Confused MOOCThink

I came across an article by the progenitors of #EDCMOOC on their initial thinking around MOOC pedagogy (MOOC pedagogy: the challenges of developing for Coursera). Riding on the Coursera engagement with the University of Edinburgh, the team designing the eLearning and Digital Cultures MOOC on the Coursera platform (that I missed enrolling for, though) was seeking to engage with the medium and pedagogy, planning and development and the wider implications for the practice of and research in eLearning and Higher Education.

The article makes a promising start by articulating the “digital mimicry” of the xMOOC platforms by calling out the fact that their models are digital extensions of the conservative education system. The authors also demonstrate their understanding that the MOOC innovation as one that questions and loosens the traditional notions such as institutional control, learning outcomes and assessment criteria.

They do acknowledge the precedents set by the cMOOCs, but dismiss them as being “populated by committed e-learning enthusiasts and remain untested as vehicles for delivering alternative, less ‘reflexive’ subject matter”, “pedagogically interesting, may not fit so well across other disciplines…radical fringes of what the Higher Education sector might be prepared to more fully endorse”.

Their focus is to preserve the “construction of the teacher that has an immediacy that can succeed at scale”, with the belief that the teacher’s role is somewhere in between “over-celebratory fetishizing of the teacher” and “(writing) the teacher out of the equation altogether”. They don’t subscribe to the hype that MOOCs (and the Open Education movement) will achieve grand visions of democratizing education or freeing of the world’s knowledge, but do believe that the MOOCs have some merit in terms of scale, diversity, experimentation & research, and augmentation to physical offerings of higher education institutions.

There intent is to see how the MOOC can operate in conjunction with traditional practices. Essentially, they base their interest on:

Online education is a trend-ridden field, and MOOCs might be seen as just another – rather high-profile – piece of ed-tech du jour. However, in their sheer scale, in the rapidity of their rise and in the profound issues they appear to be raising regarding the purposes of higher education and the future of the university, they are clearly something genuinely new, something more than simply modish. For this reason, they are surely worth serious engagement on the part of anyone interested in the digital futures of educational change.

IMHO, this is a very cavalier approach to think about MOOC pedagogy and I am sure the authors will want to defend their approach based on the learning they have had from actually putting this into practice.

Why do I say this? At the outset, you cannot think of cMOOCs and Connectivism from within the system – they are a disruption – xMOOCs being the (rather limited) innovation. cMOOCs questioned the existing paradigm, demonstrated an alternative (raised many questions that are still unsolved like, for example, assessments in a cMOOC environment) and laid a strong foundation for thinking about the disruption through the theory of Connectivism.

It is not enough to state they cannot fulfill grand visions of democratizing education or cannot work in less-reflexive settings. There must be an effort to quantify the “why” behind these assertions. There must be an awareness that networks that are democratic do not exhibit power laws, rather they are horizontal line graphs that require certain critical literacies (not only those found in “elearning enthusiasts” – dislike being called that).

There must also be a concerted effort to understand that the alternative to instructor-mediated “contact and dialogue” at small scale, towards preserving the quality of these interactions at a much larger scale, must have necessarily to leverage the power of the network (witness Alec Couros’s experiment to call for external mentors online for his physical class) and does not exist in the spectrum between “no-teacher” and “over-fetished teacher”, but rather in different conceptions of what a teacher can be (Atelier, Weaver and so many others that were discussed in CCK08).

It is also important not to bypass the role of technology in unearthing the progress, direction and quality of learning and acting as tools for the network itself to evolve and progress. Therefore, discussions around Learning Analytics, Complexity, Network evolution & collaboration, design of emergent environments for learning and new ways of implicit and explicit assessments must foreground any new design of a MOOC or any conversation around MOOC Pedagogy (if that is the right term – heutagogy was considered as more appropriate in some conversations).

What would count is if the authors directed their design efforts towards exploring the new paradigm from a new paradigm perspective, rather than force-fitting it to existing notions of what they think works and what does not. Their kind of MOOCThink confuses and perplexes me.

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MOOCology

The discussion on what is a MOOC or how do we classify MOOCs is gaining momentum. First we had George explaining the difference by saying that there are xMOOCs and cMOOCs. Now Lisa Lane has come with a different taxonomy (network/task/content based) with some interesting distinctions. Dominic came up his own understanding of the “features” of a MOOC. See also Gordon Lockhart’s Super-MOOC, A MOOC by Another Name and a brilliant post by Doug Holton, where he makes many insightful remarks including what could be necessary and sufficient conditions for learning to occur or to be “caused” (don’t particularly like that last word).

Taking Doug’s cue, we should perhaps be talking of massive in the sense of the quantum of connected-ness or connection-richness, or in terms of the widespread nature of the learning need or motivation, rather than looking at it from the point of view of number of learner enrolments.

That said, I would reiterate that we are comparing apples with oranges, and despite the “mania”, there is no reason why we should be forced to compare these different initiatives in the first place. MOOCs (cMOOCs) will have a plethora of possible implementation strategies and techniques. For example, I love what the folks at the Mechanical MOOC are doing (Audrey covered them here).

In my opinion, it makes more sense to focus on the platform rather than the tool, the rubric rather than the assessment and the DNA rather than the you or me.

A video, by Prof. John Holland (University of Michigan) speaking on Modelling Complex Adaptive Systems, is a must view (rather long, but worth it) for a large number of reasons. I find this CAS video (and generally the complex systems area) appealing because it makes more sense to me than engineered closed systems like we have in education today.

