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.
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.
… and my first post for Open Learning 2019 because I have to post to have a feed to complete sign-up. This procedure guarantees that I will have written at least one blog post for Open Learning 2019, which puts me ahead of Open Learning 2017, although at least I came away from it with a Hypothesis account and another MOOC feed in my reader.
I’ve participated in MOOCs since 2010, including the occasional x-version. The past few years, participation has not matched intentions, and I’ve been on an extended blogging hiatus as well. When I missed most of Open Learning 2017, I told myself next year but missed that too.
So here I am following #openlearning19 tweets, reading blog posts and collecting links. And if it helps kick starts a return to blogging? Lagniappe.
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.
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.
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.
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).
At the invitation of Steve Greenlaw (hi, Steve!) I’ve enrolled in the #OpenLearning17 cMOOC. On the one hand: I’ve done plenty of work with OER in the past. I’ve posted about it. I’ve even presented about it. That doesn’t mean I’m doing as much as I could, and it doesn’t mean I’ve learned all that can …
So I read on twitter that “Open educational resources (#oer) and open source software are the single best way to ensure #equity for all students.”
Ensure?
Let’s talk about ‘equity’ and the adult ed folks in need of basic literacy and numeracy.
Ensure?
OER are starting to serve some people well. IT’s an awesome adventure.
However, when I talk about adult ed and literacy and numeracy, I’m referred to OpenStax and OpenEd and… no, those materials are not designed for these folks. The designers for learning MOOC is a single example of a real effort to get OER materials designed and delivered to adult ed providers who need it, but it only chips at a few ice flakes on part of the iceberg.
I’ve been encouraged to give the #openlearning cMOOC a chance because it might not be as dry as I fear… but then I read statements like that.
It’s analogous to having an amazing library that’s “open to everybody” — well, except it’s in the nicest part of town, with no infrastructure for access and — erm, you don’t even want to be walking down that street if you don’t look like you live there and don’t know the hidden social rules. (And of course you have to have time to get there between shifts, and…) Still, it’s OPEN!!!
It is open. IT’s wonderful. However, it isn’t equity. (Sorry, that’s my mathiness showing.) And y’all wonder why only folks with graduate educations do MOOCs.
WHen I ask about adult ed and equity, and the answers are all about LTI and sharing protocols — again, I need time and training to even know what that means. And frankly, based on my experience w/ Canvas… knowing what they mean doesn’t help. They’re utterly inadequate. Getting units after an amount is asking too much. Logging in? THat’s our first weedout of the unworthy. (The first of *many.* )
Only Canvas is the venue that *is* more open. MOst “open” stuff that I learned about at the OER conference? Oh, it’s open … to … faculty. To major efforts at institutions. Oops. Equity. Right.
THen there’s UDL, and all the preaching that it’s best not to apply it retroactively. This is a golden opportunity, people…. if you really mean that stuff about equity. LEt’s do!
(And sigh, I did go back and do a note to self on Canvas. YEs, I was told that ‘don’t assume people who insult and belittle you mean to be negative!’ and I do understand that that’s the culture… but I also know that nobody’s going to so much as notice whether I lurk or not… it’s so much like cycling communities, where people will drop you in a heartbeat and then wonder why no beginners ever go on the rides… they don’t *mean* to put you down but you’re such a Fred!)
Seems there will be a “cMOOC” about this. cMOOC being an open course that’s focused on ‘connectivity,’ somehow. We’ll see. The syllabus is pretty dry and academic, going through the history of ‘open.’ Guess my main beef with the ‘open’ community is that it’s so imbued with academic culture, as in “let me pontificate about equity and open” in theory. http://openlearninghub.net/ is the door and it’s out of Virginia and … am I destined to return there? It’s so *in the grid.*
I’m also wading through the convoluted directions for how I should tag my blog posts for it. I did hte best I could… thought about using ds4oer so I could be “the whole blog is about this thing” but … that’s my blog to my self. So
TAG openlearning (It feels like one more dead end distraction but … let’s see right now about finding that wretched flash drive and getting my ‘five things on the course’ started…)
(It feels like one more dead end distraction but … let’s see right now about finding that wretched flash drive and getting my ‘five things on the course’ started…)
