Dave’s Educational Blog

The CCK08 MOOC - Connectivism course, 1/4 way

October 2, 2008 – 3:02 pm

To the best of my knowledge, the term “MOOC” comes out of a skype chat conversation I had with George Siemens about what exactly he would call this thing he and Stephen Downes were doing so I could call it something for the ETT show were were planning on the subject. We threw a bunch of possibilities around, and I dropped MOOC into the connectivism wiki, and, yesterday, someone asked me to do a presentation on the topic. 3 months. crazy. I’m not going to dial down into specifics of how the course is structured, so if you don’t know what I’m talking about… check out the wiki first.

We had two discussion on edtechtalk about the course before things actually kicked off… We had George, Stephen, Alec Couros and Leigh Blackall come out and share their opinions on the topic. Stephen and George as the course leaders and Alec and Leigh as two of the best thinkers on open courses that I know. The upshot of it was that it really was going to be an open course, and the instructors were going to allow the students to form whatever groups they might be interested in and they would provide the communication stream but not the organizational scaffolding.

Communications - What there is
There are a variety of ways in which learners in the connectivism course are being distributed to the world, and I’ll break down each one and try to establish how i feel they’re working at this point. Overall the communications weight on George and Stephen is huge, they’re involved in a large number of conversations, and have been trying to follow the vast weight of the content that has been produced… not sure this is a sustainable model, nor would it necessarily work as well for a different teacher who didn’t already spend a large amount of time working on the web. (note - i hate googlegroups and am therefore not able to speak to them. haven’t participated, have heard that they exist)

Moodle
Moodle is a Virtual Learning environment and is being used for one primary (forums) and one collateral purpose (aggregation). The aggregation purpose serves the same goal as the multitude of pageflake, netvibes etc… aggregation page… it helps people see what’s going on. Good so far as it goes. The moodle discussions have taken on that nice tone that I like to see. They are polite, (mostly) and there is an acceptance that it is a public space. There are several exploratory threads that I think have been very useful to the learners… i’ve always really liked discussion forums for co-creation of knowledge. I think this is working… for those who are using it.

The Daily and the blog.
This is the master aggregated list of all the posts related to the course as well as a few plucked out by Stephen as of particular interest to him, and the blog serves as a central stream of discussions (i particularly like Stephen’s round up… agree or disagree Stephen always leaves you with something to think about) I’ve used the Daily as my main way of following along with the course.

The wiki and the readings
I think that the syllabus can be very helpful, but the work there has not really been worked on by anyone other than Stephen and George… not much sense having a wiki when only the administrators end up working in it. Wikis almost always end up this way… This is the main syllabus for the course, and a good way to catch up with the core course material. I’ve not done most of the readings, but they are available here, and I’ve been sampling them occasionally…

The live stuff - eluminate and ustream
I’m not a big fan of eluminate, i think it’s a little clunky, it’s never really liked my microphones and i think it’s far too ‘display’ centric. It replicates the f2f presentation and I think, doesn’t really represent the most realistic way that people participate in front of their computers. I’m biased, i like the ustream format we’re doing… it’s more user focused and I get to talk more That being said, these are the most effective parts of the course for me, I really have to commend both Stephen and George for their lucidity and their willingness to be in the firing line every day. I’m loving moderating the ustream and have really enjoyed the questions from the chatroom… still wondering if it makes sense to bring people into the live discussion… so far the format seems to be working with me as the rep. of the folks in the chatroom… would like feedback on this.

Early lessons
I remember George saying something in one our our Edtechtalk discussions like “just getting the course off the ground is what I’m going to consider a success” and I think I agree with him. It’s a huge undertaking, with lots of little bits and pieces and a collosal amount of data. That being said, here’r some of the things that I’ve taken out of the first quarter of the course

Prerequisite Literacies
I think this kind of course needs a very specific description of what people are goign to need to know in order to be able to participate effectively. This might also include go forward models in terms of how people might go about doing that. For those of us who participate in online communities all the time it wasn’t terribly difficult, but i get the sense that more online participation would have resulted from added scaffolding.

Community building
I’m a bit of a community freak. I’m in the online stuff for the community as much as the learning… I like to hear about people’s lives as much as their professional accomplishments, I learn from their mores as much as their knowledge. I would have liked a bit more sanctioned community building directed from the top, to help scaffold the organicness of the groups that are out there… but that’s just me.

Course standards
I’m not sure if this is a lesson or not, because i think it’s been handled pretty well. There are some folks who’ve taken a more combative approach to the course which others have felt restricts the conversation. I HATE ‘what you can do’ standards on the internet generally, but i think the grace with which S and D have accepted critiques speaks well for them and open courses generally.

Rhizomatics
My own goals going in were to get a better sense of where my own work fits in with Connectivism. I’ve said several times that I’ve felt that rhizomatic community stuff seems like a subset of connectivism, even though I personally don’t go in for the ‘neural networks’ stuff… a science i consider too shadowy at this point to use as a premise for solid philosophical discussion (let alone practical application) I believe i’m seriously at odds with S & D on this and, as they have clearly done way more research on this than I have, I would probably consider taking their opinion over mine. I just can’t help but think that we are at the Bohr Atom stage of our understandings of our brains at this point… we have some models, they are a verifiable narrative, but not something I’m looking to use to guide my policy.

The debate around my article has been interesting (and not least in the way that people were WAY more polite about the theory during the live discussions) … particularly in the ways that I haven’t been clear. I don’t, for instance, think that rhizomatic education is a particularly fantastic way of memorizing things that are useful. I do realize that there are many different ‘real world’ issues out there that make it difficult. That theory did, at least partially, come out of real experience in the classroom and after the paper was released, I actually ran a course by its priciples… that was fairly well received. There are gaps, and many have been very nicely elucidated in the discussions.