I am intrigued by the emphasis in the talk of building blocks, signals, interactions and boundaries within an overall approach of risk taking innovation. I think that fundamentally describes the platform I am referring to. Let us look at that process.

When a learner first starts out, certain pre-conditions exist. These pre-conditions are what makes a person a learner – whether it be out of curiosity, awareness, context, a need and/or some other kind of motivation trigger. At this point, the learner understands little of the network of knowledge, and perhaps may also have a sense or purpose or general idea of outcomes from the forthcoming experience. The platform will have to recognize this initial state.

Next comes a series of interactions in and with the network. This is where the accessibility, quality and depth of the network (in terms of coverage, accuracy, engagement, open-ness) and the contained boundaries play a big role in facilitating or obstructing discovery, experimentation and conjecture – viz. sense-making.

The network really is two things – one, an explicitly curated or visible set of people, content and tools, and two, a vast hidden implicit network intimately connected with the first but not explicitly visible at first.

Interaction in the network will be governed by signals – actions by the learner, actions by others and changes in the network itself as it evolves and adapts. The learner will interact to implicitly or explicitly “produce” or “engineer” make visible or personal, a set of connected nodes in the network (which shall be her curation arising out of her discovery, experimentation and conjecture).

The visible and invisble impact of her sense-making and of others will generate fresh signals in a non-linear manner. Over time, some of the network constellations will get broken to form new bonds (or connections) as the process will be usually far from equilibrium. Visible parts will become a part of the network thus changing the network maps of sense-making of others and in turn generating new innovations and experimentation.

Again over time, feedback from these interactions or signals will reinforce collections or patterns of these nodes of sense-making and new building blocks of comprehension and sense making will emerge. This is turn will affect boundaries of interaction and reduce impedance caused by them, so that new constellations are created.

The platform will have to recognize this elaborate dance of sense-making, the signals, interactions, boundaries and complex adaptation. It will have to provide for this complexity and it will need to allow for contextual influence to align towards certain constellations (and it will do so in many ways, giving us the agency). 

The platform will have to recognize and help resolve multiple trails that coalesce into a conception, parallelisms or multiple patterns of building blocks that converge into a model (a thought, an idea). And the system will have to recognize transition or inflection points, when existing models are questioned and new trains of thoughts emerge, just like in this post.

The platform has to provide for this emergence, chaos, self-organization and adaptation. Something that is spectacularly different from what Khan Academy or Coursera or other non-MOOCs are attempting to do. And in doing so, it will forge a new understanding of what an educational system ought to be.

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MOOC Dropouts

Audrey is grumpy and unhappy about the massive dropout rate vs. the hype of the open courses. She writes:

I’m starting to get more than a little grumpy about MOOCs, what with all the hype about the revolutionary disruptions and game-changing tsunamis. I’m tired of the mainstream media punditry and their predictions that Stanford University’s experiments with online education (and by extension now Coursera and Udacity) will change everything; I’m tired of Silicon Valley’s exuberance that this could mark the end-of-the-(academic)-world-as-we-know-it – a future that its press, its investors, and its entrepreneurs are all invested (sometimes literally) in being both high tech and highly lucrative.

And she goes on to say:

While aspiring to learn is, indeed, worth celebrating, I can’t imagine anyone seriously argue that aspiring to learn is sufficient. Yet The Atlantic suggests the low success rates are “a sign of the system’s efficiency.”
 
And perhaps as these MOOCs are all just experiments – hyped experiments, but experiments nonetheless – we can shrug and say it’s great folks want to learn and, alas, it’s a pity when they don’t. Perhaps. But when we praise the failure to complete a class (a failure to learn) as “efficiency” and simply stop there, then I’m not sure what we’re building with MOOCs even rises to the level of what Dean Dad calls a “useful extra.” I’m not sure we can even know that it’s useful at all.

This is symptomatic of the adaptation the MOOC idea has gone through. Where many people are amazed (including George who says “I can’t recall a time when universities at one moment have responded en masse as aggressively and as collaboratively” ) at the response in  the past few months, and others like Audrey mix scepticism with an open-ness to engage with the medium, I want to take a step back and talk about some of the major learning from the MOOCs starting 2008.

For me, and many others in CCK, the question of comparisons between existing systems and the MOOC model did not really exist – it was like comparing apples to oranges. There isn’t anything like the existing system (no vocabulary) that exists in a MOOC (except for the name, which has “course” in it).

We were witnessing the emergence of a new way of thinking about teaching and learning. New catchphrases – “Learning is the process of making connections”, “Knowledge is the network”, “to teach is to model and demonstrate, to learn is to practice and reflect” – emerged out of these original MOOCs.

The MOOCs taught me to appreciate emergence, complexity, self-organization and chaos in my learning, both at an individual level and at a group level. Perhaps the most difficult for me to “learn” was the absence of determinism in learning, except that negotiated during the process.

Learning then became something more than the sum of its parts. I have not seen a connectivist implementation of a learning experience that can stand against the traditional LMS and social collaboration add-ons (although George has been working on such an initiative) based learning experience, which focus on the parts rather than the whole. And there exists no pedagogical or andragogical recipe for a MOOC the way Coursera and others may want to advertise.

The vocabulary elements that indicate accomplishment and learning have not been been conceptualized for MOOCs. That is an important thing to remember (and Stephen could have something with his chess game analogy). Neither, more than conceptually, have we talked of the notion of competency. We are at a state of the art in Connectivism today that, in my opinion, defies implementation to any significant degree, for if we had, Audrey would be less grumpy.

