All posts by @https://twitter.com/tokyokevin

Open Participants, Syndicated

Open Pedagogy Live

Probably the most remarkable content this week was an interview (45 min) with Rob Blair on his (and many others’) course on Democratic Erosion (syllabus). This was all part of the online course I am taking for #openlearning19 at the Open Learning Hub.

This is team teaching on a whole new level. It is team learning. It is collaboration between students, professors, and institutions. It works because faculty, starting at Brown University, then expanding last year to more than a dozen universities, were all able to work together on a common syllabus, then sharing comments and produced work. This year there are over 25 universities involved.

Do watch the interview. Gardner Campbell covers the issues, starting with the technical, then moves on to design and administration. They get into the nuts and bolts of how the program was set up. It was enlightening. It is revolutionary. It breaks down the classroom walls and tasks students with creating relevant materials for distribution to a real audience. The content is now being collected by graduate researchers who will use it to synthesize into a body of work useful to the outside work. This is a truly relevant audience.

I floated the idea of working together within our department, and it went nowhere. I am now considering how to adapt this framework to my language classes here in Tokyo. There is a lot of potential.

Open Participants, Syndicated

Open Learning

I was reading Stephen Downes’ RSS feed (oldaily) when I came across another cMOOC. His last one was so good I cannot pass up the opportunity to try another one. (Even though I have contributed to many, starting with CCK08).

Now that I am on “spring break” with graduation tomorrow and the party on St. Pat’s, I will have time to devote to this curious idea that has become a lot more relevant lately. Namely, Open Pedagogy. Looking forward to it.

Open Participants, Syndicated

On moving away from Facebook

Time to move and refocus

The idea is to post once a week here on this blog, with all my thoughts for the week, and then link to it from Facebook. So I am not giving up on FB completely, but only accessing it on the weekends. I have taken it off my phone and am avoiding the urge to post. I hope to have the process down by the new year. (I may blog more often, if it becomes sustainable).

I have noticed, though, that my outrage is mitigated by posting to the blog instead of FB. It requires a bit more contemplation, some thought, and more consideration. The zing is less, but that, in my opinion, is a good thing. Zing is addictive and destructive.

Instead of having FB open on my phone, I have WordPress ready to go. I have reworked the site here, mostly ignored in 2017, but ready for a resumption.

What you guys can do to move away from the FB ecosystem is to use one that I have used over the years, and you may have done too. RSS. Get a reader. I use Feedly, Mac people like Inoreader. You can even set up Flipboard as an RSS reader if you are using that. You will see, after the initial investment to set up your feeds (the websites you monitor), that the control you get is well worth it. I end 15 minutes of FB enraged; I end 15 minutes of Feedly enlightened.

And if you do make it over to my blog at kevinryan.com, you are welcome to make comments. I have to approve your first comment (this is spam control), but once approved, you can comment any time.

Open Participants, Syndicated

Connectivism mathified #el30

I am in this online course, an extension of a MOOC, called E-Learning 3.0, hosted by Stephen Downes. Over 10 weeks (12 if you count the warm-up) we look at the technical and social sides of where learning online (edtech?) is going, or at least where it is right now. 

MOOCS have been closely associated with Connected Learning over the last 10 years, especially for Stephen and a group of thinkers “connected” to him. I, for example have been “connected” since the first MOOC in 2008, and since then in a couple of other online events. Building a personal learning envirionment (PLE) or similar is expanding your connections to other resources and people, thus the name “Connected Learning”. But others have taken that idea and refined it so that it could be considered an alternative to Constructivist (think Piaget), Constructionist (think Papert) (disambiguation) or Behaviorist (think Skinner).  

Connectivism came about as a result of the environment. The web was maturing, and the web is based on nodes with anchors, links and targets to other nodes. Brain science (OK, neuroscience) was going great gangbusters with a new tool called FMRI, discovering all these links between neurons. I was reading Linked by Albert-Lazlo Barabasi. It was only natural that we try to apply these advances to learning (and by extension, to teaching, and finally to education). 

Back to the present. In our 3rd week of #el30 we are looking at some highly technical roots of connectionism, mostly mathematical concepts that underlie how tech works, how we work with tech, and how we work with each other.  Last week we talked about tree structures, which look like the sentence diagrams we wrote at kids when Chomsky was applied to everything. It also looks like the sports league championship diagrams. 

But this week we move from trees to graphs. All trees are graphs (a subset), but graphs can be more like networks, with multiple connections in all directions, without–and this is crucial–a center. From there the thinking widens to neural networks and machine learning. Note again that these can be applied to networks of machines or of people. It is a way to look at the world, a way to see that the connections are just as important as the nodes of content. I can see how this can even get philosophical. 

I don’t understand much of this. When I studied this stuff in the ’90s, about Speech Recognition, there was the Markov Model and not much else. It has blossomed as I have ignored it. My silly prediction that SR would be viable was premature by at least a decade. But now we have SR, many of us use it every day, and it is based on these ideas of graph theory. This is my corner of the connected part of this course. You can jump in any time. 