Very cool so far. much more to say, but babyland has left me with other gardens that need tending.

Posted in Research notes, rhizomes | 4 Comments »

Openhabitat - The magazine

September 30, 2008 – 11:02 pm

Hey folks… it’s been quite a rollercoaster ride here lately… but time to get back to work

Last week I got formally assigned the roll of editor for the Openhabitat magazine… uh… idea. We’ve got a general idea of where we want to go with this magazine, and I’m going to try and pull together the ideas of my fine compatriots and put them together into some kind of multi-narrative that will make it interesting to someone who has not really thought of using an MUVE for an educational purpose and still compelling for the hearties who’ve been at this since the MUDs were king.

The Magazine - What is it?
We’re planning a two pronged magazine approach: one, an online rhizomatically structured living document, full of interconnections focused both internally and reaching out to the other communities of folks who are working on these issues. The second is a PAPER magazine, that should be a snapshot of the ‘knowledge’ that our community contains at the time of publication… say January 15th, 2009. The first gives an uptodate and ongoing idea of the state of the work that is being done by the folks in the openhabitat project and the other allows people to take a digestible look at what we’ve learned from 13 months of this project.

The online magazine (do people still say e-zine?)
There’s a pile of content on the openhabitat website at this point in the project. What we’ve come to realize, is that most of it is only really understandable by those of us who’ve been part of the project. The goals, directions and needs of the project have morphed as we’ve started to understand different things about the work that we’ve done and the magazine is an attempt to try and craft those things that we are now starting to see into a format that is manageable and interesting to people regardless of where they fit on the spectrum.

The paper magazine
One of the things that I learned from the living archives project is that its really difficult to show what you’ve done in an MUVE project in a meeting, in a bus, or in your office. People confronted by a virtual world for the first time are going to struggle to see past the wonder, confusion or simply the lack of familiarity with the ‘medium’ in order to be able to see what you’ve done with that space. Enter the magazine format. It’s a familiar medium, which should give people with less experience with MUVEs a place to start with evaluating wether the lessons that we’ve learned apply to their situation.

Ideas for structure
The majority of the content will be repurposing of the live blogs, data and pictures (the existing content is really quite good) from the research project organized and coalated in order to give people a window into the work done and hopefully pass on the lessons learned in this project to others doing the same work. In addition to this however I’m starting to think that I’d like to acquire some other pieces as well

1. The anatomy of an MUVE (a non-MUVEer’s explanation of what one is)
2. Some ads from other project doing work with Virtual Worlds.
3. A story (or two) from one of the students about their learning journey.
4. Interviews with the teachers and TAs… done in some not yet decided interesting manner (online this will be easy, in print… well… maybe excerpts that link back to the website
5. Talk with dave re: project management

And I turn it over to you folks to ask for some more things you’d like to see!

Posted in habitat, opensim | No Comments »

We are Media - teaching and currating

August 16, 2008 – 12:33 pm

This is my third critical friend post regarding the excellent ‘we are media‘ project. I love a collaborative project where each time i consider dropping an idea in, or adding to the process I find that someone has just dropped in the idea i was considering and done a nicer job of explaining it. For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, I don’t think there is a better resource online right now to empower the innovator to try and entice institutional change (They focus on the non-profit sector, but most of the resources could apply to any professional environment) through social media.

According to the module outline the creation part of the project is essentially at its halfway point. The first half being a collection of strategic resources for people interested in using social media…4
Strategic Track
Module 1: Why or why not?
Module 2: Thinking Strategically
Module 3: Resistance
Module 4: Storytelling
Module 5: Engagement Strategy and Skills
Module 6: ROI

The work plan for the project cross-referenced with the overview page seem to indicate that the goals are twofold. The first, and seemingly seminal goal for the project is to create a curricular base for training people in the uses of social media for non-profits. The second, and seemingly strenghtening purpose, is to create a long term curated, vetted space for information about using social media in a non-profit setting… My comments today will address these two goals and how they work in the same setting.

Wikiing for curriculum
The We Are Media project plans to have f2f training sessions (which I wish I could be at) at the end of this year where they hope to use their existing knowledge base as a backdrop to their training. What they’ve done, essentially, is combed the internet for best resources available on the topic of using social media in a non-profit setting. If you combined this project with the ict-km toolkit, you’d pretty much have all directed reading you would need for a degree let alone a training course.

The key next step for working towards training is to think about the syllabus. How exactly are these topics going to be introduced in a learner-centred setting? How are the concepts going to be discussed and organized so that each of the learners has the opportunity to make their own meaning and bring that meaning back to their own professional context? Are all of the resources still going to be active by the time the course actually starts? Might it make sense to turn some of the key resources into webcite references in order to preserve the reliability of critical concepts?

The development and examination of a syllabus is going to focus the discussion of the second half of the development towards specific things that will be needed in the educational space that may not jump out as obvious in the wiki space.

On another note there might be some sense in which planning for live resources that don’t yet exist can be interesting from a curricular perspective. Using yahoo pipes to create a feedbook of live resources that can be delivered in a single page as a living textbook for f2f learners to both use during the classes and also take home as a page or an OPML.

Wikiing for posterity
The obvious difference between building for a curriculum that someone is going to facilitate and creating a repository of knowledge, is that, in the repository, there is no translation. The tools need to exist there, from the beginning, for people to be able to navigate the content. With the end of the strategic phase of the content creation coming on, it may be time to return to the idea of the audience for the wiki and expand it from the creation team to include those passive users that must already be using the website.