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My life is a MOOC

I have been meaning to catch up with the interesting discussion happening around MOOCs. I believe that there will be and should be plurality of approaches and intentions – they are the inevitable accompaniment to change itself. The top tensions in the conversation are:

• How do MOOCs compare with other initiatives like the Stanford AI? Should they be compared at all? How is the MOOC experience different from the others in both design and execution?
• Should MOOCs be seen as disruptive and liberating futures of education, or as incremental improvements to existing educational systems? Should they be posted at all as alternatives to degree or continuing education programs?
• What skills do learners require to navigate these new learning environments? Does it require that they be motivated, socially enabled and have certain Critical Literacies? Should we worry about motivation or presume it? Is learning an art that can be acquired through reflection and practice or is it a science that can/should be rigorously taught?
• Is there intentionality in the design/conception of a MOOC? Should we be moving away from the assumption that MOOCs exist to teach something (as opposed to arguing whether learners can chase their own goals)? If so, how is it different from the way things are today on the Internet and with social media?
• Are theories other than Connectivism able to explain these phenomena accurately? Can/should existing theories be reframed effectively for these types of experiences? Is the Connectivist mode, just as for other theories, like the principles behind the steam engine – evidenced anywhere, anytime?
• What are the benefits that can be derived from such open systems? Are these benefits comparable to the perceived benefits from traditional closed, semi-open systems?

George indicates that this is a process of experimentation, rather than a prescription yet. But not necessarily one that should or does preclude entrepreneurs from adopting it or universities using and promoting their brand to differentiate themselves with. Stephen indicates that we would be better off thinking afresh, rather than treating them as another way of doing the same thing. Dave indicates how the Cynefin framework and the Rhizomatic learning approach can be interpreted in the context of what a MOOC can help one achieve.

The goals of education are variously defined to include a humane & progressive society, inclusive & equitable development, growth & innovation and a host of other goals that arise from awakened and aware individuals. The goals of training are to ensure repeatability in performance and the ability to handle emergent situations.

Theory and Practice are clearly differentiated by challenges of scale, diversity, infrastructure and operations. While Theory may predicate how things should be, Practice dictates what things are – and there are substantial gaps between the two that cannot be resolved by changes in Theory or Practice alone. This is true, not just in Education.

Thus while theories may suggest that Connectivism or Cognitive Apprenticeship or any other theory be the best way for someone to learn, the practice may leave much to be desired. In fact, trying to systematize any theory/philosophy at scale has always been a challenge. This is the core problem that faces us today, so much so, that we have questioned repeatedly the industrial nature of the education system. Of course, there will always be much to be said and debated about one theory over the other.

Which is why it makes sense to experiment with another paradigm which is closer to the way things are and much more in tune with what our goals from Education and Training are. Such a paradigm embraces complexity, questions the existing design and intentionality, while at the same time attempts to meet the same overarching goals. It is necessarily incomparable and requires a new acceptance from people willing to experiment, to craft it into Practice.

The new paradigm is at once more scalable, more respectful of diversity & personal needs, more inclusive & progressive, and most importantly, addresses just those issues that are really crippling the existing paradigm.

In Practice, there is still a long way to go to see how that acceptance can occur in an emergent manner. There are questions around the temporality of learning for specific needs, the need to assess (internal or external) learning for performative reasons, the assurance of learning in such environments, the use of technology, heutagogical considerations and many other important areas. These cannot be answered by rebuttal, but by cooperation. And it must be done by mechanisms that respect complexity and open-ness.

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The Informal Educators: Steve Jobs and Jagjit Singh

Steve Jobs, S.J. and Jagjit Singh J.S. SJ and JS. Full Circle. Closed Loop. Rest in peace.

While SJ epitomised creativity and innovation in technology, JS did the same with Music. While SJ brought personal computing on its own, JS brought life to the dying art of the ghazal. Two people who were never formal teachers. Nonetheless, what we learnt from them is priceless and will continue to inspire us and future generations to come. And they were connected too. The ghazals that JS sang adorn many an iPhone or iPAD.

Since I am irreversibly Connectivist, I can’t help thinking that they were informal educators, teachers who taught without teaching, motivated with their words and actions, who could not be formal educators because perhaps the world was too big to fit in their class, and from who generations will continue to learn.

And there are many like them. Some resting in peace, some visibly our guides and some hidden somewhere off our networks. The skill we must imbibe is how to connect with them, learn from them, despite them not teaching us in an explicit classroom. The world then becomes our classroom, substituting formal teaching with guided collaboration and self-service. That learning is different from time bound, formally assessed mechanisms in ways that are fundamentally incomparable. It is chaotic, non-deterministic and complex and led by our own desires and skills.

The puzzle is in figuring if this is a new kind of education system. Not system, in the traditional closed loop sense, but a complex, distributed one with many cores – many distributed and disaggregated centres of learning and assessment. The puzzle is in the emergence not the making, because it can’t really be “made”. The puzzle is whether it will result in superior outcomes – better citizens, more informed decision makers, more democratic nations and more competent professionals.

It is a puzzle I love and hate to think and talk about. Hate because it involves letting go of structure, intermediation and control. Love because it is free and open, and perhaps has the best chance of helping our children emerge from the abyss of learning they are in today. It needs more people to experiment, play in local contexts, stay globally connected to an ever-expanding network of practice. It is a movement rather than a policy decision, a personal decision to play ball, rather than an imposed directive, an urge to change rather than a push to reform.

SJ and JS. Full circle. Rest in peace.