Open Participants, Syndicated

E Learning 3.0, A MOOC for the Future

I have been working at the intersection of language teaching and technology for almost 30 years (had to know when it started, the connection). One of the best influences I have discovered, following the sharing of new content in the Tokyo PC Users Group (an excellent learning experience), was a MOOC. I was a member of the first real MOOC 10 years ago, hosted by our current host as part of a team of 3 or 4. A truly revolutionary idea to tap the expertise around the globe on a topic of great interest to me. Connected Learning.

E Learning 3.0: And now we have a look at how this idea of MOOC is morphing, how it is influenced by other factors, technical and social, and where we might be headed as I head for retirement. Like Sylvia Curry, another “Old Fogie” and my first connection in what I hope will be a rich web, this is a personal look for my future, as well as my current students at a women’s university in Tokyo.

I hope to see you there.  I was interviewed by iTDi last week, if you have an hour, you can find out about where I stand on most of these issues.

#el30

Open Participants, Syndicated

iTDi Interview Follow-up

Last Tuesday Steven Herder, of the International Teacher Development Institute, or iTDi (itdi.pro, YouTube, Facebook) was nice enough to include me on the list of people interviewed for their Teacher’s Room series. Steven interviewed me online using Zoom conferencing software. It ran almost exactly an hour and was really exhilarating. I started to realize I may just have some things that are worth telling people.

I went on far too long about my own history of language learning and teaching, how I discovered at 11 years old in Mexico that there were some people who did not speak English. I didn’t get to tell the story of watching Batman in Spanish, and how two little bilingual kids about half my 10 years of age could translate the dialog on the fly, all the while giggling. I wanted to do that. So you can go through my notes if you don’t want to watch the first 30 minutes.

More interesting was the last half where we talked about teaching and learning languages, along with tech (I am a tech guy). We did a few minutes at the beginning on RSS feeds and (one of many readers) Feedly software and how to use that to collect (aggregate) blog posts from across the world. I didn’t have time to note that after 20 minutes of Facebook, I am angry, and after 20 minutes of RSS (Feedly) I am enlightened. (Facebook is like porn, which, as Bruce Springsteen notes, “Just makes me mean,” because the enticement is there, but no real interaction.)

But after my history of junior year abroad in Barcelona, returning to teach English, studying for DELTA (in those days RSA Dip) and working my way into the field, my move back to Chicago for an MA (under Elliott Judd, great mentor), then to the TESOL meat market to get a job in Tokyo, meeting my wife at work, China for a year then daughter and university job 3 days apart 34 years ago, we finally got to the real discussion.

We talked about influences like JALT as a professional development network, but I did not talk about the Tokyo PC Users Group where I learned how to learn with other people and without a textbook (there were no guides to PC use in the early 90’s, things were moving too fast). The thrill of arguing about the best way to improve speed on the BBS software (a precursor to the Internet) to avoid high telephone bills when using a modem at 300 “baud” was eye opening in that we could create our own knowledge and help each other as a group. Following the Hacker Ethic has guided my teaching too. (Look it up. Hackers were good before some went to the dark side.)

Now a list of links because I was too excited and talked too fast about too many things, so you can follow up here. MIT Conference on Connected Learning netted a new tool for Augmented Reality software (for iOS) and Interactive Storytelling ARIS. We talked about Stephen Downes and his contributions to MOOCs and Connectionism. Do note that right now, he has just started a new MOOC taking it to the next step, E-Learning 3.0. Do take a look. The future of learning with tech. We talked about the JALT CALL SIG and how that paralleled my experiences of the TokyoPC in that we were (and still are) creating new knowledge, this time about teaching languages with tech.

We talked about frameworks for teaching. Steven liked that we had come up with similar ideas about having a variety of approaches to vocabulary learning, some with tech, others not. Developing a set of tools is something the learner has to do on their own, with support of course. I talked about using small groups and having students teach each other. Here are slides from a presentation I made last year on the topic. I didn’t get to talk about Socratic Circles (pdf) where you ask questions in the SIR order (Summary, Issues, Relevance) and SOLE (Self Organized Learning Environments of Sugata Mitra) to develop learner autonomy.

Language learning is 90% motivation, 10% autonomy. If I am doing my job correctly, students will not see most of my work, which is developing and fostering an environment conducive to learning (languages).

More in upcoming posts.

Open Participants, Syndicated

Moving to Medium

mediumlogoThere is a new blogging platform, one that I think is better than WordPress, and I am moving there for future posts. I will add pointers here, but the content will be there.

Why am I releasing total control over my feed here, with my own domain name and wordpress installation? Two factors, curation and convenience.

Medium was developed by one of the co-founders of Twitter. Understanding social media and applying it to content, Evan Williams put together a platform that allows any user to blog, limits the format options to make the content the draw, and allows for readers to decide easily what should be highlighted and promoted each day. Add to that paid authors of note, like Steven Levy on Crypto War Redux, to draw the public.

