I attended a local (the 5 Toronto-area colleges) one-day conference last Wednesday called "Connecting the Dots ..." which I described, shortly after, here. But I've been thinking about why I was so surprised and delighted by the messages of both the keynote speakers, Dr. Marcel Danesi and Dr. Sandy Shugart. In talking to a friend, I discovered what my expectations for this conference had been, and why I'd had these expectations.

I believe that in the search for funding, efficiency, and fairness, educational institutions have largely eliminated personal connections. Students are lured with the best marketing schools can buy to apply to become "funding units". Efficiency requires a standardized approach, and high school marks seem to answer that need. Even though it is clear both in common sense and through long-term research, that there are multiple intelligences, and that high school only uses a limited number of them, personal interviews are inefficient and expensive, as are portfolios. The teachers have less and less say in who is accepted, but it is the teachers' responsibility to "retain" students no matter how they are "recruited".

Courses are often created independently of those who will teach them, on the assumption that curriculum can be disengaged from both teachers and students. Students apply for courses, not teachers, and often teachers teach courses they are required to, not ones they personally continue to study and develop. The institution is the source of authority not the teacher. Which is why a high proportion of part-time teachers is acceptable - "experts" create the curricula, and (insecure) instructors teach what they're told to, how they're told to.

In this kind of environment, the purpose of pedegogy is to instruct teachers in methods that will retain students (i.e. funding units). And i had expected a utilitarian approach in this conference. But what I got instead was meaning, and I drank it in!

A meaningful pedagogical approach (not method) focuses on the interpersonal relationship, the teacher as mentor, (Danesi) and as lead researcher in an area of mutual interest (Danesi). The purpose of pedagogy is to help the teacher engage the students in exploring and understanding, and then in producing objects or performances valued in our culture (Gardner). The teacher must be engaged with the subject, and with the students' learning. The students must be engaged, with the subject and what they can learn by accepting the teacher's leadership.

Learning results from engagement, from the heart!

The purpose of pedagogy is to help teachers figure out how they can best engage the students in what is alive and rich-in-meaning in their subject. The purpose of pedagogy is to help teachers to understand how to develop their own personal approach and to keep alive their interest in their students' learning. The purpose of pedagogy is not instructions in utilitarian efficient structures for classes andcourses, but an understanding that teaching and learning are human activies, where meaning and engaged hearts are essential, (Shugart) and ultimately, the most truly efficient and effective approach in education.

Connecting the Dots ... reminded me of the true purpose of pedagogy, and I am grateful.

Matthew McKinnon, published on CBC's Arts & Entertainment Website, gives the clearest map of the new Web that I've seen:

• Think of the web’s old guard as TV networks — they provide mainstream programming for amorphous audiences — and its young turks as cable channels, offering niche content to avid subscriber bases.The leaders of this new school excel at creating online communities. MySpace, YouTube and Flickr function as self-contained planets in cyberspace; Blogger is chief architect of the blogosphere. All of them encourage their users to contribute content, engage in conversation and form personal relationships. It’s a totally different tao of building traffic: Yahoo! takes you places, MySpace means you’re already there.
• 
  
• Settle in, and get a load of the big stars of the net’s new wave...

Here's the link to his article: http://www.cbc.ca/arts/media/megasites.html.

Enjoy!

As a user of blogs and wikis in my teaching, I was especially interested in the current issue of Innovate, a free online academic journal. I recommend these two articles from Volume 2, Issue 5.

In Teaching Social Software Using Social Software, Ulises Mejias concludes -

• ...  that social software can be used to create effective distributed research communities. I also feel that a similar design can be used to teach classes in different subject matters. Most importantly, I think the application of social software in this manner supports a constructivist pedagogy where students feel empowered to take charge of their own learning.

Yes. That matches my experience of using wikis as part of my courses. His description of how he taught the course is detailed and useful.

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Note: This article was originally published in Innovate (http://www.innovateonline.info/) as: Mejias, U. 2006. Teaching social software with social software. Innovate 2 (5). http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=260 (accessed June 4, 2006). The article is reprinted here with permission of the publisher, The Fischler School of Education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University.

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S. Pixy Ferris and Hilary Wilder use Ong's concept fo "secondary orality" (1982) to explain the educational power of using wikis - (the definition link for "secondary orality" is a fascinating read by itself) - in their article, Uses and Potentials of Wikis in the Classroom. They say -

• An alternative model of education that may be better suited to the cyber age would take advantage of secondary orality, which relies on the affordances of print culture but also reintroduces the value of such oral characteristics as communality, group-sense, and participation (Ong 1982). Additionally, secondary orality promotes self-awareness, magnanimity, responsibility, reasonability, and the development of a "world-cultural consciousness" (Gronbeck, Farrell, and Soukup 1991). Secondary orality is uniquely a product of the twentieth century, in which advancements in electronic technology created the conditions for a resurgence and reshaping of the oral characteristics of pre- or low-literate cultures. In a secondary-oral model, learners assume ownership of knowledge within learning experiences that encourage them to engage with texts electronically.

