IACE-T Presentation

elearning: promises and practices

Peter TittenbergerLearning Technologies Centre

University of ManitobaOctober, 2008

Change pressures information growthopen movementstudent habits

How does education respond? values of formal educationthe role of elearning

The world is flat

The world is flat …

The world is flatThe world is spiky …

Information growth

Change pressure 1.

Growth of information.

Information growth

In 2006, the amount of digital information created, captured, and replicated was 161 exabytes or 161 billion gigabytes … This is about 3 million times the information in all the books ever written.

The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe

http://www.emc.com/collateral/analyst-reports/diverse-exploding-digital-universe.pdf

Information growth

Between 2006 and 2010, the information added annually to the digital universe will increase more than six fold from 161 exabytes to 988 exabytes.



Information growth

Images, captured by more than 1 billion devices in the world, from digital cameras and camera phones to medical scanners and security cameras, comprise the largest component of the digital universe.



Information growth

Chevron's CIO says his company accumulates data at the rate of 2 terabytes – 17,592,000,000,000 bits – a day.



More than 3,000 new books are published . . .

Karl Fischhttp://thefischbowl.blogspot.com/2006/08/did-you-know.html

daily.


It’s estimated that a week’s worth of New York Times . . .


Contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century.


The amount of new technical information is doubling every 2 years.


It’s predicted to double every 72 hours by 2010.


more predictions

By 2013 a supercomputer will be built that exceeds the computation capability of the human brain . . .


By 2023, a $1,000 computer will exceed the computation capability of the human brain . . .


And while technical predictions further out than about 15 years are hard to do . . .


Predictions are that by 2049 a $1,000 computer will exceed the computational capabilities of the human race.


Who is producing all this information?

everyone

What’s happening?This information growth is leading to …

What’s happening?DecentralizationDemocratizationChanging notion of what it means to knowContinual suspended certaintyChaotic (diverse, messy and unbounded)

What’s happening?characteristics at odds with formal education which likes learning to be …

What’s happening?ControlledAuthoritativeCertainLinearNeat and bounded

Change pressure 2.

The open movement.

“… information wants to be free …”

Stewart Brand, 1984

open technologyopen content open accessopen teaching

open technology– Linux (OS)– Apache (web server)– mySQL (database)– Moodle, Sakai (LMS)– Wordpress (blogs)– Drupal (CMS)– Mediawiki (wikis)– Open Journal Systems (publishing)– DimDim (web conferencing)– Etc…

free supporting software– Firefox (browser)– Thunderbird (email)– Skype (VOIP)– OpenOffice – Audacity (audio)– Etc…

free web services– Blogs (blogger.com)– Google groups– Image sharing (Flickr)– Video (youtube)– Bookmarking (delicious)– Wikis (pbwiki)– Webconferencing (wiziq)– RSS readers (Pageflakes)– Presentations (slideshare)

75,000,000 photos

open content

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others.

open content

Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.

open educational resources

“shifting faculty perspectives from this courseware is mine to this courseware is for (open) mining.”

open educational resources

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration

“everyone should have the freedom to use, customize, improve and redistribute educational resources without constraint.”

October 1, 2008171 organizations and 1680 individuals signed

Open Educational Resources

MIT Open CourseWare project

open educational resources– OpenCourseware Consortium

• Over 200 HE institutions– OpenLearn (Open University)– Internet Archive– OER initiatives

• Hewlett Packard• Rice Connexions• UNESCO• OECD

– Curriki– Merlot– Creative Commons

open access

– 25,000 peer-reviewed journals published worldwide

– 2.5 million articles per year– Most universities subscribe to only a small

set of these

open access

– 2002 Budapest declaration - open access to peer reviewed journal literature is the goal

– Open access aims to remove restrictions that exist on the access to articles and knowledge to the world wide scholarly community, in particular to those in developing countries.

open access

Public Library of Science publishes under an open access license that allows unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

open access

"Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences adopted the world's 38th Green Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate"

open access

"The objective of the Harvard mandate is to provide Open Access (OA) to its own scholarly article output. This objective is accomplished by making those articles freely accessible on the web by depositing them in a Harvard OA Institutional Repository."

open teaching

David Wiley taught an online course at Utah State University last fall and let anyone fully participate

5 students, joined 15 who had registered, and got a ‘home-made certificate’ from Dr. Wiley.–

open teaching

200 students informally followed a course by Alec Couros, information and communication technology coordinator for the School of Education at the University of Regina, in Saskatchewan.

