Stanford University recently announced creation of the Office of the Vice Provost for Online Learning, which will be led by computer scientist John Mitchell. The online learning initiatives at Stanford appear to be focused on experimentation with the open online course model serving as a way to better understand new pedagogical approaches and methods. The overview for Stanford Online provides some interesting rationale for what they are doing.

The University of Pennsylvania also announced the appointment of law professor Edward Rock as senior advisor to the president and provost and director of open course initiatives. Rock is a leading scholar on corporate law and corporate governance, and has written widely on “the balance of power between shareholders and managers, government ownership, hedge funds, shareholder voting and mergers and acquisitions.” Apparently, these are valued knowledge domains for leading online initiatives at Penn.

I suspect that we will see the rest of the Coursera gang announce – like falling dominoes – similar positions in short order.

This is an interesting development. It appears we may be witnessing the early stages of a strategic realignment / reorganization of institutional power around online courses and learning in elite institutions of higher education.

A piece posted in the early summer at Logos Journal described the collapse of the corporate university, and offers a nice historical arc that serves as a potentially interesting backdrop to the changes at Penn and Stanford. The “Coursera Consortium”…(or the Sweet 16…your call) may well be an early iteration of a new business model for higher education.

“Open and free as a public service” deserves some careful consideration…

That is until you change something. Sometimes I like a little mustard on the sandwich…my son however will not touch a bologna and cheese sandwich with mustard. He likes it plain and simple…a purist you might say. I’ve seen others react in a similar way…bologna and cheese on whole wheat? Are you crazy? It’s better for you, I say…fiber you know? Hell, I don’t eat bologna and cheese because it’s healthy! Or what about a little mayo…or some lettuce and tomato…you know, change things up a bit. Nope! Resistance, rejection, heckling, that is what you get when you try messing with the bologna and cheese equation.

The memory and feelings run deep.

I think the same thing can happen when we try to change things in the classroom…in the ways we teach…particularly after learners have eaten their fair share of bologna and cheese over the course of 12 + years of schooling.

Changing the menu can be a challenge…and working to expand the learning palate can result in what seems like a lot of untouched plates. It is easier to stay with the predictable – because it feels familiar and known…it gets the job done…it just works. It’s connected up to all those things you know – that you have done before – it fits right back in to a place in your brain that makes sense.

So I’ve been looking for examples of things that change the menu and puts some of this in reverse…that might not fit just right in your brain, that is not something we’ve done before, and is not neatly connected to all those things we know.

I’m trying to think carefully about what these things mean for learning…

Ed Parkour
“Ed Parkour is not a person or a movement.  It is people on the move.  In parkour, the structures of the world are not taken as they were meant, but how they might be used.  Walls, obstacles, and barriers become objects to be leveraged, harnessed, and sometimes altered.  The practitioner of parkour sees the world as a playground of possibility.  Likewise, the practitioner of Ed Parkour tries to leverage and harness the “walls” and “structures” that try to control learning.  Ed Parkour is learning around, over, and outside the walls.”

ds106
“Digital Storytelling (also affectionately known as ds106) is an open, online course that happens at various times throughout the year….but you can join in whenever you like and leave whenever you need. This course is free to anyone who wants to take it, and the only requirements are a real computer (none of those wimpy ass iPads), a hardy internet connection, a domain of your own, some commodity web hosting, and all the creativity you can muster (and we’ll spend time helping you get up and running with at least two of the last three requirements).”

Udacity
“We believe university-level education can be both high quality and low cost. Using the economics of the Internet, we’ve connected some of the greatest teachers to hundreds of thousands of students all over the world. Udacity was founded by three roboticists who believed much of the educational value of their university classes could be offered online. A few weeks later, over 160,000 students in more than 190 countries enrolled in our first class, “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence.”

What are you seeing out there that is a change in the menu?

It has made me think – perhaps more than I should – about the promise of learning and what it means to teach…really teach. It is about way more than content and curriculum delivery…at least it should be. It should be about caring for individuals and recognizing that there are many paths to learning. As teachers, we sometimes lose sight of this…or trade it for some higher ideal.

What is your promise for learning?

It’s an interesting question…and I find myself asking it more often…as a parent.

