Greg Francom

Minimal Guidance is Relative

2008-09-09T18:00:00.000-07:00

I recently read an interesting article entitled Why Minimal Guidance during Instruction Does Not Work that brought up a whole new world of thoughts about constructivism into my mind. The article uses three main arguments to explain how constructivist approaches to learning have not worked including Sweller's cognitive load theory, theories about long term and short term memory, and differences between experts and novices.

The first thought that I had with regard to this article is how do they define “work,” or whether a certain activity is working or not. It is made clear that this is when learned items are stored in long term memory. But aren't there many other ideas in the field of whether something works or not based on other criteria? For instance, instead of just storing something in long term memory, shouldn't we be able to perform in some greater capacity than we were able to before an activity. What if motivation to learn is a specific problem, then shouldn't this be used as a criteria for what works in an activity? And what of problem-solving ability, is this not very useful in our information age?

The authors also blanket all types of subjects and learners into one great whole when they say that guided instruction works better than minimal guidance. The only distinction that is made is between novices and experts. I see a more comprehensive continuum between novices and experts and at some point, I think we are better off giving minimal guidance as learners become more experienced.

Also, one of the main tenets of the article is the idea that so many constructivist activitys are done with too little guidance and that adding guidance is admitting that constructivism is inadequate. I don't think this is the case. Based on my experience working with some constructivists, the authors' view of constructivism is very different from what actually happens. In fact most would agree that giving no guidance is ineffective for promoting learning on either side of the spectrum. It seems to me that the difference is that constructivists want to give enough guidance to help the learner along, but not so much that they stifle the creativity and problem-solving ability of the learner.

Lastly, the authors mention that giving learners complete and correct information is the best method for learning to occur. A constructivist may say “whose information are they being given?” In other words, constructivism may challenge the notion that there is one correct version of the information irrespective of the situation or knower of the information.

Reference:

Kirschner, P. A., Sweller, J., & Clark, R. E. (2006). Why Minimal Guidance during Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching. Educational Psychologist, 41(2), 75.

Digital Games Based Learning?

2008-06-09T18:06:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine once told me that we are not here to entertain students, we are here to teach them. In that situation I wholeheartedly agreed. I had just been trying to teach a Sunday school class to a group of digital natives with no attention span having limited success. But then I thought about the field of Instructional Technology and how many in the field try to entertain students, in fact a large part of formative evaluation involves asking students how they felt about the instruction in question and what they would do to improve it. Some of these answers (especially those coming from digital natives) may ask for more entertainment in teaching.

In my own opinion instructional designers should be required to make what they are teaching relevant and useful to their students now or in the future, but they should not have to entertain students beyond that. Maybe your opinion is different, but consider that in order for our instruction to compete with other things digital natives do, it would have to meet the highest quality standards of a video game production. This is doable, but only with a lot of time and money.

A common complaint among digital natives is that they are bored, but what this really means is that they are not stimulated as much as they could be when they are doing something more stimulating. Boredom is relative. Instructional Technology often tries to cater to digital natives' needs by creating instruction that is in video games, or other digital media that they are used to. While these efforts are commendable, I wonder if they are somewhat misguided because ultimately school must help get the next generation ready to work in meaningful jobs.

I am not saying that all jobs are boring, but I am saying that most jobs now require workers to stick to a task that digital natives would consider boring. Life is full of "boring" things that have to be done. While video games teach problem solving skills and critical thinking, the very problems that are being solved are more often than not very different than real life tasks that students will do in the future. Do these problem solving and critical thinking skills learned in a very exciting environment actually transfer to "boring" or real-life tasks that people do in their job? I don't know, but I think that this is what we should be asking in digital games based learning. Perhaps instructional design efforts should be made to help people become creative enough to take care of their own boredom problems. Or maybe "paying-attention" skills need to be the focus of some instruction to digital natives.

Brett Shelton discusses using a commercial game for education in his book, The Design and Use of Simulation Computer Games in Education. He mentions that something called unintentional learning happens in these types of games, which is not useful from a design standpoint (2007, p. 108). I have not read any studies that prove that general skills learned from video games (like problem-solving and critical thinking) transfer to any real-world situation (perhaps you have). But I think the best efforts of digital game based learning teach specific skills that are relevant to real-life.

In an excellent article entitled Game-Based Learning: A Different Perspective, Karl Royle explains that games and education have been and are still largely mutually exclusive (2008). But Royle proposes a model of instruction that comes from the field of instructional technology that will allow for the blending of these, problem-based learning. Royle explains that problem-based learning in a video game would require the learner to complete a complex, real-world and authentic task by applying rote information found in the game (2008). In other words, learners would be able to learn and apply useful information to a unique real-world and relevant task.

This is the type of approach that I see being useful from an instructional design standpoint. It instructs and makes use of only relevant media. It has been proven that media does not influence learning through thousands of no significant difference studies. Therefore any irrelevant media added to instruction will not make any difference in real learning and can often be distracting. Many video games do this. In contrast, there have been many great efforts to create instructional games using relevant, real-world tasks and I think these are the only useful ones for education. After all, we are not here to entertain students.

References:

Royle, K. (2008). Game-Based Learning: A Different Perspective. Innovate, 4(4).

Shelton (2007). Designing Educational Games for Activity-Goal Alignment. In Shelton, B. E., & Wiley, D. A. (2007). The Design and Use of Simulation Computer Games in Education (p. 316). Sense Publishers.

Instructional Technology Blames Teachers

2008-06-04T18:31:00.000-07:00

Instructional Technologists always give teachers a hard time. It seems like all the talk that I have heard lately about teaching practices has been negative toward the teacher who does the bad teaching practice. But bad teachers are too often an easy target and I think that they are only a small part of the reason for less-effective instruction in college campuses today.

In the many discussions that I had while completing my Master's degree in Instructional Technology, all bad teaching practices were attributed to the teacher who was doing them. It is really easy to blame the teacher, after all, they are the person who does the act, and as Master's students just getting into Instructional Technology, my classmates and I would look upon our limited past experience with college including our undergraduate classes. The most visible instructional component of these classes was our teachers.

But what if there were deeper roots to bad instruction than just the teachers themselves? After having taught and worked to create courses for higher education, I can say there are. I have never met a single teacher that would not like his/her students to learn something. This is no longer a question in teacher's minds. The real question is how to do this when teachers are put under the constraints that higher education imposes upon them.

"congratulations graduates, this diploma signifies that you have sat in your classroom seat for a certain amount of hours and have received arbitrarily fabricated grades from overworked and underpaid instructors. You are now ready to do something totally different than you learned in college ;)" (photo provided by Josh Thompson)

Instructional Technology has come up with some great ways to help students learn better, quicker, and in more depth, but few of these methods even consider the constraints that teachers in higher education are put under, fewer still help alleviate them. Many theories claim that they do when they really don't. I think that some of the most valuable work being done in Instructional Technology involves systemic change in public education.

A professor that I work with currently teaches several freshman classes full of ninety students each semester, is required to do research that requires extensive travel and time to write and submit manuscripts, and must serve on several committees for the university. He wakes up at about 4am each morning to get to work and usually stays there until 6pm. He then goes home to have dinner and then does reading and research for the rest of the night each day. This is typical here. I know of at least 3 other people whose schedules are similar. They do this work because they are required to by the university. This is a regular university workload.

The field of Instructional Technology generally defines behaviorist practice such as lecture and multiple choice tests as bad teaching and assessment practices. But these are the very same practices that help teachers be more efficient in their teaching. For instance, lectures can be the same every time allowing teachers to create it only once and then deliver it many times. Multiple choice tests in testing centers allow assessment of student's knowledge without having to involve the teacher.

Some Instructional Technologists sit there an wonder why more teachers are not doing more good instructional practices like peer interaction, group projects, authentic tasks, task-centered instruction and so on. Some become angry at teachers for their bad practices, but the reason is that they don't have time! All of those practices will ultimately take more of a busy teacher's time, and taking more time on teaching and less on research could put a college teacher's job in jeopardy. Imagine approaching the professor that I work with and telling him that he does not teach well, and he needs to change his curriculum to be more task-centered. You explain that this will take more time to do, but in the end students will learn more and enjoy the class better. Most professors would respond that they just don't have the time, and this answer is perfectly honest and acceptable. The time in one day cannot be increased even by a minute.

There is a lot that needs to change in colleges today, but I think that it needs to start not with teaching practices, but with the structures that are in place that do not allow teachers to engage in good teaching practices.

Authentic Tasks or Task-Centered Instruction?

2008-05-14T18:02:00.000-07:00

I recently read an excellent article by Jan Herrington, Tom Reeves and Ron Oliver about Authentic tasks entitled Authentic Tasks Online: A Synergy among Learner, Task, and Technology (2006). This article begins by saying that the most common online learning tries to break down information into digestible chunks and distance education needs to be seen as part of a synergistic system.

The authors believe that the authentic tasks model will fill this need for synergy. They give some guidelines for authentic tasks, outlining what an authentic task is. When I first read this, I realized that the authentic tasks outlined in this article are somewhat different than the whole-task approach we have been working on in our higher-education institution. We work with Dr. M. David Merrill to follow First Principles of Instruction (2002), converting traditional lecture-based classes into task-centered ones.

Authentic tasks seem more drawn out than the tasks Merrill talks about in First Principles (2002), but I think the distinction is blurred somewhat. Either way, the tasks that we have been implementing in higher education class are usually shorter in length (1-2 weeks to complete) and the tasks mentioned by Herrington, Reeves and Oliver (2006) can take a whole semester to solve, or no less than a third of that semester.

Among the definitions of authentic tasks listed in this article, several stand out to me:

Authentic tasks are ill-defined, students have to define the tasks and sub-tasks to complete, also they are open to multiple interpretations and solutions.

Authentic tasks provide the opportunity for students to examine the task from different theoretical, practical perspectives. students must distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information.

The items above require that students must choose their own methods for solving the problem, and they must examine the task from differing perspectives. This is perhaps the furthest departure from what we are doing with our classes. In our approach, heuristics and rules of thumb are provided for solving a problem and students are taught how they might go about solving the problem themselves. Pitfalls with our approach may include decreased authenticity of the task (people in the "real-world" don't have someone showing how to do a problem, they are just asked to do it), and a lack of creativity of solutions (students will solve the next problem in much the same way as the first).

Pitfalls with the authentic tasks method stem from it's sink or swim approach. Students will have little guidance on where to start (although often the technology provides affordances), or what process to take in solving the problem.

Overall, I still think that it is best to scaffold students' performance with some guidance for completing the task or they may fail. Without this guidance, it is easy for a student to become frustrated and give up on a complex task. Perhaps vanMerrienboer's 4CID model (1997) is a good middle ground, tasks are kept complex, but are scaffolded only as much as students need and this scaffolding is removed as student performance increases.

The article also mentions:

Authentic tasks can be integrated and applied across different subject areas.

In dealing with the realities of higher education we have not been able to integrate differing subject areas to a very high degree. But in our approach, we have successfully combined English as an International Language instruction with Biology. I see no pitfalls with these approaches except perhaps that students will become confused, but only because they have been taught within the confines of subject areas for so long.

