Shock of the Social – Oxford University
March, 22
2007
Terry Anderson, Ph.D.
Canada Research Chair in Distance Education terrya@athabascau.ca

Traditional Opening Joke
Affordances of Web 2.0
Personal Learning Environments
Change process
Your comments and questions

• If you get tired, you can stop, save your place and pick up where you left off.
• You can finish early without feeling guilty.
• You can get rid of any viruses you catch with a $50 program from McAfee
• With a little coffee you can do it all night.
• You don’t usually get divorced if your spouse interrupts you in the middle of it.
• And If you're not sure what you are doing, you can always ask your tutor.

*
Athabasca
University
 Athabasca University
Fastest growing university in
Canada
34,000 students, 700 courses
100% distance education
Graduate and
Undergraduate programs
Master & Doctorate – Distance
Education
Only USA Accredited
University in Canada

Congratulations
You - as a contributing lifelong learner
Are the
Person of the Year!

Wants to learn things
Continuously moves between on and offline
Is learning to recognize and demand quality when investing in learning
Knows there are many paths to learning
Normally uses a wide set of information processing, creation and communications tools
“The decline of the compliant learner’. P. Goodyear 2004

“We must look at today's radical changes in technology, not just as forecasters but as actors charged with designing and bringing about a sustainable and acceptable world.”
– Herbert Simon, 1916-2001

We can (and must) continuously improve the quality, effectiveness, appeal, cost and time efficiency of the learning experience.
Student control and freedom is integral to
21 st Century life-long education and learning.
Education for elites is not sufficient for planetary survival

Educational challenges are not met through evangelism, threats or technologies alone.
Change happens when teachers, administrators and learners make it happen
– Perceived benefits – Personal
– Readiness - Organizational
– Pressure – Inter-organizational
Chwelos; Benbasat; Dexter, 2001)
Each of us is an agent of change

The Net Creates
– Great challenge and Great Opportunity

to co-determine and negotiate :
– Time and place
– Tools for learning
– Content
– Pace
– Means of evaluation
– Ways to learn
– Relationships
– Openness
(Paulsen, 1993)

67.9% of Canadians use the Net -
Computer
Industry Almanac (2005)
85% access from home
– Canadian Internet
Project (2006)
Average 13.5 hours/week
76% Broadband
UK - 57% of homes have Internet access
69% use broadband
(2006)

Affordances of the Educational Semantic Web
(Anderson & Whitelaw, 2004)
Abundance of Content
Read/Write
Web 2.0
Connected
High quality,
Low cost
Communication
Learning
Automated
Facilitation
Net as OS
Filtering,
Mashups,
Updating
Agent
Assistance

Affordance 1. Massive Amounts of Content
Any information, any format, anytime, anywhere
Customizable content
Interactive content
User created content
Open content resources

Imagine a world in which every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing. –
– Terry Foote, Wikipedia

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) society aims to distribute a laptop to every child in the world in the next 5 to 10 years
“Our display has higher resolution than 95% of the laptop displays on the market today; approximately 1/7th the power consumption; 1/3rd the price; and sunlight readability” www.laptop.org
See Mar 13/07 review of beta2 http://paulstamatiou.com/2007/03/13/hands-on-the-100-laptop/

Cheap or free
Need to learn to share, recontextulize and re-use.
Don’t build your value on your content
Content is necessary, but not sufficient, to create a quality educational experience for the persons of the year

Multi mode
– Synchronous, asynch
– Text, audio and video
Stored, indexed and retrievable
Mobile
Embedded
Pervasive
Learner, teacher, community and publisher created

“I learned more about Clive by reading his introduction tonight online than I did in our entire course together last summer ”
(Kerlin, R-A, 1997) http://kerlins.net/bobbi/research/diss/
“Each person operates a separate personal community network and switches rapidly among multiple subnetworks.”
(Wellman, Boase, & Chen, 2002)

Google Alerts
MeetingWizard
RSS
Athabasca
– Freudbot AIML
– E-Advisor
– Are you ready for AU? Agents

relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another - at the least they care what other people think about what they have created.
– Henry Jenkins, Media Education of 21. Century
2006