Which is why I found this site of a Swedish primary school to be so interesting. On their site they outline their learning promises…simple perhaps, but I found them inspirational:

Vittra gives every individual the opportunity…

• to find the best approach for them
  Children play and learn on the basis of their needs, curiosity and inclination in the best ways possible.
• to learn based on experience
  Children’s learning is based on their experience which increases motivation and inspires creativity.
• to understand their own learning
  Children are equipped with the tools to acquire new knowledge and increase understanding of ‘How I learn’, which enables them to learn more easily and effectively in the future.
• to have faith in themselves and their abilities
  Children become more self-aware, aware of their strengths and potential for development which means they dare and like to be challenged.
• to develop their ability to communicate and engage in respectful interaction with others
  Children understand and are considerate to the needs and interests of others, they can express and stand for their own views as well as take responsibility for their actions.
• to be equipped for study and work in an international environment
  Children develop effective bilingualism in English and Swedish while experiencing and creating international contacts through networks and exchange programmes abroad.

I don’t know about you, but its not often I see a K-12 school – anywhere in the U.S at least – making any kind of promises about learning. One thing for sure, I have never seen a college or university make these kinds of promises about learning for students who enroll in their programs and courses. I wonder if it would make a difference? A difference in how we teach….

Some folks might see the “free course” phenomena as a threat to traditional university courses, and something that confounds the notion of “academic credit.” I think it provides a healthy disruption that asks us to think about the future of education. No crystal ball here, but MIT’s online learning initiative (MITx) continues to be an important example of how this space is morphing.

Bottom line…it isn’t about “free” as in gratis, rather it is “free” in the spirit of libre…of setting knowledge free. Greater learner freedom is a good direction for education.

Now go drink to that…cheers!

We’ve been having a similar conversation in GRAD 602, and asking whether we find the 7 Principles to be a meaningful set of guidelines for selecting digital technologies as well as informing teaching practice.

Reviews have been mixed.

Some see the Principles in a positive light,  having immediate application in their current context, or recognize the obvious value, of say, communication between teachers and students.  Others have expanded them to include a few additional principles, and even lamented their absence as part of the professional education of PhD students.

Some regard the Principles with a bit more skepticism, at least with their regard to their being used as a heuristic for teaching. Some urge caution at the use of technology to facilitate contact & communication. Others acknowledge experiences where they have employed the Principles, but did not get the “buy-in” from students. Still others viewed the Principles as an idealized vision for education, and questioned whether faculty teaching practices would ultimately align with them unless they were valued throughout the institution…from the top to the bottom.

Clearly there are no guarantees here. Good teaching practice alone does not lead to enhanced learning, indeed learning can and does occur even in the absence of good teaching.

So, does good teaching practice matter? I guess it depends…

If you care about an answer to that question I encourage you to watch this TED Talk from Sugatra Mitra, and see where it leaves you…

We’ve introduced blogging in a two-pronged sort of way, in that we see it as 1) a potentially valuable way to engage in meaningful reflection on learning and practice, and 2) as an academic publishing platform with an eye toward supporting the role of being a public intellectual.

I think this can be a tricky two-step.

As I reflect on the discussion thus far, I think we may have inadvertently emphasized the academic publishing platform notion a bit too much. It seems that this is a slippery slope, as it can quickly tumble into concerns about openness, intellectual property and the like. What happens next is that the idea of an academic publishing platform on the web are often compared to and then conflated with traditional notions of scholarship. Perhaps this is a natural slip…but it misses the point a bit and inspires some FUD rhetoric…at least from my perspective. All the same, the discussion of how future faculty perceive and engage in new media environments – as both scholars and educators – is a crucially important one. It raises critical questions about peer review, authorship, collective knowledge, open teaching and community building that are worth exploring.

At this point, academic publishing on the web (blogs, wikis, video, podcasts, etc.) remains a fringe notion for the bulk of faculty members with whom I work. To suggest that this kind of work can potentially be a form a scholarship is often met with dismissive smiles and the kind of head tilting dogs do when they hear a high-pitched sound. Alas…

What I’d like to suggest here is that while academic publishing platforms (e.g., blogs) may not yet be considered a form of scholarship, I think that the process of writing in the open for academic / scholarly purposes can serve as an act in support of scholarship.

In 1990 Ernest Boyer made an important contribution to the literature of higher education by authoring the book Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. In this book, Boyer argued for a broader definition of what constituted scholarship and called upon those in higher education to “…break out of the tired old teaching versus research debate and define, in more creative ways, what it means to be a scholar.” He outlined the following four areas of scholarship, that taken collectively – he argued – represent a more meaningful approach to recognizing and rewarding the scholarly work of faculty:

• Scholarship of Discovery – Build new knowledge through traditional research.
• Scholarship of Integration – Interpret the use of knowledge across disciplines.
• Scholarship of Application – Aid society and professions in addressing problems.
• Scholarship of Teaching – Study teaching models and practice to achieve optimal learning.