Also, authentic tasks would be very difficult to implement on a full scale in our outdated education systems. There is a very strong mentality that information should be broken down into manageable chunks and then fed to students. The whole system of education, from colleges, to schools to programs to courses to credits follows this approach. If things like authentic tasks are going to take off, this mindset will have to change and the idea of courses will have to go away.

Another pitfall with the authentic tasks approach is that we are asking students who are novices to do what professionals do and to produce professional work. I like the high expectations that this conveys, but students are not experts. They will not produce completely professional work unless it is in a very narrow topic area. At the same time, many undergraduate students do not take their education seriously enough to produce work at this level.

References:

Herrington, J., Reeves, T. C., & Oliver, R. (2006). Authentic Tasks Online: A Synergy among Learner, Task, and Technology. Distance Education, 27(2), 233.

Merrienboer, J. J. G. V. (1997). Training Complex Cognitive Skills: A Four-Component Instructional Design Model for Technical Training. , 338. Educational Technology Pubns.

Merrill, M. D. (2002). First Principles of Instruction. Educational Technology Research and Development, 50(3), 43.

Peer-Assessment in Higher Education

2008-05-09T15:21:00.000-07:00

I have recently done a mini-review of Peer-Assessment in higher education. The results of studies are mixed but generally support that peer-assessment is as valid as instructor assessment as long as it is scaffolded properly.

Here are a few of the articles I looked at and what they said:

Cho, K., Schunn, C. D., & Wilson, R. W. (2006). Validity and Reliability of Scaffolded Peer Assessment of Writing from Instructor and Student Perspectives. Journal of Educational Psychology, 98(4ov), 891.
- Students and instructors do not trust peer-grading schemes, however, there is high reliability and validity in these schemes if done correctly.
- Instructors often have no time to grade and therefore skim through assignments while peer graders will take time on each assignment, judging its quality more in depth
- Instructors grade papers with no other help, while peer graders will usually grade multiple papers, giving each paper a combined rating from multiple peers. Bias can be reduced with this method.
- Studies in the past have either predicted high or low validity in peer grading, they produced mixed results, some because of errors.
- Even when peer grade validity is high, students may not perceive it as such.
- Self assessments are generally less accurate than peer assessments and are often more influenced by self-esteem than actual performance. This is one of the reasons students often feel that peer-assessments are not accurate.
- Multiple peers should be used to rate each other
- What an instructor views as reliable peer assessment is usually different than what a student views as the same.
- Overall, peer assessment may be more valid than instructor assessment because multiple people are rating a single work, instead of a single person rating a single work.
- Peer review is part of student's learning process.
- Concerns about reliability and validity are not valid reasons to shy away from peer assessment.
Lejk, M. & Wyvill, M. (2001b) The effect of the inclusion of self-assessment with peer assessment of contributions to a group project: a quantitative study of secret and agreed assessments, Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 26(6), 551–561.
- Peer assessment is better done without self assessment
Magin, D. J. (2001) A novel technique for comparing the reliability of multiple peer assessments with that of single teacher assessments of group process work, Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 26(2), 139–152.
- Group members are generally more able to assess each other than mentors or teachers
Struyven, K., Dochy, F., & Janssens, S. (2008). The Effects of Hands-On Experience on Students' Preferences for Assessment Methods. Journal of Teacher Education, 59(1), 69.
- Teachers and student teachers generally react negatively to forms of assessment that they are not used to
- Traditional assessment methods were often negatively looked upon by students and alternative methods were perceived to enable quality learning
Kilic, G. B., & Cakan, M. (2007). Peer Assessment of Elementary Science Teaching Skills. Journal of Science Teacher Education, 18(1), 91.
- Peer scores significantly correlate with instructor scores
Ryan, G. J., Marshall, L. L., Porter, K., & Jia, H. (2007). Peer, Professor and Self-Evaluation of Class Participation. Active Learning in Higher Education: The Journal of the Institute for Learning and Teaching, 8(1), 49.
- One study with 144 students in higher ed led to a 0.83-0.9 correlation coefficient between instructor and student ratings with forced distribution
- Another similar study with another 144 students led to a correlation of 0.72 between instructor and student ratings.
- This study found that rankings were statistically different but not academically different (not enough to affect a student's grade).
- Problems arising from group grades include “inflated grading of friends, lack of discrimination among members of a group, individuals dominating to seek higher marks, and students who do less work but still benefit from a group grade.” forced distribution or ranking reduces all of these problems to some degree.
- Students did not like this type of grading overall.
- Forced distribution (ranking) of each other's grades affected whether students gave a higher or lower grade to their peers.
- Peer assessment should be scaffolded
Wen, M. L., & Tsai, C. (2006). University Students' Perceptions of and Attitudes toward (Online) Peer Assessment. Higher Education: The International Journal of Higher Education and Educational Planning, 51(1), 27.
- Peer assessment can increase student-student interaction, enhance students understanding of other student's ideas, increase learner's understanding in the cognitive and meta-cognitive domains, and develop transferable and social skills
- Peer assessment methods should make criteria clear to students
- Anonymous assessment may produce better validity of assessments
- A study with 280 college students found that most felt it appropriate to use peer assessment as a small portion of their grade
- Students had a positive attitude toward peer assessment
- Results suggest that “more effort needs to be placed on giving students responsibilities for grading, to develop a sense of learner control and ownership of their own learning, especially in higher education.”

Recent efforts of ours to implement a group peer-ranking system into a general education course have come under attack by uninformed people with authority over the course. This will provide some good points of discussion as we go through the process of testing the course.

Blackboard Still Vastly Inferior to Moodle

2008-05-03T23:22:00.000-07:00

I received some comments on my last post “Blackboard Vastly Inferior to Moodle.” An anonymous poster wished for more information, more support to backup my claims. While it was not my intention to make a long discussion about whether Blackboard is better than Moodle for everybody, I will address some of the comments.

It is always good form to consider the source when you get comments from somebody. Comments that are from persons who have only used one cms or another could not be considered very valid because that person has no experience using both systems. Comments from Blackboard's lawyers should be treated differently than comments from a Moodle developer. Blackboard's lawyers have allegedly been calling Desire2Learn customers and bullying them into switching to Blackboard.

Clearly the ethos of a potential poster is an important indicator of why they are really posting. But online, we do not have the advantage of knowing a poster on our Blogs, especially if they hide behind the name anonymous. But for this posting, I am going to assume the comments were made by someone with an open mind who is pushing me to give more evidence that supports my claims that Blackboard is vastly inferior to Moodle. I will provide this evidence.

The commenter first asked:

I'm not sure I understand how you can view that Blackboard is vastly inferior to Moodle. The only example you list is the clicks it takes to set up a group.

For the purpose of this analysis, page loads should be considered more detrimental to performance in the course management system than clicks because they usually take longer than a simple click.

Adding an item to a course Blackboard 3 clicks, two page loads, Moodle 4 clicks, two page loads.
Removing the same item Blackboard 2 clicks, 1 page load, Moodle 2 clicks, two page loads.
Hiding an item in the course Blackboard 4 clicks 2 page loads, Moodle 1 click no page loads
Re-showing an item Blackboard 4 clicks, 2 page loads, Moodle 1 click no page loads
Adding a discussion board Blackboard 4 clicks, 3 page loads, Moodle 3 clicks, 2 page loads
Remove discussion board Blackboard 2 clicks, 1 page load, Moodle 2 clicks, 2 page loads
Add 4 users to a group Blackboard 20 clicks, 6 page loads, Moodle 6 clicks, 2 page loads
Remove a user from a group Blackboard 8 clicks, 6 page loads, Moodle 6 clicks, 2 page loads
Add an assignment to a course Blackboard 6 clicks 2 page loads, Moodle 4 clicks 2 page loads
Removing an assignment Blackboard 2 clicks one page load, Moodle 2 clicks, 2 page loads
List all users in the course Blackboard 4 clicks, 3 page loads, Moodle 1 click, one page load
Viewing and grading an assignment for 4 students with comments Blackboard 22 clicks, 6 page loads, Moodle, 15 clicks, 1 page load

If you were to do all of the above tasks in each management system the total clicks and page loads would be:

Blackboard – 76 clicks, 33 page loads
Moodle – 41 clicks, 18 page loads

This IS a significant difference between the two. Feel free to post requests for more click/page load tests if you are still curious since these do not cover every possible activity in the learning management systems. Any additional requests will likely follow the same lines, with Moodle requiring only about 53% of the clicks and 54% of the page loads than Blackboard to do the same thing.

Lets look at the important factor of satisfaction with an online learning system. The folks at Humboldt state university did a study that supports my hypothesis that Blackboard is vastly inferior to Moodle. It is a good read. http://www.humboldt.edu/~jdv1/moodle/all.htm. I have done no independent research on this, but then again satisfaction was not my claim except for my own satisfaction of the course management systems.

The anonymous person also asked:

What are the many more features that Moodle has compared to Blackboard?

Comparing potential features, like those featured on a website but not added into the cms, is not good practice since those features could cost too much for your institution or may be in beta versions. Therefore, only features that come with the default installation of Moodle and standard versions of Blackboard are compared here. This was part of an analysis I did of learning management systems including Blackboard, Moodle and another learning management system. Keep in mind that the quality ratings are somewhat subjective, but the present ratings are not:

Feature	Blackboard	Moodle
Forum	7/10	8/10
Email	8/10	2/10
Notes	8/10	8/10
Chat	6/10	6/10
Blog/Journal	Not present	10/10
Whiteboard	8/10	Not present
Course Calendar	10/10	10/10
Help features	2/10	10/10
Groups	5/10	8/10
Quizzes	8/10	10/10
Gradebook	8/10	8/10
Customizable interface	2/10	7/10
Linear lessons	5/10	5/10
Survey Tools	7.5/10	6/10
Wiki	Not present	10/10
Workshop	5/10	7/10
Total Present	14	15
Total Quality Score	87.5	115

I may have missed a few of the features, but those listed above are the ones important to my work. I also missed some features that are obviously a part of any system, such as user authentication, assignments etc. Whether or not you agree with my quality ratings of the different cms features is up to you. But before you decide, I hope you have as much experience as I do building and teaching courses in both course management systems so that you can make an educated decision.

There are plenty of other works done comparing Moodle and blackboard and it only takes a minute to search for them in google if you care to take the time. Here are a few of these:

http://ssedro.blogspot.com/2007/05/why-moodle-instead-of-blackboard.html

http://learnonline.wordpress.com/2007/07/04/moodle-vs-blackboard-in-nz/

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=9345 (Login as a guest)

The anonymous commenter also added:

I don't see how Moodle is any more "designed for constructivism" than any other cms...

I cannot give a detailed list of constructivist features of all course management systems, but I can write about what I have experience in. Let's also take another look at the chart above and determine if features that are more constructivist are part of Blackboard's or Moodle's standard installations.