What tools do they have to find and use resources?
What supports could be built during the rest of the process to facilitate that?
What would the lifespan on those resources be?

so…
As it stands now, the introductory module is a very detailed wiki page with pretty much everything you’d need to know to get started. A trimmed down introductory page, with a screencast walkthrough of the site might be a nice place to start for the ’second wavers’ who come to the site without the web/wiki literacies that will allow them to skim and process all the cool work there. A couple of potential syllabus pages might also be interesting, to give people a chance to talk about how they might remix this content in their own f2f or online training and see how that maps against the existing work that is being done.

Tracking these as they develop can do a great deal to flush out a curriculum and a webcite and keep these two ’seperate but equal’ goals on target.

Posted in Be The Media Project | No Comments »

Thoughts plucked from the openhabitat project

August 7, 2008 – 2:50 am

I’ve been wandering around the blogposts on the openhabitat website trying to glean from the work of my colleagues a small fraction of the lessons learned to try and give people a sense of the work they’ve done and the things that they’ve come to understand. (If you don’t know what I”m talking about, check out the about page.)

There is a heavy dose of reality in these posts… about what happens when you drop students from different disciplines (art and design and philosophy) into a virtual world. The project is divided into phases and, with the completion of phase one, these sets of lessons cover the tone that you would expect. They are about seeing the spaces for what they are rather than what they appear to be during the planning process. There is nothing like having 20 avatars swirling around to get a sense of out of control, or, as david points to, of people trying to capture each other in massive spheres. There are discussions of identity and collaboration, of the limitations of platforms and some real possible strenghts moving forward.

For this post I’ve really only covered the posts of the two actual educational pilots themselves, and left many of the very interesting side conversation aside. I’ve chosen to cut out bits of realizations and link you back to their source in the hopes of encouraging you to follow the pieces that would most affect your practice. It’s a focus on the results in the classroom…

1. Collaboration

“Maybe ‘collaboration’ in these MUVE environments is more about discussion than construction. When people collaborate in world they are rarely to be found wrestling over the same polygons/prims.” http://www.openhabitat.org/blogfeed/muve-curriculum/initial-impressions-first-open-habitat-pilot dave white.

I think the initial desire with these technologies is to assume that the ‘construction’ part will actually be the collaborative aspect that things focus around. It may be more interesting to think about how the space can contribute to knowledge building and the formations of community.

2. Identity

“Design education consciously and deliberately strives to achieve a balance between the unrestricted and impulsive (Nobody), the collaborative teamworking, subject specific or audience satisfying (Anybody) and the personal achievement of the author/producer (Somebody). We glued all this together with many, many ‘Aha!’ moments (Eureka)…. but it is clear that individual and collective identity is bound together with the creative process”. http://www.openhabitat.org/blogfeed/blogspot/eureka ian truelove

Identity is a key concept in all of this. In some sense i wonder how much of an issue identity will be the more that people get comfortable with the medium. In a designed classroom, where you already know who the people in the class are, flights of identity are going to be less disruptive. This quote is a nice subtle description of how that can work in set-piece courses.

3. Games

“The students flicked between real world and in world chat as the games progressed. One pair discovered that they could throw objects around in world and appeared to be attempting to trap each other inside large spheres in what looked like a surrealist version of a fight between two super heroes. This was transition point one, when the activity shifted from simply learning a piece of software to co-habiting the same virtual space with all the attendant social effects.” http://www.openhabitat.org/blogfeed/muve-curriculum/making-transition-practical-social
david white

Contextual play in a virtual world seems to be something that happens is many MUVE projects and is something that is very hard to predict. It may be a lesson going forward that we might want to consider ‘encouraging’ play… whatever that would mean.

4. Feedback

“But what really tipped it for me was the lack of tools in SL for getting feedback from the audience. How do I know I am being heard - do I need to adjust volume, where is the back channel for people to participate, ask questions … and so on? Status indicators are key.” http://www.openhabitat.org/blogfeed/second-life/six-barriers-innovation-learning-and-teaching-muves david white edit: Steven Warburton

Funny that the lack of interactive technologies would send someone from a very new technology to an older technology to allow for more interaction. The pitch on MUVEs has always been that they are ’supremely’ interactive and give people a sense of embodiment. It might be just a lack of needed literacies (different feeback mechanisms… maybe something like twitter?) but it might be an indication of MUVEs really being at the PacMan stage of development.

5. Wonderland

“Wonderland is basically a 3D conferencing tool, a bit like a 3D version of Elluminate. Rather than avatars, it would be more useful to see a live video stream of the people you are communicating with. Bandwidth restrictions would probably limit this to low-rez versions of each participant’s webcam, but even this in the 3D space would be useful. As a participant watches you move around, they would get a sense of what you are looking at, as your video image would be orientated to face that thing. In group meetings, the direction that you are looking would make sense in the 3D space. If you look to someone on your left, your video image would seem to be looking at the same person in the 3D space. This would provide valuable cues to enhance social cohesion. If someone decided to wander off, you could follow them, see what they are drawing or browsing, and engage in a meaningful conversation with them about it. “http://www.openhabitat.org/blogfeed/blogspot/walking-inter-wonderland ian truelove

Very tidy description of the pros and cons of Wonderland, which, of course, is still in development. I like the idea of these different platforms specializing out to specific pro/con specializations… the same way that we’ve noted the difference between opensim (reliable, contained) and SL (open, communal) and how they can both be very well used inside the same project in order to arrive at different points.