There are other alternatives to Medium, outlined at Lifehacker, but they don’t put the author at the center, supported by the readers, in a symbiotic relationship that is an evolution from what publishers used to do. Medium acts as a medium, but is, in its current state, almost invisible. Something I like.

As an occasional blogger in the days of fading RSS use, I cannot expect people to come to my domain to read what I have to say; it gets lost in the shuffle of a million other blogs. With Medium, I have a chance that they may get linked or looked at more often. As well as the convenience of web-based posting. Find me at https://www.medium.com/@tokyokevin

UPDATE: about a year later. Medium is going through some changes. I am back here. Sorry about the leave.

Open Participants, Syndicated

Teachers: Now a Working Class Profession

magister“From the Sage on the Stage to the Guide on the Side” is now about 20 years old. A little shopworn, but still a…how shall I put it….goal, of some teachers and how they adapt to technology. It is the gist of an Atlantic article by Michael Godsey, a K-12 teacher witnessing the “progress” right before his eyes. Another (and earlier!) way to look at it is John Higgins’ differentiation of teacher as Magister, the German cloak-clad lecturer, and the pedagogue, a poor wise man following around the son of a rich client to explain things to him. Find this in articles from 1983 and 1984, but also in his book from 1988.

pedagogueI have been in meetings all day, discussing the curriculum for next year. One area of contention is control of the part-time teachers (adjunct staff). I felt a palpable want, almost a need, to put restraints on behavior to standardize content among students and classes. And I think that is just because we can. Some adjunct staff even prefer to come in, teach the text, and leave. Labor rules here in Japan now promote this system of itinerant labor by capping any part-time contract at 5 years, requiring the university to make them full time, or let them go. So now we have churn.

But the attitude toward teachers (no, not adjunct staff), even though most are highly qualified to deliver a quality course, even when asked to provide their own materials. And yet…that desire to make sure they are doing not just anything they want is still there.

Which brings me to an article at one of my favorite websites, Hybrid Pedagogy. John Rees asks How long will your class remain yours? Here is the first paragraph.

The late labor historian David Montgomery wrote famously about workers’ control in America during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. “At times the story involved little more than silent and opaque resistance to the demands and innovations of employers,” he suggested in 1979. “At other times, workers in skilled crafts adopted and fought to enforce collective work rules through which they regulated human relations on the job and wrestled with the chronic menace of unemployment.” When I first read those words, I was in graduate school. I never thought they’d actually apply to me. Now, I believe that the working class in academia at all levels of employment are beginning to move from the first set of times that Montgomery described to the second.

He goes on to paint a very dark picture, but does leave the doorway open a crack with the following: “However, the key takeaway here should be that every professor should adopt only those tools that best fit their style of teaching (perhaps including parts of the LMS if they meet a particular need).”

The problem is, that most teachers today don’t know how to use many tech tools for teaching and thus will be at the mercy of those who do, the programmers and instructional designers. So if you don’t start putting some online tools in your toolbox, and learn how to use them in a class, or even outside a class, online, you will have to learn tools assigned to you.

I had my last graduate school class of the academic year (we start in April, end in February), and my student was worried after we went through the Atlantic article (link above). She was worried that she would be out of a job. I told her first, not in Japan. The horizon of change you can see in the US, but here, not even a hint. She is still trying to get a projector and laptop for her high school classroom, all she has now is a blackboard. Second, language learning is like learning a sport, or a musical instrument. Really difficult to put online. So we are safe, as long as we learn how to adapt the tech to us, before the admins try to make us adapt to the tech.

Open Participants, Syndicated

The Graduation Thesis: Insufficient and Outmoded

This the title of a recent article I wrote for my university research journal (Gakuen). In it, I advocate for subsuming the Graduation Thesis, common here in Japan among undergraduates, among a collection of other possible ways for demonstrating ability to work in a field. Notice how I don’t use the word “mastery”, as that is not really possible in a foreign language at the undergraduate level (I work in the English Department).

This collection of what I call Graduation Projects (sometimes called Capstone Projects) could entail a variety of different ways to demonstrate that one can use tools (not understand a field), as tools and skills are what will be needed in this world with the entire sum of human knowledge is constantly at our fingertips (OK, I exaggerate, but not by much). Knowing stuff is no longer as important as being able to learn new stuff by yourself.

Read more about it in the article which I have attached here. Another thing I argue for is that all students should learn programming, or at least enough to be able to understand the thinking behind programming. Authoring is no longer just about writing words, and the people who program are creating a world that the rest of humanity has to live in (or will have to live in, soon). So if you want to control your creative production, you have to learn how to program.

Since the article came out, a number of new events have reinforced the points I made. The most popular major among women at Stanford is Computer Science, along with the most popular course at Harvard, Computer Science. A recent article is going viral about how virtual classes can be better than real ones. Another thing I advocate is for Open Source Publishing, or Open Education Resources, and now the entire staff from a linguistics journal has quit Elsevier in protest over the policies that make huge profits selling things produced at universities back to the faculties.

Lots more issues, but no time here. Let me attach my article, maybe we can get a discussion going.

Ryan Gakuen Oct 2015 Grad Thesis Outmoded