The New Yorker September 12, 2005

Social Affordances of the Web
Content
WIKI
Blogs
MySpace
Learning
Del.icio.us
Flicker
Filtering
Agent
Communication SecondLife
Calendaring
Geotracking

Our educational discourse is largely stuck in a time warp, framed by issues and standards set decades before the widespread use of the personal computer, the Internet, and free trade agreements.”
Stewart and Kagan (2005)
Knowing Knowledge Siemens, G. (2007)
Integrated Virtual learning – pedagogy of nearness
Mejias, 2005
The contributing student Collis 2005
“ Towards a Pattern Language for Networked Learning,
Goodyear, P.
Community of Inquiry Garrison & Anderson, 2003
New Learning Environments John Seely Brown,
2006

Learning
About
Dimensions of Knowledge
Michael Polanyi
Explicit
Knowledge
Learning
To Be
John Seely Brown
New Learning Environments for the 21st Century 2006
Tacit
Knowledge

Educational Interactions
Learner / learner
Learner
Learner teacher
/ Learner / content
Teacher Content
Teacher / content.
Teacher / teacher Content / content
•Anderson (2002) Equivalency Theorem

Educational Interactions
Learner / learner
Jon Dron, 2007
Learner
Learner / teacher
Learner / content
Teacher Content
Teacher / content.
Teacher / teacher Content / content
•Anderson (2002) Equivalency Theorem

As a resource – wikipedia effect
As a motivator
As a real world source of authentication/validation
As a way for integration with the institutionalized learning

Lifelong learning demands a move from
Institutional to Learner Centered
Paradigms
The Personal Learning Environment (PLE)
Solution

“The logic of education systems should be reversed so that the system conforms to the learner, rather than the learner to the system.”
Futurelab 2006

A PLE is a user constructured web interface into the owners’ digital environment.
– Content management integrating personal and professional interests (both formal and informal learning),
– A profiling system for making connections
– A collaborative and individual workspace
– A multi formatted communications system
– All connected via a series of syndicated and distributed feeds to each other and selected others.

Stephen Downes
An approach that:
– Values and builds upon learner input
– Protects and celebrates identity
– Respects academic ownership
– Is Net-centric
– Supports multiple levels of socializing, administration and learning
– Supports communities of inquiry across and within disciplines, programs, institutions and individual learning contexts

My social Life
My work
My school(s)
My calendar
My profile
My hobbies
My files
My publications
E-portfolios
My conversations(s)
My identity

VLEs were designed, built for and operated by institutions of formal learning
– Designed to meet teacher needs
– Based on dissemination & push rather than a pull model of education
– Contributions are owned by the institution
– Student is forced to learn a new system at each institution
– Course centric view of learning
– Hard to interoperate with competitive or OS products
– Designed to protect intellectual property, not make it freely available
– Very poor record of innovation

Making connections, classifying and organizing
Creating, tagging and sharing artifacts
Applying knowledge on and offline
Sharing experiences and building new contexts
Teacher’s job is:
– to help learner’s determine and satisfy their learning needs
– to create and support environments from which learning emerges

Learner Centred OLE.doc – Derek Wenmoth,
March 2006

Blogs and Profiles
With RSS
“Welcome to Flock, the safe, spyware free web browser that makes it easier to connect with your friends.
With Flock it's a snap to upload, comment, and discover new pics.
Read all the news you care about, in one place. Blog freely.”
PLEX - RSS Reader on steroids
“The perfect solution for you to bring people together around shared goals, activities and interests to form a shared knowledge network”.