6. Sports

“I found my mind wandering towards sport as something that might provide a possible framework for creative collaboration in virtual worlds. I like the idea of teams with different skills working together. I’m interested in two or more teams competing. I’m wondering what the rules of art/design sports might be. I like the fact that teams can compete globally. I can see how the tutor could be like a coach, picking the team, structuring the training exercises, motivating and encouraging, but ultimately standing on the side line whilst the students put in the effort and perform. “http://www.openhabitat.org/blogfeed/blogspot/united-united ian truelove

I love that question. I have no idea what it would mean… but certainly with the different games that have been played (check around for d. white’s tower building exercise) it shows more and more that these games allow us to explore these environments passed the pioneer stage.

6.5 Going Forward

50 ideas for going forward with the project. http://www.openhabitat.org/blogfeed/blogspot/50-ideas-phase-2 ian truelove

A really great narrative list of feedback and go forward positions for the project.

7. Teaching

a. “The majority of the participants were experienced philosophers. They did not have to grapple with the environment AND the subject. Once they had learnt how to text chat, move and sit down (an activity they all seemed to enjoy) the rest was home territory.”
b. “We were flexible with the teaching format and adjusted activities to fit the flow of the discussion and the speed of response from the students.”
c. “The participants who signed up for the pilot self selected as those willing to investigate a possible new format. This was not a mandatory part of a course. In other words they were open to a new experience.” http://www.openhabitat.org/blogfeed/muve-curriculum/philosophers-philosophise-second-life david white

Tagged these comments from dave because they remind me that teaching in an MUVE doesn’t change all the things that we already know about teaching. People get confused if confronted with too many layers of confusion. Self-selected students are different than those who are being forced. Being flexible when exploring new territory is essential to the success of the project.

8. Limitations

“Second Life can be deceptive. On the surface it presents itself as an environment that can be interpreted by understandings from the real world. It can seduce one into believing that ‘teaching’ practices that work on the outside can be readily transposed inside. It is a sobering experience when the particular constraints of SL kick back and even the best-laid plans begin to unravel.” http://www.openhabitat.org/blogfeed/second-life/how-tall-tall-second-life david white edit: Steven Warburton

These worlds are experimental and while many people are forging foward right now into these worlds they have severe limitations… not the least of which sometimes they flat out don’t work. They also force you to think in a specific way… there is a real sense where the logic of the world is going to inevitably affect what’s happening in the classroom.

Posted in habitat | 2 Comments »

Rhizomatic Education course - Technical Lessons

July 25, 2008 – 2:02 am

This is number two in an at least three part reflection on my Educational Technology and the Adult Learner course that I completed last week. I’m saving the ‘what i learned as a teacher’ post for last, so that I have all the grades finished and a full reflection is possible. For this particular (and probably shorter) post, I’d like to sketch out some of my tech design ideas.

You can now visit the website, I had to remove two students information (at their request) but got permission from the other students to share their quite excellent work with you all, and hope that it in some way contributes to the ongoing discussion of teacher training, reverse curriculum usages and my own discussion on rhizomatic learning. See http://edugrids.org

Drupal - the platform
The website was built in drupal six. I’ll post a copy of the build here on the website in a couple of weeks once i’ve cleaned it out for anyone who thinks it may be of help as a start for their own educational websites. It was designed as a site for a single class, with all the navigation intended to serve one class in particular and in no way designed to interact with the outside world. I kept the module selection fairly vanilla, just the usual suspects

CCK
Views
pathauto
token
image
fckeditor (with aspell add on, by overwhelming student request)
userplus (excellent funnymonkey module)

Design approach
I went for an ‘add don’t take away’ design approach to this website. In the first iteration, the students had access to three navigation buttons across the top -

• my work (view of all of an individual student’s work),
• my planning page (rebranded my account page, included personal descriptions, course goals and a literacy plan)
• reflections for review (a view of recent blog posts, sorted by day then by how many comments they had received)

On the side navigation they had the created content button which offered them book, blog and image options. There was an additional sidebar which had the syllabus in it, and eventually grew into the reverse curriculum document, essentially a book with completely open editing rights.

A few other options were added, the contact button and browse by learner (mostly for me) but the students found the simplicity of options and navigation… well… actually they didn’t say anything about it. Which I take as the highest compliment. They were all working in it from day one, and other than two students who registered with email addresses they couldn’t access from inside our classroom, things went pretty smoothly.

URLS (pathauto/token)
I included the day, week, author name and raw title in each of the urls. I just found this the easiest way for me to figure out where i was at a glance of the url and also to use that to sort the content. It’s easy enough to sort in other ways, but i find url sorting to be very tidy… personal preference I guess.

Weird date thingy on the student projects page
You’ll notice on the student projects section that all the pages start with a number followed by a time. I did this (on the spur of the moment) in order to allow the students to choose their presentation day at the same time. They ‘added a child page’ to the book page and were instructed to use the number representing the day of the week followed by the time they wanted. Worked like a charm… not elegant, but… waddaya gonna do. It makes a really nice reference page AND made it so that they could contribute simultaneously.

chat
I used the chatroom in order to give students a way to co-create knowledge during the presentation of other students. If you flip through the pages, you’ll notice chat records. I didn’t, sadly, end up using the chatroom installed on the site. It seemed to work fine, but i just didn’t feel like i knew it well enough to trust it for student interaction… so i used the edtechtalk chatroom.

timeline
I put this together pretty quickly, and spent the vast majority of the time worrying about the syllabus and a very small amount of time worrying about the site itself. It could easily be adapted for multiple classes, but I just wanted a sleak simple interface that would give me my few requirements. Simple user interface. Encourage blogging comments. Allow for co-creation of textbook. Allow for student connections via tags. Allow for personal descriptions via profile. Allow for easy browsing.

overall lessons
My instinct with this build was to stay as simple as humanly possible. No frills, and nothing that could break or confuse the students. Want video? upload it outside and copy and paste the code in. Want editing functions? you’ve got bold, a few more (and i broke on the spelling… wow… did they ever want a spell checker). Some of the students really seemed to identify with the site and the work that they were doing. Most of that was them, some of that might have been my teaching… the website did it’s job… stayed out of the way and structured the habitat within which the real work got done.

upnext - my lessons as a ‘person who stands up and tries to help people learn stuff’.

