Group items tagged

This is what I asked each student to do: 1) create a series of three goals or metas, one progressively more complex than the other, and each building upon the other, that were to be accomplished his term. The first goal was to be done by the end of March, the second by the end of April, the third maybe by the end of the term…but probably not. 2) create a series of tasks that s/he felt would lead to realizing those goals. 3) blog about about his or her progress at least 2 times per week 4) At the end of the term: write up a final self assessment (in English or in Spanish), reflecting upon the progress completed, including the work done in class that would contribute to these goals, and assign a grade for the term. The students needed to evidence of their progress as a way of justifying their chosen grade. CAVEAT: If the grade s/he chose was lower than one than I would have selected, they would get my grade and an explanation. If the grade was higher, we would continue the conversation and try to see what it was that I was missing. I was willing to be (and wanted to be!) swayed, given that this was the student’s assessment of his/her personal learning goals in Spanish.

Some (but very few indeed) met ALL of their goals. Almost all acknowledged that they had set up unrealistic expectations for themselves (in terms of how much they could get done in a semester) and many used their self assessment as a way to set up future goals for their language growth. (Exactly the kinda thing you hope to see happen…learning extending beyond the limits imposed by the classroom).

A shy, timid young man, he did not mention in his evaluation the class discussion he led, and managed, and blogged about at the end of the term… nor did he see how any of this was helping him move towards his most lofty goal…to be able to travel with friends in Spain and to be able to communicate with ease and without anxiety.

It pains me to read this, but not because of the critiques she makes about me, the tools, or the class. It pains me because Edie passed on an opportunity to try something new, experiment, take a calculated risk…all things she will eventually have to do when she travels in another culture. It’s sad because she was the only student who did not “let go” of something during the semester and instead just held on tight to how she wanted this class to be, vs how it really, truly was. Unstructured to her meant undirected. Allowing the group to decide the flow of the class frustrated her, because the cadence of the class was not one that was controlled by the teacher and therefore predictable

In the end, she presented me with a chart that logged over 40 hours of Skype conversations with a native speaker she eventually found, and 110 pages (!) of chat transcripts with others with whom she tried to make regular contact. In class, as a result of her out of class experiences, she became more involved and engaged, eventually leading a class discussion about her interests in music, but doing so such that it wove itself in with the topic the class was discussing that week.

The OLN model is aimed at leveraging these affordances in ways that the CMS does not. For example, discussions that last longer than 50 minutes can be conducted online without prompting or intervention by the instructor. And such discussions can include more voices than those of the students formally enrolled in the class. Whatever connections students make with each other can be maintained via social networking applications of their choosing. And students can capture, annotate, and archive the content they assemble and create in their courses as well as in their less formal learning experiences. And since they are using their tools, they maintain control of and access to the content as long as they choose.

Given the ever increasing rate of change and improvement in learning technologies and approaches, committed teachers should be anxious to find and employ new, more effective tools to help their students learn more effectively.

The OLN also has the significant advantage of being time-persistent. Compared with the frequent starts and stops in the CMS (see Figure 2), much of what happens in the OLN allows learners to build their learning networks over time, since it is not bound to semesters, terms, or even the institution. And the artificial boundaries of the CMS are removed thereby allowing the learner to benefit from participation in a broader community of networked learners, further removing the limitations on learner network growth (see Figure 4).  

One of the primary aims of the OLN model is to reestablish teachers and learners at the center of learning activity (both inside and outside of courses).

By combining several functions into one application, the CMS has forced us to make a tradeoff that is suboptimal for learning. Because there is some confidential and proprietary data in the CMS, we have traditionally locked all course data behind a login screen, viewable only by an instructor and the officially enrolled members of his or her class - and then only for the duration of the semester or term. This is perhaps the most debilitating example of CMS technology being used to reinvent the past. The traditional classroom has always been a private, physically, and temporally bounded space. The natural inclination was to replicate that model within the CMS. However, doing so has imposed the limits of the old space in a new space where such limitations do not exist.

there are several key components of the OLN that should be private and secure, situated within an institution's intranet. These include student information systems (SISs), identity and role repositories, proprietary content stores, and secure online assessment applications. These are and should remain core components of the institutional IT infrastructure. Beyond these, however, there are several OLN components that need not be private. Faculty and student blogs, wikis, portfolios, and open courseware and open educational resource repositories can be open (at the option and discretion of individual faculty members and students). These functions can exist, spread across multiple applications and websites, in the cloud. Some applications might even be mashups of intranet and cloud-based applications.

Light's examination of the impact of group study among students at Harvard is particularly compelling. In Making the Most of College, Light presents evidence that "students who study outside of class in small groups of four to six students, even just once a week, benefit enormously. Group meetings are organized around discussions of the homework, and as a result of their study group discussion, students are far more engaged and better prepared for class, learning significantly more" (2001, 52).

Learning is not a simple acquisition activity. A large body of critical analysis and research concur that learning is at least as much a function of social discourse as it is solitary cognition (e.g., Vygotsky, 1962, 1978, or Schon, Brown, et al., 1989).

The same is true for the best educational content—it draws people into arguments, explorations, discussions, and relationships that add depth, meaning, and value to that content.