Constructivism often emphasizes shared knowledge, especially the ability to discuss and defend ones knowledge with peers. This is supported by communication tools that allow discussion of subject matter among peers including chat, forums and blogs/journals. Other constructivist features of forums include forum rating systems that allow grading. Group features are considered constructivist because they allow group collaboration. Surveys could be considered constructivist because they allow instructors to find out what students are thinking. Wiki's fit within the constructivist view, more specifically in the idea of constructionism, where learners are encouraged to collaborate in the creation of a unique artifact. Workshops, or peer-assessments are used to allow peers to grade peers, allowing peers to learn more in the process.

Lets see how the course management systems add up. Looking back at the chart we find the following:

Forums – present in both Blackboard and Moodle at about the same quality
Chat – present in both Blackboard and Moodle at about the same quality
Blog/Journal – present in Moodle but not Blackboard
Groups – present in both Blackboard and Moodle with Moodle's group features more enhanced
Survey tools – present in both Blackboard and Moodle with Blackboard's survey more robust
Wiki – present in only Moodle
Workshop – present in both Blackboard and Moodle, Moodle's Workshop feature being superior to Blackboard's self and peer assessment.

The above evidence supports my claim that Moodle is more constructivist than Blackboard. But of course this is well documented too if you are willing to do a little research. Martin Dougiamas, original founder and builder of Moodle built Moodle to follow theories of “social constructionism,” which is deeply situated within the constructivist epistemological stance. As listed above, this philosophy shows in Moodle's features. I was unable to find any information about the underlying learning theories that guided the creation of Blackboard on Blackboard's website.

Of course, there are many factors that affect a decision on which course management system an institution should adopt, and those mentioned above are but a few of them. Factors such as cost of software, hosting, total cost of ownership, student needs, instructor needs are just a few of these. But if you choose to go with Blackboard, take a hard look at whether your institution wants to use more constructivist features. Also consider that it will take about 46 percent longer for your faculty to effectively do something in Blackboard than it will in Moodle, and factor in this cost of loss of productivity.

Blackboard vastly Inferior to Moodle

2008-05-02T18:22:00.000-07:00

Recently I have been frustrated by something beyond my control. This insidious thing slows my work down, making some tasks take more than 2 times longer to complete. No, it is not a slow computer or other people I work with, the thing that slows my productivity down so much is the vastly inferior Blackboard course management system.

(Photo provided by Garrettc)

In 2006, Blackboard filed a patent request in many countries in 2006 and won. Then they sued Desire2Learn and won a lawsuit claiming that Desire2Learn had infringed on their patent. Blackboard also "pledged" not to sue open-source course management systems such as Sakai, Moodle and Atutor. Recently the Software Freedom Law Center filed a re-examination request on the patent and the patent office overturned the patent pending appeal on March 31, 2008. The patent was overturned mainly because Blackboard was trying to patent a system with a single user that could have multiple roles within the same system. There are in fact many different systems that precede Blackboard in featuring this and other claimed items and the fact that the patent was even issued originally to Blackboard was absurd.

Not to diminish the importance of this legal battle, but lets move away from legal/business side of things toward the more important usability side of things. I work with both Blackboard and Moodle for different classes that I am teaching and administrating. Moodle is consistently easier for me to work with and for my students to use.

For example, I recently had to add students into groups in Blackboard. To add a student to a group, I had to click "Add users to group." then I had to type in the user's last name and click search. When the user's name came up, I clicked a checkbox next to their name and then clicked submit. Blackboard showed a window that said something with the essence of "you successfully added the member to the group." This window required me to click "ok." To add another member to the group I had to start the process over again and go through these clicks for each member of the group. The amount of clicks that it took to add 4 members to each group was 5 times 4, or 20 clicks.

In Moodle the same action goes like this. I click "add/remove users," then I am presented with a list of all students in the class. I click the 4 that I want to be added into the group and then click the arrow button which adds the users to the group. That is 6 clicks total, and much faster clicks since most clicks did not take me to another page as they did in Blackboard.

When it comes to adding more members to a group, the difference between clicks required in Moodle and clicks required in Blackboard increases exponentially.

And this doesn't even mention the fact that Moodle runs faster at loading pages and responding to my clicks. Nor does it mention the fact that my students have a much easier time navigating in Moodle, and that Moodle has many more features. At BYU-Hawaii, we have worked with learning theories that the latest research supports, Including problem-centered teaching strategies. But whenever I go to Blackboard to implement these, I have to work around it's unwieldy interface just to make something happen. But in Moodle, these items are easy to implement. Probably because Moodle was built to follow Constructivist ideals, and Blackboard works well disseminating information as in the behaviorist approach to teaching. No wonder they feel like they have to sue others, they can't keep up with the latest learning theories and practices in education.

All of the hoopla about patents is troublesome when you consider that a severely inferior system like Blackboard is able to receive a patent and then potentially sue other, more superior products to make sure that we cannot use them.

Thanks a lot Blackboard. For slowing down academia by requiring them to click more, and filing patents to assure that the future is filled with more clicking and less learning.

Is There Still a Lack of Information?

2008-03-31T13:32:00.001-07:00

(photo of an internet cafe in Peru, provided by jocularme)

I recently finished reading The Children's Machine by Semour Papert (1993). A very interesting read yet somewhat narrow in its scope. While he does talk about education in general, Papert talks mostly about mathematics education and even calls learning mathetics. While he gives justification in his book for using this term, I don't think it will catch on. Some of the thoughts about education are brilliant though.

On page 165 he talks about a student, Debbie whose problem is not a lack of bits of knowledge, but a lack of connections between the knowledge that she has. Papert asserts that perhaps this is a very common problem (1993). most computer aided instruction assumes that a lack of knowledge is present and tries to give instruction to fill in this gap. As I have looked at many different types of CAI, I have seen much of the same thing, the computer tells or shows you something. It gives you information assuming that this information will change your conceptual understanding or behavior about a certain subject. Then it asks you to regurgitate that information to find out if you know it.

But to me building conceptual understanding or changing behavior is much bigger than that. It involves much more than being told something, such as application and experience. The rise of the Internet has given us information that was unimaginable in the past and has provided instant access to that information. The assumption should not be that people do not have the information or knowledge they need, it should be that they don't know how to connect it to other relevant information and experience to make it applicable. If we knew exactly what to do with the information and how to organize it, then anyone who has read about rock climbing should be able to rock climb well, and anyone who has looked up information about a fixing a car should be able to fix it.

In the business world, Performance technologists have been talking about this for years. They explain that most performance problems cannot be fixed with training. Training assumes a lack of knowledge.

This does not mean that the information on the internet is useless, certainly it is far from it. According to Bloom's Taxonomy you must have knowledge before you can comprehend it apply it, synthesize it or evaluate it. Knowledge is necessary but not sufficient. I think that the real trick is not to figure out what information someone needs to know, but how to help learners connect new information to existing information in their mental models of a domain. So far things that have been suggested include microworlds, authentic tasks, experiential learning, cognitive tools, situated learning. Perhaps there are more effective ways not yet discovered....

Reference

Papert, S. (1993). The Children's Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer. Seymour Papert. New York: BasicBooks.

Games, Simulations, Microworlds

2008-03-11T16:38:00.000-07:00

I recently found out that much of my research and practice interests lie along the same lines as Lloyd Rieber at the University of Georgia. I read several articles and chapters written by him and have come to realize that I feel the same way about a lot of things.

Rieber (2005) talks about two main cognitive theories that relate to the use of games, simulations and microworlds in education. The first is dual-coding theory and the second is mental models. Mental models is the theory that I am interested at the moment because M. David Merrill, who I now work closely with at BYU-Hawaii also talks about this in his work.

Mental models are a personal theory of some domain. They are our conception of what a domain is like including what we think are the rules the domain must follow and how we can manipulate these. Rieber (2005) mentions that a mental model is believed to be loosely organized and subject to continual refinement.

I think that an important distinction in the use of mental models is how much or how little of a student's current mental model we find out about and use when we teach. Merrill (2002) would call this the activation principle in his first principles which states:

Learning is promoted when learners activate relevant cognitive structures by being directed to recall, describe or demonstrate relevant prior knowledge or experience.

Merrill indicates that Mental models will not develop well if the learner is not provided with the appropriate guidance, practice and demonstration. I believe activation to be the most important of the first principles besides the task-centered principle because students need to place information into their own mental models for it to create lasting effects on their learning. Integration depends on it, and Application and Demonstration support it.

But I don't think that learners are limited in activating relevant cognitive structures to recalling, describing or demonstrating. When students work with a microworld, they can activate their mental model without doing any of these.

In Microworlds, the user can change a variable and see how the domain reacts. The variable that the user changes is an item in their own mental model that they want to test out. It is not something that their teacher thinks is in the student's mental model, nor is it something that is in a fellow student's mental model. The student herself tests something she wants to know to determine if her mental model is correct. When something unexpected happens, then the student finds out what the discrepancy is and quickly tunes her mental model to fit. this is a very individual and personal process that takes into account many of the differentiating characteristics that students have with regard to learning.

So this is activation without requiring any of the students to recall, demonstrate or describe what they already know. Perhaps the best verb for this type of activation is testing.

References:

Merrill, M. D. (2002). First Principles of Instruction. Educational Technology Research and Development, 50, 43.

Rieber, L. P. (2005). Multimedia Learning in Games, Simulations, and Microworlds. In The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning. Cambridge, U.K. ; New York: Cambridge University Press.

OpenEd week 15: Wrap Up

2007-12-04T08:48:00.000-08:00

I have certainly learned a lot about Open Education licensing, philosophies, and even learning digitally in general. This course has actually been a lot of work, but it has been fun to see different comments on my blog and to share my opinions. I especially enjoyed reading posts that had opinions that were different than my own and commenting on them. Most of these experiences have led me to change my own opinions on the subject matter.

I have also learned what I believe about open education and perhaps this is the most important thing that I can take from the class. I think that it will have an impact for good on many aspects of higher education. I think that it will provide an infrastructure for more innovative practices in instruction and learning to come in the future.

The way I will use the material in this class is always have an eye toward open practices. With instruction that I develop, I will look for materials that I can use that are open, try to incorporate more openness into the instruction, and look at programs and procedures to see how they could be more open.

As far as what could be covered that has not, let's reconcile the two views of instructional technology, localization vs. universal instruction. It may be good to cover the idea of localization and how it is to be done especially. From an instructional technology standpoint, show people how to make some open content work as part of an instructional piece.

I like the idea that others have posted about just posting comments on others blogs for the in-between weeks. It would also be okay to have an in-between week that also requires a new post. I also enjoy hearing the instructors opinion about topics. We got some of this in the readings, but not as much as I would have liked. All classes have to at some point give some answers to the questions it raises.

I never thought I would learn as much as I did from a blog based class, so it was a surprise to me how much I could learn from others posts. Thanks for the class!

OpenED Week 14: Comments

2007-11-28T08:46:00.000-08:00

Yu-Chun mentions one change that I hope does happen in the future, "Due to the advent of technology and the emergence of the OER, there are more ways to achieve higher education. I imagine that people probably can get their degree through free materials besides entering to university the normal way. "

I, for one, am looking forward to having more ways to achieve higher education so that higher education will be able to cater to more students and fulfill their needs more accurately.

