Guerrilla Connectivism: 10 Tips for Taking Control of your Education

Posted on January 18, 2013 Written by

Photo Credit: dcJohn via Compfight cc

Photo Credit: dcJohn via Compfight cc

I recently had the misfortune of taking a week-long training course on project management. The instructor was a friendly, experienced, and knowledgable project manager, but her teaching style consisted of reading through a company-prepared deck of over 500 powerpoint slides. For five days. Seven hours a day. There were about 50 of us sitting in rows, quietly listening as she diligently worked through the slides, interjecting a personal experience here or expanding on a bullet point there. Someone would occasionally raise a hand to ask a question, but most sat silently. Many had that glazed-over look with heads about to nod sleepily forward, or were surreptitiously reading email or Facebook.
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I spent most of the course frustrated with the experience and developing in my mind how I would do it differently if I were in charge. I devised mental plans for re-organizing the content, engaging the learners, and building a learning community. I’ve been so inspired by what I’ve learned about connectivism from people like Alec Couros, and from my experiences of being part of courses that develop powerful learning communities, that I couldn’t help but dream of better ways to do this.

But this is where, I now realize, I failed. I could have done something more.

I’ve been so busy working on my education degree, studying connectivism and other learning theories, and writing up education plans for my job as a learning consultant, that I lost sight of the actions I could have taken right there and then, in my role as a student. I think this is vitally important, as most instructors are not about to start adopting a connectivist philosophy anytime soon, and connectivist principles need to start making their way into classrooms now. We, as students, don’t need to wait for our instructors to do this for us, and instead, we can take control of our own education by following a few connectivist-inspired tips:

1. Talk to your co-students. The first step in building a learning community is to reach out and communicate with the members of that potential community. This can be as simple as extending an open invitation to go out for coffee during the first day’s break. Introduce yourself, ask about them, gauge their interest in connecting.

2. Tweet. Just before things get started after that first break, stand up and announce a twitter hashtag for the class, and invite people to use it. Twitter often forms a key communication piece in connectivist learning, and it could just as easily be introduced by students as by the instructor.

3. Become a Facilitator. You may need to actively facilitate the initial discussions to kick things off and establish the environment. Start by tweeting an interesting question or reflection on a point made by the instructor or a co-student. Send out a relevant link. When others tweet, send an encouraging reply. But also, be sure to step back when the conversation starts to take off. Not enough facilitation might prevent the conversation from starting, but too much can choke it off. Facilitation is a careful balancing act.

4. Help others. Connectivist courses often start with sessions to help orient students to this new way of learning. To replicate this, offer to spend the first lunch break helping people setup a twitter account or reviewing how it works. Point them to some of the great introductory resources developed by other connectivist educators. Connectivist learning can be disorienting for those new to it, and does require a basic understanding of some of the core technologies like twitter, social bookmarking, and blogging. A bit of guidance can make a big difference to the success of the learning community.

5. Establish a Google Community. Yet another free service from Google, this allows you to quickly and easily establish a connectivist, student-run web space for the course. Remember to tell everyone where to find it. Use twitter, but also let people know face to face. Try not to be exclusionary, but instead keep all information open and accessible to everyone in the course.

6. Start blogging. You and your co-students can use Blogger, WordPress, or other free services to create your own blogs. This can be an important place to narrate your learning, demonstrate to others in the course how narrated learning works, and to comment on one another’s posts.

7. Social bookmarking. Use free tools like Diigo or Delicious to setup social bookmarking groups. This can allow everyone in the class to contribute links and pull in their relevant knowledge from outside of the course. Encourage others to do some content curation using Scoop.it or other similar tools. Again, remember to tell everyone and to seed it with some links of your own.

8. Keep it positive. Although you may be starting this due to frustration with the course instructor, be sure to stay focused on the course content and the learning. Avoid criticism of the instructor or his/her teaching style. This will help with the next tip.

9. Invite the instructor to participate. If things start to take off, share the success with the instructor. Invite him or her to get involved. Take this as an opportunity to share the value of connectivism, and possibly inspire him or her to adopt this approach in the future. Some instructors may not get it and reject your invitation, but many will see the benefits when they are demonstrated right in front of them.

10. Connect with a librarian. If offered by a college or university, there will usually be a librarian responsible for the course. This person really wants to help you and your co-students succeed and can be a great source of related content and resources. Let your librarian know what you are doing, invite him or her to participate, and you may just win another person over to this kind of learning.

