Edupunk

I can become a better photographer simply by the sheer act of continually doing photography… heading towards the idea of 10,000 hours at doing something can get you near the “Welcome to Expertise” sign. This seems simple- I get better at something by doing it. There is no central authority, no entity that is approving what I do. If I skip a day or more, there is no punishment. It is not based on attendance. I get out what I put into it. I’m really on my own. That’s is as Personal as the Learning Environment can be, eh? But I am not completely on my own… and what I think is a key ingredient here is the feedback I get by being in a network of peers doing the same thing. It is the comments, suggestions, and even small reinforcements that others doing the same activity as me that increase or reinforce my learning, not a teacher’s.

1. The longest path is the shortest and the shortest path is the longest Essentially, if you are looking for shortcuts to learning , your end path will take more time and effort. At first the path of learning all of the basic concepts seems like a long route, but in the end, the authors argue will be shorter in the long run. 2. Avoid isolation. This not only means find online communities, but also people you can talk to or bounce ideas off of. It’s the “Learning is social” concept –“As a self-learner, you do not have the convenience of scheduled class time and required problem sets. You must be aggressive about finding people to help you.” 3. Avoid multitasking It does not mean you cannot study with music playing (I am listening to a blues show as I type) but it is important to focus solely on trying to learn a task or complete a project. 4. You don’t read textbooks, you work through them It ain’t a novel and need not be read cover to cover, or even chapter start to end- “Successful self-learners don’t read, they toil. If there are proofs, walk them through, and try proving results on your own. Work through exercises, and make up your own examples.” It’s more like exercising than reading. 5. Build Eigencourses I cannot define “eigencourse” but to me it says leverage the open content that is out there. The “eigen” part seems to mean its not all in one place, you will need to pick and choose, mix and mashup. Don;t expect a single course pack. 6. What to do when you don’t understand. This point was a bit more vague to me and aimed more at learning to code, but the idea of a “logic tree” tells me there are patterns of ways to figure out how to step back and sort out what you need to learn something you don’t get at first. Maybe it should read, “DON’T PANIC”? 7. There is nothing so practical as a good theory. The authors here suggest to not be a “theoretician” or a “practitioner” but both. “Not all textbooks can be read with application in mind, despite that they serve as the theoretical foundation for applied work. This is why you must have a deep sense of patience and commitment – which is why a prolonged curiosity and passion for a topic are so valuable… Avoid the dualistic mistakes of technical execution without intuition, and intuition without technical execution.”

Education is technology’s Afghanistan — school-conquering technology keeps charging in, and the technology limps out defeated:

 Education is way harder than handheld personal computing.

 If we do teach more with MOOCs, we should be the harshest critics of MOOCs

the Indians I heard in London accepted the following premise: university education, at least in part, involves seasoned, well-educated people determining what less seasoned, less well-educated people should know, then proceeding to teach them. By contrast, at the Palo Alto gathering there was much more talk of “hacking college.” This worldview, though certainly not universal, reflects a certain disdain for hierarchies of knowledge and expertise. Instead, it embraces a radically individualistic approach to higher ed, one based on the idea that it’s always a great thing when students create their own education, piecing together courses and educational materials, free from the confines of convention.

Lots of students who want a college education, whether at the elite or mass-access end of the spectrum, either want to study a curriculum that has been proven, need support because they don’t have the tools to educate themselves, or both.

The edupunk aesthetic certainly has some appeal – why not blow up some traditional assumptions about the structure of education? And it is so varied that it wouldn’t be fair to say its proponents are all blind to questions of giving students the guidance they need to succeed. But its anarchistic edge risks leaving students to their own devices so much that oversight and quality control goes out the window

As I’ve mentioned before, it is up to online communities to disrupt the oppressive status quo at conventional institutions. The same applies to our conception of currency, and how we form online “transactions.” Now that the focus among the technorati is shifting from how to monetize social media toward how to use it to create social impact, we have an opportunity to harness the meaning economy

“Abundance breaks more things than scarcity does.”

PickupPal, a ride-sharing service in Ottawa that was providing information for commuters to more easily use the service. It became so easy to use that the City of Ottawa, whose public transportation system was at risk of loosing market share, passed a law making carpooling and ridesharing unreasonably difficult to do. PickupPal was deemed “too efficient.” A local movement to save the rideshare company began and the uproar in the community caused the city to rewrite the law.