It is this last component, the Scholarship of Teaching, that I suggest could be supported and enhanced through open academic publishing on the web. Blogs provide a platform for sharing ideas, offering aspects of peer-review in the form of commenting, and engaging public as well as discipline-based communities of practice. For faculty members, the act of authoring ideas about education can inspire meta-cognition and support the kind of critically reflective practice that leads to the growth of knowledge in teaching.

While open academic publishing is currently in an emergent stage, it seems to hold great potential for thinking through important questions and issues about what it might mean to engage in scholarly teaching practice in the digital age.

The other piece was an interview that Will Richardson did for EdWeek. In the interview, Richardson touches on the idea of “network literacy” – an idea that really resonates with me – and shared some views about why the teaching of this new literacy is important. While his focus tends to be on the K-12 context his ideas are equally important in higher education. The PLENK 2010 course is a meaningful response to what Richardson is calling for, but I’m wondering where else this is happening? The concept of networked learning remains a bit of a fringe idea when I talk with other faculty about it…and as such it often gets easily dismissed. At the same time, I can’t help but sense that there is a profound transformation taking place right in front of our eyes, and too few people in education seem to be taking notice and considering the implications for education. I just don’t see this as a pervasive conversation in broader education circles… Should it be?

It seems to me there is a gulf of understanding between what many in higher ed. are seeing and thinking and what is happening around them. I liken it to what has happened to traditional news media in the wake of web publishing…none of them (editors, periodicals, newspapers, etc.) saw their own demise coming. Some were nimble and have adjusted…others are still scratching their heads.

A current example of the kind of change that is underfoot is the Drumbeat Learning, Freedom and the Web Festival. This “festival” (read conference) is one of the most interesting I have seen to date in terms of pushing the conversation about the Open Education and networked learning. Combine this with the the announcement this week that OpenStudy is partnering with MIT OpenCourseware and you begin to get a real glimpse of how traditional notions of course-based learning are morphing here. Some very interesting stuff in my opinion.

It seems to me that these examples of changes taking place….(Peer2Peer U., badges for recognizing informal online learning, open courses, open source learning content, etc.) represent a whole different ballgame. Perhaps a bit radical for those with a conservative lens…but I think any position / view of the future of education needs to take into account the changes taking place here.

I know I’m not alone in this endeavor; there are other folks who’ve been doing this for a while and trying new things that I find to be wonderful examples of teaching and learning in the open. So I wanted to share a few examples that illustrate what I think is particularly cool and powerful about the process.

One of the gurus for me is Gardner Campbell, who seems to constantly be pulling off amazing learning wherever he goes. He recently described his experience at the OpenEdTech 2010 conference, and shared a story about how he tapped into conversations unfolding in Barcelona and connected them to students at Baylor who in turn amplified and added to the ideas and sent them back around again. His post – The global nervous system worked like a champ – is thick with meaning for understanding learning that is open, connected and social.

In another example, a colleague of mine here at VCU, Jon Becker, has encouraged his students and his network at large to engage in the learning of the course by sharing the living syllabus on the web, inviting tagging of resources, and reading / commenting on the blogs of students. The opportunity for learning here is amplified and extended by being in the open. Educational leaders not  “officially” in the course can contribute and learn with those aspiring to be school leaders…it becomes a community of practice.

My current favorite is by another VCU colleague, Scott Sherman, who has cooked up a great blog that is his reflective space for sharing ideas about teaching advertising.  Scott has embarked on a very cool project with his students this semester where over 100 students are curating content on the web related to advertisements for Life Savers. They are doing this in the open through individual student blogs aggregated on a Netvibes page as Project54. When the course comes to a close this project will not only be one of the largest collections of curated material about a brand on the web, it will be a learning resource for exploration, dialogue and critique.

Open amplifies learning.

I’m not sure if that is the right question to be asking when we invite students to share their ideas on the web, but that is what I did. I wanted them to consider developing a rationale for writing in the open that could support learning and reflective practice, as well as explore opportunities for connecting and community building. I also understand that my asking them to enter this space is potentially at odds with what some might call “authentic” purposes for writing that are individually motivated. Many have written about the tension and disconnect that can emerge when students engage in this kind of writing for course-based purposes, and I still like Stephen Downes’ take on it.

