ClintLalonde.net

Google Docs adds search to documents

2012-05-17T18:47:56Z

I opened up a new Google Doc this morning and was greeted with a new Google Docs feature called Research.

Use this research tool to learn more information about the topics in your document.

Well now, this looks interesting. And potentially very useful.

At first, I thought that Google had come up with a method of extracting information from your document and using it to return relevant search results, perhaps using some kind of semantic search. Turns out, it isn’t quite that sophisticated (yet?).

But, it still looks like a useful feature as it adds search capabilities right there in the document you are working on, and makes it quite easy to add that web content directly to the document you are working on.

The search interface is a basic Google web search, with a drop down option to search for images or search for quotes. It will also return a Google map that you can embed when you do a location search.

One of the nice features of the search is that it adds an image license filter so you can filter search results based on usage. The options are limited (it looks like the only CC license they use allows for commercial reuse, which really will restrict the results and may be overly restrictive compared to the types of results you would get with a non-commercial use license), but it is still a nice feature that can probably easily be expanded to include the other types of CC licenses.

As I hinted at earlier when I mentioned what I hoped the search would be, you can get a sense as to where this can go, with semantic suggestions popping up based on the content you are entering into the document. Start working on a document that mentions something like the B.C. Education Plan (as I happened to be doing), and resources related to that would auto-magically appear in the search results area, perhaps using my network connections as part of the filter parameters. Which will then turn this feature into a very powerful research tool.

Pedagogy drives technology drives pedagogy

2012-05-15T19:10:28Z

We are in the process of switching to Moodle 2.1 from Moodle 1.9. We’ve been planning this switch for a year but, like many tech projects, it doesn’t matter how much planning and testing you do, the real test happens when users start rolling in.

We’re at that point right now. People are starting to use the system. The most painful point. The transition.

I won’t get into details about the inner workings of Moodle, but those who know the 2.x version compared to the 1.9 version know that there has been a major overhaul of how the file system works. Gone is the file storage area – the place where people dumped all their course files. Instead we have a new file repository system.

From the reading I have done and the people I have talked to, this change has been one of the most contentious changes in Moodle, and we are struggling with how to support it as it means a big shift in how people organize their stuff. It forces people to make a conceptual shift in that their content is now somewhat disaggregated from their course. Dispersed, distributed and decentralized. Not contained within neat little folders. Not easily accessible in a single place. Living….somewhere?

It is forcing people to think about their content in a different way, and it is changing their workflow at the most basic level.

How do I organize my stuff?

How do I delete my stuff?

Where is my stuff? WHERE IS MY STUFF?

It makes sense to me why Moodle is moving to the new repository system, but I can see the technical reasons. That (usually) doesn’t fly with users, and the new system is stressing people out.

One thing I never considered until I read Mark Dreschler’s post, however, is that the pedagogical framework of social constructivism that underpins Moodle means having a powerful file management system could be a rather low priority for Moodle developers because social constructivism moves the focus of a learning experience away from content as the cornerstone and refocuses the experience on the construction of knowledge among participants.

I never really thought about this until Martin’s discussion with the group yesterday, but, and I’ll say it loud and clear now – Moodle is not meant to be a file repository. When I look back at Martin’s original pedagogical drivers of social constructionism then it makes perfect sense that storing files should be low on the list of priorities. Learning in a social constructionist world isn’t about downloading and reading files, its about collaboratively constructing them with others – a critical distinction.

Learning in a social constructionist world isn’t about downloading and reading files, its about collaboratively constructing them with others

In this specific case, the pedagogical model drives the technological development.

Now, that is all wonderful IF you use it in a homogenous environment where all users are on board and working from the same pedagogical model. Great. However, stray from that model and you find yourself working against the technology; fighting, wrestling and wringing it into submission to do what you want to do with it. Or, you are forced to alter your own pedagogical model to make it fit with the technology.

In this case, it’s hard to argue that the instructivist “here are my notes and PowerPoint slides” model is superior to the social constructivism Moodle model, but still; it’s a pedagogical choice being enforced on a user by technology. People don’t like that. They fight back and get defensive when a machine forces them to do something they don’t want to do. It’s technology driving pedagogy.

And this is the inherent problem (feature?) of ANY LMS. It is not neutral. It WILL impose its way on you.

