student teachers who were already using technology with online acquaintances in their after-hours social networking were not carrying this over into their professional teaching practices.

I would speculate that the problem here is likely not so much the implementation timeline or the scope of the district's 1:1 laptop initiative, but rather the TEACHERS themselves. Are teachers teaching differently, and are they receiving the TIME and SUPPORT they need to teach differently? Is the district administration encouraging the teachers to TEACH DIFFERENTLY, or just to teach the same but with laptops?

but why don’t teachers understand this? To figure this out we need to understand this philosophically and historically. Doctors, in the mid-19th Century resisted technologies as most teachers do now. Lister and Pasteur were “so far ahead of the curve they weren’t on the same road” when they suggested sterilization. Doctors of the time, seeing themselves as “healers” could not comprehend that they were killing half of their patients by resisting the technologies of the time – the belief system inherent in the identity model of the profession actually prevented them from being what they perceived themselves to be.

Part of this is because we teach neither history nor philosophy. We do not share with teachers why Socrates opposed literacy, or what Gutenberg destroyed. We do not allow them to understand the essential humanness of technology, or to understand technology in Heidegger’s terms – the art of manipulating the world for our benefit.

Now I don’t know what Glogster is, but I do know that every technology gives and takes. The book disabled hundreds of millions and wiped out hundreds of languages. It also spread learning and allowed both the novel and eventually journalism to appear. And I know that our students must have the philosophical grounding in what technology is, how to learn it, and how to use it, that so many of our current teachers lack. After all, the classroom is filled with technology – chairs and desks (1835 via William Alcott), chalkboards (1840 via William Alcott), Time schedules (1845 via Henry Barnard), Books (1840s, mostly Henry Barnard), testing (1910, the Carnegie Commission), even ballpoint pens – that highly controversial 1950s invention of Marcel Bich. And all of those technologies have benefits and real limits.

I’m not really focused on, nor do I think Scott is focused on, “administrative technologies” but on “educational technologies.” A gradebook – I might argue, is no more an “educational technology” than a file cabinet is.

What I think we are discussing is transformational technologies. Technologies whereuse alters the learning process.

I need to say two things: First, and I think this is a big part of Scott’s target here, every school administrator, every policy maker, and every tech director making “blocking decisions,” needs to wake up and take responsibility for keeping our current century away from education.

But – in the end – a big part of this remains “taking responsibility for your own learning.” The first free seminars in these systems which I offered were presented in 1998, and at that point there was already a massive research base for what Scott is saying here. The laws regarding technology access in terms of students with disabilities (and those with “504″ plans) were placed on the books in 1995. IBM was promoting speech recognition and text-to-speech in 1996, and Lynne Anderson-Inman was already proving the value of “digital texts” and “digital notebooks” and digitally linked note-taking in the mid-1990s.

Jerrid, Troy, and everyone… The issue is this - In order to be lifelong learners it is essential to understand and know how to function with the information and communications technologies of our world, and to know how to adapt when those technologies change. In order to be human successes we also must understand how to communicate what we know, how to collaborate, and how to distribute information. This is why Socrates drilled his students on memory. In pre-literate Greece, that was the essential tool. This is why we taught “reading” (meaning decoding ink-on-paper alphabetic texts) in school, and why we taught writing with pens and pencils, and why we introduced students to libraries. In the Gutenberg era these were the essential tools.

But, when kids are writing, I want them to (among other things) be able to communicate with Grandma even if Grandma lives thousands of miles away, even if Grandma is blind, even if Grandma speaks another language. And if they are reading, I don’t want them limited to the 2,000 “age appropriate” books and 1975 World Book Encyclopedia in the local public library.

Newspaper readership, yes a minority, but a rapidly changing environment http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1133/decline-print-newspapers-increased-online-news with (in 2009) only 25% of Americans getting news from print daily.

The change is occurring across the “print world” – Amazon, 19 July 2010: “Over the past three months, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 143 Kindle books. Over the past month, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 180 Kindle books.

The lack of real history of education courses is what leaves so many teachers completely unaware of why schools do what they do, and leaves them confused about what the tools of education are.

Every day that I present for educators, I have a greater appreciate for how distorted the view is as seen through the eyes of a typical EduBlogger. In fact, the majority of the voices in the EdTech Community are so far ahead of the curve that it doesn’t even seem like their on the same road anymore. Most educators have never listened to a podcast, much less created one. They’ve never edited a wiki, much less started one of their own. So how on earth could they be expected to have a rational conversation about the impact new technologies are having on the skill sets our students need? Simply put, they can’t. The majority of the voices many of us listen to on a regular basis… actually represent just a tiny fraction of the educators out there. We’re the minority, the outsiders, the ones who talk using strange terms involving words with far too many missing vowels.