Technologies of AU’s MDE 663 Fall 2006
Elgg Me2U.Athabascau.ca
Moodle
Blogging
Connections
Content
Admin
Asynchronous Int.
Portal
Products
Elluminate
Real Time
Pacing
Social Presence
Learning Objects
CMAP
Furl
Dissemination
Knowledge Polling

BookMarks
Profiles
Web Conf
Cmap
RSS
Moodle Discussion
Blogs
Email
0
N= 9 of 13
1 2 3 4 5
Usefulness

Advantages of VLEs
– Purposefully designed
– Mature
– Safe and Secure
– Ease of Use
– Centrally Supported

Identity
Customizable and control
Ownership
Social Presence
Capacity and Speed of Innovation
Open Connectivity (API, mashups, web services)
See my blog posting at: Are PLE’s ready for prime time?
http://terrya.edublogs.org/

Some will.
Most likely survivors
– Are modular allowing student and teacher use of component parts
– Are standards based and provide access
(APIs) or source code for mashups and interoperability
– Are driven by and respond to user centric innovation
– Don’t make mistakes that alienate their users

David White, JISC funded ‘SPIRE’ project 2007’.

Who are "we" in this case? We in the ed-biz or we human inhabitants of the earth? I may be being hyper sensitive but all too often we in the ed-biz see it as our job to operationalize things for them, the (demonic) other.
Through this, Terry appears to be perpetuating the teacher/learner divide. Too many discussions are about how can we do things for you/them.
Not until we realize that we are them and they are us - without abdicating responsibility for mentorship, inscription, facilitation and, indeed, teaching - can such ideas as PLEs be realized.
Seb Schmoller http://my-world.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/01/personal_learni.html

Cameron & Anderson, 2006
Cognitive presence
– Context beyond the course allows for enhanced verification and application
– Focus beyond course aids in application to real contexts
Social Presence
– Increased depth from chronological background
– Openness may inhibit self-disclosure, humour
Teaching Presence
– Poor navigation and tracking
– Difficult to follow conversations
– Harder to assess
– Little institutional support

Many PLE applications today are:
– challenging to learn how to use,
– unstable and unsupported
– not as administratively effective for either students or faculty as VLE substitutes.
– Why bother with their use????

“A complex system, when disturbed or threatened by some change in its environment, can be lured by attractors and feedback modifiers out of a sense of equilibrium towards the edge of chaos”
(p.125 Pascale et al.,2000)
Qualities of complex adaptive systems:
– Emergent behaviour
– Unpredictability
– Amplification and dampening feedback loops
– Complex relationships content, actors (learners and teachers), machines
– ‘edge of chaos’ sweet spot
“zone of high creativity, innovation, and breaking with the past to create new modes of operating”
(Zimmerman, 2001)

“living systems thrive only when pushed away from their comfort zone, the area in which they must reconfigure themselves”
(Dervitsiotis, 2005, p. 925)
Three key factors are variation, interaction and selection (Benet
& Benet, 2004, p.45)
Diagram of the Edge of Chaos/Zone of Complexity
Copyright © 2001, Brenda J. Zimmerman. York University, Canada. Permission to copy for educational purposes only. From Ralph Stacey, 1996

There is no PLE best practice
Work on PLE’s is needed to create Edge of Chaos context for our universities
“the point isn’t to find the best learning strategy but to evolve systems that continually search, explore, and test out those strategies”
Cooper et al.,2004

(Jan 19, 2007)
"It really is a different world, and these legacy businesses are going through a wrenching transition .
. . they have to run the old business while building the new one."
Harold Vogel

The context of both formal and lifelong learning is changing rapidly, creating great opportunity and considerable risk.
Positive adaptation requires allowing student and teacher choice, support and opportunity to exploit affordances of Net technologies.
Role of management is to create an ecology of innovation, testing and reflection.
There is no single ‘killer app” in this environment
- rather an evolving set of personal and social tools, pedagogies, and resources.

Be the person you want your pupils to be – model desired behaviour (Stephen
Downes).
Support a culture of reflection, innovation and teaching scholarship on the edge of chaos in your institution
Use open standard and interoperable tools.
Try a new tool in every course you teach.

..a subtle, delicate, vivid and responsive art of communication must take possession of the physical machinery of transmission and circulation and breath life into it. When the machine age has thus perfected its machinery, it will be a means of life and not its despotic master.
– John Dewey (1927) The great community

Terry Anderson terrya@athabascau.ca
Final reference: futurelab (2006) Social software and learning