In the case of Moodle, the pedagogy is explicit. Indeed, I think this is one of the reasons why Moodle is a popular choice – it is built around an explicit pedagogy, which appeals to many educators. The foundation is educational, not technological. But, just because it is explicit (and, let’s face it, a pretty good model) doesn’t mean the pain of fitting into that model is any less.

Right now, I am not sure how we are going to deal with the Moodle file issue. Secretly, deep down, part of me smiles just a little to think that the system is actually making it more difficult to stuff a course full of Word and PDF documents; that using the LMS as a content repository is just a little bit tougher to do. But that fades quickly when I realize that this is causing stress and friction for the people I support.

It is also difficult to use moments like this as leverage into a conversation about whether uploading a whack of files into an LMS is the best way to encourage learning when faculty have students breathing down their neck for the latest PowerPoint presentation. But we’ll try. And it won’t be the last time we make choices on how we do things in order to fit the pedagogy imposed on us by our technology.

As Neil Postman says in Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology:

Every technology is both a burden and a blessing; not either-or, but this-and-that.

This is the moment I am living right now.

New like e-textbook new?

2012-03-28T13:07:43Z

I started writing a comment on George’s spot post Connected Learning: What have they done with Alec, Will, Vicki?, prompted by the announcement coming out of the DML conference in San Francisco of a “new” learning model called connected learning. I quickly realized that what I wanted to say was not a comment, but a blog post.

It’s a post that is also a reaction to a tweet that Alec Couros made about the same connected learning initiative over the weekend:

“Researchers Introduce New Model of Learning. Connected Learning” bit.ly/AkzrEN Wow. How’d they come up with something so original?

—Alec Couros (@courosa) March 3, 2012

I get Alec’s point. Reading about the initiative did feel more than just a bit familiar. Is this really “new” as the press has been spinning it?

Well, it’s probably new like e-textbooks became “new and revolutionary” once Apple decided to get involved. Get a juggernaut like the MacArthur Foundation on board with an initiative and it is bound to cause a splash.

I also take George’s point that it is important to acknowledge the people who have been pushing this model of learning for may years. But I actually take the connected learning initiative as an acknowledgment of their hard work, and the hard work of many people over the years. It is the continuing evolution of many conversations that have been pulsing around the edges of numerous communities for quite a while now.

It has me wondering if we aren’t hitting some kid of tipping point in the whole networked/connected/distributed learning world? That there are more conversations going on about it in many diverse communities? In short, is “connected learning” (or whatever you choose to call it) going mainstream?

One of my staff said to me recently “edtech is the new vertical”. Once the public educator in me suppressed my urge to throw up at the VC speak, I found myself agreeing. It seems that the edtech space is “in play”. Money is being invested. Startups are being funded. Things seem to be happening.

Not that I want to lump connected learning with the edtech startup space. Rather, my point being that there is a lot of conversation happening in many diverse communities about this topic, so it seems inevitable that a high profile initiative like connected learning seemingly pops up out of nowhere. It’s in the air.

But I look at the names of the people floating around the initiative and I wonder – did this really just pop-up? I mean, it is coming out of the MacArthur Foundation, an organization that has more than a casual relationship with learning & technology.

I see names like Mimi Ito and Howard Rheingold associated with this initiative. Hardly newcomers, or people who have popped up out of nowhere. John Seely Brown gave the keynote at the conference and, judging from the casual banter, obviously knows Mimi Ito and her work. Howard Jenkins seems to be a fan. These are people who’s work I deeply respect and admire, and who have been either directly in the edtech space or working very close to the edges of the space for a long time. I see their names floating around a project and I pay attention.

Ultimately, I think the connected learning initiative is a good thing. A very good thing, actually. A research initiative that focuses on the type of learning I think is important – networked, collaborative, digital. A pedagogy of the internet, which is what I think open learning/open pedagogy, connected learning, distributed learning, networked learning <insert phrase of your choice> is all about. It what drew me – and continues to draw me – to the work of people like Alec, George, Stephen Downes, Dave Cormie (and others) just as it draws me to the work of the people who I see associated with the connected learning initiative.

New? No. Which I actually think the connected learning initiative acknowledges when they state that (emphasis mine) “Connected learning is a work in progress, building on existing models, ongoing experimentation, and dialog with diverse stakeholders.”