These are just some of my initial thoughts on ways for students to take control over their education and pro-actively become part of the learning process, without needing permission. I think it can be done for workplace training, academic courses, or any other kind of learning event, whether online or in-person.

I’ve no doubt missed other important tips, so please let me know what else you think can be done. As well, if you have any experience doing something like this, or being an instructor where students did any of these, please do comment here. I’d love to hear about real examples of how this has played out.

Filed Under: Thoughts

Toward an Organizational Knowledge Management Strategy

Posted on March 25, 2012 Written by

I came across a few very good learning opportunities last week that have helped move some of my thinking about knowledge management further ahead. First, Jane Hart and Harold Jarche (two people well-worth following) had an online conversation about personal knowledge management. Of particular interest to me was the idea of PKM consisting of “seeking, sensemaking, and sharing”:

I was already familiar with the idea of seeking information and sharing that information (maybe its my librarian background), but I hadn’t thought enough about the importance of the sensemaking element. This is the critical area of adding value — where information gets transformed into knowledge (or is at least part of this process). Sensemaking provides value in a couple of ways. First, to me at the centre of my own personal knowledge network, it means that I need to not just consume the information I have discovered (and will probably forget 10 minutes later), but actually need to engage with it, reflect on it, contextualize it, synthesize it with other information, and think about how I might be able to utilize it. Second, for others that I am sharing it with, I’ve added my own piece, enhanced it a little, revealed a bit of myself, and added my own brick to the rising structure of knowledge and understanding.

One of the challenges in doing this, of course, is time. When will any of us find the time to do this? Well, to actually move ourselves and our organizations forward, to grow and develop, I think we need to find the time. Jarche’s responded to this concern by referencing Beth Kanter’s Content Curation practice, which outlines how to systematically do 1 – 2 hours of seeking, sensing, and sharing each day:

For those of us with commutes on public transit, much of this can be done with our mobile devices to and from the office each day. Research shows that most knowledge workers aren’t very productive after 6 hours of straight work anyway, so why not invest an hour or so into this kind of activity with those final less-productive two hours?

There are many ways to add this kind of value to the knowledge we encounter. It could be as simple as adding a few extra characters to a retweet (WHY are you re-tweeting?), adding a thoughtful comment to an online article, or — requiring a bit more effort — writing up your thoughts in a blog post. Harold specifically mentioned the value of narrating your work, both as a reflective tool but also to add value to existing ideas (Harold’s blog is a rich example of this — see his Friday Finds). Image the results if everyone in an organization was actively seeking out information, making sense of it through reflection and writing, and then sharing it with others. I think it would take a pretty profound cultural shift to make this happen, but it is certainly possible, and worth trying.

This leads to the next item that I found helpful this week. In her blog post “Avoiding half-assed knowledge management flops“, Jane Young writes that many knowledge management efforts have failed because they only go half way. Organizations attempting to implement KM have understood the need generate knowledge and to store it (as explicit knowledge), but often fail to explain this knowledge to others or to help others make use of it. This results in the whole concept of KM being discounted — “we tried that and it didn’t work” — when it was never really implemented properly or completely.

What I think needs to happen is to apply Jarche’s personal knowledge management stages of seeking, sensemaking, and sharing to an organizational knowledge management strategy. Organizations seem to be getting the seeking right — they know they need to capture knowledge and store it somewhere. They also understand the importance of sharing — it isn’t of any value if others don’t know about it or can’t find it. The next step though, is to put more time and effort into sensemaking — why is this knowledge valuable? Why should you read this document or report? What does it mean in our organizational context? This kind of sensemaking can help to tap into the valuable tacit knowledge that resides in the heads of knowledge workers, and can be so hard to get at. Asking people to narrate their work (including those at the top of the hierarchy) could provide fascinating insight into what is currently being worked on, what new ideas are emerging, and what new opportunities might be evolving. And, of course, good, old-fashioned, face to face conversations can be an important part of this too (when not prohibited by distance).

From a leadership perspective, introducing organizational seeking, sensemaking, and sharing — developing a knowledge management network based on hundreds of personal knowledge nodes — could have significant long-term implications for enhancing innovation and achieving outcomes. It might (well, probably will) require cultural change and the reorganizing of priorities, but the benefits could potentially be profound.