Posted in rhizomes | No Comments »

Community Curriculum - eight days into the course.

July 16, 2008 – 11:24 pm

I thought I might contribute the the we are media project by making a reflection on my current teaching practice. I’ve spent most of the last two weeks working on “educational technology and the adult learner” a course being delivered to education students here on PEI. The course had no existing curriculum and it gave me a real chance to take a run at actually making the curriculum come out of the community interactions that were happening in the classroom. I’ll be making a series of reflections on this, tonight, an overview of goals.

There were three main goals that I was hoping for from the course… all hoping to change the focus from ‘the material’ to the ‘experience’.

A Reverse Curriculum
An archival record of learning directed, organized and created by the students… there was no other curriculum outside of the sketch syllabus posted in my last post, much of which was layed aside as community interests moved us to more natural ground. The reason i like to think of this as a reverse curriculum is that it tends to develop out of the interests that the students show during the course and they get to record and create the material as part of their daily practice. It is part creative zone, part class note record and part review space. The constant revisitation of the material for sorting, upkeep and improvement also serves to reinforce the material.

This also means that the students are, in effect, creating the work in the classroom with a specific audience in mind. Them. Six months from now. The students were repeatedly encouraged that they would forget some part of the work they were doing and that their inclass ‘book building’ (drupal book… essentially a wiki) should be directed at themselves, months from now, coming up with an idea and needing to be reminded of it. It’s also been a really nice live model of the pros and cons of live co-creation of knowledge.

One deep skill per student
Over the course of the uh… course, we’ve covered all of the standard issues, tools and strategies in the social software and desktop technology space that can support learning (list in forthcoming post with more details on curricular content), but, instead of expecting broad based reportable knowledge on each of these skills each learner was responsible for finding something new during the first week of the intensive course (ostensibly that they hadn’t heard of before) and present it to the class in week two. Students were very strongly encouraged to teach us ‘in context’ and prepare the material in such a way as to give us a clear sense of the context that they were writing from. This serves a variety of purposes

1. The literacies that are learned from searching, learning and presenting a tool/strategy/method in a short period of time with only a community and the internet to lean on are critical to life long learning
2. The first attempt at delivering this kind of content can lead people back to ‘old habits’ and a classroom can be a safe place to try new delivery methods.
3. One deep skill, well understood, is more likely to inspire the confidence that the other three things you might have seen during the class are also adoptable when they become necessary in your practice

Community Literacies esp. Community commitment
Maybe the most important part of the of a course like this are the community literacies that are accumulated through a community enquiry into new material. The learners found that they could work together and rely on each other. They wrote nightly reflections and commented and helped each other with their work and reactions to the course. the sense of ‘competition’ between students evaporated. A sense of responsibility to the work at hand became stronger as the students found less and less direct guidance coming from the front of the room.

They also got a sense of how I relate with my own online community and how that serves me in my own professional and, indeed, personal ways. Knowing that we have a community to rely on can be as much an emotional support to our practice as a technical one. Each student has remarked, in one sense or another, how their nightly blogging (closed, sadly) has allowed them to understand that they weren’t alone in their moments of frustration or overwhelmedness. Thinking of your professional life as something that can contain a community that can do all those things can be a very powerful realization.

What we didn’t do.
What we did not focus on was outlining the ‘takeaways’ that students needed to bring out of the course itself, at least, not in a communal sense. There was a palapable sense from the first day that the students themselves came from very different backgrounds and any focus on particular outcomes outside of the somewhat ephemeral ones stated above lead to the kind of co-depency and artificial structure that tend to be superimposed on the learning process in order to bureaucratize it.

In a very real sense, each of those students will be taking a very different set of takeaways from this course, related to what they themselves put in, how they contributed to the community and where they are going to take those new literacies when they go back to their own professional practice.

There was no guided step by step instruction from me. All learning happened by suggestion, and mostly with modelling and contextualization after the fact. A rather jarring way to learn, but by the second week, the learners were willing to tackle any new task with no real prompting.

More on the specific breakdown of actual curriculum covered and ‘class leadership’ concepts that evolved in future posts.

Most useful thing I said during the course? READ THE PAGE. The students use it as a talisman for confusion, the stop, they breathe, and try again. Just an amazing group to spend two weeks with.

Posted in rhizomes | 8 Comments »

Community as curriculum a syllabus (starts tomorrow)

July 7, 2008 – 1:12 am

Here’s the syllabus for the course i start tomorrow morning. It’s my first shot at what a community curriculum course might look like. It takes into account some of the realities (moodle and angel are the prevaling course management systems on the island) tries to bridge traditional learning and then hand the learning over to the student by the second week.

The syllabus is pretty much out of date as soon as I post it, as I’ll be tinkering with it, and adjusting it to the feedback of the students and my own experiences in the course. I would, therefore, LOVE some feedback from you folks to help refine where i can. 2 week course, 10 3 1/2 hour sessions, 27 students, educators (and, I guess, educators to be) across many different professions.

Welcome to Educational Technology and the Adult Learner.