As Alec noted in a tweet later in the day, that last point is crucial. A “dialog with diverse stakeholders” :

@clintlalonde Agreed. Or Siemens. Or Bandura. Not trying to take credit here, but demonstrate that this is a much longer convo. @_valeriei

—Alec Couros (@courosa) March 3, 2012

The conversation is longer. Much longer. But it is happening. And in a lot of different spaces. I saw many people in my PLN at the DML conference, getting excited about what they were seeing. Talking about it. Practicing connected/network/distributed/open learning. Which is, ultimatley, what we all want to see happen.

So, let the conversation ~~begin~~ continue.

Publishing my thesis with WordPress and Digress.it – Part 2

2012-03-05T07:18:42Z

I’m working on publishing my thesis on this site using WordPress and the Digress.it plugin. This is part 2. You can read about how I configured WordPress to run a second blog on a sub-domain and set up Digress.it in part 1.

From Word to WordPress

This is a big challenge. If I want to take advantage of all the features of Digress.it (like the auto-created table of contents), and create a nicely formatted site, then I need to publish the 130+ page thesis into post size chunks.

The brute force way is to begin cutting and pasting, but I want to see if I can be a bit more elegant than that.

I remember experimenting a few years back with publishing from Word to WordPress using XML-RPC, so thought I would test this option out. A few setting adjustments in both WordPress and Word to enable XML-RPC publishing and a successful test post has me thinking I am on the right track.

Splitting a 130 page Word document

Still, while this looks promising, I can’t just hit the publish button in Word and magically expect my 130+ page thesis to automagically be sliced up and posted into separate posts. In fact, publishing the thesis this way will end up creating a single blog post of 40,000 words. Not ideal. So, I need to figure out how to split my single long Word document into smaller documents, and then try to publish each of those smaller documents as individual posts.

Surely, there must be a way in Word to split a long document into smaller ones. And sure enough, there is via a Word feature known as sub-documents, which allows a user to split a large document into smaller pieces.

Using the headings and sub-headings of my thesis as the logical starting point for dividing up the content, I split the original Word document into 56 documents based on chapters, headings and sub-headings.

I did have a few formatted tables and images in my thesis and was worried about how they would publish to the site directly from Word. There was some formatting that I need to do to clean up the formatting, but, for the most part, they came over clean and intact, complete captions and legends.

I was also a bit worried about how the participant quotes would translate. Being that this was qualitative research, the analysis draws heavily on participant quotes to support the findings and these quotes needed to be correctly formatted using the correct blockquote tags.

In fact, the only real issue I had (and it was quite minor) was that the posts had extra paragraphs tags at the beginning and the end of the posts, so that needed a bit of editing.

Next steps

So, now that the content is in, I could just stop and call it a self-published thesis. But I want to be able to do a bit more with it. My next tasks will include:

See if there is a way I can structure the TOC a bit better to have headings and subheadings formatted different from chapter headings. Rught now it’s a pretty long list with no visual hierarchy.
Setting up a way for people to download the entire thesis as an ebook, probably using the Anthologize plugin.
Add in a plugin or two to generate metadata, specifically for adding content to a citation manager like Zotero or Mendeley. Perhaps the COinS plugin
Look at ways to generate hyperlinks within the document to my references and citations. Something like the KCite or Zotpress plugin.

I’d also like to take a crack at some of the CSS and clean up some of the CSS around how tables and data are displayed. But these are all projects for another day.

Publishing my thesis with WordPress and Digress.it – Part 1

2012-03-03T16:47:01Z

This is part 1 of a many part process & is just the beginning of this little project. There will be more posts in the coming days as I get my thesis site launched. If you go there, you will see a work in progress at the moment.

A sick day at home with a kid gave me the opportunity to start tackling a project I’ve had on my plate for a few months now: publishing my completed thesis using WordPress and Digress.it.

One of the things I promised myself when I decided to do a thesis was that I would post a copy of it in this space in a format that would allow people to comment on it.

I think posting it in an open public space is important for a couple of reasons. For one, I think that, even though it is only a Masters thesis, it still represents academic research, and I strongly believe that any academic research should be as open and accessible as possible. And not just to other academics.