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Epistemic Games

Clark Quinn pointed me to the work of David Williamson Shaffer and the work around Epistemic Games, the site provocatively taglined Building the Future of Education. Defined:

Epistemic games are computer games that can help players learn to think like engineers, urban planners, journalists, lawyers, and other innovative professionals, giving them the tools they need for a changing world. In epistemic games, players see what it is like to live in the world of adults. They learn ways of thinking that matter in the digital age, and have a chance to imagine the kind of person they might someday become.

David has an interesting presentation from the Design Education Seminar in Paris, France (June 2011) [slides, video, interview]. The first point he makes is about the Epistemic Frame. The Epistemic Frame comprises of:

• Identity (the who)
• Skills (the how)
• Knowledge (the what)
• Values (the why)

(italics added)

He also illustrates an important aspect of games – games as cultures and as environments for growth of innovation cultures. He also connects two “theories” – learning by knowing and learning by connecting.

It is an interesting level of detail for the commonly used word immersion. There is an epistemological and ontological base that designers can use to inform the design of the games they invent. Against the backdrop of the two theories and the epistemic frame, game design becomes a tool for mapping inter-relationships within the epistemic frame – literally describing a state of competence through conversation, game-play and learning. The epistemic frame poses the Values dimension, to me a critical aspect of immersion. In doing so, it focuses on a culture of thinking and innovation that is overwhelmingly important today.

In Use of a professional practice simulation in a first year Introduction to Engineering course, the authors state:

Importantly, engineering knowledge and skills are not required to complete the two design-build-test cycles in the simulation; instead the emphasis is on managing conflicting client requirements, making trade-offs in selecting a final design and justifying design choices….Prior work has also shown that epistemic games—learning environments where students gameplay to develop the epistemic frame of a profession—increase students’ understanding of and interest in the profession.

They explain the methodology behind the game, called Nephrotex, and include a blend of virtual with physical mentoring – something that they believe is critical to the simulation process. It also is a practitioner experience, giving what students will face in real life. In Collaborating in a Virtual Engineering Internship, the authors state that:

epistemic games are designed based on the epistemic frame hypothesis, a theory of learning that analyzes thinking in terms of connections among frame elements: skills, knowledge, values, and justification or decision-making (otherwise known as epistemology) of a STEM profession.

…Nephrotex is grounded in the epistemic frame hypothesis, which suggests that any professional community has a culture (Rohde & Shaffer, 2004; Shaffer, 2004a, 2005, 2006) and that culture has a grammar: a structure composed of skills (the things that members of the community do), knowledge (the understandings that members of the community share), values (the beliefs that members of the community hold), identity (the way that members of the community see themselves), and epistemology (the warrants that justify actions or claims as legitimate within the community). This collection of skills, knowledge, values, identity, and epistemology forms the epistemic frame of the community. The epistemic frame hypothesis suggests that (a) an epistemic frame binds together the skills, knowledge, values, identity, and epistemology that an individual takes on as a member of a community of practice; (b) such a frame is internalized through the training and induction processes by which an individual becomes a member of the community; and (c) once internalized, the epistemic frame of a community is used when an individual approaches a situation from the point of view (or in the role) of a member of the community (Shaffer, 2004a, 2005).

…Put in more concrete terms, engineers act like engineers, identify themselves as engineers, are interested in engineering, and know about physics, electricity, mechanics, chemistry, and other technical fields. These skills, affiliations, habits, and understandings are made possible by looking at the world in a particular way: by thinking like an engineer. The same is true for biologists but for different ways of thinking—and for mathematicians, computer scientists, science journalists, and so on, each with a different epistemic frame.

In David Hatfield’s dissertation, The right kind of telling: an analysis of feedback and learning in a journalism epistemic game, he states:

Epistemic frame theory (Shaffer, 2006, 2007) argues that expertise, such as the kind involved in complex thinking and problem solving, fundamentally involves diverse and dynamic connections between different forms of knowing (Broudy, 1977) and acting, guided by the norms and principles of a particular community….More than simply a collection of different elements, though, epistemic frame theory focuses on the ways in which specific frame elements are used together during complex thinking and problem solving (Shaffer, 2010).

The Critical Literacies MOOC focussed on just this kind of research a year ago from the point of analysis of thinking. Where it starts getting really interesting is here:

Epistemic frame theory thus argues that expertise can be modeled as a network of connections between specific understandings, techniques, values, identities and epistemologies, all of which are articulated through discourse. Assessing the development of such expertise, however, is a significant challenge.

I would add that fidelity of the simulation environment (level of immersion) becomes a significant challenge because it is itself a dynamic network of object and non-object states. In a lot of situations, as in regular eLearning, the struggle is between fidelity and scale (time to develop, cost, effort, complexity). At low scales, all experiences can have a high level of fidelity designed (witness the physical blend in Nephrotex). This can invert very quickly as we add additional variables and behaviors in the mix.

Be that as it may, this work is very useful because it leads us to the next question – how can these elements and their relationships be modeled to increase fidelity while at the same time lessen the impact of the scale of the challenge. Treating the elements of the epistemic frame as categories or clusters of child elements and then building networked relationships and “knowledge” out of these connections, is one part; modeling the dynamism is the much larger other.

In part (see Connectivist Simulations), I have always likened this to the challenge of sense-making and wayfinding in learning and knowledge (networks)  in Connectivism.

But what really got me excited is the possibility that all these ideas could probably merge if we started looking at simulations on a wider scale – connective simulations that could provide a way to abstract from the richness and complexity of our learning  process in a meaningful manner – allowing us to not only gain better insight about learning, but also to be able to guide our efforts to architect/enable observation based assessments.