This is a course comprised of adult learners looking to acquire and refine skills directed toward teaching future adult learners. Key to this course is the concept of networking, in the community sense rather than the technological. Each of you in this class will be a primary part of your classmates’ curriculum and learning experience. In a world where technologies change very quickly and what is new or current is always fluid, a focus on ideas about technologies and strategies for drawing on and collating resources is more sustainable than an emphasis on teaching mastery of any specific technologies.

Therefore, while a sufficient quantity of tools, training and tricks will be presented to satisfy the technophile, this course is an exploration of what the technology can facilitate, educationally and professionally. It is only through the use of new technologies that certain kinds of knowledge building and community-based learning can occur, and these are the specific literacies that are emphasized in this course. The goals of learning to approach and assess new technologies on the fly, and to utilize Web 2.0 skills to filter the mass of ‘newness’ and focus in on the applications that will most satisfy a learner/educator’s curricular goals will also be primary.

The course is broken down into two major sections; week 1 and week 2. The first week is focused on group work and research. Learners will be expected to explore three different learning platforms/environments and both evaluate the systems and produce learning materials that will work in each one. Week 2 will focus almost entirely on ‘community curriculum’, wherein learners will research and present one learning object that is relevant to their own environment, and classsmates will be required to respond and interact with those pieces.

Community Grading Rubric

Personal Learning Plan - Students must submit an eportfolio (My Work - top of website page) and will be assessed on their ability to complete a personal learning plan developed during the course. This portfolio will include reflective blog posts as well as upkeep of the (My Planning Page - top of website page) with relevant acquired literacies.

Course participation and Group Work - Students are responsible for responding to the work of other students (Reflections for review - top of website page), specifically commenting on reflective posts and commenting on their learning object plan. They are also responsible for the learning objects created by the group during the first week of the course.

Community as Curriculum project plan - Students are responsible for choosing one educational technology tool, technological method, or community plan and developing a project plan for including it in their own practice that includes a learning object as well as the reasoning for its inclusion in their own context. This will be then be presented in a ten minute presentation to the class. All materials will be released creative commons so that all students can use this material in their classes.

Community Curriculum

When dealing with a discipline where knowledge is a moving target, or where differing ideas of what is good or best practice can co-exist quite comfortably, it can be very helpful to use the community of learners itself as the curriculum.

This is especially true of the field of educational technology. What may be ‘true’ or ‘current’ in one year might be entirely outdated and left behind in the next. Every day new best practices are developed and new efforts are made to push the envelope a little further. The traditional reaction to this is to try and ‘keep current’ with all the work that is going on. This is, however, a mistake. They key is to find a community of trusted people from whom to learn, and to whom you can contribute.

This course is designed to simulate and, hopefully, emulate this form of curriculum building and model these life long learning skills. Each student will be responsible for contributing to the curriculum, and for participating in the development of other student’s work.

Day 1 - Self Assessment, goal setting and ‘helper tools’

The purpose of the first day of classes will be to take a good look at our existing practice. We need to identify ‘transparent technologies’ in the classroom and make a distinction between these and the helper technologies that we will be employing to keep track of information and work throughout our course. Goal is to get students to set objectives for themselves.

Introduction

1. Introduction to the general concepts of ‘educational technology and the adult learner.’
2. Personal Learning Plan and the community rubric.
3. Personal reflective responses.

Activity - Tagging ourselves - paper edition

DIscussion - Groups - What literacies do we need?

Activity - Tagging ourselves - digital edition

Outputs - First draft of personal learning plan, groups selected, tagging explored, first reflection written.

Didactic pieces by dave. (time dependent)

tagging - connecting the pieces.

Structure - All collaborative work comes down to whether the ’structure’ is working. Fantastic work by students and instructors can easily be lost by not taking 30 seconds to consider where your work fits into the whole.

Goal Setting

As this community of learners that makes up this course will necessarily be at different levels of experience in teaching generally and the facilitation and use of technologies in particular, it is necessary for each student to chart out their own learning path through the course. It is also the responsibility of their colleagues to help them with advice and to learn from different people’s goals.

We will each fill out a “Learning Plan” which will include a variety of goals that the individual student will be attempting to achieve during the course of this course, and, at the end, what goals they might set for themselves as they leave the course.
Helper Tools

Del.icio.us - This tool will allow us to share a variety of tools and websites while we are working our way through internet research. It will also keep a record for you of the websites that you visited during the course.

Skype - is an instant messaging and VOIP (voice over IP) tool that allows for a variety of community style interactions. It can be essential for getting information quickly.

Google - Seems silly maybe, but effective use of google can find the answer to most any question

Technorati - And when google doesn’t seem to get you the answer, try the blogs. There is a huge educational technology blogosphere… use them.

flickr - Photos are great, and a tool like flickr can bring alot to a classroom. Having students take digital snapshots of busted engines might seem strange, but its a great record keeping tool.

youtube etc… - video sites can be a great resource for training materials.

Screencasts - I think this might be the most useful teaching tool available to the educator when dealing with technology.

This Website - See some things missing, like blogging and wikis… they are included in the course website, I decided to go that way because I’m comfortable with this technology. Comfort is important.

pageflakes - Just to illustrate the possibilities outside this website, I’ve included a pageflakes page that will aggregate the course content as well.

Self Assessement

Self Assessment is a critical part of any fruitful learning experience. It is necessary to understand what tools we bring to the table before we take the time and effort necessary to develop a new set of literacies. It’s important to remember that this should not only include ‘technical literacies’ which, while important, are often not as critical as teaching skills, organizational skills, the ability to focus on a task or any other of the myriad of skills that professionals acquire and perfect over the course of their careers.

Day 2 - Community Learning

Learning to use educational technologies in a vacuum, that is, without the value of a filtering community is very difficult. What most successful educational technologists are doing is finding communities of educators with like interests, and learning from them. Choose groups for formal educational project.