Brown & Adler have argued that, "The most profound impact of the Internet, an impact that has yet to be fully realized, is its ability to support and expand the various aspects of social learning" (2008, 18). This is in contrast to the prevailing "traditional Cartesian view" of instruction that focuses primarily on the transfer of knowledge—as if it were a substance—from teacher to learner (18). Educational theorists have long argued against the didactic approach. Freire critiqued what he called "banking education," a model in which student activity is limited to "receiving, filing, and storing the deposits" of information apportioned them by the instructor (1970, 72).

We may fruitfully update Freire's metaphor of "banking education" to a metaphor of "downloading learning." So much of what passes for innovative uses of instructional technology today, like the OpenCourseWare collections available from MIT and other universities, restricts learners to downloading files.

If "hyperlinks subvert hierarchy" (Levine, et al., 1999), Web 2.0 tools are making the learning space fundamentally and permanently flat. CIOs, academic leaders, and individual faculty members might argue that they need the structure and security of the CMS. We agree that some elements of the CMS should be maintained. But students, and a growing number of instructors, are engaging in rich, meaningful dialog, content creation, and sharing outside the CMS.

When students enter the walled garden of the CMS, they are largely "acted upon." Efficacious, self-regulating learners, on the other hand, "act" as they participate in and take ownership of their own learning activities and ultimately what they learn and how they employ that new learning in pursuit of their various life projects.

The center of gravity in the CMS is decidedly on institutional and instructor efficiency and convenience, not student participation and learning. This should not be surprising given Cuban's findings that educational technology is used largely to "maintain existing practices" rather than to "revolutionize," or even change in any substantial way, teaching and learning practices (2001).

But the CMS paradigm actually works against such a transformation of the relationship between teachers and learners because it privileges the role of the instructor and technically restricts individual students from contributing and to shaping courses in any meaningful way. Sclater has argued that the term "learning management system" itself suggests "disempowerment—an attempt to manage and control the activities of the student by the university" (2008, p. 2). The tendencies of the CMS are not, he argues, just "minor irritations" but rather forces that "may overtly or subtly align the institutional processes with the software rather than having the system serve the requirements of the institution" (p. 3).

Most (if not all) of these sorts of activities are absent from the typical CMS-based course. This is true primarily because there is no space provided for students to publish such content and engage in such activities of their own creation. Moreover, students engaged in such activities are unlikely to make the CMS the base of their activities because they would be walled off from the rest of the world, destined for deletion at the end of the semester.

12-year-old home schooled girl, Heather Lawver, who created an online, fan-authored version of The Daily Prophet, the fictional newspaper in the Harry Potter series (see http://dprophet.com).

Jenkins argues that Lawver's activities, and those of the reporters she recruited, went far beyond a creative outlet for fans—participants acquired knowledge creation, knowledge pooling, and knowledge sharing skills, gained experiences sharing and comparing value systems, learned how to express and interpret feelings about a literary work, and developed Internet publishing skills (p. 185). Gee has argued that similarly transferable skills can be acquired in online role-playing games, where players learn to work well with team members, collaborate to solve problems, and hone individual skills in the context while understanding and appreciating others' skills, etc. (2009).

Learners as Co-Instructors, Instructors as Co-Learners

the overwhelming usage patterns of instructors indicate that the CMS has been used primarily to mimic the traditional, semester-based, lecture-driven, content-centric model of instruction - one of bestowing "course info" on students.

the CMS was designed primarily to support and enhance traditional teaching. It is not coincidental that the first incarnation of Blackboard was branded "CourseInfo."

While perhaps a bit stylized, the typical CMS-delivered, content-centric, lecture-driven course complete with multiple-choice midterm and final exams, does little to prepare students to succeed in a world in which there will always be more new knowledge created every day than they can possibly access, much less assimilate, master, and apply. Given the overwhelming flow of data all around us, our job should be increasingly less focussed on making our students "knowledgeable" and focused instead more on making them "knowledge-able" (Wesch, 2009).

When a student at Ryerson University convened a chemistry study group inside Facebook in 2007, the University threatened to expel him for academic misconduct. In his defense, the student observed that he was simply replicating online what was common practice in face-to-face study group and tutorial sessions (Schaffhauser, 2008). The difference between these face-to-face sessions and the groups the student created in Facebook, however, was that the online versions of the study groups would persist over time, perhaps far beyond the students' time at Ryerson. Access to Facebook, unlike access to live study sessions or to the CMS, does not expire when a student graduates.

Most institutions of higher education appear focused on . . . content coverage, course structure, and pre-existing time arrangments such as semesters and hours of credit than . . . issues such as learning and performance (

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I love learning by making my own mistakes - and that is certainly part of learning to be a decent programmer

Or are we to allow that "this is a solved problem, that is a solved problem (read about it here if it helps) but here is a real-world problem that needs research done on it..."

Wouldn't it be great if universities once again became places where new knowledge grew and spread from, rather than where it went to be locked up and die?

The model of "Trust no-one and write all your code yourself" is outdated. The model of "Trust your fellow humans and write your code with their help" is the future.