You can’t ‘firmly believe in life-long learning’ and simultaneously not be clued in to the largest transformation in learning that ever has occurred in human history. Those two don’t co-exist. Being a ‘life-long learner’ is not ignoring what’s going on around you; you don’t get to claim the title of ‘effective educator’ if you do this.

However, in order for education to work within the larger structure of integrated societal systems, clear outcomes are still needed.

How can we achieve learning targets when the educator is no longer able to control the actions of learners?

I’ve come to view teaching as a critical and needed activity in the chaotic and ambiguous information climate created by networks. In the future, however, the role of the teacher, the educator, will be dramatically different from the current norm. Views of teaching, of learner roles, of literacies, of expertise, of control, and of pedagogy are knotted together. Untying one requires untying the entire model.

Most likely, a teacher will be one of the more prominent nodes in a learner’s network. Thoughts, ideas, or messages that the teacher amplifies will generally have a greater probability of being seen by course participants.

A curatorial teacher acknowledges the autonomy of learners, yet understands the frustration of exploring unknown territories without a map. A curator is an expert learner. Instead of dispensing knowledge, he creates spaces in which knowledge can be created, explored, and connected.

The curator, in a learning context, arranges key elements of a subject in such a manner that learners will “bump into” them throughout the course. Instead of explicitly stating “you must know this”, the curator includes critical course concepts in her dialogue with learners, her comments on blog posts, her in-class discussions, and in her personal reflections. As learners grow their own networks of understanding, frequent encounters with conceptual artifacts shared by the teacher will begin to resonate.

When I first started learning about the internet (pre-web days), I felt like I had stepped into a alternate realm with its own norms of behaviour and conduct. Bulletin boards and chat rooms presented a challenging mix of navigating social protocols while developing technical skills. By engaging with these conversation spaces – and forming a few tentative connections with others – I was able to find a precarious foothold in the online medium.

Today’s social web is no different – we find our way through active exploration. Designers can aid the wayfinding process through consistency of design and functionality across various tools, but ultimately, it is the responsibility of the individual to click/fail/recoup and continue.

Social structures are filters. As a learner grows (and prunes) her personal networks, she also develops an effective means to filter abundance. The network becomes a cognitive agent in this instance – helping the learner to make sense of complex subject areas by relying not only on her own reading and resource exploration, but by permitting her social network to filter resources and draw attention to important topics. In order for these networks to work effectively, learners must be conscious of the need for diversity and should include nodes that offer critical or antagonistic perspectives on all topic areas. Sensemaking in complex environments is a social process.

Imagine a course where the fragmented conversations and content are analyzed (monitored) through a similar service. Instead of creating a structure of the course in advance of the students starting (the current model), course structure emerges through numerous fragmented interactions. “Intelligence” is applied after the content and interactions start, not before. This is basically what Google did for the web – instead of fully defined and meta-described resources in a database, organized according to subject areas (i.e. Yahoo at the time), intelligence was applied at the point of search. Aggregation should do the same – reveal the content and conversation structure of the course as it unfolds, rather than defining it in advance.

Educators often have years or decades of experience in a field. As such, they are familiar with many of the concepts, pitfalls, confusions, and distractions that learners are likely to encounter. As should be evident by now, the educator is an important agent in networked learning. Instead of being the sole or dominant filter of information, he now shares this task with other methods and individuals.

Filtering can be done in explicit ways – such as selecting readings around course topics – or in less obvious ways – such as writing summary blog posts around topics. Learning is an eliminative process. By determining what doesn’t belong, a learner develops and focuses his understanding of a topic. The teacher assists in the process by providing one stream of filtered information. The student is then faced with making nuanced selections based on the multiple information streams he encounters. The singular filter of the teacher has morphed into numerous information streams, each filtered according to different perspectives and world views.

During CCK08/09, one of Stephen’s statements that resonated with many learners centers on modelling as a teaching practice: “To teach is to model and to demonstrate. To learn is to practice and to reflect.”

Apprenticeship learning models are among the most effective in attending to the full breadth of learning. Apprenticeship is concerned with more than cognition and knowledge (to know about) – it also addresses the process of becoming a carpenter, plumber, or physician.

Without an online identity, you can’t connect with others – to know and be known. I don’t think I’m overstating the importance of have a presence in order to participate in networks. To teach well in networks – to weave a narrative of coherence with learners – requires a point of presence.

In CCK08/09, we used The Daily, the connectivism blog, elearnspace, OLDaily, Twitter, Facebook, Ning, Second Life, and numerous other tools to connect with learners. Persistent presence in the learning network is needed for the teacher to amplify, curate, aggregate, and filter content and to model critical thinking and cognitive attributes that reflect the needs of a discipline.