Catia says, "I think that there is a long way to go before there is fair awareness of the potentials of openness in education. There is even a longer way to go before the universities work with such openness withing their institutional structure. Can you imagine getting around the bureaucracy? I think that by 2012 educators who believe in open education will still be working a lot in order to spread the notion of open education and to untangle the misconceptions in the area - for higher education institutions as well as for k-12 systems."

I certainly agree with this. Higher education has been resistant to change in the past and will continue to be. Changing it could be compared to trying to change the velocity and direction of a train on tracks.

Rob also talks about the resistance to change in higher education but believes that they will eventually be forced to make a change, "With the lower-tier schools enabling and empowering their students, the research universities will have no choice but to adjust their practices to remain competitive. The top-tier schools will be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the collaborative age and then will immediately turn around and congratulate themselves on their innovative practices (like how the cellphone companies fought against phone number portability, but now tout it as a great feature since they were forced to implement it)."

I laughed and laughed about the cell phone companies comment.

Catia also mentions that the Learner support organization is not plausible and she thinks that learning communities are more likely. My thought about this is that Learner Support seems to have many of the elements of learning communities except for one difference, it is for profit.

Karen has a good point, "Even if the “formal” OER community (higher ed courseware projects, Hewlett funded projects, etc.) implode under their own weight, there are a number of other open efforts that cannot be stopped. These include Wikipedia and all of its associated projects (Wikibooks, Wikiversity, etc.); other wikis such as Wikispaces, WikiEducator, etc.; user-generated content sites like YouTube, TeacherTube, MySpace, Facebook, and countless others; and a plethora of other brilliant web sites. These sites will continue to multiply, build strong communities, and improve in quality. This will be a huge boon for lifelong learners."

Karen believes that Formal educational institutions (K-12 and higher education) will ultimately not be changed by OER initiatives. Karen mentions things that cannot be stopped like youtube and wikipedia. Youtube and wikipedia are different than OER initiatives because they completely rely on user input. There is no authoritative voice of knowledge. Are OER initiatives just ways to turn something formal that should be informal anyway, and by changing does the usefulness of OER initiatives become nothing? Does the fact that OER initiatives have to be funded cause thier death in the future? Does the fact that OER initiatives are organized and have a mission kill them? Interesting questions, thanks for the thought Karen.

Bobbe mentions, "As we discuss localization and colonization we need to be aware that their are some people missing from the movement. Non-inclusion will one day come back to bite the butt of OER. What measures do we take to make sure that all stakeholders are included?"

I am not an expert or insider on the OER movement, but I think that this is true too. Those who are not involved in the movement because they are not allowed or not aware will hurt the future of OER too. OER movements tend to ignore the end user just a little too much too.

Jessie gives a good insight about changes in her native China, "I believe that the higher education in the U.S. will become more open in the future; but as a Chinese viewpoint, I feel like it is too difficult to change the traditional system of higher education. We talked about words like democracy and open for years, but hard to move on. There are many reasons of difficulties such as our government, politics, economics, and especially the population."

It is so nice to have the opinions of people from places other than the US (and very different) to put these discussions into context.

OpenEd week 13: TenureTrek, The Next Generation

2007-11-19T10:13:00.001-08:00

I think that the future of Higher Education will move to be more open in more ways than just items that result in the change from open educational resources. David Wiley paints an interesting picture of the future of Open Education. I like the future that it portrays from dealing with license issues of the NC clause and the LLL to the "trib" features of open educational resources. I particularly like the part where publishers finally lose power and students start scanning textbooks to stick it to the man. TAKE THAT, man.

From: http://www.tv.com/naruto/show/18558/the-japanese-and-english-versions-of-naruto/topic/8722-840435/msgs.html?page=1

Let me paint a more bleak picture....(jokingly?)

One trajectory that higher education is on right now (at least at research universities in the USA) is the increase in difficulty of qualifying for a job. Many long-time (and even some short-time) professors have mentioned to me that they would never have gotten a job in today's academic world. This trend is likely to increase and to create a more exclusive, rather than inclusive, culture in academia.

Students emerging with a PhD must have several publications, presentations and a lot of experience. And they must increasingly do it all to the same set of specifications and in the same way. In the future, Students will have to have 50 publications to graduate and at least 100 a year. They will have to have received a grant for at least 10 million dollars too. Those who do not have these qualifications will not even be remotely considered for a job and will end up working at Super Star-Mart (the future successor of Wal-Mart, the biggest store will be the size of Mexico City, offering more cheap plastic crap) as a bagger with a PhD. Students who can attain this high level of publications and grant money are those who are rich and powerful enough to hire an army of writers to do their work and have friends and family with money to grant them.

Another trend at research universities is the increase in difficulty of getting tenure. Many long-time professors have also admitted that they would not have received tenure with their credentials in today's world. Tenure makes you compete against your peers so there will be an increase in the competitive nature of the academic world. Those who receive tenure will be increasingly limited to people who have little personal life and no families, giving them more time to work on research, publications and presentations.

Having inherited money or being independently wealthy will also help since budget cuts seem to be on the rise and armies of writers aren't cheap. Tenure will depend on more and more of less and less factors (grants and publications only, not teaching or service, etc.). Professors wishing to receive grants will be pitted against those who have friends and family in the now corrupted granting institutions. Faculty who do not have money or power will not receive grants or write their 100 peer-reviewed publications in thier first year and will be removed from their positions.

With these two trajectories, faculty will increasingly become more exclusive, wealthy and childless. These "virtues" will be taught to all new students who go through the education system and higher education will soon become even more of an ideological mass production factory than it already is. Rich and powerful faculty in higher education will soon influence legislators to make laws that limit the freedom of those who are not "smart" because they think that knowledge should forever govern ignorance.

Of course, I hope that this doesn't happen but some of the trajectories are there, at least as I see them in my own associations here in the US. I think other places are quite different.

Here is what I hope happens. Higher education becomes more open to change, allows more time for faculty publications and grants, gets more money, and tenure becomes open to more diverse values than just publications and grants. Teaching in higher education becomes more open to techniques besides lecture and powerpoint, allowing students to "trib" a lot more.

Open education may help the tenure and job problems listed above by adding to the options for a faculty member to get tenure. Contribution to Open education could be one more thing to do in academia that can help with tenure along with many other neglected values in higher education (how about quality teaching, for starters). Open education will play a big part in online type higher education institution, and competency based programs like Western Governors university.

I think that higher education will get to this good future by listening to students and responding to their needs. Higher education will need to become less unwieldy and more open to change or I think it will get more and more behind.

OpenED week 12: Comments

2007-11-13T17:33:00.000-08:00

Last week, Elisa mentioned some important things that fall along the lines of what I said in my post. "one can assume that open educational resources should include, among other things such as full courses, course materials, content modules, collections etc., learning objects as well." And "m optimistic as for the future of learning objects. They have not died;"

Jennifer mentions, "Likely, in the process, elements were "fixed", but it is unclear to me if the desire to fix problems with learning objects led to the open education movement. Rather, it seems more likely that advances in technology and experiences with what is possible have helped to foster the changes in the characteristics between learning objects and open education." I agree that learning objects have evolved and that the purpose is what is important. People probably did not set out to fix learning objects, OERs were just the next inevitable iteration for those whose goal is to spread education. It was not, however, the next phase for those whose goal is to create automated instruction. I don't know what that next phase is (hopefully death).

I disagree with Jennifer's classification of old learning objects and the new open educational resources. I think that most definitions of learning objects never stuck them into the don't change, rigid and high cost column. That was done by opportunists on a small piece of what could be considered learning objects.

Jennifer also gives a great point that I totally agree with, "I'm not sure we have a good handle on either the extent of OER use (by teachers or learners) or the best ways to facilitate use of OERs by users. Further, I think there is a lot to be learned from an instructional design perspective about both open educational practices, as well as OERs as instructional content"

Catia mentions at the end of her post, "But let's not forget that quality is an element that cannot be forgotten - no matter what the approach might be." The discussion on quality is very important and multi-faceted. In my previous post I talked about this same issue of quality, Can open educational resources be made higher quality for everyone everywhere, or is localization the only answer?

Karen talks about the problem of engineers working on open educational resources, "The bottom line is that there is too much focus on structure, technology, and systems and not enough attention on learning, learners, and content." AMEN.

She also talks about a problem with OER that we have not yet looked at, "In informal interviews with several experts in this area, I have heard several times that the overriding problem with most OERs is that they are not reused much at all." I think that ease and knowledge for reuse is an important factor here.

Houshuang talks about the absence of lms's for this class, "this course being a good example, we don’t use Moodle or ATutor or similar software, and I am not sure if anyone thinks that our course would be enhanced by using them." I Agree. For a class presentation on open source Learning Management Systems, I discussed the idea of how lms's lock things down and that students cannot go back and view old courses at all. But I used this course and others taught by David Wiley as examples of courses that can be seen later and are open.

Jon talks a great deal about the bricks and mortar metaphor of learning objects. I like this metaphor too because it allows for what the user adds or the mortar. Jon gives some good insights about brick laying and how rocks can be very different from each other yet they can be placed together.

Speaking about my last weeks post, Jesse shares her opinion, "I do agree that localization is very important, but I think it is possible to make a piece of instruction effective in every culture because the world is getting flatter." Perhaps she is right and her perspective about China is valuable, but I would still like to see any studies done with this.

David Wiley wants to make 2008 the year of open content. I say we begin with some lighthearted and creative mash-ups:

OpenEd: Learning Objects are not Dead, You Just Didn't Understand Them

2007-11-08T12:02:00.000-08:00

To say that open educational resources fix many of the problems of learning objects is a stretch simply because what learning objects are has not been defined. From what I have read there are so many different things that can be considered learning objects that open educational resources could certainly be another name for what some though learning objects were supposed to be. They most certainly fit most of the definitions of learning objects. It seems like the idea of learning objects has simply evolved to better meet a goal and with the evolution came a new name.

I think when people say that learning objects are dead they are not talking about the Wiley definition of learning objects. If the definition of learning objects is, “A digital resource that can be reused to mediate learning,” then learning objects are certainly still alive and well. If we define learning objects as digital resources that reside in a closed system and are only available for out of context and non-adaptable learning experiences, then they should be dead. Why didn't people make the distinction? It seems to me that the goals for using learning objects were different and therefore the definition of learning objects went along with the goals. Wiley and colleagues had the goal of spreading education through whatever means possible. Others had the goal of making money by creating a system which would save time for users. Still others wanted to use learning objects as a way to create more precise instruction, but in order to do so they had to be very specific and time-intensive in what information about the learning objects they required. These systems inevitably were closed rather than open because of their highly specific nature.