The challenge, in my opinion, is also to prove that the new forms of assessment are scalable and accurate. That is, a large number of people can reliably be observed (or can demonstrate) “being” or “doing” in a manner that is reliable, accurate and consistent. The accuracy problem is important because simulations can only do so much in abstracting from a complex real-world.

If we had that method, and it was proved superior to traditional methods, then we would have buy-in. After all, the problem confronting us at this moment really is that we still end up trying to observe and assess people’s performance afresh whenever they start on a job, despite qualifications and proof from reliable assessments.

I just came across a load of search links to Connectionist Simulations, which is where all this is ultimately headed and should, at some point, capture my undivided attention. But this is wonderful work and I will follow it closely.

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Learning Histories

What happens to learning histories? Traditionally, in the school or college system, we treat textbooks and references built by experts as the starting point of our education. Students are encouraged to discover through the texts and teacher led activities. However, from one group of students to the other, from one year to the other, it is an ab-initio start. The only continuity is possibly provided by the teacher, who takes to her class the knowledge of any prior learning histories.

The traditional system has a short memory. Histories of student conversations, their trials and tribulations as they navigated unfamiliar terrain, are transmogrified into common mistakes pointed out by the teacher, FAQs built by experts and so on – themselves shortcuts to navigate the longer path taken by the experts to arrive at their conception of the domain. In the process, experts make some reasoned choices about what to leave out. It is important to learn and apply the Pythagorous theorem in a secular manner – never relating to Pythagorous himself or the cultural, social and political context in which he invented the theorem.

These choices are made for the learner. And in this manner, she is condemned to not “know” many learning histories. And therefore, not be able to construct many new forms of learning or adapt histories into new futures. This is typical of a system where temporality is key – competence is generated (or not) out of a structured time-space of an institution.

However, this is simply not the way competence is employed and grown at work or in life. Knowledge management is key to successful enterprises and initiatives, where processes become as important as competence. A hallmark of this competence is that it is based on non-linearity of paths taken to perform based on extensive networks of resources available for self-use.

The core issue is that our systems need several proofs of competence as entry criteria to a variety of different spaces. And they need these proofs to be socially acknowledged, presumably because they shift the burden of proving them to experts. As it happens, the provers and the system are often at odds with each other because they believe in different notions of competence and how to engender it.

Scale entrenches these vulnerable and shifting contracts deeper. With scale (numbers, diversity, globalization, technology), it becomes even more difficult to remember or place learning histories within the context of engendering competence. Someone I know told me about how one of his unofficial mentors spent forty years of his life sifting through Ramanujan’s discoveries, trying to decipher how exactly Ramanujan made his phenomenal discoveries – an anachronistic, obscure but inspiring endeavor in these times.

Learning histories are important. They are important for us to spark innovation, to facilitate the next Ramanujan in his discoveries, to place our learning in local and global contexts within which we exist today. And possibly the way we need to retain these learning histories to record the conversations, curate them, enable connections to them, and celebrate the paths that learners before us took to both fail and succeed. And hope that these inform and help develop new ways of addressing our problems today and for the future.

 

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MOOC, DIY-U and Edupunk

I was reading with interest Stephen Downes’ critique of Anya Kamenetz’s approach in her book DIY-U. I am reading Anya’s book, but could not help writing this post, even though that exercise is incomplete, so I beg your indulgence.

The point Stephen is making is definitely not just academic. The term DIY (do-it-yourself) affords primacy to the individual and is application based. Over time sites like eHow and companies like Home Depot, realizing different needs (cost saving, interests, job compulsions), put together a set of material (books, online guides, community trouble-shooting and advice etc.) to put structure to “learning” specific things with the objective of being able to apply them in a specific context.

This took the form of learning packages, not unlike our monogamous WBTs (web based training) formats. Now these are being extended by the affordances of the networked digital economy like open access, social search, social networking and location awareness. This is very akin to the way our LMSs have evolved. They started with learning packages (which evolved into standards based packaging like SCORM), and then as the network surfaced, they added the “social” to it and called them the next version / next generation social collaborative learning management systems. That is also why these vendors cannot seem to position the Edupunk version as the alternative and have ended up creating a “me-too” add-on feature set for “informal learning”.

There is a deeper malaise, one that Stephen also points to. We are thinking inside the box (very un-Edupunk), when we do try to map an existing system with a new alternative way of doing things keeping the existing system as the base reference. Edupunks (I am hoping) will not look at taking the affordances of an educational system and propose an alterative that will map to its “benefits” or affordances. Rather, they will stand outside the box and raise questions about whether the box really is what we need (why not look at the sphere next to it or why look at all at a closed bounded object). This is similar to combating the oft-heard argument or stance – “technology cannot replace the classroom”. Stephen is right to remark – “It’s establishment thinking combined with a good dose of offloading costs.”

A direct consequence of thinking like that is the “objectification” of learning and the learning process. The approach is to “objectify” or treat learning as a structured process with pre-identified participants, an approach which tries to build a marketplace and commodifies learning. Teachstreet, for example, has the tag line – “Learn Something New” – exhorting us to “find great classes and courses”. Similar to how Anya talks about “content and skills”.

The MOOC Edupunks have demonstrated the way to think outside the box – of becoming rather than doing or getting, of being able to measure your performance. And in doing so, they have exposed core principles of how learning happens (at least their perspective). There is great learning happening as well, as the MOOCs & accompanying deliberations evolve. No one claims to have the final recipe (maybe because none is needed or even possible), which is also why DIY is perhaps a bit presumptuous. But the focus on thinking outside the box rather than inside it is the biggest contribution being made to start with.