Didactic pieces by dave.

Blogging - An introduction to blogging, both as a useful source of knowledge and as a way of creating effective community.

Rhizomatic Knowledge and Connectivism - How curriculum can be formed when things are changing quickly.

Day 3 - Moodle

Moodle is a content management system and more specifically a Virtual Learning Environment, a Learning Content Management System and a Course Management System. There are other names for it, but, suffice it to say, it stores your courses online. It is open source and free to download and install on any given server that you can find. Our moodle course http://moodle.upei.ca/course/view.php?id=585 Moodle planning.

Didactic pieces by dave.

Discussion Forums - Discussion forums (aka bulletin board system, threaded discussions) can be a very effective participation tool. Students can be given a variety of different power situations and it can be used for a variety of ‘process’ tasks.

Wikis - Wikis can be used for many different things, from schedule building to creating online resource repositories.

Setting of objectives.

1. Create an audience for the exercise

2. create exercise in moodle

Day 4 - Angel

Our Angel Sandbox http://sam.hollandcollege.com/section/default.asp?id=dave_cormier_s_sandbox

ANGEL’s web-based teaching and learning tools allow educators to Get Perspective on student performance, Take Action to interact and intervene, and See Results of student achievement.

We will be approaching Angel with much the same plan as the one we had for Moodle. The intent will be to assess the ways in which the learning management systems are similar and to discover ways in which general strategies can be applied to any learning scenario.

Didactic pieces by dave.

Reading the page - Learning to use software can often be as simple as reading the text that is on the page. Most professional software systems have that information present… too often left unread.

Doing it Live - There are a variety of reasons to have syncronous or asynchronous sections to a course. Live chat, streaming and twitter can be helpful, but sometimes giving people the time to think is essential.

Day 5 - Evaluating tools and projects (day 2 - day 4)

Throughout this week we will have evaluated and created learning resources using two content management systems as well as explored the idea of online community learning. The groups will spend this day creating learning reflections and solidifying the work that was done in the three platforms into a definitive format for the learning portfolios. 2 modules

Day 6 - Community learning and Community Curriculum 1

The first part of this day will be to reflect on the work from the week before. We will then spend considerable time preparing for incorporating the community curriculum project. The instructor will present his two last contextualized pieces, and the students will model and discuss various productive ways of engaging with the prsentation in preparation for the student presentations for the rest of the week. The first few students who are prepared to present this day should present in the second half of the class.

Day 7 Cool Tools and Community Curriculum 2

This day will start with a whirwind tour of some of the more cutting edge tools available for teaching. The Openhabitat project and the living archives project will be featured prominently as well as some potential use cases from a variety of educational contexts.

Day 8 Teacher Stories and Community Curriculum 3

Several educational professionals from different contexts will be invited to present (via skype) to the class. Jennifer Maddrell has just completed teaching a 24 hour course with transit tranining authorities for the State of New York. There are many literacies that can only be acquired through experience, the purpose of this class will be to explore and catalogue those experiences wherever possible.

Day 9 Special Issues and Community Curriculum 4

There are a variety of ’special issues’ that will no doubt be referenced a various point throughout the course but will be covered in more detail during this class. They include internet security, creative commons licensing and adapating for learners with a disability.

Day 10 Bridging to the future and Community Curriculum 5

The first part of this class will be taken up by the remainder of the community curriculum presentation. The remainder will involve reflecting on the work that was done, a review of the planning page to examine what literacies were acquired and to develop strategies to maintain as many of those literacies as possible.

Posted in rhizomes | 5 Comments »

Be the Media - Being a critical friend and community participation

June 30, 2008 – 11:42 pm

I sent a skype over to Beth Kanter after having read about the Be the Media project over at her blog.

The Be The Media Project is a community of people from nonprofits who are interested in learning and teaching about how social media strategies and tools can enable nonprofit organizations to create, compile, and distribute their stories and change the world.

It’s a very interesting network knowledge building project and I told her after half a heartbeat that I would love to be able to tag along for the ride in whatever way possible. She asked that I be a ‘critical friend’ for the project… see here, here and here for some ideas about what some people think this means.

I’ve managed the first part of the commitment to being a critical friend, I’ve reviewed the planning and worked my way through the ideas that are there… all the more convinced that this is a really cool project. We’ve tried this kind of thing at Edtechtalk before… i have very fond memories of the ‘live barnstorming’ session from a few years ago when we tried to create a new media curriculum, live, in a wiki. I’ve since been in any number of community builds. Some have worked very well… and others have been less successful.

Critical friend contribution - two questions.

How are you contributing to people’s feelings of ‘responsibility’ to the knowledge creation process?
The biggest thing that I work for in my social communities, and look for in community partners is their ability to invest their own sense of responsibility into the work that they are involved in. Much of our societies/y’s generally tends to sell their sense of responsibility for money or praise, or to a communal normality like common space or blood. There is a very strong sense of hierarchy in these kinds of community with parental kinship relationships, medieval manorial/manager interactions and expert/novice associations filling much of the interaction space.

A community based responsibility model can explode many of those power structures, and find people moving to take over the tasks that need to be done, and taking ownership to both change things they think need changing, log and tag those changes in case the majority thinks they need to be reversed or thrown into a parallel contruct, and make the necessary connections between one bit of knowledge/information and another to create that magic rhizome soup.

But this works best when people feel a clean responsibility to the work at hand. There is a good start there with the personal profile ‘what module would you most like to contribute to’ section. I think the transition between voluteerism there and action by the leadership team is crucial.

What are your thoughts about the lifespan of your knowledge creation?