Filed Under: Readings, Thoughts

EC&I 831: Summary of Learning

Posted on November 28, 2011 Written by

There was certainly a wide range of options available for our final Summary of Learning project. I decided to use a combination of Powerpoint and Knovio. Powerpoint is a tool I use regularly, but I wanted to enhance it with something new. Knovio allowed me to record myself on video as I presented the slides. I’ve participated in a few conference panels remotely using Skype and Powerpoint, but am always nervous about the quality of the Internet connection. With something like this prepared ahead of time, I could be assured that my co-panelists wouldn’t run into any problems. Here’s the result.

Overall, I do like the tool. I did have problems recording the video over several slides — it didn’t work out and in the end I had to do most slide narration individually, which ended up inserting rather long black transitions between most of the slides. I think this would be a great desktop tool, with greater editing controls.

Filed Under: Thoughts

Whaddaya Know: We Built a Community

Posted on November 25, 2011 Written by

At the end of this week’s wrap up class, I found myself feeling kind of bad that things were ending. It had gone so fast and we’d traveled so far. Although I love learning, I’m not all that fond of taking classes, and I’m usually pretty done once the 13 week point comes. It is different this time, and it made me wonder why.

Early in the term, we had a great presentation by Richard Schwier, looking at the concept of virtual learning communities. This sounded like a great idea in theory, and one that I wanted to explore further, but wasn’t really one that I had ever experienced in a distance university course. I think there was some skepticism as to how possible it really was to build a community amongst a group of people that had never (and would never) meet.

Well, several weeks later many of the recent student blog posts indicate that we did indeed build a virtual community around this course. Alison became a sharer, Katy found her voice, Shauna told us about putting things into practice at work, Tannis didn’t want to say goodbye.

Where did this come from? Why are so many people feeling moved or even transformed? What was different? Here’s my take on it:

  1. The synchronous classes were key. We actually had to come together on the same site, on the same night, at the same time each week. We didn’t talk a whole lot, but we got the text messages rolling, and got to know each other a little there.
  2. Our posts and comments were not required. We needed to do some, but we didn’t have to post or comment on everything. This let us write genuine thoughts and reflections on things that actually touched us, rather than trying to think up something to say to fulfill some requirement.
  3. We blogged on our own spaces, that we created, that we controlled. And we needed to come over to someone else’s space to find out about her or him, and comment in his or her space. I think this made for a much more personal experience than simply posting on a class forum in Moodle or some other LMS.
  4. Alec didn’t explicitly lay down any ground rules on how we needed to behave online. But, in my experience, everyone was positive, constructive, and truly supportive and enthusiastic about other people’s learning. I had a sense that people actually cared about what was going on with others.
  5. Without a set reading list designed by Alec, it was up to all of us to design the content as we went. We needed to find things that would be of interest to others and share them. In so doing, we learned about the tools available, about searching, and about sharing — as well as about the content. We also learned about each other. We discovered that we had many shared interests and some distinct ones as well.
  6. The learning seemed to flow between the classroom, the workplace, and our social spaces. We pulled in content and experiences from all of them, breaking down the artificial divide between them. This also helped us gain more insight into the real person behind each twitter id.
  7. Alec’s choice of assessment methods didn’t lead to a competitive environment, where we felt like we needed to “outsmart” each other to win some points.

I’m sure there are more factors that resulted in this unique learning community coming together. No doubt some people had a different experience and different factors that impacted their experience. I’d love to hear about them. Thanks folks :-)