What is required is greater investigation into “design” of connected environments, into techniques/patterns that underlie the conversation itself, into technologies and designs that support these connections – in a way that does not translate into “design” of learning, like in the traditional system.

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Learning Styles and Learning

When I was building up the story for LearnOS, in my mind I had a mathematical model for how a complex of factors, assessed through various instruments (psychometric, inventories, observable analytics), could result in heuristics not only for content presentation, but also for collaboration, tools usage and learning process design. A Learning Weights Matrix mapped elements of the learning experience to learner, learning, media and organization indicators to arrive at an indication of design or experience. I tried this with research aimed at evaluating two courses offered by the British Council in New Delhi and got some interesting results.

However, my thinking has changed past that phase, based on a few key considerations.

This is not a machine. There isn’t a definitive set of factors I could use, there is probably not a definitive way of measuring and categorizing profiles and perhaps not a definitive way of mapping enumerated elements of the learning experience to profile information. I am not saying it may not be accurate, or adaptively so, useful, but that it is misdirected. It depends on thinking of students and teachers as finitely defined entities on a production line, programmable and predictable in the face of input.

We are trying to extrapolate from small instances to large scale systems using technology. That is not correct. eLearning as such does not scale well. The quality breaks with scale of any sort. Scale must leverage scale – have a large number of small learning clusters/networks rather than a small number of very large paradigms.

Research, especially around Connectionism (and more specifically Connectivism) indicates that we would be better off looking at focusing on capabilities/literacies rather than on learning styles, on networked behavior rather than individual unrelated atomic conceptions.  Competency frameworks, career progression, and talent management as a whole, need to be re-evaluated in this context

How this emergent ecology will result in competencies bookmarked to real life skills is not altogether unknown. But it still requires structure and method that practitioners, who are currently trying to fit these new ideas inside dominant frames of reference (inside the box), can leverage. It has the promise to scale, much beyond the confines of current eLearning.

These thoughts pretty much redefine the state of art from when I wrote the initial draft for LearnOS and bear on me to remember that technology cannot play God, as someone in a recent conversation, tried to impress upon me.

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Learning and Chaos

Found an interesting article after talking with an expert in Chaos theory. JoAnn discusses possible impacts of Chaos theory on classroom learning using systems, initial effects, bifurcations and fractals. She also explores existing theory in relation to chaotic systems for learning.

Essentially, the point that needs to be explored is whether learning is linear, deterministic and predictable or is it inherently non-linear, dynamic and unpredictable. Chaotic systems may appear random and dynamically changing, but still exhibit an underlying pattern or order.

With such a myriad of factors at all levels (content, teacher, student, learning environment) that affect the teaching-learning process, it is a little wondrous to assume that learning is determinate. For example, as JoAnn points out, prior knowledge has an acknowledged role in what we learn. From the point of view of Chaos theory, small changes in initial conditions may cause very large changes in individual learning or performance.

George Siemens brings more in through adding theories of complexity, chaos and emergence into understanding learning. George appeals to “deterministic unpredictability” of the learning process as reason enough for us to consider the impact of these three theories in our own think about learning. More links here.

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Centenary Post

For my hundredth post, I would like to focus on a few key questions that attack various aspects of what I have experienced and learnt in the past two years. These questions are extremely important for me to attempt to answer and I hopefully will, atleast in part, as I go on. The questions may seem disjointed, but perhaps have a common set of answers.

The first, and overarching, question is:

Are there (or what could be) education systems that have (or would) worked outside the box (in contrast to what exists today) and have proved their reliability and validity in the context of today’s and future needs?

This is important to me because I need to understand if we can really envisage an alternate system of education – one more geared towards achieving a vision of a just, inclusive and humane society – than the one we have now. Not that an educational system is solely responsible for all that is wrong today, but in the sense that the educational system is an important enough component of achieving that vision.

There are many strands of thought that connect to this question, not the least being whether this disruptive change is at all required, but it is a question worthy of building an informed belief around. I would further acknowledge that perhaps this change could happen in a way that replaces a portion of the existing system.

The second question relates to the qualifications of a teacher in higher education in India. 

Do undergraduate and post-graduate teachers need a qualifying degree/diploma in educational theory, instructional design/methods and learning technology with a model of internship before they start teaching?

As I have noted before, this question puzzles me no end. I can’t understand why this is not a pre-requisite already (rather than a possible refresher down the line). School teachers require certification, but others do not? It is a different matter that existing certifications in India may perhaps need to be effectively revamped to meet today’s and future requirements.

But I think the answer to this question may have huge implications for achieving the overall vision of any educational system. In particular, it may help bring disruptive change that partially replaces the dominant paradigm.

The third question relates to the role of assessments in an increasingly collaborative world.

How does one assess learning based on principles of collaboration, free thinking and reflection?

What happens when we remove the boundaries of formal curricula, competency models and organizational metrics? This is an important gap, I believe, in connectivist thinking. I am particularly interested in this because the traditional model has an answer that can be tied directly to economic models, social aspirations, development and growth paradigms.

To build an alternative, intelligible and acceptable bridge to other parts/components of our world, we will need to answer this question. Lots of these other systems depend upon the ability of an educational system to provide these assessments to be efficient and effective.

And finally, the question:

What will it take for the change to happen?

I believe that a change is needed and that it should be disruptive change. The change has to be wrenched out and has to stand tall. What will  the drivers be? I think we need to look outside the educational system in order to assess these drivers. 

Perhaps we need to ask ourselves what the political system needs, what the justice system needs, what the economic system needs, as inputs that will help reshape their own destinies in the quest for a just, inclusive and humane society.