They describe both the theoretical implications and practical uses of using wikis in courses.

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Note: This article was originally published in Innovate (http://www.innovateonline.info/) as: Ferris, S., and H. Wilder. 2006. Uses and Potentials of Wikis in the Classroom. Innovate 2 (5). http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=258 (accessed June 4, 2006). The article is reprinted here with permission of the publisher, The Fischler School of Education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University.

With all the stories of institutions & bureaucracies getting all uptight about students using MySpace, here's a happy store about a sensible response to students using MySpace and
Facebook. From Meredith Farkas's blog Information Wants to be Free - her post - Libraries in Social Networking Software

• Some libraries have made their Facebook or MySpace site an extension of the library Web site with links to the catalog, chat reference pages, research guides, calendar of events, etc. The Brooklyn College Library profile has links to all sorts of areas on their library Web site including research tools, instructions for off-campus library access, and their Ask-a Librarian page. They also used MySpace’s calendar feature to display the library’s calendar of events. Finally, under books and movies, where regular folks write down what books and movies they like, the library profile has links to the catalog. The Morrisville College Library goes one step further and actually has a search box in their MySpace profile in which students can actually search the catalog (nice job, Bill!). The Hennepin County Public Library’s profile links to lists of new CDs, books and movies for teens and booklists that provide a valuable readers’ advisory service. The Denver Public Library’s eVolver profile is visually consistent with their regular Web site which brings home the idea of the profile as an extension of the Web site.
  

What a smart move!

Through Stephen Downes OLDaily newsletter, I came across Graham Attwell's blog the Wales-Wide Web ... and his position paper on Personal Learning Environments.

Rarely have I read such a scholarly paper that is so clear and cogent. He discusses lurking as an enactment of Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development!

He says -

---

Social software is increasingly being used in education and
training through such applications as web logs, wikis, tools and
applications for creating and sharing multi media and tools for sharing
all kinds of different personal knowledge bases including bookmarks and
book collections.

In software terms, rather than monolithic
vendor driven and designed applications, Web 2 and social software is
based on the idea of 'small pieces, loosely connected' utilising commonly recognised standards and web services for linking ideas, knowledge and artefacts.

Social software offers the opportunity for narrowing the divide between
producers and consumers. Consumers become themselves producers, through
creating and sharing. One implication is the potential for a new
ecology of open content, books, learning materials and multi media,
through learners themselves becoming producers of learning materials.

Social software has already led to widespread adoption of portfolios
for learners bringing together learning from different contexts an
sources of learning and providing an on-going record of lifelong
learning, capable of expression in different forms.

---

The whole paper is a wonderful read, and I strongly recommend it.

There's a new learning community that I find quite intriguing, SocialLearning.ca.

 I recommend you take a look at the site and/or see my description in my practical blog WebToolsForLearners.

Through Stephen Downes OLDaily newsletter, I linked to an article that explains how social software can  work in an academic setting, in a way that might help the undecided and/or outsiders "get it". Here's the link for Three Stars and a Chili Pepper  -

The author, Joseph Ugoretz, says

• So we have this constellation of tools—these new methods of creating, sharing, categorizing, accessing and critiquing content. And in all of the cases, these tools, these resources, lack a central authority or a hierarchy of editorial control. In all of these cases the content and the conclusions and the references are communally negotiated and collaboratively assembled. And our students are using these tools. They are going to use them, whether we want them to or not, or whether we have thought about them or not.
  
  I want to present some suggestions for how we, in the academic world, the college context, can use these tools to the advantage of our teaching and our students' learning.
  

A good essay to share with teachers not yet using social software in their teaching.

I just dragged and dropped the image above from my Flickr bar (near the top in the screenshot)in my new Flock browser. I can see my own or my friends' Flickr photos within my browser, and can drag and drop images into into any HTML-accepting fields. Very cool.

When I open it, the Flickr bar is right under the Favorites Toolbar, which is integrated with del.icio.us so I can bookmark and add to my del.icio.us account all in the same move. And I can tag all my favorites (bookmarks). This seems totally sensible to me, as it allows me to access URLs I've saved from any online computer. Seems like a really smart set-up.

Flock also has  a blogging tool that allows me to create my blog posts in Flock and post them to my blogs (with easy addition of photos, screenshots etc.). I've done this with my Blogger blog and my SocialLearning.ca blog, and it worked quite well. I think I need more practice, and I haven't figured out how, or if, I can, add my Elgg blog to the Flock blogging tool. 

Flock also has an integrated aggregator but I'm sticking to my Bloglines account for the time being, and just putting its link up on my Favorites Toolbar, where it's handy.