“the emerging open education movement in higher education and beyond is beginning to change the way educators use, share, and improve educational resources and knowledge by making them open and freely available.”

Change pressure 3.

Changing student habits, expectations, attitudes and abilities.

Today’s student…

A child born in 1990,now entering university, has not known a world without the Internet.

1990Tim Berners-Lee creates the World Wide Web.

1993

Mosaic Web browser released

First web cam goes online

Web grows by 341,000 percent in a year.

1994

Precursor to Yahoo goes online

Netscape browser released

1995

• Amazon.com launched• RealAudio, audio streaming

technology, developed • Traditional online dial-up

systems (Compuserve, America Online, Prodigy) begin to provide Internet access

• eBay founded as Auctionweb

1996

• The WWW browser war, fought primarily between Netscape and Microsoft

• 342,081 websites (August)

• Hotmail launched

1997

• Term weblog, later shortened to blog, coined

1998

• Google opens its first office in a garage

1999

MMORG Everquest released

Napster launched

MySpace launched

2000

Nearly 20 million websites online (August)

Dot com bubble bursts

2001

Wikipedia founded

Pope John Paul II sends an email

2003

iTunes launched

2004

Mozilla Firefox open source browser released

Facebook launched

2005

Youtube launched

Web 2.0 defined by Tim O’Reilly

2006

Estimated 92 million websites online

Google acquires YouTube for $US1.65 billion

2007Google surpasses Microsoft as "the most valuable global brand," and also is the most visited Web site.

1.114 billion people use the Internet

Microsoft buys 1.6% of Facebook for $US 240 million making Facebook worth $US15 billion

2008

A vision of students today

habits are changing

A spring 2007 survey and interviews with 27,846 freshman, senior, and community college students at 103 American higher education institutions indicated:

The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2007

98.4% own a computer 75.8% own a laptop


99.9% create, read and send email


84% use instant messaging


83% use course management systems


81.6% use social networks


78.3% play computer and video games


77.8% download music or video


70.5% agree that IT helps them do better research for their courses


61% agree that IT in courses improves their learning


Today’s undergraduate student spends an average of 18 hours per week online


26% spend more than 20 hrs per week online

Academica Group, 2007 UAS/CAS Web Trends Study

They are the first generation to grow up with the Internet – pervasive, always-on, and now … mobile.

with the WWW – whatever, whenever, wherever.

expectations are changing

immersed in a cloud of information and services

students expect access to information and friends anywhere and anytime

ubiquitous infinite bandwidth

and in the classroom?



attitudes are changing

The Web has shifted from being a medium, in which information is transmitted and consumed, into being a platform, in which content is created, shared, remixed, repurposed, and passed along.

Stephen Downes

the emergence of Web 2.0 is not a technological revolution, it is a social revolution

Stephen Downes

“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

today’s student switches contexts quickly (multitasks?)

today’s student jumps into new areas (doesn’t read the manual)

today’s student is cynical

today’s student does not respect authority

today’s student is inherently collaborative

If habits, expectations and attitudes are changing are abilities changing as well?

for better or for worse?

technology is making us smarter

What is surprising perhaps is … the sophisticated ways in which they are finding and synthesizing information and integrating across multiple sources of data.

JISC LXP Student experiences of technologies Draft final reportGráinne Conole, Maarten de Laat, Teresa Dillon and Jonathan Darby1The Open University, 2Exeter University, 3Polar Producehttp://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/elearningpedagogy/lxpprojectfinalreportdec06.pdf

… there is strong evidence of peer support and peer community, resonant with the rhetoric inherent in the idea of social networking and the world of Web 2.0.

JISC LXP Student experiences of technologies Draft final reportGráinne Conole, Maarten de Laat, Teresa Dillon and Jonathan Darby1The Open University, 2Exeter University, 3Polar Producehttp://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/elearningpedagogy/lxpprojectfinalreportdec06.pdf

“popular culture has, on average, grown more complex and intellectually challenging over the past thirty years."

Steven Berlin Johnson

In the US, IQ scores have risen about 3 points per decade since 1940

Mark Bauerlein

technology is making us dumber

Google is making us stupid

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory.

My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing.

I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading.

Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose.

That’s rarely the case anymore.

Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages.

I get fidgety,

lose the thread

begin looking for something else to do.