Filed Under: Thoughts

From Training to Knowledge Management, Transmission to Connection

Posted on November 11, 2011 Written by

Stephen Downes sparked a lot of ideas this week, all of which require some serious reflection to come to grips with. Included amongst these would be the concept that content is the tool to support learning, not the object of learning. With so many of our ideas about teaching revolving around how we can best transfer content from the instructor to the learner, this is a pretty radical notion. By presenting us with this idea, Stephen is asking us to think carefully about what education is about — is it about acquiring a pre-defined skill, or is it about developing as an individual. I think we continue to need a combination of both, and these tend to roughly fall under the broad categories of “training” and “education”. Training is about that direct transfer of a skill — “I know how to do a mail merge in Microsoft Word and I’m going to help you do it too”. There isn’t much expectation that you’re going to grow as a result of learning to do a mail merge, but it might help you keep your job. In this kind of learning, there can still be a role for more traditional aspects of education, such as content experts, lectures, exercises, etc. A “sage on the stage” can still be useful here. Education, on the other hand, is less about the content, and more about the personal development, the individual growth, the learning how to learn, and, importantly, the connections one makes with others on that journey. Here we can see less emphasis on experts and lectures (although they can still have a role to play), and more on interactions, explorations, and discussions. As educators, it is part of our responsibility to figure out when we should be training (and focusing on the content), and when we should be educating (and focusing on the connections). Ideally, we won’t be doing this in isolation, but as part of a learning community that includes students, parents, supervisors, neighbours, and others impacted by the process. The power of the connections is something new to me, and I’ve encountered some of the ideas in connectivism, but I think I need to explore this further.

Another key point from Stephen’s talk was the multiple roles of the educator. You can see a good summary of these roles (there are 23, so I won’t repeat them here) in this Huffington Post article. Stephen argues that these roles are becoming too complex for any individual teacher to do them all. Many teachers are feeling extremely stretched by the expectation that they should continue to do them all. Instead, these roles need to be shared in the wider community and advances in technology are making this more feasible. This reminded me of arguments made Ivan Illich in Deschooling Society, where the entire concept of institutionalized education is criticized as outmoded and ineffectual, and instead outlines an alternative based on decentralized learning webs, where students could select what they want to learn, from whom, and how. Everyone would could become teachers and everyone would be learners. Instead of isolated institutions called schools, the roles of education would be shared throughout the community. It is a very radical notion, and requires questioning many of the fundamental, taken-for-granted ways of viewing our world, but is a valuable source of broader thinking. I don’t think there is a clear blueprint in place for this, or that society could switch to this model overnight, but it does generate some deep critical thinking and questioning of our own assumptions, which can generate unexpected innovations. I really appreciated Stephen putting everything on the table like this. And I’d rather talk about this than learn how to do a mail merge :-)

In thinking about these ideas over the past few days, I’ve tried to place them into a practical context that I’m familiar with. I’m not a school teacher, but I am involved in helping people learn at work. Traditionally, a lot of workplace learning has been focused on classroom-based training — learning how to do that mail merge, listening to an expert lecture on customer service, or doing an elearning module or simulation on occupational health and safety. These will continue to be important aspects of workplace learning, but I think the concepts of devolving educational roles and the importance of connections are highly relevant here. Instead of focusing exclusively on the training role, workplace educators also need to pay attention to knowledge management. Knowledge management understands that knowledge exists throughout the organization, is largely contained within the minds of individuals (as tacit knowledge), and is only sometimes written down (as explicit knowledge) and rarely captures all of the richness on paper (or in knowledge databases). The way to tap into the tacit knowledge of the organization is to help individuals connect with one another — to get them meeting, talking, debating, arguing, sharing, and otherwise interacting. The stronger the connections, the better that critical tacit information can be shared and more widely valued for the entire organization. Writing it down can capture some of it, but some of the richest knowledge can only be shared through connections — and through the process of interacting (connecting), new knowledge can be generated. In this way too, everyone in an organization becomes a teacher, sharing what they know best, and everyone becomes a learner, benefiting from the expertise of others. The workplace educator will continue to train in a classroom, but must also work to connect people with information to people in need, and encourage everyone to be both teachers and learners, all the time, throughout the organization, across units and hierarchies.

Filed Under: Presentations, Thoughts

Knowledge Sharing and Effective Filtering

Posted on November 4, 2011 Written by

Dean Shareski’s talk this week provided some very compelling information on the value of sharing, aimed particularly at teachers, but having some wider applicability. His reasons to share included:

  • to build community
  • as part of professional responsibility
  • to reciprocate
  • because we’re lazy
  • to avoid reinventing the wheel
  • to model sharing for students
  • because you never know – unexpected things can happen, things can be useful to others that you didn’t expect
  • to make things better
  • to learn from others

All of these are great reasons — ranging from the self-interested (laziness) to the altruistic (to make things better) to the practical (re-inventing the wheel is expensive). One of the criticisms that is sometimes leveled against so much sharing, however, is that it leads to information overload — too many posts, too many tweets, too many photos, too many comments, too many objects in a learning object repository, too many journal articles to read, etc. — and the absence of an effective filter to know what is good and what is bad.