Like its cousin, Firefox, (they're both built with Mozilla) Flock has a Search field in the upper right corner. Flock's Search field has more possibilities, (see below) and you can set preferences.

 I will be recommending Flock to my friends and my students, as I see it as the first one-stop browser designed specifically for the Social Web. I really like it!

I've just finished reading Derrick de Kerckhove's The Skin of Culture(1995) and I am knocked out! It took me two tries to get through it, the first over a year ago, when it just faded from my interest unfinished. This time, reading it,  i was electrified (pardon the pun) at a number of his observations. The book is over 10 years old, but de Kerckhove quotes William Irwin Thompson writing in 1983:

• Precisely because global forms of communication have integrated everyone into a planetary culture. (sic) The traditional forms of identity are threatened and are fighting for survival with the hysteria of the terrorist, (p 73)
  

I read this and I automatically play 9/11 videos in my head.

In 1995, de Kerckhove wrote about "prosumers" (a term I only encountered a couple of years ago) and says: "[T]he ninties economy will probably be based on inviting the consumer to take part in production decisions" (p 95) and I think of just-in-time production, and the emergence of business blogs that invite and respond to customers concepts. And thinking about blogs, which hadn't appeared when de Kerckhove wrote this, I read on - "The leaders will use cyberactive systems and they will inspire a changed approach in many other fields as well, for instance, education, entertainment, self-help services, and perhaps even politics "(p 95). I think again of blogs, 

• education - the edublogsphere, (and  more below)
• entertainment - iTunes and YouTube and the legal and illegal transmission of music, movies and TV clips and shows
• self-help - blogs and groups, for example blogs for new Moms, as seen here or Technorati's page on ADHD here.
• politics - blogs were widely recognized as influencing the second election of G.W. Bush in the States, and, in Canada, at least one MP, Sam Bulte, lost her seat in the '06 federal election due to blogs.

So what does this have to do with the obsolescence of educational systems, as I entitled this post? Well, if you read what de Kerckhove has to say on how TV and computers are changing the way we humans experience the world, how our senses and our brains are changing, it is utterly clear that our schools should be changing rapidly and radically. Instead, 15 years after the development of the Web, and at least 20 years after word processing and the Internet began spreading, we still have a book, chalk, and lecture dominated educational system.

• The model of education for 500 years has been a teacher becomes an expert and dumps data on kids. Thomas Jefferson could know everything, but now, no one can, because there is so much more knowledge out there today. We should look at law school as a model, because there's too much damn law. Nobody can learn all of it. Instead, you learn how to ask the right questions, identify the issues, and find the law. That's a much better model for kids to learn in a knowledge-rich society. It's a different kind of learning. (from Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth on Angus King and the Maine Laptop Program, 3/4s of the scroll down)

What's really depressing about this is that our educational systems are supposed to be leaders in developing thinking and thinkers, and they're often not even online. de Kerckhove said -

•  While TV provided a kind of collective mind for everybody, but with no individual input, computers were private minds without collective inputs. Convergence offers a ne, unprecedented possibility, that of plugging individuals and their special needs into collective minds.This new situation is profoundly empowering; it has social and political as well as economic repercussions. It will accelerate changes and adaptations in the geopolitical scene as well as in the private sensibility of everybody. It will bring on new forms of consciousness and put new pressures on the world's educational systems to cope with the change. (p 53) (Italics and bolding added)

Where I find, indirectly, a little hope is the story of how one politician looked at the world and how it is evolving and successfully strategized to make real change. Maine's former govenor, Angus King, got laptops into  the Maine middle schools, as described here, which I found where I find so much about education and the Web, through Stephen Downes's newsletter, OLDaily.

Thanks Stephen. 

A succinct and clear look at how we learn and learning theories. Siemens says:

Most learning needs today are becoming too complex to be addressed in "our heads". We need to rely on a network of people (and increasingly, technology) to store, access, and retrieve knowledge and motivate its use. The network itself becomes the learning. This is critical today; the rapid development of knowledge means that we need to find new ways of learning and staying current. We cannot increase our capacity for learning ad infinitum. We must begin to conceive learning as socially networked and enhanced by technology (it’s a symbiosis of people and technology that forms our learning networks). We need to acknowledge our learning context not only as an enabler of learning, but as a participant of the learning itself.

...

We rely on Google, libraries, friends, social bookmarks/tags, etc. to serve as our personal learning network (we store the knowledge external to ourselves). When we need something, we go to our network (know-where is more important than know-how or know-what)...or we expand our network. In the end, the constant act of connecting in order to stay current is a much more reflective model of learning than constructivism.

Connectivism Blog

That matches my experience as a learner.

Also very interesting, the

matrix posted by Derek Wenmoth on online learning (including a continuum of learning theories)

Connectivism Blog

http://blog.core-ed.net/derek/archives/001082.html

A final note - I think using the Flock blogging tool is helpful, but it does alter my style.