Of all of the directions that learning objects could have taken, open educational resources are the most useful way to go if your goal is to spread education. David Wiley mentions this in his presentation. Learning objects needed to go in the direction that people actually do things already to make them easy enough and simple enough. What are people doing to sort and find information on the web? Tagging and Google. Why are people doing this? Because it is easy and simple. Open educational resources are the new learning objects, and they are now easier to find and use. Now learning objects are created as open as possible to allow for use in a variety of systems and are created by universities to share educational materials for free.

If your goal is to create an automated learning system, then open educational resources have not fixed any of the problems that learning objects had. The idea of vendor lock-down comes to mind. Learning objects did what many software vendors do. They locked people into a certain system and method of use. We are still where we were years ago with our systems that piece together learning objects in a instructionally effective way. These systems do not work well with humans, and require a lot of work.

I recently read an interesting chapter in the book, Lessons in Learning, e-Learning, and Training by Roger Schank. The chapter was about Artificial Intelligence and its use in training. Schank mentions that Artificial Intelligence could be used in a training solution to give learners a proper story (Schank loves stories) at the proper time to help learners handle a situation. The intelligence, as I understand it, would provide for more appropriate resources being given at the correct time to help a learner learn. At the beginning of the chapter, however, Schank makes the point that if we can create great training already, why use Artificial Intelligence anyway? I tend to agree. Too many new technologies have come and gone with unfulfilled promises for education.

Some innovations, however, have good uses and have fulfilled some promises. If such an intelligent system would work well, then why not use it. The problem, Schank says, is getting there from here. The costs right now are too expensive to create such a system for the average instructional design group. When the cost of production is less than the value of what is created, then these systems will be a good idea.

David Wiley talked a great deal about infrastructure in his opening speech at OpenEd 2007. He gave the example of roads being an infrastructure for all kinds of innovative activities such as food delivery. He mentioned that open educational resources are a kind of infrastructure and that all kinds of innovative activities can be built upon them beyond what was ever intended by their creators. I think some innovative activities to come include the “learning with media” and not from that Thomas Reeves often talks about. Instead of using open educational resources as the instructor and purveyor of information, students can take the resources to remix and make something new out of them. Students can take the resources and use them as cognitive tools to scaffold their learning experiences. Task-centered instruction could make use of open educational resources to help students complete a task. There are many great ways that resources could be used by students to help them learn. We have the infrastructure of openly licensed resources, now we need the people willing to build on that infrastructure.

Something that I heard in David Wiley's Presentation troubled me. He said that it is not possible to make a piece of instruction more effective for everyone in every culture and this is why localization is so important. Yet there are those in the field who would say that instruction is a science and you can do certain things that will improve instruction universally. M. David Merrill would be one of these people, his First Principles of Instruction is a work that attempts to combine prominent instructional theory into a universal whole. I could not readily find any work attempting to compare the effectiveness of first principles as a model of instruction to other (perhaps more culturally relevant) methods of instruction in a culture or place very different from the United States or Europe. Or in other words, does localization work better than First Principles?

Of course the answer would depend on a lot of factors. Some cultures do instruction very different from the ones in which first principles originated. Storytelling and experiential learning are two examples but I am sure there are more. First principles methods of instruction may not work in cultures that have rich traditions of pedagogies that differ greatly from first principles. However, it may well be that introducing such a culture to first principles would result in more effective instruction.

What about accepted laws dealing with human learning. Thorndike's law of exercise and law of effect come to mind. Would building these into open education guarantee a more effective learning experience? Should M. David Merrill put an asterisk on his first principles linking to fine print stating that they only work in the United States and some places in Europe?

OpenEd week 10: Comments

2007-11-07T12:44:00.000-08:00

In week 10 I commented on other's blogs instead of posting on my own. But, realizing the error of my ways, I am posting many of the discussion points from the week now.

Elisa talks about a problem with copyright, "In Italy, the situation is not at all better than it is in the States. I will talk of the case of Beppe Grillo, a popular Italian actor and comedian. After the great impact on the public opinion of Beppe Grillo's ideas about political and corporate corruption in Italy published in his blog, ranked the ninth most visited in the world, some government members have proposed a bill that claims that anyone with a blog or a website has to register it with the ROC, a register of the Communications Authority, produce certificates, pay a tax, even if they provide information without any intention to make money. If you want to know more about this, click here. It seems that the bill will be modified, but this example suggests how, once again, as Lessig shows in Free Culture, the copyright law is used to check the access to the mass media and the critical positions and going up stream ideas of people."

I hope that this bill does not pass. Too often copyright is used for unintended purposes such as the suppression of valid points of view, and at the same time the most important uses of copyright are forgotten. In the constitution it says that congress has the power to promote the progress of science and useful arts through copyright. Not to help businesses become monopolies or suppress technologies.

Some comments on my own post led to a discussion of Lessig's percieved vs. actual personality as indicated in the Lessig/Valenti debate:

Thank you for the Lessig vs Valenti debate in mp3 format, I had never heard their voices before. :-)))Apart from the enjoyment of the humour and wit of both their conversations, I am on Lessig's side in the interpretation of the USA founding fathers' intention in their establishing the duration of copyrights. My impression is that Valenti was sometimes in trouble in refuting Lessig's statements. However, wasn't Lessig a bit too aggressive in his choice of words, or was it just an impression of mine?
November 1, 2007 9:24 AM
Karen Fasimpaur said...

Great post, Greg, and thanks for the link to the Lessig-Valenti debate.

Elisa, yes, Lessig is *always* "a bit too aggressive." I actually agree with a lot of his points but find myself bristling at his extremeness. I think he'd have a better reception with a more logical and less emotionally charged demeanor.
November 3, 2007 6:02 PM
Silvana said...

"Education must strike a balance between meeting the needs of the institution (test scores, learning objectives etc.) and meeting the needs of the student (expression, desire to learn a certain topic, etc.)."

I quite agree with you and try to set that balance right for my students. However, I'm not ready yet because in the context of informal learning I can't respect deadlines myself -I finished reading Free Culture an hour ago!

Silvana
November 5, 2007 12:29 PM
Greg said...

Speaking of Lessig, "I think he'd have a better reception with a more logical and less emotionally charged demeanor."

I find this comment interesting because he said himself that his one mistake when going before the supreme court was that he was not appealing to the political (or emotional) side of the debate. So either Lessig incorrectly views himself as an unemotional reasonable academic, or we have him incorrectly categorized.

-Greg

Erik featured a tribute video to me on his blog, I will follow suit by placing a tribute picture on my blog for him.

I also commented on Yu-Chun's blog "...I have often thought of the peer-production model that has even been adopted by major businesses as an efficient way of producing products. I agree with your statement about granularity. Certain subjects in Open Education do not work well with such small pieces of instruction. It seems that Open education course management systems should keep this in mind and allow for different categorizing methods for different subjects.
2007年10月30日下午 8:36
Elisa's comments were pertinent on this same topic:
I like your points about granularity and consistency very much. Writing a set of recipes or the entries of an encyclopaedia on the Web is not the same as writing a scientific treatise or a novel. Some key concepts about granularity should be re-interpreted in the light of different kinds of OER projects.

Open Ed Week 9: Free Culture, Free Voice

2007-10-28T15:56:00.000-07:00

I chose to read Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig.

I think the open education movement can learn a lot about the idea put forth in Free Culture about the importance of free speech and allowing all voices to be heard. These ideas can be applied to the instructional strategies that open educational materials use, the methods in which they are disseminated, and the formative evaluation methods they follow.

It seems to me that most educational materials have one voice. The voice of the creator. Like the MPAA or the RIAA who comprise the few voices that speak for everyone else and take measures to assure their continued authority, some forms of education use a single all-knowing voice tell us what the truth is, and that they are the main authority on a subject. Free Culture talks often about the suppression of technologies that would allow a more diverse set of voices to be heard as well as suppression of the voices themselves. Lessig is clearly very concerned about this issue.

Open education can be seen as a way to spread the knowledge of the few to the many and it is a laudable movement. But in the actual instruction being done does open education allow the few to speak for the many, or does it give ample opportunity for self-expression specifically among its users, the learners and teachers? I think that the former is more common.

Open education needs to take a hard look at what voice is speaking in its resources and whether students who are participating in a class, or teachers using open educational materials can be heard. Perhaps some reasons that the few speak for the many in open education includes the fact that OER generally come from more rich and powerful places, they seldom do any formative evaluation in which they ask for input from the user, and instructional practices that allow for students to have a voice are rarely followed.

First of all, it seems to me that users of open educational resources are most likely not from the same location or culture of those that produce open educational resources. Most OER come from a rich and powerful places of the world because that is who has the money and other resources to create them. So the voice of the rich and powerful is placed into the OER, not because of some evil intent, but simply because that is the mindset of the creator. Localization is very important to help alleviate this concern. The idea that knowledge will forever govern ignorance should continue to be a driving force behind the open education movement, but let's not forget the power of the voice that we use in our materials. As with all education, OER must strike a proper balance between being culturally specific and useful, to being culturally general and ambiguous.

One way to give open educational resource users a voice is to do formative evaluation on those materials by taking input from users. Carnegie Mellon University's Open Learning Initiative attempts this by taking statistics from its users. From these statistics the system can determine in what areas learners are struggling and offer clarification or remediation. Technologies are not quite to the point where artificial intelligence can be manipulated to easily change a lesson in real time based on a person's input. But we are making progress. Things that can be done now with the technologies that we have include giving the user a choice about what to learn first etc., allowing a user to make decisions on what to learn, taking as much learner input as possible and changing lessons based on it, and encouraging teachers who use OER to do all of these things. In this way we are giving voice to a larger number of participants.

Another way to give voice to participants is to use instructional techniques in the actual delivery of instruction that allow for discussion, reflection and learner-centered activities rather than direct instruction techniques. Technologies do not currently make it very easy to hold a quality synchronous meeting over the Internet but they are getting better. Lessig mentions the power of the blog, where people can post items for peer review and content. Ideas are discussed at length and arguments are made. Technologies certainly allow for a quality discussion to happen over the course of time on blogs. The voice of the student is heard.

Now these techniques may seem radical and indeed instruction that relied only upon the voice of the students would probably not meet any standardized goals. Not all instruction can use the voice of the students. Education must strike a balance between meeting the needs of the institution (test scores, learning objectives etc.) and meeting the needs of the student (expression, desire to learn a certain topic, etc.).

I think another point that the open education movement can learn from Free Culture is that there will always be those who are against giving something of value away for free. Lessig mentions that our society has basically said that if something has value, then someone (beside the public) must have rights to it. He calls this, “if value, then right.” Lessig talks about how intellectual property has become very protected and there are many powerful and rich organizations who are willing to fight to keep it from getting to the public. Congress and the supreme court are usually on their side. So the open education movement needs to be careful to have everything legally in order before it proceeds. But it need not view opposition with with as much pessimism as Lessig seems to. When opposition comes, it is a sign that progress is being made enough to awaken those who would oppose the movement. It seems to me that giving away educational materials has been a challenge. I think that giving away credentialed degrees will be more of one.