The second reason is that I want it critiqued by a wider audience of my peers. I want it to be a starting point for conversation. What worked in the thesis, what didn’t, what rings true to others using Twitter in a PLN, which parts are valuable & what parts are fuzzy or just wonky?

Finally, I haven’t had a good hands on WordPress project for awhile now so it feels good to dig into WP again after being in the Drupal/Moodle world for the past year.

The tools I’ll be using

I’m taking my inspiration here from the NMC and the Horizon Report and how they have published that report for the past few years. I’m also inspired by Joss Winn, who published his dissertation this way a few years ago.

You’re no doubt familiar with WordPress, the blog-cum-CMS platform that this site runs on. But you may not be as familiar with Digress.it. a WordPress plugin created by the Institute for the Future of the Book.

What draws me to Digress.it are two features; the ability to link directly to specific portions of a large document, and the ability to allow paragraph by paragraph commenting. Both of these are important when posting something as large as a 40,000 word thesis.

I don’t expect many will read the entire paper, but sections may be of more interest to some than others so I want to section the thesis as much as possible. And, if someone does read it, I want them to be able to comment on something when the comment pops into their head and not have to slog thru an entire section of 2, 3 or 4 thousand words before getting a comment box.

So, technically, here is what I am doing.

Create a multi-site WordPress instance

I want my thesis to live on my domain, clintlalonde.net. Since I already have a WordPress blog running here, I needed to figure out a way to add a second instance of WordPress that I could use Digress.it with.

If this was a few years ago, I probably would have installed a whole separate instance of WordPress. However, since WordPress 3, you now have the ability to run multiple WordPress sites on a single WordPress install. Each site is independent of the other, with it’s own set of plug-ins and themes. So, after doing a bit of reading on how to set up multisites on an established blog, I fired up a multi-site instance of WordPress on my domain clintlalonde.net.

Two Small Issues

The multi-site setup was fairly straightforward. I only had two small issues.

Permalink structure changed

The first was that the permalink structure on my original clintlalonde.net blog got changed when I flipped the switch to make my WordPress site a multi-site instance. The switch added the word /blog/ to the URI’s on my site. This means that links on my site that used to look like this:

http://clintlalonde.net/2012/02/10/frog-in-a-pot/

were changed to this

http://clintlalonde.net/blog/2012/02/10/frog-in-a-pot/

Which broke all the internal links on my blog. So, when you clicked on the title of a blog post from my home page, you ended up with a 404 page not found error. Not good.

After a bit of digging on the WP forums, I found an easy fix to the problem, and was able to safely change the permalink structure to remove the word /blog/ from the link structure and set up the permalink structure to match what it was before. Once I did that, the /blog/ was gone from the URI and my internal links were repaired and working again.

Configuring cPanel

The second issue was that I couldn’t actually create a new sites. Whenever I tried to create a site in the WordPress admin panel, it looked like the site was created. But when I clicked the link to go to the admin panel or to the new site I got a “server not found” error. Technically, this told me that the sub-domain wasn’t being set up properly.

Off to trusty Google to try to find a solution, and it didn’t fail me. Once I had cPanel configured correctly and my directory structure set up (although I am not really sure why I need to have a folder called blogs.dir in my wp-content folder but, whatever, it worked) I was on my way.

I created a new site and sub-domain at thesis.clintlalonde.net.

Install Digress.it

After getting the site and sub-domain set up, I then downloaded and installed Digress.it. Before I could add Digress.it to the new thesis.clintlalonde.net site, I had to add the plug-in at the admin level of my newly created WordPress network. Once that was done, I went into the admin panel of the thesis site and activated the plug-in.

When I took a look at Digress.it out of the box, I saw that it needed some tweaking. There were unnecessary WordPress widgets in the lower part of the home page, and I wanted to get rid of the default text, posts and comments and get some more useful data posted to begin to see what the site would look like when I began posting my thesis content to it.

First, to replace the text on the homepage. Digress.it uses the contents from a WordPress page titled “About” to populate the homepage of the site. So, I created an “About” page and added some info about what the site was about along with the abstract of my thesis.

After that, I got rid of the default widgets that appeared in the area below the textbox.

I’ve noticed that the admin toolbar that runs across the top of the page is badly formatted and might need some tweaking. But since I am the only person who will see that, it’s not critical right now since I am the only person who will see it. So, this will do for now.