Kevin Donovan had an ambition to build an open-courseware Web site, this one amid the "not-so-free culture" of Georgetown University, as one blog put it. Mr. Donovan, a junior in Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, wants to see first-class education available to the third world. He argues that open courses make sense, given Georgetown's Jesuit tradition of social responsibility. The dean of his school bought his pitch, which carries a valuable lesson for fellow student organizers: once you obtain that kind of high-level support, things get a lot easier. The open-courseware project became Mr. Donovan's summer job. Working with faculty and the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, Mr. Donovan helped put six courses online last year. He hopes to build on that start in the coming semester.

One unified megablog

1569 reads

10000 reads

The Internet is a democratizing technology not because users have access to services like Twitter and Facebook but because it supported the development of these tools in the first place. Ignoring this distinction has led to the United States' unfortunate decision to craft public policies that focus primarily on expanding Internet "access" with too little attention paid to the fact that not all access is created equal (PDF). By focusing on access, disregarding the mounting threats to the openness of the Internet, our politicians and regulators are ignoring a growing divide between users with control over digital technologies and those without.

protect the rights of users to create

the iPhone is part of a new class of devices that actively keep the end user from having control

I grab feeds from external blogs all the time that are related to UMW an pull them into our sitewide “tags” blog (the name tags here is confusing, it is simply a republishing of everything in the entire WPMu install) with FeedWordPress. For example, I stumbled across this post in the tags blog on UMW Blogs tonight, which was actually being pulled in from a WordPress.com blog of a student who graduated years ago, but regularly blogs about her work in historic preservation.  This particular post was all about a book she read as an undergraduate in Historic Preservation, and how great a resource it is.  A valuable post, especially since the professor who recommended that book, W. Brown Morton, retired last year. There is a kind of eternal echo in a system like this that students, faculty, and staff can continue to feed into a community of teaching and learning well beyond their matriculation period, or even their career.

what we are doing as instructional technologists, scholars and students in higher ed right now is much bigger than a particular blogging system or software, I see my job as working with people to imagine the implications and possibilities of managing and maintaining their digital identity in a moment when we are truly in a deep transformation of information, identity, and scholarship.

we’ll host domains that professors purchase and, ideally, map all their domains onto one WP install that can manage many multi-blogging solutions from one install.  The whole Russian Doll thing that WPMu can do with the Multi-Site Manager plugin. So you offer a Bluehost like setup for faculty, and if that is too much, allow them to map a domain, take control of their own course work, and encourage an aggregated course management model that pushes students to take control of their digital identity and spaces by extension.  Giving students a space and voice on your domain or application is not the same as asking them to create, manage and maintain their own space.  Moreover, it doesn’t feed into the idea of a digital trajectory that starts well before they come to college and will end well after they leave.  This model extends the community, and brings in key resources like a recent graduate discussing an out-of-print historic preservation text book a retired professor assigned to be one of the best resources for an aspiring Preservation graduate student. This is what it is all about, right there, and it’s not gonna happen in silos and on someone else’s space, we need to provision, empower, and imagine the merge as a full powered move to many. many domains of one’s own.

The pyramid creates the impression that there is a scarcity of creativity — only those who can traverse the bottom levels and reach the summit can be creative. And while this may be how it plays out in many schools, it’s not due to any shortage of creative potential on the part of our students.

Here’s what I propose: we flip Bloom’s taxonomy. Rather than starting with knowledge, we start with creating, and eventually discern the knowledge that we need from it.

I’ve come to realize that it’s very important for my students to encounter a concept before fully understanding what’s going on. It makes their brain try to fill in the gaps, and the more churn a brain experiences, the more likely it’s going to retain information

A success for college-made free online courses—except that Mr. Ziegler, who works for a restaurant-equipment company in Pennsylvania, is on the verge of losing his job. And those classes failed to provide what his résumé real ly needs: a college credential.

the recession and disappearing grant money are forcing colleges to confront a difficult question: What business model can support the high cost of giving away your "free" content?

The education oracle offers another prophecy for open courseware. "Every OCW initiative at a university that does not offer distance courses for credit," he has blogged, "will be dead by the end of calendar 2012."