Finally it seems that the open education movement should know (and already knows) how unconstitutional our copyright laws are in the United States and use Creative Commons or other effective licensing as a way to ensure the availability of open educational resources. Part of the discussion that follows is from a debate between Lawrence Lessig and Jack Valenti that I also listened to. It was clear to me that Lessig was much more well informed to talk about both sides of the issues at hand while Valenti seemed only to know his side and nothing more.

Lessig, Valenti Debate (mp3)

An interesting part of this debate involves Lessig advocating a copyright system that the founding fathers of our nation intended. Jack Valenti counters that no one can really know what the founders intended because we cannot read their minds now, and times have changed anyway. Lessig did not have a chance to speak to this subject afterward, but he does reiterate what the actual words in the constitution are. In the book Free Culture, Lessig makes it clear what the founding fathers did intend and the best way we can determine what they intended is by their behavior at the start of our nation. They set the copyright term at 14 years. So it is quite clear to me that something similar to a 14 year copyright term is what the founding fathers of the United States intended. No reading of minds was needed.

I believe that the copyright term as it currently exists in the United States is unconstitutional and also stifles the progress of the same science and useful arts that the constitution was intended to protect. Lessig believes that limiting the copyright term allows for more voices to be heard and that this is a first amendment right. His system of copyright that he proposes imposes a limit to copyright in years (50) and then requires the owner to re-register the copyright after that for another term.

I would think that an optimal time would be around 15 years, the average time calculated by another article we read by Pollock. I would require copyrighted items to be registered once they are created, using a very easy and inexpensive method, if works are not registered on this database, then they are not copyrighted. This cataloging system, as Lessig mentions, eliminates the difficulties in searching to find out whether a creative work is copyrighted. After the 15 year period the author would have the opportunity to renew the copyright for another period specified by the author up to 15 years. Then a third period could be specified up to 15 years, making the total allowed time 45 years. This would be the last term of renewal given to the author of the work. After the last period of renewal expires, or if the author chooses not to copyright a work in the first place, or if they choose not to extend the copyright of the work in the second or third period, the work will fall into the public domain as the constitution states.

Pollock talks about differing terms of optimal copyright with different numbers of years associated with it, but asserts that the optimal time for holding a monopoly on a creative work will decrease over time. Lessig also makes the point in Free Culture that copyright laws need simplicity. For that reason I like the idea of picking an average or optimal number and just saying all creative works fall into public domain after this number of years. Then I allow for the extension in case a particular work is still functioning in a way that promotes the progress of the arts (or the artist just wants it to be renewed). Keep in mind that fair use still plays a part in this program, critiques, parodies etc. can still be done on a creative work even with the more limited copyright term.

Just changing the law to require registration of all works that authors want copyrighted would fix much of what is wrong about copyright laws in the United States. A database would make it easier to find who owns a copyright, and not requiring all intellectual “property” to be copyrighted as soon as it is made will allow much more free culture to enter into the public domain when it is created.

One point of departure that I have from Lessig is the idea that derivitave works should always be allowed on even copyrighted works. Lessig mentions that the founding fathers did not originally protect any copyrighted works from being used for derivative works. He seems to laud this availability of works to be remixed and adapted and desires that all works should allow for derivatives. I think that an original creator of a work would be more likely to release a creative work such as a film to the public with the understanding that no one (for a limited time, at least) will be able to market its characters as toys, or create a coloring book with the characters, or release a derivative which is very close to the original work online for free.

The constitution says that Congress has the power to, "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts...” I believe that the actions that congress takes in giving a monopoly to a creative artist should “promote the progress of science and useful arts” and this should be the main question that congress asks in making laws. Does the law promote this progress for the greatest amount of people, or does it stifle progress for most while promoting it for the few? Making works of art available for remix right at the beginning may very well stifle the progress of art.

I also view a brighter future than Lessig with regard to copyright laws and free culture in general. The next term of the copyright act will end in 2019. I think that there will be more lobbying to once again extend the copyright term from big media, but I also think that opposition will be greater. Lessig argued before the supreme court for a limit to congresses power to continue to extend the copyright term and said that by extending the act they are essentially not limiting monopolies on creative works as they should be. I think this argument may be more powerful in 2019 because a continued extension will only prove Lessig's point. There are always opposing opinions though and like in 1998, the court could say that what has been done before can be done again.

Also, creative works that are not copyrighted fully are proliferating thanks to licensing options that turn the copyright laws against itself. It seems to me that more and more people are seeing the value of such licensing options and opposing big media. Hopefully a combination of these two items, a realization of the unconstitutional nature of congresses copyright law extension, and the increased perceived value of creative works licensed differently, will lead to a climate that has more sensible attitudes toward copyright and allows the term of copyright to end.

OpenEd Week 8: One Button to rule them all

2007-10-20T20:40:00.000-07:00

Building a sustainable business model around giving away educational materials is, as the readings indicate, tricky. Giving educational materials away for free does not bring in money to pay for staffing of personnel who work to give these educational materials away, or the extra time that a creator of educational materials takes to prepare the materials to be given away. But money is not the only thing that motivates people, in fact, it is not even the main thing that usually motivates people. Many people are motivated by desires to help others, have peer review etc. There are many economic models that creators of open educational resources currently use to fund their initiatives.

Models of funding for OER initiatives
-Endowment model - The project obtains a base funding from a grant or charitable organization.
-Membership model - Members pay for membership for special privileges early access, road map decisions code releases and documentation.
-Donations model- Development is funded by community donations.
-Conversion model - Users are converted into students.
-Contributor pay model - Contributors pay for the cost of maintaining the contribution. The provider makes the Initiative freely available
-Sponsorship model - Advertising pays for an OER initiative.
-Institutional model - An institution takes its own monetary responsibility for OERs.
-Governmental model - A government takes its own monetary responsibility for OERs.
-Replacement Model - Use of OERs can replace expensive systems like blackboard.
-Foundation model - Funding comes from foundations if deemed to be worthy.
-Segmentation model - Value added services are provided along with oers for a price.
-Voluntary support model - Fund-raising efforts pay for OER initiatives.

Wiley also brings up another important model in which the cost of the creation of open educational resources becomes almost nothing and therefore it is sustainable in the long run. It seems to me that this would need several things to fall into place if it were to become widespread. First, technologies (including proprietary systems like blackboard) would have to widely adopt a “one button” functionality to take a course that is online from being closed to open. If this type of functionality is not adopted by proprietary systems like blackboard, then universities that use blackboard would have to make a switch to a different learning management system that either has the potential for allowing the creation of such a “one button” function (open-source programs allow this), or already integrates this function (Wiley indicates that the Sakai project is working on this). Open source learning management systems that do not already contain a “one button” function to take a course into an open course from a closed course would have to be programmed to do so. This, of course, costs money but could be a great money-saver in the long run.

Blackboard is not likely to change their system to allow for a “one button” functionality, so there will be costs involved in exporting a blackboard course to fit another learning management system which does have this functionality. Blackboard now holds somewhat of a monopoly (though I do not know why, especially when other systems are so much easier to use and less expensive) so they are in a position to do whatever they want. When all is said and done, it would probably be faster to take the course from blackboard straight to an open courseware system like eduCommons rather than having universities convert all of their course material from blackboard to Sakai. Still, open source learning management systems are gaining ground especially among academic institutions. Moodle usage has almost exponentially increased since its inception, and Sakai has done the same with a more limited adoption.

There is still the question of courses that are not currently online or are only online as a supplement to face to face courses. Conversion of these courses to an online system such as Moodle or Sakai still takes an enormous amount of work and therefore, cost. The open educational resources movement does not have, to my knowledge, any tool that will help a professor who is not adept at technology to take their own face to face course and add it to Open CourseWare with a type of “one button” function. Such a technology would likely be very complex and require high costs in programming, but would enable a very low cost in the provision of open educational resources. An interesting parallel was a piece of software developed by the ID2 research group at Utah State University. This software followed M. David Merrill's Instructional Transaction Theory. It asked for certain items from the user, and then arranged these in such a way as to become properties of an item that was to be learned. So the system asks for the information that it needs, allows the user (subject matter expert) to enter that information, and then as long as the system has all of the information that it asked for, it can organize and place the information in a purportedly instructionally effective manner. Can a similar approach be taken to help professors provide open educational resources? A system could ask the professor or an assistant for certain files and the professor/assistant can explain what module these files belong to. Then the system can take them and arrange them for final approval. All of this would have to be done using terminology that the professor/assistant understands, and would avoid arcane technical terms. Of course there are still those who have class materials on paper only and these would have to be converted to a digital format.

Giving away credentialed degrees for free is quite of problematic, especially when students are still paying tuition for their education. You really have to justify this method of giving away degrees when others have dutifully worked to pay their tuition and make it through a difficult 4 years at an institution of higher education. I think that so far the two cannot be reconciled. If education is going to be free for one, it will have to be free for all. The only sustainable model that would make this work is having the government take care of the bill. This is the case in our education system except the government is only willing to pay so much. Grants, donations, and students have to foot the rest of the bill. So until the government is willing to pay more, or grants and donations take over, it seems to me that students will have to pay for credentialed degrees.

So should governments step in and fund open education initiatives? I think they should. Let me just say that open educational resources would be best served if the production of them can be made as inexpensive as possible. Then let the government come in and help fund OER initiatives. Developing countries can benefit from aid or their own government's money to make OER initiatives work locally. OER initiatives are a way for a government to give the result of the tax dollars that are spent on higher education (and paid by the general population, including those who never attend a government-sponsored university) back to people who are not currently attending a university.

Open Ed: Fuzzy and Blue

2007-10-12T09:19:00.000-07:00

Creative Commons offers some good options for licensing, but after reading about licensing with the GFDL, Creative Commons and Public Domain, I realize that there are several options missing. What if I want someone to be required to share-alike all derivative works but not give attribution, keeping the work in the creative commons but not telling who originally created it? Apparently this is not an option. Why is attribution the basic requirement for a creative commons license? Perhaps attribution is there so that any future users of the material can be more easily held to the requirements of the author, but attribution often creates extra effort for the re-mixer of a creative work because they are required to attribute the work to someone in a way that the author requires. Often this means that the work cannot be used without attribution having to be placed in the work or on another prominent position of the derivative which does not look good. Indeed the attribution requirement restricts the very people we are trying to empower, the user of the work. The Creative commons website speaks about the most liberal of the licensing schemes, “By attribution you let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work — and derivative works based upon it” seems like you should have the above options or even the option to require no derivatives of your work without attribution. I noticed that Houshuang agrees that there should be a creative commons license that does not require attribution.

It looks like the Creative Commons and GFDL licenses are incompatible and do not allow for people to put them together. David Wiley explains this in his posts. A few years ago Lawrence Lessig posted that you cannot legally mix items from OCW to Wikipedia. Lessig talks about how items from Wikipedia are required to be re-shared under the FDL license and items licensed as share alike in OCW require re-licensing under that same license. These licenses were incompatible when he wrote this in 2005. He also explained that the people at creative commons are beginning an effort to put the licenses together in a more compatible way. Hopefully there has been progress in making these licenses more compatible, but maybe that is not the point. Is any restriction of freedoms bad? I can see the value of having intermediary licenses such as share alike and non-commercial as a kind of gateway to help apprehensive individuals begin to license their original work. These licenses, however, still restrict end users from using resources in certain ways as David Wiley points out. I agree with him that the ideal and future goal is the public domain.