Before I wrap up my first days work, I install the Akismet comment filter to begin filtering out comment spam. I’ve found with WordPress sites, it pays to fire up Akismet sooner rather than later as the spam starts rolling in pretty quickly.

With WordPress multi-site up and running and Digress.it installed, the challenge now becomes one of getting the content from Word into WordPress in a more elegant way than cutting and pasting. That’s the next challenge, and the next blog post.

Instructions for a Bad Day

2012-03-01T19:23:29Z

Yesterday was Pink Shirt Day in Canada. A day to stand up to bullying. It also marked the release of this video, created by students at G.P. Vanier school in Courntay, BC.

It is a touching video about hope, featuring a composition created to mark the day by poet Shane Koyczan (he of We Are More fame from the opening ceremonies of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics).

What a wonderful, inspiring project, which will (thanks to YouTube) be seen by thousands of people around the world. And, perhaps, one person who just might need to hear this message at the most pivotal moment of their life.

Here is Shane talking about how the project came about.

So long and thanks for all the global beats Village 900

2012-02-17T21:45:00Z

This is a long post. The kind of post that I write more for myself because it is fairly personal and not something that is directly related to what I usually write about here. Or maybe it is. If you decide to slog through my memories and recollections, you can decide.

I heard a few days ago that Village 900 radio at Camosun College is going off the air on March 4th.

Village 900 is/was licensed as an instructional radio station, one of a handful of stations across Canada that had this instructional designation. Meaning it’s primary purpose was to train broadcasters. It was experiential education at is finest, and, for the past 20 years, students in the Applied Communication Program at Camosun have been using the station as a launching pad for media and communication careers.

But, as we all know, times are a-changing for traditional media, and for the educators who teach in that field. I won’t get into the details of why the station is going off the air. Suffice to say, this day has been inevitable.

Why do I care?

I have wonderful memories of managing that station from 1995 (when it was then CKMO radio, a small 50 watt FM radio station) to 2001. During that time, I had the opportunity to work with so many people who, if you live in Victoria and pay attention to any media outlet in the city – mainstream, public or alternative – are probably part of your everyday life. I turn on almost any radio station in town, open a newspaper, scan a local website, hear a soundbite delivered by a spokesperson of the government/non-profit/corporation/event, hear an announcement on a ferry, voiceover in a tourist attraction and I see and hear the voices of the graduates of the Applied Communication Program. So, my first memory is of the students and faculty I have worked with over the years associated with both the station and ACP.

I was there for the birth of Village 900. Early on, the idea of Village 900 was unique. Moving away from the traditional block formatting you usually find on alternative or campus radio stations, we focused on ways in which we could continually provide an aural reflection of the cultural diversity in our community. We created a melting pot of sound, blending world, worldbeat, traditional folk and roots music continuously throughout the day. One minute you might hear the Algerian club rai of Cheb Mami, the next the lipstick, lies and gasoline of Fred Eaglesmith. We dubbed the music format Global Roots, and tagged the station with the identity of Village 900 – A World of Music, A Community of Ideas.

We imported programming from around the world, airing shows from Radio Netherlands, the BBC, Channel Africa, the United Nations. We took this idea of global culture seriously, and tried hard to reflect it on the air by making connections with public broadcasters from around the world to air their programming . This was really early days of the Internet when this stuff wasn’t available with a click like it is now. Radio programs arrived weekly in the mail on cassettes, reel to reel tape, and CD’s. If we were lucky, we might get a satellite feed.

There was also a real commitment to local artists from Victoria, the Gulf Islands and Vancouver. Chances are, if you were a world or folk/roots act based in Victoria, you passed through the doors of Village 900, often with guitar in hand, pulling up a mic and tossing out a few tunes live on the air.

Village 900 and its predecessor CKMO are intensely personal for me in a couple of ways.

First, as part of the development team, it was a station that embodied and reflected my own deeply held beliefs in the power of universality, multiculturalism, education and culture.

It also introduced to me the entire world of alternative media through the works of people like Noam Chomsky and Neil Postman. By virtue of being a “campus” radio station, I had the opportunity to see both radio and the media in a whole different way than when I worked at a commercial radio station. In fact, it validated for me that community radio is what radio is supposed to be, and that commercial radio (and, by extension television as well) is, for the most part, a tragic waste of a publicly owned bandwidth.