I believe it is a valuable experience for students to engage with writing in the open for the purposes of reflecting on their learning and connecting their ideas with others who are engaged in a similar pursuit. Consideration of the potential audience is at once humbling, exciting and unknown. From my perspective, there is no other way to reap potential benefits of this experience, or to be able to level a reasoned critique of it, unless you engage in it.

All said, the brief clip below of Seth Godin and Tom Peters talking about why they blog seemed to resonate with us as we discussed a rationale for blogging. In less than two minutes, Godin and Peters offer some of the most honest and encouraging advice I’ve heard…

While their perspectives are great for a general audience, I think their message could apply to educational blogging as well. There are probably better examples for supporting my rationale for blogging in education, but the clip really gets the job done for me. As I think about specific educational examples, I’m hard pressed to find something that tops Gardner Campbell’s view of why he asks his students to blog, or Henry Jenkins’ call to academics to write in the open. Taken collectively, these examples form a foundation for my rationale about why I ask students to engage in blogging to support reflective practice and learning.

I know that there are multiple ways and reasons to engage students in the use of blogs in education…and probably an equal number of reasons not to. So I’m curious…if you are a fan of blogging to support learning what is your rationale? If you have some push back in the other direction I’d really like to hear that as well…

The idea that learning within a community is – at its core – the conversation among members of that community, is not necessarily a new idea. Combine this with the fact that I’m a big fan of the notion of communities of practice, and you might be surprised that I’m even choosing to write about what is for many a commonly accepted idea. So I’m going to try to briefly describe a recent experience that really drove the idea home for me in a new way.

In the past few years I’ve been fascinated, and at times confounded, by the ways the web has transformed opportunities for communication and exchange among people, as well as the ways in which virtual communities can be formed and sustained. In fact, I’m still trying to come to terms with the ways in which my own understanding of “conversation” and “community” have been, and continue to be, altered by my participation in web-based communities. Like many folks, I read and comment on blogs, use delicious to share resources with my network, connect with people on twitter, collaborate with people on ning sites, and even begrudgingly let Facebook vacuum up my data in order to stay in touch with friends. All these forms of participation can be seen, on some level, as “conversations” that take place in various communities that are networked and distributed…a part of my personal learning network. I have come to value these opportunities to connect and learn a great deal, and at times some of the exchanges do seem to be conversations. I am also learning more about how my practices are shifting as I attempt to teach in this networked environment. Lately however, I find myself asking more and more – What constitutes a conversation? Are my activities on blogs and twitter really conversations? When does a distributed network of networks on the web constitute a community? How do you recognize the shared “ah-ha” moment among learners in a web-based environment? These are slippery questions for me…

Which brings me to a recent conversation in a class I was teaching. We happened to be discussing how digital media has changed the landscape of learning, and the potential value of the ideas of the PLE and PLN for adult learners. We had read a piece from Stephen Downes, Learning Networks in Practice, and it generated some interesting perspectives. One perspective was that Downes’ view was old news, pretty much business as usual, while others suggested that his ideas represented a fundamental paradigm shift for education. The tension between these two perspectives made for some valuable in-class discussion. I recognized a quality about this exchange that was missing from the distributed and often fragmented conversations that take place in my PLN.

It was a shared event where people in the conversation could all recognize learning that was the result of collective conversation in the moment. It was a meaningful experience for me. It seemed to be a collective “ah-ha” moment; a moment where the learning is the conversation in the community. It was beautiful. I do not routinely have that experience in conversations that are distributed and networked, that is, where those in the conversation have a shared recognition of the learning. The networked learning seems more individual and parsed to me. I’m having a hard time seeing the community learning in the cloud. Maybe it is my over-reliance and need for physical cues…the head nodding & the non-verbals…the follow-up questions and the comments of affirmation…where the learning seems to get named. I like that. I’m looking for similar cues in the networked environment, where members of a community can experience the collective acknowledgment of learning. Perhaps this happens for folks, and I am just a novice network learner not yet able to see the markers. Maybe I am not dialed in to the subtle ways that distributed learning networks come to shared understanding. Or, it may be that my view here is simply a lament for the vestiges of my thinking, which suggest that learning in community, somehow needs a face-to-face component. Ultimately, I’m not sure the “place-based” experience is necessary, but my sense is that the realization of collective learning and shared understanding among members of a web-based community is more challenging to nail down. So I guess my question at this point is whether its even necessary to identify collective learning that results from the – conversation[s] – in a networked community…is it? If not, I need to figure out how to better navigate without those markers. If it is, I need to get much better at understanding how multiple entry points, fragments of perspective, and varied learning trajectories coalesce to represent learning in a distributed network on the web.