Moving on to the share alike and non commercial clause, it seems likely that share alike would fill most people's needs because it requires an item to be used and shared by the remixer with the same license. Non-commercial basically states that users cannot use a work for commercial gain. Would this restriction mean that businesses simply cannot use these items, even if they are not using the actual creative work to make money? A business may need a training on how to do good customer service. They find a great non-commercially licensed item on the internet that teaches about an aspect of good customer service. They desire to use this in their internal training. Would this be allowed since its use does not directly lead to the business making money, or would this be restricted because it is a business using the item? In my opinion the business ideally should be able to use the resource.

I think that when people say that share-alike will cover all of the needs of the non-commercial clause, they are correct because of the above scenario. If the business in the above example were required to re-share their training material it would make not make a difference in their use of it. If a company sells a creative item that is licensed with the share-alike clause and not the non-commercial one, then they are also required to release this item for free to the general public. Selling an item that you must also provide free to the public would not work very well.

Copyleft, or share-alike, is very good for the open education movement. Most importantly, it gives people the freedom to use, remix, modify and share a creative work. These rights must be given by an author or else the open education movement could not even exist. I think that a better question is, “is public domain good for the open education movement.” Copyleft contains freedoms, but it also contains restrictions too, the main one being a requirement to share again any derivitave works under the same license. Public domain does not carry any non-commercial or share-alike restrictions. David Wiley also mentions how much better this is for the open education movement, mentioning the idea of privileging people over content.

Last weeks discussion was about the value of items published in the Creative commons vs. Public domain. I read several posts that did not differentiate these two values. They essentially said that 100 percent of the value of Public domain is realized in a creative commons license. I strongly disagree. In my post I set it at around 50%. This is just an arbitrary number at best, but if you have ever had to reuse creative commons vs. public domain licensed work, you understand that you have to put forth a lot of extra effort when using creative commons, and none when you are using public domain works. Lets look at the scenario of an instructional designer creating a training slide show featuring a creative commons attribution share alike licensed creative work. The instructional designer has to determine how the original author wants to be attributed. This often means defacing the training by adding attribution on the actual slide. The the instructional designer must also figure out a way to license the work again in the same way as the original work. If the instructional designer has a choice of this and a work that is already in the public domain, they will choose the public domain every time. Another scenario could involve a teacher in the developing world, but it would be very similar. So the value of the public domain is not 100% realized in creative commons or GFDL licensing in even the most liberal renditions. Not to mention the commercial value that can be applied to a public domain work which cannot be attached to a share alike or non-commercial creative commons work.

On the flip side of things, we should also look at the creator of a work too. What is the difference for them if they release a creative work in public domain and creative commons. The only real value for releasing a work into the creative commons over public domain is the fuzzy and blue feeling inside that they know the work will be attributed to them and that it will always released using a creative commons license (if they release it with attribution share alike). They could use other clauses, but these would only result in more blue fuzzies for the author, but no increase in the real value of the work to them or others.

Open Ed: A Juvenile Delinquent and Public Domain

2007-10-03T19:00:00.000-07:00

I am not sure off hand what percentage of the value of the public domain is realized with a creative commons or GFDL license, but I think that it is less than half with even the most liberal creative commons license, the attribution one. Creative commons has many levels of usage requiring the re-user to tell who the original author was, restricting the user from making money by using a work, requiring the user to re-share what they have made and even restricting the user to change the original work in any way.

It is clear that if the non-commercial creative commons license is applied, the re-user cannot even sell a derivative work. The value of that potential sale would have to be factored into the percentage value of creative commons vs. public domain. But just the simple fact that a re-user must attribute a work to the original author is enough to stop many from using the work. The derivative work may need to be formatted in such a way that does not allow attribution for aesthetic reasons. Placing works in the public domain does not preclude a re-user from doing anything she wants with the original work.

Take a look at this video in which I combined 2 videos in the public domain with the soundtrack from a public domain song and my own voice to teach about setting up a blog for use in a classroom (some of you may have seen my other video Rick Noblenski at OpenEd 2007, this is the other one about blogs).

Our project group cited the sources from our videos at www.wikiblogedu.org out of courtesy but in this case they are all in the public domain so I don't have to worry about attribution etc. One of the original videos teaches about vandalism and encourages youth not to vandalize. The other video is of a career counselor who meets with a student who no longer wants to sell shoes for a living. The student has dreams of being an architect but the counselor effectively shoots down those dreams and helps the student to be happy amounting to less in life and continue to sell shoes. If a no derivative works license was put on any of the elements of this video, then the video would not have been possible to make (perish the thought!).

OERs are different though. I don't believe that their value is less than half of the public domain because most of them have instructional value and are somewhat polished. Putting them in the public domain may not result in a significant increase in value except in the areas mentioned above.

I find it interesting that a mathematical calculation can tell us the optimal time to allow a monopoly on created intellectual property. Especially since the calculated times given are much shorter than those currently in place in the United States. I feel like our copyright laws have gotten far out of hand. Especially when you hear of people saying that copyright should be “forever minus a day.” Ridiculous.

OpenEd: Comparison of Open CourseWare

2007-09-27T18:32:00.000-07:00

All of the featured Open CourseWare items contain open educational resources and all of them have the general aim of sharing content to a wide audience. The things that I think matters that differ between them are the more specific intended audience, whether the courses are offered with actual credit, the quality of the courses, and the modularity of the content.

Open University (UK) Open Content Initiative

Open University contains courses that range in many different subject areas including language, technology and philosophy. The courses are college level and each course ranges in time from 5 hours to 40 hours or more. The Open University Open Content Initiative can lead to actual college credit hours and offers media that is mainly text and graphics. The audience is limited to college level students.

Rice Connexions

Rice offers many college level courses but is not restricted to these. Connexions sees its users as re-sharers of courses and as collaborators on the effectiveness of the same. This is evidenced by the fact that they allow users to comment on content and share their own if they want. Most of the content is text and picture based. Connexions does not organize its content into linear lessons but tries to provide content piece by piece. This modularity seems to add to the idea of allowing easy remix of content but makes Connexions difficult to navigate in my opinion.

Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative

Carnegie Mellon offers a much smaller number of courses but increases the instructional quality of their courses. They take user data and use it for formative evaluation processes. The courses on Carnegie Mellon can be taken for college credit or not. The audience is college level but can also extend to other life-long learners. the courses feature instructional tools such as cognitive tutors, virtual laboratories, group experiments and simulations.

UNESCO Open Training Platform

UNESCO caters to a more worldwide audience featuring instructional materials that are not from college classes, but are more focused on social and economic issues. The resources often had a third-world use and were more localized than the other open education projects. UNESCO's site includes many different ways of exporting content, and a variety of media formats.

MIT OCW

MIT was the largest of the open education projects with over 3000 courses. The courses are meant for the specific audience of college level students. MIT OCW is made up of content that is mostly in a non-remixable format, pdf, but there are also some text classes and videos. The courses are very linear and they allow for downloading of an entire course.

National Repository of Online Courses

The National Repository of Online Courses offers a limited number of college and high school level open courses. They evaluate the quality of their courses using user evaluations, and other important tools. The media that they use is generally more sophisticated than the other sites. It involves pictures text and audio in a type of slideshow presentation on each topic. This makes and enjoyable experience for the learner, but does not readily allow for remix of the media.

Quality

I am not sure what quality means to those who work on the open education projects listed above. There are many ways to think of quality in Open CourseWare. For some, quality probably means accessibility. Quality could mean accuracy or remixability of content. Quality could mean a high amount of content. Quality could mean giving the users the ability to comment on content to help make it better. I prefer the methods that the Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative and the National Repository of Online Courses use to evaluate the quality of their content. Both of these projects report that they gain feedback from the user to improve their courses. The Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative also takes user performance data to determine where instruction is lacking and where they can add remediation. Instructional effectiveness should be considered as a quality measurement too.

Open Ed Week 4: On constructivism and knowledge and...

2007-09-18T16:01:00.000-07:00

The three readings from the past weeks have all been somewhat of an overview of the Open Education Movement (see posts below for synopses and reactions). The text, Giving Knowledge for Free, Talks mainly about the movement, reasons behind it and the models that it embodies. This text gives little suggestion for the direction that the OER movement needs to take in the next few years, rather, it tells about the movement based on survey information. Interesting notes about this article can be seen in previous posts under Open educational resources and the decentralized development model. It is interesting that most who share educational resources rarely do it for personal benefit or money. As Karen wrote in her blog, wikinomics explains how open resources and capitalism are not mutually exclusive, “And once you start thinking about changing the world, who cares how much money you make?” Great point Karen. It seems like those who share OERs already do well financially anyway. But this is a loaded comment, because open educational resources are out there to help the disadvantaged (financially and otherwise), yet in order to localize it purveyors of OER will have to rely on those same people who do not have money or time.

An interesting note about using the word knowledge (as in this text's title) to describe open educational resources or open content is made by David Wiley on his blog. I couldn't agree more with him, free knowledge can never be provided on the internet. Last year at OpenEd 2006, Dr. Paul Kirschner said something about how learning does not happen online or at a university, it happens in the mind of the learner. It takes a knower to have knowledge, and until the knower interacts with the content, it cannot become knowledge. what is on the web will always remain content.

A random video:

The OLCOS road map also provides a survey of the OER movement but talks more in depth about the end user/remixer/re-sharer. This person is often viewed as a mere user (see below under learning with media, not from). Of all of the three readings, this one resonated better with me because it talks about how the open education resources movement will have to provide support for users of OERs to help them appropriately use OERs in the classroom etc. and reshare them for continuing spread of OERs. This is where I believe the field of open educational resources converges with instructional technology. Practitioners need to be supported in using open educational resources in appropriate ways to effectively instruct (see below under learning with media, not from).

This text also talks a lot about constructivist virtues such as end users remixing and re-sharing resources. A post by Rob Barton, on a relevant blog entry not associated with this class talks about a constructivist learning environment, the results of which indicate that, "the effectiveness of the constructivist environment relies heavily on the learner's task management and decision-making processes." Rob mentions that this is a loaded conclusion. I believe that students in the information age need to have quality task management and decision-making processes that they use. Rob continues, “so do constructivist learning environments fail because of inherent problems in the process or because we have trained students (and been trained ourselves) that the teacher's job is to stand in front of a classroom expounding and exhorting while the student's role is to sit there and bask in our glory, soaking up the knowledge that we spew forth? ” I think that this is hitting the nail on the head. The OLCOS roadmap talks a lot about supporting learners to be able to analyze the quality of information, use self-directed learning skills, practice task management, and make good decisions etc. to become lifelong learners. Students will increasingly need these skills as they get into a knowledge based economy. The old model of “sage on the stage” will not achieve these results. But a paradigm shift will need to take place in our education system.