I used to be passionate about that (and God love ya VIU for keeping this students writing from 1997 alive and available on the web 15 years after the fact. It’s a credit to you and your IT people that you have not trashed this stuff and sent me scrambling to the Internet Archives to dig it up). But today, in a world where anyone can be the media, I don’t care that much any more. The media has been democratized, and there are other, more important battles these days.

Village 900 was also a low risk experiment which afforded me the opportunity to play; to try things unencumbered by a ton of constraints. Sure, I had some parameters, but for the most part as long as the station met the mandate of training communication students while abiding to the broadcasting laws and regualtions we were governed by, I was pretty well left to my own devices. I had autonomy to make decisions and try different things.

The website, for example, was my ongoing personal learning laboratory – a project for me to experiment with. Which meant that, in 1995, I could do things like make a station website even when I had no idea how the web worked. I did it because I could follow my interest (passion based learning?) into this new thing called the web. I was an active BBS user in the early 90′s, so was curious as to what this whole web thing was about. After building a website, and then another, and another, I got hooked. My love of the web – both the technologies and the culture – was ignited at that station.

Working at the station also ignited another lifelong passion for me; a love of education. One of the truly unique aspects of the station was the requirement that we air educational radio programs. What that meant was that we had to, as a condition of our broadcast license, work with faculty at the College to create for-credit courses that aired on the radio. In 1995 when I first got to the station, I saw this requirement of our license as a bother – a technicality that needed to be filled.

Oh, how wrong I was.

What started as a requirement soon became one of my favorite activities. I loved working with the faculty and producing their radio programs. We did all kinds of wonderful programs.

I remember working quite closely in those early days (95/96/97) with a Psychology instructor named Gary Anderson. With Gary, we created a handful of Psychology radio courses. Each course consisted of 12, 1 hour radio shows. We went all out. Gary was full of ideas and had tons of energy. He had vision and a passion for radio. He loved the medium. The storytelling, the conversational aspect that great radio presenters have, the theatre of the mind, the ability to connect with experts via telephone. We interviewed psychologists, created radio dramas, had panel discussions, dramatizations, went out of the studio and did streeters. This was not a single instructor talking for an hour at a time. These were full on productions. At our height, we were airing 30 hours a week of educational programming, including English, French, Psychology, Geography and Physics courses.

Little did I realize that during the process of creating these courses, I was being turned into an educational technologist.

Looking back on it now, I realize that this was the pivotal moment in my career when I began to feel more like an “educator” and less like a broadcaster. Which is funny because, even though I worked as an instructional assistant with students carrying out the day to day operations of the radio station, it was working on those radio courses that made me feel like I was doing something “educational”.

It was during the development of these radio courses that I first heard the word pedagogy (wish Wikipedia was around that day), and was lucky enough to work with both a skilled broadcaster and educator in Helen Pearce, who understood more than anyone I have worked with, how to use audio in an educational context.

So, here we are…at a thousand words and I could probably write another thousand about what a profound influence working at CKMO/Village 900 and in the Applied Communication Program at Camosun has had on my career and my life. Transformative experiences in higher education are not limited to students.

In recent years, my involvement in the operations of the station has diminished. After leaving the Applied Communication Program in 2001 to delve deeper into the web side of the edtech world, I did sit on the board of the station for a few more years. But I found that I was too close to it and had taken it as far as I could. It needed new blood to survive. Like a parent who knows that it is time to let their child go, I had to step away.

After hearing the news, I’m feeling both sad and nostalgic. Like an important piece of my life is passing into history. Perhaps this is a eulogy written for an old dear friend who, when we were both younger, would walk along the same path. But upon reaching the fork, chose different directions.

It will be an odd sensation on March 5th when I hit preset #4 on my car radio and hear nothing but dead air.

Frog in a pot

2012-02-10T08:30:39Z

As I was reading Electronics and the Dim Future of the University by Eli M. Noam I couldn’t help but feel I had stumbled upon a very prescient academic. This article resonates just as strongly today as it did when it was written in 1995.

