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Dave Cormier, Dave’s Educational Blog, February 3, 2012. Dave Cormier writes about Rhizomes and uncertainty. "The rhizome is uncertainty. That doesn’t mean it ‘isn’t’. It has no start and no ending. It is complex… and as such, it resists definition. As a model for learning, it resists ‘core principles’ or ‘final outcomes’. It is an ongoing process of growing, of surprise and of change." Martin Weller comments on this model in relation to the way experts are able to remember detailed aspects of their experience; "experts don't know they do this, but it's a by-product, or rather a means, of expertise." All very well, but "if it's unintentional, undirectional, informal and accidental then is there much we as educators can say about it other than 'that's interesting'?" I think that's a fallacy - I think that our inability to 'manage' something doesn't mean we have nothing useful to say about it. [Link] [Comment]

Phil Hill, e-Literate, February 3, 2012. "We are going," writes Phil Hill, "from an enterprise LMS market to a learning platform market." The difference between an LMS and a learning platform is that the latter "does not contain all the features in itself and is based on cloud computing – multi-tenant, software as a service (SaaS)." Definitely have a look at the article for a number of links to examples. "Another trend that is becoming apparent is that many of the new offerings are not attempting to fully replace the legacy LMS, at least all at once." [Link] [Comment]

Dave Ferguson, Dave's Whiteboard, February 3, 2012. A topic that really interests me is expertise. How do we become 'expert' and what does it look like? Dave Ferguson takes a look at what was arguably expert performance, Chesley Sullenberger's "successful ditching" of a passenger aircraft in the Hudson River (which maps to another topic that really interests me, flight). What's interesting is that there was no training specific to low-altitude engine loss and no time to consult the ditching checklest en route to the river. So expertise does not consist of 'training for that' but rather learning that can be applied in rtandom situatrions. Sullenberger says, "one way of looking at this might be that for 42 years, I’ve been making small, regular deposits in this bank of experience, education, and training. And on January 15 the balance was sufficient so that I could make a very large withdrawal." [Link] [Comment]

David Wiley, iterating toward openness, February 3, 2012. Before we get a little overly exuberant about the ascendence of OERs, writes David Wiley, we need to look at what's happening in the education technology space. "Can you name a single OER project that does assessment at all (and I don’t mean PDFs of quizzes)? Can you name one that does diagnostic assessment or handles mastery in any meaningful way? ... Open education currently has no response to the coming wave of diagnostic, adaptive products coming from the publishers." The crux, says Wiley, is that if it took $100 million to get to where we are in OER, how much will it take to get to that next level?

Of course, the skill set required to make OERs is completely different from the skill set required to make educational software. Thus were is virtually no overlap between the OER community and, say, projects like OSCATS (Open Source Computerized Adaptive Testing System), Concerto, or even the older IRT-Computerized Adaptive Testing, to name a few. So I think the work is being done in the community, but most such work, it forms its own community, and doesn't evolve out of an existing community. But I don't want to downplay Wiley's point - it is absolutely essential that we look at the next generation of opnline learning, and not merely at replicating textbooks online. [Link] [Comment]

Jonathan Gray, Weblog, February 3, 2012. Jonathan Gray writes, "A little while ago I posted some ideas for a project called OpenPhilosophy.org, which would enable users to transcribe, translate, annotate and create collections of philosophical texts which have entered the public domain... the project has secured some funding from JISC, who champion digital technology for use in higher education in the UK... The project will develop an open source platform called TEXTUS, which will enable users to create, manage and interact with collections of texts." Related: read the full-text comments from Occupy Philosophy: Chad Kautzer, Charles Mills, Darrell Moore, Annika Theim, and Jennifer Uleman. [Link] [Comment]

Rebecca Davis, NITLE Logo National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education, February 3, 2012. I would never have though this would be an issue, but apparently "a recurring motif along the lines that coding (markup and programming) is so difficult that undergraduates trained in the humanities cannot learn it quickly or successfully." I must be a polymath then, having spent time coding pretty much through the whole of my philosophy undergrad. Or maybe the motif is just wrong. "The skills most humanities majors have mastered as part of their academic training, such as formulating research questions and reading critically, carry over easily and naturally into the world of humanities computing." And vice versa. [Link] [Comment]

Nicola, One Change a Day, February 3, 2012. Creative Thinking by Joanna Maxwell is a short but beautifully presented slide show outlining four major steps to cultivating your creativity. It is also sport-on -- these are tips I use on a daily basis and which have served me remarkably well:
- be curious
- make connections
- challenge yourself
- cultivate your ideas
[Link] [Comment]