The OLCOS report clearly advocates such a paradigm shift and is quite ambitious. Sylvia put it very well when she said, “I liked the fact that OLCOS looked beyond the provision of OERs and LOs and recognized many of the inherent barriers in our current educational systems. I just have some serious doubts that there is any possibility of achieve their goals by 2012!” Yet this paradigm shift will have to happen if the potential of OERs is going to be achieved. Otherwise it could just become the next in a series of failed innovations in education.

In A Review of the Open Educational Resources Movement, The authors talk specifically to the hewlett foundation and give recommendations to the foundation about where to put their money in the future. This text overviews prominent projects dealing with open educational resources and then talks about future technologies that will allow for the spread of open educational resources. What is noticeably left out in this text is any mention of instructional effectiveness. The authors are focused mainly on technologies that are used to share OERs. The author mentions that content + context is king. I don't agree. I think that content + context is great, but content + context + effective instruction is king. Sometimes advocates of OERs miss the point. The point is to help more people get more education, not more content or more access to the internet or digital resources. These are only the means to the end.

Open Ed: Learning with media, not from

2007-09-12T16:52:00.000-07:00

I have recently finished reading the OLCOS road map. One important point in the OLCOS report is that models and guidelines for proper use of Open Educational Resources need to be provided if OER initiatives are to grow based on user input. This, I believe, is where instructional design fits into the big picture of open educational resources. Instructional designers can provide guidelines and models on the effective use of open educational resources for learning. The OLCOS report also states that too often, producers of open educational resources look at consumers as merely users of the content. They do not see them as collaborators on the usefulness and effectiveness of resources, or as colleagues who re-share resources that they have remixed. Consumers of resources should also re-share resources when they have used or remixed them. Clearly to do all these things, the users and re-sharers of resources will need support.

The OLCOS report also makes the point that open educational resources will be better used in situations that foster learner-centered approaches to instruction rather than teacher-centered ones. This represents a change in practice for most educational institutions. There are different ways to use media in education. Students can learn from media in a passive role. Verbs that fit this approach are watching, viewing and reading. Students can also learn with media in an active role. Verbs that fit this approach are watching, viewing, reading and then downloading, collecting, changing, and sharing. I certainly believe more in the latter. Giving students the opportunity to learn with media will better prepare them for the knowledge economy.

My favorite quote from the report is from David Weinberger, he talks about the virtues of collaborative software such as wikipedia, “We hope they’re learning that they can’t be passive recipients of knowledge. But they’re also learning that authority doesn’t come only through chains of credentials; that we can get on the same page about what we know; that knowing involves being willing to back away from your beliefs at times; that knowledge is a social product, or at least heavily socially contextualized; that the willingness to admit fallibility is a greater indicator of truth than speaking in a confident tone of voice; that knowledge lives in conversation, not in the heads of experts; that certain people who do not need to be named are just impossible.” (Weinberger 2006)

Open educational resources serve as a way to promote lifelong learning and help others build on knowledge that is already there instead of “reinventing the wheel.” I like this point of view with regard to open education because there is more knowledge in our day than there ever has been. We have the opportunity to learn from it only if it is accessible to us. If it is not accessible, does it really exist? This is going back to the old saying that if a tree falls in the middle forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? So much of what people do in academics is not widely spread at all. Professors make a break through discovery and then publish the results in a magazine. The published article is read by a few of the professors colleagues who actually subscribe to the high priced magazine. The publisher retains rights to the article so that it cannot be shared further. No change happens from the published breakthrough beyond the professor and a few of his colleagues.

Open Ed: Open educational resources and the decentralized development model

2007-09-07T13:33:00.000-07:00

Much of the discussion in week 1 was about the right to education and whether governments should mandate education and compel people to attend. I spoke of the right to not go to school and Dr. Wiley gave a good answer to that point “...but how should a government respond if an overwhelming majority of its school-aged children choose to refuse? What would be the future consequence of such widespread illiteracy and innumeracy? Would the government have an obligation to step in and “do what’s best” for the future of the people and the country?” The answer to this question for me is YES. The government should step in and begin to mandate education for its citizens in the interest of the advancement of that society. The problems that would arise from not doing so would far outweigh the issues of personal freedom that would result from compelling people to go to school. What a government does in such times of crisis is and should be different from what it does in times of normalcy. For times when a society is desiring to go to school as a majority and a small minority does not want to go to school, it may be appropriate to make a joint decision on the local and national level whether to compel this minority to attend and bypass their personal freedom to not get an education. I have to admit that I do not know the answer to this dilemma.

So if a government has interest in educating its citizens for the advancement of society, then the government should certainly provide a quality education to its citizens (and I believe that this should be free if it is mandatory) and perhaps more. So what more can a government give to its citizens to support self-directed learners who are no longer compelled to go to school? How can a government increase the availability of information? How can a government support the need for its teachers to continually learn and update skills? Pedro has a great thought “By having access to the knowledge -whatever it be- is a way to educate yourself. But most of times, it is not enough. The knowledge needs to be organized in some other way than an alphabetic sort. "Open education" (in the sense thar is organized knowledge) can be useful to achieve the goal to satisfy the right to education for some people, like adults looking for knowledge in a life-long-learning situation.” I agree that this is where open educational resources come in. These are a great way to continue to spread knowledge to those who want it.

Hylen gives a great overview of open educational resources in Giving Knowledge for Free. I spoke to him at the OpenEd 2006 conference after he presented many similar facts there. I find it interesting that the survey results say that the most compelling reasons for producing and disseminating open educational resources are to have someone else review your material for quality, and be acknowledged as the creator. Most people are not asking for much when the produce open educational resources, the factors that deal with financial recompense are the lowest in the scale. To me this means that people who produce OERs care about the cause and want education to spread along with their own personal notoriety.

Another point of note is the fact that open educational resources tend to help out the instutions that produce them. Hylen mentions that these resources and the institutions that produce them are subject to “rapid quality improvement and faster technical and scientific development.” This decentralized development “increases quality, stability and security; and free sharing of software, scientific results and educational resources reinforces societal development and diminishes social inequality. From a more individual standpoint, open sharing is claimed to increase publicity, reputation and the pleasure of sharing with peers.” These are very good results that come from the production of OERs.

This idea of decentralized development has been an interesting shift in United States business models over the past few years. Proctor and Gamble, for instance, has reduced its internal research and development efforts and instead relied upon outside customer and expert feedback to improve its current products and create new ones. National Public Radio has followed a similar pattern in the development of its radio programs. This model is nothing new, it has been followed very extensively in open source software, the quality of which is undeniable.

My hope is that the education sector can catch on to this model by allowing for decentralized development of quality educational materials, decreasing the amount of time it takes for professors themselves to improve and revise materials.

OpenEd Week 1: The right to education

2007-08-31T08:22:00.000-07:00

First of all, I believe that education is a right to a certain age. I agree with Tomasevski when she says that it should be mandated to the age that students can begin working. I also believe governments should mandate education to a certain extent to that age, but I think I disagree with her on who should mandate and what education should be. Also, I hope that governments would not choose to foolishly mandate education universally even though parents and children may not want to go. Governments should educate these people about the importance of education and persuade them to go, but ultimately, people would be allowed to choose for themselves.

When talking about education for all, we must first talk about what education should be and what it should not be. Mandating an education that is not beneficial for its students is naïve and harmful. Tomasevski talks about differing schools around the world that use prejudice and hatred as part of their curriculum. Clearly it would be putting the cart before the horse to mandate that students attend these schools.

We need to first examine and improve what schools are teaching before we begin to call it a right to go to them. But what about the schools that are teaching good things to students already? I submit that any school curriculum can be improved to help students become better prepared to take productive roles in society. This, I believe is where instructional technology really matches Open Education. If instructional technologists are going to be of any use, they will be improving instruction, not providing information. Anyone with any computer expertise from any field could help someone provide Open Educational resources or content, but only a skilled instructional designer could make use of those resources in a meaningful and effective manner, or help others do so. Instructional designers are not and should not be merely content providers.

According to Tomasevski, Technical schooling is often seen as useless, yet didactic learning is mind-numbing to students. This, I believe, is also an important area for instructional technologists. I highly doubt that technical schooling is universally seen as useless, especially when it can lead to jobs and help people to become competent. In places where it is seen as useless, let's improve it. Where there is didactic learning that is mind numbing, let's adjust what is taught and improve students outlook. Obviously there needs to be improvement in economies and a change of attitudes toward education. Especially in cases where people just expect school to lead to an office job without fail. Spreading education should be a government and tax based initiative involving many different academic disciplines, but improving it should be done with help from the instructional technology and education disciplines.

Education is not always a good thing. We often talk about this in instructional technology settings, when you can teach anything very effectively, what kinds of things should you teach? Tomasevski seems to like the idea of universally mandating a human rights curriculum that would be a part of each school's teaching. This is probably a good idea, but where will it end? For instance, Tomasevski and others may read studies that indicate that it is very healthy or useful to society to be a Muslim. It could then be mandated that fundamentals of Islam be taught in all schools while other religions of the world should not be taught. This may work very well in Iraq, but it would not fly in Israel.

I propose a balance between locally and universally mandated curriculum. I believe that those who are local will be more in touch with what skills, knowledge and attitudes students should have to make them more successful. Those who are on the global scale will only know about human rights issues on that scale. Their portion of this mandated curriculum should be very small. But there should be some checks between the local and global, meaning, the human rights advocates should be able to check curriculum items proposed by local governments for any violations of human rights.

If we can get education to the point where it is high-quality, then I believe we can ethically mandate it to a certain degree as long as it is also free. But this is another difficult issue. Most governments do not allocate or prioritize enough money for education. I believe that governments should pay for all mandated education in its entirety. They should also pay a fair salary to teachers.

Another issue is the right to education balanced with the right to refuse it. Tomasevski talks about sheepherding in Lesotho and how the governments denies the individuals the right to be educated after they are finished with their duties. Often these herders do not have enough food. But it is still naïve to project feelings onto these herders. They may enjoy immensely the opportunity to herd and hate the idea of being stuck inside all day. The tribes in Bolivia may contain members who would not want to go to school even if there were no prejudice against them. Is their right to education more important than their personal right to refuse it? I don't think so. if we go too far saying that we know what is best for someone else, where will it end? We may take away fundamental personal freedoms like freedom of speech because a study said that it leads to a better economy, or more educated people.

Governments have a need to educate their people. People who are educated make better moral and economic choices and the governments have interests in these things. Therefore governments should do all that is in their power to persuade citizens to go to school and educate them on the importance of doing so. But I think that there are some cases when it is not right to force someone to go to school.

Tomasevski indicates that one obstacle to the right to education is parents viewing their children as their own property rather that beings with rights to education. While I don't believe keeping children from school is equivalent to viewing them as property, I do believe that this is a problem in many parts of the world. I hope that the efforts to spread education continue but I also hope these are balanced with the rights of individuals to make choices.

Welcome

2007-08-29T14:06:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my Blog! I am looking forward to learning more about Open Education.