Dean dealt with this criticism by drawing on the work of Clay Shirky, author of several books including Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (2008) and Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (2010). Shirky argues that the problem isn’t so much information overload, as filter failure. In the past, the widespread sharing of ideas and knowledge was limited to media such as print, radio, and television, and was very expensive to produce. As a result, information needed to be filtered by media producers before it was published. Today, sharing information is cheap and accessible to almost everyone, and allows for rapid production (via blogs, wikis, web sites, podcasts, youtube, etc.) and filtering after publication.

This represents a profound power shift, reducing the ability of major media producers to determine what is worthy (in their opinion) of being published and what is not. Instead, we can now all publish and share, but that does comes with the responsibility to develop our own effective filtering systems. What is particularly exciting about this is that we now have access to knowledge and information that would not have been *approved* in the past — we would never have even know it existed or even had the potential to exist — and can decide for ourselves what we want to access. While the old model may have been easier, allowing someone else to make our decisions for us, the new model is incredibly empowering, allowing us to make the connects *we* want to, and reject the information *we* choose to reject. By building trusted communities through tools like Twitter, we can rely on our peers to help us with our filtering, recommending valuable links to one another, pointing us in potentially interesting directions, and sharing our experiences.

I found this topic of particular interest, because the project I work on is occasionally charged with contributing to this so-called information overload problem. We make free, open source software that helps anyone that wants to start and operate a peer-reviewed, academic journal able to do so — with only minimal technological skill and hardware. Through the use of this software, hundreds of people have found their voices as independent “scholar-publishers”, generating and sharing knowledge that might otherwise have never been heard through the traditional academic publishing system. This is particularly true in the developing world, where more than half of our 10,000 or so journals are located. The traditional publishing system has done a fairly poor job of providing access to scholarly information to the developing world, and an even worse job of giving voice to scholars in the south. As Dean described in his talk, there are so many benefits to sharing, that we undermine it at our peril. Although helping to enable all of these voices can, to some, be perceived as adding to a cacophony of noise, I prefer to hear it, with the properly developed filters, as enriching the music.

If you are a sharing enthusiast, what do you do to filter what you want from what you don’t? Do you leave a little space for the unexpected?

Filed Under: Thoughts

Rhizomatic Learning and Unconferencing

Posted on November 1, 2011 Written by

From reading the latest blog posts, it sounds like many of us were quite intrigued with Dave Cormier’s concept of Rhizomatic Learning. It is always intriguing when someone asks the bigger questions like “why do we teach”. This bigger question set the context for the discussion of rhizomatic learning, which is associated with the ideas of knowledge negotiation, open-ended learning, student-driven learning, chaos, difficulty to assess and script, the role of creative “nomads”, becoming over memory, and the idea of life-long learning. If the main reason we teach is to transfer information, this probably doesn’t sound like a good idea. But if the goal is to help someone develop themselves to their fullest capacity, then this sounds pretty interesting.

I liked the sound of what Dave was talking about a lot, and it really fit into my own philosophical comfort level around adult education and my own reasons for teaching adults. As I continued to ponder it over the week, what kept coming back to me was, “where can you apply this?”, “when would it be appropriate (and inappropriate) to apply it?”, and “what would it look like?”.

By coincidence, I also participated in my first “unconference” this Sunday in Baltimore — on the topic of libraries and publishing (THATCamp Publishing). I’ve never been to an unconference before, but it really seems to embody many of the principles that Dave was talking about. In a traditional conference, authors submit proposals, the conference directors decide which to accept and which to decline, they put out a schedule, and participants register and later decide which sessions to attend. This sounds a lot like traditional education, with a separation between the teachers, who decide what and how to teach, and students, who just sign up and hope for the best. In an unconference, however, there is no pre-set schedule. Participants had been invited to submit open proposals to the unconference web site for several weeks, and they were all posted for everyone to view (kind of like an open syllabus). On the morning of the unconference, all participants (organizers, submitters, attendees) got together in the main room and decided which sessions were of most interest to the most people, and those chosen went ahead. Some sessions were dropped and some were combined with other sessions. One session that didn’t find a space proceeded as an informal lunch meeting. Live tweets were scrolling past on the projected screen throughout the process, which added to the discussion.