These are all overall questions that impact my thinking at this point. As is the fact with questions, I am sure many would share them with me. If anyone has what they think could be answers, I would greatly appreciate your stopping by!

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3 Idiots: Educational Pedagogy or Fantasy

In case you didn’t know, 3 Idiots is now a record-breaking Hindi movie, that explores and exposes the educational system. As of the time of this post, it has been released worldwide and is the highest grosser in Indian cinema history (about US$68mn in 19 days and also made 43 million pounds worldwide to date).

The movie is based in a “traditional” academic setting in an engineering college, reputed for its excellence and for its no-holds-barred-excellence-is-the-most-important thing principal. The story revolves around 3 students who get to live together in the college hostel and become lasting friends. The story tries to bring to the front the problems created by a severe focus on grades and book knowledge and essentially laments the restriction of freedom of thought and reflection that has become a hallmark of the educational system. The term “idiot” is used to refer to not someone stupid but to an irrepressible free thinker who follows his heart.

It has caught the imagination of an entire nation of learners. And that fact bears important testimony to the popular perception that the academic system discourages free thinking, diversity of opinion, creativity and innovation because of it’s over emphasis on grades, bookish knowledge, competitive spirit and teacher-centricity.

The main “idiot”, played by Aamir Khan, is, in my opinion, the only idiot in the film. Born to the assistant of a rich man, he proxies all the way through engineering college for the rich man’s son. As a result, he gets to go where his interests take him, to whichever subject and teacher that excite his imagination. He is naturally inclined to be curious, his questioning ways earning him the ire of his teachers and the ridicule of his peers. But he is brilliant and ultimately emerges as a scientist with a large number of important patents to his name.

Aamir believes in free thinking, of questioning the dominant paradigm. Ultimately he converts the principal of the engineering college, who is fanatically entrenched in the “traditional” mindset, to seeing things in a different light. The movie ends with shots of Aamir in a “school” in Ladakh doing what he believes – teaching kids to let their imagination, innovation and creativity take over.

But there is a bit of demagoguery here, with no clear indication that the ideas are as revolutionary as they seem. For example, a point of discussion should be what is exactly being proposed. The movie is not clear on what or how this pedagogy and system really to be made possible. If it is argued that ultimately it is a movie and not a research project, I would argue that it is not a trifling matter given the reach and success of the movie and its ability to shape popular perception.

The applicability of these ideas and their sudden, almost inexplicable shift from a higher education setting to a school, is a little puzzling too. There is no evidence of Aamir’s school principal having the same endgame delirium as was the case with Boman Irani, who played the engineering college principal. The dynamics are very different between the two scenarios. 

Also, there is little evidence that creativity, innovation and imagination does not at all exist in the traditional system -sometimes teacher-heroes led and sometimes with an organizational focus. It then begs the question – are we talking of a change from inside the box or are we talking about something revolutionary that is at odds with tradition. I don’t see that debate happening around me. Most of the debate seems to be around how the movie has borrowed more from Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone than anything else.

Conflicting verdict at the end for me, though. It leaves me wanting for more because it was hugely entertaining. And a trifle irritable because perhaps the matter should not be trifled with.

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Networked Learning Environments

So are LMSs now part of a technology trend that is headed south? Will incorporation of Web 2.0 features make them more enticing? Will learning really become more effective if Web 2.0 happens to these LMSs? Will they start working on a networked learning SCORM advanced API soon, maybe by defining standard runtime Web 2.0 interactions with services such as Facebook and Twitter? Do we bid adieu to learning objects?

These are uncomfortable questions that must be asked. Scholar360 attempts to be one effort to move away from LMSs as we traditionally know them by keeping the social network at the core.

Let us try and visualize what would really happen if the network really was the core and learning, the process of making connections.

Firstly, the definition of what constitutes content would change. It would become highly personal. This is because it would be pieced together from every learner’s perspective from the content already available to her.

Secondly, content would generally come from connections, which is to say that each learner would share her raw or synthesised perspective with her network and those who have access to that network will learn through evaluating the content and perhaps engaging in discussion. Perhaps rather than a learning object with pre-filled content, it would become a network map of ideas and concepts peppered with individual insights. So a “course” written by an “expert” would become a “network of ideas” weaved together by a “weaver”.

Not only would it be personal, but it would also be dynamic with very little control by the “weaver” in determining the boundary or tone of the ideas, once it is “out there”.

So a new learner who “enrols in the course” (read, “decides to learn”) would, around the broad parameters of the learning experience, start building certain types of awareness.

The first awareness would be of the mass of ideas. The second would be of the people. The third would be of the technology that enables her to navigate between people and ideas. The fourth would be a growing awareness of the learning process itself.

This awareness would continue to grow through the “course”. The process of learning as mandated by the “weaver” would be a responsible contract between the learner and the ”weaver”, as would be unwritten rules of conduct in collaboration and communication in the network. Certain technological  peculiarities may also need to be learnt or adapted to.

Imagine walking down a road all times of a day and night over many different seasons. Imagine watching a kaliedoscope of people, houses, shops, all change over time. Imagine recognizing something new in the landscape that has changed since you were last there. That is how the network of ideas that the learner creates will change in response to the evolution of the learning experience that is being woven as the “course” progresses.

The weaver’s job will be to acclimatise the learner to the changing landscape, provide an understanding of the environment through initial idea networks and through an empowerment in terms of tools, technologies, processes and social conduct perhaps. It will be the learner’s job to practice and reflect.