First, before I start cherry picking quotes from the article, let me say that I am not someone who relishes the fact that higher education may be in trouble. I’m not an anarchist or revolutionary who believes the system must break down in order for something new and better to rise from the ashes. I passionately believe there is an enormous amount of societal value in having strong, publicly funded institutions of higher learning like universities and colleges. Which is maybe why I react the way I do to what I see happening in the webscape. It both exhilarates and terrifies me.

The question is not whether universities are important to society, to knowledge or to their members — they are — but rather whether the economic foundation of the present system can be maintained and sustained in the face of the changed flow of information brought about by electronic communications. It is not research and teaching that will be under pressure — they will be more important than ever — but rather their instructional setting, the university system.

I am sure there are other academics who thought like Noam in the early days of the web, but as I read his 1995 article, I was struck by how many of his points have appeared, or are appearing, on the 2012 learning landscape.

If alternative instructional technologies and credentialing systems can be devised, there will be a migration away from classic campus-based higher education. The tools for alternatives could be video servers with stored lectures by outstanding scholars, electronic access to interactive reading materials and study exercises, electronic interactivity with faculty and teaching assistants, hypertextbooks and new forms of experiencing knowledge, video- and computer-conferencing, and language translation programs.

Hmmm, Kahn Academy? YouTube EDU? Flat Earth Knowledge? Open courses?

A curriculum, once created, could be offered electronically not just to hundreds of students nearby but to tens of thousands around the world.

MOOC’s? University of the People? P2PU? Saylor?

In any event, the ultimate providers of an electronic curriculum will not be universities (they will merely break the ice) but rather commercial firms.

Udemy? Udacity? Code Academy? Straightline?

Today’s students, if they seek prestigious jobs or entry-restricted professions, usually have no choice other than to attend university. However, this is a weak and mostly legal reed for universities to lean on, and is only as strong as their gatekeeper control over accreditation and over the public’s acceptance of alternative credentials. When this hold weakens, we may well have in the future a “McGraw-Hill University” awarding degrees or certificates, just as today some companies offer in-house degree programs. If these programs are valued by employers and society for the quality of admitted students, the knowledge students gain and the requirements that students must pass to graduate, they will be able to compete with many traditional universities, yet without bearing the substantial overhead of physical institutions.

Open Badges? Instructor certification?

Now, granted, I haven’t lived in this world of academia as long as many of you (okay all 3 of you) who are reading this, and I might be suffering from a case of — (oh dammit, what is the word – that term that refers to each generation feeling like they are the generation that is living on the cusp of some GREAT CHANGE)….anyway, you get the idea.

Or maybe I am not far fetched in thinking that the world of higher ed is on the cusp of a shakeup. That we have reached some kind of tipping point. Or, as John Naughton notes in The Guardian article that led me to Noam’s article and inspired this post…

Some things have happened recently that make one think that perhaps the water might be reaching boiling point for traditional universities.

Photo credit: Frog in a pot 1 by jronaldlee. Used under Creative Commons license.

Trends that will impact education in the next 5 years

2012-01-23T23:47:18Z

My colleague at BCIT in Vancouver, Kyle Hunter, recently asked the following question:

Here is my video response.

After I did the video I felt like singing that old Sesame Street song “one of these things is not like the other” as I have lumped Apple in with this fine batch of openness when, in fact, I have some issues with the open of Apple and iTunesU. But I still think that iTunesU and the announcement last week that they are going to offer full courses through iTunesU fits with the point I was trying to make, despite the open/closed distinction.

And I said Stanford Thrun when it is really Sebastian Thrun from Stanford University.

I wonder how these students felt at the end of this term with this instructor?

2012-01-13T18:34:04Z

Valued? Recognized? Appreciated? I wonder what “assessment” of their work by their instructor, alejandra m. pickett, these students will remember 20 years from now: the mark they received, or this?

As I watched this, I was reminded of this quote by Malcolm Knowles:

Learning is a very human activity. The more people feel they are being treated as human beings – that their human needs are being taken into account – the more they are likely to learn, and learn to learn.

Could there be a more wonderful way to let your students know they are human beings than by acknowledging and recognizing the qualities and attributes in each one that make them unique individuals? That you noticed them, and appreciated the fact that each one of them brought something unique and special to the experience?

Side note: It looks like alejandra used Animoto to create this video, which is free for educators.