Once the group decided on which sessions should take place, everyone also worked together to decide on the placement of each session in the day’s schedule, which was available as a live Google Doc. Because there were only 3 sets of 4 concurrent sessions, it was only possible for anyone to participate in 3 of the 12 sessions. This required a certain amount of collective negotiation, but after about 15 minutes the group developed the plan for the day.

The sessions themselves were also unlike any conference session I’ve ever been to. The original proposers were tasked with facilitating their sessions, but not leading them. They operated essentially as seminar discussions rather than lectures — the idea being that no one person was the main expert, but that our collective expertise was going to be unleashed. There was little (if any) content delivered, but the connections made between people and the ideas and knowledge shared were extremely valuable. One of the action items from one session was to setup a Google Group as a new community of practice among the participants, to continue the discussions. I met many very smart, experienced people, connected with people I only knew online, and re-connected with others I’ve met in the past. The overall experience certainly reflected much of what Dave discussed in class.

While I think the day was a success, I don’t believe you could make just any conference into an unconference. This one worked because of the clear focus of the topic, the sense of community and common cause amongst the group, and the advanced warning about what was going to happen (if you didn’t like the idea, you wouldn’t have registered). I think the cultural expectations about how learning is supposed to happen are so deeply ingrained, however, that asking many traditional conference goers to accept this level of chaos, participation, interaction, and knowledge sharing (rather than knowledge receiving) wouldn’t fly. We haven’t really prepared ourselves to be very self-directed in our learning — starting from kindergarten and following right through to our post-secondary and work-related learning. One of the exciting things about what Dave is proposing for school teachers today is the opportunity to bring this expectation for self-direction, chaos, power, and interaction to the next generation, so that for them, the thought of passively sitting through another powerpoint presentation or lecture will seem absurd.

Has anyone else ever participated in an unconference? Did you like it? Did you hate it? Why?

Filed Under: Conferences, Thoughts

Open Education 2011 Conference Experiences

Posted on October 27, 2011 Written by

I’ve just finished up three days at my first Open Education conference in Park City, Utah, and it was an amazing experience, made even more so by being in the middle of ECI 831. It was pretty inspiring to be in a huge ballroom full of people who all “get it” — from teachers to vendors to bureaucrats. I wish all of my co-students could have been here to share in the experience — everything was directly relevant to what we are studying, and so many people were knowledgeable about so much, and were eager to share. Fortunately, in the finest spirit of openness, all of the presentations were recorded and will be made available soon (including mine, ugh, where I fear I talked way too fast due to being a little nervous — my slides are here). Here are a few of my highlights:

Open Textbooks

There was a lot of discussion of open textbooks at the conference. When you look at the numbers it seems like such an obvious choice. Each school, division, city, province, state, country (or whatever unit funds textbooks) is paying each year thousands or even millions of dollars for the same basic textbooks for their schools. A more fiscally-responsible alternative would be to pay an expert or two in each field a couple of hundred thousand dollars to write the authoritative textbook (e.g., Biology 101, Psych 101, etc.), and then make the results openly available for everyone. The potential cost savings are pretty staggering. Fortunately, the tools and services are now being put into place, such as Flatworld Knowledge and Connexions that can make this possible, and, it seems, policy makers are starting to listen. How can they not? Apparently, some traditional textbook publishers are fighting back, trying to get legislation passed that would block this, but it doesn’t seem likely to pass. One speaker quoted Gandhi as saying “first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then… you win”. Much of the open movement (source, education, access) has matured to the fighting stage, so its just a matter of time before we win (and, in fact, in many ways we already have).

Does anyone know of any initiatives in Saskatchewan in this direction? I learned that BCCampus is quite involved in moving forward.

Cool Tools

There were several sessions on new tools for open educators. A couple that stood out for me were OERGlue and OpenStudy. OERGlue allows a teacher to pull together open resources from across the web into a course, and build online interactions around those. They’ve developed a useful widget that lets you basically surf the web and grab content into your course. The web site has a helpful demo. By providing a quick and easy way to integrate a wide variety of content into a single course, it looks like a great piece of infrastructure to help expand the use of open educational resources. OpenStudy provides a social network of learning support for students. Anyone can set up a study group for their course and invite others to participate. I was impressed to learn that it already has over 70,000 users in 170 countries. Due to the large size of the community, students often get answers to their questions in minutes, not hours or days. It makes use of a reward system, so that good behaviour is encouraged and bad behaviour can result in banning, and a very positive, helpful culture has been established. This is another good example of a tool that facilitates the connectedness that we know is so important to effective learning (online or off).