John T. Spencer, Education Rethink, February 2, 2012. When I read a statement like "we are more than algorithms" two things come to my mind:
- it depends on what you mean by "we", and
- it depends on what you mean by "algorithms"
Because, after all, an algorithm is, broadly construed a process or mechanism for doing something. Now if by that you mean 'a set of rules', then I agree, we are more than that. But if you mean by 'we' that there is some aspect of our comprehension that is by definition not representable through some process or mechanism, then I disagree. Simply setting the iPod down and jamming instead is the unthinking response. It's easy and glib to say 'we are more than algorithms' but in fact there are (or are going to be) algorithms that comprehend the innovative, the improvisational and the messy. And we can learn them. And we can become virtuosos - with or without the iPod. [Link] [Comment]

Inge de Waard, Ignatia Webs, February 2, 2012. Mostly my thinking is in alignment with Noam Chomsky's so it is not surprising to find his reflections on the subject of education reasonable and well-considered. Here are (sme of) Chomsky's ideas on education in short (as paraphrased by Ignatia at times):
- There is a constant struggle between two realities: the principles of the enlightment and indoctrination.
- Technology is a neutral instrument, education is a framework (note: I don't agree that technology is neutral; technology, too, is a framework - SD)
Ignatia's reflections are also interetsing: "the thing I wonder about is, how can you build a critical thinking framework and ... even if such a framework is provided, who is to say how 'critical' is defined? ... I wish enlightenment was possible, but power and establishment seems to be getting in the way."
[Link] [Comment]

Scott Leslie, EdTechPost, February 2, 2012. Scott Leslie explores MediaWiki as an authoring tool for open textbooks. Along the way he discovers:
- D2L exports aren't very good
- there's no simple way of getting from an IMS Content Package to a wiki (cynically, I would say they were designed that way)
- approaches that let you output to multiple formats depend on clean markup
- editing mediawiki seems just short of rocket science (at least for some people)
- the UBC wiki continues to astound
- you can write blog posts while sailing across the Salish Sea.
[Link] [Comment]

Stephen Gordon, Globe and Mail, February 2, 2012. Following widespread tutition-rate protests in Canada yesterday the Globe and Mail is trotting out the well-worn counterargument: tuition cuts won't increase university access. It's disingenuous. The author, if he chose to be accurate, would write "tuition cuts by themselves won't increase university access." They are a necessary but not sufficient condition. We need to address other costs as well (such as, say, books) and we need to acddress social equity in society in general. But that said, ti should be clear, that tuition hikes decrease access. They make a hard problem even harder to solve. And it is for that reason the students are right and the purveyors of tired old canards are wrong. [Link] [Comment]

Wolfgang Greller, Reflections on the Knowledge Society, February 2, 2012. Wolfgang Greller takes a quick look at an intriguing project that has people learn a language by translating content on the web from that language into their own language. "Duolingo adjusts to your competence level and provides help on the fly, such as translation suggestions. [Link] [Comment]

Catherine Anne Schmidt-Jones, International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, February 1, 2012. Today I bring to you links to four of the articles in the latest edition of the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning. This first paper examines how people are using open educational resources (OERs). "Most reported accessing individual modules on their own initiative, as part of a specific, immediate inquiry, rather than responding to institutional directives or following entire online courses." Part nway through the paper we read an interesting and important question: were learners self-directing out of choice or need? As the author notes, "over half of the self-directed learners reported that they had not received as much formal music education as they would have liked. Money or cost was the most common reason given." So self-directed learning becomes not the preferred alternative, but for many, the only alternative. Not that this is necessarily bad - self-directed learning has a long history. As the author concludes, "Dewey (1938) has stated: There is, I think, no point in the philosophy of progressive education which is sounder than its emphasis upon the importance of the participation of the learner in the formation of the purposes which direct his activities in the learning process." [Link] [Comment]

Lisa Marie Blaschke , International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, February 1, 2012. One thing I've learned over the years in education and social science generally: for anything you can think of, someone has created a 'theory' of that thing. Thus we have heutagogy, which is "a form of self-determined learning with practices and principles rooted in andragogy." A key concept in heutagogy is 'double-loop learning' "In double-loop learning, learners consider the problem and the resulting action and outcomes, in addition to reflecting upon the problem-solving process and how it influences the learner’s own beliefs and actions." Or as I would say (without the academic mantra), "practice and reflection".



That said, the discussion around heutagogy is important. It is an explicit recognition of the importance of self-directed learning, and explicitly described the move from competences to capabilities. As such, it explains much of the appeal of web 2.0, e-learning 2.0, informal learning (as described volumously by people like Jay Cross) and (dare I say) connectivism. Indeed, most of the work cited in this paper comes only a couple of years after e-learning 2.0 - from 2007-2010. The work from Kenyon and Hase stands on its own, but the rest of it, I think, really ought to be read in this wider context. [Link] [Comment]