The job of technology then transcends the social network provision or the provision of Web 2.0 tools such as blogs and wikis. Technology should now be harnessed “network” each dimension of the learning experience, to help the network really become the core.

For the weaver, technology should provide a way to negotiate the changing nature of interaction/collaboration, of the explosive network of ideas that she set the seed for, of the mechanisms for maximum impact of these ideas on learners. Not only that, it must allow for her the ability to derive a measure of her effort.

For her, the “weaver”, the experience will repeat multiple times. But each time, her network is enriched by the thought processes of her learners – past and present, so that it is never the same experience.

Technology’s greatest challenge will be this immersion into the network, both visually and conceptually. It will not be simple. Atleast not as simple as pushing Web 2.0 collaboration over a social network or inserting a social network (and tools) into a course.

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Network based Training (NBTs)

I have written earlier about what I am proposing as the evolution from the CBT and WBT – the NBT or Network based training, for some time now. NBTs provide a framework for organizations who want to adopt Web 2.0 and networked learning (the connectivism way) in their systems. The main components of the NBT would be both learning process and tool based.

The NBT consists of the following components:

• a learning process that emphasizes learner participation prior to the course in setting up goals and sequences
• definition of agreed upon sequence of focus areas and learning events based on a temporal sequence
• agreed upon rules/structures of participation with weakly or strongly defined compliance
• defined initial roles for participant and educator (and others) that is consonant with a networked learning strategy
• initially defined ecology of 2.0 tools (blog, wiki, discussion forum, live conference events, other collaboration techniques etc) to be enmeshed in the course
• choosing appropriate collaboration techniques e.g. Delphi, shared maps,
• if required, avenues for structured peer review (could have multiple levels) and group work; if so required an expert review
• resource repository that captures suggested content for review and discussion; could include documents or web collaboration resources
• collaboration using techniques specifically suited for the context of the course; e.g. grouped concept maps if a goal is to create a resource base
• policy for sharing; e.g. if sharing with a wider audience is agreed upon, some way of sharing blog posts, discussions with personal blogs or social network could be explored
• statistics for the facilitator role to judge quantitatively and tools for analysis based on qualitative criteria
• setting up of a default network for the participants of the course (as more people join, a historian role is defined that brings them up to speed using a special mechanism for navigating the content, maybe through learner contributed summaries or commentaries)
• post assessment of learning experiences to evolve the learning ecology
• some way of integrating and reporting on the experience in both directions – organizational and personal learning environments
• norming of the participants on how to use; overcoming barriers to use

These would define an ecology within which much learning could happen. One possible view is that each NBT could become a “slice” of learning that could be linked to the PLE. Several such slices could be linked and could potentially inter-mesh to allow cross-disciplinary or cross-network linkages to promote diversity.

Obviously, from a technology point of view, one could go in two directions. One, allow loosely coupled 2.0 service integration. Two, create generic tools to store localized data and build bridges so that this information can be ported to available 2.0 services. The first allows for easy extensibility when a new 2.0 service or app comes along. The second encourages careful selection of appropriate learning tools (not just mash up anything with anything irrespective of the impact on learning – if something is indeed effective, one would rather build it in to the system in a generic fashion, giving far more control).

From a learning process orientation, specifically a connectivist orientation, it will be necessary to position the NBT somewhere along the range between individuals and groups, connectives and collectives, in an attempt to engender the greatest possibilities for leveraging the power of networked learning, collaboration and innovation. The prime challenges and constraints will lie in shaping policy, between open-ness and protection of IP for instance.

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Connectivism and social action

In the wake of the Mumbai terror attacks, I have witnessed in graphic detail the many aspects of socio-political crisis. On one hand, there is the actual terror and consequent military action. On the other is the political shakeout because of mass opinion that reflected in the local elections and change of power positions in the state.

There is also the role of the media as an agent provocateur, irresponsible in its behaviour and indicative of the explicit power mass media has in shaping opinions. In fact the media took upon itself (through its famous media icons), to show their bias and partisan nature, a shocking revelation of the lack of maturity. For example, when the Muslim groups in India expressed their shock and anger at the terror attacks, one media channel anchor said it was a “welcome change”, not understanding that the channel was not a medium to voice her personal bias.

What did the people do? A famous ex-actress, and there were more of these who were interviewed rather than thought and opinion leaders (of those leaders that were interviewed, it wasn’t a dialogue but more a diatribe anyways), stated that taxpayers in Mumbai should not pay taxes next year in protest! That probably is liable to be branded a seditionary comment. Ironically, these people rail against such comments made by people who are really seditionary and communal in nature!

What this all really exposes for me, is the lack of reflection, the lack of serious thinking on serious issues have large geo-political, social, economic and other impacts. Even more the lack of practice, of social action that an individual can contribute to.

For me this reinforces what I am only being able to appreciate in-context now – that our education system needs ecologies where diverse influences are made available – not awareness courses, but strategies for engendering critical thought and refection and avenues for actuating practice through social action.

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CCK08 Week 2

End of week two of the “course” and I think I have come some way. While Week 1 was about Connectivism and the changing face of the web at an introductory level exposing me to some interesting ideas and getting me acclimatised to a massively online course, Week 2 has been the process of getting my hands dirty on some of the basic ideas. You can read my meanderings at the links below on http://learnoscck08.wordpress.com, a blog I specially created for this course, but which I expect shall go far beyond that.

• Patterns
• Rhizomatic Education
• A Global Theory?
• What is Theory?
• Chat Interaction Frequency
• Learning Formations for this course
• What is learning theory?
• Web 2.0 JISC Report CMap

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