One of the critical thoughts that went into the community as curriculum article that Beth mentioned in a blog post last week was that the when the community is the curriculum knowledge must always be emerging. It is constantly in flux and only by aggregating and assessing the community in real time, with constant new connections and renewed re-evaluation can the curriculum stay ‘current’. It is through an assessment of those ties, and those trust relationships, in addition to the ‘does it work for me now in this context’ practical evaluation that knowledge gets assessed.

For this project… how is the knowledge going to be nourished? Is there a sense in which you are thinking about some bits being ‘higher level’ maybe longer lasting bits and other bits being more transient bits. Some pieces being jumping off points and others being destinations.
In a sense I’m talking about curation… but not in the sense of antiquities… it’s an inverse curator… instead of one person with deep knowledge keeping old things old, it is many curators with wide knowledge keeping the new things juggled to the front. tags. tags. tags. tags. Man do i love tags in wikis. Particular community contributed tags. The more the community is involved in the tagging process… the more depth to the knowledge connections.

if that makes sense.

And, if you’ve made it down here… do check out the excellent wiki orientation.

Thanks very, very much for having me on this journey.

Posted in Be The Media Project, rhizomes | 1 Comment »

Opensim/Drupal integration for education - proposal and call for help

June 24, 2008 – 11:05 pm

Well… i’m finally getting my teeth back into opensim and finding that there are a couple of things i’d like to get built over the next couple of months. We’ve already gotten a good start on the automated installer for opensim, but what i’d really like to do now is attempt an integration with drupal. I’ll be keeping my running requirements list for that integration on the openhabitat project page and will hopefully pop a few updates into here from time to time.

What I need
I need two things.

1. I need a good drupal/opensim programmer. Someone familiar with both platforms who can spearhead the drupal integration (or, if you like opensim integration).
2. I need some sense that there are other folks in the British Higher Education community who would find this integration compelling for an application to the emerge community for extra funding.

Why would we need this?
Opensim is an opensource Multi User Virtual Environment. It allows you to have much of the functionality from something like Second Life, and you can host it on any server you like, or, if you like, on a desktop in your classroom. The one issue, is that if you would like to tinker with it a little, you currently pretty much have to do it from the command line on the server. What I would like to see is an integration with a content management system (my preference is drupal, but the code could easily be repurposed) so that a teacher can do stuff like track users and install different ‘presets’ for training purposes.

Why would we need this — slightly more technical explanation.
There are currently two flavours of opensim, the ‘grid server’ and the ’standalone server’. My work with opensim over the last 9 months has led me to believe that the standalone server is far better scaled to the average educational use… but, sadly, much of the work towards creating a user interface has tended to side with the larger grid server installations. Standalones are more manageable, and provide an easier entry point for the ‘average’ person and really allow for alot more functionality.

so… if you’re interested and interested British Higher Ed person (I’m looking at you emerge community or anyone else for that matter) … just send a comment here and I’ll pick up your email address and get back to you. Same goes for if you are that drupal/opensim person out there. If you don’t want your comment posted, no worries, just indicate in the title, and I’ll delete it after getting your email address.

Posted in habitat, opensim | 7 Comments »

Openhabitat Opensim

June 19, 2008 – 9:32 am

Well… time to put rhizomes aside for a bit and move onto working on some of the other interesting projects that I’m privileged enough to be involved in. It’s been quite a spring really… my partner has been on bedrest for the past 13 weeks, and with conferences and projects and writing I really haven’t had much space to think…

I’ve spoken about openhabitat in the context of how I find it interesting as a knowledge node, but not so much as a project. Basically, there are two courses being taught at two English universities using Multi User Virtual Environments (MUVEs)

The project will generate solutions to the challenges of teaching, learning and collaboration in MUVEs. These solutions will be primarily in the form of guidelines, models and exemplars but will also be supported by the development/appropriation of software tools and services in and around the MUVEs themselves.

My main role in the process is to support the opensim side of the equation. Opensim is an opensource MUVE server that allows folks to have their own MUVE installed on their own server thus sidestepping some of the downtime and money-for-upload issuesassociated with some of the commercial servers as well as having local installations that can be installed inside school firewalls and, indeed, on each computer in a computer lab.

I have a couple of development goals that I would like to get accomplished during the course of this project. 1. I’d like to be able to finalize a ‘plug and play’ version of the server. Something that can be put into any computer and simply start up a server. We have a version of it now, but… well… it’s not too terribly reliable. 2. I’d like to get some version of a server installed on a USB drive. This would allow for the ultimate in portability, a personal world that you could take and move from your home to the classroom, without the need of supporting a server. 3. I’d like to create a preinstallable ‘distribution’ of opensim that had the training for opensim built into it. It could be the started version that you would load up if you had a new group of folks that needed to learn about opensim and then you could simply dump that version when you were ready to start working on your own world.

For now, I’ve set up a little sandbox for people in the community to drop into an opensim world and see what it’s all about. I’ll include the ’superfast’ instructions and then add some of the other options at the bottom. There are a variety of ways of doing this… see

To get into my opensim with existing Second Life client
1. Find the shortcut to your secondlife client on your desktop (either on your desktop or in your second life client) right click on it and click ‘properties’
2. Change the Target: to “C:\Program Files\SecondLife\SecondLife.exe” -loginuri http://openhabitat.org:9000 and Apply and OK
3. Lauch client using shortcut button you just changed
4. The temporary creds are ‘user’ ‘one’ ‘password’ (five users… user one user two user three) but i hope to do away with those in the next week (email me for username and passwords instructions after this) Also, if you need more instruction getting in, feel free to do the same.

Looking forward to digging in

Posted in habitat, opensim | 1 Comment »