I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text.

The deep reading that used to come naturally

has become a struggle.

I get fidgety,

lose the thread

begin looking for something else to do.

I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text.

The deep reading that used to come naturally

has become a struggle.

I get fidgety

lose the thread

I get fidgety

Or . . . technology is making us smarter

“Students are demonstrating new skills in terms of harnessing the potential of technologies for their learning. These include new forms of evaluation skills and strategies ( searching, restructuring, validating), which enable them to critique and make critical decisions about a variety of sources and content.”

JISC LXO: Student experiences of technologies

“The use of these tools is changing the way we gather, use and create knowledge. There is a shift in the basic skills with a shift from lower to higher levels of Blooms taxonomy, necessary to make sense of their complex technologically enriched learning environment.”

JISC LXO: Student experiences of technologies

Or . . . technology is making us dumber

Decrease in verbal-linguistic and logical mathematical intelligence.

Increase in spatial intelligence.

Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation

“The simple fact is that kids aren't reading, aren't engaging in wider cultural experiences, aren't developing broad horizons of interest or knowledge. And so, they are not building the cognitive frameworks they require for a flourishing life”

Mark Nichols

What formal education doesHow does formal education respond?

“in school they are expected to submit to a pedagogic regime that is fundamentally premised on the transmission and testing of decontextualised knowledge and skills, and which is dominated by “old generation” technologies (Web 1.0) underpinned by a radically different philosophy and a different set of affordances.”

Learning from digital natives: bridging formal and informal learning

What formal education doesWhat is the role of formal education in this environment?

What formal education doesWhat value does it add?

cognitive growthconceptual maturitythe development of reasoningexposure to alternatives

The promise – the values of a formal education

Formal education puts boundaries on knowledge – courses circumscribe what has to be learned.

The practice

Formal education defines outcomes – programs extract meaningful chunks (courses) and sequence them

The practice

Provides structure and discipline– through place/space/time (both physical and virtual)

The practice

Provides access to experts, mentors, guides (both human and technological)

The practice

Provides access to learning resources - libraries, studios and labs.

The practice

Provides a narrative of coherence.

The practice

“Formal and informal learning have been viewed as competing paradigms, however, students are increasingly adopting the tools and strategies for informal learning within formalised educational settings.”

"a widening of the gap between the culture of the educational institutions and the culture of learners' lives outside school" (p.4)

What formal education doesis elearning a solution?

What formal education doescan it close the gap?

What formal education doescan it adopt the tools and strategies used by students for informal learning within formalised educational settings?

What formal education doesa definition of elearning …

“Electronic learning (or e-Learning or eLearning) is a type of education where the medium of instruction is computer technology. No in-person interaction may take place in some instances.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-learning

elearning is pedagogy empowered by technology.

Mark Nichols,

elearning is as varied as the pedagogies and technologies that facilitate it.

Mark Nichols,

Almost all current university level courses have an elearning component

From the simplest … a traditional face to face course augmented with email communication between instructor and students and/or students to students

To a blended course… where traditional learning activities are moved online (e.g. bulletin board discussion, simulation, or online test) with a reduction in face to face contact time.

To an online course . . . where all content, communication, interaction and assessment are delivered through technology.

distance learning is not necessarily elearning.

online learning is a type of elearning.

We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.

Marshal McLuhan

We use new tools to do the work of the old.

Marshal McLuhan

Powerpoint, audio, video, podcasts, simulations to augment lectures

Personal response systems

Putting course notes online

Instructors email

Some online discussions

Some online tests

Some learning objects

Is this enough to close the gap?

Or do we need to change our approach to teaching and learning?

Or do we need to change our approach to ownership and authority?

Or do we need to change our approach to command and control?

and take steps

to address the new habits, attitudes, expectations and abilities of students

to rethink authority, control and teaching and learning strategies in a networked world.

to try collaboration and open access through a social networking site, wiki projects, new partnerships for online courses and a massively open online course (MOOC)

http://webmail.cs.umanitoba.ca/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page

Online certificate program in HIV/AIDS Program Administration with Regional Aids Training Network in Africa.

Courses to Sedaya (Malaysia) and Birzeit (Palestine)

Open teaching

http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/connectivism/

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msa=0&msid=101659969634438263199.0004560540c6229475ac2

http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/wiki/Connectivism

Thank you!

Peter [email protected]/learning_technologies

mailto:[email protected]