Connectedness

A common theme throughout many of the sessions was the importance of building connections and communities. One statement making its way around the twitterverse was “education is more about connecting than content”. This fits very well into what we’re learning in class.

Another piece of good news is that Open Education 2012 will be in Vancouver, which is much closer to home for many of us. I’m definitely planning to attend. I was very fortunate to have my employer pay for this trip, but I’d definitely self-fund a visit to the coast to participate in this next event. The community of people were all enthusiastic, positive, full of ideas, and wanting to talk and share. It is a great way to spend a few days!

Filed Under: Conferences, Thoughts Tagged:

Tweets, Blogs, and Knowledge Creation

Posted on October 27, 2011 Written by

Our class has gotten me thinking a lot about how we learn and how our ideas and knowledge develop. It has been interesting to use Twitter to get continual input from so many smart people (such as my co-students!), and to be influenced by them, remotely, on a regular basis. Often, an idea sparked in a tweet will lead to a blog post, where it can be fleshed out with a little more thought and detail (and beyond 140 characters). If we’re lucky, exposing our ideas in a blog post will generate some helpful and critical comments, which can either reinforce our concepts or challenge us to rethink them. If an idea really gets interesting, we can think about it even further, discuss it with friends and colleagues, and may even bring it to a conference and deliver it as a presentation. Again, this can create a new feedback loop, with a different set of people engaging with the ideas, offering more perspectives and opinions, and leading again to the need to reconsider elements of the original ideas. Based on all of this learning, if you are really jazzed up about it, you can then take all of the thinking, all of the discussions, all of the further investigation, all of the feedback, and write it up as an article for publication in a professional publication or scholarly journal.

All of this thinking and scholarly activity, sparked by a single tweet. Who knew? Anyone here thinking about writing up something for publication? Anyone want to co-author something?

Filed Under: Thoughts Tagged: ,

Open Cities, Adult Education, and Community Development

Posted on October 25, 2011 Written by

Andrea Reimer’s closing keynote at the Access conference was a truly inspiring presentation. In it, she outlined Vancouver’s Open3 policy, consisting of:

  1. Open Source: The city’s purchasing policy now treats open source software the same as proprietary software. In the past, open source always lost out because it wasn’t “supported”. The city now recognizes community support. There is no mandate to always use open source, but instead the playing field is simply levelled. Great win!
  2. Open Standards: The city is committed to using data formats that are widely accessible and open. Data that you can’t read isn’t much use. Another important win.
  3. Open Data: Almost all of the data collected by the city is made freely available on their web site. This matters. A lot.

One reason this matters is because it allows innovative new services to be developed. Andrea gave the example of the massive amount of time the city spends answering the question, “when is my garbage getting picked up?”. Using the open data, a small software company created an application that allows people to now check for themselves, and the volume of calls has dropped significantly.

More importantly, though, is the crucial role data plays in engaged citizenship. A vibrant democracy is based on popular decision-making — but good, effective decisions can’t be made without good data to inform those decisions. The City of Vancouver has now made the critical step of providing the data to its citizens, providing them with the tools for more meaningful (and ultimately democratic) decision-making. This reminded me of the participatory budgeting processes that have taken place in cities in Brazil, Chicago, and elsewhere. This is such an important part of meaningful community development.

One of the reasons I entered the Adult Education program at the U of R was to explore the connections between adult learning and community development more closely. The connections between the two go back a long way, such as in the Antigonish Movement in Nova Scotia in the early 20th Century. For many of us, adult education is fundamentally about the growth and enrichment of the life of the individual learner, and the benefits that then provides to his or her wider community. The community itself develops as the individuals within it develop. This happens through a process of learning — learning about one’s life situation, the politics and economic context in which one lives, etc. Paolo Freire continued this tradition into the late 20th Century, and it lives on today in the work of educators and scholars practicing Critical Pedagogy. And now, thanks to Andrea Reimer and her colleagues, practicing critical pedagogy in the City of Vancouver just got a whole lot more interesting! Rich, open data means greater learning, greater information, greater knowledge, and the potential for greater participation and decision-making, and ultimately, greater community development.

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