We’re

We’re still early in many of these trends. Many questions remain unanswered about privacy, ethics in networks, and assessment. My view is that change in education needs to be systemic and substantial. Education is concerned with content and conversations. The tools for controlling both content and conversation have shifted from the educator to the learner. We require a system that acknowledges this reality.

Aggregation had so much potential. And yet has delivered relatively little over the last decade.

Perhaps we need to spend more time in information abundant environments before we turn to aggregation as a means of making sense of the landscape.

I’d like a learning system that functions along the lines of RescueTime – actively monitoring what I’m doing – but then offers suggestions of what I should (or could) be doing additionally. Or a system that is aware of my email exchanges over the last several years and can provide relevant information based on the development of my thinking and work.

Just-in-Time Teaching

So schools do not teach effective use of Google, of text-messaging, of instant-messaging. They don't teach collaboration. They barely teach communication outside the stilted prose only academics use. No wonder students are prepared for nothing except more school.

There is also the issue of educational discrimination. When schools fight against technology, they are fighting access to education for people who learn and function differently. Technology, from computers to calculators to classroom cellphones, enables a wide variety of students who would otherwise be left out to participate and succeed. Technology in the hands of all students allows disabilities and functional deficits to be invisibly accommodated so that knowledge can be developed, nurtured, and evaluated on terms fair to everyone.So, no, the problem is not cheating. The problem is firmly one of instructional and evaluation technique. It will not be solved until teachers and professors figure out that understanding and the ability to work with knowledge is what counts, and that anything you can instantly Google, or store in your calculator, or retrieve via quick text-message or phone call need not be remembered, nor tested, because, obviously, you will always be able to instantly Google it, or store it in your cellphone, or get someone to text it to you. 

i.e. I remember it only until I've finished the test) transforms to internalized (and useful) memorization only when the information is RELEVANT to my life! That's why kids can remember Pokemon points and Blues Clues songs yet struggle with their times tables or history dates! Yes, we need to agree on what content is foundational - AND we need to learn to teach it to (or learn it with) our children in ways that are meaningful to THEM, not just to us!

I used to teach in an urban alternative school where many of my students were gang members.  These students were not successful in school though they did get an education.  I am sorry to say that the majority of their education did not come from school teachers nor was it an education sanctioned by the school district.  I also through the years have been involved in many online communities of interest.  Learning occurs there all the time.  Not all members of these communities were successful in school but within these communities were successful in becoming educated about certain things.  There is high quality education occurring in many places that we don't consider school:  boy and girl scouts, workplaces, church youth groups, 4H, Little League, gangs, internet chat rooms, YouTube, blogs, libraries, family interaction, etc.  In fact, the most relevant learnin for most people happens in one of hese other places of education and not in schools. 

If the goal for schools is to become the most relevant and useful place for education we need to harness the rhetorical draw of the gang, the personal significance of the family, the intrinsic nature of clubs and organizations like the Scouts and 4H, the relevance and applicability of the work place, and the openness of social media.  The only way to do this is to personalize the learning experience for each student.  This means that content will be as different from person to person as is the approach to teaching that content.

Students who behave, and learn, most like their teachers do the best in classrooms. Teachers see this reflection as proof of their own competence - "The best students are just like me." And thus all who are "different" in any way - race, class, ability, temperament, preferences - are left out of the success story.

Mobile phones, computers everywhere, hypertext, social networking, collaborative cognition (from Wikipedia on up), Google, text-messaging, Twitter, audiobooks, digital texts, text-to-speech, speech recognition, flexible formatting - these are not "add ons" to the world of education, they are the world of education. This is how humans in this century talk, read, communicate, learn. And learning to use these technologies effectively, efficiently, and intelligently must be at the heart of our educational strategies. These technologies do something else - by creating a flexibility and set of choices unprecedented in human communication - they "enable" a vast part of the population which earlier media forms disabled.

Back in Socrates' time it was all about the information you could remember. With this system very, very few could become "educated." In the ‘Gutenberg era' it was all about how many books you could read and how fast you could decode alphabetical text; this let a few more reach that ‘educated' status - about 35% if you trust all those standardized tests to measure "proficiency." But now it is all about how you learn to find information, how you build your professional and personal networks, how you learn, how to learn - because learning must be continuous. None of this eliminates the need for a base of knowledge - the ability to search, to ask questions, requires a knowledge base, but it dramatically alters both how that knowledge base is developed, and what you need to do with it. This paradigm opens up the ranks of the "educated" in ways inconceivable previously.

We must abandon the one-way classroom communication system, be it the lecture or use of the "clicker," and teach with conversation and through modeling learning itself. We must lose the idea that "attention" means students staring at a teacher, or that "attendance" means being in the room, and understand all the differing ways humans learn best. We must stop separating subjects rigidly and adopt the contemporary notion of following knowledge where it leads us.